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The international live-fire cyber defence exercise Locked Shields 2018 took place on April 23-26 in Tallinn, Estonia, and the figures behind this important competition are impressive., A total of 22 Blue Teams participated in the Locked Shields 2018 exercise, more than 1,000 experts from nearly 30 countries have tested their cyber capabilities-, Yes, I forgot to tell you that this year the winner is the team from NATO composed of 30 cyber experts, followed by France and the Czech Republic., “The winning team excelled in all categories of the exercise. It was the first time NATO participated with a team representing different NATO agencies,” said Aare Reintam, Project Manager of Technical Exercises at CCDCOE., The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) organizes the Locked Shields since 2010, the exercise aims to test the abilities of the team in responding to a major cyber attack., The exercise sees a fictional country named Berylia targeted by massive and coordinated cyber attacks that hit its critical infrastructure, including Internet services provider, power grids, military airbase, telecommunication networks., Locked Shields 2018 involved 4,000 virtualized systems and over 2,500 attacks that hit the target altogether., The Blue Teams were tasked to preserve the operations of more than 150 complex IT systems per team, reporting incidents, executing strategic decisions and solving forensic, legal and media challenges., “However, every single participating team deserves credit for handling the complex cyber challenges of Locked Shields. The exercise involved around 4000 virtualised systems and more than 2500 attacks altogether.” added Reintam. “In addition to keeping up more than 150 complex IT systems per team, the Blue Teams had to be efficient in reporting incidents, executing strategic decisions and solving forensic, legal and media challenges. Protection of critical infrastructure is essential for ensuring the efficient operation of both military and civilian organisations, it is the foundation of our modern digital lifestyle,” , More photos of Locked Shields 2018 (credits to CCDCOE, photographer Arno Mikkor), Once again, the exercise highlighted the importance of the information sharing when dealing cyber threats and the authority to make a decision and give guidelines, carefully evaluating the potential legal implications., “In 2018 the exercise highlighted the growing need to enhance dialogue between technical experts, civil and military participants and decision-making levels.” reads the press release published by the CCDCOE., “CCDCOE integrates the technical and strategic game, enabling participating nations to practice the entire chain of command in the event of a severe cyber incident involving both civilian and military players.”, Cyber drills like the Locked Shields 2018 are very important occasions for tasting cyber defense abilities and processes in place to mitigate massive attacks against critical infrastructure., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Locked Shields 2018, hacking), ,

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The iBoot is the component loaded in the early stages of the boot sequence and it is tasked with loading the kernel, it is stored in a boot ROM chip., “This is the first step in the chain of trust where each step ensures that the next is signed by Apple.” states Apple describing the iBoot., The leaked code is related to iOS 9, but experts believe it could still present in the latest iOS 11., Apple promptly reacted to the data leak asking to remove the content for a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)., “This repository is currently disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice. We have disabled public access to the repository. The notice has been publicly posted.” reads the notice on the GitHub repository., “Reproduction of Apple’s “iBoot” source code, which is responsible for ensuring trusted boot operation of Apple’s iOS software. The “iBoot” source code is proprietary and it includes Apple’s copyright notice. It is not open-source.”, , The data leak is considered very dangerous because hackers and security experts can analyze the code searching for security vulnerabilities that could be triggered to compromise the iBoot., Even is the code cannot be modified, the exploit of a flaw could allow loading other components compromising the overall security of the architecture., The boot sequence is:, Bootrom → Low Level Bootloader → iBoot → Device tree → Kernel., The Jailbreak consists of compromising one of the above phases, typically the kernel one., Newer iPhones have an ARM-based coprocessor that enhances iOS security, so-called Secure Enclave Processor, it makes impossible the access to the code to conduct reverse engineering of the code., But now the iBoot code has been leaked online and experts can analyze it., The jailbreak could allow removing security restrictions making it possible to install third-party software and packages, also code that is not authorized by Apple and therefore not signed by the IT giant., Compromising the iBoot could theoretically allow loading any malicious code in the boot phase or a tainted kernel., Apple tried to downplay the issue saying that it implements a layered model of security, “Old source code from three years ago appears to have been leaked, but by design the security of our products doesn’t depend on the secrecy of our source code. There are many layers of hardware and software protections built into our products, and we always encourage customers to update to the newest software releases to benefit from the latest protection,” reads a statement issued by Apple., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iBoot, Apple)

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The Ukrainian Government is suffering a series of power outages in the Western region of the country likely caused by cyber attacks., The Ukrainian Government believes that the power outages are caused by operations conducted by Russian nation-state actors., “hacker attacks by Russian special services”., According to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), experts have discovered a malware infecting critical infrastructure of the country, the malicious code targeted networks of some utilities., The malware infections were observed in concurrent with a “non-stop telephone flood at utility plants’ technical support departments.” According to the local media, the Ukraine is suffering information warfare attacks., “Experts detected virus software was found in some networks, SBU says. The virus attack was timed with nonstop telephone flood at utility plants’ technical support departments.”, The Security Service of Ukrainian also confirmed that its experts reportedly foiled other attacks conducted by Russian hackers. Russian agents attempted to infiltrate computer networks of a number of electricity utility companies., It is not the first time that the Ukrainian Government suffers attacks alleged launched by Russian hackers. The number of attacks during the dispute between the two countries on the control of the Crimea., Last Christmas Eve, infrastructure in the Ukraine suffered numerous power outages that were attributed to cyber attacks operated by Russian hackers., While the Government of Kiev is blaming Russian hackers, the Russian Government hasn’t replied to the accusation. There are also other possible explanations for the numerous power outages, including accidental failures caused by animals and weather conditions., There are anyway, if confirmed the news of the presence of a malware targeting the national infrastructure it is more likely the involvement of a foreign government, but as usually happen in this case the problem of attribution has no simple resolution., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Information Warfare, Russia, Ukraine, nation-state attacks)

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Cryptocurrency malware continues to be a privileged choice for crooks and the number of victims is rapidly growing., Cryptocurrency miners are easy to detect due to the saturation of resources on the affected systems, but experts from Trend Micro spotted a new miner that leverages a rootkit component to hide its presence., Even if the malware slows down infected systems abusing of their resources, the administrators will not be able to detect what process is causing it., “We recently encountered a cryptocurrency-mining malware (detected by Trend Micro as Coinminer.Linux.KORKERDS.AB) affecting Linux systems,” reads the report published by TrendMicro. , “It is notable for being bundled with a rootkit component (Rootkit.Linux.KORKERDS.AA) that hides the malicious process’ presence from monitoring tools. This makes it difficult to detect, as infected systems will only indicate performance issues. The malware is also capable of updating and upgrading itself and its configuration file.”, The experts speculate that the infection vector could be an unofficial or compromised plugin such as a media-streaming software.,  ,  , Once installed the initial executable (Trojan.Linux.DLOADER.THAOOAAK) will download a file from Pastebin that is a shell script. The file is saved as /bin/httpdns and a scheduled task is created to run /bin/httpdns every hour. The shell script is executed. /bin/httpdns contains a shell script that connects and downloads another base64-encoded text file., The process will allow to download and execute a series of shell scripts that ultimately install the miner and then a rootkit to hide its presence., , Experts pointed out that when the rootkit is not installed, administrators can easily detect the malicious process utilizing 100% of the CPU., The following images show how the miner process is hidden by the rootkit., , , Once the rootkit is installed, though, the process causing the high CPU is not visible even though the total system utilization is still shown as 100%., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linux cryptocurrency miner, hacking)

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The New York time published the news that an FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, coordinated in 2012 a campaign of hundreds of cyberattacks on foreign websites. In many cases we discussed the possibility to exploit hacktivism to support military operations against a foreign government, the US intelligence was accused to have infiltrated popular collectives of hacktivists to coordinate attacks on foreign governments including Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Brazil., According declarations of participant to the attacks, the group of hackers exploited a vulnerability in a popular web hosting software to steal sensitive information from the government servers. All the information collected during the offensives were uploaded on a server monitored by the FBI according to court statements., “The details of the 2012 episode have, until now, been kept largely a secret in closed sessions of a federal court in New York and heavily redacted documents. While the documents do not indicate whether the F.B.I. directly ordered the attacks, they suggest that the government may have used hackers to gather intelligence overseas even as investigators were trying to dismantle hacking groups like Anonymous and send computer activists away for lengthy prison terms.” reported the New Youk Times., Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka Sabu, was one of the leaders of the popular group of hacktivists LulzSec that breached many high profile targets during in the last years, including Sony Pictures (2011). The group also claimed responsibility for taking down many other notorious targets such as  AT&T, Viacom, Disney, EMI, and NBC Universal, The Sun, PayPal, MasterCard, The Times and the CIA., Sabu once arrested decided to collaborate with law enforcement to track down other members of Anonymous. Various members of the popular group of hacktivists have been identified and arrested. , Thanks Monsegur, F.B.I. arrested another popular hacktivist, Jeremy Hammond that joined in the group of hackers known as Antisec. Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, he collaborated with Monsegur to conduct the attack on the private intelligence firm Stratfor., , During the process Hammond declared that FBI coordinated numerous attacks of Anonymous on foreign governments, after the Stratfor hack in fact Monsegur began supplying Hammond with lists of foreign vulnerable websites representing the targets of the offensives. The collective of hackers led by Mr. Hammond exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the web-hosting software Plesk to install a backdoor into thousands of websites and gaining their complete control., The attack pattern was quite similar, once installed the backdoor on the target, sensitive data like emails and databases were extracted and uploaded to a computer server controlled by Monsegur., “Mr. Hammond would not disclose the specific foreign government websites that he said Mr. Monsegur had asked him to attack, one of the terms of a protective order imposed by the judge. The names of the targeted countries are also redacted from court documents.”, The list included more than 2,000 Internet domains, Monsegur directed Mr. Hammond to hack government websites in Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil and other government sites, including the Ministry of Electricity in Iraq., The sentencing statement confirmed the involvement of Mr. Monsegur in the attacks against Syrian government websites, including banks and ministries of the government of President Bashar al-Assad., “The F.B.I. took advantage of hackers who wanted to help support the Syrian people against the Assad regime, who instead unwittingly provided the U.S. government access to Syrian systems,” the statement said., According Hammond, Mr. Monsegur never carried out the hacks himself:, “Sabu wasn’t getting his hands dirty,” said Hammond., The exact role of the FBI is still unclear, the involvement of groups of hackers capable to hit any target on the Internet is a known and efficient strategy adopted by governments.  Characters like Mr. Monsegur can influence large masses of hacktivists that taking part to a cyber attack support a tactical operation of the US government., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Hacktivist, Monsegur)

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Mobile devices are reason of great concern for governments, they have a great computational capability, huge memories to store our personal data, GPS to follow our movements and are equipped with a camera and microphone to increase our experience in mobility. But all those features could be exploited by attackers for cyber espionage, the problem is well known to governments that are adopting necessary countermeasures especially following the recent revelations about the U.S. surveillance program., The UK Government has decided to ban iPads from the Cabinet over foreign eavesdropper fears,  it has been requested Ministers to leave mobile in lead-lined boxes to avoid foreign governments to spy on top level government meetings., The news is reported by the Mail on Sunday, after the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude made a presentation using his iPads last week (about how the Government Digital Service might save the UK £2bn a year) the Downing Street security staff has dismissed the mobile device to prevent eavesdropping of ongoing discussions., , The measure was adopted to avoid that foreign security services infecting mobile devices are able to capture audio and data from victims, it is known that hostile actors like China, Russia and Iran have the ability to use mobiles in powerful spy tools., Ministers belonging to sensitive government departments were recently issued with soundproof lead-lined boxes to guard and isolate their mobile devices during official meetings., The precautions have been taken due the high concern caused by news that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal mobile has been spied by the NSA for years. My personal opinion it that it is not acceptable that the German Federal Intelligence Service has allowed everything, missing the adoption of appropriate protective measures like crypto mobile devices, protected landline and similar. Other governments already have approached the problem to adopt secure devices to prevent bugging and eavesdropping, the British foreign secretary William Hague confirmed his phone has been armored by GCHQ., Just a week ago it was published the news that delegates at the G20 summit in Russia received malicious computer memory sticks used to serve a malware to spy on the participants and steal sensitive information, let’s remember also that the information leaked on the NSA FoxAcid platform revealed the existence of spy tool kits RADON and DEWSPEEPER able to exploit victims via USB. , Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, ordered tests to be carried out on the memory sticks  and the results are shocking:, ‘The USB pen drives and the recharging cables were able to covertly capture computer and mobile phone data,’ a secret memo said., Overseas, the situation does not change, even the US fear that the use of the mobile devices can cause them problems,  The Department of Homeland Security and FBI warn public safety departments that their out-of-date Android devices are a security risk, but updating them is not always easy or simple., The alert cited unspecified “industry reporting” that, “44 percent of Android users are still using versions 2.3.3 through 2.3.7 (Gingerbread)  which were released in 2011 and have a number of security vulnerabilities that were fixed in later versions.”, Google’s own figures on its site for Android developers estimate that percentage at about a third less — 30.7 percent. But it also showed 21.7 percent using versions 4.0.3-4.0.4, called Ice Cream Sandwich, which is also out of date. Less than half – 45.1 percent – are using the latest OS, called Jelly Bean, and of that group, 36.6 percent are using 4.1, and only 8.5 percent are using 4.2, which is the latest OS., The DHS/FBI document address principal cyber threats to out-of-date Android mobile devices, including SMS Trojans, Rootkits and fake Google Play Domains., Despite the alert recommends regular updates, running an “Android security suite” and downloading apps only from the official Google Play Store, the update for Android devices can reveal several problems., “There is a wide variety of Android OEM versions rolled out to a huge number of different handsets, and not all carriers and handset OEMs will allow you to upgrade to the latest version,” “So, the Android versions that can run are restricted per device. Even now it is possible to buy Gingerbread devices that cannot be upgraded to Jelly Bean.” said Mario de Boer, research director, Security and Risk Management Strategies at Gartner for Technical Professionals., De Boer suggested that the only solution for now is to block the use of Android devices that are not running the latest OS., “Apply admission control,””If your Smartphones or tablet is running a vulnerable OS, you cannot get access to the specific service or data.” “this is hard to accomplish for voice and text, and easier for email and access to files.”, The principal problem related to the use of mobile devices in government environment is that almost every Smartphone is not designed following severe requirements in term of corporate or government security, let’s add that wrong user’s habits aggravate the situation., It needs a change or mobile devices should be excluded from sensitive contexts.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mobile devices, BYOD)

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Avid Life Media, the company that owns the Ashley Madison is offering a $500,000 reward for information that could allow law enforcement to identify and arrest the hackers behind the recent data breach it suffered., The company is hunting the resposibles, it has hired a number of investigators and forensic experts to identify them., Bryce Evans, the acting staff superintendent of the Toronto police, made the official announcement:, “Today I can confirm that Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 reward to anyone providing information that leads to the identification, arrest and prosecution of the person or persons responsible for the leak of the Ashley Madison database,” Evans said, reported the BBC., The consequence of such kind of data breach could be dramatic for the victims of the adultery website, the police confirmed to suicides caused by the hacks. The stolen data included some 36 million email addresses associated with accounts, the dump leaked online includes personal information of Ashley Madison users., , Evans also provided further details on the breach, he revealed that Ashley Madison workers first discovered the hack on July 12 when they logged into their computers and received a message from the hackers. Evans only added that the message was accompanied by the AC/DC’s song “Thunderstruck.”, This particular sounds familiar for my old readers, on July 2012 a scientist working at the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) declared that computer systems were hit by a cyber-attack., This attack appeared really singular because it forced computers to play AC/DC’s Thunderstruck at full volume in the middle of the night., The company F-Secure was the first security firm informed of the attack, it received an email from AEOI that stated:, “I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom. According to the email our cyber experts sent to our teams, they believe a hacker tool Metasploit was used. The hackers had access to our VPN. The automation network and Siemens hardware were attacked and shut down. I only know very little about these cyber issues as I am scientist not a computer expert., There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC.”, It’s curious that the hackers behind the Ashley Madison hack have used the same music., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ashley Madison, Data Breach)

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A new Apple’s iOS bug was discovered in the community of mobile tech experts, it can be exploited to crash iPhone or iPad devices by just sending an Emoji text message., Several users are already reporting the issue and the popular YouTube EverythingApplePro published a video proof-of-concept for the bug. In the video is reported an example of the sequence of characters that temporarily freeze an iPhone causing the device restarting., The sequence is composed of a white Flag emoji, the digit “0” and a Rainbow emoji. The issue is linked to the way that iOS creates the rainbow flag emoji that is not an official emoji, Apple creates the rainbow flag Emoji by combining the code behind the two white flag and rainbow emoji. Apple iOS joins them by using a hidden character known as a VS16. The iPhone attempts to combine the two emoji, but is unable to because of the zero in the middle., Source There are also other ways to crash the Apple mobile device, another hack leverages the same characters used in a contact file that is sent to an iMessage contact via the iCloud’s sharing feature., “Both the methods mentioned above will crash and iPhone or iPad to varying degrees, although the simple text string sent via a standard iMessage appears to affect iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.1 or below.” reported The Hacker News. “However, the boobytrapped contact card affects all versions of iOS 10, including Apple’s latest iOS 10.2 operating system.”, Users have to upgrade their version to the last one in order to prevent such kind of attacks., , In November the EverythingApplePro reported that most of the Apple devices were crashing when the owners play a video. An iPhone-freezing video circulated online, when users played it in the Safari browser the iPhones slow down until they stop working altogether., The iPhone-freezing video was first discovered by EverythingApplePro, it is a short .mp4 clip of someone standing by a bed with the words “Honey” written across the screen., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iPhone-freezing Emoji text message, hacking)

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Mobile botnets are malicious infrastructures that are increasing with impressive trend especially the Android botnets, considering the capillary diffusion for the Google mobile OS. Android devices are in the hands of more than half mobile users and unfortunately bad habits and lack of awareness of cyber threats are creating the favorable conditions for the diffusion of malicious applications that could infect helpless mobile., Every day I meet dozens of persons that have made a jailbreak on their device, that have installed insecure application downloaded from third-party application stores in most of the cases for trivial reasons. For youngsters security is an unknown word, exactly such as malware despite they know that they desktop PC could be infected., But mobile devices are also in workspace, the promiscuous usage is very common that’s why concepts such as BYOD are becoming very familiar at least between company management., Cybercriminals are aware of this lack of awareness and the absence of proper defense mechanisms advantage their offensive., We are speaking of Android botnets, many malicious applications are downloaded directly from a Google Play app store, but the most common question that ordinary people do is:, How do cybercriminals upload malicious code on the official store managed by a company such as Google? It’s known that Google is very careful with the security of its customers and automatically scans every submission to the Google Play store so in our notional there is no possibility for the cybercriminals to exploit this channel for malware diffusion., Cybercriminals adopt commercial availability DIY Android application decompiler/injector developed to work exclusively with a publicly obtainable Android-based trojan horse, security expert Dancho Danchev explains how it is possible to manage Android botnets in a recent post, using commercially available tools it is possible to inject a pre-configured Android trojan client into any applications., The diffusion of malicious agents is possible in various ways depending on attackers, the botmaster could spread the malware using compromised Web servers or through DIY Google Dorks based hacking tools  “and instead of monetizing the traffic by serving client-side exploits, they can filter and redirect all the mobile device traffic to a fraudulent/malicious Android application.”, The offer is very attractive also due the cheap price, only $37 for this injector tool, in the following image a few screenshots of the application in action., , ,  ,  , Apparently the Android trojan has been designed by a group of four students for a university project and has all the feature for this category of malware. Fortunately the malware has an hardcoded reference to a centralized C&C infrastructure that make it easy to trace and bring down. The malware uses no-ip.org as Dynamic DNS services to address to its control infrastructure., It could be activated both via phone call or SMS and according the post it has the following features:, An interesting phenomenon observed by security researchers is the cybercriminal ecosystem is that criminals are also showing an increasing interest in buy verified Google Play accounts, exploiting their reputation in fact they could distribute Android bots to the users who trust/recommend a particular developer., Mobile malware black market is still not well developed for now, because cybercriminals mostly use to directly attack mobile platforms instead to sell exploit toolkits and mobile malware. Andrey Komarov from security firm Group-IB told me in a previous interview that the key properties of mobile malware for cybercrime are:, Security Expert are sure that we will assist to an explosion in the diffusion of mobile malicious infrastructures and in particular for Android botnets, we must be prapared., (Security Affairs – Android botnets, cybercrime)

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“A total of 58 such attacks were reported by ten countries, up from 15 attacks during 2015.  ‘Black Box’ is the connection of an unauthorised device which sends dispense commands directly to the ATM cash dispenser in order to ‘cash-out’ the ATM.  Related losses were down 39%, from €0.74 million to €0.45 million.”, The technique is very effective, it has been estimated that crooks have stolen €45 million using it since 2016., The attack method was first reported by the notorious expert Barnaby Jack in 2010, the researcher coined the term jackpotting during the 2010 Black Hat conference., , The brute-force black box attack against an ATM starts by punching a hole into the machine’s casing, then the crooks connect a laptop to the exposed cables or ports and use it to issue commands to the ATM to dispense money., , The arrests were part of a still ongoing Europol operation conducted with law enforcement of numerous states in Europe. Below the details of the arrests:, “Our joint efforts to tackle this new criminal phenomenon resulted in significant arrests across Europe. However the arrest of offenders is only one part of stopping this form of criminality. Increasingly we need to work closely with the ATM industry to design out vulnerabilities at source and prevent the crime taking place,” said Steven Wilson, Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre., The crooks that were involved in the jackpotting ATM Black Box attacks are mainly from countries in Eastern Europe, such as Romania, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine., Let me suggest to read an interesting post that was written by the security expert Brian Krebs that is titled “Thieves Jackpot ATMs With ‘Black Box’ Attack” that describes this kind of attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ATM Black Box attacks, jackpotting)

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In the last days, security experts discovered numerous attacks that have been leveraging the same EternalBlue exploit used by the notorious WannaCry ransomware., The Shadow Brokers hacker group revealed the exploit for the SMB vulnerability in April, but according to malware researchers, other threats used it such as the Adylkuzz botnet that is active since April 24., Security experts at Cyphort found evidence on a honeypot server that threat actors in the wild were already exploiting the SMB flaw in early May to deliver a stealth Remote Access Trojan (RAT) instead of ransomware., The RAT didn’t show worm network worm capabilities like the WannaCry ransomware., The malware is delivered from an IP (182.18.23.38) located in China., “Once the exploitation is successful, the attacker will send an encrypted payload as a shellcode. The shellcode is encrypted via XOR with the key, “A9 CA 63 BA”. The shellcode has an embedded binary in it as shown below:” reads the analysis published by Cyphort. “The embedded DLL is basically a trojan which downloads additional malware and receives commands from its controller.”, Once infected a system, the malicious code closes the port 445 to prevent other malware from abusing the same SMB flaw., This aspect suggests the attacker was aware of the EternalBlue vulnerability., “This is yet another indication that the malware is probably aware of the Eternal Blue vulnerability and is closing it.” continues the analysis. “The threat actors probably did not want other threats mingling with their activity. We believe that the group behind this attack is the same group that spreads Mirai via Windows Kaspersky discovered in February.  We found similarities in terms of their IOCs.”, The RAT sets the following Registry Run entries to download and execute additional malware., The malicious code attempts to delete a number of users and terminate and/or delete various files or processes.  The experts also noticed that it is connected to a remote access tool hosted on a Chinese website, ForShare 8.28., The malware can be instructed by the C&C server to execute various commands, including the screen monitoring, capturing audio and video, monitoring keystrokes, transfer data, deleting files, terminating processes, downloading and executing files and many other operations., The report published by Cyphort included the Indicators of Compromise for this specific threat., The facts that multiple groups have been exploiting ETERNALBLUE weeks before WannaCry is also demonstrated by an analysis published by Secdo., Secdo claims to have found evidence of ransomware abusing EternalBlue flaw weeks before WannaCry emerged., “Secdo has uncovered a new evasive attack that leaves no trace and has been infecting organizations using NSA exploits since the mid-April.” reads the analysis published by Secdo. “The ransomware is the most apparent payload, yet under the surface a more sophisticated attack occurred that would have gone unnoticed.”, , The researchers also reported that threat actors in the wild were using an EternalBlue-based worm to infect all machines in a compromised network and exfiltrate login credentials., Recently experts at Heimdal discovered the UIWIX ransomware, a fileless malware exploiting the EternalBlue vulnerability., Like the WannaCry, UIWIX exploits the same vulnerability in Windows SMB protocol, but the new threat has the ability to run in the memory of the infected system after the exploiting of the EternalBlue., In late April, The experts at Secdo also discovered another attack exploiting the EthernalBlue vulnerability,  it was associated with a Chinese threat actor that used a botnet to distribute a backdoor., “It begins by spawning a thread inside of lsass.exe, similar to the credential theft attack, only instead of remaining purely in-memory, the initial payload connects back to a Chinese C2 server on port 998 (2.x.x.x) and downloads a known root-kit backdoor (based on Agony).” reads the analysis published by Secdo., “The file is dropped in %programdata% under the name 666.exe. Existing NG-AV vendors that were present were able to block 666.exe from running, but remained oblivious to the malicious thread running inside of lsass.exe.”, Summarizing, at least 3 different groups have been leveraging the NSA exploit weeks before the WannaCry, this means a significant portion of the security community failed to monitor the threat or that failed to share the information about the attacks they have observed., The success of EternalBlue attacks are the failure of our current model of cyber security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaCry, EternalBlue vulnerability)

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“The flaw is in read_server_hello() / _gnutls_read_server_hello(), where session_id_len is checked to not exceed incoming packet size, but not checked to ensure it does not exceed maximum session id length.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  GnuTLS, encryption)

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The security expert and bug hunter Craig Arendt (@craig_arendt) has discovered flaws in major eBook readers including the ones commercialized by Amazon, Apple, and Google., The expert discovered different XML external entity (XXE) vulnerabilities in the online epub ebook services that use leverages the ‘EpubCheck’ library.  The library is used for the operations of format conversions into the universal Epub book format., “Applying a familiar XXE pattern to exploit services & readers that consume the ePUB format. Exploiting vulnerabilities in EpubCheck <= 4.0.1 (ePub Validation Java Library & tool), Adobe Digital Editions <= 4.5.2 (book reader), Amazon KDP (Kindle Publishing Online Service), Apple Transporter, and Google Play Book uploads, etc.”, “ePub is a standard format for open books maintained by IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum). IDPF is a trade and standards association for the digital publishing industry, set up to establish a standard for ebook publishing. Their membership list:  reads a blog post published by Arendt., The researcher focused its tests the tool/Java library called EpubCheck (provided by IDPF) used to validate books in the ePub format. Publishers perform a validation step using the library to verify that the format is valid and Arendt discovered the XML external entity (XXE) issue., “The validator tool (EpubCheck) was vulnerable to XXE, so any application that relies on a vulnerable version to check the validity of a book would be susceptible to this type of attack.” continues the analysis., , Arendt explained that in the case of Amazon, the KDP Kindle file upload service used to help publishers upload their books was affected by an XXE flaw that could be exploited by attackers to steal books and data., A similar flaw affected the Apple Transporter service that ships books to the App Store., “Parsing maliciously crafted EPUB may lead to disclosure of user information, Description: An information disclosure issue existed in the parsing of EPUB. This issue was addressed through improved parsing. CVE-2016-7666: Craig Arendt of Stratum Security” state the advisory published by Apple., Arendt confirmed that during the test he accidentally grabbed the shadow password file for one of the epub services using the vulnerable EpubCheck library., The Google Play Books service was not affected by the XXE flaw, but the expert discovered the possibility to trigger an XML Entity expansion flaw that could be exploited to cause denial of service through an explosive growth of parsed data., “The software uses XML documents and allows their structure to be defined with a Document Type Definition (DTD), but it does not properly control the number of recursive definitions of entities.” states the advisory published by the Mitre.org., “If the DTD contains a large number of nested or recursive entities, this can lead to explosive growth of data when parsed, causing a denial of service.”, Similar problems affect other services that permit Java and Flash, Arendt will disclose further attacks once the vendors have fixed the vulnerabilities he reported., All the vendors above have already applied the necessary security patches to the vulnerable epub services., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – epub services, hacking)

