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Nice article on the piglet squid.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
MoonBounce UEFI implant used by spy group brings firmware security into spotlight
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Researchers uncovered a stealthy UEFI rootkit that’s being used in highly targeted campaigns by a notorious Chinese cyberespionage group with suspected government ties. The group is known for using software supply-chain attacks in the past. Dubbed MoonBounce by researchers from Kaspersky Lab, the implant’s goal is to inject a malicious driver into the Windows kernel during the booting stages, providing attackers with a high level of persistence and stealthiness.
While MoonBounce is not the first UEFI rootkit found in the wild — LoJax, MosaicRegressor are two examples– these types of implants are not common because they require knowledge of low-level firmware programming. They are typically found in the arsenal of well-resourced and sophisticated attacker groups.
A Backdoor in WordPress AccessPress Plugins and Themes Could Allow an Attacker Access to a Targeted Website
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A backdoor has been discovered in WordPress AccessPress plugins and themes, which could allow an attacker access to a targeted website. AccessPress plugins and themes are used to provide website functionality and design options to website administrators. Successful exploitation of this backdoor could allow an attacker to redirect users to malicious sites as well as access to the vulnerable website.
Attackers use public cloud providers to spread RATs
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A campaign that uses public cloud service providers to spread malware has been discovered by Cisco Talos. The offensive is the latest example of threat actors abusing cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for malicious purposes, security researchers Chetan Raghuprasad and Vanja Svajcer wrote in the Talos blog.
To camouflage their activity, the researchers noted, the hackers used the DuckDNS dynamic DNS service to change the domain names of the command-and-control hosts used for the campaign, which started distributing variants of Nanocore, Netwire, and AsyncRATs to targets in the United States, Italy and Singapore, starting around October 26. Those variants are packed with multiple features to take control of a target’s computer, allowing it to issue commands and steal information.
Homelife of Connecticut Residents Secretly Recorded
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Homelife of Connecticut Residents Secretly Recorded
A man from Connecticut has been arrested on suspicion of using digital devices to record his neighbors.
Waterford resident Keith Hancock allegedly recorded 10 victims from outside their homes, two of whom were juveniles. Six of the individuals were filmed while undressing.
Hancock is also suspected of recording more victims while inside his home on Overlook Drive.
Cops arrested 53-year-old Hancock on Tuesday and charged him with eight counts of voyeurism and three counts of criminal trespass in the third degree.
According to an arrest affidavit for Hancock, the alleged voyeur admitted filming individuals in two residences without their knowledge or consent.
The investigation that led to Hancock’s arrest began on October 07 2021 when the Waterford Police Department responded to a report of an intruder entering a male resident’s backyard.
According to news source The Day, the resident became aware of the intruder’s presence when he let his dog out into the yard and the animal started to bark. When the resident shone a flashlight into the yard, he was able to see an intruder running away.
The resident searched his backyard and found a pair of binoculars and a black Canon camcorder stashed behind a tree. A portable chair and two posts were discovered on the other side of the wall that separated the resident’s property from his neighbor’s.
Stored on the SD card inside the recovered camcorder was video footage of another home, focusing on an upstairs window.
Police traced the camcorder to Hancock and obtained a search warrant for his residence. Stored on a laptop seized in the search was video footage of a woman undressing. Another video showed a woman naked from the waist down and urinating into a toilet.
The bathroom in the video matched a bathroom shown in an online real estate listing of Hancock’s house. When officers searched Hancock’s bathroom, they found a hole in the base of a cabinet set opposite the toilet through which they believe the defendant filmed his victims.
Hancock was released on a $100,000 bond. He is scheduled to appear in court on February 23.
Pennsylvania Approves Ransomware Bill
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Pennsylvania Approves Ransomware Bill
Pennsylvania has approved new legislation barring state and local governments from using taxpayers’ money to pay ransoms to cyber-criminals.
Senate Bill 726, amending Title 18 (Crimes and Offenses) of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, was approved by the Pennsylvania Senate on Wednesday. The legislation has now advanced to the House of Representatives for further consideration.
