Title
stringlengths 25
115
| Link
stringlengths 48
107
| Article
stringlengths 141
13.2k
| Label
stringclasses 4
values |
|---|---|---|---|
GandCrab Ransomware Decryption Tool [All Versions] — Recover Files for Free | https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/gandcrab-ransomware-decryption-tool.html | Cybersecurity researchers have released an updated version of GandCrab ransomware decryption tool that could allow millions of affected users to unlock their encrypted files for free without paying a ransom to the cybercriminals.
GandCrab is one of the most prolific families of ransomware to date that has infected over 1.5 million computers since it first emerged in January 2018.
Created by BitDefender, the new GandCrab decryption tool [download] can now unlock files encrypted by the latest versions of the ransomware, from 5.0 to 5.2, as well as for the older GandCrab ransomware versions.
As part of the "No More Ransom" Project, BitDefender works in partnership with the FBI, Europol, London Police, and several other law enforcement agencies across the globe to help ransomware affected users.
The cybersecurity company in recent months released ransomware removal tools for some older GandCrab versions that helped nearly 30,000 victims recover their data for free, saving roughly $50 million in unpaid ransoms.
The GandCrab creators recently announced retirement of their Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operations that allowed criminal hackers affiliated with the organized crime extort more than a total of $2 billion from victims.
"While the number is clearly exaggerated, the GandCrab operation was prolific enough to score enough revenue to allow its masters to retire," researchers at BitDefender said. "The shutdown will be followed by deletion of all keys, leaving the victims unable to retrieve the ransomed data even if they do pay a ransom."
"Launched in January 2018, GandCrab quickly became the go-to tool for hackers for affiliate-based ransomware, holding a 50% share of all the ransomware market by mid-2018," the Europol explained.
"Set as a ransomware-as-a-service licensing model, distributors could buy the ransomware on dark web markets and spread it among their victims. In exchange, they would pay 40% of their profits to the GandCrab developers and keep 60% for themselves."
Most computer viruses make their way into your systems due to lack of simple security practices. Here below, we have listed some simple tips you should always follow to protect your computers against ransomware attacks:
Beware of Phishing Emails — Always be suspicious of uninvited documents sent over an email and never click on links inside those documents unless verifying the source.
Backup Regularly — To always have a tight grip on all your important files and documents, keep a good backup routine in place that makes their copies to an external storage device that is not always connected to your PC.
Keep your Antivirus Software and System Up-to-Date — Always keep your antivirus software and systems updated to protect against the latest threats.
| Malware |
OpenX Advertising Network hacked and backdoor Injected | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/OpenX-Advertising-Malware-backdoor-hacked-trojan.html | OpenX, a leading provider of digital and mobile advertising technology has accordingly served backdoors that are injected into the Code and allows hackers to control over your Web server.
German tech site the Heise notified Germany's computer emergency response team (CERT) this week about the OpenX Ad Server (2.8.10) backdoor, allowing an attacker to execute any PHP code via the "eval" function and could have provided attackers full access to their web sites.
The OpenX team has confirmed the breach and OpenX senior application security engineer Nick Soracco said that two files in the binary distribution of 2.8.10 had been replaced with modified files that contained a remote code execution vulnerability.
The attack code is written in PHP but is hidden in a JavaScript file that is part of a video player plugin (vastServeVideoPlayer) in the OpenX distribution.
This vulnerability only applies to the free downloadable open source product, OpenX Source. It's important to note that all of OpenX's main suite of products, including OpenX Enterprise (ad serving), OpenX Market (exchange) and OpenX Lift (SSP) are not affected.
Server administrators can find out if they are running the OpenX version that contains the backdoor by searching for PHP tags inside .js files. Researchers from Sucuri provide a simple command for this:
$ grep -r --include "*.js" '<?php' DIRECTORYWHEREYOURSITEIS
This is not the first time when Opex.org has been hacked. Last year in March 2012, it was hacked and served malware to users.
OpenX has now released OpenX Source v2.8.11, which according to Soracco is a mandatory upgrade for all users of 2.8.10 that should be applied immediately.
| Malware |
LinkedIn Hacker, Wanted by US & Russian, Can be Extradited to Either State | https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/linkedin-russian-hacker-extradition.html | The alleged Russian hacker, who was arrested by the Czech police in Prague last October on suspicion of massive 2012 data breach at LinkedIn, can be extradited to either the United States or Russia, a Czech court ruled on Tuesday.
Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, a 29-years-old Russian national, is accused of allegedly hacking not just LinkedIn, but also the online cloud storage platform Dropbox, and now-defunct social-networking company Formspring.
However, he has repeatedly denied all accusations.
Nikulin was arrested in Prague on October 5 by the Czech police after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant against him.
Nikulin appeared at a court hearing held inside a high-security prison in Prague on Tuesday and emaciated after eight months in solitary confinement.
The court ruling, pending appeals, left the final decision in the hands of Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan, who can approve extradition to one of the countries and block the other.
The United States has requested Nikulin extradition for carrying out hacking attacks and stealing information from several American social networking companies, including LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring, between March 2012 to July 2012.
However, Russia, where Nikulin is facing a lesser charge, has requested his extradition on a separate cyber theft charge of stealing $3,450 via the Internet in 2009.
"Both [case] documents are very, very sufficient for reasonable suspicion that [the offenses] took place and that there is a reason to press charges," the judge said.
Hacker Claims FBI Pressured Him to Confess to US Election Hacks
Nikulin's arrest last October came three days before the United States officially accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
Nikulin's lawyer says the case is a set-up, indicating that his arrest may have deeper inclinations than over the cyber attacks against American firms.
The Guardian reported Nikulin was interrogated in Prague, where he currently remains imprisoned, by FBI special agent Jeffrey Miller.
Nikulin wrote in a letter from prison that during his interrogation, Miller reportedly brought up the US election hacking and claimed that the FBI agent pressured him to admit to the DNC hack and promised him good treatment if he accepted to cooperate.
Nikulin wrote in the letter that he rejected the offer. His lawyer indicated that Nikulin was not a hacker, but just a victim of an FBI plot.
"Do you really imagine that a high-ranking FBI agent is going to travel all the way from San Francisco just to read this guy his rights?," Nikulin lawyer said.
Mark Galeotti, a senior security researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague, also showed his concern about an FBI agent traveling to another country to extradite a hacker.
"An FBI agent traveling from the US to a third country as part of an extradition request is extremely unusual and highlights that the case is seen as significant," Galeotti said, as quoted by the Guardian.
Nikulin's Russian lawyer stated that his client's life revolved around buying and selling luxury cars, adding that Nikulin was "useless with computers" and capable of checking his email and no more and, far from being a super-hacker who can hack big firms.
Tuesday's court hearing was held in a tiny room inside the prison for security reasons, to which Nikulin's Czech lawyer said: "In all my 25 years as a lawyer, I don't remember any cases being tried inside the prison, including serial killers or organized crime cases."
Now, the final decision is in the hands of the Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikan, who is slated to decide where Nikulin will be extradited: The United States, where he can face a "disproportionately harsh" sentence of 54 years behind bars, or Russia, where he faces a lesser charge of cyber theft.
| Data_Breaches |
Marriott Suffers Second Breach Exposing Data of 5.2 Million Hotel Guests | https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/marriott-data-breach.html | International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years.
"At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property," Marriott said in a statement.
"We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests."
The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences.
The hospitality giant said an investigation into the breach was ongoing, but said there was no evidence that Marriott Bonvoy account passwords or PINs, payment card information, passport information, national IDs, or driver's license numbers were compromised.
Marriott has also set up a self-service online portal for guests to check whether their personal details were involved in the breach, and what categories of information were exposed. In addition, it's offering affected users an option to enroll in IdentityWorks, a personal information monitoring service, free of charge for 1 year.
The company has already taken the step of disabling the passwords of Marriott Bonvoy members who had their information potentially exposed in the incident, and they will be notified to change their passwords during the next login, as well as prompted to enable multi-factor authentication.
The incident follows a 2014 compromise of Starwood Hotels guest reservation database, which was acquired by Marriott in 2016. The breach, which exposed personal details of over 339 million guests globally, wasn't detected until November 2018, leading to it paying a fine of £99 million ($123 million) to the UK's data privacy regulator Information Commissioner's Office under GDPR laws.
"The kinds of information disclosed in the latest Marriott breach might seem innocuous, but it is precisely this kind of intelligence that enables threat actors to better target attacks on consumers," Gerrit Lansing, STEALTHbits' Field CTO told The Hacker News via email today.
"Simply: the more I know about you, the better chance I have of fooling you. Compromised credentials remain one of the top vectors for this kind of compromise, and strong authentication before accessing sensitive information one of the best defenses."
| Cyber_Attack |
Unpatched Prototype Pollution Flaw Affects All Versions of Popular Lodash Library | https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/lodash-prototype-pollution.html | Lodash, a popular npm library used by more than 4 million projects on GitHub alone, is affected by a high severity security vulnerability that could allow attackers to compromise the security of affected services using the library and their respective user base.
Lodash is a JavaScript library that contains tools to simplify programming with strings, numbers, arrays, functions, and objects, helping programmers write and maintain their JavaScript code more efficiently.
Liran Tal, a developer advocate at open-source security platform Snyk, recently published details and proof-of-concept exploit of a high-severity prototype pollution security vulnerability that affects all versions of lodash, including the latest version 4.17.11.
The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-10744, potentially affects a large number of frontend projects due to the popularity of lodash that is being downloaded at a rate of more than 80 million times per month.
Prototype pollution is a vulnerability that enables attackers to modify a web application's JavaScript object prototype, which is like a variable that can be used to store multiple values based on a predefined structure.
These structures and default values are called prototypes that prevent an application from hashing when no values are set.
However, if an attacker manages to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes and manipulate these attributes to overwrite or pollute, it could affect how the application processes JavaScript objects through the prototype chain, leading to a denial of service issue or a remote code execution vulnerability.
According to Tal, the function "defaultsDeep" in the Lodash library could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype using a constructor payload, which could result in crashing the web application or altering its behavior, depending upon the affected use-case.
It should be noted that exploiting prototype pollution flaws is not easy and require in-depth knowledge on how each targeted web application works.
The researcher responsible reported this vulnerability to John Dalton, maintainer of Lodash, and proposed fixes (pull requests 1 and 2) that will be included in the next version of the library, expected to be released very soon.
If your project also uses on lodash, you are recommended to immediately update your library as soon as the official patch releases or manually apply the fixes.
| Vulnerability |
Millions of DSL modems hacked in Brazil, spread banking malware | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/millions-of-dsl-modems-hacked-in-brazil.html | More than 4.5 million DSL modems have been compromised as part of a sustained hacking campaign in Brazil, with the devices spreading malware and malicious web address redirects.
According to the malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab in Brazil, Fabio Assolini. The vulnerability exploited by attackers allowed the use of a script to steal passwords and remotely access the configuration of modems. The attacks was described as "One firmware vulnerability, two malicious scripts, three hardware manufacturers, 35 malicious DNS servers, thousands of compromised ADSL modems, millions of victims."
According to Kaspersky, the Brazilian attackers sought to steal users' banking credentials by redirecting users to false versions of popular sites like Facebook or Google and prompting them to install malware. Some 40 DNS servers were set up outside Brazil too in order to serve forged requests for domain names belonging to Brazilian banks.
Nakedsecurity writes,-- The first thing users may have noticed is that they would visit legitimate websites such as Google, Facebook and Orkut (a Google social network which is particularly popular in Brazil) and would be prompted to install software. In the example below, visitors to Google.com.br were invited to install a program called "Google Defence" in order to access the "new Google".
It remains unclear which modem manufacturers and models are susceptible to the attacks. Assolini said a vulnerability disclosed in early 2011 appears to be caused by a chipset driver included with modems that use hardware from communications chip provider Broadcom. It allows a CSRF attack to take control of the administration panel and capture the password set on vulnerable devices.
After manufacturers issued firmware updates to plug the security hole, the number of compromised modems reduced. However, some 300,000 modems are still thought to be controlled by attackers.
| Vulnerability |
Critical RCE Bug Affects Millions of OpenWrt-based Network Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/openwrt-rce-vulnerability.html | A cybersecurity researcher today disclosed technical details and proof-of-concept of a critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting OpenWrt, a widely used Linux-based operating system for routers, residential gateways, and other embedded devices that route network traffic.
Tracked as CVE-2020-7982, the vulnerability resides in the OPKG package manager of OpenWrt that exists in the way it performs integrity checking of downloaded packages using the SHA-256 checksums embedded in the signed repository index.
While an 'opkg install' command is invoked on the victim system, the flaw could allow a remote man-in-the-middle attacker in a position to intercept the communication of a targeted device to execute arbitrary code by tricking the system into installing a malicious package or software update without verification.
If exploited successfully, a remote attacker could gain complete control over the targeted OpenWrt network device, and subsequently, over the network traffic it manages.
The three-year-old vulnerability was discovered earlier this year by Guido Vranken from the ForAllSecure software company, who then reported it responsibly to the OpenWrt development team.
In a blog post published today, Vranken explained that when a checksum contains any leading spaces, OPKG on the vulnerable versions of OpenWrt skips checking the integrity of the downloaded package and proceeds to the installation task.
"Due to the fact that opkg on OpenWrt runs as root and has write access to the entire filesystem, arbitrary code could be injected by means of forged .ipk packages with a malicious payload," OpenWrt team said.
The remote exploitation of this vulnerability is possible due to the fact that integrity in Linux based software installation mechanisms rely on digitally signing files while downloading files over the insecure HTTP connection.
Besides this, to exploit the vulnerability, attackers also need to serve a malicious package with the size equals to that specified in the package list on downloads.openwrt.org.
According to the project team, OpenWrt versions 18.06.0 to 18.06.6 and 19.07.0, as well as LEDE 17.01.0 to 17.01.7, are affected.
"As a stopgap solution, OpenWRT removed the space in the SHA256sum from the package list shortly after I reported the bug," Vranken said.
"However, this is not an adequate long-term solution because an attacker can simply provide an older package list that was signed by the OpenWRT maintainers."
To fix this issue, affected users are advised to upgrade their device firmware to the latest OpenWrt versions 18.06.7 and 19.07.1, which were released last month.
| Vulnerability |
ALERT: This New Ransomware Steals Passwords Before Encrypting Files | https://thehackernews.com/2015/12/ransomware-hacking-password_3.html | You should be very careful while visiting websites on the Internet because you could be hit by a new upgrade to the World's worst Exploit Kit – Angler, which lets hackers develop and conduct their own drive-by attacks on visitors' computers with relative ease.
Many poorly-secured websites are targeting Windows users with a new "Cocktail" of malware that steals users' passwords before locking them out from their machines for ransom.
Yes, stealing Windows users' passwords before encrypting their data and locking their PCs for ransom makes this upgrade to the Angler Exploit Kit nastier.
Here's How the New Threat Works:
Once the Angler exploit kit finds a vulnerable application, such as Adobe Flash, in visitor's computer, the kit delivers its malicious payloads, according to a blog post published by Heimdal Security.
The First Payload infects the victim's PC with a widely used data thief exploit known as Pony that systematically harvests all login usernames and passwords stored on the infected system and then sends them to servers controlled by hackers.
This allows attackers to obtain working logins for a number of websites, e-commerce sites, and even corporate applications, from which the hackers could steal more data.
The Second Payload drops the widely-used CryptoWall 4.0 Ransomware that locks user files until a ransom amount is paid.
Also Read: Anyone can Now Create their Own Ransomware using This Hacking ToolKit
So in short, the new campaign is one of the most sophisticated and effective ransomware attacks to date that uses a combination of:
World's Worst Exploit Kit + World's Worst Password Stealer + World's Worst Ransomware
The campaign is "extensive" and originates from a secure hosting environment located in Ukraine, the researchers say. Over 100 web pages in Denmark have been "injected with the malicious scripts, but the campaign is not limited to Europe."
Rise in Ransomware Threat
Ransomware attacks hit thousands of Internet users every week, and costs them a total of $18 Million in losses, according to the FBI.
Moreover, a recent report dated back to last month suggested that the Cryptowall family alone has managed to raise over $325 Million in revenue in the past year alone.
Few days back, we also saw Cryptowall 4.0 – the newest version of the world's worst Ransomware – surfacing in the Nuclear exploit kit, one of the most potent exploit kits available in the market for hacking into computers.
Also Read: Free Ransomware Decryption and Malware Removal ToolKit
What Should You do if You get Infected by Cryptowall 4.0?
Once your system gets affected by Cryptowall 4.0, unfortunately, there's not much you can do, as the encryption the ransomware uses is very strong and almost unbreakable.
So, the only options you are left with are:
Format your computer and restore your data from the backup
OR
Pay the Ransom money for decryption key
However, we don't advise anyone to pay ransom as it doesn't guarantee that you will get the decryption keys; as well as this would encourage criminal activities.
Also Read: Ransomware Attacks Threaten Wearable Devices and IoTs
Prevention is the Best Practice
As I previously recommended, one of the best defense measures to mitigate the Ransomware attack is to:
Keep your systems and apps up-to-date
Create awareness within the organizations
Maintain backups of your files on an external hard drive regularly
Most malware and viruses are introduced by clicking on links usually contained in spam emails and opening attachments from unknown sources.
So, DO NOT CLICK on any suspicious link provided in the emails and attachments from unknown sources.
| Malware |
The Pirate Bay have nothing to do with Free VPN service | https://thehackernews.com/2012/08/the-pirate-bay-have-nothing-to-do-with.html | Yesterday someone anonymously posted on Slashdot that The Pirate Bay had launched a free VPN service called PrivitizeVPN (https://freevpn.thepiratebay.se/). But Just today team at torrentfreak confirms on behalf of team The Pirate Bay that its not a Pirate Bay project.
They're just running it as an ad next to the regular download links. According to people close to PrivitizeVPN they are working on the connectivity issues. Till now according to PrivitizeVPN statics more than 45,091,927 users Downloads VPN client after the fake news that "The Pirate Bay team is going to be making the RIAA angry, with the launch of a new ad-supported VPN service"
| Malware |
More than 250 iOS Apps Caught Using Private APIs to Collect Users' Private Data | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/apple-ios-malware-apps.html | Apple is cleaning up its iTunes App Store again – for the third time in two months – following another flood of iOS apps that secretly collect users' personal information.
Researchers discovered more than 250 iOS apps that were violating Apple's App Store privacy policy, gathering personal identifiable data from almost one Million users estimated to have downloaded those offending apps.
The offending iOS applications have been pulled out of the App Store after an analytics service SourceDNA reported the issue. After XcodeGhost, this is the second time when Apple is cleaning its App Store.
Malicious iOS Apps Stealing Users' Private Info
The malicious applications were developed using a third-party software development kit (SDK) provided by Youmi, a Chinese advertising company.
Once compiled and distributed on Apple's official App Store, those apps secretly accessed and stored users' personal information, including:
A list of apps installed on the victim's phone
Serial number of iPhones or iPads themselves when they run older versions of iOS
A list of hardware components on iPhones or iPads running newer versions of iOS along with the components' serial numbers
E-mail addresses associated with the users' Apple IDs
How iOS Malware Works?
Youmi's SDK makes use of private Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to gather users' information that only Apple should be able to view.
The gathered information is then routed through Youmi's servers in China.
What's even More Bothersome?
The app developers who programmed those iOS applications aren't even aware of the fact that their apps are mining users' data.
Also Read: Popular Apple Store Apps Infected with Data-Theft Malware
The app makers that made use of Youmi's SDK may not have knowingly violated Apple's security and privacy guidelines.
"We believe the developers of these apps aren't aware of this since the SDK is delivered in binary form, obfuscated, and user info is uploaded to Youmi's server, not the app's," reads SourceDNA's blog post. "We recommend developers stop using this SDK until this code is removed."
Apple App Store Review Process Needs to be Stronger
However, the primary concern over here is that even after the discovery of XcodeGhost malware, Apple's App Store review process wasn't able to catch this malicious activity until being alerted by a third party.
It's still unclear how Youmi's SDK did not raise red flags at Apple.
Also Read: Apple Kicks Out some Malicious Ad-Blocker Apps from its Online Store
In an official statement Apple says all offended iOS apps relying on the Youmi's SDK have now been removed. The company is now working with its developers to ensure their applications is in compliance with the App Store guidelines:
We've identified a group of apps that are using a third-party advertising SDK, developed by Youmi, a mobile advertising provider, that uses private APIs to gather private information, such as user email addresses and device identifiers, and route data to its company server.
This is a violation of our security and privacy guidelines. The apps using Youmi's SDK have been removed from the App Store and any new apps submitted to the App Store using this SDK will be rejected. We are working closely with developers to help them get updated versions of their apps that are safe for customers and in compliance with our guidelines back in the App Store quickly.
| Cyber_Attack |
eToro Vulnerable to Database Dump | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/etoro-vulnerable-to-database-dump.html | eToro Vulnerable to Database Dump
Security Experts at Zsecure.net discover a serious Vulnerability in eToro,which is a financial trading company based in Cyprus and one of the top ranked Forex Trading Service Provider Worldwide. It provides personal online financial services in forex, commodities and stock indices through its own electronic trading platform. eToro is primarily a platform and a software provider; it is not itself a financial broker. Rather, it connects its customers with third party brokerage services provided by various brokers.
About the Vulnerability
zSecure team has detected detected an active vulnerability in eToro's web-portal which allows the complete access to their database and even the complete database can be dumped/downloaded. Since the company is handling the portfolio thousands of trader's keeping their database vulnerable to outside attack is a shame on the part of the company which is said to carrying millions of value of transactions every month.
Website: www.etoro.com
Alert Level: High
Threats: Database Access, Database Dump
| Vulnerability |
Iranian nuclear program hit by AC/DC virus | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/iranian-nuclear-program-hit-by-acdc.html | A scientist working at the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran said computer systems have been hit by a cyber-attack which forced them to play AC/DC's Thunderstruck at full volume in the middle of the night.
The attack came to light after a researcher at security firm F-Secure received a string of emails from a Iran's atomic energy organisation."I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom."
"It does sound really weird," he said. "If there was an attack, why would the attacker announce themselves by playing 'Thunderstruck?" If true, this attack is the third hacking attempt aimed at Tehran's controversial nuclear program.
It sounds like the AEOI may have been hit with an infrastructure-targeting malware attack, similar to those that have plagued the Middle East since 2010 starting with Stuxnet. However, there's no independent confirmation of this attack's existence.
The scientist reported that the virus came through a simple and cheap open-source project that finds vulnerabilities in software.
See the full e-mail below:
I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom.
According to the email our cyber experts sent to our teams, they believe a hacker tool Metasploit was used. The hackers had access to our VPN. The automation network and Siemens hardware were attacked and shut down. I only know very little about these cyber issues as I am scientist not a computer expert.
There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC.
| Vulnerability |
Facebook app spreading Android Malwares | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/facebook-app-spreading-android-malwares.html | Facebook app spreading Android Malwares
Even though Google recently introduced a malware-blocking system called Bouncer to keep the Android Market safe from malicious software, crafty spammers and fraudsters are still managing to find ways around the restrictions to get their software onto users' phones.
Security firm, Sophos have reported that there is malware going around via the Facebook application. The malicious software disguises itself as an Android app named "any_name.apk" or "allnew.apk" and is sent to Android phones via Facebook's mobile app.
An Android user may receive a Facebook friend request and if the user goes to the requester's profile to check them out, they could be diverted to another web page instead, where the malicious app will be automatically downloaded.
Although Android doesn't by default allow apps to be automatically downloaded, some users choose to turn off this protection in order to have access to apps distributed outside of the Android Market. This kind of malware is similar to clickjacking, which takes place very often on Facebook.
Bouncer is a good first step towards protecting Android users, but regardless of what methods are used to lock down the Android Market, spammers and scammers can always find another way in.
| Malware |
Warning! This Cross-Platform Malware Can Hack Windows, Linux and OS X Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2016/09/cross-platform-malware.html | Unlike specially crafted malware specifically developed to take advantage of Windows operating system platform, cyber attackers have started creating cross-platform malware for wider exploitation.
Due to the rise in popularity of Mac OS X and other Windows desktop alternatives, hackers have begun designing cross-platform malware modularly for wide distribution.
Cross-platform malware is loaded with specialized payloads and components, allowing it to run on multiple platforms.
One such malware family has recently been discovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, which run on all the key operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Stefan Ortloff, a researcher from Kaspersky Lab's Global Research and Analysis Team, first discovered the Linux and Windows variants of this family of cross-platform backdoor, dubbed Mokes, in January this year.
Now, the researcher today confirmed the existence of an OS X variant of this malware family, explaining a technical breakdown of the backdoor in a post on Securelist.
Alike the Linux and Windows variants, the OS X backdoor variant, Backdoor.OSX.Mokes.a, specializes in capturing audio-video, obtaining keystrokes as well as taking screenshots every 30 seconds from a victim's machine.
The variant is written in C++ using Qt, a cross-platform application framework that is widely being used for developing applications to run on various software and hardware platforms.
The backdoor also has the capability to monitor removable storage like when a USB drive is connected to or removed from the computer.
It can also scan the file system for Office documents, including .docx, .doc, .xlsx, and .xls files.
The OS X backdoor can also execute arbitrary commands on the victim's computer from its command and control (C&C) server.
The backdoor establishes an encrypted connection with its command and control server and communicates using AES-256 encryption, which is considered to be a secure encryption algorithm.
Ortloff notes, right after execution, the OS X sample he analyzed copies itself to a handful of locations, including caches that belong to Skype, Dropbox, Google, and Firefox. This behavior is similar to the Linux variant that copied itself to locations belonging to Dropbox and Firefox after execution.
The researcher has not attributed the Mokes backdoor family to any hacking group, state-sponsored hacker or country, nor he detailed about the OS X backdoor's infection vector and how widespread it is.
However, based on the currently available information, the backdoor seems to be a sophisticated piece of malware.
| Malware |
Hacking a Facebook Account using Facebook | https://thehackernews.com/2011/08/hacking-facebook-account-using-facebook.html | Hacking a Facebook Account using Facebook
Many of us know that phishing is also a trick to hack a facebook and session hijicking but hacker can do both at a same time. This vulnerability was happened on Facebook (static FBML) .Example here .
Here you can get that Facebook FBML script : https://pastebin.com/REmvjkRN
What user will do ??
1. Checks for the URL.
2. Checks for which year the page was create.
Is it easy to fool the people?
Yes, by creating a new page in facebook in such way that user has to beliveness.
How its work??
1.Once the user clicks the link the session(cookies) where stolen by the hacker using That he can login any users account without a username and password
2. usually the users will check for the URL once it was known 1 they can enterning a userename and password.
3.After hitting the button Test your Password , Page will reflect a Thankyou Msg and it will popup with a paswd Rank
4. Check ur email spam there must a email on this and it will say that ur password was wrong trying again
Countermeasures:
1.Dont click a new link from a person u don't know..
2.Facebook is not going to ask ur password is strong are not.
3.Some of the virus and worm (scam) was spreading in facebook applications.
Submitter By Noah Franklin
"Hackers can die but Hacking never dies"
| Vulnerability |
Cyber attack hits Istanbul Airport passport control system | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/Istanbul-airport-cyber-attack-virus.html | The passport control system at Istanbul Ataturk Airport International departure terminal was under cyber attack on Friday, while another airport in the Turkish largest city was also affected.
Passengers stood in lines for hours and plane departures were delayed, because cyberattack shutdown passport control systems at two facilities. Later Authorities has restored the systems.
Few local media said that the passport control system at the Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in Istanbul also broke down due to the malfunction of the Istanbul provincial security directorate's Polnet data system.
They believe that systems were infected using some malwares, But Authorities also investigating if the malware yielded user details from the infected machines or not.
No claim of responsibility or blame was attributed to the alleged cyberattack. However, this is another malware attacks been reported, targeting vital infrastructure so far. Cybersecurity has emerged as an emerging threat to national security in the digital age.
| Malware |
Security breach at OAuth based applications can cause Social Media Disaster | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/security-breach-at-oauth-based.html | With all the popular social networking websites there on the web, managing them from several different internet browser tabs or windows can get frustrated very quickly.
Besides our own Facebook Page, Twitter account, and Google+ profile, I also manage several others and, YES, I feel the "time management" pain!
To make social media management and monitoring easier for users, some very innovative desktop applications and mobile apps were developed to help organize multiple platforms and information sharing across selected networks.
Using online tools like TweetDeck, Seesmic, Hootsuite, Feedly, Twuffer and Buffer App for scheduling and posting directly from a web page has become an absolute necessity especially where Twitter is concerned.
Additionally these apps gives you the ability to post on one or all of your connected accounts together i.e Multiple Facebook, Twitter or Google+ profiles.
These applications don't require your passwords for social media accounts, i.e. It would be really very uncool in sharing your Facebook password with a third-party site. That's where OAuth comes in.
OAuth is an open standard for authorization, which keeps your passwords safe on third-party sites and instead of giving the keys to your entire house, you've given a special key called 'Access token' that only opens one room which you want them to access.
This Access token behaves similar to a session variable which you can store in a cookie to keep the user logged into your website. The only difference is that many services will send back an Access Token and Secret Access Token. You likely need both of these to pull any data from the server.
But more importantly, if somehow that application server gets hacked, your Twitter or Facebook passwords are still safe. But yes, the hackers would still be able to post on your behalf on Facebook or Twitter and can spread spam via tweets, status updates or Direct Inbox messages.