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Exactly on week ago a group of Iranian hackers named Cyber Warriors Team claimed to have compromised an SSL certificate issued to the Research and Education Support Services of NASA.  The press released by the Cyber Warriors Team said that hackers have written an HTTPS protocol scanner to find weaknesses in the NASA website.  A NASA spokesman hasn’t denied the hack declaring that the agency is currently investigating on the event., Why steal a certificate?, Last year I wrote an article on the main reasons behind the theft of a digital certificate, let’s remind the principal motivations:, Malware production – Installation for certain types of software could needs that its code is digitally signed with a trusted certificate. By stealing the certificate of a trusted vendor reduces the possibility that the malicious software being detected as quickly. That is exactly what happened for Stuxnet virus., Cyber warfare – Criminals or governments could use the stolen certificates to conduct “man-in-the-middle” attacks, tricking users into thinking they were at a legitimate site when in fact their communications were being secretly tampered and intercepted. That is for example what occurred in the DigiNotar case … companies like Facebook, Google and also agencies like CIA, MI6 were targeted in Dutch government certificate hack., Economic Frauds – digital signature give a warranty on who signed a document and you can decide if you trust the person or company who signed the file and if you trust the organization who issued the certificate. If a digital certificate is stolen we will suffer of an identity theft, let’s imagine which could be the implication., In the specific case the hackers have motivated the attack, in a message published on Pastebin, declaring that the certificate is necessary to perform a man-in-the-middle attack., Our main work and we target Is in use.Our target was not Internet sabotage , Our Target was Do “MAN IN THE MIDDLE” attack., ( with using Confirmation obtained ) and also Clear the track after each connection in the network For Hide and Disclosing my presence in Two-way communication between., But the problem still exists And its use isn’t Hard For We (CW.T) <<<<, we obtain User information for thousands of NASA researcher With Emails and Accounts of other users.Send For You soon Videos of Man in the middle attack and Stealing relationship ( Addressing security managers at NASA )., , Analyzing the screenshot published by the hackers the certificate was utilized on the site of NASA’s Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and Evaluation System (NSPIRES). The hackers have exploited the authentication process obtaining the administrator’s credentials., ,  , In the message is reported that the hackers have exploited thousands of NASA researcher’s accounts, and they have promised that will release a video of the operation, anyway it’s clear the intent of cyber espionage of the group., What it is interesting to investigate is the real origin of the attack, is it an isolated operation made by a group of Iranian hackers or is it an act of cyber warfare?, To  hazard hypotheses let’s remind the content of significant report “The Iranian Cyber Threat to the U.S. Homeland” Statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies and Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. In the document are analyzed the growing Iranian capabilities, the country expanding exploitation of cyberspace can be attributed to two principal geopolitical drivers:, The report clarify the position of Teheran that is considering itself engaged in a cyber war with West, due this reason the Iranian regime is mobilizing in response launching an ambitious $1 billion governmental program to boost national cyber capabilities, acquiring new technologies, investing in cyber defense, and creating of a new army of cyber experts., Iranian Government is working on different fronts in my opinion, on one side it’s recruiting internal hackers in the name of religious motivations, on the other hand it is acquiring knowledge from mercenaries hackers coming from East Europe and also from Asia. It will no difficult for Iran to prepare its own cyber arsenal, and these cyber weapons could hit vulnerable western critical infrastructures., I personally think that the cyber attack is linked to the Iranian government., It’s not the first time that the NASA is hacked, in the beginning of the year several attacks revealed that the agency is unprepared for cyber attacks., The situation is worrying, we must consider the strategic importance of intellectual property exposed due to these accidents. We have repeatedly stressed the attention of foreign governments in strategic technology solutions in industries such as aerospace. In these areas it is extremely high the contribute in term of research and innovation made by new technologies that are introduced in later years in the traditional sectors. Be able to steal these information means bridging a gap of technology and research for decades with disastrous consequences in economic terms., NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin declared that in 2011 the agency was the target of 47 cyber attacks known as advanced persistent threats (APTs) surely made by group of expert hackers with deep knowledge of their target and of the information to search and steal, this is the proof that we are facing with cyber intelligence operations made by hostile governments. Martin admitted:, “the attackers had full functional control over these networks.”, Since the declaration of the official, a number of security experts claimed that some actions were done to improve security of the infrastructures of the agency, but the events seems demonstrate that they are not sufficient., Pierluigi Paganini,  

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Do you have exposed your Industrial control system (ICS) on the Internet?, “If ICS is connected to the Internet, it comes with an almost 100% guarantee of its being hacked on the first day” E. Kaspersky, I used the reply of the Founder of security firm Kaspersky Lab to give you an idea of the concrete risks for the numerous ICS exposed on the Internet. Hackers, cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and other bad actors can hit any industrial system without specific knowledge., In 2013 ICS-CERT received 181 vulnerability reports from researchers and ICS vendors, 177 were true vulnerabilities, 87 percent were exploitable remotely while the other 13 percent required local access to exploit the flaws., , A search engine like Shodan, a specific exploit easily available on an underground forum and an anonymizing tool to avoid detection could be sufficient to compromise a system in a critical infrastructure., In many cases  control systems have to be accessible directly from the Internet, this means that they are exposed to risk of cyber attacks, probes, brute force attacks, attempts and unauthorized access and scanning are the events most frequent events., “Internet facing devices have become a serious concern over the past few years with  remote access demands giving way to insecure or vulnerable configurations. Tools, such as SHODAN, Google and other search engines, enable researchers and adversaries to easily discover and identify a variety of ICS devices that were not intended to be Internet facing.” reports the last ICS-CERT Monitor (Jan-Apr 2014), According ICS-CERT, in many cases devices are not adequately configured, adversary with increasing capabilities could benefit by poor security design of targeted architectures., “Most recently, ICS-CERT received reports of three new cyber incidents that resulted from weak network configuration and/or lack of perimeter security. Two of those incidents involved intrusions by unauthorized parties, and the other was identified as vulnerable by a researcher. In the majority of these cases, the system owners are unaware of the nonsecure configurations or the associated risk.” states the last ICS-CERT Monitor, The ICS-CERT reported that a public utility was recently compromised, a threat actor gained unauthorized access to its control system network, the investigation demonstrated that the system was exposed on the Internet without a strong authentication mechanism. After notification of the incident, forensics experts discovered that the system was already compromised in the past., The document proposes other cases, including a Sochi Arena HVAc system exposed to the Internet discovered by Billy Rios, a researcher at Qualys, which has provided information related to HVAC and Energy Management System (EMS) associated with the Olympics Games in Russia., This system was reported to lack authentication requirements to access the control system. The researcher worked with the system integrator to reconfigure the system prior to the Olympics and opening ceremonies., How to protect ICS?, ICS-CERT recommends adopting defensive action to secure ICSs by using defense-in-depth principles, below the principal suggestions to minimize the risk of exploitation:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  ICS, critical infrastructure)

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It’s not a secret, Israel military is one of the most advanced and active cyber army that is using cyber-warfare to attack its enemy in the cyber space. For years Israel conducts cyber espionage and cyber offensive operations that allow the state to operate undisturbed, away from media pressure always attentive to the controversial international policy of the government of the country., To Israel must recognized the great merit of having invested significantly in cyber warfare in advance respect other states,  pushing the mostly on internal resources and on forming their own militias to cyber offensive techniques., “The IDF has been engaged in cyber activity consistently and relentlessly, gathering intelligence and defending its own cyber space. Additionally if necessary the cyber space will be used to execute attacks and intelligence operations,”, This statement published on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) website, summarized the Israeli military approach to cyber warfare considering it in same way of conventional conflicts, admitting intelligence operations and cyber attacks against foreign governments., , According the information published on the IDF website the IDF Operations Department is the real core of IDF cyber warfare, giving the guidelines for the definition of cyber operations against the enemy of Israel., But what’s the meaning for “cyber operations”?, With the term cyber operation is referred the usage of technology to interfere and destroy enemy projects with cyber attacks and cyber espionage activities, this new area of military discipline is often associated to conventional interventions to increase their efficiency and force., “There are many, diverse, operational cyber warfare goals, including thwarting and disrupting enemy projects that attempt to limit operational freedom of both the IDF and the State of Israel, as well as incorporating cyber warfare activity in completing objectives at all fronts and in every kind of conflict,” according to declarations published., Reading the declaration it’s impossible to don’t think to the recent events of Flame malware detecting and the revelations on Stuxnet project and the US “Olympic Games” operation. Both cases represents good example of the destructive power of cyber weapon used against critical infrastructure of a country. Meanwhile it seems sure the involvement of Israeli in the attacks against Iran conducted in collaboration with US using Stuxnet malware, no verified information are available on the creators of Flame agent., According Israeli software companies, their country’s expertise with cyber weapons is very high supported by a strong government commitment that has created a pool of army-trained hacking talent., Let’s propose the case of the Gil Shwed, founder, CEO, and chairman of board of Check Point Software Technologies Ltd, who served in an elite intelligence unit and that, according his declarations, has recruited from the military cyber corps high skilled personnel for his company. The case is not isolated , Cyber-Ark Software Ltd., a firm specialized in cyber-defense drew on the same source to recruit specialists in the computer industry, has reported its Chief Executive Officer Udi Mokady said., Israel has transformed the hacking in an impressive business that today has a great impact on national security and also on the economy of the country., Its security sector is considered one of the most advanced all over the world, foreign governments and private companies refer it to protect their critical system, it has been estimated the official market amount is around $18 billion, but it is just the tip of the iceberg., The awareness on the efficiency of a cyber attack is shared in the high level of the Israeli government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:, “This is an era that we’re entering into where entire societies can be paralyzed by cyber attack, and Israel is no different,”  “We are committed to being one of the three leading cyber powers of the world.”, Government of Israel is massive investing on cyber security demonstrating a great attention to incoming cyber threats, it has announced that it will expend more than $13 million in the coming years to develop new technologies for cyber defense., Networks, critical infrastructures, military environments and private companies must be protected from foreign cyber attacks., Israeli networks are daily goal of thousands of cyber attacks conducted by hostile governments, hacktivist and independent hackers who want to compete with one of the most advanced nations, for obvious reasons are reported only in presence of substantial losses or sensational data breach., The National Cyber Committee, a department under direct control of the Prime Minister’s Office, will coordinate with the Science and Technology Ministry the project during at least three years,  reserving each year $525,000 for advanced cyber security projects sponsored by corporations, and $80,000 to generation with scholarships., The government of course has a great interest to improve security of its critical infrastructures, due this reason it will push the researchers to develop project that will cover there delicate areas such as banking, defense, government and smart grids in general., The same thought is shared by hostile countries that daily attack Israeli system stressing the critical infrastructure of the country., In January 2012 massive attacks against The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al Israel Airlines Ltd. (ELAL) have blocked the operations leaving their websites down., , Israeli security services are engaging a security challenge with external hackers trying to put in place defense systems also able to trace back the origins of the attacks., Yitzhak Ben Israel responsible for the creation of the National Cyber Directorate declared:, “We’re in pretty good shape with current threats, but the threats next year and two years from now are just going to get higher and we need to keep up,”, “Our biggest worry is damage to our major life systems that are all controlled by computers.”, A so complex situation is stimulating the security market and its growth, to give an example let’s analyze the progress made by the Check Point’s Software Technologies, traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, that has increase its quotation more over 70 percent in the past two years reducing market share of its direct competitors Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Network, both have fallen more than 30 percent in the same period., Other private companies are also investing on the creation of new solutions that could be proposed to te cyber security market, for example Elbit Systems Ltd., maybe the Israel’s biggest non-government defense contractor, will propose to the market a new cyber-security simulator, designed to train government and private companies to the proper response to cyber attacks., Israeli private companies are proofing the hacking methods proposing high level consulting to the businesses of the world, developing and studying the most sophisticated attacks technologies and creating powerful tools and systems for both cyber offense and defense., The reliability of Israeli companies is worldwide recognized, companies such as  Check Point have a 10.7 percent share of the world cyber security market by revenue in 2009, according to a November 2010 study by market researcher IDC., The proceeds from information technology products are around $4.2 billion in 2010, with more than half of that coming from security, stating to the declaration of Yafit Katz- Rubin, business development manager for the industry at the Israel Export Institute in Tel Aviv., Of course a so sustained market is attracting also external capital and investors, Goldman joined Jerusalem Venture Partners in a $40 million investment in Cyber- Ark, which has its research and development facilities in Petach Tikva, Israel., In my personal opinion the investments in cyber defense are really judicious and profitable but we must also consider drawbacks to a totally opening to the security markets. The same companies that propose defense systems could arm foreign state militia with serious consequences. The belief that these concerns are only present in spy story films is wrong, the business follow only the money reason and it is already happened in the past that security companies has violated the technological embargo decided for rogue states such as Syria and Iran., So let’s support the growth of the security industry, but beware the lure of the money god. Safety is everyone’s responsibility., Pierluigi Paganini

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)

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Is the popular messaging service Whatsapp affected by a backdoor? According to a blog post published by The Guardian, the application was affected by a vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to intercept and read messages., The issue could not be considered as a backdoor either a vulnerability, it is an issue related to the implementation of the cryptography in the app, in the specific case of user’s encryption key changes., Even when a new key is generated, for example using a new device,  the user will be able to continue an old conversation without informing the sender of the change. Anyway, specific settings in Whatsapp can enable the notification that the sender transmitted message using a new Key., The security issue was discovered by Tobias Boelter, a cryptography and security researcher at the University of California, Berkeley., “If WhatsApp is asked by a government agency to disclose its messaging records, it can effectively grant access due to the change in keys.” Boelter told the Guardian, Resuming the issue is a serious threat to the users’ privacy, WhatsApp can read encrypted messages sent through the service., The researcher reported the flaw to WhatsApp in April, but the loophole is still present., Boelter highlights WhatsApp by default trusts the use of new key without any sender’s notification, he also remarked that the application notifies the sender of the change only after the message is sent even when that default is changed., On the other end, the application Signal, for example, requires a sender to manually verify keys, WhatsApp doesn’t., The notorious Moxie Marlinspike, who is considered the mind behind the encryption protocol behind both Signal and WhatsApp explained that the issue could not be considered as a backdoor., “The fact that WhatsApp handles key changes is not a ‘backdoor,'” reads a blog post published by Moxie. “It is how cryptography works. Any attempt to intercept messages in transmit by the server is detectable by the sender, just like with Signal, PGP, or any other end-to-end encrypted communication system.”, Moxie highlighted that WhatsApp takes strict precautions to prevent its servers from knowing which users have enabled security notifications. This means that it should be impossible for attackers to gather information about potential victims that turned off the notification., Boelter highlighted that an attacker can hack WhatApp servers and gain administrative control over them., The attacker could force a change of the encryption key for a targeted mobile device allowing the application to use his key to encrypt messages without ever warning the receiver., , The attacker then has to take the targeted phone temporarily unavailable (for a period of hours or days). All the messages that were sent during that time will be stored in a queue and once the phone became available again, the messages will be encrypted with the new attacker key., The attack anyway is very complex from the attacker perspective because:, Which is the WhatsApp reply?, “WhatsApp does not give governments a “backdoor” into its systems and would fight any government request to create a backdoor. The design decision referenced in the Guardian story prevents millions of messages from being lost, and WhatsApp offers people security notifications to alert them to potential security risks. WhatsApp published a technical white paper on its encryption design and has been transparent about the government requests it receives, publishing data about those requests in the Facebook Government Requests Report.” states WhatsApp, “Ultimately, there’s little evidence of a vulnerability and certainly none of a backdoor—which is usually defined as secret functionality for defeating security measures. WhatsApp users should strongly consider turning on security notifications by accessing Settings > Account > Security.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Backdoor, hacking)

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The security community is threatened by a new botnet composed at least 162,000 WordPress-powered websites abused to run DDoS attacks. The technique of attack allows to flood a target with requests sent by WordPress servers that received a specifically crafted spoofed Web request. The requests sent to the WordPress servers appear to come from the target site, so the attackers are able to amplify they fire capability., The discovery was made by experts from security firm Sucuri that counted more than 162,000 legitimate WordPress sites targeting the web site of a company customer., “Can you see how powerful it can be?” “One attacker can use thousands of popular and clean WordPress sites to perform their DDoS attack, while being hidden in the shadows, and that all happens with a simple ping back request to the XML-RPC file.” states the blog post published by the company. , The attack targets the XML-RPC implemented by web sites running WordPress and many other Web applications that offer services such as pingbacks, trackbacks, and remote access to some users., A similar attack is considerable as an “application DDoS” conducted with ISO/OSI application layer requests, exactly like HTTP DDoS attack, despite its magnitude is significantly lower respect a DNS amplification DDoS attack or an NTP based DDoS., One attacker can use thousands of popular and clean WordPress sites to perform their DDOS attack, while being hidden in the shadows, and that all happens with a simple ping back request to the XML-RPC file:, To discover if your WordPress instance is abused to conduct DDoS attack it is possible to run an online scan with this tool proposed by Sucury firm, the post also provides instructions to improve security of the WordPress like adding the following code to a site theme:, add_filter( ‘xmlrpc_methods’, function( $methods ) { unset( $methods‘pingback.ping’ ); return $methods; } );, Be aware, because filter could have an impact on your website because the numerous functionalities based on XML-RPC protocol. We can conclude that DDoS attacks are becoming even more popular and attackers are adopting new and original techniques., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WordPress, DDoS)

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Turkish hackers have taken down the Vatican City official website for revenge against the recent statements by Pope Francesco on the Armenian genocide. The hacking group named Herakles (@THTHerakles) announced that he will continue the offensive against the Vatican City website until the Pope will not apologize officially for statements., “We want Pope to apologize for his words or we will make sure the website remains off-line” said one of the hacker at Hackread., The Pope’s statements on the Armenian genocide have aroused the indignation of the Turkish Government, the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu defined “unacceptable” the attitude of the head of the Christian Church, confirming that his declaration are “out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis.”are “out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis.”, The Pope’s statement, which is out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis, is simply unacceptable. +++, — Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu (@MevlutCavusoglu) 12 Aprile 2015, The site is actually online, but according to hacker the main server targeted by his group is still down., Below one of the tweets sent by the hackers about the attack on the Vatican City website:, ,  , The Vatican City website was redirected to another server in order to mitigate the attack., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Vatican City, hacking)

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The team of researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel composed of Mordechai Guri, Dima Bykhovsky‏, Yuval Elovici developed a PoC malware that leverages security cameras with Infrared capabilities to steal data., The security cameras are used as a covert channel for data exfiltration and to send commands to the malicious code., Modern surveillance and security cameras are equipped with infrared LEDs for night vision, experts decided to exploit them because infrared light is imperceptible to the human eye making impossible for users to discover the data transmission through led blinking., The same research team has devised numerous techniques to exfiltrate data from air-gapped networks across the years, including DiskFiltration, AirHopper, BitWhisper, LED-it-Go, SPEAKE(a)R, USBee, Fansmitter, xLED., The current research project dubbed aIR-Jumper, leverage on a malicious code that must be installed on the target computers which enables the attackers to control it with security surveillance cameras/software, or on a computer in the same network with the camera., “In this paper, we show how attackers can use surveillance cameras and infrared light to establish bi-directional covert communication between the internal networks of organizations and remote attackers. We present two scenarios: exfiltration (leaking data out of the network) and infiltration (sending data into the network). ” reads the paper published by the team and titled “aIR-Jumper: Covert Air-Gap Exfiltration/Infiltration via Security Cameras & Infrared (IR)“, The malicious code is able to steal data from an infected system and then convert it into a sequence of ones and zeros that is then transmitted by making the device’s infrared LEDs blinking., “By blinking the IR LEDs an attacker can leak sensitive data stored on the device, such as credentials and cryptographic keys, at a speed of 15 bit/sec. However, in their method the attacker must find a way to insert the compromised hardware into the organization. In contrast, our method uses the IR LEDs that already exist in surveillance and security cameras and doesn’t require special or malicious hardware.” continues the paper., On the other end, an attacker sitting in the range of the security camera’s infrared LED will be able to receive the blinking and use an application developed by the ream to reconstructs stream of data sent through the led blinking., The researchers also demonstrated that an attacker can use an infrared LED to send new commands to a security camera inside an infected network. The malicious code developed by the experts analyzes the camera’s video feed, detect infrared LED transmissions and convert the incoming blinks into new commands., The expert implemented a malware prototype and evaluated it with different models of cameras and discussed preventive and defensive countermeasures., “Our evaluation shows that an attacker can use IR and surveillance cameras to communicate over the air-gap to a distance of tens to hundreds of meters away. We demonstrate how data can be leaked from the network at a bit rate of 20 bit/sec (per camera) and be delivered to the network at bit rate of more than 100 bit/sec (per camera).” states the paper., The exfiltration speed obtained by the researchers is low compared to the one obtained with other techniques tested by the same group of researchers. In July, the team of experts led by the expert Mordechai Guri developed a specific firmware dubbed xLED that allowed them to control the LED while the router is working. The router LEDs were used to exfiltrate data from air-gapped networks with better performance compared with aIR-Jumper., The researchers explained that infrared signals are better than router LEDs because infrared signals bounce of nearby surfaces with a higher reflection rate, this means that attackers don’t necessarily need a line of sight to the camera., In the following table, the aIR-Jumper technique is compared with others devised by the research team, , In their research paper. the team proposes a series of software and hardware countermeasures, such as window shielding, IR LED activity monitoring, firmware controls for disabling IR support, irregular access to camera API functions, suspicious traffic detection (LED control), and also LEDs covering /disconnecting., I reached Mordechai Guri for a comment:, “This air-gap covert-channel is unique since it allow attackers to establish a bi-directional communication with a remote attacker, like a TCP/IP connection with IR signals and security cameras: you can send a request and receive a response. Almost all existing air-gap covert-channels allows only one way communication” , The experts published two videos PoC that show how they send commands to the aIR-Jumper malware via the security camera, and how they exfiltrate data from the affected network., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – aIR-Jumper, air-gapped network)

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Security experts have observed during last months an increase in the use of AutoIt coding language To Spread Malware and Toolsets. AutoIt is a very flexible scripting language used since 1999 in Windows environments. The language was used to perform simple operations like text file editing but allows also the creation of more complex scripts that perform mass downloads with complex GUIs., AutoIt is an easy-to-learn language that allows for quick development,due this reason it was chosen by numerous malware author., In 2013 security firm have detected an alarming increase for infostealer malware and banking trojans, there were observed new variants of the popular ZeuS designed for 64bit systems and able to exploit Tor networks to hide C&C servers.  The new variant for 64 bit architecture includes a malicious AutoIt file and garbage files, it is spread via email message and the unpacked file it recognized as as TSPY_ZBOT.SMIG.  Exactly like other ZeuS malware version it drops a configuration file that contains a list of its targets (e.g. Banks, Financial organizations)., But malware is even more complex, new instances are also able to steal data from different FTP sites and personal certificates from the infected host., Malware analysts at Trend Micro spotted other malicious code with same packer, TSPY_CHISBURG.A and TSPY_EUPUDS.A, while the first one steals user names and passwords from Yahoo, Hotmail, Pidgin, FileZilla, and VPN/ISP credentials once is loaded in memory, the second one collect victim’s info (e.g. User ID, browser and version, OS version) and user’s credentials., Infostealers are privileged tools for cybercriminals to collect tools information to sell in the underground cybercrime, these info are used for fraud arrangement or to organize targeted attacks., Returning to AutoIt packer, a new code was found online to implement propagation mechanism via removable drives. The code is able to checks installed antivirus software on the system and it includes obfuscated  functions to make it harder the detection., Thanks to improved AutoIt packer also old malware could be effective as explained by TrendMicro experts., “With the incorporation of malware to a scripting language such as AutoIt, it makes analysis arduous especially if there is no decompiler that can aid in the analysis.  AutoIt is also used by normal applications, thus there is need for malware which are compressed to be unpacked so as to get only the malicious routines/behavior.”, Infostealers aren’t unique malware to menace user’s security, the 2013 was considere also the year of ransomware, Cryptolocker for example has infected about 250,000 PCs mainly from US, UK and Australia., ,  , Last variant of CryptoLocker detected by TrendMicro includes a new notable propagation feature, the instance WORM_CRILOCK.A has the capability to spread via removable drives., “Aside from its propagation technique, the new malware bears numerous differences from known CryptoLocker variants. Rather than relying on a downloader malware—often UPATRE— to infect systems, this malware pretends to be an activator for various software such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing sites. Uploading the malware in P2P sites allows bad guys to easily infect systems without the need to create (and send) spammed messages.” states TrendMicro post., The example provided show the continuous improvement of the cybercrime ecosystem to malicious tools like infostealer and ransomware, cybercrime menace is becoming even more insidious and sophisticated.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  malware, TrendMicro),  

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According to the threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, a Russian-speaking black hat hacker, known as ‘Rasputin‘, hacked systems of more than 60 universities and U.S. Government agencies., , We met Rasputin in December 2016, when he was offering for sale stolen login credentials for a U.S. agency that tests and certifies voting equipment, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Rasputin uses to exploit SQL injection flaws to gain access to sensitive information that he can sell on cybercrime marketplaces., Rasputin uses SQL injection vulnerabilities to compromise target systems and steal sensitive information that he offers for sale cybercrime black markets., Record Future has been following Rasputin since 2015, according to the security firm he may also have tried to sell details about the SQL injection to a broker working on behalf of a Middle Eastern government., Based on Rasputin’s historical criminal forum activity, the experts exclude he is sponsored by a foreign government., Researchers at Recorded Future identified many of the Rasputins’ victims, including ten universities in the United Kingdom, over two dozen universities in the United States, and many US government agencies., The hacker breached the systems of government agencies includes local, state and federal organizations. The list of victims includes the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration., There are plenty of free tools that can be used to find and exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities, including Havij, Ashiyane SQL Scanner, SQL Exploiter Pro, SQLI Hunter, SQL Inject Me, SQLmap and SQLSentinel.Rasputin has been using a SQL injection tool that he developed himself., Rasputin doesn’t use free SQL injection scanners, he has been using a SQL injection tool that he developed himself instead., “Financial profits motivate actors like Rasputin, who have technical skills to create their own tools to outperform the competition in both identifying and exploiting vulnerable databases. ” reads the analysis published by Recorded Future., Experts from Recorded Future highlighted that while the level of awareness of SQL injection vulnerabilities is high, the organizations lack basic secure coding practices., Recorded Future pointed out that addressing these types of flaws can often be costly, for this reason companies use to postpone the fixing activities until the budget is available, but sometimes it is too late., “SQLi vulnerabilities are simple to prevent through coding best practices. Over 15 years of high-profile data breaches have done little to prevent poorly programmed web applications and/or third-party software from being used by government, enterprises, and academia.” continues the analysis. “Some of the most publicized data breaches were the result of SQLi including large corporations like Heartland Payment Systems, HBGary Federal, Yahoo!, Linkedin, etc.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Rasputin, hacking)

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According to the security firm Check Point a vulnerability in the popular messaging service WhatsApp Web exposes up to 200 million of its users at risk of cyber attack., WhatsApp Web allows the users of the popular mobile app to access their messages from desktop machines., An attacker can exploit the flaw in WhatsApp Web, the web-based version of the mobile application, can be exploited by attackers to trick users into executing arbitrary code on their PC., The security researcher Kasif Dekel from Check Point explained that the vulnerability can be exploited by simply sending a vCard contact card containing malicious code to a WhatsApp user that opening it in the WhatsApp Web executes the code., An attacker can inject a command in the attribute “name” of the vCard using the ‘&’ character as a separator. Windows will automatically parse the various attributes composing the vCard trying to execute their content, including the injected command., “Check Point security researcher Kasif Dekel recently discovered significant vulnerabilities which exploit the WhatsApp Web logic and allow attackers to trick victims into executing arbitrary code on their machines in a new and sophisticated way. All an attacker needed to do to exploit the vulnerability was to send a user a seemingly innocent vCard containing malicious code. Once opened, the alleged contact is revealed to be an executable file, further compromising computers by distributing bots, ransomware, RATs, and other malwares.” states Check Point in a blog post., The exploitation of the flaw could allow crooks to serve various types of malware on the target machine, including RATs and ransomware. The flaw exploits the lack of validation of the contact card sent in the ‘vCard’ format., “By manually intercepting and crafting XMPP requests to the WhatsApp servers, it was possible to control the file extension of the contact card file,” Dekel added., The experts highlighted that the attacker just needs to create a contact and inject malicious code in the name attribute directly on the phone, then he needs to send it through the targeted WhatsApp client., Check Point added that attackers can also use an icon to exploit the flaw and serve malicious binaries., “But wait, there’s more! Clever attackers can exploit this in more devious scenarios, using the displayed icon to enrich the scam:, , This simple trick opened up a vast world of opportunity for cybercriminals and scammers, in effect allowing easy “WhatsApp Phishing”. Massive exploitation of this vulnerability could have affected millions of users, failing to realize the malicious nature of the attachment.”, Check Point reported the flaw to WhatsApp at the end of last month and the company promptly fixed it. WhatsApp Web v0.1.4481 and later include the fix for this vulnerability., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WhatsApp Web, hacking)

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According to security firm FireEye, a cyber espionage group linked to the Iranian Government, dubbed APT33, has been targeting aerospace and energy organizations in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea., The APT33 group has been around since at least 2013, since mid-2016, the group targeted the aviation industry and energy companies with connections to petrochemical production., “From mid-2016 through early 2017, APT33 compromised a U.S. organization in the aerospace sector and targeted a business conglomerate located in Saudi Arabia with aviation holdings.” reads a blog post published by FireEye., “During the same time period, APT33 also targeted a South Korean company involved in oil refining and petrochemicals. More recently, in May 2017, APT33 appeared to target a Saudi organization and a South Korean business conglomerate using a malicious file that attempted to entice victims with job vacancies for a Saudi Arabian petrochemical company.”, According to the experts, the APT33 group is gathering information on Saudi Arabia’s military aviation capabilities to gain insight into rivals in the MiddleEast., “We assess the targeting of multiple companies with aviation-related partnerships to Saudi Arabia indicates that APT33 may possibly be looking to gain insights on Saudi Arabia’s military aviation capabilities to enhance Iran’s domestic aviation capabilities or to support Iran’s military and strategic decision making vis a vis Saudi Arabia,” continues FireEye., “We believe the targeting of the Saudi organization may have been an attempt to gain insight into regional rivals, while the targeting of South Korean companies may be due to South Korea’s recent partnerships with Iran’s petrochemical industry as well as South Korea’s relationships with Saudi petrochemical companies,” , The cyberspies leverage spear phishing emails sent to employees whose jobs related to the aviation industry., , The recruitment themed messages contained links to malicious HTML application (.hta) files. The .hta files contained job descriptions and links to legitimate job postings on popular employment websites that would be of interest for the victims., The experts noticed APT33 used a built-in phishing module within the publicly available ALFA TEaM Shell (aka ALFASHELL) to send phishing messages to targeted individuals in 2016., The attackers set up several domains that appeared as belonging to Saudi aviation firms and other companies that work with them, including Alsalam Aircraft Company, Boeing and Northrop Grumman Aviation Arabia., The malware used by the APT33 group includes a dropper dubbed DROPSHOT that has been linked to the wiper malware SHAPESHIFT, tracked by Kaspersky as StoneDrill, used in targeted attacks against organizations in Saudi Arabia. The arsenal of the group also includes a backdoor called TURNEDUP., Kaspersky experts linked the StoneDrill malware to the Shamoon 2 and Charming Kitten (aka Newscaster and NewsBeef), a threat actor believed to be operating out of Iran., The researchers identified an actor using the handle “xman_1365_x” that has been involved in the development and use of the TURNEDUP backdoor., “Xman_1365_x was also a community manager in the Barnamenevis Iranian programming and software engineering forum, and registered accounts in the well-known Iranian Shabgard and Ashiyane forums, though we did not find evidence to suggest that this actor was ever a formal member of the Shabgard or Ashiyane hacktivist groups.” continues FireEye., FireEye cited open source reporting links the “xman_1365_x” actor to the “Nasr Institute,” which is the equivalent to Iran’s “cyber army” and directly controlled by the Iranian government., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Iran, APT33)

