Login
We learned some remarkable new details this week about the recent supply-chain attack on VoIP software provider 3CX. The lengthy, complex intrusion has all the makings of a cyberpunk spy novel: North Korean hackers using legions of fake executive accounts on LinkedIn to lure people into opening malware disguised as a job offer; malware targeting Mac and Linux users working at defense and cryptocurrency firms; and software supply-chain attacks nested within earlier supply chain attacks.
Researchers at ESET say this job offer from a phony HSBC recruiter on LinkedIn was North Korean malware masquerading as a PDF file.
In late March 2023, 3CX disclosed that its desktop applications for both Windows and macOS were compromised with malicious code that gave attackers the ability to download and run code on all machines where the app was installed. 3CX says it has more than 600,000 customers and 12 million users in a broad range of industries, including aerospace, healthcare and hospitality.
3CX hired incident response firm Mandiant, which released a report on Wednesday that said the compromise began in 2022 when a 3CX employee installed a malware-laced software package distributed via an earlier software supply chain compromise that began with a tampered installer for X_TRADER, a software package provided by Trading Technologies.
“This is the first time Mandiant has seen a software supply chain attack lead to another software supply chain attack,” reads the April 20 Mandiant report.
Mandiant found the earliest evidence of compromise uncovered within 3CX’s network was through the VPN using the employee’s corporate credentials, two days after the employee’s personal computer was compromised.
“Eventually, the threat actor was able to compromise both the Windows and macOS build environments,” 3CX said in an April 20 update on their blog.
Mandiant concluded that the 3CX attack was orchestrated by the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group known as Lazarus, a determination that was independently reached earlier by researchers at Kaspersky Lab and Elastic Security.
Mandiant found the compromised 3CX software would download malware that sought out new instructions by consulting encrypted icon files hosted on GitHub. The decrypted icon files revealed the location of the malware’s control server, which was then queried for a third stage of the malware compromise — a password stealing program dubbed ICONICSTEALER.
The double supply chain compromise that led to malware being pushed out to some 3CX customers. Image: Mandiant.
Meanwhile, the security firm ESET today published research showing remarkable similarities between the malware used in the 3CX supply chain attack and Linux-based malware that was recently deployed via fake job offers from phony executive profiles on LinkedIn. The researchers said this was the first time Lazarus had been spotted deploying malware aimed at Linux users.
As reported in a series last summer here, LinkedIn has been inundated this past year by fake executive profiles for people supposedly employed at a range of technology, defense, energy and financial companies. In many cases, the phony profiles spoofed chief information security officers at major corporations, and some attracted quite a few connections before their accounts were terminated.
Mandiant, Proofpoint and other experts say Lazarus has long used these bogus LinkedIn profiles to lure targets into opening a malware-laced document that is often disguised as a job offer. This ongoing North Korean espionage campaign using LinkedIn was first documented in August 2020 by ClearSky Security, which said the Lazarus group operates dozens of researchers and intelligence personnel to maintain the campaign globally.
Microsoft Corp., which owns LinkedIn, said in September 2022 that it had detected a wide range of social engineering campaigns using a proliferation of phony LinkedIn accounts. Microsoft said the accounts were used to impersonate recruiters at technology, defense and media companies, and to entice people into opening a malicious file. Microsoft found the attackers often disguised their malware as legitimate open-source software like Sumatra PDF and the SSH client Putty.
Microsoft attributed those attacks to North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group, although they’ve traditionally referred to this group as “ZINC“. That is, until earlier this month, when Redmond completely revamped the way it names threat groups; Microsoft now references ZINC as “Diamond Sleet.”
The ESET researchers said they found a new fake job lure tied to an ongoing Lazarus campaign on LinkedIn designed to compromise Linux operating systems. The malware was found inside of a document that offered an employment contract at the multinational bank HSBC.
“A few weeks ago, a native Linux payload was found on VirusTotal with an HSBC-themed PDF lure,” wrote ESET researchers Peter Kalnai and Marc-Etienne M.Leveille. “This completes Lazarus’s ability to target all major desktop operating systems. In this case, we were able to reconstruct the full chain, from the ZIP file that delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy, up until the final payload.”
ESET said the malicious PDF file used in the scheme appeared to have a file extension of “.pdf,” but that this was a ruse. ESET discovered that the dot in the filename wasn’t a normal period but instead a Unicode character (U+2024) representing a “leader dot,” which is often used in tables of contents to connect section headings with the page numbers on which those sections begin.
“The use of the leader dot in the filename was probably an attempt to trick the file manager into treating the file as an executable instead of a PDF,” the researchers continued. “This could cause the file to run when double-clicked instead of opening it with a PDF viewer.”
ESET said anyone who opened the file would see a decoy PDF with a job offer from HSBC, but in the background the executable file would download additional malware payloads. The ESET team also found the malware was able to manipulate the program icon displayed by the malicious PDF, possibly because fiddling with the file extension could cause the user’s system to display a blank icon for the malware lure.
Kim Zetter, a veteran Wired.com reporter and now independent security journalist, interviewed Mandiant researchers who said they expect “many more victims” will be discovered among the customers of Trading Technologies and 3CX now that news of the compromised software programs is public.
“Mandiant informed Trading Technologies on April 11 that its X_Trader software had been compromised, but the software maker says it has not had time to investigate and verify Mandiant’s assertions,” Zetter wrote in her Zero Day newsletter on Substack. For now, it remains unclear whether the compromised X_Trader software was downloaded by people at other software firms.
