Archive for author: makoadmin

What can we say about 2020 that hasn’t already been said? Beliefs were shaken. Values were questioned. Truths were tested. Then COVID happened and things really got crazy.

The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic on March 12, 2020. That same day cybersecurity got flipped on its head. 

Entire businesses had to transition from mostly in-person workforces to mostly remote. Even schools and hospitals transitioned to online instruction and virtual doctor visits. Sysadmins had to contend with more endpoints, spread across more locations, giving cybercriminals a whole lot of new ways to attack a network. And attack they did.

Heading into 2020, hackers mostly preferred sneak attacks powered by some form of automated malware like a Trojan, carrying a secondary payload, often ransomware. Several months later, hackers were bashing down the front door, favoring brute force attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) clients. 

What a difference a year makes.

That got us thinking. In light of these dramatic changes to the threat landscape, what is the current state of trust and confidence when it comes to IT security professionals and their corporate endpoint protection?

The good news and bad news from the front line

The Malwarebytes SMB Cybersecurity Trust & Confidence Report 2021 is a first-of-its-kind survey of the hardworking IT professionals on the front lines of the fight against cyberthreats.

We spoke with 704 CIOs, IT directors, sysadmins, decision makers, and heads of security from businesses across the US, ranging in size from 50 to 999 employees. What did we find?

Let’s start with the good news.

In spite of everything that happened in 2020, stalwart SMBs remain confident that their endpoint protection can handle whatever threats come their way. The vast majority, 95 percent, say they trust their vendor to provide effective cybersecurity. At the same time, more than 90 percent also say their endpoint protection is effective and they’re confident it protects against dangerous threats. 

That’s some unusually high trust and confidence going on here. 

Could this be an example of security hubris (i.e., overconfidence in limited or untested security measures) or can we count on optimistic SMBs as a reliable barometer for overall trust and confidence in the world of technology and e-commerce?

That leads us to the bad news.

Almost half of SMBs, 47 percent, say the endpoint security products they hold in such high regard are very complex and hard to manage. And only a third, 36 percent, of SMBs expected those same endpoint security products to detect every single threat.

Going one step further, a full 56 percent of respondents said it’s not a matter of if but when their organization suffers a successful attack or breach.

Clearly, there’s some cognitive dissonance happening. What SMBs want to believe about their endpoint protection is at odds with what they’re actually experiencing.

We attempted to discover truth of the matter with even more questions:

Q: Are malware threats harder to stop than in years past?
A: Definitely.

Q: Has your endpoint protection product ever failed to detect a threat?
A: Uh-oh.

Q: Have you tested your endpoint protection product to see if it is detecting cyberthreats in the past 12 months?
A: Mostly yes, but testing methods vary and each has its flaws.

Q: What’s at stake if your organization comes under any cyberattack?
A: Depends on the size of the organization.

Q: Are you satisfied with the performance of the endpoint protection provider?
A: Yes, with some serious caveats.

Q: How does your endpoint protection fall short?
A: Reasons vary, but SMBs know a good deal when they see it.

Q: Do hackers prefer to target bigger organizations?
A: Everyone thinks they’ve got a target on their back, regardless of size.

The complete answers to these questions and many more await curious readers in Malwarebytes’ SMB Cybersecurity Trust & Confidence Report 2021. 

Download the full report.

The post Malwarebytes releases SMB Cybersecurity Trust & Confidence Report 2021 appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

When malware found its way into the network of Bakker Logistiek, a company specializing in the transport and warehousing of food and other products, on the night of 4 to 5 April, its IT systems ground to a halt. And, along with them, the reception of orders from clients, and the delivery of goods to branches of Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands. With systems down, companies affected have resorted to using pen and paper for the time being.

Thankfully, all systems are back online now, according to Bakker Logistiek’s CEO Toon Verhoeven who gave an interview to local news organization, Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS). The company is now in the process of contacting customers so they can begin deliveries as normal.

Verhoeven also confirmed with De Telegraaf, a Dutch morning newspaper, that the malware in question is ransomware, but the variant is yet to be disclosed by the company. “We have filed a complaint and it is now with the judicial authorities,” Verhoeven said in the NOS interview, which we have translated using Google Translate. “We are not making any further statements about that. We have worked very hard over the past six days to get our information systems up and running again.”

One of the foodstuffs most affected by the attack is packaged cheese. Albert Heijn said in a statement that they, too, are working hard to get the availability of cheese both in shops and online, although the latter is still a bit difficult to achieve in terms of ordering. Although headline writers have had some fun with the attacks affect on cheese supplies, the plain fact is that a gang of criminals has successfully disrupted a food supply chain, and that’s no laughing matter.

The CEO suspects that the compromise had something to do with the ProxyLogon vulnerability affecting Microsoft Exchange Servers. You may recall, Microsoft issued patches for four Microsoft Exchange zero-day exploits last month. The flaws were being taken advantage of by an attack group called Hafnium. After news of the patches broke, criminals were quick to reverse engineer the patches and use the vulnerabilities to attack servers, deploy web shells and drop ransomware payloads like Black KingDom and DearCry, knowing that many organizations would be slow to apply the patches.

