IT NEWS

A student friend recently shared a WhatsApp message, unsure if it was scam. The message claims to offer an easy to route to free visas, housing, accommodation, and medicine access.

Here’s how we know it was a scam, and where it lead.

It read as follows:

UK GOVERNMENT JOB RECRUITMENT 2022: This is open to all Individuals who wants to work in UK, Here is a great chance for you all to work conveniently in the UK. UK needs over 132,000 workers in 2022. Over 186,000 Jobs are Open for applying. THE PROGRAM COVERS: Travel expense. Housing. Accommodation. Medical facilities. Applicant must be 16 years or above. Can speak basic English. BENEFIT OF THE PROGRAM: Instant work permit. Visa application assistance. All nationalities can apply. Open to all individuals and students who want to work and study. Apply here [url removed]

As you might suspect, there’s multiple red flags in the above claims for anyone considering signing up.

The bogus visa claim checklist

The site gives the impression of being operated by UK Visas and Immigration, and repeats some of the errors and red flags from the WhatsApp message.

It said:

We are urgently looking for foreigners to apply for the thousands of jobs already available in the United Kingdom. This application is free and upon approval you will be given a work permit, visa, plane tickets and accommodation in the UK for free.

With even the most cursory of glances, the claims on this website simply don’t add up. Let’s dissect some of them:

1. UKVI applications all begin here, on a gov.uk address. This scam site is not hosted on a gov.uk address.
2. The Home Office does not cover the cost of flights or accomodation for visa applicants coming to the UK.
3. There is no free access to medical services in the UK. Visa holders pay an annual immigration health surcharge to access NHS services. This is paid upfront at visa application time.
4. The minimum age requirement for a skilled work visa is 18, not “16 years or above”.
5. In most cases, applicants need to be able to demonstrate English ability through one of several available qualifications, not just “can speak basic English”.
6. You won’t get an “Instant work permit” without paying an additional fee to make use of same day / next day processing.

It’s website quiz time

The site posed two questions, including marital and employment status. It then asks for first and last name, email address, and phone number. No matter what I entered, or even if I left all the form elements blank, I always got the following message:

After checking your applications, You have been approved to work in the United Kingdom 2022

I most certainly had not. It continued:

–Your UK VISA FORM will be available immediately after you click the “Invite Friends/Group” button below to share this information with 15 friends or 5 groups on WhatsApp so That They Can Also be Aware of the PROGRAM.

Unlike other sites along the same lines, this one didn’t check if I really was sending the link to people on WhatsApp, so I faked it. Did I get my visa after “sharing” the scam?

No, I did not.

A distinct lack of visa forms

The clue is definitely in the title. Instead of the promised form, I was greeted by the following message:

To facilitate the downloading of your UK VISA FORM you must complete this final step of Nationality Verification!

1.Click the Continent you are from and complete the given tasks, verification is by phone number or downloading, registering e.t.c.

(Remember, this step is very important, add your phone number to verify)

Do not skip any step..

I think my favourite part about all of this is that they used the logo for VISA, the financial multinational corporation. At this point, why not?

Of redirects and surveys

Whether I choose “Africa” or “Other Continent”, I was directed to several sites selling drones and watches or asking for mobile numbers, alongside yet more quizzes. The visa forms? Not so much.

While digging around for more information on the site involved in this, I came across this article from the last day or so. Clearly, this site is doing the rounds in WhatsApp circles. There’s also some additional UK visa-related scams listed there too, one of which was bouncing around a few months ago. All in all, this is yet another “if it’s too good to be true” escapade and should be avoided.

The post “Free UK visa” offers on WhatsApp are fakes appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

In the digital era, freedom is inextricably linked to privacy. After a good start, the Internet-enabled, technological revolution we are living through has hit some bumps in the road. We have already lost a lot of control over who and what has access to our data, and there are further threats to our freedom on the horizon.

It doesn’t have to be that way though, and it is not inevitable that the trend will continue. To celebrate Independence Day we want to draw your attention to five technologies that could improve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on the Internet.

The technologies are listed in a rough order of simplest, soonest, and most likely to happen, to most complex, furthest out, and least likely to happen.

DNS encryption

DNS encryption plugs a gap that makes it easy to track the websites you visit.

The domain name system (DNS) is a distributed address book that lists domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. When you visit a website, your browser sends a request to a DNS resolver, which responds with the IP address of the domain you’re visiting. The request is sent in plain text, which is the computer networking equivalent of yelling the names of all the websites you’re visiting out loud.

Anyone, or anything, on the same local network as you can see your DNS lookups, as can your ISP, which will happily sell your browsing history to the highest bidder. And any machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attackers between you and the DNS resolver—such as rogue Wi-Fi access points—can also silently change your plain text DNS requests and use them to direct you to malicious websites.

