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Hacker exploits Heartbleed bug to Hijack VPN Sessions | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/hacker-exploits-heartbleed-bug-to.html | Cyber criminals have explored one more way to exploit Heartbleed OpenSSL bug against organisations to hijack multiple active web sessions conducted over a virtual private network connection.
The consulting and incident response Mandiant investigated targeted attack against an unnamed organization and said the hackers have exploited the "Heartbleed" security vulnerability in OpenSSL running in the client's SSL VPN concentrator to remotely access active sessions of an organization's internal network.
The incident is the result of attacks leveraging the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerabilities, which resides in the OpenSSL's heartbeat functionality, if enabled would return 64KB of random memory in plaintext to any client or server requesting for a connection. The vulnerability infected almost two-third of internet web servers, including the popular websites.
Recently, there has been an arrest of a Canadian teen of stealing usernames, credentials, session IDs and other data in plaintext from the Canada Revenue Agency by exploiting the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug. This shows that there may have been more active cyber criminals out there using the Heartbleed bug to steal private data and take over web sessions.
The hacker successfully stolen active user session tokens in order to bypass both the organization's multifactor authentication and VPN client software used to validate the authenticity of systems connecting to the VPN were owned by the organization and running specific security software.
"Specifically, the attacker repeatedly sent malformed heartbeat requests to the HTTPS web server running on the VPN device, which was compiled with a vulnerable version of OpenSSL, to obtain active session tokens for currently authenticated users," wrote Mandiant investigators Christopher Glyer and Chris DiGiamo. "With an active session token, the attacker successfully hijacked multiple active user sessions and convinced the VPN concentrator that he/she was legitimately authenticated."
OpenVPN previously warned that it could be vulnerable to attack since the open source VPN software uses OpenSSL by default.
According to the firm, it is clear that the Heartbleed attack is not traceable, and the bug returns only 64KB of memory for each heartbeat request, but in order to fetch useful data an attacker need to send a continuous chain of requests, and in this situation, an IDS signature specifically written for Heartbleed triggered more than 17,000 alerts during the intrusion.
The researchers posted the evidence for the assurance that the attacker they tracked had "stolen legitimate user session tokens":
A malicious IP address triggered thousands of IDS alerts for the Heartbleed vulnerability destined for the victim organization's SSL VPN.
The VPN logs showed active VPN connections of multiple users rapidly changing back and forth, "flip flopping", between the malicious IP address and the user's original IP address. In several cases the "flip flopping" activity lasted for multiple hours.
The timestamps associated with the IP address changes were often within one to two seconds of each other.
The legitimate IP addresses accessing the VPN were geographically distant from malicious IP address and belonged to different service providers.
The timestamps for the VPN log anomalies could be correlated with the IDS alerts associated with the Heartbleed bug.
"Once connected to the VPN, the attacker attempted to move laterally and escalate his/her privileges within the victim organization," the researchers wrote.
The Mandiant researchers recommended all organizations running both remote access software and appliances vulnerable to the Heartbleed exploit to immediately identify and upgrade with the available patches and review their VPN logs to know if an attack had occurred in the past or not.
| Vulnerability |
Mimecast Finds SolarWinds Hackers Stole Some of Its Source Code | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/mimecast-finds-solarwinds-hackers-stole.html | Email security firm Mimecast on Tuesday revealed that the state-sponsored SolarWinds hackers who broke into its internal network also downloaded source code out of a limited number of repositories.
"The threat actor did access a subset of email addresses and other contact information and hashed and salted credentials," the company said in a write-up detailing its investigation, adding the adversary "accessed and downloaded a limited number of our source code repositories, as the threat actor is reported to have done with other victims of the SolarWinds Orion supply chain attack."
But Mimecast said the source code downloaded by the attackers was incomplete and would be insufficient to build and run any aspect of the Mimecast service and that it did not find signs of any tampering made by the threat actor to the build process associated with the executables that are distributed to its customers.
On January 12, Mimecast disclosed that "a sophisticated threat actor" had compromised a digital certificate it provided to certain customers to securely connect its products to Microsoft 365 (M365) Exchange.
Weeks later, the company tied the incident to the SolarWinds mass exploitation campaign, noting that the threat actor accessed and possibly exfiltrated certain encrypted service account credentials created by customers hosted in the U.S. and the U.K.
Pointing out that the intrusion stemmed as a result of Sunburst backdoor that was deployed via trojanized SolarWinds Orion software updates, the company said it observed lateral movement from the initial access point to its production grid environment containing a small number of Windows servers in a manner that was consistent with the attack pattern attributed to the threat actor.
Although the exact number of customers who used the stolen certificate remains unknown, the company said in January that "a low single digit number of our customers' M365 tenants were targeted."
Alleged to be of Russian origin, the threat actor behind the SolarWinds supply-chain attacks is being tracked under multiple names, including UNC2452 (FireEye), Dark Halo (Volexity), SolarStorm (Palo Alto Unit 42), StellarParticle (CrowdStrike), and Nobelium (Microsoft).
Mimecast, which had roped Mandiant to lead its incident response efforts, said it concluded the probe earlier this month.
As part of a slew of countermeasures, the company also noted that it fully replaced the compromised Windows servers, upgraded the encryption algorithm strength for all stored credentials, implemented enhanced monitoring of all stored certificates and encryption keys and that it had decommissioned SolarWinds Orion in favor of a NetFlow monitoring system.
| Cyber_Attack |
Unpatched Flaw in UC Browser Apps Could Let Hackers Launch Phishing Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/uc-browser-url-spoofing.html | A bug hunter has discovered and publicly disclosed details of an unpatched browser address bar spoofing vulnerability that affects popular Chinese UC Browser and UC Browser Mini apps for Android.
Developed by Alibaba-owned UCWeb, UC Browser is one of the most popular mobile browsers, specifically in China and India, with a massive user base of more than half a billion users worldwide.
According to the details security researcher Arif Khan shared with The Hacker News, the vulnerability resides in the way User Interface on both browsers handles a special built-in feature that was otherwise designed to improve users Google search experience.
The vulnerability, which has yet not assigned any CVE identifier, could allow an attacker to control URL string displayed in the address bar, eventually letting a malicious website to pose as some legitimate site.
The vulnerability affects the latest UC Browser version 12.11.2.1184 and UC Browser Mini version 12.10.1.1192—that is currently being used by over 500 million and 100 million users respectively, according to Google Play Store.
Though the flaw is similar to the one Khan discovered last month in the MI browser that comes pre-installed on Xiaomi smartphones and the Mint browser, phishing pages served using the newly discovered vulnerability in UC Browser still leaves some indicators that vigilant users can spot.
When users search something on "google.com" using UC Browsers, the browsers automatically remove the domain from the address bar and rewrite it only to display the search query string to the user.
Arif found that the pattern matching logic used by UC Browsers is insufficient and can be abused by attackers by simply creating subdomains on their own domain, as "www.google.com.phishing-site.com?q=www.facebook.com," tricking browsers into thinking that the given site is "www.google.com" and the search query is "www.facebook.com."
The URL Address Bar spoofing vulnerability can be used to easily trick UC Browser users into thinking they're visiting a trusted website when actually being served with a phishing page, as shown in the video demonstration.
"The fact that their regex rules just match the URL string, or, the URL any user is trying to visit a whitelist pattern but only check if the URL begins with a string like www.google.com can enable an attacker to bypass this regex check by simply using a subdomain on his domain like www.google.com.blogspot.com and attach the target domain name (which he wants to pose as) to the query portion of this subdomain like ?q=www.facebook.com," Arif explains in a blog post.
Unlike Xiaomi browsers flaw, the UC browsers vulnerability does not allow an attacker to spoof SSL indicator, which is a basic and important factor that users cross-check to determine if a site is fake or legit.
The Hacker News has independently verified the vulnerability and can confirm it works on the latest versions of both web browsers available at the time of writing.
What's interesting? The researcher also mentioned that some old and other versions of UC Browser and UC Browser Mini are not affected by this URL Address Bar spoofing vulnerability, which suggests that a "new feature might have been added to this browser sometime back which is causing this issue."
Khan responsibly reported the vulnerability to the UC Browser security team more than a week ago, but the company has not yet addressed the issue and simply put an Ignore status on his report.
UC Browser was in the news just over a month ago when researchers found a "hidden" feature in its Android app that could have been exploited by attackers to remotely download and execute malicious code on Android phones and hijack them.
| Vulnerability |
How to Mitigate Microsoft Print Spooler Vulnerability – PrintNightmare | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/how-to-mitigate-microsoft-print-spooler.html | This week, PrintNightmare - Microsoft's Print Spooler vulnerability (CVE-2021-34527) was upgraded from a 'Low' criticality to a 'Critical' criticality.
This is due to a Proof of Concept published on GitHub, which attackers could potentially leverage for gaining access to Domain Controllers.
As we reported earlier, Microsoft already released a patch in June 2021, but it wasn't enough to stop exploits. Attackers can still use Print Spooler when connecting remotely. You can find all you need to know about this vulnerability in this article and how you can mitigate it (and you can).
Print Spooler in a nutshell: Print Spooler is Microsoft's service for managing and monitoring files printing. This service is among Microsoft's oldest and has had minimal maintenance updates since it was released.
Every Microsoft machine (servers and endpoints) has this feature enabled by default.
PrintNightmare vulnerability: As soon as an attacker gains limited user access to a network, he will be able to connect (directly or remotely) to the Print Spooler. Since the Print Spooler has direct access to the kernel, the attacker can use it to gain access to the operating system, run remote code with system privileges, and ultimately attack the Domain Controller.
Your best option when it comes to mitigating the PrintNightmare vulnerability is to disable the Print Spooler on every server and/or sensitive workstation (such as administrators' workstations, direct internet-facing workstations, and non-printing workstations).
This is what Dvir Goren's, hardening expert and CTO at CalCom Software Solutions, suggests as your first move towards mitigation.
Follow these steps to disable the Print Spooler service on Windows 10:
Open Start.
Search for PowerShell, right-click on it and select the Run as administrator.
Type the command and press Enter: Stop-Service -Name Spooler -Force
Use this command to prevent the service from starting back up again during restart: Set-Service -Name Spooler -StartupType Disabled
According to Dvir's experience, 90% of servers do not require Print Spooler. It is the default configuration for most of them, so it is usually enabled. As a result, disabling it can solve 90% of your problem and have little impact on production.
In large and complex infrastructures, it can be challenging to locate where Print Spooler is used.
Here are a few examples where Print Spooler is required:
When using Citrix services,
Fax servers,
Any application requiring virtual or physical printing of PDFs, XPSs, etc. Billing services and wage applications, for example.
Here are a few examples when Print Spooler is not needed but enabled by default:
Domain Controller and Active Directory – the main risk in this vulnerability can be neutralized by practicing basic cyber hygiene. It makes no sense to have Print Spooler enabled in DCs and AD servers.
Member servers such as SQL, File System, and Exchange servers.
Machines that do not require printing.
A few other hardening steps suggested by Dvir for machines dependent on Print Spooler include:
Replace the vulnerable Print Spooler protocol with a non-Microsoft service.
By changing 'Allow Print Spooler to accept client connections', you can restrict users' and drivers' access to the Print Spooler to groups that must use it.
Disable Print Spooler caller in Pre-Windows 2000 compatibility group.
Make sure that Point and Print is not configured to No Warning – check registry key SOFTWARE/Policies/Microsoft/Windows NT/Printers/PointAndPrint/NoElevationOnInstall for DWORD value 1 and change it to 0.
Turn off EnableLUA – check registry key SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System/EnableLUA for DWORD value 0 and change it to 1.
Here's what you need to do next to ensure your organization is secure:
Identify where Print Spooler is being used on your network.
Map your network to find the machines that must use Print Spooler.
Disable Print Spooler on machines that do not use it.
For machines that require Print Spooler – configure them in a way to minimize its attack surface.
Beside this, to find potential evidence of exploitation, you should also monitor Microsoft-Windows-PrintService/Admin log entries. There might be entries with error messages that indicate Print Spooler can't load plug-in module DLLs, although this can also happen if an attacker packaged a legitimate DLL that Print Spooler demands.
The final recommendation from Dvir is to implement these recommendations through hardening automation tools. Without automation, you will spend countless hours attempting to harden manually and may end up vulnerable or causing systems to go down
After choosing your course of action, a Hardening automation tool will discover where Print Spooler is enabled, where they are actually used, and disable or reconfigure them automatically.
| Vulnerability |
Converting Google Chrome into a Bugging Device by exploiting Speech Recognition feature | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/converting-google-chrome-into-bugging.html | How many of you use Google Chrome for surfing the Internet and feel safe while working on it? I think many of you. Chrome is one of the most trusted Web Browsers that provide a user friendly environment and cyber security, but this we all know that every product has its negative side too, and so has Google's Chrome.
Chrome has a 'Voice Recognition' feature, that use your system's microphone and allows you to speak instead of typing into any text box, to make hands-free web searches, quick conversions, and audio translator also work with them.
Google's browser is also not immune to bugs and this time the new bug discovered in Chrome is capable to listen and record your whole private conversations without your knowledge, by abusing the voice recognition feature.
While working on 'Annyang', a voice to text software for websites, the web developer 'Tal Ater' discovered a vulnerability that can be exploited and lets malicious sites to turn your Google Chrome into a listening device, that can record anything said around your computer, even after you've left those sites.
Whenever a user visits a speech recognition site that offers them to control the site by using their voice with speech recognition software, the Chrome asks permission to use a microphone, the user accepts. Chrome shows an icon in the notification area that your microphone is on which suppose to be turned off when you close that tab or visit another site.
All a malicious site has to do is get you to enable voice control for any legitimate purpose and shoot out a pop-under window disguised as an ordinary ad, to keep your microphone 'ON'. As long as it remains open, every noise you make will be uploaded to the hacker's server without asking any permission.
He also explained that just by using secure HTTPS connections don't mean that the site is safe. Once you give the permission to access your microphone for the HTTPS site, Chrome will remember and won't ask your permission again for that site.
Chrome Speech Recognition Exploit Demo
He reported the flaw to the Google security team in late September, 2013; they accepted the loophole, but never released the update to the desktop users.
A few weeks later, Tal Atar asked the Google Security Team about the reason for the delay in patch delivery, and they replied, "we are waiting for the web's standards organization, the W3C group to agree on the best course of action", and so your browser is still vulnerable.
After the public release of POC, the Google spokesperson said, "We've re-investigated and still believe there is no immediate threat, since a user must first enable speech recognition for each site that requests it. The feature is in compliance with the current W3C standard, and we continue to work on improvements."
He has published the source code for the exploit to encourage Google to fix it and to maintain users' Internet security.
| Vulnerability |
Iran blocks most virtual private network (VPN) services | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/iran-blocks-most-virtual-private.html | IRAN has spent years fending off cyber attacks, blocking access and isolated their own intranet off from the outside world. Many Iranians was using of virtual private network (VPNs), which provides encrypted links directly to private networks based abroad, to access Sites like YouTube and Facebook after bypassing the country's internet filter.
But recently, Iranian authorities have blocked the use of most virtual private network to stop people in the country from circumventing the government's internet filter.
A widespread government internet filter prevents Iranians from accessing many sites on the official grounds they are offensive or criminal.
Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, the head of parliament's information and communications technology committee said, "Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked. Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used."
Registered and legal VPN access can still be purchased, but the typical filter workarounds no longer work.
| Cyber_Attack |
Duuzer Trojan: A New Backdoor Targeting South Korean Organizations | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/computer-malware-attack.html | Security researchers at Symantec have uncovered a new Backdoor Trojan that grants hackers remote access and some control over infected machines.
"Duuzer," as dubbed by the researchers, has been targeting organizations in South Korea and elsewhere in an attempt to steal valuable information.
The Trojan is designed to infect both 32-bit and 64-bit computers running Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP.
Duuzer gives attackers remote access to the compromised computer, allowing them to:
Collect system and drive information
Create, enumerate, and end processes
Access, modify and delete files
Upload and Download additional files
Change the time attributes of files
Execute malicious commands
Steal data from infected system
Know about victim's Operating System
Duuzer Infects via Spear Phishing or Watering Hole Attacks
It is currently unclear how the malware is being distributed, but according to Symantec Researchers, the most obvious routes are Spear Phishing campaigns and Watering Hole attacks.
Once infected, Duuzer checks if the system is running on a virtual machine like VMWare or Virtual Box to ensure that security researchers are not analyzing the malware before performing its malicious routines.
Moreover, the Trojan identifies the existing software configured to run on startup and takes the name of that legitimate software on an infected computer and spread across the system.
Duuzer's first sets up a backdoor on the machine, allowing attackers physical access to the system.
The attackers then manually run commands through the backdoor on affected computers. They can perform a variety of operations mentioned above.
"Based on our analysis of Duuzer, the attackers behind the threat appear to be experienced and have knowledge about security researchers' analysis techniques," researchers said. "Their motivation seems to be obtaining valuable information from their targets' computers."
'Brambul' Worm and 'Joanap' Trojan also Detected
Research also discovered a dropper that infects computers with a worm known as Brambul and a Backdoor Trojan called Joanap. Both of them mostly work together and typically used to log and monitor infected systems remotely.
It is still unclear how the dropper is being distributed; however, it is believed that it comes from malicious emails.
The worm detected as W32.Brambul uses brute-force attacks via the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to spread from one computer to another.
Once infected, the Brambul worm connects to random IP addresses on the local network and authenticates itself through SMB using common passwords, like 'password,' 'login,' '123123,' 'abc123' and 'iloveyou.'
Besides attacking other computers via SMB, Brambul creates a network share on compromised computers, usually the system drive, and then sends the computer's details and login credentials to a predefined email address.
Connection between Duuzer, Brambul and Joanap
According to Symantec, Duuzer has a connection with both Joanap and Brambul...But how?
Once infected, Brambul drops other pieces of malware on infected machines, either Duuzer or Joanap.
Systems infected with Brambul have been used as command-and-control (CnC) servers for Duuzer and have also been compromised with Duuzer.
If Joanap is dropped, the Trojan will register itself as a local OS service, named "SmartCard Protector." The Trojan opens a backdoor on the compromised machine and starts:
Sending specific files to the attackers
Saving or deleting files
Downloading and executing files
Executing or terminating processes
Propagating instructions it receives from the C&C server
How to get rid of this ARMY?
Though Duuzer, Brambul, and Joanap are just a small selection of many threats affecting South Korean organizations with a very low-risk level.
But still, it is recommended for the users and businesses to keep themselves safe and protected by following these steps and prevent their systems from being compromised with this malware:
Use a firewall to block all incoming connections from the Internet to services that shouldn't be publicly available.
You should, by default, deny all incoming connections and only allow services you explicitly want to offer to the outside world.
Use Complex Passwords as it makes it difficult to crack.
Turned OFF Bluetooth if it is not required for mobile devices. Also, turn off other services not required at present.
Train your employees not to open email or messages attachments unless they are expecting them.
For more details, head on the Symantec's official blog.
| Cyber_Attack |
Japanese Android developers arrested for infecting 10 million users | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/japanese-android-developers-arrested.html | Japanese police arrested five mobile applications developers for creating and embedding a virus into smartphone applications. According to The Metropolitan Police Department, Intial reports said that about 90,000 smartphones users were infected with a virus lurking in applications they downloaded, But later they found that developers stole more than 10 million pieces of personal information from users mobile.
These guys runs an IT-related company, they created a video applications for Android smartphones containing a virus that extracts personal information stored on the phone. The man released the apps on Google Inc.'s official store for free in late March and was downloaded 270,000 times.
The free apps were marketed to customers by affixing the phrase "The Movie" to existing popular game titles. When the apps are downloaded and activated, they can automatically transmit personal data. The stolen information found on the server has not been used by the malware developers but the police is investigating the motive of the crime.
Violators face up to three years in prison or fines of up to 500,000 yen (S$7645). Creating viruses for computers and smartphones was criminalized under the revised Penal Code that was enacted in July last year.
| Malware |
Intel Adds Hardware-Enabled Ransomware Detection to 11th Gen vPro Chips | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/intel-adds-hardware-enabled-ransomware.html | Intel and Cybereason have partnered to build anti-ransomware defenses into the chipmaker's newly announced 11th generation Core vPro business-class processors.
The hardware-based security enhancements are baked into Intel's vPro platform via its Hardware Shield and Threat Detection Technology (TDT), enabling profiling and detection of ransomware and other threats that have an impact on the CPU performance.
"The joint solution represents the first instance where PC hardware plays a direct role in ransomware defenses to better protect enterprise endpoints from costly attacks," Cybereason said.
Exclusive to vPro, Intel Hardware Shield provides protections against firmware-level attacks targeting the BIOS, thereby ensuring that the operating system (OS) runs on legitimate hardware as well as minimizing the risk of malicious code injection by locking down memory in the BIOS when the software is running to help prevent planted malware from compromising the OS.
Intel TDT, on the other hand, leverages a combination of CPU telemetry data and machine learning-based heuristics to identify anomalous attack behavior — including polymorphic malware, file-less scripts, crypto mining, and ransomware infections — in real-time.
"The Intel [CPU performance monitoring unit] sits beneath applications, the OS, and virtualization layers on the system and delivers a more accurate representation of active threats, system-wide," Intel said. "As threats are detected in real-time, Intel TDT sends a high-fidelity signal that can trigger remediation workflows in the security vendor's code."
The development comes as ransomware attacks exploded in number last year, fueled in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, with average payout increasing from about $84,000 in 2019 to about $233,000 last year.
The ransomware infections have also led to a spike in "double extortion," where cybercriminals steal sensitive data before deploying the ransomware and hold it hostage in hopes that the victims will pay up rather than risk having their information made public — thus completely undermining the practice of recovering from data backups and avoid paying ransoms.
What's more, malware operators are increasingly extending their focus beyond the operating system of the device to lower layers to potentially deploy bootkits and take complete control of an infected system.
Last month, researchers detailed a new "TrickBoot" feature in TrickBot that can allow attackers to inject malicious code in the UEFI/BIOS firmware of a device to achieve persistence, avoid detection and carry out destructive or espionage-focused campaigns.
Viewed in that light, the collaboration between Intel and Cybereason is a step in the right direction, making it easier to detect and eradicate malware from the chip-level all the way to the endpoint.
"Cybereason's multi-layered protection, in collaboration with Intel Threat Detection Technology, will enable full-stack visibility to swiftly detect and block ransomware attacks before the data can be encrypted or exfiltrated," the companies said.
| Malware |
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.
| Cyber_Attack |
Ubuntu Linux Forum Hacked! Once Again | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/ubuntu-hacked.html | No software is immune to being Hacked! Not even Linux.
The Ubuntu online forums have been hacked, and data belonging to over 2 Million users have been compromised, Canonical just announced.
The compromised users' data include their IP addresses, usernames, and email addresses, according to the company, who failed to apply a patch to secure its users' data.
However, users should keep in mind that the hack did not affect the Ubuntu operating system, or it was not due to a vulnerability or weakness in the OS.
Instead, the breach only affected the Ubuntu online forums that people use to discuss the OS, said BetaNews, who initially reported the news.
"There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums site," Jane Silber, Chief Executive Officer at Canonical wrote in a blog post. "We take information security and user privacy very seriously, follow a strict set of security practices and this incident has triggered a thorough investigation."
"Corrective action has been taken, and full service of the Forums has been restored. In the interest of transparency, we'd like to share the details of the breach and what steps have been taken. We apologize for the breach and ensuing inconvenience."
After deeply investigating the incident, the company came to know that it left a known SQLi (SQL injection) vulnerability unpatched in the Forumrunner add-on in its Forums that exposed its users data.
Sounds really awful. This again proves that the Weakest Link in the security is still – Humans.
The SQL injection (SQLi) attack is an attack used to inject malicious SQL commands (malicious payloads) through the input data from the client to the application in order to breach the database and get access to the user's personal data.
The vulnerability is one of the oldest, but most powerful and most dangerous flaw that could affect any website or web application that uses an SQL-based database.
According to Silber, here's what the attackers were able to access:
The attackers were able to inject formatted SQL to the Forums database on the Forums database servers, which gave them access to read from any table.
The attackers then used the above access to download portions of the 'user' table containing usernames, email addresses, and IP addresses for 2 Million users.
Since the passwords stored in this table were random strings (which were Hashed and Salted) as the Ubuntu Forums rely on Ubuntu Single Sign On for logins, the company said that no active passwords were accessed by the attackers.
Although Canonical responded fast and had since patched the flaw, it is still disappointing that the firm's silly mistake to not installing a patch for a known bug caused exposure of its users personal data.
| Data_Breaches |
Cyber Espionage Campaign Targets Israel and Palestine | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/cyber-espionage-campaign-targets-israel.html | Multiple malware attacks against both Israeli and Palestinian systems, likely to be coming from the same source, have been seen over the last year. Researchers in Norway have uncovered evidence of a vast Middle Eastern espionage network that for the past year has deployed malicious software to spy on Israeli and Palestinian targets.
Israel has banned its police force from connecting to the Internet and from using memory sticks or disks in an effort to curb a cyberattack. The ban, enacted last week, is meant to prevent a malware program called Benny Gantz-55 named after Benny Gantz, Israel's Chief of General Staff from infecting the police's computer network
Trend Micro has obtained samples of malware implicated in a recent incident, The attack began with a spammed message purporting to come from the head of the Israel Defense Forces, Benny Gatz. The From field has the email address, bennygantz59(at)gmail.com and bore the subject IDF strikes militants in Gaza Strip following rocket barrage to make it more legitimate.'
The attackers were serving up the XtremeRat trojan, which was infamously used in surveillance campaigns against Syrian activists. XtremeRat trojan a Remote Access Trojan that can be used to steal information and receive commands from a remote attacker. According to Trend, the latest iterations of Xtreme Rat have Windows 8 compatibility, improved Chrome and Firefox password grabbing, and improved audio and desktop capture capabilities features.
Looking into the source of the attacks, Norman said "What is behind these IP addresses is hard to establish. It is possible they are hacked boxes and as such do not give much valid information. If that were the case, one might have expected a greater IP range and geographical distribution, but nothing is certain,".
"In the following investigation we first found several other trojans similarly signed, then many more trojans connecting to the same command & control structure as the first batch.".
"The Command & Control structure is centered around a few dynamic DNS (DynDNS) domains that at the time of writing point to hosting services in the US."
Officials have yet to determine whether the virus is a prank or was generated by Iran's cyberwarfare program, which had been rapidly expanded since Tehran's nuclear program was hit by the Stuxnet virus in 2010.
| Malware |
Zeus Alternative Pandemiya Banking Malware For Sale in Underground Forums | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/zeus-alternative-pandemiya-banking.html | A new and relatively rare Zeus Trojan program has found which is totally different from other banking Trojans and has capability to secretly steal data from forms, login credentials and files from the victim as well as can create fake web pages and take screenshots of victim's computer.
Researchers at RSA Security's FraudAction team have discovered this new and critical threat, dubbed as 'Pandemiya', which is being offered to the cyber criminals in underground forums as an alternative to the infamous Zeus Trojan and its many variants, that is widely used by most of the cyber-criminals for years to steal banking information from consumers and companies.
The source code of the Zeus banking Trojan is available on the underground forums from past few years, which lead malware developers to design more sophisticated variants of Zeus Trojan such as Citadel, Ice IX and Gameover Zeus.
But, Pandemiya is something by far the most isolated and dangerous piece of malware as the author spent a year in writing the code for Pandemiya, which includes 25,000 lines of original code written in C.
Like other commercial Trojan, Pandemiya infect the machines through exploit kits and via drive-by download attacks to boost infection rate that exploit flaws in the vulnerable software such as Java, Silverlight and Flash within few seconds victim lands on the web page.
"Pandemiya's coding quality is quite interesting, and contrary to recent trends in malware development, it is not based on Zeus source code at all, unlike Citadel/Ice IX, etc.," researchers from RSA, the security division of EMC, said Tuesday in a blog post. "Through our research, we found out that the author of Pandemiya spent close to a year of coding the application, and that it consists of more than 25,000 lines of original code in C."
Pandemiya Trojan using Windows CreateProcess API to inject itself into every new process that is initiated, including Explorer.exe and re-injects itself when needed. Pandemiya is being sold for as much as $2,000 USD and provides all the nasty features including encrypted communication with command and control servers in an effort to evade detection.
The Trojan has been designed with modular architecture to load more external plug-ins, which allows hackers to add extra features simply by writing new DLL (dynamic link library). The extra plug-ins easily add capabilities to the Trojan's core functionality, that's why the developer charge an extra of $500 USD to get the core application as well as its plugins, which allows cybercriminals to open reverse proxies on infected computers, to steal FTP credentials and to infect executable files in order to inject the malware at start up.
"The advent of a freshly coded new trojan malware application is not too common in the underground," Marcus writes, adding that the modular approach in Pandemiya could make it "more pervasive in the near future."
The malware developers are also working on other new features to add reverse Remote Desktop Protocol connections and a Facebook attack module in order to spread the Trojan through hijacked Facebook accounts.
HOW TO REMOVE PANDEMIYA TROJAN
The Trojan can be easily removed with a little modification in the registry and command line action, as explained below:
Locate the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and identify the *.EXE filename in your user's 'Application Data' folder. Note the name, and delete the registry value.
Locate the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\AppCertDlls. Find the value with the same name as the *.EXE file in the previous step. Note the file name, and remove the value from the registry.
Reboot the system. At this stage Pandemiya is installed but no longer running. Delete both files noted earlier. This will remove the last traces of the Trojan. Your system is now clean.
Stay Safe!
| Malware |
Hackers Target Military and Aerospace Staff by Posing as HRs Offering Jobs | https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/military-aerospace-hacking.html | Cybersecurity researchers today took the wraps off a new sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign directed against aerospace and military organizations in Europe and the Middle East with an aim to spy on key employees of the targeted firms and, in some case, even to siphon money.
The campaign, dubbed "Operation In(ter)ception" because of a reference to "Inception" in the malware sample, took place between September to December 2019, according to a new report cybersecurity firm ESET shared with The Hacker News.
"The primary goal of the operation was espionage," the researchers told The Hacker News. "However, in one of the cases we investigated, the attackers tried to monetize access to a victim's email account through a business email compromise (BEC) attack as the final stage of the operation."
The financial motivation behind the attacks, coupled with similarities in targeting and development environment, have led ESET to suspect Lazarus Group, a notorious hacking group that's been attributed to working on behalf of the North Korean government to fund the country's illicit weapon and missile programs.
Social Engineering via LinkedIn
Stating that the campaign was highly targeted, ESET said it relied on social engineering tricks to lure employees working for the chosen companies with fake job offers using LinkedIn's messaging feature, posing as HR managers of well-known companies in the aerospace and defense industry, including Collins Aerospace and General Dynamics.
"Once the contact was established, the attackers snuck malicious files into the communication, disguising them as documents related to the advertised job offer," the researchers said, based on an investigation with two of the affected European companies.