The attack on Bakker Logistiek is yet another real-world example in the lengthening list of malware attacks affecting vital organizations with major consequences that go beyond the targeted businesses. We’re not even going to take a look back at what happened to Maersk in 2018 when NotPetya struck them hard. Or when EKANS disrupted industrial control systems (ICS) of Honda, GE, and Honeywell.

And it isn’t just businesses. The number of schools and hospitals that have experienced downtime because of ransomware is staggering, with some of them paying the ransom not only to get their systems up and running as quickly as possible but also to get their precious time back. In turn, those ransom payments fund the boom in ransomware.

In all honesty, although we don’t endorse ransom payments, it is not difficult to see why people make the calculation that they should pay, and we wouldn’t have been surprised if Bakker Logistiek had done the same.

As the sophistication of ransomware grows, organizations must continue to take this threat seriously, act swiftly in auditing their security posture as a whole, and plan accordingly. Preparing for ransomware doesn’t just mean beefing up security, it also means having a realistic plan in place for how to recover if the worst does happen, and keeping off-site, air-gapped backups that will be out of any attackers’ reach.

Every organization is a target, and the victims are everyone that relies on that organization. Your organization must be better prepared than ever. You can start by reading our guide to ransomware.

The post Ransomware disrupts food supply chain, Exchange exploitation suspected appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

A day late and a dollar short is a well-known expression that comes in a few variations. But this version has a movie and a book to its name, so I’m going with this one. Why?

Google has published an update for the Chrome browser that patches two newly discovered vulnerabilities. The browser’s Stable channel has been updated to 89.0.4389.128 for Windows, Mac and Linux. Both being exploited in the wild.

Google is aware of reports that exploits for CVE-2021-21206 and CVE-2021-21220 exist in the wild.

Note that other browsers, such as Edge, Brave and Vivaldi are also based on Chrome and likely to be affected by the same issues.

Which vulnerabilities are patched?

Publicly disclosed computer security flaws are listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. Its goal is to make it easier to share data across separate vulnerability capabilities (tools, databases, and services).

The first zero-day was listed as CVE-2021-21220 and was discovered at the Pwn2Own 2021 event last week. The vulnerability is caused by insufficient validation of untrusted input in V8, Google’s high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine that interprets code embedded in web pages.

The second zero-day was listed as CVE-2021-21206 and is described as a “use after free in Blink”. Use after free (UAF) is a vulnerability caused by incorrect use of dynamic memory during a program’s operation. If after freeing a memory location, a program does not clear the pointer to that memory, an attacker can use the error to manipulate the program. Blink is the name of the rendering engine used by Chromium to “draw” web pages.

Why did I say a day late?

Researcher Rajvardhan Agarwal managed to publish a working exploit for CVE-2021-21220 (the vulnerability discovered at Pwn2Own) on GitHub over the weekend, by reverse-engineering a patch produced by the Chromium team. Chromium is the open source browser that Chrome is built upon, and it in turn is made up of components, like V8 and Blink. Fixes appear in Chromium first, and then Google packages them up, along with some Google-specific goodies, into a new version of the Chrome browser.

And why a dollar short?

Because the same researcher stated that (at the time) although the vulnerability affecting Chromium-based browsers had been patched in the latest version of V8, it worked against the current Chrome release, thereby leaving users potentially vulnerable to attacks.

Luckily, although Agarwal proved that exploitation was possible, he stopped short of handing criminals the keys to the entire castle. Purposely, the published exploit only worked if users disabled their browser’s sandbox, a sort of protective software cage that isolates the browser from the rest of the computer and protects it from exactly this kind of exploit. Criminals looking to use his exploit would have to chain it with a sandbox “escape”, a technically difficult task (although not an impossible one, as the Pwn2Own winners proved).

The update

The easiest way to do it is to allow Chrome to update automatically, which basically uses the same method as outlined below but does not require your attention. But you can end up lagging behind if you never close the browser or if something goes wrong, such as an extension stopping you from updating the browser.

So, it doesn’t hurt to check now and then. And now would be a good time, given the working exploits. My preferred method is to have Chrome open the page chrome://settings/help which you can also find by clicking Settings > About Chrome.

If there is an update available, Chrome will notify you and start downloading it. Then it will tell you all you have to do to complete the update is Relaunch the browser.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Update now! Chrome needs patching against two in-the-wild exploits appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

A rather remarkable story has emerged, setting the scene for lively debates about permissible system access. A press release from the US Department of Justice Judge has revealed that the FBI were granted permission to perform some tech support backdoor removal. Bizarrely, they did this without letting the admins know beforehand.