DNS encryption restores your privacy by making it impossible for anything other than the DNS resolver to read and respond to your queries. You still have to trust the resolver you send your requests to, but the eavesdroppers are out in the cold.

DNS encryption is new, and still relatively rare, but it is supported natively by modern versions of Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, as well as a number of different DNS clients, proxies and applications, including the DNS Filtering module for the Malwarebytes Nebula platform. It’s ascendancy seems assured.

Passwordless authentication

Passwordless authentication could usher in a world where we no longer rely on passwords, and that could be an enormous, unabashed win for security and peace of mind. The trouble is, that has been true for a very long time indeed, and it hasn’t happened yet.

There is reason to hope that things are finally about change though.

Passwords are a great idea in theory that fail horribly in practice. Humans are poorly equipped to create and remember them, and demonstrably poor at building systems that handle them securely. And yet almost every Internet account requires one. The inevitable result is an epidemic of poor passwords and an entire criminal industry preying on them with relentless automated attacks.

For a long time, the successor to the password was widely presumed to be some form of biometric authentication—such as face or fingerprint recognition—but nobody could agree which one. With multiple novel, competing, costly, and incompatible alternatives, passwords remained the clear winner.

The solution to that gridlock was FIDO2.

FIDO2 is a specification that uses public key encryption for authentication. This allows users to log in to websites without sharing a secret that needs to be secured like a password. There is nothing for a programmer to secure, nothing for an attacker to guess, and nothing that can be stolen in a data breach.

The sensitive encrpytion work all happens on a device owned by the user, which can be a specialist hardware key, a phone, a laptop, or any other compatible device. FIDO2 doesn’t specify what the device is, or how it should be secured, only that a user must make a “gesture” to approve the authentication. This leaves device manufacturers free to use whatever “gesture” works best for them: PIN numbers, swipe patterns, and any and all forms of biometrics. The end result is a technology that allows you to log in to a website securely using Windows Hello, Apple’s Touch ID, and any number of other methods that exist now or could be created in the future.

Passwordless authentication is possible today but still extremely rare. However, it took a big step forward in May this year when Google, Microsoft, and Apple made simultaneous, coordinated pledges to increase their adoption of the FIDO2 standard.

Onion networking

Onion networking, the technology behind Tor and the “dark web”, has been around for twenty years, so it might seem an odd candidate for an emerging technology that could change everything—but what if that’s just because we’ve been thinking about it the wrong way?

Tor is a network of servers that allows software clients (like web browsers) and services (like websites) to communicate securely and anonymously. Although the software is extremely good at what it does, today it services a narrow niche of users who put privacy and security above all, and it has become strongly associated with ransomware, illegal drug markets, and other forms of unsavoury criminal activity.

According to security evangelist Alec Muffett, we are overlooking a very important aspect of this technology though. Muffett was previously a security engineer at Facebook, where he was responsible for putting the social network on Tor. Speaking to David Ruiz on a recent Malwarebytes Lock and Code podcast, he explained how he sees Tor as “a brand new networking stack for the Internet” that can “guarantee integrity, and privacy, and unblockability of communication.”

Every Tor address is also the cryptographic public key of the service you want to talk to. For example, the Facebook address is:

www.facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion

Having the public key act as the address provides cryptographic assurance that you are talking to the service you want to talk to, bypassing several layers of the OSI model, and cutting out fundamental Internet vulnerabilities, such as BGP hijacking.

We should stop thinking about Tor as just an anonymity tool, says Muffet. It should be attractive to anyone who cares about the integrity of their brand and what it has to say:

If you are in the position of providing a forum, a messenger service, or news to a mass public … where your brand name is a really important part of your value proposition, then onion networking is for you, because you can make sure that no one can mess with your traffic.

Alec Muffet speaking to Lock and Code.

Although mainstream organizations like The New York Times, Pro Publica, Facebook, and Twitter have already embraced Tor, having a .onion site is still very much the exception. In all likelihood, it will take something quite dramatic to change that, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

In 2013, Edward Snowden’s revelations about pervasive Internet surveillance triggered a huge gobal effort to make encrypted web traffic the norm, rather than the exception.

A similar stimulus today could tip onion networking from its niche into the mainstream.

Cryptocurrencies

People may be surprised to see cryptocurrencies appearing in our list. If cryptotrading sites are naming stadia and buying superbowl ads then cryptocurrencies are already mainstream and hardly a technology for the future, surely.

Its presence near the bottom of our list tells you that isn’t how we see it.

