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How to Freeze Credit Report To Protect Yourself Against Identity Theft | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/howto-Freeze-Credit-Report.html | If your Social Security number gets hacked in any data breaches, including recently hacked T-Mobile, then there's a way to prevent hackers from misusing your identity (i.e. identity theft).
The solution here is that you can institute a security freeze at each of the three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion.
Once frozen, nobody will be allowed to access your credit report, which will prevent any identity thieves from opening new accounts in your name.
Because most creditors required to see your credit report before approving a new account. But, if they are restricted to see your file, they may not extend the credit or open a new account in your name.
However, there are some disadvantages of doing so.
1. Cost
The cost of a security freeze differs by state (check yours here). However, it is often free for already affected people, but the issue is – if you want to let anyone check your credit, you will need to pay a fee every time to lift the freeze.
This happens not just for your credit applications, but your credit report also gets pulled when you register for a mobile phone contract or apply for a new job or a new apartment as well.
The credit agencies will provide you a unique password to lift the freeze and charge up to $12 each time you lift the freeze. So this option can get costly.
2. Once Used, Nobody can Help
Moreover, if an identity thief has already used your stolen data to open accounts in your name, then a credit freeze will not help you out.
You can check your credit report for free three times a year at annualcreditreport.com. If you suspect any fraud, change your passwords, notify your financial institutions, keep an eye on your financial statements, and report to police.
| Data_Breaches |
Outdated version of WordPress leads to MasterCard Hack | https://thehackernews.com/2013/01/outdated-version-of-wordpress-leads-to.html | On tip of a readers, yesterday we came across a new MasterCard hack, performed by Syrian Electronic Army. Hackers was able to breach MasterCard Blog (https://insights.mastercard.com) and make a new blog post on the website with title "Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army" on January 5, 2013.
For now MasterCard deleted that post, but readers can check Google cache. Today we tried to contact the hacker, but may be they are busy in Hacking Next Target , I started my investigation that how they can hack such a big economic website's blog.
Starting from very first step, Information gathering about your target. Simple by reviewing the source code we found that MasterCard blog is using Wordpress. We all know, WordPress is particular a popular attack vector for cyber criminals.
To know this, I just tried to access the readme.html file of CMS , that's it - MasterCard #fail ! They are using an old Wordpress 3.3.2 version, instead of the current version 3.5 and Proudly vulnerable to many flaws like Cross Site scripting, File upload vulnerability, Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) etc.
As far I know, There is a good Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) exploit available on internet for Wordpress 3.3.2 Cross-site request forgery, that allow attacker to add a new admin user, using bit of social engineering with administrator.
Possibly Hacker may use any one of these vulnerability to hack MasterCard blog. WordPress and its plug-ins are always primary attack vectors for many attacks. You should always be using the latest version of your software, especially if you're a major company that is often targeted by hackers.
If you're also not using the latest version of WordPress, you should upgrade immediately.
| Vulnerability |
XSS vulnerability in Bing.com Maps by Juan Sacco (runlvl) | https://thehackernews.com/2011/08/xss-vulnerability-in-bingcom-maps.html | XSS vulnerability in Bing.com Maps
One of the Security Researcher "Juan Sacco (runlvl)" - Insecurity Research Labs expose the Cross Site vulnerability (XSS) in Bing.com Search Engine. BING.COM is prone to a XSS vulnerability because the application failsto properly perform adequate boundary checks on user-supplied data.An attacker can exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code in thevictim's browser.
Details :
The reflected XSS vulnerability is a variant of a cross-site scriptingflaw: it occurs when the data provided by the attacker is exectued bythe browser, and then displayed on "normal" pages returned to otherusers in the course of regular browsing, without proper HTML escaping. Aclassic example of this is with online message boards where users areallowed to post HTML formatted messages for other users to read.
Vulnerable Link
| Vulnerability |
2012 Most Vulnerable Cities At Risk Of Cyber Crime | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/2012-most-vulnerable-cities-at-risk-of.html | 2012 Most Vulnerable Cities At Risk Of Cyber Crime
Norton's study showed the city was one of the ten worst for hacking. Each city was ranked by the prevalence of PCs and smartphones in addition to social media use with risk factors like unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots and malware attempts. Manchester was found to be the riskiest city and Vancouver is the third most vulnerable city in Canada for cyber-crime.
The Top 10 Riskiest Online Cities in the U.S. are:
#1 – Washington, D.C.
#2 – Seattle
#3 – San Francisco
#4 – Atlanta
#5 – Boston
#6 – Denver
#7 – Minneapolis
#8 – Sacramento, Calif.
#9 – Raleigh, N.C.
#10 – Austin, Texas
The Top 10 Riskiest Online Cities in Canada are:
#1 - Burlington, ON
#2 - Port Coquitlam, BC
#3 - Vancouver, BC
#4 - Langley, BC
#5 - Calgary, AB
# 6 - Fredericton, NB
#7 - Toronto, ON
#8 - New Westminster, BC
#9 - Edmonton, AB
#10 - Victoria, BC
Cyber crime expert Simon Ellson said there are a numer of steps people can take to stay safe when they are using accessing the web via a smart phone or laptop.Mr Ellson said: "Never ask your web browser to store your username and password for a website. If you are going to create a password, which you should for any device that you are using, make it unique and change it regularly.Ultimately, make sure you have got some protection on the device you are using. It is a bit like the lock on your front door, if you don't put some kind of preotection on your device, it is like not locking your front door."
Top 3 Safety Tips from Norton
1. Proceed with caution when using Wi-Fi hotspots
2. Use complex and unique passwords for each site
3. Stay educated
According to Symantec, people who are more connected online are more vulnerable to cyber-criminals. Cyber crime rates cost Canadians $5.5 billion in 2010, according to a study released by Symantec. At least 7.3 million Canadians were victims of cybercrime last year, and there are about 20,000 new victims each day.
| Vulnerability |
Android Bloatware, Another Serious Android Privacy Issue | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/android-bloatware-another-serious.html | Android Bloatware, Another Serious Android Privacy Issue
Researchers have found that some Android smartphones are more vulnerable to attacks than others, thanks to add-on software and skins that get installed by handset makers before they ship their smartphones to subscribers. It's not just Carrier IQ that Android users need to be worried about.
A team of researchers from North Carolina State University discovered the security vulnerability on eight different smartphones from Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung. Black hat hacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to record phone calls (see proof of concept video below), wipe out your phone, call or text premium rate numbers, and read your private messages and emails, all without your permission, of course. According to the paper published by the team.
"Our results with eight phone images show that among 13 privileged permissions examined so far, 11 were leaked, with individual phones leaking up to eight permissions. By exploiting them, an untrusted application can manage to wipe out the user data, send out SMS messages, or record user conversation on the affected phones - all without asking for any permission". According to the researchers, certain system configurations added on top of the Android OS by manufacturers, contain a backdoor to this personal information.
Android permissions are cornerstone of Android security and user privacy. For example, if an application requests permission to use a user's location--perhaps as part of an advertiser-backed effort to track their online behavior--the smartphone owner can deny that request. Likewise, permissions serve as a last line of defense against malicious applications that may end up on their phones. For example, if an application attempts to access both the Internet and a user's address book, but shouldn't need to do so, it could indicate that the application in question is attempting to steal data and phone home.
To test the permission-enforcement security model on Android smartphones, the researchers built a tool, dubbed Woodpecker, that subjects images of Android operating systems to permission tests. As a baseline, they first studied the Google Nexus One and Nexus S smartphones which come with a vanilla version of Android installed as well as the Motorola Droid, which is "close to the reference Android design," they said.
The university researchers explained in their paper, as well as in a YouTube video, that the code that allows these apps to sidestep Android's permission system lies in the interfaces and services phone manufacturers add on to their devices to supplement Google's firmware.
To Ensure your Privacy ,You can use custom ROM To Protect your Privacy on Android Phones By rooting your phone.
| Vulnerability |
Company Detected Years-Long Breach Only After Hacker Maxed Out Servers' Storage | https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/hacking-file-storage.html | What could be even worse than getting hacked?
It's the "failure to detect intrusions" that always results in huge losses to the organizations.
Utah-based technology company InfoTrax Systems is the latest example of such a security blunder, as the company was breached more than 20 times from May 2014 until March 2016.
What's ironic is that the company detected the breach only after it received an alert that its servers had reached maximum storage capacity due to a data archive file that the hacker created.
InfoTrax Systems is an American company based in Utah that provides backend operations systems to multi-level marketers, which also includes an extensive amount of sensitive data on their users' compensation, inventory, orders, and accounting.
The breach reportedly occurred in May 2014 when the hacker exploited vulnerabilities in InfoTrax's server and its client's website to gain remote control over its server, allowing him to gain access to sensitive personal information for 1 million consumers.
At the time, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued the company for failing to safeguard the personal information the company maintained on behalf of its clients.
According to the FTC complaint, the hacker remotely accessed the system 17 times over the next 21 months without being detected and then began pulling the personal information of consumers on March 2, 2016.
The stolen information included customers' full names, social security numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, usernames, and passwords for 4100 distributor and admin accounts on the InfoTrax service.
What's even worse? The leaked data also included some customers' payment card information (full or partial credit card and debit card numbers, CVVs, and expiration dates), as well as bank account information, including account and routing numbers.
The company discovered the breach on March 7, 2016, when it began receiving alerts that one of its servers had reached its maximum capacity, which was due to a massive data archive file that the hacker created on its customers.
Surprisingly, the intruder managed to breach the company at least two more times even after InfoTrax Systems became aware of the intrusion.
On March 14, 2016, the hacker harvested over 2300 unique, full payment card numbers—including names, physical addresses, CVVs, and expiration dates—and other billing data newly submitted by distributors during the checkout process.
Then again, on March 29, 2016, the hacker used the user ID and password of a valid InfoTrax distributor account to upload more malicious code to collect newly submitted payment card data from that client's website again.
According to the FTC, InfoTrax Systems failed to "inventory and delete personal information is no longer needed, conduct code review of its software and testing of its network, detect malicious file uploads, adequately segment its network, and implement cybersecurity safeguards to detect unusual activity on its network."
On Tuesday, the FTC published a press release, announcing a proposed settlement, which requires InfoTrax Systems to implement a comprehensive data security program that corrects the failures identified in the complaint.
Besides this, the proposed settlement also requires InfoTrax Systems to obtain third-party assessments of its information security program every two years.
| Data_Breaches |
Newly Uncovered 'SowBug' Cyber-Espionage Group Stealing Diplomatic Secrets Since 2015 | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/sowbug-hacking-group.html | A previously unknown hacking and cyber-espionage group that has been in operation since at least 2015 have conducted a series of highly targeted attacks against a host of government organizations in South America and Southeast Asia to steal their sensitive data.
Codenamed Sowbug, the hacking group has been exposed by Symantec security researchers, who spotted the group conducting clandestine attacks against foreign policy institutions, government bodies and diplomatic targets in countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Malaysia.
Symantec analysis found that the Sowbug hacking group uses a piece of malware dubbed "Felismus" to launch its attacks and infiltrate their targets.
First identified in late March of this year, Felismus is a sophisticated, well-written piece of remote access Trojan (RAT) with a modular construction that allows the backdoor trojan to hide and or extend its capabilities.
The malware allows malicious actors to take complete control of an infected system and like most RATs, Felismus also allows attackers to communicate with a remote server, download files, and execute shell commands.
By analysing Felismus, researchers were able to connect previous attack campaigns with the Sowbug hacking group, indicating that it had been active since at least early-2015 and may have been operating even earlier.
"To date, Sowbug appears to be focused mainly on government entities in South America and Southeast Asia and has infiltrated organizations in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Brunei and Malaysia," the Symantec report said.
"The group is well resourced, capable of infiltrating multiple targets simultaneously and will often operate outside the working hours of targeted organisations."
Although it is still unclear how the Sowbug hackers managed to gain a foothold in computer networks, evidence gathered by researchers suggested the hackers have made use of fake, malicious software updates of Windows or Adobe Reader.
The researchers also found that the group have used a tool known as Starloader to deploy additional malware and tools, such as credential dumpers and keyloggers, on victims' networks.
Symantec researchers have found evidence of Starloader files being spread as software updates entitled AdobeUpdate.exe, AcrobatUpdate.exe, and INTELUPDATE.EXE among others.
Instead of compromising the software itself, Sowbug gives its hacking tools file names "similar to those used by software and places them in directory trees that could be mistaken for those used by the legitimate software."
This trick allows the hackers to hide in plain sight, "as their appearance is unlikely to arouse suspicion."
The Sowbug hackers took several measures to remain under-the-radar by carrying out their espionage operations outside of standard office hours to maintain the presence on targeted networks for months at a time.
In one instance, the hacking group remained undetected on the target's network for up to six months between September 2016 and March 2017.
Besides the Felismus malware's distribution method used in the Sowbug operation, the identity of Sowbug attackers also remains unknown.
| Cyber_Attack |
Free Ransomware Decryption and Malware Removal ToolKit | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/ransomware-decryption-software.html | A security researcher has compiled a ransomware removal and rescue kit to help victims deal with ransomware threats and unlock encrypted files without paying off a single penny to the cyber crooks.
Ransomware is a growing threat to the evolution of cyber criminals techniques in an attempt to part you from your money. Typically, the malicious software either lock victim's computer system or encrypt the documents and files on it or in some cases both, to extort money from victims.
Most often ransomware victims end up paying off crooks either due to the threat of losing their important files or in panic as the threat pretends to be from some government agency.
Though IT professionals and security companies have been dealing and fighting back with the ransomware threats, security professional Jada Cyrus has compiled a "Ransomware Rescue Kit" or "Ransomware Removal Kit" and made it available for free online.
Ransomware removal kit - Download for Free
The Ransomware Malware Removal kit supports decryption tools for different strains of ransomware variants along with instructions on how to perform the necessary tasks.
"You should never pay the ransom," Cyrus says. "This will only reinforce this type of attack. According to most security intelligence reports, criminal enterprises are already making large profits from ransomware."
The ransomware response kit comes with the removal tools to combat the following variants of malware strains:
CryptoLocker: CryptoLocker removal tools and Threat Mitigation
CryptoLockerDecrypt: FireEye Tool to decrypt files encrypted by the CryptoLocker ransomware
TrendMicro_Ransomware_RemovalTool: General ransomware removal tool from TrendMicro
FBIRansomWare: FBIRansomWare Removal Tools
CoinVault: CoinVault ransomware removal tools
TeslaCrypt: Tool for removing this variant of CryptoLocker ransomware
Cyrus encourages system administrators and IT professionals not to pay the ransom to the cyber criminals. Instead, they should first remove the infected machine from the corporate network to prevent the spreading of malware.
Once this is done, the users should then attempt to identify the type of ransomware their machine is infected with. They should take images of the encrypted box before removal for later analysis.
Once the type of ransomware is identifiable, you have the above option to try and decrypt files and remove the ransomware threat from the infected system with the help of the kit's removal tools.
Ransomware threat has emerged in past few years and many victims, including local police departments, do pay ransom to the crooks to get their important and personal files back.
To keep yourself safe from this emerging threat, we have a good article on How to protect your computer from ransomware malware?
| Malware |
State-Sponsored SCADA Malware targeting European Energy Companies | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/scada-malware-energy.html | Security researchers have discovered a new campaign targeting energy companies in Western Europe with a sophisticated malware that almost goes to great lengths in order to remain undetected while targeting energy companies.
Researchers from SentinelOne Labs discovered the malware, which has already infected at least one European energy company, is so sneaky and advanced that it is likely believed to be the work of a wealthy nation.
The malware, dubbed 'SFG', contains about 280 kilobytes of code, featuring a vast arsenal of tools rarely seen in ordinary malware samples. It takes "extreme measures" to cleverly and stealthily evade a large number of security defenses before it drops its payload.
The malware dismantles antiviruses processes one-by-one until the malware is finally safe to uninstall them all. It also encrypts key features of its code so that it could not be discovered and analyzed. It'll not execute itself if it senses it's being run in a sandbox environment.
The Windows-based malware even takes special care of features such as facial recognition, fingerprint scanners, and other advanced biometric access control systems running inside target organizations.
To gain administrative access to the infected computer, the malware sample uses a pair of privilege escalation exploits for Windows flaws (CVE-2014-4113 and CVE-2015-1701) that were patched by Microsoft in October 2014 and May 2015, respectively.
SentinelOne Chief Security Officer Udi Shamir says: "The malware has all the hallmarks of a nation-state attack due to its extremely high level of sophistication and the cost associated with creating software of this advanced nature."
Once it has gained administrative control of a computer, the malware surveys the connected network, reports information about the infected network back to its operators, and await further instructions, giving attackers a network backdoor on targeted industrial control systems.
The backdoor could then be used to install other malware on systems for more detailed espionage or "extract data or potentially shut down the energy grid," security researchers warn.
The SFG malware is related to an earlier malware sample dubbed Furtim – another piece of highly sophisticated malware that was uncovered in May – that's also able to evade antivirus and other security defenses.
The amount of time, efforts, and resources required to create the malware means that it is the work of a team of hackers working for a wealthy nation government, though the researchers didn't reveal the nation behind the attack.
"It appears to be the work of multiple developers who've reverse engineered more than a dozen antivirus solutions and gone to extreme lengths to evade detection, including causing the [antivirus] software to stop working without the user being alerted," Shamir wrote says.
"Attacks of this nature require substantial funding and knowhow to pull off and are likely to be the result of a state-sponsored attack, rather than a cybercriminal group."
You can find more technical details about the SFG malware in a report published by the security firm SentinelOne on Tuesday.
| Malware |
Marcus Hutchins (MalwareTech) Gets $30,000 Bail, But Can't Leave United States | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/malwaretech-marcus-hutchins.html | Marcus Hutchins, the malware analyst who helped stop global Wannacry menace, has reportedly pleaded not guilty to charges of creating and distributing the infamous Kronos banking malware and is set to release on $30,000 bail on Monday.
Hutchins, the 23-year-old who operates under the alias MalwareTech on Twitter, stormed to fame and hailed as a hero over two months ago when he stopped a global epidemic of the WannaCry ransomware attack by finding a kill switch in the malware code.
MalwareTech Arrested After Attending Def Con Event
Hutchins was recently arrested at the McCarran International Airport before he could board his flight back to the U.K. after attending Def Con event for his alleged role in creating and distributing the Kronos Banking Trojan between 2014-2015.
Kronos is a Banking Trojan designed to steal banking credentials and personal information from victims' computers, which was sold for $7,000 on Russian online forums.
MalwareTech to Pay $30,000 for Bail, But Can't Leave US
In a police interview, Hutchins admitted of writing the code of malware that targeted bank accounts, US prosecutors said during a hearing on Friday, but during the hearing at a Las Vegas court, he pleaded not guilty.
The judge at Las Vegas court ruled on Friday that Hutchins could be released on $30,000 bail, saying the defendant wasn't a danger to the community nor a flight risk, though the judge ordered him to remain in the U.S. with GPS monitoring.
Unfortunately, since the clerk's office closed at 4 PM, the bail did not happen yet. The attorney expects Hutchins will be released on Monday but will need to appear in Wisconsin for facing the grand jury indictment on Tuesday (8 August).
Adrian Lobo, Hutchins' defence attorney (in above video), later confirmed to the local reporter Christy Wilcox.
"We intend to fight the case," Lobo said. "He has dedicated his life to researching malware, not to try to harm people. He has tremendous community support, local and abroad and in the computer world."
Hutchins, along with another unnamed co-defendant, is currently facing six counts of hacking-related charges from the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) for writing the Kronos virus in 2014.
If Found Guilty, MalwareTech Could Face 40 Years In US Prison
Hutchins was also charged with five other counts, including wiretapping and violating Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
If convicted, Hutchins faces a maximum of 40 years in jail.
Hutchins' supporters believe that he is innocent and claims a tweet from July 2014 proves he could not have written the malware. In the tweet, Hutchins was himself asking for a Kronos sample.
| Malware |
'Paunch', Blackhole exploit kit creator and Gang arrested in Russia | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/Punch-Blackhole-exploit-kit-arrested-in-russia.html | In October, we had reported that the creator of the infamous Blackhole exploit kit was arrested in Russia and now the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has also confirmed that 'Paunch', the mastermind behind infamous BlackHole exploit kit, along with Gang of 12 other criminals were arrested on October 4, 2013 in Russia.
Russian security firm Group-IB has disclosed that it has assisted the police in the investigation of Paunch, who was residing in the city of Togliatti.
27-years old 'Paunch' is the author of the notorious BlackHole and Cool exploit kits that are today popular among cybercriminals and costs $500 to $700 a month in for buyers.
Cool and Blackhole exploit kits are the ready-made hacking tools for easily serving malware from compromised sites, in result to install malware on users' computers using exploits of zero-day vulnerabilities in latest web browsers. The general damage caused by the criminal gang is estimated around US $2.13 million.
'At present, there are reports that BlackHole kingpin, 'Paunch' , has more than a thousand customers. It is known that 'Paunch' was earning $50,000 per month from his illegal activity and had a white Porsche Cayenne as his personal car.' Group-IB said in a press release.
He also created Crypt.Am − an anonymous anti-virus simulator, which provided services for protection of malware against detection by antivirus programs.
| Malware |
Warning: Malware Campaign targeting Jailbroken Apple iOS Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/iphone-ios-Malware-targeting-apple-account.html | A new piece of malicious malware infection targeting jailbroken Apple iOS devices in an attempt to steal users' credentials, has been discovered by Reddit users.
The Reddit Jailbreak community discovered the malicious infection dubbed as 'Unflod Baby Panda', on some jailbroken Apple iOS devices on Thursday while a user noticed an unusual activity that the file was causing apps such as Snapchat and Google Hangouts to crash constantly on his jailbroken iPhone.
CHINA WANTS YOUR APPLE ID & PASSWORDS
Soon after the jailbroken developer uncovered the mysteries 'Unfold.dylib' file and found that the infection targets jailbroken iOS handsets to captures Apple IDs and passwords from Internet sessions that use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to encrypt communications and is believed to be spreading through the Chinese iOS software sites, according to the researchers at German security firm SektionEins.
The researchers found that the captured login information is been sent to some server of the Internet Protocol (IP) address "23.88.10.4", which is suspected to be controlled by the individuals in China, as the malware developer certificate is found digitally signed by the name Wang Xin.
"Currently the jailbreak community believes that deleting the Unfold.dylib binary and changing the apple-id's password afterwards is enough to recover from this attack. However it is still unknown how the dynamic library ends up on the device in the first place and therefore it is also unknown if it comes with additional malware gifts," the researchers wrote while inspecting the infection. "We therefore believe that the only safe way of removal is a full restore, which means the removal and loss of the jailbreak," they added.
Immediately after the thread at the Reddit jailbreak community was started, several developers in the community warned the users to not touch the software, which they suspected was a malware. While the researchers noted that the manual removal of the malware infection is possible.
AFFECTED DEVICES
The iPhone owners using iPhone 5 and any other 32-bit jailbroken iOS device handset might be affected, who are advised to change their Apple ID password after the removal of the malicious software using the steps mentioned below.
However, the iPhone owners using latest 64-bit iOS devices such as iPhone 5S, iPad Air and iPad Mini Retina might not be affected by the malware.
HOW TO REMOVE MALWARE
Download the iFile app for free from Cydia and by using iFile, check whether your device is affected by the malicious software or not.
Navigate to /Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries/
If you spot any files named Unflod.dylib or Unflod.plist and/or framework.dylib and framework.plist then you have been affected.
Use iFile to delete Unflod.dylib and Unflod.plist and/or framework.dylib and framework.plist
Reboot your device and then change your Apple ID password and security questions immediately and just to be on safe side, use two-step verification method and avoid installing apps from untrusted sources.
for details of removal click here.
Yet, most iPhone users are not vulnerable to the malicious malware as the infection requires the user's handset to be jailbroken in order to be installed in the victim's device. Also the malware has not been spotted on any of the apps on the Apple iOS App Store , THANKS to Apple's tight control of the App Store approval process.
| Malware |
Can Data Protection Systems Prevent Data At Rest Leakage? | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/can-data-protection-systems-prevent.html | Protection against insider risks works when the process involves controlling the data transfer channels or examining data sources.
One approach involves preventing USB flash drives from being copied or sending them over email. The second one concerns preventing leakage or fraud in which an insider accesses files or databases with harmful intentions.
What's the best way to protect your data?
It seems obvious that prevention is the best way to solve any problem. In most cases, DCAP (data-centric audit and protection) and DAM (database activity monitoring) is sufficient. Both serve the purpose of protecting data at rest.
The following example illustrates the approach we found in the Russian legal system.
An employee of the Federal Migration Service in one of the Russian regions was approached by his friend, who asked him to hide information about two offenses in his file in the migrant database. The employee knew that this could be done remotely, accessed the database from home, and blocked the necessary data. For doing this, he received a reward of a mere $100.
In order to prevent this incident from happening, it was enough for the manager to observe the employee accessing the database and performing unauthorized operations. A DAM solution would be helpful. Here you can browse more information about the DAM system tactics.
As an example of how the DCAP system detected fraud, here is a customer's case from SearchInform:
SearchInform FileAuditor identified several computers on which price lists were stored and where, in addition to selling prices, purchase prices were also listed. This information is confidential; it is prohibited to distribute it uncontrollably within or outside the company. If customers know the purchase prices, they will be armed with arguments and can negotiate the best discounts. There is clearly a loss for the seller.
The price column was typed in white, which made the price list appear like it was normal. In spite of this, FileAuditor acknowledged that the purchase price was definitely included in the document. Investigating the case using the DLP system, the cybersecurity specialist discovered that employees had forwarded these price lists to external email addresses. A subsequent investigation confirmed that there was collusion between the buyers and sellers.
This was classic scheming: the seller's manager agreed to a large discount for the buyer on any pretext he could think of. The buyer representative agreed to repay a portion of the difference to the seller's manager, who negotiated the discount.
So, both the seller and manager benefited, while the company selling lost money. In the event of a violation, it can take up to a year for the damage to be identified; depending on the size of the business, this damage can range from thousands up to millions of dollars.
It turns out that control of information sources enables an information security expert to detect an incident at its earliest stage - intention, rather than following up after it occurs. Tight control on such matters prohibits a more detailed investigation, which would allow evidence to be collected and conclusions drawn so that the incident wouldn't repeat itself. Here, the information security specialist has tightened DLP security policies on documents that include purchase prices.
Which is the best approach to data protection?
A complex approach. It's not possible to solve everything with DLP. Not everything is really dependent on control of the source. However, when combined, these approaches give a super-effect. When the DCAP system detects a potential violation, the DLP system gathers evidence and allows conclusions to be drawn on how to improve business processes and make them more transparent.
What are DCAP and DAM?
DCAP and DAM solutions are already on the market in mass quantities due to the need for data at rest protection. In addition, this software is easy to use and integrates with already popular security solutions.
You can use SearchInform FileAuditor to determine:
which documents contain business-critical information,
how much of this information is stored by the company and where it is located,
who has access to them and can modify them.
It is possible for the IT department to take on such tasks. For instance, DCAP makes the file system less messy since each document is assigned a category (contracts, prices, personal data, research, etc.).
Probably not the most important feature, but shadow copying is a useful feature, which lets you restore documents without any problems if something goes wrong. As a first step, however, the software is intended for information security specialists.
Here's how FileAuditor works:
searches for a file
assesses its compliance with the rules and labels it ("personal data," "agreement," etc.)
if necessary, copy a file to the repository.
keeps track of all actions with files and folders
reads permissions on files and folders
at subsequent checks, only newly added or changed files are scanned.
This year, SearchInform also released its own database monitoring solution - SearchInform Database Monitor. A database is the main information asset of businesses, so it plays a critical role in their operations. Fraudsters are interested in both the entire array and specific access points to data. This threat can be handled using the DAM system; for example, the Database Monitor sees:
Who is accessing the databases, and for what purpose?
What information is requested from the database, and how much of it.
What changes are being made to the databases?
In spite of the belief by many companies that they have sufficient control over their file systems and are certain that their users will adhere to corporate policies, our experience shows that some companies can treat sensitive information poorly, and some documents can be found at nonconforming locations.
Try the file audit solution for 30 days for free, and you'll probably change your mind and learn more about data misuse incidents within your company.
| Data_Breaches |
A New Wiper Malware Was Behind Recent Cyberattack On Iranian Train System | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/a-new-wiper-malware-was-behind-recent.html | A cyber attack that derailed websites of Iran's transport ministry and its national railway system earlier this month, causing widespread disruptions in train services, was the result of a never-before-seen reusable wiper malware called "Meteor."
The campaign — dubbed "MeteorExpress" — has not been linked to any previously identified threat group or to additional attacks, making it the first incident involving the deployment of this malware, according to researchers from Iranian antivirus firm Amn Pardaz and SentinelOne. Meteor is believed to have been in the works over the past three years.
"Despite a lack of specific indicators of compromise, we were able to recover most of the attack components," SentinelOne's Principal Threat Researcher, Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, noted. "Behind this outlandish tale of stopped trains and glib trolls, we found the fingerprints of an unfamiliar attacker," adding the offensive is "designed to cripple the victim's systems, leaving no recourse to simple remediation via domain administration or recovery of shadow copies."
On July 9, the Iranian train system was left paralyzed in the wake of a major attack, with the hackers defacing electronic displays to instruct passengers to direct their complaints to the phone number of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's office. The incident is said to have reportedly caused "unprecedented chaos" at stations with hundreds of trains delayed or canceled.
Now according to SentinelOne, the infection chain commenced with the abuse of Group Policy to deploy a toolkit that consisted of a combination of batch files orchestrating different components, which are extracted from multiple RAR archives and are chained together to facilitate the encryption of the filesystem, corruption of the master boot record (MBR), and locking of the system in question.
Other batch script files dropped during the attack were found to take charge of disconnecting the infected device from the network and creating Windows Defender exclusions for all of the components, a tactic that's becoming increasingly prevalent among threat actors to hide their malicious activities from antimalware solutions installed on the machine.
Meteor, for its part, is an externally configurable wiper with an extensive set of features, including the ability to delete shadow copies as well as a "wealth of additional functionality" such as changing user passwords, terminating arbitrary processes, disabling recovery mode, and executing malicious commands.
