IT NEWS

Doxing (or doxxing) is in the news again, for an absolutely shocking story that ended with a man’s death caused by a swatting attack. If you don’t know what doxxing or swatting are, don’t worry. We’ll explain it all.

The doxing 101

Doxing someone is a technique going back to the 90s. Back then, everyone was typically very anonymous online and stripping that anonymity away was a powerful weapon.

I’d argue it really came to prominence in mainstream terms during the massive boom in social media. Bad people very quickly realised huge amounts of personal data was lurking on sites such as MySpace, just out of reach. Once obtained, chaos and mayhem were the inevitable end result. In that time period, roughly between 2007 to 2010, law enforcement was generally struggling to keep up. If you ended up in Internet trouble with trolls and / or doxers, you were essentially on your own.

Not a great position to be in.

The Swatting 101

Prank calls to emergency services have been around forever. The difference here is swatting calls come with the threat of injury or death. The technique involves calling emergency services and telling the operator someone is about to commit suicide, or a family is at risk from an intruder, or perhaps they’ve witnessed someone brandishing a weapon. Whatever it takes to get law enforcement to turn up expecting trouble.

The name swatting comes from the US-based Special Weapons and Tactics teams (SWAT) used to deal with violent and dangerous situations. Swatting became a go-to tactic in gaming circles. Aggrieved gamers would get busy doxing after fallouts over online matches, with inevitable consequences. As streaming is now a default for many gamers, more and more examples of swatting are caught on camera. Everyone from 12 year olds to people gaming in business premises are at risk.

The problem is so bad that law enforcement frequently create tactics to help mitigate the threat to innocent people. Real world pranking can range from mildly amusing to incredibly annoying, but the trouble is people can and do take it to extremes. Swatting is, as you’d guess, a “prank” at the absolute extreme end.

Jail time after man dies of swatting-induced heart attack

What happened here is an awful combination of threats, harassment, social engineering and swatting. A desire to obtain “rare” social media handles led individuals to pressure victims into handing them over. A lot of it sounds like the usual thing you’d expect from doxing: pizza delivered to the door, that kind of thing.

However, it quickly escalated into all manner of malicious tactics designed to steal away desirable usernames. Bomb threats, SIM swap attacks, and even fake dating meetings which involved unsuspecting dates walking into one victim’s home as if they were expected.

Eventually, one victim’s address was posted into a Discord chat. The inevitable swat attack took place, and they died of a heart attack after crawling under a fence at the behest of police officers.

60 months in prison is the end result for 18-year-old Tennessee man Shane Sonderman, one of the people involved in what the judge described as these “almost unspeakable” crimes, and the person who posted the victim’s address to Discord. Sonderman’s sentence is the maximum the law allows.

Steering clear of swatting

Protecting yourself from swatting isn’t exactly easy, and a lot depends on whether your local law enforcement regularly deploy with weaponry. There are certainly ways to minimise the threat in relation to personal information exposure. However, much of that is down to warding off social engineering attacks and good OPSEC. All the same, it’ll help in all situations including potential swat attempts so it’s win-win.

This story is a shocking reminder that far too many people out there are willing to casually endanger lives over nothing more than videogames, social media accounts, or even just plain old boredom. We need to do everything we can to ensure our risk from such attacks is as minimal as it can possibly be.

The post 5 years for swatter who caused a man’s death for a Twitter handle appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

On July 18, a group of 17 newspaper and media organizations—aided by Amnesty International’s Security Lab and the research group Citizen Lab—revealed that one of the world’s most advanced and viciously invasive spyware tools had been used to hack, or attempt to hack, into 37 mobile phones owned by human rights activists, journalists, political dissidents, and business executives.

The spyware, called Pegasus and developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, is reportedly instrumental to several governments’ oppressive surveillance campaigns against their own citizens and residents, and, while NSO Group has repeatedly denied allegations that it complicitly sells Pegasus to human right abusers, it is difficult to reconcile exactly how the zero-click spyware program—which non-consensually and invisibly steals emails, text messages, photos, videos, locations, passwords, and social media activity—is at the same time a tool that can, in its very use, respect the rights of those around the world to speak freely, associate safely, and live privately.

Pegasus is spyware, and spyware is not made to respect privacy. It erodes it.

What may be most upsetting about Sunday’s bombshell reporting is that the cybersecurity community has known about Pegasus for years. Antivirus vendors detect it. Digital forensics labs know how to catch it. And between 2016 and 2018, more than 1,000 IP addresses were found to be associated with it.

With tools like Pegasus that can be abused on a global scale, we take on too big a risk. When weaponized by authoritarian governments, surveillance chills free speech, scares away dissent, and robs an innocent public of a life lived unwatched, for no crime committed other than speaking truth to power, conducting public health research, or simply loving another person.

It enables abuses like the mobile phone hack of Hatice Cengiz, former fiancée of murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khoshoggi. After the world learned that her phone was hacked, she wrote:

“I am deeply shocked that I have been targeted while I was in such pain waiting to find out what had happened to Jamal. This was the worst time of my life and yet the killers were spying on me. They have no shame. They must be brought to justice.”

Pegasus in theory

According to NSO Group, its main spyware program is a beneficial tool for investigating and preventing terrorist attacks and maintaining the safety of the public. In answering questions from the group of 17 media organizations—which published their findings under the name “The Pegasus Project”—NSO Group said:

“Simply put, NSO Group is on a life-saving mission, and the company will faithfully execute this mission undeterred, despite any and all continued attempts to discredit it on false grounds.”