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Early 2015, part of the source code for the 2.0 version of the RIG exploit kit was leaked online due to a dispute between the main developer and a reseller. According to the researchers at Trustwave, the developer has recently released a 3.0 version of the RIG exploit kit which includes some significant improvements to avoid the analysis of the source code., The developer of the version 3.0 RIG exploit kit has patched the vulnerabilities that allowed the reseller to steal the source code. The experts discovered that the new variant doesn’t allow unauthenticated users to access internal files hosted on the backend server., The RIG developer has chosen CloudFlare to protect the control panel of its architecture against DDoS attacks. The researchers also discovered that payloads are no longer stored in a folder on the server to prevent users from uploading backdoors., The researchers that investigated on the 3.0 version of the RIG exploit kit succeeded in access administration servers used by two RIG instances. The new variant of RIG exploit kit is responsible for more than 3.5 million infection attempts., , “The screenshots above, taken from the two RIG instances we observed, show the up-to-date state of RIG. It is evident from this overview that not only did RIG 3.0 manage to maintain the exploitation percentage of RIG 2.0, it also managed to vastly increase its number of hits- reaching the high volume of over 3.5 million hits recorded thus far in both instances combined. ” states the post published by Trustwave., According to the researchers over 1.3 million of these infections were successful, which corresponds to a 34 percent success rate. The majority of victims is located in Brazil (450,529 infections) and Vietnam (302,705). Other infections were observed in the US (45,000) , UK (10,000) , and Canada (4,000)., The number of new infections per day is 27,000 on average, the majority of victims is infected with the Tofsee spam bot, only one of the RIG 3.0 customers distributes Tofsee and experts have estimated that his revenues were between $60,000 and $100,000 per month., The experts highlighted that the RIG exploit kit were prevalently served through malvertising campaign, which used a number of websites ranked in Alexa’s top 3000., “Our investigation shows that 90% of the traffic flowing into the various campaigns of the RIG exploit kit were a result of malvertisement (malicious ads). Apparently, according to the referers, many large websites were abused by malvertising campaigns in order to redirect visitors to the RIG exploit kit, these include large news sites, investment consulting firms, IT solution provides, etc. – all of them ranked in Alexa’s top 3000.” continues the post., The experts speculate that the malvertising campaign exploited many vulnerabilities in the Adobe Flash Player recently disclosed, including the zero-days leaked following the Hacking Team breach., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RIG Exploit Kit 3.0, cybercrime)

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Which is the cost of cybercrime suffered by US companies? The fifth annual report published by the Ponemon Institute and titled “2014 Global Report on the Cost of Cyber Crime” reveals that cyber attacks against large US companies (the Ponemon Institute focused on companies having more that 1,000 employees) result in an average of $12.7 million in annual damages., , The report, sponsored this year by Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Security division, confirmed an increase of 9.7 percent from the previous year, the research has discovered that the economic losses are mainly related to business disruption and data breaches information loss account for nearly three-quarters of the cost of cybercrime incidents., The sectors that suffers the higher cost of cybercrime according to the Ponemon Institute are energy and utility companies and the financial industry, the number of the attacks against both industries is increasing at a worrying trend., The security posture of companies is significant in the evaluation of the cost of cybercrime they suffer, as explained in the report organizations that invest in security result lower costs associated with security incidents. Analyzing the economic benefit for the adoption of an efficient security policy, the expert at the Ponemon Institute observed a reduction of cost of cybercrime by an average of $2.6 million., “Business disruption, information loss and the time it takes to detect a breach collectively represented the highest cost to organizations experiencing a breach,” Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said in a statement., An alarming data published in the report is the average company took detect a cyber attack against its systems, 170 days to detect an attack and 31 days on average to apply necessary mitigation actions. The most dangerous attacks are related to the activity of insiders, these attacks are more difficult to be detected and took about two months to resolve., , As explained in the Ponemon Institute, the cost of cybercrime depends on the size of the victims, the largest firms had greater cost of cybercrime, meanwhile smaller firms had higher damages per employee ($1,601 per worker)., Web-based attacks are most expensive incidents for smaller companies, followed by malware based attacks and denial-of-service attacks, meanwhile large enterprises mainly suffers denial-of-service attacks., , I consider very difficult to evaluate the overall cost of cybercrime for a company, the data proposed could give us an idea of the trends on the topic, but in my opinion probably the real cost for companies is significantly higher., Anyway I suggest you the reading of this interesting report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cost of cybercrime, Ponemon Institute)

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A new study confirms that dozens of iOS apps are affected by vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers to run man-in-the-middle (MitM) and intercept data from connections even if protected by TLS., The study was conducted by the developers at verify.ly, a service that analyzes iOS apps searching for security issues. The experts analyzed applications in the Apple App Store and discovered hundreds of security issues that potentially expose mobile users to MITM attacks. All the applications have been tested on iPhone mobile devices running iOS 10 version and confirmed that 76 had been vulnerable., The impact is serious if we consider that the affected applications account for more than 18 million downloads. The vulnerability is considered high risk in the case of 19 of the 76 applications. The applications expose sensitive data, including financial or medical service credentials or session authentication tokens., “During the testing process, I was able to confirm 76 popular iOS applications allow a silent man-in-the-middle attack to be performed on connections which should be protected by TLS (HTTPS), allowing interception and/or manipulation of data in motion.” reads the blog post published by the researchers., “According to Apptopia estimates, there has been a combined total of more than 18,000,000 (Eighteen Million) downloads of app versions which are confirmed to be affected by this vulnerability.”, , Examining the key findings of the report we can see that:, “This sort of attack can be conducted by any party within Wi-Fi range of your device while it is in use. This can be anywhere in public, or even within your home if an attacker can get within close range,” continues the post. “Such an attack can be conducted using either custom hardware, or a slighly modified mobile phone, depending on the required range and capabilities. The best similar and well-understood form of attack to this would be the ability to read data from credit cards at a close range.”, The security issues discovered by the experts are the result of the lax of adoption of secure coding techniques. Waiting for a fix, the users of the affected iOS apps need to avoid using them on Wi-Fi networks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iOS apps, MITM)

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A few weeks ago, CISCO issued an alert to warn enterprise customers about a spike in attacks in which hackers use valid admin credentials on IOS devices to install bogus ROMMON images, which is the bootstrap program that initializes the CISCO hardware and boot the software., Now security experts at Mandiant confirmed to have detected such “implants” in the wild, the researchers found the malicious ROMMON images dubbed “SYNful Knock,” on 14 Cisco routers located in Ukraine, Philippines, India and Mexico. The Cisco models 1841, 2811, 3825 are affected, it is important to highlight that they are no longer being on the market., Once loaded the bogus ROMMON, The attackers have unrestricted backdoor access to the CISCO router via the console and Telnet using a special password. Bad actors can load further malicious payloads by using specially crafted TCP packets sent to the device’s interface., The ROMMON implant is persistent meanwhile the 100 additional modules observed by Mandiant reside in volatile memory and for this reason they are removed after a reboot or reload of the router., As explained by CISCO the attackers exploit stolen credentials to gain control of the CISCO network device and install the bogus ROMMON images., The attacker somehow accessed valid administrative credentials to access the CISCO devices, they aren’t exploiting any vulnerability, but experts speculate they are harvesting admin credentials to run the attacks and install the malicious ROMMON images., “Cisco PSIRT has contacted customers to describe an evolution in attacks against Cisco IOS Classic platforms. Cisco has observed a limited number of cases where attackers, after gaining administrative or physical access to a Cisco IOS device, replaced the Cisco IOS ROMMON (IOS bootstrap) with a malicious ROMMON image,” states the advisory from Cisco., “In all cases seen by Cisco, attackers accessed the devices using valid administrative credentials and then used the ROMMON field upgrade process to install a malicious ROMMON. Once the malicious ROMMON was installed and the IOS device was rebooted, the attacker was able to manipulate device behavior. Utilizing a malicious ROMMON provides attackers an additional advantage because infection will persist through a reboot.,  No product vulnerability is leveraged in this attack, and the attacker requires valid administrative credentials or physical access to the system to be successful. The ability to install an upgraded ROMMON image on IOS devices is a standard, documented feature that administrators use to manage their networks. No CVE ID will be assigned., Researchers at Mandiant confirm the attackers have had access to admin credentials, or the compromised devices were poorly configured by using default credentials., , “ Each of the modules are enabled via the HTTP protocol (not HTTPS), using a specifically crafted TCP packets sent to the routers interface. The packets have a nonstandard sequence and corresponding acknowledgment numbers.  The modules can manifest themselves as independent executable code or hooks within the routers IOS that provide functionality similar to the backdoor password. The backdoor password provides access to the router through the console and Telnet.” states Mandiant in a blog post., , This kind of attacks is very insidious for enterprises, they are hard to discover and compromised routers could represent an entry point in the corporate network attackers an easy entry point, Cisco provided the following suggestions to detect and mitigate SYNful_Knock attacks:, These attacks are likely grow in popularity and could represent a serious threat to enterprises as confirmed by FireEye:, “We believe that the detection of SYNful Knock is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to attacks utilizing modified router images (regardless of vendor),” “As attackers focus their efforts on gaining persistent access, it is likely that other undetected variants of this implant are being deployed throughout the globe.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISCO, ROMMON),  

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A database containing 5 million alleged Google login and password has been leaked online on a Russian cyber security internet forum. The news was spread by online media agencies, including RT.com. The huge archive is in text file format and includes credentials for alleged compromised Google accounts, the database was published on Tuesday on the Bitcoin Security board, but in time I’m writing is is no more accessible.  The list is mainly composed of accounts belonging to Google users that could be used by threat actors for the entire family of services offered by Google, from the Gmail mail service to the G+ social network., According to RT the list includes 4.93 million entries, but for obvious reasons the forum administrators haven’t disclosed the passwords leaving only the logins in the purged list., The figure is impressive and the repercussions under the security perspective are serious, the user on the forum with nickname “tvskit“ who published the file claimed that 60 percent of the passwords are valid., “The forum user tvskit, who published the file, claimed that 60 percent of the passwords were valid, with some users confirming that they found their data in the base, reports CNews, a popular Russian IT news website.” reported the post from RT.com., Google Russia immediately started the investigation of the alleged data breach, and announced that in any case it will encourage its users to adopt strong passwords and enable the two-factor authentication process implemented by the company for its services., , The disclosure process is similar to other data leaks for compromised accounts belonging the Russian web services, unfortunately data breaches are becoming events very frequent worldwide. A few days ago the Russian web services Mail. Ru and Yandex suffered announced the leaks of user account credentials of 4.66 and 1.26 million accounts respectively., In the cases reported by Russian Internet Giants Mail.ru and Yandex, according to the experts, the majority of the accounts leaked were obsolete or no more active. The company confirmed that their databases were not compromised and claimed that the leaked data was collected over the time through other kind of attacks, like phishing attacks or malware based attack, against the end-users. A similar defense was recently sustained by Apple in the case of the leak of celebrities’ naked photos online, also in that case the company revealed that its iCloud architecture was not compromised and that the users were victim of other form of direct attacks., Stay tuned for further info., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Google account credentials, data breach)

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A mystery surrounds the recent hack of CoinPouch wallet app, users lost over $655,000 worth of Verge cryptocurrency., On Tuesday, the maintainers of the CoinPouch multi-currency wallet app  published a statement that disclosed a security breach that affected its users who stored Verge currency in their wallets., The project maintainers claimed the incident affected a Verge node set up with the help of Verge project maintainers to handle Verge transactions for Coin Pouch users., “Users who held XVG Verge in Coin Pouch which was routed through the affected Verge Specific Node. Please note that at this time it appears that only Verge XVG wallets were affected. We have no information or customer reports to suggest that any other coins in CoinPouch were affected by this hack.” reads the announcement., According to CoinPouch, a user reported having his Verge funds stolen on November 9. The results of the investigation  conducted by the company along with the maintainers at the Verge project excluded the incident was caused by a cyber attack., The Verge development team provided specific settings for CoinPouch’s Verge node that would improve its security, but evidently that modifications were not enough., Even if the developers applied the changes suggested by the Verge team, a few days later some of its users reported problems with the Verge wallets., “A few days later, we started getting additional reports from users stating their Verge wallets in Coinpouch were not working correctly. So, we contacted Justin again to investigate the issue.” continues the statement. “During that investigation, it was discovered that most Verge tokens on the Verge Specific Node had been transferred out which prompted us to immediately shut down the Verge Specific Node once we were able to confirm that it was a hack.”, CoinPouch publicly disclosed the hack and filed a complaint with law enforcement, it also hired a forensics lab to conduct further investigation., “Users who held XVG Verge in CoinPouch which was routed through the affected Verge Specific Node. Please note that at this time it appears that only Verge XVG wallets were affected.” reads the Verge statement.”, , The good news is that the Verge team has traced the wallet used by the hackers to hijack the funds that was containing over 126 million Verge coins., The maintainers at the Verge project took the distance from CoinPouch, claiming the company was never listed as a recommended wallet on its website and confirmed that it was removed from the site., To clarify situation and stop disinformation: It was 3rd party wallet @coinpouchapp that was hacked cos wasn't secured properly on their side. Not Verge blockchain. Independent forensic probe was ordered, as reported by #CoinPouch. Expect further status updates on their channels., — vergecurrency (@vergecurrency) November 23, 2017, , CoinPouch iOS wallet has been removed from our website.#xvg #verge #coinpouch #vergecurrency, — vergecurrency (@vergecurrency) November 22, 2017, , “This does not mean Verge was hacked nor does it mean Coinpouch was hacked. At this moment neither Coinpouch nor Justin, the founder and lead developer of Verge, are clear how the hack occurred.” said the Verge development., “At this moment neither Coinpouch nor Justin, the founder and lead developer of Verge, are clear how the hack occurred,” said the company in a statement., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Verge, cryptocurrency)

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According to a report published by American Security Today, the DARPA High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) program is designing technology for the creation of safe and secure cyber-physical systems., DARPA is currently developing a multifactor authentication system that aims to replace the current common access card (CAC) which leverages two-factor authentication., The solution will verify the identity of the person using biometrics and behavioral analysis., Behavioral analysis is based on the concept of “patterns of life,” an individual is identified by analyzing his actions and comparing them to a database of habits., “The new system will employ behavioral analysis and biometrics to ensure that the identity of the person using the network is verified. This probably would feature “patterns of life,” in which a person’s actions are compared to their established habits, Gen. Lynn relates.” states Americansecuritytoday.com., , The Department of Defense (DoD) plans to adopt multi-factor authentication solutions including biometrics and other “patterns of life” technologies to replace access cards in the next months., In April, Alfred Rivera, Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) director at that time, confirmed that the agency was analyzing different solutions from several vendors and that was searching for innovative technologies., Lt. Gen. Alan R. Lynn, who lead DISA and Joint Force Headquarters, Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DODIN), announced that both agencies are searching for any solutions that could help to stay ahead of cyber adversaries, “The cyber battlefield is growing, it’s unending and it’s 24/7, and we have to keep a constant eye on it, and any tools that industry can bring, we’re interested in,” said Gen. Alan R. Lynn., “If there is some technology that would allow us to provide more bandwidth, more capability, we’re interested in that as well.” , DISA representatives will discuss new cyber tools for the creation of safe and secure cyber-physical systems at the AFCEA International’s Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium, to be held June 13-15 at the Baltimore Convention Center., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DARPA, authentication)

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Yahoo is ready to confirm a massive data breach that affected its service that has exposed several hundred million user accounts., “Yahoo is poised to confirm a massive data breach of its service, according to several sources close to the situation, hacking that has exposed several hundred million user accounts.” reported the website recode.net., “While sources were unspecific about the extent of the incursion, since there is the likelihood of government investigations and legal action related to the breach, they noted that it is widespread and serious.”, In August, the notorious hacker Peace advertised 200 Million Yahoo accounts on Dark Web, and the company is aware of the sale., Peace offered for sale the 200 million of Yahoo account credentials (from “2012 most likely,”) on The Real Deal black marketplace. Yahoo was informed of the events and launched an internal investigation avoiding public comment on the case. The hacker was offering the data leak for 3 bitcoins (roughly $1,800 at the time of the disclosure)., , While the Yahoo security team was investigating the incident, the company suggested its customers to use strong passwords, one for each web service they use, and enable two-factor authentication when it is available., Security experts believe its question of hours before the Yahoo will publicly confirm the data breach that caused at least the exposure of 200 million of Yahoo account credentials., Of course, the news will have a significant impact on the company because the hackers attacked the core service of the IT giant. Analysts speculate a possible interference with the announced $4.8 billion sale of the company to Verizon., Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Data Breach, 200 Million Yahoo accounts)

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A new data breach made the headlines, the victim is Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor stores. According to the parent company Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the security breach exposed customer payment card data, customer payment card data at certain Saks Fifth Avenue, the discount store brand Saks Off 5TH and Lord & Taylor stores in North America are impacted., “We recently became aware of a data security issue involving customer payment card data at certain Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks OFF 5TH, and Lord & Taylor stores in North America. We identified the issue, took steps to contain it, and believe it no longer poses a risk to customers shopping at our stores.” reads the official statement issued by Lord & Taylor., “While the investigation is ongoing, there is no indication that this affects our e-commerce or other digital platforms,”, The hackers did not compromise the HBC’s e-commerce or other digital platforms, the company promptly informed authorities and hired security investigators to, “We are working rapidly with leading data security investigators to get our customers the information they need, and our investigation is ongoing. We also are coordinating with law enforcement authorities and the payment card companies,” continues the announcement., The HBC issued the following statement:, “HBC has identified the issue, and has taken steps to contain it,” the company said in a statement. “Once the Company has more clarity around the facts, it will notify customers quickly and will offer those impacted free identity protection services, including credit and web monitoring. HBC encourages customers to review their account statements and contact their card issuers immediately if they identify activity or transactions they do not recognize.”, The data breach was first reported by threat intelligence firm Gemini Advisory, which noticed the offer for sale of over five million stolen credit and debit cards on a cybercrime marketplace called JokerStash., , The researchers linked the security breach to the financially-motivated FIN7 APT group also known as Carbanak or Anunak., The group continuously changed attack techniques and implemented new malware obfuscation methods. The FIN7 group has been active since late 2015, it was highly active since the beginning of 2017., Fin7 was spotted early 2017 when it targeted personnel involved with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings at various organizations with a new PowerShell backdoor dubbed POWERSOURCE., “On March 28, 2018, a notorious hacking JokerStash syndicate, also known as Fin7 announced the latest breach of yet another major corporation, with more than five million stolen payment cards offered for sale on the dark web. Several large financial institutions have confirmed that all tested records had been used before at Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5TH, a discounted offset brand of luxury Saks Fifth Avenue stores, as well as Lord & Taylor stores.” the company said in a post., “Several large financial institutions have confirmed that all tested records had been used before at Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5TH, a discounted offset brand of luxury Saks Fifth Avenue stores, as well as Lord & Taylor stores,” , As of Sunday, only a small portion of compromised records have been offered for sale, crooks offered roughly 35,000 records for Saks Fifth Avenue and 90,000 records for Lord & Taylor., “As of this writing, approximately 125,000 records have been released for sale, although we expect the entire cache to become available in the following months.” added Gemini., At the time of writing HBC did not provide details on the extent of the security breach, it is still unclear how the hackers have stolen payment card data, experts believe hackers may have compromised point-of-sale systems., “Based on the analysis of records that are currently available, it appears that all Lord & Taylor and 83 US based Saks Fifth Avenue locations have been compromised. In addition, we identified three potentially compromised stores located in Ontario, Canada. However, the majority of stolen credit cards were obtained from New York and New Jersey locations.” concluded Gemini., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – HBC data breach, FIN7 APT), ,

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It might seem far-fetched, it looks like the hacker Craig Smith was able to design a malicious code that could infect computers used in the mechanic’s workworkshop, and these machines can later start infecting other vehicles that are going for service., Craig Smith is the founder of the Open Garages, a Vehicle Research Labs (VRL) focused around understanding the increasingly complex vehicle systems.  He spends a lot of his time, warning car makers that there is a need to open up their software to owners, to allow them to modify their cars, he is also a member of the I Am The Calvary initiative., During 2015, Craig Smith presented the world a proof-of-concept code that allows an attacker to infect the car with a malware that could be used also to compromise the computers at the repair workshops. Smith continued to work on his own attack and now the malware used in his proof-of concept was improved in terms of machine learning capabilities. The expert claims that now an attacker without a deep knowledge could use the malware and launch successfully attacks., “These (mechanics) tool have the codes to read and write firmware and if it is compromised by a malicious car it can modify the firmware of other cars that come in afterwards,” Smith told Vulture South at the Nullcon security conference in Goa, India, as reported by El-Reg., “There are easier ways to compromise a car dealership – shoddy wifi, whatever – but this is the kind of thing that needs to be considered by anyone making these tools.”, , How does the malware work?, The malware uses a learning mode, to monitor traffic between the Workshop’s computer and the car, and finds out potential modules. Modules where the diagnosis tool was able to contact with success are in blue, and all the findings are saved to a .ini file, alongside with the captured packets., “It sorts through all the complex stuff for you and just highlights the packets and as a a researcher that is really useful.”, After the learning mode, the malware can switch to the attack mode, and starts fuzzing the information got in the learning mode,, “Everything is point and click up to this point so if there’s a crash you’re going to have to go and figure out what caused it,”., Even if many details are missing, we can understand that this proof-of-concept if applied to the real word, can be create a lot of damaged if in the wrong hands., Car makers need to do a bigger effort in allowing hackers to work with them towards understanding their software, and in my opinion maybe even allowing a restrict group of security professions to have full access to cars maker’s software to assess it and find security vulnerability before black hat do it., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking mechanic’s workshop, car hacking)

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A new strain of Point-of-Sale malware named “JackPOS” was discovered by IntelCrawler, a cyber intelligence firm from Los Angeles, confirming the growing trend of Point-of-Sales malware after the Target data breach. JackPOS was detected several days ago and it seemed based on code from “Alina”., “The bad actors are using similar tactics and methods by gathering and memory parsing of the of credit card data once inside the merchant’s system” reported the official post published by the company.,  , ,  , , The cybercriminals distributed via Drive-by attack several variants of malware masked as Java (TM) Platform SE binary which then replaced the legit Java Update Scheduler file having its embedded strings in the file description., “Some of detected samples use APC Injection from User Space using the API function QueueUserAPC to “svchost.exe”. The malware samples are pretty fresh and were created close to the beginning of February. The build path which was detected follows to “C:\Users\ziedpirate.ziedpirate-PC\Desktop\sop\sop\Release”, , , , , , , The cybercriminals have written the loaders with AutoIt coding language because it is a very flexible scripting language used since 1999 in Windows environments. The language was used to perform simple operations like text file editing, but allows also the creation of more complex scripts that perform mass downloads with complex GUIs. AutoIt is an easy-to-learn language that allows for quick development,due this reason it was chosen by numerous malware author., Malware authors used it to implement detection avoidance techniques, in particular, they have written the loader code to unpack additional binary malicious code and execute further instructions received from the C&C server.  IntelCrawler experts confirmed the existence of different attack vectors, crooks have used some sophisticated scanning, loading, and propagating techniques to get into merchants’ system thru external perimeters and then move to card processing areas, which were possibly not separated in compliance with PCI polices. , Which is the extent of the infection?, IntelCrawler  analysts have found compromised machines in numerous countries, including  Brazil, Canada, France, India, Spain, Korea, Argentina and the US. In same cases the machines were infected more than 17 days ago. The IntelCrawler’s threat intelligence team released a global map of Point-of-Sales infections based on data collected during the investigation on different malware., , adorate banner=”9″, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  JackPOS, malware), adorate banner=”12″, Credits: – Xylitol ( – MalwareMustDie! ( About IntelCrawler IntelCrawler.com is a multi-tier intelligence aggregator, which gathers information and cyber prints from a starting big data pool of over 3, 000, 000, 000 IPv4 and over 200, 000, 000 domain names, which are scanned for analytics and dissemination to drill down to a desired result. This finite pool of cyber prints is then narrowed further by comparing it to various databases and forum intelligence gathered from the underground and networked security company contacts. The final result could be the location of a particular keyboard or a computer housing the threat.

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In June, the security research firm CrowdStrike reported on a cyber breach of the Democratic National Committee (DNS).  CrowdStrike’s incident response time discovered not one, but two hacking groups that it considers “some of the best adversaries out of the all the numerous nation-state” groups the company encounters daily – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR.  According to the Washington Post, the Russian hackers managed to steal an entire database of opposition research on the presumptive Republican nominee for President Donald Trump., The breach of DNC servers is just one of many in a long list of attacks against government and political organization around the world.  In February of this year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told congress that intelligence officials were already seeing targeting of the 2016 presidential campaigns.  Brian P. Hale, director of public affairs for the agency said, ““We’re aware that campaigns and related organizations and individuals are targeted by actors with a variety of motivations — from philosophical differences to espionage — and capabilities — from defacements to intrusions.” reported the Washington Post., Now new evidence collected by investigators suggests DNC hackers accessed more information than previously thought., The alleged state-sponsored hackers that breached a Democratic National Committee consultant’s personal Yahoo Mail account likely accessed private communications in the attempting to defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump., Yahoo news confirmed the story, reporting that the DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa received a notification warning from the Yahoo security experts that “strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”, , A few weeks after the DNC officials announced the security breach caused by Russian state-sponsored hackers more than 19,000 private DNC messages were leaked online by WikiLeaks. Some messages were sent by DNC officials to deride Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, their disclosure led to the resignation of Chair Debra Wasserman Schultz., But investigators believe hackers also compromised personal email account and stoled data from DNC officials’ smartphones., “But Chalupa’s message, which had not been previously reported, stands out: It is the first indication that the reach of the hackers who penetrated the DNC has extended beyond the official email accounts of committee officials to include their private email and potentially the content on their smartphones.”  reported Yahoo. “After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work.” “That’s when we knew it was the Russians,” said a Democratic Party source who has knowledge of the internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, “we told her to stop her research.”, The investigation conducted by the security firm CrowdStrike suggests that Russian government was behind the espionage campaign., “Two sources familiar with the breach said that the hackers’ reach was far more widespread than initially thought and includes personal data about big party contributors and internal “vetting” evaluations that include embarrassing comments about their business dealings (as well as gossipy internal emails about the private affairs of DNC staffers).” continues the post published by Yahoo. “There are also signs that the hackers have penetrated the personal email of some Clinton campaign staffers—at least those who were in communication with senior DNC staff members.” , How Wikileaks obtained the information from the alleged Russian hackers?, Some media speculate that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has in the past hosted a talk show on RT, which is the Russian television network., Whoever is behind the attack, the case demonstrates the potential influence of hackers on the politic of one of the most important governments of the world., But probably a better security posture of DNC politicians would have protected them from such kind of attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DNC, Russian hackers)

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Siemens has fixed several flaws in SINUMERIK controllers, some of them have been classified as “critical.” The list of vulnerabilities includes DoS, privilege escalation and code execution flaws., Security experts at Kaspersky Lab discovered that SINUMERIK 808D, 828D and 840D controllers are affected by multiple vulnerabilities., “The latest updates for SINUMERIK controllers fix multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to cause Denial-of-Service conditions, escalate privileges, or to execute code from remote.” reads the security advisory published by Siemens., “Siemens has released updates for several affected products, is working on updates for the remaining affected products and recommends specific countermeasures until fixes are available. Siemens recommends to update affected devices as soon as possible.”, The most serious flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-11466 and ranked with CVSS score of 10, could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker on the network to trigger a DoS condition on the integrated software firewall or execute arbitrary code in the context of the firewall by sending specially crafted packets to TCP port 102., “Specially crafted network packets sent to port 102/tcp (ISO-TSAP) could allow a remote attacker to either cause a Denial-of-Service condition of the integrated software firewall or allow to execute code in the context of the software firewall.” continues the advisory., “The security vulnerability could be exploited by an attacker with network access to the affected systems on port 102/tcp. Successful exploitation requires no user privileges and no user interaction. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to compromise confidentiality, integrity and availability of the system.”, Siemens also fixed the CVE-2018-11457 in the integrated web server, the flaw can be exploited by a network attacker with access to TCP port 4842 to execute code with elevated privileges by sending specially crafted packets., “The security vulnerability could be exploited by an attacker with network access to the affected devices on port 4842/tcp. Successful exploitation requires no privileges and no user interaction. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to compromise confidentiality, integrity and availability of the webserver.” continues the advisory., Another critical flaw tracked as CVE-2018-11462 could be exploited to elevate privileges, except to root. , The last critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-11458, affects the integrated VNC server, it could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges via specially crafted network packets on port 5900. , Siemens also fixed three high-severity flaws that allow local code execution, and three medium-severity privilege escalation and DoS bugs., The good news is that Siemens is not aware of attacks exploiting the above flaws. , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Siemens, Sinumerik)

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Bad news for Android users, according to the security Doctor Web firm dozens of game apps in the Google Play Store have been infected with the Android.Xiny.19.origin Trojan. The malware could allow attackers to control the victim’s mobile device, by installing and running any kind of software (apk files), it also allows to display annoying advertisements., “However, the main threat of Android.Xiny.19.origin lies in its capability to download and dynamically run arbitrary apk files upon cybercriminals’ command. However, the way it is carried out is rather unique.” states a blog post published by Doctor Web., The malware collects information from the infected device and sends them back to the command and control server, it gathers the IMEI identifier, the MAC address, version and language of the operating system and the mobile network operator’s name., Experts at Doctor Web discovered more than 60 games infected by the Android.Xiny distributed in the Official Android Google Play Store. The malicious app were apparently deployed by over 30 different that used different names, including Conexagon Studio, Fun Color Games and BILLAPPS., , “At first glance, these affected games look similar to numerous such-like applications; and they are games indeed, with just one difference—while a user is playing a game, the Trojan is performing its malicious activity.” states Doctor Web., Another interesting feature implemented by the authors of Android.Xiny is that the malware hides malicious program in specially created images by using steganography.  Android.Xiny receives malicious images from the server and then retrieves the apk they contain., The Android.Xiny malware is able to perform many other malicious operations without the user’s consent. The researchers noticed that despite it is not yet able to gain root privileges, it has the ability to download the proper exploit in order to gain root access to the device., “Android.Xiny.19.origin can perform other malicious functions, such as to download and prompt a user to install different software, or to install and delete applications without the user’s knowledge if root access is available on the device.” continues the post., “it can download a set of exploits from the server in order to gain root access to the device for covert installation or deletion of applications.”, Doctor Web has already reported the discovery to Google., Unfortunately, the fact that the malware author chose the Google Play to distribute the malware is not a novelty, in January Lookout firm discovered 13 Android apps infected with the Brain Test malware and available for download on the official Google Store., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android, Android.Xiny, mobile)