Cryptocurrencies face a number of cyclone-force headwinds, starting with the current, across-the-board, price crash. The market cap of the biggest currencies, Bitcoin and Ether, is shrinking fast, and some cryptocurrencies have already disappeared completely; the free flow of venture capital money is likely to dry up; there are issues with scalability, scams, rug pulls, thefts from exchanges, and environmental damage; and the pseudo-anonymity blockchains provide is challenged by our ever-improving capacity to identify patterns in payments.

More importantly, from the perspective of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, almost nobody is using these currencies as actual currencies—nobody is paid in Bitcoin, and nobody is using Ether to buy groceries. Remember, Bitcoin was supposed to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system not a vehicle for speculative trading.

So why is it on our list at all?

For all the reasons to dislike them or write them off, cryptocurrencies are hard to ignore. At its core, the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was supposed to be a trustless, borderless payment system that was built on top of the Internet.

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

“Satoshi Nakamoto”, from Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

It was a vision of what freedom might look like in the digital age.

That desire for freedom propelled Bitcoin it in its early days, and the attractiveness of a private, peer-to-peer currency is undimmed, even if nobody has managed to actually build one that works yet.

The current crash will pass and the strongest ideas and technology will survive. We suspect that Satoshi’s original vision will be one of them, even if Bitcoin isn’t.

Homomorphic encryption

The cornerstone of digital privacy, security, and freedom is encryption, and the last item in our list is one of its holy grails: Encryption that never needs to be undone.

Encryption protects your data if your phone is stolen, and it makes your emails, credit card details, and WhatsApp messages tamper proof as they whizz around the Internet. And it’s what underpins all of the other things in our list.

And all of the examples above have something in common: They are either examples of encryption that’s used to protect data at rest, or data that’s in transit. Moving or storing data only gets you so far though, sooner or later it has to be used. It can’t be used unless it’s decrypted, and you need to trust whatever system has access to that decrypted data.

Homomorphic encryption algorithms allow mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data, so that it doesn’t need to be decrypted at all, ever, even when it’s being used.

The result of performing a mathematical operation on the encrypted data is the same as if the data was decrypted, subject to a mathematical operation, and the answer encrypted.

This incredible act of needle threading needs to ensure that you can’t learn anything about the data from the ciphertext (the encrypted version of the data), and that you can’t learn anything at all about it by observing the mathematical operations performed on it.

If you had access to homomorphic encryption you wouldn’t have to trust anyone you share your data with, whether they are the vendors in your organization’s supply chain, or your favorite, data-hungry social network.

Almost unbelievably, homomorphic encryption algorithms already exist. The reason you don’t have access to their almost magical properties though is that they are prohibitively slow. It currently takes days for them to perform actions that we expect to take seconds.

Although slow, these algorithms are already millions of times quicker than they were just a few years ago. And while that rate of improvement will surely decelerate, the processing power of computers is still doubling every few years.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, when these two trends meet, it could change how we think about trust and freedom in the digital age completely.

The post 5 pro-freedom technologies that could change the Internet appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Two insiders and an accomplice were indicted on Tuesday for multiple counts of fraud. According to documents unsealed by the Wester District of Oaklahoma, a grand jury charged Raymond Bradley Pearce (aka Brad Pearce), a former employee of Avaya; Dusti O. Pearce, his wife; and Jason M. Hines (aka Joe Brown, aka Chad Johnson, aka Justin Albaum), a former Avaya authorized reseller, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 13 counts of wire fraud. The court also charged the Pearces with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering.

Avaya is a business-to-business (B2B) communications company catering to small- and medium-sized businesses. It sold a product called IP Office, a kind of telephone system, that depended on software licenses to fully use its features, such as voicemail or more telephones.

These licenses were generated within Avaya and sold via authorized distributors and resellers. Avaya required each software license to be linked to a physical flash memory card with a unique serial number. This card had to be plugged into a computer to activate the license.

Avaya introduced Avaya Cloud Office in 2020 and replaced IP Office. However, many businesses worldwide continue to use the latter through license renewals.

Per the indictment, Brad Pearce, a former Avaya customer service employee, abused his administrator privileges to create software license keys and sell them to Jason Hines, a de-authorized reseller, and other customers. They then sold the keys to other resellers and end-users globally.

Pearce also hijacked accounts of former Avaya employees to generate more license keys and draw suspicion away from him. He also used his privileges to conceal evidence that such accounts were generating keys, leaving Avaya in the dark for years.

Dani Pearce allegedly took the accountant and financial manager role in their illegal business operation.

Hines, who operated Direct Business Services International (DBSI), presumably sold the licenses at a much lower price than Avaya’s standard wholesale price. This caused an estimated $88 million in financial damage to Avaya.

All money the Pearces received went to multiple PayPal accounts, bounced to different bank accounts, and then routed to investment accounts. The document further revealed the couple invested in valuable items and large quantities of gold bullion.