After The Pegasus Project published its initial findings on Sunday, NSO Group’s chief executive Shalev Hulio spoke with The Washington Post about concerns he had about how his company’s software has been used against journalists and human rights activists.

“The company cares about journalists and activists and civil society in general,” Hulio said. “We understand that in some circumstances our customers might misuse the system and, in some cases like we reported in [NSO’s] Transparency and Responsibility Report, we have shut down systems for customers who have misused the system.”

Hulio told The Washington Post that his company had terminated the contracts of two customers because of allegations of human rights abuses, but, according to the paper, he refused to disclose which accounts were closed.

NSO Group’s explanations are just one half of the story, though, because, in reporting out Sunday’s revelations, The Pegasus Project also asked potentially responsible governments why they used Pegasus to hack the mobile phones of dissidents and reporters. The governments in question either denied using Pegasus at all—like Rwanda’s foreign affairs minister said—or they claimed that any surveillance carried out by their governments was lawful—like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s office did.

Similarly, the government of India rebuffed any allegations that it wrongfully used Pegasus to conduct surveillance. Any interception of messages, the government said, is approved at several levels of the government in accordance with several laws.

“In India, there is a well established procedure through which lawful interception of electronic communication is carried out in order for the purpose of national security, particularly on the occurrence of any public emergency or in the interest of public safety, by agencies at the Centre and States,” the government said. “The requests for these lawful interception of electronic communication are made as per relevant rules under the provisions of section 5(2) of Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 and section 69 of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2000”

The twin stories that NSO Group and its clients tell, then, is that Pegasus is a necessary tool to maintain safety, and that the use of Pegasus is legal within a country’s own surveillance regime.

NSO Group has also said that its tool is increasingly necessary in an era when end-to-end encryption is widely available to criminals.

“Terror organizations, drug cartels, human traffickers, pedophile rings and other criminal syndicates today exploit off-the-shelf encryption capabilities offered by mobile messaging and communications applications,” NSO Group told The Pegasus Project. “These technologies provide criminals and their networks a safe haven, allowing them to ‘go dark’ and avoid detection, communicating through impenetrable mobile messaging systems. Law enforcement and counterterrorism state agencies around the world have struggled to keep up.”

This trend can be true—end-to-end encryption is more widely available today than ever before, offered in several consumer apps on both Android and iOS devices—while also overblown. As Malwarebytes Labs has written before, the “going dark” problem is often overstated, and the solution to that problem, to make “safe backdoors,” is also technologically impossible.

Importantly, though, if Pegasus was actually a critical tool to stop crime, it could be proven. In practice, however, The Pegasus Project found that the targets of Pegasus are not “terror organizations, drug cartels, human traffickers, pedophile rings” or “other criminal syndicates,” but rather reporters, scientists, romantic partners, and potentially heads of state

Pegasus in practice

On Sunday and in the days following, The Pegasus Project revealed the broad cast of victims it believes have been targeted with Pegasus spyware.

In its reporting, The Pegasus Project relied on a list of 50,000 phone numbers obtained by the French journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories. The reporters believe the 50,000 phone numbers are a list of phone numbers that have been targeted using Pegasus spyware. The list also includes timestamps for each phone number entry, which the reporters believe shows when a phone was potentially first targeted by a Pegasus operator.

In the investigation, the reporters contacted dozens of the individuals who the listed phone numbers belonged to, eventually obtaining 67 mobile devices that they believed had been targeted by the spyware.

The 67 devices were first analyzed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab, which looked for traces of Pegasus spyware and for malicious text messages that, if clicked, were known to exploit device zero-day vulnerabilities to install the Pegasus spyware and hack into phones. Amnesty International’s work was separately verified by Citizen Lab, a research institution at the University of Toronto that focuses on technology and human rights.

In the investigation, The Pegasus Project found signs of successful or attempted hacking by Pegasus spyware on 37 devices. The remaining 30 devices produced inconclusive results.

The list of phone numbers—which NSO Group denied is a list of Pegasus targets—included 14 politicians, including three presidents, 10 prime ministers (three current and seven former), and one king.

The three presidents are France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih, and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa. None of the heads of state offered their mobile devices to The Pegasus Project, making it impossible to know if the devices had been hacked or had received malicious text messages that could result in a hack.

The possible use of Pegasus against presidents, prime ministers, and princesses is just that: Possible. But remember that The Pegasus Project found evidence of hacking or attempted hacking on 37 of the 67 mobile devices it tested.

From the facts reported so far, the use of Pegasus against those individuals bears no marking of anti-terrorist, pro-security, or counterintelligence work at all.

For instance, why was Pegasus used to hack into the phone of reporter Khadija Ismayilova, whose investigative work has revealed corruption within Azerbaijan’s ruling family?

Why was Pegasus silently implanted onto the iPhone 11 of Claude Magnin, Paris resident and  wife of the political activist Naama Asfari, who was jailed and allegedly tortured in Morocco?

Why was Pegasus used to hack into the phones of the wife and separate fiancée of Washington Post columnist and critic of the Saudi Arabian government Jamal Khoshoggi, who, according to the Biden Administration, was murdered and dismembered with approval from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince?

And why did a Pegasus operator send malicious texts to one scientist and two nonprofit directors who actively supported a banal soda tax in Mexico? Or why did a Pegasus operator similarly send text messages to Mexican journalist Raphael Cabrera that, if clicked, could have reportedly resulted in a Pegasus infection of his iPhone 6?