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Three security researchers have discovered security vulnerabilities in the telematics control unit (TCU) manufactured by Continental AG that is installed on various car models manufactured by BMW, Ford, Infiniti, and Nissan., The researchers are Mickey Shkatov, Jesse Michael, and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk (@jessemichael, @HackingThings, @ABazhaniuk) from the Advanced Threat Research Team at McAfee. The team has presented their discovery at the last DEF CON security conference., The TCUs are 2G modems that are used by modern vehicles to transfer data, they enable the communications between the car and remote management tools such as web panels and mobile apps., The two vulnerabilities found by the research team affect the TCUs that use the S-Gold 2 (PMB 8876) cellular baseband chipset, they are a stack-based buffer overflow in the TCU’s component that processes AT commands (CVE-2017-9647), and a vulnerability in the temporary mobile subscriber identity (TMSI) may could be exploited by attackers to access and control memory (CVE-2017-9633)., The first vulnerability could be exploited only by an attacker with a physical access to the car using the vulnerable TCU, while the second can be exploited by a remote attacker., Below the description provided in the alert:, “Stack-based buffer overflow CWE-121 – An attacker with a physical connection to the TCU may exploit a buffer overflow condition that exists in the processing of AT commands. This may allow arbitrary code execution on the baseband radio processor of the TCU., IMPROPER RESTRICTION OF OPERATIONS WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF A MEMORY BUFFER CWE-119 – A vulnerability in the temporary mobile subscriber identity (TMSI) may allow an attacker to access and control memory. This may allow remote code execution on the baseband radio processor of the TCU.”, , The ICS-CERT issued a specific alert for the vulnerabilities affecting the Continental AG Infineon S-Gold 2 (PMB 8876)., “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. This may allow an attacker to disable the infotainment system of the vehicle and affect functional features of the vehicle. According to affected auto manufacturers, these vulnerabilities do not directly affect the critical safety features of the vehicle.” states the alert issued by the ICS-CERT., The following vehicles use vulnerable TCUs:, According to affected car makers, the flaws could be exploited only to access the infotainment systems of the vehicles., Nissan announced it will disable the 2G modems (TCUs) for all affected customers for free in one of its services. Same thing for Infiniti cars, while BMW “will be offering a service measure to affected customers.”, Ford already started disabling all 2G modems in 2016., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TCUs,car hacking)

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Security experts at FireEye have discovered a new zero-day, a privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003., Microsoft has issued a security advisory (2914486) informing the customers that Windows Kernel could allow elevation of privilege to attackers due the exploit of a bug in Windows XP’s NDPROXY.SYS driver., “We are aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit this vulnerability. Our investigation of this vulnerability has verified that it does not affect customers who are using operating systems newer than Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.” reported Microsoft., , Hackers could exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code in the system’s kernel running it from a standard user account, be aware the vulnerability cannot be used for remote code execution., “An attacker must have valid logon credentials and be able to log on locally to exploit this vulnerability. The vulnerability could not be exploited remotely or by anonymous users” states the advisory., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Microsoft, zero-day)

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This week, Juniper Networks has patched dozens of serious security provided security patches for each of them, the security advisories are available on the company website., The most severe flaw is probably the  CVE-2018-0049, which could be exploited by an attacker to crash the Junos kernel by sending specially crafted MPLS packets., Juniper reported that a single specially crafted MPLS packet could trigger a DoS condition while sending more packets it is possible to crash the device., “A NULL Pointer Dereference vulnerability in Juniper Networks Junos OS allows an attacker to cause the Junos OS kernel to crash. A single packet received by the target victim will cause a Denial of Service condition.  Continued receipt of this specifically crafted malicious MPLS packet will cause a sustained Denial of Service condition.” reads the security advisory., As a possible workaround, the company suggests to Remove MPLS configuration stanza from interfaces at risk., At the time of the provisioning of the patch, there is no news about exploitation of the flaw in the wild, anyway, Juniper is aware of “possible malicious network probing which may have triggered this issue., Another severe flaw fixed by Juniper affecting the Juniper NFX series devices could be exploited by a remote attacker to gain access to the system by using accounts with blank passwords., The patched provided by the company no more allow empty passwords., Juniper also provided fixes for several vulnerabilities affecting the NTP daemon. The company addressed several flaws in RDP most of them could be exploited to cause a DoS condition., , Two issues can be exploited to crash the routing protocol daemon (RPD) and potentially allow remote code execution., Giving a look at the list of advisories we can find a fix a high-risk vulnerability in Junos Space Network Management Platform and a DoS flaw in the SIP application layer gateway (ALG) in Junos. This latter issue could be exploited by an attacker to crash several processes., Experts also fixed a high-risk flaw in the RSH service that could allow a remote and unauthenticated attacker to gain root access to affected devices., The company also fixed dozen of DoS and XSS flaws rated as “medium risk.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Junos, hacking)

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Ripple (XRP) and Verge (XVG) are two cryptocurrencies that attracted many investors in the last months., Last week attackers hackers the Verge cryptocurrency system by exploiting a vulnerability in its software and forced its developers to hard-fork the currency., The bug in the cryptocurrency scheme allowed the attacker to mine blocks with bogus timestamps, it seems that attackers were able to generate new blocks at a rate of roughly one per second., The hacker reportedly making off with $1 million-worth of tokens, the news was later confirmed on Bitcoin Talk forum by the user with the handle “ocminer” of the Suprnova Mining Pools., “There’s currently a >51% attack going on on XVG which exploits a bug in retargeting in the XVG code.  Usually to successfully mine XVG blocks, every “next” block must be of a different algo.. so for example scrypt, then x17, then lyra etc.” wrote ocminer., “Due to several bugs in the XVG code, you can exploit this feature by mining blocks with a spoofed timestamp. When you submit a mined block (as a malicious miner or pool) you simply set a false timestamp to this block one hour ago and XVG will then “think” the last block mined on that algo was one hour ago. Your next block, the subsequent block will then have the correct time.., And since it’s already an hour ago (at least that is what the network thinks) it will allow this block to be added to the main chain as well.”, OCminer speculated it was a 51 per attack(aka majority attack), this means that hackers in somehow were able to control the majority of the network mining power (hashrate)., The Verge development team finally confirmed on Wednesday the attack that caused the XVG value to drop from $0.07 to $0.05., We had a small hash attack that lasted about 3 hours earlier this morning, it's been cleared up now. We will be implementing even more redundancy checks for things of this nature in the future! $XVG #vergefam, — vergecurrency (@vergecurrency) April 4, 2018, , “The XVG team erroneously forked their entire network to ‘undo’ the exploited blocks, but this resulted in the entire network being unable to sync,” noted cryptocurrency news site The Merkle., “When the team was made aware of their mistake, they were able to re-sync the network, but still have not completely defeated the issue.”, At the time of writing the Verge currency has recovered all its value., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Verge, hacking), ,

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Sony Xperia Devices secretly send user data to servers in China, this is the last news that is shocking the mobile industry and that was published on several forums. The problem relates to Sony devices running the Android 4.4.2 or 4.4.4 KitKat version, it seems that the anomalous behavior is observable even if the users haven’t installed any application on the Smartphone., The news is disconcerting and it seems that some new Sony Xperia Smarphone contain the Baidu spyware. A few weeks ago a group of users belonging to an online community of Sony Xperia Smarphone owners, discovered the presence of a folder, named “Baidu” on their devices, that was created without the owner’s permission., Due to the presence of the folder it is very easy for the users to verify in the Baidu spyware has infected their device., Another worrying aspect is that users aren’t authorized to delete it from their Sony Xperia Smarphone, once they try to remove it, it instantly reappears. Users are not able to delete the Baidu folder even if the user tries the same procedure starting the phone in Safe Mode., “Just unpacked my Sony Z3 compact, haven’t installed a single app and its connecting to China. I am not so concerned about the folder itself but my phone now has a constant connection to an IP address in Beijing, which I am not too happy about.” is the comment of a  Sony Xperia Smarphone user published on a Reddit discussion on the topic., According the reports circulating online the new Sony Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact are affected by the problem, but many other users detected the folder on their devices, not only Sony Smartphone. The owners of an HTC One M7, an HTC One X and a few users using the OnePlus One have discovered the presence of the Baidu malware., As reported by the colleagues at TheHackerNews, the mysterious Baidu folder appears to be created by Sony’s “my Xperia” service every time the handset establishes a connection and it is reported to be sending pings to China., , Many users reported they found that the Chinese government is able to control the spyware to gain access to the user’s device exactly in the same way any RAT does, in particular a users with the nickname Elbird has posted on different Sony Forums that the Baidu malware allows the Chinese Government to perform the following actions, The Sony Xperia case arrives a few days after the news that Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi was involved in a similar issue, experts sustain that the company is spying on personal user data. A few months ago, experts at F-Secure collected evidences that Xiaomi Smartphones were sending user data back to the servers based in China., Sony still hasn’t officially commented the case, despite it has  admitted the issue announcing the release of a fix., Below the instructions to remove the Baidu Spyware from the device., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (Sony Xperia Smartphones, mobile malware)

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violation of the country’s data protection laws., On Thursday, a Moscow court has confirmed the decision to ban the professional social network LinkedIn in Russia. LinkedIn is violating the country’s data protection laws that ask foreign and Russian companies to store personal data of Russian users within the country’s borders since Sept. 2015., This summer a court ruled in favor of Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications, explaining that LinkedIn company didn’t comply with Russian law., LinkedIn it is not storing information about Russians on servers inside the country, and it is processing information about third parties who aren’t registered on the site and haven’t signed the company’s user agreement., The Russian Personal Data Law was implemented since September 1st, 2015, it requests foreign tech companies to store the personal data of Russian citizens within the country. The Law was designed for protecting Russian citizens from surveillance activities of foreign agencies such as the NSA., “On Aug. 4, Moscow’s Tagansky Court approved a request from Russia’s communications watchdog Roskomnadzor to add LinkedIn to a list of Internet sites that violated Russia’s personal data laws. ” reported the Moscow Times, “On Sept. 1 2015, amendments to the law “On Personal Data,” which requires the localization of personal data on the territory of Russia, came into effect. Any Russian or foreign company working with Russian users must ensure recording, systematization, accumulation, storage and clarification of personal data of Russians using databases on Russian territory.”, , LinkedIn is just the first firm that could be targeted by the Roskomnadzor which is now threatening other tech giants, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter., ‘’The Russian court’s decision has the potential to deny access to LinkedIn for the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses. We remain interested in a meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss their data localization request.” “reads a statement from Linkedin., Some companies like Google and Apple have already moved some of their infrastructures to Russia this year, differently from Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter that decided not to comply with the Russian law., The ban could take effect today, with Russian internet service providers blocking access to LinkedIn. LinkedIn could still appeal the court’s decision to avoid being blocked across the country., Russia isn’t the unique country that is going to adopt a similar law, the Germany passed similar legislation that forces tech companies to store German users’ data on servers located in the country., “A number of American tech companies are investing billions of dollars combined to build data centers across Europe to comply with such rules.” reported the NYT., In Brazil, a judge also blocked WhatsApp, the internet messaging service, after the company, which is owned by Facebook, refused to hand over data to help in a criminal investigation., In May, a Brazilian judge ordered to block access to the WhatsApp messaging service for 72 hours, it was the second time in five months., Brazilian authorities ordered ISPs to block WhatsApp in a dispute over access to encrypted data. The order to block the messaging service for 72 hours has been issued by a judge from the Brazilian state of Sergipe,  the ISPs were obliged to comply the order to avoiding face fines., According to the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo the ban impacted more than 100 million Brazilian users., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Russia, LinkedIn)

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What is a DNS leaks?, In this context, with the term “DNS leak” we indicate an unencrypted DNS query sent by your system OUTSIDE the established VPN tunnel., Kaspersky VPN is one of the most trusted VPN which comes with 1,000,000+ tier downloads in the official Google Play Store, however, it was observed that when it connects to any random virtual server still leaks your actual DNS address., The expert Dhiraj Mishra that discovered the flaw reported it to Kaspersky via Hackerone., Mishra also published a step-by-step guide to reproduce the problem:, , The expert explained that the data leak could threaten the privacy of end-users that want to remain anonymous on the internet., “I believe this leaks the trace’s of an end user, who wants to remain anonymous on the internet. I reported this vulnerability on Apr 21st (4 months ago) via H1, and a fix was pushed for same but no bounty was awarded.” states Mishra., The expert reported this vulnerability to Kaspersky on Apr 21st via HackerOne, and a fix was pushed for the issue., Unfortunately, at the time, the researcher was awarded as expected under the company’s bug bounty., About the Author: Security Researcher Dhiraj Mishra, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Kaspersky VPN, privacy)

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Early this week,  Microsoft issued the security advisory 3010060 to warn its customer of a new Zero-Day vulnerability that affects all supported versions of Windows OS except, Windows Server 2003., The OLE Packager is the component that is affected by the zero-day, which was discovered by researchers at McAfee and Google. Curiously the component was just patched this month in MS14-060, but Microsoft,  in response to this latest flaw, has released a Fix It package for PowerPoint, and encouraged the use of EMET 5.0., The most concerning things related to the Microsoft zero-day flaw is that it is already being exploited by threat actors in targeted attacks., “The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Microsoft Office file that contains an OLE object. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user,” the advisory explained.”At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit the vulnerability through Microsoft PowerPoint.” confirming the voice that bad actors are already exploiting the zero-day in limited cases., The OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) is a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. As explained by the experts at Microsoft, the vulnerability in Microsoft OLE, coded as CVE-2014-6352, could allow remote code execution, this is possible if a Microsoft user opens a specially crafted Microsoft Office file that contains an OLE object., , The file could be sent via email to the victims in a classic spear-phishing attack or the attacker could serve it through a compromised website in a classic watering hole attack., The security advisory reports the following mitigation factors:, The principal problem is that despite the exploit of the flaw trigger a warning, users often ignore them, the issue appears very serious in corporate environments, where executives and remote users are often granted administrative rights on their systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft zero-day, hacking, OLE )

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The BBC reported that two major high street banks will adopt new security measures to protect their customers. The decision to modify the security procedures follows the scoop made by two journalists from BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme that broke into an account online and removed money., Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting bank customers with different techniques, one of them is known as ‘SIM swap fraud.’, A SIM swap fraud is a type of fraud that overwhelms the additional security measures introduced by banks to protect customer transactions. Basically cyber criminals are able to transfer cash from a victim’s account by accessing one-time pin codes and SMS notifications., Criminal organizations obtain a customer’s bank details by launching a phishing campaign, or by purchasing them in the underground market., At this point, the criminals open a parallel business account with the same victim’s bank, in the customer’s name. This is possible because the procedure involves fewer security checks when the victim is already a customer., The criminals use answers to security questions obtained from the analysis of the victim’s social media accounts, to contact the victim’s mobile phone provider, posing as the customer, to report that their mobile device is lost or damaged., They demonstrate their identity, answering basic security questions, this causes the cancellation of the old SIM and the activation of new one. From then the criminals can operate with the victim’s mobile account, intercepting or initiating calls, texts and authorizations that could allow them to transfer cash., The cybercriminals can also request that security settings are changed to lock out the victim from the account., Recently bank customers’ accounts have been successfully hacked with the SIM swap fraud technique, several victims reported the crimes to the You and Yours programme., “You and Yours has been contacted by dozens of people affected by the scam. All say they have never revealed their security details to anyone, and the that first they knew something was wrong was their mobile phone going dead.” reported the BBC., You and Yours producer Natalie Ms Donovan is a customer of the NatWest and decided to investigate on the SIM swap fraud cases., , She used her bank account as an experiment and her colleague Shari Vahl was able to break into her account without having specific information such as the banking customer number, PIN or any passwords., “I did not know her mother’s maiden name, her pet’s name or her first school, and yet I was still able to change her PIN and password to lock her out of her own account.” continues Shari Vahl , In the experiment, the attacker only transferred £1.50 to his bank account by controlling the of Natalie Donovan ‘s mobile phone., The journalists reported the issue to the NatWest, owned by Royal Bank of Scotland. Representatives from the Royal Bank of Scotland confirmed that that the systems for both banks would be changed as a direct result of the You and Yours investigation., “This is a cross-industry problem, particularly with us, and the telecom companies. We working with Financial Fraud Action UK to make sure we’re communicating with each other … to make sure mobile phone security is as strong as it possibly can be.” said Chris Popple, managing director of NatWest Digital., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SIM swap fraud, banking)

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An “unauthorized code” was discovered in the operating system for Juniper NetScreen firewalls. The company admitted the presence of the “unauthorized code” that could allow an attacker to decrypt VPN traffic., “unauthorized code” “could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen devices and to decrypt VPN connections.”, According to The Register, the presence of the unauthorized code could date back to 2008, the experts referred a 2008 notice issued by Juniper’s about a security issued that impacts ScreenOS 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20. ScreenOS 6.2 was released. The Screen OS 6.3 was presented in 2009., “During a recent internal code review, Juniper discovered unauthorized code in ScreenOS that could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen devices and to decrypt VPN connections,” Juniper Chief Information officer Bob Worrall wrote. “Once we identified these vulnerabilities, we launched an investigation into the matter, and worked to develop and issue patched releases for the latest versions of ScreenOS.” states the advisory., The experts explained that there are several releases with numerous versions of the Juniper products and the unauthorized code was only found in some of them., , A separate advisory issued by the company confirm the presence of two separate vulnerabilities in its products, the first one allows unauthorized remote administrative access to an affected device over SSH or telnet, “The second issue may allow a knowledgeable attacker who can monitor VPN traffic to decrypt that traffic,” the advisory said. “It is independent of the first issue. There is no way to detect that this vulnerability was exploited.”, The presence of unauthorized code is disconcerting, one of the most important vendors of security appliances inserted an unauthorized code in a number of its products., Giving the nature of the code it is difficult to think that the code was accidentally “inserted” in the OS, it is likely that it was used to monitor customers’ confidential communications., Users urge to update their products, Juniper has issued an out-of-band patch to fix the issue., Stay Tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Juniper firewall, unauthorized code)

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The German Government is preparing a law that will force hardware vendors to include a backdoor in their products. The law aims to allow law enforcement agencies to use backdoors to gather information during their investigations., The law would target devices in any industry, including telecommunications, automotive and IoT products., According to local news outlet RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND), German Officials are expected to submit their proposal for debate this week., “The acting Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière (CDU) wants to oblige the industry, German security authorities to open digital gateway for the spying on private cars, computers and smart TVs.” states the news outlet., “The application is overwritten with “Need for action on the legal obligation of third parties for measures of covert information gathering according to §§ 100c and 100f StPO”. De Maizière wants to drastically expand the so-called eavesdropping attack by “using technical means against individuals”. Above all, large corporations and producers of digital security systems should be required to provide information and notification.”, The proposal is strongly supported by the Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière who cites the difficulty investigations have had in the past especially when fighting against terrorist organizations., , The Interior Minister explained that modern technology is able to alert suspects for every suspicious activity conducted by law enforcement agencies., The Minister cited the cases of smart cars that alert an owner as soon as the car is shaken or any other anomalous activity is conducted by police officers., Well the presence of a backdoor could allow investigators to operate stopping any warning is sent to the suspect., De Maizière stressed out that companies have a “legal obligation” to introduce backdoors for the use of law enforcement agencies., The Minister aims to oblige hardware manufacturer to disclose their “programming protocols” for analysis of Government experts and consequently to force companies to disclose details about their encrypted communication practices., “Accordingly, eavesdropping would in future be possible wherever devices are connected to the Internet. The industry should give the state exclusive access rights, such as private tablets and computers, smart TVs or digitized kitchen appliances. A precondition for all measures of the extended wiretapping attack, however, would remain a judicial decision.” continues the news outlet., One of the most disturbing aspects of the new law is that it would give German officials powers to hack back any remote computer that is suspected to be involved in attacks against the country infrastructure., Something similar was discussed by the French Defense Minister Le Drian comments in January 2017 and by the US authorities, in both cases, the Government officials were referencing the cyber attacks conducted by the Russian intelligence., The Minister says this is important to “shut down private computers in the event of a crisis,” such as is the case with botnet takedowns., “De Maizière also wants an authorization for the security authorities to shut down private computers in the event of a crisis. An “Botnet takedown specialist concept” will allow security authorities to use private data to alert end users in good time if hackers want to misuse their computers for criminal purposes. In the event that online providers refuse to cooperate, far-reaching penalties are provided for.” continues the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland., Privacy advocates believe the German law could open the door to a mass surveillance programs, Government officials will have full powers of snooping everyone’s online communications., The German authorities refused such kind of accusations and highlighted that any access to data gathered under these surveillance programs would be allowed only after law enforcement have obtained a court order., The reality is that the presence of backdoor dramatically reduces the overall security of any system, the backdoors could be discovered and used by malicious actors such as a foreign government and a criminal syndicate with unpredictable consequences., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Germany, backdoors)

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During the S4x14 Conference in Miami, Luigi Auriemma of ReVuln disclosed a serious vulnerability in HMI software. The team of researchers at ReVuln discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in the company’s IntegraXor Web-based HMI software, a software designed by the Malaysian SCADA company Ecava., IntegraXor is a suite of management tools for HMIs, the application is mainly diffused in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Poland and Estonia, and in other dozens of countries., “The vulnerability is a classical stack based buffer-overflow. This SCADA product is a web server, so it opens a TCP port where it accepts HTTP requests,”  “Exploiting the attack is very trivial because it’s enough to send a long request.” Auriemma said., An HMI (human–machine interface) software is the component in a SCADA system that presents a visual representation of processed data, of industrial control and manufacturing processes, to a human operator.The HMI component, typically a Windows-based machine, communicates directly with programmable logic controllers and provide control for monitored processes., ReVuln team did not notify the vendor in advance of the presentation, Auriemma provided also a proof-of-concept code that allow an attacker to execute a denial of service attack to block the HMI, a circumstance that could leave the industrial process out of control., , Auriemma made an alarming revelation, he discovered, in fact, that the attacker, under certain conditions, could remotely execute malicious code., I contacted Luigi Auriemma to ask him why ReVuln has chosen the Ecava product, below his reply:, “The vulnerability has been disclosed publicly at the S4 conference in Miami during our (ReVuln) talk as a demonstration of an undisclosed 0-day affecting an HMI/SCADA system and how to fix or limit it without a patch from the vendor.The business model of our company is to not disclose vulnerabilities publicly or to report them to vendors. The uncoordinated disclosure of this issue is interesting moreover, because Ecava has a very controversial bug bounty program in which they pay researchers with points for the licenses of the product instead of money.” said Auriemma., The ICS-CERT in the same day of the disclosure issued an advisory, fortunately the SCADA company Ecava immediately released a patch to fix the zero-day vulnerability., Well,  if the flaw was immediately fixed, you can ask me why to publish the news and I can reply you that:, “By judging the vulnerabilities I disclosed in the past and those currently in the ReVuln portfolio, this type of security issues is still diffused,” “A difference with the past is that more products try to use the security features of the compilers (enabling DEP, ASLR, stack cookies and so on).”Auriemma said confirming my perception., Let me suggest you to read the slides proposed by ReVuln at the conference and titled “Securing ICS Applications When Vendors Refuse Or Are Slow To Produce a Security Patch”  , you will find a lot of interesting stuff, it’s a must reading for security experts., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  SCADA, ReVuln)

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Private companies and governments agencies all around the word make huge investments for the automation of their processes and in the management of the electronic documentation., The main requirement in the management of digital documentation is its equivalence, from a legal perspective, to paperwork, affixing a signature on a digital document is the fundamental principle on which are based the main processes of authorization and validation, apart from the specific area of ​​application., Main benefits for the introduction of digital signing processes are cost reduction and complete automation of documental workflow, including authorization and validation phases., In essence, digital signatures allow you to replace the approval process on paper, slow and expensive, with a fully digital system, faster and cheaper.,  , Figura 1 – Digital document lifecycle,  , The digital signature is simply a procedure which guarantees the authenticity and integrity of messages and documents exchanged and stored with computer tools, just as in traditional handwritten signature for documents. Essentially The digital signature of an electronic document aims to fulfill the following requirements:, A typical digital signature scheme consists of three algorithms:, To generate a digital signature is necessary to use the digital asymmetric key pair, attributed unequivocally to a person, called holder of the key pair:, Once the document is signed with the private key, the signature can be verified successfully only with the corresponding public key. Security is guaranteed by the impossibility to reconstruct the private key (secret) from the public, even if the two keys are uniquely connected., A Digital signature is a one-way hash, of the original data, that has been encrypted with the signer’s private key. A digital signature process is composed by the following steps:, For the verification, The receiving software first uses the signer’s public key to decrypt the hash, then it uses the same hashing algorithm that generated the original hash to generate a  new one-way hash of the same data. The receiving software compares the new hash against the original hash. If the two hashes match, the data has not changed since it was signed., , Figura 2 – Digital Signature Process, The authenticity of a document can be verified by anyone decrypting the signature of the document with the sender’s public key, obtaining the fingerprint of the document, then comparing it with that obtained by applying the hash function (which is known) to the document received which was attached the signature. If the two fingerprints are equal, the authenticity and integrity of the document are demonstrated. The signing and verification operations may be delegated to a schedule issued by the certification. Thanks to the mechanism shown, the digital signature ensures non-repudiation: the signer of a document transmitted cannot deny having sent it and the receiver can deny to have received it. In other words means that the information cannot be ignored, as in the case of a conventional signature on a paper document in the presence of witnesses., The advantages of digital signatures The activation of a fully automated workflow, digital signatures, reduce time and costs associated with the signatures on paper, the latter in fact have an economic cost and create delays and inefficiencies. An estimate provided by ARX on the basis of current data sets that each of their clients handwritten signature on a paper document to determine the company at a cost of $ 30 U.S including costs associated with paper, printing costs, of signing, scanning, forwarding, storage and regeneration of lost or missing documents. According to the study of ARX, a person authorized to sign documents marking more than 500 documents a year., The digital signatures process is essential for the formal approval processes of every companies, a typical scenario require multiple authorization of multiple offices for each document., Thus digital signatures allow alternate approval processes, collaboration and delivery of paper (expensive and slow), with a digital system (faster, cheaper and more efficient).This results in a number of advantages:, Resuming, digital signatures can reliably automate the signatures of authorization allowing the elimination of paper, reducing costs and improving the speed of production processes. By virtue of all these advantages, the digital signature can be particularly useful for:, Pierluigi Paganini,  

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Cyber defence industry is making money. In 2015, the market will reach 75 billion and in 2020 it will grow to around 170 billion. For some countries like the US, Israel, India and Europe, the cyber industry is vital to their economy., But, while the industry makes money, it doesn’t solve the problems. If you don’t believe me, try looking for a company that give you guarantee from cyber attacks. You can also look for cyber attacks statistics to see that the amount of attacks and their relative damage is on the rise., In one of my last interviews with an Israeli branch manager of a known cyber defence company, he told me that the statistics didn’t change for the last twenty years.  Yes, the solutions are more advanced and complicated, but the infection rate and the ability to identify a threat is the same., “it’s a Hamster Wheel”, he told me. “But it’s good money. So nobody care”. , The Emperor’s New Clothes, The question is what’s broken? Is it the solutions that aren’t good enough? The users that can’t change their behavior? The international community that can’t share information and cooperate? Maybe all of it is true. Perhaps the paradigm of cyber defense is fundamentally flawed., If one is looking from a birds eye, down at the cyber defence industry, he will notice it’s all about preventing information flow. In other words, the paradigm is that there are secrets, islands of private information, that should be hedged., But the truth is that the world changed, and this paradigm stayed. If one reads Alvin & Heidi Toffler books and a lot of other stuff on that subject, it becomes apparent that the information is the actual currency of our time. And as such, trying to prevent it from flowing is to go against economic and social evolution., It’s scary to think about an open digital world. The world without privacy that does not include secrets or private information. A system where sharing information is not mandatory, but a way of life. A culture of openness that most of the knowledge is common knowledge., In a way, we all are living in such a world. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsUp, Wechat, Telegram and a lot of others – They are all information sharing platforms. And almost all of us are sharing our life experiences with them. All our secrets are already there, In the cyberspace. One only has to infect the information pieces to know them., , Under this perspective, the hackers and the NSA and every other intelligence organization understand something that the defense industry doesn’t – You can’t stop the information flowing., So if you can’t stop it, why try? And why sell dreams to the public? It’s not a technical failure that you can fix. It’s a mental failure you have to fix. Instead of thinking how to hide information, embrace the fact that everything is exposed and start to think what we can do with the information for the benefit of humanity or business., WAZE is one example. All the world already knows where I am, so why not use this information to make the traffic better. In Israel, the ministry of health is developing an app to balance the load in emergency rooms based on WAZE. It means that giving up my private information My location for public use, can save lives., In reality, the cyber defense paradigm is broken, and Companies are looking for cyber insurance and regulation as a sign of disbelief in the cyber defense products. If the past twenty years would have produced working solutions, there was no “cyber” problem today., The truth is that we are ahead of a future market dominated by mandatory behavior dictated by the government and insurance companies, rather than a market driven by positive thinking how to solve the problems., In a cyberspace where “most do” defense is the norm, hackers will always have the advantage. The defenders on the other side are like a hamster running on a wheel. To get off it, one should a make peace with the death of private information. To do so, we most change the paradigm of how we perceive the meaning of information in the digital world., Written by Ami Rojkes Dombe, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyber defense, cyber security)

