IT NEWS

Today, the Internet Explorer (IE) 11 desktop application goes out of support and will be retired for certain versions of Windows 10.

The retirement consists of two phases. During the first phase—the redirection phase—devices will be progressively redirected from IE to Microsoft Edge over the following months.

The second phase of retirement is the Windows Update phase. After the redirection phase completes, IE will be permanently disabled through a future Windows Update on all devices with Windows platforms that are in-scope for IE retirement.

History

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 1.0 saw the first websites in August 1995. In 2003, Microsoft said goodbye to the standalone version of the browser, but Internet Explorer continued as a part of the evolution of the operating system, with updates coming bundled in operating system upgrades.

Over the following years, despite everything Microsoft tried, Chrome took over as the most used browser. With Windows 10, Edge became the default Microsoft browser, but Internet Explorer could still be found in the Windows Accessories folder.

While Edge started out based on Microsoft’s EdgeHTML browser engine, it later switched to a Chromium-based model.

After all this, Microsoft felt it was time to phase out Internet Explorer.

Platforms

For now the retirement is only partial, even for Windows 10. In scope at the time of this announcement.

Internet Explorer 11 desktop application delivered via the Semi-Annual Channel (SAC):

• Windows 10 client SKUs
• Windows 10 IoT

Out of scope at the time of this announcement (unaffected):

• Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge
• Internet Explorer platform (MSHTML/Trident), including WebOC and COM automation
• Internet Explorer 11 desktop application on:
  • Windows 8.1
  • Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU)
  • Windows Server SAC (all versions)
  • Windows 10 IoT Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) (all versions)
  • Windows Server LTSC (all versions)
  • Windows 10 client LTSC (all versions)
  • Windows 10 China Government Edition

In-market Windows 10 LTSC and Windows Server are also unaffected by this change. Windows Server 2022 and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 are also out of scope.

The end

During the first phase, users will find themselves redirected from IE to Microsoft Edge. This will not happen for all devices at the same time, which gives organizations a chance to identify and resolve any potential issues, such as missed sites, before the redirection happens on all devices within an organization.

The second phase of retirement is the Windows Update phase. After the redirection phase completes, IE will be permanently disabled through a future Windows Update on all devices with Windows platforms that are in-scope for IE retirement.

Given the cumulative nature of Windows Updates, IE disablement will persist in subsequent Windows Updates.

For those that can’t wait to get rid of Internet Explorer, Microsoft has published a blog to explain how to move forward. It’s also worth reading for system administrators that want to prepare for the second phase of the retirement process.

Not so much

Why not uninstall IE entirely, you may wonder. This isn’t recommended as Internet Explorer mode relies on Internet Explorer 11 to function. IE mode on Microsoft Edge makes it easy to use all of the sites your organization needs in a single browser. It uses the integrated Chromium engine for modern sites, and it uses the Trident MSHTML engine from Internet Explorer 11 for legacy sites.

Support for IE mode follows the lifecycle of current and future Windows client, Windows server, and Windows IoT releases (including Windows 11) at least through 2029.

Security angle

While your first response to the news might have been a sigh of relief, the stage exit of Internet Explorer does not bring any immediate security improvements. The holy grail of backward compatibility has thrown a wrench in the Microsoft works before and it will probably continue to do so, as long as we are afraid to say goodbye to legacy technology in a decisive manner.

Switching to a more secure platform makes all kinds of sense, but it is held back if we keep on using the old, less secure platform on the side. Threat actors will prey on the old platform as long as it is in use.

Researchers will find vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer related files that need to stay on the system even if someone doesn’t use Internet Explorer anymore. And system administrators will find endpoint and/or users that need to keep Internet Explorer because there is some legacy resource that requires it.

The post It’s official, today you can say goodbye to Internet Explorer. Or can you? appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

The June 2022 Patch Tuesday may go down in history as the day that Follina got patched, but there was a host of other important updates. And not just from Microsoft. Many other software vendors follow the pattern of monthly updates set by the people in Redmond.