This is not security work. This is surveillance.

A dangerous industry

Pegasus is not new. The company behind it launched in 2010, and it reportedly gained its first overseas customer just one year later. For years, Citizen Lab has been tracking the spread of Pegasus, searching for government clients and tracking down mobile devices that were hacked by the spyware. Back in 2016, the group’s investigations helped spur MacOS updates to fix severe vulnerabilities that could have been exploited by Pegasus. In 2018, Citizen Lab also identified 45 countries that were potentially relying on Pegasus to conduct surveillance.

More recently, NSO Group’s activities spilled into American news when Facebook blamed the Israeli company for exploiting a vulnerability in WhatsApp in 2019. Facebook-owned WhatsApp later sued NSO Group for allegedly using this vulnerability to allow Pegasus users to hack 1,400 devices. The lawsuit is still proceeding, and it has gained the support of Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and VMWare.

We have known about these problems for years. We can no longer turn a blind eye to this type of abuse. Two years ago, a group of cybersecurity vendors, digital rights activists, and domestic violence support networks came together to launch the Coalition Against Stalkerware, recognizing the interdisciplinary need to protect users from the threat of intimate partner surveillance.

We hope the same energy can be captured today.

After learning about the findings from The Pegasus Project, former NSA defense contractor and surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that spyware is not a small problem. It is, he said, everywhere, and it needs to be stopped.

“When I look at this, what the Pegasus Project has revealed is a sector where the only product are infection vectors, right? They don’t—they’re not security products,” Snowden said. “They’re not providing any kind of protection, any kind of prophylactic.”

“They don’t make vaccines. The only thing they sell is the virus.”

The post Pegasus spyware has been here for years. We must stop ignoring it appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Users with low privileges can access sensitive Registry database files on Windows 10 and Windows 11, leaving them vulnerable to a local elevation of privilege vulnerability known as SeriousSAM or HiveNightmare.

Doesn’t sound serious? Reassured that users must already have access to the system and be able to execute code on said system to use this vulnerability? Don’t be.

Using SeriousSAM, a user can access multiple system files, including the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. The attacker would then have full control, which means they can install programs, view, change, or delete data, and create new accounts with full user rights. Which is exactly what an attacker wants.

My mama said

SAM stands for Security Accounts Manager and it is supposed to be a protected database that can only be accessed by users with Adminstrator privileges. This was designed as such because the database contains the hashed passwords for all users on a system.

Now, I’ve always been taught that anyone with physical access to your system, and enough knowledge, can take it over. One of the reasons why this is true is that the “holder” of the system can dump those sensitive Registry database files when Windows is not running.

When Windows is not running the registry is not “mounted” and the “access violation” protection is inactive, since to another operating system (OS) they are just files like any other. You can see the caveat there. You need to look at the files from an external OS to pull this off. (I will leave the “how to” do that to your imagination.)

While dumping a registry hive from an inactive Windows machine like that may sound daunting to some, and difficult for malware to pull off, SeriousSAM makes it much easier. SeriousSAM removes the need for that external OS, and for Windows to be off, making it a much more achievable trick. It allows users (or malicious programs inadvertently run by those users) to bypass the “access violation” protection on the computer they’re using, while it’s running.

Pass the hash

“But the passwords are hashed!”, I heard you thinking. In that case, meet pass-the-hash attacks.  Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) is a challenge-response authentication protocol used to authenticate a client to a resource on an Active Directory domain. When the client requests access to a service associated with the domain, the service sends a challenge to the client, requiring the client to perform a mathematical operation using its authentication token, and then return the result of this operation to the service. The service may validate the result or send it to the Domain Controller (DC) for validation. If the service or DC confirm that the client’s response is correct, the service allows access to the client. Sounds secure, right? Well, the fun part is that with the hash you have enough information to perform that “mathematical operation” required to gain access. The authentication process does not require the plaintext password. The hash is enough.

So, pass the hash is the name for a technique that allows an attacker to authenticate to a remote server or service by using the hash of a user’s password, instead of requiring the associated plaintext password as is normally the case.

Made easy

The vulnerability we have been referring to as SeriousSAM is listed as CVE-2021-36934 and while it is unclear exactly which versions of Windows are vulnerable, it looks as if some versions of Windows 10 and all versions of Windows 11 are affected, as long as System Protection, aka Shadow Volumes, is enabled. The Microsoft advisory says “…we can confirm that this issue affects Windows 10 version 1809 and newer operating systems”. The company is researching the issue and we will update this post once we know more.

The vulnerability got its other name, HiveNightmare, because it affects registry hives, and as a reference to the recently discovered PrintNightmare vulnerabilities in the Windows Print Spooler service. I think it’s a better name for this vulnerability because SAM is not the only sensitive Registry database that’s affected. Others  are all stored in the %windir%system32 config folder, as is SAM. They are SYSTEM, SECURITY, DEFAULT, and SOFTWARE. Which means there might be more options for hackers with limited access to raise privileges or achieve remote code execution waiting to be found.

The underlying problem is, in Microsoft’s own words “overly permissive Access Control Lists (ACLs) on multiple system files”. Those lax permissions are carried over into the Shadow copies where the files are unmounted and as unprotected as the files on the dormant computer my mother warned me about. So, any user can dump the database from the Shadow copy and as such create a readable database.

Shadow Volumes are enabled by default so that doesn’t bring the number of systems at risk down a lot. It is a useful option, but in this case it is also what enables this vulnerability.