The wiper has been characterized as "a bizarre amalgam of custom code" that blends open-source components with ancient software that's "rife with sanity checks, error checking, and redundancy in accomplishing its goals," suggesting a fragmented approach and a lack of coordination across different teams involved in the development.
"Conflict in cyberspace is overpopulated with increasingly brazen threat actors. Behind the artistry of this epic troll lies an uncomfortable reality where a previously unknown threat actor is willing to leverage wiper malware against public railways systems," Guerrero-Saade said. "The attacker is an intermediate level player whose different operational components sharply oscillate from clunky and rudimentary to slick and well-developed."
"We should keep in mind that the attackers were already familiar with the general setup of their target, features of the domain controller, and the target's choice of backup system (Veeam). That implies a reconnaissance phase that flew entirely under the radar and a wealth of espionage tooling that we've yet to uncover."
| Cyber_Attack |
Duqu Trojan found in Indian Server | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/duqu-trojan-found-in-indian-server.html | Duqu Trojan found in Indian Server
Last week we update you about Duqu when Symantec said it had found a mysterious computer virus that contained code similar to Stuxnet, a piece of malware believed to have wreaked havoc on Iran's nuclear program.
Two workers at a web-hosting company called Web Werks told Reuters that officials from India's Department of Information Technology last week took several hard drives and other components from a server that security firm Symantec Corp told them was communicating with computers infected with Duqu.
The equipment seized from Web Werks, a privately held company in Mumbai with about 200 employees, might hold valuable data to help investigators determine who built Duqu and how it can be used. But putting the pieces together is a long and difficult process, experts said. "This one is challenging," said Marty Edwards, director of the US Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team. "It's a very complex piece of software."
The Duqu trojan is composed of several malicious files that work together for a malicious purpose.
Duqu appears to be more narrowly targeted than Stuxnet as researchers estimate the new trojan virus has infected at most dozens of machines so far. By comparison, Stuxnet spread much more quickly, popping up on thousands of computer systems.
Security firms including Dell Inc's SecureWorks, Intel Corp's McAfee, Kaspersky Lab and Symantec say they found Duqu victims in Europe, Iran, Sudan and the United States. They declined to provide their identities.
Duqu so named because it creates files with "DQ" in the prefix -- was designed to steal secrets from the computers it infects, researchers said, such as design documents from makers of highly sophisticated valves, motors, pipes and switches.
Duqu and Stuxnet both use a kernel driver to decrypt and load encrypted DLL (Dynamic Load Library) files. The kernel drivers serve as an "injection" engine to load these DLLs into a specific process. This technique is not unique to either Duqu or Stuxnet and has been observed in other unrelated threats.
"We are a little bit behind in the game," said Don Jackson, a director of the Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit. "Knowing what these guys are doing, they are probably a step ahead."
[Source]
| Malware |
Microsoft Exchange Hackers Also Breached European Banking Authority | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/microsoft-exchange-hackers-also.html | The European Banking Authority (EBA) on Sunday said it had been a victim of a cyberattack targeting its Microsoft Exchange Servers, forcing it to temporarily take its email systems offline as a precautionary measure.
"As the vulnerability is related to the EBA's email servers, access to personal data through emails held on that servers may have been obtained by the attacker," the Paris-based regulatory agency said.
EBA said it's launched a full investigation into the incident in partnership with its information and communication technology (ICT) provider, a team of forensic experts, and other relevant entities.
In a second update issued on Monday, the agency said it had secured its email infrastructure and that it found no evidence of data extraction, adding it has "no indication to think that the breach has gone beyond our email servers."
Besides deploying extra security measures, EBA also noted it's closely monitoring the situation after restoring the full functionality of the email servers.
The development is a consequence of an ongoing widespread exploitation campaign by multiple threat actors targeting vulnerable Microsoft Exchange email servers a week after Microsoft rolled out emergency patches to address four security flaws that could be chained to bypass authentication and remotely execute malicious programs.
Microsoft is said to have learned of these vulnerabilities as early as January 5, 2021, indicating that the company had almost two months before it eventually pushed out a fix that shipped on March 2.
The Exchange Server mass hack has so far claimed at least 60,000 known victims globally, including a significant number of small businesses and local governments, with the attackers casting a wide net before filtering high-profile targets for further post-exploitation activity.
The rapidly accelerating intrusions, which also come three months after the SolarWinds hacking campaign, has been primarily attributed to a group called Hafnium, which Microsoft says is a state-sponsored group operating out of China.
Since then, intelligence gathered from multiple sources points to an increase in anomalous web shell activity targeting Exchange servers by at least five different threat clusters toward the end of February, a fact that may have played an important role in Microsoft releasing the fixes a week ahead of the Patch Tuesday schedule.
Indeed, according to the vulnerability disclosure timeline shared by Taiwanese cybersecurity firm Devcore, Microsoft's Security Response Center (MSRC) is said to have originally planned the patch for March 9, which coincides with the Patch Tuesday for this month.
If the commoditization of the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities doesn't come as a surprise, the swift and indiscriminate exploitation by a multitude of cybercrime gangs and nation-state hackers alike is sure is, implying that the flaws were relatively easier to spot and exploit.
Stating that the Chinese Exchange server hacks are a major norms violation, Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and co-founder of CrowdStrike, said "while it started out as targeted espionage campaign, they engaged in reckless and dangerous behavior by scanning/compromising Exchange servers across the entire IPv4 address space with web shells that can now be used by other actors, including ransomware crews."
| Cyber_Attack |
Hacking Air-Gapped Computers Using Heat | https://thehackernews.com/2015/03/hacking-air-gapped-computer.html | An air-gapped computer system isolated from the Internet and other computers that are connected to external networks believes to be the most secure computers on the planet -- Yeah?? You need to think again before calling them 'safe'.
A group of Israeli security researchers at the Cyber Security Labs from Ben Gurion University have found a new technique to hack ultra-secure air-gapped computers and retrieve data using only heat emissions and a computer's built-in thermal sensors.
WHAT IS AIR-GAPPED COMPUTERS ?
Air-gapped computers or systems are considered to be the most secure and safest computer systems. These systems are isolated from the Internet or any other commuters that are connected to the Internet or external network.
Air-gapped systems are used in situations that demand high security because it's very difficult to siphon data from these systems, as it requires a physical access to the machine which is possible by using removable device such as a USB flash drive or a firewire cable.
Air-gapped computers are classified military networks, the payment networks that process credit and debit card transactions for retailers, and in industrial control systems that operate critical infrastructure of the Nation. Even journalists use them to prevent intruders from remotely accessing sensitive data.
HACKING AIR-GAPPED COMPUTERS USING HEAT
In August 2014, security researchers from Ben Gurion University found a new way to breach an air-gapped system by using a method called Air-Hopper which utilizes little more than a mobile phone's FM radio signals for data exfiltration.
The same security researchers have now discovered a new technique, dubbed BitWhisper, that could be used by hackers to hack air-gapped computers by utilizing heat exchange between two computer systems.
Dudu Mimran, the CTO of Cyber Security Labs, blogged on Monday, "BitWhisper is a demonstration for a covert bi-directional communication channel between two close by air-gapped computers communicating via heat. The method allows bridging the air-gap between the two physically adjacent and compromised computers using their heat emissions and built-in thermal sensors to communicate."
This new technique would allow hackers to stealthily siphon passwords or security keys from a secured system and send the sensitive data to an Internet-connected system which is placed in close proximity controlled by hackers.
Hackers could also use their Internet-connected system to send malicious commands to the air-gapped computer using the same heat and sensor technique in order to cause more severe danger to the secured infrastructure.
The team provided a video demonstration which shows how they were able to send a command from one computer to an adjacent air-gapped machine to re-position a toy missile launcher connected to the adjacent air-gapped system.
HOW BITWHISPER WORKS ?
Thermal sensors exist in computers used to trigger the internal fans to cool the PC down if overheating components such as CPU, GPU (graphics-processing unit) and other motherboard components threatens to damage them.
BitWhisper utilizes these sensors to send commands to an air-gapped system or siphon data from it. The different heat patterns generated from the computer is regulated and binary data is modulated into thermal signals.
The other adjacent PC in close proximity to the first one uses its built-in thermal sensors to measure the environmental changes. These changes are then sampled, processed, and demodulated into binary data in order to exfiltrate data.
Experts demonstrated that the communication can also be bi-directional with both computers capable of transmitting or receiving commands and data by using the heat emitted by computers' various components. A hacker simply needs to plant a piece of malware on each PC that need to communicate.
Dudu Mimran told The Hacker News in an email that Its "not easy (to install Malware,) but possible i.e via USB or bad firmware or infection via other computers in the internal network. Such malware can be installed long time before activation so there are quite a few chances. Our base assumption that air gapped computers can be infected."
The malware is designed to search for nearby systems by periodically emitting a thermal ping from the infected system in order to determine when a victim has placed his infected laptop next to a classified desktop system.
"Once a bridging attempt is successful, a logical link between the public network and the internal network in established," researchers explained. "At this stage, the attacker can communicate with the formerly isolated network, issuing commands and receiving responses."
Both the systems would then engage in a handshake, involving a sequence of "thermal pings", to establish a connection between them. But increased success of an operation is achieved outside work hours, when the internet-connected computer and the air-gapped one are in close proximity for an ongoing period and there is no need to conduct a handshake each time.
FEW LIMITATIONS
The proof-of-concept attack requires both systems to first be compromised with malware.
The attack currently allows for just 8 bits of data to be reliably transmitted over an hour, which is sufficient for an attacker to siphon a password or secret keys.
The attack works only if the air-gapped system is within 40 centimeters/about 15 inches from the other computer controlled by an attacker.
However, researchers say they may be able to increase the distance between the two communicating computers and the speed of data transfer between them.
FUTURE ATTACK MAY INVOLVE IoT DEVICES
According to the security researchers, the future research might involve using the so-called internet of things (IoT) — an internet-connected heating and air conditioning system or a fax machine — as an attack vector instead of internet-connect computers.
The team of researchers Mordechai Guri and Matan Munitz, under the guidance of Professor Yuval Elovici, planned to present their findings at a security conference in Tel Aviv next week and publish a paper on their research, "BitWhisper: Covert Signaling Channel between Air-Gapped Computers Using Thermal Manipulations."
| Vulnerability |
Surveyspaysu.com ( Survey Company ) Emails/Passwords Exposed | https://thehackernews.com/2011/05/surveyspaysucom-survey-company.html | Surveyspaysu.com ( Survey Company ) Emails/Passwords Exposed
Mohit Pande find a Security hole in a Survey Company at Surveyspaysu.com , whose whole database is visible to everyone without login. Almost 183500 Members data is Exposed to all.
| Vulnerability |
Zero-Day Warning! Ransomware targets Microsoft Office 365 Users | https://thehackernews.com/2016/06/ransomware-msoffice.html | If just relying on the security tools of Microsoft Office 365 can protect you from cyber attacks, you are wrong.
Variants of Cerber Ransomware are now targeting MS Office 365 email users with a massive zero-day attack that has the ability to bypass Office 365's built-in security tools.
According to a report published by cloud security provider Avanan, the massive zero-day Cerber ransomware attack targeted Microsoft Office 365 users with spam or phishing emails carrying malicious file attachments.
The Cerber ransomware is invoked via Macros. Yes, it's hard to believe but even in 2016, a single MS Office document could compromise your system by enabling 'Macros'.
Locky and Dridex ransomware malware also made use of the malicious Macros to hijack systems. Over $22 Million were pilfered from the UK banks with the Dridex Malware that got triggered via a nasty macro virus.
You can see a screenshot of the malicious document in the latest malware campaign below, targeting Microsoft Office 365 users:
While the security firm did not specify the exact number of users possibly hit by the ransomware, Microsoft reported in its first quarter 2016 that there are almost 18.2 Million Office 365 subscribers.
"While difficult to precisely measure how many users got infected," Avanan estimated that "roughly 57 percent of organizations using Office 365 received at least one copy of the malware into one of their corporate mailboxes during the time of the attack."
Although Cerber originally emerged in March, the malware campaign targeting Office 365 users began on June 22. However, Microsoft started blocking the malicious file attachment on June 23.
The Cerber Ransomware not only encrypts user files and displays a ransom note, but also takes over the user's audio system to read out its ransom note informing them that their files were encrypted.
The ransomware encrypts files with AES-256 encryption, asking victims to pay 1.24 Bitcoin (nearly US$810) for the decryption key.
How to Protect Yourself from Cerber Ransomware
In order to prevent yourself from the Cerber or any ransomware attack:
Always keep your system and antivirus up-to-date.
Regularly backup your files in an external hard-drive.
Disable Macros in your MS Office programs.
Always beware of phishing emails, spams, and clicking the malicious attachment.
You can also use an Intrusion detection system (IDS), for which you can try AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) that includes an inbuilt IDS with SIEM and real-time threat intelligence to help you quickly detect malware and other threats in your network.
We have also written a step-by-step tutorial article on How to Protect your Computer from Macro-based Malware, which you can follow to secure yourself.
| Cyber_Attack |
NSA denies Report that Agency knew and exploited Heartbleed Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/NSA-Heartbleed-Vulnerability-OpenSSL-Robin-Seggelmann.html | The Bloomberg claimed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) knew about the most critical Heartbleed flaw and has been using it on a regular basis to gather "critical intelligence" and sensitive information for at least past two years and decided to keep the bug secret, citing two sources 'familiar with the matter'.
In response to the above report, NSA has issued a '94 character' statement today denying the claims that it has known about the Heartbleed bug since two years and that it has been using it silently for the purpose of surveillance.
"NSA was not aware of the recently identified Heartbleed vulnerability until it was made public," the U.S. intelligence agency said on its Twitter feed.
Heartbleed is one of the biggest Internet vulnerabilities in recent history that left large number of cryptographic keys and private data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers, from the most important sites and services on the Internet open for hackers.
The bug resides in the "Heartbeat" feature of the most secured open source encryption protocol, OpenSSL, which is used by several social networks, search engines, banks and other websites to enable secure connections while transmitting data.
A team of researchers from Codenomicon and Google Security researcher revealed the vulnerability this week that is in the wild since the new version 1.0.1f was released in March 2012. And just after the revelation, OpenSSL released the security Fix for the bug in its version 1.0.1g, but until then the Heartbleed bug made websites, email, instant messaging (IM), including some virtual private networks, on about half a million of the world's widely trusted web servers, open to hackers.
The birth of the most critical bug Heartbleed was due to a mistake done by a German programmer Robin Seggelmann over two years ago while working on a new Heartbeat feature in the OpenSSL.
He submitted the code of OpenSSL with the heartbeat feature in an update on New Year's Eve, 2011, and an "oversight" led to an error that unintentionally created the "Heartbleed" vulnerability.
Yesterday he said it could be entirely possible that the government intelligence agencies had been making use of this critical flaw over the past two years.
The fix was released just after, but the users' data are vulnerable until the vulnerable websites didn't implement it. You can only change your password immediately for those websites that are not affected, assuming that it was vulnerable before, just to make sure that you are now safe.
Related Important Articles:
How Heartbleed Bug Exposes Your Passwords to Hackers
German Developer responsible for HeartBleed Bug in OpenSSL
How to Protect yourself from the 'Heartbleed' Bug
Heartbleed - OpenSSL Zero-day Bug leaves Millions of websites Vulnerable
| Vulnerability |
Experts Believe Chinese Hackers Are Behind Several Attacks Targeting Israel | https://thehackernews.com/2021/08/experts-believe-chinese-hackers-are.html | A Chinese cyber espionage group has been linked to a string of intrusion activities targeting Israeli government institutions, IT providers, and telecommunications companies at least since 2019, with the hackers masquerading themselves as Iranian actors to mislead forensic analysis.
FireEye's Mandiant threat intelligence arm attributed the campaign to an operator it tracks as "UNC215", a Chinese espionage operation that's believed to have singled out organizations around the world dating back as far as 2014, linking the group with "low confidence" to an advanced persistent threat (APT) widely known as APT27, Emissary Panda, or Iron Tiger.
"UNC215 has compromised organizations in the government, technology, telecommunications, defense, finance, entertainment, and health care sectors," FireEye's Israel and U.S. threat intel teams said in a report published today.
"The group targets data and organizations which are of great interest to Beijing's financial, diplomatic, and strategic objectives," the findings reflecting a relentless appetite for defense-related secrets among hacking groups.
Early attacks perpetrated by the collective is said to have exploited a Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability (CVE-2019-0604) as a stepping stone toward infiltrating government and academic networks to deploy web shells and FOCUSFJORD payloads at targets in the Middle East and Central Asia. First described by the NCC Group in 2018, FOCUSFJORD, also called HyperSSL and Sysupdate, is a backdoor that's part of an arsenal of tools put to use by the Emissary Panda actor.
Upon gaining an initial foothold, the adversary follows an established pattern of conducting credential harvesting and internal reconnaissance to identify key systems within the target network, before carrying out lateral movement activities to install a custom implant called HyperBro that comes with capabilities such as screen capture and keylogging.
Each phase of the attack is marked by notable efforts undertaken to hinder detection by removing any traces of residual forensic artifacts from compromised machines, while simultaneously improving the FOCUSFJORD backdoor in response to security vendor reports, concealing command-and-control (C2) infrastructure by using other victim networks to proxy their C2 instructions, and even incorporating false flags in an attempt to mislead attribution.
To that effect, the group deployed a custom web shell called SEASHARPEE that's associated with Iranian APT groups on at least three occasions, and even used file paths containing references to Iran and displayed error messages in Arabic likely to obfuscate the source of the activity.
What's more, in a 2019 operation against an Israeli government network, UNC215 obtained access to the primary target via remote desktop protocol (RDP) connections from a trusted third-party using stolen credentials, abusing it to deploy and remotely execute the FOCUSFJORD malware, the cybersecurity firm noted.
"The activity [...] demonstrates China's consistent strategic interest in the Middle East," the researchers concluded. "This cyber espionage activity is happening against the backdrop of China's multi-billion-dollar investments related to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its interest in Israeli's robust technology sector."
"China has conducted numerous intrusion campaigns along the BRI route to monitor potential obstructions—political, economic, and security—and we anticipate that UNC215 will continue targeting governments and organizations involved in these critical infrastructure projects in Israel and the broader Middle East in the near- and mid-term," the teams added.
| Cyber_Attack |
How Russian Hackers Placed "Digital Bomb" Into the NASDAQ | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/how-russian-hackers-placed-digital-bomb.html | Four years ago, NASDAQ servers were compromised by Russian hackers, who were somehow able to insert a "digital bomb" into the systems of NASDAQ stock exchange, which would have been able to cause several damage to the computer systems in the stock market and could bring down the entire structure of the financial system of the United States.
Till now, identities of the hackers have not been identified by the agencies who are investigating the whole incident from past four years. However, it has been identified that the intruder was not a student or a teen, but the intelligence agency of another country.
The Hackers successfully infiltrated the network of NASDAQ stock exchange with customized malware which had ability to extract data from the systems and carry out surveillance as well. However, a closer look at the malware indicated that it was designed to cause widespread disruption in the NASDAQ computer system.
MALWARE EXPLOITS TWO 0-DAY VULNERABILITIES
According to a magazine cover story, the malware that was actually used by the hackers to infect NASDAQ servers exploited two mystery zero-day vulnerabilities.
The attack on the NASDAQ stock exchange was reported by Bloomberg Businessweek in its investigative cover story, "The Nasdaq Hack", which detailed the incidents took place at the NASDAQ leading up to the discovery of the inserted digital time bomb.
According to the magazine, it all started in October 2010, when the FBI was monitoring the Internet traffic in the United States and noticed a signal coming from NASDAQ, which indicated a malware infection. The most troubling part was that the malware was actually an attack code, which was created to cause significant damage, from another country's foreign intelligence agency.
In February 2011, NASDAQ stock exchange confirmed the breach to its network and notified its customers.
The feds alerted and warned NASDAQ officials, who already knew about a compromise in their systems but had neglected to bother and inform anyone about it. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was called in to help investigate the hack attacks against the company that runs the NASDAQ stock market.
After a five-month investigation by the FBI, NSA, CIA and US Treasury Department, it was uncovered that the malware used two unnamed Zero-day security flaws, for which there were no patches existed. Rather, it is unclear that the hackers targeted which software, and whether the hackers used these zero-day vulnerabilities to infect NASDAQ systems or to exfiltrate data.
In fact, one of the forensic investigators described the NASDAQ servers as "the dirty swamp," because very few records were available that would have revealed daily activities on the servers and helped retrace the steps of the intruders.
"The agents found little evidence of a broader attack. What they did find were systematic security failures riddling some of the most important U.S. financial institutions. It turned out that many on the list were vulnerable to the same attack that struck Nasdaq. They were spared only because the hackers hadn't bothered to try."
Further analysis of the attacking code indicated that the malware attacked the NASDAQ systems was similar in design to the malware written by the Russian Federal Security Service for the purpose of spying and, NSA agents says, had the ability to seriously disrupt the exchange's activities.
But it is also possible that the malware which had been used belongs to another country, Bloomberg notes. China was a primary suspect, for both its intrinsic features and its ability to confuse an investigation.
Nasdaq spokesperson says that the malware did not reach the stock exchange, as originally stated in the cover story headline. "The events of four years ago, while sensationalized by Businessweek, only confirmed what we have said historically: that none of Nasdaq's trading platforms or engines were ever compromised, and no evidence of exfiltration exists from directors' desks," said NASDAQ spokesman Ryan Wells.
| Malware |
Los Angeles College Pays Hackers $28,000 Ransom To Get Its Files Back | https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/ransomware-malware-attack.html | Ransomware has turned on to a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly.
Once again the heat was felt by the Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) when hackers managed to infect its computer network with ransomware and demanded US$28,000 payment in Bitcoins to get back online.
The cyber-attack occurred over winter break and caused widespread disruption to online, financial aid, email and voicemail systems, including locking out 1,800 students and staffs from their computers.
As the situation was gone out of its hand, the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) agreed to pay the ransom demand of $28,000 in Bitcoin to criminals to resume their operations after gaining the decryption keys, the school newspaper, The Valley Star, reports.
The cyber criminals gave the college a week to pay the ransom and threatened to delete all the data if they were not paid.
Also Read: RansomFree Tool Detects Never-Seen-Before Ransomware Before It Encrypts Your Data
Just like most ransomware victims the college obviously was not properly backing up the data. Therefore, the district agreed to pay up the ransom amount to quickly recover access to their systems and data.
However, according to the college officials, it was ultimately cheaper for them to pay the ransom than to remove the unknown ransomware virus from their systems to recover data and resume other services.
After paying the ransom, the college was given a ransomware decryption key to retaining access to its valuable data.
"LACCD and LAVC information technology staff, outside cybersecurity experts and law enforcement are working together to determine the specific nature and impact of this incident. Our top priority is the integrity of student, faculty and employee data, and we will continue to communicate with the LAVC community and the public as the investigation proceeds." the College wrote in a report [PDF].
The college was lucky this time, because, in the case of ransomware, there is no guarantee that one will get the right decryption key in return. For example, recently discovered KillDisk Ransomware that targets Linux machines, demands $218,000 to decrypt, but in return, wipes out data permanently.
One of the most notorious examples of ransomware attacks took place in March last year when crooks locked down the computers and sealed all sensitive files of a Los Angeles hospital, including patient data, which eventually made the hospital to pay $17,000.
Last year, we saw an enormous rise in Ransomware threats, both in numbers and sophistication, and the only way to secure your environment is to deploy automated and isolated backup mechanism.
| Malware |
Hackers Used Malicious MDM Solution to Spy On 'Highly Targeted' iPhone Users | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/mobile-device-management-hacking.html | Security researchers have uncovered a "highly targeted" mobile malware campaign that has been operating since August 2015 and found spying on 13 selected iPhones in India.
The attackers, who are also believed to be operating from India, were found abusing mobile device management (MDM) protocol—a type of security software used by large enterprises to control and enforce policies on devices being used their employees—to contol and deploy malicious applications remotely.
Exploiting Apple MDM Service to Remotely Control Devices
To enroll an iOS device into the MDM requires a user to manually install enterprise development certificate, which enterprises obtained through the Apple Developer Enterprise Program.
Companies can deliver MDM configuration file through email or a webpage for over-the-air enrollment service using Apple Configurator.
Once a user installs it, the service allows the company administrators to remotely control the device, install/remove apps, install/revoke certificates, lock the device, change password requirements, etc.
"MDM uses the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) to deliver a wake-up message to a managed device. The device then connects to a predetermined web service to retrieve commands and return results," Apple explains about MDM.
Since each step of the enrollment process requires user interaction, such as installing a certificate authority on the iPhone, it is not yet clear how attackers managed to enroll 13 targeted iPhones into their MDM service.
However, researchers at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence unit, who discovered the campaign, believe that the attackers likely used either a social engineering mechanism, like a fake tech support-style call, or physical access to the targeted devices.
Spying Through Compromised Telegram and WhatsApp Apps
According to the researchers, the attackers behind the campaign used the MDM service to remotely install modified versions of legitimate apps onto target iPhones, which were designed to secretly spy on users, and steal their real-time location, contacts, photos, SMS and private messages from chat applications.
To add malicious features into secure messaging apps, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, the attacker used the "BOptions sideloading technique," which allowed them to inject a dynamic library into the legitimate apps.
"The injection library can ask for additional permissions, execute code and steal information from the original application, among other things," researchers explain.
The malware injected into the compromised versions of the Telegram, and WhatsApp applications were designed to send contacts, location, and images from the compromised device to a remote server located at hxxp[:]//techwach[.]com
"Talos identified another legitimate app executing malicious code during this campaign in India. PrayTime is used to give the user a notification when it's time to pray," researchers said.
"The purpose is to download and display specific ads to the user. This app also leverages private frameworks to read the SMS messages on the device it is installed on and uploads these to the C2 server."
At this time, it is not known who is behind the campaign, who was targeted in the campaign, and what were the motives behind the attack, but researchers find evidence suggesting the attackers were operating from India, while the attackers planted a "false flag" by posing as Russian.
"Over a three-year period, the attackers remained under the radar — likely due to the low number of compromised devices. We found testing devices enrolled on the MDM with an Indian phone number and registered on an Indian provider," Talos researchers said.
"All the technical details point to an actor based in the same country as the victims: India."
At the time of reporting, Apple had already revoked 3 certificates linked to this campaign, and after getting informed by the Talos team, the company also canceled the rest two certificates as well.
| Malware |
Microsoft Issues Emergency Patch for Critical Windows PrintNightmare Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/microsoft-issues-emergency-patch-for.html | Microsoft has shipped an emergency out-of-band security update to address a critical zero-day vulnerability — known as "PrintNightmare" — that affects the Windows Print Spooler service and can permit remote threat actors to run arbitrary code and take over vulnerable systems.
Tracked as CVE-2021-34527 (CVSS score: 8.8), the remote code execution flaw impacts all supported editions of Windows. Last week, the company warned it had detected active exploitation attempts targeting the vulnerability.
"The Microsoft Windows Print Spooler service fails to restrict access to functionality that allows users to add printers and related drivers, which can allow a remote authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges on a vulnerable system," the CERT Coordination Center said of the issue.
It's worth noting that PrintNightmare includes both remote code execution and a local privilege escalation vector that can be abused in attacks to run commands with SYSTEM privileges on targeted Windows machines.
"The Microsoft update for CVE-2021-34527 only appears to address the Remote Code Execution (RCE via SMB and RPC) variants of the PrintNightmare, and not the Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) variant," CERT/CC vulnerability analyst Will Dormann said.
This effectively means that the incomplete fix could still be used by a local adversary to gain SYSTEM privileges. As workarounds, Microsoft recommends stopping and disabling the Print Spooler service or turning off inbound remote printing through Group Policy to block remote attacks.
Given the criticality of the flaw, the Windows maker has issued patches for:
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2008
Windows 8.1
Windows RT 8.1, and
Windows 10 (versions 21H1, 20H2, 2004, 1909, 1809, 1803, and 1507)
Microsoft has even taken the unusual step of issuing the fix for Windows 7, which officially reached the end of support as of January 2020.
The update, however, does not include Windows 10 version 1607, Windows Server 2012, or Windows Server 2016, for which the Redmond-based company stated patches will be released in the forthcoming days.
| Vulnerability |
Google vs. Microsoft — Google reveals Third unpatched Zero-Day Vulnerability in Windows | https://thehackernews.com/2015/01/google-windows-vulnerability.html | Microsoft has heavily criticized Google and its 90-days security disclosure policy after the firm publicly revealed two zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Windows 8.1 operating system one after one just days before Microsoft planned to issue a patch to kill the bugs. But, seemingly Google don't give a damn thought.
Once again, Google has publicly disclosed a new serious vulnerability in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 before Microsoft has been able to produce a patch, leaving users of both the operating systems exposed to hackers until next month, when the company plans to deliver a fix.
DISCLOSURE OF UNPATCHED BUGS, GOOD OR BAD?
Google's tight 90-days disclosure policy seems to be a good move for all software vendors to patch their products before they get exploited by the hackers and cybercriminals. But at the same time, disclosing all critical bugs along with its technical details in the widely used operating system like Windows 7 and 8 doesn't appears to be a right decision either. In both cases, the only one to suffer is the innocent users.
The revelation of the security flaw was also a part Google's Project Zero, an initiative that identifies security holes in different software and calls on companies to publicly disclose and patch bugs within 90 days of discovering them.
Chris Betz, senior director of the Microsoft Security Response Center, wrote that Google's move "feels less like principles and more like a 'gotcha', with customers the one who may suffer as a result." He continues, "What's right for Google is not always right for customers. We urge Google to make protection of customers our collective primary goal."
This time the search engine giant has discovered a flaw in the CryptProtectMemory memory-encrypting function found within Windows 7 and 8.1 and presents in both 32- and 64-bit architectures, which can accidentally disclose sensitive information or allow a miscreant to bypass security checks, apparently.
MICROSOFT WILL DELIVER PATCH IN FEB, 2015
Google first notified Microsoft of the vulnerability in Windows 7 and 8.1 on October 17, 2014. Microsoft then confirmed the security issues on October 29 and said that its developers managed to reproduce the security hole. The patch for the vulnerability is scheduled for Feb. 10, next Patch Tuesday.