The decoy RAR archive files, which were directly sent over the chats or as emails sent from their fake LinkedIn personas pointing to an OneDrive link, purported to contain a PDF document detailing salary information of specific job positions, when in actuality, it executed Windows' Command Prompt utility to perform a series of actions:
Copy Windows Management Instrumentation command-line tool (wmic.exe) to a specific folder
Rename it to something innocuous to evade detection (e.g., Intel, NVidia, Skype, OneDrive and Mozilla), and
Create scheduled tasks that execute a remote XSL script via WMIC.
The actors behind the operation, upon gaining an initial foothold inside the target company, went on to employ a custom malware downloader, which in turn downloaded a previously undocumented second-stage payload — a C++ backdoor that periodically sends requests to an attacker-controlled server, carry out pre-defined actions based on the received commands, and exfiltrate the collected information as a RAR file via a modified version of dbxcli, an open-source command-line client for Dropbox.
In addition to using WMIC to interpret remote XSL scripts, the adversaries also abused native Windows utilities such as "certutil" to decode base64-encoded downloaded payloads, and "rundll32" and "regsvr32" to run their custom malware.
"We actively seek out signs of state-sponsored activity on the platform and quickly take action against bad actors in order to protect our members. We don't wait on requests, our threat intelligence team removes fake accounts using information we uncover and intelligence from a variety of sources, including government agencies," Paul Rockwell, Head of Trust and Safety at LinkedIn said in a statement sent to The Hacker News.
"Our teams utilize a variety of automated technologies, combined with a trained team of reviewers and member reporting, to keep our members safe from all types of bad actors. We enforce our policies, which are very clear: the creation of a fake account or fraudulent activity with an intent to mislead or lie to our members is a violation of our terms of service. In this case, we uncovered instances of abuse that involved the creation of fake accounts. We took immediate action at that time and permanently restricted the accounts"
Financially Motivated BEC Attacks
Besides reconnaissance, ESET researchers also found evidence of attackers attempting to exploit the compromised accounts to extract money from other companies.
Although unsuccessful, the monetization tactic worked by using the existing email communications between the account holder and a customer of the company to settle an outstanding invoice to a different bank account under their control.
"As part of this ruse, the attackers registered an identical domain name to that of the compromised company, but on a different top-level domain, and used an email associated with this fake domain for further communication with the targeted customer," ESET said.
Ultimately, the targeted customer reached out to the correct email address of the victim about the suspicious emails, thus foiling the attackers' attempt.
"Our research into Operation In(ter)ception shows again how effective spear-phishing can be for compromising a target of interest," the researchers concluded.
"They were highly targeted and relied on social engineering over LinkedIn and custom, multistage malware. To operate under the radar, the attackers frequently recompiled their malware, abused native Windows utilities, and impersonated legitimate software and companies."
| Cyber_Attack |
PHP Site's User Database Was Hacked In Recent Source Code Backdoor Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/php-sites-user-database-was-hacked-in.html | The maintainers of the PHP programming language have issued an update regarding the security incident that came to light late last month, stating that the actors may have gotten hold of a user database containing their passwords to make unauthorized changes to the repository.
"We no longer believe the git.php.net server has been compromised. However, it is possible that the master.php.net user database leaked," Nikita Popov said in a message posted on its mailing list on April 6.
On March 28, unidentified actors used the names of Rasmus Lerdorf and Popov to push malicious commits to the "php-src" repository hosted on the git.php.net server that involved adding a backdoor to the PHP source code in an instance of a software supply chain attack.
While this was initially treated as a compromise of the git.php.net server, further investigation into the incident has revealed that the commits were a result of pushing them using HTTPS and password-based authentication, leading them to suspect a possible leak of the master.php.net user database.
The "git.php.net (intentionally) support[s] pushing changes not only via SSH (using the Gitolite infrastructure and public key cryptography), but also via HTTPS," Popov said. "The latter did not use Gitolite, and instead used git-http-backend behind Apache 2 Digest authentication against the master.php.net user database."
"It is notable that the attacker only makes a few guesses at usernames, and successfully authenticates once the correct username has been found. While we don't have any specific evidence for this, a possible explanation is that the user database of master.php.net has been leaked, although it is unclear why the attacker would need to guess usernames in that case."
Additionally, the master.php.net authentication system is said to be on a very old operating system and a version of PHP, raising the possibility that the attackers may have also exploited a vulnerability in the software to stage the attack.
As a consequence, the maintainers have migrated master.php.net to a new main.php.net system with support for TLS 1.2, in addition to resetting all existing passwords and storing passwords using bcrypt instead of a plain MD5 hash.
| Data_Breaches |
Hacker Discloses New Unpatched Windows Zero-Day Exploit On Twitter | https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/windows-zero-day-exploit.html | A security researcher with Twitter alias SandboxEscaper today released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Microsoft's Windows operating system.
SandboxEscaper is the same researcher who previously publicly dropped exploits for two Windows zero-day vulnerabilities, leaving all Windows users vulnerable to the hackers until Microsoft patched them.
The newly disclosed unpatched Windows zero-day vulnerability is an arbitrary file read issue that could allow a low-privileged user or a malicious program to read the content of any file on a targeted Windows computer that otherwise would only be possible via administrator-level privileges.
The zero-day vulnerability resides in "MsiAdvertiseProduct" function of Windows that's responsible for generating "an advertise script or advertises a product to the computer and enables the installer to write to a script the registry and shortcut information used to assign or publish a product."
According to the researcher, due to improper validation, the affected function can be abused to force installer service into making a copy of any file as SYSTEM privileges and read its content, resulting in arbitrary file read vulnerability.
"Even without an enumeration vector, this is still bad news, because a lot of document software, like office, will actually keep files in static locations that contain the full path and file names of recently opened documents..," the researcher said.
"Thus by reading files like this, you can get filenames of documents created by other users.. the filesystem is a spiderweb and references to user-created files can be found everywhere.. so not having an enumeration bug is not that big of a deal."
Besides sharing video demonstration of the vulnerability, SandboxEscaper also posted a link to a Github page hosting its proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the third Windows zero-day vulnerability, but the researcher's GitHub account has since been taken down.
This is the third time in the past few months SandboxEscaper has leaked a Windows zero-day vulnerability.
In October, SandboxEscaper released a PoC exploit for a privilege escalation vulnerability in Microsoft Data Sharing that allowed a low privileged user to delete critical system files from a targeted Windows system.
In late August, the researcher exposed details and PoC exploit for a local privilege escalation flaw in Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler occurred due to errors in the handling of the Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) service.
Shortly after the PoC released, the then-zero-day vulnerability was found actively being exploited in the wild, before Microsoft addressed it in the September 2018 Security Patch Tuesday Updates.
| Vulnerability |
This Cryptomining Malware Launches Linux VMs On Windows and macOS | https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/emulated-malware.html | Cybersecurity researchers from at least two firms today unveiled details of a new strain of malware that targets Windows and macOS systems with a Linux-based cryptocurrency mining malware.
It may sound strange, but it's true.
Dubbed "LoudMiner" and also "Bird Miner," the attack leverages command-line based virtualization software on targeted systems to silently boot an image of Tiny Core Linux OS that already contains a hacker-activated cryptocurrency mining software in it.
Isn't it interesting to use emulation to run single-platform malware on cross-platforms?
Spotted by researchers at ESET and Malwarebytes, attackers are distributing this malware bundled with pirated and cracked copies of VST (Virtual Studio Technology) software on the Internet and via Torrent network since August 2018.
VST applications contain sounds, effects, synthesizers, and other advanced editing features that allow tech-centric audio professionals to create music.
"Regarding the nature of the applications targeted, it is interesting to observe that their purpose is related to audio production; thus, the machines that they are installed on should have the good processing power and high CPU consumption will not surprise the users," ESET researchers said.
Researchers have found various malicious versions of nearly 137 VST-related applications, 42 of which are for Windows and 95 for macOS platform, including Propellerhead Reason, Ableton Live, Sylenth1, Nexus, Reaktor 6 and AutoTune.
For macOS systems, the software runs multiple shell scripts and uses the open-source Quick Emulator (QEMU) utility to launch the virtual Linux OS, and for Windows, it relies on VirtualBox for emulation.
Once installed and activated, the malware also gains persistence on the system by installing additional files and then launches virtual machines in the background.
These Linux OS images have already been pre-configured by attackers to launch cryptocurrency mining software automatically on the startup without ever needing a user to login and connect to the hacker's command-and-control servers.
"OVF file included in the Linux image describes the hardware configuration of the virtual machine: it uses 1GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores (with maximum usage of 90%)," ESET researchers said.
"The Linux image is Tiny Core Linux 9.0 configured to run XMRig, as well as some files and scripts to keep the miner updated continuously."
The malware "can run two images at once, each taking 128 MB of RAM and one CPU core" to mine simultaneously.
"Further, the fact that the malware runs two separate miners, each running from their own 130 MB Qemu image file, means that the malware consumes far more resources than necessary," Malwarebytes said.
The attack is another good reason why you should never trust unofficial and pirated software available on the Internet.
| Malware |
Spotify Hacked, Urges Android Users to Upgrade app and Change Password | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/spotify-hacked-urges-android-users-to.html | Today, the popular Music streaming service Spotify said the company has suffered a Data breach and warned users of its Android app to upgrade it in the wake of a potential data breach in their servers.
Spotify is a commercial music streaming service launched in October 2008 by Swedish start-up Spotify AB and is freely available for Android and iOS devices as well as for desktop computers with more than 40 million active users, out of which about 10 million users are its paid subscribers. It offers offline listening and ad-free playback are also available for Premium subscribers of the service.
The company announced that a hacker had allegedly broken into its systems and gained unauthorized access to the internal company data. So far only one of its users' accounts has been accessed in the data breach, but the company believes that there is no harm to the financial information, payment details or password of the affected user.
"Our evidence shows that only one Spotify user's data has been accessed and this did not include any password, financial, or payment information," Spotify chief technology officer Oskar Stal said in a blog post on Tuesday. "We have contacted this one individual. Based on our findings, we are not aware of any increased risk to users as a result of this incident."
The company takes the matters seriously and immediately launched an investigation. But they do not believe users are at any extended risk following the breach.
However, Stal said the company takes such matters very seriously, and as "general precautions," Spotify will signed out some of their desktop, iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps users in the coming days and will ask them to log-in again by re-entering their username and password, just some extra steps to ensure its customers' private data stays safe.
Spotify will release the updates this week and will also guide its Android users to upgrade the Android app. "Please note that offline playlists will have to be re-downloaded in the new version," Stål said. "We apologize for any inconvenience this causes, but hope you understand that this is a necessary precaution to safeguard the quality of our service and protect our users."
In their statements, Spotify has not given any details that how attackers were able to compromise the database, but the above Android app recommendation hints that users of Android app are likely at great risk, as there are possibilities that the data breach was caused because of a vulnerability in the Android app. Whereas, Spotify said, 'no action recommended for iOS and Windows Phone users' at this time.
The news comes after the latest eBay massive data breach that affected 145 million registered users across the world after the company's database was compromised by the hackers.
| Data_Breaches |
Warning: ASUS Software Update Server Hacked to Distribute Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2019/03/asus-computer-hacking.html | Remember the CCleaner hack?
CCleaner hack was one of the largest supply chain attacks that infected more than 2.3 million users with a backdoored version of the software in September 2017.
Security researchers today revealed another massive supply chain attack that compromised over 1 million computers manufactured by Taiwan-based tech giant ASUS.
A group of state-sponsored hackers last year managed to hijack ASUS Live automatic software update server between June and November 2018 and pushed malicious updates to install backdoors on over one million Windows computers worldwide.
According to cybersecurity researchers from Russian firm Kaspersky Lab, who discovered the attack and dubbed it Operation ShadowHammer, Asus was informed about the ongoing supply chain attack on Jan 31, 2019.
After analyzing over 200 samples of the malicious updates, researchers learned that hackers did not want to target all users, instead only a specific list of users identified by their unique MAC addresses, which were hardcoded into the malware.
"We were able to extract more than 600 unique MAC addresses from over 200 samples used in this attack. Of course, there might be other samples out there with different MAC addresses in their list," researchers say.
Like the CCleaner and ShadowPad hacks, the malicious file was signed with legitimate ASUS digital certificates in order to make it look an official software update from the company and to remain undetected for a long time.
Researchers didn't attribute the attack to any APT group at this moment, but certain evidence linked the latest attack to the ShadowPad incident from 2017, which Microsoft attributed to the BARIUM APT actors behind the Winnti backdoor.
"Recently, our colleagues from ESET wrote about another supply chain attack in which BARIUM was also involved, that we believe is connected to this case as well," researchers say.
According to Kaspersky, the backdoored version of ASUS Live Update was downloaded and installed by at least 57,000 Kaspersky users.
"We [researchers] are not able to calculate the total count of affected users based only on our data; however, we estimate that the real scale of the problem is much bigger and is possibly affecting over a million users worldwide," Kaspersky says.
Symantec told Vice that the company identified the malware on more than 13,000 machines running its antivirus software.
Most of the victims Kaspersky detected are from Russia, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, though the malware infected users from around the world.
Kaspersky has notified ASUS and other antivirus companies of the attack while the investigation into the matter is still ongoing.
The antivirus firm has also released an automated tool for users to check whether they had specifically been targeted by the ShadowHammer advanced persistent threat.
| Cyber_Attack |
Reserve Bank of Australia Hacked by Chinese malware | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/reserve-bank-of-australia-hacked-by.html | If hackers want to get into your computer network, they will find a way. You can make it harder but you can't stop them.
According to Australian Financial Review report on Monday, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was hacked by hackers who infiltrated its networks and allegedly stole information using a Chinese piece of malware.
After investigations they found multiple computers had been compromised by malicious software seeking intelligence. Several RBA staffers including heads of department were sent the malicious emails over two days, but it isn't known if the malware executed and succeeded in capturing information from the compromised computers.
The malware consisted of a web address that linked to a zip file that contained a Trojan which at the time was not detected by the anti-virus program, according to the bank.
A Defence department spokesperson said: "The government does not discuss specific cyber incidents, activities or capabilities. [Doing so] could jeopardise ongoing investigations, monitoring of cyber incidents and the ability to protect information and networks."
Documents also showed that six users clicked on the link contained in the mail. All of the six workstations affected did not have local administrator rights, so the virus could not spread.
| Malware |
NoxPlayer Supply-Chain Attack is Likely the Work of Gelsemium Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/noxplayer-supply-chain-attack-is-likely.html | A new cyber espionage group named Gelsemium has been linked to a supply chain attack targeting the NoxPlayer Android emulator that was disclosed earlier this year.
The findings come from a systematic analysis of multiple campaigns undertaken by the APT crew, with evidence of the earliest attack dating back all the way to 2014 under the codename Operation TooHash based on malware payloads deployed in those intrusions.
"Victims of these campaigns are located in East Asia as well as the Middle East and include governments, religious organizations, electronics manufacturers and universities," cybersecurity firm ESET said in an analysis published last week.
"Gelsemium's whole chain might appear simple at first sight, but the exhaustive configurations, implanted at each stage, modify on-the-fly settings for the final payload, making it harder to understand."
Targeted countries include China, Mongolia, North and South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt.
Since its origins in the mid-2010s, Gelsemium has been found employing a variety of malware delivery techniques ranging from spear-phishing documents exploiting Microsoft Office vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-0158) and watering holes to a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Exchange Server — likely CVE-2020-0688, which was addressed by the Windows maker in June 2020 — to deploy the China Chopper web shell.
According to ESET, Gelsemium's first stage is a C++ dropper named "Gelsemine," which deploys a loader "Gelsenicine" onto the target system, which, in turn, retrieves and executes the main malware "Gelsevirine" that's capable of loading additional plug-ins provided by the command-and-control (C2) server.
The adversary is said to have been behind a supply chain attack aimed at BigNox's NoxPlayer, in a campaign dubbed "Operation NightScout," in which the software's update mechanism was compromised to install backdoors such as Gh0st RAT and PoisonIvy RAT to spy on its victims, capture keystrokes, and gather valuable information.
"Victims originally compromised by that supply chain attack were later being compromised by Gelsemine," ESET researchers Thomas Dupuy and Matthieu Faou noted, with similarities observed between the trojanized versions of NoxPlayer and Gelsemium malware.
What's more, another backdoor called Chrommme, which was detected on an unnamed organization's machine also compromised by the Gelsemium group, used the same C2 server as that of Gelsevirine, raising the possibility that the threat actor may be sharing the attack infrastructure across its malware toolset.
"The Gelsemium biome is very interesting: it shows few victims (according to our telemetry) with a vast number of adaptable components," the researchers concluded. "The plug-in system shows that developers have deep C++ knowledge."
| Malware |
Phorpiex Botnet Sending Out Millions of Sextortion Emails Using Hacked Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/phorpiex-botnet-sextortion-emails.html | A decade-old botnet malware that currently controls over 450,000 computers worldwide has recently shifted its operations from infecting machines with ransomware or crypto miners to abusing them for sending out sextortion emails to millions of innocent people.
Extortion by email is growing significantly, with a large number of users recently complaining about receiving sextortion emails that attempt to extort money from individuals by blackmailing them into exposing their sexual content.
Though until now, it wasn't clear how scammers were sending such massive amounts of emails without getting blacklisted by the email providers, security researchers from CheckPoint finally found the missing block in this puzzle.
In its latest report shared with The Hacker News prior to the release, Tel Aviv-based security firm CheckPoint reveals that a botnet, called Phorpiex, has recently been updated to include a spam bot designed to use compromised computers as proxies to send out over 30,000 sextortion emails per hour—without the knowledge of the infected computers' owners.
How Does Phorpiex Spam Bot Work?
The spambot module of Phorpiex downloads the list of its targets/receipts' email addresses from a remote command-and-control server and uses a simple implementation of the SMTP protocol to send sextortion emails.
"Then, an email address is randomly selected from the downloaded database, and a message is composed from several hardcoded strings. The spam bot can produce a large amount of spam emails – up to 30,000 per hour. Each individual spam campaign can cover up to 27 million potential victims," researchers explain.
"The spam bot creates a total of 15,000 threads to send spam messages from one database. Each thread takes a random line from the downloaded file. The next database file is downloaded when all spam threads finish. If we consider the delays, we can estimate that bot is able to send about 30,000 emails in an hour."
To intimidate innocent recipients, criminals behind these sextortion campaigns also add one of the victims' online passwords in the subject line or content of the sextortion email, making it more convincing that hacker knows their passwords and might have access to their private content.
In reality, these combinations of email addresses and passwords of recipients were curated from various previously compromised databases. So, the passwords displayed to the victims don't necessarily belong to their email accounts; it could be old and related to any online service.
"The downloaded database is a text file, which contains up to 20,000 email addresses. In various campaigns, we observed from 325 to 1363 email databases on a C&C server. Therefore, one spam campaign covers up to 27 million potential victims. Each line of this file contains email and password delimited by colons," researchers say.
The same sextortion campaign powered by similar or the same botnet has also been named as "Save Yourself" malware attacks by other teams of researchers.
In over five months, cybercriminals behind this campaign have made more than 11 BTC, equivalent to approximately $88,000. Though the figure is not huge, researchers say the actual revenue made by the hackers could be larger, as they did not monitor the sextortion campaigns in the years before.
| Cyber_Attack |
Uber fined $1.1 million by UK and Dutch regulators over 2016 data breach | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/uber-data-breach-fine.html | British and Dutch data protection regulators Tuesday hit the ride-sharing company Uber with a total fine of $1,170,892 (~ 1.1 million) for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a 2016 cyber attack involving millions of users.
Late last year, Uber unveiled that the company had suffered a massive data breach in October 2016, exposing names, email addresses and phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders and drivers along with driving license numbers of around 600,000 drivers.
Besides this, it was also reported that instead of disclosing the breach at the time, the company paid $100,000 in ransom to the two hackers with access to the stolen data in exchange for keeping the incident secret and deleting the information.
Today Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined Uber 385,000 pounds ($491,102), while the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA) levied a 600,000 euro ($679,790) penalty on Uber for failing to protect the personal information of its 3 million British and 174,000 Dutch citizens, respectively.
"In 2016 a data breach occurred at the Uber concern in the form of unauthorized access to personal data of customers and drivers. The Uber concern is fined because it did not report the data breach to the Dutch DPA and the data subjects within 72 hours after the discovery of the breach," the Dutch DPA says.
The ICO also confirmed that the attackers were able to compromise Uber's cloud-based storage system using stuffing attack—"a process by which compromised username and password pairs are injected into websites until they are matched to an existing account"—a loophole that could have been "avoided."
"Uber US did not follow the normal operation of its bug bounty programme. In this incident Uber US paid outside attackers who were fundamentally different from legitimate bug bounty recipients: instead of merely identifying a vulnerability and disclosing it responsibly, they maliciously exploited the vulnerability and intentionally acquired personal information relating to Uber users," the ICO states.
The UK watchdog also said that none of the affected customers compromised by the incident were notified of the breach. Instead, Uber started monitoring affected riders and drivers accounts for fraud 12 months after the cyber attack, when the incident was made public last year.
At the time, Uber notified regulatory authorities and offered affected drivers free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.
The company assured its users that other personal details, such as trip location history, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers or dates of birth, were not accessed in the attack.
Since the data breach happened before the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May 2018, the fine of £385,000 imposed under the UK's old Data Protection Act 1998 is still lesser.
The penalty could have been much larger had it fallen under EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), wherein a company could face a maximum fine of 17 million pounds or 4% of its annual global revenue, whichever is higher, for such a privacy breach.
Last month, the UK's data protection watchdog also imposed a fine of £500,000 on Facebook for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to gather and misuse data of 87 million users improperly.
In September, the ICO also issued the maximum allowed fine of £500,000 on credit reporting agency Equifax for its last year's massive data breach that exposed personal and financial data of hundreds of millions of its customers.
| Data_Breaches |
Hijacking plane's navigation system with an Android app, Researcher claimed | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/hijacking-planes-navigation-system-with.html | It is a terrifying prospect, a hack that allows an attacker to take control of plane navigation and cockpit systems has been revealed at a security conference in Europe.
This was demonstrated by Hugo Teso, a researcher at security consultancy N.Runs in Germany who's also a commercial airline pilot. He explained that by building an exploit framework called Simon and a complimentary Android app that delivers attack messages, he could manipulate a plane's path as he saw fit.
"You can use this system to modify approximately everything related to the navigation of the plane," Teso told reporters. Teso found he was able to eavesdrop on the system's communications over its 1MBps link, as well as blocking information and injecting data into link.
It took three years of hunting down holes in standard systems to work out how he could use radio signals to send his own navigation commands to a plane's control system, using publicly available Flight Management System (FMS) hardware and software which mirror the code onboard real planes.
The results of Teso's hard work are terrifying. The hack targets two technologies, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and Aircraft Communications Addressing and Report System (ACARS).
"I expected them to have security issues but I did not expect them to be so easy to spot. I thought I would have to fight hard to get into them but it was not that difficult," Teso said.
He stressed his app was merely a proof of concept, intended to alert aircraft manufacturers to the security loopholes. He claimed the Federal Aviation Administration and the European Aviation Safety Administration were already working on fixing the vulnerability.
| Vulnerability |
Expedia Orbitz Travel, Flights, Hotel Booking Site Compromised | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/expedia-data-breach.html | Chicago-based online travel booking company Orbitz, a subsidiary of Expedia.com, reveals that one of its old websites has been hacked, exposing nearly 880,000 payment card numbers of the people who made purchases online.
Orbitz.com is a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine, allowing customers to quickly and easily search and book flights, hotels, rental cars, vacation packages, travel deals, cruises and more.
The data breach incident, which was detected earlier this month, likely took place somewhere between October 2016 and December 2017, potentially exposing customers' information from the travel site to hackers.
According to the company, hackers may have accessed payment card information stored on a consumer and business partner platform, along with customers' personal information, including name, address, date of birth, phone number, email address and gender.
However, the company said its services such as Expedia flights, Expedia hotels, Expedia business account, Expedia car insurance, and Expedia merchant services have not been affected by the breach.
Expedia Orbitz Says Data Breach Exposes 880,000 Payment Cards
Orbitz worked closely with cybersecurity experts and law enforcement to investigate the breach and confirms that the social security numbers for U.S. customers were not exposed in this incident.
The company claims to have enhanced the security of its compromised platform, though it assures its customers that the current website Orbitz.com was not impacted.
"We deeply regret the incident, and we are committed to doing everything we can to maintain the trust of our customers and partners," Orbitz said in a statement.
Orbitz is currently working to notify the thousands of affected customers and plans to offer one year of free credit monitoring and identity protection service.
Before looking for hotel bookings, Expedia travel rewards, how to list hotel on Expedia, how to book first class flights on Expedia or how to list hotel on Expedia, you should protect your information.
Since the payment card information is now in the hands of cybercriminals, customers are advised to closely monitor their credit card statements and report any unauthorized charges to the issuing bank.
It will be quite impressive to see if the company will compensate its affected users with Expedia coupon code, Orbitz rewards or Expedia promo code so that users with Expedia business account can use Expedia points on the website.
It will not come as a surprise if Expedia stock price drops as soon as Orbitz and Expedia press release is made public with detailed information on the extent of the breach.
For any query related to the data breach, you can call Orbitz or Expedia customer service. Orbitz customer service number is 001-312-279-7740, and Expedia customer service number is (877) 227-7481.
Or you can only call for Expedia rewards points, or promotional codes, from the company ;-)
| Data_Breaches |
Chrome Bug Allowed Hackers to Find Out Everything Facebook Knows About You | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/google-chrome-vulnerability.html | With the release of Chrome 68, Google prominently marks all non-HTTPS websites as 'Not Secure' on its browser to make the web a more secure place for Internet users.
If you haven't yet, there is another significant reason to immediately switch to the latest version of the Chrome web browser.
Ron Masas, a security researcher from Imperva, has discovered a vulnerability in web browsers that could allow attackers to find everything other web platforms, like Facebook and Google, knows about you—and all they need is just trick you into visiting a website.
The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-6177, takes advantage of a weakness in audio/video HTML tags and affects all web browsers powered by "Blink Engine," including Google Chrome.
To illustrate the attack scenario, the researcher took an example of Facebook, a popular social media platform that collects in-depth profiling information on its users, including their age, gender, where you have been (location data) and interests, i.e., what you like and what you don't.
You must be aware of Facebook offering post targeting feature to page administrators, allowing them to define a targeted or restricted audience for specific posts based on their age, location, gender, and interest.
How the Browser Attack Works?
To demonstrate the vulnerability, the researcher created multiple Facebook posts with different combinations of the restricted audiences to categorize victims according to their age, location, interest or gender.
Now, if a website embeds all these Facebook posts on a web page, it will load and display only a few specific posts at the visitors' end based on individuals' profile data on Facebook that matches restricted audience settings.
For example, if a post—defined to be visible only to the Facebook users with age 26, male, having interest in hacking or Information Security—was loaded successfully, an attacker can potentially learn personal information on visitors, regardless of their privacy settings.
Though the idea sounds exciting and quite simple, there are no direct ways available for site administrators to determine whether an embedded post was loaded successfully for a specific visitor or not.
Thanks to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)—a browser security mechanism that prevents a website from reading the content of other sites without their explicit permission.
However, Imperva researcher found that since audio and video HTML tags don't validate the content type of fetched resources or reject responses with invalid MIME types, an attacker can use multiple hidden video or audio tags on a website to request Facebook posts.
Though this method doesn't display Facebook posts as intended, it does allow the attacker-controlled website to measure (using JavaScript) the size of cross-origin resources and number of requests to find out which specific posts were successfully fetched from Facebook for an individual visitor.
"With several scripts running at once — each testing a different and unique restriction — the bad actor can relatively quickly mine a good amount of private data about the user," Masses said.
"I found that by engineering sites to return a different response size depending on the currently logged user properties it is possible to use this method to extract valuable information."
A member from Google security team also pointed that the vulnerability could also work against websites using APIs to fetch user session specific information.
The core of this vulnerability has some similarities with another browser bug, patched in June this year, which exploited a weakness in how web browsers handle cross-origin requests to video and audio files, allowing attackers to read the content of your Gmail or private Facebook messages.
Imperva researcher reported the vulnerability to Google with a proof of concept exploit, and the Chrome team patched the issue in Chrome 68 release.
So, Chrome users are strongly recommended to update their browser to the latest version, if they haven't yet.
| Data_Breaches |
MailSploit — Email Spoofing Flaw Affects Over 30 Popular Email Clients | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/email-spoofing-client.html | If you receive an email that looks like it's from one of your friends, just beware! It's possible that the email has been sent by someone else in an attempt to compromise your system.
A security researcher has discovered a collection of vulnerabilities in more than 30 popular email client applications that could allow anyone to send spoofed emails bypassing anti-spoofing mechanisms.
Discovered by security researcher Sabri Haddouche, the set of vulnerabilities, dubbed MailSploit, affects Apple Mail (macOS, iOS, and watchOS), Mozilla Thunderbird, several Microsoft email clients, Yahoo Mail, ProtonMail, and others.
Although most of these affected email client applications have implemented anti-spoofing mechanisms, such as DKIM and DMARC, MailSploit takes advantage of the way email clients and web interfaces parse "From" header.
Email spoofing is an old-school technique, but it works well, allowing someone to modify email headers and send an email with the forged sender address to trick recipients into believing they are receiving that email from a specific person.
In a dedicated website went up today, Haddouche explained how the lack of input sanitization implemented by vulnerable email clients could lead to email spoofing attack—without actually exploiting any flaw in DMARC.
To demonstrate this attack, Haddouche created a payload by encoding non-ASCII characters inside the email headers, successfully sending a spoofed email from an official address belonging to President of the United States.
"Using a combination of control characters such as new lines or null-byte, it can result in hiding or removing the domain part of the original email," Haddouche says in his blog post.
"We've seen a lot of malware spreading via emails, relying on social engineering techniques to convince users to open unsafe attachments, or click on phishing links. The rise of ransomware distributed over email clearly demonstrates the effectivity of those mechanisms."
Besides spoofing, the researcher found some of the email clients, including Hushmail, Open Mailbox, Spark, and Airmail, are also vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, which stems from the email spoofing issue.
Haddouche reported this spoofing bug to 33 different client applications, 8 of which have already patched this issue in their products before the public disclosure and 12 are on their way to fix it.
Here you can find the list of all email and web clients (both patched and unpatched) that are vulnerable to MailSploit attack.
However, Mozilla and Opera consider this bug to be a server-side issue and will not be releasing any patch. Mailbird closed the ticket without responding to the issue, while remaining 12 vendors did not yet comment on the researcher's report.
| Vulnerability |
Finland's 3rd Largest Data Breach Exposes 130,000 Users' Plaintext Passwords | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/helsingin-uusyrityskeskus-hack.html | Over 130,000 Finnish citizens have had their credentials compromised in what appears to be third largest data breach ever faced by the country, local media reports.
Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) is warning users of a large-scale data breach in a website maintained by the New Business Center in Helsinki ("Helsingin Uusyrityskeskus"), a company that provides business advice to entrepreneurs and help them create right business plans.
Unknown attackers managed to hack the website (https://liiketoimintasuunnitelma.com) and stole over 130,000 users' login usernames and passwords, which were stored on the site in plain-text without using any cryptographic hash.
Right after knowing of the breach on 3rd April, the company took down the affected website, which is currently showing "under maintenance" notice with a press release about the incident on its homepage.
"We are very sorry for all the people who have been subjected to crime and who may be affected by mental or financial disadvantages. Unfortunately, we are not yet able to know exactly how many people are and what information this information breaks. We have filed an offense report, and the parties do not need to report to the police separately," says Jarmo Hyökyvaara, Chairman of the Board of the New Business Center of Helsinki.
"The maintenance and security of our service was the responsibility of our subcontractor, our long-term partner. Unfortunately, the security of the service has not been enough to prevent this kind of attack. This is, in part, our mistake, and as a subscriber and owner of the service we are responsible for this."
The company also ensures that the detailed information of its customers was stored on a different system, which was not affected by the data breach.
The incident has been reported to the Helsinki police, who is currently investigating the case as a gross fraud.
As soon as the website returns, users who have an account with the affected website are strongly recommended to change their passwords.
Since the plain-text passwords have been exposed to hackers, it would be a great idea for users to change their passwords for any other website, in case they are using identical to the one used on this website.
| Cyber_Attack |
Bitcoin Exchange Offers $3.5 Million Reward for Information of Stolen Bitcoins | https://thehackernews.com/2016/08/bitcoin-exchange-hack.html | Hong Kong-based Bitcoin exchange 'Bitfinex' that lost around $72 Million worth of its customers' Bitcoins last week is now offering a reward of $3.5 Million to anyone who can provide information that leads to the recovery of the stolen Bitcoins.
Bitfinex revealed on August 2 that the cryptocurrency exchange had suffered a major security breach, which resulted in the loss of nearly 120,000 BTC.
The hack led to a 36 percent loss for each Bitfinex customer, who will be issued tokens to be redeemed as the company is able to reimburse the losses.
Now, the exchange is willing to offer 5% of the lost funds (nearly 6,000 BTC) as a reward for the recovery of the stolen bitcoins.
The news came after a Reddit user, using alias someguy916, inquired about a reward Bitfinex would be willing to offer for the stolen bitcoins.
In response to the question, Bitfinex community director Zane Tackett stated that a bounty would be awarded to anyone who has information that would help the exchange recover the funds.
"5% of recovery and for information leading to recovery (but no bounty if no recovery); if multiple persons lead to recovery, share pro rata," Tackett wrote.
Where 5% of the stolen funds is about 6,000 BTC, which is around $3.5 MILLION.
Bitfinex is the third-largest Bitcoin exchange in the world. After the news of the Bitfinex hack had broken on August 2, the price of Bitcoin dropped almost 20%, from $602.78 to $541 per Bitcoin, within the day after the announcement.
As a precaution, Bitfinex has adopted additional security measures for its customers, as the company said in a statement Wednesday:
"We have added additional platform and infrastructure security checks; regenerated all encrypted services, including wallets, security tokens, and passwords; moved funds to multisig cold storage; re-evaluated all third-party integrations; performed a comprehensive system audit in order to identify vulnerabilities; and, rebuilt our entire platform on new infrastructure."
The best way to secure yourself from such hacks is to keep your Bitcoins OFFLINE.
The safest place to store your Bitcoins or any other digital currency is in on your own (if possible, offline) wallet; instead on any website or cryptocurrency exchange.
| Cyber_Attack |
16 Million German Users' Data Compromised in mysterious Botnet Malware attack | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/16-million-german-users-data.html | A New day begins with a Cup of Coffee and with new massive Data Breach News.
This time in Germany, the Digital identities of about 16 million online users had been stolen, and posing a risk to their accounts linked to social media and other services.
Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) discovered a security breach after running an analysis of the botnet network of computers infected with malware.
The compromised accounts have email addresses as their username and also the passwords were stolen, that could also be sold to spammers and people looking to "phish" account holders.
Until now it hasn't been known that how and when the analysis was carried out and who exactly were involved behind this massive data breach, as the BSI refused to give details on the source of the information.
Authorities have set up a German-language website which allows users to enter their email address and check whether their email accounts are compromised or not.
The officer advised those with compromised email addresses to change their passwords of "social networking sites, online shops, email accounts and other online services;" and check their computers for malware and viruses and also assured the user that they are taking necessary security measures against it.
An Agency spokesman, Tim Griese, said about half the accounts have '.de' domain-name endings, denoting German-based accounts, and it appears the majority of users are in Germany, RT reports.
Data breach has become a burning issue these days, and a problem which is skyrocketing!
| Malware |
WordPress Cookie Flaw Lets Hackers Hijack Your Account | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/wordpress-cookie-flaw-lets-hackers-to.html | Do you own a blog on WordPress.com website? If Yes, then you should take some extra cautious while signing into your Wordpress account from the next time when connected to public Wi-Fi, because it can be hacked without your knowledge, even if you have enabled two-factor authentication.
Yan Zhu, a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noticed that the blogs hosted on WordPress are sending user authentication cookies in plain text, rather than encrypting it. So, it can be easily hijacked by even a Script-Kiddie looking to steal information.
HIJACKING AUTHENTICATION COOKIES
When Wordpress users log into their account, WordPress.com servers set a web cookie with name "wordpress_logged_in" into the users' browser, Yan Zhu explained in a blog post. He noticed that this authentication cookie being sent over clear HTTP, in a very insecure manner.
One can grab HTTP cookies from the same Wi-Fi Network by using some specialized tools, such as Firesheep, a networking sniffing tool. The cookie can then be added to any other web browser to gain unauthorized access to the victim's WordPress account and in this way a WordPress.com account could be easily compromised.
Using stolen cookies, an attacker can get access to the victim's WordPress account automatically without entering any credentials and fortunately the vulnerability does not allow hijackers to change account passwords, but who cares? as the affected users would have no knowledge that their wordpress account has been hijacked.
"Hijacking cookie on WP gives you login for 3 years. There's no session expiration for the cookie, even when you log out." Yan tweeted.
Using this technique, one can also see blog statistics, can post and edit articles on the hijacked Wordpress blog and same account also allows the attacker to comment on other Wordpress blogs from the victim's profile. Sounds Horrible! Isn't it?
But, an attacker "couldn't do some blog administrator tasks that required logging in again with the username/password, but still, not bad for a single cookie." she explained.
She recommends that Wordpress 'should set the "secure" flag on sensitive cookies so that they're never sent in plaintext.'
The Good news is that, if you own a self-hosted Wordpress website with full HTTPS support, then your blog is not vulnerable to cookies reuse flaw.
Recently, similar Cookies reuse vulnerability was discovered by 'The Hacker News' team on eBay website, that could allow an attacker to hijack eBay accounts without knowing the victims' actual credentials.
| Vulnerability |
Most LokiBot samples in the wild are "hijacked" versions of the original malware | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/lokibot-infostealer-malware.html | Hacker himself got hacked.
It turns out that most samples of the LokiBot malware being distributed in the wild are modified versions of the original sample, a security researcher has learned.
Targeting users since 2015, LokiBot is a password and cryptocoin-wallet stealer that can harvest credentials from a variety of popular web browsers, FTP, poker and email clients, as well as IT administration tools such as PuTTY.
The original LokiBot malware was developed and sold by online alias "lokistov," a.k.a. "Carter," on multiple underground hacking forums for up to $300, but later some other hackers on the dark web also started selling same malware for a lesser price (as low as $80).
It was believed that the source code for LokiBot was leaked which might have allowed others to compile their own versions of the stealer.
However, a researcher who goes by alias "d00rt" on Twitter found that someone made little changes (patching) in the original LokiBot sample, without having access to its source code, which let other hackers define their own custom domains for receiving the stolen data.
Hackers Are Actively Spreading "Hijacked" Versions of LokiBot
The researcher found that the C&C server location of the malware, where the stolen data should be sent, has been stored at five places in the program—four of them are encrypted using Triple DES algorithm and one using a simple XOR cipher.
The malware has a function, called "Decrypt3DESstring," that it uses to decrypt all the encrypted strings and get the URL of the command-and-control server.
The researcher analyzed the new LokiBot samples and compared them with the old original sample, and found that Decrypt3DESstring function in new samples has been modified in a way that it always return value from the XOR-protected string, instead of Triple DES strings.
"The 3DES protected URLs are always the same in the all of the LokiBot samples of this [new] version," the researcher said.
"In addition, those URLs are never used. Decrypt3DESstring returns a 3DES decrypted buffer. This should be the ideal behavior of this function, but as was described before, each time Decrypt3DESstring is called, it returns a decrypted url with XOR or encrypted url with XOR."
These changes allowed anyone with a new sample of LokiBot to edit the program, using a simple HEX editor, and add their own custom URLs for receiving the stolen data.
However, it is not clear why the original malware author also stored the same C&C server URL in a string encrypted by the less secure XOR cipher, even when it was unnecessary.
A lot of different LokiBot samples currently distributed in the wild and available for sale on the underground market at a very low price have also been patched in the same way by several hackers.
Meanwhile, the original author of LokiBot has already launched its new version 2.0 and selling it online on many forums.
The decryption function was also being used to get registry values required for making the malware persistent on a system, but since after patching the decryption function only returns a URL, the new LokiBot samples fails to restart after the device reboots.
To know more technical details about the new samples, you can head on to the research paper [PDF] published by the researchers on GitHub.
| Cyber_Attack |
Latest Joomla 3.7.1 Release Patches Critical SQL Injection Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/joomla-security-update.html | If your website is based on the popular Joomla content management system, make sure you have updated your platform to the latest version released today.
Joomla, the world's second popular open source Content Management System, has reportedly patched a critical vulnerability in its software's core component.
Website administrators are strongly advised to immediately install latest Joomla version 3.7.1, released today, to patch a critical SQL Injection vulnerability (CVE-2017-8917) that affects only Joomla version 3.7.0.
"Inadequate filtering of request data leads to a SQL Injection vulnerability." release note says.
The SQL Injection vulnerability in Joomla 3.7.0 was responsibly reported by Marc-Alexandre Montpas, a security researcher at Sucuri last week to the company.
According to the researcher, 'The vulnerability is easy to exploit and doesn't require a privileged account on the victim's site,' which could allow remote hackers to steal sensitive information from the database and gain unauthorized access to websites.
The SQL Injection vulnerability originates from a com_fields parameter, which was introduced in version 3.7.
/index.php?option=com_fields&view=fields&layout=modal
"So in order to exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker has to do is add the proper parameters to the URL in order to inject nested SQL queries." the researcher says.
Joomla 3.7.0 Proof-of-Concept Exploit:
https://target-joomla-website.com/index.php?option=com_fields&view=fields&layout=modal&list[fullordering]=updatexml(1,concat(0x3e,user()),0)
Since hackers would not take much time to exploit this vulnerability against millions of websites, you are advised to download the latest version of Joomla for your website and inform others about the release of critical patch update as well.
| Vulnerability |
Exposed : HBGary wanted to suppress Stuxnet research ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/02/exposed-hbgary-wanted-to-suppress.html | It is no secret that in recent days, Anonymous Operatives have released a cache of HBGary Federal internal emails to the public. Crowdleaks has discovered that within these communications, Aaron Barr received a copy of Stuxnet (a computer worm that targets the types of industrial control systems (ICS) that are commonly used in infrastructure supporting facilities) from McAfee on July 28, 2010.
In an effort to confirm this was in fact Stuxnet, Crowdleaks has decompiled some of the source code, which can be found. Throughout the following emails it is revealed that HBGary Federal may have been planning to useStuxnet for their own purposes.
In a message sent to all email account holders at HBGary.com, Charles Copeland (Lead Support Engineer at HBGary, Inc.) writes:
from: Charles Copeland
to: [email protected]
date: Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 9:54 PM
subject: Stuxnet Worm Mailing List
Filter messages from this mailing list. mailed-byhbgary.com
hide details 9/25/10
Computerworld – Officials in Iran have confirmed that the Stuxnet worm infected at least
30,000 Windows PCs in the country, multiple Iranian news services reported on Saturday.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9188018/Iran_confirms_massive_Stuxnet_infection_of_industrial_systems
I've already got a email asking about stuxnet, this came out late Friday. Does anyone have a dropper I have been unable to find it.
In another email sent directly to Aaron Barr, David D. Merritt writes:
from: David D. Merritt
to: Aaron Barr
date: Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 9:35 PM
subject: Re: Hunter Killer Insanity 285mailed-bygmail.com
hide details 10/3/10
contacts over at TSA say that everybody has a copy…combine that with US CERTs vulnerability status and their own systems not meeting the spec….
i'm seeing TSA becoming a malware testbed…
Aaron Barr responds:
On Oct 3, 2010, at 10:13 PM, Aaron Barr wrote:
> Dave,
>
> We haven't but I would be interested to talk to you some about the tie. I do have a decent amount of information on Stuxnet and would be interested to hear about the tie. Some of what I know about Stuxnet might be of interest. I think it would be best to discuss in a more closed space though.
>
> In doing a little research:
> https://diocyde.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/ringy-ringy-beacon-callbacks-why-dont-you-just-tell-them-their-pwned/
>
> While this guy can be a bit of a crackpot at times his post has more validity than fiction. Greg and I have brainstormed a bit in the past on how to conduct such an attack that would be very difficult to detect. Autonomous, single purpose malware with no C&C. As we have said the battle is on the edges either source of destination, everything else is or will become somewhat irrelevant or diminished in value.
>
> Aaron Barr
> CEO
> HBGary Federal, LLC
> 719.510.8478
In another message sent to all email account holders at HBGary.com by
Greg Hoglund, it's made clear that HBGary wanted to hide their work onStuxnet.
from: Greg Hoglund
to: [email protected]
date: Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 10:26 PM
subject: stuxnet mailing list
Filter messages from this mailing listmailed-byhbgary.com
hide details 9/26/10
All,
HBGary has no official position on Stuxnet. Please do not comment to the press on Stuxnet. We know nothing about Stuxnet.
-Greg Hoglund
CEO, HBGary, Inc.
In the most chilling strand of emails, we find that whatever HBGary was working on, it was in conjunction with the NSA.
Aaron Barr writes:
Hi Cheryl,
719.510.8478
Aaron
Sent from my iPad
Aaron Barr writes:
> From: Aaron Barr
> To: Peace, Cheryl D
> Sent: Mon Aug 09 13:54:23 2010
> Subject: Re: Number
>
> Hi Cheryl,
>
> It does. I haven't met him personally. Our sister company does work
> in a few different pockets on the bldg. And i am on the extended NANA
> team. I recently joined to stand up HBGary federal, a related but
> separate company. We manage all the work that requires clearances.
> We exchange some technologies, but we have some separate developments
> as well. Mostly around threat intelligence and CNO/social media.
>
> I think there are some enabling tech to your mission but really need
> that qualified.
>
> Interested to run some of the stuxnet stuff by u as well.
>
> Aaron
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
Cheryl Peace writes:
On Aug 9, 2010, at 9:27 AM, "Peace, Cheryl D" wrote:
>
>> Aaron
>> Did a little checking and we already do busy with you guys. Does the name
>> Tony Seager ring a bell?
Aaron Barr writes:
>> —–Original Message—–
>> From: Aaron Barr [mailto:[email protected]]
>> Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 10:56 AM
>> To: Peace, Cheryl D
>> Subject: Re: Number
>>
>> OK. If interested do you have some time to get together when you get back?
>> either next Friday or early the following week?
>> Aaron
Cheryl Peace writes:
>> On Aug 6, 2010, at 10:44 AM, Peace, Cheryl D wrote:
>>
>>> I am in Europe till mid next week
Aaron Barr writes:
>>> —–Original Message—–
>>> From: Aaron Barr [mailto:[email protected]]
>>> Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 10:57 PM
>>> To: Peace, Cheryl D
>>> Subject: Re: Number
>>>
>>> Hi Cheryl,
>>>
>>> Can I schedule an appointment with you to come by and chat for a few
>>> minutes?
>>>
>>> Aaron
Cheryl Peace writes:
>>> On Jul 30, 2010, at 10:41 PM, Peace, Cheryl D wrote:
>>>
>>>> I am at Rao at the bar if you want to come by for a few. Meeting friends
>>> for a cocktail in a few
>>>> ————————–
>>>> Sent using BlackBerry
Arron Barr writes:
>>>> —– Original Message —–
>>>> From: Aaron Barr
>>>> To: Peace, Cheryl D
>>>> Sent: Fri Jul 30 20:02:44 2010
>>>> Subject: Number
>>>>
>>>> Cheryl,
>>>>
>>>> Sorry to bother you but do you have a minute to talk. I don't have
>>>> your number handy. It will only take moment, but I have some
>>>> information for you.
>>>>
>>>> Aaron Barr
>>>> CEO
>>>> HBGary Federal
>>>> 7195108478
In a related internal email sent to Rich Cummings (CTO of HBGary, Inc.)Greg Hoglund writes:
from: Greg Hoglund
to: Rich Cummings
date: Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 9:30 PM
subject: Govt dropper in this word DOC, zipped up for youmailed-byhbgary.com
hide details 11/16/09
Phil, Rich,
I got this word doc linked off a dangler site for Al Qaeda peeps. I think it has a US govvy payload buried inside. Would be neat to REcon it and see what it's about. DONT open it unless in a VM obviously. password is meatflower. Remove the .txt extension too. DONT let it FONE HOME unless you want black suits landing on your front acre. :-)
-Greg
Crowdleaks.org had a software engineer (whose name has been withheld) look at the Stuxnet binaries inside of a debugger and offer some insight on the worm. She informed us that most of the worms' sources were using code similar to what is already publically available. She noted that the only remarkable thing about it was the 4 windows 0 days and the stolen certificates.
She says:
"A hacker did not write this, it appears to be something that would be produced by a team using a process, all of the components were created using code similar to what is already publically available. That is to say it's 'unremarkable'. This was created by a software development team and while the coders were professional level I am really not impressed with the end product, it looks like a picture a child painted with finger paints."
When asked what type of organization likely wrote it, she stated:
"Probably a corporation by request of a government, it was clearly tested and put together by pro's. It really looks like outsourced work."
| Malware |
SHEIN-Fashion Shopping Site Suffers Data Breach Affecting 6.5 Million Users | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/shein-data-breach.html | U.S. online fashion retailer SHEIN has admitted that the company has suffered a significant data breach after unknown hackers stole personally identifiable information (PII) of almost 6.5 million customers.
Based in North Brunswick and founded in 2008, SHEIN has become one of the largest online fashion retailers that ships to more than 80 countries worldwide. The site has been initially designed to produce "affordable" and trendy fashion clothing for women.
SHEIN revealed last weekend that its servers had been targeted by a "concerted criminal cyber-attack" that began in June this year and lasted until August 22, when the company was finally made aware of the potential theft.
Soon after that, the company scanned its servers to remove all possible backdoored entry points, leveraging which hackers could again infiltrate the servers. SHEIN assured its customers that the website is now safe to visit.
Hackers Stole Over 6.42 Million SHEIN Customers' Data
Although details about the incident are scarce, the online retailer revealed that the malicious hackers managed to steal gain access to email addresses and encrypted password credentials for 6.42 million customers who registered on its website.
"While the full extent of the attack will continue to be investigated, it can now be confirmed that the personal information illegally acquired by the intruders included email addresses and encrypted password credentials of customers who visited the company website," SHEIN said.
"It is our understanding that the breach began in June 2018 and continued through early August 2018 and involves approximately 6.42 million customers."
However, the company said it typically does not store any credit card information on its systems and has currently no evidence that any credit card information of its customers was taken from its systems.
Since no payment card details were stolen, it does not appear that if the online retailer was hit by the recent series of Magecart cyber attacks that have recently affected popular online services including Ticketmaster, British Airways, and Newegg.
Are You Affected? Here's What Users Should Do
Upon becoming aware of this potential theft, SHEIN immediately hired a leading international forensic cybersecurity firm and an international law firm to launch a thorough investigation into the breach.
The company has already begun contacting all affected customers and requesting them to change passwords for their online store accounts by either clicking the link provided in the email notification from SHEIN or directly logging into their SHEIN account to change the password.
You can find "Edit Password" link under the "Account Setting" page.
If customers believe the attackers may have compromised their credit card information, the company urged them to directly contact their respective banks or credit card companies with any concerns.
For more information regarding the breach investigation and the actions SHEIN is taking to protect its customer information, you can contact the company at 844-802-2500, or visit its FAQ at www.shein.com/datasecurity.
| Data_Breaches |
90% SSL sites vulnerable to the BEAST SSL attack | https://thehackernews.com/2012/04/90-ssl-sites-vulnerable-to-beast-ssl.html | 90% of the Internet's top 200,000 HTTPS-enabled websites are vulnerable to known types of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) attack, according to a report released Thursday by the Trustworthy Internet Movement (TIM), a nonprofit organization dedicated to solving Internet security, privacy and reliability problems.
The report is based on data from a new TIM project called SSL Pulse, which uses automated scanning technology developed by security vendor Qualys, to analyze the strength of HTTPS implementations on websites listed in the top one million published by Web analytics firm Alexa.
SSL Pulse checks what protocols are supported by the HTTPS-enabled websites (SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, etc.), the key length used for securing communications (512 bits, 1024 bits, 2048 bits, etc.) and the strength of the supported ciphers (256 bits, 128 bits or lower).
The BEAST attack takes advantage of a flaw in SSL 3.0, allowing the attacker to grab and decrypt HTTPS cookies on an end user's browser, effectively hijacking the victim's session. This could be achieved either through an iframe injection or by loading the BEAST JavaScript into the victim's browser, but BEAST is known to be especially hard to execute.
TIM has established a taskforce of security experts, who will review SSL governance issues and develop proposals aimed at fixing both SSL and the certificate authority systems, both of which have been called into question in recent times. In the case of certificate authorities (CAs), a number of them have been compromised in the past year, allowing attackers to spoof websites with fake certificates. One of those CAs, DigiNotar, went bankrupt after it was hacked.
The attack was fixed in version 1.1 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, but a lot of servers continue to support older and vulnerable protocols, like SSL 3.0, for backward compatibility reasons. Such servers are vulnerable to so-called SSL downgrade attacks in which they can be tricked to use vulnerable versions of SSL/TLS even when the targeted clients support secure versions.
The taskforce members include Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal; Taher Elgamal, one of the creators of the SSL protocol; Adam Langley, a Google software engineer responsible for SSL in Chrome and on the company's front-end servers; Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of the Convergence project, which offers an alternative method for SSL certificate validation; Ivan Ristic, the creator of the Qualys SSL Labs and Ryan Hurst, chief technology officer at certificate authority GlobalSign.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Stole 50 Million Facebook Users' Access Tokens Using Zero-Day Flaw | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/facebook-account-hack.html | Logged out from your Facebook account automatically? Well you're not alone…
Facebook just admitted that an unknown hacker or a group of hackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in its social media platform that allowed them to steal secret access tokens for more than 50 million accounts.
UPDATE: 10 Important Updates You Need To Know About the Latest Facebook Hacking Incident.
In a brief blog post published Friday, Facebook revealed that its security team discovered the attack three days ago (on 25 September) and they are still investigating the security incident.
The vulnerability, whose technical details has yet not been disclosed and now patched by Facebook, resided in the "View As" feature—an option that allows users to find out what other Facebook users would see if they visit your profile.
According to the social media giant, the vulnerability allowed hackers to steal secret access tokens that could then be used to directly access users' private information without requiring their original account password or validating two-factor authentication code.
Secret access tokens "are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook, so they don't need to re-enter their password every time they use the app."
To prevent its users' accounts, Facebook has already reset access tokens for nearly 50 million affected Facebook accounts and an additional 40 million accounts, as a precaution.
"We're taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what's happened and the immediate action we've taken to protect people's security," Facebook said.
"As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login. After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened."
The "View as" feature has also temporarily been disabled, at the time of writing. Facebook has also notified law enforcement officials of the security breach.
Since the investigation is still in the early stages, Facebook has yet to determine whether the attackers misused the stolen access tokens for 50 million accounts or if any information was accessed.
Facebook is already under heavy fire since the revelation that consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had misused data of 87 million Facebook users to help Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal led to public outcry for lawmakers to hold Facebook accountable for its data-management practices, raising questions about whether Facebook can be trusted to protect the personal data of its 2 billion users.
And now, the recent revelation has once again underlines the failure of the social-media giant to protect its users' information while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.
| Vulnerability |
Just Answering A Video Call Could Compromise Your WhatsApp Account | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/hack-whatsapp-account-chats.html | What if just receiving a video call on WhatsApp could hack your smartphone?
This sounds filmy, but Google Project Zero security researcher Natalie Silvanovich found a critical vulnerability in WhatsApp messenger that could have allowed hackers to remotely take full control of your WhatsApp just by video calling you over the messaging app.
The vulnerability is a memory heap overflow issue which is triggered when a user receives a specially crafted malformed RTP packet via a video call request, which results in the corruption error and crashing the WhatsApp mobile app.
Since the vulnerability affect RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) implementation of Whatsapp, the flaw affects Android and iOS apps, but not WhatsApp Web that relies on WebRTC for video calls.
Silvanovich also published a proof-of-concept exploit, along with the instructions for reproducing the WhatsApp attack.
Although the proof-of-concept published by Silvanovich only triggers memory corruption, another Google Project Zero researcher, Tavis Ormandy, claims that "This is a big deal. Just answering a call from an attacker could completely compromise WhatsApp."
In other words, hackers only need your phone number to completely hijack your WhatsApp account and spy on your secret conversations.
Silvanovich discovered and reported the vulnerability to the WhatsApp team in August this year. WhatsApp acknowledged and patched the issue on September 28 in its Android client and on October 3 in its iPhone client.
So if you have not yet updated your WhatsApp for Android or WhatsApp for iOS, You should consider upgrading now.
Two months ago, researchers also discovered a flaw in the way WhatsApp mobile app connects with WhatsApp Web that allowed malicious users to intercept and modify the content of messages sent in both private as well as group conversations.
| Vulnerability |
New Shamoon Malware Variant Targets Italian Oil and Gas Company | https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/shamoon-malware-attack.html | Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East.
Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and sensitive files on about 10 percent of its servers were destroyed, mainly in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, but also in India and Scotland.
Saipem admitted Wednesday that the computer virus used in the latest cyber attack against its servers is a variant Shamoon—a disk wiping malware that was used in the most damaging cyber attacks in history against Saudi Aramco and RasGas Co Ltd and destroyed data on more than 30,000 systems.
The cyber attack against Saudi Aramco, who is the biggest customer of Saipem, was attributed to Iran, but it is unclear who is behind the latest cyber attacks against Saipem.
Meanwhile, Chronicle, Google's cybersecurity subsidiary, has also discovered a file containing Shamoon sample that was uploaded to VirusTotal file analyzing service on 10th December (the very same day Saipem was attacked) from an IP address in Italy, where Saipem is headquartered.
However, the Chronicle was not sure who created the newly discovered Shamoon samples or who uploaded them to the virus scanning site.
The latest attack against Saipem reportedly crippled more than 300 of its servers and about 100 personal computers out of a total of roughly 4,000 machines, though the company confirmed that it had already backed up the affected computers, so there no possibility of data being lost in the cyber attack.
"Saipem reports that the cyber attack hit servers based in the Middle East, India, Aberdeen and, in a limited way, Italy through a variant of Shamoon malware," Saipem said in its press release.
"The restoration activities, in a gradual and controlled manner, are underway through the backup infrastructures and, when completed, will re-establish the full operation of the impacted sites."
Shamoon, also known as Disttrack, works by disabling systems by overwriting key computer files, including the master boot record (MBR), making it impossible for computers to start up.
The malware can also rapidly propagate across infected networks using Windows Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, similar to other known destructive malware like WannaCry and NotPetya.
Shamoon was first surfaced in 2012, and then after a long time of silence, an evolved version of the malware was used in attacks against various Saudi organizations in 2016 and 2017 targeting multiple industries, including the public and financial services sectors.
It is still unclear who actually created Shamoon, but security researchers widely believe that the Iranian hacking groups OilRig, Rocket Kitten, and Greenbug working on behalf of the Iranian government were behind previous Shamoon attacks, though Iran has strongly denied.
| Cyber_Attack |
How to Protect yourself from the 'Heartbleed' Bug | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/how-to-protect-yourself-from-heartbleed_10.html | Millions of websites, users' passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information may be at risk as a result of the Heartbleed security flaw, a vulnerability in widely used cryptographic library 'OpenSSL'. [READ DETAILS HERE]
Netcraft survey says that about half a million widely trusted active websites on the internet are vulnerable to the heartbleed bug, which means the information transmitting through hundreds of thousands of websites could be vulnerable, despite the protection offered by encryption techniques.
According to Netcraft, "the heartbeat extension was enabled on 17.5% of SSL sites, accounting for around half a million certificates issued by trusted certificate authorities. These certificates are consequently vulnerable to being spoofed (through private key disclosure), allowing an attacker to impersonate the affected websites without raising any browser warnings."
Among the trusted names running OpenSSL is Yahoo!, which has been affected by this critical flaw. Yes, Yahoo Inc., which boasts more than 800 million users worldwide, is among the Internet services that could be potentially hurt by Heartbleed.
The bug leaks the below given information, although Yahoo! has since patched its systems.
The Popular sites which exhibit support for the TLS heartbeat extension also include Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Bank of America, DropBox are not currently vulnerable, but it is unclear that they were vulnerable few days ago.
Including Yahoo!, Flickr, Tumbler, Google, OKCupid and even the anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo was vulnerable, which has now been fixed.
Yahoo Inc. said that it has "successfully made appropriate corrections" to the main Yahoo properties, including Yahoo Homepage, Search, Mail, Finance, Sports, Food, Tech, Flickr and Tumblr.
You can see the Heartbleed mass-test when performed around 8th April from here. In the list, the websites shown vulnerable may not be vulnerable right now.
HOW TO CHECK IF YOUR FAVORITE WEBSITES ARE VULNERABLE
1.) First of all check if the sites you use every day on an individual basis are vulnerable to Heartbleed bug or not using https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/, and if you're given a red flag, avoid the site for now.
2.) LastPass also created a Web app that will tell you what kind of encryption a site uses, and when the encryption was last updated.
3.) Provensec also created a scanner at https://provensec.com/heartbleed/
4.) GlobalSign SSL Configuration Checker.
5.) The easiest way to keep you safe is to use a new add-on to the Chrome browser, Chromebleed, created by security researcher, Jamie Hoyle.
HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM HEARTBLEED
If the site you use is not affected by the vulnerability, its good idea that you change your password immediately, assuming that it was vulnerable before, just to make sure that you are now safe. But changing the password before the bug is fixed could compromise your new password as well.