Mitigation

While Microsoft is expected to come up with an out-of-band patch for this vulnerability, there are some things you can do to defeat the vulnerability. Whatever you do to address problem, note that fixing the cause does not necessarily fix broken permissions in shadow copies you have already taken.

You can find some useful commands for discovering if your systems have Shadow copies enabled, and whether they are vulnerable in the CERT advisory. The advisory notes that “simply having a system drive that is larger that 128GB in size and then performing a Windows Update or installing an MSI will ensure that a VSS shadow copy will be automatically created.”

Microsoft recommends restricting access to the problematic folder and deleting Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) shadow copies to mitigate this issue.

Restrict access to the contents of %windir%system32config

• Open Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell as an administrator.
• Run this command: icacls %windir%system32config*.* /inheritance:e

Delete Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) shadow copies

• Delete any System Restore points and Shadow volumes that existed prior to restricting access to %windir%system32config.
• Create a new System Restore point (if desired).

Note: Deleting shadow copies could impact restore operations, including the ability to restore data with third-party backup applications.

The post HiveNightmare zero-day lets anyone be SYSTEM on Windows 10 and 11 appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

We’ve written at length about account compromise and identity theft, and how criminals will often hijack accounts belonging to dead people. In many ways, it’s the perfect crime for anyone indulging in social engineering.

The amount of abandoned accounts due to death can only ever go up, and nobody is really paying attention if someone accesses them illicitly. By the same token, crooks grabbing ID’s during a disaster (natural or otherwise) is a good fit for bad people. Governments and rescue organisations are busy looking for folks and sorting out the problem. The moment victim details are released and / or leaked, the possibility for fraud is there. It could be days, or weeks before someone realises what’s happening. By that point it could already be too late.

Digging into identity theft

Depending on the region, identity theft of the dead can take many forms. In the US, for example, there were concerns back in 2012 over public access to something called the “Death Master File”. There were also plenty of concerns about this problem on a broad scale. Millions of dead people each year having their identities stolen, and around 800,000 instances of credit applied for in their names?

You bet. If this happens close to the time of the person’s death, it can easily disrupt and complicate a situation which is bad enough to deal with as it is. In the aftermath of the Japanese Earthquake / Tsunami in 2011, identity assistance was in so much disarray generally that most ID scams we saw focused on pretending to be charities as opposed to victims.

It stands to reason they’re probably more likely to swipe data from smaller, more local disasters than those on a much larger scale. Bigger events tend to cause scammers to gravitate towards mass donation charity fakeouts in any case.

When scammers strike

The latest example of this particularly distasteful trend came to light a few days ago. Scammers simply monitored unfolding news of a partial 12 story building collapse in Surfside, Florida that has so far claimed 90 lives. As names of victims were released, the scammer tried to exploit their identities. Relatives of the deceased are being urged to check credit accounts in case something untoward has taken place.

At time of writing, no further details have been released. We can only hope law enforcement has some idea who is behind this one, and that more information will be forthcoming soon. So far, the only comment available is one which says they’re protecting the integrity of the case, and also preventing further victimization.

Speaking to WPLG Local 10, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett channelled the town’s revulsion, warning “[the police department] are out there looking. I wouldn’t want to be that person right now.”

Preventing identity theft

This can be a contentious topic, especially when credit score agencies themselves are at risk from attacks of the most severe variety. There’s also considerable concern over various types of identity theft protection services. With those caveats out of the way:

• Here’s a run-down of how you can protect yourself from any breach which affects a credit score agency you happen to have shared your data with.
• We cover a lot of ground with regards warding off various types of tax identity theft.
• Did you know child identity theft is a thing? Because it absolutely is. We’ve covered this topic at length in not one, but two articles.

Away from our blog, there’s a couple of other articles you may wish to also check out. The Experian blog explains some of the different types of common identity theft. Mail, credit card, online shopping, biometric, and synthetic. There’s something for everyone. They also have another article which details some of the ways scammers can misuse your data. Finally, Equifax list some of the methods you can deploy to keep your social media identity secure.

It’s not like there’s a huge amount we can do to secure our accounts or identity once we’re gone, but we can certainly be proactive about it while still able to set the wheels in motion.

The post ID theft ghouls targeting Surfside victims is appalling, but no surprise appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Whether you’ve read up on Greek mythology or you’re simply a big fan of Marvel comics, the name “Zeus” should be familiar to you. In the context of cybercrime though, ZeuS (aka the Zbot Trojan) is a once-prolific malware that could easily be described as one of a handful of information stealers ahead of its time. Collectively, this malware and its variants infected millions of systems and stole billions of dollars worldwide.

ZeuS was primarily created to be a financial or banking Trojan, otherwise known as crimeware. But, as you’ll see, the extent of its information stealing ability could easily go beyond covertly pilfering financial information, making it a real threat to individuals and organizations of all sizes.

First spotted in-the-wild in 2007, the earliest known version of the ZeuS Trojan was caught stealing sensitive information from systems owned by the United States Department of Transformation. It was believed that ZeuS originated in Eastern Europe. ZeuS affiliates focused their efforts away from corporations and large banks, going after small- to medium-sized organizations, including towns and churches, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

ZeuS usually arrives via phishing campaigns, spam campaigns, and drive-by downloads. However, this is easy to change and anyone motivated to conduct financial fraud can easily change who they target and how they want their ZeuS to be delivered. Victims have been infected by ZeuS variants via instant messengers (IM), messaging features in social media platforms, and even a pay-per-install (PPI) service—a way to distribute ads to users that a ZeuS user employed for their campaigns.