According to the fourth installment of the annual insider threats report released by Proofpoint and the Ponemon Institute, insider threat incidents have increased in frequency and cost. Of the more than 6,000 incidents they looked into, 26 percent of them are criminal insiders, the category Pearce and Hines might belong to.

The report, if anything, paints a harrowing picture of the increased risk of insider threats. And non-enterprise organizations aren’t immune to it. More than ever, it is essential for companies of all sizes to take action to reduce this risk.

Combatting insider threats

Every organization should acquaint itself with the differet types of insider threats they might have to deal with. Controlling insider threats includes (but is not limited to):

• Identifying risks that may be unique to your industry.
• Assigning access rights according to the principle of least privilege.
• Propper logging and auditing of user activity.

Lastly, organizations should also refer to the common sense guide to mitigating insider threats. A thorough but non-exhaustive list of insider threat references on the same site.

Stay safe!

The post Insider Threat: Employees indicted for stealing $88 million of license keys appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

When Lock and Code host David Ruiz talks to hackers—especially good-faith hackers who want to dutifully report any vulnerabilities they uncover in their day-to-day work—he often hears about one specific law in hushed tones of fear: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, is a decades-old hacking law in the United States whose reputation in the hacker community is dim. To hear hackers tell it, the CFAA is responsible not only for equipping law enforcement to imprison good-faith hackers, but it also for many of the legal threats that hackers face from big companies that want to squash their research.

The fears are not entirely unfounded.

In 2017, a security researcher named Kevin Finisterre discovered that he could access sensitive information about the Chinese drone manufacturer DJI by utilizing data that the company had inadvertently left public on GitHub. Conducting research within rules set forth by DJI’s recently announced bug bounty program, Finisterre took his findings directly to the drone maker. But, after informing DJI about the issues he found, he was faced not with a bug bounty reward, but with a lawsuit threat alleging that he violated the CFAA.

Though DJI dropped its interest, as Harley Geiger, senior director for public policy at Rapid7, explained on today’s episode of Lock and Code, even the threat itself can destabilize a security researcher.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, we speak with Geiger about other hacking laws can be violated when conducting security researcher, how hackers can document their good-faith intentions, and the Department of Justice’s recent decision to not prosecute hackers who are only hacking for the benefits of security.

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

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

The post When good-faith hacking gets people arrested, with Harley Geiger: Lock and Code S03E14 appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

The vulnerability disclosure platform HackerOne has revealed that one of their staff members had improperly accessed security reports for personal gain.

The—now former—staff member approached HackerOne customers with vulnerabilities that belonged to users of the platform.

HackerOne

HackerOne acts as a mediator between white hat hackers that find software vulnerabilities, and software vendors who want to know about weaknesses in their products. The vendors let HackerOne take care of the first steps after a vulnerability is discovered in their software. The hackers submit detailed reports to be evaluated and triaged by HackerOne.

Generally you will see the platform referred to as a bug bounty program, because part of the business entails paying rewards to the white hat hackers that find new vulnerabilities.

Disclosure

Responsible disclosure is one of the pillars of trust that platforms like HackerOne are built upon. The vendors trust that the found vulnerabilities will remain secret until they have had a chance to fix or patch them. That is, after all, how the platform contributes to a safer internet. And the bug bounty hunters rely on the platform to negotiate a fair reward for their efforts.

Having someone in your staff that steals ideas from one side and tries to monetize them on the other side breaks that trust on both sides.

What happened?

On June 22, 2022, a customer asked HackerOne to investigate a suspicious vulnerability disclosure made outside of the HackerOne platform. The vulnerability was suspiciously similar to one that was already under investigation. And the hacker, operating under the handle “rzlr” used intimidating language.

Bug collision, where two bug bounty hunters find the same vulnerability around the same time, happens on occasion, but the customer was able to convince HackerOne that this was not a coincidence.

According to HackerOne, it quickly became clear that this must have been an inside job, and a day after the customer’s inquiry HackerOne had a suspect on its radar. They terminated the suspect’s system access and remotely locked their laptop.

The company says it then managed to associate a HackerOne sockpuppet account to the suspected employee by following the money trail. The employee’s contract was terminated a week after the investigation started.

Vendors using HackerOne who have been contacted by someone using the handle “rzlr”, and who aren’t already coordinating with HackerOne, are urged to contact the company (for details on how, see HackerOne’s report of the incident).

It is believed that none of the vulnerabilities affected have been put to use in exploits, and that the insider’s actions have not affected any judgments or bounty amounts.

Customers who had any reports accessed by the threat actor have been contacted by HackerOne specifying what was accessed and when.

Lessons learned

HackerOne has been admirably transparent about the incident.