You are advised to don't reuse the same passwords on different websites and try to use a separate password for each website.
If you are using a public Wi-Fi at MacDonald or any other public places, then you should limit your Internet behavior and avoid sign in into websites that are especially sensitive.
OpenSSL version 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f and 1.0.2-beta1 are Vulnerable and flaw is fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.1g. If you haven't yet, please update your system that use OpenSSL for TLS encrypted communications.
And last but not the least; keep an eye on every financial transaction, and it is good practice to use two-factor authentication, which means with the password, the account requires a freshly generated pass code that shows up only on your personal smartphone, before getting into certain sites.
Stay Secure! Stay Tuned.
Related Important Articles:
German Developer responsible for HeartBleed Bug in OpenSSL
How Heartbleed Bug Exposes Your Passwords to Hackers
How to Protect yourself from the 'Heartbleed' Bug
Heartbleed - OpenSSL Zero-day Bug leaves Millions of websites Vulnerable
| Vulnerability |
Google pays $31,336 bounty to hacker for reporting critical vulnerabilities in Chrome | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/google-pays-31336-bounty-to-hacker-for.html | Google has fixed a series of serious vulnerabilities in its Chrome OS, including three high-risk bugs that could be used for code execution on vulnerable machines. Bug bounties is the cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs have been steadily on the rise for several years now.
As part of its reward program, Google paid out $31,336 to a researcher who found three of the vulnerabilities. Google's post notes: "We're pleased to reward Ralf-Philipp Weinmann $31,336 under the Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program for a chain of three bugs, including demo exploit code and very detailed write-up. We are grateful to Ralf for his work to help keep our users safe."
The three-bug chain credited to Weinmann exploited O3D, a JavaScript API (application programming interface) designed for crafting interactive 3-D graphics-based Web applications. The API and supporting browser plug-in were created by Google, with a preliminary version of the latter released in 2009.
Vulnerabilities that Google fixed in Chrome OS 26:
[227197] Medium CVE-2013-2832: Uninitialized memory left in buffer in O3D plug-in. Credit to Ralf-Philipp Weinmann.
[227181] High CVE-2013-2833: Use-after-free in O3D plug-in. Credit to Ralf-Philipp Weinmann.
[227158] High CVE-2013-2834: Origin lock bypass of O3D and Google Talk plug-ins. Credit to Ralf-Philipp Weinmann.
[196456] High CVE-2013-2835: Origin lock bypass of O3D and Google Talk plug-ins. Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Chris Evans).
Google has paid out more in various contests it's run or co-sponsored, including $100,000 to a two-man team from MWR InfoSecurity at last month's Pwn2Own.
Most of the rewards are in the $1,000-$3,000 range, with some going above that, depending upon the severity of the vulnerability and difficulty of exploitation.
"The Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program was created to help reward the contributions of security researchers who invest their time and effort in helping us make Chromium more secure. We've been very pleased with the response: Google's various vulnerability reward programs have kept our users protected and netted more than $1 million dollars of total rewards for security researchers. Recently, we've seen a significant drop-off in externally reported Chromium security issues."
Other big companies also pays bug bounties, but unlike Google, does not release the names of researchers or the payments they receive.
| Vulnerability |
CouchPotato: CIA Hacking Tool to Remotely Spy On Video Streams in Real-Time | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/cia-hacking-tool-video.html | After disclosing CIA's strategies to hijack and manipulate webcams and microphones to corrupt or delete recordings, WikiLeaks has now published another Vault 7 leak, revealing CIA's ability to spy on video streams remotely in real-time.
Dubbed 'CouchPotato,' document leaked from the CIA details how the CIA agents use a remote tool to stealthy collect RTSP/H.264 video streams.
Real Time Streaming Protocol, or RTSP, is a network control protocol designed for use in entertainment and communication systems for controlling streaming media servers.
CouchPotato gives CIA hackers ability to "collect either the stream as a video file (AVI) or capture still images (JPG) of frames from the stream that are of significant change from a previously captured frame," a leaked CIA manual reads.
The tool utilises FFmpeg for video and image encoding and decoding and Real Time Streaming Protocol connectivity.
The CouchPotato tool works stealthily without leaving any evidence on the targeted systems because it has been designed to support ICE v3 "Fire and Collect" loader, which is an in-memory code execution (ICE) technique that runs malicious code without the module code being written to the disk.
However, neither Wikileaks nor the leaked user guide details how the agency penetrates into the targeted systems at the first place, but since the publication has previously leaked many CIA malware, exploits and hacking tools to get into a network, the agency might have been using CouchPotato in combining with other tools.
Previous Vault 7 CIA Leaks
Since March, WikiLeaks has published 20 batches of "Vault 7" series, which includes the latest and last week leaks, along with the following batches:
Imperial — Details of at least 3 CIA-developed hacking tools and implants designed to target PCs running Apple Mac OS X and different flavours of Linux operating systems.
UCL/Raytheon — An alleged CIA contractor, which analysed in-the-wild malware and hacking tools and submitted at least five reports to the agency for help the CIA developed its own malware.
Highrise — An alleged CIA project that let the spying agency stealthy collects and forwards stolen data from compromised smartphones to its server via SMSes.
BothanSpy and Gyrfalcon — 2 alleged CIA implants that let the CIA intercept and exfiltrate SSH credentials from targeted Windows and Linux PCs using different attack vectors.
OutlawCountry – An alleged CIA project that allowed the spying agency to hack and remotely spy on systems running Linux OS.
ELSA – Alleged CIA malware that tracks geo-location of targeted computers and laptops running the Microsoft Windows OS.
Brutal Kangaroo – A tool suite for Microsoft Windows OS used by the CIA agents to target closed networks or air-gap computers within an organisation or enterprise without requiring any direct access.
Cherry Blossom – A framework employed by the agency to monitor the Internet activity of the targeted systems by exploiting flaws in Wi-Fi devices.
Pandemic – A CIA's project that allowed the spying agency to turn Windows file servers into covert attack machines that can silently infect other PCs of interest inside the same network.
Athena – A spyware framework that the agency designed to take full control over the infected Windows systems remotely and works against every version of Windows OS–from Windows XP to Windows 10.
AfterMidnight and Assassin – 2 alleged CIA malware frameworks for the Microsoft Windows platform that's meant to monitor and report back actions on the infected remote host PC and execute malicious actions.
Archimedes – Man-in-the-middle attack tool reportedly developed by the CIA to target computers and laptops inside a Local Area Network (LAN).
Scribbles – Software supposedly designed to embed 'web beacons' into confidential files and documents, allowing the CIA to track insiders and whistleblowers.
Grasshopper – A framework that allowed the spying agency to quickly create custom malware for breaking into Microsoft Windows OS and bypassing antivirus protection.
Marble – Source code of a secret anti-forensic framework used by the CIA agents to hide the actual source of its malware.
Dark Matter – Hacking tools the spying agency used to target iPhones and Macs.
Weeping Angel – Spying tool used by the CIA to infiltrate smart TVs, and transforming them into covert microphones.
Year Zero – CIA hacking tools and exploits for popular hardware and software.
| Cyber_Attack |
Android WebView vulnerability allows hacker to install malicious apps | https://thehackernews.com/2013/09/android-webview-vulnerability-allows.html | WebView is an essential component in Android and iOS. It enables applications to display content from online resources and simplifies task of performing a network request, parsing the data and rendering it.
Today AVG Security expert reported a critical vulnerability in Android's WebView feature that allows an attacker to install malicious software, send SMSs and performing more tasks.
WebView uses a number of APIs which can interact with the web contents inside WebView. So this allows the user to view a web application as a part of an ordinary Android application.
Users can be infected when they click on a URL link using a vulnerable application that allows opening a Java enabled browser or web page. The commands in the JavaScript code can enable attackers to install malicious software, send SMSs, steal personal information and more.
To exploit the flaw, attacker can trick users to click a malicious link from a vulnerable WebView application and which will trigger a malicious JavaScript command contained on the same webpage.
All the applications running on Android 4.1 or older could perform malicious tasks and users are advised to upgrade to Android 4.2 or higher and download applications only from Google Play.
| Vulnerability |
Biggest American Bank 'JPMorgan Chase' hacked; 465,000 card users' data stolen | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/JPMorgan-Chase-bank-card-hacked_5.html | JPMorgan Chase, one of the world's biggest Banks has recently announced that it was the victim of a cyber attack and warned round 465,000 of its holders of prepaid cash cards on the possible exposure of their personal information.
In the Security Breach that took place on the bank's website www.ucard.chase.com in July, around 465,000 accounts are compromised i.e. 2% of the overall 25 million UCard users. JPMorgan confirmed that there is no risk for holders of debit cards, credit cards or prepaid Liquid cards.
They informed the law enforcement in September, and till now no information on how attackers have conducted the attack has been disclosed.
The JPMorgan spokesman Michael Fusco declared that the investigation allowed the identification of victim accounts and the data stolen, the bank already notifying the cardholders of the incident.
JPMorgan representative also remarked that hackers haven't stolen money from any user's account, due this reason the company is not issuing replacement cards but is only offering the cardholders a year of free credit-monitoring services.
"The bank typically keeps the personal information of its customers encrypted, or scrambled, as a security precaution. However, during the course of the breach, personal data belonging to those customers had temporarily appeared in plain text in files the computers use to log activity." reported the Reuters agency.
I confess that the above statement made me literally jump out of the chair, what does it mean that "customers had temporarily appeared in plain text in files the computers use to log activity", if confirmed the situation is very embarrassing.
The bank experts sustain that only "a small amount" of data was exposed during the data breach , the information according the company doesn't include social security numbers and other personal information like birth dates and email addresses that could be used by cyber criminals for financial frauds and identity theft.
At the moment there is an absolute reserve on the names of the victims and there is no idea on the origin of the attack. The cybercrime considers the type of information acquired a precious commodity for sale in the underground, security experts Stewart from Dell SecureWorks and independent researcher David Shearhave recently published a study on the online underground marketplace for stolen data, the analysis revealed for example that it is quite easy to buy credit card information for a little more than ten dollars.
In 2007 some 41 million credit and debit card numbers from major retailers, including the owner of T.J. Maxx stores, were stolen. It is just the beginning!
| Cyber_Attack |
New Exploit for MikroTik Router WinBox Vulnerability Gives Full Root Access | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/router-hacking-exploit.html | A known vulnerability in MikroTik routers is potentially far more dangerous than previously thought.
A cybersecurity researcher from Tenable Research has released a new proof-of-concept (PoC) RCE attack for an old directory traversal vulnerability that was found and patched within a day of its discovery in April this year.
The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-14847, was initially rated as medium in severity but should now be rated critical because the new hacking technique used against vulnerable MikroTik routers allows attackers to remotely execute code on affected devices and gain a root shell.
The vulnerability impacts Winbox—a management component for administrators to set up their routers using a Web-based interface—and a Windows GUI application for the RouterOS software used by the MikroTik devices.
The vulnerability allows "remote attackers to bypass authentication and read arbitrary files by modifying a request to change one byte related to a Session ID."
New Hack Turned 'Medium' MikroTik Vulnerability Into 'Critical'
However, the new attack method found by Tenable Research exploits the same vulnerability and takes it to one step ahead.
A PoC exploit, called "By the Way," released by Tenable Research Jacob Baines, first uses directory traversal vulnerability to steal administrator login credentials from user database file and the then writes another file on the system to gain root shell access remotely.
In other words, the new exploit could allow unauthorized attackers to hack MikroTik's RouterOS system, deploy malware payloads or bypass router firewall protections.
The technique is yet another security blow against MikroTik routers, which was previously targeted by the VPNFilter malware and used in an extensive cryptojacking campaign uncovered a few months ago.
New MikroTik Router Vulnerabilities
Besides this, Tenable Research also disclosed additional MikroTik RouterOS vulnerabilities, including:
CVE-2018-1156—A stack buffer overflow flaw that could allow an authenticated remote code execution, allowing attackers to gain full system access and access to any internal system that uses the router.
CVE-2018-1157—A file upload memory exhaustion flaw that allows an authenticated remote attacker to crash the HTTP server.
CVE-2018-1159—A www memory corruption flaw that could crash the HTTP server by rapidly authenticating and disconnecting.
CVE-2018-1158—A recursive parsing stack exhaustion issue that could crash the HTTP server via recursive parsing of JSON.
The vulnerabilities impact Mikrotik RouterOS firmware versions before 6.42.7 and 6.40.9.
Tenable Research reported the issues to MikroTik in May, and the company addressed the vulnerabilities by releasing its RouterOS versions 6.40.9, 6.42.7 and 6.43 in August.
While all the vulnerabilities were patched over a month ago, a recent scan by Tenable Research revealed that 70 percent of routers (which equals to 200,000) are still vulnerable to attack.
The bottom line: If you own a MikroTik router and you have not updated its RouterOS, you should do it right now.
Also, if you are still using default credentials on your router, it is high time to change the default password and keep a unique, long and complex password.
| Vulnerability |
Louisiana State Government Hit by Ransomware Attack Forcing Server Shutdowns | https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/louisiana-ransomware-attack.html | Targeted ransomware attacks on banking and finance, government, healthcare, and critical infrastructure are on the rise, with the latest victim being the state government of Louisiana.
The state government of Louisiana was hit by a large-scale coordinated ransomware attack yesterday, which forced the state to take several state agency servers offline, including government websites, email systems, and other internal applications, to mitigate the risk of the malware's infection from spreading.
The Monday's ransomware attack resulted in the subsequent shutdown of a majority of large state agencies, including the Office of the Governor, the Office of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Health, the Department of Children and Family Services, and the Department of Transportation and Development, among others.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards revealed the incident in a series of tweets, saying that he had activated the state's cybersecurity team in response to the cyber attack and that the shutdown of services was due to the state's response and not due to the attack.
"Today, we activated the state's cybersecurity team in response to an attempted ransomware attack that is affecting some state servers. The Office of Technology Services identified a cybersecurity threat that affected some, but not all state servers," Governor Edwards said.
"The service interruption was due to OTS' aggressive response to prevent additional infection of state servers and not due to the attempted ransomware attack. Online services started to come back online this afternoon, though full restoration may take several days."
Ransomware attacks involve cybercriminals encrypting files and locking them up so users can't access them without paying a ransom amount, which they demand typically in Bitcoin to give the user access to those files again.
Edwards noted that the Louisiana State Police and several federal agencies are already investigating the cyberattack that impacted nearly every major state agency.
This is the second major ransomware attack that Louisiana suffered this year. In July 2019, Louisiana declared a state of emergency following a coordinated ransomware outbreak that disrupted nearly half a dozen school districts.
Governor Edwards also confirmed that Monday's cyber attack is similar to the July's ransomware attack.
"OTS has confirmed that this attempted ransomware attack is similar to the ransomware targeted at local school districts and government entities across the country this summer," Governor Edwards said.
At this time, it's unclear what family of ransomware malware was used in the latest attack, how the ransomware got into the state's systems, and how much amount the attackers have demanded as a ransom.
However, the governor has assured that there is "no anticipated data loss" and that "the state did not pay a ransom."
| Cyber_Attack |
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/nasa-jet-propulsion-laboratory.html | Yesterday, we report about the security breach in US Government computers belongs to NASA restricted area website and Hacker dump out the complete source code and files from server of the website.
Today another hacker claim a quick XSS (Cross site scripting) Vulnerability in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website (https://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov/) via a pastebin note.
Hacker is going by name "Antraxt Hacker" and said about vulnerability exposure that,"I just want to proof that NASA is and never will be secured as human kind thinks they are".
The xss vulnerable link is disclosed in pastebin note. I feel this not a offensive hack by hacker, even NASA should take advantage of free of cost Penetration testing services from individual like , who even not looking for Bug Bounties.
| Vulnerability |
Someone Hijacked MEGA Chrome Extension to Steal Users' Passwords | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/mega-file-upload-chrome-extension.html | Warning! If you are using Chrome browser extension from the MEGA file storage service, uninstall it right now.
The official Chrome extension for the MEGA.nz cloud storage service had been compromised and replaced with a malicious version that can steal users' credentials for popular websites like Amazon, Microsoft, Github, and Google, as well as private keys for users' cryptocurrency wallets.
On 4 September at 14:30 UTC, an unknown attacker managed to hack into MEGA's Google Chrome web store account and upload a malicious version 3.39.4 of an extension to the web store, according to a blog post published by the company.
Malicious MEGA Chrome Extension Steals Passwords
Upon installation or auto-update, the malicious extension asked for elevated permissions to access personal information, allowing it to steal credentials from sites like Amazon, Github, and Google, along with online wallets such as MyEtherWallet and MyMonero, and Idex.market cryptocurrency trading platform.
The trojanized Mega extension then sent all the stolen information back to an attacker's server located at megaopac[.]host in Ukraine, which is then used by the attackers to log in to the victims' accounts, and also extract the cryptocurrency private keys to steal users' digital currencies.
"You are only affected if you had the MEGA Chrome extension installed at the time of the incident, autoupdate enabled, and you accepted the additional permission, or if you freshly installed version 3.39.4," the company warned.
The company also said Google disallowed publishers to sign their Chrome extensions and instead is now relying solely on signing them automatically by Google after the extension is uploaded, which makes it easier for hackers to push new updates same as developers do.
The official Twitter account of Monero (XMR) also posted a warning about the incident, saying that the malicious MEGA extension also includes functionality to steal Monero cryptocurrency and advising Monero holders to stay away from the extension.
A security researcher, who first reported the breach, also posted a warning on Reddit and Twitter, advising users to avoid the trozanised MEGA extension.
Although the company has not revealed the number of users affected by the security incident, it is believed that the malicious version of the MEGA Chrome extension may have been installed by tens of millions of users.
What MEGA Users Should Do Next?
The Firefox version of MEGA has not been impacted or tampered with, and users accessing MEGA through its official website (https://mega.nz) without the Chrome extension are also not affected by the breach.
Four hours after the security breach, the company learned of the incident and updated the extension with a clean MEGA version (3.39.5), auto-updating all the affected installations.
Google also removed the MEGA extension from its Chrome Web Store five hours after the breach.
However, users should consider their credentials being compromised on websites and applications they visited while the trojanized MEGA Chrome extension was active.
"Please note that if you visited any site or made use of another extension that sends plain-text credentials through POST requests, either by direct form submission or through a background XMLHttpRequest process (MEGA is not one of them) while the trojaned extension was active, consider that your credentials were compromised on these sites and/or applications," the company said.
The Bottom line:
Users who had installed the malicious extension should uninstall the MEGA extension version 3.39.4 right now, and change passwords for all your accounts, especially for those you may have used while having the malicious extension.
| Malware |
LinkedIn iOS app HTML Message Parsing Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/linkedin-ios-app-html-message-parsing.html | LinkedIn's iOS application is prone to a vulnerability that may permit remote attackers to execute arbitrary code.
Security Researcher Zouheir Abdallah has disclosed HTML parsing vulnerability in LinkedIn iOS an app, that can be used to phish for credentials or be escalated into a full blown attack.
LinkedIn's vulnerability occurs when the messaging feature of LinkedIn's mobile app parses invalid HTML and an attacker can exploit this vulnerability remotely from his/her account, which could have serious impact on LinkedIn's users.
He created Proof of concept of the flaw and submitted it to the LinkedIn Security team in September 2013. Later in October 2013, the vulnerable application was patched.
One of the possible attack vector is that, using this vulnerability attacker can easily phish LinkedIn user on iOS app. As shown in the screenshot, POC message says:
Hey, Can you please view my LinkedIn profile and endorse me! Thanks! I appreciate it!
The iOS app will display the url without the hyperlink embedded in the HTML a href , and the receiver of the message will not even know that he is being redirected to a malicious site.
The phishing site can be a replica of LinkedIn and tricks the victim into giving out his username and password.
This attack can also be used against LinkedIn users by claiming that, they have to re-authenticate to view some article on LinkedIn. The Same attack could also work on different devices such as Android and Blackberry, but he couldn't test as he didn't have other handsets at hand.
LinkedIn doesn't have a Bug Bounty program neither a Hall of Fame, nevertheless he received a symbolic token of a Shirt, Mug, and a thank you note from LinkedIn's security team.
Zouheir is known for reporting a serious vulnerability in DropBox's 2 Factor Authentication back in July 2013.
| Vulnerability |
Over 92 Million New Accounts Up for Sale from More Unreported Breaches | https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/data-breach-sale-darkweb.html | All these numbers….
"More than 5 billion records from 6,500 data breaches were exposed in 2018" — a report from Risk Based Security says.
"More than 59,000 data breaches have been reported across the European since the GDPR came into force in 2018" — a report from DLA Piper says.
…came from data breaches that were reported to the public, but in reality, more than half of all data breaches actually go unreported.
Just last week, we disclosed the existence of some massive unreported data breaches in two rounds, which a hacker has now started monetizing by selling stolen user databases publicly.
Now, a new set of databases containing millions of hacked accounts from several websites has been made available for sale on the dark web marketplace by the same hacker who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers.
Gnosticplayers last week made two rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web marketplace called Dream Market, posting details of nearly 620 million accounts stolen from 16 popular websites in the first round and 127 million records originating from 8 other sites in the second.
The third round, which the hacker told The Hacker News would be his last round, published Sunday contained more than 92 million hacked users' accounts stolen from 8 websites, including the popular GIF hosting platform Gfycat.
New List of Hacked Websites
Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News in an email that the third round up for sale on Dream Market belonged to the following 8 hacked websites:
Pizap (Photo editor) — 60 million
Jobandtalent (Online job portal) — 11 million
Gfycat (GIF hosting service) — 8 million
Storybird (Online publishing platform) — 4 million
Legendas.tv (Movie streaming site) — 3.8 million
Onebip (Mobile payment service) — 2.6 million
Classpass (Fitness and Yoga center) — 1.5 million
Streeteasy (Real estate) — 990,000 (1 million)
The hacker is selling each of the above listed hacked databases individually on Dream Market for a total worth 2.6249 Bitcoin (roughly $9,700).
In an interview with The Hacker News, Gnosticplayers said none of the services listed in the third round was aware of the data breach of its network and has previously disclosed any such security incident.
Since the majority of compromised services listed in the first and second batches have confirmed the previously-unreported or undetected data breaches, it's likely that the new round of stolen accounts being sold on the underground market is also legit.
While the third round of the stolen accounts has been up for sale on the Dream Market, the first and second collections have already been removed from the underground market (except a round-2 database from interior designing service Houzz) by the hacker to avoid them from getting leaked or land on security initiatives like Google's new Password Checkup tool.
What's next? If you are a user of any of the above-listed services or websites disclosed in the previous two rounds, you should consider changing your passwords and also on other services in the event you re-used the same password.
| Data_Breaches |
FBI raids BlackShades RAT Malware Customers in Europe and Australia | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/fbi-raids-blackshades-rat-malware_16.html | When it comes to crime, whether it's an online or offline, FBI doesn't spare anyone. According to the French media reports and various announcements on underground forums by hacking groups, the FBI has started a large-scale operation of International raids with the help of local law enforcement authorities to arrest a particular group of cyber criminals and Hackers.
The FBI has targeted the customers of a popular Remote Administration Tool (RAT) called 'blackshades', which allows them to connect and manage thousands of remotely infected computers over the Internet.
WHAT IS BLACKSHADES RAT??
'Blackshades' is a remote administration tool (RAT) which allows an attacker to control several clients from around the world.
Blackshades malware is fully equipped with Drive-by attacks, Java exploits, keylogger and it allows an attacker to steal usernames and passwords for email and Web services, instant messaging applications, FTP clients and lots more.
In worst cases, the program even allows hackers to take remote control of users' computer and webcam to take photos or videos without the knowledge of the computer owner.
The infected PCs can also be used to perform DDoS attacks and other illegal activities without any knowledge of its owner. The program modifies itself in such a way so that it remains elusive for antivirus software. It has been sold on underground forums since at least 2010, which cost between 40 and 100 dollars.
In 2012, while a very serious and bloody internal war between the government and the opposition forces, the BlackShades RAT was also used to infect and Spy on Syrian activists.
However, Back in 2012, a developer of the Blackshades team was reportedly arrested and during same time the source code of the tool was also leaked on the Internet.
FBI RAID AND SEIZURE
On various hacking forums, members claimed that FBI especially going after all of them who purchased the hacking tool using PayPal as payment option, so it could be estimated that PayPal is cooperating with the FBI.
Some claimed, even if the FBI has no record or evidence that those customers committed any crime or not, they are still raiding in search of logs and proofs.
Few users of 'Blackshades' Tool posted on the Hack Forums website that their houses are being raided by the FBI.
A user from Germany reported that he was visited by German police on purchased of the BlackShades RAT and agents seized his PC, laptop, external hard drive, and cryptography-related documents.
Another user from the Netherlands posted on the Hack Forums that he too has been visited by seven agents of the country's cyber crime police, who seized his phone, computer and other electronics as well.
The current ongoing FBI raid-campaign is targeting only European, including Belgium, UK, Denmark, Italy, Sweden and even the Australian Customers, but till now we have not seen any evidence of raids in the US or Canada.
FBI has also seized the European domain of BlackShades official website (www.eurid.eu) and modified the owner details to 'Federal Bureau of Investigation', as shown.
Marjinz, a member of BlackShades developer team claimed on a forum that FBI got their customer database from his Hotmail, but he even didn't know HOW! It could be possible that Microsoft has provided the content from developer's Hotmail account to the FBI.
FBI WARNING TO HACKERS
This could be in response to the latest Wednesday announcement of the FBI that it is planning searches and multiple arrests of cyber criminals over the next several weeks for combating cybercrime, Reuters reported.
"There is a philosophy change. If you are going to attack Americans, we are going to hold you accountable," the FBI's Robert Anderson told the Reuters. "If we can reach out and touch you, we are going to reach out and touch you."
BlackShades tool was actually developed by an IT surveillance and security-based company, who promoted it as a tool for parents to monitor their Children activities and for finding the cheating partners in relationship. But, as usual every weapon could be used for both purposes, killing and saving lives.
Update: One of our reader from Canada confirmed that his house was also raided by 'Royal Canadian Mounted Police' (FBI of Canada) two days ago. 'My son bought Blackshades and they had a warrant and search the entire house. They confiscated his computer.' he said.
| Malware |
Google Patches Critical Remotely-exploitable Flaws in Latest Android Update | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/update-android-security.html | Google has released the February Security Update for Android that patches multiple security vulnerabilities discovered in the latest version of Android operating system.
In total, there were five "critical" security vulnerabilities fixed in the release along with four "high" severity and one merely "moderate" issues.
Remote Code Execution Flaw in WiFi
A set of two critical vulnerabilities has been found in the Broadcom WiFi driver that could be exploited by attackers to perform Remote Code Execution (RCE) on affected Android devices when connected to the same network as the attacker.
The vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-0801 and CVE-2016-0802) can be exploited by sending specially crafted wireless control message packets that can corrupt kernel memory, potentially leading to remote code execution at the kernel level.
"These vulnerabilities can be triggered when the attacker and the victim are associated with the same network," reads the advisory. "This issue is rated as a Critical severity due to the possibility of remote code execution in the context of the kernel without requiring user interaction."
Remote Code Execution Flaw in Mediaserver
Another set of two critical security vulnerabilities were discovered in Mediaserver that was targeted last summer by critical Stagefright vulnerabilities and exploits, allowing anyone to compromise an Android device by sending just a specially crafted MMS message.
The recently discovered flaws (CVE-2016-0803 and CVE-2016-0804) in Mediaserver could enable remote code execution (RCE) on affected Android devices through email, web browsing, or MMS files when processing media files.
Moreover, a separate vulnerability called elevation of privilege (CVE-2016-0810) was also discovered in Mediaserver that could be exploited to gain elevated capabilities, including Signature or SignatureOrSystem permissions privileges, that aren't accessible to third-party apps.
Two Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities has also been found in Qualcomm components: the Qualcomm Performance Module (CVE-2016-0805) and the Qualcomm Wi-Fi Driver (CVE-2016-0806). Both the flaws, rated as critical, leveraged an attacker to launch further attacks.
Another critically rated bug (CVE-2016-0807) discovered in the Debuggerd component could open the door to execute arbitrary code within the device's root level. Debuggerd is a software tool used for debugging and analyzing Android crashes.
Other high severity bugs include:
An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Android Wi-Fi component
A denial-of-service vulnerability in the Minikin library
An information disclosure bug in libmediaplayerservice
The final set of vulnerabilities is an Elevation of Privilege flaw in Setup Wizard that could allow a hacker to bypass the Factory Reset Protection and gain access to the affected device.
All the Security patches are currently made available for Nexus devices only. Google also shared the patches with carrier and manufacturer partners on January 4, but users of other Android devices should have to wait until their devices receive an update.
Nexus device users are advised to patch the flaws by flashing their devices to this new build immediately. Users can also wait for the OTA (Over-the-Air) update that will be out in the next week or so.
| Vulnerability |
Browser Bugs Exploited to Install 2 New Backdoors on Targeted Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/browser-exploit-backdoor.html | Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new watering hole attack targeting the Korean diaspora that exploits vulnerabilities in web browsers such as Google Chrome and Internet Explorer to deploy malware for espionage purposes.
Dubbed "Operation Earth Kitsune" by Trend Micro, the campaign involves the use of SLUB (for SLack and githUB) malware and two new backdoors — dneSpy and agfSpy — to exfiltrate system information and gain additional control of the compromised machine.
The attacks were observed during the months of March, May, and September, according to the cybersecurity firm.
Watering hole attacks allow a bad actor to compromise a targeted business by compromising a carefully selected website by inserting an exploit with an intention to gain access to the victim's device and infect it with malware.
Operation Earth Kitsune is said to have deployed the spyware samples on websites associated with North Korea, although access to these websites is blocked for users originating from South Korean IP addresses.
A Diversified Campaign
Although previous operations involving SLUB used the GitHub repository platform to download malicious code snippets onto the Windows system and post the results of the execution to an attacker-controlled private Slack channel, the latest iteration of the malware has targeted Mattermost, a Slack-like open-source collaborative messaging system.
"The campaign is very diversified, deploying numerous samples to the victim machines and using multiple command-and-control (C&C) servers during this operation," Trend Micro said. "In total, we found the campaign using five C&C servers, seven samples, and exploits for four N-day bugs."
Designed to skip systems that have security software installed on them as a means to thwart detection, the attack weaponizes an already patched Chrome vulnerability (CVE-2019-5782) that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a specially-crafted HTML page.
Separately, a vulnerability in Internet Explorer (CVE-2020-0674) was also used to deliver malware via the compromised websites.
dneSpy and agfSpy — Fully Functional Espionage Backdoors
The difference in the infection vector notwithstanding, the exploit chain proceeds through the same sequence of steps — initiate a connection with the C&C server, receive the dropper, which then checks for the presence of anti-malware solutions on the target system before proceeding to download the three backdoor samples (in ".jpg" format) and executing them.