Once a machine gets infected, ZeuS immediately steals information from web browsers and Windows’ protected storage (PStore), such as banking or financial information and stored account credentials, respectively. All stolen data are siphoned off via a command & control (C&C) server.

Furthermore, any system infected with ZeuS also becomes a bot in a botnet. A kind of illegal Cloud computing platform that can be rented out to other criminals. These bots were also used to remotely update the ZeuS variants residing in them.

To date, there are 545 versions of the ZeuS Trojan, according to a website called ZeuSMuseum.com.

How mighty is the ZeuS Trojan?

A ZeuS Trojan toolkit can be fashioned to do a number of things both for the fledgling and adept fraudster.

ZeuS lurks inside infected machines as it stealthily monitors the websites users visit. It recognizes when a user is on a banking website, for example, and then records keystrokes when the user logs into the site. Because of this, fraudsters can easily log back into that banking account using the recorded keystrokes.

Some variants of ZeuS also affect mobile devices that run Android, Symbian, and Blackberry. ZeuS is the first information stealing malware that steals Mobile Transaction Authentication Numbers (mTANs), a type of two-factor authentication (2FA) method that banks use when you want to perform transactions. An mTAN, also called SMS TAN code, is usually a 6-digit number that is unique per transaction and is sent via SMS.

ZeuS steals information in a number of ways, including: Stealing user keystrokes; collecting the text users enter into web forms; taking screenshots whenever the mouse is clicked; so-called man-in-the-browser (MiTB) attacks that add new elements to web forms asking for things like social security numbers or bank PINs.

As to what, exactly, ZeuS steals, here is non-exhaustive a list provided by the SecureWorks security researchers:

• Data submitted in HTTP forms
• Account credentials stored in the Windows Protected Storage
• Client-side X.509 public key infrastructure (PKI) certificates
• FTP and POP account credentials
• HTTP and Flash cookies

ZeuS is also capable of re-encrypting itself every time it infects a system, making each infection “unique” and therefore harder to detect.

Many researchers attribute ZeuS’s ability to stay under the radar for long periods of time as the main reason why it became the most sought-after info-stealer kit in the underground market during its time. It’s likely that ZeuS infected millions of computers, with many victims not realizing that their sensitive data had fallen into the hands of criminals and that their computer was part of a botnet.

The ZeuS developers also put a lot of effort into protecting their malware. According to SecureWorks, ZeuS 1.3.4.x, a privately sold version of the kit, is protected via a hardware-based licensing system. Also known as hardware-locked licensing, this system allows the kit to be installed on only one computer.

The “fall” of ZeuS Trojan

In 2011, the source code for ZeuS 2.0.8.9 was leaked. Some groups or individuals started offering the use of ZeuS botnets on a subscription basis. According to a case study on ZeuS from students at the University of Cambridge, this “maximises earnings by providing the same service to multiple users. For the user of the service, the benefits are in a reduction in the initial financial outlay, while outsourcing the logistical and maintenance requirements, and reducing the risk of failure to achieve results.”

Cybercriminals also began creating their own ZeuS-based information stealers, make ZeuS itself something of a footnote. Citadel, GameOver, Panda Banker, Terdot, Floki, and Sphinx are some of the known ZeuS variants to date.

Before the code leak, it was rumored that the ZeuS creator would be retiring and then selling his code to a competitor called SpyEye, an up-and-coming information stealer that made heads turn for being able to remove ZeuS infections. There had been reports of a code hand-over, yes, further confirming the merging of the two malware, but the ZeuS creator didn’t quit. According to a report from Brian Krebs, the creator merely stopped selling it publicly and started creating “a more robust and private version of Zeus” instead.

In 2013, the FBI charged and arrested Aleksander “Harderman” Panin, a 24-year-old Russian male believed to be the creator of the SpyEye Trojan. That same year, Hamza Bendelladj, a 24-year-old Algerian male, was arrested and charged for developing components of SpyEye, operating botnets infected with SpyEye, and of course, fraud charges.

Is ZeuS dead?

As long as criminals continue to use bits and pieces of its code to create their own malware, ZeuS can’t be considered dead, so much as fading away slowly. However, ZeuS’s purpose, data theft, is making a comeback.

Banking trojans haven’t gone away, but in recent years their activity has been eclipsed by an epidemic of ransomware. Recently though, major ransomware operators have taken to stealing victims’ data before encrypting it, so they can threaten to leak it.

The tactic has been so successful that some ransomware actors claim to be moving away from encrypting files, and focussing entirely on finding and exfiltrating sensitive data from organisations.

In fact, following a devastating attack on Ireland’s public health system, the Conti ransomware gang issued the Health Service Executive (HSE), a free decryption key to unlock all of their affected files, convinced that simply publishing and selling the data they had stolen was leverage enough.

How long I wonder, before information stealers are another thing Biden will be phoning Putin for?

The post The life and death of the ZeuS Trojan appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Do you remember back when the latest urgent update was a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange? How is that only four months ago? The trigger for the urgent advice in March was the fact that Microsoft detected multiple zero-day exploits being used to attack on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server in limited and targeted attacks. Microsoft attributed the attacks to a group they have dubbed Hafnium.