Since the founding of HackerOne, we have kept a steadfast commitment to disclosing security incidents because we believe that sharing security information far and wide is essential to building a safer internet.

It says it has identified several areas it intends to improve. It believes that better logging could improve its ability to respond to similar incidents in the future, and it is going to add additional employees dedicated to insider threats that will bolster detection, alerting, and response for business operations that require human access to disclosure data.

Perhaps least surprisingly it says it will also look to improve its hiring screening. Insider threats are one of the most insidious in cybersecurity. Especially in the business model of a negotiator where mutual trust at two sides of the business is of the essence.

The post HackerOne insider fired for trying to claim other people’s bounties appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Reversing Labs reports that the latest verison of AstraLocker ransomware is engaged in a a so-called “smash and grab” ransomware operation.

Smash and grab is all about maxing out profit in the fastest time. It works on the assumption by malware authors that security software or victims will find the malware quickly, so it’s better to get right to the end-game as quickly as possible. Adware bundles in the early 2000s capitalised on this approach, with revenue paid for dozens of adverts popping on desktops in as short a time as possible.

That smash and grab spirit lives on.

In a ransomware attack, criminals typically break into a victim’s network via a trojan that has already infected a computer, by exploiting a software vulnerability on an Internet-facing server, or with stolen Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) credentials. They then make their way silently to devices and servers where important data is stored. Anything of value is stolen and sent outside of the network. When the attacker is good and ready, ransomware is deployed, encrypting the files on the machines and rendering them useless. From here, double or even triple threat extortion (blackmail and the threat of data leakage) is deployed. This careful approach, which can sometimes take weeks, allows attackers to stop organisations dead in their tracks and demand multi-million dollar ransoms.

It is so successful that almost all major ransomware families are used in this way.

But AstraLocker is not a major ransomware family, and it doesn’t do this. (These two things may be connected.)

Click to run

In the attacks observed by Reversing Labs, AstraLocker just arrives and encrypts.

It starts life as a rogue Word document attachmed to an email. The payload lurking in the document is an embedded OLE object. Triggering the ransomware requires the victim to double click the icon within the document, which comes with a security warning. As researchers note, this isn’t as slick a process as the recent Follina vulnerability (which requires no user interaction), or even misusing macros (which some user interaction).

In its rush to encrypt, AstraLocker still manages to do some standard ransomware things: It tries to disable security programs; it also stops applications running that might prevent encryption from taking place; and it avoids virtual machines, which might indicate it’s being run by researchers in a lab.

The sense of this being a rushed job doesn’t stop there.

Reaffirming (and then breaking) the circle of trust

When decryption doesn’t happen, either because of a poor quality decryptor, or because no decryption process actually exists, the ransomware author’s so-called circle of trust is broken. Too many decryption misfires is bad for business. After all, why would victims pay up if there’s no chance of file recovery?

It’s interesting, then, that the following text is in AstraLocker 2.0’s ransom note:

What guarantees?
I value my reputation. If I do not do my work and liabilities, nobody will pay me. This is not in my interests. All my decryption software is perfectly tested and will decrypt your data.

So far, so good…you would think. Unfortunately, there’s a sting in the tail.

The cost of their decryption software is “about $50 USD”, payable via Monero or Bitcoin. There is some question as to who the author of this version of AstraLocker is, as the email addresses tied to the original campaign have been replaced. Unfortunately, this is where the circle of trust falls apart.

You can certainly pay the ransom with no problem whatsoever. That side of things, the making money side, works perfectly. The getting your files back side of things? Not so much. The new contact email address mentioned above is only partially included.

There is currently no way to ask the ransomware author for the decryption tool. Unless some sort of update is forthcoming, this is the quickest way you’ll ever lose both your files and $50.

Whether this is by accident or design, the circle of trust here is more of a downward curve.

The post AstraLocker 2.0 ransomware isn’t going to give you your files back appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence builds a monthly picture of ransomware activity by monitoring the information published by ransomware gangs on their Dark Web leak sites. This information represents victims who were successfully attacked but opted not to pay a ransom.

In June, LockBit was the most active ransomware, just as it has been all year. The month was also notable for the disappearance of Conti, and the large number of attacks by groups alleged to have links with the disbanded group.

The service industry remained the hardest hit industry sector, and the USA the most attacked country. The number of attacks in the USA continued to dwarf other countries, with more known victims than Canada and all the European countries in our list combined.

LockBit

Without fanfare, LockBit has become the dominant force in ransomware this year. Although there were fewer victims on its leak site in June than in May, it was still far ahead of its competition.

While Conti—“the costliest strain of ransomware ever documented,” according to the FBI—has spent 2022 making noisy pronouncements and digging itself out of a hole of its own making with a hair-brained scheme to fake its own death, LockBit has been all business.