The vulnerability was found by James Forshaw, who also discovered a "privilege elevation flaw" in Windows 8.1, which was disclosed earlier this week and drew strong criticism from Microsoft. The newly discovered bug actually resides in the CNG.sys implementation, which failed to run proper token checks.
"The issue is the implementation in CNG.sys doesn't check the impersonation level of the token when capturing the logon session ID (using SeQueryAuthenticationIdToken) so a normal user can impersonate at Identification level and decrypt or encrypt data for that logon session," James Forshaw says in the post disclosing the vulnerability.
"This behaviour of course might be design; however, not having been party to the design, it's hard to tell."
This is third time in less than a month when the Google's Project Zero released details of the vulnerability in Microsoft's operating system, following its 90-day public disclosure deadline policy. Few days ago, Google released details of a new privilege escalation bug in Microsoft's Windows 8.1 operating system just two days before Microsoft planned to patch the bug.
| Vulnerability |
FBI Used Firefox Exploit to Shutdown Illegal Site Running on Tor Network | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/Firefox-Exploit-Tor-Network-child-pornography-Freedom-Hosting.html | TOR is the dark side of the Internet, the so-called dark web, which provides a safe haven to privacy advocates but is also where drugs, assassins for hire and other weird and illegal activities can allegedly be traded.
A claimed zero-day vulnerability in Firefox 17 was used by the FBI to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network. The FBI did not compromise the TOR network itself and The complex multi-layers of encryption still stand. Instead the FBI compromised the TOR browser only using a zero-day JavaScript exploit and used this to implant a cookie which fingerprinted users through a specific external server.
Eric Eoin Marques, 28 year-old man in Ireland believed to be behind Freedom Hosting, the biggest service provider for sites on the encrypted Tor network, is awaiting extradition on p*rno charges. It is understood the FBI had spent a year trying to locate Mr Marques.
Marques was arrested on a Maryland warrant that includes charges of distributing and promoting child p*rn online. He faced four charges relating to alleged child p*rno offenses with a total of 30 years jail, reportedly dubbed by the FBI as "the largest facilitator of child p*rn on the planet." That need has been particularly heightened with the many revelations of the US Prism program and other cyber spying initiatives.
Mr Marques told the court he was born in the US but has lived in Ireland since he was five. He said he was last in Romania a few weeks ago when he withdrew €6,000 from his credit card to help a friend start a business.
The Tor Network is a robust tool for journalists, whistleblowers, dissidents and others looking to publish information in a way that is not easily traced back to them. His arrest coincides with mass outages across the Darknet affecting popular services like Tor Mail, HackBB and the Hidden Wiki which were run on Freedom Hosting. Worse, there are reports of many well known TOR hidden services may be compromised using a browser exploit.
"The current news indicates that someone has exploited the software behind Freedom Hosting. From what is known so far, the breach was used to configure the server in a way that it injects some sort of javascript exploit in the web pages delivered to users. This exploit is used to load a malware payload to infect users' computers. The malware payload could be trying to exploit potential bugs in Firefox 17 ESR, on which our Tor Browser is based. We're investigating these bugs and will fix them if we can." Andrew Lewman, Tor Project's Executive Director said in a blog post.
Mozilla says it has been notified of a potential security vulnerability in Firefox 17 (MFSA 2013-53) , which is currently the extended support release (ESR) version of Firefox. The Exploit code posted by Mozilla and Deobfuscated JS used by the Tor Browser exploit posted on Google Code.
The malicious Javascript is a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named "Magneto", but the Magneto code doesn't download anything. It looks up the victim's MAC address and the victim's Windows hostname. Then it sends it to the Virginia server, outside of Tor, to expose the user's real IP address, and coded as a standard HTTP web request.
The FBI appears to have gained access to Freedom Hosting and injected malicious HTML code that checks the visitor's browser to see if he is using Firefox 17. Some visitors looking at the source code of the maintenance page realized that it included a hidden iframe tag that loaded a mysterious clump of Javascript code from a Verizon Business internet address located in eastern Virginia.
The Openwatch reported that, The execution of malicious JavaScript inside the Tor Browser Bundle, perhaps the most commonly used Tor client, comes as a surprise to many users. Previously, the browser disabled JavaScript execution by default for security purposes, however this change was recently reverted by developers in order to make the product more useful for average internet users. As a result, however, the applications have become vastly more vulnerable to attacks such as this.
The JavaScript code's payload analyzed by reverse engineering and exploit developer Vlad Tsyrklevich, who reveals that it briefly connects to a server and sends the hostname and MAC address of the victim. "Briefly, this payload connects to 65.222.202.54:80 and sends it an HTTP request that includes the host name (via gethostname()) and the MAC address of the local host (via calling SendARP on gethostbyname()->h_addr_list). After that it cleans up the state and appears to deliberately crash."
Microsoft used to provide the US government with a an early start on its security vulnerabilities, which was reportedly used to aid its cyber espionage programs. But here no idea at this point, that Mozilla worked with the government in this case.
Of course, this shows how complacency can be a very bad thing, especially when it comes to security. In its attempts to bring down child images, but it could also mean a serious security breach for international activists and internet users living in repressive states who use the services to practice online free speech.
Be sure you're running a recent enough Tor Browser Bundle. That should keep you safe from this attack. Windows users are advised to Update Tor Browser Bundle, version 2.3.25-10 (released June 26 2013), 2.4.15-alpha-1 (released June 26 2013), 2.4.15-beta-1 (released July 8 2013), 3.0alpha2 (released June 30 2013) includes the fix. Consider disabling JavaScript (click the blue"S" beside the green onion, and select "Forbid Scripts Globally"). Disabling JavaScript will reduce your vulnerability to other attacks like this one, but disabling JavaScript will make some websites not work like you expect.
Update: According to Baneki Privacy Labs research, the IP address 65.222.202.53 hardcoded into the exploit belongs to Virginia is actually owned by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major intelligence, military, aerospace, engineering and systems contractor involved with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) , Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA).
They believe that the hardcoded IP address is directly allocated to the NSA's Autonomous Systems (AS), so its probably not the FBI, its NSA who used Firefox Zero-Day exploit to compromise Freedom Hosting and TOR network.
| Vulnerability |
First Time Ever Apple Automatically Pushes Security Patch for Mac OS | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/Apple-Mac-Security-Patch.html | First time ever in the History, Apple Inc. has pushed out an automatic security update for Macintosh OS X computers to address a critical security issue that, according to the company, was too risky to wait for users to patch after seeking their prior approval.
Despite having the ability for years to silently and automatically update its users computers, Apple typically asks its users' permission to approve them manually or automatically before installing any security update of this kind. But, the company has exercised its ability for the very first time to patch a critical security flaw in a component of its OS X operating system called the Network Time Protocol (NTP).
This newly discovered security vulnerability, assigned CVE-2014-9295, became public late last week and affects all operating systems, including OS X and other Linux and Unix distributions, running versions of NTP4 prior to 4.2.8. NTP is used for synchronizing clocks between computer systems and across the global internet.
TURNING YOUR MAC INTO DDOS ZOMBIES
Once exploited, the NTP vulnerability can allow an attacker to remotely execute an arbitrary code on a system using the privileges of the ntpd process. The security hole in NTP would give hackers ability to turn users' Macs into DDoS zombies. However, no security firms have reported any cases of hackers exploiting this vulnerability.
NTP is a global way of synchronising time over a network, and because of its link to networks it has previously been exploited by hackers a number of times. At the beginning of the year, NTP was used to launch 300Gbps DDoS attack against Internet blacklist maintainer Spamhaus. Also in February 2014, the record breaking 400Gbps DDoS attack was launched against content-delivery and anti-DDoS protection firm CloudFlare by leveraging weaknesses in NTP.
The Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute identified the critical flaw which was made public on Friday by the Department of Homeland Security. The vulnerability affects dozens of technology companies' products including Apple's.
"As NTP is widely used within operational Industrial Control Systems deployments, NCCIC/ICS-CERT is providing this information for US Critical Infrastructure asset owners and operators for awareness and to identify mitigations for affected devices," ICS-CERT wrote in an advisory published Tuesday. "Products using NTP service prior to NTP–4.2.8 are affected. No specific vendor is specified because this is an open source protocol."
UPDATE YOUR SYSTEMS NOW
The company recommends that all users apply this patch "as soon as possible." The update is available for OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.5, OS X Mavericks v10.9.5, OS X Yosemite v10.10.1 and is available for download via the "updates" section of the Mac App Store. The update doesn't require a restart.
| Vulnerability |
6 Charged for Hacking Lottery Terminals to Produce More Winning Tickets | https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/hacking-lottery-terminal.html | Police have arrested and charged six people with crimes linked to hacking Connecticut state lottery terminals in order to produce more winning tickets than usual.
Prosecutors say all the six suspects are either owners or employees of retail stores that produced a much higher number of winning tickets than the state average, according to the Hartford Courant.
Suspects Hacked Lottery Terminal
The alleged group set up machines to process a flood of tickets at once that caused a temporary display freeze, allowing operators to see which of the tickets about to be dispensed would be winning tickets, cancel the duff ones, and print the good ones.
The hack appears to have exploited some software weaknesses in lottery terminals that not only caused ticket requests to be delayed but also allowed operators to know ahead of time whether a given request would produce a winning ticket.
The actual culprit, in this case, was a game dubbed "5 Card Cash."
The alleged suspects manipulated automated ticket dispensers to run off 5 Card Cash game that consists of tickets a user can buy, on which playing cards are printed.
If 5 cards form a winning poker hand, then the buyer can cash the tickets based on the hand they received.
Authorities Suspended 5 Card Cash Lottery Game
Authorities had already suspended the 5 Card Cash lottery game in Connecticut past November after discovering that the game was generating more winning tickets than its winning range parameters should have technically permitted.
The six suspects are:
Vikas Patel, 32, from Windsor
Pranav Patel, 32, from Bloomfield
Sedat Kurutan from Naugatuck
Moinuddin Saiyed from Norwalk
Prakuni Patel from Wallingford
Rahul Gandhi from Wallingford
Pranav Patel and Vikas Patel were arrested on Friday, March 19 while the rests took into custody between February 29 and March 7.
The charges filed against Vikas and Pranav include first-degree felony counts of larceny and computer crime as well as felony rigging a game charges. Both of them have been bailed on $25,000 bonds each and are scheduled to appear in court on Monday.
Investigators for the Department of Consumer Protection and the Connecticut Lottery say that many clerks were abusing lottery tickets to fetch out more winning tickets that they would later cash in for themselves, and that more arrests may be made in the future.
| Vulnerability |
Operation Windigo: Linux malware campaign that infected 500,000 Computers Worldwide | https://thehackernews.com/2014/03/operation-windigo-linux-malware.html | In late 2013, Security Researchers identified thousands of Linux systems around the world infected with the OpenSSH backdoor trojan and credential stealer named Linux/Ebury, that allows unauthorized access of an affected computer to the remote attackers.
Antivirus Firm ESET's Reseacher team has been tracking and investigating the operation behind Linux/Ebury and today team uncovers the details [Report PDF] of a massive, sophisticated and organized malware campaign called 'Operation Windigo', infected more than 500,000 computers and 25,000 dedicated servers.
'We discovered an infrastructure used for malicious activities that is all hosted on compromised servers. We were also able to find a link between different malware components such as Linux/Cdorked, Perl/Calfbot and Win32/Glupteba.M and realized they are all operated by the same group.' ESET reported.
Malware used in Operation Windigo:
Linux/Ebury – an OpenSSH backdoor used to keep control of the servers and steal credentials.
Linux/Cdorked – an HTTP backdoor used to redirect web traffic. We also detail the infrastructure deployed to redirect traffic, including a modified DNS server used to resolve arbitrary IP addresses labeled as Linux/Onimiki.
Perl/Calfbot – a Perl script used to send spam.
The Group behind the attacks may have been active since December 2012, using a modified version of OpenSSH, an open source alternative to proprietary Secure Shell Software (SSH) to infect thousands of servers and desktop computers, apparently, stole user credentials on system and SSH private keys for outgoing SSH connections.
"According to our analysis, over 25,000 servers have been affected over the last two years. More than 10,000 of them are still infected today." ESET reported, "using the Linux/Ebury OpenSSH backdoor"
Hackers have accessed a wider range of compromised machines, used them to redirect half of a million web visitors to malicious websites and abusing the server bandwidth to send more than 35,000,000 spam messages per day. If victim will use a Smartphone to surf the malicious link from Spam mails, they will be redirected to Porn sites, with the intention of making money.
High-profile Targets: Report listed some affected high profile servers and companies, including cPanel (famous web hosting control panel) and Linux Foundation's kernel.org (main repository of source code for the Linux kernel).
ESET Researchers collaborated with CERT-Bund, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing and other agencies to fight against this malware campaign.
Affected Operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, and even Windows (with Perl running under Cygwin) and affected countries are US, Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Netherlands, Russian Federation, Ukraine, Mexico and Canada.
How to Check, if you have been compromised? If you use only 'ssh -G' command, a clean server will print: 'ssh: illegal option -- G', but an infected server will only print the usage.
Administrators can use the following UNIX/Linux command to check:
$ ssh -G 2>&1 | grep -e illegal -e unknown > /dev/null && echo "System clean" || echo "System infected"
If your system or server was also compromised in the same campaign, it's recommended to re-install the system or re-set all passwords and private OpenSSH keys.
| Malware |
Mount Locker Ransomware Offering Double Extortion Scheme to Other Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/mount-locker-ransomware-offering-double.html | A relatively new ransomware strain behind a series of breaches on corporate networks has developed new capabilities that allow it to broaden the scope of its targeting and evade security software—as well as with ability for its affiliates to launch double extortion attacks.
The MountLocker ransomware, which only began making the rounds in July 2020, has already gained notoriety for stealing files before encryption and demanding ransom amounts in the millions to prevent public disclosure of stolen data, a tactic known as double extortion.
"The MountLocker Operators are clearly just warming up. After a slow start in July they are rapidly gaining ground, as the high-profile nature of extortion and data leaks drive ransom demands ever higher," researchers from BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team said.
"MountLocker affiliates are typically fast operators, rapidly exfiltrating sensitive documents and encrypting them across key targets in a matter of hours."
MountLocker also joins the likes of other ransomware families like Maze (which shut down its operations last month) that operate a website on the dark web to name and shame victims and supply links to leaked data.
To date, the ransomware has claimed five victims, although the researchers suspect the number could be "far greater."
Offered as Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), MountLocker was notably deployed earlier this August against Swedish security firm Gunnebo.
Although the company said it had successfully thwarted the ransomware attack, the criminals who orchestrated the intrusion ended up stealing and publishing online 18 gigabytes of sensitive documents, including schematics of client bank vaults and surveillance systems, in October.
Now according to BlackBerry's analysis, threat actors behind MountLocker-related affiliate campaigns leveraged remote desktop (RDP) with compromised credentials to gain an initial foothold on a victim's environment — something that was observed in Gunnebo's hack as well — and subsequently install tools to carry out network reconnaissance (AdFind), deploy the ransomware and laterally spread across the network, and exfiltrate critical data via FTP.
The ransomware in itself is lightweight and efficient. Upon execution, it proceeds to terminate security software, trigger encryption using ChaCha20 cipher, and create a ransom note, which contains a link to a Tor .onion URL to contact the criminals via a "dark web" chat service to negotiate a price for decrypting software.
It also uses an embedded RSA-2048 public key to encrypt the encryption key, deletes volume shadow copies to thwart restoration of the encrypted files, and eventually removes itself from the disk to hide its tracks.
The researchers, however, point out that the ransomware uses a cryptographically insecure method called GetTickCount API for key generation that may be susceptible to a brute-force attack.
MountLocker's list of encryption targets is extensive, with support for over 2600 file extensions spanning databases, documents, archives, images, accounting software, security software, source code, games, and backups. Executable files such as .exe, .dll, and .sys are left untouched.
That's not all. A new variant of MountLocker spotted in late November (dubbed "version 2") goes a step further by dropping the list of extensions to be included for encryption in favor of a lean exclusion list: .exe, .dll, .sys, .msi, .mui, .inf, .cat, .bat, .cmd, .ps1, .vbs, .ttf, .fon, and .lnk.
"Since its inception, the MountLocker group has been seen to both expand and improve their services and malware," the researchers concluded. "While their current capabilities are not particularly advanced, we expect this group to continue developing and growing in prominence over the short term."
| Malware |
Two Hackers Who Extorted Money From Uber and LinkedIn Plead Guilty | https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/hackers-extorted-money.html | Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber, LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016.
In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover (26) of Florida and Vasile Mereacre (23) of Toronto admitted they accessed and downloaded confidential corporate databases on Amazon Web Services using stolen credentials.
After downloading the data, the duo contacted affected companies to report security vulnerabilities and demanded money in exchange for the deletion of the data, according to a press release published by the US Justice Department.
"I was able to access backups upon backups, me and my team would like a huge reward for this," the hackers said to the victim company in an email.
"Please keep in mind, we expect a big payment as this was hard work for us, we already helped a big corp which paid close to 7 digits, all went well."
As The Hacker News reported two years ago, the hackers managed to inappropriately accessed and downloaded sensitive information of 57 million Uber riders and drivers, for which Uber reportedly paid the duo $100,000 in bitcoin in an attempt to cover up the breach.
"The defendants used false names to communicate with the victim-corporations, and, on several occasions, informed the victim-corporations that they had been paid by other victim-corporations for identifying security vulnerabilities," the indictment reads.
"They also sent the victim-corporations a sample of the data in order for the victim-corporations to verify the authenticity of data."
The indictment also revealed that the duo blackmailed LinkedIn in the same way in December 2016, informing the company that they had compromised databases of LinkedIn's subsidiary Lynda.com and stole over 90,000 user records, including their credit card information.
At that time, it was also reported that Uber sent its forensic team to the hackers' house in Florida and Canada to analyze their computers to make sure all the stolen data had been wiped and had the hackers also sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent further wrongdoings.
Uber waited a year to reveal the October 2016 data breach, for which it was later ordered by the attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to pay $148 million across all 50 states and Washington DC to settle the investigation.
British and Dutch data protection regulators also hit the ride-sharing company with a total fine of approximately $ 1.1 million for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a 2016 cyber attack.
At the time, it was also reported that Uber hid the data breach incident from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which was investigating another hacking incident against the company, and only told the commission about the 2016 breach in late 2017 when the incident was made public.
Glover and Mereacre each pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit extortion and are set to face a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 when they are sentenced.
The duo has been released on bond and will be sentenced in March 2020.
| Data_Breaches |
Someone is Using Mirai Botnet to Shut Down Internet for an Entire Country | https://thehackernews.com/2016/11/ddos-attack-mirai-botnet.html | Note — We have published an updated article on what really happened behind the alleged DDoS attack against Liberia using Mirai botnet.
Someone is trying to take down the whole Internet of a country, and partially succeeded, by launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using a botnet of insecure IoT devices infected by the Mirai malware.
It all started early October when a cyber criminal publicly released the source code of Mirai – a piece of nasty IoT malware designed to scan for insecure IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks.
Just two weeks ago, the Mirai IoT Botnet caused vast internet outage by launching massive DDoS attacks against DNS provider Dyn, and later it turns out that just 100,000 infected-IoT devices participated in the attacks.
Experts believe that the future DDoS attack could reach 10 Tbps, which is enough to take down the whole Internet in any nation state.
One such incident is happening from past one week where hackers are trying to take down the entire Internet of Liberia, a small African country, using another Mirai IoT botnet known as Botnet 14.
Security researcher Kevin Beaumont has noticed that Botnet 14 has begun launching DDoS attacks against the networks of "Lonestar Cell MTN ", the telecommunication company which provides the Internet to 10-15% of Liberia via a single entry point from undersea fiber cable.
"From monitoring, we can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks — Additionally, a source in country at a Telco has confirmed to a journalist they are seeing intermittent internet connectivity, at times which directly match the attack," Beaumont said in a blog post published today.
According to Beaumont, transit providers confirm that the attacks were over 500 Gbps in size, but last for a short period. This volume of traffic indicates that the "Shadows Kill" Botnet, as the researcher called it, is "owned by the actor which attacked Dyn."
Why Taking Down Liberia's Internet Is easy?
Over a decade of civil war in Liberia destroyed the country's telecommunications infrastructure, and at that time a very small portion of citizens in Liberia had access to the internet via satellite communication.
However, some progress were made later in 2011 when a 17,000 km Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine fiber-optic cable was deployed from France to Cape Town, via the west coast of Africa.
The ACE fiber cable, at depths close to 6,000 meters below sea level, eventually provides broadband connectivity to more 23 countries in Europe and Africa.
What's shocking? The total capacity of this cable is just 5.12 Tbps, which is shared between all of the 23 countries.
Since massive DDoS attack against DynDNS used a Mirai botnet of just 100,000 hacked IoT devices to close down the Internet for millions of users, one can imagine the capability of more than 1 Million hacked IoT devices, which is currently in control of the Mirai malware and enough to severely impact systems in any nation state.
This is extremely worrying because, with this capacity, not just Liberia, an attacker could disrupt the Internet services in all 23 countries in Europe and Africa, which relies on the ACE fiber cable for their internet connectivity.
The root cause? More insecure, vulnerable IoT devices, more Mirai bots.
So, in order to protect yourself, you need to be more vigilant about the security of your smart devices because they are dumber than one can ever be.
In our previous article, we provided some basic, rather effective, solutions, which would help you protect your smart devices from becoming part of the Mirai botnet. You can also check also yourself if your IoT device is vulnerable to Mirai malware. Head on to this article.
| Malware |
Another Facebook Quiz App Left 120 Million Users' Data Exposed | https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/facebook-users-data-leak.html | People are still getting over the most controversial data scandal of the year, i.e., Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Facebook is under fire yet again after it emerges that a popular quiz app on the social media platform exposed the private data of up to 120 million users for years.
Facebook was in controversies earlier this year over a quiz app that sold data of 87 million users to a political consultancy firm, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016.
Now, a different third-party quiz app, called NameTests, found exposing data of up to 120 million Facebook users to anyone who happened to find it, an ethical hacker revealed.
NameTests[.]com, the website behind popular social quizzes, like "Which Disney Princess Are You?" that has around 120 million monthly users, uses Facebook's app platform to offer a fast way to sign up.
Just like any other Facebook app, signing up on the NameTests website using their app allows the company to fetch necessary information about your profile from the Facebook, with consent naturally.
However, Inti De Ceukelaire, a bug bounty hunter and hacker, found that the popular quiz website is leaking logged-in user's detail to the other websites opened in the same browser, allowing any malicious website to obtain that data easily.
In a Medium post published yesterday, Ceukelaire said he liked to participate in the Data Abuse Bounty Program that Facebook recently launched in the wake of Cambridge Analytica scandal. So, he started looking at the apps his friends on Facebook had installed.
Ceukelaire then decided to take his first quiz through the NameTests app, and as he started taking a closer look on the test process, he noticed that the website was fetching his personal information from "https://nametests[.]com/appconfig_user" and display it on its website.
Ceukelaire was shocked when he saw his personal data in a JavaScript file that could easily be accessed by virtually any website when they would request it.
What Was the Flaw? How It Leaked Users' Data?
This issue was due to a simple yet severe flaw in NameTests website that appears to have existed since the end of 2016.
Storing user data in JavaScript file caused the website to leak data to other websites, which is otherwise not possible due to browser's Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy that prevents a website from reading the content of other websites without their explicit permission.
As a proof of concept, Ceukelaire developed a malicious website that would connect to NameTests to mine the data of visitors using the app. Using a simple bit of code, he was able to harvest the names, photos, posts, pictures, and friends lists of anyone taking part in the quiz.
The vigilant hacker also made a video as a proof of his findings, demonstrating how the NameTests website revealed your personal data even after deleting the app.
Ceukelaire reported the flaw via Facebook's Data Abuse Bounty Program on April 22, and over a month later the social media informed him that it could take three to six months to investigate the issue.
Over two months after initially reporting the issue to Facebook, Ceukelaire noticed that NameTests has fixed the issue, and told him it had found no evidence of abuse of the exposed data by any third party.
On 27th June, Facebook contacted Ceukelaire and informed him that NameTests had fixed the issue, and at his request, donated $8,000 to the Freedom of the Press Foundation as part of its Data Abuse Bounty Program.
German company Social Sweethearts, who is behind NameTests, claims to have more than 250 million registered users and have reached more than 3 billion page views per month.
The latest incident shows that, even after the social media giant changed its conditions for apps to access data on its platform back in 2015, Facebook failed to adequately police such apps that have access to substantial amounts of personal data on its platform.
| Vulnerability |
Chip and PIN payment card system vulnerable to Card cloning | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/chip-and-pin-payment-card-system.html | At a cryptography gathering in Leuven, Belgium, on Tuesday, Cambridge University researchers made it known that they do not like what they see in chip and pin systems. The chip and PIN system employed by most European and Asian banks is definitely more secure than the magnetic strip one, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't have its flaws.
A flaw in the EMV protocol which lays out the rules for chip-and-PIN card transactions at ATMs and point-of-sale terminals could enable persistent attackers to carry out bogus card transactions. Five Cambridge (UK) University researchers released a paper today with the gory details.
Bank cards are reportedly vulnerable to a form of cloning and researchers have pinpointed the poor implementation of cryptography methods in ATM machines as being the reason for the flaw.
The chip in an EMV card is there to execute an authentication protocol, and is itself very difficult to clone. However, the authentication process also relies on the merchant's point-of-sale kit, or an ATM, generating a completely random number to prove the uniqueness of the transaction. They discovered a flaw with the so called unpredictable number (UN), generated by software within cash point machines and other similar equipment. The researchers warned that this random number is not so random, and is even possible sometimes to predict.
"The UN (unique number) appears to consist of a 17 bit fixed value and the low 15 bits are simply a counter that is incremented every few milliseconds, cycling every three minutes,".
"We wondered whether, if the 'unpredictable number' generated by an ATM is in fact predictable, this might create the opportunity for an attack in which a criminal with temporary access to a card (say, in a Mafia-owned shop) can compute the authorization codes needed to draw cash from that ATM at some time in the future for which the value of the UN can be predicted."
Banks, meanwhile, are standing firmly behind EMV and chip-and-PIN and are refusing to refund customers protesting fraudulent transactions, banks are telling customers EMV is secure and they either are mistaken about a transaction, or are lying. Meanwhile, many wouldn't have the mechanisms or procedures to patch PIN entry devices in the field in the need arose.
| Vulnerability |
Qualcomm Chip Flaws Let Hackers Steal Private Data From Android Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/qualcomm-android-hacking.html | Hundreds of millions of devices, especially Android smartphones and tablets, using Qualcomm chipsets, are vulnerable to a new set of potentially serious vulnerabilities.
According to a report cybersecurity firm CheckPoint shared with The Hacker News, the flaws could allow attackers to steal sensitive data stored in a secure area that is otherwise supposed to be the most protected part of a mobile device.
The vulnerabilities reside in Qualcomm's Secure Execution Environment (QSEE), an implementation of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based on ARM TrustZone technology.
Also known as Qualcomm's Secure World, QSEE is a hardware-isolated secure area on the main processor that aims to protect sensitive information and provides a separate secure environment (REE) for executing Trusted Applications.
Along with other personal information, QSEE usually contains private encryption keys, passwords, credit, and debit card credentials.
Since it is based on the principle of least privilege, Normal World system modules like drivers and applications can not access protected areas unless necessary—even when they have root permissions.
"In a 4-month research project, we succeeded in reverse Qualcomm's Secure World operating system and leveraged the fuzzing technique to expose the hole," researchers told The Hacker News.
"We implemented a custom-made fuzzing tool, which tested trusted code on Samsung, LG, Motorola devices," which allowed researchers to find four vulnerabilities in trusted code implemented by Samsung, one in Motorola and one in LG.
dxhdcp2 (LVE-SMP-190005)
sec_store (SVE-2019-13952)
authnr (SVE-2019-13949)
esecomm (SVE-2019-13950)
kmota (CVE-2019-10574)
tzpr25 (acknowledged by Samsung)
prov (Motorola is working on a fix)
According to researchers, the reported vulnerabilities in the secure components of Qualcomm could allow an attacker to:
execute trusted apps in the Normal World (Android OS),
load patched trusted app into the Secure World (QSEE),
bypassing Qualcomm's Chain Of Trust,
adapt the trusted app for running on a device of another manufacturer,
and more.
"An interesting fact is that we can load trustlets from another device as well. All we need to do is replace the hash table, signature, and certificate chain in the .mdt file of the trustlet with those extracted from a device manufacturer's trustlet," researchers said.
In short, a vulnerability in TEE component leaves devices vulnerable to a wide range of security threats, including the leakage of protected data, device rooting, bootloader unlocking, and execution of undetectable APT.
The vulnerabilities also affect a wide range of smartphone and IoT devices that use the QSEE component to secure users' sensitive information.
Check Point Research responsibly disclosed its findings to all affected vendors, out of which Samsung, Qualcomm, and LG have already released a patch update for these QSEE vulnerabilities.
| Vulnerability |
New Trojan Turns Thousands Of Linux Devices Into Proxy Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/linux-proxy-malware.html | "Linux doesn't get viruses" — It's a Myth.
A new Trojan has been discovered in the wild that turns Linux-based devices into proxy servers, which attackers use to protect their identity while launching cyber attacks from the hijacked systems.
Dubbed Linux.Proxy.10, the Trojan was first spotted at the end of last year by the researchers from Russian security firm Doctor Web, who later identified thousand of compromised machines by the end of January this year and the campaign is still ongoing and hunting for more Linux machines.
According to researchers, the malware itself doesn't include any exploitation module to hack into Linux machines; instead, the attackers are using other Trojans and techniques to compromise devices at the first place and then create a new backdoor login account using the username as "mother" and password as "fucker."
Once backdoored and the attacker gets the list of all successfully compromised Linux machines, and then logs into them via SSH protocol and installs the SOCKS5 proxy server using Linux.Proxy.10 malware on it.
This Linux malware is not at all sophisticated since it uses a freeware source code of the Satanic Socks Server to setup a proxy.
According to the security firm, thousands of Linux-based devices have already been infected with this new Trojan.
