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14 Articles

This Week In Security: Zimbra, Lockbit 2, And Hacking NK

February 11, 2022 by 9 Comments

Unknown attackers have been exploiting a 0-day attack against the Zimbra e-mail suite. Researchers at Volexity first discovered the attack back in December of last year, detected by their monitoring infrastructure. It’s a cross-site scripting (XSS) exploit, such that when opening a malicious link, the JavaScript running on the malicious page can access a logged-in Zimbra instance. The attack campaign uses this exploit to grab emails and attachments and upload them to the attackers. Researchers haven’t been able to positively identify what group is behind the attacks, but a bit of circumstantial evidence points to a Chinese group. That evidence? Time zones. The attacker requests all use the Asia/Hong_Kong time zone, and the timing of all the phishing emails sent lines up nicely with a work-day in that time zone.

Zimbra has responded, confirming the vulnerability and publishing a hotfix for it. The campaign seems to have been targeted specifically against European governments, and various media outlets. If you’re running a Zimbra instance, make sure you’re running at least 8.8.15.1643980846.p30-1.

LockBit 2.0

Because security professionals needed something else to keep us occupied, the LockBit ransomware campaign is back for a round two. This is another ransomware campaign run in the as-a-Service pattern — RAAS. LockBit 2 has caught enough attention, that the FBI has published a FLASH message (PDF) about it. That’s the FBI Liaison Alert System, in the running for the worst acronym. (Help them figure out what the “H” stands for in the comments below!)

Like many other ransomware campaigns, LockBit has a list of language codes that trigger a bail on execution — the Eastern European languages you would expect. Ransomware operators have long tried not to poison their own wells by hitting targets in their own back yards. This one is being reported as also having a Linux module, but it appears that is limited to VMWare ESXi virtual machines. A series of IoCs have been published, and the FBI are requesting any logs, ransom notes, or other evidence possibly related to this campaign to be sent to them if possible. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Zimbra, Lockbit 2, And Hacking NK” →

This Week In Security: Pwn2own, Zoom Zero Day, Clubhouse Data, And An FBI Hacking Spree

April 16, 2021 by 11 Comments

Our first story this week comes courtesy of the Pwn2own contest. For anyone not familiar with it, this event is held twice a year, and features live demonstrations of exploits against up-to-date software. The one exception to this is when a researcher does a coordinated release with the vendor, and the update containing the fix drops just before the event. This time, the event was held virtually, and the attempts are all available on Youtube. There were 23 attacks attempted, and only two were outright failures. There were 5 partial successes and 16 full successes.

One of the interesting demonstrations was a zero-click RCE against Zoom. This was a trio of vulnerabilities chained into a single attack. The only caveat is that the attack must come from an accepted contact. Pwn2Own gives each exploit attempt twenty minutes total, and up to three attempts, each of which can last up to five minutes. Most complex exploits have an element of randomness, and exploits known to work sometimes don’t work every time. The Zoom demonstration didn’t work the first time, and the demonstration team took enough time to reset, they only had enough time for one more try.

BleedingTooth

We first covered BleedingTooth almost exactly six months ago. The details were sparse then, but enough time has gone by to get the full report. BleedingTooth is actually a trio of vulnerabilities, discovered by [Andy Nguyen]. The first is BadVibes, CVE-2020-24490. It’s a lack of a length check in the handling of incoming Bluetooth advertisement packets. This leads to a buffer overflow. The catch here is that the vulnerability is only possible over Bluetooth 5. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Pwn2own, Zoom Zero Day, Clubhouse Data, And An FBI Hacking Spree” →

FBI Reports On Linux Drovorub Malware

August 22, 2020 by 26 Comments

The FBI and the NSA released a report on the Russian-based malware that attacks Linux known as Drovorub (PDF) and it is an interesting read. Drovorub uses a kernel module rootkit and allows a remote attacker to control your computer, transfer files, and forward ports. And the kernel module takes extraordinary steps to avoid detection while doing it.