A campaign targeting vulnerable Exchange servers has left web shells scattered everywhere. Those shells are backdoors. They allow attackers to access and creep around inside the compromised networks. Additionally, it seems that not all shells were properly locked down. They fell foul to password reuse. This means criminals figuring out the passwords to other criminals’ web shells could also potentially access the compromised servers. Having those shells lying around on systems for such a long time isn’t a great thing to happen.

When calls to fix systems go unheeded

Despite repeated warnings, and even one-click tools from Microsoft aiming to mitigate the issue, and no small amount of patching, some vulnerable servers remained. Some organisations missed or ignored the mass-massaging about the threat. Or perhaps they just didn’t know what to do to fix the problem. It’s likely that some also patched the vulnerability without also finding and removing the web shells.

This means lots of compromised exchange servers all over the place, just waiting for illicit access to begin all over again. What do you do in this situation? We’ll get to that but before we do, let’s talk about the perils of getting involved in situations. Any situation.

Getting involved in situations. Any situation.

People love to help. Members of the public often get involved in security issues alongside professional researchers and organisations. They may give tip-offs, or send files over, and most commonly, do some work in anti-phishing. It’s fairly easy to do, has a steady stream of ready-made content in their mailboxes to check out, and there’s a lot of places to report it to.

The problem is when individuals who mean well take it a step further without taking appropriate security measures. For example, a popular past time is filling up phish pages with bogus data. This is done to slow down phishers by making their data worthless. If folks aren’t careful, issues can arise.

At the extreme end, the same goes for vigilante style takedown tactics / breaking into servers / deleting data or “hacking back”. It might feel good to wipe large quantities of illegal content from a server you’ve taken control of which belongs to very bad people. But the law of unintended consequences has a way of biting the hand that feeds it. Even if your commands have exactly the effect you expect (and how often does that happen?), in one fell swoop you may have ruined an already ongoing law enforcement investigation, scrubbed the evidence needed to put someone in jail, and now you’re on the wanted list for breaking into a server and doing things you shouldn’t have been.

When the golden rule is broken

The golden “don’t do this” rule is “don’t touch servers and devices you have no permission to access”. It’s a great rule and helps keep people from getting into trouble, and it’s the backbone of computer misuse laws in both the US and the UK.

Where it gets a bit less clear, is when law enforcement agencies are granted permission from a Judge to access previously compromised servers and change things (in this case by deleting web shells). As per the release:

“the FBI conducted the removal by issuing a command through the web shell to the server, which was designed to cause the server to delete only the web shell (identified by its unique file path).”

The release mentions that “hundreds” of vulnerable computers had shells removed. These removals were done upfront with no knowledge of the system owners beforehand, according to the below:

The FBI is attempting to provide notice of the court-authorized operation to all owners or operators of the computers from which it removed the hacking group’s web shells. For those victims with publicly available contact information, the FBI will send an e-mail message from an official FBI e-mail account (@FBI.gov) notifying the victim of the search. For those victims whose contact information is not publicly available, the FBI will send an e-mail message from the same FBI e-mail account to providers (such as a victim’s ISP) who are believed to have that contact information and ask them to provide notice to the victim.

You weren’t home, so we left a message…sort of

It is rather alarming to think that a chunk of these system owners will probably go about their business for years to come with no idea the FBI stopped by to do a bit of digital tidying up. We also wonder how realistic it is to think ISPs will actually do some outreach. Even if they do, the business owners may think the mails are fake. Perhaps they’ll accept them as real, but still have no idea what to do about it. It’s surely unrealistic to think the ISPs will be able to take on an intermediary tech support role in all of this. If the goal is to have ISPs tell affected organisations to get in touch with the FBI directly, that’s still dependent on the victim not ignoring the ISP in the first place.

However you stack it up, it’s a bit of a mess.

“New” changes, a long time coming

The FBI requested a rule change for expanded access powers back in 2014, and it was granted in 2016. Essentially, we’ve known this would happen for some time but perhaps didn’t know quite what form it would take. While coverage of the proposed powers focused on “hacking” systems and talking about the issue in terms of offensive / surveillance capabilities, what we’ve ended up with is something a little different.

At the very least, I don’t think many expected the breakthrough story would be “they cleaned up compromised devices”. The question is, have we seen the opening of a Pandora’s box which really should have stayed shut?

General approval or generally derided?

Many of the arguments against this practice say there’s no real way to know if anything else on the servers was accessed or changed. There’s also the problem that solutions like this tend to breed their own additional complications. Just wait until scammers start pushing “FBI access required: problem detected” messages. It’ll be like the bad old days of fake antivirus pop-ups, except now the law enforcement mentioned is offering to help instead of send you to jail.

On the other hand: despite everyone’s best efforts to notify infected organisations and a massive splash of mainstream media coverage, it’s likely that lots of systems would simply have stayed compromised for a very long time to come if the FBI hadn’t done this. And it isn’t just the organisation that’s targeted that suffers, it’s everyone who depends on that organisation, and everyone who becomes a victim if the compromised system is used to launch further attacks.

