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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: NSO, Print Spooler, And A Mysterious Decryptor

July 23, 2021 by 22 Comments

The NSO Group has been in the news again recently, with multiple stories reporting on their Pegasus spyware product. The research and reporting spearheaded by Amnesty International is collectively known as “The Pegasus project”. This project made waves on the 18th, when multiple news outlets reported on a list of 50,000 phone numbers that are reported as “potential surveillance targets.” There are plenty of interesting people to be found on this list, like 14 heads of state and many journalists.

There are plenty of questions, too. Like what exactly is this list, and where did it come from? Amnesty international has pointed out that it is not a list of people actively being targeted. They’ve reported that of the devices associated with an entry on the list that they have been able to check, roughly 50% have shown signs of Pegasus spyware. The Guardian was part of the initial coordinated release, and has some impressive non-details to add:

The presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack. However, the consortium believes the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.

Amazon’s AWS was named as part of the C&C structure of Pegasus, and in response, they have pulled the plug on accounts linked to NSO. For their part, NSO denies the validity of the list altogether. Continue reading “This Week In Security: NSO, Print Spooler, And A Mysterious Decryptor” →

This Week In Security: REvil Goes Dark, Kaseya Cleanup, Android Updates, And Terrible Firmware

July 16, 2021 by 16 Comments

The funniest thing happened to REvil this week. Their online presence seems to have disappeared.
Their Tor sites as well as conventional sites all went down about the same time Tuesday morning, leading to speculation that they may have been hit by a law enforcement operation. This comes on the heels of a renewed push by the US for other countries, notably Russia, to crack down on ransomware groups operating within their borders. If it is a coordinated takedown, it’s likely a response to the extremely widespread 4th of July campaign launched via the Kaseya platform. Seriously, if you’re going to do something that risks ticking off Americans, don’t do it on the day we’re celebrating national pride by blowing stuff up.

Speaking of Kaseya, they have finished their analysis, and published a guide for safely powering on their VSA on-premise hardware. Now that the fixes are available, more information about the attack itself is being released. Truesec researchers have been following this story in real time, and even provided information about the attack back to Kaseya, based on their observations. Their analysis shows that 4 separate vulnerabilities were involved in the attack. First up is an authentication bypass. It takes advantage of code that looks something like this: Continue reading “This Week In Security: REvil Goes Dark, Kaseya Cleanup, Android Updates, And Terrible Firmware” →