Security Hacks

1425 Articles

Malduino Elite – First Impressions

May 31, 2017 by 39 Comments

A while back, I wrote an article about Malduino, an Arduino-based, open-source BadUSB device. I found the project interesting so I signed up for an Elite version and sure enough, the friendly postman dropped it off in my mail box last Friday, which means I got to play around with it over the weekend. For those who missed the article, Malduino is USB device which is able to emulate a keyboard and inject keystrokes, among other things. When in a proper casing, it will just look like a USB flash drive. It’s like those things you see in the movies where a guy plugs in a device and it auto hacks the computer. It ships in two versions, Lite and Elite, both based on the ATmega32U4.

The Lite version is really small, besides the USB connector it only contains a switch, which allows the user to choose between running and programming mode, and a LED, which indicates when the script has finished running.

Original Malduino Elite sketch and Lite prototype

The Elite version is bigger, comes with a Micro-SD card reader and four DIP switches, which allow the user to choose which script to run from the card. It also has the LED, which indicates when a script has finished to run. This allows the user to burn the firmware only once and then program the keystroke injection scripts that stored in the Micro-SD card, in contrast to the Lite version which needs to be flashed each time a user wants to run a different script.

These are the two Malduinos and because they are programmed straight from the Arduino IDE, every feature I just mentioned can be re-programmed, re-purposed or dropped all together. You can buy one and just choose to use it like a ‘normal’ Arduino, although there are not a lot of pins to play around with. This freedom was one the first things I liked about it and actually drove me to participate in the crowd-funding campaign. Read on for the full review.
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Counterfeit Hardware May Lead To Malware And Failure

May 31, 2017 by 89 Comments

Counterfeit parts are becoming increasingly hard to tell the difference from the real deal, the technology used by the counterfeiters has come on leaps and bounds, so even the experts struggle to tell the real product from a good fake. Mere fake branding isn’t the biggest problem with a counterfeit though, as ieee.com reports, counterfeit parts could contain malware or be downright dangerous.

Way back in 2014 the FBI charged [Marc Heera] with selling clones of the Hondata S300, a plugin engine module for Honda cars that reads sensors, and depending on their values can change idle speed, air-fuel mixture and a plethora of other car/engine related settings. What, might you ask, is the problem, except they are obviously not genuine parts? According to Honda they had a number of issues such as random limits on engine rpm and occasionally failure to start. While the fake Hondata S300 parts where just poor clones that looked the part, anything connected to an engine control unit brings up huge safety concerns and researchers have shown that through ECU access, they could hijack a car’s steering and brakes.

It’s not just car parts being cloned, remember the fake USB-to-serial chips of FTDI-Gate? Entire routers are also being cloned, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that the cloners could configure your internet traffic to be redirected through their network for snooping. In 2010 Saudi citizen [Ehab Ashoor] was convicted of buying cloned Cisco Systems gigabit interface converters with the intention of selling them to the U.S Dept of Defense. While nothing sinister was afoot in [Ashoor]’s case other than greed, these routers were to be deployed in Iraq for use by the Marine Corps networks. They were then to be used for security, transmitting troop movements and relaying intelligence from field operations back to HQ.

So who are the cloners and why are they doing it? It is speculated that some of them may be state funded, as there are a lot of countries who do not trust American silicon. Circuits are reverse engineered and find their way to the international market. Then just like the FTDI-Gate case, cloners want to make profits from others intellectual property. This also brings up another question, if there is a mistrust of American silicon, nearly everything is made in China these days so why should we trust anything from there? Even analog circuits can be made to spy on you, as you can see from the piece we recently featured on compromising a processor using an analog charge pump. If you want to defend yourself from such attacks, perhaps look at previous Hackaday Prize finalist, ChipWhisperer.

Hacked By Subtitles

May 25, 2017 by 15 Comments

CheckPoint researchers published in the company blog a warning about a vulnerability affecting several video players. They found that VLC, Kodi (XBMC), Popcorn-Time and strem.io are all vulnerable to attack via malicious subtitle files. By carefully crafting a subtitles file they claim to have managed to take complete control over any type of device using the affected players when they try to load a video and the respective subtitles.

According to the researchers, things look pretty grim:

We estimate there are approximately 200 million video players and streamers that currently run the vulnerable software, making this one of the most widespread, easily accessed and zero-resistance vulnerability reported in recent years. (…) Each of the media players found to be vulnerable to date has millions of users, and we believe other media players could be vulnerable to similar attacks as well.

One of the reasons you might want to make sure your software is up to date is that some media players download subtitles automatically from several shared online repositories. An attacker, as the researchers proved, could manipulate the website’s ranking algorithm and not only would entice more unsuspecting users to manually download his subtitles,  but would also guarantee that his crafted malicious subtitles would be those automatically downloaded by the media players.

