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Microsoft Corp. today pushed software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks.
Top of the heap on this Fat Patch Tuesday is CVE-2024-21412, a “security feature bypass” in the way Windows handles Internet Shortcut Files that Microsoft says is being targeted in active exploits. Redmond’s advisory for this bug says an attacker would need to convince or trick a user into opening a malicious shortcut file.
Researchers at Trend Micro have tied the ongoing exploitation of CVE-2024-21412 to an advanced persistent threat group dubbed “Water Hydra,” which they say has being using the vulnerability to execute a malicious Microsoft Installer File (.msi) that in turn unloads a remote access trojan (RAT) onto infected Windows systems.
The other zero-day flaw is CVE-2024-21351, another security feature bypass — this one in the built-in Windows SmartScreen component that tries to screen out potentially malicious files downloaded from the Web. Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs says it’s important to note that this vulnerability alone is not enough for an attacker to compromise a user’s workstation, and instead would likely be used in conjunction with something like a spear phishing attack that delivers a malicious file.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said this is the fifth vulnerability in Windows SmartScreen patched since 2022 and all five have been exploited in the wild as zero-days. They include CVE-2022-44698 in December 2022, CVE-2023-24880 in March 2023, CVE-2023-32049 in July 2023 and CVE-2023-36025 in November 2023.
Narang called special attention to CVE-2024-21410, an “elevation of privilege” bug in Microsoft Exchange Server that Microsoft says is likely to be exploited by attackers. Attacks on this flaw would lead to the disclosure of NTLM hashes, which could be leveraged as part of an NTLM relay or “pass the hash” attack, which lets an attacker masquerade as a legitimate user without ever having to log in.
“We know that flaws that can disclose sensitive information like NTLM hashes are very valuable to attackers,” Narang said. “A Russian-based threat actor leveraged a similar vulnerability to carry out attacks – CVE-2023-23397 is an Elevation of Privilege vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook patched in March 2023.”
Microsoft notes that prior to its Exchange Server 2019 Cumulative Update 14 (CU14), a security feature called Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA), which provides NTLM credential relay protections, was not enabled by default.
“Going forward, CU14 enables this by default on Exchange servers, which is why it is important to upgrade,” Narang said.
Rapid7’s lead software engineer Adam Barnett highlighted CVE-2024-21413, a critical remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that could be exploited just by viewing a specially-crafted message in the Outlook Preview pane.
“Microsoft Office typically shields users from a variety of attacks by opening files with Mark of the Web in Protected View, which means Office will render the document without fetching potentially malicious external resources,” Barnett said. “CVE-2024-21413 is a critical RCE vulnerability in Office which allows an attacker to cause a file to open in editing mode as though the user had agreed to trust the file.”
Barnett stressed that administrators responsible for Office 2016 installations who apply patches outside of Microsoft Update should note the advisory lists no fewer than five separate patches which must be installed to achieve remediation of CVE-2024-21413; individual update knowledge base (KB) articles further note that partially-patched Office installations will be blocked from starting until the correct combination of patches has been installed.
It’s a good idea for Windows end-users to stay current with security updates from Microsoft, which can quickly pile up otherwise. That doesn’t mean you have to install them on Patch Tuesday. Indeed, waiting a day or three before updating is a sane response, given that sometimes updates go awry and usually within a few days Microsoft has fixed any issues with its patches. It’s also smart to back up your data and/or image your Windows drive before applying new updates.
For a more detailed breakdown of the individual flaws addressed by Microsoft today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s list. For those admins responsible for maintaining larger Windows environments, it often pays to keep an eye on Askwoody.com, which frequently points out when specific Microsoft updates are creating problems for a number of users.
Microsoft today issued software updates to fix at least five dozen security holes in Windows and supported software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited. Also, Adobe, Google Chrome and Apple iOS users may have their own zero-day patching to do.
On Sept. 7, researchers at Citizen Lab warned they were seeing active exploitation of a “zero-click,” zero-day flaw to install spyware on iOS devices without any interaction from the victim.
“The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim,” the researchers wrote.
According to Citizen Lab, the exploit uses malicious images sent via iMessage, an embedded component of Apple’s iOS that has been the source of previous zero-click flaws in iPhones and iPads.