Rather than hacking into individual accounts which is almost impossible, Hacking an OAuth based application server, having millions of users - is enough to damage the Internet and Social Media.
Just yesterday Buffer, the social content management and scheduling service was hacked by cyber crooks, which resulted in a flood of unauthorized posts to user accounts for both Twitter and Facebook.
The security of such apps should be very high, where access to Social media accounts of millions of users are available in bulk after exploiting the vulnerabilities in application server only. Buffer Hack was basically used to spread SPAM messages linked to weight-loss web site.
The main reason why this particular attack is so effective is because:
The victims were essentially receiving messages including links from sources they trust; accounts that they follow on Twitter or Facebook.
A hacker could trigger huge spam messages on all buffer users with one click.
But in the worst scenarios, a malicious attacker could use the same techniques to spam links to Malware infected websites or other such websites serving exploit kits to compromise visitors' computers.
After recovering for Security Breach, Buffer said on Sunday that they have encrypted all OAuth access tokens in the database for further security.
In June 2012, a hacking group called 'LulzsecReborn' associated with Anonymous Hackers, hacked into TweetGif website, which allows you to use animated GIF image as your twitter picture.
In that hack, attackers were able to access 10,000 Twitter users OAuth access tokens and they choose to leak the information on the Internet, including usernames, TweetGif account passwords, Real names, locations, Bios, Avatars and Secret tokens also on the Internet.
To avoid such issues, pay attention to the permissions that each app is taken from your account. If it does something you don't want it to do, just don't use that app.
There is no good or even half good way to protect keys that untrusted users can access. The minimum amount of effort won't be effective. Even the maximum amount of effort won't be effective against a skilled hacker with just a few hours of spare time.
It is a genuine problem with no effective solution. Not in Java, not in C#, not in Perl, not in C, not in anything. Think of it as if it was a Law of Physics. Your alternatives are:
Always use trusted applications and grant limited required permissions.
Turn your application into a service and run it on a machine that you control access to.
Use some authentication mechanism that doesn't require permanent secret keys to be distributed.
Always, be sure to regularly review your authorized apps so you don't run into trouble if you haven't used one of them in a while, you're probably better off getting rid of it completely.
All you need to do is go to your Twitter settings and revoke access to that app. That way, your tokens become useless and your account is under your control again, without even having to change your password.
Swati Khandelwal - Working with 'The Hacker News'. Social Media Lover and Gadget Girl. Speaker, Cyber Security Expert and Technical Writer. (Google+ Profile)
| Vulnerability |
Researcher finds a way to Delete and Modify Facebook Messages Sent to Other Users | https://thehackernews.com/2016/06/delete-facebook.html | Sometimes I receive emails from our readers who wanted to know how to hack Facebook account, but just to delete some of their messages they have sent to their friends or colleagues mistakenly or under wrong circumstances like aggression.
How to hack a Facebook account? It is probably the biggest "n00b" question you will see on the Internet.
The solution for this query is hard to find — but recently researchers have shown that how you can modify or alter your messages once you have pressed the SEND button in Facebook Messenger.
According to the researcher Roman Zaikin from cyber security firm Check Point, a simple HTML tweak can be used to exploit Facebook online chat as well as its Messenger app, potentially allowing anyone to modify or delete any of his/her sent message, photo, file, and link.
Though the bug is simple, it could be exploited by malicious users to send a legitimate link in a Facebook chat or group chat, and later change it to a malicious link that could lead to a malware installation, tricking victims into infecting their systems.
Here's How the Exploit Works:
The exploit works on the way Facebook assigns identities to chat messages. Each chat message has a unique "message_id" identifier that could be revealed by sending a request to www.facebook.com/ajax/mercury/thread_info.php.
Once message_id is identified, an attacker could alter its respective message content and send it back to Facebook servers which accept the new content as legitimate and push it back to the victim's PC or mobile device.
Video Demonstration:
"By exploiting this vulnerability, cyber criminals could change a whole chat thread without the victim realizing," said Oded Vanunu, Head of Products Vulnerability Research at Check Point.
"What's worse. The hacker could implement automation techniques to continually outsmart security measures for long-term chat alterations. We applaud Facebook for such a rapid response and putting security first for their users."
Researchers discovered the vulnerability earlier this month and notified Facebook about the flaw.
The social networking giant promptly moved to fix the vulnerability, though Facebook explained that the flaw only affected its Messenger app on Android.
"Based on our investigation, this simple misconfiguration in the Messenger app on Android turned out to be a low-risk issue, and it's already been fixed," Facebook wrote in its blog post published Tuesday.
Additionally, Facebook claims the vulnerability could not be exploited to infect its users' PCs with malicious software, as the company is using anti-spam and anti-virus filters to detect malware and spams.
| Vulnerability |
Over 100 New Chrome Browser Extensions Caught Spying On Users | https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/chrome-browser-extensions-spying.html | Google recently removed 106 more extensions from its Chrome Web Store after they were found illegally collecting sensitive user data as part of a "massive global surveillance campaign" targeting oil and gas, finance, and healthcare sectors.
Awake Security, which disclosed the findings late last week, said the malicious browser add-ons were tied back to a single internet domain registrar, GalComm.
However, it's not immediately clear who is behind the spyware effort.
"This campaign and the Chrome extensions involved performed operations such as taking screenshots of the victim device, loading malware, reading the clipboard, and actively harvesting tokens and user input," Awake Security said.
The extensions in question posed as utilities offering capabilities to convert files from one format to the other, among other tools for secure browsing, while relying on thousands of fake reviews to trick unsuspecting users into installing them.
Furthermore, the actors behind the operation leveraged evasion techniques to avoid flagging the domains as malicious by anti-malware solutions, thereby allowing the surveillance campaign to go undetected.
In total, the extensions were downloaded nearly 33 million times over the course of three months before Awake Security reached out to Google in May.
The search giant, in response to the disclosures, has deactivated the problematic browser extensions. The full list of offending extension IDs can be accessed here.
Telemetry data has revealed that some of these extensions were active on the networks of "financial services, oil and gas, media and entertainment, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, retail, high-tech, higher education, and government organizations," although there's no evidence that they were actually used to collect sensitive data.
"Galcomm is not involved, and not in complicity with any malicious activity whatsoever," the Israel-based registrar's owner Moshe Fogel told Reuters, which broke the development.
Deceptive extensions on the Chrome Web Store have continued to be a problem, what with bad actors exploiting it for malvertising and other data-stealing campaigns.
Earlier this February, Google removed 500 malware-ridden extensions after they were caught serving adware and sending users' browsing activity to attacker-controlled servers. Then in April, the company yanked another set of 49 extensions that masqueraded as cryptocurrency wallets to steal Keystore information.
It's recommended that users review extension permissions by visiting "chrome://extensions" on the Chrome browser, consider uninstalling those that are rarely used, or switch to other software alternatives that don't require invasive access to browser activity.
| Malware |
Microsoft to Patch Critical Internet Explorer Zero-Day Vulnerability Next Tuesday | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/microsoft-to-patch-critical-internet.html | Today Microsoft has released its Advance Notification for the month of June 2014 Patch Tuesday releasing seven security Bulletins, which will address several vulnerabilities in its products, out of which two are marked critical and rest are important in severity.
This Tuesday, Microsoft will issue Security Updates to address seven major vulnerabilities and all those are important for you to patch, as the flaws are affecting various Microsoft software, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer.
CRITICAL VULNERABILITY THAT YOU MUST PATCH
Bulletin one is considered to be the most critical one, which will address a the zero-day Remote Code Execution vulnerability, affecting all versions of Internet Explorer, including IE11 in Windows 8.1.
All server versions of Windows are affected by this vulnerability, but at low level of severity because by default, Internet Explorer runs in Enhanced Security Configuration and just because Server Core versions of Windows Server do not include Internet Explorer, so are not affected.
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code using JavaScript, but so far, the zero-day flaw is not known to have been used in any attacks, according to Microsoft. "The Update for Internet Explorer addresses CVE-2014-1770, which we have not seen used in any active attacks."
Microsoft kept hidden this critical Internet explorer Zero-Day vulnerability from all of us since October 2013, but last month the team at 'Zero Day Initiative' disclosed the vulnerability publically when Microsoft failed to respond and patch this flaw within 180 days after receiving the details from security researcher.
The second Bulletin addresses one or more flaws in both Windows and Office products. It is also a Remote Code Execution vulnerability and rated 'Critical' on all versions of Windows including Server Core; Microsoft Live Meeting 2007 Console and all versions of Microsoft Lync, excluding the Lync Server. The flaw is also rated 'Important' for Office 2007 and Office 2010.
These critical security updates are really important for users to patch and both the patches will require a restart after the installation of the new versions.
OTHER IMPORTANT PATCHES TO INSTALL
Remaining five bulletins will address one or more remote code execution vulnerabilities in Office, an information disclosure bugs in Windows, information disclosure bugs in Lync Server, a Denial of Service (DoS) bug in all Windows versions since Vista, and a "tampering" vulnerability in Windows including Windows 7, 8.x and Server 2012.
NOT FOR XP THIS TIME
Microsoft will not release any security update for its older version of Windows XP, like last month it provided an 'out-of-band security update' for Windows XP machines affected by the zero-day vulnerability.
Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP Operating System. So, if you are still running this older version of operating system on your PCs, we again advise you to move on to other operating system in order to receive updates and secure yourself from upcoming threats.
| Vulnerability |
Critical Flaws Reported in Sage X3 Enterprise Management Software | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/critical-flaws-reported-in-sage-x3.html | Four security vulnerabilities have been uncovered in the Sage X3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) product, two of which could be chained together as part of an attack sequence to enable adversaries to execute malicious commands and take control of vulnerable systems.
These issues were discovered by researchers from Rapid7, who notified Sage Group of their findings on Feb. 3, 2021. The vendor has since rolled out fixes in recent releases for Sage X3 Version 9 (Syracuse 9.22.7.2), Sage X3 HR & Payroll Version 9 (Syracuse 9.24.1.3), Sage X3 Version 11 (Syracuse 11.25.2.6), and Sage X3 Version 12 (Syracuse 12.10.2.8) that were shipped in March.
The list of vulnerabilities is as follows -
CVE-2020-7388 (CVSS score: 10.0) - Sage X3 Unauthenticated Remote Command Execution (RCE) as SYSTEM in AdxDSrv.exe component
CVE-2020-7389 (CVSS score" 5.5) - System "CHAINE" Variable Script Command Injection (No fix planned)
CVE-2020-7387 (CVSS score: 5.3) - Sage X3 Installation Pathname Disclosure
CVE-2020-7390 (CVSS score: 4.6) - Stored XSS Vulnerability on 'Edit' Page of User Profile
"When combining CVE-2020-7387 and CVE-2020-7388, an attacker can first learn the installation path of the affected software, then use that information to pass commands to the host system to be run in the SYSTEM context," the researchers said. "This can allow an attacker to run arbitrary operating system commands to create Administrator level users, install malicious software, and otherwise take complete control of the system for any purpose."
The most severe of the issues is CVE-2020-7388, which takes advantage of an administrative service that's accessible over the internet to craft malicious requests with the goal of running arbitrary commands on the server as the "NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM" user. The service in question is used for remote management of the Sage ERP solution through the Sage X3 Console.
Separately, the 'Edit' page associated with user profiles in the Sage X3 Syracuse web server component is vulnerable to a stored XSS attack (CVE-2020-7390), enabling the execution of arbitrary JavaScript code during 'mouseOver' events in the 'First name', 'Last name', and 'Email' fields.
"If successful, however, this vulnerability could allow a regular user of Sage X3 to execute privileged functions as a currently logged-in administrator or capture administrator session cookies for later impersonation as a currently-logged-in administrator," the researchers said.
Successful exploitation of CVE-2020-7387, on the other hand, results in the exposure of Sage X3 installation paths to an unauthorized user, while CVE-2020-7389 concerns a missing authentication in Syracuse development environments that could be used to gain code execution via command injection.
"Generally speaking, Sage X3 installations should not be exposed directly to the internet, and should instead be made available via a secure VPN connection where required," the researchers noted in the disclosure. "Following this operational advice effectively mitigates all four vulnerabilities, though customers are still urged to update according to their usual patch cycle schedules."
| Vulnerability |
New TeamViewer Hack Could Allow Clients to Hijack Viewers' Computer | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/teamviewer-hacking-tool.html | Do you have remote support software TeamViewer installed on your desktop?
If yes, then you should pay attention to a critical vulnerability discovered in the software that could allow users sharing a desktop session to gain complete control of the other's PC without permission.
TeamViewer is a popular remote-support software that lets you securely share your desktop or take full control of other's PC over the Internet from anywhere in the world.
For a remote session to work both computers—the client (presenter) and the server (viewer)—must have the software installed, and the client has to share a secret authentication code with the person he wants to share his desktop.
However, a GitHub user named "Gellin" has disclosed a vulnerability in TeamViewer that could allow the client (sharing its desktop session) to gain control of the viewer's computer without permission.
TeamViewer Hack Could Be Used By Anyone—Server Or Client
Gellin has also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) code, which is an injectable C++ DLL, which leverages "naked inline hooking and direct memory modification to change TeamViewer permissions."
The injectable C++ DLL (hack) can be used by both, the client and the server, which results as mentioned below:
If exploited by the Server—the hack allows viewers to enable "switch sides" feature, which is only active after the server authenticated control with the client, eventually allowing the server to initiate a change of control/sides.
If exploited by the Client—the hack allows the client to take control of the mouse and keyboard of the server "with disregard to servers current control settings and permissions."
This vulnerability impacts TeamViewer versions running on Windows, macOS as well as Linux machines.
A Reddit user "xpl0yt," who first publicized this vulnerability, claimed to have been in contact with the TeamViewer security team, who confirmed him the existence of the vulnerability in its software and released a patch for Windows.
A TeamViewer spokesperson told The Hacker News, "We are patching versions 11-13. Windows is already available, whereas MacOS and Linux are expected later today."
TeamViewer users are recommended to install the patched versions of the software as soon as they become available. Patches will be delivered automatically to those users who have configured their TeamViewer software to receive automatic updates.
| Vulnerability |
Here's the NSA Employee Who Kept Top Secret Documents at Home | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/nghia-hoang-pho-nsa.html | A former employee—who worked for an elite hacking group operated by the U.S. National Security Agency—pleaded guilty on Friday to illegally taking classified documents home, which were later stolen by Russian hackers.
In a press release published Friday, the US Justice Department announced that Nghia Hoang Pho, a 67-year-old of Ellicott City, Maryland, took documents that contained top-secret national information from the agency between 2010 and 2015.
Pho, who worked as a developer for the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking group at the NSA, reportedly moved the stolen classified documents and tools to his personal Windows computer at home, which was running Kaspersky Lab software.
According to authorities, the Kaspersky Labs' antivirus software was allegedly used, one way or another, by Russian hackers to steal top-secret NSA documents and hacking exploits from Pho's home PC in 2015.
"Beginning in 2010 and continuing through March 2015, Pho removed and retained U.S. government documents and writings that contained national defense information, including information classified as Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information," the DoJ said in disclosing Pho's guilty plea.
"This material was in both hard-copy and digital form, and was retained in Pho's residence in Maryland."
For those unaware, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has even banned Kaspersky Labs' antivirus software from all of its government computers over suspicion of the company's involvement with the Russian intelligence agency and spying fears.
Kaspersky CEO Says He Would Leave If Russia Asked Him To Spy
Though there's no substantial evidence yet available, an article published by US news agency WSJ in October claimed that Kaspersky software helped Russian spies steal highly classified documents and hacking tools belonging to the NSA in 2015 from a staffer's home PC.
However, Kaspersky Labs has denied any direct involvement with the Russian spies in the alleged incident.
Just last month, Kaspersky claimed that its antivirus package running on the Pho's home PC detected the copies of the NSA exploits as malicious software, and uploaded them to its cloud for further analysis by its team of researchers.
According to the company, as soon as its analysts realized that its antivirus had collected more than malicious binaries, the company immediately deleted the copy of the classified documents, and also created a special software tweak, preventing those files from being downloaded again.
Even, when asked if Russian intel agency had ever asked him to help it spy on the West at a media briefing at the Kaspersky's offices in London on Tuesday, CEO Eugene Kaspersky said "They have never asked us to spy on people. Never."
Kaspersky further added that "If the Russian government comes to me and asks me to anything wrong, or my employees, I will move the business out of Russia."
NSA Hacker Faces A Prison Sentence Of Up To 10 Years
In Pho's plea deal with prosecutors, the NSA hacker admitted that he copied information from NSA computers multiple times between 2010 and 2015 and took it all home with him.
Taking classified documents at home is a clear violation of known security procedures—and in this process, Pho eventually exposed the top secret information to Russian spies.
Pho has pleaded guilty in a United States district court in Baltimore to one count of willful removal and retention of national defense information, with no other charges filed against him and there's no mention of Pho selling or passing off that confidential data.
The retention of national defense information offense carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.
Federal prosecutors said they would seek an eight-year sentence for Mr. Pho. However, his attorney can ask for a more lenient sentence.
Pho remains free while awaiting sentencing on 6th April next year.
| Data_Breaches |
'Kill Switch' to Mitigate Memcached DDoS Attacks — Flush 'Em All | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/prevent-memcached-ddos.html | Security researchers have discovered a "kill switch" that could help companies protect their websites under massive DDoS attack launched using vulnerable Memcached servers.
Massive Memcached reflection DDoS attacks with an unprecedented amplification factor of 50,000 recently resulted in some of the largest DDoS attacks in history.
To make matter even worse, someone released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for Memcached amplification attack yesterday, making it easier for even script kiddies to launch massive cyber attacks.
Despite multiple warnings, more than 12,000 vulnerable Memcached servers with UDP support enabled are still accessible on the Internet, which could fuel more cyber attacks soon.
However, the good news is that researchers from Corero Network Security found a technique using which DDoS victims can send back a simple command, i.e., "shutdown\r\n", or "flush_all\r\n", in a loop to the attacking Memcached servers in order to prevent amplification.
Where, the flush_all command simply flush the content (all keys and their values) stored in the cache, without restarting the Memcached server.
The company said its kill-switch has efficiently been tested on live attacking Memcached servers and found to be 100% effective, and has already been disclosed to national security agencies.
Based on this finding, security researcher Amir Khashayar Mohammadi—who focuses on malware analysis, cryptanalysis, web exploitation, and other cyber attack vectors—has created and released a simple DDoS mitigation tool, dubbed Memfixed, that sends flush or shutdown commands to the vulnerable Memcached servers.
Written in Python, Memfixed automatically obtains a list of vulnerable Memcached servers using Shodan API to trigger shutdown/flush commands.
Stealing Sensitive Data From Memcached Servers
What's more? Corero Researchers also claimed that the Memcached vulnerability (CVE-2018-1000115) is more extensive than initially reported, and can be exploited beyond leveraging it for a DDoS attack.
Without revealing any technical detail, the company said the Memcached vulnerability could also be exploited by remote attackers to steal or modify data from the vulnerable Memcached servers by issuing a simple debug command.
Dynamic database-driven websites use a Memcached application to improve their performance by caching data and objects in the RAM.
Since Memcached has been designed to be used without logins or passwords, attackers can remotely steal sensitive user data it has cached from its local network or host without requiring any authentication.
The data may include confidential database records, emails, website customer information, API data, Hadoop information and more.
"By using a simple debug command, hackers can reveal the 'keys' to your data and retrieve the owner's data from the other side of the world," the company said. "Additionally, it is also possible to maliciously modify the data and re-insert it into the cache without the knowledge of the Memcached owner."
Server administrators are strongly advised to install the latest Memcached 1.5.6 version which disables UDP protocol by default to prevent amplification/reflection DDoS attacks.
| Vulnerability |
Millions of WordPress sites exploitable for DDoS Attacks using Pingback mechanism | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/millions-of-wordpress-sites-exploitable.html | Distributed Denial of Service attacks have increased in scale, intensity and frequency. The wide range of motives for these attacks political , criminal, or social makes every merchant or organization with an online presence a potential target.
Over the weekend Incapsula mitigated a unique DDoS attack against a large gaming website, in which they have discovered a DDoS attack using thousands of legitimate WordPress blogs without the need for them to be compromised.
Incapsula released the list of approximately 2,500 WordPress sites from where the attack was originated, including some very large sites like Trendmicro.com, Gizmodo.it and Zendesk.com.
In a recent report, we posted about another method for DDoS attacks using DNS amplification, where a DNS request is made to an open DNS resolver with the source IP address forged so that it is the IP address of the targeted site to which the response is thus sent, but this new method uses HTTP rather than DNS.
The attack makes uses of a feature in the WordPress blogging platform called 'pingback', which allows the author of one blog to send a 'ping' to a post on another blog to notify the latter that it has been referenced. It turns out that most WordPress sites are susceptible to this abuse. Since this feature is enabled by default, and there is no protection mechanism within WordPress against it.
The Pingback mechanism has been known to be a security risk for some time. Late last year a similar vulnerability was discovered that could turn third party blogs into a powerful port-scanning engine. The vulnerability (CVE-2013-0235) was fixed in in Wordpress 3.5.1, by applying some filtering on allowed URLs.
However, in this case the requests do not appear to be amplified, which means the attackers would have to be able to control a large botnet in order for such attacks to be successful. Incapsula also added that all website using Incapsula are protected from such abuse.
| Vulnerability |
Fake Lookout android app stealing your SMS and MMS messages | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/fake-lookout-android-app-stealing-your.html | Android's App store is currently facing a new dilemma as its security has been compromised once again. Researchers from security firm TrustGo have recently spotted on Google Play a bogus app that supposedly automatizes the updating of a batch of other apps.
The malicious code was hidden within an app named, "Updates" by developer Good Byte Labs (Package name: com.updateszxt) and was designed to look like an update to the Lookout™ mobile security application.
The malware detected as Trojan!FakeLookout.A is capable of stealing SMS and MMS messages and upload them to a remote server via FTP. This virus has the potential to steal all personal business sensitive data from the users' device.
Though there are no reports of being infected by the users, it is believed that the infected users are not aware of it yet. "New approach being attempted by malware makers," TrustGo said the site in question "contains a Trojan file that targets multiple platforms including Windows, Mac, and Unix/Linux operating systems."
After the researchers notified Google, the app has been removed from Google Play. The only protection as of now is to go for good Anti-virus software. If it doesn't help you, a factory reset of the device is advised. Be aware to have your data backup before the reset.
| Malware |
Millions of Vulnerable Routers aiding Massive DNS Amplification DDoS Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/millions-of-vulnerable-routers-aiding_3.html | The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex with the increase in the skills of attackers and so, has become one of favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend or crash the services of a host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack.
Since 2013, Hackers have adopted new tactics to boost the sizes of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack known as 'Amplification Attack', leveraging the weakness in the UDP protocols. One of the commonly used by hacker is (Domain Name System) DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS).
WHAT IS DrDoS ATTACK?
The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Internet protocol spoofing, the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to the target and the target of the attack receives replies from all the DNS servers that are used. This type of attack makes it very difficult to identify the malicious sources.
MILLIONS OF HIJACKED-ROUTERS AIDING DrDoS ATTACKS
The new research carried out by DNS providers Nominum, provides ISPs with DNS based analytics and monetization solutions, revealed that the DNS-based DDoS amplification attacks have significantly increased in the recent months and hackers are using home as well as small office routers to amplify the bandwidth.
The report claimed that more than 24 million home routers, majority of which (800,000 routers) located in the UK are vulnerable to various firmware flaws, that allow hackers to gain unauthorised access and modifying DNS (Domain Name Server) settings.
In a previous report, we also disclosed that more than 200,000 Algerian TP-LINK Routers are vulnerable to Hackers, allowing them to hijack DNS requests.
This could be exposing ISPs and their users to participate in the massive Internet DNS-based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks unknowingly.
In February alone, more than five million home routers were used to generate DDoS attack traffic, and in January, more than 70% of total DNS traffic on a provider's network was associated with DNS amplification.
The impact on Internet service providers (ISPs) is four times because amplification attacks generates malicious traffic that not only consume bandwidth, but also cause support costs and impact the reputation of the ISPs, Nominum said.
"Existing in-place DDoS defenses do not work against today's amplification attacks, which can be launched by any criminal who wants to achieve maximum damage with minimum effort," explained Sanjay Kapoor, CMO and SVP of Strategy, Nominum. "Even if ISPs employ best practices to protect their networks, they can still become victims, thanks to the inherent vulnerability in open DNS proxies."
"ISPs today need more effective protections built-in to DNS servers. Modern DNS servers can precisely target attack traffic without impacting any legitimate DNS traffic. ThreatAvert combined with 'best in class' GIX portfolio overcomes gaps in DDoS defenses, enabling ISPs to constantly adapt as attackers change their exploits, and precision policies surgically remove malicious traffic."
WHY DrDoS?
The main reason of the increase in the popularity of DNS amplification or DrDoS attacks is that it requires little skills and efforts to cause major damage. The high attack bandwidth is made possible only as the attackers are using misconfigured domain-name service (DNS) servers known as open recursive resolvers or open recursors to amplify a much smaller attack into a larger data flood.
"Because vulnerable home routers mask the target of an attack it is difficult for ISPs to determine the ultimate destination and recipient of huge waves of amplified traffic," said Nominum.
RISE IN MASSIVE DDoS ATTACKS
The DDoS techniques have massively increased with the attackers becoming more skillful at working around the network security. A Year back, a massive 300Gbps DDoS attack launched against Spamhaus website that almost broke the Internet. Also earlier this year, hackers have succeeded in reaching new heights of the massive DDoS attack targeting content-delivery and anti-DDoS protection firm CloudFlare, reaching more than 400Gbps at its peak of traffic, striking at the company's data servers in Europe.
At the beginning of last month, the US-CERT also issued an alert warning, listed certain UDP protocols identified as potential attack vectors for Amplification Attack, including DNS, NTP, SNMPv2, NetBIOS, SSDP ,CharGEN, QOTD, BitTorrent, Kad, Quake Network and Protocol Steam Protocol.
Users are recommended to change the default username and password of their routers and ensure that you have updated router firmware installed with security patches. You router should be accessible only from the local network or LAN.
| Vulnerability |
Android Flaw Lets Hackers Inject Malware Into Apps Without Altering Signatures | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/android-malware-signature.html | Millions of Android devices are at serious risk of a newly disclosed critical vulnerability that allows attackers to secretly overwrite legitimate applications installed on your smartphone with their malicious versions.
Dubbed Janus, the vulnerability allows attackers to modify the code of Android apps without affecting their signature verification certificates, eventually allowing them to distribute malicious update for the legitimate apps, which looks and works same as the original apps.
The vulnerability (CVE-2017-13156) was discovered and reported to Google by security researchers from mobile security firm GuardSquare this summer and has been patched by Google, among four dozen vulnerabilities, as part of its December Android Security Bulletin.
However, the worrisome part is that majority of Android users would not receive these patches for next few month, until their device manufacturers (OEMs) release custom updates for them, apparently leaving a large number of smartphone users vulnerable to hackers.
The vulnerability affects apps using APK signature scheme v1 installed on devices running Android versions 5 (Lollipop) and 6 (Marshmallow).
Explained: How Android Janus Vulnerability Works?
The vulnerability resides in the way Android handles APK installation for some apps, leaving a possibility to add extra bytes of code to an APK file without affecting the application's signature.
Before proceeding further, you need to know some basics about an APK file.
A valid APK file is a type of archive file, just like Zip, which includes application code, resources, assets, signatures, certificates, and manifest file.
Earlier versions of Android operating system 5.0 (Lollipop) and 6.0 (Marshmallow) also support a process virtual machine that helps to execute APK archives containing a compiled version of application code and files, compressed with DEX (Dalvik EXecutable) file format.
While installing an Android app or its update, your device checks APK header information to determine if the archive contains code in the compressed DEX files.
If header says APK archive contains DEX files, the process virtual machine decompiles the code accordingly and executes it; otherwise, it runs the code as a regular APK file.
It turns out that an APK archive can contain DEX files as well as regular application code simultaneously, without affecting its validity and signatures.
Researchers find that this ability to add extra bytes of code due to lack of file integrity checking could allow attackers to prepend malicious code compiled in DEX format into an APK archive containing legitimate code with valid signatures, eventually tricking app installation process to execute both code on the targeted device without being detected.
In other words, the hack doesn't require attackers to modify the code of legitimate applications (that makes signatures invalid)—instead, the vulnerability allows malware authors to merely add some extra malicious lines of code to the original app.
Attack Scenarios
After creating malicious but valid versions of legitimate applications, hackers can distribute them using various attack vectors, including spam emails, third-party app stores delivering fake apps and updates, social engineering, and even man-in-the-middle attacks.
According to the researchers, it may be "relatively easy to trick some users because the application can still look exactly like the original application and has the proper signature."
I find man-in-the-middle attack more interesting, as it could allow hackers to push malicious installation for the apps designed to receive its updates over an unencrypted HTTP connection.
"When the user downloads an update of an application, the Android runtime compares its signature with the signature of the original version. If the signatures match, the Android runtime proceeds to install the update," GuardSquare explains.
"The updated application inherits the permissions of the original application. Attackers can, therefore, use the Janus vulnerability to mislead the update process and get an unverified code with powerful permissions installed on the devices of unsuspecting users."
"For experts, the common reverse engineering tools do not show the injected code. Users should always be vigilant when downloading applications and updates," the security firm added.