Besides this, the same server — belonging to the cybercriminals who distribute the Linux.Proxy.10 malware — not only contained the list of compromised devices but also hosted the control panel of a Spy-Agent computer monitoring software and a Windows malware from a known family of Trojan spyware, called BackDoor.TeamViewer.
This is not the first time when such Linux malware has been discovered.
Over a year ago, ESET security researchers uncovered a similar malware, dubbed Moose, that also had the capability to turn Linux devices into proxy servers that were then used for launching armies of fake accounts on social media networks, including Instagram, and Twitter.
Linux users and administrators are recommended to tighten SSH security by limiting or disabling remote root access via SSH, and to know if your system has already been compromised, keep a regular watch on newly generated login users.
| Malware |
Beware! Cyber Criminals Spreading Click Fraud Trojan for Making Money | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/beware-cyber-criminals-spreading-click.html | Before Ransomware, Click fraud was one of the popular and efficient ways for cybercriminals to make money and with the explosive growth in the size of the online threats it is still making its way on the Internet.
"Click-Fraud" is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget. Besides the search results, we all have seen advertisements placed in the search engine's WebPage. If the visitor clicks the Ad, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine.
A problem that has arisen with pay-per-click is results in Click-Fraud. The term "fraud" is used because in either case, the advertiser is paying for a click without receiving any true value. Of course, the number of clicks has to be large enough in order to gain a considerable amount of money, and in order to do that an attacker can use an automated script or malicious program to simulate multiple clicks by a browser on an ad.
Such a malicious software infection used by cybercriminals to carry out Click Fraud operations has been spotted by the researchers of Symantec. Last month, the researchers noticed a recent surge of infections which they dubbed as Trojan.Viknok.
Trojan.Viknok was first observed by the security researchers in April 2013. The researchers considered the malware as a sophisticated threat because it has the ability to turn victims' computer into a botnet. To do this, the malware is capable of gaining the elevated operating system privilege in order to infect system files on multiple Windows operating systems, including the 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista and 7.
Then these Viknok-infected computer botnet zombies are allegedly used by cybercriminals to carry out Ad-Click Fraud and to pull more money the scammers are trying to add more victims' computers to their botnet.
"The scammers behind the current Viknok campaign have gone to a lot of effort to add more victims to their Adclick botnet, helping them make more money in the process," states the blog post.
In the last six months, there has been an increase in the use of this threat by cyber criminals and in many cases, the victims infected with the Trojan report hearing audio clips through their computers' speakers.
HOW THE VIKNOK INFECTS COMPUTERS
Viknok infects the victims' computers by injecting its payload into DLL files, but modifying the DLL files in the latest operating systems is not an easy task. In this case, cyber criminals make use of a number of methods to infect files, such as rpcss.dll, a library that runs every time the Windows is started. So, if an attacker is able to infect the rpcss.dll file, the malicious code is executed every time Windows starts.
There are a number of methods to infect the rpcss.dll file, including:
Using SeTakeOwnershipPrivilege function to take ownership of system files.
Taking advantage of Windows' "Dynamic-Link Library Search Order" to run a malicious DLL inside the System Preparation Tool process.
Using the Run a legacy CPL elevated tool to run a DLL with elevated privileges.
The most powerful technique is by exploiting the Microsoft Windows Kernel 'Win32k.sys' local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability, CVE-2013-3660 that allows to run the malicious code in kernel mode.
Once installed on the computer, the Viknok uses one or more of the above techniques to inject the rpcss.dll file in victims' computers that allow the malicious code to execute every time the operating system starts. Once rpscc.dll file is infected, it loads the core of the malware, which is usually stored in the %System% folder in an encrypted file.
"In many cases, the infection process is completely stealthy; the threat does not show any warning to the user. The malware is also difficult to detect since it does not show any suspicious running process, nor does it infect any of the standard load points," Symantec researchers note in their blog post.
The malware shows the User Account Control (UAC) prompt to the victim in order to gain the elevated privileges, and if user doesn't grant the permission, the infection will fail. But, the UAC prompt masquerade itself as a part of normal system activity, so users might give the Trojan permission without giving it too much thought.
Once the permission is granted, the attacker can remotely send the infected systems commands to load various websites. The websites offer car insurance, travel tickets, domain name registration, and many other services.
The count of Viknok infections has increased over the past few months. From January to April, the number of unique infections has increased from over 10,000 to 22,000 and over 16,500 unique Viknok infections have been noticed in the first week of May alone. The majority of the victims are located in the United States.
Stopping click-fraud is proving as difficult as stopping e-mail spam; and click-fraud artists may be more highly motivated. It is a good idea for users to practice safe email habits, such deleting any suspicious mail received without opening or viewing them, as well as refraining from opening any suspicious attachments or Links.
| Malware |
Flappy Bird app clones send text messages to Premium Number | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/Flappy-Bird-app-download-android-iphone.html | Flappy Bird, developed by a 29-year old, Dong Nguyen, was one of the top free gaming apps of the last month, but now officially unavailable for users.
After achieving income of $50,000 per day in advertising revenue, Dong Nguyen pulled out Flappy Bird gaming app from all the web app stores and now it's permanently dead.
"Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," says Dong Nguyen, in an exclusive interview with Forbes. "But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it's best to take down Flappy Bird. It's gone forever."
Till now the reason is not clear from Dong's statement that why exactly he quit the app, but it's clear that his decision have given opportunity for hackers for creating a malicious version of this app and the app's popularity will help them to gain success in spreading Smartphone malware to mass and hence, the malicious apps are available in play stores with undesirable side effects.
After his single tweet, "I just cannot take this anymore." The users began downloading Flappy bird app from their play stores, without bothering it's the real version or not and after he pulled off the app from the play stores, hundreds of phones with Flappy Bird installed appeared for sale on eBay, racking up huge bids, as much as $100,000.
Sophos researchers examined the app available at non-official stores and found it malicious that sends SMS to premium numbers for continuing with the app and also get access to other mobile services. Rather the real version of the app was available for free.
The fake Flappy Bird app doesn't stop even after you exit the app as it needs to be killed from the task manager of your device. The fake app has ability to access your SD card with read and write permission, send SMS, receive and read without your intervention and it can also add and remove shortcuts without informing you, reported by Sophos.
Another fake Flappy Bird app was discovered by Trend Micro that appeared in unofficial stores in Russia and Vietnam. These apps mimic the behavior of the real app, but have some hidden features including secretly connecting to "Command and Control" server via Google Cloud Messaging for further instructions.
The apps seek for the personal data of the phone including phone number, carrier and email addresses together with the Gmail account registered with the phone.
Since the fake app is not available in Google play store, so Android gives a warning. Also, Android phones have a default setting to not allow "off-market" apps. Leaving this option alone will protect your devices from Flappy Bird malware.
Though it is not guaranteed that app available on official store are secure, but someone has kept an eye on it, and appropriate action will be taken automatically whenever found malicious. But if you install any third party app, then you are whole sole maintainer of the app and you are running it at your own risk.
If it is must for you to install third party apps, you must have a good anti-virus installed on your Smartphone which can inform you about any malicious activity being performed on your phone and keep an eye on your phone bills on a regular basis.
The users who were addicted to the Flappy Bird Game and can't resist themselves playing it in their free times or to relax themselves, are supposed to accept the reality that it has been dead. Now it's time to move on!
| Malware |
World's largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox Shuts Down; CEO quits Bitcoin Foundation | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/worlds-largest-bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox.html | World's largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has shut down its website, withdrawal system, deleted its Twitter feed and halted all trading systems after it detected "unusual activity."
The Bitcoin Foundation, a Bitcoin advocacy group, confirmed that Mark Karpeles, the chief executive of Tokyo-based Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange has resigned from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation. This comes just days after the exchange gave an update regarding the technical issues.
Last week, Mt. Gox said a technical glitch that had forced the exchange to suspend bitcoin withdrawals for a week. They discovered the transaction falsification glitch and same flaw alleged to have been used to steal all of the bitcoins worth about $2.7 million from Silk Road 2.0.
Later, some sources close to the matter have confirmed that more than 700,000 bitcoins are indeed missing from MtGox records, in a 'slow-leak' hack that went on for years. The repeated technical glitches over the past several months caused the Shut down of the biggest Bitcoin Industry.
Bitcoin companies 'Coinbase, Blockchain.info, Circle, Kraken, Bitstamp, and BTC China' have issued a joint statement regarding MtGox.
"This tragic violation of the trust of users of Mt.Gox was the result of one company's abhorrent actions and does not reflect the resilience or value of bitcoin and the digital currency industry. There are hundreds of trustworthy and responsible companies involved in bitcoin. These companies will continue to build the future of money by making bitcoin more secure and easy to use for consumers and merchants." "We strongly believe in transparent, thoughtful, and comprehensive consumer protection measures. We pledge to lead the way."
MtGox has also deleted its entire Twitter feed, which is nearly unprecedented. Late last week, Bitcoin prices dropped to the lowest they have been since June, by $300 and currently, the value on MtGox is swinging between $300 and $500.
| Vulnerability |
How to Hack Facebook Accounts? Just Ask Your Targets to Open a Link | https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/hack-facebook-account-password.html | It's 2019, and just clicking on a specially crafted URL would have allowed an attacker to hack your Facebook account without any further interaction.
A security researcher discovered a critical cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the most popular social media platform that could have been allowed attackers to hijack Facebook accounts by simply tricking the targeted users into clicking on a link.
The researcher, who goes by the online alias "Samm0uda," discovered the vulnerability after he spotted a flawed endpoint (facebook.com/comet/dialog_DONOTUSE/) that could have been exploited to bypass CSRF protections and takeover victim's account.
"This is possible because of a vulnerable endpoint which takes another given Facebook endpoint selected by the attacker along with the parameters and makes a POST request to that endpoint after adding the fb_dtsg parameter," the researcher says on his blog.
"Also this endpoint is located under the main domain www.facebook.com which makes it easier for the attacker to trick his victims to visit the URL."
All the attacker needs to do is trick the victims into clicking a specially crafted Facebook URL, as mentioned on his blog, designed to perform various actions like posting anything on their timeline, change or delete their profile picture, and even trick users into deleting their entire Facebook accounts.
1-Click Exploit to Completely Take Over Facebook Accounts
Taking over full control of the victims' accounts or tricking them into deleting their entire Facebook account requires some extra efforts from the attacker's side, as victims need to enter their password before the account is deleted.
To do this, the researcher said it would require the victims to visit two separate URLs, one to add the email or phone number and one to confirm it.
It's "because the 'normal' endpoints used to add emails or phone numbers don't have a 'next' parameter to redirect the user after a successful request," the researcher says.
However, the researcher still made the full account takeover possible with a single URL by finding the endpoints where the 'next' parameter is present and authorizing a malicious app on behalf of the victims and obtaining their Facebook access token.
With access to the victims' authentication tokens, the exploit automatically adds an attacker-controlled email address to their account, allowing the attacker to fully take over accounts by simply resetting their passwords and locking the legitimate users out of their Facebook accounts.
Though the full Facebook account takeover hack involved multiple steps, the researcher said the complete one-click exploit would have allowed any malicious user to hijack your Facebook account "in the blink of an eye."
Such account takeover attacks can be mitigated if you have enabled two-factor authentication for your Facebook account, preventing hackers from logging into your accounts until or unless they verify the 6-digit passcode sent to your mobile device.
However, any mitigation could not prevent hackers from performing some actions on your behalf leveraging this vulnerability, like changing or deleting your profile pictures or albums or posting anything on your timeline.
Samm0uda reported the vulnerability with the details of his exploit to Facebook on January 26. The social media giant acknowledged the issue and addressed it on January 31, rewarding the researcher with $25,000 as part of Facebook's bug bounty program.
| Vulnerability |
"Certifi-Gate" Android Vulnerability Lets Hackers Take Complete Control of Your Device | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/certifi-gate-android-vulnerability.html | Android users are busy fighting with Stagefright vulnerability while the popular mobile operating system faces another critical security vulnerability, dubbed as "Certifi-Gate".
Millions of Android devices could be hacked exploiting a plugin that comes pre-installed on your Android devices by the manufacturers.
Most of the Android device manufacturers pre-install 'Remote Support Tool (mRST)' plugin onto their phones that are intended to help users, such as RSupport or TeamViewer.
But, a critical Certifi-Gate security vulnerability in this mRTS plugin allows malicious applications to gain illegitimate privileged access rights, even if your device is not rooted.
"Certifi-Gate" Android security vulnerability
According to Israeli researchers at Check Point, Ohad Bobrov and Avi Bashan, Certifi-Gate Android vulnerability lies in the way Google's partners (manufacturers) use certificates to sign remote support tools.
Remote support tools often have root level access to Android devices, even if your device is not rooted. Thus any installed app can use Certifi-Gate vulnerability to gain unrestricted device access, including:
screen scraping
keylogging
exfiltrating private information
installing malware apps, and more
The flaw affects thousands of millions of Android devices, and users cannot uninstall the vulnerable plugin from the device because it is part of the core system…
...Ironic, huh?
"An attacker can exploit mRATs to exfiltrate sensitive information from devices such as location, contacts, photos, screen capture, and even recordings of nearby sounds." Researchers explained in the published paper.
"While analyzing and classifying mRATs, our research team found some apps share common traits with mRST. Known mRAT players include HackingTeam, mSpy, and SpyBubble."
Video Demonstration:
Android Smartphones and tablets running the latest version of Android (Lollipop) are also at risk.
Am I vulnerable to Certifi-Gate vulnerability?
Checkpoint released an app that detects if your Android device is vulnerable to the Certifi-Gate exploits and also reveals if any attacks have already been launched on the user's phone.
The annoying news is that the vulnerability may not go away anytime soon, because Android phone manufacturer companies are notoriously slow in releasing patches to users.
| Malware |
Oracle Patches Java Zero Day Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2013/01/oracle-patches-java-zero-day.html | Oracle delivered an unusual emergency patch to Java's critical Zero Day vulnerability on Sunday to fix a malicious bug that allowed hackers access to users web browsers. Exploits for the previously undisclosed flaw were being hosted in a number of exploit kits and attacks have already been seen in the wild dropping ransomware and assorted other malware.
Security Alert CVE-2013-0422 include two vulnerabilities that are remotely executable. Oracle confirmed that the flaws were only present in Java 7 versions and did not impact Java on servers, Java desktop applications, or embedded Java.
Java is used in 3 billion machines, about 2 billion of which are desktop or laptop computers. Similarly, Back in August last year, Oracle issued an urgent fix to seal a dangerous security flaw within its Java software that's left thousands of computers wide open to malicious attacks from hackers.
Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development for nCircle said, "We're just two weeks into 2013 and already we've seen a surge of critical vulnerabilities and emergency patches. Oracle just added 86 new fixes to overloaded IT teams already struggling to keep up with emergency patches for Java, Internet Explorer and Ruby on Rails.
No matter how far behind IT teams are, they can't afford to ignore this massive Oracle patch. Oracle Mobile Server has two CVEs that have a CVSS score of ten, that's as bad as it gets. There are also two MySQL vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely. All of these should be patched as soon as possible."
January Patch include 86 security updates across all major product lines including Oracle Database and MySQL Server. Patches for a number of Oracle applications were released Tuesday, including nine for Oracle E-Business Suite (7 of which are remotely exploitable), 12 in Oracle PeopleSoft (7 remotely exploitable), 10 in Oracle Siebel CRM (5 remotely exploitable), and one each in Oracle Supply Chain Products Suite and Oracle JD Edwards Products.
| Vulnerability |
REvil Used 0-Day in Kaseya Ransomware Attack, Demands $70 Million Ransom | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/revil-used-0-day-in-kaseya-ransomware.html | Amidst the massive supply-chain ransomware attack that triggered an infection chain compromising thousands of businesses on Friday, new details have emerged about how the notorious Russia-linked REvil cybercrime gang may have pulled off the unprecedented hack.
The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) on Sunday revealed it had alerted Kaseya to a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in its VSA software (CVE-2021-30116) that it said were being exploited as a conduit to deploy ransomware. The non-profit entity said the company was in the process of resolving the issues as part of a coordinated vulnerability disclosure when the July 2 attacks took place.
More specifics about the flaws were not shared, but DIVD chair Victor Gevers hinted that the zero-days are trivial to exploit. At least 1,000 businesses are said to have been affected by the attacks, with victims identified in no less than 17 countries, including the U.K., South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Kenya, according to ESET.
Kaseya VSA is a cloud-based IT management and remote monitoring solution for managed service providers (MSPs), offering a centralized console to monitor and manage endpoints, automate IT processes, deploy security patches, and control access via two-factor authentication.
REvil Demands $70 Million Ransom
Active since April 2019, REvil (aka Sodinokibi) is best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS early last month, with the ransomware-as-a-service business accounting for about 4.6% of attacks on the public and private sectors in the first quarter of 2021.
The group is now asking for a record $70 million ransom payment to publish a universal decryptor that can unlock all systems that have been crippled by file-encrypting ransomware.
"On Friday (02.07.2021) we launched an attack on MSP providers. More than a million systems were infected. If anyone wants to negotiate about universal decryptor – our price is 70,000,000$ in BTC and we will publish publicly decryptor that decrypts files of all victims, so everyone will be able to recover from attack in less than an hour," the REvil group posted on their dark web data leak site.
Kaseya, which has enlisted the help of FireEye to help with its investigation into the incident, said it intends to "bring our SaaS data centers back online on a one-by-one basis starting with our E.U., U.K., and Asia-Pacific data centers followed by our North American data centers."
On-premises VSA servers will require the installation of a patch prior to a restart, the company noted, adding it's in the process of readying the fix for release on July 5.
CISA Issues Advisory
The development has prompted the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue an advisory, urging customers to download the Compromise Detection Tool that Kaseya has made available to identify any indicators of compromise (IoC), enable multi-factor authentication, limit communication with remote monitoring and management (RMM) capabilities to known IP address pairs, and place administrative interfaces of RMM behind a virtual private network (VPN) or a firewall on a dedicated administrative network.
"Less than ten organizations [across our customer base] appear to have been affected, and the impact appears to have been restricted to systems running the Kaseya software," Barry Hensley, Chief Threat Intelligence Officer at Secureworks, told The Hacker News via email.
"We have not seen evidence of the threat actors attempting to move laterally or propagate the ransomware through compromised networks. That means that organizations with wide Kaseya VSA deployments are likely to be significantly more affected than those that only run it on one or two servers."
By compromising a software supplier to target MSPs, who, in turn, provide infrastructure or device-centric maintenance and support to other small and medium businesses, the development once again underscores the importance of securing the software supply chain, while also highlighting how hostile agents continue to advance their financial motives by combining the twin threats of supply chain attacks and ransomware to strike hundreds of victims at once.
"MSPs are high-value targets — they have large attack surfaces, making them juicy targets to cybercriminals," said Kevin Reed, chief information security officer at Acronis. "One MSP can manage IT for dozens to a hundred companies: instead of compromising 100 different companies, the criminals only need to hack one MSP to get access to them all."
| Malware |
Hacking Gmail accounts with password reset system vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/hacking-Gmail-accounts-password-hack-vulnerability.html | Oren Hafif, a security researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in the Password reset process of Google account that allows an attacker to hijack any account.
He managed to trick Google users into handing over their passwords via a simple spear-phishing attack by leveraging a number of flaws i.e. Cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and cross-site scripting (XSS), and a flow bypass.
In a proof of concept video demonstration, the attacker sends his victim a fake "Confirm account ownership" email, claiming to come from Google.
The link mention in the mail instructs the recipient to confirm the ownership of the account and urged user to change their password.
The link from the email apparently points to a HTTPS google.com URL, but it actually leads the victim to the attacker's website because of CSRF attack with a customized email address.
The Google HTTPS page will will ask the victim to confirm the ownership by entering his last password and then will ask to reset your password.
But in actuality the hacker has grabbed your new password and cookie information using an XSS attack at this step.
Video demonstration:
Hafif informed the Google Security engineers with the details of this serious security vulnerability and Google has now addressed the issues. Google has rewarded Mr. Hafif with $5,100 under their Bug Bounty Program.
| Vulnerability |
POODLE SSL Vulnerability Now Attacking TLS Security Protocol | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/SSL-Poodle-TSL-attack.html | POODLE, a critical SSL flaw discovered in October that was patched and fixed by webmasters around the world after Google alerted software and hardware vendors, has again made its way and this time the vulnerability affects implementations of the newer Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.
Yes, the serious POODLE vulnerability that affected the most widely used web encryption standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0 has once again returned and is likely to affect some of the most popular web sites in the world — including those owned or operated by Bank of America, the US Department of Veteran's Affairs, and Accenture.
POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) flaw, disclosed two months ago by Google security team, allowed attackers to perform Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack in order to intercept traffic between a user's browser and an HTTPS website to decrypt sensitive information, like the user's authentication cookies.
Now, the dangerous flaw has turned out to some versions of TLS — the seemingly secure successor of SSL. The new vulnerability (CVE-2014-8730) affects TLS version 1.2 which fails to handle padding, which was the target of POODLE. Researchers at security firm Qualys says, "some TLS implementations omit to check the padding structure after decryption."
"The impact of this problem is similar to that of POODLE, with the attack being slightly easier to execute–no need to downgrade modern clients down to SSL 3 first, TLS 1.2 will do just fine," Ivan Ristic, Qualys's director of application security research, wrote in a blog post titled POODLE bites TLS.
"The main target are browsers, because the attacker must inject malicious JavaScript to initiate the attack. A successful attack will use about 256 requests to uncover one cookie character, or only 4096 requests for a 16-character cookie. This makes the attack quite practical."
Qualys has provided a free test, SSL Server Test, that showed some of the Internet's leading websites including Bank of America, VMware, the US Department of Veteran's Affairs, and business consultancy Accenture, are affected by the bug. The vulnerability is very serious as the most recent SSL Pulse scan showed that about 10 percent of the servers are vulnerable to the POODLE attack through TLS.
Till now, load balancers and similar devices which are used to handle the TLS connections sold by two different manufacturers, F5 Networks and A10 Networks, are found vulnerable to the attack. Basically, the recent versions of TLS calls for the encryption padding to be closely checked for Oracle attacks, which was skipped by both the companies during implementation, which makes them vulnerable to POODLE attacks.
F5 Networks agrees that their F5 kit is vulnerable to the attack, and believes that A10 should also be releasing updates for patches in coming hours. "Everything less than TLS 1.2 with an AEAD cipher suite is broken", Google's Adam Langley notes. "I'm not completely sure that I've found every affected vendor but, now that this issue is public, any other affected products should quickly come to light."
Website administrators who want to check if their servers or load balancers used in front of their servers are vulnerable to this newly discovered POODLE attack through TLS can use the Qualys SSL Labs server test, which has been updated on its website in order to detect the problem.
| Vulnerability |
OkCupid Dating App Flaws Could've Let Hackers Read Your Private Messages | https://thehackernews.com/2020/07/hacking-okcupid-account.html | Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed several security issues in popular online dating platform OkCupid that could potentially let attackers remotely spy on users' private information or perform malicious actions on behalf of the targeted accounts.
According to a report shared with The Hacker News, researchers from Check Point found that the flaws in OkCupid's Android and web applications could allow the theft of users' authentication tokens, users IDs, and other sensitive information such as email addresses, preferences, sexual orientation, and other private data.
After Check Point researchers responsibly shared their findings with OkCupid, the Match Group-owned company fixed the issues, stating, "not a single user was impacted by the potential vulnerability."
The Chain of Flaws
The flaws were identified as part of reverse engineering of OkCupid's Android app version 40.3.1, which was released on April 29 earlier this year. Since then, there have been 15 updates to the app with the most recent version (43.3.2) hitting Google Play Store yesterday.
Check Point said OkCupid's use of deep links could enable a bad actor to send a custom link defined in the app's manifest file to open a browser window with JavaScript enabled. Any such request was found to return the users' cookies.
The researchers also uncovered a separate flaw in OkCupid's settings functionality that makes it vulnerable to an XSS attack by injecting malicious JavaScript code using the "section" parameter as follows: "https://www.okcupid.com/settings?section=value"
The aforementioned XSS attack can be augmented further by loading a JavaScript payload from an attacker-controlled server to steal authentication tokens, profile information, and user preferences, and transmit the amassed data back to the server.
"Users' cookies are sent to the [OkCupid] server since the XSS payload is executed in the context of the application's WebView," the researchers said, outlining their method to capture the token information. "The server responds with a vast JSON containing the users' id and the authentication token."
Once in possession of the user ID and the token, an adversary can send a request to the "https://www.OkCupid.com:443/graphql" endpoint to fetch all the information associated with the victim's profile (email address, sexual orientation, height, family status, and other personal preferences) as well as carry out actions on behalf of the compromised individual, such as send messages and change profile data.
However, a full account hijack is not possible as the cookies are protected with HTTPOnly, mitigating the risk of a client-side script accessing the protected cookie.
Lastly, an oversight in the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy of the API server could have permitted an attacker to craft requests from any origin (e.g. "https://okcupidmeethehacker.com") in order to get hold of the user ID and authentication token, and subsequently, use that information to extract profile details and messages using the API's "profile" and "messages" endpoints.
Remember Ashley Madison Breach and Blackmail Threats?
Although the vulnerabilities were not exploited in the wild, the episode is yet another reminder of how bad actors could have taken advantage of the flaws to threaten victims with black and extortion.
After Ashley Madison, an adult dating service catering to married individuals seeking partners for affairs was hacked in 2015 and information about its 32 million users was posted to the dark web, it led to a rise in phishing and sextortion campaigns, with blackmailers reportedly sending personalized emails to the users, threatening to reveal their membership to friends and family unless they pay money.
"The dire need for privacy and data security becomes far more crucial when so much private and intimate information is being stored, managed and analyzed in an app," the researchers concluded. "The app and platform was created to bring people together, but of course where people go, criminals will follow, looking for easy pickings."
| Data_Breaches |
Most LokiBot samples in the wild are "hijacked" versions of the original malware | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/lokibot-infostealer-malware.html | Hacker himself got hacked.
It turns out that most samples of the LokiBot malware being distributed in the wild are modified versions of the original sample, a security researcher has learned.
Targeting users since 2015, LokiBot is a password and cryptocoin-wallet stealer that can harvest credentials from a variety of popular web browsers, FTP, poker and email clients, as well as IT administration tools such as PuTTY.
The original LokiBot malware was developed and sold by online alias "lokistov," a.k.a. "Carter," on multiple underground hacking forums for up to $300, but later some other hackers on the dark web also started selling same malware for a lesser price (as low as $80).
It was believed that the source code for LokiBot was leaked which might have allowed others to compile their own versions of the stealer.
However, a researcher who goes by alias "d00rt" on Twitter found that someone made little changes (patching) in the original LokiBot sample, without having access to its source code, which let other hackers define their own custom domains for receiving the stolen data.
Hackers Are Actively Spreading "Hijacked" Versions of LokiBot
The researcher found that the C&C server location of the malware, where the stolen data should be sent, has been stored at five places in the program—four of them are encrypted using Triple DES algorithm and one using a simple XOR cipher.
The malware has a function, called "Decrypt3DESstring," that it uses to decrypt all the encrypted strings and get the URL of the command-and-control server.
The researcher analyzed the new LokiBot samples and compared them with the old original sample, and found that Decrypt3DESstring function in new samples has been modified in a way that it always return value from the XOR-protected string, instead of Triple DES strings.
"The 3DES protected URLs are always the same in the all of the LokiBot samples of this [new] version," the researcher said.
"In addition, those URLs are never used. Decrypt3DESstring returns a 3DES decrypted buffer. This should be the ideal behavior of this function, but as was described before, each time Decrypt3DESstring is called, it returns a decrypted url with XOR or encrypted url with XOR."
These changes allowed anyone with a new sample of LokiBot to edit the program, using a simple HEX editor, and add their own custom URLs for receiving the stolen data.
However, it is not clear why the original malware author also stored the same C&C server URL in a string encrypted by the less secure XOR cipher, even when it was unnecessary.
A lot of different LokiBot samples currently distributed in the wild and available for sale on the underground market at a very low price have also been patched in the same way by several hackers.
Meanwhile, the original author of LokiBot has already launched its new version 2.0 and selling it online on many forums.
The decryption function was also being used to get registry values required for making the malware persistent on a system, but since after patching the decryption function only returns a URL, the new LokiBot samples fails to restart after the device reboots.
To know more technical details about the new samples, you can head on to the research paper [PDF] published by the researchers on GitHub.
| Malware |
U.S. Charges 4 Chinese Military Hackers Over Equifax Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/equifax-chinese-military-hackers.html | The United States Department of Justice today announced charges against 4 Chinese military hackers who were allegedly behind the Equifax data breach that exposed the personal and financial data of nearly 150 million Americans.
In a joint press conference held today with the Attorney General William Barr and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, the DoJ officials labeled the state-sponsored hacking campaign as the largest hacking case ever uncovered of this type.
The four accused, Wu Zhiyong (吴志勇), Wang Qian (王乾), Xu Ke (许可) and Liu Lei (刘磊), have also been indicted for their involvement in hacking and stealing trade secrets, intellectual property and confidential information from several other U.S. businesses in recent years.
In September 2017, credit reporting agency Equifax disclosed it had become a victim of a massive cyberattack that left highly sensitive data of nearly half of the U.S. population in the hands of hackers.
As The Hacker News reported earlier, hackers compromised Equifax servers using a critical vulnerability in Apache Struts Web Framework that the company forgets to patch on time even when an updated secure version of the software was available.
"They used this access to conduct reconnaissance of Equifax's online dispute portal and to obtain login credentials that could be used to further navigate Equifax's network. The defendants spent several weeks running queries to identify Equifax's database structure and searching for sensitive, personally identifiable information within Equifax's system," the DoJ said.
"Once they accessed files of interest, the conspirators then stored the stolen information in temporary output files, compressed and divided the files, and ultimately were able to download and exfiltrate the data from Equifax's network to computers outside the United States. In total, the attackers ran approximately 9,000 queries on Equifax's system, obtaining names, birth dates, and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens."
"The defendants took steps to evade detection throughout the intrusion, as alleged in the [nine-count] indictment. They routed traffic through approximately 34 servers located in nearly 20 countries to obfuscate their true location, used encrypted communication channels within Equifax's network to blend in with normal network activity, and deleted compressed files and wiped log files on a daily basis in an effort to eliminate records of their activity."