What is perhaps most interesting though, is that the agencies did the leg work to track the malware to its source: the GRU — Russian intelligence. The name Drovorub translates into “woodcutter” and is apparently the name the GRU uses for the program.

A look inside the code shows it is pretty mundane. There’s a server with a JSON configuration file and a MySQL backend. It looks like any other garden-variety piece of code. To bootstrap the client, a hardcoded configuration allows the program to make contact with the server and then creates a configuration file that the kernel module actively hides. Interestingly, part of the configuration is a UUID that contains the MAC address of the server computer.

The rootkit won’t persist if you have UEFI boot fully enabled (although many Linux computers turn UEFI signing off rather than work through the steps to install an OS with it enabled). The malware is easy to spot if you dump raw information from the network, but the kernel module makes it hard to find on the local machine. It hooks many kernel functions so it can hide processes from both the ps command and the /proc filesystem. Other hooks remove file names from directory listings and also hides sockets. The paper describes how to identify the malware and they are especially interested in detection at scale — that is, if you have 1,000 Linux PCs on a network, how do you find which ones have this infection?

This is a modern spy story, but not quite what we’ve come to expect in Bond movies. “Well, Moneypenny, it appears Spectre is using the POCO library to generate UUIDs,” is hard to work into a trailer. We prefer the old days when high-tech spying meant nonlinear junction detectors, hacking Selectrics, moon probe heists, and passive bugging.

iPhone pictured with a lock

Is Anything Really Private Anymore?

June 26, 2020 by 53 Comments

In the connected age, every day it appears privacy is becoming more and more of an idealistic fantasy as opposed to a basic human right. In our latest privacy debate per [TechCrunch], apparently the FBI is taking some shots at Apple.

You may recall the unfortunate events, leading the FBI to ask Apple to unlock an iPhone belonging to a person of interest. Apple did not capitulate to the FBI’s request on the basis of their fundamental commitment to privacy. The FBI wasn’t really thrilled with Apple’s stance given the circumstances leading to the request. Nevertheless, eventually, the FBI was able to unlock the phone without Apple’s help.

You may find it somewhat interesting that the author of the news piece appears to be more upset with the FBI for cracking the phone than at Apple (and by extension other tech companies) for making phones that are crackable to begin with.

Maybe we should take solace in knowing that Apple stood their ground for the sake of honoring their privacy commitment. But as we saw, it didn’t really matter in the end as the FBI was able to hire a third party to help them unlock the phones and were later able to repeat the process in-house. The article also noted that there are other private companies capable of doing exactly what the FBI did. We understand that no encryption is 100% safe. So it begs the question, “Is anything really private anymore?” Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Books You Should Read: The Cuckoo’s Egg

October 19, 2017 by 62 Comments

The mid-1980s were a time of drastic change. In the United States, the Reagan era was winding down, the Cold War was heating up, and the IBM PC was the newest of newnesses. The comparatively few wires stitching together the larger university research centers around the world pulsed with a new heartbeat — the Internet Protocol (IP) — and while the World Wide Web was still a decade or so away, The Internet was a real place for a growing number of computer-savvy explorers and adventurers, ready to set sail on the virtual sea to explore and exploit this new frontier.

In 1986, having recently lost his research grant, astronomer Clifford Stoll was made a computer system admin with the wave of a hand by the management of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s physics department. Commanded to go forth and administer, Stoll dove into what appeared to be a simple task for his first day on the job: investigating a 75-cent error in the computer account time charges. Little did he know that this six-bit overcharge would take over his life for the next six months and have this self-proclaimed Berkeley hippie rubbing shoulders with the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the German Bundeskriminalamt, all in pursuit of the source: a nest of black-hat hackers and a tangled web of international espionage.

Continue reading “Books You Should Read: The Cuckoo’s Egg” →

How To Find A Twitter Account

April 4, 2017 by 35 Comments

[Ashley Feinberg] is not one to say no to a challenge. When James Comey (the current Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the United States of America) let slip that he has a secret Twitter and Instagram account, [Ashley] knew what she had to do.