Since this vulnerability does not affect Android 7 (Nougat) and latest, which supports APK signature scheme version 2, users running older Android versions are highly recommended to upgrade their device OS (if available).
It's unfortunate, but if your device manufacturer neither offers security patches nor the latest Android version, then you should not install apps and updates from outside of Google Play Store to minimise the risk of being hacked.
Researchers also advised Android developers always to apply signature scheme v2 in order to ensure their apps cannot be tampered with.
| Malware |
Malware Encoded Into DNA Hacks the Computer that Reads It | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/hacking-computer-with-dna.html | Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years?
Even in March this year, a team of researchers successfully stored digital data — an entire operating system, a movie, an Amazon gift card, a study and a computer virus — in the strands of DNA.
But what if someone stores a malicious program into the DNA, just like an infected USB storage, to hijack the computer that reads it.
A team of researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have demonstrated the first successful DNA-based exploit of a computer system that executes the malicious code written into the synthesised DNA strands while reading it.
To carry out the hack, the researchers created biological malware and encoded it in a short stretch of DNA, which allowed them to gain "full control" of a computer that tried to process the genetic data when read by a DNA sequencing machine.
The DNA-based hack becomes possible due to lack of security in multiple DNA processing software available online, which contains insecure function calls and buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
"We analysed the security of 13 commonly used, open source programs. We selected these programs methodically, choosing ones written in C/C++," reads the research paper [PDF], titled "Computer Security, Privacy, and DNA Sequencing: Compromising Computers with Synthesized DNA, Privacy Leaks, and More."
"We found that existing biological analysis programs have a much higher frequency of insecure C runtime library function calls (e.g., strcpy). This suggests that DNA processing software has not incorporated modern software security best practices."
To create the biological malware, the researchers translated a simple computer program into a short stretch of 176 DNA letters, denoted as A, G, C, and T, each representing a binary pair (A=00, C=01, G=10, T=11).
The exploit took advantage of a basic buffer overflow attack, in which a software program executes the malicious command because it falls outside maximum length.
The command then contacted a server controlled by the team, from where the researchers took control of a computer in their laboratory they were using to analyse the DNA file.
"Our exploit did not target a program used by biologists in the field; rather it targeted one that we modified to contain a known vulnerability," the researchers said.
Although this kind of hack probably doesn't pose any threat anytime soon, the team warned that hackers could in future use fake blood or spit samples to gain access to computers, steal information, or hack medical equipments installed at forensic labs, hospitals and the DNA-based data storage centers.
The researchers will be presenting this first "DNA-based exploit of a computer system" at the next week's Usenix Security Symposium in Vancouver. For the more in-depth explanation on the DNA-based hack, you can head on to the research paper.
| Vulnerability |
Masque Attack — New iOS Vulnerability Allows Hackers to Replace Apps with Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/masque-attack-new-ios-vulnerability_10.html | Android have been a long time target for cyber criminals, but now it seems that they have turned their way towards iOS devices. Apple always says that hacking their devices is too difficult for cyber crooks, but a single app has made it possible for anyone to hack an iPhone.
A security flaw in Apple's mobile iOS operating system has made most iPhones and iPads vulnerable to cyber attacks by hackers seeking access to sensitive data and control of their devices, security researchers warned.
The details about this new vulnerability was published by the Cyber security firm FireEye on its blog on Monday, saying the flaw allows hackers to access devices by fooling users to download and install malicious iOS applications on their iPhone or iPad via tainted text messages, emails and Web links.
MASQUE ATTACK - REPLACING TRUSTED APPS
The malicious iOS apps can then be used to replace the legitimate apps, such as banking or social networking apps, that were installed through Apple's official App Store through a technique that FireEye has dubbed "Masque Attack."
"This vulnerability exists because iOS doesn't enforce matching certificates for apps with the same bundle identifier," the researchers said on the company's blog. "An attacker can leverage this vulnerability both through wireless networks and USB."
Masque attacks can be used by cyber criminals to steal banking and email login credentials or users' other sensitive information.
Security researchers found that the Masque attack works on Apple's mobile operating system including iOS 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 8.0, 8.1, and the 8.1.1 beta version and that all of the iPhones and iPads running iOS 7 or later, regardless of whether or not the device is jailbroken are at risk.
According to FireEye, the vast majority, i.e. 95 percent, of all iOS devices currently in use are potentially vulnerable to the attack.
MASQUE ATTACK IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN WIRELURKER
The Masque Attack technique is the same used by "WireLurker," malware attack discovered last week by security firm Palo Alto Networks targeting Apple users in China, that allowed unapproved apps designed to steal information downloaded from the Internet. But this recently-discovered malware threat is reportedly a "much bigger threat" than Wirelurker.
"Masque Attacks can pose much bigger threats than WireLurker," the researchers said. "Masque Attacks can replace authentic apps,such as banking and email apps, using attacker's malware through the Internet. That means the attacker can steal user's banking credentials by replacing an authentic banking app with an malware that has identical UI."
"Surprisingly, the malware can even access the original app's local data, which wasn't removed when the original app was replaced. These data may contain cached emails, or even login-tokens which the malware can use to log into the user's account directly."
HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM MASQUE ATTACK
Apple devices running iOS are long considered more safe from hackers than devices running OS like Microsoft's Windows and Google's Android, but iOS have now become more common targets for cybercriminals.
In order to avoid falling victim to Masque Attack, users can follow some simple steps given below:
Do not download any apps offer to you via email, text messages, or web links.
Don't install apps offered on pop-ups from third-party websites.
If iOS alerts a user about an "Untrusted App Developer," click "Don't Trust" on the alert and immediately uninstall the application.
In short, a simple way to safeguard your devices from these kind of threats is to avoid downloading apps from untrusted sources, and only download apps directly from the App Store.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Found Using A New Way to Bypass Microsoft Office 365 Safe Links | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/microsoft-safelinks-phishing.html | Security researchers revealed a way around that some hacking groups have been found using in the wild to bypass a security feature of Microsoft Office 365, which is originally designed to protect users from malware and phishing attacks.
Dubbed Safe Links, the feature has been included in Office 365 software as part of Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) solution that works by replacing all URLs in an incoming email with Microsoft-owned secure URLs.
So, every time a user clicks on a link provided in an email, it first sends the user to a Microsoft owned domain, where the company immediately checks the original URL for anything suspicious. If Microsoft's scanners detect any malicious element, it then warns users about it, and if not, it redirects the user to the original link.
However, researchers at cloud security company Avanan have revealed how attackers have been bypassing the Safe Links feature by using a technique called, "baseStriker attack."
BaseStriker attack involves using the <base> tag in the header of an HTML email—which is used to defines a default base URI, or URL, for relative links in a document or web page.
In other words, if the <base> URL is defined, then all subsequent relative links will use that URL as a starting point.
As shown in the above screenshot, the researchers compared HTML code of a traditional phishing email with the one that uses a <base> tag to split up the malicious link in a way that Safe Links fails to identify and replace the partial hyperlink, eventually redirecting victims to the phishing site, when clicked.
Researchers have even provided a video demonstration, which shows the baseStriker attack in action.
The researchers tested the baseStriker attack against several configurations and found that "anyone using Office 365 in any configuration is vulnerable," be it web-based client, mobile app or desktop application of OutLook.
Proofpoint is also found vulnerable to the baseStriker attack. However, Gmail users and those protecting their Office 365 with Mimecast are not impacted by this issue.
So far, researchers have only seen hackers using the baseStriker attack to send phishing emails, but they believe the attack can be leveraged to distribute ransomware, malware and other malicious software.
Avanan reported the issue to both Microsoft and Proofpoint earlier last weekend, but there is no patch available to fix the problem at the time of writing.
| Cyber_Attack |
Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) Portal Suffers Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/joomla-data-breach.html | Joomla, one of the most popular Open-source content management systems (CMS), last week announced a new data breach impacting 2,700 users who have an account with its resources directory (JRD) website, i.e., resources.joomla.org.
The breach exposed affected users' personal information, such as full names, business addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords.
The company said the incident came to light during an internal website audit that revealed that a member of the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) team stored a full unencrypted backup of the JRD website on an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket owned by the third-party company.
The affected JRD portal lists developers and service providers specialized in Joomla, allowing registered users to extend their CMS with additional functionalities.
Joomla said the investigation is still ongoing and that accesses to the website have been temporarily suspended. It has also reached out to the concerned third-party to get the data deleted. It's not clear if any party found the unencrypted backup and accessed the information.
The details that could have been potentially accessed by an unauthorized third-party are as follows:
Full names
Business addresses
Business email addresses
Business phone numbers
Company URLs
Nature of business
Encrypted passwords (hashed)
IP addresses
Newsletter subscription preferences
The impact of the breach is said to be low, given that most of the information is already in the public domain.
In addition to mandating a password reset for all impacted accounts, it's recommended to change them on other sites that reuse the same password to prevent credential stuffing attacks.
As a consequence of the audit, Joomla has removed all users who've not logged in before January 1st, 2019, as well as several unused groups. Furthermore, it has enabled two-factor authentication and rolled out security fixes on its platform.
"Even if we don't have any evidence about data access, we highly recommend people who have an account on the Joomla Resources Directory and use the same password (or combination of an email address and password) on other services to immediately change their password for security reasons," Joomla said in the advisory.
| Data_Breaches |
Researchers to Share Details of Cyber-Terrorists Targeting Indian Government Officials | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/hacker-cyber-terrorism.html | The Potential threat, range from very narrow to very broad, posed by Cyber-Terrorism has provoked considerable alarm.
Terrorists involved in Cyber Espionage and Operations aim at gaining access to Nation's critical infrastructure involving both Government as well as Private sectors.
The Frequency and Intensity of such Cyber-attacks are increasing rapidly and extending into absolute cyber-war between states, allowing terrorist organizations to pilfer data from financial and military organizations.
Similar Incident happened, few months back, when a group of Middle-east terrorists tried to infiltrate Indian Government officials operational in Cyber related divisions.
In response, a team of Independent Indian security researchers planned a counter operation to track down the terrorist organization behind the cyber attack.
Shesh Sarangdhar, a security researcher at Seclabs & Systems Pvt. told The Hacker News that his team successfully penetrated the source computer (using zero-day exploits) used for spreading malware to Government officials and found that the attacker's IP address belongs to Pakistan Telecommunication company limited.
"Upon Analysis, the infected system appeared be a part of an elaborately designed cyber operation center," Mr. Sarangdhar explained.
Researchers found a directory called "Umer Media" on that compromised system, which contained Excel files maintaining a list of "multiple social media profiles of terrorism bent."
"Excel file elaborately maintained the details of individuals who comment and like on these pages. Many of these social media profiles were later analyzed and revealed some key players behind the cyber-terror organization," he told The Hacker News team.
The goal of cyber counter operation conducted by the Indian researchers was to prevent cyber attacks against any and all critical infrastructures.
Moreover, the researchers obtained mobile numbers of those key players and compromised their devices using a zero-day vulnerability in Maxthon browser.
"The mobile communication revealed that around 1000 mujahids were being trained to infiltrate Indian borders," Mr. Sarangdhar told us.
Shesh Sarangdhar and his team will present the complete technical details of their operation, zero-day vulnerabilities used and the malware analysis at upcoming "1337Con" CyberSecurity Conference.
| Cyber_Attack |
Microsoft Kept Secret That Its Bug-Tracking Database Was Hacked In 2013 | https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/microsoft-bug-tracking-breach.html | It was not just Yahoo among "Fortune 500" companies who tried to keep a major data breach incident secret.
Reportedly, Microsoft had also suffered a data breach four and a half years ago (in 2013), when a "highly sophisticated hacking group" breached its bug-reporting and patch-tracking database, but the hack was never made public until today.
According to five former employees of the company, interviewed separately by Reuters, revealed that the breached database had been "poorly protected with access possible via little more than a password."
This incident is believed to be the second known breach of such a corporate database after a critical zero-day vulnerability was discovered in Mozilla's Bugzilla bug-tracking software in 2014.
As its name suggests, the bug-reporting and patch-tracking database for Windows contained information on critical and unpatched vulnerabilities in some of the most widely used software in the world, including Microsoft's own Windows operating system.
The hack was believed to be carried out by a highly-skilled corporate espionage hacking group known by various names, including Morpho, Butterfly and Wild Neutron, who exploited a JAVA zero-day vulnerability to hack into Apple Mac computers of the Microsoft employees, "and then move to company networks."
With such a database in hands, the so-called highly sophisticated hacking group could have developed zero-day exploits and other hacking tools to target systems worldwide.
There's no better example than WannaCry ransomware attack to explain what a single zero-day vulnerability can do.
"Bad guys with inside access to that information would literally have a 'skeleton key' for hundreds of millions of computers around the world," said Eric Rosenbach, who was American deputy assistant secretary of defence for cyber at the time of the breach.
When Microsoft discovered the compromised database in earlier 2013, an alarm spread inside the company.
Following the concerns that hackers were using stolen vulnerabilities to conduct new attacks, the tech giant conducted a study to compare the timing of breaches with when the bugs had entered the database and when they were patched.
Although the study found that the flaws in the stolen database were used in cyber attacks, Microsoft argued the hackers could have obtained the information elsewhere, and that there's "no evidence that the stolen information had been used in those breaches."
Former employees also confirmed that the tech giant tightened up its security after the 2013 hacking incident and added multiple authentication layers to protect its bug-reporting system.
However, three of the employees believes the study conducted by Microsoft did not rule out stolen vulnerabilities being used in future cyber attacks, and neither the tech giant conducted a thorough investigation into the incident.
On being contacted, Microsoft declined to speak about the incident, beyond saying: "Our security teams actively monitor cyber threats to help us prioritise and take appropriate action to keep customers protected."
| Data_Breaches |
New Chrome 0-day Bug Under Active Attacks – Update Your Browser ASAP! | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/new-chrome-0-day-bug-under-active.html | Exactly a month after patching an actively exploited zero-day flaw in Chrome, Google today rolled out fixes for yet another zero-day vulnerability in the world's most popular web browser that it says is being abused in the wild.
Chrome 89.0.4389.72, released by the search giant for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Tuesday, comes with a total of 47 security fixes, the most severe of which concerns an "object lifecycle issue in audio."
Tracked as CVE-2021-21166, the security flaw is one of the two bugs reported last month by Alison Huffman of Microsoft Browser Vulnerability Research on February 11. A separate object lifecycle flaw, also identified in the audio component, was reported to Google on February 4, the same day the stable version of Chrome 88 became available.
With no additional details, it's not immediately clear if the two security shortcomings are related.
Google acknowledged that an exploit for the vulnerability exists in the wild but stopped short of sharing more specifics to allow a majority of users to install the fixes and prevent other threat actors from creating exploits targeting this zero-day.
"Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2021-21166 exists in the wild," Chrome Technical Program Manager Prudhvikumar Bommana said.
This is the second zero-day flaw in Chrome that Google has addressed since the start of the year.
On February 4, the company issued a fix for an actively-exploited heap buffer overflow flaw (CVE-2021-21148) in its V8 JavaScript rendering engine. Additionally, Google last year resolved five Chrome zero-days that were actively exploited in the wild in a span of one month between October 20 and November 12.
Chrome users can update to the latest version by heading to Settings > Help > About Google Chrome to mitigate the risk associated with the flaw.
| Vulnerability |
Source Code for IoT botnet responsible for World's largest DDoS Attack released Online | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/mirai-source-code-iot-botnet.html | With rapidly growing Internet of Thing (IoT) devices, they have become a much more attractive target for cybercriminals.
Just recently we saw a record-breaking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the France-based hosting provider OVH that reached over one Terabit per second (1 Tbps), which was carried out via a botnet of infected IoT devices.
Now, such attacks are expected to grow more rapidly as someone has just released the source code for IoT botnet, which was 'apparently' used to carry out world's largest DDoS attacks.
Internet of Things-Botnet 'Mirai' Released Online
Dubbed Mirai, the malware is a DDoS Trojan that targets BusyBox systems, a collection of Unix utilities specifically designed for embedded devices like routers.
The malware is programmed to hijack connected IoT devices that are using the default usernames and passwords set by the factory before devices are first shipped to customers.
Spotted by Brian Krebs, the "Mirai" source code was released on Hackforums, a widely used hacker chat forum, on Friday.
However, there is no concrete evidence that this is the same botnet malware that was used to conduct record-breaking DDoS attacks on Krebs' or OVH hosting website.
Reportedly, the attack code has built-in scanners that look for vulnerable smart devices in homes and enroll them into a network of Botnet, that hackers and cyber criminals can then use in a DDoS attack to temporarily shut down any website.
The hacker, nicknamed "Anna-senpai," who released the Mirai source code said they have "made their money...so it's time to GTFO."
"So today, I have an amazing release for you," Anna-senpai wrote. "With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping."
Even after the above explanation, I am still wondering why the malware's author chose to dump the code online over making big money.
Beware: Don't Download It Or Use at your own risk!
I apologize, if you are looking for the download link. We came across hundreds of such malware and their source codes, but ethically we don't prefer to promote them through our articles because that could indirectly advantage more blackhat hackers to cause further damages.
What if the source code contains any backdoor?
It is not at all surprising to believe so, as we have seen several cases in past years, when hackers have taken advantage of trending or hot events (or incidents), in this case record-breaking DDoS attack, to post and distribute their backdoored malware strategically.
Now that the malware is publicly released, anyone can download and use it to infect a large number of devices worldwide to create their own IoT botnet.
And if the code contains any backdoor, it would not only compromise the user who downloads it from the hacking forum but also hijacks those who are part of that user's botnet network.
So, we advise beginner and our enthusiast readers not to rush to download Mirai IoT Botnet files.
Since manufacturers of IoT devices majorly focus on performance and usability and ignore security measures and encryption mechanisms, they are routinely being hacked and used as weapons in cyber attacks.
Just recently we reported about vulnerable D-Link routers that are programmed in such a way that they contain several backdoors, which allow attackers to remotely hijack and control them, as well as network, leaving all connected devices vulnerable to cyber attacks.
So, if you own one or more IoT devices, the first thing you need to do in order to protect yourself against cyber attacks is change those default credentials.
| Malware |
125 New Flaws Found in Routers and NAS Devices from Popular Brands | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/hacking-soho-routers.html | The world of connected consumer electronics, IoT, and smart devices is growing faster than ever with tens of billions of connected devices streaming and sharing data wirelessly over the Internet, but how secure is it?
As we connect everything from coffee maker to front-door locks and cars to the Internet, we're creating more potential—and possibly more dangerous—ways for hackers to wreak havoc.
Believe me, there are over 100 ways a hacker can ruin your life just by compromising your wireless router—a device that controls the traffic between your local network and the Internet, threatening the security and privacy of a wide range of wireless devices, from computers and phones to IP Cameras, smart TVs and connected appliances.
In its latest study titled "SOHOpelessly Broken 2.0," Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) discovered a total of 125 different security vulnerabilities across 13 small office/home office (SOHO) routers and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, likely affecting millions.
"Today, we show that security controls put in place by device manufacturers are insufficient against attacks carried out by remote adversaries. This research project aimed to uncover and leverage new techniques to circumvent these new security controls in embedded devices," the researchers said.
List of Affected Router Vendors
SOHO routers and NAS devices tested by the researchers are from the following manufacturers:
Buffalo
Synology
TerraMaster
Zyxel
Drobo
ASUS and its subsidiary Asustor
Seagate
QNAP
Lenovo
Netgear
Xiaomi
Zioncom (TOTOLINK)
According to the security researchers, all of these 13 widely-used devices they tested had at least one web application vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to gain remote shell access or access to the administrative panel of the affected device.
These vulnerabilities range from cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), buffer overflow, operating system command injection (OS CMDi), authentication bypass, SQL injection (SQLi), and file upload path traversal vulnerabilities.
Full Control Over Devices Without Authentication
Researchers said they successfully obtained root shells on 12 of the devices, allowing them to have complete control over the affected devices, 6 of which contained flaws that would enable attackers to gain full control over a device remotely and without authentication.
These affected business and home routers are Asustor AS-602T, Buffalo TeraStation TS5600D1206, TerraMaster F2-420, Drobo 5N2, Netgear Nighthawk R9000, and TOTOLINK A3002RU.
This new report, SOHOpelessly Broken 2.0, is a follow-up study, SOHOpelessly Broken 1.0, published by the ISE security firm in 2013, when they disclosed a total of 52 vulnerabilities in 13 SOHO routers and NAS devices from vendors including TP-Link, ASUS, and Linksys.
Since SOHOpelessly Broken 1.0, researchers said they found a few newer IoT devices implementing some useful security mechanisms in place, like address-space layout randomization (ASLR), functionalities that hinder reverse engineering, and integrity verification mechanisms for HTTP requests.
However, some things have not changed since SOHOpelessly Broken 1.0, like many IoT devices still lack basic web application protection features, like anti-CSRF tokens and browser security headers, which can greatly enhance the security posture of web applications and the underlying systems they interact with.
ISE researchers responsibly reported all of the vulnerabilities they discovered to affected device manufacturers, most of which promptly responded and already took security measures to mitigate these vulnerabilities, which have already received CVE Ids.
However, some device manufacturers, including Drobo, Buffalo Americas, and Zioncom Holdings, did not respond to the researchers' findings.
| Vulnerability |
3 Popular Drupal Modules Found Vulnerable — Patch Released | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/drupal-security-update_14.html | Just yesterday, I wrote a warning article announcing that Drupal – the popular open source content management system – will release patches for several highly critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) bugs that could allow attackers to fully take over any affected site.
Below are the three separate Drupal modules that affect up to 10,000 websites:
1. RESTful Web Services – a popular module used for creating REST APIs, which is currently installed on at least 5,804 websites.
The vulnerability in RESTWS alters the default page callbacks for entities to provide additional functionality, allowing attackers to "send specially crafted requests resulting in arbitrary PHP execution."
Since anonymous users can exploit this vulnerability and there isn't any mitigating factor, users are advised to patch their websites as soon as possible.
Admins using RESTful Web Services versions 7.x-2.x prior to 7.x-2.6 and versions 7.x-1.x prior to 7.x-1.7 for their Drupal websites are affected and are advised to upgrade to the latest RESTful Web Services releases.
2. Coder – a module used for code analysis, which is currently installed on at least 4,951 sites.
The vulnerability exists in the Coder module that does not properly validate user inputs in a script file that has the PHP extension, allowing a malicious unauthorized user to make requests directly to this file to execute arbitrary code.
To exploit the vulnerability, the Coder module does not even need to be enabled. The presence of the module on the file system and being reachable from the Web are enough for an attacker to exploit this flaw.
Coder module versions 7.x-1.x prior to 7.x-1.3 and versions 7.x-2.x prior to 7.x-2.6 are affected. Admins using the Coder module for Drupal 7.x should upgrade to the latest releases.
3. Webform Multiple File Upload – a module used for collecting files from site visitors, which is currently installed on at least 3,076 sites.
The Webform Multiple File Upload module contains a Remote Code Execution flaw that could allow an attacker to take over any affected site entirely using some specially crafted requests.
Any site visitor could potentially exploit this vulnerability to take several malicious actions on the website, including completely taking over the website and server.
This vulnerability exists in the Webform Multiple File Upload (webform_multifile) module versions 7.x-1.x and is fixed in the latest Webform Multiple File Upload version 7.x-1.4.
| Vulnerability |
Enable this New Setting to Secure your Computer from Macro-based Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/macro-malware-protection.html | Do you deal with MS Word files on the daily basis?
If yes, then are you aware that even opening a simple doc file could compromise your system?
It is a matter to think that the virus does not directly affect you, but it is you who let the virus carry out the attack by enabling deadly "Macros" to view the doc contents that are generally on eye-catching subjects like bank invoice.
How Macros are Crippling your System?
The concept of Macros dates back to 1990s. You must be familiar with this message: "Warning: This document contains macros."
A Macro is a series of commands and actions that help to automate some tasks. Microsoft Office programs support Macros written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but they can also be used for malicious activities like installing malware.
Hackers are cleverly using this technique on the shade of social engineering by sending the malicious Macros through doc file or spreadsheet with an eye-catching subject in the mail to the corporate networks.
Once a user opens the malicious Word document, the doc file gets downloaded to its system. However, danger comes in when the user opens the file, and a popup window appears that states "Enable Editing" to view the content.
Once the users click Enable Editing, the malicious file then begins to perform the notorious activities in the system such as to get embedded into other doc files to proliferate the attacking rate that results in crippling your system network.
All those actions would depend upon payload program defines inside the Macro.
Dridex and Locky are Warning Bells!!!
No other incidents could get you the clear picture on the potential threat of Macro viruses apart from Dridex Malware and Locky Ransomware. Both malware had made use of the malicious Macros to hijack systems.
Over 20 Million Euro had been stolen from the UK banks with the Dridex Malware, which got triggered via a nasty macro virus. The infectious bar of Locky ransomware had also seen an exponential growth in a couple of hours.
How to Protect Yourself from Macro-based Malware?
Step 1: Configure Trusted Location
Since disabling Macros is not a feasible option, especially in an office environment where Macros are designed to simplify the complex task with automation.
So, if your organization relies on Macros, you can move files that use Macros into the company's DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), also called Trusted Location.
To configure the trusted location, you can navigate via:
User Configuration/Administrative Templates/Microsoft Office XXX 20XX/Application Settings/Security/Trust Center/Trusted Locations
Once configured, the Macros that does not belong to the trusted location would not run in any way, beefing up your system's security.
Step 2: Block Macros in Office Files that came from the Internet
Microsoft had recently unveiled a novel method by implementing a new tactical security feature to limit the Macro execution attack in MS Office 2016, ultimately preventing your system from hijacking.
The new feature is a group policy setting that lets enterprise administrators to disable macros from running in Office files that come from the Internet.
The new setting is called, "Block macros from running in Office files from the Internet" and can be navigated through the group policy management editor under:
User configuration > Administrative templates > Microsoft Word 2016 > Word Options > Security > Trust Center
It can be configured for each Office application.
By enabling this option, macros that come from the Internet are blocked from running even if you have 'enable all macros' in the Macros Settings.
Moreover, instead of having the option to 'Enable Editing,' you'll receive a notification that macros are blocked from running, as the document comes from an Untrusted Source.
The only way to run that particular Office file is to save it to a trusted location, allowing macros to run.
| Malware |
Exclusive - openSUSE Forum Hacked; 79500 Users Data Compromised | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/openSUSE-Forum-Hacked-by-Pakistani-hacker.html | After Snapchat hack, this can be another worst data breach of the new year. A Pakistani hacker 'H4x0r HuSsY' has successfully compromised the official Forum of 'openSUSE', a Linux distro developed, sponsored & supported by SUSE.
The hacker managed to deface the Forum and uploaded its custom message page as shown and account information of 79,500 registered users' may have been compromised. (The forum was defaced at the time of writing - Check Here)
The popular website MacRumors's Forum was compromised in last November using an alleged zero day exploit, which is based on vBulletin, a famous forum software. The openSUSE Forum is also based upon vBulletin.
Another interesting fact is that openSUSE is still using vBulletin 4.2.1, which is vulnerable to inject rogue administrator accounts flaw. Whereas, the latest patched vBulletin 5.0.5 is available. Possibly, Hacker exploits same or another known vBulletin version 4.2.1 vulnerability to access the website's administrative panel.
Zone-H Mirror of the defaced page: https://zone-h.org/mirror/id/21473823
It seems that openSUSE team is even not aware about the data breach, but we have informed them and also trying to contact the hacker for further information on this.
Update (7:00 PM Tuesday, January 7, 2014 GMT): The Pakistani Hacker confirmed is that has uploaded a PHP shell on the forum server using his own Private vBulletin's zero-day exploit, that allows him to browse, read or write/overwrite any file on the Forum server without root privileges.
There are a few screenshots shared by hacker with us:
He also claimed to have the full access to the user's database, however he has promised not to disclose the database dump because the purpose of the hack is only to highlight the security weakness.
Another important claim by the hacker that vBulletin 5.0.5 latest version is also vulnerable to his zero-day exploit and there is no patch yet available to fix it. He noticed that after our news report, the Server administrator has removed the defaced page, but to proof his exploit he has uploaded another file on the server again:
There are thousands of Forums using vBulletin software and many of them are huge huge.. Well hacker has not shared any information about the vulnerability, but we are sure that official vBulletin team will consider this critical threat to fix with high priority.
Update (7:24 PM Tuesday, January 7, 2014 GMT): openSUSE team has informed the users' via tweets about the breach,"Warning: Our forums are down because they were defaced. We're currently investigating what exactly has happened."
But they have mentioned that, "Rest assured, no user credentials have been leaked as we use a single sign on system for our services. Note that we use SSO so we don't think we lost any account data."
After openSUSE's tweet, the hacker has shared some sample database screenshots on his Facebook account to prove the database hack. We have partially blur the screenshot before sharing, to keep sensitive data secure, as shown above.
Update (4:00 AM Wednesday, January 8, 2014 GMT): In a blog post, openSUSE team confirmed that their website and database have been hacked, but users' passwords are not compromised.
A cracker managed to exploit a vulnerability in the forum software which made it possible to upload files and gave access to the forum database.
The team explained, they are using single-sign-on system (Access Manager from NetIQ) that manage the real passwords.