What's changed this time around is the use of Mattermost server to keep track of the deployment across multiple infected machines, in addition to creating an individual channel for each machine to retrieve the collected information from the infected host.
Of the other two backdoors, dneSpy, and agfSpy, the former is engineered to amass system information, capture screenshots, and download and execute malicious commands received from the C&C server, the results of which are zipped, encrypted, and exfiltrated to the server.
"One interesting aspect of dneSpy's design is its C&C pivoting behavior," Trend Micro researchers said. "The central C&C server's response is actually the next-stage C&C server's domain/IP, which dneSpy has to communicate with to receive further instructions."
agfSpy, dneSpy's counterpart, comes with its own C&C server mechanism that it uses to fetch shell commands and send the execution results back. Chief among its features include the capability to enumerate directories and list, upload, download, and execute files.
"Operation Earth Kitsune turned out to be complex and prolific, thanks to the variety of components it uses and the interactions between them," the researchers concluded. "The campaign's use of new samples to avoid detection by security products is also quite notable."
"From the Chrome exploit shellcode to the agfSpy, elements in the operation are custom coded, indicating that there is a group behind this operation. This group seems to be highly active this year, and we predict that they will continue going in this direction for some time."
| Malware |
Fujitsu cracks 278-digit crypto in 148 Days using 21 PCs | https://thehackernews.com/2012/06/fujitsu-cracks-278-digit-crypto-in-148.html | Fujitsu cracks 278-digit crypto in 148 Days using 21 PCs
A team of researchers in Japan have successfully broken a 278-digit piece of crypto in less than 200 days. Fujitsu Laboratories Limited, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Kyushu University jointly broke a world cryptography record with the successful cryptanalysis of a 278-digit (923-bit)-long pairing-based cryptography, which is now becoming the next generation cryptography standard.
"We were able to overcome this problem by making good use of various new technologies, that is, a technique optimising parameter setting that uses computer algebra, a two dimensional search algorithm extended from the linear search, and by using our efficient programing techniques to calculate a solution of an equation from a huge number of data, as well as the parallel programming technology that maximises computer power."
This doesn't mean that pairing-based cryptography, which is rapidly becoming a go-to standard in crypto, is now useless. (It's to be used in everything from securing government networks to locking down financial systems.) Rather, the research is intended to establish just how long keys need to be in order to be reasonably secure against attacks by efficient algorithms and powerful computers.
Their work smashes the previous record of a 204 digit (676 bit) system which Japan's Hakodate Future University and NICT managed in 2009.Fujitsu claimed that today's record required several hundred times the computational power of the 2009 effort – in effect this amounted to 21 PCs, or 252 cores.
Fujitsu also said it used a parallel programming technology that maximises computer power to complete the task.The Japanese firm was keen to note that the result of the diciphering is more than just a new world record.
| Vulnerability |
FormBook—Cheap Password Stealing Malware Used In Targeted Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/formbook-password-stealer.html | It seems sophisticated hackers have changed the way they conduct targeted cyber operations—instead of investing in zero-days and developing their malware; some hacking groups have now started using ready-made malware just like script kiddies.
Possibly, this could be a smart move for state-sponsored hackers to avoid being attributed easily.
Security researchers from multiple security firms, including Arbor Networks and FireEye, independently discovered a series of malware campaigns primarily targeting aerospace, defence contractors and manufacturing sectors in various countries, including the United States, Thailand, South Korea and India.
What's common? All these attack campaigns, conducted by various hacking groups, eventually install same information and password stealer malware—dubbed FormBook—on the targeted systems.
FormBook is nothing but a "malware-as-as-service," which is an affordable piece of data-stealing and form-grabbing malware that has been advertised in various hacking forums since early 2016.
Anyone can rent FormBook for just $29 per week or $59 per month, which offers a range of advanced spying capabilities on target machines, including a keylogger, password stealer, network sniffer, taking the screenshots, web form data stealer and more.
According to the researchers, attackers in each campaign are primarily using emails to distribute the FormBook malware as an attachment in different forms, including PDFs with malicious download links, DOC and XLS files with malicious macros, and archive files (ZIP, RAR, ACE, and ISOs) containing EXE payloads.
Once installed on a target system, the malware injects itself into various processes and starts capturing keystrokes and extracts stored passwords and other sensitive data from multiple applications, including Google Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Safari, Vivaldi, Q-360, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, 3D-FTP, FileZilla and WinSCP.
FormBook continuously sends all the stolen data to a remote command and control (C2) server which also allows the attacker to execute other commands on the targeted system, including start processes, shutdown and reboot the system, and stealing cookies.
"One of the malware's most interesting features is that it reads Windows' ntdll.dll module from disk into memory, and calls its exported functions directly, rendering user-mode hooking and API monitoring mechanisms ineffective," FireEye says.
"The malware author calls this technique "Lagos Island method" (allegedly originating from a userland rootkit with this name)."
According to the researchers, FormBook was also seen downloading other malware families such as NanoCore in the last few weeks.
The attackers can even use the data successfully harvested by FormBook for further cybercriminal activities including, identity theft, continued phishing operations, bank fraud and extortion.
FormBook is neither sophisticated, nor difficult-to-detect malware, so the best way to protect yourself from this malware is to keep good antivirus software on your systems, and always keep it up-to-date.
| Cyber_Attack |
Rogue Developer Infects Widely Used NodeJS Module to Steal Bitcoins | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/nodejs-event-stream-module.html | A widely used third-party NodeJS module with nearly 2 million downloads a week was compromised after one of its open-source contributor gone rogue, who infected it with a malicious code that was programmed to steal funds stored in Bitcoin wallet apps.
The Node.js library in question is "Event-Stream," a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to create and work with streams, a collection of data in Node.js — just like arrays or strings.
The malicious code detected earlier this week was added to Event-Stream version 3.3.6, published on September 9 via NPM repository, and had since been downloaded by nearly 8 million application programmers.
Event-Stream module for Node.js was originally created by Dominic Tarr, who maintained the Event-Stream library for a long time, but handed over the development and maintenance of the project several months ago to an unknown programmer, called "right9ctrl."
Apparently, right9ctrl gained Dominic's trust by making some meaningful contributions to the project.
After gaining access to the library, the new rightful maintainer "Right9ctrl" released Event-Stream version 3.3.6, containing a new library, called Flatmap-Stream, as a dependency, which was specifically crafted for the purposes of this attack and includes the malicious code.
Since the flatmap-stream module was encrypted, the malicious code remained undetected for more than 2 months until Ayrton Sparling (FallingSnow), a computer science student at California State University, flagged the issue Tuesday on GitHub.
After analyzing the obfuscated code and encrypted payload, open source project manager NPM which hosted event-stream found that the malicious module has been designed to target people using BitPay's open-source bitcoin wallet app, Copay, a company that incorporated event-stream into its app.
The malicious code attempted to steal digital coins stored in the Dash Copay Bitcoin wallets—distributed through the Node Package Manager (NPM)—and transfer them to a server located in Kuala Lumpur.
Officials from NPM—the open source project manager that hosted event-stream code library—removed the backdoor from NPM's listing on Monday this week.
BitPay also published an advisory saying Copay versions 5.0.2 through 5.1.0 were affected by the malicious code and that users with these versions installed should avoid running or opening the app until they install Copay version 5.2.0.
"Users should assume that private keys on affected wallets may have been compromised, so they should move funds to new wallets (v5.2.0) immediately," BitPay says in the advisory.
"Users should first update their affected wallets (5.0.2-5.1.0) and then send all funds from affected wallets to a brand new wallet on version 5.2.0, using the Send Max feature to initiate transactions of all funds."
BitPay also says that its team continues to investigate this issue and the extent of the vulnerability to know whether the malicious code was ever exploited against Copay users.
BitPay assures its users that the BitPay app was not vulnerable to the malicious code.
| Cyber_Attack |
Core Tor Developer who accuses FBI of Harassment moves to Germany | https://thehackernews.com/2016/05/tor-fbi-lovecruft.html | One of TOR's primary software developers, Isis Agora Lovecruft, has fled to Germany, following the threat of a federal subpoena.
Lovecruft is a well-known cryptographer and lead software developer for Tor project from many years. She has worked for a variety of other security and encryption products, such as Open Whisper Systems and the LEAP Encryption Access Project.
Since November 2015, the FBI special agents in the United States have been trying to meet with her, but they will not tell her or her lawyer exactly why.
When her lawyer reached out the FBI Special Agent Mark Burnett and asked why he wanted to meet with her, the agent assured the lawyer that she is not the target of any investigation, but also said that…
Also Read: Mozilla asks Court to disclose Firefox Exploit used by FBI to hack Tor users.
The FBI have their agents on the streets in 5 cities in the United States hunting for her, intending to simply ask her some questions without her lawyer's presence.
Lovecruft's lawyer responded by saying that all questions should be directed to him rather than to Lovecruft or her family, but Burnett said that he will not tell her or her lawyer what this involves.
In general, it's not a big deal to have at least a meeting with the FBI agents to know what exactly are the federal agents looking for.
But Lovecruft fears that the federal agents will serve her with some kind of secret warrant, possibly to get her to insert a backdoor in the TOR system and expose TOR users around the world to potential spying.
Must Read: Former Tor Developer Created Malware for FBI to Unmask Tor Users.
So, she packed her suitcase and left the United States for Germany on December 7 last year, accusing the FBI of harassment for the past 6 months.
"I had already been in the process of moving, permanently, to Germany, and had retained a German immigrations lawyer several months prior to these events," Lovecruft wrote in her blog post titled, 'FBI Harassment.'
Although unsure if she was breaking any laws by leaving the country, she booked a flight to Berlin – despite the fact that she didn't intend to use the return ticket – just to avoid raising suspicions.
However, this didn't end the matter, and the FBI Special Agent Kelvin Porter in Atlanta called Lovecruft's lawyer last month, asking him where to send a subpoena for Lovecruft to help testify in a criminal hacking case.
Also Read: Judge Ordered the FBI to Reveal the Source Code of its Tor Hacking Exploit.
Following the Lovecruft's blog post, the Tor Project official Twitter tweeted out in support of their developer, saying "We support our colleague Isis."
In response to this issue, an FBI spokesperson told IBTimes:
"The FBI, as a general policy, does not confirm nor deny investigations, nor comment on the investigative activity unless it is a matter of public record. If someone is alleging harassment of any kind that should be brought to the attention of the government, though it is unclear what specific activity is even being characterized as harassment."
TOR is an anonymity software that provides a safe haven to human rights activists, government, journalists but also is a place where drugs, child pornography, assassins for hire and other illegal activities has allegedly been traded.
Since last few years, the FBI has been trying to break TOR and unmask TOR users identity in several investigations.
The agency has accused of hacking TOR users in an investigation of the world's largest dark web child pornography site 'Playpen.' The FBI has also compelled Carnegie Mellon University to help them hack TOR users.
| Malware |
A New Paradigm For Cyber Threat Hunting | https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/cyber-threat-hunting.html | It's no secret that expecting security controls to block every infection vector is unrealistic. For most organizations, the chances are very high that threats have already penetrated their defenses and are lurking in their network.
Pinpointing such threats quickly is essential, but traditional approaches to finding these needles in the haystack often fall short.
Now there is a unique opportunity for more feasible, more effective threat hunting capabilities, and it stems from a most unusual effort: rethinking the approach to wide area networking.
When we look at the cyber kill-chain today, there are two major phases—infection and post-infection. Security experts acknowledge that organizations can get infected no matter how good their security controls are.
The simple fact is, infection vectors change rapidly and continuously. Attackers use new delivery methods – everything from social engineering to zero-day exploits – and they often are effective.
In most cases, an infection is a singular event. The delivery method is singular, which decreases the chances of detection by the security controls that are meant to prevent threats from entering.
Unfortunately, most organizations still focus more of their resources on prevention rather than detection. The primary tools they deploy today include firewall, anti-spam, sandboxing, IPS (intrusion prevention), intelligence feeds, URL filtering, anti-malware, and anti-bot.
These solutions are designed to be in front of what's left of the perimeter to prevent infection attempts. Once a threat slips through the perimeter, however, the tool can't see or stop it.
Threat hunting is on the rise
This has given rise to the notion of "threat hunting," or the process of proactively searching the network for threats that have evaded existing security measures.
Threat hunting requires a shift to a post-infection mentality and sets of tools such as SIEM (security incident and event management), EDR (endpoint detection and response) and NDR (network detection and response).
Even with these tools, threat hunting is a challenge for a variety of reasons. For one thing, these solutions are "heavy." They require some kind of data collection that involves installing agents on endpoints and/or hardware placed on networks. This can get quite expensive for a large enterprise.
What's more, it can miss traffic from mobile devices that don't have the collection agent installed. Another problem is that these solutions rely on available substantive data at a single point in time. This data lacks a broader context and historical perspective.
For example, when a SIEM tool receives alerts and logs from the many different point security solutions, the alerts are detached from each other, such that each conclusion is different without the raw data behind the alerts.
There are too many events without enough context for security analysts to pinpoint an infection. Moreover, few organizations have the skills and resources to analyze the data and identify persistent threats.
A new opportunity for threat hunting
Oddly enough, the enterprise shift to software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) as a cloud-based service now offers an alternative means to conduct threat hunting that addresses the shortcomings of the existing approaches.
Cloud-based SD-WAN is a new networking architecture whereby all the entities of the typical enterprise network – the headquarters office, the data center(s), branch locations, the cloud infrastructure that is part of the external network (i.e., AWS, Azure, etc.), as well as mobile users – are all connected into a network in the cloud.
These elements connect to the cloud network backbone through a global series of points of presence (PoPs). This creates a single unified network that carries all traffic of the various enterprise entities that are connected, including corporate internet plus WAN traffic. Having all this traffic flow on one network forms a valuable dataset for threat hunting.
Cato Networks has identified the opportunity to utilize this single, unified source of data flowing across its Cato Cloud network as input to a new threat hunting service.
This extends Cato's converged security offering which already includes the firewall as a service, Next Generation firewall, secure web gateway and advanced threat protection.
What makes threat hunting via cloud-based networking unique
Traditional network security solutions are built at the level of a single branch network. All the traffic they inspect is isolated and limited to a specific location, such as a branch or a geographic location.
Because Cato has its own network backbone, into which it has full visibility, the service provider can see all network traffic, from all customers, all over the world. This visibility into so many network flows and so much data are unique, and it allows Cato to build the models that enable full threat hunting based on unlimited raw data.
Cato's model evolves three aspects of data context: client classification, target and time (see Figure 1). Let's have a look at each of these elements, and how putting the three pieces together provides a very high degree of confidence that a threat is present on the network.
Figure 1: Cato claims to improve detection accuracy by working from raw network data and not just security logs, and then expanding context in three dimensions — client, target and time.
Client classification
It starts with client classification. When other security solutions inspect the source client with the flow, entities such as source IP, username, and device name are considered.
Usually, this information is used to distinguish different devices over the network, but it is rarely used in the actual decision making of whether the traffic is malicious or not.
Cato has expanded the client classification into a broader scheme, using elements such as whether HTTP or TLS is part of the main communications, the unique fingerprints of various browsers, and the types of libraries they use. These items provide much more detail, and by analyzing this data with machine learning, Cato can classify different clients on its network very accurately.
The target
The next context element that Cato uses is the target—the IP or domain address that a client is connecting to. The target is commonly part of the flow that's used in the decision-making process of whether something is malicious or not. Most security solutions simply compare the target against a list of security feeds.
Cato goes further by creating a "popularity score" to each target it sees. The score is calculated based on the number of times clients communicate with the targets. Scores of all targets are then bucketed, and typically the lowest scored targets are indicators of malicious or command and control websites.
Communication over time
Cato's last context parameter is time. Active malware keeps communicating over time; for example, to get commands from the C&C server, or to exfiltrate data. Time (repetitiveness) is often not considered by other security solutions, whereas Cato sees it as an important data element.
The more the external communication is repeated uniformly, the more likely it is a machine or bot that is generating this traffic, and thus more likely to be malicious traffic.
A real-life example
Figure 2: Here's one example of how Cato identified Conflicker on a customer's network. Note the use of client, target, and time throughout the process.
The following example is from a real Cato customer. There is a machine on the Cato Cloud network that tries to connect to about 150 domains where more than 90% of them are unresolved DNS requests. The domains themselves look like an algorithm generated them (see figure 2)
Looking back historically, analysts can see that this event occurs every three hours, indicating it's probably bot traffic. Some of the domains were resolved, after which there was an HTTP session which allows analysts to resolve the client.
Based on the client classification algorithms, this client is unknown to Cato across all the data the network provider has gotten. At this point, it's possible to conclude that an unknown bot is frequently communicating with a low popularity target website. Further analysis with the customer that owns the machine shows that it is infected with malware.
Cato was able to detect this threat automatically without any external feeds or IPS signatures. The discovery was purely a result of looking at network flows. No additional agents or hardware was necessary to collect the data, as it all came from flows normally traversing the Cato network.
The end customer didn't expend any effort to hunt this threat, other than looking at the machine that Cato identified as suspected of harboring malware. This is indeed a new paradigm for threat hunting.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hijacking WhatsApp Account in Seconds Using This Simple Trick | https://thehackernews.com/2015/06/hijacking-whatsapp-account.html | The hugely popular smartphone messaging service WhatsApp, acquired by Facebook for over $20 billion last year, has reportedly been found to be prone to hijacking without unlocking or knowing your device password, making its hundreds of Millions of users vulnerable to, not just hackers, but also non-technical people.
This trick lets anyone surrounds you to get effectively control over your WhatsApp account. The attacker needs nothing more than a phone number of the target person and access to the target mobile phone for a few seconds, even if it is locked.
Hacking Whatsapp account in such scenario is not hard for your friends and colleagues.
This is not actually a loophole or vulnerability in WhatsApp, and rather it is just the way WhatsApp is designed and its account setup mechanism works.
NOTE: Moreover, we aren't encouraging users to hack others WhatsApp account, but the purpose of publishing this article is to warn and remind our readers that you should be extra careful to whom you lend your mobile phone and not to leave it unattended for longer durations with strangers around.
The trick enables the offender to get full control over the victim's WhatsApp account in no time and the most surprising part is that it independently works on all mobile platforms, including Android, Windows and Apple's iOS.
Here's How to Hijack someone else's WhatsApp Account?
Below are the clear steps to hack the WhatsApp account on any Smartphones:
Begin by setting up a WhatsApp account on a new mobile phone using the phone number of your target.
During the setup process, WhatsApp will call the target's phone number and will provide a PIN that needs to be entered for the authentication of the account.
If you already have access to the victim's phone, you can just answer the phone call and grab the code with no efforts. Even if the victim has a lock screen enabled on the phone, you can receive the phone call to get the secret PIN.
Using this known and simple trick your colleagues can hijack your WhatsApp Account easily.
The worst case is with iPhones:
Things get even worse on iPhone if the users have configured their iPhones with Siri authentication for the lock screen, because all the contact details are available to access the Siri's settings, effectively giving everyone access to their phone number without the need for a PIN.
Thus, if you try to steal the account information of WhatsApp, without even having the phone number of the target user, you can just call your number from target's phone using Siri.
Just check the given video demonstration that explains the simple trick of taking control of anyone's WhatsApp account.
| Vulnerability |
McAfee drafted Five Steps to Avoiding bad apps on Pc & Mobile | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/mcafee-drafted-five-steps-to-avoiding.html | McAfee drafted Five Steps to Avoiding bad apps on Pc & Mobile
Malicious applications are one of the most serious threats to smartphone users today. Not only can a dangerous app infect your phone and steal your personal information, it can even spy on you. Read our five easy tips for avoiding bad apps, and keep your device and information safe.
An Android developer recently discovered a clandestine application called Carrier IQ built into most smartphones that doesn't just track your location; it secretly records your keystrokes, and there's nothing you can do about it. In this digital age, privacy is more important than ever. Just because you "don't have anything to hide," does not mean that you shouldn't value your privacy or fight for it when companies do things like this, especially with something as personal as your cell phone.
McAfee has come up with five "Common sense" practices that you might not have thought about before, but they actually do make sense for the most part.
Here's a look:
For the moment, the amount of detected smartphone malware is relatively low compared to malware that targets desktop or laptop PCs; but being aware that it exists is the first step toward protecting yourself and your data.
Research apps and their publishers thoroughly and check the ratings - better to install apps that are broadly used in the market and/or are recommended by your circle of friends and colleagues
It is wise to purchase from a well-known reputable app store market, such as the Android Market. One way for Android users to avoid installation of non-market applications is to de-select the "Unknown sources" option in the Applications Settings menu on their device. If the option is not listed, it means your mobile service provider has already done this for the user.
When you install an app, you'll see a list of permissions for services that are granted access to the hardware and software components on your device, like contacts, camera and location. If something in the permissions screen doesn't look right, don't install that app! For example, a game or alarm clock app probably shouldn't need to access your contacts or have the ability to transmit that data from your device.
Install antivirus software on your phone. It is a good idea to install an antivirus program when you get a new mobile device before you add any other apps.
This last one actually be the most crucial one that people are missing. McAfee argues now that because smartphone and tablet sales are eclipsing those of desktops and laptops, cyber crime is surging in the mobile sector.
| Malware |
Firefox 31 — Mozilla Releases Security Updates to Tighten Browser Security | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/firefox-31-mozilla-releases-security_22.html | Mozilla has officially released its latest build Firefox 31 for all supported platforms, addressing 11 vulnerabilities in total, three of which are marked critical that could have been exploited by hackers to mount remote code execution attacks.
Mozilla Firefox recommends its users to install the security update as soon as possible, warning that the three critical vulnerabilities discovered in its browser could be exploited by attackers and leverage them to "run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing".
CRITICAL VULNERABILITIES
The three major vulnerabilities are as follows:
MFSA 2014-62 - This is one of the three critical vulnerabilities reported by Patrick Cozzi and get fixed in the newer version of the browser. The vulnerability allows the exploitation of a WebGL crash with Cesium JavaScript library. Much details about the flaw are not known at the time, but Mozilla notes that the flaw cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird client because scripting is disabled.
MFSA 2014-59 - The second critical flaw discovered in the browser, reported by Mozilla community member James Kitchener, refers to a use-after-free vulnerability when handling DirectWrite font. The vulnerability could be exploited by an attacker to crash Firefox due to an error in the way it handles font resources and tables, when rendering MathML content with specific fonts. However exploiting this flaw would be possible only on Windows platform, it does not affect OS X or Linux systems.
MFSA 2014-56 - This vulnerability refers to miscellaneous memory safety hazards, identified by Mozilla developers, that affected Mozilla version 30. Mozilla fixed several memory safety bugs in its browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products in order to safeguard its customers.
"Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," Mozilla wrote.
OTHER SECURITY VULNERABILITIES
Mozilla also addresses two high rated vulnerabilities that cause a potential danger, as they could be used by an attacker to fetch users' personal and sensitive information from other websites they visit or inject malicious code into those websites to infect users.
Moreover, the security issues fixed in the latest revision of Firefox mostly refer to use-after-free vulnerabilities, in Web Audio, with the FireOnStateChange event and when manipulating certificates in the trusted cache.
Also, to provide more security to its customers, the company has announced a protection mechanism against malicious downloads in its latest build. The feature relies on the Safe Browsing API from Google and leverages application reputation information to detect malware in file downloads.
The protection mechanism consists in verifying the metadata, such as download URL, SHA-256 hash, details about the certificate, belonging to the item requested by the user, and comparing it to a given block list.
Based on a local list of files and remote one, the verification of the metadata is carried out. If a match is found the file is not saved to disk. On the other hand, when files are signed, they are matched from a given whitelist, and the binary is marked as trusted and as a result of it, the remote check is no longer performed.
Additionally, a new SSL/TLS certificate verification is now available on Firefox latest build 31 that uses a more powerful and easier to maintain "mozilla::pkix" library. No doubt this change would go unnoticed by the regular user, but it would protect its users from the compatibility issues arose for websites that do not use an authorized certificate accepted in the Mozilla CA Program.
Update your Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird as soon as possible. Stay Safe! Stay Secure!
| Vulnerability |
Microsoft's Emergency Patch Fails to Fully Fix PrintNightmare RCE Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/microsofts-emergency-patch-fails-to.html | Even as Microsoft expanded patches for the so-called PrintNightmare vulnerability for Windows 10 version 1607, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2016, it has come to light that the fix for the remote code execution exploit in the Windows Print Spooler service can be bypassed in certain scenarios, effectively defeating the security protections and permitting attackers to run arbitrary code on infected systems.
On Tuesday, the Windows maker issued an emergency out-of-band update to address CVE-2021-34527 (CVSS score: 8.8) after the flaw was accidentally disclosed by researchers from Hong Kong-based cybersecurity firm Sangfor late last month, at which point it emerged that the issue was different from another bug — tracked as CVE-2021-1675 — that was patched by Microsoft on June 8.
"Several days ago, two security vulnerabilities were found in Microsoft Windows' existing printing mechanism," Yaniv Balmas, head of cyber research at Check Point, told The Hacker News. "These vulnerabilities enable a malicious attacker to gain full control on all windows environments that enable printing."
"These are mostly working stations but, at times, this relates to entire servers that are an integral part of very popular organizational networks. Microsoft classified these vulnerabilities as critical, but when they were published they were able to fix only one of them, leaving the door open for explorations of the second vulnerability," Balmas added.
PrintNightmare stems from bugs in the Windows Print Spooler service, which manages the printing process inside local networks. The main concern with the threat is that non-administrator users had the ability to load their own printer drivers. This has now been rectified.
"After installing this [update] and later Windows updates, users who are not administrators can only install signed print drivers to a print server," Microsoft said, detailing the improvements made to mitigate the risks associated with the flaw. "Administrator credentials will be required to install unsigned printer drivers on a printer server going forward."
Post the update's release, CERT/CC vulnerability analyst Will Dormann cautioned that the patch "only appears to address the Remote Code Execution (RCE via SMB and RPC) variants of the PrintNightmare, and not the Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) variant," thereby allowing attackers to abuse the latter to gain SYSTEM privileges on vulnerable systems.
Now, further testing of the update has revealed that exploits targeting the flaw could bypass the remediations entirely to gain both local privilege escalation and remote code execution. To achieve this, however, a Windows policy called 'Point and Print Restrictions' must be enabled (Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Printers: Point and Print Restrictions), using which malicious printer drivers could be potentially installed.
"Note that the Microsoft update for CVE-2021-34527 does not effectively prevent exploitation of systems where the Point and Print NoWarningNoElevationOnInstall is set to 1," Dormann said Wednesday. Microsoft, for its part, explains in its advisory that "Point and Print is not directly related to this vulnerability, but the technology weakens the local security posture in such a way that exploitation will be possible."
While Microsoft has recommended the nuclear option of stopping and disabling the Print Spooler service, an alternative workaround is to enable security prompts for Point and Print, and limit printer driver installation privileges to administrators alone by configuring the "RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrators" registry value to prevent regular users from installing printer drivers on a print server.
UPDATE: In response to CERT/CC's report, Microsoft said on Thursday:
"Our investigation has shown that the OOB [out-of-band] security update is working as designed and is effective against the known printer spooling exploits and other public reports collectively being referred to as PrintNightmare. All reports we have investigated have relied on the changing of default registry setting related to Point and Print to an insecure configuration."
| Vulnerability |
324,000 Financial Records with CVV Numbers Stolen From A Payment Gateway | https://thehackernews.com/2016/09/bluesnap-payment-gateway-hack.html | Around 324,000 users have likely had their payment records stolen either from payment processor BlueSnap or its customer Regpack; however, neither of the company has admitted a data breach.
BlueSnap is a payment provider which allows websites to take payments from customers by offering merchant facilities, whereas RegPack is a global online enrollment platform that uses BlueSnap to process the financial transactions for its online enrollments.
The data breach was initially reported on July 10, when a hacker published a link on Twitter, pointing to a file containing roughly 324,000 records allegedly stolen from Waltham, Massachusetts-based BlueSnap.
The tweet has since been deleted, but Australian security expert Troy Hunt took a copy of it for later review to analyze the data and after analyzing, he discovered that the leaked payment records are most likely legitimate.
Payment Card Data Including CVV Codes Leaked
The data contains users' details registred between 10 March 2014 to 20 May 2016 and includes names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, last four digits of credit card numbers, even CVV codes, and invoice data containing details of purchases.
According to Hunt, who owns 'Have I Been Pwned' breach notification service, some evidence like file names containing 'BlueSnap' and 'Plimus' in it suggests that the data comes from BlueSnap.
Plimus is the original name of BlueSnap, which was rebranded after private equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired it for $115Million in 2011.
However, since April 2013, Regpack has been using BlueSnap's payment platform, it could be possible that the stolen data has come from Regpack.
"We have got 899 totally separate consumers of the Regpack service...who send their data direct to Regpack who pass payment data onto BlueSnap for processing," Hunt explained in a blog post.
"Unless I am missing a fundamental piece of the workflow... it looks like accountability almost certainly lies with one of these two parties."
Whatever the source is, but the primary concern here is that more than 320,000 stolen users financial information is floating around the web.
Although the payment data does not contain full credit card numbers, as Hunt stressed, cyber criminals can still misuse the compromised information, particularly the CVV codes that are highly valuable payment data, which can be used to conduct "card not present" transactions.
Also, the last four digit of any user's credit card number can also be used for identity verification that's very useful in conducting social engineering attacks.
Hunt contacted BlueSnap as well as Regpack, but they both denied suffering a data breach. He has also loaded as many as 105,000 email addresses into Have I Been Pwned, so you can search for your address on the site to check whether you are impacted by the breach.
| Data_Breaches |
British Hacker Admits Using Mirai Botnet to DDoS Deutsche Telekom | https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/mirai-botnet-ddos.html | An unnamed 29-year-old man, named by authorities as "Daniel K.," pleaded guilty in a German court on Friday to charges related to the hijacking of more than one Million Deutsche Telekom routers.
According to reports in the German press, the British man, who was using online monikers "Peter Parker" and "Spiderman," linked to domains used to launch cyber attacks powered by the notorious Mirai malware has been pleaded guilty to "attempted computer sabotage."
The suspect was arrested on 22nd February this year at Luton airport in London by Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) at the request of the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany, aka the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA).
The hacker, also known as 'BestBuy,' admitted to the court on Friday that he was behind the cyber attack that knocked more than 1.25 Million customers of German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom offline last November.
According to the German authorities, the attack was especially severe and was carried out to compromise the home routers to enrol them in a network of hijacked devices popularly called Botnet, which is being offered for sale on dark web markets for launching DDoS attacks.
Late last year, Deutsche Telekom's routers became infected with a modified version of the Mirai malware – infamous IoT malware which scans for insecure routers, cameras, DVRs, and other IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network – causing over a million pounds' worth of damage, the company said at the time.