So, where does the buck stop, and who specifically is going to stop it? Do you think this was a justified action? Is it acceptable in the most dire of situations, where no help is coming? Does it pave the way for overreach and the feeling your devices are under fire from all quarters?

We’d love to know what you think in the comments.

The post FBI shuts down malware on hundreds of Exchange servers, opens Pandora’s box appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

A US diplomatic mission in Nigeria warns of a visa scam affecting Nigerian citizens looking to move to the United States. It’s an old scam message, dressed up with a fresh coat of paint. Shall we take a look?

Work visa scams are a solid fixture in the scammer’s toolkit. This one blends the pandemic, data harvesting, and a slice of bank account emptying. There’s several variations of the scam, but they follow the same pattern.

The fake e-visa press release

No matter which version you’re looking at, the bogus press release begins as follows:

President Joe Biden, the 46th U.S. President has signed an Executive Order that interested citizens of the Federal Republic of Nigeria who measure in some special professions are eligible for American work E-visa and residence permit. This was communicated to the Nigerian Mission in the United States by the U.S. Department of Immigration.

The terms of the Executive Order allow 25,000 citizens of the Federal Republic of Nigeria between the age of 35 to 55 whose area of expertise are among the following: 1. Health workers, 2. engineers, 3. marine workers, 4. civil servants, 5. business administrators, 6. accountants, 6 [SIC]. lecturers, 7. those with special skills.

The official warning from the embassy warns the target age range is 40 – 55, whereas the example above focuses on those between 35 – 55. There is yet another version discussed here, focusing on potential victims aged between 25 – 55.

Promoting a scam

There’s almost certainly more versions of this scam in circulation by email. The example given by the embassy is a screenshot of a fake press release posted to Instagram. We’ve also discovered another version, again posted to Instagram from another account.

In both cases, the accounts claim to be involved in (or offering) some form of immigration service(s). For other versions of the fake press release, they follow the same template changing details relevant to the scammer’s own interests.

What are they asking for?

No matter who is sending the individual scams, the data they ask for is pretty standard across the board. They want potential victims to either hand over certain documents, or follow some crucial steps:

1. Passport biodata pages, with “at least 6 months left before expiry date”. A work resume. A passport photograph. Government-issued ID if available. This is classic data harvesting for identity theft or social engineering.
2. The “brush off”. They claim that if potential victims haven’t heard back after 2-3 business days they should forget the whole thing. The visa won’t be headed their way, and they should simply wave goodbye to the money paid to apply.
3. A warning that potential victims shouldn’t tell anyone they’ve applied may set off alarm bells for some, but not everyone. “Applicants must go about their applications themselves without involving any third parties such as travel agents, family members living in the United States, or any other delegates”. This is simply so people with more knowledge of procedure don’t declare the whole thing one big scam.
4. A payment of $250 for an “English proficiency test”. They also ask for a further $150 for “Covid screening” if applicants have not yet had a COVID-19 vaccination.
5. A deadline. The “Press release” claims to have been signed in February or March depending on which version is on display. All of the ones we’ve seen so far claim the application deadline is the 30^th of April, 2021. Is this offer too good to be true? Better hurry up and submit those fees and find out before the opportunity is lost! This is a time-honoured pressure tactic, dusted off and reused once again.

Turning a profit on false hope

This is an awful scam, and the people behind it don’t care about the fallout for victims. They even try and make some additional cash from the pandemic. You can bet that once April 30 passes, new versions will be released with May or June listed as the new cut-off point. We’ve covered the occasional visa scam previously, and they can have serious consequences for people caught in the trap.

If you’re unsure about too-good-to-be-true visa announcements, stick to official sources. Anyone can claim to be anything on social media platforms and mailbox missives. Major changes will have major coverage, and you can always contact the relevant embassy directly in a worst case scenario.

The post Sorry, Joe Biden isn’t offering you a work visa, it’s a scam appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

A set of vulnerabilities has been found in the way a number of popular TCP/IP stacks handle DNS requests. Potentially this could impact hundreds of millions of servers, smart devices, and industrial equipment. The researchers that discovered the vulnerabilities have named them NAME:WRECK.

Plural vulnerabilities?

Yes, the researchers found 9 DNS-related vulnerabilities that have the potential to allow attackers to take targeted devices offline or to gain control over them. These vulnerabilities affect 4 popular TCP/IP stacks: FreeBSD, IPnet, Nucleus NET, and NetX. Together they are used by over 100 Million devices. Since the vulnerable DNS clients are usually exposed to the internet this creates a huge attack surface.

Some background

Domain Name System (DNS) is an internet protocol that translates user-friendly, readable URLs, like malwarebytes.com, to their numeric IP addresses, like 52.85.104.30, allowing the computer to identify a server without the user having to remember and input its actual IP address. Basically, you could say DNS is the phonebook of the internet. DNS name resolution is a complex process that can be interfered with at many levels.