No additional details were disclosed yet about how each video player is affected, although the researchers did share the details to each of the software developers so they can tackle the issue. They reported that some of the problems are already fixed in their current versions, while others are still being investigated. It might be a good idea to watch carefully and update your system before the details come out.

Meanwhile, we can look at the trailer:

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Linux SambaCry

May 25, 2017 by 25 Comments

Great news everyone, Windows is not the only operating system with remote code execution via SMB. Linux has also its own, seven-year-old version of the bug. /s

This Linux remote execution vulnerability (CVE-2017-7494) affects Samba, the Linux re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol, from versions 3.5.0 onwards (since 2010). The SambaCry moniker was almost unavoidable.

The bug, however, has nothing to do on how Eternalblue works, one of the exploits that the current version of WannaCry ransomware packs with. While Eternalblue is essentially a buffer overflow exploit, CVE-2017-7494 takes advantage of an arbitrary shared library load.  To exploit it, a malicious client needs to be able to upload a shared library file to a writeable share, afterwards it’s possible for the attacker to cause the server to load and execute it. A Metasploit exploit module is already public, able to target Linux ARM, X86 and X86_64 architectures.

A patch addressing this defect has been posted to the official website and Samba 4.6.4, 4.5.10 and 4.4.14 have been issued as security releases to correct the defect. Patches against older Samba versions are also available. If you can’t apply the patch at the moment, the workaround is to add the parameter “nt pipe support = no” to the [global] section of your smb.conf and restart smbd. Note that this can disable some expected functionality for Windows clients.

Meanwhile, NAS vendors start to realise they have work on their hands. Different brands and models that use Samba for file sharing (a lot, if not all, of them provide this functionality) will have to issue firmware updates if they want to patch this flaw. If the firmware updates for these appliances take the same time they usually do, we will have this bug around for quite some time.

Fooling Samsung Galaxy S8 Iris Recognition

May 24, 2017 by 34 Comments

We have a love-hate relationship with biometric ID. After all, it looks so cool when the hero in a sci-fi movie enters the restricted-access area after having his hand and iris scanned. But that’s about the best you can say about biometric security. It’s conceptually flawed in a bunch of ways, and nearly every implementation we’ve seen gets broken sooner or later.

Case in point: prolific anti-biometry hacker [starbug] and a group of friends at the Berlin CCC are able to authenticate to the “Samsung Pay” payment system through the iris scanner. The video, embedded below, shows you how: take a picture of the target’s eye, print it out, and hold it up to the phone. That was hard!

Sarcasm aside, the iris sensor uses IR to recognize patterns in your eye, so [starbug] and Co. had to use a camera with night vision mode.  A contact lens placed over the photo completes the illusion — we’re guessing it gets the reflections from room lighting right.  No etching fingerprint patterns into copper, no conductive gel — just a printout and a contact lens.

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Blackberry Eyes Up Car Anti-Virus Market

May 19, 2017 by 73 Comments

[Reuters] reports that BlackBerry is working with at least two car manufacturers to develop a remote malware scanner for vehicles, On finding something wrong the program would then tell drivers to pull over if they were in critical danger.

The service would be able to install over-the-air patches to idle cars and is in testing phase by Aston Martin and Range Rover. The service could be active as early as next year, making BlackBerry around $10 a month per vehicle.

Since the demise of BlackBerry in the mobile phone sector, they’ve been hard at work refocusing their attention on new emerging markets. Cars are already rolling computers, and now they’re becoming more and more networked with Bluetooth and Internet connections. This obviously leaves cars open to new types of attacks as demonstrated by [Charlie Miller] and [Chris Valasek]’s hack that uncovered vulnerabilities in Jeeps and led to a U.S. recall of 1.4 million cars.

BlackBerry seem to be hedging their bets on becoming the Kingpin of vehicle anti-virus. But do our cars really belong on the Internet in the first place?

Social Engineering Is On The Rise: Protect Yourself Now

May 18, 2017 by 31 Comments

As Internet security has evolved it has gotten easier to lock your systems down. Many products come out of the box pre-configured to include decent security practices, and most of the popular online services have wised up about encryption and password storage. That’s not to say that things are perfect, but as the computer systems get tougher to crack, the bad guys will focus more on the unpatchable system in the mix — the human element.

History Repeats Itself

Ever since the days of the ancient Greeks, and probably before that, social engineering has been one option to get around your enemy’s defences. We all know the old tale of Ulysses using a giant wooden horse to trick the Trojans into allowing a small army into the city of Troy. They left the horse outside the city walls after a failed five-year siege, and the Trojans brought it in. Once inside the city walls a small army climbed out in the dead of night and captured the city.

How different is it to leave a USB flash drive loaded with malware around a large company’s car park, waiting for human curiosity to take over and an employee to plug the device into a computer hooked up to the corporate network? Both the wooden horse and the USB drive trick have one thing in common, humans are not perfect and make decisions which can be irrational. Continue reading “Social Engineering Is On The Rise: Protect Yourself Now” →