Credentials for your openSUSE login are not saved in our application databases as we use a single-sign-on system (Access Manager from NetIQ) for all our services. This is a completely separate system and it has not been compromised by this crack. What the cracker reported as compromised passwords where indeed random, automatically set strings that are in no way connected to your real password.
| Data_Breaches |
Java based Cross platform malware targeting Apache Tomcat servers in the wild | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/java-based-cross-platform-malware.html | Takashi Katsuki, a researcher at Antivirus firm Symantec has discovered a new cyber attack ongoing in the wild, targeting an open-source Web server application server Apache Tomcat with a cross platform Java based backdoor that can be used to attack other machines.
The malware, dubbed as "Java.Tomdep" differs from other server malware and is not written in the PHP scripting language. It is basically a Java based backdoor act as Java Servlet that gives Apache Tomcat platforms malicious capabilities.
Because Java is a cross platform language, the affected platforms include Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and most supported versions of Windows. The malware was detected less than a month ago and so far the number of infected machines appears to be low.
You may think that this type of attack only targets personal computers, such as desktops and laptops, but unfortunately that isn't true. Servers can also be attacked. They are quite valuable targets, since they are usually high-performance computers and run 24x7.
Java worm seeks out for the system having Apache Tomcat installed-running and then attempts to log-in using the password brute-force attack using combinations of user names and passwords.
After installation, the malware servlet behaves like an IRC Bot and able to receive commands from an attacker. Malware is capable of sending-downloading files from the system, create new processes, update itself, can setup SOCKS proxy, UDP flooding i.e. Can perform massive DDoS Attack.
They have mentioned that the command-and-control servers have been traced to Taiwan and Luxembourg. In order to avoid this threat, ensure that your server and AV products are fully patched and updated.
| Malware |
Firefox 67.0.4 Released — Mozilla Patches Second 0-Day Flaw This Week | https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/firefox-0day-vulnerability.html | Okay, folks, it's time to update your Firefox web browser once again—yes, for the second time this week.
After patching a critical actively-exploited vulnerability in Firefox 67.0.3 earlier this week, Mozilla is now warning millions of its users about a second zero-day vulnerability that attackers have been found exploiting in the wild.
The newly patched issue (CVE-2019-11708) is a "sandbox escape" vulnerability, which if chained together with the previously patched "type confusion" bug (CVE-2019-11707), allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on victims' computers just by convincing them into visiting a malicious website.
Browser sandboxing is a security mechanism that keeps third-party processes isolated and confined to the browser, preventing them from damaging other sensitive parts of a computer's operating system.
"Insufficient vetting of parameters passed with the Prompt:Open IPC message between child and parent processes can result in the non-sandboxed parent process opening web content chosen by a compromised child process," the advisory explains.
Firefox 0-Days Found Exploited in the Wild
Mozilla has already been aware of the first issue since April when a Google Project Zero researcher reported it to the company, but it learned about the second issue and attacks in the wild just last week when attackers started exploiting both the flaws together to target employees from Coinbase platform and users of other cryptocurrency firms.
Just yesterday, macOS security expert Patrick Wardle also published a report revealing that a separate campaign against cryptocurrency users is also using same Firefox 0-days to install a macOS malware on targeted computers.
At this moment it's not clear if attackers independently discovered the first vulnerability just in time when it was already reported to Mozilla or gained classified bug-report information through another way.
Install Firefox Patches to Prevent Cyber Attacks
Anyway, the company has now released Firefox version 67.0.4 and Firefox ESR 60.7.2 that address both the issues, preventing attackers from remotely taking control over your systems.
Though Firefox installs latest available updates automatically, users are still advised to ensure they are running Firefox 67.0.4 or later.
Besides this, just like the patch for the previous issue, it is also expected that the Tor Project will once again release a new version of its privacy browser very soon to patch the second bug as well.
Important Update (21/06/2019) ➤ The Tor Project on Friday also released second update (Tor Browser 8.5.3) for its privacy web-browser this week that patches the second vulnerability Firefox patched yesterday.
| Cyber_Attack |
Experts Uncover Yet Another Chinese Spying Campaign Aimed at Southeast Asia | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/experts-uncover-yet-another-chinese.html | An ongoing cyber-espionage operation with suspected ties to China has been found targeting a Southeast Asian government to deploy spyware on Windows systems while staying under the radar for more than three years.
"In this campaign, the attackers utilized the set of Microsoft Office exploits and loaders with anti-analysis and anti-debugging techniques to install a previously unknown backdoor on victim's machines," researchers from Check Point Research said in a report published today.
The infection chain works by sending decoy documents, impersonating other entities within the government, to multiple members of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, when opened, retrieves a next-stage payload from the attacker's server that contains an encrypted downloader. The downloader, in turn, gathers and exfiltrates system information to a remote server that subsequently responds back with a shellcode loader.
The use of weaponized copies of legitimate-looking official documents also suggests that "the attackers first had to attack another department within the targeted state, stealing and weaponizing documents for use against the Ministry of Foreign Affairs," said Lotem Finkelstein, head of threat intelligence at Check Point.
The last link in the attack involves the loader establishing a connection with the remote server to download, decrypt, and execute an implant dubbed "VictoryDll_x86.dll" that's capable of performing file operations, capturing screenshots, creating and terminating processes, and even shutting down the infected machine.
Check Point said the adversary placed significant effort into concealing its activity by changing the infrastructure multiple times since its development in 2017, with the backdoor receiving its own fair share of revisions to make it more resilient to analysis and decrease the detection rates at each stage.
The long-running campaign has been linked with "medium to high confidence" to a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group it calls "SharpPanda" based on test versions of the backdoor dating back to 2018 that were uploaded to VirusTotal from China and the actor's use of Royal Road RTF weaponizer, a tool that been used in campaigns attributed to well-known Chinese threat groups since late 2018.
Several other clues point to this conclusion, including the fact that the command-and-control (C2) servers returned payloads only between 01:00 and 08:00 UTC, which the researchers suspect are the working hours in the attackers' country, and that no payloads were returned by the C2 servers between May 1 and 5 — even during working hours — which coincides with the Labor Day holidays in China.
The development is yet another indication that multiple cyberthreat groups believed to be working in support of China's long-term economic interests are continuing to hammer away at networks belonging to governments and organizations, while simultaneously spending a great deal of time refining the tools in their arsenal in order to hide their intrusions.
"All the evidence points to the fact that we are dealing with a highly-organized operation that placed significant effort into remaining under the radar," Finkelstein said. "All in all, the attackers, who we believe to be a Chinese threat group, were very systematic in their approach."
"The attackers are not only interested in cold data, but also what is happening on a target's personal computer at any moment, resulting in live espionage. Although we were able to block the surveillance operation for the Southeast Asian government described, it's possible that the threat group is using its new cyber espionage weapon on other targets around the world," he added.
| Malware |
ZeuS Trojan variant Targets Salesforce accounts and SaaS Applications | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/Salesforce-malware-attack-zeus-trojan.html | Zeus, a financially aimed Banking Trojan that comes in many different forms and flavors, is capable to steal users' online-banking credentials once installed. This time, an infamous Zeus Trojan has turned out to be a more sophisticated piece of malware that uses web-crawling action.
Instead of going after Banking credentials and performing malicious keystroke logging, a new variant of Zeus Trojan focuses on Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for the purpose of obtaining access to proprietary data or code.
The SaaS Security firm vendor Adallom, detected a targeted malware attack campaign against a Salesforce.com customer, which began as an attack on an employee's home computer. Adallom found that the new variant had web crawling capabilities that were used to grab sensitive business data from that customer's CRM instance.
The Security firm noticed the attack when they saw about 2GB of data been downloaded to the victim's computer in less than 10 minutes. Furthermore, while Zeus usually hijacks the user session and performs wire transactions, this variant crawled the site and created a real time copy of the user's Salesforce.com instance that contained all the information from the company account.
"This looks like a targeted attack against the company, cleverly targeting the employee home instead of the enterprise – thus bypassing the company controls. This was probably just the first step, using the Zeus Web inject capabilities they could have used the same tactics as in the banking sites attacks and ask the user to enter more information regarding his company credentials or send out messages in his name," says Ami Luttwak, co-founder and CTO of Adallom.
Zeus Trojan is one of the most popular family of banking Trojan. Also in 2012, the FBI warned us about the 'GameOver' banking Trojan, a variant of Zeus financial malware that spreads via phishing emails.
GameOver makes fraudulent transactions from your bank once installed in your system with the capability to conduct Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack using a botnet, which involves multiple computers flooding the financial institution's server with traffic in an effort to deny legitimate users access to the site.
At the beginning of this year, Security researcher Gary Warner explains the behavior of the new variant of GameOver Zeus malware that uses Encryption to bypass perimeter security, in a blog post.
The attackers now bypassing traditional security measures and putting Zeus to use it against Salesforce.com and possibly other SaaS applications in a type of attack that Adallom refers to as "land-mining" and "rolladexing" to grab loads of business data and customer information.
The Adallom Labs team has yet to figure out exactly how these machines were infected and who are behind the cyber attack, so the matter is still being investigated by them.
| Cyber_Attack |
ISPs May Be Helping Hackers to Infect you with FinFisher Spyware | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/gamma-finfisher-hacking-tool.html | Are you sure the version of WhatsApp, or Skype, or VLC Player installed on your device is legitimate?
Security researchers have discovered that legitimate downloads of several popular applications including WhatsApp, Skype, VLC Player and WinRAR have reportedly been compromised at the ISP level to distribute the infamous FinFisher spyware also known as FinSpy.
FinSpy is a highly secret surveillance tool that has previously been associated with British company Gamma Group, a company that legally sells surveillance and espionage software to government agencies across the world.
The spyware has extensive spying capabilities on an infected computer, including secretly conducting live surveillance by turning ON its webcams and microphones, recording everything the victim types with a keylogger, intercepting Skype calls, and exfiltration of files.
In order to get into a target's machine, FinFisher usually uses various attack vectors, including spear phishing, manual installation with physical access to the device, zero-day exploits, and watering hole attacks.
Your ISP May Be Helping Hackers To Spy On You
However, a new report published today by ESET claimed that its researchers had discovered new surveillance campaigns utilizing new variants of FinFisher in seven countries, which comes bundled with a legitimate application.
But how is this happening? Attackers are targeting victims using a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, where the internet service providers (ISP) are most likely operating as the "middle man"—bundling legitimate software downloads with FinFisher.
"We have seen this vector being used in two of the countries in which ESET systems detected the latest FinFisher spyware (in the five remaining countries, the campaigns have relied on traditional infection vectors)," the researchers say.
Previously published documents by WikiLeaks also indicated that the FinFisher maker also offered a tool called "FinFly ISP," which is supposed to be deployed on ISP level with capabilities necessary for performing such a MitM attack.
Also, the infection technique (using the HTTP 307 redirect) was implemented in the same way in the two affected countries ESET discovered being targeted by the new variants of FinFisher. However, the firm did not name the affected countries "as not to put anyone in danger."
Another fact which supports the ISP-level MitM attack is that all affected targets identified by the researchers within a country were using the same ISP.
"Finally, the very same redirection method and format have been used for internet content filtering by internet service providers in at least one of the affected countries," the ESET report reads.
The popular applications targeted by the new variants of FinFisher include WhatsApp, Skype, VLC Player, Avast and WinRAR, and the ESET researchers said, "virtually any application could be misused in this way."
Here's How The Attack Works:
When the target users search for one of the affected applications on legitimate websites and click on its download link, their browser is served a modified URL, which redirects victims to a trojanized installation package hosted on the attacker's server.
This results in the installation of a version of the intended legitimate application bundled with the surveillance tool.
"The redirection is achieved by the legitimate download link being replaced by a malicious one," the researchers say. "The malicious link is delivered to the user's browser via an HTTP 307 Temporary Redirect status response code indicating that the requested content has been temporarily moved to a new URL."
This whole redirection process, according to researchers, is "invisible to the naked eye" and occurs without user's knowledge.
FinFisher Utilizing a Whole Lot of New Tricks
The new tricks employed by the latest version of FinFisher kept it from being spotted by the researchers.
The researchers also note that the latest version of FinFisher received several technical improvements in terms of stealthiness, including the use of custom code virtualization to protect the majority of its components like the kernel-mode driver.
It also makes use of anti-disassembly tricks, and numerous anti-sandboxing, anti-debugging, anti-virtualization and anti-emulation tricks, aiming at compromising end-to-end encryption software and known privacy tools.
One such secure messaging application, called Threema, was discovered by the researchers while they were analyzing the recent campaigns.
"FinFisher spyware masqueraded as an executable file named "Threema." Such a file could be used to target privacy-concerned users, as the legitimate Threema application provides secure instant messaging with end-to-end encryption," the researchers say.
"Ironically, getting tricked into downloading and running the infected file would result in the privacy-seeking user being spied upon."
Gamma Group has not yet responded to the ESET report.
| Malware |
New Bugs Could Let Hackers Bypass Spectre Attack Mitigations On Linux Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/new-bugs-could-let-hackers-bypass.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed two new vulnerabilities in Linux-based operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could let attackers circumvent mitigations for speculative attacks such as Spectre and obtain sensitive information from kernel memory.
Discovered by Piotr Krysiuk of Symantec's Threat Hunter team, the flaws — tracked as CVE-2020-27170 and CVE-2020-27171 (CVSS scores: 5.5) — impact all Linux kernels prior to 5.11.8. Patches for the security issues were released on March 20, with Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat deploying fixes for the vulnerabilities in their respective Linux distributions.
While CVE-2020-27170 can be abused to reveal content from any location within the kernel memory, CVE-2020-27171 can be used to retrieve data from a 4GB range of kernel memory.
First documented in January 2018, Spectre and Meltdown take advantage of flaws in modern processors to leak data that are currently processed on the computer, thereby allowing a bad actor to bypass boundaries enforced by the hardware between two programs to get hold of cryptographic keys.
Put differently, the two side-channel attacks permit malicious code to read memory that they would typically not have permission to. Even worse, the attacks could also be launched remotely via rogue websites running malicious JavaScript code.
Although isolation countermeasures have been devised and browser vendors have incorporated defenses to offer protection against timing attacks by reducing the precision of time-measuring functions, the mitigations have been at an operating system level rather than a solution for the underlying issue.
The new vulnerabilities uncovered by Symantec aim to get around these mitigations in Linux by taking advantage of the kernel's support for extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF) to extract the contents of the kernel memory.
"Unprivileged BPF programs running on affected systems could bypass the Spectre mitigations and execute speculatively out-of-bounds loads with no restrictions," Symantec said. "This could then be abused to reveal contents of the memory via side-channels."
Specifically, the kernel ("kernel/bpf/verifier.c") was found to perform undesirable out-of-bounds speculation on pointer arithmetic, thus defeating fixes for Spectre and opening the door for side-channel attacks.
In a real-world scenario, unprivileged users could leverage these weaknesses to gain access to secrets from other users sharing the same vulnerable machine.
"The bugs could also potentially be exploited if a malicious actor was able to gain access to an exploitable machine via a prior step — such as downloading malware onto the machine to achieve remote access — this could then allow them to exploit these vulnerabilities to gain access to all user profiles on the machine," the researchers said.
News of the two flaws come weeks after Google published a proof-of-concept (PoC) code written in JavaScript to demonstrate Spectre in a web browser and leak data at a speed of 1 kilobyte per second (kB/s) when running on Chrome 88 on an Intel Skylake CPU.
| Vulnerability |
Police Arrested Hackers Who Stole Millions from European ATMs | https://thehackernews.com/2016/01/european-atm-hacker.html | Romanian law enforcement authorities have arrested eight cyber criminals suspected of being part of an international criminal gang that pilfered cash from ATMs (automatic teller machines) using malware.
The operation said to be one of the first operations of this type in Europe, was conducted in Romania and Moldova by Romanian National Police and the Directorate for Investigating Organised Crimes and Terrorism (DIICOT), with assistance from Europol, Eurojust and other European law enforcement authorities.
Europol did not provide names of any of the eight criminals arrested but said that the gang allegedly used a piece of malware, dubbed Tyupkin, to conduct what are known as Jackpotting attacks and made millions by infecting ATMs across Europe and beyond.
With the help of Tyupkin malware, the suspects were able to empty cash from infected ATMs by issuing commands through the ATM's pin pad.
"The criminal group was involved in large scale ATM Jackpotting – a term which refers to the use of a Trojan horse, physically launched via an executable file in order to target an ATM," Europol explained in a press release, "thus allowing the attackers to empty the ATM cash cassettes via direct manipulation, using the ATM PIN pad to submit commands to the Trojan."
Tyupkin was first analysed in 2014 by Kaspersky Lab following the request from a financial institution. During the investigation, Kaspersky found the malware threat on more than 50 ATMs in Eastern Europe.
The malware allows its operators to withdraw cash from ATMs without the requirement of any payment card.
Although, Europol did not specify how much money in total the criminal gang was able to plunder, it believed that the gang was able to cause "substantial losses" across Europe and that the losses could be in Millions.
| Malware |
Windows Servers Hacked at The Hartford Insurance Company ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/04/windows-servers-hacked-at-hartford.html | Hackers have broken into The Hartford insurance company and installed password-stealing programs on several of the company's Windows servers.
In a warning letter sent last month to about 300 employees, contractors, and a handful of customers, the company said it discovered the infection in late February. Several servers were hit, including Citrix servers used by employees for remote access to IT systems. A copy of The Hartford's letter was posted earlier this week to the website of the Office of the New Hampshire Attorney General : https://doj.nh.gov/consumer/pdf/hartford2.pdf
"It was a very small incident," said Debora Raymond, a company spokeswoman. The victims were mostly company employees. Less than 10 customers were affected by the malware, the W32-Qakbot Trojan, she said.
Qakbot has been around for about two years. Once installed it spreads from computer to computer in the network, taking steps to cover its tracks as it logs sensitive data and opens up back doors for the hackers to access the network.
With 28,000 employees worldwide, the 200-year-old Hartford, Connecticut, firm is one of the country's largest insurance companies.
The Hartford's letters are going out to "users who logged onto an infected server (either through a Citrix session or support purposes)" between Feb. 22 and Feb. 28, 2011, The Hartford said in its letter.
"We do know that the virus has the potential to capture confidential data such as bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, user accounts/logins, passwords, and credit card numbers," the letter states.
It's not clear how The Hartford was infected, but hackers have been targeting staffers for years now -- particularly those in IT -- with targeted e-mail attacks, trying to trick them into visiting malicious websites or downloading Trojan horse programs. Security experts say that these attacks are widespread and often methodically planned.
Despite the presence of keylogging software, the insurance company's lawyer, Debra Hampson, said that her company has "no reason to believe that any information has been or will be misused." Victims are being given two years' free credit monitoring.
Working with its antivirus vendor, The Hartford has cleaned up the infected servers and is working on locking down its systems. One of the steps, Hampson said: "Providing additional privacy and information security training for employees in order to warn them of the dangers of downloading files from unknown sources on the Internet."
Source : https://www.pcworld.com/
| Malware |
U.S. Department of Defense Officials are potential target of cyber espionage via social networking sites | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/us-department-of-defense-officials-are.html | In the recent months I had the opportunity to conduct an interesting study on the use of Social Media in the Military Sector, large diffusion of media platforms makes them very attractive for governments and intelligence agencies. Social media platforms reveal enormous potentiality that could be exploited also in critical sectors such as military and defense.
Modern social media networks are actively used by every government, the US, China and Russia are the most active in this field, but also emerging cyber countries like Iran and North Korea demonstrates an increasing interest in the matter.
The principal uses of social media for government are
Psychological Operations (PsyOps)
OSInt
Cyber espionage
Offensive purposes
On May 10th the Illinois Air National Guard 183rd Fighter Wing published a notice in the monthly issue of a newsletter titled Falcon View. The notice, that seems to be authentic, dedicates a paragraph to the use of social networking sites for computer network exploitation.
According the notice foreign governments regularly use social networks to conduct cyber attacks against DoD, attackers adopt social engineering techniques to gather sensitive information creating "significant operations security (OPSEC) concern".
The impact is serious, leak of knowledge of the cyber threats could cause mission degradation or even loss of life, but great concern is also reserved to the possibility of use of social network platforms to inoculate malware in US AF networks.
"The nature of social networking sites (SNS) which promote socialization and the sharing of information makes personnel more susceptible to exploitation" reports the notice.
The notice and with special recommendations to all Air Force members related to the use of social networks, informing on the risks related to cyber espionage conducted by state sponsored hackers:
"Finally, be aware of the security settings on these websites and do not inadvertently release sensitive information to the public because of careless use."
Following the integral notice, Notice to Airman 2013-080-001:
(U//FOUO) EXECUTIVE SUMMERY: Nation-state adversaries regularly use accounts on popular social networking sites to facilitate social engineering against DoD members. Information disclosed or discovered on social networking sites creates a significant operations security (OPSEC) concern and in the context of a wide spread collection effort could be by adversaries to form a classified picture.
(U//FOUO) MISSION IMPACT: Poor OPSEC practices or general disclosures of sensitive information can lead to kinetic adversary responses to U.S. forces' actions, potentially leading to mission degradation or even loss of life. Additionally, malware introduced into AF networks via social network sites can degrade or disrupt operations.
(U//FOUO) DETAILS: The nature of social networking sites (SNS) which promote socialization and the sharing of information makes personnel more susceptible to exploitation. SNS applications give the common user an increased opportunity to release official information. In the past two years, there are several examples of adversaries using or attempting to use SNS for likely cyber espionage.
(U//FOUO) ACTIONS: All Air Force members must be aware that they are a potential target of cyber exploitation/espionage and take appropriate caution when using social networking sites. Do not accept contact requests from individuals who you do not personally know and trust. Additionally, hackers are known to spoof requests so that any request may appear to be from someone you know, so treat all requests with suspicion and vigilance. Only accept a request if there is a high level of certainty regarding the identity and authenticity of the requestor. Finally, be aware of the security settings on these websites and do not inadvertently release sensitive information to the public because of careless use.
| Cyber_Attack |
BREACH decodes HTTPS encrypted data in 30 seconds | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/sniffing-https-BREACH-exploit-blackhat-hacking-tool.html | A new hacking technique dubbed BREACH can extract login tokens, session ID numbers and other sensitive information from SSL/TLS encrypted web traffic in just 30 seconds.
The technique was demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas (Presentation PDF & Paper) by Gluck along with researchers Neal Harris and Angelo Prado, which allows hackers to decodes encrypted data that online banks and e-commerce sites from an HTTPS channel.
Neal, Yoel and Angelo (From left to right) at BlackHat
BREACH (Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext) is very targeted and don't decrypt the entire channel. BREACH manipulates data compression to pry out doses of information from HTTPS protected data, including email addresses, security tokens, and other plain text strings.
Angelo Prado told The Hacker News, "We are using a compression oracle is leveraging the building blocks from CRIME, on a different compression context." i.e. To execute the oracle attack, BREACH exploits the standard Deflate compression algorithm used by many websites to conserve bandwidth.
The attacker just has to continually eavesdrop on the encrypted traffic between a victim and a web server before and the exploit requires that a victim first access a malicious link, this can be done by embedding an iframe tag in a page the victim frequents.
The recovery of secret authentication cookies opens the door for attackers to pose as their victims and hijack authenticated web sessions. It is important to note that the attack is agnostic to the version of TLS/SSL, and does not require TLS-layer compression. Additionally, the attack works against any cipher suite.
| Vulnerability |
Chinese Hackers Broke into the Database of U.S. Federal Employees | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/chinese-hackers-broke-into-database-of.html | Chinese hackers broke into the computer systems of United States government agency that keeps the personal information of all federal employees, according to the paper published in the New York Times.
The attack occurred on the Office of Personnel Management and Senior American officials believe that the attackers successfully gained access to some of the agency's databases in March before the federal authorities detected the threat and blocked them from the network.
The hackers targeted the files of tens of thousands of federal employees who have applied for top-secret security clearances, the newspaper reported.
"The intrusion at the Office of Personnel Management was particularly disturbing because it oversees a system called e-QIP, in which federal employees applying for security clearances enter their most personal information, including financial data. Federal employees who have had security clearances for some time are often required to update their personal information through the website," states the New York Times.
Until now, it is not clear how far the hackers were able to infiltrate the networks of the US Office of Personnel Management.
But the databases they managed to hack include information such as employment records, people seeking security clearance list their foreign contacts, previous jobs and personal data like past drug use etc, which all could be at risk.
In response to this matter, a senior Department of Homeland Security official confirmed that the attack had occurred but said that "at this time," neither the personnel agency nor Homeland Security had "identified any loss of personally identifiable information." The official said an emergency response team was assigned and handled over the matter "to assess and mitigate any risks identified."
Again it started a cold war between China and the United States, because according to the senior US officials, the attack was traced to China. But yet it is unclear if the hackers belonged to the government.
Where China said that it faces a major threat from hackers, accused the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command for targeting Chinese politicians and military. The United States recently charged five Chinese military officials for carrying out cyber espionage against several American companies and stealing sensitive data by breaking into corporate systems.
| Data_Breaches |
Hardware based malware steals contacts from all mobile platforms using only the Audio Jack! | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/hardware-based-malware-steals-contacts.html | Indian Security Research Atul Alex presented his surprise paper at the International Malware Conference, MalCon on what can be termed as the onset of next generation of hardware based malware that can target mobile devices irrespective of Platforms.
Typically, one of the largest challenges for malware coders are to target multiple platforms. A malware for Android will not work in Windows phone, Symbian or Apple iOS, which come in way of malware coders. Also, devices such as iPhone are extremely secure and there is little that can be extracted from a locked / secure iPhone, unless they are jailbroken.
Atul Alex's research abuses voice dialing feature which is enabled by default on all mobile platforms - and combines a bugged headset with a micro controller and code to steal private data. The bugged headset can also dial a pre-defined number by detecting if the device is in use or not and turn the phone into a spy device. Further, it can steal contacts from all devices - Blackberry, iphone, Symbian, Windows and Android, without putting a malware inside the mobile phone.
The bugged headset can in fact mimic voice commands and send it to the device discretely - and Alex mentioned that advanced software like SIRI can infact aid hackers in future in sending unauthorized text messages as well as extract personal data and device information.
Any mobile device running Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone, Apple IOS 5, or Blackberry OS provides voice command capabilities. Some of the other possible things include knowing call duration and even record incoming and outgoing calls of users. And all this is possible just by plugging a bugged headset into the Audio jack.
This has long term future implications and provides a grim future with electronics warfare. Malwares can now target people across all platforms, irrespective of 0-days in browsers, OS etc present or not.. and the last thing one would suspect is a gifted headset or speaker dock for your device.
| Malware |
FreakOut! Ongoing Botnet Attack Exploiting Recent Linux Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/freakout-ongoing-botnet-attack.html | An ongoing malware campaign has been found exploiting recently disclosed vulnerabilities in network-attached storage (NAS) devices running on Linux systems to co-opt the machines into an IRC botnet for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and mining Monero cryptocurrency.
The attacks deploy a new malware variant called "FreakOut" by leveraging critical flaws fixed in Laminas Project (formerly Zend Framework) and Liferay Portal as well as an unpatched security weakness in TerraMaster, according to Check Point Research's new analysis published today and shared with The Hacker News.
Attributing the malware to be the work of a long-time cybercrime hacker — who goes by the aliases Fl0urite and Freak on HackForums and Pastebin at least since 2015 — the researchers said the flaws — CVE-2020-28188, CVE-2021-3007, and CVE-2020-7961 — were weaponized to inject and execute malicious commands in the server.
Regardless of the vulnerabilities exploited, the end goal of the attacker appears to be to download and execute a Python script named "out.py" using Python 2, which reached end-of-life last year — implying that the threat actor is banking on the possibility that that victim devices have this deprecated version installed.
"The malware, downloaded from the site hxxp://gxbrowser[.]net, is an obfuscated Python script which contains polymorphic code, with the obfuscation changing each time the script is downloaded," the researchers said, adding the first attack attempting to download the file was observed on January 8.
And indeed, three days later, cybersecurity firm F5 Labs warned of a series of attacks targeting NAS devices from TerraMaster (CVE-2020-28188) and Liferay CMS (CVE-2020-7961) in an attempt to spread N3Cr0m0rPh IRC bot and Monero cryptocurrency miner.
An IRC Botnet is a collection of machines infected with malware that can be controlled remotely via an IRC channel to execute malicious commands.
In FreakOut's case, the compromised devices are configured to communicate with a hardcoded command-and-control (C2) server from where they receive command messages to execute.
The malware also comes with extensive capabilities that allow it to perform various tasks, including port scanning, information gathering, creation and sending of data packets, network sniffing, and DDoS and flooding.
Furthermore, the hosts can be commandeered as a part of a botnet operation for crypto-mining, spreading laterally across the network, and launching attacks on outside targets while masquerading as the victim company.
With hundreds of devices already infected within days of launching the attack, the researchers warn, FreakOut will ratchet up to higher levels in the near future.
For its part, TerraMaster is expected to patch the vulnerability in version 4.2.07. In the meantime, it's recommended that users upgrade to Liferay Portal 7.2 CE GA2 (7.2.1) or later and laminas-http 2.14.2 to mitigate the risk associated with the flaws.
"What we have identified is a live and ongoing cyber attack campaign targeting specific Linux users," said Adi Ikan, head of network cybersecurity Research at Check Point. "The attacker behind this campaign is very experienced in cybercrime and highly dangerous."