Apple says the iOS flaw (CVE-2023-41064) does not seem to work against devices that have its ultra-paranoid “Lockdown Mode” enabled. This feature restricts non-essential iOS features to reduce the device’s overall attack surface, and it was designed for users concerned that they may be subject to targeted attacks. Citizen Lab says the bug it discovered was being exploited to install spyware made by the Israeli cyber surveillance company NSO Group.
This vulnerability is fixed in iOS 16.6.1 and iPadOS 16.6.1. To turn on Lockdown Mode in iOS 16, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Lockdown Mode.
Not to be left out of the zero-day fun, Google acknowledged on Sept. 11 that an exploit for a heap overflow bug in Chrome is being exploited in the wild. Google says it is releasing updates to fix the flaw, and that restarting Chrome is the way to apply any pending updates. Interestingly, Google says this bug was reported by Apple and Citizen Lab.
On the Microsoft front, a zero-day in Microsoft Word is among the more concerning bugs fixed today. Tracked as CVE-2023-36761, it is flagged as an “information disclosure” vulnerability. But that description hardly grasps at the sensitivity of the information potentially exposed here.
Tom Bowyer, manager of product security at Automox, said exploiting this vulnerability could lead to the disclosure of Net-NTLMv2 hashes, which are used for authentication in Windows environments.
“If a malicious actor gains access to these hashes, they can potentially impersonate the user, gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems,” Bowyer said, noting that CVE-2023-36761 can be exploited just by viewing a malicious document in the Windows preview pane. “They could also conduct pass-the-hash attacks, where the attacker uses the hashed version of a password to authenticate themselves without needing to decrypt it.”
The other Windows zero-day fixed this month is CVE-2023-36802. This is an “elevation of privilege” flaw in the “Microsoft Streaming Service Proxy,” which is built into Windows 10, 11 and Windows Server versions. Microsoft says an attacker who successfully exploits the bug can gain SYSTEM level privileges on a Windows computer.
Five of the flaws Microsoft fixed this month earned its “critical” rating, which the software giant reserves for vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or malcontents with little or no interaction by Windows users.
According to the SANS Internet Storm Center, the most serious critical bug in September’s Patch Tuesday is CVE-2023-38148, which is a weakness in the Internet Connection Sharing service on Windows. Microsoft says an unauthenticated attacker could leverage the flaw to install malware just sending a specially crafted data packet to a vulnerable Windows system.
Finally, Adobe has released critical security updates for its Adobe Reader and Acrobat software that also fixes a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-26369). More details are at Adobe’s advisory.
For a more granular breakdown of the Windows updates pushed out today, check out Microsoft Patch Tuesday by Morphus Labs. In the meantime, consider backing up your data before updating Windows, and keep an eye on AskWoody.com for reports of any widespread problems with any of the updates released as part of September’s Patch Tuesday.
Update: Mozilla also has fixed zero-day flaw in Firefox and Thunderbird, and the Brave browser was updated as well. It appears the common theme here is any software that uses a code library called “libwebp,” and that this vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2023-4863.
“This includes Electron-based applications, for example – Signal,” writes StackDiary.com. “Electron patched the vulnerability yesterday. Also, software like Honeyview (from Bandisoft) released an update to fix the issue. CVE-2023-4863 was falsely marked as Chrome-only by Mitre and other organizations that track CVE’s and 100% of media reported this issue as “Chrome only”, when it’s not.”
Microsoft Corp. today issued software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including multiple zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited in the wild.
Six of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning malware or miscreants could use them to install software on a vulnerable Windows system without any help from users.
Last month, Microsoft acknowledged a series of zero-day vulnerabilities in a variety of Microsoft products that were discovered and exploited in-the-wild attacks. They were assigned a single placeholder designation of CVE-2023-36884.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said the August patch batch addresses CVE-2023-36884, which involves bypassing the Windows Search Security feature.
“Microsoft also released ADV230003, a defense-in-depth update designed to stop the attack chain associated that leads to the exploitation of this CVE,” Narang said. “Given that this has already been successfully exploited in the wild as a zero-day, organizations should prioritize patching this vulnerability and applying the defense-in-depth update as soon as possible.”
Redmond patched another flaw that is already seeing active attacks — CVE-2023-38180 — a weakness in .NET and Visual Studio that leads to a denial-of-service condition on vulnerable servers.
“Although the attacker would need to be on the same network as the target system, this vulnerability does not require the attacker to have acquired user privileges,” on the target system, wrote Nikolas Cemerikic, cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs.