Although never visible to end-users, TCP/IP stacks are libraries that vendors add to their firmware to support internet connectivity and other networking functions like DNS queries for their devices. These libraries are very small but, in most cases, underpin the most basic functions of a device, and any vulnerability here exposes users to remote attacks.

Devices and organizations affected by NAME:WRECK

FreeBSD is widely used in firewalls and several commercial network appliances. It is also the basis for other well-known open-source projects. The most common device types running FreeBSD include computers, printers and networking equipment.

IPNet tends to be used by internet-facing enterprise devices located at the perimeter of an organization’s network, such as modems, routers, firewalls, and printers, as well as some industrial and medical devices.

The Nucleus RTOS website mentions that more than 3 billion devices use this real-time operating system, such as ultrasound machines, storage systems, critical systems for avionics and others, although presumably many of them are not internet connected.

NetX is usually run by the ThreadX Real Time Operating System (RTOS). Typical applications include medical devices, systems-on-a-chip and several printer models. The most common device types running ThreadX include printers, smart clocks and energy and power equipment in Industrial Control Systems (ICS).

Did you notice how it may turn out that the vertical that has most to fear from these vulnerabilities is a sector that is already under heavy stress, and has been actively targeted by cyberattacks? The healthcare sector is indeed in the top 3 of most affected by these vulnerabilities, together with the government.

Exploitation

For an attacker to use these vulnerabilities they have to find a way to send a malicious packet in reply to a legitimate DNS request. So the attacker will have to run a person-in-the-middle attack or be able to use an existing vulnerability like DNSpooq between the target device and the DNS server to pull this off.

Mitigation

Complete protection against NAME:WRECK requires patching devices running the vulnerable versions of these IP stacks. FreeBSD, Nucleus NET and NetX have been patched recently, and device vendors using this software should provide their own updates to customers.

It is not always easy though for users to find out whether they have the most up to date patches for any devices running across these affected IP Stacks. And patching devices is not always easy, or even possible.

There are a few things you can do however:

• Make an inventory of the devices running the vulnerable stacks. Forescout Research Labs has released an open-source script that uses active fingerprinting to detect devices running the affected stacks.
• Keep unpatched devices contained or disconnected from the internet, until they can be patched or replaced.
• Configure devices to rely on internal DNS servers where possible.
• Monitor network traffic for malicious packets that try to exploit the vulnerabilities.
• Apply patches as soon as possible after they have been made available.

For those interested in the full technical details the full report is available here and will be presented at Black Hat Asia 2021.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post NAME:WRECK, a potential IoT trainwreck appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

An Italian citizen’s apparent attempt to hire a hitman on the Dark Web has been undone by clever analysis of his Bitcoin transactions. The man, who is reported to be an IT worker employed by a major corporation, is alleged to have paid the hitman to assassinate his former girlfriend.

What happened?

According to a news article published by European policing entity Europol on April 7, they assisted Italian communications crime law enforcement Polizia Postale e Delle Comunicazioni in arresting a local citizen suspected of paying about $12,000 USD worth of bitcoin (at the moment of writing) to a Dark Web hitman to kill his ex-girlfriend. The Europol report states that the timely investigation had prevented any harm against the potential victim. The spiteful ex was detained before he paid the entire sum on the verge of the attack.

The agencies

The Polizia Postale e Delle Comunicazioni is a federal department of the Italian police force that is, among others, responsible for solving cybercrimes.

Europol is the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation. Headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands, they assist the EU member states in their fight against serious international crime and terrorism.

The investigation

After being asked for assistance, Europol reportedly carried out an urgent analysis of the Bitcoin transactions to trace the origin. They were able to identify the crypto-asset service provider from which the suspect had acquired the funds. The company that sold the assets confirmed the information provided by the investigators and offered more information about the suspected man.

Unmasking Bitcoin transactions

Europol managed to track down the local cryptocurrency service provider that facilitated the suspect’s Bitcoin purchases to uncover more information about him.

In their press release Europol states:

Europol carried out an urgent, complex crypto-analysis to enable the tracing and identification of the provider from which the suspect purchased the cryptocurrencies.

It was able to do this because Bitcoin transactions are all recorded in a public ledger called a blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain records every transaction ever made using the currency in its blockchain, making it a perfect source for big data investigations. With the proper tools investigators can follow and back-track payments. Although Bitcoin transactions don’t record the names of the people involved, they do record the wallet addresses that sent or received money. If police can link a wallet address to a real individual, they can trace that individual’s credits and debits.

Exchanges where non-digital money and crypto-currencies get exchanged are an established weak spot in the chain for criminals, since users often have to hand over personally identifiable information before they can use one. If the police can trace bitcoin payments back to a bitcoin purchase at a legitimate exchange they can subpoena the exchange for the bitcoin owner’s personal details.