"The fact that some of the vulnerabilities exploited were just published, provides us all a good example for highlighting the significance of securing your network on an ongoing basis with the latest patches and updates."
| Malware |
Thousands of MikroTik Routers Hacked to Eavesdrop On Network Traffic | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/mikrotik-router-hacking.html | Last month we reported about a widespread crypto-mining malware campaign that hijacked over 200,000 MikroTik routers using a previously disclosed vulnerability revealed in the CIA Vault 7 leaks.
Now Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360 Netlab have discovered that out of 370,000 potentially vulnerable MikroTik routers, more than 7,500 devices have been compromised to enable Socks4 proxy maliciously, allowing attackers to actively eavesdrop on the targeted network traffic since mid-July.
The vulnerability in question is Winbox Any Directory File Read (CVE-2018-14847) in MikroTik routers that was found exploited by the CIA Vault 7 hacking tool called Chimay Red, along with another MikroTik's Webfig remote code execution vulnerability.
Both Winbox and Webfig are RouterOS management components with their corresponding communication ports as TCP/8291, TCP/80, and TCP/8080. Winbox is designed for Windows users to easily configure the routers that download some DLL files from the router and execute them on a system.
According to the researchers, more than 370,000 of 1.2 million MikroTik routers are still vulnerable to the CVE-2018-14847 exploit, even after the vendor has already rolled out security updates to patch the loophole.
Netlab researchers have identified malware exploiting the CVE-2018-14847 vulnerability to perform various malicious activities, including CoinHive mining code injection, silently enabling Socks4 proxy on routers, and spying on victims.
CoinHive Mining Code Injection — After enabling the Mikrotik RouterOS HTTP proxy, the attackers redirect all the HTTP proxy requests to a local HTTP 403 error page which injects a link for web mining code from Coinhive.
"By doing this, the attacker hopes to perform web mining for all the proxy traffic on the users' devices," the researchers explain.
"What is disappointing for the attacker though, the mining code does not work in this way, because all the external web resources, including those from coinhive.com necessary for web mining, are blocked by the proxy ACLs set by attackers themselves."
Maliciously Enabling Sock4 Proxy — Silently enabling the Socks4 port or TCP/4153 on victims device allows an attacker to gain control of the device even after it has been rebooted (IP change) by periodically reporting its latest IP address to the attacker's URL.
According to the researchers, at present, a total of 239,000 IP addresses are confirmed to have Socks4 proxy enabled maliciously, eventually allowing attackers to continuously scan more MikroTik RouterOS devices using these compromised Socks4 proxy.
Eavesdropping on Victims — Since the MikroTik RouterOS devices allow users to capture packets on the router and forward them to the specified Stream server, attackers are forwarding the traffic from compromised routers to IP addresses controlled by them.
"At present, a total of 7.5k MikroTik RouterOS device IPs have been compromised by the attacker, and their TZSP traffic is being forwarded to some collecting IP addresses," the researchers say.
"We also noticed the SNMP port 161 and 162 are also top on the list. This deserve some questions, why the attacker is paying attention to the network management protocol regular users barely use? Are they trying to monitor and capture some special users' network SNMP community strings?"
The victims are spread across various countries Russia, Iran, Brazil, India, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ecuador, the United States, Argentina, Colombia, Poland, Kenya, Iraq, and some European and Asian countries, with Russia being the most affected.
Netlab did not share the IP addresses of the victims to the public for security reasons but said that relevant security entities in affected countries can contact the company for a full list of infected IP addresses.
The best way to protect yourself is to PATCH. MikroTik RouterOS users are highly recommended to update their devices and also check if the HTTP proxy, Socks4 proxy, and network traffic capture function are being maliciously exploited.
| Cyber_Attack |
CISA Issues Emergency Directive on In-the-Wild Microsoft Exchange Flaws | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/cisa-issues-emergency-directive-on-in.html | Following Microsoft's release of out-of-band patches to address multiple zero-day flaws in on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an emergency directive warning of "active exploitation" of the vulnerabilities.
The alert comes on the heels of Microsoft's disclosure that China-based hackers were exploiting unknown software bugs in Exchange server to steal sensitive data from select targets, marking the second time in four months that the U.S. has scrambled to address a widespread hacking campaign believed to be the work of foreign threat actors.
While the company mainly attributed the campaign to a threat group called HAFNIUM, Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET said it found evidence of CVE-2021-26855 being actively exploited in the wild by several cyber espionage groups, including LuckyMouse, Tick, and Calypso targeting servers located in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Researchers at Huntress Labs have also sounded the alarm about mass exploitation of Exchange servers, noting that over 350 web shells have been discovered across approximately 2,000 vulnerable servers.
"Among the vulnerable servers, we also found over 350 web shells — some targets may have more than one web shell, potentially indicating automated deployment or multiple uncoordinated actors," Huntress senior security researcher John Hammond said. "These endpoints do have antivirus or EDR solutions installed, but this has seemingly slipped past a majority of preventative security products."
The latest development indicates a much larger spread that extends beyond the "limited and targeted" attacks reported by Microsoft earlier this week.
It's not clear if any U.S. government agencies have been breached in the campaign, but the CISA directive underscores the urgency of the threat.
Strongly urging organizations to apply the patches as soon as possible, the agency cited the "likelihood of widespread exploitation of the vulnerabilities after public disclosure and the risk that federal government services to the American public could be degraded."
| Vulnerability |
Beware! You Can Get Hacked Just by Opening a 'JPEG 2000' Image | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/openjpeg-exploit-hack.html | Researchers have disclosed a critical zero-day vulnerability in the JPEG 2000 image file format parser implemented in OpenJPEG library, which could allow an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on the affected systems.
Discovered by security researchers at Cisco Talos group, the zero-day flaw, assigned as TALOS-2016-0193/CVE-2016-8332, could allow an out-of-bound heap write to occur that triggers the heap corruption and leads to arbitrary code execution.
OpenJPEG is an open-source JPEG 2000 codec. Written in C language, the software was developed for coding and encoding JPEG2000 images, a format that is often used for tasks like embedding image files within PDF documents through popular software including PdFium, Poppler, and MuPDF.
Hackers can exploit the security vulnerability by tricking the victim into opening a specially crafted, malicious JPEG2000 image or a PDF document containing that malicious file in an email.
The hacker could even upload the malicious JPEG2000 image file to a file hosting service, like Dropbox or Google Drive, and then send that link to the victim.
Once downloaded to the system, it would create a way for hackers to remotely execute malicious code on the affected system.
The flaw was caused "due to an error while parsing mcc records in the jpeg2000 file,...resulting in an erroneous read and write of adjacent heap area memory," Cisco explained in its advisory.
"Careful manipulation of heap layout and can lead to further heap metadata process memory corruption ultimately leading to code execution under attacker control."
The researchers successfully tested the JPEG 2000 image exploit on the OpenJPEG openjp2 version 2.1.1. The flaw was discovered by Aleksandar Nikolic from the Cisco Talos Security team.
The team reported the zero-day flaw to OpenJPEG developers in late July, and the company patched the flaw last week with the release of version 2.1.2.
The vulnerability has been assigned a CVSS score of 7.5, categorizing it as a high-severity bug.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Steal Customers' Credit Cards From Newegg Electronics Retailer | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/newegg-credit-card-hack.html | The notorious hacking group behind the Ticketmaster and British Airways data breaches has now victimized popular computer hardware and consumer electronics retailer Newegg.
Magecart hacking group managed to infiltrate the Newegg website and steal the credit card details of all customers who entered their payment card information between August 14 and September 18, 2018, according to a joint analysis from Volexity and RiskIQ.
Magecart hackers used what researchers called a digital credit card skimmer wherein they inserted a few lines of malicious Javascript code into the checkout page of Newegg website that captured payment information of customers making purchasing on the site and then send it to a remote server.
Active since at least 2015, the Magecart hacking group registered a domain called neweggstats(dot)com on August 13, similar to Newegg's legitimate domain newegg.com, and acquired an SSL certificate issued for the domain by Comodo for their website.
A day later, the group inserted the skimmer code into the Newegg website at the payment processing page, so that it would not come into play until or unless the payment page was hit.
So, when customers add a product in their shopping cart, enter their delivery information during the first step of the check-out, and validate their address, the website takes them to the payment processing page to enter their credit card information.
As soon as the customer hit submit button after entering their credit card information, the skimmer code immediately sends a copy that data to the attacker's domain, i.e., neweggstats(dot)com without interrupting the checkout process.
Newegg Hack May Affect Millions of Customers
The attack affected both desktop and mobile customers, though it is still unclear how many customers were actually hit by this credit card breach.
However, considering that more than 50 million shoppers visit Newegg every month and that the malicious code was there for over one month, it could be assumed that this Magecart newest card skimming campaign has possibly stolen the payment information on millions of Newegg customers, even if only a fraction of those visitors make purchases.
Earlier this month, the Magecart hacking group breached the British Airways website and its mobile application and managed to walk away with a bounty of sensitive payment card data from 380,000 victims.
"The skimmer code [used in the Newegg breach] is recognizable from the British Airways incident, with the same basecode," RiskIQ researchers said.
"All the attackers changed is the name of the form it needs to serialize to obtain payment information and the server to send it to, this time themed with Newegg instead of British Airways."
In the Newegg case, the hackers used smaller skimmer code of "a tidy 15 lines of script," since it only had to serialize one form.
If you are one of those Newegg customers who entered their credit card details on the website during the attack period, you should immediately contact your bank, block your payment card, and request for a replacement.
However, the way Magecart is scooping up payment card data from popular services with relatively little efforts suggests that Newegg probably will not be its last target.
| Cyber_Attack |
New Critical Exim Flaw Exposes Email Servers to Remote Attacks — Patch Released | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/exim-email-security-vulnerability.html | A critical security vulnerability has been discovered and fixed in the popular open-source Exim email server software, which could allow a remote attacker to simply crash or potentially execute malicious code on targeted servers.
Exim maintainers today released an urgent security update—Exim version 4.92.3—after publishing an early warning two days ago, giving system administrators an early head-up on its upcoming security patches that affect all versions of the email server software from 4.92 up to and including then-latest version 4.92.2.
Exim is a widely used, open source mail transfer agent (MTA) developed for Unix-like operating systems like Linux, Mac OSX or Solaris, which runs almost 60 percent of the Internet's email servers today for routing, delivering and receiving email messages.
This is the second time in this month when the Exim maintainers have released an urgent security update. Earlier this month, the team patched a critical remote code execution flaw (CVE-2019-15846) in the software that could have allowed remote attackers to gain root-level access to the system.
Identified as CVE-2019-16928 and discovered by Jeremy Harris of Exim Development Team, the vulnerability is a heap-based buffer overflow (memory corruption) issue in string_vformat defined in string.c file of the EHLO Command Handler component.
The security flaw could allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition or execute arbitrary code on a targeted Exim mail server using a specially crafted line in the EHLO command with the rights of the targeted user.
According to the Exim advisory, a currently known PoC exploit for this vulnerability allows one to only crash the Exim process by sending a long string in the EHLO command, though other commands could also be used to potentially execute arbitrary code.
"The currently known exploit uses an extraordinary long EHLO string to crash the Exim process that is receiving the message," says the Exim developers' team.
"While at this mode of operation, Exim already dropped its privileges, other paths to reach the vulnerable code may exist."
In mid-year, Exim also patched a severe remote command execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-10149) in its email software that was actively exploited in the wild by various groups of hackers to compromise vulnerable servers.
Therefore, server administrators are highly recommended to install the latest Exim 4.92.3 version as soon as possible, since there is no known mitigation to temporarily resolve this issue.
The team also says, "if you can't install the above versions, ask your package maintainer for a version containing the backported fix. On request and depending on our resources, we will support you in backporting the fix."
The security update is available for Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, Debian, and Fedora.
| Vulnerability |
'The Home Depot' Data Breach Put 56 Million Payment Cards at Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2014/09/the-home-depot-data-breach-put-56_18.html | Home Depot, the nation's largest home improvement retailer, announced on Thursday that a total of 56 million unique payment cards were likely compromised in a data breach at its stores, suggesting that the data breach on Home improvement chain was larger than the Target data breach that occurred last year during Christmas holidays.
The data theft occurred between April and September at Home Depot stores in both the United States and Canada, but the confirmation comes less than a week after the retailer first disclosed the possibility of a breach.
"We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and anxiety this has caused, and want to reassure them that they will not be liable for fraudulent charges," Home Depot CEO Frank Blake said in a statement. "From the time this investigation began, our guiding principle has been to put our customers first, and we will continue to do so."
It is believe that the cybercriminals successfully compromised the Home Depot's network and installed a unique, custom-built software on the company's point-of-sale (PoS) systems in order to steal information on its customers' debit and credit cards and siphoned off to cyber crooks, the company stated.
The nasty malware used to infect the company's system had not been seen in any of the previous cyber attacks. The malware was designed to evade detection in its most complete account.
In upcoming days, the payment cards details are believed to be sold in underground black market, resulting in identity theft to millions of customers. But to help its customers, Home Depot also said that it is offering free identity protection services to those customers who may have been affected by the data breach.
According to the Home improvement retailer, so far the costs of the data breach is estimated to be $62 million, but it could reach much higher because the full scope, scale and impact of the breach has yet to be determined, so it may take months in calculating the actual loss.
"To protect customer data until the malware was eliminated, any terminals identified with malware were taken of out service, and the company quickly put in place other security enhancements," Home Depot said in its statement. "The hacker's method of entry has been closed off, the malware has been eliminated from the company's systems, and the company has rolled out enhanced encryption of payment data to all U.S. stores."
The company assured its customers that no PINs were obtained in the data breach and it found no evidence of fraud on the compromised accounts yet. Also there is no evidence that anyone who shopped at stores in Mexico or shopped online at the retailer's website were affected.
As a part of its efforts, the DIY giant has completed a "major payment security project" in order to provide enhanced encryption at the point of sale in the company's U.S. stores. This project will be completed in Canadian outlets by early 2015, offering significant new protection for customers.
The exposure of the data breach put Home Depot in the list of firms that have been compromised by point-of-sale malware, in which the U.S. retailer Target topped the list. However in coming weeks, Home Depot breach may give a tough competition to Target breach, which resulted in the loss of 40 million cards and the personal information of 70 million individuals, lasted three weeks during the 2013 holiday shopping season.
| Data_Breaches |
Oops! Adult Dating Website Ashley Madison Hacked; 37 Million Accounts Affected | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/adult-dating-website.html | "Life is short. Have an affair," but always remember "Cheaters never prosper."
AshleyMadison.com, an American most prominent dating website, that helps married people cheat on their spouses has been hacked, potentially putting very private details of Millions of its users at risk of being exposed.
The Stolen personal data may include information from users' real names, addresses and their personal photographs to credit card details and sexually explicit chat logs.
With a Huge Database of over 37 Million users, AshleyMadison.com, owned by Avid Life Media (ALM) company, is a very popular dating website that helps married people have extramarital affairs.
Cougar Life and Established Men, two other dating sites also owned by Avid Life Media, have also had their data compromised.
The Hacker group responsible for the hacks called itself "The Impact Team," a company spokesperson confirmed.
The group apparently raises an objection to the website's morally dubious business model and were threatening the company to release all its customer records if the Ashley Madison and Established Men are not completely shut down.
The Impact Team claims to have complete access to not only personal account information of the company's customers, but also their secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, names, residential addresses, employee documents and emails.
Reason behind the Ashley Madison Hack
The Impact Team of hackers appears to be upset over a website's service called "Full Delete" that promises to erase a customer's profile and all associated data for a $19 fee completely.
However, according to the Impact Team, Ashley Madison made money from the paid "Full Delete" service that does not work.
"Full Delete netted [Avid Life Media] $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It's also a complete lie," the group wrote in a statement released Sunday. "Users almost always pay with the credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised and include real name and address, which is, of course, the most important information the users want to be removed."
The company denied the claims, however, is now temporarily offering its customers the ability to delete their account completely from the website free of charge.
If you are Ashley Madison customer, You should Worry
Avid Life Media is working with law enforcement agencies to investigate this criminal act and also using Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get the personal data the hackers have disclosed so far removed from the Internet.
However, It's unlikely to be a prevention measure, because once the personal data has been publicly exposed over the Internet, it becomes almost next to impossible to stop its spread.
Also Read: Lessons We Learned From Ashley Madison Data Breach
| Data_Breaches |
75% of the 'Left to Get Hacked' Redis Servers Found Infected | https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/redis-server-hacking.html | Despite the continual emergence of new cyber attacks because of misconfigured servers and applications, people continue to ignore security warnings.
A massive malware campaign designed to target open Redis servers, about which researchers warned almost two months ago, has now grown and already hijacked at least 75% of the total servers running publicly accessible Redis instances.
Redis, or REmote DIctionary Server, is an open source, widely popular data structure tool that can be used as an in-memory distributed database, message broker or cache. Since it is designed to be accessed inside trusted environments, it should not be exposed on the Internet.
Dubbed RedisWannaMine, a similar malware leveraging same loophole was discovered in late March by data center security vendor Imperva and designed to drop a cryptocurrency mining script on the targeted servers—both database and application.
According to Imperva's March blog post, this cryptojacking threat was "more complex in terms of evasion techniques and capabilities. It demonstrates a worm-like behavior combined with advanced exploits to increase the attackers' infection rate and fatten their wallets."
A newly published report from the same security firm has now revealed that three-quarters of the open Redis servers accessible from the Internet (over port 6379) contain malicious sets of a key-value pair in the memory, indicating despite multiple warnings administrators continue to leave their servers vulnerable to hackers.
Out of total compromised servers, 68 percent systems were found infected using similar keys, named "backup1, backup2, backup3," which were attacked from a medium-sized botnet located at China (86% of IPs), according to the data Imperva collected from their self-set-up publicly available Redis servers to serve as a honeypot.
Moreover, the attackers have now found using the compromised servers as a proxy to scan and find vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, malicious file uploads, and remote code executions, in other websites.
The new attack works by setting a malicious key-value pair in the memory and saving it as a file in the /etc/crontabs folder that forces the server to execute the file.
"Attackers usually set values that include commands to download external remote resource and run it. Another popular type of command is adding SSH keys, so the attacker can remotely access the machine and take it over," Nadav Avital, security research team leader at Imperva, explains in a blog post.
To protect Redis servers from falling victim to such attacks, administrators are advised never to expose their servers to the Internet, but if required, apply authentication mechanism to prevent unauthorized access.
Also, since Redis doesn't use encryption and stores data in plain text, you should never store any sensitive data on these servers.
"Security issues commonly arise when people don't read the documentation and migrate services to the cloud, without being aware of the consequences or the adequate measures that are needed to do so," Avital said.
| Malware |
70% of South Korean Population Victimized In Online Gaming Heist | https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/70-of-south-korean-population_27.html | More than half of South Korea's 50 million population aged between 15 and 65 have been affected in a massive data breach, compromising their personal information.
The data breach came to light when 16 individual were arrested following the theft of about 220 million stolen records from a number of online game, ringtone storefronts and movie ticket sites that contains personally identifiable information related to 27 million victims.
The stolen records included actual name, account name, password and resident registration number of the victims, According to the English version of a Seoul-based daily newspaper, the Korea Joongang Daily.
Among 16 perpetrators, the South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency arrested a 24-year-old man named 'Kim' , for allegedly obtaining and selling all 220 million personal information including names, registration numbers, account names, and passwords, from a Chinese hacker he met through an online game in 2011.
Police estimated the breach caused in secondary damages alone is nearly $2 million. Also, Kim hacked into a total of 6 online video games in South Korea using the stolen information, from which he allegedly stole almost $400,000. Kim reportedly gave $130,000 cut of the money to the Chinese hacker whom he initially acquired the information from.
The stolen information was sold for prices ranging from US$0.001 to US$20 per item depending on whether the buyer is a thief or illegal gaming advertiser, the police said. Authorities claim Kim went on to sell the personal information to mortgage fraudsters and "illegal gambling advertisers" for for 10 to 300 won, or a fraction of a U.S. dollar. Those swindlers and advertisers duped hundreds of South Koreans between September 2012 and November 2013.
Online gaming is wildly popular in South Korea, so the stolen information is of much use for the buyers. They used those credentials to steal in-game currency and other game-related items from online gaming accounts and sold off to other players at a much higher rates.
It is estimated that the hackers have used a hack tool dubbed "extractor" that would log into user accounts and steal the information. Although, the authorities are investigating how the stolen information has been circulating and is in the middle of pursuing seven other suspects, including the Chinese hacker.
The breach was really bad, but it isn't the first time that Internet users in South Korea are suffering from a massive data breach. The more damaging data breach occurred in 2011, in which 35 million people of the country were exposed after hackers broke into the database South Cyworld, a South Korean social media site and the search engine Nate portal.
Earlier this year, 20 million South Koreans were impacted by a data breach caused by an employee of the Korea Credit Bureau, who copied their PII onto an external drive over a period of 18 months.
| Data_Breaches |
Latest Security Flaw in Skype Enables IP address & Location Tracking | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/latest-security-flaw-in-skype-enables.html | Latest Security Flaw in Skype Enables IP address & Location Tracking
The serious breach in the widely-used, internet video chat program means that any evil computer nerd could easily hunt down users' whereabouts, according to a study co-authored by an NYU-Poly professor.
The flaw in Skype could allow a skilled hacker to find out the IP address from which a user has logged in to Skype, thereby determining the location of Skype users, which is a massive breach of privacy and security. The company is trying to downplay the flaw, claiming that the ability to derive IP addresses was common with all web based communication clients.
The flaw can reportedly be exploited without the user's knowledge, and can be executed on a massive scale. The reserch team demonstrated this by scheduling hourly calls to tens of thousands of Skype users.
Adrian Asher, Skype's chief information security officer, said that IP addresses are easily uncovered in most web communications clients."Just as with typical Internet communications software, Skype users who are connected may be able to determine each other's IP addresses. Through research and development, we will continue to make advances in this area and improvements to our software," he told.
| Vulnerability |
TikTok Bug Could Have Exposed Users' Profile Data and Phone Numbers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/tiktok-bug-could-have-exposed-users.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed a now-patched security flaw in TikTok that could have potentially enabled an attacker to build a database of the app's users and their associated phone numbers for future malicious activity.
Although this flaw only impacts those users who have linked a phone number with their account or logged in with a phone number, a successful exploitation of the vulnerability could have resulted in data leakage and privacy violation, Check Point Research said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News.
TikTok has deployed a fix to address the shortcoming following responsible disclosure from Check Point researchers.
The newly discovered bug resides in TikTok's "Find friends" feature that allows users to sync their contacts with the service to identify potential people to follow.
The contacts are uploaded to TikTok via an HTTP request in the form of a list that consists of hashed contact names and the corresponding phone numbers.
The app, in the next step, sends out a second HTTP request that retrieves the TikTok profiles connected to the phone numbers sent in the previous request. This response includes profile names, phone numbers, photos, and other profile related information.
While the upload and sync contact requests are limited to 500 contacts per day, per user, and per device, Check Point researchers found a way to get around the limitation by getting hold of the device identifier, session cookies set by the server, a unique token called "X-Tt-Token" that's set when logging into the account with SMS and simulate the whole process from an emulator running Android 6.0.1.
It's worth noting that in order to request data from the TikTok application server, the HTTP requests must include X-Gorgon and X-Khronos headers for server verification, which ensures that the messages are not tampered with.
But by modifying the HTTP requests — the number of contacts the attacker wants to sync — and re-signing them with an updated message signature, the flaw made it possible to automate the procedure of uploading and syncing contacts on a large scale and create a database of linked accounts and their connected phone numbers.
This is far from the first time the popular video-sharing app has been found to contain security weaknesses.
In January 2020, Check Point researchers discovered multiple vulnerabilities within the TikTok app that could have been exploited to get hold of user accounts and manipulate their content, including deleting videos, uploading unauthorized videos, making private "hidden" videos public, and revealing personal information saved on the account.
Then in April, security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk exposed flaws in TikTok that made it possible for attackers to display forged videos, including those from verified accounts, by redirecting the app to a fake server hosting a collection of fake videos.
Eventually, TikTok launched a bug bounty partnership with HackerOne last October to help users or security professionals flag technical concerns with the platform. Critical vulnerabilities (CVSS score 9 - 10) are eligible for payouts between $6,900 to $14,800, according to the program.
"Our primary motivation, this time around, was to explore the privacy of TikTok," said Oded Vanunu, head of products vulnerabilities research at Check Point. "We were curious if the TikTok platform could be used to gain private user data. It turns out that the answer was yes, as we were able to bypass multiple protection mechanisms of TikTok that lead to privacy violation."
"An attacker with that degree of sensitive information could perform a range of malicious activities, such as spear phishing or other criminal actions."
| Vulnerability |
Android.Bmaster Exploits root access to connect to Botnet | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/androidbmaster-exploits-root-access-to.html | Android.Bmaster Exploits root access to connect to Botnet
A new piece of Android malware named Android.Bmaster, first highlighted by researcher Xuxian Jiang at North Carolina State University, was uncovered on a third-party marketplace and is bundled with a legitimate application for configuring phone settings, Symantec researcher Cathal Mullaney wrote in a blog.
This Malware is estimated to affect between 10,000 and 30,000 phones on any given day. The malware, mostly found on Chinese phones, works by using GingerBreak, a tool that gives users root access to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. RootSmart is designed to escape detection by being named "com.google.android.smart," which the same name as a settings app included by default with Android operating systems.
Mullaney explained that once the malware is installed on the Android phone, an outbound connection from the infected phone to a remote server is generated."The malware posts some user and phone-specific data to the remote address and attempts to download and run an APK file from the server. The downloaded file is the second stage in the malware and is a Remote Administration Tool (RAT) for Android, detected as Android.Bmaster. This type of malware is used to remotely control a device by issuing commands from a remote server".
To counter the rising tide of threats, Google last week announced it had launched an app prescreening tool called Bouncer that runs a server-based simulation to check apps for malicious behavior such as attempts to access or send personal data, or simply send out pricey text messages. Google blocks them before they get into the official Android Market.Bouncer has been used quietly for several months; in the second half of 2011, the Android market saw a 40 percent decrease in malware apps identified as potentially malicious, compared to the first half of the year.
Google spokesperson Nancarrow points out that Rootsmart wasn't found in the official Android Market and so falls outside the zone of protection that Google is trying to enforce with its new malware scanner. And the fact that Gingerbreak was already patched, he adds, points to Android's "defense in depth approach, not a reliance on any specific user protection measure."
Get one Best Security Product for your Android from above list, If you really love your Phone, Read Here.
| Vulnerability |
Vulnerability in Facebook discloses Primary Email Address of any account | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/vulnerability-in-facebook-discloses.html | When you sign up on Facebook, you have to enter an email address and that email address becomes your primary email address on Facebook.
In a recent disclosure by a Security researcher, Stephen Sclafani - The Social Networking site Facebook was vulnerable to disclosure of primary email address of any Facebook user to hackers and spammers.
The flaw resides in the invitation mechanism of Facebook, using which one can invite his all contacts emails to Facebook for making new account.
As shown in following screenshot, an invitation received on an email, where one need to click the Signup URL:
After clicking that URL, invited user will be redirected to a signup page filled in with the email address and the name of a person who used the link to sign up for an account was displayed:
There are two parameters in this URL, i.e "re" and "mid". According to Stephen changing some part of "mid" parameter can expose the email address of another user.
https://www.facebook.com/r.php?re=245bf2da75118af20d917bdd34babddb&mid=59b63aG5af3107aba69G0G46
59b63a G 5af3107aba69 G 0 G 46
He explained that, in above string, "G" acting as a delimiter/separator, where 2nd value after first "G" i.e 5af3107aba69 is the Profile ID of user. Replacing user ID can give expose email ID of any user in Sign Up Page. Attacker can obtain this numerical ID of facebook profile from Graph API.
Using this flaw attacker can extract email address of all facebook profiles for spamming or hacking purpose. Attacker need to just write an automated script/code to grab all email address of billions of facebook users.
Using following steps hacker can write a automated code to grab all emails:
1.) Grab profile links of all facebook users from Facebook People Directory i.e https://www.facebook.com/directory/people/
2.) Collect Numerical Facebook ID for each Profile from facebook Graph API i.e https://graph.facebook.com/mohitkumar.thehackernews, where extracted user ID is 1251386282.
3.) In Next step, using curl or other methods open the modified URL for each profile ie https://www.facebook.com/r.php?re=245bf2da75118af20d917bdd34babddb&mid=59b63aG1251386282G0G46
4.) Filter the email address exposed in the Source code obtained from above step for each profile and store in database.
This way, above vulnerability was able to put every facebook user at Risk, but Stephen's responsible disclosure to Facebook Security team save us. He is rewarded with $3,500 for helping them to patch this flaw.
| Vulnerability |
Warning: Millions Of P0rnHub Users Hit With Malvertising Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/online-malvertising-attack.html | Researchers from cybersecurity firm Proofpoint have recently discovered a large-scale malvertising campaign that exposed millions of Internet users in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia to malware infections.
Active for more than a year and still ongoing, the malware campaign is being conducted by a hacking group called KovCoreG, which is well known for distributing Kovter ad fraud malware that was used in 2015 malicious ad campaigns, and most recently earlier in 2017.
The KovCoreG hacking group initially took advantage of P0rnHub—one of the world's most visited adult websites—to distribute fake browser updates that worked on all three major Windows web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer.
According to the Proofpoint researchers, the infections in this campaign first appeared on P0rnHub web pages via a legitimate advertising network called Traffic Junky, which tricked users into installing the Kovtar malware onto their systems.