Hafnium at the time was a newly identified attack group that was also thought to be responsible for attacks on internet-facing servers, and which was known for exfiltrating data to file sharing sites. Its targets were mainly entities in the United States across a number of industry sectors. Despite the group’s use of leased servers in the US, Microsoft believed it was based in China.

The attack method used against the Exchange servers was called ProxyLogon. ProxyLogon quickly went from “limited and targeted attacks” to a full-size panic. Microsoft’s patches for the Exchange vulnerabilities were quickly reverse engineered. Before long attackers from everywhere in the world and every level of cybercrime were using the bugs to access vulnerable servers before establishing web shells to gain persistence and steal information.

Attribution

As most security researchers will tell you, attribution is hard, especially when it involves international espionage. Nonetheless, the US, UK, EU, and NATO have simultaneously voiced their concern about what they say is the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) irresponsible and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace.

Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Canada have also joined the coalition that are exposing further details of the PRC’s pattern of malicious cyber activity and taking further action to counter it. One of the elements of the exposure is to confirm that Chinese state-backed actors were responsible for gaining access to computer networks around the world using ProxyLogon attacks against Microsoft Exchange servers.

The US Department of Justice also announced criminal charges against four hackers from the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the country’s unofficial espionage institution (the same organization that the UK named as the culprit behind the cyberattacks on Microsoft Exchange servers that took place earlier this year). The indictments against Ding Xiaoyang, Cheng Qingmin, Zhu Yunmin and Wu Shurong are believed to be a part of this broader set of actions the federal government took to expose cybercrimes the White House officials say are sponsored and encouraged by the Chinese government.

The allies are also attributing the Chinese Ministry of State Security as being behind activity known by cyber security experts as “APT40” and “APT31”. It is rare to see such a unified and orchestrated reprimand against one of the world’s leading economies, but so far that seems to be as far as it goes. We have not seen any sanctions to be announced.

Sanctions

The EU has urged China to adhere to the “norms of responsible state behaviour as endorsed by all UN member states”, and not allow its territory to be used for malicious cyber-activities, and “take all appropriate measures and reasonably available and feasible steps to detect, investigate and address the situation”.

The UK is calling on China to “reaffirm the commitment made to the UK in 2015 and as part of the G20 not to conduct or support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property of trade secrets.”

When asked about the Microsoft hack, Joe Biden said one reason the US has not imposed sanctions against China over the cyberattacks is that the Chinese government, not unlike the Russian government, is not doing this themselves, but are protecting those who are doing it and maybe even accommodating them being able to do it.

In the past the EU imposed its first-ever sanctions in response to cyberattacks in July 2020, targeting Russian, Chinese and North Korean hackers involved in major incidents in previous years, namely the NotPetya ransomware outbreak, Cloud Hopper supply-chain hack, and WannaCry ransomware attack. In October 2020, it imposed sanctions on two Russian intelligence officers and a unit of the GRU military intelligence services over their involvement in hacking the German parliament in 2015.

From state-sponsored to free-for-all

As we have seen with ProxyLogon, the impact of this type of state-sponsored cybercrime aren’t limited to states. Techniques used by state actors have a way of getting picked up by cybercriminals that will grab every opportunity to make a few extra bitcoins.

Just look at EternalBlue and the other SMB vulnerabilities – developed as NSA hacking tools – that came out of The Shadow Brokers leak. These vulnerabilities were quickly picked up by threat actors like  Emotet and TrickBot. EternalBlue was also the driving power behind WannaCry.

Observed tactics and techniques

The NSA, CISA, and FBI also issued a joint advisory containing more than 50 tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have used in attacks targeting the US and allied networks.

The post US, EU, UK, NATO blame china for “reckless” Exchange attacks appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

We’ve observed a 419-style scam (also known as an advance fee scam) which combines the promise of cryptocurrency riches with WhatsApp conversation.

The mail, which arrived with the subject “Urgent respond”, begins as follows:

Greetings to you my friend,

My name is Haifa Kalfan, I am the Store manager with a Security Firm here in Malaysia . I need your urgent assistance to transfer funds out of this firm. I cannot directly achieve this without the help of a foreigner and that is why I am contacting you. All documents to enable the smooth release of this fund to you will be carefully worked out and there will be practically no risk involved, this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of law as a change of fund ownership certificate in your name will be legally initiated.

A fairly typical opening. Claiming to be in a reassuring position of power, along with the promise of being protected from any “breach of law”. Are you ready for things to go a bit Blockchain? Because they’re about to go a bit Blockchain.

Things go a bit Blockchain

This is the part of the scam where the people behind it start to get technical. Folks already involved in cryptocurrency would likely have suspicions raised after reading the below. Those with no prior experience may think somebody is suggesting an unfamiliar yet safe way to make a fortune.

A perfect arrangement is in place for the release of the fund to you without hitches through crypto currency which you may call bitcoin if you want. This measure was thought of due to the difficulties in transferring huge funds from one country to another, because of global fight on illicit movement of funds to sponsor terrorism. Transferring the fund to you through bitcoin is a perfect way. You will have to create a BLOCK CHAIN ACCOUNT on your phone, but you will first download the blockchain application on your phone, register an account and send the QR code to the financial institution, the fund will immediately be transferred into your blockchain account within 24 hours as soon as you send your blockchain QR code to the the department of any of our paying banks responsible for crypto currency transactions.

This is a long-winded way of asking would-be victims to install an app and begin transferring funds. Regular readers will be aware this means someone is about to have their bank account emptied, or have themselves turned into a money mule. If they’re really unlucky, both of these things are on the cards.