Unmasking Dark Web activity

The story is a useful reminder that the Dark Web is not as hidden and unconnected as many people think. Connections to the regular web, and the real world, can reveal the things its users are trying to keep hidden. In this case, the arrested man seems to have been unmasked by his connections to currency transactions on the regular web, but there are numerous other pathways from one to the other.

For example, Dark Web sites can reveal their links to hosting companies or regular websites through misconfigured SSL certificates or leaky server-status pages, among other things. And real people can accidentally unmask themselves through any number of mistakes, from EXIF data in photos to reusing their Reddit account username on a Dark Web market.

Investigation tools

There are existing tools and new ones under development that enable investigators to find the type of information that can connect Dark Web operators to a real world identity. Interpol is working with great interest on a Dark Web Monitor to help in criminal investigations that involve Crypto-currencies, PGP, the Dark Web, and other related fields, and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) revealed the existence of its Deep Web search project, Memex, several years ago.

Anonymity and privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis has written a tool called OnionScan to help Dark Web site operators identify the kind of operational security leaks or software misconfigurations, like shared SSH keys, which can connect Dark Web sites to each other, or to clear web sites. You can find information about her work on onionscan.org.

The hitman

It is unknown whether the hitman that offered to carry out the crime has been identified and will be prosecuted. As we have seen in the past, not every hitman on the Dark web does what they were paid for. Obviously we do not condone what this suspect was doing, but there is another lesson to be learned here. It is not safe to assume that you are private on the Dark Web, nor that you will get what you paid for.

The post How bitcoin payments unmasked a man who hired a Dark Web contract killer appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Many of us who read the news daily encounter a regular drum beat of ransomware stories that are both worrying and heartbreaking. And what many of us don’t realize is that they are often interconnected. Some of the gangs behind the ransomware campaigns that we read about have established a relationship among each other that can be described as “being in league with each other”, yet they lack certain elements that might cement their status as a true cartel in the digital underground world.

This is the overall finding of Jon DiMaggio, known cybersecurity luminary and Chief Security Strategist for Analyst1, a threat intelligence company.

In a whitepaper entitled “Ransom Mafia – Analysis of the World’s First Ransomware Cartel”,  DiMaggio and his team aimed to provide an analytical assessment on whether there is indeed a ransomware cartel, or if indications there might be was just something the ransomware gangs fabricated to distract researchers and law enforcement.

The ties that bind

Analyst1 has identified two strong connections among the affiliated groups mentioned in its report that establishes how they work together as something like a cartel. They are:

Shared data leak sites

The gangs within the cartel share information about the companies they have attacked, as well as all the data they have exfiltrated. In one example, the researchers saw Twisted Spider posting victim data gathered by the Lockbit gang and Viking Spider. This is on top of these gangs posting company data onto their respective leak sites.

Shared infrastructure

SunCrypt was found using IP addresses and Command and Control infrastructure tied to Twisted Spider to deliver the ransomware payload in its campaigns. This was observed 10 months after Twisted Spider used them in its operations. This kind of resource sharing can only occur if a relationship of trust has already been established.

Analyst1 has also identified other circumstantial and technical ties among the groups that, on their own, aren’t sufficient measures for precise attribution.

Other noteworthy findings

The research includes several other noteworthy findings:

• Victim data is not the only thing these affiliate gangs pass between each other. They were also observed sharing tactics, such as the increasing proliferation and persistence of their malware in the wild by making a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) package available to other criminals, and command and control (C&C) infrastructure.
• Affiliated gangs appear to be on the move to automate their attacks, in evidence of added automated capabilities found in ransomware payloads. Manually infecting compromised companies is a known hallmark of big game hunting (BGH) ransomware threat actors.
• Some of the groups involved have opened themselves to media interviews in the past. They also issue their own press releases from their own websites and use multiple means to harass victims into paying up.
• Affiliated gangs have claimed to be part of a cartel at some point in the past. Although some of them have already denied their connections, evidence contradicts this.

Who is in the cartel?

Analyst1 grouped affiliated ransomware gangs under the “Ransom Cartel” tag. Note, however, that this collective had named themselves the “Maze Cartel” the same year their cooperative relationship had been established.

The Ransom Cartel arose in May 2020. Twisted Spider, the gang behind Maze ransomware and others, is said to be the group that initiated its creation. Their primary motivation was financial gain.