Among other malicious things, the Kovter malware is known for its unique persistence mechanism, allowing the malware to load itself after every reboot of the infected host.
The Traffic Junky advertising network redirected users to a malicious website, where Chrome and Firefox users were shown a fake browser update window, while Internet Explorer and Edge users got a fake Flash update.
"The [infection] chain begins with a malicious redirect hosted on avertizingms[.]com, which inserts a call hosted behind KeyCDN, a major content delivery network," Proofpoint writes.
The attackers used a number of filters and fingerprinting of "the timezone, screen dimension, language (user/browser) history length of the current browser windows, and unique id creation via Mumour," in an effort to target users and evade analysis.
Researchers said Chrome users were infected with a JavaScript which beaconed back to the server controlled by the attackers, preventing security analysts working through the infection chain if their IP had not "checked in."
"This makes it extremely unlikely that the JavaScript can be run alone and provide the payload in a sandbox environment," Proofpoint writes. "This is most likely why this component of the chain has not been documented previously."
In this case, the attackers limited their campaign to click fraud to generate illicit revenue, but Proofpoint researchers believed the malware could easily be modified to spread ransomware, information stealing Trojans or any other malware.
Both P0rnHub and Traffic Junky, according to the researchers, "acted swiftly to remediate this threat upon notification."
Although this particular infection chain was successfully shut down after the site operator and ad network got notified, the malware campaign is still ongoing elsewhere.
| Malware |
Mobile Security and Lack thereof | https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/mobile-security-and-lack-thereof.html | Mobile Security and Lack thereof
Nidhi Rastogi ,A Security Consultant with Logic Technology Inc, New York share her Views about the Mobile Security and Lack thereof . The Article is taken from our September Month Magazine Edition .Here we go..
Mobile technology, particularly smartphones, has come of age and is increasingly replacing PCs for internet surfing, emails, gaming and social networking. As per a recent survey by Neilson Media Research, smartphones now comprise over 38% of the U.S. Cellphone Market and will become the majority by end of the year. To meet this growing demand, cellphone companies are fast churning out new models with killer features, latest and greatest in technology.
With this growth it has also come to attention that security of these devices cannot be left behind. Every day a new data breach is making headlines suggesting hackers have gone into overdrive. However, what is of particular interest is that a bulk of them is being attributed to cellphones. Hacking alone accounted for $3.2 billion in losses for the telecom industry, says CFCA.
The culprits are many. Several companies like Apple and Google own online application store that allow 3rd party developers to upload programs that can be made available for download by the users. Many users are deceived into downloading applications that appear to be legitimate. The terms are conditions are loosely defined which makes them easy to accept. Once on the device, the "app" can do a variety of damage, and at times without alarming the user. The App Genome Project by the company Lookout showed that in a study of 100,000 apps for iPhones and Android devices, a substantial proportion contained code which could pose a security risk.
In another recent finding, security researchers at Trend Micro discovered a malware on Android devices that disguised itself as a Google+ app. The app was capable of performing malicious activities like recording phone calls and gathering GPS location, and more. This user data was then uploaded on a remote server. The application called itself Google++, which apparently was overlooked by several customers. It's worth mentioning here that a big factor in the working of a malware is the casual behavior of the user, who fails to pay enough attention when installing a program on their device.
In another report, SMS Android Trojan was hidden inside a movie player app and, once installed, would send out premium text messages. Many such malwares and viruses combined have affected up to 250,000 android devices to date.
The rationale behind making smartphone the target by hackers is very simple. A smart phone today not only stores contacts but also other sensitive information like emails, pictures, and more. And in the case of some devices, a history of user visited locations with timelines. The faster and improved cellular networks and Wi-Fi capability have made handheld computing very convenient, making it a widely accepted product. Hence, it has attracted the attention of hackers with malicious intent.
This increased visibility has, however, put pressure on software companies as well as hardware manufacturers to provide security features and configuration options. Facebook now offers its users secure logging via SSL on their wireless devices by activating an account setting. Twitter followed suit by enabling "always-on SSL" and thereby keeping user data secure even when connected through a public Wi-Fi.
The users too need to be vigilant of their devices. In case of a lost device, remote erasure of data or locking of the device is recommended. An alternative is to trigger the remote kill switch which will render the phone dead. If the device contains sensitive information, it is recommended to store digital assets in encrypted folders. Other simple tricks include keeping the Bluetooth off and in non-promiscuous mode at all times, unless when in-use. Contacts, photos and videos should be periodically backed-up in a safe location, preferably encrypted. Several anti-virus software compatible with various OS platforms are available for download from online application markets to help make sure that mobile devices are as secure as possible.
Some Real world Mobile Security Issues in Recent News:
Cross Application Scripting vulnerability in Android browser
Fake 'Walk and Text' App steals Android user data
iPhone can be used as spy phone to get desktop Keystrokes
iPhone Skype XSS Vulnerability Lets Hackers Steal Phonebook [Video]
Android phones vulnerable to hackers
HTC Android Vulnerability - Exposes Phone numbers, Gps, SMS, Emails etc
Android malware - Works on remote commands form encrypted blog
QR codes - Next way for Android Malware
More Android vulnerabilities exposed [Video Demonstration]
SpyEye Trojan stole $3.2 million from US victims,Android users will be next target !
| Malware |
Bredo Banking Malware Campaign Targets Bank of America Customers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/bredo-banking-malware-campaign-targets.html | The Major US Financial institution, Bank of America is being targeted by a stealthy malicious financial malware campaign, according to AppRiver report.
Last month the researchers at AppRiver has noticed enormous volumes of traffic through their data centers, with the peaks of traffic reaching three or four times than their normal network traffic.
They caught and blocked a malware campaign that was using the new and novel tactics designed specifically to beat the filtering engines.
Last Wednesday the company experienced huge spam traffic i.e. 10 to 12 times the normal amount of their normal routine traffic. "These spikes have been driven by a tremendous increase in the number of incoming messages being sent with viruses attached." and some user experienced delays in sending and receiving mail.
They found the malware campaign, distributing a Financial Trojan designed to target, the Bank of America customers, known as 'Bredo virus', capable of stealing information such as Credit Card Numbers, Banking credentials, user's keystrokes.
AppRiver said that 'The software may also have abilities to further infect a system by downloading more malware on to the machine' and added that, 'running through a variety of virus scanners showed that only 11 of 51 antivirus vendors were classifying it as malware.'
The Bredo botnet was first detected in May 2009 and is capable of propagating through malicious e-mails that includes malware attachments which would infect a computer when opened, effectively turning the computer into another zombie controlled by the botnet.
In October 2010, the Dutch law enforcement agents seized 143 LeaseWeb servers used as command & the control center of botnet, but were not able to successfully vanish it completely.
| Malware |
LibSSH Flaw Allows Hackers to Take Over Servers Without Password | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/libssh-ssh-protocol-library.html | A four-year-old severe vulnerability has been discovered in the Secure Shell (SSH) implementation library known as Libssh that could allow anyone to completely bypass authentication and gain unfettered administrative control over a vulnerable server without requiring a password.
The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-10933, is an authentication-bypass issue that was introduced in Libssh version 0.6 released earlier 2014, leaving thousands of enterprise servers open to hackers for the last four years.
But before you get frightened, you should know that neither the widely used OpenSSH nor Github's implementation of libssh was affected by the vulnerability.
The vulnerability resides due to a coding error in Libssh and is "ridiculously simple" to exploit.
According to a security advisory published Tuesday, all an attacker needs to do is sending an "SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS" message to a server with an SSH connection enabled when it expects an "SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST" message.
Due to a logical flaw in libssh, the library fails to validate if the incoming "successful login" packet was sent by the server or the client, and also fails to check if the authentication process has been completed or not.
Therefore, if a remote attacker (client) sends this "SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS" response to libssh, it considers that the authentication has been successful and will grant the attacker access to the server, without needing to enter a password.
Although GitHub uses libssh, it confirms that its official website and GitHub Enterprise are not affected by the vulnerability due to how GitHub uses the library.
"We use a custom version of libssh; SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS with the libssh server is not relied upon for pubkey-based auth, which is what we use the library for," a GitHub security official said on Twitter.
"Patches have been applied out of an abundance of caution, but GHE [GitHub Enterprise] was never vulnerable to CVE-2018-10933."
Shodan search shows that around 6,500 internet-facing servers may be impacted due to the use of Libssh one or the other way.
The security bug was discovered by Peter Winter-Smith from NCC Group, who responsibly disclosed the issue to Libssh.
The Libssh team addressed the issue with the release of its updated libssh versions 0.8.4 and 0.7.6 on Tuesday, and the details of the vulnerability were also released at the same time.
If you have Libssh installed on your website, and mainly if you are using the server component, you are highly recommended to install the updated versions of Libssh as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Android Malware uses Google Cloud Messaging Service; infected over 5 Million Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/Android-Malware-Google-Cloud-Messaging-mohit-Kaspersky.html | The Kaspersky Lab researchers recently have discovered a number of Android malware apps are abusing the Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) as Command and Control server. The GCM service allows Android app developers to send messages using JSON Format for installed apps, but hackers exploited it for malicious Purposes.
Using Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) as Command and Control server for Android Malware is not a new concept, as last year Security researcher and Hacker 'Mohit Kumar' demonstrated 'Android Malware Engine' - One of the Most Sophisticated Android malware during Malcon conference.
The Kaspersky Lab researchers have detected at least five Different Android Trojans that used JSON format:
1. SMS.AndroidOS.FakeInst.a
2. SMS.AndroidOS.Agent.ao
3. SMS.AndroidOS.OpFake.a
4. Backdoor.AndroidOS.Maxit.a
5. SMS.AndroidOS.Agent.az.
The authors of the malware in Every case took advantage of Google Cloud Messaging Service to Exchange messages between C&C services and the malicious app. Once Gained a Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) ID, malware updates are distributed exploiting directly the Google cloud services and also any Command to the malicious agent is sent is exploiting the service and using JSON format.
Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) act as Command and Control server for the Trojans, which makes the malware updates as the official Updates via Google.
"Furthermore, The execution of commands received from the Google Cloud Messaging Service GCM is performed by the GCM system and it is impossible to block them Directly on an infected device. The only way to cut this channel off From virus writers is to block developer accounts with IDs linked to the Registration of malicious programs."
SMS.AndroidOS.FakeInst.a Is the most diffused agent, according Kaspersky experts more than 4,800,000 installers have been detected and around 160000 attempted Installation was blocked in 2012.
"It Can send text messages to premium numbers, delete incoming text Messages, generate shortcuts to malicious sites, and display Notifications advertising other malicious programs that are spread under The guise of useful applications or games" states the Kaspersky blog Post.
SMS.AndroidOS.Agent.ao is presented as a porn app and has the primary intent to send messages to premium numbers, meanwhile the SMS.AndroidOS.OpFake.a malware is the typical SMS malicious application of which have been detected also more than 1 million installers.
This last malware is also able to steal Sensitive information from the victim's handset such as contacts and it is also able to self-update its code, the agent appeared very active And was detected in 97 different countries, the majority in Russia and Eastern countries.
The Kaspersky team has blocked more than 60,000 Attempted installs, it sends several commands from both the GCM and its Own C&C servers such as:
Sending premium text messages to a specified number
Sending text messages
Performing self-updates
Stealing text messages
Deleting incoming text messages that meet the criteria set by the C&C
Theft of contacts
Replacing the C&C or GCM numbers
Stopping or restarting its operations
Backdoor.AndroidOS.Maxit trojan was very dated, first instance was detected in late 2011 and Appears to be continuously updated, today the experts counted more than 40 different variants most often in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines And Burma.
"All of These modifications are very similar to one another," "the app opens Websites with games, while malicious operations are executed in the Background." It has been found most often in Malaysia, but also in Thailand, the Philippines and Burma.
"The The first thing the backdoor sets out to do is collect information about The phone and the SIM card, including the phone number and the mobile Provider. All of this data is uploaded to the androidproject.imaxter.net C&C. This is the server that manages all of the Trojan's primaries Functions."
The Last trojan, SMS.AndroidOS.Agent.az., was detected for the first time in May 2012 and is a shell app for a Vietnamese porn website which is able Also to send text messages to a premium number.
The number of malware that exploits the Google Cloud Messaging Service is Destined to increase despite it is still relatively low, the data on Their diffusion demonstrated it. These malware are prevalent in Western Europe, the CIS, and Asia, virus writers know very well that execution Off commands received from GCM is performed by the Google Cloud Messaging Service system and it is impossible to block them directly on an Infected device.
Actually The only option for security experts is to block developer accounts With IDs linked to the registration of malicious applications.
| Malware |
Red Hat Linux DHCP Client Found Vulnerable to Command Injection Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/linux-dhcp-hacking.html | A Google security researcher has discovered a critical remote command injection vulnerability in the DHCP client implementation of Red Hat Linux and its derivatives like Fedora operating system.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-1111, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on targeted systems.
Whenever your system joins a network, it's the DHCP client application which allows your system to automatically receive network configuration parameters, such as an IP address and DNS servers, from the DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) server.
The vulnerability resides in the NetworkManager integration script included in the DHCP client packages which is configured to obtain network configuration using the DHCP protocol.
Felix Wilhelm from the Google security team found that attackers with a malicious DHCP server, or connected to the same network as the victim, can exploit this flaw by spoofing DHCP responses, eventually allowing them to run arbitrary commands with root privileges on the victim's system running vulnerable DHCP client.
Although full details of the vulnerability have not been released, Wilhelm claims his PoC exploit code is so short in length that it even can fit in a tweet.
Meanwhile, Barkın Kılıç, a security researcher from Turkey, has released a tweetable proof-of-concept exploit code for the Red Hat Linux DHCP client vulnerability on Twitter.
In its security advisory, Red Hat has confirmed that the vulnerability impacts Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7, and that all of its customers running affection versions of the dhclient package should update their packages to the newer versions as soon as they are available.
"Users have the option to remove or disable the vulnerable script, but this will prevent certain configuration parameters provided by the DHCP server from being configured on a local system, such as addresses of the local NTP or NIS servers," Red Hat warns.
Fedora has also released new versions of DHCP packages containing fixes for Fedora 26, 27, and 28.
Other popular Linux distributions like OpenSUSE and Ubuntu do not appear to be impacted by the vulnerability, as their DHCP client implementation doesn't have NetworkManager integration script by default.
| Vulnerability |
2 Hackers Win Over 1 Million Air Miles each for Reporting Bugs in United Airlines | https://thehackernews.com/2016/08/united-airlines-air-miles.html | Two computer hackers have earned more than 1 Million frequent-flyer miles each from United Airlines for finding and reporting multiple security vulnerabilities in the Airline's website.
Olivier Beg, a 19-year-old security researcher from the Netherlands, has earned 1 Million air miles from United Airlines for finding around 20 security vulnerabilities in the software systems of the airline.
Last year, Chicago-based 'United Airlines' launched a bug bounty program to invite security researchers and bug hunters for finding and reporting security holes in its websites, software, apps and web portals.
Under its bounty program, United Airlines offers a top reward of 1 Million flyer miles for reporting Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaws; 250,000 miles for medium-severity vulnerabilities, and 50,000 flyer miles for low-severity bugs.
According to Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation, the 19-year-old reported 20 security issues to United Airlines and the most severe flaw earned the teenager 250,000 air miles.
Beg did not reveal the details about the flaws he discovered, but the teenager claims to have reported flaws in software from popular tech companies including Yahoo, Google, and Facebook.
Another 23-years-old security researcher from Algeria reported three security issues under the airline's bug bounty program and earned 1.7 Million flyer miles from the United Airlines.
Djaballah Mohamed Taher told The Hacker News that he reported Remote Code Execution, authorization bypass and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaws to the airline but did not detail the technical aspects given the program's non-disclosure agreement.
Last year, Jordan Wiens was the first security researcher to earn United Airlines' top reward of 1 Million Miles for finding a security bug that allowed him to seize control of one of the airline's websites.
Bug bounty programs are very common among technology firms, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, who offer security researchers hundreds of thousands of dollars as rewards for exposing security weaknesses in their products.
Although, it's good to see companies like United Airlines, Tesla, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, welcoming vulnerability reports from researchers and rewarding them for their work.
Apple is the latest to announce the bug bounty program starting this fall to pay outside security researchers and white hat hackers for privately disclosing security issues in its products.
The company plans to offer rewards of up to $200,000, though the scope of its program has initially been kept invitation-only targeting a small range of Apple software including iOS and iCloud.
| Vulnerability |
Chinese ISPs Caught Injecting Ads and Malware into Web Pages | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/china-hacker-malware.html | China has gained a considerable global attention when it comes to their Internet policies in the past years; whether it's introducing its own search engine dubbed "Baidu," Great Firewall of China, its homebrew China Operating System (COP) and many more.
Along with the developments, China has long been criticized for suspected backdoors in its products: Xiaomi and Star N9500 smartphones are top examples.
Now, Chinese Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been caught red-handed for injecting Advertisements as well as Malware through their network traffic.
Three Israeli researchers uncovered that the major Chinese-based ISPs named China Telecom and China Unicom, two of Asia's largest network operators, have been engaged in an illegal practice of content injection in network traffic.
Chinese ISPs had set up many proxy servers to pollute the client's network traffic not only with insignificant advertisements but also malware links, in some cases, inside the websites they visit.
If an Internet user tries to access a domain that resides under these Chinese ISPs, the forged packet redirects the user's browser to parse the rogue network routes. As a result, the client's legitimate traffic will be redirected to malicious sites/ads, benefiting the ISPs.
Here's How Malware and Ads are Injected
In the research paper titled 'Website-Targeted False Content Injection by Network Operators,' the Israeli researchers wrote that the tactic has now expanded to core ISPs – the Internet companies that interconnect edge ISPs with the rest of the ISPs globally.
These ISPs have set up specialized servers that monitor network traffic for specific URLs and move to alter it, no matter the end users are their customers or not.
Methods of Injection:
Various methods had been adopted by ISPs to infiltrate the legitimate traffic. Some of them are:
1- Out of Band TCP Injection
Unlike in the past when ISPs modified network packages to inject ads, the network operators send the forged packets without dropping the legitimate ones.
Interestingly, instead of interception or rewriting of network packets, cloning of HTTP response packets had been adopted by ISPs to replicate the infection. The ISP clones the legitimate traffic, modifies the clone, and then sends both packets to the desired destination.
So ultimately, there are 2 packet responses generated for a single request. Hence, there is a chance of forged packet to win the race, while legit packet reaches at last.
Since the cloned traffic will not always arrive at the end users before the legitimate one, the injected traffic is harder to detect.
But a serious analysis with netsniff-ng would knock out the fake packets.
2) HTTP Injection
HTTP is a stateless client-server protocol that uses TCP as its transport. As TCP only accepts the initial packet upon its receival and discards the second, there is a chance to receive the fake packet in first place; if infection had been taken place.
Here, the user might get a response with HTTP Status Number 302 (Redirection) instead of HTTP Status Number 200 (OK) and would be re-routed to the other non-legit links.
How to Identify Rogue Packets?
1) IP Identification
IP identification value does contains a counter that is sequentially incremented after each sent the packet.
The forged packet returns soon after making a request that masquerades as a legit packet. But the time stamp in each packet would provide enough evidence to eliminate the rogue packet.
The forged packet is the one that has the largest absolute difference between its identification value and the average of the identification values of all the other packets
2) TTL (Total Time to Live)
Each received packet contains an initial value set by sender that calculates the number of hops covered by the packet during the transmission.
If packet is received with different number of hop counts, then it would clearly draws a line between the legit and illegit ones.
The forged packet is the one that has the largest absolute difference between its TTL value and the average of TTL values of all the other packets
3) Timing Analysis
Time stamp in the packet captured by the monitoring systems at the entrance to the Edge network would figure out the genuinity.
The data packet with apparent time close proximity would differentiate the legitimate packets from the forged packets with unmatched arrival time.
List of the Infection Groups
In general, 14 different ISPs had been discovered with malicious background, and out of these 10 are from China, 2 from malaysia, and 1 each from India and United States.
Following are the injection groups and their characteristics:
1. Hao – Referred the user to hao123.com itself, but using an HTTP 302 response mechanism to infect users.
2. GPWA – The genuine website of Gambling had been forged to another web domain which intelligently redirects the traffic to 'qpwa' (sometimes, public would not find the difference between 'q' and 'g').
The forged content here includes a JavaScript that refers to a resource having the same name as the one originally requested by the user, but the forged resource is located at qpwa.org registered to a Romanian citizen.
3. Duba Group – The injections in this group add to the original content of a website a colorful button that prompts the victim to download an executable from a link at the domain duba.net.
The executable is flagged as malicious by several antivirus vendors.
4. Mi-img – In these injected sessions, the client, which appears to be an Android device, tries to download an application. The redirected response navigates into an online bot database that had been identified by a BotScout lookup.
5. Server Erased – In this group, the injections were identical to the legitimate response but the original value of the HTTP header 'Server' is changed.
Motive Behind the Attack
Both the advertising agencies and the ISPs are benefited by redirecting user's traffic to the corresponding sites.
This practice would mark an increase in advertisement revenue and other profits to advertisers and ISPs.
During their research, the researchers logged massive amounts of Web traffic and detected around 400 injection incidents based on this technique.
Most of these events happened with ISPs in China and far east countries, even if the traffic originated from Western countries, meaning a German user accessing a website hosted in China is also susceptible to having his/her traffic injected with ads or malware.
How to Mitigate?
Since the companies that engage in such practices are edge ISPs - the final network providers that connect users to the Internet, users can change their Internet provider.
However, the simplest way to combat this issue is for website operators to support HTTPS for their services, as all the websites that infect users are SSL-less.
The sites that supply malicious URLs are not guarded by SSL Shield, making them vulnerable to carry out the illegit things.
Therefore, usage of HTTPS-based websites would block such kinds of attacks, so users are advised only to stick to SSL sites.
Delivering the illegit content, or redirecting the crowd to stash the cash would end up losing the public trust on the technologies.
| Malware |
Google Does It Again: Discloses Unpatched Microsoft Edge and IE Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2017/02/google-microsoft-edge-bug.html | This month has yet been kind of interesting for cyber security researchers, with Google successfully cracked SHA1 and the discovery of Cloudbleed bug in Cloudflare that caused the leakage of sensitive information across sites hosted behind Cloudflare.
Besides this, Google last week disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library, which affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10.
While the Windows vulnerability has yet to be patched by the company, Google today released the details of another unpatched Windows security flaw in its browser, as Microsoft did not act within its 90-day disclosure deadline.
The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0037), discovered and disclosed by Google Project Zero team's researcher Ivan Fratric, is a so-called "type confusion flaw" in a module in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer that potentially leads to arbitrary code execution.
Proof-of-Concept Code Released!
This time, with the details of this arbitrary code execution bug, the researcher has also published a proof-of-concept exploit that can crash Edge and IE, opening the door for potential hackers to execute code and gain administrator privileges on the affected systems.
Fratric says he successfully ran his PoC code on the 64-bit version of IE on Windows Server 2012 R2, but both 32-bit IE 11, as well as Microsoft Edge, is affected by the same vulnerability.
In short, the vulnerability affects all Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 users.
You can know more details about the recently disclosed flaw on Google's bug report blog, along with proof-of-concept code that causes a crash of the browsers, though sophisticated hackers can build more dangerous exploits as well.
This vulnerability was reported to Microsoft on November 25, and it went public on February 25, after Google Project Zero's 90-day disclosure policy.
Three Unpatched, but Already Disclosed Windows Flaws
While Microsoft has delayed this month's Patch Tuesday and already has to patch two already disclosed, but unpatched vulnerabilities, it is hard to say if the company actually included a patch for this vulnerability discovered by Google in its next roll out of patches.
Yes, Microsoft has to patch two other severe security flaws as well, which have already been publicly disclosed with working exploit code but remain still unpatched, giving hackers enough time to target Windows users.
First one is a Windows SMB flaw that affects Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows Server. The PoC exploit code of this flaw was released almost two weeks ago.
The other one is the vulnerability disclosed by Google last week that affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10.
Meanwhile, just to remain on the safer side, Windows users are advised to replace their Internet Explorer and Edge browsers with a different one if possible and avoid clicking on suspicious links and websites they do not trust.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Steal $19 Million From Bithumb Cryptocurrency Exchange | https://thehackernews.com/2019/03/bithumb-cryptocurrency-hacked.html | Hackers yesterday stole nearly $19 million worth of cryptocurrency from Bithumb, the South Korea-based popular cryptocurrency exchange admitted today.
According to Primitive Ventures' Dovey Wan, who first broke the information on social media, hackers managed to compromise a number of Bithumb's hot EOS and XRP wallets and transferred around 3 million EOS (~ $13 million) and 20 million XRP (~ $6 million) to his newly-created accounts.
The hacker then distributedly transferred the stolen digital assets to his different accounts created on other cryptocurrency exchanges, including Huobi, HitBTC, WB, and EXmo, via ChangeNow, a non-custodial crypto swap platform does not require KYC/account.
Bithumb has been hacked multiple times in the past. Last time the popular cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in June 2018, when hackers stole $31 million, and in July 2017, when hackers stole $1 million worth of EOS from many wallets belonging to its users.
"And this is the second time Bithumb saw a MAJOR hack, last time it was hacked with a loss over $30m.. lol and after the first hack it was STILL able to get the fiat license from Korea and WTF??" Wan says on Twitter.
It has been reported that the private key for the EOS hot wallet account belonging to Bithumb was stolen (address g4ydomrxhege), which allowed the hacker to transfer the funds to his address, "ifguz3chmamg."
The above image shared by Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance cryptocurrency exchange, explains how hacker distributed his funds after stealing it from Bithumb.
Here's how the hacker distributed and transferred the stolen funds to his accounts on different exchanges:
EXMO: 662,600
Huobi: 263,605
Changelly 143,511
KuCoin: 96,270
CoinSwitch: 38,725
According to a blog post published by the company today, Bithumb is still investigating the hack, which it believes was performed with the help of an insider, and has reported the breach incident to security firm Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) and cyber police.
"We deeply apologize to our members for delaying the cryptocurrency deposit and withdrawal service," Bithumb said.
"As a result of the inspection, it is judged that the incident is an accident involving insiders because the external intrusion path has not been revealed until now. Based on the facts, we are conducting intensive investigations with KISA, Cyber Police Agency and security companies."
Meanwhile, Bithumb said the company is working with major cryptocurrency exchanges and foundations in hope to recover the loss of the cryptocurrency equivalent.
Last year when the exchange was hacked and lost $30 million in EOS, it managed to recover half of the stolen funds.
Would Bithumb be able to do the same this time?
| Data_Breaches |
Facebook content restrictions bypass Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/facebook-content-restrictions-bypass.html | Facebook content restrictions bypass Vulnerability
Blackhat Academy claims to have found a way to bypass content restrictions on links, as posted on their site and posts put on a user's public wall. Even Security Analysts claim that Facebook was notified of these vulnerabilities on July 31st, 2011. To date (October 4, 2011), Facebook has yet to do anything about this.
Facebook has only recently purchased Websense to attempt to push this vulnerability under the rug, however the exploit still works.To access Facebook's FQL API, Facebook was even so kind as to give a reference of tables and columns in the documentation for FQL. FQL does not allow the use of JOINS, however it is not needed as everything is thoroughly documented. Attackers can misuse this during the creation of a malicious Facebook application or directly on the FQL development api page for information gathering. :
<?php
# User agent checking methods
$fb_string = '/facebookexternal/i'; # facebookexternal shows in the facebook content scanner's user agent
$gplus_string = '/Feedfetcher-Google/i'; # googleplus shows up in the user agent as well.
# rDNS Lookup Methods
$host_websense = '/websense.com/i'; # Checking the rdns for websense filters
$host_fb = '/tfbnw.net/i'; # Checking the rdns for tfbnw.net - facebook host
# Load the request properties
$u_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$u_ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$u_host = gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
# If we're coming from or facebook or websense or google plus,
if (preg_match($host_fb,$u_host) || preg_match($host_websense,$u_host) || preg_match($fb_string,$u_agent) || preg_match($gplus_string,$u_agent)) {
# Display an image
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
@readfile ('/var/www/localhost/cute_kitten.jpeg');
} else {
# Rickroll this unsuspecting user
header('Location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&ob=av3e');
}
?>
While most major sites that allow link submission are vulnerable to this method, sites including Websense, Google+, and Facebook make the requests easily identifiable. These sites send an initial request to the link in order to store a mirror thumbnail of the image, or a snapshot of the website being linked. In doing so, many use a custom user agent, or have IP addresses that resolve to a consistent domain name. Facebook IP addresses resolve to tfbnw.net, also set a custom user agent of "facebookexternalhit".Google+ (also notified Jul. 31st and guilty of reasonable care) again follows suit and utilizes "Feedfetcher-Google" as their user agent. Knowing this, we can easily filter out requests coming from these websites, and offer up a legitimate image to be displayed on their site, while redirecting or displaying a completely different page to anyone that follows the links. Facebook's recent partnership with Websense is laughable, due to Websense's "ACE" security scanner that is just as easily identified, by using gethostbyaddr in order to resolve the IP back to websense.com. Utilizing this technique would allow an overwhelming number of malware sites to remain undetected to their automatic site analysis. Other places like digg.com either spoof a user agent to look like normal traffic, or forward the client's user agent, which makes it more difficult to catch every one of their requests. Fortunately, digg.com only requests the link once, prior to submitting the link to the world. This allows attackers to serve up a legitimate image until that initial request clears our server, and then replace it with a less than honest file. We have affectionately named this vulnerability class Cross-Site Content Forgery.Proof of Concept can be seen here.