As a result of the breach, the credit monitoring company Equifax was fined £500,000 by the U.K.'s privacy watchdog for failing to take appropriate steps to protect its customers and also agreed to pay up to $700 million in fines to settle a series of state and federal investigations in the United States.
The DoJ officials said the FBI started this investigation two years ago with only 40 IP addresses that were involved in the attacks that lead the agency to these four members of the People's Liberation Army's 54th Research Institute.
All four indicted suspects are still at large, residing in China and have been added to the FBI's Most Wanted Cyber list.
This is not the first time when the U.S. has charged Chinese intelligence officers over hacking and cyber espionage. In 2014, similar charges were announced against five Chinese military officials for hacking and cyber espionage against several American companies.
Besides this, the U.S has also charged the other two Chinese hackers in 2015 for a massive data breach where hackers stole the personal information of over 80 million customers of the Anthem health insurance company.
This story is developing and will be updated shortly as details become available. Stay tuned with The Hacker News on Twitter for quick updates.
| Data_Breaches |
Adobe Flash bug allow spying Webcam hole | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/adobe-flash-bug-allow-spying-webcam.html | Adobe Flash bug allow spying Webcam hole
The flaw was disclosed in 2008 and can be exploited to turn on people's webcams or microphones without their knowledge. Attack involved putting the Adobe Flash Settings Manager page into an iFrame and masking it with a game, so that when the user clicked on the buttons he would actually change the settings and turn on the webcam.
Adobe is working on a fix for a Flash Player vulnerability that can be exploited via clickjacking techniques to turn on people's webcams or microphones without their knowledge.The issue was discovered by a Stanford University computer science student named Feross Aboukhadijeh who based his proof-of-concept exploit on a similar one disclosed back in 2008 by an anonymous researcher.
Once it was made public, Adobe fixed the issue by adding framebusting code to the Settings Manager page. But now, Stanford University computer science student Feross Aboukhadijeh managed to bypass the framebusting JavaScript code by simply putting the settings SWF file into the iFrame, and made the clickjacking attack possible again.
In essence this is the same 2008 vulnerability exploited through a slightly different attack vector. "I was really surprised to find out that this actually works," Aboukhadijeh said.
He said that he emailed Adobe about the problem a few weeks ago, but got no response. However, the company contacted him after the public disclosure to inform him that they are working on a fix which will be deployed on their end and won't require users to update their Flash Player installations.
Using an SWF file hosted on Adobe's servers to modify Flash Player settings instead of a local interface is something that has generated problems before. For example, privacy advocates have complained in the past that this makes clearing Local Shared Objects (LSOs), commonly known as Flash cookies, difficult and confusing.
| Vulnerability |
Database of 1.4 Billion Records leaked from World's Biggest Spam Networks | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/email-marketing-database.html | A database of 1.4 billion email addresses combined with real names, IP addresses, and often physical address has been exposed in what appears to be one the largest data breach of this year.
What's worrisome? There are high chances that you, or at least someone you know, is affected by this latest data breach.
Security researcher Chris Vickery of MacKeeper and Steve Ragan of CSOOnline discovered an unsecured and publicly exposed repository of network-available backup files linked to a notorious spamming organization called River City Media (RCM), led by notorious spammers Matt Ferrisi and Alvin Slocombe.
Spammer's Entire Operation Exposed
The database contains sensitive information about the company's operations, including nearly 1.4 Billion user records, which was left completely exposed to anyone – even without any username or password.
According to MacKeeper security researcher Vickery, RCM, which claims to be a legitimate marketing firm, is responsible for sending around a billion unwanted messages per day.
Besides exposing more than a billion email addresses, real names, IP addresses and, in some cases, physical addresses, the leak exposed many documents that revealed the inner workings of RCM's spam operation.
"The situation presents a tangible threat to online privacy and security as it involves a database of 1.4bn email accounts combined with real names, user IP addresses, and often physical address," Vickery said. "Chances are that you, or at least someone you know, is affected."
Vickery wasn't able to fully verify the leak but said he discovered addresses he knew were accurate in the database.
Wondering how spamming operations can be profitable? One leaked text shows a single day of activity of RCM that sent 18 million emails to Gmail users and 15 million to AOL users, and the total take of the spamming company was around $36,000.
Illegal Hacking Techniques Used by RCM
The company employed many illegal hacking techniques to target as many users as possible. One of the primary hacking methods described by the researchers is the Slowloris attacks, a method designed to cripple a web server rather than subvert it in this manner.
"[Slowloris is] a technique in which the spammer seeks to open as many connections as possible between themselves and a Gmail server," Vickery writes in a blog post published today.
"This is done by purposefully configuring your own machine to send response packets extremely slowly, and in a fragmented manner, while constantly requesting more connections."
The researchers have reported that details of RSM's operations and its abusive scripts and techniques have been sent to Microsoft, Apple, Salted Hash, Spamhaus, and others affected parties.
Meanwhile, the researchers have also notified law enforcement agencies, which they says, have expressed keen interest in the matter.
In response to the latest discovery, Spamhaus will be blacklisting RCM's entire infrastructure from its Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database that tracks professional spam operations and lists them using a three-strike rule.
| Cyber_Attack |
Dangerous IE browser vulnerabilities, Allows remote code execution ! | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/dangerous-ie-browser-vulnerabilities.html | Dangerous IE browser vulnerabilities, Allows remote code execution !
Microsoft is expected to show some love for Windows administrators on Valentine's Day, with nine patches fixing 21 vulnerabilities in February's Patch Tuesday release. Also, Microsoft is warning all users of its Internet Explorer web browser to immediately apply the latest security patch as a precaution against malicious hacker attacks.
Critical fixes would address flaws that could allow remote code execution in Windows, Internet Explorer, .NET Framework, and Silverlight, Microsoft's web development tool. The update is rated "critical" for Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 on Windows client machines and Microsoft expects to see reliable exploit code published with the next 30 days.
Here are the bulletins for February 2012:
MS12-008 – Vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2660465)
MS12-010 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (2647516)
MS12-013 – Vulnerability in C Run-Time Library Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2654428)
MS12-016 – Vulnerabilities in .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2651026)
MS12-009 – Vulnerabilities in Ancillary Function Driver Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2645640)
MS12-011 – Vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2663841)
MS12-012 – Vulnerability in Color Control Panel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2643719)
MS12-014 – Vulnerability in Indeo Codec Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2661637)
MS12-015 – Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Visio Viewer 2010 Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2663510)
You can access the bulletin summary here on this page.
| Vulnerability |
FIN8 Hackers Return With More Powerful Version of BADHATCH PoS Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/fin8-hackers-return-with-more-powerful.html | Threat actors known for keeping a low profile do so by ceasing operations for prolonged periods in between to evade attracting any attention as well as constantly refining their toolsets to fly below the radar of many detection technologies.
One such group is FIN8, a financially motivated threat actor that's back in action after a year-and-a-half hiatus with a powerful version of a backdoor with upgraded capabilities including screen capturing, proxy tunneling, credential theft, and fileless execution.
First documented in 2016 by FireEye, FIN8 is known for its attacks against the retail, hospitality, and entertainment industries while making use of a wide array of techniques such as spear-phishing and malicious tools like PUNCHTRACK and BADHATCH to steal payment card data from point-of-sale (POS) systems.
"The FIN8 group is known for taking long breaks to improve TTPs and increase their rate of success," Bitdefender researchers said in a report published today. "The BADHATCH malware is a mature, highly advanced backdoor that uses several evasion and defense techniques. The new backdoor also attempts to evade security monitoring by using TLS encryption to conceal Powershell commands."
BADHATCH, since its discovery in 2019, has been deployed as an implant capable of running attacker-supplied commands retrieved from a remote server, in addition to injecting malicious DLLs in a current process, gathering system information, and exfiltrating data to the server.
Noting that at least three different variants of the backdoor (v2.12 to 2.14) have been spotted since April 2020, the researchers said the latest version of BADHATCH abuses a legitimate service called sslp.io to thwart detection during the deployment process, using it to download a PowerShell script, which in turn executes the shellcode containing the BADHATCH DLL.
The PowerShell script, besides taking responsibility for achieving persistence, also takes care of privilege escalation to ensure that all commands post the script's execution are run as the SYSTEM user.
Furthermore, a second evasion technique adopted by FIN8 involves passing off communications with the command-and-control (C2) server that masquerade as legitimate HTTP requests.
According to Bitdefender, the new wave of attacks is said to have taken place over the past year and directed against insurance, retail, technology, and chemical industries in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Italy.
"Like most persistent and skilled cyber-crime actors, FIN8 operators are constantly refining their tools and tactics to avoid detection," the researchers concluded, urging businesses to "separate the POS network from the ones used by employees or guests" and filter out emails containing malicious or suspicious attachments.
| Malware |
Vulnerability Management: Think Like an Attacker to Prioritize Risks | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/vulnerability-management-think-like.html | Attackers care about ROI – they want to accomplish their objective with the least investment of time and resources possible. The same is true for you - to most effectively manage vulnerabilities, you need to think like an attacker. Ask yourself: How would you go about compromising systems, exfiltrating valuable information and making money? What are the key assets in your network that you would target? How would you get to these assets?
Attackers are looking for vulnerabilities that are exposed – ones offering them an easy way to penetrate your network and pivot into the truly valuable assets on your network. Although zero-day exploits are heavily publicized, attackers more often use older, proven exploits very effectively. Fortunately, many such exploits are well known and have clear remediation methods.
So, how can you determine if a known vulnerability is actually exploitable? The key is to correlate system vulnerabilities with threat intelligence so you can prioritize those vulnerabilities that actually give the bad guys a point of entry into your network.
Prioritize the Vulnerabilities that Matter with AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM)
AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) gives you visibility to vulnerabilities in real-time for prioritization and incident response. Because USM combines vulnerability management with asset inventory, host-based IDS, network IDS, netflow analysis, file integrity monitoring, and SIEM event correlation, all of the rich information captured by these capabilities is viewable in a single screen.
As soon as an alarm is triggered, you can immediately identify known malicious IPs interacting with a vulnerable host, along with all events involving that host, details on the vulnerabilities discovered, notes on who owns the system as well as all the software installed on it.
Built-in Active Vulnerability Scanning and Assessment
AlienVault USM provides continuous vulnerability monitoring. Also known as passive vulnerability detection, USM correlates the data gathered by its asset discovery scans with known vulnerability information for improved accuracy. USM supports unauthenticated scanning, which is scanning without requiring host credentials. This scan probes hosts with targeted traffic and analyzes the subsequent response to determine the configuration of the remote system and any vulnerabilities in the installed OS and application software. USM also supports authenticated scanning – which is scanning with credentials. This entails access to the target host's file system, to be able to perform more accurate and comprehensive vulnerability detection by inspecting the installed software and its configuration. USM allows you to mix and match these methods as well.
For example, you may wish to run authenticated scans on compliance-related assets and throttle back to passive vulnerability assessment on low risk assets where reducing network traffic matters more than validating stringent security configurations. Plus, you can schedule scans, with flexibility to select which network segments are to be scanned, and at what frequency.
Remediation Advice for Every Vulnerability
AlienVault USM also provides remediation advice for vulnerabilities that are found. It includes dynamic incident response templates and 3rd party references to help you figure out how to remediate vulnerabilities that a scan may find. This advice saves you time researching each vulnerability and tracking down this information yourself.
USM can also send email alerts, open a ticket in the built-in ticketing system, or send an email to an external help desk / ticketing system. And, since exploits often opportunistically follow the discovery and public announcement of vulnerabilities by the security community, the USM vulnerability database is constantly updated with the latest details on known vulnerabilities. The built-in remediation advice is also kept up-to-date and vetted by the AlienVault Labs security research team.
Learn more about Vulnerability Management with AlienVault USM
Vulnerability management is never "done", as increasing attack vectors and software complexity require continuous monitoring. With a unified approach to security management, you can use a single product from a single vendor to determine which vulnerabilities are actually putting your network at risk, and prioritize remediation efforts accordingly.
Download a free 30-day trial of AlienVault USM
Watch a demo on-demand
Take an Interactive Test Drive
Watch the webinar: Threat Intelligence - The Key to a Complete Vulnerability Management Strategy
| Vulnerability |
Warning — Popular 'Hot Patching' Technique Puts iOS Users At Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2016/01/ios-apps-jspatch-hack.html | Do you know?… Any iOS app downloaded from Apple's official App Store has an ability to update itself from any 3rd-party server automatically without your knowledge.
Yes, it is possible, and you could end up downloading malware on your iPhone or iPad.
Unlike Google, Apple has made remarkable efforts to create and maintain a healthy and clean ecosystem of its official App Store.
Although Apple's review process and standards for security and integrity are intended to protect iOS users, developers found the process time consuming and extremely frustrating while issuing a patch for a severe bug or security flaw impacting existing app users.
To overcome this problem, Apple designed a set of solutions to make it easier for iOS app developers to push straightway out hotfixes and updates to app users without going through Apple's review process.
Sounds great, but here's the Kick:
Malicious app developers can abuse These solutions, potentially allowing them to circumvent effectively the protection given by the official App Store review process and perform arbitrary actions on the compromised device, FireEye has warned.
The framework in question is JSPatch – a small JavaScript-to-ObjectiveC engine that developers can integrate in their iOS apps, allowing them to apply hotfixes on their iOS apps simply by adding a few lines of code to their apps.
How Does JSPatch Work?
Once the JSPatch engine loads inside an application, the developer can configure the app always to load a JavaScript file hosted on a remote server, which is controlled by the developer.
Developed by a Chinese developer, JSPatch is utilised in as many as 1,220 iOS apps in the App Store, according to researchers. Although they failed to name the apps, the researchers claim that they have already notified the app providers.
So, in need of security fixes or updates to their app, instead of going through Apple's long-winded update routine, developers can just add some JavaScript code to the file hosted on their server in order to load the code in all the devices where the app is installed.
How to Exploit the JSPatch Framework?
There are two ways to abuse this framework:
If the Developer is with malicious intention.
If developer loads this framework via an unencrypted channel, allowing Man-in-the-Middle attacks.
What if the app developer has bad intention?
A malicious developer can first submit a harmless JSPatch integrated application to the Apple App Store.
Once it passed Apple's inspection and made available on the App Store for users to download, the developer can then easily send malicious JavaScript code to the running application through JSPatch, allowing the developer to perform various actions without being detected.
"JSPatch is a boon to iOS developers," FireEye researchers said in a blog post. "In the right hands, it can be used to quickly and effectively deploy patches and code updates. However, in a non-utopian world like ours, we need to assume that bad actors will leverage this technology for unintended purposes."
What if the app's developer loads JSPatch via an unencrypted channel?
If an application developer uses JSPatch without any malicious intentions, even then the users security is at risk. The developers who load JSPatch via an unencrypted (HTTP) channel could leave communications between the client and the server unprotected.
This could allow an attacker to conduct a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack to intercept the client and server connection and tamper with the JavaScript content sent to the app in order to perform a malicious action, including:
Access to sensitive information, such as media files and the pasteboard content.
Change system properties.
Load arbitrary public frameworks into the app process.
This isn't the very first-time iOS users are facing such problems. Last October, hundreds of iOS apps in the App Store were found collecting user's private data while violating security and privacy guidelines of Apple.
The discovery came just a month after the XcodeGhost malware was distributed through legitimate iOS Apps via counterfeit versions of Apple's app developer toolkit called Xcode. Here's how to protect yourself against XCodeGhost like iOS flaws.
How to Protect Yourself?
The recommendations to protect yourself against this flaw are standard:
Download apps only from the official App Store, that you need, that you know, and that you trust.
Beware of applications that ask for an extensive amount of permissions and only grant the apps permissions that are necessary.
Manually review "everything" to discover anything malicious in your devices. Rest is up to the company if it wants to improve its application update process to make it speedier, or to allow potential attack vectors that could affect most of its apps and their users.
| Malware |
NetCAT: New Attack Lets Hackers Remotely Steal Data From Intel CPUs | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/netcat-intel-side-channel.html | Unlike previous side-channel vulnerabilities disclosed in Intel CPUs, researchers have discovered a new flaw that can be exploited remotely over the network without requiring an attacker to have physical access or any malware installed on a targeted computer.
Dubbed NetCAT, short for Network Cache ATtack, the new network-based side-channel vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to sniff out sensitive data, such as someone's SSH password, from Intel's CPU cache.
Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Vrije University in Amsterdam, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11184, resides in a performance optimization feature called Intel's DDIO—short for Data-Direct I/O—which by design grants network devices and other peripherals access to the CPU cache.
The DDIO comes enabled by default on all Intel server-grade processors since 2012, including Intel Xeon E5, E7 and SP families.
According to the researchers [paper], NetCAT attack works similar to Throwhammer by solely sending specially crafted network packets to a targeted computer that has Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) feature enabled.
RDMA enables attackers to spy on remote server-side peripherals such as network cards and observe the timing difference between a network packet that is served from the remote processor's cache versus a packet served from memory.
Here the idea is to perform a keystroke timing analysis to recover words typed by a victim using a machine learning algorithm against the time information.
"In an interactive SSH session, every time you press a key, network packets are being directly transmitted. As a result, every time a victim you type a character inside an encrypted SSH session on your console, NetCAT can leak the timing of the event by leaking the arrival time of the corresponding network packet," explains the VUSec team.
"Now, humans have distinct typing patterns. For example, typing's' right after 'a' is faster than typing 'g' after's.' As a result, NetCAT can operate statical analysis of the inter-arrival timings of packets in what is known as a keystroke timing attack to leak what you type in your private SSH session."
"Compared to a native local attacker, NetCAT's attack from across the network only reduces the accuracy of the discovered keystrokes on average by 11.7% by discovering inter-arrival of SSH packets with a true positive rate of 85%."
The VUSec team has also published a video, as shown above, demonstrating a method for spying on SSH sessions in real-time with nothing but a shared server.
NetCAT becomes the new side-channel vulnerability joined the list of other dangerous side-channel vulnerabilities discovered in the past year, including Meltdown and Spectre, TLBleed, Foreshadow, SWAPGS, and PortSmash.
In its advisory, Intel has acknowledged the issue and recommended users to either completely disable DDIO or at least RDMA to make such attacks more difficult, or otherwise suggested to limit direct access to the servers from untrusted networks.
The company assigned the NetCAT vulnerability a "low" severity rating, describing it as a partial information disclosure issue, and awarded a bounty to the VUSec team for the responsible disclosure.
| Vulnerability |
Adobe Releases Security Patches for Flash, Acrobat Reader, Other Products | https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/adobe-security-updates.html | Good morning readers, it's Patch Tuesday again—the day of the month when Adobe and Microsoft release security patches for their software.
Adobe just released its monthly security updates to address a total of 40 security vulnerabilities in several of its products, including Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat and Reader, and Shockwave Player.
According to an advisory, Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS operating systems are vulnerable to a total 21 vulnerabilities, 11 of which have been rated as critical in severity.
Upon successful exploitation, all critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat and Reader software lead to arbitrary code execution, allowing attackers to take complete control over targeted systems.
Remaining ten vulnerabilities in the most widely used PDF reader are all rated as important and could lead to information disclosure.
If your system hasn't yet detected the availability of the new update automatically, you should manually install the update by choosing "Help → Check for Updates" in your Adobe Acrobat and Reader software.
Here we have compiled a brief list of all vulnerabilities Adobe patched this month in its various products:
Adobe Acrobat and Reader — 11 Critical and 10 Important Flaws
Adobe Flash Player — 2 Critical Flaws
Adobe Shockwave Player — 7 Critical Flaws
Adobe Dreamweaver — 1 Moderate Flaw
Adobe XD — 2 Critical Flaws
Adobe InDesign — 1 Critical Flaw
Adobe Experience Manager Forms —1 Important Flaw
Adobe Bridge CC — 2 Critical and 3 Important Flaws
Adobe has released updated versions of Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS to address two security vulnerabilities, one of which is critical and the other is important in severity.
Flash Player, which will receive security patch updates until the end of 2020, addresses a critical use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2019-7096) that could potentially allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on the affected systems.
The company has also patched 7 critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Shockwave Player—most likely the last update for the software. That's because, effective from today (April 9, 2019), Adobe has discontinued support for Shockwave for Windows.
Users of affected Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS are urged to update their software packages to the latest versions as soon as possible.
According to the company, none of the listed vulnerabilities has been found exploited in the wild.
Check out details of the latest April 2019 security updates from Microsoft.
| Vulnerability |
First Malware Designed for Apple M1 Chip Discovered in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/first-malware-designed-for-apple-m1.html | One of the first malware samples tailored to run natively on Apple's M1 chips has been discovered, suggesting a new development that indicates that bad actors have begun adapting malicious software to target the company's latest generation of Macs powered by its own processors.
While the transition to Apple silicon has necessitated developers to build new versions of their apps to ensure better performance and compatibility, malware authors are now undertaking similar steps to build malware that are capable of executing natively on Apple's new M1 systems, according to macOS Security researcher Patrick Wardle.
Wardle detailed a Safari adware extension called GoSearch22 that was originally written to run on Intel x86 chips but has since been ported to run on ARM-based M1 chips. The rogue extension, which is a variant of the Pirrit advertising malware, was first seen in the wild on November 23, 2020, according to a sample uploaded to VirusTotal on December 27.
"Today we confirmed that malicious adversaries are indeed crafting multi-architecture applications, so that their code will natively run on M1 systems," said Wardle in a write-up published yesterday. "The malicious GoSearch22 application may be the first example of such natively M1 compatible code."
While M1 Macs can run x86 software with the help of a dynamic binary translator called Rosetta, the benefits of native support mean not only efficiency improvements but also the increased likelihood of staying under the radar without attracting any unwanted attention.
First documented in 2016, Pirrit is a persistent Mac adware family notorious for pushing intrusive and deceptive advertisements to users that, when clicked, downloads and installs unwanted apps that come with information gathering features.
For its part, the heavily obfuscated GoSearch22 adware disguises itself as a legitimate Safari browser extension when in fact, it collects browsing data and serves a large number of ads such as banners and popups, including some that link to dubious websites to distribute additional malware.
Wardle said the extension was signed with an Apple Developer ID "hongsheng_yan" in November to further conceal its malicious content, but it has since been revoked, meaning the application will no longer run on macOS unless attackers re-sign it with another certificate.
Although the development highlights how malware continues to evolve in direct response to both hardware changes, Wardle warned that "(static) analysis tools or antivirus engines may struggle with arm64 binaries," with detections from industry-leading security software dropping by 15% when compared to the Intel x86_64 version.
GoSearch22's malware capabilities may not be entirely new or dangerous, but that's beside the point. If anything, the emergence of new M1-compatible malware signals this is just a start, and more variants are likely to crop up in the future.
| Malware |
Obama will control internet, signs Emergency Internet Control | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/obama-will-control-internet-signs.html | Barack Obama has signed an executive order that could hand control of the internet to the U.S. Government, in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. "The federal government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions," Obama said.
President Obama adds that it is necessary for the government to be able to reach anyone in the country during situations it considers critical, writing, "Such communications must be possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies and improve national resilience." Later the president explains that such could be done by establishing a "joint industry-Government center that is capable of assisting in the initiation, coordination, restoration and reconstitution of NS/EP [national security and emergency preparedness] communications services or facilities under all conditions of emerging threats, crisis or emergency."
But Section 5.2 has raised alarm among those who fear the government will have too much control over the Web. The section explained how the secretary of homeland security - currently Janet Napolitano - will 'satisfy priority communications requirements through the use of commercial, Government, and privately owned communications resources, when appropriate.'
White House officials have acted quickly to ease concern, insisting the order is just an update of an existing authority dating back to 1984 . The claim the government has been granted no extra powers.
How threatening Obama's new executive powers are is subject to debate. Please pass your feedback in Comments.
| Vulnerability |
Update Your Chrome Browser to Patch New Zero‑Day Bug Exploited in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/update-your-chrome-browser-to-patch-new.html | Google has pushed out a new security update to Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux with multiple fixes, including a zero-day that it says is being exploited in the wild.
The latest patch resolves a total of eight issues, one of which concerns a type confusion issue in its V8 open-source and JavaScript engine (CVE-2021-30563). The search giant credited an anonymous researcher for reporting the flaw on July 12.
As is usually the case with actively exploited flaws, the company issued a terse statement acknowledging that "an exploit for CVE-2021-30563 exists in the wild" while refraining from sharing full details about the underlying vulnerability used in the attacks due to its serious nature and the possibility that doing so could lead to further abuse.
CVE-2021-30563 also marks the ninth zero-day addressed by Google to combat real-world attacks against Chrome users since the start of the year —
CVE-2021-21148 - Heap buffer overflow in V8
CVE-2021-21166 - Object recycle issue in audio
CVE-2021-21193 - Use-after-free in Blink
CVE-2021-21206 - Use-after-free in Blink
CVE-2021-21220 - Insufficient validation of untrusted input in V8 for x86_64
CVE-2021-21224 - Type confusion in V8
CVE-2021-30551 - Type confusion in V8
CVE-2021-30554 - Use-after-free in WebGL
Chrome users are advised to update to the latest version (91.0.4472.164) by heading to Settings > Help > 'About Google Chrome' to mitigate the risk associated with the flaw.
| Vulnerability |
France Telecom Orange Hacked Again, Personal Details of 1.3 Million Customers Stolen | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/france-telecom-orange-hacked-again.html | French leading telecommunications company 'Orange' hit by second major data breach of its kind in a matter of months. Company announced that hackers have stolen personal data of 1.3 million customers of its online portal.
ORANGE HACKED SECOND TIME IN THREE MONTHS
Hackers have stolen a "limited amount of personal information concerning clients and future customers", including their first names, Surnames email addresses, phone numbers for both mobiles and fixed lines, dates of birth as well as the names of clients' mobile and Internet operators.
"The data recovered could be used to contact those concerned by email, SMS or by phone, particularly for phishing purposes," company said in an statement.
The Incident was detected by the company on April 18, but the company has waited until now to inform customers to determine its full extent and to ensure that the security holes leveraged by the hackers have been patched.
BEWARE OF PHISHING ATTACKS
We don't know what the motivations of the Cyber criminals are, it is not known what will actually happen to the Stolen Database. The attackers know the recipients name, so this could potentially lead to e-mail spam and phishing attacks.
Such attacks are frequently disguised as an email from a company asking the customer to provide sensitive information such as passwords, user names or credit card details.
"The data collected could be used to contact people involved in e-mail, SMS or telephone, including for phishing" warns Orange.
In February, Orange revealed a separate security breach, in which more than 800,000 users' emails, passwords, addresses and phone numbers had been stolen from its customer website.
Orange also reported that it had found the source of the attack and has filed an official police complaint about the data breach.
| Cyber_Attack |
22-Year-Old Charged With Hacking Water System and Endangering Lives | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/22-year-old-charged-with-hacking-water.html | A 22-year-old man from the U.S. state of Kansas has been indicted on charges that he unauthorizedly accessed a public water facility's computer system, jeopardizing the residents' safety and health in the local community.
Wyatt A. Travnichek, 22, of Ellsworth County, Kansas, has been charged with one count of tampering with a public water system and one count of reckless damage to a protected computer during unauthorized access, according to the Department of Justice (DoJ).
"By illegally tampering with a public drinking water system, the defendant threatened the safety and health of an entire community," said Lance Ehrig, Special Agent in Charge of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Criminal Investigation Division in Kansas.
"EPA and its law enforcement partners are committed to upholding the laws designed to protect our drinking water systems from harm or threat of harm. Today's indictment sends a clear message that individuals who intentionally violate these laws will be vigorously prosecuted."
On March 27, 2019, Travnichek is said to have broken into a protected computer system belonging to the county's Post-Rock Rural Water District, using it to shut down the cleaning and disinfecting processes at the facility.
The indictment doesn't specify if the attack was successful and how it was detected. If found guilty, Travnichek faces up to 25 years in federal prison and a total fine of $500,000.
The development comes months after unidentified actors staged an intrusion at a water treatment facility in the state of Florida and changed a setting that drastically altered the levels of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) in the water.
| Cyber_Attack |
WARNING: Hackers Install Secret Backdoor on Thousands of Microsoft SQL Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2020/04/backdoor-.html | Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a sustained malicious campaign dating back to May 2018 that targets Windows machines running MS-SQL servers to deploy backdoors and other kinds of malware, including multi-functional remote access tools (RATs) and cryptominers.
Named "Vollgar" after the Vollar cryptocurrency it mines and its offensive "vulgar" modus operandi, researchers at Guardicore Labs said the attack employs password brute-force to breach Microsoft SQL servers with weak credentials exposed to the Internet.
Researchers claim the attackers managed to successfully infect nearly 2,000-3,000 database servers daily over the past few weeks, with potential victims belonging to healthcare, aviation, IT & telecommunications, and higher education sectors across China, India, the US, South Korea, and Turkey.
Thankfully for those concerned, researchers have also released a script to let sysadmins detect if any of their Windows MS-SQL servers have been compromised with this particular threat.
Vollgar Attack Chain: MS-SQL to System Malware
The Vollgar attack starts off with brute-force login attempts on MS-SQL servers, which, when successful, allows the interloper to execute a number of configuration changes to run malicious MS-SQL commands and download malware binaries.
"Attackers [also] validate that certain COM classes are available - WbemScripting.SWbemLocator, Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 and Windows Script Host Object Model (wshom). These classes support both WMI scripting and command execution through MS-SQL, which will be later used to download the initial malware binary," the researchers said.
Aside from ensuring that cmd.exe and ftp.exe executables have the necessary execute permissions, the operator behind Vollgar also creates new backdoor users to the MS-SQL database as well as on the operating system with elevated privileges.
Upon completion of the initial setup, the attack proceeds to create downloader scripts (two VBScripts and one FTP script), which are executed "a couple of times," each time with a different target location on the local file system to avert possible failures.
One of the initial payloads, named SQLAGENTIDC.exe or SQLAGENTVDC.exe, first proceeds to kill a long list of processes with the goal of securing the maximum amount of system resources as well as eliminate other threat actors' activity and remove their presence from the infected machine.
Furthermore, it acts as a dropper for different RATs and an XMRig-based crypto-miner that mines Monero and an alt-coin called VDS or Vollar.