Most of these groups are based in Eastern Europe and they primarily speak Russian, an attribute they don’t hide at all. Some of these groups have developed malware other than ransomware; however, all groups made sure that none of them would affect users in Russia and in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Below is a brief overview of the individual groups said to make up the Ransom Cartel (Note that not all of them go for an official name. As such, they are named based on the ransomware variant they use):

Twisted Spider

Other alias(es): Maze Team, FIN6

Malware: Maze ransomware (previously known as ChaCha), Egregor ransomware, Qakbot worm, other commodity exploit kits

Malwarebytes detections: Ransom.Maze, Ransom.Sekhmet, Worm.Qakbot, respectively

LockBit gang

Other alias(es): none

Malware: LockBit ransomware, Hakops keylogger

Malwarebytes detection: Ransom.LockBit, Trojan.Keylogger, respectively

Wizard Spider

Other alias(es): Grim Spider (hailed as a subset of Wizard Spider), UNC1878, TEMP.MixMaster

Malware: TrickBot Trojan, Ryuk ransomware, Conti ransomware, MegaCortex ransomware, BazarLoader backdoor

Malwarebytes detection: Trojan.TrickBot, Ransom.Ryuk, Ransom.Conti, Ransom.MegaCortex, Trojan.Bazar, respectively

Viking Spider

Other alias(es): Ragnar group

Malware: Ragnar locker ransomware

Malwarebytes detection: Ransom.Ragnar

SunCrypt Gang

Other alias(es): none

Malware: SunCrypt ransomware

Malwarebytes detection: Ransom.SunCrypt

“What cartel?”

Although there is indeed trust, and sharing of resources and tactics, among these ransomware gangs, Analyst1 has assessed that the Ransomware Cartel is not a true cartel. Its report concludes that the cooperation it witnessed lacked some of the elements needed to reach the level of a cartel, most notably profit-sharing.

You can read more about the report here.

The post How ransomware gangs are connected, sharing resources and tactics appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

This week on Lock and Code, we discuss the top security headlines generated right here on Labs. In addition, we speak to Point3 Security chief strategist Chloé Messdaghi, HaveIBeenPwned founder Troy Hunt, and We Hack Purple founder and CEO Tanya Janca about security fatigue.

Security fatigue is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the limit we all reach when security best practices become overbearing. It’s what prevents us from making a strong password for a new online account. It’s why we may not update our software despite repeated notifications.

And, importantly, it probably isn’t your fault.

Tune in to learn about security fatigue from the experts—how does it manifest in their professions, what have they seen, and what are the unforeseen outcomes to it—on the latest episode of Lock and Code, with host David Ruiz.

https://feed.podbean.com/lockandcode/feed.xml

You can also find us on the Apple iTunes store, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus whatever preferred podcast platform you use.

We cover our own research on:

• Research claims Pixel phones share 20 times more data than iPhones
• Has Facebook leaked your phone number?
• Aurora campaign: Attacking Azerbaijan using multiple RATs
• Pre installed auto installer threat found on Android devices in Germany
• Fake Trezor app steals more than $1 million worth of crypto coins
• SAP warns of malicious activity targeting unpatched systems
• Zoom zero day discovery makes calls safer, hackers $200,000 richer

Other cybersecurity news:

• Vulnerabilities cause headaches for QNAP (Source: The Register)
• Preventing cyberattacks during tax season (Source: Help Net Security)
• Call of Duty cheats expose gamers to malware (Source: Threat Post)
• Avoiding Instagram scams (Source: Business 2 Community)
• Hackers steal security camera footage, sell it on as “home videos” (Source: SCMP)

Stay safe!

The post Beating security fatigue with Troy Hunt, Chloé Messdaghi, and Tanya Janca: Lock and Code S02E06 appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Last month, Google began a test pilot of its Federated Learning of Cohorts—or FLoC—program, which the company has advertised as the newest, privacy-preserving alternative in Google Chrome to the infamous third-party cookie.

Sounds promising, right? Well, about that.

Despite Google’s rhetoric about maintaining user privacy, its FLoC trial leaves much to be desired. Google Chrome users had no choice in whether they were included in the FLoC trial, they received no individualized notification, and, currently, they have no option to specifically opt-out, instead having to block all third-party cookies on their Google Chrome browsers to leave the trial.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which analyzed Google’s published materials and Chromium’s source code to better understand FLoC, lambasted the pilot program and the technology behind it.

“EFF has already written that FLoC is a terrible idea,” the digital rights organization said. “Google’s launch of this trial—without notice to the individuals who will be part of the test, much less their consent—is a concrete breach of user trust in service of a technology that should not exist.”

What is FLoC?

Labored acronyms aside, FLoC is part of Google’s broader plan to develop its idea of a more private web, as the search giant struggles with the death of the most important digital advertising tool in the history of the Internet—the third-party cookie.

We should be clear at the outset here. First-party cookies help the Internet function. Cookies help websites knit web page visits together. First-party cookies are used to knit together different visits to pages on the same website and help them remember useful information such as your settings, what’s in your shopping cart, and—most importantly—whether you are logged in or not.

Third-party cookies can also benefit Internet users, but for years, this technology primarily served as a sort of “tree of life” for the digital advertising economy, allowing advertisers to knit together web page visits from many different websites.

Implanted on millions of popular websites, tracking code that relies on third-party cookies has enabled the profiling of nearly every single Internet user by their age, gender, location, shopping interests, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. Third-party cookies also ushered in the era of “Real-Time Bidding,” in which businesses compete for the opportunity to deliver you ads based on those user profiles. And as online publishers like newspapers struggled to maintain in-print advertising revenue in their decade-long transition to digital, third-party cookies provided a sometimes necessary bargain for those publishers: Sell ad placements not to individual companies, but scale ad revenue rapidly by harnessing the results of mass user profiling.