Microsoft

Microsoft released updates to deal with 60 security vulnerabilities. Undoubtedly the most prominent one is the one that goes by the name of Follina. The Edge browser received five of the patched vulnerabilities .

Follina, or CVE-2022-30190

A quick recap about Follina. On Monday May 30, 2022, Microsoft issued CVE-2022-30190 regarding a vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) in Windows. An in the wild exploit was using a feature in Word to retrieve a HTML file from a remote server, and that HTML file in turn was using MSDT to load code and execute PowerShell commands.

CVE-2022-30136

Another critical vulnerability is CVE-2022-30136, a bug in NFS 4.1 which could be exploited over the network by making an unauthenticated, specially crafted call to a Network File System (NFS) service to trigger a Remote Code Execution (RCE). This vulnerability concerns a number of Windows Server products and received a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. Last month, Microsoft fixed a similar vulnerability (CVE-2022-26937) affecting NFS v2.0 and v3.0.

CVE-2022-30139

Similar is CVE-2022-30139, a Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability. This vulnerability is only exploitable if the MaxReceiveBuffer LDAP policy is set to a value higher than the default value. LDAP is a software protocol for enabling anyone to locate data about organizations, individuals and other resources such as files and devices in a network. LDAP is a “lightweight” (smaller amount of code) version of Directory Access Protocol (DAP). In total, seven vulnerabilities in LDAP were found and fixed.

CVE-2022-30163

Noteworthy as well is CVE-2022-30163 a Windows Hyper-V Remote Code Execution vulnerability that allows an attacker to run a specially crafted application on a Hyper-V guest that could cause the Hyper-V host operating system to execute arbitrary code. Microsoft Hyper-V is a virtualization platform, which enables administrators to virtualize multiple operating systems to run off the same physical server simultaneously.

More Microsoft news

Microsoft has also started to phase out Internet Explorer, but more about that in a separate post.

And then there was a storm of criticism about the way Microsoft handled the SynLapse vulnerability in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Pipelines. SynLapse is the name for a critical bug in Azure’s Synapse service that allowed attackers to obtain credentials to other workspaces, execute code, or leak customer credentials to data sources outside of Azure. Rather than dealing with the vulnerability in a way that closed the gap once and for all, Microsoft choose what researchers called a halfhearted way that was easily bypassed in a following attempt. Orca researchers said they were able to bypass Microsoft’s fix for the issue twice before the company put a working fix in place.

Other vendors

Adobe has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products.

Atlassian released a patch for the in the wild exploited Confluence RCE vulnerability.

Citrix fixed two vulnerabilities in Citrix ADM server and Citrix ADM agent.

Drupal fixed two “Moderately critical” vulnerabilities.

GitLab released versions 15.0.1, 14.10.4, and 14.9.5 for GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE).

Google put out updates for Android and Chrome.

SAP published security notes about some high priority vulnerabilities

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Update now!  Microsoft patches Follina, and many other security updates appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Cookies are in the news as Mozilla rolls out significant privacy changes for Firefox. The idea is to dramatically lessen the risk of privacy-invading tracking across websites without your knowledge. Tracking cookies have been a hot topic in recent months, as advertisers try switching to other methods of tracking. Will this make a noticeable difference to people’s everyday browsing experience?

What are cookies?

Cookies are pieces of information which websites can save in your browser. Sites you visit can request your browser save cookies whenever the browser asks it for data. This can be pictures, downloads, page content, pretty much anything at all. The browser will keep the cookie and send it back to the website whenever requests are made until the cookie expires.

Expires? That’s right. Some cookies, called session cookies, expire once you close the browser. Others, persistent cookies, will remain on board until they eventually expire or you manually delete them. Humorously, some sites allow you to permanently opt-out of cookies and tracking by…asking you to accept permanent cookies which never expire.

Forget me not…but only sometimes

But how do these cookies, session or persistent, actually work?

Browsers and websites converse in a “stateless” fashion. Every message sent is isolated from all of the other messages. There’s no link to join any of these messages up, and that’s where cookies come into play. Cookies act like a sort of bridge for many day to day tasks inside your browser. Websites send browsers cookies, known as first party cookies, tied to a unique ID the first time they converse. The browser fires the unique ID back at the website as these messages continue to be sent.