Like all the ransomware in our review, LockBit is offered in the form of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS). Attacks are carried out by affiliates (“pen testers”) who pay the LockBit organization 20 percent of the ransoms they receive in return for using its software and services.

And while some ransomware gangs seem to want to tell the world what they think, and how great they are, LockBit seems to care more about what its users think. Its affiliate page begins with a statement that seems designed to contrast it with its nosiy Russian rival:

We are located in the Netherlands, completely apolitical and only interested in money.

Thereafter the page is peppered with people-pleasing language designed to signal the gang’s trustworthiness and willingness to listen. Affiliates are asked “if you do not find one of your favorite features, please inform us,” and told that “it is very important for us to know about all our strengths and weaknesses.” It says “we have never cheated anyone and always fulfill our agreements. Decrypter work, stolen data is deleted”

It is this combination of attractiveness to affiliates and an ability to avoid costly mistakes that seems to be behind its success this year.

This risk averse approach is nothing new. Out of an abundance of self interest, ransomware has always conspicuously avoided attacking targets in Russia and the Commonwealth of Indpednent States, for example. Attracting the attention of the three-letter agencies in Russia and the USA is simply bad for business.

Unusually, LockBit hit the headlines in June with some obvious publicity seeking. The gang launched LockBit 3.0, along with a new dark web site, and a bug bounty program promising rewards of up to $1 million for finding bugs in its website and software, submitting brilliant ideas, or successfully doxing the head of the gang’s affiliate program.

We invite all security researchers, ethical and unethical hackers on the planet to participate in our bug bounty program. The amount of remuneration varies from $1000 to $1 million.

Whether the group seriously intends to pay out these sums remains to be seen. If all it wanted from the announcement was to drum up some publicity, it has already succeeded. However, if it does intend to use bug bounties it improve its software and sharpen its approach then it could deprive law enforcement and security researchers of valuable tools and information.

Conti

As expected, the last public vestige of the Conti ransomware gang, its leak site, disappeared in June, after a few weeks of inactivity. As we reported in last month’s ransomware review, detailed research by Advintel in May suggested that the gang’s alignment with the Russian state in February had caused victims’ lawyers to warn against paying it ransoms, for fear of breaking sanctions.

When the group’s revenue dried up its leaders allegedly hatched a plot to retire the brand by dispersing its members into other ransomware gangs like BlackBasta, BlackByte, KaraKurt, Hive and ALPHV, and then faking its own death.

Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence was able to independently confirm that Conti sent an internal announcement about its retirement to affiliates at the end of May, and that its internal chat servers stopped working around the same time.

The leak site disappeared on June 22, 2022, and remains down.

The Conti shutdown has overlapped with the overnight arrival of BlackBasta in April and a big increase in activity (and the appearance of a new leak site) by KaraKurt in June. It may be a coincidence, but we note that last month the combined activity of BlackBasta, BlackByte, and KaraKurt reached Conti-like levels.

Trends

Most software, even malware, trends towards “feature completeness”—a point where adding new features adds little, if anything, to its usefulness. Ransomware has been more-or-less feature complete for a number of years, and most RaaS offerings have very similar capabilities.

Similarly, the way that ransomware is packaged and sold, and the ways that different affiliates break into networks and deploy ransomware vary little from one ransomware group to another, and evolve slowly.

The most active area of innovation in the last few years appears to be how gangs operate as a business, and in how they put pressure on victims to pay a ransom.

In June we saw some things we haven’t seen before: The LockBit gang offering bug bounties, and a leak site by the ALPHV group aimed at the staff and customers of a victim.

At least one ransomware gang has tried targeting executives at the top of companies in an effort to ramp up the pressure, but ALPHV’s targeting of employees and customers with a dedicated website is new. The site allowed guests and employees to explore the personal data ALPHV had stolen from them in the attack and, very unusually, the leak site was not on the dark web.

By putting the site on the regular web the gang made the information much more accessible to non-technical users, but without the protection of Tor it only lasted a few days before being taken down. The gang would certainly have known this would happen, but presumably it only had to last long enough to gather the attention it needed in order to impact negotiations.

Such innovation is nothing new—ransomware gangs experiment with new ideas all the time. The experiments that don’t work are forgotten and those that do are quickly copied by other gangs.

In this case the experiment appears to have been unsuccessful. The victim has since appeared on the main ALPHV dark web leak site, which normally indicates they have resisted the pressure to pay a ransom.

Malwarebytes protection

Malwarebytes can protect systems against all ransomware variants in several ways.

The Malwarebytes Anti-Malware technology detects malicious files, browser modifications, and system modifications on Windows PCs using a combination of signature-based and signatureless technologies.

