spyware

6 Articles

This Week In Security: Wyze, ScreenConnect, And Untrustworthy Job Postings

February 23, 2024 by 7 Comments

For a smart home company with an emphasis on cloud-connected cameras, what could possibly be worse than accidentally showing active cameras to the wrong users? Doing it again, to far more users, less than 6 months after the previous incident.

The setup for this breach was an AWS problem, that caused a Wyze system outage last Friday morning. As the system was restored, the load spiked and a caching library took the brunt of the unintentional DDoS. This library apparently has a fail state of serving images and videos to the wrong users. An official report from Wyze mentions that this library had been recently added, and that the number of thumbnails shown to unauthorized users was around 13,000. Eek. There’s a reason we recommend picking one of the Open Source NVR systems here at Hackaday.

ScreenConnect Exploit in the Wild

A pair of vulnerabilities in ConnectWise ScreenConnect were announced this week, Proof of Concepts were released, and are already being used in active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are a CVSS 10.0 authentication bypass and a CVSS 8.4 path traversal bypass.

Huntress has a guide out, detailing how embarrassingly easy the vulnerabilities are to exploit. The authentication bypass is a result of a .Net quirk, that adding an additional directory on the end of a .aspx URL doesn’t actually change the destination, but is captured as PathInfo. This allows a bypass of the protections against re-running the initial setup wizard: hostname/SetupWizard.aspx/literallyanything

The second vulnerability triggers during extension unpack, as the unzipping process doesn’t prevent path traversal. The most interesting part is that the unzip happens before the extension installation finishes. So an attacker can compromise the box, cancel the install, and leave very little trace of exploitation. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Wyze, ScreenConnect, And Untrustworthy Job Postings” →

Liberté, égalité, Fraternité: France Loses Its Marbles On Internet Censorship

August 22, 2023 by 77 Comments

Over the years we’ve covered a lot of attempts by relatively clueless governments and politicians to enact think-of-the-children internet censorship or surveillance legislation, but there’s a law from France in the works which we think has the potential to be one of the most sinister we’ve seen yet.

It flew under our radar so we’re grateful to [0x1b5b] for bringing it to our attention, and it concerns a proposal to force browser vendors to incorporate French government censorship and spyware software in their products. We’re sure that most of our readers will understand the implications of this, but for anyone not versed in online privacy and censorship  this is a level of intrusion not even attempted by China in its state surveillance programme. Perhaps most surprisingly in a European country whose people have an often-fractious relationship with their government, very few French citizens seem to be aware of it or what it means.

It’s likely that if they push this law through it will cause significant consternation over the rest of the European continent. We’d expect those European countries with less liberty-focused governments to enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and we’d also expect the European hacker community to respond with a plethora of ways for their French cousins to evade the snooping eyes of Paris. We have little confidence in the wisdom of the EU parliament in Brussels when it comes to ill-thought-out laws though, so we hope this doesn’t portend a future dark day for all Europeans. We find it very sad to see in any case, because France on the whole isn’t that kind of place.

Header image: Pierre Blaché CC0.

Decoding ZeuS Malware Disguised As A .DOC

March 6, 2015 by 30 Comments

[Ronnie] recently posted about his adventures in decoding malware. One of his users reported a phishy email, which did indeed turn out to contain a nasty attachment. The process that [Ronnie] followed in order to figure out what this malware was trying to do is quite fascinating and worth the full read.

[Ronnie] started out by downloading the .doc attachment in a virtual machine. This would isolate any potential damage to a junk system that could be restored easily. When he tried to open the .doc file, he was presented with an error stating that he did not have either enough memory or disk space to proceed. With 45GB of free space and 2GB of RAM, this should not have been an issue. Something was definitely wrong.

The next step was to open the .doc file in Notepad++ for analysis. [Ronnie] quickly noticed that the file was actually a .rtf disguised as a .doc. [Ronnie] scanned through large chunks of data in an attempt to guess what the malware was trying to do. He noticed that one data chunk ended with the bytes “FF” and D9″, which are also found as the ending two bytes of .gif files.

[Ronnie] copied this data into a new document and removed all new line and return characters. He then converted the hex to ASCII, revealing some more signs that this was actually image data. He saved this file as a .gif and opened it up for viewing. It was a 79KB image of a 3D rendered house. He also found another chunk of data that was the same picture, but 3MB in size. Strange to say the least.