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Everywhere is possible to read rivers of words on the impressive diffusion of social networks and mobile devices, both technologies used in the last months as privileged channels of attacks due their large audience., We all know how much dangerous are botnets and how many malicious purposes could be achieved with their diffusion, today I desire to discuss about the first-known Android botnet composed by mobiles devices on all the major U.S. mobile networks., Its principal use is the SMS spamming according security researches of the two US security firms, Cloudmark and Lookout Mobile Security that discovered the malicious architecture in December., The method of infection is a consolidated process based on malware, the SpamSoldier trojan, and every victim is compromised when installs a malware masquerade as a game application., The trojan mobile exploits infected devices to spread spam and invitations for other users to download the infected apps. The malware send out SMSs inviting victims to download a free version of a popular Android game like “The Need for Speed Most Wanted “or “Angry Birds Star Wars” ., , During installation procedure the malware explicit requests to the user to grant permission to the app to perform many operations such as surfing the web and sending SMS messages, but unfortunately users never make attention to the messages proposed by apps to acquire further privileges., Once infected the victims communicate with command-and-control server, according a classic architecture, receiving instruction on the final destination for SMS spam. Typically the bot receives a list of 50 or more phone to send SMS, once sent the messages it get a new list from C&C server within 65 seconds., The Cloudmark researches discovered that the apps were downloaded from sites hosted on a server in Hong Kong that offers free copies of popular games. These URLs have been used for malware distribution:, Meanwhile these URLs have been used by the C&C server, Very smart the mechanism to preserve the malware from being discovered,  to neutralize alerting messages from mobile service providers it blocks any incoming and outgoing SMS from unknown numbers., Which is the monetization schema behind the botnet?, According researchers at Cloudmark the botmasters could works in various way such as a classic phishing schema or making money sending out message containing links to rogue e-commerce sites that request personal information and banking credentials for payments., Andrew Conway, a researcher at Cloudmark declared at SCmagazine:, “This botnet has “changed the economics” of spamming campaigns.” “The typical SMS spamming technique is that a spammer will go to the grocery store, buy some prepaid SIM subscriber identity module cards and use them to send out spam messages,” Conway said. “We think the spammers are getting less and less value for money out of that approach as the industry catches on to that.”, “the spammer no longer has to pay for the messages that are sent if he can use a botnet to cover his costs. Now that we know it can be done, we can expect to see more complex attacks that are harder to take down”, In the SpamSoldier campaign, the fraudsters make their victims shoulder the cost of spamming, Conway explained. While he described the botnet as “primitive” compared to those that fester among infected endpoints in the traditional PC environment, the tactic may demonstrate a future model to be taken up by attackers., So far, Cloudmark investigation has revealed more than 800 phone numbers, mainly  belonging to the US Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile,  sending out the spam messages. A raw estimation suggested a that the total number of compromised mobile devices is around 1,000., The dimension of the botnet is still considerable limited but wide diffusion of the mobile could  have a greater impact in the future, underestimate it is a great error., In reality Android is the mobile OS that most attracts cybercrime due its diffusion, early in 2012 experts from Kaspersky Labs have discovered the first IRC bot for Android, it used IRC channel to communicate with C&C servers. The IRC bots were used for various malicious purposes, also in the case the victims were convinced to install the malware masquerading it as a game application, the famous game Madden NFL 12., In July was detected a new spam botnet on Android devices, but its existence was promptly denied by Google that explained the spammers were using infected computers and a fake mobile signature to abuse a Yahoo Mail app for Android devices., Mobile botnets represent for security experts a nightmare, they are very effective and difficult to trace, the leak of awareness of mobile users, incorrect behavior such as mobile “jailbreaking” and the download from unsafe third party app store, and large diffusion of these platform make them ideal for hackers and cyber criminals., Mobile platform need an increasing level of security to protect unsuspecting users., Pierluigi Paganini

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The authors of the TeslaCrypt ransomware have introduced a couple of significant improvements, the new variant Version 4.1 has been in circulation for about a week. According to the experts at Endgame Inc., VXers have invested heavily in obfuscation and evasion techniques, and the malicious code can also encrypt new file extensions (.7z; .apk; .asset; .avi; .bak; .bik; .bsa; .csv; .d3dbsp; .das; .forge; .iwi; .lbf; .litemod; .litesql; .ltx; .m4a; .mp4; .rar; .re4; .sav; .slm; .sql; .tiff; .upk; .wma; .wmv; and .wallet)., “As our latest research on TeslaCrypt demonstrates, ransomware not only is becoming more widespread, but it is also becoming more sophisticated and adaptable. TeslaCrypt 4.1A  is only a week old and contains an even greater variety of stealth and obfuscation techniques than its previous variants, the earliest of which is just over a year old.” states a report published by Endgame Inc., The ransomware also targets backup files by deleting the Volume Shadow Copy, the new strain uses AES 256 for file encryption., Like its predecessors, this new strain of Teslacrypt is spread as attachments of spam campaigns purporting to be shipping delivery notifications., When the victims open the malicious .zip file sent as the attachment, a JavaScript downloader using Wscript is executed in order to download the TeslaCrypt ransomware from greetingsyoungqq.com/80.exe., The Teslacrypt 4.1A ransomware also uses COM objects and deletes zone identifiers to evade the detection., , The ransomware also implements an anti-monitoring feature that terminates several Windows processes, including the Task Manager; Registry Editor; Command Shell, SysInternals Process Explorer and System Configuration., This variant of TeslaCrypt maintains the persistence by making a copy of itself to the disk and creating a registry entry that points to the copy., The ransomware attacks are the headlines in this first part of the year, and the situation is worsening., “Only four months into 2016, as our timeline demonstrates, this may very well be the year of the ransomware attack. These kinds of opportunistic attacks can be very lucrative and sophisticated, and should increasingly be on the radar of both high-value organizations as well as individuals. ” close the post, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, Ransomware)

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Kaspersky was a long accused to support Russian intelligence in cyber espionage activities and for this reason, its products have been banned by the US Government and EU Parliament., The company denied any involvement with operations conducted by the Russian intelligence and recently opened it Transparency Center in Zurich to assure the integrity and trustworthiness of its products., Now the position of the company seems completely changed., We have a long discussed the hack of the NSA-linked Equation Group Remember carried out by the “The Shadow Brokers” that attempted to sale the stolen hacking tools and exploits and leaked part of them online. , In August 2016, the FBI has arrested the former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin over a massive secret data theft. At the time of the arrest, Martin was working for Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. , The US DoJ charged Harold Thomas Martin (51) with theft of secret documents and highly classified government material. According to a court complaint disclosed, the stolen data include source codes developed by the NSA to its hacking campaigns against foreign governments., According to the Politico website, sources informed of the events reported that Kaspersky learned about Martin after he sent strange Twitter messages to two researchers of the firm in 2016, minutes before The Shadow Brokers began leaking the NSA dump online., “The timing was remarkable — the two messages arrived just 30 minutes before an anonymous group known as Shadow Brokers began dumping classified NSA tools online and announced an auction to sell more of the agency’s stolen code for the price of $1 million Bitcoin. ” reported the Politico website., “The case unfolded after someone who U.S. prosecutors believe was Martin used an anonymous Twitter account with the name ‘HAL999999999’ to send five cryptic, private messages to two researchers at the Moscow-based security firm,” Politico reports., A first message sent on Aug. 13, 2016, asked one of the researchers to arrange a conversation with Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky., Kaspersky reported the events to the NSA that identified Martin and the FBI arrested him later., “According to the sources who spoke with POLITICO, Kaspersky gave the NSA all five Twitter messages as well as evidence of the sender’s real identity.” continues the Politico. “Then, according to the redacted court document, the FBI used the evidence to obtain search warrants for Martin’s Twitter account and Maryland home and property. The document doesn’t indicate how the FBI learned of the Twitter messages or Martin’s identity. “, Summarizing, Kaspersky Lab helped the NSA to catch an alleged NSA data thief, the security firm exposed a massive breach that U.S. authorities were not able to detect., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Kaspersky Lab, intelligence),

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Electronic health record databases are becoming the most precious commodities in the cyber criminal underground., The healthcare sector has been the industry with the highest number of data breaches in 2015 when a total of 113.2 million healthcare-related records were stolen by hackers., Cybercriminals are exploiting the lax of security implemented for EHR systems., “Given the contents of an EHR and its capacity to hold financial and credit card records, healthcare organizations become targets of cybercriminals who aim to steal personal identifiable information (PII), as well as financial information.” reads the report titled “Cybercrime and Other Threats Faced by the Healthcare Industry” “But unlike other data breaches, cybercriminals have found more ways to use information from EHRs aside from selling the data in bulk in underground markets” , The researchers have analyzed the offer on the Deep Web in the attempt to profile the offer and understand pricing models used by the criminals focused on the sale of EHR data., Giving a look at EHR data, Medical insurance IDs with valid prescriptions go for $0.50 US, while complete profiles of US citizens including medical and health insurance data were selling for under $1., As we said EHR data are a profitable business for cyber criminals, fraudulent tax returns based on stolen medical records go for $13.50 and fake birth certificates based on data stolen from medical records were selling for $500., “In the last two years the number of cybercriminals committing tax fraud, through the use of stolen personal data found in EHRs, increased.19 As a result, Turbo Tax–a program used for filing taxes in the U.S.–had to temporarily suspend state tax filings to investigate the increasing number of fraud cases. ” continues the report., Identity theft is one of the main fraudulent activities conducted by cyber criminals that can use the EHR data to accredit ththemselves gainst multiple webservices., “In terms of resolving fraud issues, credit cards breaches have financial liability limited to US$50 per card. In the health industry, however, 65% of victims of medical identity theft had to pay an average of US$13,500 to resolve the crime–with costs covering the services of creditors and legal counsel.” reads the report.  “Credit cards can be easily canceled and replaced but health care data such as Social Security numbers, and birthdates, are permanent–which means the data will live forever and that cyber criminals may reuse such information for a variety of purposes”, Crooks can use data stolen from medical records to obtain and sell copies of real birth certificates. In the following figure is reported an advertisement for birth certificates published on AlphaBay starting at US$500 per person., , The situation is worrisome, healthcare organizations are failing to protec their key assets., It is quite easy for hackers to find EHR systems exposed online with a poor security, search engines like Shodan could provide detailed information on these systems, healthcare facilities, medical equipment., The TrendLabs report detailed research conducted through Shodan that demonstrated the existence of many systems managing EHR data that were left open to the Internet with poor security., Enjoy the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  EHR data,  healthcare)

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The latest chaos in the digital world regarding Apple has stricken like a bullet, as the iPhone manufacturer announced to relocating the encryption key for users data in China; from the United States of America to some country in Asia!, Well, some security advocates argue that this is incorrect for the corporation itself as well as a privacy threat for users, but according to Apple Company; the codes are secure. According to the reports, the users of iCloud in China are confused that in what way Apple will manage the confidentiality of their essential data., Apple too fears that data protection employees have concerns about changing the privacy of iCloud users in China, as per two reports this week. The classified data such as online emails, photographs, and messages stay protected from hackers by encryption. And now, Apple will store encryption keys in China instead of the United States of America (Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reports)., It means that the Chinese authorities do not need to go to USA law agencies to force Apple to provide the rights to the data. This step in reaction to newly introduced laws in China, according to which iCloud services offered to the citizens, should secure data within premises of the country and can be used by Chinese organizations., By the end of the coming month, Apple is going to start transmitting coded information to China and will work closely with a Chinese government. Apple did not say when the encryption data keys would move abroad., Data protection advocates said, “The change can cause problems for political and other dissidents”. “Given that Apple is going to work in China, it is unlikely that government can get access to Apple’s data from the local community,” said the professor at the Toronto University, studying the actions of the Chinese government carefully., Apple says, however, that the data keys stored in a secure place, still Apple will control them. Besides, Apple also claimed that it would provide data only on demand to China’s current legislative requirements and did not create loopholes for access. Apple’s high-level officer said to news agencies that iCloud is a matter of concern for the recently introduced laws., , The spokeswoman also noted that Apple decision to break the service of iCloud in China would lead to reduced client’s interaction with Apple and would reduce the security and confidentiality of data for Chinese users. Big multinationals like Microsoft and Amazon also work with Chinese companies to provide cloud storage service and use the vast Chinese market. Two technological giants of USA refused to inform the magazine, where the encryption keys of the company’s data store. Apple informed the news agencies that they sent a warning about the transition to Chinese iCloud users, which will allow them to disable iCloud to avoid data storage in the country. Apple also told that no one will be touched before accepting new terms of use in China. Users whose configurations allow another nation like Macao and Hong Kong have not registered their data on servers in China., The Reuters also includes Taiwan in this list; the newspaper does not do this. Apple Company and Amazon did not respond to our request for additional comments yet. Microsoft also denied giving any further comments., Written by Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at Cyberogism.com, Author Bio: Ali Qamar is a privacy and cyber security enthusiast, his work has been featured in many major tech and security blogs including InfosecInstitute, Hackread, ValueWalk, Intego, and SecurityAffairs to name a few. He runs SpyAdvice.com currently. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Apple iCloud, China), ,

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The Meltdown and Spectre attacks could be exploited by attackers to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access target sensitive data., The Meltdown attack could allow attackers to read the entire physical memory of the target machines stealing credentials, personal information, and more., The Meltdown exploits the speculative execution to breach the isolation between user applications and the operating system, in this way any application can access all system memory., The Spectre attack allows user-mode applications to extract information from other processes running on the same system. It can also be exploited to extract information from its own process via code, for example, a malicious JavaScript can be used to extract login cookies for other sites from the browser’s memory., The Spectre attack breaks the isolation between different applications, allowing to leak information from the kernel to user programs, as well as from virtualization hypervisors to guest systems.,  , Meltdown attacks trigger the CVE-2017-5754 vulnerability, while Spectre attacks the CVE-2017-5753 (Variant 1) and CVE-2017-5715 (Variant 2). According to the experts, only Meltdown and Spectre Variant 1 can be addressed via software, while Spectre Variant 2 required an update of the microcode for the affected processors. Software mitigations include., Google addressed the Meltdown issue in Chrome OS with the release of the version 63 in December, tens of days before researchers at Google Project Zero disclosure the flaws., , Google rolled out the KPTI/KAISER patch to address the flaw in 70 Intel-based Chromebook models from various vendors, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung., This week the company released Chrome OS 65 release that also includes the KPTI mitigation against Meltdown for a number of Intel-based systems that were not addressed in with version 3.14 of the kernel., According to Google, all older Chromebooks with Intel processors should get the KPTI mitigation for Meltdown with the release of Chrome OS 66 that is scheduled for release on April 24., “The Stable channel has been updated to 65.0.3325.167 (Platform version: 10323.58.0/1) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates.” reads the Google announcement., “Intel devices on 3.14 kernels received the KPTI mitigation against Meltdown with Chrome OS 65., All Intel devices received the Retpoline mitigation against Spectre variant 2 with Chrome OS 65.”, Chrome OS 65 also includes the Retpoline mitigation for Spectre Variant 2 for all Intel-based devices. Google experts highlighted that for Spectre Variant 1 attack, hackers can abuse the eBPF feature in the Linux kernel, but Chrome OS disables eBPF., Chrome OS devices running on ARM-based systems are not affected by Meltdown. Google is working to cover also Spectre issues., “On ARM devices we’ve started integrating firmware and kernel patches supplied by ARM. Development is still ongoing so release timelines have not been finalized. ARM devices will receive updated firmware and kernels before they enable virtualization features.” concluded Google., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Chrome OS, Meltdown and Spectre)

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For this study, Intel Security presented 10 emails where people were asked to identify which emails were phishing with the purpose of steal personal data, and which were legit, legal emails. The data for the study was collected from 144 countries and 19000 people were surveyed., “To help consumers spot these popular phishing attacks, we developed a quiz to help people learn how to properly identify phishing emails. We shared 10 real emails and you decided whether they were real, or real dangerous. We’ve been doing this for some time, and now that the tests have been turned in, scored and graded, it’s time to take a look at how everyone did.” states the official blog published by McAfee., The results were:, If 80% got at least one answer wrong, this means that  the attacker has found the “open door”, since he just needs us to get wrong one time to get his opportunity., Another interesting data emerged from the study is related to the email that more people got the wrong response … it is the legitimate email. The legit email, consisted in the user taking action and “claim their free ads. Normally people associate “free money” to phishing campaigns, and that was the main reason why some many people got the wrong answer here., “Phishing emails often look like they are from credible sites but are designed to trick you into sharing your personal information,” “Review your emails carefully and check for typical phishing clues including poor visuals and incorrect grammar, which may indicate that the email was sent by a scammer.” said Gary Davis, Chief Consumer Security Evangelist at Intel Security., , Using the advices provided by Gary Davis, you can follow the following tips to improve defense against phishing attacks:, Do:, Don’t:, Phishing is one of the most insidious cyber threats despite the high level of knowledge on the techniques implemented by criminals. Everyone can fall victim for phishing emails, even people working in IT, but the trick is to follow some steps like the ones provided to help us reduce our mistakes., Early in my career in IT phishing emails were a big deal, since they had many of spelling mistakes, but today I can’t say the same, because now I see a lots of phishing emails, perfectly writing, since the scammers hire people to do the spell checking for each country, being difficult to distinguish a phishing emails from a legit emails, and that’s why the numbers of this study are so alarming., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  phishing, cybercrime)

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According to the experts at the security firm Wordfence tens of thousands, of home routers have been hacked and used to power cyber attacks on WordPress websites., The security firm observed a spike in the number of attacks originated from Algeria and that targeted customer websites. Further investigation revealed that the attacks were launched from more than 10,000 IP addresses, most of which were associated with state-owned telecoms company Telecom Algeria., “Last week, while creating the Wordfence monthly attack report, we noticed that Algeria had moved from position 60 in our “Top Attacking Countries” list to position 24. That was a big jump and we were curious why Algeria had climbed the attack rankings so rapidly.” reads the analysis published by Wordfence., “What we discovered on closer examination is that over 10,000 IP addresses in Algeria were attacking WordPress websites in March. Most IPs were only launching between 50 and 1000 attacks during the entire month.”, The hackers exploited vulnerabilities in the routers provided by Telecom Algeria to its customers, then compromised the devices to launch brute-force and other WordPress attacks., Wordfence identified compromised routers from 27 ISPs worldwide involved in the WordPress attacks. The routers of more than a dozen of these ISPs are listening on port 7547 that is used by the ISPs for remote management purposes, the experts noticed that all the flawed devices are running a vulnerable version of the AllegroSoft RomPager web server., All the RomPager versions prior to 4.34 are affected by a critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2014-9222, also known as ‘Misfortune Cookie‘., , The flaw was reported in December 2014 by researchers at Check Point Software Technologies who discovered that more than 12 Million Home Routers were affected by the issue., The vulnerability could be exploited by an attacker to run a man-in-the-middle attack on traffic going to and from home routers from every manufacturer., Once an attacker compromise a router, it could target any other devices on a local network, such as a smart TV or a printer., The flaw can be exploited to hijack a large number of devices made by Huawei, Edimax, D-Link, TP-Link, ZTE, ZyXEL and other vendors., The routers provided by 14 of the 28 ISPs are vulnerable to Misfortune Cookie attacks., According Wordfence, in just three days, 6.7 percent of all attacks aimed at protected WordPress websites came from home routers that have port 7547 open., Last month, Wordfence observed more than 90,000 unique IP addresses from the 28 ISPs associated with compromised routers, most of them generate less than 1,000 attacks over the course of up to 48 hours, after which they stop., “In just the past month we have seen over 90,000 unique IP addresses at 28 ISPs that fit our compromised-router attack pattern. We monitor these attacks across our customer websites which is an attack surface of over 2 million websites.” states Wordfence. “We only see a sample of the attacks that all websites globally experience. If you extrapolate the numbers, it indicates that there is a very large number of compromised ISP routers out there performing attacks and acting in concert.”, WordFence has published a free online tool that can be used to check if a router has port 7547 open., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Misfortune Cookie, WordPress attacks)

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According to the experts at Kaspersky security firm, an ATP group dubbed Blue Termite has been active since at least November 2013 focusing its attacks on Japanese organizations. The Blue Termite APT crew hit also other organizations worldwide, but most of its control infrastructure (C&C servers) are located in Japan., The list of targets is long and includes government agencies, financial services firms, banks, universities, public interest groups, news companies, and various organizations from sectors such as automotive, healthcare, chemical, electrical, real estate, food, construction, insurance, transportation, robotics, semiconductors, and information services., According to the experts the Blue Termite APT is responsible for the recently data breach suffered by the Japan Pension Service that exposed personal details of 1.25 million people., The researcher noticed a spike in the number of infection related the Blue Termite since July, the APT is still active. In July the group start leveraging a Flash Player exploit (CVE-2015-5119) leaked following the Hacking Team hack, the APT used the Flash Player exploit in spear-phishing emails to infect victims before its public disclosure., , In July, the Blue Termite hackers deployed the Hacking Team exploit on several compromised Japanese websites in order to deliver the malware for its campaign via drive-by-download attacks., In some cases, the APT conducted surgical operation infecting only the computers of certain users, they adopted the watering hole attack against a prominent member of the Japanese government., In another case the Blue Termite hackers used a script to ensure that only users who visited the compromised website from the IP addresses of a certain Japanese organization would be infected., Blue Termite has been leveraging customized data stealer belonging the Emdivi family., “Kaspersky Lab detected the tailored malware, “emdivi t20″. This malware is basically used after the infection by emdivi t17 that serves as a backdoor. Although the versions emdivi t17 and emdivi t20 are from the same emdivi family, the latter is more sophisticated.” states the post published on SecureList., “One of the most interesting things about the malware used by the Blue Termite actor is that each victim is supplied with a unique malware sample that is made in a way that it could only be launched on a specific PC, targeted by the Blue Termite actor,” Kaspersky said., The attribution is not simple dealing with APT, but experts at Kaspersky speculate the attackers are likely Chinese speakers., Kaspersky isn’t the unique firm that analyzed the Blue Termite APT, Symantec has also been monitoring it, in November 2014 the company published a report on a cyber espionage campaign dubbed “CloudyOmega.”, Symantec reported that the APT group behind the CloudyOmega operation is linked with the Hidden Lynx APT and the threat actor responsible for the “LadyBoyle” attacks., Trend Micro also published a report on the APT., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Blue Termite, APT)

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There’s a new botnet in town and it’s named after the spy with a license to kill – James Bond. The new Bondnet botnet “Bond007.01” was discovered coming out of China by researchers at Guardicore Labs and it has infected an estimated 15,000 Windows server computers worldwide. The infected systems make up a wide variety of government, corporate, university, city and hospital computers., So far the Bondnet botnet has not been weaponized but instead seems to be focused on using the thousands of slaved computers to mine a variety of cryptocurrencies such as ZCash, RieConin, and what appears to be its primary target, Monero., “Operating under the name Bond007.01, the attacker can then take full control of the servers to exfiltrate data, hold it for ransom, use the server to stage further attacks and more. Active since December 2016, Bondent primarily mines Monero. Bond007.01 is financially motivated, earning around a thousand dollars a day.” states the report published by Guardicore., Crypto-currency mining is a mechanism used to introduce more currency into the system. Miners are often paid a small transaction fee as well as a “subsidy” of newly created electronic coins. Crypto-currency mining is a very computer resource intensive effort and can consume the availability of infected machines to the point of making them useless to the owners., The Bondnet botnet, which has been reportedly in operation since late 2016, produces over $1,000 a day in mined currency., The prime targets for the Bondnet attacks seem to be Windows 2008 servers equipped with MySQL however, the creators have a wide variety of targets and exploits they employ to infect a targeted system. The primary attack surface appears to be Windows RDP combined with brute force attacks against weak credentials., , The attackers also used a wide range of attacks against other web server software including JBoss, Oracle web apps, MSSQL and Apache Tomcat. Researchers have confirmed the Bondnet attacks seen so far are limited to Windows based server systems with 2008 and 2012 releases facing the brunt of the assault., Once the Bondnet intruder has broken through into the Windows system it then installs a series of Visual Basic programs, DLLs and Windows management programs to act as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) and the crypto-currency mining system. The RAT allows back door access for the Bondnet controllers and the mining system reports back with its results so the controllers can profit from the stolen computer usage., While the Bondnet botnet creators are stealing computer time and resources to obtain their digital bounty, there are darker forces that can be unleashed. The Bondnet botnet is managed and controlled remotely by the unknown users and thus can also be weaponized to form a DOS attack network, a ransomware net or be used for simple passive surveillance., Guardicore and other researchers have not seen any indication that the Bondnet operators are interested in data stored on the infected systems. Instead, they are concentrating their efforts on stealing the computer time for the crypto-currency mining operations. The speculation is that the amount of money earned by the Bondnet stealthy mining techniques exceeds what could be obtained via extortion by ransomware or DOS attacks., However, the added usage and power consumption inflicted by Bondnet botnet reportedly costs victims as much as $2,000 a month and the potential of the Bondnet to be weaponized into something more sinister shows just how dangerous it is., “While organisations can treat this as an issue of increased electric bills which can annually result in additional costs of 1000-2000$ per server, this may only be the beginning.” warns the analysis. “With relatively simple modifications the Bondnet can use its complete control over compromised organization servers, many of which contain sensitive information, to spread evil and perform other illegal actions. Today’s mining may easily become a ransomware campaign, data exfiltration or lateral movement inside the victim’s network.”, Owners of Windows server based systems are advised to monitor usage carefully, update their software to the latest versions to close security holes, raise the level of their password and credential employment and run a complete check for the Bondnet using AV security products., Guardicore has released a full technical report on the Bondnet, a removal tool and an analysis of its operations at:, About the author: Charles R. Smith is CEO of Softwar Inc. a US based information warfare company and a former national security journalist., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bondnet botnet, cybercrime)

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Adobe has released an emergency patch to patch a critical remote code-execution vulnerability (CVE-2104-8439) affecting Flash Player that was already fixed last month (Adobe’s Oct. 14th), but that was exploited again. According to an Adobe Security Bulletin, the update implements a mitigating solution for the CVE-2104-8439 that affects the Adobe Flash and could be exploited by attackers to install malware., The critical vulnerability in Flash Player for Windows, Mac and Linux was mitigated in October 14 for the first time, but the French researcher Kafeine discovered evidence of the exploits in the Angler, Astrum and Nuclear malware kits after Adobe released the patch. It is likely that the attackers were able to reverse-engineering the patch issued by Adobe and include it in commercial available exploits., “The vulnerability is being exploited in blind mass attack. No doubt about it : the team behind Angler is really good at what it does,” Kafeine said in a blog post., , The Flash Player to the latest version of Windows and Apple’s Mac OS is 15.0.0.239, and the latest for Linux is 11.2.202.424, anyway it is possible to install the patch manually from Adobe. Timo Hirvonen, a senior researcher at F-Secure, confirmed that its company has received an exploit sample from Kaffeine and that they verified that the exploit was working despite the deployment of the Adobe fixed in October., “We discovered the vulnerability while analyzing a Flash exploit from an exploit kit called Angler. We received the sample from Kafeine, a renowned exploit kit researcher. He asked us to identify the vulnerability which was successfully exploited with Flash Player 15.0.0.152 but not with 15.0.0.189. That would imply the vulnerability was something patched in APSB14-22. However, based on the information that we had received via Microsoft Active Protections Program the exploit didn’t match any of the vulnerabilities patched in APSB14-22 (CVE-2014-0558, CVE-2014-0564, or CVE-2014-0569). We considered the possibility that maybe the latest patch prevented the exploit from working and the root cause of the vulnerability was still unfixed so we contacted the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team.” reported F-Secure in a blog post., Users can install the new update from Adobe Flash Player Download Center, or using the automated update requested by the Adobe solution., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Adobe patch, CVE-2104-8439)

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No Doubts, cyber criminals are jackals always ready to exploit any event in the headlines, even the most dramatic incidents. We have assisted in the past many cases in which crooks exploited the media attention on news events, such as the mysterious skyjacking of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 or the incident occurred at the AirAsia flight QZ8501., News of the day is that people from several countries, including Canada, Dubai, Bahrain and Turkey, have received fake “terror alert” emails. According to Symantec, the bogus notifications advise recipients reading the mail to keep them and their families and company secured from an imminent attack., , The specific campaign leveraged on malicious emails with two attachments which according to the content in the mail is a brief on measures to adopt to remain secure. One of the attachment is in reality a document containing indications on the measured to adopt, the second one is a malware used to infect the victim’s computer., The malicious code is a multiplatform remote access Trojan (RAT) dubbed Jsocket (Backdoor.Sockrat), a RAT which was developed by the same authors of the AlienSpy RAT., , Operators behind the campaign used the signatures from local law enforcement agency’s officials in order to trick victims by giving more credibility to the messages., “Earlier this month, Symantec observed malicious emails spoofing the email address of one United Arab Emirates (UAE) law enforcement agency, particularly the Dubai Police Force. These spear-phishing emails, which read like a warning from the Dubai Police, bank on users’ fear of terror attacks to trick them into executing the malicious attachments. The attachments are disguised as valuable security tips that could help recipients to protect themselves, as well as their companies and their families, from potential terror attacks that may occur in their business location.” states Symantec in a blog post., “To add more credibility to the emails, the crooks impersonate the incumbent Dubai Police lieutenant general, who is also the head of general security for the emirate of Dubai, by signing the email with his name.”, The experts noticed that the spear phishing messages were well written and all officials used as alleged sender are currently in office., Another element of interest highlighted by Symantec is represented  by the effort spent by threat actors in targeting their victims, for example, the subject in most cases reflects the name of an employee who works for the targeted company. This circumstance leads the expert to believe that attackers have a specific knowledge of their victims., Symantec experts confirm we may yet see more of these kinds of social engineering tactics preying on real-world fears, be careful!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – spear phishing, Terror-alert spam)