Confidence tricksters

Here’s the part where they attempt to keep would-be victims talking. It’s all about that personal touch in the land of cryptocurrency scams.

If you are ready, I will have to send you the director of the cryptocurrency department WhatsApp number, you will have to chat him up on WhatsApp for more details and guidelines. I will secure a legal certificate of fund ownership change through our firm’s legal team which you will forward.

This is nothing more than “the place the specifics of the scam unfold”. We did attempt to make contact and find out:

• Which app they want people to use and
• What the process is once the scam takes hold on WhatsApp, but at time of writing we’ve received no reply. Should we happen to get one, we’ll update this blog post in due course.

A multifaceted approach to scamming

With cryptocurrency being so widespread, it’s possible folks with digital money in the bank could be completely cleaned out. Whether the victim is someone tech-savvy or somebody who simply thinks they see a good thing, it will only end in disaster.

The email we received was already flagged as spam by Gmail, so it’s possible other spam filters have already marked this one out too. This style of missive is incredibly popular and costs folks a fortune every year. “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is” may be a little tired and worn around the edges these days, but it’s 100% accurate in this case. Should you receive a mail similar to the above, flag it as spam and send it straight to the trash bin.

The post Beware, crypto-scammer seeks foreigner with BLOCK CHAIN ACCOUNT appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

This blog post was authored by Erika Noerenberg

Introduction

Over the past months, Malwarebytes researchers have been tracking a unique malspam campaign delivering the Remcos remote access trojan (RAT) via financially-themed emails. Remcos is often delivered via malicious documents or archive files containing scripts or executables. Like other RATs, Remcos gives the threat actor full control over the infected system and allows them to capture keystrokes, screenshots, credentials, or other sensitive system information. Unlike most RATs used by malicious actors however, Remcos is marketed as an administrative tool by the company Breaking Security which sells it openly on their website.

Distribution

Remcos often infects a system by embedding a specially-crafted settings file into an Office document, allowing an attacker to trick a user to run malicious code without additional notification. This variant of Remcos has been observed to be distributed via targeted spam emails with an attached archive file. The emails and attachment names have been primarily financially-themed; an example email is shown below:

For illustration, the following table lists a sample of email subjects and attachment names from 2021 by date:

In most Remcos spam campaigns, the payload is an executable contained in an attached archive (.zip) or disk image (.img) file, though malicious documents are also sometimes used. In this campaign however, the emails contain a zip archive containing a Visual Basic script (.vbs) which downloads and executes additional scripts and finally installs the Remcos payload.

*Eariler versions also included a “Property.hta” file which only comprised the VB script wrapped in HTML as seen below. Interestingly, the body of this HTML consisted only of the text “demo”, which indicates this might have been test code.

Analysis

Remcos is a fully-functioning RAT that gives the threat actor full control over the infected system and allows them to collect keystrokes, audio, video, screenshots, and system information. Because it has full control, Remcos is also able to download and execute additional software onto the system. This Remcos distribution utilizes a series of scripts that ultimately results in the injection of a Remcos payload into the Windows system binary aspnet_compiler.exe. A sample infection chain for this variant is shown below:

The samples analyzed below originate from the attachment Appraisalreportl1100788392210.zip (SHA256 4e712de8a3d602ccf55321a85701114c01f9731af356da05fb6e3881a13bb23e). As with all analyzed samples, the the infection chain followed the process flow above; the initial Visual Basic script initiates a series of download and execution of obfuscated scripts that eventually result in the injection of the final Remcos payload into aspnet_compiler.exe.

Although the script above is lengthy due to obfuscation, it ultimately amounts to the following simple powershell command which downloads and executes a second Visual Basic script:

The first downloaded script (ALL.TXT) also uses simple deobfuscation techniques to perform a few simple tasks. The $JUANADEARCO variable in this script contains Base64-encoded data which is decoded by the last line of the script (this data is shown as decoded in the highlighted box in the image below). This script performs the following actions:

• Creates the directory C:UsersPublicRun
• Downloads Run_02_02_02.TXT (saved as C:UsersPublicRunRun.vbs)
• Downloads Lerveri.txt (saved as UsersPublicRun—–Run+++++++++.ps1)
• Sets HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell FoldersStartup to “C:UsersPublicRun”
• Sets HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerShell FoldersStartup to “C:UsersPublicRun”

The shell folder registry entries are legacy keys that are still existent for backwards compatibility. Setting the “Startup” value of these registry entries to the malware’s directory of execution effectively sets the contents of that directory to execute upon system startup, ensuring persistence.

Run.vbs is obfuscated in a similar fashion to the initial Visual Basic script:

This script (deobfuscated below) is responsible only for execution the main powershell script which contains embedded binaries, encoded in hex in plaintext.

One of the binaries encoded in —–Run+++++++++.ps1 is the Remcos payload which is loaded into the legitimate Windows binary aspnet_compiler.exe. The following function in the powershell script loads the Remcos PE into the binary:

Although all of the analyzed Remcos samples of this campaign since January 2021 call back to the same IP address and port, no actual C2 traffic has been observed. All of the script downloads have pointed to addresses on the legitimate website us.archive.org, and the payloads have connected (though only via TCP handshake) to the IP address 185.19.85[.]168 on port 8888.