After finding a few other weird bits of data, [Ronnie] finally started to see more interesting sections. First he noticed some strings with mixed up capital and lowercase letters, a tactic sometimes used to avoid antivirus signatures. A bit lower he found a section of data that was about the size of typical shellcode. He decoded this data and found what he was looking for. The shellcode contained a readable URL. The URL pointed to a malicious .exe file that happened to still be available online.

Of course [Ronnie] downloaded the .exe and monitored it to see how it acted. He found that it set a run key in the registry to ensure that it would persist later on. The malware installed itself to the user’s appdata folder and also reached out repeatedly to an IP address known to be affiliated with ZeuS malware. It was a lot of obfuscation, but it was still no match for an experienced malware detective.

Fake Certificate

Lenovo Shipped PC’s With Spyware That Breaks HTTPS

February 19, 2015 by 91 Comments

If you’ve ever purchased a new computer then you are probably familiar with the barrage of bloatware that comes pre-installed. Usually there are system tools, antivirus software trials, and a whole bunch of other things that most of us never wanted in the first place. Well now we can add Superfish spyware to the list.

You may wonder what makes this case so special. A lot of PC’s come with software pre-installed that collect usage statistics for the manufacturer. Superfish is a somewhat extreme case of this. The software actually installs a self-signed root HTTPS certificate. Then, the software uses its own certificates for every single HTTPS session the user opens. If you visit your online banking portal for example, you won’t actually get the certificate from your bank. Instead, you’ll receive a certificate signed by Superfish. Your PC will trust it, because it already has the root certificate installed. This is essentially a man in the middle attack performed by software installed by Lenovo. Superfish uses this ability to do things to your encrypted connection including collecting data, and injecting ads.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, their certificate is actually using a deprecated SHA-1 certificate that uses 1024-bit RSA encryption. This level of encryption is weak and susceptible to attack. In fact, it was reported that [Rob Graham], CEO of Errata Security has already cracked the certificate and revealed the private key. With the private key known to the public, an attacker can easily spoof any HTTPS certificate and systems that are infected with Superfish will just trust it. The user will have no idea that they are visiting a fake phishing website.

Since this discovery was made, Lenovo has released a statement saying that Superfish was installed on some systems that shipped between September and December of 2014. They claim that server-side interactions have been disabled since January, which disables Superfish. They have no plans to pre-load Superfish on any new systems.

Blue Light Special: Earn $10 By Installing Spyware

September 13, 2009 by 28 Comments

sears

Ars technica is reporting on the ruling from the FTC about the software shenanigans of Kmart and Sears. The marketing geniuses behind the parent company of Sears and Kmart decided they needed more information about the users of their website. Their solution? Offering $10 to users who install their custom software which phones home with data on just about everything they do on their computer. Not content with just browsing habits of webites, the software apparently recorded everything the user did online, including secure sessions. Under the settlement (PDF) with the FTC, Sears says they will stop collecting data and promises to destroy any and all information they’ve collected so far. Selling what websites you’ve been to, how much money you have, which prescriptions you take and what products you’re interested in for the low low price of $10 seems like a bargain.

Interview With An Adware Author

January 14, 2009 by 41 Comments

toolbars2

Philosecurity has an interview with [Matt Knox], a former coder for Direct Revenue, an adware company which was sued in 2006 by New York governor Eliot Spitzer. The interview contains some interesting details of how the adware code worked internally: it created a Browser Helper Object, then ensured that the Browser Helper Object stayed up by creating a poller to check every ten seconds and regenerate the Browser Helper Object if it had stopped running. The poller ingeniously masked itself partly by exploiting Windows’ Create Remote Thread function to run itself as a series of threads instead of as an executable.

The truly fascinating bit of the interview is how [Knox] defies your initial suspicion that he’s a complete scumbag; he started off writing spam filtering software, was hired by Direct Revenue to do traffic analysis, started writing tiny bits of code to improve the adware, and eventually wound up knee-deep in the code.  [Knox] notes that you can get ordinary people to do incredibly distasteful things if you break those things into small enough chunks and introduce them gradually.

[via Waxy]

[photo: xcaballe]