Through this, the sites you use are able to keep you logged in, remember what you’ve done, and keep the site functional for your specific needs. While sites can read their own cookies, they can’t read cookies from other websites. This is where third-party cookies come into play.

Third party tracking: An advertiser’s dream

A first-party cookie on a website has been placed there by the website itself. A third-party cookie is being set by someone else, like an advertiser or ad network, via code embedded into the page. That cookie is designed to essentially follow you around the internet. This is why you start one day on a website offering up deals on movies you’re interested in, and then see adverts for those films at a cheaper price on another site the day after.

Slowly but surely, ad networks build up an incredibly accurate advertising profile of you as you move from one site to another. Depending on what’s being collected, you may end up with a huge slice of identifiable data tagged to your identity without you ever even seeing it yourself. It’s just there, and there’s not much you can do about it.

The cookie controversy

Third party cookies are not particularly popular. Ad tracking generally, even less so. Numerous questions of privacy and safety exist. Something else which exists: big fines. Not so long ago, Google and Facebook received fines for $157 million and $62 million respectively. This was for making cookies easier to accept than refuse.

Elsewhere, replacements of varying effectiveness have been proposed. Apple blocks default tracking everywhere. Google plans to ditch third party cookies in Chrome by the end of next year. Brave browser is already taking action against something called bounce tracking.

With all this in mind: What is Mozilla doing?

Hands off the cookie jar

Users of Firefox will now find something called Total Cookie Protection ticking along in the background. Mozilla claims that this release makes Firefox:

The most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.

Total Cookie Protection creates individual “cookie jars” for every website you browse. Trackers are no longer able to thread that analytics picture across the web. What you get up to on one site stays on one site. As a result, tracking/advertising services can no longer watch from afar as you move from URL to URL. Your analytics profile is no longer quite as useful to advertisers as it once was.

Those cookies are still able to provide analytics in terms of the site they’re on. The difference is they’re no longer as invasive in terms of building a big picture of your internet activities.

This new stack of cookie jars is in addition to a number of other privacy features already up and running, including Enhanced Tracking Protection. Around since 2018, ETP blocks trackers from a maintained list. If a party is on the list, they lose the ability to use third-party cookies.

A cookie clean up

No matter which browser you use, an occasional cookie clean up is a good idea. Check out our post on removing cookies, which covers removal instructions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Safari, and several mobile browsers too.

The post Firefox stops advertisers tracking you as you browse, calls itself the most “private and secure major browser” appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Malwarebytes is happy to announce our Vulnerability Assessment module for OneView, our multi-tenant console where you can manage Malwarebytes Nebula accounts, subscriptions, invoicing, and integrations. 

This module enables our MSPs to scan, identify, and assess vulnerabilities in customers’ digital ecosystems using our single lightweight agent.  

Here are some key benefits:

• Automatically identify vulnerabilities via scheduled or manual scans
• Deliver key insights and remediation steps for vulnerabilities; prioritized by severity level
• Stay informed with customizable notifications when new vulnerabilities are discovered
• Detailed vulnerability dashboards for a high-level view or all your customers

In this post, we’ll give you a step-by-step on how to complete an inventory and vulnerability scan in Malwarebytes Vulnerability Assessment for OneView.

Table of contents

• Part 1: Selecting endpoints
• Part 2: Scanning inventory and vulnerabilities
• Part 3: Viewing CVEs
• Part 4: Schedule a scan

Part 1: Selecting endpoints 

To conduct a vulnerability scan, start by clicking “Endpoints” in the left hand navigation bar. 

Select the site or individual endpoints you wish to scan.

Part 2: Scanning inventory and vulnerabilities

Once you have selected an endpoint, click the kebab menu in the upper right-hand corner. 

Click “Scan Inventory & Vulnerability” in the middle.

Click “Accept” in the confirmation window.

Part 3: Viewing CVEs

We can see the results of our scan by clicking the “Vulnerabilities” tab.

Selecting any of these CVEs will open a slide-out panel with more information. At the top, you’ll see remediation steps (most likely telling you to update to the latest version) and a link of references for further reading. 