Submitted By : Blackhat Academy
| Vulnerability |
Windows Remote Assistance Exploit Lets Hackers Steal Sensitive Files | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/window-remote-assistance.html | You have always been warned not to share remote access to your computer with untrusted people for any reason—it's a basic cybersecurity advice, and common sense, right?
But what if, I say you should not even trust anyone who invites or offer you full remote access to their computers.
A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft's Windows Remote Assistance (Quick Assist) feature that affects all versions of Windows to date, including Windows 10, 8.1, RT 8.1, and 7, and allows remote attackers to steal sensitive files on the targeted machine.
Windows Remote Assistance is a built-in tool that allows someone you trust to take over your PC (or you to take remote control of others) so they can help you fix a problem from anywhere around the world.
The feature relies on the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to establish a secure connection with the person in need.
However, Nabeel Ahmed of Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative discovered and reported an information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2018-0878) in Windows Remote Assistance that could allow attackers to obtain information to further compromise the victim's system.
The vulnerability, which has been fixed by the company in this month's patch Tuesday, resides in the way Windows Remote Assistance processes XML External Entities (XXE).
The vulnerability affects Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 and R2, Windows Server 2008 SP2 and R2 SP1, Windows 10 (both 32- and 64-bit), Windows 8.1 (both 32- and 64-bit) and RT 8.1, and Windows 7 (both 32- and 64-bit).
Exploiting Windows Remote Assistance to Steal Files
Since a security patch for this vulnerability is now available, the researcher has finally released technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code for the flaw to the public.
In order to exploit this flaw, which resides in MSXML3 parser, the hacker needs to use "Out-of-Band Data Retrieval" attack technique by offering the victim access to his/her computer via Windows Remote Assistance.
While setting up Windows Remote Assistance, the feature gives you two options—Invite someone to help you and Respond to someone who needs help.
Selecting the first option helps users generate an invitation file, i.e. 'invitation.msrcincident,' which contains XML data with a lot of parameters and values required for authentication.
Since the parser does not properly validate the content, the attacker can simply send a specially crafted Remote Assistance invitation file containing a malicious payload to the victim, tricking the targeted computer to submit the content of specific files from known locations to a remote server controlled by the attackers.
"The stolen information could be submitted as part of the URL in HTTP request(s) to the attacker. In all cases, an attacker would have no way to force a user to view the attacker-controlled content. Instead, an attacker would have to convince a user to take action," Microsoft explains.
"This XXE vulnerability can be genuinely used in mass scale phishing attacks targeting individuals believing they are truly helping another individual with an IT problem. Totally unaware that the .msrcincident invitation file could potentially result in loss of sensitive information," Ahmed warns.
Among patching other critical vulnerabilities fixed this month, Windows users are highly recommended to install the latest update for Windows Remote Assistance as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Threaten to Leak D.C. Police Informants' Info If Ransom Is Not Paid | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/hackers-threaten-to-leak-dc-police.html | The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia has become the latest high-profile government agency to fall victim to a ransomware attack.
The Babuk Locker gang claimed in a post on the dark web that they had compromised the DC Police's networks and stolen 250 GB of unencrypted files. Screenshots shared by the group, and seen by The Hacker News, include various folders containing what appears to be investigation reports, arrests, disciplinary actions, and other intelligence briefings.
Also called the DC Police, the MPD is the primary law enforcement agency for the District of Columbia in the U.S.
The ransomware gang has given the department three days to heed to their ransom demand or risk leaking sensitive files that could expose police informants to criminal gangs.
"Hello! Even an institution such as DC can be threatened, we have downloaded a sufficient amount of information from your internal networks, and we advise you to contact us as soon as possible, to prevent leakage, if no response is received within 3 days, we will start to contact gangs in order to drain the informants, we will continue to attack the state sector of the usa, fbi csa, we find 0 day before you, even larger attacks await you soon," the ransomware group said on their data leak site.
Babuk Locker is a relative newcomer in the ransomware landscape, with the group targeting transportation, healthcare, plastic, electronics, and agricultural sectors across the U.S., U.K., U.A.E., China, India, South Africa, Spain, Germany, and Italy at least since the beginning of 2021. The syndicate is also known for attacking Linux-based systems such as VMware ESXi.
"The Babuk gang highlighted the key problem that all organizations face when confronting threats, and that is speed," Cymulate CTO Avihai Ben-Yossef said. "The time it takes for known vulnerabilities to get patched on all systems is too long. Defenders that rely on manual security testing methodologies are unable to match the pace of threat actors in finding security gaps and fixing them."
| Cyber_Attack |
Lenovo Caught Using Rootkit to Secretly Install Unremovable Software | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/lenovo-rootkit-malware.html | Two years ago Chinese firm Lenovo got banned from supplying equipment for networks of the intelligence and defense services various countries due to hacking and spying concerns.
Earlier this year, Lenovo was caught red-handed for selling laptops pre-installed with Superfish malware.
One of the most popular Chinese computer manufacturers 'Lenovo' has been caught once again using a hidden Windows feature to preinstall unwanted and unremovable rootkit software on certain Lenovo laptop and desktop systems it sells.
The feature is known as "Lenovo Service Engine" (LSE) – a piece of code presents into the firmware on the computer's motherboard.
If Windows is installed, the LSE automatically downloads and installs Lenovo's own software during boot time before the Microsoft operating system is launched, overwriting Windows operating system files.
More worrisome part of the feature is that it injects software that updates drivers, firmware, and other pre-installed apps onto Windows machine – even if you wiped the system clean.
So even if you uninstall or delete the Lenovo's own software programs, the LSE hidden in the firmware will automatically bring them back as soon as you power-on or reboot your machine.
Users at a number of online forums are criticizing Lenovo for this move and suspecting that the Chinese computer maker has installed a "bootkit" that survives a full system wipe-and-reinstall.
The issue was first discovered and reported by users back in May when using new Lenovo laptops but was widely reported Tuesday.
What these Unwanted Program Does?
For Desktops:
In case of desktops, Lenovo's own description states that the software doesn't send any personally identifying information, but sends some basic information, including the system model, date, region, and system ID, to a Lenovo server.
Moreover, the company claims that this process is done only one-time, sending the information to its server only when a machine first connects to the Internet.
For Laptops:
However, in case of Laptops, the software does rather more. LSE installs a software program called OneKey Optimizer (OKO) that bundles on many Lenovo laptops.
According to the company, the OKO software is used for enhancing computer performance by "updating the firmware, drivers, and pre-installed apps" as well as "scanning junk files and find factors that influence system performance."
OneKey Optimizer falls under the category of "crapware". The worst part is that both LSE as well as OKO appears to be insecure.
Back in April, security researcher Roel Schouwenberg reported some security issues, including buffer overflows and insecure network connections, to Lenovo and Microsoft.
This forced Lenovo to stop including LSE on its new systems that built since June. The company has also provided firmware updates for vulnerable laptops and issued instructions to disable the option on affected machines and clean up the LSE files.
Among others, many Flex and Yoga machines running an operating system including Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 are affected by this issue. You can see the full list of affected notebooks and desktops on Lenovo's website.
Lenovo has since released an official statement, which notes that the systems made from June onwards have BIOS firmware that eliminates the issue, and it's no longer installing Lenovo Service Engine on PCs.
Expert way! How to Remove Lenovo Service Engine (Rootkit)
In order to remove LSE from your affected machines, you have to do it manually. Follow these simple steps in order to do so:
Know your System Type (whether it's a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows)
Browse to the Lenovo Security Advisory, and select the link for your specific Lenovo machine.
Click the "Date" button for the most recent update.
Search for "Lenovo LSE Windows Disabler Tool" and Click the download icon next to the version that matches your version of Windows.
Open the program once it downloads. It will remove the LSE software.
| Malware |
Microsoft Says Its Systems Were Also Breached in Massive SolarWinds Hack | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/microsoft-says-its-systems-were-also.html | The massive state-sponsored espionage campaign that compromised software maker SolarWinds also targeted Microsoft, as the unfolding investigation into the hacking spree reveals the incident may have been far more wider in scope, sophistication, and impact than previously thought.
News of Microsoft's compromise was first reported by Reuters, which also said the company's own products were then used to strike other victims by leveraging its cloud offerings, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Windows maker, however, denied the threat actor had infiltrated its production systems to stage further attacks against its customers.
In a statement to The Hacker News via email, the company said —
"Like other SolarWinds customers, we have been actively looking for indicators of this actor and can confirm that we detected malicious SolarWinds binaries in our environment, which we isolated and removed. We have not found evidence of access to production services or customer data. Our investigations, which are ongoing, have found absolutely no indications that our systems were used to attack others."
Characterizing the hack as "a moment of reckoning," Microsoft president Brad Smith said it has notified over 40 customers located in Belgium, Canada, Israel, Mexico, Spain, the UAE, the UK, and the US that were singled out by the attackers. 44% of the victims are in the information technology sector, including software firms, IT services, and equipment providers.
CISA Issues New Advisory
The development comes as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a fresh advisory, stating the "APT actor [behind the compromises] has demonstrated patience, operational security, and complex tradecraft in these intrusions."
"This threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations," it added.
But in a twist, the agency also said it identified additional initial infection vectors, other than the SolarWinds Orion platform, that have been leveraged by the adversary to mount the attacks, including a previously stolen key to circumvent Duo's multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access the mailbox of a user via Outlook Web App (OWA) service.
Digital forensics firm Volexity, which tracks the actor under the moniker Dark Halo, said the MFA bypass was one of the three incidents between late 2019 and 2020 aimed at a US-based think tank.
The entire intrusion campaign came to light earlier this week when FireEye disclosed it had detected a breach that also pilfered its Red Team penetration testing tools.
Since then, a number of agencies have been found to be attacked, including the US departments of Treasury, Commerce, Homeland Security, and Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and several state department networks.
While many details continue to remain unclear, the revelation about new modes of attack raises more questions about the level of access the attackers were able to gain across government and corporate systems worldwide.
Microsoft, FireEye, and GoDaddy Create a Killswitch
Over the last few days, Microsoft, FireEye, and GoDaddy seized control over one of the main GoDaddy domains — avsvmcloud[.]com — that was used by the hackers to communicate with the compromised systems, reconfiguring it to create a killswitch that would prevent the SUNBURST malware from continuing to operate on victims' networks.
For its part, SolarWinds has not yet disclosed how exactly the attacker managed to gain extensive access to its systems to be able to insert malware into the company's legitimate software updates.
Recent evidence, however, points to a compromise of its build and software release system. An estimated 18,000 Orion customers are said to have downloaded the updates containing the back door.
Symantec, which earlier uncovered more than 2,000 systems belonging to 100 customers that received the trojanized SolarWinds Orion updates, has now confirmed the deployment of a separate second-stage payload called Teardrop that's used to install the Cobalt Strike Beacon against select targets of interest.
The hacks are believed to be the work of APT29, a Russian threat group also known as Cozy Bear, which has been linked to a series of breaches of critical US infrastructure over the past year.
The latest slew of intrusions has also led CISA, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to issue a joint statement, stating the agencies are gathering intelligence in order to attribute, pursue, and disrupt the responsible threat actors.
Calling for stronger steps to hold nation-states accountable for cyberattacks, Smith said the attacks represent "an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world."
"In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world's critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation's intelligence agency," he added.
| Data_Breaches |
Warning! Over 900 Million Android Phones Vulnerable to New 'QuadRooter' Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2016/08/hack-android-phone.html | Android has Fallen! Yet another set of Android security vulnerabilities has been discovered in Qualcomm chipsets that affect more than 900 Million Android smartphones and tablets worldwide.
What's even worse: Most of those affected Android devices will probably never be patched.
Dubbed "Quadrooter," the set of four vulnerabilities discovered in devices running Android Marshmallow and earlier that ship with Qualcomm chip could allow an attacker to gain root-level access to any Qualcomm device.
The chip, according to the latest statistics, is found in more than 900 Million Android tablets and smartphones.
That's a very big number.
The vulnerabilities have been disclosed by a team of Check Point researchers at the DEF CON 24 security conference in Las Vegas.
Critical Quadrooter Vulnerabilities:
The four security vulnerabilities are:
CVE-2016-2503 discovered in Qualcomm's GPU driver and fixed in Google's Android Security Bulletin for July 2016.
CVE-2016-2504 found in Qualcomm GPU driver and fixed in Google's Android Security Bulletin for August 2016.
CVE-2016-2059 found in Qualcomm kernel module and fixed in April, though patch status is unknown.
CVE-2016-5340 presented in Qualcomm GPU driver and fixed, but patch status unknown.
Qualcomm is the world's leading designer of LTE (Long Term Evolution) chipsets with a 65% share of the LTE modem baseband market. If any one of the four flaws is exploited, an attacker can trigger privilege escalations for gaining root access to an affected device.
All an attacker needs is to write a piece of malware and send it to the victim. When installed, the malware offers the attacker privilege escalation on the affected devices.
According to the researchers, the attack can also be conducted through a malicious app. An attacker needs to trick a user into installing a malicious app that, unlike other malware, would execute without requiring any special permission checks.
"Such an app would require no special permissions to take advantage of these vulnerabilities, alleviating any suspicion users may have when installing," Check Point researchers write in a blog post.
If any of the four vulnerabilities are successfully exploited, an attacker could gain root access to an affected device, giving the attacker full access to the device, including its data, camera and microphone.
List of Affected Devices (Popular)
More than 900 Million Android devices that ship with Qualcomm chip are vulnerable to the flaws.
Here's the list of some of the popular affected devices, though there are far more devices that are impacted by one or more Quadrooter vulnerabilities.
Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung S7 Edge
Sony Xperia Z Ultra
OnePlus One, OnePlus 2 and OnePlus 3
Google Nexus 5X, Nexus 6 and Nexus 6P
Blackphone 1 and Blackphone 2
HTC One, HTC M9 and HTC 10
LG G4, LG G5, and LG V10
New Moto X by Motorola
BlackBerry Priv
How to Check if Your Device is Vulnerable?
You can check if your smartphone or tablet is vulnerable to Quadrooter attack using Check Point's free app.
Since the vulnerable software drivers, which control communication between Qualcomm chipset components, come pre-installed on these devices at the time of manufacturing, they can only be fixed by installing a patch from the devices' distributors or carriers after receiving fixed driver packs from Qualcomm.
"This situation highlights the inherent risks in the Android security model," the researchers say. "Critical security updates must pass through the entire supply chain before they can be made available to end users."
Three of the four vulnerabilities have already been fixed in Google's latest set of monthly security updates, and a patch for the remaining flaw will be rolled out in the upcoming September update.
Since Qualcomm has already released the code, the phone manufacturers could be able to issue patches to the individual devices as soon as possible.
Android Nexus devices are already patched via the over-the-air updates, but other smartphone models will need to wait until their lazy phone manufacturers integrate the fixes into their own custom Android ROMs.
| Malware |
10 Critical Flaws Found in CODESYS Industrial Automation Software | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/10-critical-flaws-found-in-codesys.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed as many as ten critical vulnerabilities impacting CODESYS automation software that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution on programmable logic controllers (PLCs).
"To exploit the vulnerabilities, an attacker does not need a username or password; having network access to the industrial controller is enough," researchers from Positive Technologies said. "The main cause of the vulnerabilities is insufficient verification of input data, which may itself be caused by failure to comply with the secure development recommendations."
The Russian cybersecurity firm noted that it detected the vulnerabilities on a PLC offered by WAGO, which, among other automation technology companies such as Beckhoff, Kontron, Moeller, Festo, Mitsubishi, and HollySys, use CODESYS software for programming and configuring the controllers.
CODESYS offers a development environment for programming controller applications for use in industrial control systems. The German software company credited Vyacheslav Moskvin, Denis Goryushev, Anton Dorfman, Ivan Kurnakov, and Sergey Fedonin of Positive Technologies and Yossi Reuven of SCADAfence for reporting the flaws.
Six of the most severe flaws were identified in the CODESYS V2.3 web server component used by CODESYS WebVisu to visualize a human-machine interface (HMI) in a web browser. The vulnerabilities could potentially be leveraged by an adversary to send specially-crafted web server requests to trigger a denial-of-service condition, write or read arbitrary code to and from a control runtime system's memory, and even crash the CODESYS web server.
All the six bugs have been rated 10 out of 10 on the CVSS scale —
CVE-2021-30189 - Stack-based Buffer Overflow
CVE-2021-30190 - Improper Access Control
CVE-2021-30191 - Buffer Copy without Checking Size of Input
CVE-2021-30192 - Improperly Implemented Security Check
CVE-2021-30193 - Out-of-bounds Write
CVE-2021-30194 - Out-of-bounds Read
Separately, three other weaknesses (CVSS scores: 8.8) disclosed in the Control V2 runtime system could be abused to craft malicious requests that may result in a denial-of-service condition or being utilized for remote code execution.
CVE-2021-30186 - Heap-based Buffer Overflow
CVE-2021-30188 - Stack-based Buffer Overflow
CVE-2021-30195 - Improper Input Validation
Lastly, a flaw found in the CODESYS Control V2 Linux SysFile library (CVE-2021-30187, CVSS score: 5.3) could be used to call additional PLC functions, in turn allowing a bad actor to delete files and disrupt critical processes.
"An attacker with low skills would be able to exploit these vulnerabilities," CODESYS cautioned in its advisory, adding it found no known public exploits that specifically target them.
"Their exploitation can lead to remote command execution on PLC, which may disrupt technological processes and cause industrial accidents and economic losses," said Vladimir Nazarov, Head of ICS Security at Positive Technologies. "The most notorious example of exploiting similar vulnerabilities is by using Stuxnet."
The disclosure of the CODESYS flaws comes close on the heels of similar issues that were addressed in Siemens SIMATIC S7-1200 and S7-1500 PLCs that could be exploited by attackers to remotely gain access to protected areas of the memory and achieve unrestricted and undetected code execution.
| Vulnerability |
Hajime 'Vigilante Botnet' Growing Rapidly; Hijacks 300,000 IoT Devices Worldwide | https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/vigilante-hacker-iot-botnet_26.html | Last week, we reported about a so-called 'vigilante hacker' who hacked into at least 10,000 vulnerable 'Internet of Things' devices, such as home routers and Internet-connected cameras, using a botnet malware in order to supposedly secure them.
Now, that vigilante hacker has already trapped roughly 300,000 devices in an IoT botnet known as Hajime, according to a new report published Tuesday by Kaspersky Lab, and this number will rise with each day that passes by.
The IoT botnet malware was emerged in October 2016, around the same time when the infamous Mirai botnet threatened the Internet last year with record-setting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the popular DNS provider Dyn.
How the Hajime IoT Botnet Works
Hajime botnet works much like Mirai by spreading itself via unsecured IoT devices that have open Telnet ports and uses default passwords and also uses the same list of username and password combinations that Mirai is programmed to use.
However, the interesting part of Hajime botnet is that, unlike Mirai, once Hajime infects an IoT devices, it secures the devices by blocking access to four ports (23, 7547, 5555, and 5358) known to be the most widely used vectors for infecting IoT devices, making Mirai or other threats out of their bay.
Hajime also uses a decentralized peer-to-peer network (instead of command-and-control server) to issue updates to infected devices, making it more difficult for ISPs and Internet providers to take down the botnet.
One of the most interesting things about Hajime is the botnet also displays a cryptographically signed message every 10 minutes or so on infected device terminals, describing its creators as "just a white hat, securing some systems."
Unlike Mirai and other IoT botnets, Hajime lacks DDoS capabilities and other hacking skills except for the propagation code that lets one infected IoT device search for other vulnerable devices and infects them.
But What if…?
What's not known is: What the Hajime Botnet is for? or Who is behind it?
"The most intriguing thing about Hajime is its purpose," says Kaspersky security researchers. "While the botnet is getting bigger and bigger, partly due to new exploitation modules, its purpose remains unknown. We haven't seen it being used in any type of attack or malicious activity, adding that "its real purpose remains unknown."
Also, the researchers believe that this might not happen, because Hajime botnet takes steps to hide its running processes and files on the file system, making the detection of infected systems more difficult.
So far, the purpose behind building this botnet is not entirely clear, but all signs yet point to a possible white-hat hacker, who is on his/her mission to secure open and vulnerable systems over the Internet.
However, the most concerning issue of all — Is there any guarantee that the Hajime author will not add attack capabilities to the worm to use the hijacked devices for malicious purposes?
Maybe today the Hajime author is in the mission to secure the world, but tomorrow, when he would realize he could make money online by renting his/her botnet to others, he could be another Adam Mudd.
Mudd, a 19-year-old teenager, has recently been sentenced to 2 years in prison for creating and running a DDoS-for-hire service called 'Titanium Stresser' that made more than 1.7 million victims of DDoS attacks since 2013.
Secondly, What if the well-intentioned botnet is hijacked by some malicious actor?
If this happens, the vigilant IoT botnet could be used for malicious purposes, such as conducting DDoS attacks against online sites and services, spreading malware, or instantly bricking the infected devices at one click.
Radware researchers also believe that the flexible and extensible nature of the Hajime botnet can be used for malicious purposes, like those mentioned above and conducting real-time mass surveillance from Internet-connected webcams, according to a new threat advisory published Wednesday by Radware.
Last but not the least: Do we seriously need some vigilante hackers to protect our devices and network?
This solution could be temporary, trust me. For example, the latest Hajime botnet is nothing but a band-aid.
Since Hajime has no persistence mechanism, as soon as the infected device is rebooted, it goes back to its previously unsecured state, with default passwords and the Telnet port open to the world.
How to Protect your IoT devices?
The only true solution is You — Instead of just sitting over there, doing nothing and waiting for some vigilante hackers to do miracles, you can protect your IoT devices in a way Hajime or any well-intentioned botnet can't do.
So go and update the firmware of your devices, change their default passwords, put them behind a firewall, and if any device is by default vulnerable and cannot be updated, throw it and buy a new one.
Just keep in mind: Once a single IoT of yours gets compromised, your whole network falls under risk of getting compromised and so all your devices which are connected to that network.
| Malware |
U.S. Announces Charges Against 2 Russian and 2 Iranian Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2020/09/us-announces-charges-against-2-russian.html | Immediately after revealing criminal charges against 5 Chinese and 2 Malaysian hackers, the United States government yesterday also made two separate announcements charging two Iranian and two Russian hackers and added them to the FBI's most-wanted list.
The two Russian nationals—Danil Potekhin and Dmitrii Karasavidi—are accused of stealing $16.8 million worth of cryptocurrencies in a series of phishing attacks throughout 2017 and 2018.
"This tactic used a combination of phishing and spoofing to exploit Internet users' trust in known companies and organizations to fraudulently obtain their login credentials, including email addresses, password information, and other personal information," the DoJ said.
In addition to the criminal charges, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has also sanctioned both Russian hackers, freezing all their assets under U.S. jurisdiction and banning them from doing business with Americans.
"Karasavidi laundered the proceeds of the attacks into an account in his name. He attempted to conceal the nature and source of the funds by transferring them in a layered and sophisticated manner through multiple accounts and multiple virtual currency blockchains. Ultimately, the stolen virtual currency was traced to Karasavidi's account, and millions of dollars in virtual currency and U.S. dollars was seized in a forfeiture action by the United States Secret Service," the U.S. Department of the Treasury explained.
Whereas, both two Iranian nationals—Mehdi Farhadi and Hooman Heidarian—are allegedly involved in government-linked hacking operations and have stolen hundreds of terabytes of sensitive data from several targeted organizations.
According to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department, since 2013, Iranian hackers have targeted several American and foreign universities, think tanks, defense contractors, aerospace companies, foreign policy organizations, NGOs, and foreign governments.
"In some instances, the defendants' [Iranian] hacks were politically motivated or at the behest of Iran, including instances where they obtained information regarding dissidents, human rights activists, and opposition leaders," the indictment says.
"In other instances, the defendants sold the hacked data and information on the black market for private financial gain."
After selecting their victims using online reconnaissance and publicly available data, the hackers run vulnerability scanning tools and other means to assess computer networks remotely.
"The defendants gained and maintained unauthorized access to victim networks using various tools, including session hijacking, SQL injection, and malicious programs."
"The defendants then used key-loggers and "remote access Trojans" to maintain access and monitor the actions of users of the victim networks."
All four hackers remain at large, likely in their respective countries, and have been charged with several counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, unauthorized access, wire fraud, identity theft, and related activity in connection with computers
| Cyber_Attack |
Chinese Hackers Used Facebook to Hack Uighur Muslims Living Abroad | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/chinese-hackers-used-facebook-to-hack.html | Facebook may be banned in China, but the company on Wednesday said it has disrupted a network of bad actors using its platform to target the Uyghur community and lure them into downloading malicious software that would allow surveillance of their devices.
"They targeted activists, journalists and dissidents predominantly among Uyghurs from Xinjiang in China primarily living abroad in Turkey, Kazakhstan, the United States, Syria, Australia, Canada and other countries," Facebook's Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations, Mike Dvilyanski, and Head of Security Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said. "This group used various cyber espionage tactics to identify its targets and infect their devices with malware to enable surveillance."
The social media giant said the "well-resourced and persistent operation" aligned with a threat actor known as Evil Eye (or Earth Empusa), a China-based collective known for its history of espionage attacks against the Muslim minority in the nation at least since August 2019 via "strategically compromised websites" by exploiting iOS and Android devices as an attack surface to gain access to Gmail accounts.
The disclosures come days after the European Union, U.K., U.S., and Canada jointly announced sanctions against several senior officials in China over human rights abuses against Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Evil Eye is said to have resorted to a multifaceted approach to stay under and conceal its malicious intent by posing as journalists, students, human rights advocates, or members of the Uyghur community to build trust with targeted victims before drawing them into clicking on malicious links.
Besides social engineering efforts, the collective leveraged a network of malware-infested websites, both legitimately compromised websites and lookalike domains for popular Uyghur and Turkish news sites, that were used as a watering hole to attract and selectively infect iPhone users based on certain technical criteria, including IP address, operating system, browser, country, and language settings.
"Some of these web pages contained malicious javascript code that resembled previously reported exploits, which installed iOS malware known as INSOMNIA on people's devices once they were compromised," the company noted. Insomnia comes with capabilities to exfiltrate data from a variety of iOS apps, such as contacts, location, and iMessage, as well as third-party messaging clients from Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail, and Hangouts.
Separately, Evil Eye also set up lookalike third-party Android app stores to publish trojanized Uyghur-themed applications such as a keyboard app, prayer app, and dictionary app, which served as a conduit to deploy two Android malware strains ActionSpy and PluginPhantom. Further investigation into the Android malware families linked the attack infrastructure to two Chinese companies Beijing Best United Technology Co., Ltd. (Best Lh) and Dalian 9Rush Technology Co., Ltd. (9Rush).
"These China-based firms are likely part of a sprawling network of vendors, with varying degrees of operational security," the researchers noted.
In a series of countermeasures, the company said it blocked the malicious domains in question from being shared on its platform, disabled the offending accounts, and notified about 500 people who were targeted by the adversary.
This is not the first time Facebook has outed technology firms that operate as a front for state-sponsored hacking activities. In December 2020, the social network formally linked OceanLotus to an information technology company called CyberOne Group located in Vietnam.
| Malware |
Tweaking Facebook Status with HTML button | https://thehackernews.com/2011/08/tweaking-facebook-status-with-html.html | Tweaking Facebook Status with HTML button
Have you thought that Facebook status updates that can be modified ? Yes we have a tweak for you : One is a Button Tag. One of our Hacker Friend "Acizninja DeadcOde" , admin of https://blog.cyber4rt.com sharing such cool tweaks with The Hacker News readers :
Here's the concept:
1. Log in to your Facebook account.
2. Copy and paste the url code below into the Address Bar and press the Enter key:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=209403259107231&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww..facebook.com&message&link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thehackernews.com%2F&name=<center><button>Visit+:+The+Hacker+News<%2Fbutton><%2Fcenter>
3. After that just press the button SHARE, and see your Facebook profile.You can also send them to friends, Fans Page & Events.
NOTE :
app_id=209403259107231 ( App ID on Facebook, Keep it same )
Redirect_uri = https://www.facebook.com ( This Will redirect to https://www.facebook.com )
Link = https://thehackernews.com ( Button link )
Name = <center> <button>Visit : The Hacker News </ Button> </ center> ( buttons and text )
to= ( Target posts. Fill in the ID NUMBER Facebook friends, FansPage or event )
The result you can see here:
https://www.facebook.com/unix.root/posts/269040589776535?notif_t=like
These are some urls with modified code:
a. https://goo.gl/6yZPr
b. https://tinyurl.com/3thplca
c. https://goo.gl/3NgWY (with music)
Thanks to Acizninja DeadcOde
https://blog.cyber4rt.com
| Vulnerability |
Crackonosh virus mined $2 million of Monero from 222,000 hacked computers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/crackonosh-virus-mined-2-million-of.html | A previously undocumented Windows malware has infected over 222,000 systems worldwide since at least June 2018, yielding its developer no less than 9,000 Moneros ($2 million) in illegal profits.
Dubbed "Crackonosh," the malware is distributed via illegal, cracked copies of popular software, only to disable antivirus programs installed in the machine and install a coin miner package called XMRig for stealthily exploiting the infected host's resources to mine Monero.
