This Week in Security

238 Articles

This Week In Security: Updraft, Termux, And Magento

February 25, 2022 by 7 Comments

One of the most popular WordPress backup plugins, UpdraftPlus, has released a set of updates, x.22.3, that contain a potentially important fix for CVE-2022-23303. This vulnerability exposes existing backups to any logged-in WordPress user. This bug was found by the guys at Jetpack, who have a nice write-up on it. It’s a combination of instances of a common problem — endpoints that lacked proper authentication. The heartbeat function allows any user to access it, and it returns the latest backup nonce.

A cryptographic nonce is a value that’s not exactly a cryptographic secret, but is only used once. In some cases, this is to mitigate replay attacks, or is used as an initialization vector. In the case of UpdraftPlus, the nonce works as a unique identifiers for individual backups. The data leak can be combined with another weak validation in the maybe_download_backup_from_email() function, to allow downloading of a backup. As WordPress backups will contain sensitive information, this is quite the problem. There are no known in-the-wild instances of this attack being used, but as always, update now to stay ahead of the game.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Updraft, Termux, And Magento” →

This Week In Security: Chrome 0-day,Cassandra, And A Cisco PoC

February 18, 2022 by 7 Comments

Running Chrome or a Chromium-based browser? Check for version 98.0.4758.102, and update if you’re not running that release or better. Quick tip, use chrome://restart to trigger an immediate restart of Chrome, just like the one that comes after an update. This is super useful especially after installing an update on Linux, using apt, dnf, or the like.

CVE-2022-0609 is the big vulnerability just patched, and Google has acknowledged that it’s being exploited in the wild. It’s a use-after-free bug, meaning that the application marks a section of memory as returned to the OS, but then accesses that now-invalid memory address. The time gap between freeing and erroneously re-using the memory allows malicious code to claim that memory as its own, and write something unexpected.

Google has learned their lesson about making too many details public too early, and this CVE and associated bug aren’t easily found in in the Chromium project’s source, and there doesn’t seem to be an exploit published in the Chromium code testing suite. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Chrome 0-day,Cassandra, And A Cisco PoC” →

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: Geopolitical Hacktivism, Antivirus Mining, And Linux Malware

January 28, 2022 by 15 Comments

The CIA Hacktivists have launched a sort of ransomware campaign against the Belarusian rail system, but instead of cryptocurrency, they want the release of political prisoners and removal of Russian soldiers. This could be called an example of cyber-terrorism, though there is a reasonable theory that this is a state-sponsored hack, masquerading as hacktivism. What does seem certain is that something has interrupted rail transit, and a group on Twitter has produced convincing proof of a breach.

Your Antivirus Now Includes a CryptoMiner

Don’t look now, but your latest update of Norton 360 or Avira may have installed a cryptocurrency mining module. The silver lining is that some sanity has been retained, and you have to opt-in to the crypto scheme before your machine starts spending its spare cycles on mining. For users who do, they’re put into a mining pool, making for small payouts for most hardware. Norton, naturally, takes a 15% fee off the top for their trouble.

The State of Linux Malware

There used to be an adage that Linux machines don’t get malware. That’s never really been quite true, but the continued conquest of the server landscape has had the side effect of making Linux malware an even greater danger. Crowdstrike has seen a 35% increase in Linux malware in 2021, with three distinct categories leading the charge: XorDDoS, Mozi, and Mirai. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Geopolitical Hacktivism, Antivirus Mining, And Linux Malware” →

This Week In Security: NetUSB, HTTP.sys, And 2013’s CVE Is Back

January 21, 2022 by 2 Comments

Let’s imagine a worst case situation for home routers. It would have to start with a port unintentionally opened to the internet, ideally in a popular brand, like Netgear. For fun, let’s say it’s actually a third-party kernel module, that is in multiple router brands. This module would then need a trivial vulnerability, say an integer overflow on the buffer size for incoming packets. This flaw would mean that the incoming data would write past the end of the buffer, overwriting whatever kernel data is there. So far, this exactly describes the NetUSB flaw, CVE-2021-45608.

Because red teams don’t get their every wish, there is a catch. While the overflow is exceptionally easy to pull off, there isn’t much wiggle room on where the data gets written. There’s no remote code execution Proof of Concept (PoC) yet, and [Max Van Amerongen], who discovered the flaw, says it would be difficult but probably not impossible to pull off. All of this said, it’s a good idea to check your router for open ports, particularly non-standard port numbers. If you have a USB port on your router, check for updates.

Windows HTTP.sys Problem

A serious problem has been announced in Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10, with some versions vulnerable in their default configurations. The problem is in how Windows handles HTTP Trailer packets, which contain extra information at the end of normal HTTP transfers. There is a PoC available that demonstrates a crash. It appears that an additional information leak vulnerability would have to be combined with this one to produce a true exploit. This seems to be a different take on CVE-2021-31166, essentially exploiting the same weakness, and working around the incomplete fix. This issue was fixed in the January patch set for Windows, so make sure you’re covered. Continue reading “This Week In Security: NetUSB, HTTP.sys, And 2013’s CVE Is Back” →

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” →

This Week In Security: Y2K22, Accidentally Blocking 911, And Bug Alert

January 7, 2022 by 45 Comments

If you had the misfortune of running a Microsoft Exchange server this past week, then you don’t need me to tell you about the Y2K22 problem. To catch rest of us up, when Exchange tried to download the first malware definitions update of 2022, the version number of the new definitions triggered a crash in the malware detection engine. The date is represented as the string 2201010001, where the first two digits represent the year. This string gets converted to a signed long integer, which maxes out at 2,147,483,647. The integer overflows, and the result is undefined behavior, crashing the engine. The server fails safe, not processing any messages without a working malware engine, which means that no e-mail gets through. Happy new year!
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Y2K22, Accidentally Blocking 911, And Bug Alert” →