Narang said the software giant also patched six vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, including CVE-2023-21709, an elevation of privilege flaw that was assigned a CVSSv3 (threat) score of 9.8 out of a possible 10, even though Microsoft rates it as an important flaw, not critical.
“An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by conducting a brute-force attack against valid user accounts,” Narang said. “Despite the high rating, the belief is that brute-force attacks won’t be successful against accounts with strong passwords. However, if weak passwords are in use, this would make brute-force attempts more successful. The remaining five vulnerabilities range from a spoofing flaw and multiple remote code execution bugs, though the most severe of the bunch also require credentials for a valid account.”
Experts at security firm Automox called attention to CVE-2023-36910, a remote code execution bug in the Microsoft Message Queuing service that can be exploited remotely and without privileges to execute code on vulnerable Windows 10, 11 and Server 2008-2022 systems. Microsoft says it considers this vulnerability “less likely” to be exploited, and Automox says while the message queuing service is not enabled by default in Windows and is less common today, any device with it enabled is at critical risk.
Separately, Adobe has issued a critical security update for Acrobat and Reader that resolves at least 30 security vulnerabilities in those products. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild targeting these flaws. The company also issued security updates for Adobe Commerce and Adobe Dimension.
If you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a fair chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with useful tips.
Additional reading:
-SANS Internet Storm Center listing of each Microsoft vulnerability patched today, indexed by severity and affected component.
–AskWoody.com, which keeps tabs on any developing problems related to the availability or installation of these updates.
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to fix dozens of security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. This month’s relatively light patch load has another added bonus for system administrators everywhere: It appears to be the first Patch Tuesday since March 2022 that isn’t marred by the active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s products.
June’s Patch Tuesday features updates to plug at least 70 security holes, and while none of these are reported by Microsoft as exploited in-the-wild yet, Redmond has flagged several in particular as “more likely to be exploited.”
Top of the list on that front is CVE-2023-29357, which is a “critical” bug in Microsoft SharePoint Server that can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker on the same network. This SharePoint flaw earned a CVSS rating of 9.8 (10.0 is the most dangerous).
“An attacker able to gain admin access to an internal SharePoint server could do a lot of harm to an organization,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “Gaining access to sensitive and privileged documents, stealing and deleting documents as part of a ransomware attack or replacing real documents with malicious copies to further infect users in the organization.”
There are at least three other vulnerabilities fixed this month that earned a collective 9.8 CVSS score, and they all concern a widely-deployed component called the Windows Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM), which is used for delivering multicast data — such as video streaming or online gaming.
Security firm Action1 says all three bugs (CVE-2023-32015, CVE-2023-32014, and CVE-2023-29363) can be exploited over the network without requiring any privileges or user interaction, and affected systems include all versions of Windows Server 2008 and later, as well as Windows 10 and later.
It wouldn’t be a proper Patch Tuesday if we also didn’t also have scary security updates for organizations still using Microsoft Exchange for email. Breen said this month’s Exchange bugs (CVE-2023-32031 and CVE-2023-28310) closely mirror the vulnerabilities identified as part of ProxyNotShell exploits, where an authenticated user in the network could exploit a vulnerability in the Exchange to gain code execution on the server.
Breen said while Microsoft’s patch notes indicate that an attacker must already have gained access to a vulnerable host in the network, this is typically achieved through social engineering attacks with spear phishing to gain initial access to a host before searching for other internal targets.
“Just because your Exchange server doesn’t have internet-facing authentication doesn’t mean it’s protected,” Breen said, noting that Microsoft says the Exchange flaws are not difficult for attackers to exploit.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Social networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. What follows is an interview with a Russian hacker responsible for a series of aggressive crypto spam campaigns that recently prompted several large Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code.
Renaud Chaput is a freelance programmer working on modernizing and scaling the Mastodon project infrastructure — including joinmastodon.org, mastodon.online, and mastodon.social. Chaput said that on May 4, 2023, someone unleashed a spam torrent targeting users on these Mastodon communities via “private mentions,” a kind of direct messaging on the platform.
The messages said recipients had earned an investment credit at a cryptocurrency trading platform called moonxtrade[.]com. Chaput said the spammers used more than 1,500 Internet addresses across 400 providers to register new accounts, which then followed popular accounts on Mastodon and sent private mentions to the followers of those accounts.
Since then, the same spammers have used this method to advertise more than 100 different crypto investment-themed domains. Chaput said that at one point this month the volume of bot accounts being registered for the crypto spam campaign started overwhelming the servers that handle new signups at Mastodon.social.