Below, you’ll find a list of all the affected endpoints and applications. 

Part 4: Scheduling a scan

You can also schedule a vulnerability scan to keep reports updated automatically. 

In this section, follow along with the screenshots to learn how to schedule a vulnerability scan.

Update the schedule type to “Software Inventory Scan”.

Select if this is a Global schedule or for a specific site. For this demo, we’ll choose Global.

Scan, identify, and assess customer vulnerabilities with Malwarebytes Vulnerability Assessment for OneView

We’ve given you a brief overview of how to check for (and schedule!) Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) using Malwarebytes Vulnerability Assessment for OneView.

Want to learn more about Malwarebytes Vulnerability Assessment for OneView? Read the data sheet.

The post Introducing Malwarebytes Vulnerability Assessment for OneView: How to check for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Microsoft has warned that “multiple adversaries and nation-state actors” are making use of the recent Atlassian Confluence RCE vulnerability. A fix is now available for CVE-2022-26134. It is essential users of Confluence address the patching issue immediately.

Confluence vulnerability: Background

At the start of June, researchers discovered a vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence via an incident response investigation. Confluence, a Wiki-style collaboration tool, experienced a “critical unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability”. It affected Confluence server and Confluence Data Center.

The attack discovered during the investigation revealed web shells deployed on the server. These web shells allow for Persistent access on compromised web applications. The web server process and its child processes ran as root and full privileges. This is very bad news, and allowed for execution of commands even without valid credentials.

Worse, the web shell found is one commonly used by various Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. This almost certainly isn’t the kind of thing admins discovering an attack want to hear mid-investigation.

Unfortunately, mitigation advice was somewhat limited. It veered between restricting access to just turning off Confluence Server and Data Center instances. On June 3, Atlassian released versions 7.4.17, 7.13.7, 7.14.3, 7.15.2, 7.16.4, 7.17.4 and 7.18.1 which contained a fix for this vulnerability.

The current situation

Here’s the latest observations from Microsoft:

Microsoft continues:

In many cases impacted devices have been observed with multiple disparate instances of malicious activity, including extensive device and domain discovery, and the deployment of payloads like Cobalt Strike, web shells, botnets like Mirai and Kinsing, coin miners, and ransomware.

A mixed bag of attacks

Industrious malware authors really have been having a grand time of things with this vulnerability. As noted by Microsoft, several varied approaches to compromise and exploitation are being used. AvosLocker Ransomware and Linux botnets are getting in on the action. Cryptomining jumping on the bandwagon is an inevitability across most scams we see, and this is no exception.

Microsoft also noticed the Confluence vulnerability being exploited to download and deploy Cerber2021 ransomware. The Record observed that Cerber2021 is a “relatively minor player”, with both Windows and Linux versions used to lock up machines. Here’s an example of the ransomware, via MalwareHunterTeam:

Having the fixes to address this issue is great, but organisations need to actually make use of them. This is still a serious problem for anyone using unpatched versions of affected Confluence installations.

If you don’t want to run the gauntlet of APT groups, cryptomining chancers, botnets and more, the message is loud and clear: get on over to the Confluence Download Archives and patch immediately.

The post “Multiple adversaries” exploiting Confluence vulnerability, warns Microsoft appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

What would you do if a friend of yours set up a NSFW account, and then used it to follow you on Instagram? Would you check it out?

We recently learned of a group of friends who had to ask themselves exactly that. Fortunately, they realised that something was off. The account wasn’t the real owner’s, it just used her identity and left her with a mess to clean up.

We learned about the scam from Malwarebytes’ former social media guru, Amanda, who was one of its targets. She graciously allowed us to use her screenshots in this article in the interests of teaching others about the scam.

It started with Amanda’s real Instagram account, her name, her pictures, and her followers. The scammers used them to create a simple “NSFW” Instagram account designed to look like it belonged to her, and then tried to lure her friends into visiting it by following them.