Attack Infrastructure Hosted On Compromised Systems
Guardicore said attackers held their entire infrastructure on compromised machines, including its primary command-and-control server located in China, which, ironically, was found compromised by more than one attack group.
"Among the files [on the C&C server] was the MS-SQL attack tool, responsible for scanning IP ranges, brute-forcing the targeted database, and executing commands remotely," the cybersecurity firm observed.
"In addition, we found two CNC programs with GUI in Chinese, a tool for modifying files' hash values, a portable HTTP file server (HFS), Serv-U FTP server and a copy of the executable mstsc.exe (Microsoft Terminal Services Client) used to connect to victims over RDP."
Once an infected Windows client pings the C2 server, the latter also receives a variety of details about the machine, such as its public IP, location, operating system version, computer name, and CPU model.
Stating that the two C2 programs installed on the China-based server were developed by two different vendors, Guardicore said there are similarities in their remote control capabilities — namely downloading files, installing new Windows services, keylogging, screen capturing, activating the camera and microphone, and even initiating a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
Use Strong Passwords to Avoid Brute-Force Attacks
With about half-a-million machines running MS-SQL database service, the campaign is yet another indication that attackers are going after poorly protected database servers in an attempt to siphon sensitive information. It's essential that MS-SQL servers that are exposed to the internet are secured with strong credentials.
"What makes these database servers appealing for attackers apart from their valuable CPU power is the huge amount of data they hold," Guardicore researchers concluded. "These machines possibly store personal information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, etc., which can fall into the attacker's hands with only a simple brute-force."
| Cyber_Attack |
Anti-DDoS Firm Staminus HACKED! Customers Data Leaked | https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/ddos-protection.html | Staminus Communications – a California-based hosting and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection company – is recovering a massive data breach after hackers broke down into its servers and leaked personal and sensitive details of its customers.
Though the company acknowledged that there was a problem in a message posted to Twitter on Thursday morning, it did not specify a data breach.
Staminus's website went offline at 8 am Eastern Time on Thursday, and on Friday afternoon, a representative said in a Twitter post that "a rare event cascaded across multiple routers in a system-wide event, making our backbone unavailable."
What type of information?
The dump of information on Staminus' systems includes:
Customer usernames
Hashed passwords
E-mail addresses
Customer real names
Customer credit card data in plain text
Customer support tickets
Server logs data
Chat logs
Source code of some of the company's services including Intreppid
Staminus' main database
Database of one of Staminus' clients, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
The data was posted on the Internet Friday morning, and some Staminus customers who wish to remain anonymous confirmed that their data was part of the leaked data dump.
However, the company says it does not store or collect its customers' Social Security numbers (SSNs) or tax IDs, so they are safe from the data breach.
What happened?
The Staminus data breach occurred after hackers infiltrated the company's server backbone, seized control of Staminus' routers and then reset them to factory settings, which effectively brought down the company's entire network.
The hackers also stole the company's database and dumped it online. Links to downloads of the internal Staminus data were published in a file sarcastically headlined, "TIPS WHEN RUNNING A SECURITY COMPANY," detailing the security holes (given below) found during the data breach:
Use one root password for all the boxes
Expose PDU's [power distribution units in server racks] to WAN with telnet auth
Never patch, upgrade or audit the stack
Disregard PDO [PHP Data Objects] as inconvenient
Hedge entire business on security theatre
Store full credit card info in plaintext
Write all code with wreckless abandon
How many customers affected?
Although the total number of victims has not been known yet, Forbes reported that the data breach included at least 15 gigabytes worth of data belonging to Staminus.
Security researcher Nathan Malcolm from Sinthetic Labs told the publication that he analysed the data dump and found unencrypted credit card numbers, expiry dates and CVVs for as many as 1,971 Staminus customers.
What was the motive for the breach?
Potential motives for hacking Staminus are quite easy to figure out.
Staminus' clients include the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan (www.kkk.com). The company also hosts several IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels for large-scale DDoS attack services, Krebs noted.
What was the company's response?
Staminus CEO Matt Mahvi published the following statement on the Staminus website (which again went offline), confirming the data breach.
"We can now confirm the issue was a result of an unauthorized intrusion into our network. As a result of this intrusion, our systems were temporarily taken offline and customer information was exposed. Upon discovering this attack, Staminus took immediate action including launching an investigation into the attack, notifying law enforcement and restoring our systems.
Based on the initial investigation, we believe that usernames, hashed passwords, customer record information, including name and contact information, and payment card data were exposed. It is important to note that we do not collect Social Security numbers or tax IDs.
While the investigation continues, we have and will continue to put additional measures into place to harden our security to help prevent a future attack. While the exposed passwords were protected with a cryptographic hash, we also strongly recommend that customers change their Staminus password."
Staminus' website came back online and believed to be wiped clean, but at the time of writing the website is still unavailable.
What victims should do?
Staminus customers are recommended to review their credit card statements carefully and to report any unauthorized bank transactions.
Meanwhile, Staminus has also advised its customers to reset all their account passwords once the service is fully operational once again.
| Data_Breaches |
Microsoft Says SolarWinds Hackers Accessed Some of Its Source Code | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/microsoft-says-solarwinds-hackers.html | Microsoft on Thursday revealed that the threat actors behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack were able to gain access to a small number of internal accounts and escalate access inside its internal network.
The "very sophisticated nation-state actor" used the unauthorized access to view, but not modify, the source code present in its repositories, the company said.
"We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories," the Windows maker disclosed in an update.
"The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated."
The development is the latest in the far-reaching espionage saga that came to light earlier in December following revelations by cybersecurity firm FireEye that attackers had compromised its systems via a trojanized SolarWinds update to steal its Red Team penetration testing tools.
During the course of the probe into the hack, Microsoft had previously admitted to detecting malicious SolarWinds binaries in its own environment but denied its systems were used to target others or that attackers had access to production services or customer data.
Several other companies, including Cisco, VMware, Intel, NVIDIA, and a number of other US government agencies, have since discovered markers of the Sunburst (or Solorigate) malware on their networks, planted via tainted Orion updates.
The Redmond-based company said its investigation is still ongoing but downplayed the incident, adding "viewing source code isn't tied to elevation of risk" and that it had found evidence of attempted activities that were neutralized by its protections.
In a separate analysis published by Microsoft on December 28, the company called the attack a "cross-domain compromise" that allowed the adversary to introduce malicious code into signed SolarWinds Orion Platform binaries and leverage this widespread foothold to continue operating undetected and access the target's cloud resources, culminating in the exfiltration of sensitive data.
SolarWinds' Orion software, however, wasn't the only initial infection vector, as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said the attackers used other methods as well, which have not yet been publicly disclosed.
The agency also released supplemental guidance urging all US federal agencies that still run SolarWinds Orion software to update to the latest 2020.2.1 HF2 version.
"The National Security Agency (NSA) has examined this version and verified that it eliminates the previously identified malicious code," the agency said.
| Cyber_Attack |
Private Decryption Key For Original Petya Ransomware Released | https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/petya-ransomware-decryption-key.html | Rejoice Petya-infected victims!
The master key for the original version of the Petya ransomware has been released by its creator, allowing Petya-infected victims to recover their encrypted files without paying any ransom money.
But wait, Petya is not NotPetya.
Do not confuse Petya ransomware with the latest destructive NotPetya ransomware (also known as ExPetr and Eternal Petya) attacks that wreaked havoc across the world last month, massively targeting multiple entities in Ukraine and parts of Europe.
The Petya ransomware has three variants that have infected many systems around the world, but now the author of the original malware, goes by the pseudonym Janus, made the master key available on Wednesday.
According to the security researchers, victims infected with previous variants of Petya ransomware, including Red Petya (first version) and Green Petya (second version) and early versions the GoldenEye ransomware can get their encrypted files back using the master key.
The authenticity of the master key has been verified by an independent Polish information security researcher known as Hasherezade.
"Similarly to the authors of TeslaCrypt, he released his private key, allowing all the victims of the previous Petya attacks, to get their files back," Hasherezade posted her finding on MalwareBytes on Thursday.
"Thanks to the currently published master key, all the people who have preserved the images of the disks encrypted by the relevant versions of Petya, may get a chance of getting their data back."
Although the first and second version of Petya was cracked last year, the private key released by Janus offers the fastest and most reliable way yet for Petya-infected victims to decrypt their files, especially locked with the uncrackable third version.
Meanwhile, Kaspersky Lab research analyst Anton Ivanov also analyzed the Janus' master key and confirmed that the key unlocks all versions of Petya ransomware, including GoldenEye.
Janus created the GoldenEye ransomware in 2016 and sold the variants as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) to other hackers, allowing anyone to launch ransomware attacks with just one click and encrypt systems and demand a ransom to unlock it.
If the victim pays, Janus gets a cut of the payment. But in December, he went silent.
However, according to the Petya author, his malware has been modified by another threat actor to create NotPetya that targeted computers of critical infrastructure and corporations in Ukraine as well as 64 other countries.
The NotPetya ransomware also makes use of the NSA's leaked Windows hacking exploit EternalBlue and EternalRomance to rapidly spread within a network, and WMIC and PSEXEC tools to remotely execute malware on the machines.
Security experts even believe the real intention behind the recent ransomware outcry, which was believed to be bigger than the WannaCry ransomware, was to cause disruption, rather than just another ransomware attack.
According to researchers, NotPetya is in reality wiper malware that wipes systems outright, destroying all records from the targeted systems, and asking for ransom was just to divert world's attention from a state-sponsored attack to a malware outbreak.
Lucky are not those infected with NotPetya, but the master key can help people who were attacked by previous variants of Petya and Goldeneye ransomware in the past.
Security researchers are using the key to build free decryptors for victims who still have crypto-locked hard drives.
| Malware |
Virus conducting DDoS attack from infected systems | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/virus-conducting-ddos-attack-from.html | Russian anti-virus company Doctor Web is warning users about the malicious program which is helping attackers carry out mass spam mailings and allow attacker to use victim's PC as slave of his DDOS Army.
According to researchers from the company they have discovered a Trojan "Trojan.Proxy.23012" application that uses a rare method of distribution through peer networks.
"The botnet, consisting of Trojan.Proxy.23012-infected computers, is used by criminals to control proxy servers for the purpose of using them to send spam upon command". An example of such a spam message is shown in the screenshot below.
This Malware work as:
1.) Using peer to peer network it will download the executable file and that will be a encrypted malicious module. A very interesting algorithm used by the Trojan to download the infected computer other malware.
2.) After successfully decrypt it launches another module that reads the image in computer memory or other malicious applications.
3.) The program is saved to a user account as an executable file with a random name, and then modifies the registry Windows, to give yourself the ability to automatically run along with the operating system loads.
4.) Trojan is launched automatically at Windows' startup. The malware also tries to disable the UAC. At the final stage of the installation process, the Trojan code is injected into explorer.exe.
After successfully downloading the DDoS-module generates up to eight independent threads that begins continuously sending POST-requests to the server from a stored list of Trojan downloader, and trying to connect with a number of servers via SMTP, and then sends them to the random data.
Total list contains 200 selected as a target for DDoS-attack sites, some of which are known resources such as a portal love.com, owned corporation America On-Line, sites of several major U.S. universities, as well as portals msn.com, netscape.com and others.
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| Malware |
Cisco released Security advisory for critical Router password reset vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/cisco-released-security-advisory-for.html | In the first week of this year, we have reported about a critical vulnerability found in more than 2000 Routers that allow attackers to reset the admin panel password to defaults.
Recently, Cisco has released a security advisory, detailed about the similar vulnerability affecting their three networking products.
Cisco has rated the flaw highly critical and marked it as 10.0 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
A security researcher found a secret service listening on port 32764 TCP, allowed a remote user to send unauthenticated commands to the device and reset the administrative password. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability allows the hacker to execute arbitrary commands on the device with escalated privileges.
Vulnerable Cisco products are: WAP4410N Wireless-N Access Point, Cisco WRVS4400N Wireless-N Gigabit Security Router, and the Cisco RVS4000 4-port Gigabit Security.
"This vulnerability is due to an undocumented test interface in the TCP service listening on port 32764 of the affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by accessing the affected device from the LAN-side interface and issuing arbitrary commands in the underlying operating system. An exploit could allow the attacker to access user credentials for the administrator account of the device, and read the device configuration. The exploit can also allow the attacker to issue arbitrary commands on the device with escalated privileges."
Similar backdoor is also present in multiple devices from Cisco, Netgear, Belkin and other manufacturers, according to the security researcher, Eloi Vanderbeken. He has also released a Python based exploit script to automate the exploitation.
This vulnerability has been assigned Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID CVE-2014-0659. Cisco has not yet patched the bug, but it is promising to do so by the end of this month.
| Vulnerability |
Imgur—Popular Image Sharing Site Was Hacked In 2014; Passwords Compromised | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/imgur-data-breach.html | Only after a few days of Uber admitting last year's data breach of 57 million customers, the popular image sharing site disclosed that it had suffered a major data breach in 2014 that compromised email addresses and passwords of 1.7 million user accounts.
In a blog post published on Friday, Imgur claimed that the company had been notified of a three-year-old data breach on November 23 when a security researcher emailed the company after being sent the stolen data.
Imgur Chief Operating Officer (COO) then alerted the company's founder and the Vice President of Engineering to the issue before began working to validate that the data belonged to Imgur users.
After completing the data validation, the company confirmed Friday morning that the 2014 data breach impacted approximately 1.7 million Imgur user accounts (a small fraction of its 150 million user base) and that the compromised information included only email addresses and passwords.
Since Imgur has never asked for people's real names, phone numbers, addresses, or any other personally-identifying information (PII), no other personal information was allegedly exposed in the data breach.
The company also said that the stolen passwords were scrambled with older SHA-256 hashing algorithm—which can be easily cracked using brute force attacks.
However, Imgur's COO Roy Sehgal said the website had already moved from SHA-256 to much stronger bcrypt password scrambler last year.
"We have always encrypted your password in our database, but it may have been cracked with brute force due to an older hashing algorithm (SHA-256) that was used at the time," the image sharing service said. "We updated our algorithm to the new bcrypt algorithm last year."
The company has begun notifying affected users along with enforcing a password change.
Moreover, those using the same email address and password combination across multiple sites and applications are also advised to change those details as well.
It's still unknown how this incident occurred and went unnoticed for roughly three years. Imgur is still actively investigating the hacking intrusion and will be sharing details as soon as they become available.
Security expert Troy Hunt who notified Imgur of the incident praised the company for its swift response to the breach notification and disclosure of the data breach.
"I want to recognise @imgur's exemplary handling of this: that's 25 hours and 10 mins from my initial email to a press address to them mobilising people over Thanksgiving, assessing the data, beginning password resets and making a public disclosure. Kudos!" Hunt tweeted.
"This is really where we're at now: people recognise that data breaches are the new normal and they're judging organizations not on the fact that they've had one, but on how they've handled it when it happened."
Imgur is yet another company in a series of security breaches that took place years ago but have only come to light in 2017. Other companies revealing previously-occurred major breaches years after included Yahoo, Uber, LinkedIn, Disqus, and MySpace.
| Data_Breaches |
Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery | https://thehackernews.com/2011/07/apple-macbooks-can-be-hacked-through.html | Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery
Security researcher Charlie Miller is quite well known for his works on Apple products. Today he has come up with a very interesting way to hack the MacBook using the battery. Laptop battery contains its own monitoring circuit which reports the status of the battery to the OS. It also ensure that the battery does not overcharge even when the laptop is turned off.
Miller has discovered that on the MacBooks, the batteries are shipped with the default password set on the chips. It means that if someone knows the default password, the firmware of the battery can be controlled to do many things from simply ruining the battery to installing a malware which reinstalls whenever the OS boots. Miller said that it might even be possible to overload the battery so that it catches fire.
This is what Miller said:
These batteries just aren't designed with the idea that people will mess with them. What I'm showing is that it's possible to use them to do something really bad.
You could put a whole hard drive in, reinstall the software, flash the BIOS, and every time it would reattack and screw you over. There would be no way to eradicate or detect it other than removing the battery.
This is a very real threat but such an attack is not likely to occur anytime soon. To successfully carry out the attack, the attacker has to analyze the 2009 software updates from Apple for the password, like Miller has done. If he is able to retrieve the password, he will have to find a vulnerability in the interface between the OS and the firmware. Miller believes that this will not be a difficult job as Apple probably never expected such kind of attack.
Miller will present his findings at the BlackHat security conference next month. At the conference, he also plans to release a tool which will change the password of the battery to a random string.
| Vulnerability |
BBC music websites get hacked ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/02/bbc-music-websites-get-hacked.html | THE BBC'S MUSIC WEBSITES have been hacked to stream malware using drive-by downloads for anyone browsing the infected webpages.
Hackers set the drive-by malware up at the BBC's 6 Music website and the BBC 1Xtra radio station website. Researchers at the insecurity outfit Websense found the exploits and put its report up on its security labs blog.
"The BBC - 6 Music Web site has been injected with a malicious iframe, as have areas of the BBC 1Xtra radio station Web site," an anonymous Websense insecurity researcher wrote.
Websense claims the injected iframe is at the bottom of the BBC 6 Music webpage and has been set up to automatically download some dodgy code from a .cc website. Apparently the hack is exactly the same on the BBC's 1Xtra website.
"If an unprotected user browsed to the site they would be faced with drive-by downloads, meaning that simply browsing to the page is enough to get infected with a malicious executable," Websense continued.
The malware was designed using a Pheonix Exploit kit and only 12 out of 43 of the top anti-virus packages found the exploit. Using Virus Total scan to see which products picked up the injected iframe, Websense showed that anti-virus scans from some outfits like Kaspersky, Symantec, PC Tools and Trend Micro picked up the hack.
However, other top name insecurity vendors like Sophos, McAfee and even Microsoft's anti-virus tools didn't register the hack at all. That is an appalling detection rate from both free and paid-for anti-virus kits and, as of yesterday, Websense reckoned the anti-virus toolkits were still vulnerable.
| Malware |
Print of one malicious document can expose your whole LAN | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/print-of-one-malicious-document-can.html | Print of one malicious document can expose your whole LAN
This year at Chaos Communications Congress (28C3) Ang Cui presents Print Me If You Dare, in which he explained how he reverse-engineered the firmware-update process for HPs hundreds of millions of printers and In Andrei Costin's presentation "Hacking MFPs" he covered the history of printer and copier hacks from the 1960s to today.
Cui discovered that he could load arbitrary software into any printer by embedding it in a malicious document or by connecting to the printer online. As part of his presentation, he performed two demonstrations: in the first, he sent a document to a printer that contained a malicious version of the OS that caused it to copy the documents it printed and post them to an IP address on the Internet; in the second, he took over a remote printer with a malicious document, caused that printer to scan the LAN for vulnerable PCs, compromise a PC, and turn it into a proxy that gave him access through the firewall.
Costin found a method to exploit the firmware update capability of certain Xerox MFPs to upload his crafted PostScript code. He was able to run code to dump memory from the printer. This could allow an attacker to grab passwords for the administration interface or access or print PIN-protected documents.
MFPs are trusted devices connected to the office network, but sometimes they're also accessible from the Internet. The numbers of publicly accessible office MFPs range in the tens of thousands. An attacker could craft PostScript code tied with exploits from the Metasploit framework and upload it to an MFP to attack a corporate network.
Cui's technique for infecting printers involves the more limited Printer Job Language, rather than PostScript, and injects code into processes running on the printer. This was effectively a custom rootkit for the printer's OS. Cui gave HP a month to issue patches for the vulnerabilities he discovered, and HP now has new firmware available that fixes this (his initial disclosure was misreported in the press as making printers vulnerable to being overheated and turning into "flaming death bombs" he showed a lightly singed sheet of paper that represented the closest he could come to this claim). He urges anyone with an HP printer to apply the latest patch, because malware could be crafted to take over your printer and then falsely report that it has accepted the patch while discarding it.
The vulnerability was disclosed to HP, and updates for infected printers were released last week.
[Source]
| Vulnerability |
French Police Remotely Removed RETADUP Malware from 850,000 Infected PCs | https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/retadup-botnet-malware.html | The French law enforcement agency, National Gendarmerie, today announced the successful takedown of one of the largest wide-spread RETADUP botnet malware and how it remotely disinfected more than 850,000 computers worldwide with the help of researchers.
Earlier this year, security researchers at Avast antivirus firm, who were actively monitoring the activities of RETADUP botnet, discovered a design flaw in the malware's C&C protocol that could have been exploited to remove the malware from victims' computer without executing any extra code.
However, to do that, the plan required researchers to have control over the malware's C&C server, which was hosted with a hosting provider located in the Ile-de-France region in north-central France.
Therefore, the researchers contacted the Cybercrime Fighting Center (C3N) of the French National Gendarmerie at the end of March this year, shared their findings, and proposed a secret plan to put an end to the RETADUP virus and protect victims.
According to the proposed plan, the French authorities took control over the RETADUP C&C server in July and replaced it with a prepared disinfection server that abused the design flaw in its protocol and commanded the connected instances of the RETADUP malware on infected computers to self-destruct.
"In the very first second of its activity, several thousand bots connected to it in order to fetch commands from the server. The disinfection server responded to them and disinfected them, abusing the C&C protocol design flaw," the researchers explain in a blog post published today.
"At the time of publishing this article, the collaboration has neutralized over 850,000 unique infections of RETADUP."
According to Jean-Dominique Nollet, head of the National Criminal Intelligence Service at Gendarmerie Nationale, the authorities will keep the disinfection server online for a few more months as some infected computers have not yet made a connection with the police controlled C&C server—some have been offline since July while others have network problems.
The French police also contacted the FBI after finding some parts of the RETADUP's C&C infrastructure in the United States. The FBI then took them down on July 8, leaving the malware authors with no control over the bots.
"Since it was the C&C server's responsibility to give mining jobs to the bots, none of the bots received any new mining jobs to execute after this takedown," the researchers say. "This meant that they could no longer drain the computing power of their victims and that the malware authors no longer received any monetary gain from mining."
Created in 2015 and primarily infected computers throughout Latin America, RETADUP is a multi-functional Windows malware that is capable of mining cryptocurrency using the computing power of infected machines, DDoSing targeted infrastructure utilizing the bandwidth of the victims, and gathering information for espionage.
There are several variants of RETADUP, some of which have been either written in Autoit or using AutoHotkey. The malware has been designed to achieve persistence on Windows computers, install additional malware payloads on infected machines and also periodically perform other attempts to spread itself.
Besides distributing cryptocurrency malware as payload, RETADUP, in some cases, has also been found spreading the Stop ransomware and the Arkei password stealer.
"The C&C server also contained a .NET controller for an AutoIt RAT called HoudRat. Looking at samples of HoudRat, it is clear that HoudRat is just a more feature-rich and less prevalent variant of Retadup," the researchers learned after analyzing the seized C&C server.
"HoudRat is capable of executing arbitrary commands, logging keystrokes, taking screenshots, stealing passwords, downloading arbitrary files, and more."
At the time of publishing this article, the authorities have neutralized over 850,000 unique infections of Retadup, with most victims being from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.
| Malware |
XSS Vulnerability in Apple website | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/xss-vulnerability-in-apple-website.html | A 16 years old Spanish Whitehat hacker going by name "The Pr0ph3t" found XSS Vulnerability on Apple website. The Vulnerability reported in Apple subdomain - https://locate.apple.com, where users can choose a service center location.
About Cross site scripting : Cross-Site Scripting attacks are a type of injection problem, in which malicious scripts are injected into the otherwise benign and trusted web sites. The malicious script can access any cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive information retained by your browser. This vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same origin policy.
After capturing HTTP headers, hacker found that there is a parameter called "location" which is actually not filtered for malicious inputs. Hacker. For proof of concept , he inject a JavaScript code - as shown in image.
Vulnerability existence verified by The Hacker News team and its still vulnerable.
| Vulnerability |
U.S. developing Technology to Identify and Track Hackers Worldwide | https://thehackernews.com/2016/05/darpa-trace-hacker.html | Without adequate analysis and algorithms, mass surveillance is not the answer to fighting terrorism and tracking suspects.
That's what President Obama had learned last year when he signed the USA Freedom Act, which ends the bulk collection of domestic phone data by US Intelligence Agencies.
There is no doubt that US Government is collecting a vast quantity of data from your smartphone to every connected device i.e. Internet of the things, but…
Do they have enough capabilities to predict and identify terrorists or cyber criminals or state-sponsored hackers before they act?
Well, if they had, I would not be getting chance to write about so many brutal cyber attacks, data breaches, and terrorist attacks that not only threatened Americans but also impacted people worldwide.
The Ex-NSA technical director William E. Binney, who served the US National Security Agency for over 30-years, said last year in the front of Parliamentary Joint Committee that forcing analysts to examine billions of records crush their ability to identify actual threats.
Technology to Track and Identify Hackers
Now, the Pentagon wants a better way to not only identify the malicious hacker but also looking for practical algorithms that can predict where that hacker might attack next.
Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) is offering funding for security researchers who can help the agency to develop algorithms that can identify hackers under its new game-changing initiative called 'Enhanced Attribution Program'.
Although organizations and countries give their best to identify cyber campaigns who infiltrated their critical infrastructure, tracking down the culprits has always been a difficult task — thanks to TOR, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and other methods used to hide the attack source.
However, through this new initiative, the United States military research agency DARPA hopes that agencies would quickly track and identify sophisticated hackers or criminal groups by monitoring their exact behavior and physical biometrics.
The aim of Enhanced Attribution program is to track personas continuously and create "algorithms for developing predictive behavioral profiles."
"The goal of the Enhanced Attribution (EA) program is to develop technologies for generating operationally and tactically relevant information about multiple concurrent independent malicious cyber campaigns, each involving several operators; and the means to share such information with any of a number of interested parties without putting at risk the sources and methods used for collection," reads the project's official site.
In other words, the Enhanced Attribution Program will not only help the government characterize the cyber criminal but also share the criminal's modus operandi with potential victims and predict the attacker's next target.
Enhanced Attribution Project
DARPA also wants the program to include algorithms to predictive behavioral profiles within the context of cyber campaigns, as well as technologies to validate and improve this knowledge base with public and commercial sources of information.
The program is divided into three tracks:
Behavior and Activity Tracking and Summarization
Fusion and Predictive Analysis
Validation and Enrichment
Each track deals with different levels of behavior data collection and analysis.
The Enhanced Attribution Program will last 18 months, so if you have a crazy idea to track down malicious hackers, you can submit your research proposal until June 7, 2016.
| Cyber_Attack |
DNS Changer malware mastermind pleaded guilty | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/dns-changer-malware-mastermind-pleaded.html | Remember the DNS Changer malware that infected at least four million computers in more than 100 countries, including 500,000 in the United States, with malicious software or malware ?
Valeri Aleksejev, 32 years old from Estonia, is the first of the seven individuals to enter a plea, admitting his guilt for his role in the global scam that netted approximately $14 million. He faces up to 25 years in prison, deportation and the forfeiture of $7 million.
The other six individuals have been named as Anton Ivanov, Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorov, Konstantin Poltev, and Andrey Taame. Alekseev was the first large-scale Internet fraud criminal case came to trial.
The scam had several components, including a click-hijacking fraud in which Malware was delivered to victims' PCs when they visited specially crafted websites or when they downloaded phony video codec software.
The malware changed the DNS settings of the infected computers, and even in cases could change the DNS settings of the routers they were connected to.
| Malware |
SolarWinds Issues Second Hotfix for Orion Platform Supply Chain Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/solarwinds-issues-second-hotfix-for_15.html | Network monitoring services provider SolarWinds officially released a second hotfix to address a critical vulnerability in its Orion platform that was exploited to insert malware and breach public and private entities in a wide-ranging espionage campaign.
In a new update posted to its advisory page, the company urged its customers to update Orion Platform to version 2020.2.1 HF 2 immediately to secure their environments.
The malware, dubbed SUNBURST (aka Solorigate), affects Orion app versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1, released between March 2020 and June 2020.
"Based on our investigation, we are not aware that this vulnerability affects other versions—including future versions—of Orion Platform products," the company said.
"We have scanned the code of all our software products for markers similar to those used in the attack on our Orion Platform products identified above, and we have found no evidence that other versions of our Orion Platform products or our other products or agents contain those markers."
It also reiterated none of its other free tools or agents, such as RMM and N-central, were impacted by the security shortcoming.
Microsoft Seizes Domain Used in SolarWinds Hack
While details on how SolarWinds' internal network was breached are still awaited, Microsoft yesterday took the step of taking control over one of the main GoDaddy domains — avsvmcloud[.]com — that was used by the hackers to communicate with the compromised systems.
The Windows maker also said it plans to start blocking known malicious SolarWinds binaries starting today at 8:00 AM PST.
Meanwhile, security researcher Mubix "Rob" Fuller has released an authentication audit tool called SolarFlare that can be run on Orion machines to help identify accounts that may have been compromised during the breach.
"This attack was very complex and sophisticated," SolarWinds stated in a new FAQ for why it couldn't catch this issue beforehand. "The vulnerability was crafted to evade detection and only run when detection was unlikely."
Up to 18,000 Businesses Hit in SolarWinds Attack
SolarWinds estimates that as many as 18,000 of its customers may have been impacted by the supply chain attack. But indications are that the operators of the campaign leveraged this flaw to only hit select high-profile targets.
Cybersecurity firm Symantec said it identified more than 2,000 computers at over 100 customers that received the backdoored software updates but added it did not spot any further malicious impact on those machines.
Just as the fallout from the breach is being assessed, the security of SolarWinds has attracted more scrutiny.
Not only it appears the company's software download website was protected by a simple password ("solarwinds123") that was published in the clear on SolarWinds' code repository at Github; several cybercriminals attempted to sell access to its computers on underground forums, according to Reuters.
In the wake of the incident, SolarWinds has taken the unusual step of removing the clientele list from its website.
| Malware |
New Zero-Day Vulnerability CVE-2014-1776 Affects all Versions of Internet Explorer Browser | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/new-zero-day-vulnerability-cve-2014.html | Microsoft confirmed a new Zero Day critical vulnerability in its browser Internet Explorer. Flaw affects all versions of Internet Explorer, starting with IE version 6 and including IE version 11.