Mirai is the same botnet that knocked the entire Internet offline last year by launching massive distributed denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against the Dyn DNS provider, crippling some of the world's biggest and most popular websites, including Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, Slack, and Spotify.
Mirai leveraged attack experienced sudden rise after a cyber criminal in October 2016 publicly released the source code of Mirai, which is then used to by many cyber criminals to launch DDoS attacks.
The hacker reportedly told the court that a Liberian internet service provider (ISP) paid him $10,000 to carry out the attack against its competitors., and that Deutsche Telekom was not the main target of his attack.
At the time of his arrest, the suspect faced up to 10 years in prison. He's due to be sentenced on July 28.
The BKA got involved in the investigation as the attack on Deutsche Telekom was deemed to be a threat to the nation's communication infrastructure.
The investigation involved close cooperation between British, German and Cypriot law enforcement agencies, backed by the European Union's law enforcement intelligence agency, Europol, and Eurojust.
| Malware |
U.S. Takes Down Kelihos Botnet After Its Russian Operator Arrested in Spain | https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/kelihos-botnet-russian-hacker.html | A Russian computer hacker arrested over the weekend in Barcelona was apparently detained for his role in a massive computer botnet, and not for last year's US presidential election hack as reported by the Russian media.
Peter Yuryevich Levashov, 32-years-old Russian computer programmer, suspected of operating the Kelihos botnet — a global network of over 100,000 infected computers that was used to deliver spam, steal login passwords, and infect computers with ransomware and other types of malware since approximately 2010, the U.S. Justice Department announced Monday.
As suspected earlier, Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, is the same man who has also been listed in the World's Top 10 Worst Spammers maintained by anti-spam group Spamhaus, which has given him the 7th position in the list.
The arrest was made possible after the FBI learned just last month that Levashov was traveling with his family to Spain from his home in Russia, a country without any extradition treaty to the United States.
Initially, it was believed that Levashov was detained on suspicion of 2016 US election hack, after his wife told Russian publication RT that authorities said her husband's apprehension was in part due to his involvement in the U.S. election hacking, including the notorious breach of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
However, the DoJ press release indicates no link between Levashov and US election hack at all.
Instead, Levashov was linked to the Kelihos botnet by the FBI because he used the same IP address to operate the botnet that he used to access his email and other online accounts in his name, including Apple iCloud and Google Gmail accounts.
According to the indictment unsealed Monday, Levashov operated the botnet since 2010, targeting Microsoft Windows machines for infection. He allegedly used Kelihos to distribute hundreds of millions of spam emails per year, and pump-and-dump stock scams.
Besides conducting spamming operations, prosecutors also alleged Levashov also used the Kelihos botnet to infect end-user computers with malware and harvest passwords to online and bank accounts belonging to thousands of Americans.
"The ability of botnets like Kelihos to be weaponized quickly for vast and varied types of harms is a dangerous and deep threat to all Americans, driving at the core of how we communicate, network, earn a living, and live our everyday lives," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Blanco.
"Our success in disrupting the Kelihos botnet was the result of strong cooperation between private industry experts and law enforcement, and the use of innovative legal and technical tactics."
The FBI officials obtained court orders (Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure) to redirect Kelihos-infected PCs to servers operated by authorities — a process known as "Sinkhole attack" — and to block any attempts by the botnet to regain control of those sinkholed computers.
The FBI said it worked with security firm CrowdStrike and Shadowserver Foundation, a volunteer group of information security experts, to deploy the sinkhole attack to disconnect communications between criminals and infected computers.
Levashov has been charged with wire fraud and unauthorized interception of electronic communications. The government is now seeking his extradition to the United States.
| Cyber_Attack |
McAfee will prevent vehicles from becoming vulnerable to Car Virus | https://thehackernews.com/2012/08/mcafee-will-prevent-vehicles-from.html | Vehicles are becoming more and more reliant on computers for efficiency, safety systems, and infotainment systems. Most vehicles on the market today use throttle-by-wire systems, where the onboard computer controls the throttle of the vehicle. Toyota has had problems in the past with so-called unintended acceleration, with many pointing fingers at the electronic systems in the car.
Intel's McAfee unit, which is best known for software that fights PC viruses, is one of a handful of firms that are looking to protect the dozens of tiny computers and electronic communications systems that are built into every modern car. McAfee, makers of the popular anti-virus software, are just one of the teams looking to protect automobiles from many bugs and viruses which could wreak havoc on the tiny computers inside modern cars.
"You can definitely kill people", said John Bumgarner, chief technology officer of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit organization that helps companies analyze the potential for targeted computer attacks on their networks and products. "Ford is taking the threat very seriously and investing in security solutions that are built into the product from the outset," he said.
To date, however, there have been no severe attacks on vehicles through viruses.But Studies have already proven that it is technically possible to hack into a car's on-board warning systems and alter its tire pressure, as well as prevent it from using its brakes.
| Malware |
This String of 13 Characters Can Crash your Chrome on a Mac | https://thehackernews.com/2015/03/chrome-crash-vulnerability.html | If you're currently on a Mac computer and using a Chrome browser then a weird little Apple's OS X quirk, just a special thirteen-characters string could cause your tab in Chrome to crash instantly.
A string of 13 characters (appear to be in Assyrian), shown below in an image, is all needed to crash any tab in Chrome for OS X, however, this text has no impact on Windows, Android, or iOS operating systems.
This Chrome crash vulnerability has already been reported by an open-source project Chromium project, which means that Google is likely aware of this troublesome issue.
What steps will reproduce the problem?
Any page with [that special character] will crash the chrome tab on a Mac.
Just create any dummy page with the unicode characters, and the Mac Chrome tab will crash hard.
What is the expected result?
Expect it not to crash
What happens instead?
It crashes
Warning: Do not click on this link, which actually points to the bug report on the Chromium product describing the issue, if your are using Chrome on a Mac.
If you'll click, it will immediately cause the Chrome tab to crash in which the link opens. Emil Protalinski of VentureBeat says even the tab showing the news article also crashes for some readers.
13 characters crash exploit code
The issue appears to be small but is really serious, as it is possible for anyone to tweet out the text in question, and crash all Chrome for Mac users whose Twitter timeline will load those characters.
The developer who discovered this bug gives two different scenarios in which this bug could be abused. "This is pretty serious. You could imagine someone spamming this message in Hangouts/Gmail and just straight-up force crashing all Mac Chrome browsers," the developer said.
Furthermore, someone could post this 13-characters string on Facebook walls or timelines, and force-crash all Mac Chrome browsers that will saw the characters in question.
VentureBeat notes that the Chrome crash doesn't happen every time, in some cases, when Chrome renders text differently, Mac users see 13 blank rectangles (▯▯▯▯▯ ▯▯▯ ▯▯▯▯▯) instead of the crash, though they never see the proper characters.
It's currently not known why this character causes tab on Chrome to crash while page rendering, but we'll recommend you to do not use theses characters while Tweeting or dropping them in the comments or emailing them to the entire company or posting them to Facebook or as a headline of your blog post.
If you are curious just how often and why your Chrome is crashing, you can type chrome://crashes into your location bar and press Enter to view the list of crashes.
| Vulnerability |
Google Adds New Behavior-Based Malware Scanner To Every Android Device | https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/google-play-protect-android.html | In order to keep its billions of users safe, Google has introduced another security defense for its Android devices, called Google Play Protect.
Google Play Protect, which is part of the Google Play Store app, uses machine learning and app usage analysis to weed out the dangerous and malicious apps, which have always been albatross around the tech giant's neck.
Since Google Play Protect actually comes with the Google Play Store, users do not need to install or activate this security feature separately.
Google Play Protect for Android devices consists:
App scanning
Anti-Theft Measures
Browser Protection
Play Protect's App Scanning Feature
Google Play Protect is an always-on service on devices which said to scan 50 billion apps each day across a billion Android devices to ensure they are safe.
Google already has a number of security measures in place to help keep your smartphones safe, including Verify Apps and its Bouncer service, but once apps are uploaded to the Play Store and installed on your device, Google does not have anything in place to monitor the behavior of those apps – something that most malware apps were abusing.
Running automatically in the background, Google Play Protect is actually built into devices, which will not only analyse apps before appearing on the Play Store, but also monitor them once installed on the device, including apps that have been installed from third-party stores as well.
For this, Google makes use of machine learning algorithms that automatically compares app behavior and distinguishes those acting abnormally, and if encounters any malicious app, it warns you or even disables the app to prevent further harm.
Google says it works around the clock to keep up with the latest threats
Google says the new machine learning system regularly updates to help Android ecosystem stay one step ahead of any potential threats by always looking out for "new risks, identifying potentially harmful apps and keeping them off your device or removing them."
Play Protect's Anti-Theft Measures
With the introduction of Google Play Protect, Android Device Manager has been replaced with Find My Device, use to locate lost and misplaced devices.
You can use the browser or any other device to remotely call, locate, and lock, your Android device or even erase the data to protect sensitive information remotely.
Find My Device is the same old solution, but Google included it into the Google Play Protect program.
Play Protect's Browser Protection
With Safe Browsing feature in Chrome, Play Protect lets users stay safe while browsing the Internet.
Usually, virus, malware and worm land on to your smartphones and computers via malicious web browsers. So, if you visit any website that is acting suspicious, Safe Browsing feature will warn you and block websites that feel sketchy or seems to be unsafe for you.
Google Play Protect service will be rolling out to Android devices over the coming weeks.
| Malware |
Necro Python Malware Upgrades With New Exploits and Crypto Mining Capabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/necro-python-malware-upgrades-with-new.html | New upgrades have been made to a Python-based "self-replicating, polymorphic bot" called Necro in what's seen as an attempt to improve its chances of infecting vulnerable systems and evading detection.
"Although the bot was originally discovered earlier this year, the latest activity shows numerous changes to the bot, ranging from different command-and-control (C2) communications and the addition of new exploits for spreading, most notably vulnerabilities in VMWare vSphere, SCO OpenServer, Vesta Control Panel and SMB-based exploits that were not present in the earlier iterations of the code," researchers from Cisco Talos said in a deep-dive published today.
Said to be in development as far back as 2015, Necro (aka N3Cr0m0rPh) targets both Linux and Windows devices, with heightened activity observed at the start of the year as part of a malware campaign dubbed "FreakOut" that was found exploiting vulnerabilities in network-attached storage (NAS) devices running on Linux machines to co-opt the machines into a botnet for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and mining Monero cryptocurrency.
In addition to its DDoS and RAT-like functionalities to download and launch additional payloads, Necro is designed with stealth in mind by installing a rootkit that hides its presence on the system. What's more, the bot also injects malicious code to retrieve and execute a JavaScript-based miner from a remote server into HTML and PHP files on infected systems.
While previous versions of the malware exploited flaws in Liferay Portal, Laminas Project, and TerraMaster, the latest variants observed on May 11 and 18 feature command injection exploits targeting Vesta Control Panel, ZeroShell 3.9.0, SCO OpenServer 5.0.7, as well as a remote code execution flaw impacting VMWare vCenter (CVE-2021-21972) that was patched by the company in February.
A version of the botnet, released on May 18, also includes exploits for EternalBlue (CVE-2017-0144) and EternalRomance (CVE-2017-0145), both of which abuse a remote code execution vulnerability in Windows SMB protocol. These new additions serve to highlight that the malware author is actively developing new methods of spreading by taking advantage of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.
Also of note is the incorporation of a polymorphic engine to mutate its source code with every iteration while keeping the original algorithm intact in a "rudimentary" attempt to limit the chances of being detected.
"Necro Python bot shows an actor that follows the latest development in remote command execution exploits on various web applications and includes the new exploits into the bot," Talos researchers said. "This increases its chances of spreading and infecting systems. Users need to make sure to regularly apply the latest security updates to all of the applications, not just operating systems."
| Cyber_Attack |
Critical Flaws in MySQL Give Hackers Root Access to Server (Exploits Released) | https://thehackernews.com/2016/11/mysql-zero-day-exploits.html | Over a month ago we reported about two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in the world's 2nd most popular database management software MySQL:
MySQL Remote Root Code Execution (CVE-2016-6662)
Privilege Escalation (CVE-2016-6663)
At that time, Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers who discovered these vulnerabilities published technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code for the first bug only and promised to release details of the second bug (CVE-2016-6663) later.
On Tuesday, Golunski has released proof-of-concept (POC) exploits for two vulnerabilities:
One is the previously promised critical privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2016-6663), and another is a new root privilege escalation bug (CVE-2016-6664) that could allow an attacker to take full control over the database.
Both the vulnerabilities affect MySQL version 5.5.51 and earlier, MySQL version 5.6.32 and earlier, and MySQL version 5.7.14 and earlier, as well as MySQL forks — Percona Server and MariaDB.
Privilege Escalation/Race Condition Bug (CVE-2016-6663)
The more severe of the two is the race condition bug (CVE-2016-6663) that can allow a low-privileged account (with CREATE/INSERT/SELECT grants) with access to the affected database to escalate their privileges and execute arbitrary code as the database system user (i.e. 'mysql').
Once exploited, an attacker could successfully gain access to all databases within the affected database server.
Root Privilege Escalation (CVE-2016-6664)
Another critical flaw in MySQL database is a root privilege escalation bug that could allow attackers with 'MySQL system user' privilege to further escalate their privileges to root user, allowing them to fully compromise the system.
The issue actually stems from unsafe file handling of error logs and other files, which comes under MySQL system user privileges, allowing it to be replaced with an arbitrary system file, which opens the door to root privileges.
What's more troublesome? An attacker with a low-privileged account can also achieve root privilege by first exploiting the Privilege Escalation flaw (CVE-2016-6663) to become 'MySQL system user' and thus allow attackers to fully compromise the targeted server.
All these vulnerabilities could be exploited in shared hosting environments where users are assigned access to separate databases. By exploiting the flaws, they could gain access to all databases.
Golunski has published the proof-of-concept exploit code (Exploit 1, Exploit 2) for both the flaws and will soon upload videos.
MySQL has fixed the vulnerabilities and all of the patches ultimately found their way into Oracle's quarterly Critical Patch Update last month.
Administrators are strongly advised to apply patches as soon as possible in order to avoid hackers seeking to exploit the vulnerabilities.
If you are unable to immediately apply patches, then as a temporary mitigation you can also disable symbolic link support within your database server configuration to this setting — my.cnf to symbolic-links = 0 — in an attempt to protect yourself against cyber attacks.
| Vulnerability |
Android Passwords are stored in plain text on Disk | https://thehackernews.com/2011/07/android-passwords-are-stored-in-plain.html | Android Passwords are stored in plain text on Disk
A Android user complain that , All passwords are stored in plane text on Disk via a message on discussion board of Android.
He said "The password for email accounts is stored into the SQLite DB which in turn stores it on the phone's file system in plain text.Encrypting or at least transforming the password would be desirable."
On this Android Support "Andy Stadler" Reply that :
Hello-
Thanks for the information and the feedback on this concern.
First, I would like to reiterate the notes made by a couple of you, which is to remind users that if you are concerned about this issue, *please* simply click the star. Every time you respond "please fix" or "should be fixed!" it sends email to over 200 people.
Second, please know that we take information security very seriously, and this is baked into the Android platform at multiple levels.
Now, with respect to this particular concern. The first thing to clarify is that the Email app supports four protocols - POP3, IMAP, SMTP, and Exchange ActiveSync - and with very few, very limited exceptions, all of these are older protocols which require that the client present the password to the server on every connection. These protocols require us to retain the password for as long as you wish to use the account on the device. Newer protocols don't do this - this is why some of the articles have been contrasting with Gmail, for example. Newer protocols allow the client to use the password one time to generate a token, save the token, and discard the password.
I urge you to review the article linked to in comment #38, which is well-written and quite informative. It provides some very good background on the difference between "obscuring" passwords, and making them truly "secure". Simply obscuring your password (e.g. base64) or encrypting it with a key stored elsewhere will *not* make your password or your data more secure. An attacker will still be able to retrieve it.
(In particular, some claims have been made about some of the other email clients not storing the password in cleartext. Even where this is true, it does not indicate that the password is more secure. A simple test: if you can boot up the device and it will begin receiving email on your configured accounts, then the passwords are not truly secure. They are either obfuscated, or encrypted with another key stored somewhere else.)
To the author of comment #44: If you can obtain *any* data from files in /data/data/* on a non-rooted device, this is a security problem in the device, not a bug in the Email program. I urge you to contact our security team and provide more information (details here: https://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/faq/security.html)
Having said all this - rest assured, I am not closing this bug. We recognize that this is causing concern for some users, and we're going to look at identifying steps that can make your data more secure.
Andy Stadler
[email protected]
Every User Request to Fix this Problem as soon as Possible. We hope via this article of THN , other Security experts will also share their review and solutions with Us and Google :)
| Vulnerability |
Print of one malicious document can expose your whole LAN | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/print-of-one-malicious-document-can.html | Print of one malicious document can expose your whole LAN
This year at Chaos Communications Congress (28C3) Ang Cui presents Print Me If You Dare, in which he explained how he reverse-engineered the firmware-update process for HPs hundreds of millions of printers and In Andrei Costin's presentation "Hacking MFPs" he covered the history of printer and copier hacks from the 1960s to today.
Cui discovered that he could load arbitrary software into any printer by embedding it in a malicious document or by connecting to the printer online. As part of his presentation, he performed two demonstrations: in the first, he sent a document to a printer that contained a malicious version of the OS that caused it to copy the documents it printed and post them to an IP address on the Internet; in the second, he took over a remote printer with a malicious document, caused that printer to scan the LAN for vulnerable PCs, compromise a PC, and turn it into a proxy that gave him access through the firewall.
Costin found a method to exploit the firmware update capability of certain Xerox MFPs to upload his crafted PostScript code. He was able to run code to dump memory from the printer. This could allow an attacker to grab passwords for the administration interface or access or print PIN-protected documents.
MFPs are trusted devices connected to the office network, but sometimes they're also accessible from the Internet. The numbers of publicly accessible office MFPs range in the tens of thousands. An attacker could craft PostScript code tied with exploits from the Metasploit framework and upload it to an MFP to attack a corporate network.
Cui's technique for infecting printers involves the more limited Printer Job Language, rather than PostScript, and injects code into processes running on the printer. This was effectively a custom rootkit for the printer's OS. Cui gave HP a month to issue patches for the vulnerabilities he discovered, and HP now has new firmware available that fixes this (his initial disclosure was misreported in the press as making printers vulnerable to being overheated and turning into "flaming death bombs" he showed a lightly singed sheet of paper that represented the closest he could come to this claim). He urges anyone with an HP printer to apply the latest patch, because malware could be crafted to take over your printer and then falsely report that it has accepted the patch while discarding it.
The vulnerability was disclosed to HP, and updates for infected printers were released last week.
[Source]
| Malware |
Hackers-For-Hire Group Develops New 'PowerPepper' In-Memory Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/hackers-for-hire-group-develops-new.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed details of a previously undiscovered in-memory Windows backdoor developed by a hacker-for-hire operation that can execute remotely malicious code and steal sensitive information from its targets in Asia, Europe, and the US.
Dubbed "PowerPepper" by Kaspersky researchers, the malware has been attributed to the DeathStalker group (formerly called Deceptikons), a threat actor that has been found to hit law firms and companies in the financial sector located in Europe and the Middle East at least since 2012.
The hacking tool is so-called because of its reliance on steganographic trickery to deliver the backdoor payload in the form of an image of ferns or peppers.
The espionage group first came to light earlier this July, with most of their attacks starting with a spear-phishing email containing a malicious modified LNK (shortcut) file that, when clicked, downloads and runs a PowerShell-based implant named Powersing.
While their objectives don't appear to be financially motivated, their continued interest in collecting crucial business information led Kaspersky to the conclusion that "DeathStalker is a group of mercenaries offering hacking-for-hire services, or acting as some sort of information broker in financial circles."
PowerPepper now joins the group's list of expanding and evolving toolsets.
Spotted in the wild in mid-July 2020, this new strain of malware gets dropped from a decoy Word document and leverages DNS over HTTPS (DoH) as a communications channel to transmit encrypted malicious shell commands from an attacker-controlled server.
The spear-phishing emails come with themes as varied as carbon emission regulations, travel booking, and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, with the Word documents having social engineering banners urging users to enable macros in a bid to lure an unsuspecting user into downloading the backdoor.
To achieve its goals, the implant sends DNS requests to name servers — servers that store the DNS records — associated with a malicious C2 domain, which then sends back the command to be run in the form of an embedded response. Upon execution, the results are beamed to the server through a batch of DNS requests.
Besides leveraging macro-based and LNK-based delivery chains to deploy the malware, DeathStalker employed "obfuscation, execution and masquerading tricks to hinder detection, or deceive targets that are curious about what is happening on their computers," Kaspersky's Pierre Delcher noted.
Chief among them are the capabilities to hide malicious execution workflow in Word embedded shape and object properties and use Windows Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files as archives for malicious files.
Multiple mercenary groups have been seen in the wild before, including BellTroX (aka Dark Basin), Bahamut, and CostaRicto, all of whom have deployed custom malware to breach systems belonging to financial institutions and government officials.
"It only seems fair to write that DeathStalker tried hard to develop evasive, creative and intricate tools with this PowerPepper implant and associated delivery chains," Delcher concluded.
"There is nothing particularly sophisticated about the techniques and tricks that are leveraged, yet the whole toolset has proved to be effective, is pretty well put together, and shows determined efforts to compromise various targets around the world."
To safeguard against PowerPepper delivery and execution, it is recommended that businesses and users update their CMS backends as well as associated plugins, restrict PowerShell use on end-user computers with enforced execution policies, and refrain from opening Windows shortcuts attached to emails, or click links in emails from unknown senders.
| Cyber_Attack |
How to Secure Your Mid-Size Organization From the Next Cyber Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/cyber-security-webinars.html | If you are responsible for the cybersecurity of a medium-sized company, you may assume your organization is too small to be targeted. Well, think again.
While the major headlines tend to focus on large enterprises getting breached – such as Sony, Equifax, or Target the actual reality is that small and mid-sized companies are experiencing similar threats.
According to Verizon's 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, fifty-eight percent of malware attack victims are SMBs.
Added to this is the fact that attack vectors that target small and medium-sized businesses are growing increasingly sophisticated, which makes securing them respectively challenging, and the trend of targeting ransomware campaigns on smaller organizations, as attackers assume smaller outfits are more likely to quickly pay in order to avoid damage to their business and reputation.
Cisco's 2018 Security Capabilities Benchmark Study states that 44 percent of cyber attacks cost organizations over $500,000 in financial damages. To put it simply, the cost of being breached is rising.
That said, there is a lot you can do to enhance your security posture within your available resources.
Ensure that your organization has basic security hygiene processes in place. This includes employee cyber safety training, implementing unique IDs, password management and general cyber education.
Set system access limitations for employees and third-party vendors so that people only access the data they actually need.
Ensure that your systems and apps across the network, your databases and servers are updated and patched
Utilize an updated and robust anti-malware solution, that provides security across your entire environment.
Have an incident response plan in place, so that you can quickly respond in the event of a breach.
Want to hear first-hand advice from an experienced CISO? Join this webinar on Wednesday, January 30, 2019, at 1:00 PM EST as Wade P. Richmond, founder, and CEO of CISO ToGo, talks about what SMBs can do to protect their network from cyber attacks effectively.
Sign up for the webinar here, and we'll send you a registration email. See you on January 30, 2019, at 1:00 PM EST to discuss how you can effectively secure your SMB organization from cyber attack.
| Cyber_Attack |
Face to Face with Duqu malware | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/face-to-face-with-duqu-malware.html | Face to Face with Duqu malware
Once again we discuss about Stuxnet, cyber weapons and of the malware that appears derivate from the dangerous virus. The international scientific community has defined a Stuxnet deadly weapon because been designed with a detailed analysis of final target environment supported by a meticulous intelligence work that for the first time in history has embraced the world of information technology.
The agent was designed with the intent to strike the Iranian nuclear program and even more clear is who has always opposed such a program, U.S. and Israel first, and consider also the technology skill necessary to develope a weapon with the observed architecture is really high.
Extremely important two factors af the event:
1. the choose of control systems as target of the malware.
2. the conception of the virus as an open project, a modular system for which it was designed a development platform used to assemble the deadly cyber weapons in relation to the final targets.
Regarding the second point, it has been discovered a platform behind Stuxnet called "Tilded Platform", used also for the development of Duqu malware, and that make possible the development of a set of reusable tools, a true innovation that make possible the composition of ever new and enhanced agents with modules developed to fulfill specific functions against clearly defined targets.
As previously stated Duqu has some interesting features such as:
Modularity of its structure.
In isolated instances of the malware, unlike Stuxnet, it would not seem to be equipped with modules for SCADA systems attack. It is only able to steal information from the host system.
The malware, such as Stuxnet has characteristics that demonstrate innovative techniques behind its development. We suppose that a team of specialists with high technical skills has been engaged to project the most innovative cyber weapon.
According the ENISA Duqu Analysis there are important differences between Duqu and Stuxnet. The 2010 Kaspersky analysis [Gostev 2011] concluded that Stuxnet consists of the two parts:
1. A component responsible for the propagation of the malware (a carrier platform).
2. A separate module targeting Programmable Logic Controllers (an attack module).
According to Kaspersky, the carrier platform of Stuxnet could be reused, for example with a different attack module. But, unlike Stuxnet, DuQu can also be reconfigured remotely to install new malware payloads and to direct attacks at new targets.
The attack module of DuQu, found together with the detected samples was a general purpose keylogger (enriched with some additional spying capabilities) able to perform a reconnaissance in any organization. However, according to Symantec, the aim of DuQu is to infiltrate organizations operating in industrial environments. This conclusion is based on the fact that the majority of the detected threats were found in industrial infrastructures, and because of the connection to Stuxnet code. Unlike Stuxnet, DuQu is an intelligence gathering tool, apparently aiming to prepare the ground for attacks such as Stuxnet. It should be emphasised, however that there is no direct evidence for the intentions behind DuQu
But if Duqu has no components to attack SCADA systems or similar, why create in us so much worry? Remember that we defined modular Duqu? Well this is the feature I think that should cause us to jump from the chair. To date we have isolated versions of malware orphan of those components to attack specific critical systems, but it is reasonable to assume that the same Duqu is a work in progress project. The ability to compose its structure at different times using modules designed specifically for precise goals, makes this unique and formidable.
What occurred in the Stuxnet case has raised media attention demonstrating the total inadequacy of the defense systems of critical infrastructures across the world. Many, too many, the SCADA systems around the world, achievable in an easy manner and easily attacked by evil-minded because they are un protected, exposed on the web for maintenance purpose, and configured with the factory settings easily available even with simple searches on the web. Also for that SCADA systems deployed without security and isolated from the Internet there is a concrete risk to be infected using USB memory sticks.
While in recent weeks, the Iranian government declared definitively defeat the threat Stuxnet in the last month there are many news published on the web related to malware Duqu.
The mistery of Duqu sorce code
The first one was related the identification of the mysterious language used in the DuQu virus. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab requested the help of international experts after failing to figure out the language on their own.
Thanks to help from programmers has been discovered that the language, which DuQu used to communicate with C&C (command & control) servers, is a special type of C code compiled with the Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008.
Despite the long period of study conducted on the agent the component of the source written in C remained a mystery. It's a vital part for Duqu used to communicate with C&C servers, download additional payload modules and execute them on infected machines.
The code was C code compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008 using options 01 and Ob1 in the compiler to keep the code small optimizing execution time and size of the source code.
The use of object-oriented C dialect, generally called "OO C, to write the event-driven code in the malware reveals that authors who coded this part of DuQu were probably old-school programmers, their style is uncommon for malware and is more commonly found in professionally-produced commercial software created ten years ago, according Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab's global research and analysis team.
Another important factor in choose of C language instead other more powerful like C++ it the necessity to grant portability of the agent that maybe must be compiled with several standard compiler in different environments. This requirement indicate us that the agent could be used to attack other platforms, not necessary Widows based.
"Obviously when you create such a complex espionage tool, you take into account that maybe some day you will run it on servers, maybe you will want to run it on mobile phones or God knows what other devices, so you just want to make sure your code will work everywhere," Raiu says.
The Duqu evolution
News of these days is that a new variant of Duqu has been isolated, the event confirm the hypothesis made on the evolution of the malware, a work still in progress that will propose in the next year several instances customized to attacks specific targets. The variant found was designed to evade detection mechanism of antivirus products and other security systems. Vikram Thakur, principal security response manager at Symantec, announced that the new Duqu Driver has been identified, let's remind that the module is used for loading the malware's encrypted body stored on the systems. The driver is called mcd9x86.sys and it was compiled on Feb. 23.
What is changed in the new driver?
The source code appears to be reshuffled and compiled with a different set of options and it also contains a different subroutine for decrypting the configuration block and loading the malware's body. A similar operation has been already observed in October 2011. Of course also the references to C&C server are changed because all old structures were shut down on Oct. 20, 2011.
Unfortunately the addresses of this server are not known because principal security firm don't have the full Duqu body but only the loader in the form of the driver, the loader does not contact the C&C directly, it only loads the main body which is stored in encrypted form.
What we expect from the future?
Surely we will confront with new and dangerous cyber threats that can offend the military and also private sector. Agents such as Stuxnet and Duqu are children of an ambitious and complex project that wants to be able to provide an "evolutionary" threat. Prepare to have to deal with new modules and new features designed to attack specific targets.
Let me raise serious doubts on the immediate effectiveness of preventive measures against this new generation of cyber weapons because the industry in general is still too vulnerable. Possible evolutions of malware could cause serious damage to infrastructures that use the systems in question.
The only way to emerge unscathed from this awkward situation is a close collaboration between industry, leading manufacturers of control systems and governments, hoping that security will become a requirement in the design phase.
Submitted By : Pierluigi Paganini
About the Author : Pierluigi Paganini, Security Specialist
CEH - Certified Ethical Hacker, EC Council
Security Affairs ( https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress )
Email : [email protected]
| Malware |
Oracle Issues Emergency Java Update for Windows | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/oracle-issues-emergency-java-update-for.html | The US-based software maker Oracle delivered an unusual out-of-box emergency patch for Java in an effort to fix a during-installation flaw on the Windows platforms.
The successful exploitation of the critical vulnerability, assigned CVE-2016-0603, could allow an attacker to trick an unsuspecting user into visiting a malicious website and downloading files to the victim's system before installing Java 6, 7 or 8.
Although the vulnerability is considered relatively complex to exploit, a successful attack results in "complete compromise" of the target's machine.
What You Need to Know About the Java Exploit
The successful attack requires an attacker to trick a suitably unskilled user for opening a Java release even though the user is nowhere near the Java Website.
Since the existence of the loophole is only during the installation process, users are not required to upgrade their existing Java installations in order to address the vulnerability.
"However, Java users who have downloaded any old version of Java before 6u113, 7u97 or 8u73, should discard these old downloads and replace them with 6u113, 7u97 or 8u73 or later," says Eric Maurice, Oracle security blogger.