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The most severe vulnerability patched by Drupal 8.3.7 is a critical issue, tracked as CVE-2017-6925 that affects the entity access system. The CVE-2017-6925 flaw can be exploited by an attacker to view, create, delete or update entities., The flaw impacts only entities that don’t have UUIDs and ones that have different access restrictions on different revisions of the same entity., “There is a vulnerability in the entity access system that could allow unwanted access to view, create, update, or delete entities. This only affects entities that do not use or do not have UUIDs, and entities that have different access restrictions on different revisions of the same entity.” reads the advisory., Another access bypass vulnerability patched in the latest version of Drupal 8, CVE-2017-6924, resides in the REST API and could be exploited to bypass comment approval., “When using the REST API, users without the correct permission can post comments via REST that are approved even if the user does not have permission to post approved comments,” Drupal continues the advisory. “This issue only affects sites that have the RESTful Web Services (rest) module enabled, the comment entity REST resource enabled, and where an attacker can access a user account on the site with permissions to post comments, or where anonymous users can post comments.”, This vulnerability has been rated because it affects only sites that have the RESTful Web Services module and the comment entity REST resource enabled., , Security advisory adds that are attackers needs access to a user account that is allowed to post comments to trigger the issue, or the targeted website needs to allow comments from anonymous users., Another flaw rated as moderately critical fixed in Drupal 8 is tracked as CVE-2017-6923 and affects the “views” component., “When creating a view, you can optionally use Ajax to update the displayed data via filter parameters. The views subsystem/module did not restrict access to the Ajax endpoint to only views configured to use Ajax. This is mitigated if you have access restrictions on the view,” Drupal said. “It is best practice to always include some form of access restrictions on all views, even if you are using another module to display them.”, Update your Drupal installation!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Drupal 8, CMS)

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Malware researchers at Cybaze ZLab analyzed the latest version of the infamous GandCrab ransomware, version 5.0. Most of the infections have been observed in central Europe, but experts found evidence that the malicious code doesn’t infect Russian users. GandCrab operates like a classic ransomware, it encrypts all user files and drops some ransom notes on the infected machine., The ransomware uses a pseudo-randomic extension (5 characters long), that is different for each infection (some of these extensions are: .txvpq, .rttmc, .mcbot, etc…)., The ransom note contains some information related to the infection: an ID (“fed0a66240f8743f”, in the image below), a “GANDCRAB KEY”, required to restore the original files, and some encrypted information about the infected system such as the username, the PC name, the domain, the operative system and the language., , Unlike GandCrab v4, this version is able to kill some processes associated with some popular applications (i.e. Word, Excel, SQLServer etc.) to allow the code to encrypt the files opened by these applications., , The payment process is implemented through the hidden service associated with the Tor address:, hxxp://gandcrabmfe6mnef.onion, which is the same used by previous versions of the malware., Technical details, including IoCs and Yara Rules, are reported in the analysis shared by researchers at the ZLab., You can download the full ZLAB Malware Analysis Report at the following URL:, ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ransomare, cybercrime)

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The malware compromised systems worldwide, most of them in Ukraine, the list of victims is long and includes the US pharmaceutical company Merck, the shipping giant Maersk, the Ukraine’s central bank, Russian oil giant Rosneft, advertising group WPP, TNT Express and the law firm DLA Piper., According to the second quarter earnings report published by Maersk, there were expecting losses between $200 million and $300 million due to “significant business interruption” because the company was forced to temporarily halt critical systems infected with the ransomware., The situation announced by FedEx is also disconcerting, its systems will only be fully restored only at the end of September, three months after the incident., “The worldwide operations of TNT Express were significantly affected during the first quarter by the June 27 NotPetya cyberattack. Most TNT Express services resumed during the quarter and substantially all TNT Express critical operational systems have been restored. However, TNT Express volume, revenue and profit still remain below previous levels,” the company said on Tuesday., “Operating results declined due to an estimated $300 million impact from the cyberattack, which was partially offset by the benefits from revenue growth, lower incentive compensation accruals and ongoing cost management initiatives,”, ,  , During a conference call with financial analysts on Tuesday, FedEx chief information officer Rob Carter confirmed that the attack vector was an infected tax software update delivered to its system in Ukraine, clearly, it is referring the MeDoc accounting application., Carter confirmed that the malware used in the attack was extremely disruptive, but also confirmed that customer data were not exposed., “This attack was the result of a nation state targeting Ukraine and companies that do business there,” he explained., TNT adopting further measured to protect its infrastructure, especially legacy systems in hubs and depots worldwide., Other companies are counting the huge cost of attack, the consumer goods firm Reckitt Benckiser announced the attack cost it £100m ($136m), but the highest cost was announced by Saint Gobain, which expected $400 million losses., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FedEx, NotPetya)

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In 2014, the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a the MEMEX project to design advanced search tools that could be also used to scan the deep web, which isn’t indexed by Google and other commercial search engines., The Memex  search engine was started to allow search of not indexed content, an operation that in the majority of cases is still run manually by Intelligence Agency., “DARPA has launched the Memex program. Memex seeks to develop the next generation of search technologies and revolutionize the discovery, organization and presentation of search results. The goal is for users to be able to extend the reach of current search capabilities and quickly and thoroughly organize subsets of information based on individual interests. Memex also aims to produce search results that are more immediately useful to specific domains and tasks, and to improve the ability of military, government and commercial enterprises to find and organize mission-critical publically available information on the Internet” states the official page of the project., A few days ago, for the first time, the  security community has the opportunity to give a look to the MEMEX system, DARPA opened the doors of its laboratories to the journalists of the Scientific American. The Agency provided a preview of the powerful search engine and explained its use in the fight against the cybercrime., , The Pentagon’s research agency gave Scientific American a preview of the software and 60 Minutes exclusive looks at the technology. The researchers explained that there is an impressive amount of data that is not considered useful for ordinary web users, but that represents a crucial source of information for law enforcement and intelligence agencies., “That leaves untouched a multitude of information that may not be valuable to the average Web surfer but could provide crucial information to investigators.” states the article published by the Scientific American., The majority of information in the Deep Web is unstructured data which are gathered from multiple sources that could not be crawled by ordinary search engines. The most popular subset of the Deep Web is the Tor network, an anonymizing network that is accessible only by using specific software., “We’re envisioning a new paradigm for search that would tailor indexed content, search results and interface tools to individual users and specific subject areas, and not the other way around,” said Chris White, DARPA program manager. “By inventing better methods for interacting with and sharing information, we want to improve search for everybody and individualize access to information. Ease of use for non-programmers is essential.”, The DARPA involved 17 different teams of researchers, composed of representatives of the academic world and private industry, to develop most advanced technologies to include in the MEMEX program. The ambitious projects aim to revolutionize the way so search and present information from a larger pool of sources, including the content on the Deep Web., In many circumstances, we have explained that the Deep Web is often abused by criminals that manage a multitude of illegal activities, including child pornography, human trafficking, drug deals and any other cyber criminal activities., According to several reports, including one published by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University, the NYDA’s Office is one of several bureaus and agencies that have already used earlier versions of the Memex system to collect information on human trafficking cases and prosecute criminals., In a video interview released by Chris White, the inventor of the Memex search engine, the expert explained how this amazing platform works and which kind of information is able to access., ,  “The internet is much, much bigger than people think,” White said. “By some estimates Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo only give us access to around 5% of the content on the Web.” said White, highlighting that the Deep Web represents a privileged environment for bad actors and their illegal affairs., Very eloquent was the intervention of another researcher involved in the project MEMEX, the DARPA innovation head Dan Kaufman. who says, ”, “the easiest way to think about Memex is: How can I make the unseen seen?” commented Kaufman. “Most people on the internet are doing benign and good things,” Kaufman said. “But there are parasites that live on there, and we take away their ability to use the internet against us– and make the world a better place.”, At the moment, different Intelligence Agencies are testing the Memex, including two district attorneys’ offices, a law enforcement agency, and a nongovernmental organization. In the next phase the access to the platform will be extended to a greater number of beta testers to stress the capabilities of the application., “The next set of testing begins in a few weeks and will include federal and district prosecutors, regional and national law enforcement and multiple NGOs. One of the main objectives of this round is to test new image search capabilities that can analyze photos even when portions that might aid investigators—including traffickers’ faces or a television screen in the background — are obfuscated,” Scientific American reports. “Another goal is to try out different user interfaces and to experiment with streaming architectures that assess time-sensitive data.”, White remarked the potentiality of a set of tools like MEMEX and that improvements they bring to searches conducted by law enforcement for their investigation and to prevent crimes, the experts also explained that its system will never hack any service on the Internet in order to retrieve information-, “White made several key decisions about the type of data Memex could access in an effort to steer clear of the controversy around government access to private citizen information and communications, a particularly touchy subject since Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations beginning in June 2013. If something is password protected, it is not public content and Memex does not search it, according to White.” reported the Scientific American., “We didn’t want to do hacking,” White added. “We didn’t want to cloud this work unnecessarily by dragging in the specter of snooping and surveillance.” , As usual happen for special projects born in the Intelligence, one day we would all benefit of the services offered by MEMEX and its searches, we are drowning in a sea of information., “Memex would ultimately apply to any public domain content; initially, DARPA intends to develop Memex to address a key Defense Department mission: fighting human trafficking. Human trafficking is a factor in many types of military, law enforcement and intelligence investigations and has a significant web presence to attract customers. The use of forums, chats, advertisements, job postings, hidden services, etc., continues to enable a growing industry of modern slavery. An index curated for the counter-trafficking domain, along with configurable interfaces for search and analysis, would enable new opportunities to uncover and defeat trafficking enterprises. Memex plans to explore three technical areas of interest: domain-specific indexing, domain-specific search, and DoD-specified applications.”, (Security Affairs –  MEMEX project, DARPA)

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The year started very difficult for the U.S. government, its networks have been constantly hit by hackers that for different reasons have tried to steal sensitive information and intelligence secrets., The principal menaces against US come from state-sponsored hackers and hacktivists, in the last months we have read of many cyber attacks, mainly for cyber espionage purpose,  that involved also US infrastructures and offices., The US governments is facing with one of the most aggressive cyber campaign against its cyber resources, and exactly as any other countries is working to definition of a series of countermeasure to mitigate the risks related cyber threats., As anticipated the attacks aren’t exclusively political motivated, hacker group Anonymous represents a constant menace to its systems, the collective recently proved that gained access to State Department’s website and its database during Operation Last Resort and probably it will not be the only one., The group exposed personal information of State Department consular and staff members to protest against US authorities being allegedly responsible for the suicide of young internet activist Aaron Swartz., Anonymous has also announced that has possession of key codes to unlock encrypted files named after the nine Supreme Court justices, they were widely distributed January 25 when Anonymous hacked the US Sentencing Commission website , which allegedly contain highly sensitive government information., Is clear that this type of attacks are a great menace for the government that need to reinforce its cyber security and to find the way to persecute every cyber actors that violate its cyberspace., We are in the middle of a cyberwar which is going on between multiple actors, in which the actors are mixed and there aren’t clear rule of engage. Every governments despite global economic crisis is investing in both defense and offense sectors, most active countries are China, U.S., Israel, Iran, North Korea and Russia which are pushing militarization of cyberspace., The espionage is become cyber espionage and instead of explicit attacks many countries prefer to explore to cause sensible damage to adversary hitting its critical infrastructures using a cyber weapon., In recent weeks  Obama has signed an Executive Order on cyber security to define a set of actions required to contain “growing threat from cyber-attacks”. The order extends  the concept of cyber threats including acts such as “website defacement, espionage, theft of intellectual property, denial of service attacks, and destructive malware,”, obviously any operations of hacktivism is also  considered as an attacks against government assets., During RSA conference on Thursday, Feb. 28 by White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel announced that U.S. government is considering other measures such as  visa restrictions and financial sanctions against hackers or governments that might hack national networks., It’s first time specific retaliation methods have been mentioned by the White House,  is difficult to imagine how the government can take legal action against hackers operating in the country, but especially for those who attack US from the outside., “It’s really a question that we’re still debating and debating vigorously, and we need to debate within the government and as a society,” “What I can say is that once we decide a federal response is warranted though, there’s still a broad spectrum of actions we could take.”, While the government studies how to implement its retaliation strategy, one after another U.S. IT giants (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter) have fallen under cyber attacks of yet unidentified hackers, due this reason US will employ military action to respond to further hacks., Principal security firms consider Chinese state sponsored hackers responsible for the attacks, Chinese cyber units are accused of conduct  “thousands” attacks daily, Governments need to further strengthen its infrastructures and to act also on diplomatic way to hack to foreign governments such us China to monitor hacking activities that offend US., this may include the U.S. leveraging its diplomatic powers to “push countries to crack down on hacking activities from within their borders.” Daniel said., Despite US intentions are clear their realization is very hard and delicate under diplomatic point of view with meaningful implications, retaliating against foreign hackers it’s difficult and must be done with due care are as reiterated by Daniels., “The risk of missed attribution, missed calculation and escalation in cyberspace are very real,” “As a government, any action we take in cyberspace must be considered against its possible foreign policy implications and our desire to establish international norms of acceptable behavior in cyberspace.”, The road is steep, full of difficulties and it is interesting to study how the U.S. Government intends to follow it and what will be the repercussions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber security)

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A massive DDoS attack targeted the European Commission website, fortunately, according to an official statement from the organization the internal security team repelled the attack without damages., The experts from the European Commission confirmed that some servers hit by the DDoS attack went offline causing an outage that lasted a few hours., , The European Commission informed internal staff of the attack via email and it explained that the malicious volume of traffic caused “the saturation of our Internet connection.”, “No data breach has occurred,” a Commission spokesperson was quoted by the Politico. “The attack has so far been successfully stopped with no interruption of service, although connection speeds have been affected for a time.”, Employees claim Internet was down following the attacks, The attack occurred yesterday and according to an employee, the internal staff was not able to work during the afternoon., “no one could work this afternoon, since the Internet was gone twice, for several hours.” said the source., At the time I was writing there are no technical details of the DDoS attack, the responsible is still unknown neither the motivation of the offensive., The European Commission is currently investigating the case., Insiders confirmed that security experts at the European Commission  expected new waves of cyber attacks in the coming days. The European cyber emergency response team (CERT-EU) was already alerted and it is working with the IT security team at the European Commission to repeal any attack., The aforementioned source notes that in addition to the traffic that hackers submitted to the EU website, the Commission also experienced attacks specifically aimed at network gateways, and this is the main reason that caused Internet connections used by employees to go down., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – European Commission, DDoS)

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The Dutch Information and Security Services Act will come into force in January 2018 and one of the main effects of the new legal framework is that country’s certificate authority, CA of the Staat de Nederlanden, could be taken off the Mozilla’s trust list., The new security laws specifically address metadata retention powers and surveillance activities. Like legal frameworks adopted by other countries, the law grants broad-based interception powers for Dutch authorities., Mozilla maintainers argue that under the new law, the CA of the Staat de Nederlanden could be forced by the Government to support interception by abusing SSL proxying., The Dutch secret services, with the help of the CA of the Staat de Nederlanden, could access the encrypted traffic, a situation that threatens also other European states because in The Netherlands operates major transit services., “The new “Wet op de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten (Wiv)” (Law for intelligence and security services) has been accepted by the Dutch Government. Provisions authorizing new powers for the Dutch intelligence and security services will become active starting January 1st, 2018.” wrote Chris Van Pelt, “This revision of the law will authorise intelligence and security to intercept and analyse cable-bound (Internet) traffic, and will include far-reaching authorisations, including covert technical attacks, to facilitate their access to encrypted traffic.”, “Article 45 1.b, explicitly authorises the use of ‘false keys’ in third party systems to obtain access to systems and data”., , Van Pelt pointed out that the Dutch CA is operated by PKIOverheid / Logius that is a division of the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations that also operates the AIVD intelligence service., For this reason, Van Pelt suggests to take off the Dutch CA from the Mozilla ‘s trust list., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dutch CA, surveillance)

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Yesterday a massive DDoS attack targeted the DNS service of the Dyn company, one of the most authoritative domain name system (DNS) provider, and caused an extended Internet outage. A large portion of Internet users was not able to reach most important web services, many websites like including Twitter, GitHub, PayPal, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and Spotify were down for netizens in the US., What happened? Who his behind the attack?, The fear of cyber attack on a global scale brought people in the panic, yesterday a large portion of users have probably understood that the Internet architecture is a resource that could be targeted by hackers with serious and unpredictable consequences., But how the attack happened? What’s the cause behind the attack?, We still ignore the exact dynamic of the attack, neither who is the responsible, the unique certainty is that the Dyn DNS Service was flooded by a devastating wave of requests originated by million of compromised IoT devices. The Dyn company reported a huge army of hijacked Internet of Things devices could be abused by attackers to power the massive DDoS attack., The security intelligence firm Flashpoint published an interesting post on the massive DDoS in which confirm that its experts have observed the Mirai bots driving the attack against DynDNS., “Flashpoint has confirmed that some of the infrastructure responsible for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Dyn DNS were botnets compromised by Mirai malware. Mirai botnets were previously used in DDoS attacks against security researcher Brian Krebs’ blog “Krebs On Security” and French internet service and hosting provider OVH.” reads the analysis published by Flashpoint “Mirai malware targets Internet of Things (IoT) devices like routers, digital video records (DVRs), and webcams/security cameras, enslaving vast numbers of these devices into a botnet, which is then used to conduct DDoS attacks. “, Below the Key Findings of the report published by Flashpoint, This is not surprising if we consider that the source code of the botnet was leaked of the popular criminal hacker forum Hackforum earlier October by a user with moniker “Anna-senpai” that shared the link to the source code of the malware “Mirai.”, “The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed ‘Mirai’ spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.” reported Krebs., , The Mirai Botnet was first spotted by the researcher MalwareMustDie this summer targeting IoT devices, it mainly targets connected objects such as routers, CCTV, and DVRs., The Mirai malware target Internet of Things (IoT) devices using the credential factory settings, a circumstance that is quite common in the wild., The availability of the source code of Mirai Botnet in the wild theoretically made possible everyone to power a botnet., I confess you that I believe the leak of the source code of such kind of botnet could be also part of a wider strategy of a certain category of attackers that intend to power massive attacks making impossible the attribution., Watch out! The Mirai botnet that powered the attack against the Dyn DNS service is not the same used against Krebs’s site and OVH., “While Flashpoint has confirmed that Mirai botnets were used in the October 21, 2016 attack against Dyn, they were separate and distinct botnets from those used to execute the DDoS attacks against “Krebs on Security” and OVH. Earlier this month, “Anna_Senpai,” the hacker operating the large Mirai botnet used in the Krebs DDoS, released Mira’s source code online.” continues Flashpoint “Since this release, copycat hackers have used the malware to create botnets of their own in order to launch DDoS attacks.”, It is unknown if the attacks against Dyn DNS are linked to the DDoS attacks against Krebs, OVH, or other previous attacks., The attack against a DNS aims to obtain a wide effect, in the specific case many sites and services are using Syn as their upstream DNS provider., If you are interested to know more about the diffusion of the Mirai Botnet you can use this online tracker that reports more than 1.2 Million IPs seen associated to devices infected by the Mirai code in the wild. Consider that isn’t the exact number of infected devices, because many of them use dynamic IPs., ,  , According to the Reuters, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are both investigating the massive DDoS attacks against the Dyn DNS service., We have no indication about the possible culprit, I personally believe that the leakage of the Mirai botnet in the wild and this last massive attack have something in common and there is a specific strategy of a persistent attacker behind the events., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dyn DNS service, massive DDoS)

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This week I had the pleasure and the honor to participate as a speaker for a seminar at Rome Security Summit 2014, the theme of the event was “Impact of Windows XP End of life on Critical Infrastructure”., The seminar was arranged by the AIIC (Association of Italian experts of Critical Infrastructure), a non-profit scientific association that was born to create and sustain an interdisciplinary culture to the developing of strategies, methodologies and technologies able to adequately govern the critical infrastructures, especially in crisis scenarios resulting from both natural catastrophes or anthropic malicious behavior., I made the presentation with the popular cyber security expert Raoul Chiesa, together we have explored, over two months after the announcement of the End Of Live for Windows XP from Microsoft, the risks related to the presence of XP-based systems within high critical environments., , XP OS is still widely used in huge quantity of systems ranging from Cashpoint (ATM) machines to HMI/SCADA systems, analyzing data published in May, worldwide use of XP has passed from 19,79% to 16,17% in the last 6 months., Windows XP widely adopted in critical environments, Supervisory (computer) systems), Programmable logic controllers and Human–machine interface applications are still based on XP systems, and starting from April 8th 2014 they will no more receive security updates., According to many security experts, this could be a limited problem because the lack of patch mentality of the ICS/SCADA world, between 10 to 20 percent of organizations today actually install patches that their SCADA vendors are releasing., It must be considered that during the XP design timeframe the overall IT scenario is changed, mobility as assumed a crucial role differently from the past, especially for HMI while technology passed from isolated and proprietary systems into open architectures. The number of cyber attacks against critical infrastructure is increased in a significant way, state-sponsored hackers, hacktivists and cyber criminals are threatening government and private businesses., Analyzing the risks XP End of Life it is possible to distinguish:, Consequences of Windows XP end of life can be serious if critical infrastructure owners take no actions, the number of breaches and data compromise will surely increase with serious repercussions on the ability of organizations to comply with standards and damage to corporate brand., Organize an attack against a critical infrastructure could be dramatically easier for skilled hackers, the Open Internet and the underground provide all the necessary tools and services to cause serious problems, the fact that targeted systems are based on XP OS could give to the attackers a further vector of attack., “If ICS is connected to the Internet, it comes with an almost 100% guarantee of its being hacked on the first day” E. Kaspersky , The presentation includes information on the attacks against critical infrastructure with specific reference to XP systems., Let me suggest the to give  a look of the presentation., , A Special thanks to Raoul Chiesa and to the moderators Enzo Tieghi (Vice-AIIC) and Piergiorgio M. Foti (Vice-AIIC) and to all the other participants., Andrea Guarino, Responsabile Tutela del Patrimonio – ACEA SPA, socio AIIC, Angelo Luca Barba, Marketing Cyber Security – Selex ES, socio AIIC, Giorgio Basanisi, Senior Manager Spike Reply, socio AIIC, Andrea Carcano, CTO & Founder Nozomi Networks, socio AIIC., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Critical Infrastructure,XP )

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Adobe has released security updates for Flash Player that address four vulnerabilities, including a critical issue (CVE-2018-5002) that has been exploited in targeted attacks mainly aimed at entities in the Middle East., The CVE-2018-5002 vulnerability, reported by researchers at ICEBRG and Qihoo 360 and Tencent,  is a stack-based buffer overflow that can be exploited by attackers arbitrary code execution., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS. These updates address critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player 29.0.0.171 and earlier versions.  Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.” reads the security advisory published by Adobe., “Adobe is aware of a report that an exploit for CVE-2018-5002 exists in the wild, and is being used in limited, targeted attacks against Windows users. These attacks leverage Office documents with embedded malicious Flash Player content distributed via email.”, The researcher did not disclose technical details of the vulnerability, but Adobe confirmed that the zero-day was exploited in targeted attacks against Windows users., Attackers launched spear phishing attacks using messages with weaponized Office documents (Excel spreadsheet named “salary.xlsx) that contain specially crafted Flash content., “The hackers carefully constructed an Office document that remotely loaded Flash vulnerability. When the document was opened, all the exploit code and malicious payload were delivered through remote servers. This attack mainly targets the Middle East.” reads the analysis published by Qihoo 360., , The Flash Player 30.0.0.113 version also addresses the following vulnerabilities:, This is the second zero-day discovered in 2018, the first Adobe zero-day, tracked as CVE-2018-4878, was patched in February after it was exploited by North Korea-linked nation-state hackers in attacks aimed at South Korea. The flaw was later exploited by different cybercrime gangs., According to the analysis published by Qihoo 360, attackers were preparing the campaign recently detected at least since February. The C&C domain appears as a job search website in the Middle East and its name leads the experts into believing that the target is located in Doha, Qatar., “Through analysis, we can see that the attack used a 0-day vulnerability regardless of the cost. The attacker developed sophisticated plans in the cloud and spent at least three months preparing for the attack. The detailed phishing attack content was also tailored to the attack target. All clues show this is a typical APT attack. We suggest all relevant organizations and users to update their Flash to the latest versions in a timely manner. ” concludes Qihoo 360., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe, CVE-2018-5002)

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Gaana (Gaana.com), one of the most popular music streaming service in India has reportedly been hacked. Gaana service has more than 10 Million registered users and 7.5 Million monthly visitors, according to various sources available on the Internet, the hackers have had access to user information (including username, date of birth, email address, MD5-encrypted password,  and other personal information) stored in the database ., A Pakistani hacker claimed responsibility for the attack and announced that the stolen data were available in a searchable database. Just after the attack the Gaana website was down for maintenance, but the company didn’t issue any official statement., The hacker, which calls himself Mak Man (this is the nick name he also used on Facebook), has published screen shots of the stolen data, the images demonstrate that the attacker accessed user IDs, passwords and other private details. Mak Man exploiting an SQL injection vulnerability in Gaana website and once stolen the data in the database he also shared the link to a searchable archive of Gaana user., , The Gaana service has been suspended and the administrators have forced a password reset in response to the data breach., “Site is down due to server maintenance. We will be back shortly. Kindly bear with us till then.” was the message displayed by the website., Below the sequence of tweets sent by Gaana operators, one ot the messages confirm that hackers haven’t had access to financial or sensitive personal data of the users., “We have temporarily removed access to our website and app as a vulnerability in one of our Gaana user databases was exposed” , “No financial or sensitive personal data beyond Gaana login credentials were accessed. No third party credentials were accessed either.”, “Most of our users’ data has not been compromised, but we’ve reset all Gaana user passwords, so all users have to make new ones”, “We would like to assure that security is a major focus for us and we are further strengthening our user security team”, “Please be assured that we are treating this issue with the utmost urgency and will provide more information soon”, No financial or sensitive personal data beyond Gaana login credentials were accessed. No third party credentials were accessed either. 2/5, — gaana.com (@gaana) 28 Maggio 2015,   The hacker has reportedly acknowledged that the flaw ha has exploited to access Gaana database has been patched, but he is warning on the existence of many other security flaws., “The vulnerable parameter I was using here, has been patched by the Admin… Now the question is, Was this the only vulnerable parameter I had.” saids Mak Man., In a Twitter update provided by the CEO of Gaana.com, Stayen Gajwani, it is reported that the stolen database has been removed from the hacker’s website., Update- No data was ever stored, and the site is removed. Nonetheless, we are resetting all user details on @gaana pic.twitter.com/YanYnA0XXA, — Satyan Gajwani (@satyangajwani) 28 Maggio 2015, It seems that the Pakistani hacker was not interestes in the sale of data, instead he acted to prove the poor level of security implemented by the service. He tried to contact the company several times to report the issue by the was always ignored, so he decided to hack the website., Unfortunately, there is the concrete risk that the data are in the hands of cyber criminals in this moment that could try to monetize them in the incoming days., I suggest Gaana users that share the same credentials on other web services to change their password on the other sites as soos as possible., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Gaana, SQL injection)

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On Saturday Carphone Warehouse (CW) was reportedly swamped by hackers than may have accessed personal and financial details of around 2.4 million customers according to the mobile retailer. The data breach affects customers who used OneStopPhoneShop.com, e2save.com and the Mobiles.co.uk websites. But it may not just stop there, apparently customers from iD Mobile, TalkTalk Mobile, Talk Mobile services may have been affected too., The cybercriminals covered their attack with junk traffic as a smokescreen, while breaking into systems and stealing names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and crucially bank details, sort codes and account numbers.  Up to 90,000 customers may also have had their encrypted credit card details accessed., , They used DDoS attacks while carrying out more significant data breaches, this type of pre-attack can have two main reasons, to keep security response staff too busy to follow up alerts that can provide an early warning sign of intrusion, and to trick them into relaxing security controls such as firewall rules.  While attacking with junk data the attackers left enough bandwidth available for a subsequent attack to infiltrate the network., Smokescreen attacks as they are being referred is thought to have been used previously on Sony’s PlayStation Network 2011’s assaults and against US banks since at least 2012. The high values of the losses lead security companies and their clients to closure to public information on the security details in these cases until they are solved. As a result, these types of attacks appear to be effective and are becoming more common, especially Internet-connected businesses that house sensitive data., Carphone Warehouse, is in the process of contacting customers affected by the breach and the end result might be millions in losses for the company., About the Author Bruno Esteves Macedo, Bruno is a CIO, public speaker / technology evangelist and information systems security lecturer. With more than 16 years experience as CIO Internacionaly managing technology-enabled business transformations.  Areas of expertise: Cybersecurity, fraud management, aviation security, business intelligence, and banking finance., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Carphone Warehouse, data breach)

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The State Bank of India that left a database containing personal information exposed online., The discovery was made by an anonymous security researcher that has found a server used for the bank’s Quick service, a mobile-based information service. Quick is “a free service from the Bank where in you can get your Account Balance, Mini Statement and more just by giving a Missed Call or sending an SMS with pre-defined keywords to pre-defined mobile numbers from your registered mobile number.” , The database was exposed online without protection and the database was located could gain access to the plaintext information it contained., The archive contained millions of text messages, going back to December, that were exchanged by the bank with its customers. Exposed data includes the customer’s phone number, partial bank account number, bank balance and records of transactions., The good news is that the State Bank of India quickly fixed the issue within hours after it was informed of the problem, unfortunately, it is not known how long the data remained exposed online or whether threat actors accessed to the huge trove of information., The availability of this information poses a serious risk to bank customers, threat actors could use it to target bank customers. , Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – data breach, State Bank of India),

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Recently I wrote a post on an Aerial Assault Drone recently presented at the Black Hat conference, the vehicle was equipped with hacking tools to compromise wi-fi target networks. The use of drones is increasing and the possible misuses too, the unmanned aerial vehicles could be used by groups of terrorists for reconnaissance before an attack or to hit a critical infrastructure. The security problems are even more serious is we consider the use of drones and quadcopters in the urban areas, for this reason, it is necessary the monitoring of these vehicles to prevent dangerous situations., The Israeli company ARTSYS 360 is developing a small 3D electronic radar that will be able to monitor every unmanned vehicle in small areas. This new radar is lightweight, has low power consumption and is able to monitor aerial traffic in an area with a range of 400 meters., , ARTSYS 360 states its radar ensures blind zones coverage: 3D-360° and assures detection and tracking also in a high-density environment such as an urban area., “The system performs a 3D 90 degrees vertical scanning and an horizontal 360 degrees scanning. The company claims that the system provides 1.5 degrees horizontal and vertical accuracy.The new radar, according to the company, performs a 360 degrees scanning every second.” states the iHLS portal., The radar is ideal for homeland security, it could be used to enforce physical security of an area with a limited perimeter, for instance, monitoring the presence of drones along fences or borders., The company website advertises its Grid Micro-Radar systems with following statements:, The small radar is able to communicate with the control center via WiFi, Lan, Rj45 and 3G, the power supply relies on an electric grid and has as an optional 4 lithium batteries to last through 48-96 hours of operations as well as a solar panel., Another point of strength that makes this radar ideal for urban areas are low radiation emissions during operations., The radar could be used also to interfere with drones, in case it detects unauthorized UAVs and quadcopters it is able to jam them causing malfunction., The authors explained that such radar is particularly useful in combating drug smuggling and to prevent drones incidents., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Drones, Radars)