The amendment defines ransomware and makes it illegal to possess, use, develop, sell or threaten to use the malware in Pennsylvania.
Penalties set for the newly imposed ransomware offenses vary depending on how much money is being exploited. While some violations are classed as first-degree misdemeanors, others have been designated a first-degree felony.
While prohibiting state and local governments from spending taxpayers’ dollars on cyber ransoms generally, the legislation allows this practice to go ahead should a declaration of disaster emergency be made and authorized by the governor.
Under the new legislation, state agencies, including the General Assembly, local government entities, school districts, state-related universities, community colleges and charter and cyber schools are required to notify the Office of Administration of ransomware attacks within an hour of discovery. Commonwealth agencies must report ransomware within two hours.
The Office of Administration is required to notify the FBI of ransomware attacks within 24 hours. In addition, the office must submit an annual report to the General Assembly on ransomware attacks.
The bill’s primary sponsor, senator Kristin Phillips-Hill, said: “We have seen an increase in ransomware attacks in governmental entities at all levels, as well as against critical infrastructure across the United States.
“We know that these attacks will grow as technology used by criminals becomes more sophisticated.”
She added: “This legislation draws a line in the sand to say that taxpayers will not pay the ransom requested by entities seeking to illegally extort cash from hard-working Pennsylvanians.”
On January 19, the Senate of Pennsylvania also approved legislation that would create a new Office of Information Technology and require cybersecurity best practices across state agencies.
The new office would manage and maintain IT procurement within state agencies and establish a strategic plan for future IT projects across state government.
Crime Shop Sells Hacked Logins to Other Crime Shops
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Up for the “Most Meta Cybercrime Offering” award this year is Accountz Club, a new cybercrime store that sells access to purloined accounts at services built for cybercriminals, including shops peddling stolen payment cards and identities, spamming tools, email and phone bombing services, and those selling authentication cookies for a slew of popular websites.
Criminals ripping off other crooks is a constant theme in the cybercrime underworld; Accountz Club’s slogan — “the best autoshop for your favorite shops’ accounts” — just normalizes this activity by making logins stolen from users of various cybercrime shops for sale at a fraction of their account balances.
The site says it sells “cracked” accounts, or those that used passwords which could be easily guessed or enumerated by automated tools. All of the credentials being sold by Accountz provide access to services that in turn sell access to stolen information or hijacked property, as in the case of “bot shops” that resell access to infected computers.
One example is Genesis Market, where customers can search for stolen credentials and authentication cookies from a broad range of popular online destinations. Genesis even offers a custom-made web browser where you can load authentication cookies from botted PCs and waltz right into the account without having to enter a username or password or mess with multi-factor authentication.
Accountz is currently selling four different Genesis logins for about 40-50 percent of their unspent balances. Genesis mostly gets its inventory of botted computers and stolen logins from resellers who specialize in deploying infostealer malware via email and booby-trapped websites. Likewise, it appears Accountz also derives much of its stock from a handful of resellers, who presumably are the same ones doing the cybercrime service account cracking.
In essence, Accountz customers are paying for illicit access to cybercrime services that sell access to compromised resources that can be abused for cybercrime. That’s seriously meta.
Accountz says its inventory is low right now but that it expects to offer a great deal more stock in the coming days. I don’t doubt that’s true, and it’s somewhat remarkable that services like this aren’t more common: From reporting my “Breadcrumbs” series on prominent cybercrime actors, it’s clear that a great many cybercriminals will use the same username and password across multiple services online.
What’s more, relatively few cybercrime shops online offer their users any sort of multi-factor authentication. That’s probably because so few customers supply their real contact information when they sign up. As a result, it is often far easier for customers to simply create a new account than it is to regain control over a hacked one, or to change a forgotten password. On top of that, most shops have only rudimentary tools for blocking automated login attempts and password cracking activity.