In a Security Advisory (2963983) released yesterday, Microsoft acknowledges a zero-day Internet Explorer vulnerability (CVE-2014-1776) is being used in targeted attacks by APT groups, but the currently active attack campaigns are targeting IE9, IE10 and IE11.
INTERNET EXPLORER 0-DAY VULNERABILITY (CVE-2014-1776)
According to Advisory, Internet Explorer is vulnerable to Remote Code Execution, which resides 'in the way that Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated.' Microsoft said.
Microsoft Investigation team is currently working with FireEye Security experts, and dubbed the ongoing targeted campaign as "Operation Clandestine Fox".
In a blogpost, FireEye explained that an attacker could trigger the zero-day IE exploit through a malicious webpage that the targeted user has to access with one of the affected Internet Explorer browser. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code within the browser in order to gain the same user rights as the current user.
CULPRIT: ADOBE FLASH PLUGIN
But, Internet Explorer zero-day exploit depends upon the loading of a Flash SWF file that calls for a Javascript in vulnerable version Internet Explorer to trigger the flaw, and which also allows the exploit to bypass Windows' ASLR and DEP protections on the target system by exploiting the Adobe Flash plugin.
According to the advisory, there is currently no security patch available for this vulnerability. "Collectively, in 2013, the vulnerable versions of IE accounted for 26.25% of the browser market." FireEye said.
MITIGATION - HOW TO PROTECT YOUR COMPUTER FROM ZERO-DAY IE EXPLOIT?
Microsoft is working on a security patch for Internet Explorer vulnerability, could be available from the Next Patch Tuesday update (13th May, 2014). However, you can still migrate the zero-day threat by following below given methods:
Install Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET 4.1), a free utility that helps prevent vulnerabilities in software from being successfully exploited.
You can protect against exploitation by changing your settings for the Internet security zone to block ActiveX controls and Active Scripting.
Tools > Internet Options > Security > Internet > Custom Level > Under Scripting Settings > Disable Active Scripting
Under Local intranet's Custom Level Settings > Disable Active Scripting
If you are using Internet Explorer 10 or the higher version, enable Enhanced Protected Mode to prevent your browser from Zero-Day Attack.
IE Exploit will not work without Adobe Flash. So Users are advised to disable the Adobe Flash plugin within IE.
De-Register VGX.dll (VML parser) file, which is responsible for rendering of VML (Vector Markup Language) code in web pages, in order to prevent exploitation. Run following command:
regsvr32 -u "%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\VGX\vgx.dll"
Stay Safe!
| Cyber_Attack |
Exclusive: SonicWall Hacked Using 0-Day Bugs In Its Own VPN Product | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/exclusive-sonicwall-hacked-using-0-day.html | SonicWall, a popular internet security provider of firewall and VPN products, on late Friday disclosed that it fell victim to a coordinated attack on its internal systems.
The San Jose-based company said the attacks leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall secure remote access products such as NetExtender VPN client version 10.x and Secure Mobile Access (SMA) that are used to provide users with remote access to internal resources.
"Recently, SonicWall identified a coordinated attack on its internal systems by highly sophisticated threat actors exploiting probable zero-day vulnerabilities on certain SonicWall secure remote access products," the company exclusively told The Hacker News.
The development comes after The Hacker News received reports that SonicWall's internal systems went down earlier this week on Tuesday and that the source code hosted on the company's GitLab repository was accessed by the attackers.
SonicWall wouldn't confirm the reports beyond the statement, adding it would provide additional updates as more information becomes available.
The complete list of affected products include:
NetExtender VPN client version 10.x (released in 2020) utilized to connect to SMA 100 series appliances and SonicWall firewalls
Secure Mobile Access (SMA) version 10.x running on SMA 200, SMA 210, SMA 400, SMA 410 physical appliances, and the SMA 500v virtual appliance
The company said its SMA 1000 series is not susceptible to the zero-days and that it utilizes clients different from NetExtender.
It has also published an advisory urging organizations to enable multi-factor authentication, disable NetExtender access to the firewall, restrict access to users and admins for public IP addresses, and configure whitelist access on the SMA directly to mitigate the flaws.
With a number of cybersecurity vendors such as FireEye, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, and Malwarebytes becoming targets of cyberattacks in the wake of SolarWinds supply chain hack, the latest breach of SonicWall raises significant concerns.
"As the front line of cyber defense, we have seen a dramatic surge in cyberattacks on governments and businesses, specifically on firms that provide critical infrastructure and security controls to those organizations," SonicWall said.
UPDATE (24 Jan, 2021)
SonicWall, in an updated advisory on Saturday, said its NetExtender VPN clients are no longer affected by the potential zero-day vulnerabilities that it said were used to carry out a "coordinated attack" on its internal systems.
The company, however, said it's continuing to investigate the SMA 100 Series for probable zero-days.
"While we previously communicated NetExtender 10.x as potentially having a zero-day, that has now been ruled out," the company stated. "It may be used with all SonicWall products. No action is required from customers or partners."
That said, exact specifics about the nature of the attack and what prompted SonicWall to investigate its own products as a possible attack vector remains unclear as yet.
We have reached out to the company for details, and we'll update the story if we hear back.
| Vulnerability |
Flaw in Elementor and Beaver Addons Let Anyone Hack WordPress Sites | https://thehackernews.com/2019/12/wordpress-elementor-beaver.html | Attention WordPress users!
Your website could easily get hacked if you are using "Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder," or "Ultimate Addons for Elementor" and haven't recently updated them to the latest available versions.
Security researchers have discovered a critical yet easy-to-exploit authentication bypass vulnerability in both widely-used premium WordPress plugins that could allow remote attackers to gain administrative access to sites without requiring any password.
What's more worrisome is that opportunistic attackers have already started exploiting this vulnerability in the wild within 2 days of its discovery in order to compromise vulnerable WordPress websites and install a malicious backdoor for later access.
Both vulnerable plugins, made by software development company Brainstorm Force, are currently powering over hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites using Elementor and Beaver Builder frameworks, helping website admins and designers extend the functionality of their websites with more widgets, modules, page templates.
Discovered by researchers at web security service MalCare, the vulnerability resides in the way both plugins let WordPress account holders, including administrators, authenticate via Facebook and Google login mechanisms.
Image credit: WebARX
According to the vulnerability's advisory, due to lack of checks in the authentication method when a user login via Facebook or Google, vulnerable plugins can be tricked into allowing malicious users to login as any other targeted user without requiring any password.
"However, the Facebook and Google authentication methods did not verify the token returned by Facebook and Google, and since they don't require a password, there was no password check," explained WebARX researchers, who also analysed the flaw and confirmed its active exploitation.
"To exploit the vulnerability, the hacker needs to use the email ID of an admin user of the site. In most cases, this information can be retrieved fairly easily," MalCare said.
In an email to The Hacker News, WebARX confirmed that attackers are abusing this flaw to install a fake SEO stats plugin after uploading a tmp.zip file on the targeted WordPress server, which eventually drops a wp-xmlrpc.php backdoor file to the root directory of the vulnerable site.
MalCare discovered this vulnerability on Wednesday that affects below-listed versions of the plugins and reported it to the developers on the same day, who then quickly addressed the issue and released patched versions of both within just 7 hours.
Ultimate Addons for Elementor <= 1.20.0
Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder <= 1.24.0
The authentication bypass vulnerability has been patched with the release of "Ultimate Addons for Elementor version 1.20.1" and "Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder version 1.24.1," which affected websites are highly recommended to install as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Immediately Patch Windows 0-Day Flaw That's Being Used to Spread Spyware | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/windows-zero-day-spyware.html | Get ready to install a fairly large batch of security patches onto your Windows computers.
As part of its September Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released a large batch of security updates to patch a total of 81 CVE-listed vulnerabilities, on all supported versions of Windows and other MS products.
The latest security update addresses 27 critical and 54 important vulnerabilities in severity, of which 38 vulnerabilities are impacting Windows, 39 could lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE).
Affected Microsoft products include:
Internet Explorer
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Windows
.NET Framework
Skype for Business and Lync
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Office, Services and Web Apps
Adobe Flash Player
.NET 0-Day Flaw Under Active Attack
According to the company, four of the patched vulnerabilities are publicly known, one of which has already been actively exploited by the attackers in the wild.
Here's the list of publically known flaws and their impact:
Windows .NET Framework RCE (CVE-2017-8759)—A zero-day flaw, discovered by researchers at cybersecurity firm FireEye and privately reported it to Microsoft, resides in the way Microsoft .NET Framework processes untrusted input data.
Microsoft says the flaw could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system, install programs, view, change, or delete data by tricking victims into opening a specially crafted document or application sent over an email.
The flaw could even allow an attacker to create new accounts with full user rights. Therefore users with fewer user rights on the system are less impacted than users who operate with admin rights.
According to FireEye, this zero-day flaw has actively been exploited by a well-funded cyber espionage group to deliver FinFisher Spyware (FinSpy) to a Russian-speaking "entity" via malicious Microsoft Office RTF files in July this year.
FinSpy is a highly secret surveillance software that has previously been associated with British company Gamma Group, a company that legally sells surveillance and espionage software to government agencies.
Once infected, FinSpy can perform a large number of secret tasks on victims computer, including secretly monitoring computers by turning ON webcams, recording everything the user types with a keylogger, intercepting Skype calls, copying files, and much more.
"The [new variant of FINSPY]...leverages heavily obfuscated code that employs a built-in virtual machine – among other anti-analysis techniques – to make reversing more difficult," researchers at FireEye said.
"As likely another unique anti-analysis technique, it parses its own full path and searches for the string representation of its own MD5 hash. Many resources, such as analysis tools and sandboxes, rename files/samples to their MD5 hash in order to ensure unique filenames."
Three Publicly Disclosed Vulnerabilities
The remaining three publicly known vulnerabilities affecting the Windows 10 platform include:
Device Guard Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8746): This flaw could allow an attacker to inject malicious code into a Windows PowerShell session by bypassing the Device Guard Code Integrity policy.
Microsoft Edge Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8723): This flaw resides in Edge where the Content Security Policy (CSP) fails to properly validate certain specially crafted documents, allowing attackers to trick users into visiting a website hosting malware.
Broadcom BCM43xx Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-9417): this flaw exists in the Broadcom chipset in HoloLens, which could be exploited by attackers to send a specially crafted WiFi packet, enabling them to install programs, view, change, or delete data, even create new accounts with full admin rights.
BlueBorne Attack: Another Reason to Install Patches Immediately
Also, the recently disclosed Bluetooth vulnerabilities known as "BlueBorne" (that affected more than 5 Million Bluetooth-enabled devices, including Windows, was silently patched by Microsoft in July, but details of this flaw have only been released now.
BlueBorne is a series of flaws in the implementation of Bluetooth that could allow attackers to take over Bluetooth-enabled devices, spread malware completely, or even establish a "man-in-the-middle" connection to gain access to devices' critical data and networks without requiring any victim interaction.
So, users have another important reason to apply September security patches as soon as possible in order to keep hackers and cyber criminals away from taking control over their computers.
Other flaws patched this month include five information disclosure and one denial of service flaws in Windows Hyper-V, two cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in SharePoint, as well as four memory corruption and two remote code execution vulnerabilities in MS Office.
For installing security updates, simply head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.
| Vulnerability |
Singapore's Largest Healthcare Group Hacked, 1.5 Million Patient Records Stolen | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/singapore-healthcare-breach.html | Singapore's largest healthcare group, SingHealth, has suffered a massive data breach that allowed hackers to snatch personal information on 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth clinics between May 2015 and July 2018.
SingHealth is the largest healthcare group in Singapore with 2 tertiary hospitals, 5 national specialty , and eight polyclinics.
According to an advisory released by Singapore's Ministry of Health (MOH), along with the personal data, hackers also managed to stole 'information on the outpatient dispensed medicines' of about 160,000 patients, including Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and few ministers.
"On 4 July 2018, IHiS' database administrators detected unusual activity on one of SingHealth's IT databases. They acted immediately to halt the activity," MOH said.
The stolen data includes the patient's name, address, gender, race, date of birth, and National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) numbers.
The Ministry of Health said the hackers "specifically and repeatedly" targeted the PM's "personal particulars and information on his outpatient dispensed medicine."
So far there's no evidence of who was behind the attack, but the MOH stated that the cyber attack was "not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs." The local media is also speculating that the hack could be a work of state-sponsored hackers.
Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS) also confirmed that "this was a deliberate, targeted, and well-planned cyberattack."
PM Comments On SingHealth Healthcare Data Breach
Commenting on the cyber attack through a Facebook post published today, Singapore's Prime Minister said he believes that the attackers are "extremely skilled and determined" and they have "huge resources" to conduct such cyber attacks repeatedly.
"I don't know what the attackers were hoping to find. Perhaps they were hunting for some dark state secret or at least something to embarrass me. If so, they would have been disappointed," Singapore PM said. "My medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but nothing is alarming in it."
The Singapore government has assured its citizens that no medical records were tampered, or deleted and that no diagnoses, test results, or doctors' notes were stolen in the attack.
All affected patients will be contacted by the healthcare institution over the next five days.
Since the healthcare sector is part of the critical nation's infrastructure, alongside water, electricity, and transport, it has increasingly become an attractive target for hackers.
In the past few years, we have reported several hacks and data breaches, targeting the healthcare sector. Just last month, it was revealed that DNA registries of more than 92 million MyHeritage customers were stolen in the previous year by some unknown hackers.
Earlier this year, it was reported that more than half of Norway's population exposed its healthcare data in a massive data breach that targeted the country's major healthcare organization.
The foremost thing to protect against any data breach is to stay vigilant, as nobody knows when or where your stolen identities will be used. So, affected consumers will just have to remain mindful.
| Data_Breaches |
#OpIsrael - 7 APRIL Anonymous calls to army for massive attack against Israel | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/opisrael-7-april-anonymous-calls-to.html | We are on the eve of the fateful day, April 7th, the collective of Anonymous announced a massive cyber attack against the state of Israel as part of the campaign started in the last months and named #OpIsrael.
The hacktivists are conducting a massive call to army to recruit new forces and inform all the members of collective of the cyber attack planned against Israeli network infrastructures.
The hacktivists protest against Israeli bombing of Palestinian territory expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people condemning Israeli Government and its decisions.
The hackers motivated to The Hackers Post website their participation with following statement: "Israel isn't stopping human rights violations. It's to show solidarity with newly recognized Palestinian state." "the hacking teams have decided to unite against Israel as one entity…Israel should be getting prepared to be erased from the internet."
Anonymous has promised to 'erase Israel from the internet' in a coordinated and massive cyber attack planned on April 7th, the Holocaust Memorial Day that occur on 27 Nisan (April/May) to remember the event happened during the summer of 1942 when about 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka.
Following the message posted by Anonymous collective states:
"To the government of Israel: You have NOT stopped your endless human right violations. You have NOT stopped illegal settlements. You have NOT respected the ceasefire. You have shown that you do NOT respect international law," the group of hackers also published a video on YouTube video renewing accusations against Israeli government that menaced to shut down the internet in Gaza. "When the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all internet and other telecommunications in and outside of Gaza, they crossed a line in the sand,".
The menace is creating considerable apprehension among the Israeli authorities, majority of the main hacktivist cells has already confirmed the adhesion, most of them in the past have been guilty of attacks on government organizations and offices, Israel Government is very concerned and is organizing its defense to mitigate the offensive.
Director of online webpage Accessible Government, Ben Avi, reported to Haaretz website:
"what distinguishes this plan when compared to previous attacks is that it really seems to be organized by Anonymous-affiliated groups from around the world in what looks like a joining of forces."
Let's remember that during last initiatives related to #OpIsrael campaign around 700 Israeli websites have been hit including high-profile government systems such as Israeli President's official website and the Foreign Ministry. Official sources of Israel State reported around 44 million unique attacks on government websites, principal websites of the country suffered DDoS attacks and hacker also obtained personal data related to Israeli officials.
Israel Government is preparing the defense alerting managers of principal infrastructures of the country, Deputy Information Security Officer Ofir Cohen confirmed with an e-mail sent to Knesset ISP employees that government websites are expected to face distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and attempts at vandalism.
"The estimations are that [the cyber-attacks] will reach an unusual level that we have never seen before,"
The Information Security Department of the Knesset is working to put in place all necessary measure to mitigate the attacks and protect information stored on principal government networks.
The battlefield is not only represented by companies' networks and government network assets, every machine exposed on the internet is a possible target of the hacktivists and its impairment could advantage further attacks, a large scale campaign needs also the participation of a huge quantity of compromised machines.
I suggest to the readers the analysis proposed by AnalysisInetelligence, it sustains that the attacks against Israel could be supported by state-sponsored attackers. AnalysisInetelligence web site states:
"We recently reported on the revival of Operation Israel (#OpIsrael) being coordinated by a group of hackers aligned with Anonymous. The coalition of hackers appears to have ties to the Iranian government, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and the terror group Hezbollah, according to a report published by Cryptome.: "
"The attributions are to the best of our knowledge, based on language analysis, history and helps from our sources who speak Arabic ( various forms ) and Farsi ( various forms, mostly Persian ) natively:
AnonGhost ( distributed - freelance )AnonymousPal ( U.S and E.U - freelance )
OsamaTheGod ( false flag )
Teamr00t ( Pakistan - ideological )
Hannibal ( Anti-OPISRAEL , inside fight , Indian - freelance )
PunkBoyinSF ( Egyptian ties - freelance )
Mauritania HaCker Team ( distributed - freelance )
ajax Team ( unknown )
MLA - Muslim Liberation Army ( ties to Pakistan )
Gaza Hacker Team ( Palestinians in U.S and E.U , perhaps some members in Arab countries as well )
Gaza Security Team ( same )
Gaza Security Team ( ties to Syria - Syrian nationals - freelance )
Algerian Hacker ( unknown )
Iranian Cyber Army ( Iran , hired hackers based in Iran )
Remember Emad ( Joint Lebanese and Iranian effort - high likely state-backed )
Parastoo ( Iranian , reported to have ties with IRGC-QF and Hezbollah )
Syrian Electronic Army ( reported to be controlled by elements of pro-Hezbollah activists )
Our analysis to the moment shows not much of coordination between these groups contrary to the popular belief and the sum of human resources all together to the best of our current analysis is not more than 50 individuals. The collectives with Arab leanings are not much advanced, have ties with residents of European and U.S and they are mostly relay on Dumps and Botnets. The teams with Pakistani, Syrians and Lebanese members are more advanced and reported to have ties with governments. Iranian teams are just using the situation to harm Israel and U.S interests and reported to be directly funded by IRGC and MOIS, the Iranian Intelligence."
The risk that behind the attacks there is also the support of hostile governments is high but I exclude that the attacks have been planned with this specific intent … historically Anonymous fights for defense of human rights and free access to Internet. My principal concern is related to the possible infiltration operated by state sponsored hackers that could benefit of the large scale attack to hide their operations and increase the powerful of the cyber offensive.
| Cyber_Attack |
Flaw in Emergency Alert Systems Could Allow Hackers to Trigger False Alarms | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/hacking-emergency-alert-sirens.html | A serious vulnerability has been exposed in "emergency alert systems" that could be exploited remotely via radio frequencies to activate all the sirens, allowing hackers to trigger false alarms.
The emergency alert sirens are used worldwide to alert citizens about natural disasters, man-made disasters, and emergency situations, such as dangerous weather conditions, severe storms, tornadoes and terrorist attacks.
False alarms can create panic and chaos across the city, as witnessed in Dallas last year, when 156 emergency sirens were turned on for about two hours, waking up residents and sparking fears of a disaster.
Dubbed "SirenJack Attack," the vulnerability discovered by a researcher at Bastille security firm affects warning sirens manufactured by Boston-based ATI Systems, which are being used across major towns and cities, as well as Universities, military facilities, and industrial sites.
According to Balint Seeber, director of threat research at Bastille, since the radio protocol used to control affected sirens is not using any kind of encryption, attackers can simply exploit this weakness to activate sirens by sending a malicious activation message.
"All that is required is a $30 handheld radio and a computer," Seeber claims.
To perform the SirenJack attack, a hacker needs to be in the radio range and identify the radio frequency used by the targeted siren in order to send a specially crafted message.
"Once the frequency was found, analysis of the radio protocol quickly showed that commands were not encrypted and therefore vulnerable to forgery, rendering the system susceptible to malicious activations," Seeber explains.
Researcher finds that Outdoor Public Warning System implemented within the City of San Francisco, designed to alert residents and visitors of about possible danger, has more than 100 warning sirens that malicious hackers can exploit to cause widespread panic and annoyance across the city.
Seeber responsibly disclosed this issue to ATI Systems 90 days ago (on January 8). ATI Systems says the patch is being tested and will shortly be made available to fix its systems implemented in the City of San Francisco.
However, ATI Systems noted that installing the patch is not easy since many of its products are designed depending upon specific needs of each of its customers.
Therefore, customers are advised to contact ATI Systems to determine if they have a vulnerable configuration and/or flawed version of the system, and then take the appropriate steps suggested to remediate the issue.
Bastille researchers also encourage other siren manufacturers to "investigate their own systems to patch and fix this type of vulnerability," in case they find it.
| Vulnerability |
Games.com XSS Vulnerability by Cyber4rt | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/gamecom-xss-vulnerability-by-cyber4rt.html | Games.com XSS Vulnerability by Cyber4rt
One of the Biggest site for Hasbro Games, Video Games & Online Games - Games.com having XSS Vulnerability as shown in screenshot and Discovered by "Acizninja DeadcOde" at Cyber4rt.
| Vulnerability |
'Hacking Team' Gets Hacked! 500GB of Data Dumped Over the Internet | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/Italian-hacking-team-software.html | Yes, sometimes even the Hackers get Hacked.
Hacking Team, one of the most controversial spyware and malware providers to governments and law enforcement agencies all around the world, allegedly been hacked, with some 500 gigabytes of internal data leaked over the Internet.
The leaked data indicates that despite its denials, the spyware company did sell powerful spyware tools to oppressive regimes in Sudan, Bahrain, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia.
Massive Data Breach at Hacking Team
The unknown hackers not only managed to make 500 GB of client files, financial documents, contracts and internal emails, publicly available for download, but also defaced Hacking Team's own Twitter account, replacing the company's logo to "Hacked Team."
Hacking Team, also known as HT S.r.l, is an Italian company known for providing powerful surveillance software Remote Code System (RCS) to Governments and law enforcement agencies.
The company previously claimed to only deal with ethical governments, although they have never formally disclosed the list of names and businesses.
However, the data breach happened to Hacking Team appears to have revealed the list of its clients somehow.
Hacking Team's Twitter Account Defaced
At the time of writing, the Twitter account linked to Hacking Team is currently compromised, with its new bio reads:
"Developing ineffective, easy-to-pwn offensive technology to compromise the operations of the worldwide law enforcement and intelligence communities."
A tweet composed by unknown hackers reads, "Since we have nothing to hide, we are publishing all our emails, files, and source code," with the link to around 500GB of data.
Leaked Data Posted Online
The leaked data has been uploaded to BitTorrent, allegedly including email communications, audio recordings, and source code. The data disclosed Hacking Team customers along with the dates of their purchasing the software.
A few hours later, the list of alleged Hacking Team customers, including the past and current clients, was posted on Pastebin. The most notable and previously unknown ones are the FBI, Spain, Australia, Chile, and Iraq, among others.
Hacking Team's Christian Pozzi Twitter Account Hacked
The Twitter account of Christian Pozzi (@christian_pozzi), a Hacking Team representative who was personally exposed by the incident, is also get hacked few minutes ago.
Hacking Team has yet to verify that it has been breached and that the hacked information is legitimate. As it's hard to say the leaked data is real without any confirmation from the company itself.
| Malware |
UK banks hit by Ramnit banking malware and social engineering attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/uk-banks-hit-by-ramnit-banking-malware.html | A dangerous variant of the Ramnit malware has been discovered targeting the UK's financial sector. Trusteer claims to have discovered an interesting trojan based attack technique that injects highly convincing and interactive real-time messages into the user Web stream that they encounter when logging into a UK online banking session.
The Ramnit worm was discovered in 2010, but in 2011 researchers spotted a new strain that had incorporated source code from the notorious Zeus banking trojan.
Cyber criminals are stepping up their use of social engineering techniques to bypass increasingly security-aware users of online banking and e-commerce sites.
The malware reportedly avoids detection by going into an idle sleep mode until its intended victim logs into their online bank account, at which point it activates and presents them with a fraudulent phishing message.
Ramnit circumvented the OTP feature at the target bank using a 'Man in the Browser' attack to inject bogus HTML pages into a customer's online banking session. Malware variants present the victim with new input fields, security warnings and customized text during login, account navigation and transactions. Some malware variants go as far as creating custom, localized pages that are generated based on the victim's language preference.
This semi-automated approach, says Maor, allows the cybercriminals to inject highly specific `error messages' that pop up on the screens of the online banking user in their local language. While the victim is reading the messages, Ramnit connects to its command and control server and obtains the details of a designated money laundering bank account and sets up a wire transfer.
"The fact that they've changed the FAQ section to support this fake new process is astonishing to me in terms of details," Moar said. "The attackers are exploiting the trust relationship the user has with the bank. They have no idea the malware is in the middle and injecting new screens. It's amazing how much effort they put into making sure someone falls victim; it's a new level of social engineering."
Online scammers have become increasingly sophisticated in attacks. So far, fewer than 10 banks have been targeted in the U.K.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hackers Steal Payment Card Data From Over 1,150 InterContinental Hotels | https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/hotel-data-breach.html | InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) is notifying its customers that credit card numbers and other sensitive information may have been stolen after it found malware on payment card systems at 1,174 franchise hotels in the United States.
It's the second data breach that U.K.-based IHG, which owns Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, has disclosed this year. The multinational hotel conglomerate confirmed a credit card breach in February which affected 12 of its hotels and restaurants.
What happened?
IHG identified malware accessing payment data from cards used at front desk systems between September 29 and December 29, 2016, but the malware was erased after the investigation got completed in March 2017.
"Many IHG-branded locations are independently owned and operated franchises and certain of these franchisee operated locations in the Americas were made aware by payment card networks of patterns of unauthorized charges occurring on payment cards after they were legitimately used at their locations," read the notice published to IHG's site on Friday.
What type of information?
The malware obtained credit card data, such as cardholders' names, credit card numbers, expiration dates and internal verification codes, from the card's magnetic stripe, although the company said there is no evidence of any unauthorized access to payment card data after late December.
However, the company can not confirm that the malware was removed until February and March 2017, when it began its investigation around the data breach.
How many victims?
The total number of affected customers is not revealed by the company, although customers can use a lookup tool IHG has posted on its website to search for hotels by city and state.
The company says this most recent breach mostly affects guests from U.S-based hotels, who stayed between September 29 and December 29, 2016. The 1,174 hotels breached in the US include, 163 in Texas, 64 in California, 61 in Florida, 53 in Indiana, 50 in Ohio, 45 in New York, 42 in Michigan, 39 in Illinois, among others.
Only one hotel in Puerto Rico, a Holiday Inn Express in San Juan, is the non-U.S. hotel that was hit by malware.
Who are not affected by the breach?
Those franchise hotel locations that had implemented IHG's Secure Payment Solution (SPS) – a point-to-point encryption payment acceptance solution – before 29th September 2016 were not affected by this data breach.
IHG is advising all franchise hotels to implement SPS in order to protect themselves from such malware attacks, though the company also said, many more properties implemented SPS after September 29, 2016, which ended the malware's ability to find payment card data.
What is the IHG doing?
IHG has already notified law enforcement of the recent data breach.
Moreover, on behalf of franchisees, the company has been working closely with the payment card networks and the cyber security firm to confirm that the malware has been removed and evaluate ways for franchisees to enhance security measures.
What should IHG customers do?
Users are advised to review their payment card statements carefully and to report any unauthorized bank transactions.
You should also consider requesting a replacement card if you visited any of the affected properties during that three months duration when the breach was active.
"The phone number to call is usually on the back of your payment card. Please see the section that follows this notice for additional steps you may take," the company says.
IHG became the latest hotel chain to report a potential customer data breach in past few years, following the data breach in Hyatt, Hilton, Mandarin Oriental, Starwood, White Lodging and the Trump Collection that acknowledged finding malware in their payment systems.
| Data_Breaches |
Facebook Unveils ThreatData, a framework for Web Security | https://thehackernews.com/2014/03/facebook-unveils-threatdata-framework.html | Defending and Analysis of online threats and malwares have become more challenging nowadays and especially for larger businesses like the popular social networking site - Facebook. To encounter malware, phishing, and other online threats, Facebook has taken an important step forward.
Facebook has unveiled its latest security-focused platform, dubbed as 'ThreatData', which is a framework that aims to standardize its methods for collecting and analyzing data.
The ThreatData framework is implemented to import information about the various online threats, malware, phishing and other internet risks, then storing it proficiently for real-time and long-term analysis as well. It consists of three high level components i.e. Feeds, Data storage, and Real-time response.
FEEDS: Feeds will collect data from a distinct source and implement them via a lightweight interface.
"Here are some examples of feeds we have implemented: Malware file hashes from VirusTotal; Malicious URLs from multiple open source blogs and malware tracking sites; Vendor-generated threat intelligence we purchase; Facebook's internal sources of threat intelligence; and Browser extensions for importing data as a Facebook security team member reads an article, blog, or other content," detailed in a blog post on Tuesday.
DATA STORAGE: The data received by various Information Security firms and vendors are in different format, so the framework brought it in a common and simple format, which they call a ThreatDatum. ThreatDatums are then routed for short-term and long-term analysis through its two existing data repository systems, Hive and Scuba.
Hive storage is used to answer questions based on long-term data:
Have we ever seen this threat before?
What type of threat is more prevalent from our perspective: malware or phishing?
Scuba gives us the opposite end of the analysis spectrum:
What new malware are we seeing today?
Where are most of the new phishing sites?
REAL-TIME RESPONSE: After storing the data, a processor is built to easily and quickly address all the threats, such as:
All malicious URLs collected from any feed are sent to the same blacklist in order to protect the Facebook users.
Interesting malware file hashes are automatically downloaded from known malware repositories, stored, and sent for automated analysis.
Threat data are propagated to our homegrown security event management system, which is used to protect Facebook's corporate networks.