Friends who checked out the new account saw a face they recognised in a context they didn’t: An Instagram account that promised it’s “NOT SAFE FOR WORK” and “FOR YOUR EYES ONLY”. The public account had no posts, just a story with another stolen picture and a caption urging visitors to “VISIT MY PROFILE ON NAKED SITE”, where they were promised access to a limited number of slots for “exclusive content”. The profile included the URL of a Wix.com website that described itself as “my secret account”.

Scammers know that their websites are unlikely to stay up for long before being blocked, so services like Wix that make it easy to create professional-looking sites quickly, for free, are used to create “burner” websites that are here today and gone tomorrow.

The site featured another photo stolen from Amanda’s Instagram account as its profile picture, surrounded by NSFW and pornographic stock art.

Of course, this wasn’t a “secret account”, there were no “FREE LIVE SHOWS”, and there was no “private content”. In fact there was barely a site. There was just enough to lure in anybody whose curiosity had got the better of their critical thinking skills.

Click on a link (any link at all) and you’d end up at a different domain, at an unbranded “age verification” page hungry for an email, username, and password, so you could “JOIN NOW”.

If you’d found yourself here and wondered why it looks nothing like the site you started on, the clue is in the URL: The long SID parameter is likely an affiliate code. This tells the owner of this site which affiliate sent the traffic here (and who they should pay for providing it). The affiliate stole Amanda’s identity to get you here, but the owners of this site may not know about that, and may not care.

Eagle-eyed readers will also have noticed that an email, username, and password don’t say anything about how old you are, and this rabbit hole didn’t end here.

What the scammers really wanted, all they ever wanted, was your credit card number. Underneath the bold “Free Verification” banner, the small print reveals what this is really all about—tricking people into joining expensive subscription services.

Your access to Nightly Encounter includes a 2 day free trial promo to Locating Someone Special Nearby. If you choose to remain a member of Locating Someone Special Nearby beyond the trial period, your membership will renew at thirty nine ninety nine.

Fortunately for us, a fake credit card was enough to get us through the door and explore a bit further without rewarding the scammers.

If you’d got this far, the scammers would have known a number of very important pieces of information about you. Your ID and credit card details, obviously, but also something else that’s valuable too—that you are willing to hand those things over.

And if they got you to do it once, why not try to do it again?

Handing over your credit card wouldn’t get you to the long-ago promised NSFW content starring your friend, or even Nightly Encounter or Locating Someone Special Nearby, whatever they are.

Instead, you’d find yourself on a different site, entering yet another username, password and email into a different “Secure Billing Platform” so another affiliate gets paid for serving you up on a platter.

Your reward? Another request for your credit card details, for another subscription you didn’t need.

At this point (and to no small relief) our fake credit card details lost their magical powers of persuasion and would couldn’t go any further.

It’s not unusual for victims to double down as doubts start to creep in, and the scammers are ready to squeeze every last penny, and every last vestige of hope, from their victims.

If you are the victim of an ID theft like this, report the scam accounts and sites to the platforms operating them. The Instagram account used in this scam is gone and, to its huge credit, Wix removed the scam site within literal seconds of being alerted to it.

If photos you own are used without your permission then the scammer has violated your copyright. You can take action by filling in a DMCA takedown form.

Unfortunately we can’t offer you much for the shock and alarm of finding your public persona twisted by scammers in search of a few affiliate dollars, but you have our sympathy.

The post Instagram scam steals your selfies to trick your friends appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), together with CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) and other federal agencies, recently released a joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA) about the Karakurt data extortion group (also known as Karakurt Team and Karakurt Lair).

Like RansomHouse, Karakurt doesn’t bother encrypting data. Instead, it just steals the data and demands a ransom. If the victim organization refuses to pay up, the stolen data is auctioned off or leaked to the public for anyone to scrape and misuse for personal gain.

One may wonder why federal agencies decided to focus on Karakurt when it is a relatively obscure group. It has no prolific attacks attributed to it and doesn’t appear to have a high number of attacks under its belt.

According to Bleeping Computer, Karakurt is said to be the “data extortion arm” of the Conti ransomware syndicate. Further evidence from two blockchain traffic firms, Chainalysis and Tetra Defense, can back this up. In a report last month, they assessed “with a high degree of confidence” that Karakurt is “operationally linked to both Conti and Diavol ransomware groups”.