Because this IP address has not changed over several months, we investigated the passive DNS records to see if the infrastructure may have been used in other recent attacks. We found that this IP address had the following resolutions over the last few months:

Examination of this IP address revealed several hosted services on multiple ports. The highlighted date range above is interesting as it appears to be a mail server, and Spamhaus Zen classifies this address as blocked due to spam. Furthermore, analysis also revealed that the #totalhash malware database contains malware associated with this address going back as far as 2013. Correlating additional malware associated with this address showed several other versions of Remcos samples connecting to the same IP (many to shugardaddy.ddns.net port 5946) – a few recent samples are shown below:

One identifying factor from this campaign is the use of us.archive.org to host payloads. Although this is not unique to malware campaigns in general, it is unique to the Remcos campaigns we have analyzed – only the VBS method of distribution has been observed to display this behavior.

In an analysis from Morphisec in March of this year, an HCrypt loader sample was analyzed that demonstrated a similar infection chain to the Remcos samples discussed above. Although the stages and scripts are not identical, the intermediary steps share a few similarities, such as the file names of the downloaded scripts ALL.txt, Server.txt, and in newer samples, Bypass.txt. The scripts also have a few function names in common, but the HCrypt samples have anti-analysis and anti-virus evasion functionality not seen in the Remcos samples. Further research is required to determine whether this set of scripts is a generically available package, or specific to a particular actor and being re-used across campaigns.

Although the actor or group behind this campaign is not known, the sporadic nature of the emails distributing this malware suggests that it could be targeted in nature. Remcos is a mature trojan that has evolved over many years; though the basic capabilities have remained the same, the methodologies of distribution and installation continue to change. Because it is software that can be purchased openly online, it is difficult to trace or attribute usage to a particular actor. However, given the consistency of network infrastructure and installation methodology, it is possible that the motivation or actors behind these attacks could be identified. Malwarebytes analysts continue to monitor and track this threat and will update detections and indicators as needed.

Protection

Malwarebytes protects users from Remcos by using real-time protection.

References

https://www.anomali.com/blog/threat-actors-use-msbuild-to-deliver-rats-filelessly

https://www.cybereason.com/blog/cybereason-exposes-malware-targeting-us-taxpayers

https://blog.morphisec.com/tracking-hcrypt-an-active-crypter-as-a-service

IOCs

Analyzed Samples:

Remcos VB Scripts:

Related Remcos Samples:

Other IOCs:

The post Remcos RAT delivered via Visual Basic appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• DNS-over-HTTPS takes another small step towards global domination
• Nope, that isn’t Elon Musk, and he isn’t offering a free Topmist Dust watch either
• Four in-the-wild exploits, 13 critical patches headline bumper Patch Tuesday
• Is crypto’s criminal rollercoaster approaching a terminal dip?
• Ransomware’s Russia problem
• SonicWall warns users of “imminent ransomware campaign”
• What is scareware?
• Does using a VPN slow down your Internet?
• US offers huge reward in fight against state-sponsored cybercriminals

Other cybersecurity news:

• Kaseya finally started moving on after the ransomware attack from REvil. (Source: Kaseya CSA Incident Response)
• Attackers use non-malicious documents to disable macro security warnings before executing the malicious macro. (Source: The Hackers News)
• MageCart criminal gang used odd concatenation technique to hide their malware. (Source: Sucuri Blog)
• Mint Mobile suffered a data breach. (Source: BleepingComputer)
• Guess, the fashion retailer, suffered a breach, too. (Source: SecurityMagazine)
• SpoofedScholars phishers targets professors and writers who are experts about the Middle East. (Source: TechRepublic)
• Meanwhile, REvil seem to have disappeared. (Source: Endgadget)
• At this point, we lost count at the number of times TrickBot has come back. (Source: Gizmodo)
• Twitter verifying bot accounts raised a lot of questions regarding their process. (Source: The Daily Dot)
• Adobe releases critical patches for Reader, Acrobat, and Illustrator. (Source: Security Week)

Stay safe!

The post A week in security (July 12 – July 18) appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Department of Justice (DOJ)—along with other federal partners—have launched a new website as part of the US government’s fight against ransomware: StopRansomware.gov.

StopRansomware.gov is said to be a one-stop hub for ransomware resources for everyone, may they be individuals, SMBs, enterprises, or others.

“As ransomware attacks continue to rise around the world, businesses and other organizations must prioritize their cybersecurity,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in the official press release on the DHS website. “Cyber criminals have targeted critical infrastructure, small businesses, hospitals, police departments, schools, and more. These attacks directly impact Americans’ daily lives and the security of our Nation. I urge every organization across our country to use this new resource to learn how to protect themselves from ransomware and reduce their cybersecurity risk.”

This website release and announcement came three months after the Ransomware Task Force (RTF), a group of 60 volunteer experts across industries and governments, released a comprehensive, strategic plan to address the growing threat of ransomware.

Both the report and the new website are part of an escalation in the fight against ransomware in 2021. This year has seen devastating attacks against Colonial Pipeline, Ireland’s Health Service Executive, and Kaseya VSA, to name a few. In response, the Biden administration has issued new rules for critical infrastructure, promised to hold President Putin of Russia to account for the country’s apparent harboring of ransomware gangs, and offered rewards of up to $10 million for information about state-sponsored attacks on critical infrastructure.

StopRansomware.gov is the culmination of ransomware tools and resources from all US federal government agencies. When before, organizations would have to visit multiple sites to seek advice, threat updates, or alerts with regards to all ransomware matters, they can just visit this .gov website. Some of the resources included in StopRansomware.gov are content from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the US Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The post StopRansomware.gov brings together information on stopping and surviving ransomware attacks appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.