At least 30 different versions of the malware executable have been discovered between Jan. 1, 2018, and Nov. 23, 2020, Czech cybersecurity software company Avast said on Thursday, with a majority of the victims located in the U.S., Brazil, India, Poland, and the Philippines.
Crackonosh works by replacing critical Windows system files such as "serviceinstaller.msi" and "maintenance.vbs" to cover its tracks and abuses the safe mode, which prevents antivirus software from working, to delete Windows Defender (and other installed solutions) and turn off automatic updates.
As part of its anti-detection and anti-forensics tactics, the malware also installs its own version of "MSASCuiL.exe" (i.e., Windows Defender), which puts the icon of Windows Security with a green tick to the system tray and runs tests to determine if it's running in a virtual machine.
Last December, security researcher Roberto Franceschetti disclosed that antivirus applications could be disabled by booting into safe mode and renaming their application directories before their corresponding services are launched in Windows.
Microsoft, however, said the issue doesn't "meet the bar for security servicing," noting that the attack is predicated on having administrative/root privileges, adding a "malicious administrator can do much worse things."
The development also comes as suspected Chinese threat actors behind DirtyMoe and Purple Fox malware were found to have compromised about 100,000 Windows machines as part of an evolving cryptojacking campaign dating all the way back to 2017.
"Crackonosh shows the risks in downloading cracked software," Avast security researcher Daniel Beneš said. "As long as people continue to download cracked software, attacks like these will continue and continue to be profitable for attackers. The key take-away from this is that you really can't get something for nothing and when you try to steal software, odds are someone is trying to steal from you."
| Malware |
Wanna Cry Again? NSA's Windows 'EsteemAudit' RDP Exploit Remains Unpatched | https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/esteemaudit-windows-hacking.html | Brace yourselves for a possible 'second wave' of massive global cyber attack, as SMB (Server Message Block) was not the only network protocol whose zero-day exploits created by NSA were exposed in the Shadow Brokers dump last month.
Although Microsoft released patches for SMB flaws for supported versions in March and unsupported versions immediately after the outbreak of the WannaCry ransomware, the company ignored to patch other three NSA hacking tools, dubbed "EnglishmanDentist," "EsteemAudit," and "ExplodingCan."
It has been almost two weeks since WannaCry ransomware began to spread, which infected nearly 300,000 computers in more than 150 countries within just 72 hours, though now it has been slowed down.
For those unaware, WannaCry exploited a Windows zero-day SMB bug that allowed remote hackers to hijack PCs running on unpatched Windows OS and then spread itself to other unpatched systems using its wormable capability.
EsteemAudit: Over 24,000 PCs Still Vulnerable
EsteemAudit is another dangerous NSA-developed Windows hacking tool leaked by the Shadow Brokers that targets RDP service (port 3389) on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 / Windows XP machines.
Since Microsoft no longer support Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP and unlike EternalBlue the company has not released any emergency patch for EsteemAudit exploit so far, over 24,000 vulnerable systems remains still exposed on the Internet for anyone to hack.
"Even one infected machine opens your enterprise to greater exploitation," say Omri Misgav and Tal Liberman, security researchers at Ensilo cyber security firm who came up with the AtomBombing attack last year and now has released an unofficial patch for EsteemAudit, which we have introduced later in this article.
EsteemAudit can also be used as a wormable malware, similar to the WannaCry ransomware, which allows hackers to propagate in the enterprise networks, leaving thousands of systems vulnerable to ransomware, espionage and other malicious attacks.
Ransomware authors, such as criminals behind CrySiS, Dharma, and SamSam, who are already infecting computers via RDP protocol using brute force attacks, can leverage EsteemAudit anytime for widespread and damaging attacks like WannaCry.
How to Secure Your Computers?
Due to the havoc caused by WannaCry, SMB service gained all the attention, neglecting RDP.
"Windows XP-based systems currently account for more than 7 percent of desktop operating systems still in use today, and the cyber security industry estimates that more than 600,000 web-facing computers, which host upwards of 175 million websites, still run Windows Server 2003 accounting for roughly 18 percent of the global market share," researchers say.
Since Microsoft has not released any patch for this vulnerability, users and enterprises are advised to upgrade their systems to the higher versions to secure themselves from EsteenAudit attacks.
"Of the three remaining exploits, "EnglishmanDentist," "EsteemAudit," and "ExplodingCan," none reproduces on supported platforms, which means that customers running Windows 7 and more recent versions of Windows or Exchange 2010 and newer versions of Exchange are not at risk," Microsoft says.
If it's hard for your enterprise to upgrade their systems immediately, it's good for them to secure their RDP port by either disabling it or putting it behind the firewall.
Meanwhile, enSilo has released a patch to help Windows XP and Server 2003 users secure their machines against EsteemAudit. You can apply the patch to secure your systems, but keep in mind, that it is not an official patch from Microsoft.
If you have any doubt on the patch, enSilo is a reputed cyber security company, though I expect Microsoft to release an official patch before any outcry like that of WannaCry.
| Vulnerability |
Malware attack on Apple employees by hackers who targeted Facebook | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/malware-attack-on-apple-by-hackers-who.html | The same ring of hackers that are responsible for hacking into at least 40 companies including Facebook and Twitter are reportedly also infected the computers of some Apple employees, the company acknowledged Tuesday.
The purpose of hack considered an effort to steal company secrets, research and intellectual property that they can sell. Investigators tracked at least one server being used by the hacker ring to a hosting company in the Ukraine.
"Apple has identified malware which infected a limited number of Mac systems through a vulnerability in the Java plug-in for browsers," the company said in its statement. "The malware was employed in an attack against Apple and other companies, and was spread through a website for software developers. We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network."
Apple isolated the infected systems from its network and said there was no indication that any data had been taken. Apple is releasing a tool that scans Macs and removes the Java malware. Oracle has also released an update to Java that fixes the vulnerability.
In addition to the Java update, Apple has rolled out version 11.0.2 of iTunes via Software Update.
Facebook acknowledged that it was attacked and said no user data had been compromised, but that many other companies had been targeted in the same attack, whereas in the attack on Twitter resulted in the breach of as many as 250,000 users' data.
Apple said it was working closely with law enforcement to find the culprits, but the spokesman would not elaborate further. The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment.
| Malware |
US authorities : Iranian Hackers are Becoming a Real Pain | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/us-authorities-iranian-hackers-are.html | The U.S. have admitted they believe a series of cyber attacks on domestic banks and some foreign oil companies carried out over the last year are the handy work of a group of hackers linked to the Iranian government.
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said the cyberthreat from Iran has grown, and declared that the Pentagon is prepared to take action if America is threatened by a computer-based assault. The hackers are apparently part of a group of less than 100 computer security specialists from Iranian universities and network security firms, according to an unnamed US government official.
American officials have said they are able to discover the source of the recent cyberattacks. We do welcome this and announce our readiness for any international cooperation to find the source of the attacks.
The Iranian official said Tehran has already offered help to boost the companies cybersecurity, as Iran has itself recently been the victim of cyberattacks on its offshore oil platforms. The cyberattacks hit the Saudi Arabian state oil company Aramco and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas using a virus, known as Shamoon, which can spread through networked computers and ultimately wipes out files by overwriting them. Iran blames Israel and the United States for the attacks.
Subscribe to our Daily Newsletter via email - Be First to know about Security and Hackers. or Join our Huge Hackers Community on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
| Malware |
4XP Critical SQL Injection Vulnerability Exposed | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/4xp-critical-sql-injection.html | zSecure team has recently discovered a critical SQL Injection Vulnerability in the web portal of 4XP, a leading online forex broker having more than 1 lakh customer base. Financial transactions are carried on the broker's paltform on daily basis including but not limited to Credit Card Transactions. The critical vulnerability allows to get complete access to brokers database which can be misused to access their customers confidential information including their login id's, passwords, home address, email-id's, mobile no's, credit card details etc. This critical vulnerbility could prove devastating to the company if they doesn't fix it asap. Below are the details about the company & discovered vulnerability.
About the Company
4XP is an online forex broker that specializes in providing an all-inclusive trading package backed by a caring and devoted support team. 4XP was founded by a group of retail-ended entrepreneurs and capital market dealers sharing a vision for creating a customer-oriented brokerage service that would provide a compelling trading solution. 4XP strives toward creating the most professional and transparent trading environment possible.
Vulnerability details
Website: www.4xp.com
Vulnerability Type: Hidden SQL Injection Vulnerability
Database Type: MySql
Alert Level: Critical
Threats: Complete Database Access, Database Dump, Shell Uploading
Worst case scenarios
Any malicious smart black hats can create much more devastating attacks using this critical flaw such as:
- Uninterrupted access to the database
- Database Dump;
- Possibility of shell uploading which may result in defacement of website; and
- Much more . . .
Proof of vulnerability
Source
| Vulnerability |
Verizon wants $1 Billion Discount on Yahoo Acquisition Deal after Recent Scandals | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/verizon-yahoo-acquisition-deal.html | It seems like it is not all over for Yahoo yet. Another day, another bad news for Yahoo!
Verizon, which has agreed to purchase Yahoo for $4.8 Billion, is now asking for a $1 Billion discount, according to recent reports.
The request comes after Verizon Communications learned about the recent disclosures about hacking and spying in past few weeks.
Just two weeks ago, Yahoo revealed that at least a half Billion Yahoo accounts were stolen in 2014 hack, marking it as the biggest data breach in history.
And if this wasn't enough, the company faced allegations earlier this week that it built a secret tool to scan all of its users' emails last year at the behest of a United States intelligence agency.
Due to these incidents, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who runs the Verizon subsidiary, is "pretty upset" about Yahoo's lack of disclosure, and is even seeking to pull out of the deal completely or cut the price, the New York Post claimed, citing multiple sources.
"In the last day, we've heard that Tim [Armstrong] is getting cold feet," a source reportedly told the Post. "He's pretty upset about the lack of disclosure, and he's saying can we get out of this or can we reduce the price?"
Armstrong is reportedly discussing a price reduction with Yahoo executives, though Yahoo is pushing back, claiming a "deal is a deal" and there's no legal recourse to change the terms, according to the paper.
Both Verizon and Yahoo have yet to comment on the matter.
Verizon announced the Yahoo acquisition deal in July, with the intention of merging it with AOL. The company is thinking to combine Yahoo and AOL to form a third force to compete with Google and Facebook for digital advertising.
The acquisition deal is supposed to close early next year, merging Yahoo's search, advertising, content, and mobile operations with AOL to reach 1 Billion users.
| Data_Breaches |
An Army of Million Hacked IoT Devices Almost Broke the Internet Today | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/iot-dyn-ddos-attack.html | A massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against Dyn, a major domain name system (DNS) provider, broke large portions of the Internet on Friday, causing a significant outage to a ton of websites and services, including Twitter, GitHub, PayPal, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and Spotify.
But how the attack happened? What's the cause behind the attack?
Exact details of the attack remain vague, but Dyn reported a huge army of hijacked internet-connected devices could be responsible for the massive attack.
Yes, the same method recently employed by hackers to carry out record-breaking DDoS attack of over 1 Tbps against France-based hosting provider OVH.
According to security intelligence firm Flashpoint, Mirai bots were detected driving much, but not necessarily all, of the traffic in the DDoS attacks against DynDNS.
Mirai is a piece of malware that targets Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, and security cameras, DVRs, and enslaves vast numbers of these compromised devices into a botnet, which is then used to conduct DDoS attacks.
Since the source code of Mirai Botnet has already made available to the public, anyone can wield DDoS attacks against targets.
This time hackers did not target an individual site, rather they attacked Dyn that many sites and services are using as their upstream DNS provider for turning internet protocol (IP) addresses into human-readable websites.
The result we all know: Major sites and services including Twitter, GitHub, Reddit, PayPal, Amazon, AirBnb, Netflix, Pinterest, and so on, were among hundreds of services rendered inaccessible to Millions of people worldwide for several hours on Friday.
"Flashpoint has confirmed that at least some of the devices used in the Dyn DNS attacks are DVRs, further matching the technical indicators and tactics, techniques, and procedures associated with previous known Mirai botnet attacks," Flashpoint says in a blog post.
This type of attack is notable and concerning because it largely consists of unsecured IoT devices, which are growing exponentially with time. These devices are implemented in a way that they cannot easily be updated and thus are nearly impossible to secure.
Manufacturers majorly focus on performance and usability of IoT devices but ignore security measures and encryption mechanisms, which is why they are routinely being hacked and widely becoming part of DDoS botnets used as weapons in cyber attacks.
An online tracker of the Mirai botnet suggests there are more than 1.2 Million Mirai-infected devices on the Internet, with over 166,000 devices active right now.
In short, IoT botnets like Mirai are growing rapidly, and there is no easy way to stop them.
According to officials speaking to Reuters, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are both investigating the massive DDoS attacks hitting DynDNS, but none of the agencies yet speculated on who might be behind them.
| Cyber_Attack |
Insurance Firm CNA Financial Reportedly Paid Hackers $40 Million in Ransom | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/insurance-firm-cna-financial-reportedly.html | U.S. insurance giant CNA Financial reportedly paid $40 million to a ransomware gang to recover access to its systems following an attack in March, making it one of the most expensive ransoms paid to date.
The development was first reported by Bloomberg, citing "people with knowledge of the attack." The adversary that staged the intrusion is said to have allegedly demanded $60 million a week after the Chicago-based company began negotiations with the hackers, culminating in the payment two weeks following the theft of company data.
In a statement shared on May 12, CNA Financial said it had "no evidence to indicate that external customers were potentially at risk of infection due to the incident."
The attack has been attributed to a new ransomware called 'Phoenix CryptoLocker,' according to a March report from Bleeping Computer, with the strain believed to be an offshoot of WastedLocker and Hades, both of which have been utilized by Evil Corp, a Russian cybercrime network notorious for launching ransomware attacks against several U.S. entities, including Garmin, and deploying JabberZeus, Bugat and Dridex to siphon banking credentials.
In December 2019, U.S. authorities sanctioned the hacking group and filed charges against Evil Corp's alleged leaders Maksim Yakubets and Igor Turashev for developing and distributing the Dridex banking Trojan to plunder more than $100 million over a period of 10 years. Law enforcement agencies also announced a reward of up to $5 million for providing information that could lead to their arrest. Both the individuals remain at large.
The development comes amid a sharp uptick in ransomware incidents, in part fueled by the pandemic, with the average ransom payment witnessing a massive 171% gain year-over-year from $115,123 in 2019 to $312,493 in 2020. Last year also saw the highest ransomware demand growing to $30 million, not to mention the total amount paid by victims skyrocketing to $406 million, based on conservative estimates.
CNA Financial's $40 million ransom only shows that 2021 continues to be a great year for ransomware, potentially emboldening cybercriminal gangs to seek bigger payouts and advance their illicit aims.
According to an analysis by ransomware recovery firm Coveware, the average demand for a digital extortion payment shot up in the first quarter of 2021 to $220,298, up 43% from Q4 2020, out of which 77% of the attacks involved the threat to leak exfiltrated data, an increasingly prevalent tactic known as double extortion.
While the U.S. government has routinely advised against paying ransoms, the high stakes associated with data exposure have left victims with little choice but to settle with their attackers. In October 2020, the Treasury Department issued a guidance warning of penalties against companies making ransom payments to a sanctioned person or group, prompting ransomware negotiation firms to avoid cutting a deal with blocked groups such as Evil Corp to evade legal action.
"Companies that facilitate ransomware payments to cyber actors on behalf of victims, including financial institutions, cyber insurance firms, and companies involved in digital forensics and incident response, not only encourage future ransomware payment demands but also may risk violating [Office of Foreign Assets Control] regulations," the department said.
The surge in ransomware attacks has also had an impact on the cyber insurance industry, what with AXA announcing earlier this month that it will stop reimbursing clients in France should they opt to make any extortion payments to ransomware cartels, underscoring the dilemma that "insurance firms grapple with successfully underwriting ransomware policies while confronted with rising payout costs that threaten profitability."
Indeed, a report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Thursday revealed that the soaring demand for cyber insurance has driven insurers to raise premiums and limit coverage. The amount of total direct premiums written jumped by 50% between 2016 and 2019, from $2.1 billion to $3.1 billion. Higher insurer losses stemming from debilitating ransomware attacks are also a factor, the agency said.
"The continually increasing frequency and severity of cyberattacks, especially ransomware attacks, have led insurers to reduce cyber coverage limits for certain riskier industry sectors, such as health care and education, and for public entities and to add specific limits on ransomware coverage," the government watchdog noted in the report.
To defend against ransomware attacks, it's recommended to secure all modes of initial access exploited by threat actors to infiltrate networks, maintain periodic data backups, and keep an appropriate recovery process in place.
"Organizations should maintain user awareness and training for email security as well as consider ways to identify and remediate malicious email as soon as it enters an employee's mailbox," Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers said.
"Organizations should also ensure they conduct proper patch management and review which services may be exposed to the internet. Remote desktop services should be correctly configured and secured, using the principle of least privilege wherever possible, with a policy in place to detect patterns associated with brute-force attacks."
| Malware |
3.2 Billion Leaked Passwords Contain 1.5 Million Records with Government Emails | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/32-billion-leaked-passwords-contain-15.html | A staggering number of 3.28 billion passwords linked to 2.18 billion unique email addresses were exposed in what's one of the largest data dumps of breached usernames and passwords.
In addition, the leak includes 1,502,909 passwords associated with email addresses from government domains across the world, with the U.S. government alone taking up 625,505 of the exposed passwords, followed by the U.K (205,099), Australia (136,025), Brazil (68,535), and Canada (50,726).
The findings come from an analysis of a massive 100GB data set called "COMB21" — aka Compilation of Many Breaches — that was published for free in an online cybercrime forum earlier this February by putting together data from multiple leaks in different companies and organizations that occurred over the years.
It's worth noting that a leak doesn't imply a breach of public administration systems. The passwords are said to have been obtained via techniques such as password hash cracking after being stolen or through phishing attacks and eavesdropping on insecure, plaintext connections.
The top 10 U.S. government domains affected by the leak are as follows:
State Department - state.gov (29,144)
Veterans Affairs Department - va.gov (28,937)
Department of Homeland Security - dhs.gov (21,575)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration - nasa.gov (15,665)
Internal Revenue Service - irs.gov (10,480)
Center for Disease Control and Prevention - cdc.gov (8,904)
Department of Justice - usdoj.gov (8,857)
Social Security Administration - ssa.gov (8,747)
U.S. Postal Service - usps.gov (8,205), and
Environmental Protection Agency - epa.gov (7,986)
Interestingly, this leak also includes 13 credentials linked to emails of the Oldsmar water plant in Florida, as previously reported by CyberNews. However, there's no evidence that the breached passwords were used to carry out the cyberattack in February. In contrast, only 18,282 passwords related to Chinese government domains and 1,964 passwords from those related to Russia were laid bare.
"It is an indication that the passwords in these countries, made up of local alphabets, are less targeted by hackers. It is an unexpected layer of protection in relation to the Roman alphabet," said Syhunt Founder and Chief Visionary Officer (CVO) Felipe Daragon.
On a related note, a notorious threat actor named ShinyHunters has posted an alleged database consisting of 20 million BigBasket users for free, almost five months after the Indian online grocery delivery startup confirmed a data breach. According to Under the Breach's Alon Gal, the database includes users' email addresses, phone numbers, residential addresses, hashed passwords, dates of birth, and order histories.
In the past, ShinyHunters has been connected to the sale of personal data from several companies, including Zoosk, SocialShare, Tokopedia, TeeSpring, Mindful, Minted, Chatbooks, Dave, Promo, Mathway, Wattpad, MeetMindful.com, and StarTribune.
Users who have had their information exposed are strongly advised to change their existing passwords.
| Data_Breaches |
New Android Malware Uses VNC to Spy and Steal Passwords from Victims | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/new-android-malware-uses-vnc-to-spy-and.html | A previously undocumented Android-based remote access trojan (RAT) has been found to use screen recording features to steal sensitive information on the device, including banking credentials, and open the door for on-device fraud.
Dubbed "Vultur" due to its use of Virtual Network Computing (VNC)'s remote screen-sharing technology to gain full visibility on targeted users, the mobile malware was distributed via the official Google Play Store and masqueraded as an app named "Protection Guard," attracting over 5,000 installations. Banking and crypto-wallet apps from entities located in Italy, Australia, and Spain were the primary targets.
"For the first time we are seeing an Android banking trojan that has screen recording and keylogging as the main strategy to harvest login credentials in an automated and scalable way," researchers from ThreatFabric said in a write-up shared with The Hacker News.
"The actors chose to steer away from the common HTML overlay development we usually see in other Android banking Trojans: this approach usually requires a larger time and effort investment from the actors to create multiple overlays capable of tricking the user. Instead, they chose to simply record what is shown on the screen, effectively obtaining the same end result."
While banking malware such as MysteryBot, Grandoreiro, Banker.BR, and Vizom have traditionally relied on overlay attacks — i.e., creating a false version of the bank's login page and overlaying it on top of the legitimate app — to trick victims into revealing their passwords and other important private information, evidence is mounting that threat actors are pivoting away from this approach.
In a report published earlier this week, Italian cybersecurity firm Cleafy uncovered UBEL, an updated variant of Oscorp, that was observed using WebRTC to interact with the compromised Android phone in real-time. Vultur adopts a similar tactic in that it takes advantage of accessibility permissions to capture keystrokes and leverages VNC's screen recording feature to stealthily log all activities on the phone, thus obviating the need to register a new device and making it difficult for banks to detect fraud.
What's more, the malware employs ngrok, a cross-platform utility used to expose local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels, to provide remote access to the VNC server running locally on the phone. Additionally, it also establishes connections with a command-and-control (C2) server to receive commands over Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), the results of which, including extracted data and screen captures, are then transmitted back to the server.
ThreatFabric's investigation also connected Vultur with another well-known piece of malicious software named Brunhilda, a dropper that utilizes the Play Store to distribute different kinds of malware in what's called a "dropper-as-a-service" (DaaS) operation, citing overlaps in the source code and C2 infrastructure used to facilitate attacks.
These ties, the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity services company said, indicate Brunhilda to be a privately operating threat actor that has its own dropper and proprietary RAT Vultur.
"The story of Vultur shows one more time how actors shift from using rented Trojans (MaaS) that are sold on underground markets towards proprietary/private malware tailored to the needs of this group," the researchers concluded. "These attacks are scalable and automated since the actions to perform fraud can be scripted on the malware backend and sent in the form of commands sequence, making it easy for the actor(s) to hit-and-run."
| Malware |
Using AppLock for Android to Hide Apps and Photos? — It's Useless | https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/android-applock.html | Widely popular AppLock for Android by DoMobile Ltd. is claimed to be vulnerable to hackers.
Having an applock for iPhone or Android device is useful. It is suitable for security and keeping people out of your business.
But when it comes to how to password protect apps on Android? How to put passwords on apps? — the one app that comes to mind is AppLock.
What is AppLock?
AppLock is a lightweight Android app that enables users to apply a lock on almost any type of file or app on their devices, preventing access to your locked apps and private data without a password.
The most basic functionality of the security feature is to lock your Android apps so that nobody can access or uninstall them, but applock can hide pictures and videos, and even contacts and individual messages.
For example, if you have an app lock on WhatsApp, one of your friends borrow your phone to play games cannot get into your WhatsApp app without a password you have set for the locked app.
App Lock sits above your other Android apps and works straightforwardly. You can download app lock in play store for free. Although you can use applock for free, the Pro version of the app will cost you a few dollars.
Hide Photos, Files, and Apps On Android
App Lock works a lot like a lock screen on your Android phone. People cannot access your phone without its password. An app lock does precisely that, except for individual apps.
With AppLock, you can create a specific PIN (or an app-specific PIN) that can then be used to lock down whatever applications you wish to secure. It's incredibly simple to use.
Here are some features of AppLock:
Lock any app using either a PIN number form or a pattern lock
A Photo Vault to hide pictures, so that hidden pictures cannot be accessed by anyone except you
A Video Vault to hide videos
Create different user profiles
Easy to change the locks
Preventing AppLock uninstallation
Auto restart (to avoid app lock from being killed by task killers)
Lock Android installer
Lock incoming calls or outgoing calls
Lock access to phone
Multi-lock feature (Pro version only): Add different locks to different apps
Auto-lock base on Time or Wi-Fi (Pro version just)
Disguise feature (Pro version just)
In short, AppLock is an applocker that acts as advanced protection for your device, by securing many features that come with an android phone.
But, does this really protects you?
Let's have a look…
Security researchers at Beyond Security's 'SecuriTeam Secure Disclosure' (SSD) have reported three critical flaws to reside in the AppLock App.
They say the app that promises to hide and secure your data lacks when:
You hide your photos and videos in Vault
You apply PIN Protection to the AppLock App
You enable to reset the PIN
How Lock Unlock AppLock Key On Android?
The First vulnerability exploits the vault services with which the "AppLock empowers you to control photo and video access."
The researchers say, when you put something in the vault, the files did not get encrypted; instead they are hidden in the file system of the device and not the one assigned to the app.
With this activity, anyone can access those files, and an intruder can accomplish this task by installing a file manager on the device with simultaneously replacing some files in the directory and getting the data from the SQLite database.
The Second vulnerability allows an attacker to break the PIN attached to an app by brute force. The researchers claim that the SALT that used to attach with the password/PIN was a fixed SALT that is "domobile."
For this, the device is required to be rooted. Also, an attacker can remove and change the lock applied to an app.
The Third vulnerability allows the attackers to reset the PIN code and gain complete access to the targeted application without getting any special permissions.
Here, the researchers say that an attacker can exploit the user's privacy by resetting the password by:
If the user has not provided any E-mail address- an attacker can add his own and get the reset code.
If the user has provided an E-mail address- an attacker can intercept the traffic using Wireshark and get the MD5 hash.
SecuriTeam tried to contact the vendor, but they did not respond. Also, they say their agenda is to protect the user's privacy by notifying them about a "false sense of security."
AppLock is installed in over 50 countries with over 100 Million users, supporting 24 languages. Besides AppLock, DoMobile develops various apps supporting on Android and iOS operating system devices.
| Vulnerability |
Remote 0day Exploit for Tectia SSH Server released | https://thehackernews.com/2012/12/remote-0day-exploit-for-tectia-ssh.html | Hacker @kingcope discovered critical vulnerability in Tectia SSH Server. Exploit working on SSH-2.0-6.1.9.95 SSH Tectia Server (Latest available version from www.tectia.com) that allow attacker to bypass Authentication remotely.
Description : An attacker in the possession of a valid username of an SSH Tectia installation running on UNIX (verified on AIX/Linux) can login without a password. The bug is in the "SSH USERAUTH CHANGE REQUEST" routines which are there to allow a user to change their password. A bug in the code allows an attacker to login without a password by forcing a password change request prior to authentication.
Download Exploit Code : Click Here
A default installation on Linux (version 6.1.9.95 of Tectia) is vulnerable to the attack. Eric Romang posted a Demo video on Youtube, hope you will like it :)
Command Source : https://goo.gl/BHqWd
| Vulnerability |
Adobe Issues Emergency Patches for Two Critical Flaws in Acrobat and Reader | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/adobe-reader-vulnerabilities.html | I hope you had biggest, happiest and craziest New Year celebration, but now it's time to come back at work and immediately update your systems to patch new security flaws that could exploit your computer just by opening a PDF file.
Adobe has issued an out-of-band security update to patch two critical vulnerabilities in the company's Acrobat and Reader for both the Windows and macOS operating systems.
Though the San Jose, California-based software company did not give details about the vulnerabilities, it did classify the security flaws as critical since they allow privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.
Both the vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe by security researchers--Abdul-Aziz Hariri and Sebastian Apelt—from Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI).
Critical Adobe Acrobat and Reader Vulnerabilities
The first vulnerability, reported by Apelt and identified as CVE-2018-16011, is a use-after-free bug that can lead to arbitrary code execution.
Attackers can exploit the flaw by tricking a user into clicking a specially crafted PDF file, which will eventually execute code of their choice with the privileges of the currently logged-in user, allowing attackers to run any malicious software on the victims' computers without their knowledge.
The second vulnerability, discovered by Hariri and identified as CVE-2018-19725, is a security bypass flaw that could result in privilege escalation.
Both security vulnerabilities are rated as critical but has been assigned a priority rating of 2, which means that the company found no evidence of any exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild.
Affected Software Versions and Security Patches
Acrobat and Reader DC 2015 version 2015.006.30461 and earlier, 2017 version 2017.011.30110 and earlier, and Continuous version 2019.010.20064 and earlier for the Windows and macOS operating systems are affected by the vulnerabilities.
Adobe has addressed the flaws with the release of the latest versions of Acrobat DC 2015 and Acrobat Reader DC 2015 (version 2015.006.30464), Acrobat 2017 and Acrobat Reader DC 2017 (version 2017.011.30113), and Acrobat DC Continuous and Acrobat Reader DC Continuous (version 2019.010.20069) for Windows and macOS.
Since the vulnerabilities are now public, threat actors would not leave any opportunity to exploit the issues to target user computers, Mac and Windows computer owners are highly recommended to install patches for the two vulnerabilities as soon as possible.
Adobe typically releases security updates for its software on the second Tuesday of the month, just like Microsoft, so you can expect the company to release regular patch updates for the rest of its software in this month's release.
| Vulnerability |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.