Karakurt extortion group

The Karakurt group got its name from a type of black widow spider. Researchers have pointed out that the group liken its extortion tactics to a karakurt spider’s bite.

Karakurts poison is very toxic and dangerous. Don't waste your time.
What would you do? Of course you will have to take an antidote.
In your situation it means that you still have a chance to survive. But it will cost as double.
All you need is to accept our terms and conditions without any sort of bargain.

The NCC Group’s Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT) spotlighted Karakurt activities in February 2022. However, Karakurt, known initially as the Karakurt Hacking Team (KHT), has been around since June 2021. This also marked the creation of domains and accounts associated with the group, namely its dump sites and, later on, its Twitter account in August 2021.

Per a report from Accenture Security, Karakurt wasn’t actively extorting until September 2021. After two months, the extortion group had already bagged 40 organizations across multiple industries. However, experts from Digital Shadows seem to dispute this number, claiming that the victim number is more than 80.

Regarding victimization, it’s clear that Karakurt isn’t picky with what to target. Regarding target locations, the extortion group prefers small organizations based in the US, the UK, Canada, and Germany.

The extortion group targets organizations using single-factor Fortigate VPN (Virtual Private Network) servers using legitimate Active Directory credentials. It is unknown how the group obtains these credentials; however, it’s no surprise that they get administrative access and privileges on compromised servers.

From there, Karakurt can use the various tools it has at its disposal. Depending on the goals, the group can do a “living off the land” approach in its tactics, toolset, and intrusion techniques. It can also use common post-exploit tools like Cobalt Strike, AnyDesk, and Mimikatz.

Once Karakurt has the data it wants to exfiltrate, it uses 7zip and WinZip to compress the files before sending them to Mega.io via FileZilla or Rclone.

Karakurt demands a ransom ranging from $25,000 to $13M in Bitcoin. The payment deadline is typically seven days after the victim contacts the extortion group.

Splintering into cells

Ransomware groups have been undergoing a new phase for a few months now. If they’re not splitting into smaller groups (“cells”) to join other criminal groups, they are rotating their use of malware to avoid the growing US sanctions and pressure from law enforcement.

Since the US officially sanctioned Evil Corp, the Russian group behind the Dridex banking Trojan, things started changing, both on the side of ransomware victims and affiliates that use ransomware. Victims began refusing to pay to comply with sanctions, and these groups started rotating the use of ransomware variants in their campaigns to avoid getting associated with a sanctioned group.

With Conti “gone,” a splintering also happened within the syndicate. Researchers from Advanced Intel have data showing members of the former ransomware syndicate dispersing from the core group to join smaller ransomware groups.

Conti is not affiliated with Evil Corp, but both groups are in a similar bind that affects their profit margins but not enough to make them completely give up a criminal life. Unfortunately, members and affiliates gain from splintering and distancing themselves from these groups.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Goody, Mandiant’s director of cybercrime analysis, said that these changes obscured Evil Corp hackers’ identities “at the point of attack, throwing off investigators and sanction-compliant victim companies”. The same can be said about former actors associated with the Conti syndicate.

Keep Karakurt away from your network and data

We advise organizations to prioritize mitigating steps to keep extortion groups like Karakurt from successfully infiltrating your network. Here are some ways to do that.

• Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) in every business access point, including single-factor VPN access
• Ensure that all domain control servers are kept updated with the latest patches
• Disable unused ports
• Install an efficient and effective endpoint security solution that focuses on a layered approach to protecting systems and business assets
• Create and implement a recovery plan (if your business doesn’t have one already), including how to maintain and retain backups
• Segment your network to keep bad guys from reaching destinations that house your organization’s most sensitive and proprietary data
• Audit high-privileged accounts regularly

The federal agencies have more mitigation points in the advisory, which you can find here.

Stay safe!

The post Karakurt extortion group: Threat profile appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) found an attack surface in a hardware-level security mechanism utilized in Apple M1 chips. The flaw is unpatchable, but attackers would need to chain it with other vulnerabilities to make use of the attack method.