“We suddenly went from like three registrations per minute to 900 a minute,” Chaput said. “There was nothing in the Mastodon software to detect that activity, and the protocol is not designed to handle this.”
One of the crypto investment scam messages promoted in the spam campaigns on Mastodon this month.
Seeking to gain a temporary handle on the spam wave, Chaput said he briefly disabled new account registrations on mastodon.social and mastondon.online. Shortly after that, those same servers came under a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Chaput said whoever was behind the DDoS was definitely not using point-and-click DDoS tools, like a booter or stresser service.
“This was three hours non-stop, 200,000 to 400,000 requests per second,” Chaput said of the DDoS. “At first, they were targeting one path, and when we blocked that they started to randomize things. Over three hours the attack evolved several times.”
Chaput says the spam waves have died down since they retrofitted mastodon.social with a CAPTCHA, those squiggly letter and number combinations designed to stymie automated account creation tools. But he’s worried that other Mastodon instances may not be as well-staffed and might be easy prey for these spammers.
“We don’t know if this is the work of one person, or if this is [related to] software or services being sold to others,” Chaput told KrebsOnSecurity. “We’re really impressed by the scale of it — using hundreds of domains and thousands of Microsoft email addresses.”
Chaput said a review of their logs indicates many of the newly registered Mastodon spam accounts were registered using the same 0auth credentials, and that a domain common to those credentials was quot[.]pw.
The domain quot[.]pw has been registered and abandoned by several parties since 2014, but the most recent registration data available through DomainTools.com shows it was registered in March 2020 to someone in Krasnodar, Russia with the email address edgard011012@gmail.com.
This email address is also connected to accounts on several Russian cybercrime forums, including “__edman__,” who had a history of selling “logs” — large amounts of data stolen from many bot-infected computers — as well as giving away access to hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
In September 2018, a user by the name “ципа” (phonetically “Zipper” in Russian) registered on the Russian hacking forum Lolzteam using the edgard0111012@gmail.com address. In May 2020, Zipper told another Lolzteam member that quot[.]pw was their domain. That user advertised a service called “Quot Project” which said they could be hired to write programming scripts in Python and C++.
“I make Telegram bots and other rubbish cheaply,” reads one February 2020 sales thread from Zipper.
Quotpw/Ahick/Edgard/ципа advertising his coding services in this Google-translated forum posting.
Clicking the “open chat in Telegram” button on Zipper’s Lolzteam profile page launched a Telegram instant message chat window where the user Quotpw responded almost immediately. Asked if they were aware their domain was being used to manage a spam botnet that was pelting Mastodon instances with crypto scam spam, Quotpw confirmed the spam was powered by their software.
“It was made for a limited circle of people,” Quotpw said, noting that they recently released the bot software as open source on GitHub.
Quotpw went on to say the spam botnet was powered by well more than the hundreds of IP addresses tracked by Chaput, and that these systems were mostly residential proxies. A residential proxy generally refers to a computer or mobile device running some type of software that enables the system to be used as a pass-through for Internet traffic from others.
Very often, this proxy software is installed surreptitiously, such as through a “Free VPN” service or mobile app. Residential proxies also can refer to households protected by compromised home routers running factory-default credentials or outdated firmware.
Quotpw maintains they have earned more than $2,000 sending roughly 100,000 private mentions to users of different Mastodon communities over the past few weeks. Quotpw said their conversion rate for the same bot-powered direct message spam on Twitter is usually much higher and more profitable, although they conceded that recent adjustments to Twitter’s anti-bot CAPTCHA have put a crimp in their Twitter earnings.
“My partners (I’m programmer) lost time and money while ArkoseLabs (funcaptcha) introduced new precautions on Twitter,” Quotpw wrote in a Telegram reply. “On Twitter, more spam and crypto scam.”
Asked whether they felt at all conflicted about spamming people with invitations to cryptocurrency scams, Quotpw said in their hometown “they pay more for such work than in ‘white’ jobs” — referring to legitimate programming jobs that don’t involve malware, botnets, spams and scams.
“Consider salaries in Russia,” Quotpw said. “Any spam is made for profit and brings illegal money to spammers.”
Shortly after edgard011012@gmail.com registered quot[.]pw, the WHOIS registration records for the domain were changed again, to msr-sergey2015@yandex.ru, and to a phone number in Austria: +43.6607003748.
Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks breached data, finds that the address msr-sergey2015@yandex.ru has been associated with accounts at the mobile app site aptoide.com (user: CoolappsforAndroid) and vimeworld.ru that were created from different Internet addresses in Vienna, Austria.
A search in Skype on that Austrian phone number shows it belongs to a Sergey Proshutinskiy who lists his location as Vienna, Austria. The very first result that comes up when one searches that unusual name in Google is a LinkedIn profile for a Sergey Proshutinskiy from Vienna, Austria.
Proshutinskiy’s LinkedIn profile says he is a Class of 2024 student at TGM, which is a state-owned, technical and engineering school in Austria. His resume also says he is a data science intern at Mondi Group, an Austrian manufacturer of sustainable packaging and paper.
Mr. Proshutinskiy did not respond to requests for comment.
Quotpw denied being Sergey, and said Sergey was a friend who registered the domain as a birthday present and favor last year.
“Initially, I bought it for 300 rubles,” Quotpw explained. “The extension cost 1300 rubles (expensive). I waited until it expired and forgot to buy it. After that, a friend (Sergey) bought [the] domain and transferred access rights to me.”
“He’s not even an information security specialist,” Quotpw said of Sergey. “My friends do not belong to this field. None of my friends are engaged in scams or other black [hat] activities.”
It may seem unlikely that someone would go to all this trouble to spam Mastodon users over several weeks using an impressive number of resources — all for just $2,000 in profit. But it is likely that whoever is actually running the various crypto scam platforms advertised by Quotpw’s spam messages pays handsomely for any investments generated by their spam.
According to the FBI, financial losses from cryptocurrency investment scams dwarfed losses for all other types of cybercrime in 2022, rising from $907 million in 2021 to $2.57 billion last year.
Update, May 25, 10:30 a.m.: Corrected attribution of the Austrian school TGM.
For the past seven years, a malware-based proxy service known as “Faceless” has sold anonymity to countless cybercriminals. For less than a dollar per day, Faceless customers can route their malicious traffic through tens of thousands of compromised systems advertised on the service. In this post we’ll examine clues left behind over the past decade by the proprietor of Faceless, including some that may help put a face to the name.
The proxy lookup page inside the malware-based anonymity service Faceless. Image: spur.us.
Riley Kilmer is co-founder of Spur.us, a company that tracks thousands of VPN and proxy networks, and helps customers identify traffic coming through these anonymity services. Kilmer said Faceless has emerged as one of the underground’s most reliable malware-based proxy services, mainly because its proxy network has traditionally included a great many compromised “Internet of Things” devices — such as media sharing servers — that are seldom included on malware or spam block lists.
Kilmer said when Spur first started looking into Faceless, they noticed almost every Internet address that Faceless advertised for rent also showed up in the IoT search engine Shodan.io as a media sharing device on a local network that was somehow exposed to the Internet.
“We could reliably look up the [fingerprint] for these media sharing devices in Shodan and find those same systems for sale on Faceless,” Kilmer said.
In January 2023, the Faceless service website said it was willing to pay for information about previously undocumented security vulnerabilities in IoT devices. Those with IoT zero-days could expect payment if their exploit involved at least 5,000 systems that could be identified through Shodan.
Notices posted for Faceless users, advertising an email flooding service and soliciting zero-day vulnerabilities in Internet of Things devices.
Recently, Faceless has shown ambitions beyond just selling access to poorly-secured IoT devices. In February, Faceless re-launched a service that lets users drop an email bomb on someone — causing the target’s inbox to be filled with tens of thousands of junk messages.
And in March 2023, Faceless started marketing a service for looking up Social Security Numbers (SSNs) that claims to provide access to “the largest SSN database on the market with a very high hit rate.”
Kilmer said Faceless wants to become a one-stop-fraud-shop for cybercriminals who are seeking stolen or synthetic identities from which to transact online, and a temporary proxy that is geographically close to the identity being sold. Faceless currently sells this bundled product for $9 — $8 for the identity and $1 for the proxy.
“They’re trying to be this one-stop shop for anonymity and personas,” Kilmer said. “The service basically says ‘here’s an SSN and proxy connection that should correspond to that user’s location and make sense to different websites.'”
Faceless is a project from MrMurza, a particularly talkative member of more than a dozen Russian-language cybercrime forums over the past decade. According to cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint, MrMurza has been active in the Russian underground since at least September 2012. Flashpoint said MrMurza appears to be extensively involved in botnet activity and “drops” — fraudulent bank accounts created using stolen identity data that are often used in money laundering and cash-out schemes.
