qnap

3 Articles

This Week In Security: Samba, Wormhole Crypto Heist, And A Bogus CVE

February 4, 2022 by 6 Comments

Samba has a very serious vulnerability, CVE-2021-44142, that was just patched in new releases 4.13.17, 4.14.12, and 4.15.5. Discovered by researchers at TrendMicro, this unauthenticated RCE bug weighs in at a CVSS 9.9. The saving grace is that it requires the fruit VFS module to be enabled, which is used to support MacOS client and server interop. If enabled, the default settings are vulnerable. Attacks haven’t been seen in the wild yet, but go ahead and get updated, as PoC code will likely drop soon.

Crypto Down the Wormhole

One notable selling point to cryptocurrencies and Web3 are smart contracts, little computer programs running directly on the blockchain that can move funds around very quickly, without intervention. It’s quickly becoming apparent that the glaring disadvantage is these are computer programs that can move money around very quickly, without intervention. This week there was another example of smart contracts at work, when an attacker stole $326 million worth of Ethereum via the Wormhole bridge. A cryptocurrency bridge is a service that exists as linked smart contracts on two different blockchains. These contracts let you put a currency in on one side, and take it out on the other, effectively transferring currency to a different blockchain. Helping us make sense of what went wrong is [Kelvin Fichter], also known appropriately as [smartcontracts].

When the bridge makes a transfer, tokens are deposited in the smart contract on one blockchain, and a transfer message is produced. This message is like a digital checking account check, which you take to the other side of the bridge to cash. The other end of the bridge verifies the signature on the “check”, and if everything matches, your funds show up. The problem is that one one side of the bridge, the verification routine could be replaced by a dummy routine, by the end user, and the code didn’t catch it.

It’s a hot check scam. The attacker created a spoofed transfer message, provided a bogus verification routine, and the bridge accepted it as genuine. The majority of the money was transferred back across the bridge, where other user’s valid tokens were being held, and the attacker walked away with 90,000 of those ETH tokens. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Samba, Wormhole Crypto Heist, And A Bogus CVE” →

This Week In Security: NPM Vandalism, Simulating Reboots, And More

January 14, 2022 by 33 Comments

We’ve covered quite a few stories about malware sneaking into NPM and other JavaScript repositories. This is a bit different. This time, a JS programmer vandalized his own packages. It’s not even malware, perhaps we should call it protestware? The two packages, colors and faker are both popular, with a combined weekly download of nearly 23 million. Their author, [Marak] added a breaking update to each of them. These libraries now print a header of LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY, and then either random characters, or very poor ASCII art. It’s been confirmed that this wasn’t an outside attacker, but [Marak] breaking his own projects on purpose. Why?

It seems like this story starts back in late 2020, when [Marak] lost quite a bit in a fire, and had to ask for money on Twitter. Edit: Thanks to commenter [Jack Dansen] for pointing out an important detail that was missing. Marak was charged for reckless endangerment, and was suspected for possible terrorism aspirations, as bomb-making materials were found in his burned-out apartment. Two weeks later, he tweeted that billions were being made off open source devs’ work, citing a FAANG leak. FAANG is a reference to the big five American tech companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The same day, he opened an issue on Github for faker.js, throwing down an ultimatum: “Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it.”
Continue reading “This Week In Security: NPM Vandalism, Simulating Reboots, And More” →

NAS Firmware Hack: Synology Running On QNAP Hardware

January 31, 2012 by 22 Comments

[XVortex] pulled off a pretty incredible firmware hack. He managed to get a firmware upgrade for Synology running on a QNAP machine. These are both Network Attached Storage devices, but apparently the Synology firmware is better than what QNAP supplies with their offerings.

The nice thing is that this is not a one-off hack. You can download the raw image and give it a spin for yourself. A few words of warning though. It will only work on models which use the Atom and ICH9R chipset, you’re out of luck if you have one sporting an ARM processor. You will also need to format the drives once the new firmware is flashed so do this before you fill them up.

This harkens back to the days when DD-WRT was first being run on Linksys routers. We don’t remember if that started with upgrade image hacks like this one uses, or if the source code was available (Linksys was compelled to release it once it was proven they were in violation of the GPL).

See a proof video of this hack after the break.

Continue reading “NAS Firmware Hack: Synology Running On QNAP Hardware” →