At the beginning, [Ashley] knew only a few things: (1) Comey had recently joined twitter and (2) he only allows his “immediate relatives and one daughter’s serious boyfriend” to follow him. As such, [Ashely] deduced that “if we can find the Instagram accounts belonging to James Comey’s family, we can also find James Comey.”

To start, [Ashley] found the Instagram account of Comey’s 22-year-old son, a basketball star at Kenyon College. Not phased by Brien’s locked down Instagram account, [Ashley] requested access to Brien’s account in order to access the “Suggested for You” selections that are algorithmically generated from Brien Comey’s account. Sifting through the provided accounts [Ashley] found one that fit Comey’s profile: locked down with few friends. That account was named reinholdniebuhr. Not sure it was, in fact, James Comey, [Ashley] found Comey’s senior thesis on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and televangelist Jerry Falwell as verification.

With Comey’s Instagram found, [Ashley] moved back to Twitter (something y’all can’t seem to get enough of). With only seven accounts on Twitter using some variation of “Reinhold Niebuhr” as a user name, [Ashley] was quickly able to narrow it down to one account (@projectexile7) via profiling, sealing the deal on an awesome hack filled quest. Can’t get enough of social media? Don’t worry, you never have to be disconnected.

Apple Aftermath: Senate Entertains A New Encryption Bill

April 11, 2016 by 62 Comments

If you recall, there was a recent standoff between Apple and the U. S. Government regarding unlocking an iPhone. Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have a “discussion draft” of a bill that appears to require companies to allow the government to court order decryption.

Here at Hackaday, we aren’t lawyers, so maybe we aren’t the best source of legislative commentary. However, on the face of it, this seems a bit overreaching. The first part of the proposed bill is simple enough: any “covered entity” that receives a court order for information must provide it in intelligible form or provide the technical assistance necessary to get the information in intelligible form. The problem, of course, is what if you can’t? A covered entity, by the way, is anyone from a manufacturer, to a software developer, a communications service, or a provider of remote computing or storage.

There are dozens of services (backup comes to mind) where only you have the decryption keys and there is nothing reasonable the provider can do to get your data if you lose your keys. That’s actually a selling point for their service. You might not be anxious to backup your hard drive if you knew the vendor could browse your data when they wanted to do so.

The proposed bill has some other issues, too. One section states that nothing in the document is meant to require or prohibit a specific design or operating system. However, another clause requires that covered entities provide products and services that are capable of complying with the rule.

A broad reading of this is troubling. If this were law, entire systems that don’t allow the provider or vendor to decrypt your data could be illegal in the U. S. Whole classes of cybersecurity techniques could become illegal, too. For example, many cryptography systems use the property of forward secrecy by generating unrecorded session keys. For example, consider an SSH session. If someone learns your SSH key, they can listen in or interfere with your SSH sessions. However, they can’t take recordings of your previous sessions and decode them. The mechanism is a little different between SSHv1 (which you shouldn’t be using) and SSHv2. If you are interested in the gory details for SSHv2, have a look at section 9.3.7 of RFC 4251.

In all fairness, this isn’t a bill yet. It is a draft and given some of the definitions in section 4, perhaps they plan to expand it so that it makes more sense, or – at least – is more practical. If not, then it seems to be an indication that we need legislators that understand our increasingly technical world and have some understanding of how the new economy works. After all, we’ve seen this before, right? Many countries are all too happy to enact and enforce tight banking privacy laws to encourage deposits from people who want to hide their money. What makes you think that if the U. S. weakens the ability of domestic companies to make data private, that the business of concealing data won’t just move offshore, too?

If you were living under a rock and missed the whole Apple and FBI controversy, [Elliot] can catch you up. Or, you can see what [Brian] thought about Apple’s response to the FBI’s demand.