The hardware attack can bypass Pointer Authentication (PAC) on the Apple M1 CPU. The researchers gave a brief description on a dedicated site and will present full details on June 18, 2022 at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

The M1 chip

Until the recently announced M2, the M1 chip was the most powerful chip that Apple had created. The Apple M1 series of ARM-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) works as a central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) for Apple’s Macintosh desktops and notebooks, as well as the iPad Pro and iPad Air tablets.

Macs and PCs normally incorporate several chips for their Central Processing Unit (CPU), Input/Output (I/O), and security. The M1 was the first SoC for Macs that combined these technologies, which led to better integration and improved performance and power usage.

Security

The researchers have dubbed it PACMAN, a vulnerability in what they call the last line of security for the M1 chip. The flaw could theoretically give threat actors a door to gain full access to the core operating system kernel.

Both the researchers and Apple stated there is no cause for immediate alarm, since the system under attack needs to have an existing memory corruption bug to exploit the vulnerability.

PAC

The PAC in PACMAN is short for pointer authentication codes. The PAC is a cryptographic signature that confirms that an app wasn’t maliciously altered. With pointer authentication enabled, bugs that could normally compromise a system or leak private information are stopped dead in their tracks.

This feature makes it much harder for an attacker to inject malicious code into a device’s memory and provides a level of defense against buffer overflow exploits. A buffer overflow is a type of software vulnerability that exists when an area of memory within a software application reaches its address boundary and writes into an adjacent memory region.

The researchers found a vulnerability which allows PACMAN to find out the PAC. To understand how they pulled this off we need to understand speculative execution. The computer processor guesses several directions a computation may go in by using a technique called speculative execution. To use an analogy, they do this to have the answers ready for several following questions.

How it fails

The idea behind pointer authentication is that if all else has failed, you still can rely on it to prevent attackers from gaining control of your system. But the researchers found that the number of possible PACs has its limits and by using speculative execution they could use a trial and error method without causing any crashes. This allowed them to brute-force the PAC value without triggering any alams.

Another advantage that speculative execution provides an attacker with is that there is no known way of finding out whether your system is or has been the victim of such an attack.   

More targets

The PACMAN attack combines a software attack with a hardware attack to exploit a flaw in a security feature. The researchers expressed that they expect to see more attacks of this type in the future. This particular attack, while it was only tested against the M1 chip, is expected to work in a similar way on every architecture that uses PAC.

Apple has implemented pointer authentication on all of its custom ARM-based silicon so far, including the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max, and a number of other chip manufacturers, including Qualcomm and Samsung, have either announced or expect to ship new processors supporting the PAC security feature.

Mitigation

Current users of M1 based systems don’t need to take immediate action at this point.

Apple thanked the researchers for their work and for sharing their findings. Apple gave the following comment:

“Based on our analysis as well as the details shared with us by the researchers, we have concluded this issue does not pose an immediate risk to our users and is insufficient to bypass operating system security protections on its own.”

Since the PACMAN attack only works when chained with an existing bug and exploits the hardware architecture there is not much a user can do but be vigilant. Since the hardware mechanisms used by PACMAN cannot be patched with software features, memory corruption bugs can be, so those are the ones to look out for.

The post Don’t panic! “Unpatchable” Mac vulnerability discovered appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• FBI warns of scammers soliciting donations for Ukraine
• Microsoft autopatch is here…but can you use it?
• Prometheus ransomware’s flaws inspired researchers to try to build a near-universal decryption tool
• Rotten apples banned from App store
• Hackers can take over accounts you haven’t even created yet
• Ransomware Task Force priorities see progress in first year
• Coffee app in hot water for constant tracking of user location
• SSNDOB stolen data marketplace shut down by global law enforcement operation
• 5 Linux malware families SMBs should protect themselves against
• Awful 4chan chat bot spouts racial slurs and antisemitic abuse
• MakeMoney malvertising campaign adds fake update template
• Apple’s passkeys attempt to solve the password problem
• Update now! Patch against vulnerabilities in Meeting Owl Pro and Whiteboard Owl devices
• BlackBasta is the latest ransomware to target ESXi virtual machines on Linux
• Facebook users targeted in massive phishing campaign
• ASyncRat surpasses Dridex, TrickBot and Emotet to become dominant email threat
• Cloud data breaches: 4 biggest threats to cloud storage security
• WhatsApp spam offers up “B&Q Father’s Day Contest 2022”

Stay safe!