If there’s a silver lining here, the X_Trader software had been decommissioned in April 2020 — two years before the hackers allegedly embedded malware in it.
“The company hadn’t released new versions of the software since that time and had stopped providing support for the product, making it a less-than-ideal vector for the North Korean hackers to infect customers,” Zetter wrote.
Have you ever been browsing online and clicked a link or search result that took you to a site that triggers a “your connection is not private” or “your connection is not secure” error code? If you’re not too interested in that particular result, you may simply move on to another result option. But if you’re tempted to visit the site anyway, you should be sure you understand what the warning means, what the risks are, and how to bypass the error if you need to.
A “your connection is not private” error means that your browser cannot determine with certainty that a website has safe encryption protocols in place to protect your device and data. You can bump into this error on any device connected to the internet — computer, smartphone, or tablet.
So, what exactly is going on when you see the “this connection is not private” error?
For starters, it’s important to know that seeing the error is just a warning, and it does not mean any of your private information is compromised. A “your connection is not private” error means the website you were trying to visit does not have an up-to-date SSL (secure sockets layer) security certificate.
Website owners must maintain the licensing regularly to ensure the site encryption capabilities are up to date. If the website’s SSL certificate is outdated, it means the site owners have not kept their encryption licensing current, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are up to no good. Even major websites like LinkedIn have had momentary lapses that would throw the error. LinkedIn mistakenly let their subdomain SSL certificates lapse.
In late 2021, a significant provider of SSL certificates, Let’s Encrypt, went out of business. When their root domain officially lapsed, it created issues for many domain names and SSL certificates owned by legitimate companies. The privacy error created problems for unwitting businesses, as many of their website visitors were rightfully concerned about site security.
While it does not always mean a website is unsafe to browse, it should not be ignored. A secure internet connection is critical to protecting yourself online. Many nefarious websites are dangerous to visit, and this SSL certificate error will protect you from walking into them unaware.
SSL certification standards have helped make the web a safer place to transact. It helps ensure online activities like paying bills online, ordering products, connecting to online banking, or keeping your private email accounts safe and secure. Online security continues to improve with a new Transport Layer Security (TLS) standard, which promises to be the successor protocol to SSL.
So be careful whenever visiting sites that trigger the “connection is not private” error, as those sites can potentially make your personal data less secure and make your devices vulnerable to viruses and malware.
Note: The “your connection is not private” error is Google Chrome‘s phrasing. Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox users will instead see a “your connection is not secure” error as the warning message.
If you feel confident that a website or page is safe, despite the warning from your web browser, there are a few things you can do to troubleshoot the error.
Remember, you are taking your chances anytime you ignore an error. As we mentioned, you could leave yourself vulnerable to hackers after your passwords, personal information, and other risks.
Your data and private information are valuable to hackers, so they will continue to find new ways to try and procure it. Here are some ways to protect yourself and your data when browsing online.
As we continue to do more critical business online, we must also do our best to address the risks of the internet’s many conveniences.
A comprehensive cybersecurity tool like McAfee+ Ultimate can help protect you from online scams, identity theft, and phishing attempts, and ensure you always have a secure connection. McAfee helps keep your sensitive information out of the hands of hackers and can help you keep your digital data footprints lighter with personal data cleanup.
With McAfee’s experts on your side, you can enjoy everything the web offers with the confidence of total protection.
The post “This Connection Is Not Private” – What it Means and How to Protect Your Privacy appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Related tags
Chief Information Officers and other technology decision makers continuously seek new and better ways to evaluate and manage their investments in innovation – especially the technologies that may create consequential decisions that impact human rights. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prominent in vendor offerings, there is an increasing need to identify, manage, and mitigate the unique risks that AI-based technologies may bring.
Cisco is committed to maintaining a responsible, fair, and reflective approach to the governance, implementation, and use of AI technologies in our solutions. The Cisco Responsible AI initiative maximizes the potential benefits of AI while mitigating bias or inappropriate use of these technologies.
Gartner® Research recently published “Innovation Insight for Bias Detection/Mitigation, Explainable AI and Interpretable AI,” offering guidance on the best ways to incorporate AI-based solutions that facilitates “understanding, trust and performance accountability required by stakeholders.” This newsletter describes Cisco’s approach to Responsible AI governance and features this Gartner report.
At Cisco, we are committed to managing AI development in a way that augments our focus on security, privacy, and human rights. The Cisco Responsible AI initiative and framework governs the application of responsible AI controls in our product development lifecycle, how we manage incidents that arise, engage externally, and its use across Cisco’s solutions, services, and enterprise operations.
Our Responsible AI framework comprises:
We base our Responsible AI initiative on principles consistent with Cisco’s operating practices and directly applicable to the governance of AI innovation. These principles—Transparency, Fairness, Accountability, Privacy, Security, and Reliability—are used to upskill our development teams to map to controls in the Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle and embed Security by Design, Privacy by Design, and Human Rights by Design in our solutions. And our principle-based approach empowers customers to take part in a continuous feedback cycle that informs our development process.
We strive to meet the highest standards of these principles when developing, deploying, and operating AI-based solutions to respect human rights, encourage innovation, and serve Cisco’s purpose to power an inclusive future for all.
Check out Gartner recommendations for integrating AI into an organization’s data systems in this Newsletter and learn more about Cisco’s approach to Responsible Innovation by reading our introduction “Transparency Is Key: Introducing Cisco Responsible AI.”
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
FreshRSS