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Wang Jing, a PhD student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has discovered that the majority of the web page of About.com are vulnerable different types of attacks, including cross-site scripting (XSS) and iFrame injection (Cross Frame Scripting) ., Wang Jing has analyzed nearly 95,000 About.com links by using a script he developed and discovered that at least 99.88% of them were affected by the security flaws, the news is very disconcerting if we consider that the website is by tens of millions of users each month ., Even the search field on the main homepage is affected by an XSS flaw and as explained by Jing, all the domains related to about.com result affected by the same vulnerability., , The exploitation of the XSS flaw is possible by tricking the user into clicking on a specially crafted link and could be used by an attacker to steal sensitive information from the victims. , “About.com all “topic sites” are vulnerable to XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) and Iframe Injection (Cross Frame Scripting) attacks. This means all sub-domains of about.com are affected. Based on a self-written program, 94357 links were tested. Only 118 links do not belong to the topics (Metasites) links. Meanwhile, some about.com main pages are vulnerable to XSS attack, too. This means no more than 0.125% links are not affected” wrote Jing. “Simultaneously, the About.com main page’s search field is vulnerable to XSS attacks, too. This means all domains related to about.com are vulnerable to XSS attacks.”, , The expert also discovered that About.com is vulnerable to Iframe Injection that could be used to steal sensitive data or to turn the victim’s machine in a bot that is abused to run a DDOS (Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack) against other websites., , Wang Jing also discovered some “Open Redirect” vulnerabilities related to about.com that could be exploited by attackers to do “Covert Redirect” to websites controlled by scammers and phishers that display a site that appear as legitimate that could be used for various kinds of attacks., “The vulnerabilities can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Microsoft IE (10.0.9200.16750) of Windows 8, Mozilla Firefox (34.0) & Google Chromium 39.0.2171.65-0 ubuntu0.14.04.1.1064 (64-bit) of Ubuntu (14.04)，Apple Safari 6.1.6 of Mac OS X Lion 10.7,” Jing added in the bog post., The sad thing is that according to the researcher, despite he has reported the flaws to About.com in October 2014, the company ignored him., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – About.com, hacking)

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According to a new report from security provider Bitdefender, roughly 175,000 connected security cameras are vulnerable to cyber attacks., The vulnerable cameras are manufactured by the Chinese company Shenzhen Neo Electronics that offers surveillance and security solutions, including IP cameras, sensors and alarms., The experts discovered several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in two models of cameras manufactured by the company, the iDoorbell and the NIP-22 models., , The researchers believe that other models commercialized by the Chinese company are vulnerable because they use the same firmware., “Several buffer overflow vulnerabilities (some before authentication) are present in the two cameras studied, the iDoorbell model and NIP-22 model, but we suspect that all cameras sold by the company use the same software and are thus vulnerable.” reads the report published by BitDefender. “These vulnerabilities could allow, under certain conditions, remote code execution on the device. This type of vulnerabilities is also present on the gateway which controls the sensors and alarms.”, The security cameras use UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) to automatically open ports in the router’s firewall to allow the access from the Internet. Querying the Shodan search engine for vulnerable devices the researchers discovered between 100,000 and 140,000 vulnerable devices worldwide., “Internet. We found between 100,000 and 140,000 devices when searching for the HTTP web server, and a similar number when searching for the RTSP server (both vulnerable). These are not necessarily the same devices, as some have only one service forwarded. We estimate that the real number of unique devices is around 175,000.” continues the report., The experts noticed that both security camera models are vulnerable to two different cyber attacks, one that affects the web server service running on cameras and another that affects the RSTP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) server., Researchers demomstrated that was quite easy to exploit the flaws in the security cameras, anyone can hack access the livestream by simply logging in with default credentials (i.e. “user,” “user,” and “guest,” “guest”)., The researchers also discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to take control of the cameras remotely., Shenzhen Neo did not comment the discovery., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – security cameras, IoT)

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According to a recent report titled “Operation Saffron Rose” published by cybersecurity company FireEye, a group called the Ajax Security Team is the principal Iranian hacking group, it is responsible for different espionage campaigns on custom-built malicious software., “This group, which has its roots in popular Iranian hacker forums such as Ashiyane and Shabgard, has engaged in website defacements since 2010. However, by 2014, this group had transitioned to malware-based espionage, using a methodology consistent with other advanced persistent threats in this region., It is unclear if the Ajax Security Team operates in isolation or if they are a part of a larger coordinated effort. We have observed this group leverage varied social engineering tactics as a means to lure their targets into infecting themselves with malware. ” states the FireEye Blog post., The Iranian hacking groups are considered by US a very aggressive threat, they conducted numerous cyber attacks, sabotage and cyber espionage are their principal activities according experts at FireEye., In one of the recent attacks, the hackers of the Ajax Security Team infected computers of U.S. with spear phishing attacks, the malicious links to an infected bogus website  (aeroconf2014.org) were sent by the attackers via email or social media messages., , According to FireEye the Ajax Security Team has deployed a malware, dubbed “Stealer”, which has the classic features of spyware software, it is able to syphon data, record keystrokes and grab screen shots., Once collected, the information is encrypted and temporarily stored it on the victim’s machine, later it is sent by Stealer to the C&C server., The Iranian team known as Ajax Security Team has targeted  U.S. defense companies and also Iranians entities who are trying to elude Government Internet censorship., Experts at FireEye have collected evidence that Ajax Security Team was also involved in credit card fraud, which suggests the groups of hackers is not directly controlled by the Iranian Government., It is not the first time that Iranian cyber capabilities are analyzed by western security experts, a study titled “Iran: How a Third Tier Cyber Power Can Still Threaten the United States” published on August 2013 by the Atlantic Council, a NATO organization based in Washington, highlighted that a Iran has sufficient cyber capabilities to attack the US. Security experts are convinced that Iranian state-sponsored hackers are behind a series of DDoS attacks against U.S. banks over the past few years., “I’ve grown to fear a nation state that would never go toe-to-toe with us in conventional combat that now suddenly finds they can arrest our attention with cyber attacks,” Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, told the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit on Monday., After the discovery of Stuxnet malware, the number of cyber attacks originated from Iran is increasing rapidly, also cyber capabilities of Iranian hackers have been improved in a significant way., Who is behind the Ajax Security Team?, According FireEye, the team is composed by hackers known as “HUrr!c4nE!” and “Cair3x,” which were known in the hacking community for defacing websites., “This is a good example of a phenomenon that we are going to increasingly see with hacker groups in Iran. If their objective is to attack enemies of the revolution and further the government’s objectives, then engaging in cyber espionage is going to have more impact than website defacements,” declared Nart Villeneuve., FireEye hasn’t provided the name the companies victims of the attacks, but revealed that it is not possible at the time I’m writing to determine what data might have been stolen., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Ajax Security Team, cyber espionage, Iran)  

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Once again thank you!,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)

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HP and the Ponemon Institute have published The 2013 Cost of Cyber Crime Study, the fourth annual report that provides an estimation of the economic impact of cybercrime., “Information is a powerful weapon in an organization’s cybersecurity arsenal,”“Based on real-world experiences and in-depth interviews with more than 1,000 security professionals around the globe, the Cost of Cyber Crime research provides valuable insights into the causes and costs of cyberattacks. The research is designed to help organizations make the most cost-effective decisions possible in minimizing the greatest risks to their companies.” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute. , The report confirms that for the fourth consecutive year the frequency and cost of cyber attacks are increased., The 2013 Cost of Cyber Crime Study states that the average annualized cost of cybercrime incurred by a benchmark sample of US organizations was $11.56 million, nearly 78% more than the cost estimated in the first analysis conducted 4 years ago., The report confirmed that the sophistication of cyber attacks has grown in concerning way in the last years, attackers are adopting techniques even more complex for sabotage and cyber espionage., , The 2013 Cost of Cyber Crime Study reported that the time it takes to resolve a cyberattack has increased by nearly 130 % in four years meanwhile the average cost to resolve a single attack totalling more than $1 million., Key findings include:, The adoption of defense mechanisms like security information and event management (SIEM) and big data analytics could  help to mitigate the effect of cyber attacks, reducing the cost suffered by enterprises., “Organizations using security intelligence technologies were more efficient in detecting and containing cyberattacks, experiencing an average cost savings of nearly $4 million per year, and a 21 percent return on investment (ROI) over other technology categories.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Ponemon 2013 Cost of Cyber Crime, cybercrime)

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The data dump leaked online by ShadowBrokers is a treasure for security experts and hackers that are analyzing every tool it contains., Cisco and Fortinet have confirmed their network appliance are vulnerable to the exploits listed in the leaked dump., Recently security researchers tested the BENIGNCERTAIN tool included in the precious archive belonging to the NSA Equation Group that allows attackers to extract VPN passwords from certain Cisco devices., Now the Hungary-based security consultancy SilentSignal has focused his analysis on another exploit that could be used against the newer models of Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA)., We successfully ported EXTRABACON to ASA 9.2(4) #ShadowBrokers #Cisco pic.twitter.com/UPG6yq9Km2, — SilentSignal (@SilentSignalHU) 23 agosto 2016, , The security firm has demonstrated that the NSA-linked Cisco exploit dubbed ExtraBacon poses a bigger threat than previously thought., Initially, the ExtraBacon exploit was restricted to versions 8.4.(4) and earlier of the CISCO ASA boxes and has now been expanded to 9.2.(4)., , An attacker who has already gained a foothold in a targeted network could use the zero-day exploit to take full control of a firewall., In an e-mail sent to ArsTechnica, SilentSignal researcher Balint Varga-Perke wrote:, “We first started to work on the exploit mainly to see how easy it would be to add support for other (newer) versions. Turns out it is very easy, that implies two things:, Experts from the IT vendor Juniper also confirmed that one of the exploits in the Equation Group archive could be used to hack the Juniper NetScreen firewalls, they also confirmed that are conduction further investigation on the exploit., The tool codenamed FEEDTROUGH and ZESTYLEAK could be used by attackers to target Juniper Netscreen firewalls, the company is investigating their efficiency., “As part of our analysis of these (Equation Group) files, we identified an attack against NetScreen devices running ScreenOS,” explained the company incident response director Derrick Scholl., “We are examining the extent of the attack, but initial analysis indicates it targets the boot loader and does not exploit a vulnerability on ScreenOS devices.”, “We will continue to evaluate exactly what level of access is necessary in order to execute the attack, whether it is possible to detect the attack, and if other devices are susceptible.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISCO ASA, ExtraBacon exploit)

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The hackers started using the exploits for the above vulnerabilities to compromise drupal installs, mostly cryptocurrency mining., It has been estimated that potentially over one million Drupal websites are vulnerable to cyber attacks exploiting the two flaws if the security patches are not installed., A week after the release of the security update for the CVE-2018-7600 flaw, a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit was publicly disclosed., The experts at security firm Check Point along with Drupal experts at Dofinity analyzed the CMS to analyzed the Drupalgeddon2 vulnerability and published a technical report on the flaw., After the publication of the report. the expert Vitalii Rudnykh shared a working  Proof-Of-Concept for Drupalgeddon2 on GitHub for “educational or information purposes.”, Immediately after the disclosure of the PoC, security experts started observing bad actors attempting to exploit the flaw to install crypto miners and backdoors., Now, a growing number of malware campaigns is targeting Drupal installs, one of them was recently discovered by the security researcher Troy Mursch., “Yesterday, I was alerted to a cryptojacking campaign affecting the websites of the San Diego Zoo and the government of Chihuahua, Mexico.” wrote Mursch., “While these two sites have no relation to each other, they shared a common denominator — they both are using an outdated and vulnerable version of the Drupal content management system.”, #Coinhive found on the website of the San Diego Zoo (@sandiegozoo) in the latest high-profile case of #cryptojacking. pic.twitter.com/B3rd2Q5uVA, — Bad Packets Report (@bad_packets) May 4, 2018, , Similar story here — #Coinhive injected via the same #JavaScript library (jquery.once.js?v=1.2) pointing to , Also an outdated #Drupal installation. pic.twitter.com/fXv2sBsIVB, — Bad Packets Report (@bad_packets) May 5, 2018, , The researcher discovered that hundreds of websites were compromised with a Coinhive script via the same method. The malicious code was contained in the “/misc/jquery.once.js?v=1.2” JavaScript library and even if the payloads were different, all the infected websites pointed to the same domain using the same Coinhive site key., Mursch published a list of compromised website that includes the National Labor Relations Board and the Turkish Revenue Administration., , Security researchers from Imperva also found a malware campaign targeting Drupal websites tracked as “Kitty” campaign., “As expected, since then we’ve been picking up various attack variants piggybacking on the Drupalgeddon 2.0 exploit, including remote scanners and backdoor attempts.” reads the analysis published by Imperva., ” During the inspection of the attacks blocked by our systems, we came across the “Kitty” malware, an advanced Monero cryptocurrency miner, utilizing a “webminerpool”, an open source mining software for browsers”, The attackers used an in-browser cryptocurrency miner inside a file named “me0w.js,” the code was provided by legitimate Monero mining pool service webminerpool.com., Cybercriminals also installed a PHP-based backdoor on compromised., According to Imperva, the Monero address used in the Kitty campaign is the same used in other attacks on servers running vBulletin 4.2.x forums that occurred in April., “The Monero address used in “Kitty” was also spotted at the start of April 2018, in attacks targeting web servers that run the vBulletin 4.2.X CMS. The attacker uploaded the malware to the infected vBulletin web servers, turning them into distribution centers and making it much harder to track the attacker.” continues the analysis., “The first generation of the ‘Kitty malware’ we discovered was version 1.5, and the latest version is 1.6. This type of behavior can be an indication of an organized attacker, developing their malware like a software product, fixing bugs and releasing new features in cycles.”, No doubts, the attackers will continue to attempt the exploitation of both Drupal flaws in the next weeks, for this reason, it is essential to apply the necessary updates., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Drupalgeddon2, spyware), ,

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The last effort of the NIST Agency in the development of email security guidelines is dated 2007 when it published the  NIST SP 800-45, Version 2 – Guidelines on Electronic Mail Security., The new NIST guide is a document composed of 81 pages that aim to give recommendations and guidelines for enhancing trust in email., This guideline applies to Government IT environment, but it is also useful for private organizations of any size., The recommendations in NIST guide for secure email include suggestions on the practices to adopt for securing the environments around enterprise mail servers and mail clients. This guide also provides recommendations and guidance for email digital signatures and encryption (via S/MIME), recommendations for protecting against spam messages., Security email needs a multidisciplinary approach that involves secure solutions, effective configurations and trained personnel., “Email communications cannot be made trustworthy with a single package or application. It involves incremental additions to basic subsystems, with each technology adapted to a particular task.” states the NIST guide on secure email. , , Encryption is essential to secure email systems, the guide urge administrators to build out a cryptographic key management system (CKMS) and use keys to protect email sessions., “As with any cryptographic keying material, enterprises should use a Cryptographic Key Management System (CKMS) to manage the generation, distribution, and lifecycle of DKIM keys. Federal agencies are encouraged to consult NIST SP 800-130 SP800-130 and NIST SP 800-152 SP800-152 for guidance on how to design and implement a CKMS within an agency.”, Despite the numerous incidents occurred in the last years, the NIST still considers trustable the DNS due to the numerous security enhancements, including the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), which is a set of extensions to DNS that provide to DNS clients origin authentication of DNS data, authenticated denial of existence, and data integrity., The NIST guide highlights the importance of the S/MIME (Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) for secure email messages., “Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) is the recommended protocol for email end-to-end authentication and confidentiality. S/MIME is particularly useful for authenticating mass email mailings originating from mailboxes that are not monitored, since the protocol uses PKI to authenticate digitally signed messages, avoiding the necessity of distributing the sender’s public key certificate in advance. This usage of S/MIME is not common at the present time, but is recommended.” states the guide., The guide included a warning to the organizations that rely on cloud services for their email, in particular on services offered by a third party., Organizations need to make sure any email sent by third parties will pass SPF checks, the verification is simple because the enterprise administrator should include the IP addresses of third-party senders in the enterprise SPF policy statement RR., The NIST guide is out for public comment until May 1st, I suggest you to read it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NIST, secure email)

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According to a new Joint Intelligence Bulletin of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security on the attack on Sony Pictures, the hackers that compromised the systems of the giant. The FBI an official FBI bulletin was obtained by The Intercept states that the GoP hacking team that breached Sony Pictures represents a serious threat for US news media companies., “The hackers who infiltrated Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer servers have threatened to attack an American news media organization,according to an FBI bulletin obtained by The Intercept. The threat against the unnamed news organization by the Guardians of Peace, the hacker group that has claimed credit for the Sony attack, “may extend to other such organizations in the near future,” according to a Joint Intelligence Bulletin of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security obtained by The Intercept.” reads The Intercept., It’s not clear which is the next target for the GoP, but security experts bet on the CNN. The bulletin points to a December 20 Pastebin post titled “Christmas gift to FBI” reporting the following text:, “The result of investigation by FBI is so excellent that you might have seen what we were doing with your own eyes.We congratulate you success. FBI is the BEST in the world.”, , , Recently some news websites reported that Sony hackers threatened CNN in online message., “In one message, the group mockingly praised CNN for its “investigation” into the attack on Sony’s computer network and offered a “gift” in the form of a YouTube video titled “You are an idiot.” The message closed with a demand that CNN “give us the Wolf,” a likely reference to CNN news anchor Wolf Blitzer.” reports The Desk., A few days later a freelance writer, David Garrett, Jr, has come forward as the author of the message to the CNN that was referenced in the FBI’s intelligence memo., “David Garrett, Jr. published several images on his Twitter profile Wednesday afternoon that he asserted proved himself to be the author of the taunting message to CNN.”, Despite the threats to the CNN are fake, the US authorities are alerting US companies on possible cyber attacks, and media agencies are among the most privileged targets., Every company is a potential target, it is important to consider the FBI bulletin as a wake up call to assume a proper security posture and avoid other clamorous attacks., Stay Tuned, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  GoP, FBI Bulletin)

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Yuryevich Levashov (38), the botmaster of the dreaded Kelihos Botnet pleaded guilty this week to computer crime, fraud, conspiracy and identity theft charges., In April 2017, the United States Department of Justice announced that Peter Yuryevich Levashov (36) (also known as Petr Levashov, Peter Severa, Petr Severa and Sergey Astakhov) was arrested in Barcelona for his involvement with the infamous Kelihos botnet. Levashov was extradited to the United States in February., “Peter Yuryevich Levashov, aka “Petr Levashov,” “Peter Severa,” “Petr Severa” and “Sergey Astakhov,” 38, of St. Petersburg, Russia, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Hartford, Connecticut, to offenses stemming from his operation of the Kelihos botnet, which he used to facilitate malicious activities including harvesting login credentials, distributing bulk spam e-mails, and installing ransomware and other malicious software.” states the press release published by the DoJ., Levashov on Wednesday pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Hartford, Connecticut, to one count of causing intentional damage to a protected computer, one count of conspiracy, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of wire fraud., , According to a study conducted by CheckPoint Security, a malware landscape was characterized by some interesting changed in this first part of 2017., The Kelihos botnet climbed to the top position, while the Conficker worm dropped to fourth on the chart of malware., Levashov has operated several botnets between since the late 1990s, for example, two other botnets tracked as Storm and Waledac borrow the code with Kelihos, both have been attributed to Levashov., “For over two decades, Peter Levashov operated botnets which enabled him to harvest personal information from infected computers, disseminate spam, and distribute malware used to facilitate multiple scams,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski., “Mr. Levashov used the Kelihos botnet to distribute thousands of spam e-mails, harvest login credentials, and install malicious software on computers around the world,” said U.S. Attorney Durham.  “He also participated in online forums on which stolen identities, credit card information and cybercrime tools were traded and sold.  For years, Mr. Levashov lived quite comfortably while his criminal behavior disrupted the lives of thousands of computer users. “, The DoJ speculated Levashov sent spam urging recipients to buy shares as part of a “pump and dump” scam, among other naughtiness., The Russian hacker was accused to have used the Kelihos botnet for spam campaign that advertised various criminal schemes, including pump-and-dump stock fraud., The activity conducted by the Kelihos, Storm and Waledac botnets was very profitable, prosecutors believe they allowed crooks to earn hundreds of millions of dollars, “For years, Mr. Levashov lived quite comfortably while his criminal behavior disrupted the lives of thousands of computer users,” said U.S. Attorney John H. Durham of the District of Connecticut. “Thanks to the collaborative work of the FBI and our partners in law enforcement, private industry and academia, a prolific cybercriminal has been neutralized, and has now admitted his guilt in a U.S. courtroom.”, The sentence has been scheduled for September 6, 2019, likely because the man is now helping law enforcement agencies on investigations on other cybercrime operations., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Kelihos, malware)

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 , Day by day we read about the discovery of new cyber threats that menace the integrity of user’s machines, a multitude of agents developed by cybercriminals or by state-sponsored researchers that operate stealing sensible information and in many cases destroying  targets., Every machine that is connected to internet is exposed to serious risk to be compromised, in many cases, also having all the common defense systems in place due the exploit of zero days vulnerabilities., There are several consequences to this malware diffusion, first of all the economic loss of the entity hit by cyber attacks, it must be considered a cross effect in many sectors of social texture from Small business to Large Industry., Small business for example is one of the most damaged sector, the budget reserved by the companies for cyber security is usually limited and the global economic crisis has  worsened the situation exposing the businesses to continuous attacks most of them also undetected. But small business is directed linked to other sectors, in many cases small companies works directly as supplier for large industry and in the security chain they represent the weakest link that hackers hit to penetrate large organization. Similar scenario is very common in the last wave of APT (Advanced persistent threat) attacks that has hit for example defense companies all over the world., If small business suffers the attacks the Governments and Large Industry are no better, the diffusion of malware is increased in impressive way in frequency of attacks and complexity of the malicious agents spread, the main purpose of malware is the cyber espionage, in fact sensible information and intellectual properties are privileged targets of cybercrime and foreign governments., Thinks that cyber espionage malware are mainly developed by cybercriminal or governments is wrong, the cyberspace is also crowded by malicious agent sold by legitimate company for cyber espionage purpose. As denounced by Assange on its SpyFile web site, many legitimate companies are selling espionage products, acquired by private companies and intelligence agencies, to spy on competitors and opponents., To provide some sample let’s remind the discovery made by Doctor Web firm, a Russian anti-virus company, that in August has detected a cross-platform Trojan horse that is able to gain full control of its victims and it is also able to can render the system unusable. The agent, named dubbed BackDoor.DaVinci.1, runs both in Windows and Mac OS X and what is singular is the characteristics of the Mac OS X release that for the first time implements rootkit technologies to hide malware processes and files. According the info available on internet, the trojan has been designed by the Italian HackingTeam a security firm  which is specialized in the development of offensive solutions for cyber investigations., The Davinci malware is not a unique case, many companies are working on similar projects, FinFisher for example is another powerful cyber espionage agent developed by Gamma Group that is able to secretly spy on target’s computers intercepting communications, recording every keystroke and taking the complete control of the host. Unfortunately, although similar instruments designed for justifiable purposes, such as support for investigations and prevention of crime and terrorism, are too easily sold to governments that use them bloodthirsty for tracking and persecution of dissidents.  Another factor that is contributing is sensible mode to the rapid diffusion of malware and of dangerous botnets is the simplicity to acquire bot agents on the web, it has been also consolidated a “malware as service” model in which cyber criminals support the development of malicious networks for ordinary crime … a scaring alliance., It’s quite simple to find on internet, and also in the Deep Web, on forums and web site published in the underground to exchange exploit packages continuously updated thanks to collaboration of hackers and criminals, a new markets is growing with an amazing trend involving also young person the desire to measure their capabilities in this fashioning field and that desire to make easy earns., The rapid evolution of cyber threats has motivated several security firms to make public data related the malware diffusion, providing useful information to private companies, CERTs of several countries and of course to the end users., In September Symantec has published its report on cybercrime ”The yearly Norton Cybercrime report“, an interesting study on the evolution of  cyber criminal activities and their impact on the society. The report covers different technologies including and social networking and mobile reporting the impact on final customers in economic terms., The impact of cybercrime is worrying with 556 million of victims per year, 2 on 3 adults have been victims of on line illegals in their lifetime, the total economic loss is 110 Billion with an average cost per victim of $197., , Figure 1 – Global Price Tag of consumer cybercrime, The Asian region is the most affected by cybercrime, the global pricetag of consumer cybercrime for China amounts to 46 Billion , followed by US with 21 Billion and European Area with 16 Billion., The highest numbers of cybercrime victims were found in Russia (92 percent), China (84 percent) and South Africa (80 percent). The technologies that have suffered the major increase in cybercrime are social networking and mobile, mobile users are very vulnerable to attacks, 1/2 adults use a mobile device to access the internet and the mobile vulnerabilities doubled in 2011 respect previous year., 44% of users aren’t aware of the existence of solutions for mobile environments, and 35 of adults have lost their mobile device or had it stolen. Of particular concern is an improper use of social networks, wrong management of sessions, absence of validation of visited links and a total ignorance of any security setting expose users to fraudulent activities., 15 percent of users have had their account infiltrated, and 1 in 10 have been victims of fake links or scams., The report confirms that cybercrime industry is an factory that has no crisis and that moves amounts of money comparable to the economical revenue of a State., One of the most dangerous threat for internet users and also for institutions that expose their services on the web are the botnet, millions of infected computers synchronized to conduct an attack against a specific target., In the classic architecture each machine, named bot, executes orders sent by a master unit called bootmaster, which can instruct the various components of the malicious network to perform an attack rather than exchange communication messages. The model of botnet could be used for various scopes, in military as cyber weapon, in industry for cyber espionage, in cybercrime to steal sensible information such as banking credentials., The infection phase that represents the recruiting of the machines due the diffusion of different types of malware developed with specific and profoundly different characteristics. The most common way to build a botnet is to send the victims infected mails, containing link to compromised web site or that have attacked the malware agent that once executed on the machine it transforms it in a bot., Usually the infected machines try to contact the C&C (Command & Control) servers to receive operative instructions, botnets represent one of the most dangerous cyber threats due their adaptive capabilities and the massive diffusion. Recent events have demonstrated that every platform could be attacked, one of the latest and most aggressive malware is Flashback Trojan, a malware created to conduct click fraud scam by hijacking people’s search engine results inside their web browsers, stealing banking or login credential. Of course once infected the system it could be used as part of a botnet causing bigger damages., McAfee Labs proposed an interesting analysis on the phenomenon in McAfee Threats Report – First Quarter 2012 that illustrates the cyber threat botnet is growing creating great concern between security experts due their diffusion, millions of compromised computers connected to the Internet are in fact daily used to realize scam and cyber attacks. Security firms tracking the volume of messages exchanged between bots and command servers are able to examine the level of infection of the malicious agents. Overall messaging botnet growth jumped up sharply from last quarter, mainly in Colombia, Japan, Poland, Spain, and the United States., , Figure 2 – Global Botnet Infections, Behind the principal botnets there is the cybercrime industry that is pushing on the diffusion of malware to infect an increasing number of machines, but also proposing new models of business, such as botnet rental or the commerce of the agents for botnet creation. The business is reaching important figures in a short time mainly due to the opportunities provided by the Deep Web., In the last months experts of the AlienVault firm discovered a new service that offers cyber-attack tools and hosting as part of malware-as-a-service.  Once again cybercrime operates as enterprise, the products proposed are tools for the organization of cyber attacks such as spam of malware, malware hosting, and a to build up a complete command and control infrastructure (C&C) for the arrangement of botnets., The service is called Capfire4 and it’s a good example of C2C (Cybercrime to Cybercrime), it provides technological support to criminals who haven’t necessary knowledge to conduct a cyber attack or to arrange a cyber scam., In the simplest way, users can access to a Web portal that offers the possibility to create customized version of malware, controlling the malicious architectures through a friendly management console to coordinate the bots., Few steps for criminal that need to create a botnet without having particular knowledge., But Botnet creation is not only a prerogative of cybercrime, it is also considered in cyber warfare scenario as a military option for offensive purposes or cyber espionage. Deploying a botnet it is possible to attack the nerve centers of a country, isolated attacks can target its critical infrastructures, create serious problems in areas like finance, communications and transport. That is cyber warfare, no matter if behind the attack there is a foreign government or ruthless criminals, the risk is high and face the threat has high priority., The US government is taking in serious consideration the cyber threat related to the botnet, recently administrative officials belonging to U.S. President Barack Obama’s team declared that the government had started IBG (Industry Botnet Group) a coordinated project that involves private enterprises and trade units., One of the key features of the program is the increasing of the level of awareness on the botnet world through the cooperation of government and private sector., Despite cyber space is known as a domain without borders, many studies have demonstrated that cyber criminal activities are mainly located in some area of the planet, as we can see also the victims of the attacks have a geographical features that make them attractive targets. Kaspersky Security firm has in a recent reports illustrated that factors such as the economic level of a country, its Internet population and the security level of the nation concur to define a geography of attacks. These countries present sufficient security mechanisms to defend users and also the computer system used are often equipped with last versions of operating systems  that  incorporate mechanisms to prevent cyber attacks. According the Internet World Stats  the level of Internet penetration in US and Europe is very high, internet users in these areas actively use online services  and cards associated with their banking accounts to pay for goods online:, Having to deal with advanced and updated defense systems the crime industry is increasing the level of sophistication of attacks developing new technologies, mainly with the principal intent to make money.  The Trojan spread are mainly used with the purpose of deliver or hide malicious agents or to steal sensible information with specific reference to banking sector.,  , Figure 3 – Trojan classification, The sector mainly attacked by cybercrime is the financial / banking in which the incidence of theft of information is high, some examples of malware known to chronicle are Zbot (ZeuS) and SpyEye, both are universal Trojans which targets the accounts of many banks and also e-pay services such as PayPal and E-bay, let’s remind that usually these accounts are linked to bank accounts and are considered privileged targets,  34% and 9% respectively of all phishing attacks target them., To have an idea of the of the business and of related profits in 2010 arrested stole $9 million from more than 600 accounts in three months using Zbot. The most effective vector of attacking European and American users is still internet in the first half of 2012, 80% of all infected computers were attacked in this way, Italy and Spain are the most hit countries., The criminals use to compromise user’s machine in one of the following mode:, Figure 4 – percentage of users exposed to Internet attacks (H1 2012),  The percentage of users exposed to Internet attacks (H1 2012):, From the research is emerged also another interesting result, despite in Western Europe, Canada and US there is a strong legal basis for combating malicious content hosted on web site, 69% of infected code was hosted on servers located in these regions in the first half of 2012 corresponding to over the half of the malicious programs on the Internet.  The figures are not surprising, the majority of data centers providing failsafe hosting are located in these areas and usually cybercriminals and hackers compromise such servers to obtain reliable hosting that host legal sites, making hard their identification from an user’s perspective. The report reveals that domain zones .net, .com, .info and .org. account for 44.5% of repelled attacks that were launched from malicious web sites on users located in North America and Western Europe. Users from the US, Canada and Western Europe are typically redirected to sites located in the domain zones of India (.in), Russia (.ru) and the Cocos Islands (co.сс)., Despite the level of alert of private companies, governments and security firms is high the incidence of cyber threat is still too high, this is possible due the increasing level of complexity of malware agents., Meantime worldwide security expert are searching for a common strategy to decapitate the botnets, the cybercrime industry is providing new efficient solution to avoid any type of detection and mitigation., We have different innovative factors in the menace moved by malware and botnet creators, such as new modular and destructive malicious agent and also new botnet based on the P2P (peer to peer) communication protocol that not relies on command and control (C&C) servers for receiving commands. The interesting feature is that P2P communication is used as a backup system in case the C&C servers are not reachable, creating an autonomous peer networks in which each node can operate as a slave or as master giving orders to other PC operating and exchanging information acquired illegally by the victims., The major concern of security experts is related to the capabilities of many of these agents to exploit zero days vulnerabilities that make practically impossible the detection of the agents. But it’s dangerous justify the success of the attacks only to the exploit to unknown vulnerabilities, in many cases well known vulnerabilities are exploited due the absence of an appropriate update of the systems., The Zeus case is not isolated, recently Kaspersky Lab, in collaboration with CrowdStrike Intelligence Team, Dell SecureWorks and members of the Honeynet Project, dismantled the second Hlux botnet (aka Kelihos)., This botnet had scary size, it has been estimated it was three times larger than the first botnet Hlux / Kelihos dismantled in September 2011. After only 5 days from the transaction, Kaspersky Lab had already neutralized more than 109,000 infected hosts. It is estimated that the first botnet Hlux / Kelihos had only 40,000 infected systems., The event has demonstrated that it is becoming hard to tackle new generation of botnets, due the usage of the peer-to-peer technology also implemented in Kelihos. The new variant of malware incorporates P2P technology to eliminate the need for a C&C server, avoiding detection and the immunization campaigns to decapitate the malicious networks., Another interesting improvement proposed by the cybercrime industry is the use of Tor networks is the botnet architecture as discovered in September 2012 by the German security firm G Data Software that has detected a botnet with a particular feature, it is controlled from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server running as a hidden service of the Tor. Despite similar choice presents some technical problems related to the latency of the Tor networks and the implicit difficulty to control the botnet, the advantage is the difficulty of localize the command and control servers, due the encryption of the connections interior to the network and the unpredictability of the routing of the information., The challenge between security firms and attackers is open and it is fundamental to keep high the effort in the detection and fight of cyber threats to avoid dramatic consequences., Are our defense systems adequate to reply to incoming cyber threats?, Unfortunately in many cases the cyber threats present a level of complexity that make possible to avoid common security measures. The security firm FireEye has released  a report  named “Advanced Threat Report” related first half of 2012 that provides an overview of the current threat landscape, evolving advanced malware and advanced persistent threat (APT) tactics, and the level of infiltration seen in organizations’ networks today., The report presents and alarming scenario, the organizations are assisting to an impressive increase in advanced malware that is bypassing their traditional security defenses.  In these days we are reading a lot of news on agents that are able to elude common defense mechanisms, problem that is afflicting across all sectors, from defense to energy., The organization are facing with a dramatic explosion of the diffusion of advanced malware in terms of volume and also in effectiveness in bypassing traditional signature-based security mechanisms., A statistic proposed by the security firms report that on average, organizations are experiencing a staggering 643 Web-based malicious events each week, incidents that have as results the impairment of final targeted systems.  This figure includes file-based threats, such as malicious executables or files that contain exploit s targeting vulnerabilities in applications, that are delivered over the web and email. The figures does not include callback activities, very common on the web., , Figure 5 – Web Infection Per Week per Company, The graph show the abnormal increase registered in the first half 2012 that is greater than the number of infection per week of the entire last year, the patterns of attacks vary substantially by industry, in particular the sector of healthcare and Energy/Utilities increased respectively up 100%, and up 60% ., The fight against the proliferation of botnets and more in general of any kind of malware goes through some key factors such as:, Despite the great effort and the increasing investments made by government and private company  many sectors still suffer the attacks of cybercrime, the situation in worrying because in many cases the cyber threats do undetected causing serious damages. As demonstrated by the provided data the number of compromised machines and infrastructures is increasing despite the adoption of security countermeasures., Another fundamental step in the fight of malicious agent is the definition of a global agreement and the of a global strategy against cybercrime and a regulatory on the use and diffusion of any kind of cyber tool by government agencies, both on legislative and operative perspectives …, In the meantime the cyberspace is still too crowded!, Pierluigi Paganini