It will be interesting to see whether any of the cybercrime shops most heavily represented in the logins for sale at Accountz start to push back. After all, draining customer account balances and locking out users is likely to increase customer support costs for these shops, lower customer satisfaction, and perhaps even damage their reputations on the crime forums where they peddle their wares.
Oh, the horror.
Memorial Health System Confirms Data Breach
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Memorial Health System Confirms Data Breach
A cyber-attack on an Ohio-based health system may have exposed the protected health information (PHI) of 216,478 patients.
Memorial Health System was hit with ransomware in the early hours of August 15 2021. The incident forced the health system to suspend user access to all information technology applications related to its operations.
The disruption caused surgical cases and radiology exams to be canceled and placed Memorial Health System emergency departments on diversion.
Speaking at the time of the incident, Memorial Health System president and CEO Scott Cantley said: “Staff at our hospitals – Marietta Memorial, Selby and Sistersville General Hospital – are working with paper charts while systems are restored, and data recovered.”
A press statement, released three days after news of the ransomware attack broke, gave the impression that Memorial Health System had opted to pay its attackers.
“We have reached a negotiated solution and are beginning the process that will restore operations as quickly and as safely as possible,” said Cantley in the August 18 statement.
He added: “We are following a deliberate, systematic approach to bring systems back online securely and in a manner that prioritizes our ability to provide patient care.”
An investigation into the security incident determined that attackers had broken into the health system’s network on July 10 2021, then waited a month to deploy ransomware.
In September last year, Memorial Health System discovered that the patients’ data might have been accessed and exfiltrated in the incident. A review of what files the threat actors could have accessed was carried out.
By December 9 2021, it had become clear that patients’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, medical/treatment information and health insurance information may have been viewed and stolen.
Memorial Health System began notifying impacted patients via letter on January 12 2022. Individuals affected by the data breach have been offered a complimentary 12-month membership to Kroll’s credit monitoring service.
Jennifer Offenberger, associate vice president of service excellence at Memorial Health System, said: “While the extensive investigation with the FBI and cybersecurity teams indicates no reason to suspect there has been any fraudulent use or public release of patient information associated with this incident, we are notifying patients whose information may have been accessible during the breach.”
China’s Olympics App Is Horribly Insecure
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China is mandating that athletes download and use a health and travel app when they attend the Winter Olympics next month. Citizen Lab examined the app and found it riddled with security holes.
Key Findings:
MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
MY2022 is fairly straightforward about the types of data it collects from users in its public-facing documents. However, as the app collects a range of highly sensitive medical information, it is unclear with whom or which organization(s) it shares this information.
MY2022 includes features that allow users to report “politically sensitive” content. The app also includes a censorship keyword list, which, while presently inactive, targets a variety of political topics including domestic issues such as Xinjiang and Tibet as well as references to Chinese government agencies.
While the vendor did not respond to our security disclosure, we find that the app’s security deficits may not only violate Google’s Unwanted Software Policy and Apple’s App Store guidelines but also China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection, providing potential avenues for future redress.
News article:
It’s not clear whether the security flaws were intentional or not, but the report speculated that proper encryption might interfere with some of China’s ubiquitous online surveillance tools, especially systems that allow local authorities to snoop on phones using public wireless networks or internet cafes. Still, the researchers added that the flaws were probably unintentional, because the government will already be receiving data from the app, so there wouldn’t be a need to intercept the data as it was being transferred.
[…]
The app also included a list of 2,422 political keywords, described within the code as “illegalwords.txt,” that worked as a keyword censorship list, according to Citizen Lab. The researchers said the list appeared to be a latent function that the app’s chat and file transfer function was not actively using.
The US government has already advised athletes to leave their personal phones and laptops home and bring burners.
Multiple Vulnerabilities in Cisco Products Could Allow for Arbitrary Code Execution
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Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Cisco Products, the most severe of which could allow for arbitrary code execution. Successful exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute code on the affected systems. Depending on the privileges associated with the targeted user, an attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users configured to have fewer privileges on the system could be less impacted than those who operate with elevated privileges.