For those already infected, Ransomware Rollback can help recover encrypted files within 72 hours of the attack. Rollback creates a local cache on the endpoint to store changes to files on the system. It can use this cache to help revert changes caused by a threat. The rollback feature is dependent on activity monitoring available in Malwarebytes Endpoint Detection and Response.

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Researchers are reporting the discovery of malware targeting YouTub content creators. The aim is to compromise accounts and then take over the victims’ channels completely.

The malware, dubbed YTStealer, has one game plan: Grabbing authentication cookies. A site gives you an authentication cookie when you log in, and your browser then uses it in place of a password until you log out. If somebody can steal the authentication cookie from your browser they can use it log into whatever website you’re using, as if they are you.

Armed with YouTube cookies, YTStealer plunders YouTube accounts, and their real owners have some customer support chats waiting in their immediate future.

Targeting interests

How do malware distributors reel in YouTube channel owners in the first place? Like so many of these scams, they promote a variety of bogus applications designed to lure victims. The rogue apps don’t just install YTStealer though, they also drop several other malicious files, depending on which installer is used. Vidar and RedLine may also be present.

Several popular (fake) versions of editing and design tools, which would naturally appeal to people in video circles, are on offer. Adobe Premiere Pro, HitFilm Express, and Filmora are some of the fake installers mentioned.

Games, too, are a popular revenue stream on YouTube with game streamers and reviewers galore. No surprise, then, that fake installers and cheats for titles like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto are along for the ride.

The final group of bogus files relate to imitation security products and supposed cracks for Discord Nitro and Spotify Premium.

System checks and balances

Once installed on a target machine, YTStealer performs some checks to see if its running inside of a virtual machine. This is to see if the malware is being analysed by security researchers. If detection takes place, files like YTStealer will typically terminate or become incredibly stubborn.

With this out of the way, YTStealer proceeds to harvest authentication cookies and fire up a browser in “headless” mode (a browser with no windows to look at). In other words: A silent, invisible browser. The victim is completely unaware of what’s happening. Swiped cookies are loaded into the phantom browser, which can now log in to YouTube as the victim.

The malware harvests the victim’s subscriber count, channel name, age of channel, verification status, and whether or not the channel is monetised. The data is collected, encrypted, and sent to the Command and Control (C2) server tied to the malware.

How to avoid malware aimed at Youtubers

• Scammers will target your interests, and try to interest you in cheap / free copies of software related to the content you create. Is a stranger really going to give you free editing tools worth a few hundred dollars? Almost certainly not. “If it sounds too good to be true,” and all that.
• Many of these files insist you turn off security protection prior to installing. Ask yourself why they’d want you to do this, and then make a sharp exit.
• Are they directing you to a YouTube channel of their own for the download links? Check the comments. Are they disabled? Is every single comment positive, and posted from new / low quality accounts? There’s a reason for that…
• Free cheat tools advertised on YouTube are not going to work. Bypassing anti-cheat protection in major video game titles is big business, and people pay to use these tools. Anything given away for free in this manner will do little beyond infect your system.

The post YTStealer targets YouTube content creators appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Organisations working in the immigration sector are advised to be on high alert for Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks. Bleeping Computer reports that European organisations, specifically, are under threat from the Evilnum hacking group.

Evilnum, on the APT scene since 2018 at the earliest and perhaps most well known for targeting the financial sector, appears to have switched gears.

In times of conflict

The observed attacks seem to have sprung into life on or around the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. This is quite worrying for several reasons:

• Immigration organisations in Europe are still impacted by the fallout from COVID-19. Additionally, Government immigration services continue to be non-functional or afflicted with severe delays in processing. The UK, which set up a dedicated visa for Ukrainian refugees, has experienced processing delays for unrelated visas of up to 6 months as a result of this project. Being targeted with malware could impact crucial services still further, putting people at risk.
• Huge amounts of sensitive data is passing to and from independent immigration organisations related to the invasion of Ukraine. Exfiltration of this data could put people both outside Ukraine and those still there at risk of significant harm.
• Many volunteer organisations have sprung up to support efforts related to Ukraine. Many of these have little to no funding and are being run by random groups of immigration lawyers with minimal experience of cybersecurity issues. This is, unfortunately, an area of potential rich pickings for attackers.

Important attack details

The APT group targeted an Intergovernmental organisation (IGO), an entity created via treaty which involves two or more nations to work on issues of common interest. This attack, then, is at the highest level in terms of immigration related impact.

It begins, as so many attacks do, with a targeted email containing a rogue attachment. Opening the attached Word document fires up a message which claims that the document was created in a later version of Microsoft Word. It explains how to enable editing in order to view the supposed content, typically called “Compliance” but also “Complaint” or “Proof of ownership”, among others.