Without the third-party cookie, much of this activity would either have been delayed or limited. So, too, would the money being made by the developers of those third-party cookies, which include many digital advertising companies and, as it just so happens, one notable Silicon Valley giant—Google.

The obvious question about FLoC technology then is: Why would Google create an alternative to the technology that helps them generate billions of dollars in ad revenue every year?

Because the third-party cookie is dying. As users increasingly protect their online privacy, they continue to install browser plug-ins that block the type of online tracking enabled by third-party cookies. Further, several browsers—including Safari and Mozilla—began blocking third-party cookies by default years ago.

If anything, FLoC is Google’s answer to a future that we all know is coming, in which the third-party cookie has lost its power.

Alright but what actually is FLoC?

How FLoC technology differs from third-party cookies is that, primarily, FLoC will create profiles on groups of users and not profiles on individual users. If FLoC becomes the norm, then Google Chrome users will have their activity tracked by Google Chrome itself. Based on that browsing activity—including what sites are visited and what searches are made—Google Chrome will then group users into “cohorts.” When you visit a website it will be able to ask your browser what cohorts you belong to and deliver ads that advertisers have targeted towards those “cohorts.”

This means that the broader digital advertising ecosystem will remain, but the wheels that churn to move it forward will undergo some changes.

In its FLoC announcement, Google explained that it is trying to find a balance between what it believes is the usefulness and the harm of third-party cookies.

“Keeping in mind the importance of ‘and,’ FLoC is a new approach to interest-based advertising that both improves privacy and gives publishers a tool they need for viable advertising business models,” the company said.

According to Google, FLoC technology will not share your individual browsing history with anyone or any company, including Google. Instead, that activity will be grouped into the activity of thousands of users in a cohort. Further, Google said that its Chrome browser will not create cohorts based on “sensitive topics.” So, that hopefully means that there will not be cohorts for people searching for aid in suicide prevention, domestic abuse, drug addiction, or private medical diagnoses, for example.

According to EFF, though, Google’s FLoC technology includes multiple privacy problems, such as the ability to use FLoC findings in conjunction with browser fingerprinting to reveal information about users, and the potentially never-ending quest to gather user data as a first-stage requirement only to then “unlearn” that user data if it could lead to the creation of a sensitive cohort.

The technical concerns with FLoC are many, but they’re difficult for the average user to grasp. What is easy to understand, however, is how those average users are left behind in Google’s FLoC trial.

A quiet trial

For such a seismic shift in the Internet’s infrastructure, many might assume that Google would announce the FLoC trial with more safeguards.

That’s not what happened.

In Google’s FLoC trial announcement, it gave Google Chrome users no option to opt out before the trial began. Instead, Google silently pushed FLoC technology to Chrome users in the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. While Google described the trial as affecting a “small percentage of users,” according to EFF, that percentage could be as high as 5 percent.

That sounds small at first, but take into account that nearly-ancient estimates (circa 2016) put active Google Chrome users around 2 billion, meaning that the FLoC trial could affect up to 100 million people. That is an enormous number of people to subject to a data analysis experiment without their prior consent.

Google also said that users can opt-out of the FLoC trial by disabling third-party cookies through Google Chrome. It’s good that such an option exists, but it’s unfortunate that users will have to have some basic understanding of FLoC and third-party cookies to remove themselves from a trial that they might have no knowledge about.

Compounding the issue is that turning off all third-party cookies could remove a good deal of functionality from a user’s web experience. That seems both imprecise and unfair.

Finally, the FLoC trial affects more than browser users—it affects websites, too. Remember those publishers that Google said it would like to help? According to Google, “websites that don’t opt out will be included in the FLoC calculation if Chrome detects that they load ads-related resources”. Some of them have already opposed being automatically included into a technology trial that will result in the profiling of their readers—even if that profiling is supposedly less privacy-invasive.

Julia Angwin, editor-in-chief of the investigative news outlet The Markup, said that her organization chose to opt out of FLoC.

“We @themarkup opted out of Google’s newfangled cookie-less tracking system (FLoC) so our readers will not be targeted with ads based on visiting our site,” Angwin wrote on Twitter. “Others who care about reader privacy might want to do the same.”

Angwin is just one of many journalists who have reported on FLoC technology, most of whom have authored FAQs, explainers, and detailed guides on just what it is Google is trying to do with its recent experiment.

All of those explainers, in fact, point to the biggest problem here: Users are being included in something that they did not know about that will affect how they are treated on the Internet, and they had no say in the matter beforehand.

A private web can incorporate many things. At the very least, it should include user respect.

The post Millions of Chrome users quietly added to Google’s FLoC pilot appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.