Patch Now! Java Update Released
Not much details about the flaw have been known yet, neither Oracle has provided any public information on the nature of the vulnerability.
However, due to the threat posed by a successful attack, we strongly recommend customers to apply the emergency patch as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Password-Guessing Was Used to Hack Gentoo Linux Github Account | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/github-hacking-gentoo-linux.html | Maintainers of the Gentoo Linux distribution have now revealed the impact and "root cause" of the attack that saw unknown hackers taking control of its GitHub account last week and modifying the content of its repositories and pages.
The hackers not only managed to change the content in compromised repositories but also locked out Gentoo developers from their GitHub organisation.
As a result of the incident, the developers were unable to use GitHub for five days.
What Went Wrong?
Gentoo developers have revealed that the attackers were able to gain administrative privileges for its Github account, after guessing the account password.
The organisation could have been saved if it was using a two-factor authentication, which requires an additional passcode besides the password in order to gain access to the account.
"The attacker gained access to a password of an organization administrator. Evidence collected suggests a password scheme where disclosure on one site made it easy to guess passwords for unrelated web pages," Gentoo wrote in its incident report.
Besides this, Gentoo developers did not also have a backup copy of its GitHub Organization detail. What's more? The systemd repo was also not mirrored from Gentoo but was stored directly on GitHub.
What Went Well? (Luckily)
However, Gentoo believed the project got lucky that the attack was "loud," as knocking all other developers out of the targeted GitHub account caused them to be emailed.
Quick action from both Gentoo and Github put an end to the attack in about 70 minutes.
"The attack was loud; removing all developers caused everyone to get emailed," the Gentoo maintainers said. "Given the credential taken, it's likely a quieter attack would have provided a longer opportunity window."
Moreover, the report also added that by force pushing commits that attempted to remove all files, the attacker made "downstream consumption more conspicuous," which could have eventually "blocked git from silently pulling in new content to existing checkouts on 'git pull'."
As the project previously said, the main Gentoo repositories are kept on Gentoo hosted infrastructure, and Gentoo mirrors to GitHub in order to "be where the contributors are."
Therefore, the private keys of the account were not impacted by the incident, and so the Gentoo-hosted infrastructure.
Impact of the Cyber Attack
As a result of the incident, the Gentoo Proxy Maintainers Project was impacted as many proxy maintainers contributors use GitHub to submit pull requests, and all past pull requests were also disconnected from their original commits and closed.
The attackers also attempted to add "rm -rf" commands to various repositories, which if executed, would have deleted user data recursively. However, this code was unlikely to be executed by end users due to various technical guards in place.
rm is a Unix command which is used for removing files, directories and similar, and rm -rf denotes a more forcible removal, which "would cause every file accessible from the present file system to be deleted from the machine."
Steps Taken to Prevent Future Cyber Attacks
Following the incident, Gentoo has taken many actions to prevent such attacks in the future. These actions include:
Making frequent backups of its GitHub Organization.
Enabling two-factor authentication by default in Gentoo's GitHub Organization, which will eventually come to all users the project's repositories.
Working on an incident response plan, particularly for sharing information about a security incident with users.
Tightening up procedures around credential revocation.
Reducing the number of users with elevated privileges, auditing logins, and publishing password policies that mandate password managers.
Introducing support for hardware-based 2FA for Gentoo developers
Currently, it is not known who was behind the Gentoo Hack. Gentoo did not say if the incident has been reported to law enforcement to hunt for the hacker(s).
| Cyber_Attack |
Bamital botnet servers seized by Microsoft and Symantec | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/bamital-botnet-servers-seized-by.html | Microsoft teamed up with Symantec to take down a nasty malware affecting thousands upon thousands of PCs. Bamital botnet hijacked people's search experiences and redirected victims to potentially dangerous sites that could leave them vulnerable to other online threats and steal their personal information.
Experts from the organizations obtained a court order and shut down servers at a data center in New Jersey and convinced operators in Virginia to shut down a server they control in the Netherlands on Wednesday.
The Bamital botnet threatened the US$12.7 billion online advertising industry by generating fraudulent clicks on Internet ads. Microsoft's research shows that Bamital hijacked more than 8 million computers over the past two years. Microsoft says that the botnet affected many major search engines and browsers including Bing, Yahoo, and Google offerings.
Bamital's organizers also had the ability to take control of infected PCs, installing other types of computer viruses that could engage in identity theft, recruit PCs into networks that attack websites and conduct other types of computer crimes.
Now that the servers have been shut down, users of infected PCs will be directed to a site informing them that their machines are infected with malicious software when they attempt to search the web.
It was the sixth time that Microsoft has obtained a court order to disrupt a botnet since 2010. Botnets are an increasing problem for security firms and computer users alike.
Their complaint identified 18 "John Doe" ringleaders, scattered from Russia and Romania to Britain, the United States and Australia, who registered websites and rented servers used in the operation under fictitious names.
| Malware |
11 Million Ashley Madison Passwords Cracked In Just 10 Days | https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/ashley-madison-password-cracked.html | Last month, when hackers leaked nearly 100 gigabytes of sensitive data belonging to the popular online casual sex and marriage affair website 'Ashley Madison', there was at least one thing in favor of 37 Million cheaters that their Passwords were encrypted.
But, the never ending saga of Ashley Madison hack could now definitely hit the cheaters hard, because a group of crazy Password Cracking Group, which calls itself CynoSure Prime, has cracked more than 11 Million user passwords just in the past 10 days, not years.
Yes, the hashed passwords that were previously thought to be cryptographically protected using Bcrypt, have now been cracked successfully.
Bcrypt is a cryptographic algorithm that makes the hashing process so slow that it would literally take centuries to brute-force all of the Ashley Madison account passwords.
How do they Crack Passwords?
The Password cracking team identified a weakness after reviewing the leaked data, which included users' hashed passwords, executive e-mails and website source code.
During website's source code audit and analysis, the team found that some of the login tokens used by the website were protected using MD5 (a weak and fast hashing algorithm).
So, instead of cracking the slow Bcrypt algorithm, they simply brute-forced the MD5 tokens of respective accounts, which allowed the Password Cracking team to effectively obtain 11.2 Million passwords in plaintext format.
Also Read: Best Password Manager — For Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS and Enterprise
However, this approach doesn't allow to crack all 37 million Ashley Madison passwords, because the notoriously weak MD5 hashing algorithm was only introduced on June 2012.
Therefore, researchers estimated that nearly 15 million Ashley Madison accounts could be affected, out of which 11.4 Million are already cracked by the team's password-cracking software.
Change Your Ashley Madison Password Now!
Researchers also claimed that they hope to crack the remaining 4 Million improperly secured account passwords within next 7-8 days.
Ashley Madison users are advised to change their account passwords if they haven't already changed them.
Moreover, the users need to follow some standard prevention practice, such as:
Do not use the same login credentials on other websites, like eBay or PayPal, as hackers could break into that account using the cracked password and the already dumped email addresses.
Use strong and different passwords on different sites.
Use a reputed and Best Password Manager to manage all your passwords.
Further Related Reading:
Ashley Madison Hackers Released All the Stolen Data Online
Hackers Leak 20GB Data Dump, Including CEO's Emails
Ashley Madison Hacker – An Insider Woman Employee?
List of Top 10 Big Tech Companies where Ashley Madison is very Popular
Disgusting! Ashley Madison was Building an App – 'What's your Wife Worth?'
Lessons We Learned From Ashley Madison Data Breach
| Data_Breaches |
Citrix Releases Patches for Critical ADC Vulnerability Under Active Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/citrix-adc-patch-update.html | Citrix has finally started rolling out security patches for a critical vulnerability in ADC and Gateway software that attackers started exploiting in the wild earlier this month after the company announced the existence of the issue without releasing any permanent fix.
I wish I could say, "better late than never," but since hackers don't waste time or miss any opportunity to exploit vulnerable systems, even a short window of time resulted in the compromise of hundreds of Internet exposed Citrix ADC and Gateway systems.
As explained earlier on The Hacker News, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-19781, is a path traversal issue that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on several versions of Citrix ADC and Gateway products, as well as on the two older versions of Citrix SD-WAN WANOP.
Rated critical with CVSS v3.1 base score 9.8, the issue was discovered by Mikhail Klyuchnikov, a security researcher at Positive Technologies, who responsibly reported it to Citrix in early December.
The vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild since last week by dozens of hacking groups and individual attackers—thanks to the public release of multiple proofs-of-concept exploit code.
According to cyber security experts, as of today, there are over 15,000 publicly accessible vulnerable Citrix ADC and Gateway servers that attackers can exploit overnight to target potential enterprise networks.
FireEye experts found an attack campaign where someone was compromising vulnerable Citrix ADCs to install a previously-unseen payload, dubbed "NotRobin," that scans systems for cryptominers and malware deployed by other potential attackers and removes them to maintain exclusive backdoor access.
#Citrix released a free tool that analyzes available log sources and system forensic artifacts to identify whether an ADC appliance has potentially been compromised using CVE-2019-19781 security flaw.
You can find the tool and instructions here: https://t.co/eewijzI2l9#infosec https://t.co/YKMwgPzmYE
— The Hacker News (@TheHackersNews) January 22, 2020
"This actor exploits NetScaler devices using CVE-2019-19781 to execute shell commands on the compromised device," FireEye said.
"FireEye believes that the actor behind NOTROBIN has been opportunistically compromising NetScaler devices, possibly to prepare for an upcoming campaign. They remove other known malware, potentially to avoid detection by administrators."
Citrix Patch Timeline: Stay Tuned for More Software Updates!
Last week Citrix announced a timeline, promising to release patched firmware updates for all supported versions of ADC and Gateway software before the end of January 2020, as shown in the chart.
As part of its first batch of updates, Citrix today released permanent patches for ADC versions 11.1 and 12.0 that also apply to "ADC and Gateway VPX hosted on ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, XenServer, Azure, AWS, GCP or on a Citrix ADC Service Delivery Appliance (SDX)."
"It is necessary to upgrade all Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 11.1 instances (MPX or VPX) to build 11.1.63.15 to install the security vulnerability fixes. It is necessary to upgrade all Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 12.0 instances (MPX or VPX) to build 12.0.63.13 to install the security vulnerability fixes," Citrix said in its advisory.
"We urge customers to install these fixes immediately," the company said. "If you have not already done so, you need to apply the previously supplied mitigation to ADC versions 12.1, 13, 10.5, and SD-WAN WANOP versions 10.2.6 and 11.0.3 until the fixes for those versions are available."
The company also warned that customers with multiple ADC versions in production must apply the correct version of patch to each system separately.
Besides installing available patches for supported versions and applying the recommended mitigation for unpatched systems, Citrix ADC administrators are also advised to monitor their device logs for attacks.
UPDATE — Citrix on Thursday also released second batch of permanent security patches for critical RCE vulnerability affecting ADC and Gateway versions 12.1 and 13.0.
| Vulnerability |
Marriott Faces $123 Million GDPR Fine Over Starwood Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/marriott-data-breach-gdpr.html | After fining British Airways with a record fine of £183 million earlier this week, the UK's data privacy regulator is now planning to slap world's biggest hotel chain Marriott International with a £99 million ($123 million) fine under GDPR over 2014 data breach.
This is the second major penalty notice in the last two days that hit companies for failing to protect its customers' personal and financial information compromised and implement adequate security measures.
In November 2018, Marriott discovered that unknown hackers compromised their guest reservation database through its Starwood hotels subsidiary and walked away with personal details of approximately 339 million guests.
The compromised database leaked guests' names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.
The breach, which likely happened in 2014, also exposed unencrypted passport numbers for at least 5 million users and credit card records of eight million customers.
According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), nearly 30 million residents of 31 countries in the European and 7 million UK residents were impacted by the Marriott data breach.
The ICO's investigation found that Marriott failed to undertake sufficient due diligence when it bought Starwood and should also have done more to secure its systems.
Last year, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in Europe that forces companies to make sure the way they collect, process, and store data are safe.
"The GDPR makes it clear that organizations must be accountable for the personal data they hold. This can include carrying out proper due diligence when making a corporate acquisition, and putting in place proper accountability measures to assess not only what personal data has been acquired, but also how it is protected," Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said.
"Personal data has real value so organizations have a legal duty to ensure its security, just like they would do with any other asset. If that doesn't happen, we will not hesitate to take strong action when necessary to protect the rights of the public."
Marriott International's president Arne Sorenson said the company was "disappointed" with the ICO's announcement and would contest the fine.
| Data_Breaches |
Skygofree — Powerful Android Spyware Discovered | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/android-spying-malware.html | Security researchers have unveiled one of the most powerful and highly advanced Android spyware tools that give hackers full control of infected devices remotely.
Dubbed Skygofree, the Android spyware has been designed for targeted surveillance, and it is believed to have been targeting a large number of users for the past four years.
Since 2014, the Skygofree implant has gained several novel features previously unseen in the wild, according to a new report published by Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Labs.
The 'remarkable new features' include location-based audio recording using device's microphone, the use of Android Accessibility Services to steal WhatsApp messages, and the ability to connect infected devices to malicious Wi-Fi networks controlled by attackers.
Skygofree is being distributed through fake web pages mimicking leading mobile network operators, most of which have been registered by the attackers since 2015—the year when the distribution campaign was most active, according to Kaspersky's telemetry data.
Italian IT Firm Behind Skygofree Spyware?
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab believe the hacker or hacking group behind this mobile surveillance tool has been active since 2014 and are based in Italy—the home for the infamous 'Hacking Team'—one of the world's bigger players in spyware trading.
"Given the many artifacts we discovered in the malware code, as well as infrastructure analysis, we are pretty confident that the developer of the Skygofree implants is an Italian IT company that works on surveillance solutions, just like HackingTeam," said the report.
Kaspersky found several Italian devices infected with Skygofree, which the firm described as one of the most powerful, advanced mobile implants it has ever seen.
Although the security firm has not confirmed the name of the Italian company behind this spyware, it found multiple references to Rome-based technology company "Negg" in the spyware's code. Negg is also specialised in developing and trading legal hacking tools.
Skygofree: Powerful Android Spyware Tool
Once installed, Skygofree hides its icon and starts background services to conceal further actions from the user. It also includes a self-protection feature, preventing services from being killed.
As of October last year, Skygofree became a sophisticated multi-stage spyware tool that gives attackers full remote control of the infected device using a reverse shell payload and a command and control (C&C) server architecture.
According to the technical details published by researchers, Skygofree includes multiple exploits to escalate privileges for root access, granting it ability to execute most sophisticated payloads on the infected Android devices.
One such payload allows the implant to execute shellcode and steal data belonging to other applications installed on the targeted devices, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, and Viber.
"There are multiple, exceptional capabilities: usage of multiple exploits for gaining root privileges, a complex payload structure, [and] never-before-seen surveillance features," the researchers said.
Skygofree's control (C&C) server also allows attackers to capture pictures and videos remotely, seize call records and SMS, as well as monitor the users' geolocation, calendar events and any information stored in the device's memory.
Besides this, Skygofree also can record audio via the microphone when the infected device was in a specified location and the ability to force the infected device to connect to compromised Wi-Fi networks controlled by the attacker, enabling man-in-the-middle attacks.
The spyware uses "the Android Accessibility Service to get information directly from the displayed elements on the screen, so it waits for the targeted application to be launched and then parses all nodes to find text messages," Kaspersky said.
Kaspersky researchers also found a variant of Skygofree targeting Windows users, suggesting the authors' next area of interest is the Windows platform.
The best way to prevent yourself from being a victim is to avoid downloading apps via third-party websites, app stores or links provided in SMS messages or emails.
| Malware |
Popular Netop Remote Learning Software Found Vulnerable to Hacking | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/popular-netops-remote-learning-software.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Sunday disclosed multiple critical vulnerabilities in remote student monitoring software Netop Vision Pro that a malicious attacker could abuse to execute arbitrary code and take over Windows computers.
"These findings allow for elevation of privileges and ultimately remote code execution which could be used by a malicious attacker within the same network to gain full control over students' computers," the McAfee Labs Advanced Threat Research team said in an analysis.
The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2021-27192, CVE-2021-27193, CVE-2021-27194, and CVE-2021-27195, were reported to Netop on December 11, 2020, after which the Denmark-based company fixed the issues in an update (version 9.7.2) released on February 25.
"Version 9.7.2 of Vision and Vision Pro is a maintenance release that addresses several vulnerabilities, such as escalating local privileges sending sensitive information in plain text," the company stated in its release notes.
Netop counts half of the Fortune 100 companies among its customers and connects more than 3 million teachers and students with its software. Netop Vision Pro allows teachers to remotely perform tasks on students' computers, such as monitoring and managing their screens in real time, restricting access to a list of allowed Web sites, launching applications, and even redirecting students' attention when they are distracted.
During the course of McAfee's investigation, several design flaws were uncovered, including:
CVE-2021-27194 - All network traffic between teacher and student is sent unencrypted and in clear text (e.g., Windows credentials and screenshots) without the ability to enable this during setup. In addition, screen captures are sent to the teacher as soon as they connect to a classroom to allow real-time monitoring.
CVE-2021-27195 - An attacker can monitor unencrypted traffic to impersonate a teacher and execute attack code on student machines by modifying the packet that contains the exact application to be executed, such as injecting additional PowerShell scripts.
CVE-2021-27192 - A "Technical Support" button in Netop's "about" menu can be exploited to gain privilege escalation as a "system" user and execute arbitrary commands, restart Netop, and shut down the computer.
CVE-2021-27193 - A privilege flaw in Netop's chat plugin could be exploited to read and write arbitrary files in a "working directory" that is used as a drop location for all files sent by the instructor. Worse, this directory location can be changed remotely to overwrite any file on the remote PC, including system executables.
CVE-2021-27193 is also rated 9.5 out of a maximum of 10 in the CVSS rating system, making it a critical vulnerability.
Needless to say, the consequences of such exploitation could be devastating. They range from the deployment of ransomware to the installation of keylogging software to the chaining of CVE-2021-27195 and CVE-2021-27193 to keep an eye on the webcams of individual computers running the software, McAfee warned.
While most of the vulnerabilities have been fixed, the fixes put in place by Netop still don't address the lack of network encryption, which is expected to be implemented in a future update.
"An attacker doesn't have to compromise the school network; all they need is to find any network where this software is accessible, such as a library, coffee shop or home network," said researchers Sam Quinn and Douglas McKee. "It doesn't matter where one of these student's PCs gets compromised, as a well-designed malware could lay dormant and scan each network the infected PC connects to until it finds other vulnerable instances of Netop Vision Pro to further propagate the infection."
"Once these machines have been compromised, the remote attacker has full control of the system since they inherit the System privileges. Nothing at this point, could stop an attacker running as 'system' from accessing any files, terminating any process, or reaping havoc on the compromised machine," they added.
The findings come at a time when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned last week of an increase in PYSA (aka Mespinoza) ransomware attacks targeting educational institutions in 12 U.S. states and the U.K.
We have asked Netop for more details on the security updates and will update this article as soon as we receive a response.
| Vulnerability |
Microsoft Seized No-IP Domains, Millions of Dynamic DNS Service Users Suffer Outage | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/microsoft-seized-no-ip-domains-millions.html | In an effort to crackdown on cyber crimes, Microsoft has taken a legal action against a malware network what it thought is responsible for more than 7.4 million infections of Windows PCs across the globe.
Millions of legitimate servers that rely on Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) from No-IP.com, owned by Vitalwerks Internet Solutions were blacked out on Monday after Microsoft seized their 23 domain names that were being used by malware developed in the Middle East and Africa.
No-IP FOR MALWARE OPERATORS
The Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) from No-IP.com works by mapping users' dynamic IP addresses to a customized No-IP sub-domain like yourhost.no-ip.org or yourhost.no-ip.biz. This mechanism allows users to connect to a system with dynamic IP address using a static No-IP sub-domain.
No doubt its a useful service, but Nevada-based No-IP Dynamic DNS (DDNS) service subdomains have been abused by creators of malware for infecting millions of computers with malicious software at large scale.
FAMOUS MALWARE FAMILIES USING No-IP SERVICE
Microsoft security research team began this operation under an order granted by a federal court in Nevada, and targeted traffic involving two malware families that abused No-IP services. The Windows malwares, which went by the names Bladabindi (aka NJrat) and Jenxcus (aka NJw0rm), use No-IP accounts to communicate with their creators in 93 percent of detected infections, which are the most prevalent among the 245 other pieces of malware currently exploiting No-IP domains.
In a blog post, Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel at Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, said Microsoft pursued the seizure for No-IP's role "in creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software—harming Microsoft, its customers and the public at large." He claimed.
LARGE SCALE MALWARE INFECTION AND ACCUSED AUTHORS
Over the past year, Microsoft security team has detected more than 7 million infections that makes use of Bladabindi and Jenxcus malware, in order to take control of users' computers, steal passwords, and turn on webcams and microphones.
Microsoft accused Kuwaiti national Naser Al Mutairi and Algerian national Mohamed Benabdellah of writing and distributing the Bladabindi and Jenxcus malware, respectively. Microsoft claims the developers have sold over 500 copies of the malicious software to crooks and cyber criminals, and promoted No-IP service to use with malware to help them covering their tracks.
In a civil case filed on June 19, Microsoft named two individuals, Mohamed Benabdellah and Naser Al Mutairi, and a U.S. company, Vitalwerks Internet Solutions of violating "federal and state law by distributing malicious software through more than 18,000 sub-domains belonging to No-IP, causing the unlawful intrusion into, infection of, and further illegal conduct involving, the personal computers of innocent persons, thereby causing harm to those persons, Microsoft, and the public at large."
Microsoft attorneys said No-IP is "functioning as a major hub for 245 different types of malware circulating on the Internet."
The court in Nevada has granted a temporary controlling order against No-IP and now the DNS traffic for the hostnames associated with malicious activity being funneled through Microsoft's servers:
ns7.microsoftinternetsafety.net
ns8.microsoftinternetsafety.net
MICROSOFT vs No-IP SERVICE
Microsoft claimed, "Despite numerous reports by the security community on No-IP domain abuse, the company has not taken sufficient steps to correct, remedy, prevent or control the abuse or help keep its domains safe from malicious activity.".
In an official statement, Vitalwerks counter-accused Microsoft for allegedly affecting millions of innocent users, who are currently experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft's attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors.
"Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives." No-IP Marketing Manager, Natalie Goguen said.
"Vitalwerks and No-IP have a very strict abuse policy. Our abuse team is constantly working to keep the No-IP system domains free of spam and malicious activity." Natalie Goguen said. "Even with such precautions, our free dynamic DNS service does occasionally fall prey to cyber scammers, spammers, and malware distributors. But this heavy-handed action by Microsoft benefits no one."
OTHER POPULAR No-IP LIKE SERVICES
There are dozens of No-IP like Free Dynamic Domain Name Services (DDNS) available the Internet, those are actively being used by malware authors/operators to distribute malwares. Example:
https://www.dnsdynamic.org/
https://www.changeip.com/
https://freedns.afraid.org/
https://www.dyndns.com/
and many more…
Microsoft advised all of them to follow the Industry best security practices, in order to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to operate anonymously and harder to victimize people online.
Boscovich went on to say, "As malware authors continue to pollute the Internet, domain owners must act responsibly by monitoring for and defending against cyber crime on their infrastructure. If free Dynamic DNS providers like No-IP exercise care and follow industry best practices, it will be more difficult for cybercriminals to operate anonymously and harder to victimize people online."
However, No-IP has not created the malware, but the service has not taken strict steps to keep its domains safe from malicious activity. Microsoft said the case and operation is ongoing. Stay Tuned for more updates.
| Malware |
Hackers Spread BIOPASS Malware via Chinese Online Gambling Sites | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/hackers-spread-biopass-malware-via.html | Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a new malware that's striking online gambling companies in China via a watering hole attack to deploy either Cobalt Strike beacons or a previously undocumented Python-based backdoor called BIOPASS RAT that takes advantage of Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio's live-streaming app to capture the screen of its victims.
The attack involves deceiving gaming website visitors into downloading a malware loader camouflaged as a legitimate installer for popular-but-deprecated apps such as Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight, only for the loader to act as a conduit for fetching next-stage payloads.
Specifically, the websites' online support chat pages are booby-trapped with malicious JavaScript code, which is used to deliver the malware to the victims.
"BIOPASS RAT possesses basic features found in other malware, such as file system assessment, remote desktop access, file exfiltration, and shell command execution," Trend Micro researchers noted in an analysis published Friday. "It also has the ability to compromise the private information of its victims by stealing web browser and instant messaging client data."
OBS Studio is an open-source software for video recording and live streaming, enabling users to stream to Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms.
Besides featuring an array of capabilities that run the typical spyware gamut, BIOPASS is equipped to establish live streaming to a cloud service under the attacker's control via Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), in addition to communicating with the command-and-control (C2) server using the Socket.IO protocol.
The malware, which is said to be under active development, is also notable for its focus on stealing private data from web browsers and instant messaging apps chiefly popular in Mainland China, including QQ Browser, 2345 Explorer, Sogou Explorer, and 360 Safe Browser, WeChat, QQ, and Aliwangwang.
It isn't clear exactly as to who is behind this malware strain, but Trend Micro researchers said they found overlaps between BIOPASS and that of TTPs often associated with the Winnti Group (aka APT41), a sophisticated Chinese hacking group specialized in cyber espionage attacks, based on the use of stolen certificates and a Cobalt Strike binary that was previously attributed to the threat actor.
What's more, the same Cobalt Strike binary has also been connected to a cyber attack targeting MonPass, a major certification authority (CA) in Mongolia, earlier this year wherein its installer software was tampered with to install Cobalt Strike beacon payloads on infected systems.
"BIOPASS RAT is a sophisticated type of malware that is implemented as Python scripts," the researchers said. "Given that the malware loader was delivered as an executable disguised as a legitimate update installer on a compromised website, [...] it is recommended to download apps only from trusted sources and official websites to avoid being compromised."
| Malware |
Digitally Signed Bandook Malware Once Again Targets Multiple Sectors | https://thehackernews.com/2020/11/digitally-signed-bandook-malware-once.html | A cyberespionage group with suspected ties to the Kazakh and Lebanese governments has unleashed a new wave of attacks against a multitude of industries with a retooled version of a 13-year-old backdoor Trojan.
Check Point Research called out hackers affiliated with a group named Dark Caracal in a new report published yesterday for their efforts to deploy "dozens of digitally signed variants" of the Bandook Windows Trojan over the past year, thus once again "reigniting interest in this old malware family."
The different verticals singled out by the threat actor include government, financial, energy, food industry, healthcare, education, IT, and legal institutions located in Chile, Cyprus, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey, and the US.
The unusually large variety of targeted markets and locations "reinforces a previous hypothesis that the malware is not developed in-house and used by a single entity, but is part of an offensive infrastructure sold by a third party to governments and threat actors worldwide, to facilitate offensive cyber operations," the researchers said.
Dark Caracal's extensive use of Bandook RAT to execute espionage on a global scale was first documented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Lookout in early 2018, with the group attributed to the theft of enterprise intellectual property and personally identifiable information from thousands of victims spanning over 21 countries.
The prolific group, which has operated at least since 2012, has been linked to the Lebanese General Directorate of General Security (GDGS), deeming it a nation-state level advanced persistent threat.
The concurrent use of the same malware infrastructure by different groups for seemingly unrelated campaigns led the EFF and Lookout to surmise that the APT actor "either uses or manages the infrastructure found to be hosting a number of widespread, global cyberespionage campaigns."
Now the same group is back at it with a new strain of Bandook, with added efforts to thwart detection and analysis, per Check Point Research.
A Three-Stage Infection Chain
The infection chain is a three-stage process that begins with a lure Microsoft Word document (e.g. "Certified documents.docx") delivered inside a ZIP file that, when opened, downloads malicious macros, which subsequently proceeds to drop and execute a second-stage PowerShell script encrypted inside the original Word document.
In the last phase of the attack, this PowerShell script is used to download encoded executable parts from cloud storage services like Dropbox or Bitbucket in order to assemble the Bandook loader, which then takes the responsibility of injecting the RAT into a new Internet Explorer process.
The Bandook RAT — commercially available starting in 2007 — comes with all the capabilities typically associated with backdoors in that it establishes contact with a remotely-controlled server to receive additional commands ranging from capturing screenshots to carrying out various file-related operations.
But according to the cybersecurity firm, the new variant of Bandook is a slimmed-down version of the malware with support for only 11 commands, while prior versions were known to feature as many as 120 commands, suggesting the operators' desire to reduce the malware's footprint and evade detection against high-profile targets.
That's not all. Not only valid certificates issued by Certum were used to sign this trimmed version of the malware executable, Check Point researchers uncovered two more samples — full-fledged digitally-signed and unsigned variants — which they believe are operated and sold by a single entity.
"Although not as capable, nor as practiced in operational security like some other offensive security companies, the group behind the infrastructure in these attacks seems to improve over time, adding several layers of security, valid certificates and other techniques, to hinder detection and analysis of its operations," the researchers concluded.
| Malware |
Most Vulnerable Smart Cities to Cyber Attack on Internet of Things (IoT) | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/smart-city-cyber-attack.html | Imagine…
You drive to work in your Smart-Car connected to the GPS automatically, but a hacker breaks into your car's network, takes control of the steering wheel, crashes you into a tree, and BOOM!
Believe it or not, such cyber attacks on smart devices are becoming reality.
Car Hacking was recently demonstrated by a pair of security researchers who controlled a Jeep Cherokee remotely from miles away, which shows a rather severe threat to the growing market of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Internet of Things (IoT) — A technology that connects objects to a network or the Internet, and enables interaction among varied devices such as:
Smart Cars
Smart TVs
Refrigerators
Wearables
Routers
Other embedded computing as well as non-computing devices.
Few days back, I had read about Smart Dustbins that are the latest smart objects to become Wi-Fi-enabled.
Internet of Things to make Cities Smart or Dumb?
Cities around the world are becoming increasingly smarter and more connected to the Internet in an attempt to add convenience and ease to daily activities.
By 2020, there will be more than 50 Billion Internet-connected devices that will transform the way we live and work.
However, every new technology and innovation bring new challenges and problems. In this article, I am focusing on cyber security related issues that are currently affecting or will affect our smart life in the near future.
We all know that everything connected to the Internet is vulnerable and can be supposedly compromised, and as the number of Internet-connected devices is increasing, the potential security challenges of IoT devices can no longer be ignored.
Top 7 Smart Cities Prone to Cyber Attacks
Below is the list of Top 7 developed smart cities around the world, but also labelled as the most vulnerable Cities to Cyber threats:
Santander, Spain
New York City, USA
Aguas De Sao Pedro, Brazil
Songdo, South Korea
Tokyo, Japan
Hong Kong
Arlington County, Virginia, USA
These Cities become smarter by deploying new technologies like:
Smart street lights: Centrally managed and can adapt to weather conditions, report problems, or be automated by time of the day.