Heavily obfuscated JavaScript decrypts and deposits an encrypted binary and a malware loader (which loads up the binary), and creates a scheduled task to keep things constantly ticking over. File system artefacts created during execution are designed to imitate legitimate Windows binary names, to assist in detection avoidance.

The aim here is to create a backdoor on infected systems. Machine snapshots are taken and sent back to base via POST requests, with exfiltrated data in encrypted form.

Cybersecurity, just from a different point of view

Refugees from Ukraine are being assisted by multiple organisations that were set up after the initial invasion. Lawyers helping to run these groups may not be fully immersed in cybersecurity. However, they follow strict rules and regulations with regard to client data by default. As a result, they’re often doing security-centric things to keep client data secure without perhaps noticing the crossover.

For example: Most immigration lawyer/client interactions in the UK currently are remote, partly due to COVID-19 and partly because the UK’s visa system is now almost entirely online. As a result, pretty much everything involving sensitive documentation begins life in the form of an email. This sounds bad at first glance; however, this isn’t the case. Lawyers and clients aren’t emailing important documents in plaintext. Instead, they’re making use of encrypted documents, secure file uploads, and deleting data as and when required.

Tips for immigration orgs

If you’re a small organisation looking to help with visa or refugee processes for Ukrainians fleeing the invasion, here’s some of the things you can make a start on now to help keep things secure:

• Ensure your website is HTTPs. Most sites I’ve seen in this realm use a combination of contact email and/or web form. You don’t want sensitive information intercepted because of insecure websites. As few people as possible should have admin access to the site, and anything related to publishing. Use as few extensions and plugins as possible. Paying for domain anonymity services is useful if required.
• Consider using an alias for public facing email addresses. Additionally, lock down all email addresses with multifactor authentication (MFA). The same goes for backup/recovery emails tied to the main account(s).
• If you have the choice of SMS codes or authentication apps/hardware based security keys for 2FA, choose the latter. SMS won’t work with no signal reception, and fraudsters may divert your SMS codes via SIM swapping.
• Consider using a password manager for organization-specific passwords. If you need to share logins, use a management tool which allows you to share logins without revealing the password itself. Should you land on a phishing site, your password manager won’t pre-fill your details into the bogus portal.

I’ve spoken to individuals from several UK-based immigration organisations, including those focused on helping Ukrainians. At this point, none of them report having been targeted by attacks similar to the above. However, those organisations are absolutely in the spotlight for anyone potentially up to no good. If you’re in this line of work, or you’re just getting started, consider where and how you can begin to get things locked down right now.

The post Immigration organisations targeted by APT group Evilnum appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

The FBI has warned businesses of an uptick in reports of criminals applying for remote work using deepfake and stolen PII (personally identifiable information).

A deepfake is essentially created or modified media (image, video, or audio), often with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Deepfake creations are designed to appear and sound as authentic as possible. Because of this, they’re difficult to spot unless you know what to look for.

Years of data breaches made millions of Americans’ identities available for anyone with ill intent to gather and use for personal gains. This time, criminals seem confident about pulling off a scheme that fully intends to sabotage or steal from companies that hire them while keeping their true identities intact.

Armed with compelling synthetic images and videos with legitimate PII, we can imagine criminals likely getting the job before pulling the wool over their employer’s eyes.

Most open positions identified in the report were in the technology field, such as IT (information technology), computer programming, database, and software. The FBI has also noted that some positions criminals are trying to fill would grant them access to PII, financial data, corporate databases, and proprietary information.

Fortunately for organizations, there is a glaring flaw to an otherwise masterful execution of deceit: the deepfakes the criminals use suffer from sync issues.

“Complaints report the use of voice spoofing, or potentially voice deepfakes, during online interviews of the potential applicants. In these interviews, the actions and lip movement of the person seen interviewed on-camera do not completely coordinate with the audio of the person speaking. At times, actions such as coughing, sneezing, or other auditory actions are not aligned with what is presented visually.”

~ FBI, PSA number I-062822-PSA

Misuse of stolen PII is spotted with a pre-employment background check. So even if an interviewer puts the desyncs in a deepfake video down to a dodgy connection, criminals won’t be able to escape findings from a standard background check.

TechCrunch said the most at-risk businesses from criminals entering the job market this way are startups and SaaS (software as a service) companies. This is because these potentially hold lots of data or access to it “but comparatively little security infrastructure compared with the enterprises they serve or are attempting to displace.”

If you’re worried that your data might be used to get criminals into the same sector as you are, there’s not much to do apart from remaining alert and keeping an eye out for strange emails or phone calls.

Stay safe!

The post Criminals are applying for remote work using deepfake and stolen identities, says FBI appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.