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Dutch research group DIVD has identified multiple vulnerabilities in ITarian products. In cooperation with DIVD, ITarian has made patches available to deal with these vulnerabilities for its SaaS platform.

Software as a service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which a cloud provider hosts applications and makes them available to end users over the internet.

ITarian

ITarian is a remote access and IT management solution, which helps organizations connect and communicate with their clients and employees. It’s typically the sort of tool that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) use to remotely manage their clients.

DIVD

The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) reports vulnerabilities it finds in digital systems to the people who can fix them. It has a global reach, and tries to resolve the vulnerabilities by collaborating with the affected parties. Its services are free and most of the staff work in their free time.

You may have heard about DIVD in our reports about the Kaseya supply chain attack, or when Victor Gevers, chair of DIVD, appeared as a guest in our Lock and Code podcast about Kaseya.

Affected products

The vulnerabilities affect the following products:

• ITarian SaaS platform (version < 3.49.0): CVE-2022-25151,  CVE-2022-25152 and a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the helpdesk function.
• ITarian on-premise (version 6.35.37347.20040): CVE-2022-25151 and CVE-2022-25152.
• Endpoint Manager Communication Client (version < 7.0.42012.22030): CVE-2022-25153

The vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-25151: Within the Service Desk module of the ITarian platform (both SaaS and on-premise), a remote attacker can obtain sensitive information, caused by the failure to set the HTTP Only flag. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to gain access to the management interface by using this vulnerability in combination with a successful XSS attack on a user.

CVE-2022-25152: The ITarian platform (both SaaS and on-premise) offers the possibility to run code on agents via a function called procedures. It is possible to require a mandatory approval process. Due to a vulnerability in the approval process, present in any version prior to 6.35.37347.20040, a malicious actor, with a valid session token, can create a procedure, bypass approval, and execute the procedure. This results in the ability for any user with a valid session token to perform arbitrary code execution and full system take-over on all agents.

CVE-2022-25153: The ITarian Endpoint Manage Communication Client, prior to version 6.43.41148.21120, is compiled using insecure OpenSSL settings. Due to this setting, a malicious actor with low privileges access to a system can escalate his privileges to SYSTEM abusing an insecure openssl.conf lookup.

OpenSSL is an open source implementation of the SSL/TLS protocol. Applications use this library to secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping, or to identify the party at the other end.

Cooperation and responsible disclosure

The consequences of these vulnerabilities could have been severe. By chaining the XSS in the helpdesk function with CVE-2022-25152, an attacker would theoretically be able to create a service desk ticket that, when viewed by a user with a valid session token, would execute a workflow on all clients with superuser privileges.

It took a bit of back and forth, but once the DIVD researchers and ITarian’s software engineering team connected directly, a solution for the issues quickly came about. On 18 Feb 2022, the vulnerability in the Endpoint Manager Communications Client was resolved. The other vulnerabilities saw a solution come to live on May 19, 2022.

Planning for the full disclosure by DIVD indicates a date of July 1, 2022. The waiting time before full disclosure is to give users enough time to take appropriate measures.

Mitigation

Version v3.49.0 includes patches for the vulnerabilities in the SaaS service. ITarian controls the upgrade to this version, so it requires no user action.

It is important to note that CVE-2022-25151 and CVE-2022-25152 are still present in the on-premise version of the ITarian platform. Even though ITarian still offers the software for download, this version of the software was discontinued over 2 years ago and ITarian has informed DIVD that it will not be updated. Given the severity (9.9 out of 10) of the vulnerability listed as CVE-2022-25152, users of the on-premise version should look for alternative solutions since this solution has reached end-of-life (EOL).

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