Smart Public Transportation and Traffic control Systems adjust traffic lights based on current traffic conditions.
Smart parking application to find available parking slots.
Smart Water and Energy Management, provides information regarding the quality of air, water needs.
Sadly these cities are implementing new technologies without first testing cyber security.
In case if a cyber attack on these smart cities causes an inadequate supply of electricity or water, dark streets, or/and no cameras. Then how would citizens respond to it?
I guess such attack would cause a lot of chaos in the city.
People residing in such a city might face a panic attack when they are made slaves of their "cyber masters/criminals."
As hackers may bring more sophisticated viruses to you that a day comes when you plan to go to a movie on a Friday night, all set to go, but your house keys are in the hands of your master sitting in some other country!
Smart IoT devices create huge attack surfaces for potential cyber attacks, making the future of smart cities more vulnerable than today's computers and smartphones.
Cyber Attacks Leverages Internet of Things
Smart devices such as traffic and surveillance cameras, meters, street lights, traffic lights, smart pipes, and sensors are easy to implement, but are even easier to hack due to lack of stringent security measures and insecure encryption mechanisms.
Last year, we saw a real cyber attack scenario involving IoTs in which hackers compromised more than 100,000 Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances to send out millions of malicious spam emails.
In a separate case, researchers discovered a Linux worm 'Linux.Darlloz' that hijacked a number of smart home appliances including Home Routers, Set-top boxes, Security Cameras and printers, to mine Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Modus Operandi of a Cyber Criminal
A vulnerability in the technology, when comes in the sight of a person with malicious intent, poses as a threat and as the threat/risk associated with the system (to be compromised) is bypassed takes the form of an attack.
With the technological shift in the lives of the people from desktop PCs to mobiles, wearables and now to IoT devices, cyber criminals are also focusing on all sorts of threats to compromise them.
In one of our introductory articles to IoT we discussed about the desktop viruses coming our way through refrigerators and home appliances, therefore, emphasis is to be paid on the type of threats that can affect our digital appliances, including Ransomware, Spyware, DDoS attacks, and many more.
So, in such a scenario where every single object is dependent on the network and making our lives comfortable can be of a kind where sooner or later we are going to become "Digitally Handicapped."
No doubt, the IoT devices are said to be the next evolutionary step in our connected world and will incredibly grow, but it is very much possible to see cyber-criminals exploiting and compromising them.
By saying this, we are not making your lives more vulnerable; rather a secure one.
| Cyber_Attack |
MiniDuke Malware spreads via Fake Ukraine-related Documents | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/miniduke-malware-spreads-via-fake.html | A year back, Security Researchers from the Antivirus firm Kaspersky found a sophisticated piece of malware which they dubbed as 'MiniDuke', designed specifically to collect and steal strategic insights and highly protected political information, which is a subject to states' security.
Now, once again the MiniDuke virus is spreading in wild via an innocent looking but fake PDF documents related to Ukraine, while the researcher at F-Secure were browsing the set of extracted decoy documents from a large batch of potential MiniDuke Samples.
"This is interesting considering the current crisis in the area," Mikko Hypponen, the CTO of security research firm F-Secure, wrote on Tuesday.
The Hacker News reported a year ago about the malicious malware that uses an exploit (CVE-2013-0640) of the famous and actively used Adobe Reader. MiniDuke malware written in assembly language with its tiny file size (20KB), and uses hijacked Twitter accounts for Command & Control and incase twitter accounts are not active, the malware located backup control channels via Google searches.
The malware consists of three components: PDF file, MiniDuke Main and Payload. Payload is dropped after the Adobe process gets exploited by opening the malicious PDF file, which refers to the topics including human rights, Ukraine's foreign policy, and NATO membership plans.
The infected machine then use Twitter or Google to collect encrypted instructions showing them where to report for new backdoors and as soon as infected system connects the command servers, it starts receiving encrypted backdoors through GIF image files. Once installed, it may copy, remove, delete files, create database, stop the processes and download the new ones, that may also open backdoor access to other Trojans.
F-Secure also provided screenshots of several Ukraine-related documents that were more likely twisted from already existing and real public documents.
F-Secure found a bogus document signed by Ruslan Demchenko, the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. "The letter is addressed to the heads of foreign diplomatic institutions in Ukraine." When the researcher translated the document, it comes out to be a note regarding "the 100th year anniversary of the 1st World War."
This also signalized that the attackers have somehow access to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "We don't know where the attacker got this decoy file from," Hypponen wrote. "We don't know who was targeted by these attacks. We don't know who's behind these attacks. What we do know is that all these attacks used the CVE-2013-0640 vulnerability and dropped the same backdoor (compilation date 2013-02-21)."
The authors of MiniDuke made the malware familiar with the work principles of antivirus software which makes it different from the other viruses. The malware turns unique for each system and contains a backdoor that allows it to avoid system analytics instruments, and in case the virus is detected, the backdoor stops malicious effects and makes it disappear for the system.
MiniDuke Malware previously attacked government entities in Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, including Ukraine.
| Vulnerability |
Adobe releases important Security Updates for Flash Player | https://thehackernews.com/2014/03/adobe-releases-important-security.html | Adobe has released security updates to address important vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.70 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh and Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.341 and earlier versions for Linux.
The new build intends to address following vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player:
CVE-2014-0503, reported by security researcher, 'Masato Kinugawa', that lets attackers bypass the same-origin policy. Attackers can exploit this issue to access resources from another origin in the context of another domain. This can facilitate cross-site request-forgery attacks.
CVE-2014-0504, reported by 'Jordan Milne', that could be used to read the contents of the clipboard(). The Clipboard can be used to store data, such as text and images, but flaw could allow hacker to stuff malware URLs onto your clipboard.
Adobe Security Bulletin APSB14-08 tagged the updates with Priority 2, 'This update resolves vulnerabilities in a product that has historically been at elevated risk. There are currently no known exploits.'
Adobe recommends users to update their software installations to Adobe Flash player 12.0.0.77 i.e. Available for download from Abobe Center.
| Vulnerability |
Severe Bugs Reported in EtherNet/IP Stack for Industrial Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/severe-bugs-reported-in-ethernetip.html | The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday issued an advisory warning of multiple vulnerabilities in the OpENer EtherNet/IP stack that could expose industrial systems to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, data leaks, and remote code execution.
All OpENer commits and versions prior to February 10, 2021, are affected, although there are no known public exploits that specifically target these vulnerabilities.
The four security flaws were discovered and reported to CISA by researchers Tal Keren and Sharon Brizinov from operational technology security company Claroty. Additionally, a fifth security issue identified by Claroty was previously disclosed by Cisco Talos (CVE-2020-13556) on December 2, 2020.
"An attacker would only need to send crafted ENIP/CIP packets to the device in order to exploit these vulnerabilities," the researchers said.
CVE-2020-13556 concerns an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the Ethernet/IP server that could potentially allow an attacker to send a series of specially-crafted network requests to trigger remote code execution. It's rated 9.8 out of 10 in severity.
The four other flaws disclosed to EIPStackGroup, the maintainers of the OpENer stack, in October 2020 are as follows —
CVE-2021-27478 (CVSS score: 8.2) - A bug in the manner Common Industrial Protocol (CIP) requests are handled, leading to a DoS condition
CVE-2021-27482 (CVSS score: 7.5) - An out-of-bounds read flaw that leverages specially crafted packets to read arbitrary data from memory
CVE-2021-27500 and CVE-2021-27498 (CVSS scores: 7.5) - Two reachable assertion vulnerabilities that could be exploited to result in a DoS condition
Vendors using the OpENer stack are recommended to update to the latest version while also taking protective measures to minimize network exposure for all control system devices to the internet, erect firewall barriers, and isolate them from the business network.
This is far from the first time security issues have been unearthed in EtherNet/IP stacks. Last November, Claroty researchers revealed a critical vulnerability uncovered in Real-Time Automation's (RTA) 499ES EtherNet/IP stack could open up the industrial control systems to remote attacks by adversaries.
| Malware |
Mozilla Thunderbird vulnerability allows hackers to Insert malicious code into Emails | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/mozilla-thunderbird-vulnerability.html | Do you use Thunderbird, a free; open-source; cross-platform application for managing email and news feeds? According to a Pakistani Security Researcher from Vulnerability-Lab, a flaw gives an attacker the ability to run code on a user's machine.
Mozilla Thunderbird 17.0.6 email application is vulnerable to critical validation and filter bypass vulnerability, enables an attacker to bypass the filter that prevents HTML tags from being used in messages.
According to a Security Advisory released by Vulnerability-Lab, the flaw resides in Mozilla's Gecko engine. During the testing, the researchers found many java script errors which gave the researcher much hope in believing that the application might actually be vulnerable.
By default, HTML tags like <script> and <iframe> are blocked in Thunderbird and get filtered immediately upon insertion. However, while drafting a new email message, attackers can easily bypass the current input filters by encoding their payloads with base64 encryption and combine it with the <object> tag.
The malicious code can be triggered on the recipient's machine, when one will 'Reply' or 'Forward' that message.
The malicious code can be injected while creating a new message, inside the email signature or use the attached file with Signature.
Researchers from the Vulnerability Lab said, "These sorts of vulnerabilities can result in multiple attack vectors on the client end which may eventually result in complete compromise of the end user system. The persistent code injection vulnerability is located within the main application."
Exploitation of this persistent application vulnerability requires a low or medium user interaction. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may result in malicious script code being executed in the victim's browser.
Video Demonstration:
The vulnerability is fixed in the latest versions (24.2.0) of Thunderbird, and users are highly recommended to upgrade as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Backdoored PhpMyAdmin distributed at SourceForge site | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/backdoored-phpmyadmin-distributed-at.html | A security issue has been reported in phpMyAdmin, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system. The security issue is caused due to the distribution of a compromised phpMyAdmin source code package containing a backdoor, which can be exploited to e.g. execute arbitrary PHP code.
One of the SourceForge.net mirrors, namely cdnetworks-kr-1, was being used to distribute a modified archive of phpMyAdmin, which includes a backdoor. This backdoor is located in file server_sync.php and allows an attacker to remotely execute PHP code. Another file, js/cross_framing_protection.js, has also been modified.
SourceForge.Net is the world's largest open source software development website. A very large impact on the domestic users with this incident. The vulnerability has been cataloged as being a critical one.
A screenshot as shown of a system containing a malicious backdoor that was snuck into the open-source phpMyAdmin package.
On official website in issue "PMASA-2012-5" developers said "We currently know only about phpMyAdmin-3.5.2.2-all-languages.zip being affected,".
It's not the first time a widely used open-source project has been hit by a breach affecting the security of its many downstream users. In June of last year, WordPress required all account holders on WordPress.org to change their passwords following the discovery that hackers contaminated it with malicious software.
| Vulnerability |
Russian Hacker Gets 12-Years Prison for Massive JP Morgan Chase Hack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/russian-hacker-gets-12-years-prison-for.html | A U.S. court on Thursday sentenced a 37-year-old Russian to 12 years in prison for perpetrating an international hacking campaign that resulted in the heist of a trove of personal information from several financial institutions, brokerage firms, financial news publishers, and other American companies.
Andrei Tyurin was charged with computer intrusion, wire fraud, bank fraud, and illegal online gambling offenses, and for his role in one of the largest thefts of U.S. customer data from a single financial institution in history, which involved the personal information of more than 80 million J.P. Morgan Chase customers.
Besides the investment bank, some of the other major targets of the hacks were E*Trade, Scottrade, and the Wall Street Journal.
Tyurin, who carried out the extensive hacking from his home in Moscow between 2012 to mid-2015, is believed to have netted over $19 million in criminal proceeds as part of his intrusion schemes.
In one such instance of security fraud, Tyurin collaborated with his partner Gery Shalon to artificially inflate the price of certain stocks publicly traded in the U.S. by marketing said stocks in a deceptive and misleading manner to customers of the victim companies whose contact information were stolen during the intrusions.
Photo Credit: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
To carry out the attacks, Tyurin is alleged to have used computer infrastructure located across five continents that were remotely controlled and is said to have maintained persistent access over long periods of time to the victims' networks to download and refresh the stolen data from the companies periodically.
"And once his hacking activities were detected, TYURIN worked with Shalon to destroy the evidence of their criminal activity and undermine U.S. law enforcement's efforts to identify and arrest them," the U.S. Southern District of New York said in a statement.
The development comes after Tyurin pleaded guilty in September 2019 to carrying out the wire and bank fraud, computer intrusions, and illegal online gambling. Tyurin has been in U.S. custody since he was extradited from the country of Georgia in September 2018.
| Cyber_Attack |
Cyber 9/11, cyber doomsday...between fear and need for action | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/cyber-911-cyber-doomsdaybetween-fear.html | It's not a mystery, every nation is worried of the level of security of its infrastructure, the United States are among the most concerned governments due the high number of cyber-attack against its networks.
US Government representative such us former States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano warned in more than one occasion on the possible consequences of a cyber offensive and declared the necessity to improve the cyber capabilities of the country.
Senators are interested to evaluate the level of protection of nuclear stockpile of foreign governments against cyber attacks, question has been raised after that Pentagon's chief cyber officer admitted to ignore if countries such as Russia or China have adopted efficient countermeasures.
Nelson and Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. will request to national intelligence an assessment about the ability of foreign states to safeguard networked nuclear systems.
"In this new world of cyber threats, we of course have to be responsible for ours, but we have to worry about those others on the planet that have a nuclear strike capability, of protecting theirs against some outside player coming in and suddenly taking over their command and control," Nelson declared.
Last week Defense Science Board (DSB), a Federal Advisory Committee, published a report titled "Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat", the document presented alarming scenarios on US nation's military considered unprepared for a full-scale cyber-conflict.
The analysis proposed by DSB alerts Pentagon on the necessity to improve cyber capabilities, top-tier adversary represents a serious menace in case of cyber war, the analyst believe various initiatives conducted by US Government not sufficient to face with sophisticated cyber attacks by hostile countries. The report remarks that Defense Department "is not prepared to defend against these threats" and its effort leak of a proper coordination, the document also alert central authorities on a "fragmented" dispersion of commitments.
"Current DoD actions, though numerous, are fragmented. Thus, DoD is not prepared to defend against this threat DoD red teams, using cyber attack tools which can be downloaded from the Internet, are very successful at defeating our systems The study by the Defense Science Board urges the intelligence community to maintain the threat of a nuclear strike as a deterrent to a major cyber attack."
"DoD needs to take the lead and build an effective response to measurably increase confidence in the IT systems we depend on (public and private) and at the same time decrease a would-be attacker's confidence in the effectiveness of their capabilities to compromise DoD systems" "the relative ease that our Red Teams have in disrupting, or completely beating, our forces in exercises using exploits available on the Internet; and the weak cyber hygiene position of DoD networks and systems"
The statements are concerning, attackers don't need sophisticated computing platforms to hit the country in its vital centers, the technologies are readily available on Internet.
Chief of U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. C. Robert Kehler, which oversees Cyber Command highlighted the need of intelligence activities to evaluate security level of foreign infrastructures but he remarked the necessity to evaluate the potential for a cyber-related attack on U.S. nuclear command and control systems and the weapons systems.
The high official admitted to hasn't information on capabilities of other governments to response to a cyber offensive against its nuclear plants and arsenal. A cyber attacks could hit directly control system of a critical infrastructure, but it could also compromise military system such as an intercontinental missile that could be directly against other resources of the country.
"What about the Russians and the Chinese? Do they have the ability to stop some cyber-attack from launching one of their nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles?" probed Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a member of the Armed Forces Committee.
"Senator, I don't know," answered Kehler, who was testifying on Tuesday at a committee hearing.
As reported in the in the report of Defense Science Board the attacks against US infrastructures, including weapons of defense, could be conducted by various actors, state sponsored attacks appears to be most interested but intelligence is aware of the menace represented by cyber terrorist and cyber criminals.
Cyber terrorism is one of the aspect most debated in this moment, hit a critical infrastructure with a cyber attacks has the same effect as a conventional attack, but it has the advantage of being easier to manage. The recruitment of cyber mercenaries and the availability of tools in internet and in the underground that could be used by attackers to cause considerable damage, as demonstrated by the U.S. cyber units, may increase the risk related to the conduction of cyber attack for terrorist purposes.
We read on news paper world such as cyber "9/11" and "cyber doomsday" words that evoke death, destruction and scary scenarios but above all describe a real danger not to be underestimated, that's why top U.S. intelligence official, in another Senate chamber, named cyber first on his list of current transnational threats.
An article on Nextgov portal states: "There is a danger that unsophisticated attacks by highly motivated actors would have "significant outcomes due to unexpected system configurations and mistakes" or that a vulnerability in one spot "might spill over and contaminate other parts of a networked system," James Clapper, national Intelligence director, testified before the Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. "
What's about U.S. command and control systems nuclear weapons platforms security?
Gen. C. Robert Kehler is cautiously optimistic, he is confident U.S. command and control systems and nuclear weapons platforms "do not have a significant vulnerability", the official also remarked that meanwhile there is a "fairly decent transparency" with Russian government officials on missile capabilities it's not the same with China.
My interpretation of the words of General suggests that despite the opening to the two governments, there is much work to be conducted under its diplomatic profile in the definition and unanimous acceptance of a framework to regulate the use of cyber weapons that menace security of critical systems. We are in an extremely critical period of transition, most of the governments work for the production of cyber weapons and conduct cyber espionage campaign undercover. Alongside to historical powers such as Russia and China there are dangerous states such as Iran and North Korea and a plethora of independent actors represented by cyber terrorists and cyber criminals, so it is crucial to know the capabilities of the opponents but also enhance their own.
| Cyber_Attack |
U.S. Charges 9 Iranians With Hacking Universities to Steal Research Data | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/iranian-hackers-wanted-by-fbi.html | The United States Department of Justice has announced criminal charges and sanctions against 9 Iranians involved in hacking universities, tech companies, and government organisations worldwide to steal scientific research resources and academic papers.
According to the FBI officials, the individuals are connected to the Mabna Institute, an Iran-based company created in 2013 whose members were allegedly hired by the Iranian government for gathering intelligence.
Though the content of the papers is not yet known, investigators believe it might have helped Iranian scientists to develop nuclear weapons.
In past four years, the state-sponsored hacking group has allegedly infiltrated more than 320 universities in 22 countries—144 of which were in the United States—and stolen over 30 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property.
The group used spear-phishing attacks to target more than 100,000 e-mail accounts and computer systems of the professors around the world, and successfully compromised 7,998 of those accounts till last December—3,768 of them at US universities.
"Their primary goal was to obtain usernames and passwords for the accounts of professors so they could gain unauthorized access and steal whatever kind of proprietary academic information they could get their hands on," said the FBI agent who investigated the case.
According to the indictment unsealed today in a Manhattan federal court, Mabna Institute also shared stolen credentials with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—a branch of Iran's Armed Forces responsible for gathering intelligence.
The group then exfiltrated the academic data and sold the content via Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir, Iranian websites "where customers could access the online library systems of the hacked universities."
Following are the names and roles of the nine Iranians who were charged by the U.S. federal court:
Gholamreza Rafatnejad — one of the founding members of the Mabna Institute.
Ehsan Mohammadi — another founding member of the Mabna Institute and responsible for organising hacking campaign along with Rafatnejad.
Seyed Ali Mirkarimi — a hacker and Mabna Institute contractor, who was engaged in crafting and sending malicious spear phishing emails to steal credentials belonging to university professors.
Mostafa Sadeghi — another hacker working with the Mabna Institute, who allegedly compromised more than 1,000 university professors' accounts and exchanged their credentials with Iranian partners.
Sajjad Tahmasebi — a Mabna Institute contractor who was maintaining the list of stolen credentials and helped other hackers in reconnaissance process in order to prepare the list of targeted universities and professors to facilitate the spear phishing campaign.
Abdollah Karima — a businessman who owned and operated a website to sell stolen academic materials online.
Abuzar Gohari Moqadam — an Iranian professor who exchanged stolen credentials for compromised accounts with Mabna Institute founders.
Roozbeh Sabahi — another contractor for the Mabna Institute.
Mohammed Reza Sabahi — another Mabna Institute contractor, who assisted in making the lists of targeted university professors and academic databases.
"Although it is difficult to calculate a dollar loss amount, through the course of the conspiracy, U.S.-based universities spent approximately $3.4 billion to procure and access data that the Iranians accessed for free because of their criminal activity," FBI said.
Targeted countries include Japan, China, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
The US also imposes sanctions on "Game of Thrones" hacker
Besides these 9 Iranian hackers, the U.S. Department of Treasury has also charged a 10th Iranian hacker, named Behzad Mesri, in connection with cyber attacks against HBO and with leaking "Game of Thrones" episodes last summer.
According to the authorities, Mesri compromised multiple user accounts belonging to HBO in order to "repeatedly gain unauthorized access to the company's computer servers and steal valuable stolen data including confidential and proprietary information, financial documents, and employee contact information."
Mesri then attempted to extort HBO for $6 million to delete the stolen data.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hacker Discloses Unpatched Windows Zero-Day Vulnerability (With PoC) | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/windows-zero-day-exploit.html | A security researcher has publicly disclosed the details of a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in the Microsoft's Windows operating system that could help a local user or malicious program obtain system privileges on the targeted machine.
And guess what? The zero-day flaw has been confirmed working on a "fully-patched 64-bit Windows 10 system."
The vulnerability is a privilege escalation issue which resides in the Windows' task scheduler program and occured due to errors in the handling of Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) systems.
Advanced local procedure call (ALPC) is an internal mechanism, available only to Windows operating system components, that facilitates high-speed and secure data transfer between one or more processes in the user mode.
The revelation of the Windows zero-day came earlier today from a Twitter user with online alias SandboxEscaper, who also posted a link to a Github page hosting a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows.
"Here is the alpc bug as 0day: https://t.co/m1T3wDSvPX I don't fucking care about life anymore. Neither do I ever again want to submit to MSFT anyway. Fuck all of this shit," SandboxEscaper tweeted (archive), which has now been deleted.
Zero-Day Works Well on Fully-Patched 64-Bit Windows 10 PC
Shortly after that, CERT/CC vulnerability analyst Will Dormann verified the authenticity of the zero-day bug, and tweeted:
"I've confirmed that this works well in a fully-patched 64-bit Windows 10 system. LPE right to SYSTEM!"
According to a short online advisory published by CERT/CC, the zero-day flaw, if exploited, could allow local users to obtain elevated (SYSTEM) privileges.
Since Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) interface is a local system, the impact of the vulnerability is limited with a CVSS score of 6.4 to 6.8, but the PoC exploit released by the researcher could potentially help malware authors to target Windows users.
SandboxEscaper did not notify Microsoft of the zero-day vulnerability, leaving all Windows users vulnerable to the hackers until a security patch is release by the tech giant to address the issue.
Microsoft is likely to patch the vulnerability in its next month's security Patch Tuesday, which is scheduled for September 11.
The CERT/CC notes it is currently unaware of any practical solution to this zero-day bug.
| Vulnerability |
The 7 Most Wanted Iranian Hackers By the FBI | https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/fbi-wanted-hackers.html | The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has lengthened its Most Wanted List by adding seven Iranian hackers who are accused of attacking a range of US banks and a New York dam.
On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) charged seven Iranian hackers with a slew of computer hacking offences for breaking into computer systems of dozens of US banks, causing Millions of dollars in damages, and tried to shut down a New York dam.
The individual hackers, who allegedly worked for computer security companies linked to the Iranian government, were indicted for an "extensive campaign" of cyber attacks against the US financial sector.
All the seven hackers have been added to the FBI's Most Wanted list, and their names are:
Ahmad Fathi, 37
Hamid Firoozi, 34
Amin Shokohi, 25
Sadegh Ahmadzadegan (aka Nitr0jen26), 23
Omid Ghaffarinia (aka PLuS), 25
Sina Keissar, 25
Nader Saedi (aka Turk Server), 26
All the hackers have been charged with conducting numerous Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on major U.S. banks, with Firoozi separately gaining unauthorized access to a New York dam's industrial automation control (SCADA) system in August and September of 2013.
"This unauthorized access allowed [Firoozi] to repeatedly obtain information regarding the status and operation of the dam, including information about the water levels, temperature, and status of the sluice gate, which is responsible for controlling water levels and flow rates," a DoJ statement reads.
Luckily, the sluice gate had already been manually disconnected for the purpose of maintenance at the time Firoozi attacked.
The hackers' work allegedly involved Botnets – networks of compromised machines – that hit major American banks, including Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase, as well as the Nasdaq stock exchange with floods of traffics measuring up to 140Gbps and knocked them offline.
The Iranian hackers targeted more than 46 financial institutions and financial sector companies, costing them "tens of Millions of dollars in remediation costs" in preventing the attacks in various incidents spanning 2011 to 2013.
All the seven hackers will face up to 10 years in prison on computer hacking charges while Firoozi faces an additional 5-year prison sentence for breaking into a dam in Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye Brook, New York.
| Cyber_Attack |
KeySniffer Lets Hackers Steal Keystrokes from Wireless Keyboards | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/wireless-keylogger.html | Radio-based wireless keyboards and mice that use a special USB dongle to communicate with your PC can expose all your secrets – your passwords, credit card numbers and everything you type.
Back in February, researchers from the Internet of things security firm Bastille Networks demonstrated how they could take control of wireless keyboards and mice from several top vendors using so-called MouseJack attacks.
The latest findings by the same security firm are even worse.
Researchers have discovered a new hacking technique that can allow hackers to take over your wireless keyboard and secretly record every key you press on it.
Dubbed KeySniffer, the hack is death for millions of wireless, radio-based keyboards.
The Cause: Lack of Encryption and Security Updates
The KeySniffer vulnerability affects wireless keyboards from eight different hardware manufacturers that use cheap transceiver chips (non-Bluetooth chips) – a less secure, radio-based communication protocol.
The issue with these chips is that they don't receive Bluetooth's frequent security updates.
Moreover, the affected keyboards use unencrypted radio transmission.
This means anyone within 100 meters range of your computer and around $15-$30 long-range radio dongle can intercept the communications between affected wireless keyboards and your computer.
Eventually, this allows the attacker to collect secretly everything you type, including your passwords, credit card numbers, personal messages and even weird porn searches.
The keyboards from a surprising range of vendors, including Anker, EagleTec, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Insignia, Kensington, Radio Shack, and Toshiba, are vulnerable to KeySniffer.
This isn't the first time researchers have targeted wireless keyboards. In 2015, a white hat hacker developed a cheap Arduino-based device, dubbed KeySweeper, which covertly logs, decrypts and reports back all keystrokes from Microsoft wireless keyboards.
Although KeySweeper was due to the weak encryption used by Microsoft, the KeySniffer discovery is different as in this case; manufacturers are actually making and selling wireless keyboards with no encryption at all.
One of the affected hardware makers, Kensington responded to this matter, saying that only a single version of its keyboards was affected by KeySniffer flaw and that a firmware update with AES encryption has been released.
Since there are millions of people who do use one of the wireless keyboards identified by Bastille Networks, it has been advised to you to either go back to the wires or at least switch to Bluetooth.
The radio-based wireless keyboards and mice are a good target for hackers. Two months back, the FBI also issued warning for private industry partners to look out for highly stealthy keyloggers that quietly sniff passwords and other input data from wireless keyboards.
| Vulnerability |
SolarWinds Issues Second Hotfix for Orion Platform Supply Chain Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/solarwinds-issues-second-hotfix-for_15.html | Network monitoring services provider SolarWinds officially released a second hotfix to address a critical vulnerability in its Orion platform that was exploited to insert malware and breach public and private entities in a wide-ranging espionage campaign.
In a new update posted to its advisory page, the company urged its customers to update Orion Platform to version 2020.2.1 HF 2 immediately to secure their environments.
The malware, dubbed SUNBURST (aka Solorigate), affects Orion app versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1, released between March 2020 and June 2020.
"Based on our investigation, we are not aware that this vulnerability affects other versions—including future versions—of Orion Platform products," the company said.
"We have scanned the code of all our software products for markers similar to those used in the attack on our Orion Platform products identified above, and we have found no evidence that other versions of our Orion Platform products or our other products or agents contain those markers."
It also reiterated none of its other free tools or agents, such as RMM and N-central, were impacted by the security shortcoming.
Microsoft Seizes Domain Used in SolarWinds Hack
While details on how SolarWinds' internal network was breached are still awaited, Microsoft yesterday took the step of taking control over one of the main GoDaddy domains — avsvmcloud[.]com — that was used by the hackers to communicate with the compromised systems.
The Windows maker also said it plans to start blocking known malicious SolarWinds binaries starting today at 8:00 AM PST.
Meanwhile, security researcher Mubix "Rob" Fuller has released an authentication audit tool called SolarFlare that can be run on Orion machines to help identify accounts that may have been compromised during the breach.
"This attack was very complex and sophisticated," SolarWinds stated in a new FAQ for why it couldn't catch this issue beforehand. "The vulnerability was crafted to evade detection and only run when detection was unlikely."
Up to 18,000 Businesses Hit in SolarWinds Attack
SolarWinds estimates that as many as 18,000 of its customers may have been impacted by the supply chain attack. But indications are that the operators of the campaign leveraged this flaw to only hit select high-profile targets.
Cybersecurity firm Symantec said it identified more than 2,000 computers at over 100 customers that received the backdoored software updates but added it did not spot any further malicious impact on those machines.
Just as the fallout from the breach is being assessed, the security of SolarWinds has attracted more scrutiny.
Not only it appears the company's software download website was protected by a simple password ("solarwinds123") that was published in the clear on SolarWinds' code repository at Github; several cybercriminals attempted to sell access to its computers on underground forums, according to Reuters.
In the wake of the incident, SolarWinds has taken the unusual step of removing the clientele list from its website.
| Vulnerability |
'The Hackers Conference 2012' to be held in New Delhi | https://thehackernews.com/2012/05/hackers-conference-2012-to-be-held-in.html | The Hackers Conference 2012' to be held in New Delhi
The Biggest Hacking Mania has arrived. The Hackers Conference 2012 will be held in New Delhi on July 29. THC 2012 is expected to be the first open gathering of Blackhat hackers in India who will debate latest security issues with the top itelligence echolons in India. The Registrations and Call for papers for the conference are now open. The organizers have deicded to keep the number of seats to limited to ensure quality of the conference. The conference will be held at the India Habitat Center on July 29th.
The Hackers Conference will see a galaxy of renowned speakers presenting 0-Day Vulnerabilities, Exploits and Android/Blackberry/iPhone Hacks. Apart from Speakers presenting on WI-FI and Web Application Security the Special invitees from government Intelligence agencies will also speak on National Security Issues emerging from Scada Hacking.
The conference has sent special invites to Blackhat hackers to come and demonstrate their talent and help the security agencies bridge the knowledge gaps existing today.
To Register visit : TheHackersConference and Join Hackers on Facebook and Twitter.
| Vulnerability |
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