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When talking about Tor network, normally everyone assumes that you have an end-to-end security, but someone believes it may be wrong as it was discovered by the security researcher Chloe., Tor network is free and it is the safest way to be anonymous since it hides your original IP from the destination server, to do that Tor uses relays to redirect traffic, but now the security researcher Chloe concludes that traffic is being sniffed in the exit nodes., Chloe did the following tests to demonstrate its thesis:, This means that there was no password repetition made by Chloe., , The next thing to be done by Chloe was searching inside the logs for instances where the unique passwords (used in each logging) were used more than one time, what would indicate that someone was sniffing an exit not and trying to access and logging into Chloe’s dummy site., What Chloe found out was at least surprising, 16 instances of multiple uses of unique passwords, meaning that someone was sniffing the traffic, to add to that, Chloe got 650 unique page visits., Chloe claims that in this test it was used 1400 nodes, and that each node was used around 95 times, and the conclusion is, ” We can see that there’s passive MITM man in the middle spying going on in the Tor network. This is done by setting up a fully functional and trustworthy exit node and start sniffing.”, To the SCMagazineUK.com Chloe said, “It just shows that there’s bad guys out there that will try to take advantage of Tor-users. This is a problem that affects VPN and proxies too, but the problem is that anyone can anonymously set up a node and start sniffing.”, In the past Chloe criticized how Tor is organized, complaining about 10 or so authority nodes, which have the power to blacklist exit notes, even more, Chloe had in past notified Tor project by email about bad exit nodes, “But nothing happened. Still today the same node is actively sniffing traffic and making the Tor network unsafe for everyone,”, Roger Dingledine, the co-founder of the Tor project told to the SCMagazineUK.com that he is in communication with Chloe and that ” He disputed the number of suspect exit nodes discovered, saying it was seven rather than 15 or 16, a figure which is based on the number of unique Tor fingerprints, but even so he wasn’t surprised or overly concerned about it.”, Roger Dingledine also defends ” Tor is the best option out there in terms of privacy and anonymity, but there are still many open research questions in the area, and there’s always room for improvement. We rely in large part on community members, just like in this situation, to identify, understand, and help resolve problems,”, “I love Tor and I run a few relays by myself actually… My recommendations are better URL for onions, like foobar.onion, better cryptography, more decentralised, more power to the users and more focus on keeping the network safe. , “What I mean about the last thing is that these attacks that are made by the exit nodes are not so prioritised, Tor tries to focus on the big attacks on AS-level and so on., “Also, there needs to be better communication with Tor because I had some problems contacting the right people and even when I did, I did not get the response I was hoping for.”, About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Tor Network, hacking)

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., First of all, let me inform you that at the #infosec16 SecurityAffairs was awarded as The Best European Personal Security Blog Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, next Sunday you will receive all the news directly in your inbox.I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content. I’ll offer the opportunity to: •    Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs. •    Publish sponsored posts written by the customers that can include any kind of commercial reference. •    Arrange a monthly/quarterly/annual campaign (for big customers) to advertise customers’ activities and discoveries. For more info contact me at [email protected] Thanks for supporting Security Affairs., mc4wp_form id=”42321″, , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)

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Another flaw plagues the new Apple iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, this time the mobile devices are affected by a Lockscreen Bypass vulnerability that could be exploited by local attackers to access photos, sms, mms, emails, phone app, mailbox, phone settings or access to other default/installed mobile apps., The vulnerability was discovered by the security firm Vulnerability Lab which reported the issue to Apple in mid-March, but it decided to disclose it last week after the release of the iOS 9.3.1 that hasn’t fixed the problem., ,  , We have read about similar flaws in the past, also in this case the attackers can access data stored on a locked iPhone 6s by using Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) assistant. The attacker can use Siri to conduct an online search for email addresses via Twitter or other mobile app installed on the iPhone 6s, in this way he can bring up a context menu by pressing deeper on one of the email addresses returned by the query., At this point, the iOS shows a menu that could be used by the attacker to create or update contacts by accessing the entire list of contacts stored on the iPhone 6s. At this point, the attacker can add a photo to that contact by accessing it, a trick that gives it the access to the photos stored in the device., “A passcode bypass vulnerability has been discovered in the official Apple iOS v9.3.1 for iPhone 6S & iPhone Plus models. The vulnerability allows local attackers to bypass the physical device protection mechanism of the iphone 6s and plus models.” state the advisory published by the Vulnerability Lab. “The security risk of the passcode bypass vulnerability is estimated as high with a cvss (common vulnerability scoring system) count of 6.1.”, What happens if the attacker search for an email address that already exists in the contact list?, No problem, the attacker can access options that allow him to send SMS messages and emails anyway., Below a video PoC of the hack:, , The above bypass technique only works on iPhone 6s and 6s Plus phones because it relies on the recently introduced 3D Touch feature which allows users to access various functions of the iPhone with a pressure on the display., Waiting for a fix let me suggest you to disable Siri or restrict it the access to user data., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iPhone 6s, hacking)

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Israeli authorities have arrested two alleged operators of a DDoS service, named vDOS, as the result of an investigation conducted by the FBI., The popular security investigator Brian Krebs reported that the duo behind the vDOS booter service had earned more than $600,000 in the past two years. It has been estimated that the service was used to launch 150,000 DDoS attacks, its customers can rent it for a price that ranges between $20 and $200 per month. According to the experts, the vDOS booter has been active around since 2012., “vDOS — a “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — has been massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets.” wrote Krebs in its analysis., The security expert investigated the vDOS booter after he obtained its database in July 2016. The database was leaked after the booter service was hacked. Data included in the archive points to two young men in Israel as the masterminds of the service. He discovered that other young hackers, mostly from the US attack service, were involved as support services., Krebs analyzed configuration files and real IP addresses that suggested the involvement of two Israeli nationals, Itay Huri and Yarden Bidani, who used the aliases P1st and AppleJ4ck. The Krebs’ website was hit by a DDoS attack that peaked at nearly 140 Gbps, just after the popular expert disclosed his findings on the suspects., While Krebs was disclosing the findings of his analysis, Israeli media reported the arrest of the young men under indication of the FBI., The Israeli law enforcement arrested the two alleged owners of vDoS and placed them under house arrest for 10 days banning them using the Internet and any telecom equipment for 30 days., The duo recently published a technical paper on DDoS attacks on the website of Israeli company Digital Whisper, the Twitter account he was using reports vDoS as his personal website., , The vDOS website (vdos-s.com) is now offline. ù, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – vDOS , cybercrime)

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Experts at FireEye have discovered an ongoing phishing campaign using a Dropbox account linked to “admin@338” as the delivery platform., The account ” admin@338 ” was also used in the past to deliver malware, but at the time the main target were financial, economic, and trade policy organizations. In March 2014, FireEye discovered that the group of Chinese-based hackers called “admin@338” had sent multiple MH370-themed spear phishing emails, the attackers targeted government officials in Asia-Pacific, it is likely for cyber espionage purpose., The hacking campaign is targeting Hong Kong media organizations, which publish democratic articles. The crooks are using a simple email attach with documents as threat vector, that when victims open the attachments a malicious payload is delivered. The malware is LowBall and uses dropbox as Command and Control infrastructure., , The malicious code exploits an old Microsoft Office vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-0158), known as LowBall., Lowball “uses the legitimate Dropbox cloud-storage service to act as the CnC server. It uses the Dropbox API with a hardcoded bearer access token and has the ability to download, upload, and execute files. The communication occurs via HTTPS over port 443.After execution, the malware will use the Dropbox API to make an HTTP GET request using HTTPS over TCP port 443”, If the victim calls the dropbox account, a BAT file will be downloaded, and will run the BAT to collect information about the victim’s computer. If the attacker thinks that the PC has relevant information, a second payload known as Bubblewrap will be delivered., By the details provided by FireEye, the phishing campaign started in August targeting all types of media in Hong Kong, radio, television, and print media, and it’s using 2 different type of emails as explained in the report:, “The first email references the creation of a Christian civil society organization to coincide with the anniversary of the 2014 protests in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement.”, “The second email references a Hong Kong University alumni organization that fears votes in a referendum to appoint a Vice-Chancellor will be co-opted by pro-Beijing interests.”, Experts speculate the cybercriminals started targeting Hong Kong media sector in response the economic problems between Hong Kong and China., “The threat group’s latest activity coincided with the announcement of criminal charges against democracy activists. During the past 12 months, Chinese authorities have faced several challenges, including large-scale protests in Hong Kong in late 2014, the precipitous decline in the stock market in mid-2015, and the massive industrial explosion in Tianjin in August 2015. In Hong Kong, the pro-democracy movement persists, and the government recently denied a professor a post because of his links to a pro-democracy leader.”, FireEye uncovered the campaign in joint effort with Dropbox, but the experts of the firm end up finding out a second campaign., “Our cooperation uncovered what appears to be a second, ongoing operation, though we lack sufficient evidence to verify if admin@338 is behind it. The attack lifecycle followed the same pattern, though some of the filenames were different, which indicates that there may be multiple versions of the malware.” states FireEye, “In addition, while the operation targeting Hong Kong-based media involved a smaller number of targets and a limited duration, we suspect this second operation involves up to 50 targets. At this time, we are unable to identify the victims.”, In the end, this is another campaign in the middle of many, which use similar strategies but it is relevant as example to make people aware of these type of campaigns., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Phishing campaign, Dropbox)

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Two years ago Syria suffered a huge Internet blackout, the entire country was disconnected from the Internet for three days. Security experts attributed the responsibility for the Internet blackout to the Syrian government that is facing with an ongoing civil war., ,  , The Syrian Government denied to have disconnected the country from the Internet blaming terrorists for an attack the internal backbone., The last revelation of Edward Snowden is presenting a new disconcerting reality, the Internet Blackout in Syria was caused by the National Security Agency. In an interview with Wired magazine Snowden confirmed that the Internet blackout was caused accidentally by the hackers of the NSA belonging to the elite unit known as the Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The TAO team was attempting to infiltrate the country’s connection to the Internet to spy on the internal traffic., The TAO unit had allegedly been attempting to hack the router of Syria’s main Internet service provider injecting a malware that would have allowed the NSA to redirect traffic through systems eavesdropped with the NSA Turmoil monitoring system and the Xkeyscore packet processing system., Resuming the NSA was attempting to compromise country Internet to spy on Syrian individuals of interest, in reality they succeeded in the attack, but as a side effect the country resulted disconnected from the Internet., Snowden described the incident as an “oh shit” moment at the Tailored Access Operations center, because the US Intelligence feared that its operation would be uncovered by the Syrian Government. The TAO unit was trying to cover its operation restoring the internet connection and repairing the router., “Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage,” Bamford wrote., Snowden also added another disconcerting particular, the NSA was also thinking of a misinformation campaign to blame other countries for the incident. Snowden told to the journalist that someone reported:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Intelligence, Syria Internet blackout)  

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The day is come, yesterday morning as planned Global Payments Inc., the Atlanta-based credit and debit card processor that recently announced a breach that exposed fewer than 1.5 million card accounts, held a conference call to discuss about the breach and its impacts. Again Krebson Security Blog is the more accredited source in my opinion, they have announced the breach for first., During the conf call Paul Garcia, Chairman and CEO of Global Payments, has focused its discussion on the response of its company in front of the incident, Garcia has remarked that the company itself has reported the breach., Garcia hasn’t dated the incident to January, like several rumors sustain, declaring that Global Payments has discovered it in early March promptly informing the authorities of the sector. He said:, “There’s a lot of rumor and innuendo out there which is not helpful to anyone, and most of it incredibly inaccurate. In terms of other timelines, I just cannot be specific further about that.”, The information is in contrast with the one proposed by the KrebsOn Security that announced that Visa and MasterCard were warning of a payment processor that had an exposure between Jan 21, 2012 and Feb. 25, 2012., Garcia also added:, “This does not involve our merchants, our sales partners, or their relationships with their customers. Neither merchant systems, or point of sale devices, were involved in any way. This was self-discovered and self-reported.”, First we must observe the scaling of the figures for the number of cards compromised, initially was hypothesized that the exposed card were about 10 million, the number dropped to 1.5 million today., Unfortunately Garcia hasn’t provided more information regarding the incident, for this reason many experts have started to search for useful information on internet that could be related to the breach and to its timing collocation., I desire to report two useful observation made published on KrebsOnSecurity, -For the past two years, GlobalPaymentsInc.com has been hosted at MaximumASP, a hosting provider in Louisville, KY. On Feb. 20, 2012, the company moved its Web site to Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting service. MaximumASP declined to answer questions about possible reasons for the switch, citing customer confidentiality policies., -The New York Times in a story published Saturday cited unnamed sources saying that this was the second time in a year that Global Payments had experienced a breach. I have heard likewise from an anonymous hacker who claims the company was breached just after the new year in 2011. The hacker said the company’s network was under full criminal control from that time until March 26, 2012. “The data and quantities that was gathered was much more than they writed sic. They finished End2End encryption, but E2E not a full solution; it only defend sic from outside threats.” He went on to claim that hackers had been capturing data from the company’s network for the past 13 months — collecting the data monthly — gathering data on a total of 24 million unique transactions before they were shut out., , When asked if he had evidence that would back up his claims, the hacker produced a Microsoft Word document with Global Payments’s logo entitled “Disaster Recovery Plan TDS US: Loss of the Atlanta Data Center.” The document appears to have been created on May 6, 2010 by Raj Thiruvengadam, who according to LinkedIn.com was an Atlanta-based Oracle database administrator for Global Payments from May 2006 through August 2011., I asked Global Payments if they could verify the authenticity of the document, but have not yet heard back from them. I will not publish it, as it contains apparently sensitive information about the organization’s internal databases. A screen shot of the title page is below., The above information give the impression that something has happened a couple of years ago, an event that has prompted both the migration of systems and above all that has necessitated the implementation of a recovery procedure. The info, though consistent, require further study but it is worth pointing out that other companies in the past victims of such incidents have discovered their systems vulnerable long after the real date of the breach., Crucial is able to date the real involvement of the company and its management to determine if communication has been omitted in the past, an event that would have provided in case of failure in handling breach an advantage to the attackers., These are all hypotheses that have as their intent, to emphasize the importance of two factors:, The two aspects are strongly correlated, the demonstration is that sometimes while managing the incident in an technically impeccable way, the omission of information with third parties can cause extensive damage and trigger dangerous mechanisms that can lead to disastrous consequences., In the meantime Visa temporary removed Global Payments from its list of “compliant service providers”, leaving open doors to the company once the processor can be aligned again with “Visa’s standards.”, Looking the promblem from the perspective of the customers I can only suggest them to wait the contact from their banks but in the meantime to monitor transactions on their accounts. The risks of counterfeit of credit cards is high., In the meantime Visa temporary removed Global Payments from its list of “compliant service providers”, leaving open doors to the company once the processor can be aligned again with “Visa’s standards.”, Looking the problem from the perspective of the customers I can only suggest them to wait the contact from their banks but in the meantime to monitor transactions on their accounts. The risks of counterfeit of credit cards is high.  Let’s remind that Global Payments in the statement admitted:, “the investigation to date has revealed that Track 2 card data may have been stolen, but that cardholder names, addresses and social security numbers were not obtained by the criminals.”, But Visa referred ABC News to Global Payments’ announcement that Track 2 data was stolen.  While track 2 is used by the bank for the operation, “Track 1” data generally refers to the information reported on the front of a bank card, so if these information are stolen with that contained in the “Track 2” is possible to clone a card., Finally I leave you with a thought, the fact that the company did not immediately discovered the amount of cards exposed leaves me thinking that it did not identify with certainty the exposed portion of the system and the agent that made possible the exploitation of the vulnerability ., I think there are more doubts on event than answers, so I hope in the next days we will be able to faithfully reconstruct the events., Pierluigi Paganini, References,

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Wikileaks released a new batch of documents belonging to the Vault7 archive related to the CIA project codenamed ‘Pandemic.’, RELEASE: CIA 'Pandemic' Windows infection malware documentation #Vault7 pic.twitter.com/HhmmvUBupi, — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 1, 2017, , The Pandemic CIA project refers a Windows persistent implant that share files (programs) with remote users in a local network. Pandemic is used by the cyber spies to infect remote users by replacing application code on-the-fly with a trojaned version if the application that is retrieved from the infected machine., “Today, June 1st 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the “Pandemic” project of the CIA, a persistent implant for Microsoft Windows machines that share files (programs) with remote users in a local network.” reads the description published by Wikileaks.”‘Pandemic’ targets remote users by replacing application code on-the-fly with a trojaned version if the program is retrieved from the infected machine.”, The implant transforms file servers into machines that infect PCs which access them remotely., A computer on a local network with shared drives that is infected with the Pandemic implant is the medical equivalent of a Patient Zero in Medical science that spreads a disease. It will compromise remote computers if the user executes applications stored on the pandemic file server., , The Pandemic tool doesn’t change the file on the infected system when victims request a file from it, they will receive a trojanized replacement of the legitimate application., The Pandemic implant can replace up to 20 programs, with a maximum size of 800MB., “Pandemic is a tool which is run as kernel shellcode to install a file system filter driver. The filter will ‘replace’ a target file with the given payload file when a remote user accesses the file via SMB (read-only, not write).” reads the Pandemic Implant tool summary. “Pandemic will not ‘replace’ the target file when the target file is opened on the machine Pandemic is running on. The goal of Pandemic is to be installed on a machine where remote users use SMB to download/execute PE files. (S//NF) Pandemic does NOT//NOT make any physical changes to the targeted file on disk. The targeted file on the system Pandemic is installed on remains unchanged. Users that are targeted by Pandemic, and use SMB to download the targeted file, will receive the ‘replacement’ file.”, The Pandemic Data leak contains five files, the installation of the implant is very rapid. it just takes between 10 to 15 seconds., The documentation does not provide information about the infection process, it is not specified if infected machines become new pandemic servers., Let’s wait for the next Vault, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Pandemic Implant, CIA)

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A serious flaw in the popular work chat application Slack could be exploited to take over a user account., , The vulnerability was discovered by bug bounty hunter Frans Rosen who demonstrated that is possible to steal Slack access tokens to impersonate a user. The flaw resides in the way the Slack application communicates data in an internet browser., “I was able to create a malicious page that would reconnect your Slack WebSocket to my own WebSocket to steal your private Slack token. Slack fixed the bug in 5 hours (on a Friday) and paid me $3,000 for it.” reads a blog post published by Rosen. , Slack leverages on the technology called postMessage that safely enables cross-origin communication., Normally, scripts running on different web pages can access each other only if the pages are accessible through the same protocol (i.e. Both https), port number (443 is the default for https), and host (module Document.domain being set by both pages to the same value)., “Not validating them was a clear indication to me that I could start do fun stuff, like accessing the functions using postMessage to this window from another window I controlled.” added Rosen., Once discovered the flawed implementation, the researcher demonstrated how to exploit the bug to steal a user’s access token., Basically, he exploited the fact that if a user has a browser window, and open a new window by clicking on a link, those two windows can communicate each other through postMessage., At this point, Rosen created a malicious page that is able to hijack the Slack application., Below a video PoC of the hack in which the malicious webpage opens a Slack window that then forces a victim’s account to handover the access token:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Slack, hacking)

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Experts at security firm Group-IB have exposed the attacks committed by Silence cybercriminal group. While the gang had previously targeted Russian banks, Group-IB experts also have discovered evidence of the group’s activity in more than 25 countries worldwide., Group-IB has published its first detailed report “Silence: Moving into the darkside” on tactics and tools employed by the cybercriminals. Group-IB security analysts’ hypothesis is that at least one of the gang members appears to be a former or current employee of a cyber security company. The confirmed damage from Silence activity is estimated at 800 000 USD., After the activity of Cobalt group has declined, Silence became one of the major threats to Russian and international banks. Once only known to cybersecurity specialists, Silence is an example of a mobile, small, and young group that has been progressing rapidly. Confirmed thefts by Silence increased more than fivefold from just 100 000 USD in 2017 to 550 000 USD in less than a year. The current confirmed total thefts form Silence attacks stands at 800 000 USD., For more than two years, there was not a single sign of Silence that would enable to identify them as an independent cybercrime group. The timeline and nature of the attacks identified by Group-IB forensic specialists suggested strongly that the first attacks were very amateur in nature and the criminals were learning as they went along. Since autumn 2017, the group has become more active. Based on analysis and comparison with other incidents and financial APT timelines, it is clear that Silence analyses methods of other criminal groups and applies new tactics and tools on various banking systems – AWS CBR (Automated Work Station Client of the Russian Central Bank), ATMs, and card processing., Group-IB incident response and intelligence teams detected Silence’s activity in 2016 for the very first time. Silence members attempted to withdraw money via AWS CBR; however, due to some errors in payment orders, the theft was successfully prevented. In 2017, Silence began to conduct attacks on ATMs. The first incident confirmed by Group-IB revealed that gang members stole 100 000 USD from ATMs in just one night. In 2018, they targeted card processing using supply-chain attack, picking up 550 000 USD via ATMs of the bank’s counterpart over one weekend. In April 2018, two months after they successfully targeted card processing, the group decided to leverage its previous scheme and stole roughly 150 000 USD through ATMs. At this point, the attacks described above can be unequivocally attributed to Silence, but Group-IB security experts believe that there have been other successful attacks on banks., , Who are Silence?                                                     , Group-IB experts concluded that Silence is a group of Russian-speaking hackers, based on their commands language, the location of infrastructure they used, and the geography of their targets (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Poland, and Kazakhstan). Although phishing emails were also sent to bank employees in Central and Western Europe, Africa, and Asia). Furthermore, Silence used Russian words typed on an English keyboard layout for the commands of the employed backdoor. The hackers also used Russian-language web hosting services., There appear to be just two members in Silence—a developer and an operator. This explains why they are so selective in their attack targets, and why it takes them so long (up to 3 months, which is at least three times longer than Anunak, Buhtrap, MoneyTaker and Cobalt) to commit a theft. One gang member – a developer – has skills of a highly experienced reverse engineer. He develops tools to conduct attacks and modifies complex exploits and software. However, in development he makes a number of errors, that are quite common for virus analysts or reverse engineers; he knows exactly how to develop software, but he does not know how to program properly. The second member of the team is an operator. He has experience in penetration testing, which means he can easily find his way around banking infrastructure. He is the one who uses the developed tools to access banking systems and initiates the theft process., Silence’s tools and methods                                                                , Like most cybercrime groups, Silence uses phishing emails. Initially, the group used hacked servers and compromised accounts for its campaigns. Later on, the criminals began to register phishing domains, for which they created self-signed certificates. Silence designs very well-crafted phishing emails usually purporting to be from bank employees. To conduct their phishing campaigns, the hackers rent servers in Russia and the Netherlands. Silence also uses Ukraine-based hosting services to rent servers to use as C&C servers. A number of servers were rented at MaxiDed, whose infrastructure was blocked by Europol in May 2018., In their first operations, Silence used a borrowed backdoor – Kikothac, which makes it clear that the group began its activity without any preparation—these were attempts to test the waters. Later, the group’s developer created a unique set of tools for attacks on card processing and ATMs including Silence— a framework for infrastructure attacks , Atmosphere—a set of software tools for attacks on ATMs, Farse—a tool to obtain passwords from a compromised computer, and Cleaner—a tool for logs removal.,  “Silence, in many ways, is changing the perception of cybercrime in terms of the nature of the attacks, the tools, tactics, and even the members of the group. It is obvious that the criminals responsible for these crimes were at some point active in the security community. Either as penetration testers or reverse engineers,” says Dmitry Volkov, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Threat Intelligence at Group-IB., “They carefully study the attacks conducted by other cybercriminal groups, and analyse antivirus and Threat Intelligence reports. However, it does not save them from making mistakes; they learn as they go. Many of Silence’s tools are legitimate, others they developed themselves and learn from other gangs. After having studied Silence’s attacks, we concluded that they are most likely white hats evolving into black hats. The Internet, particularly the underground web, favours this kind of transformation; it is far easier now to become a cybercriminal than 5–7 years ago—you can rent servers, modify existing exploits, and use legal tools. It makes things more complicated for blue teams and much easier for hackers”., About, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Silence Group, APT)