"In a typical corporate environment, a single anti-virus product is deployed to all devices and used as a core defense. In reality, however, no single anti-virus product will detect all threats. Some vendors are great at detecting certain types of malware, while others can detect a wide array of threats but are more likely to mislabel them. We decided we would employ our framework to construct a light-weight set of hashes expressly not detected by our chosen anti-virus product and feed those hashes directly into our custom security event management system. The results have been impressive: we've detected both adware and malware installed on visiting vendor computers that no single anti-virus product could have found for us." Faceook explained.
THREATDATA IN ACTION:
In 2013, Facebook team investigated a spam campaign, that was using fake Facebook accounts to spread links to malware designed for feature phones and capable of stealing a victim's address book, sending premium SMS spam, and using the phone's camera to take pictures.
They analyzed the malware using ThreatData, located the origin of the malware and disrupt the spam campaign to shut down the botnet's infrastructure.
Also, the image above shows a graph Facebook developed using ThreatData to map malicious and victimized IP addresses, with the pie chart breaking that data down by ISP in the United States. For now the framework is just for Facebook's internal use.
| Malware |
Spy Agencies Hijack Google Play Store to Install Spyware on Smartphones | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/hacking-google-play-store.html | I have an Android phone with a five different gmail accounts configured in it. But what if any one of them get compromised via phishing, malware or any other way?
The Hacker would be able to access my Google account and obviously Google Play Store account too, which allows anyone to install any Android application remotely into my phone without my knowledge and confirmation…
What if someone compromises large number of Google accounts and trigger mass installation of a spying or malware app remotely with just one click????
Yes, this was exactly what the National Security Agency (NSA) had done under its widely spread Global surveillance program.
A new top-secret document obtained from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and its closest allies planned to hijack Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware.
The operation was launched by the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, including spy agents from each of the countries in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
According to the documents published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, the NSA, and the Five Eyes were working on ways to exploit smartphone technology for the purpose of surveillance.
PROJECT IRRITANT HORN
During the workshops held in Canada and Australia between November 2011 and February 2012, the Tradecraft unit dedicatedly looked for ways to find and hijack data links to servers used by Google and Samsung's mobile app stores.
As part of a project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the team targeted app store servers where smartphone users get directed whenever they download or update any app from Google or Samsung app stores.
But why the Five Eyes alliance hijacking servers?
Simply, the team wanted to implant spyware on smartphones using man-in-the-middle attacks to infect the smartphones. The man-in-the-middle attack is a technique used by cyber criminals to intercept the communication and steal sensitive data passing through it.
In this case, the technique would have let the spy agencies modify the content of data packets transmitting between the targeted smartphones and the app store servers, ultimately inserting spyware on smartphones to take control of a person's device and covertly extract data from it.
Moreover, the spy agencies used its powerful Internet spying tool "XKeyScore" to identify targets by matching their targets' smartphones to their online activities, such as emails, chats and browsing histories in order to build the profiles of people they were tracking.
Exploited UC Browser Privacy Vulnerabilities:
Another major revelation from the documents was the spy agencies' efforts to discover privacy flaws in one of the world's most popular mobile Internet browsers UC Browser — an app used to browse fast Internet across Asia, specifically in China and India with massive user base of half a Billion people.
The agencies tapped into UC Browser and exploited the weakness to collect data on suspected terrorists and other national intelligence targets, and in some cases, implant spyware on targeted smartphones.
When analyzed the Android version of the UC Browser app, it was found "major security and privacy issues" in its English and Chinese editions, putting millions of its users' data at risk, says a human rights and technology research group in Toronto, Citizen Lab.
National Security vs. Users' Privacy
"Of course, the user of this application has no idea that this is going on," says Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab. "They just assume when they open a browser that the browser's doing what it should do. But, in fact, it's leaking all this information."
The researchers have published their technical report detailing the many ways the UC Browser app has been leaking data, including SIM card numbers, search queries and unique device IDs that can be used to track people.
Deibert says the privacy vulnerabilities in the UC Browser not only exposed Millions of its users to surveillance carried out by government agencies, but it could also have been exploited by malicious hackers to harvest users' personal data for years.
The problem is straight — by secretly exploiting privacy and security vulnerabilities in popular software for years, these spy agencies are putting ordinary users at risk.
These agencies are also making it easier for criminal hackers by opening loopholes, instead of reporting them to the companies so that they can be fixed on time.
| Malware |
How to Steal Bitcoin Wallet Keys (Cold Storage) from Air-Gapped PCs | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/bitcoin-wallet-keys.html | Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D team at Israel's Ben Gurion University, who previously demonstrated various methods to steal data from an air-gapped computer, has now published new research named "BeatCoin."
BeatCoin is not a new hacking technique; instead, it's an experiment wherein the researcher demonstrates how all previously discovered out-of-band communication methods can be used to steal private keys for a cryptocurrency wallet installed on cold storage, preferably an air-gapped computer or Raspberry Pi.
For those unaware, keeping your cryptocurrency protected in a wallet on a device which is entirely offline is called cold storage. Since online digital wallets carry different security risks, some people prefer keeping their private keys offline.
Air-gapped computers are those that are isolated from the Internet, local networks, Bluetooth and therefore, are believed to be the most secure devices and are difficult to infiltrate or exfiltrate.
If you are new to this topic, we recommend reading our previous articles, detailing how highly-motivated attackers can use specially designed malware to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped computer via light, sound, heat, electromagnetic, magnetic, infrared, and ultrasonic waves.
For BeatCoin experiment, Dr. Guri deployed malware on an air-gapped computer that runs a Bitcoin wallet application and then performed each attack vector one-by-one to transmit the wallet keys to a nearby device over covert channels.
"In the adversarial attack model, the attacker infiltrates the offline wallet, infecting it with malicious code," the paper [PDF] reads. "The malware can be pre-installed or pushed in during the initial installation of the wallet, or it can infect the system when removable media (e.g., USB flash drive) is inserted into the wallet's computer in order to sign a transaction. These attack vectors have repeatedly been proven feasible in the last decade."
Results shown in the above chart suggests AirHopper, MOSQUITO, and Ultrasonic techniques are the fastest way to transmit a 256-bit private key to a remote receiver, whereas, Diskfiltration and Fansmitter methods take minutes.
Guri has also shared two videos. The first one demonstrates exfiltration of private keys from an air-gapped computer, which hardly took a few seconds to transmit data to a nearby smartphone using ultrasonic waves.
In the second video, the researcher transmitted private keys stored on a Raspberry Pi device to the nearby smartphone using the RadIoT attack—a technique to exfiltrate data from air-gapped internet-of-things (IoT) and embedded devices via radio signals.
"The radio signals - generated from various buses and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins of the embedded devices - can be modulated with binary data. In this case, the transmissions can be received by an AM or FM receiver located nearby the device."
In the last research published earlier this month, Guri's team also demonstrated how hackers could use power fluctuations in the current flow "propagated through the power lines" to covertly exfiltrate highly sensitive data out of an air gapped-computer.
| Malware |
Hackers Behind Healthcare Espionage Infect X-Ray and MRI Machines | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/healthcare-cyber-attacks.html | Security researchers have uncovered a new hacking group that is aggressively targeting healthcare organizations and related sectors across the globe to conduct corporate espionage.
Dubbed "Orangeworm," the hacking group has been found installing a wormable trojan on machines hosting software used for controlling high-tech imaging devices, such as X-Ray and MRI machines, as well as machines used to assist patients in completing consent forms.
According to a new report published by Symantec on Monday, the Orangeworm hacking group has been active since early 2015 and targeting systems of major international corporations based in the United States, Europe, and Asia with a primary focus on the healthcare sector.
"We believe that these industries have also been targeted as part of a larger supply-chain attack in order for Orangeworm to get access to their intended victims related to healthcare," Symantec said.
After getting into the victim's network, attackers install a trojan, dubbed Kwampirs, which opens a backdoor on the compromised computers, allowing attackers to remotely access equipment and steal sensitive data.
While decrypting, the Kwampirs malware inserts a randomly generated string into its main DLL payload in an attempt to evade hash-based detection. The malware also starts a service on the compromised systems to persist and restart after the system reboots.
Kwampirs then collects some basic information about the compromised computers and send it to the attackers to a remote command-and-control server, using which the group determines whether the hacked system is used by a researcher or a high-value target.
If the victim is of interest, the malware then "aggressively" spread itself across open network shares to infect other computers within the same organisation.
To gather additional information about the victim's network and compromised systems, the malware uses system's built-in commands, instead of using third-party reconnaissance and enumeration tools.
Above shown list of commands help attackers to steal information including, "any information pertaining to recently accessed computers, network adapter information, available network shares, mapped drives, and files present on the compromised computer."
Besides health-care providers and pharmaceutical companies that account for nearly 40% of targets, Orangeworm has also launched attacks against other industries including information technology and manufacturing sectors, agriculture, and logistics.
However, these industries also somehow work for healthcare, like manufacturers that make medical devices, technology companies that offer services to clinics, and logistics firms that deliver healthcare products.
Although the exact motive of Orangeworm is not clear and there's no information that could help determine the group's origins, Symantec believes the group is likely conducting espionage for commercial purposes and there's no evidence that it's backed by a nation-state.
"Based on the list of known victims, Orangeworm does not select its targets randomly or conduct opportunistic hacking," Symantec said. "Rather, the group appears to choose its targets carefully and deliberately, conducting a good amount of planning before launching an attack."
The highest percentage of victims has been detected in the United States, followed by Saudi Arabia, India, Philippines, Hungary, United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany, Poland, Hong Kong, Sweden, Canada, France, and several other countries across the globe.
| Cyber_Attack |
US Government Warns of a New Strain of Chinese 'Taidoor' Virus | https://thehackernews.com/2020/08/chinese-hacking-malware.html | Intelligence agencies in the US have released information about a new variant of 12-year-old computer virus used by China's state-sponsored hackers targeting governments, corporations, and think tanks.
Named "Taidoor," the malware has done an 'excellent' job of compromising systems as early as 2008, with the actors deploying it on victim networks for stealthy remote access.
"[The] FBI has high confidence that Chinese government actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Defense (DoD) said in a joint advisory.
The US Cyber Command has also uploaded four samples of the Taidoor RAT on the public malware repository VirusTotal to let 50+ Antivirus companies check the virus's involvement in other unattributed campaigns.
However, the malware itself is not new. In an analysis by Trend Micro researchers in 2012, the actors behind Taidoor were found to leverage socially engineered emails with malicious PDF attachments to target the Taiwanese government.
Calling it a "constantly evolving, persistent threat," FireEye noted significant changes in its tactics in 2013, wherein "the malicious email attachments did not drop the Taidoor malware directly, but instead dropped a 'downloader' that then grabbed the traditional Taidoor malware from the Internet."
Then last year, NTT Security uncovered evidence of the backdoor being used against Japanese organizations via Microsoft Word documents. When opened, it executes the malware to establish communication with an attacker-controlled server and run arbitrary commands.
According to the latest advisory, this technique of using decoy documents containing malicious content attached to spear-phishing emails hasn't changed.
"Taidoor is installed on a target's system as a service dynamic link library (DLL) and is comprised of two files," the agencies said. "The first file is a loader, which is started as a service. The loader (ml.dll) decrypts the second file (svchost.dll), and executes it in memory, which is the main Remote Access Trojan (RAT)."
In addition to executing remote commands, Taidoor comes with features that allow it to collect file system data, capture screenshots, and carry out file operations necessary to exfiltrate the gathered information.
CISA recommends that users and administrators keep their operating system patches up-to-date, disable File and Printer sharing services, enforce a strong password policy, and exercise caution when opening email attachments.
You can find the full list of best practices here.
| Malware |
Over 14 Million Verizon Customers' Data Exposed On Unprotected AWS Server | https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/over-14-million-verizon-customers-data.html | Verizon, the major telecommunications provider, has suffered a data security breach with over 14 million US customers' personal details exposed on the Internet after NICE Systems, a third-party vendor, mistakenly left the sensitive users' details open on a server.
Chris Vickery, researcher and director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, discovered the exposed data on an unprotected Amazon S3 cloud server that was fully downloadable and configured to allow public access.
The exposed data includes sensitive information of millions of customers, including their names, phone numbers, and account PINs (personal identification numbers), which is enough for anyone to access an individual's account, even if the account is protected by two-factor authentication.
"The exposure of Verizon account PIN codes used to verify customers, listed alongside their associated phone numbers, is particularly concerning," explained UpGuard's Dan O'Sullivan in a blog post.
NICE Systems is an Israel-based company that is known for offering wide-range of solutions for intelligence agencies, including telephone voice recording, data security, and surveillance.
According to the researcher, it is unknown that why Verizon has allowed a 3rd party company to collect call details of its users, however, it appears that NICE Systems monitors the efficiency of its call-center operators for Verizon.
The exposed data contained records of customers who called the Verizon's customer services in the past 6 months, which are recorded, obtained and analyzed by NICE.
Interestingly, the leaked data on the server also indicates that NICE Systems has a partnership with Paris-based popular telecommunication company "Orange," for which it also collects customer details across Europe and Africa.
"Finally, this exposure is a potent example of the risks of third-party vendors handling sensitive data," O'Sullivan said.
"NICE Systems' history of supplying technology for use in intrusive, state-sponsored surveillance is an unsettling indicator of the severity of this breach of privacy."
Vickery had privately informed Verizon team about the exposure in late June, and the data was then secured within a week.
Vickery is a reputed researcher, who has previously tracked down many exposed datasets on the Internet.
Just last month, he discovered an unsecured Amazon S3 server owned by data analytics firm Deep Root Analytics (DRA), which exposed information of more than 198 Million United States citizens, that's over 60% of the US population.
In March this year, Vickery discovered a cache of 60,000 documents from a US military project for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) which was also left unsecured on Amazon cloud storage server for anyone to access.
In the same month, the researcher also discovered an unsecured and publicly exposed database, containing nearly 1.4 Billion user records, linked to River City Media (RCM).
In 2015, Vickery also reported a huge cache of more than 191 Million US voter records and details of as many as 13 Million MacKeeper users.
| Data_Breaches |
Nearly 7 Million Dropbox Account Passwords Allegedly Hacked | https://thehackernews.com/2014/10/nearly-7-million-dropbox-account.html | Internet users have faced a number of major privacy breaches in last two months. Major in the list are The Fappening, The Snappening and now the latest privacy breach in Dropbox security has gained everybody's attention across the world.
Dropbox, the popular online locker service, appears to have been hacked by an unnamed hacker group. It is still unclear how the account details of so many users were accessed and, indeed, if they are actually legitimate or not. However, the group claims to have accessed details from nearly 7 million individual accounts and are threatening to release users' photos, videos and other files.
HACKERS CLAIMED TO RELEASE 7 MILLION USERS' PERSONAL DATA
A thread surfaced on Reddit today that include links to files containing hundreds of usernames and passwords for Dropbox accounts in plain text. Also a series of posts with hundreds of alleged usernames and passwords for Dropbox accounts have been made to Pastebin, an anonymous information-sharing site.
Hackers have already leaked about 400 accounts by posting login credentials, all starting with the letter B, and labelled it as a "first teaser...just to get things going". The perpetrators are also promising to release more more password details if they're paid a Bitcoin ransom.
"More Bitcoin = more accounts published on Pastebin. As more BTC is donated, More pastebin pastes will appear."
The security breach in Dropbox would definitely have bothered its millions of users and since passwords are involved in this incident, so it has more frightening consequences on its users. Reddit users have tested some of the leaked username and password combinations and confirmed that at least some of them work.
DROPBOX DENIED THE HACK - THIRD PARTY IS RESPONSIBLE
However, Dropbox has denied it has been hacked, saying the passwords were stolen apparently from third-party services that users allowed to access their accounts. In a statement to The Next Web, Dropbox said:
"Dropbox has not been hacked. These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log in to Dropbox accounts. We'd previously detected these attacks and the vast majority of the passwords posted have been expired for some time now. All other remaining passwords have expired as well."
The incident came just few days after the Snappening incident in which the personal images of as much as 100,000 Snapchat users were leaked online, which was the result of a security breach in the its third-party app.
Snapchat has denied that its service or server was ever compromised, but the servers of a third-party app designed to save Snapchat photos, which became the target for hackers to obtain personal photographs.
DROPBOX - "HOSTILE TO PRIVACY" SAYS SNOWDEN
Dropbox was in the news earlier this week when, in a recent interview with The Guardian, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden called Dropbox a "targeted, wannabe PRISM partner" that is "very hostile to privacy" — referring to its ability to access your data itself, which is yet another security consideration when it comes to web services.
Snowden suggested web users to stop using Dropbox and warned them that the cloud storage service does not safeguard users' privacy because it holds encryption keys and can therefore be forced by governments to hand over the personal data they store on its servers. He suggested people to use an alternative cloud storage provider that do not store any encryption keys, so that the users' data cannot be read by anyone.
USERS ARE ADVISED TO CHANGE PASSWORDS
Until the full scope of the problem is known, it's probably worthwhile changing your password. But whether the attack is confirmed or not, it's a good idea to change your password just to be on a safer side — especially for those users who use same password for multiple services.
Users are also recommended to turn on two-factor authentication, which Dropbox now supports and install a time-based, one-time password app on a mobile device.
Update: Dropbox has issued a statement on its blog further clarifying that the Dropbox passwords were stolen from "unrelated services."
"The usernames and passwords...were stolen from unrelated services, not Dropbox," the company said in a blog post. "Attackers then used these stolen credentials to try to log in to sites across the internet, including Dropbox. We have measures in place that detect suspicious login activity and we automatically reset passwords when it happens."
"Attacks like these are one of the reasons why we strongly encourage users not to reuse passwords across services. For an added layer of security, we always recommend enabling 2 step verification on your account."
| Data_Breaches |
Abusing Network Time Protocol (NTP) to perform massive Reflection DDoS attack | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/Network-Time-Protocol-Reflection-DDoS-Attack-Tool.html | In 2013, we have seen a significant increase in the use of a specific distributed denial of service (DDoS) methodology known as Distributed Reflection Denial of Service attacks (DrDoS). Open and misconfigured DNS (Domain Name System) can be used by anyone to resolve domain names to IP addresses are increasingly abused to launch powerful DDoS attacks.
But not only the DNS servers, Security Researchers at Symantec have spotted Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection DDoS attacks being launched by cyber criminals during the Christmas Holidays.
'Network Time Protocol (NTP)' is a distributed network clock time synchronization protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock times in a network of computers and runs over port 123 UDP.
NTP is one of those set-it-and-forget-it protocols that is configured once and most network administrators don't worry about it after that. Unfortunately, that means it is also not a service that is upgraded often, leaving it vulnerable to these reflection attacks.
Same as DNS Reflection attack, the attacker sends a small spoofed 8-byte UDP packets are sent to the vulnerable NTP Server that requests a large amount of data (megabytes worth of traffic) be sent to the DDoS's target IP Address. CVE assigned to the NTP vulnerability is CVE-2013-5211.
In this case, the attackers are taking advantage of the monlist command. Monlist is a remote command in older version of NTP that sends the requester a list of the last 600 hosts who have connected to that server. For attackers the monlist query is a great reconnaissance tool.
On December 16, there were almost 15000 IP addresses involved in the NTP DDoS attack. These servers can be thought of as passive botnet members since the attacker can passively gather large lists of them.
If you manage a public NTP server, can fix the issue by updating it to NTP 4.2.7, for which the support of 'monlist' query has been removed in favor of new safe 'mrunlist' function which uses a nonce value ensuring that received IP address match the actual requester.
| Vulnerability |
Vulnerability Allows Anyone to DDoS Websites Using Facebook Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/vulnerability-allows-anyone-to-ddos.html | Reading a 'Note' created by anyone on the Facebook could trick you automatically to do malicious attacks against others unknowingly.
A Security researcher Chaman Thapa, also known as chr13 claims that the flaw resides in 'Notes' section of the most popular social networking site - Facebook, that could allow anyone to launch the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack of more than 800 Mbps Bandwidth on any website.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is one in which multiple compromised systems attacks a single target system or service to make it unavailable to its intended users. The flood of incoming requests essentially forces the target system or service to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to its legitimate users.
While demonstrating the vulnerability on his blog, he explained that Facebook allows its users to include
tags inside the post in order to draft a note with beautiful related images from any source.
Facebook basically downloads external images from the original source for the first time only, and then cache them, but if the image url have dynamic parameters, then Facebook cache mechanism could be bypassed to force the Facebook servers to download all included images each time whenever anybodys open the note in its browser.
'Facebook will only cache the image once however using random get parameters the cache can be by-passed and the feature can be abused to cause a huge HTTP GET flood.' he said.
DDoS FACTOR, A SCENARIO
Let's suppose if you want to DDoS a website target.com, that have an image of 1 MB Size on its server. An attacker can create a Facebook Note with some text, including same image multiple times with dynamic parameters, i.e.
This way one can force Facebook servers to load 1 mb of file 1000 times in one pageview and if 100 Facebook users are reading the same crafted note at the same time, then Facebook servers will be forced to download 1 x 1000 x 100 = 100,000 Mb or 97.65Gb bandwidth within few seconds from the targeted servers.
400 MBPS DDoS ATTACK DEMO
Researcher demonstrated the proof-of-concept with 400 Mbps attack, by attacking on his own web server. Stats shown below:
The factor and danger of DDoS attack could be even higher when the image is replaced by a pdf or video of larger size, in case Facebook would crawl a huge file but the user gets nothing.
Facebook allows a user to create maximum of 100 Notes in a short span of time and each Note could support more than 1000 links, but because there is no captcha for the Facebook Notes creation, so all this operation can be performed automatically and an attacker could easily creates hundreds of notes using multiple users at the time of performing attack.
"It seems there is no restriction put on Facebook servers and with so many servers crawling at once we can only imagine how high this traffic can get" he concluded.
STILL UNPATCHED AND DON'T EXPECT ANY PATCH FROM FACEBOOK
Unfortunately, Facebook has no plans to fix this critical vulnerability, "In the end, the conclusion is that there's no real way to us fix this that would stop attacks against small consumer grade sites without also significantly degrading the overall functionality," Facebook replied to the researcher.
Similar kind of attack was noticed in mid of 2011 year when a security penetration tester at Italian security firm AIR Sicurezza Informatica discovered flaws in Google's Plus servers that allowed hackers to exploit the search giant's bandwidth and launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on a server of their choice.
| Cyber_Attack |
Malware Can Bypass Chrome Extension Security Feature Easily | https://thehackernews.com/2014/09/malware-can-bypasses-chrome-extension.html | Researchers have uncovered a new social engineering trick that leads users to a malicious extension from Google Chrome impersonating to deliver Adobe's Flash Player in order to lure victims in a click fraud campaign.
Security experts at TrendMicro believe that the malware is triggered by opening Facebook or Twitter via shortened links provided in any social networking websites. Once clicked, the links may lead victims to a site that automatically downloads the malicious browser extension.
MALWARE INVOLVES DOWNLOADING MULTIPLE MALICIOUS FILES
The process is quite complicated as the malware drops a downloader file which downloads multiple malicious files on the victim's computer. Moreover, the malicious program also has ability to bypass Google's recent security protection added to Chrome against installation of browser extensions that are not in Chrome Web Store.
Researchers came across a baiting tweet that advertises "Facebook Secrets", claiming to show videos that are not publicly available, along with a shortened link that is to be clicked in order to get it. Curious users easily fall victim to such campaign and click the given links to download those videos.
What the user totally unaware of is that the file which he downloaded is a malware dropper with the name "download-video.exe", detected as TROJ_DLOADE.DND, according to fraud analyst Sylvia Lascano of the security firm Trend Micro.
This malicious file then is used to drop additional malware into the victims' computer, one such is a Chrome browser extension which masquerades as Flash Player, which could be used for more offensive threats designed to steal victims' credentials for various online services.
MALWARE BYPASSES GOOGLE'S SECURITY POLICY
In order to evade detection, the malware circumvents Google's security policy – which only allows extension installations hosted in the Chrome Web Store – by creating a folder in the browser's directory where it drops "browser extension components."
The browser extension components that needs to be loaded are added to Chrome's extension folder are as follows:
manifest.json – contains browser extension description like name, script to load, version, etc.
crx-to-exe-convert.txt – contains the script to be loaded, which can be updated anytime by connecting to a specific URL.
After all the data is parsed by the browser in the dropped component manifest.json, the extension is ready to work.
OPEN FACEBOOK OR TWITTER – BE A VICTIM OF CLICK FRAUD
Once installed, if a user visits Facebook or Twitter, the extension quietly opens a specific site in the background that is written in Turkish, which researchers believe is part of a click fraud or redirection scheme.
"The site is written in Turkish and phrases such as 'bitter words,' 'heavy lyrics,' 'meaningful lyrics,' 'love messages,' and 'love lyrics' appear on the page. This routine could be a part of a click fraud or redirection scheme," fraud analyst Sylvia Lascano of the security firm Trend Micro said in a blog post.
SHORTENED LINK HELPED THREAT ACTORS
By the time researchers discovered the campaign, the tweets promoting the sophisticated malware dropper had been retweeted more than 6,000 times.
Here cyber criminals took help of shortened link in order to victimize a large number of victims because of the fact that the shortened link don't have visibility of where it directs, and contributes to spreading the campaign.
So, in order to protect your computers against this sort of threats, avoid accessing links from any unknown and suspicious sources.
| Malware |
Russian Hacker Selling Cheap Ransomware-as-a-Service On Dark Web | https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/ransomware-as-a-service.html | Ransomware has been around for a few years, but it has become an albatross around everyone's neck, targeting businesses, hospitals, financial institutions and individuals worldwide and extorting millions of dollars.
Forget about developing sophisticated banking trojans and malware to steal money out of people and organizations. Today, one of the easiest ways that can help cyber criminals get paid effortlessly is Ransomware.
This threat became even worse after the arrival of ransomware as a service (RaaS) – a variant of ransomware designed to be so user-friendly that anyone with little or no technical knowledge can also easily deploy them to make money.
Now, security researchers have uncovered an easy-to-use ransomware service that promises profit with just one successful infection.
Dubbed Karmen, the RaaS variant is based on the abandoned open-source ransomware building toolkit dubbed Hidden Tear and is being sold on Dark Web forums from Russian-speaking hacker named DevBitox for $175.
Like any typical ransomware infections, Karmen encrypts files on the infected PC using the strong AES-256 encryption protocol, making them inaccessible to the victim until he/she pays a large sum of money to obtain the decryption key from the attacker.
This new variant of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) provides buyers access to a web-based control panel hosted on the Dark Web with a user-friendly graphical dashboard that allows buyers to configure a personalised version of the Karmen ransomware.
The dashboard lets buyers keep a running tally of the number of infections and their profit in real time, allowing anyone with very minimal technical knowledge to deploy Karmen, threat intelligence firm Recorded Future said in a blog post published today.
Hacker: Don't Mess with my Malware; otherwise, Your Files are Gone!
Once infected, the Karmen ransomware encrypts the victim's files and shows a popup window with a threatening message warning users not to interfere with the malware; otherwise, they might lose all their files.
What's more interesting? Karmen automatically deletes its decryptor if a sandbox environment or analysis software is detected on the victim's computer to make security researchers away from investigating the threat.
Initial Karmen infections were reported in December 2016 by victims in Germany and the United States, while the sale in underground forums began in March 2017.
So far, 20 users have purchased copies of Karmen malware from DevBitox, according to Recorded Future, while three of those buyers have left positive reviews on their profile.
You can also watch a YouTube video demonstration which shows the RaaS in action.
How to Protect Yourself from Ransomware Threat?
Here are some important steps that should be considered safeguarding against ransomware infection:
Always keep regular backups of your important data.
Make sure you run an active anti-virus security suite of tools on your system.
Do not open email attachments from unknown sources.
Most importantly, always browse the Internet safely.
| Cyber_Attack |
PLATINUM Hackers Hijack Windows Hotpatching to Stay Hidden | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/windows-hotpatching-malware.html | In Brief
The Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team detected that a cyber espionage group of hackers, known as PLATINUM, has found a way to turn the Windows's Hotpatching technique (a way of updating the operating system without requiring a restart) to hide its malware from Antivirus products.
PLATINUM group has been active since 2009 and launching large-scale attacks against governmental organizations, intelligence agencies, defense institutes and telecommunication providers in South and Southeast Asia.
Practically speaking, the most important thing for a sophisticated APT hacker and a cyber-espionage group is to remain undetected for the longest possible period.
Well, that's exactly what an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) group has achieved.
The Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team has discovered that an APT group, dubbed Platinum, has been spying on high-profile targets by abusing a "novel" technique called Hotpatching.
Introduced in Windows Server 2003, the Hotpatching feature allows Microsoft to upgrade applications or the operating system in the running system without having to reboot the computer by inserting the new, updated code into a server.
The Platinum hacking group has often used the spear-phishing technique to penetrate initially the targeted networks, used numerous zero-day vulnerabilities in attacks, and has taken many efforts to hide its attacks.
The latest report released by Microsoft said the Platinum group abused the Windows' hotpatching feature, allowing it to inject malicious code into running processes without having to reboot the server and then later hide backdoors and other malware from installed antivirus solution.
"If the tool fails to inject code using hot patching, it reverts to attempting the other more common code injection techniques into common Windows processes, primarily targeting winlogon.exe, lsass.exe, and svchost.exe," Microsoft said in its report.
The hotpatching technique works against Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Platinum abused the technique in real-world attacks to hide its efforts from analysis.
The group has been using the Hotpatching technique to install the Dipsing, Adbupd and JPIN backdoors on networks belonging to governmental organizations, including defense organizations, intelligence agencies, diplomats and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and then to steal sensitive data.
The goal of the attacks doesn't appear to have been immediate financial gain; rather the Platinum APT group is up to a broader economic espionage campaign using stolen information.
The group has been targeting countries in South and Southeast Asia since at least 2009, with Malaysia being its biggest victim, following Indonesia, China, and India.
Though the Platinum group is still active, there is still a way for organizations and companies to avoid infection.
Microsoft's security experts explain that the hotpatching technique requires admin-level permissions, so the threat actors are sending spear-phishing emails that come with boobytrapped Office documents to infect each target.
| Cyber_Attack |
Subsets and Splits