Faceless grew out of a popular anonymity service called iSocks, which was launched in 2014 and advertised on multiple Russian crime forums as a proxy service that customers could use to route their malicious Web traffic through compromised computers.
Flashpoint says that in the months before iSocks went online, MrMurza posted on the Russian language crime forum Verified asking for a serious partner to assist in opening a proxy service, noting they had a botnet that was powered by malware that collected proxies with a 70 percent infection rate.
MrMurza’s Faceless advertised on the Russian-language cybercrime forum ProCrd. Image: Darkbeast/Ke-la.com.
In September 2016, MrMurza sent a message to all iSocks users saying the service would soon be phased out in favor of Faceless, and that existing iSocks users could register at Faceless for free if they did so quickly — before Faceless began charging new users registration fees between $50 and $100.
Verified and other Russian language crime forums where MrMurza had a presence have been hacked over the years, with contact details and private messages leaked online. In a 2014 private message to the administrator of Verified explaining his bona fides, MrMurza said he received years of positive feedback as a seller of stolen Italian credit cards and a vendor of drops services.
MrMurza told the Verified admin that he used the nickname AccessApproved on multiple other forums over the years. MrMurza also told the admin that his account number at the now-defunct virtual currency Liberty Reserve was U1018928.
According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the user AccessApproved joined the Russian crime forum Zloy in Jan. 2012, from an Internet address in Magnitogorsk, RU. In a 2012 private message where AccessApproved was arguing with another cybercriminal over a deal gone bad, AccessApproved asked to be paid at the Liberty Reserve address U1018928.
In 2013, U.S. federal investigators seized Liberty Reserve and charged its founders with facilitating billions of dollars in money laundering tied to cybercrime. The Liberty Reserve case was prosecuted out of the Southern District of New York, which in 2016 published a list of account information (PDF) tied to thousands of Liberty Reserve addresses the government asserts were involved in money laundering.
That document indicates the Liberty Reserve account claimed by MrMurza/AccessApproved — U1018928 — was assigned in 2011 to a “Vadim Panov” who used the email address lesstroy@mgn.ru.
Constella Intelligence, a threat intelligence firm that tracks breached databases, says lesstroy@mgn.ru was used for an account “Hackerok” at the accounting service klerk.ru that was created from an Internet address in Magnitogorsk. The password chosen by this user was “1232.”
In addition to selling access to hacked computers and bank accounts, both MrMurza and AccessApproved ran side hustles on the crime forums selling clothing from popular retailers that refused to ship directly to Russia.
On one cybercrime forum where AccessApproved had clothing customers, denizens of the forum created a lengthy discussion thread to help users identify incoming emails associated with various reshipping services advertised within their community. Reshippers tend to rely on a large number of people in the United States and Europe helping to forward packages overseas, but in many cases the notifications about purchases and shipping details would be forwarded to reshipping service customers from a consistent email account.
That thread said AccessApproved’s clothing reshipping service forwarded confirmation emails from the address panov-v@mail.ru. This address is associated with accounts on two Russian cybercrime forums registered from Magnitogorsk in 2010 using the handle “Omega^gg4u.”
This Omega^gg4u identity sold software that can rapidly check the validity of large batches of stolen credit cards. Interestingly, both Omega^gg4u and AccessApproved also had another niche: Reselling heavily controlled substances — such as human growth hormone and anabolic steroids — from chemical suppliers in China.
A search in Constella on the address panov-v@mail.ru and many variations on that address shows these accounts cycled through the same passwords, including 055752403k, asus666, 01091987h, and the relatively weak password 1232 (recall that 1232 was picked by whoever registered the lesstroy@mgn.ru account at Klerk.ru).
Constella says the email address asus666@yandex.ru relied on the passwords asus666 and 01091987h. The 01091987h password also was used by asus666@mail.ru, which also favored the password 24587256.
Constella further reports that whoever owned the much shorter address asus@mail.ru also used the password 24587256. In addition, it found the password 2318922479 was tied to both asus666@mail.ru and asus@mail.ru.
The email addresses asus@mail.ru, asus2504@mail.ru, and zaxar2504@rambler.ru were all used to register Vkontakte social media accounts for a Denis ***@VIP*** Pankov. There are a number of other Vkontakte accounts registered to asus@mail.ru and many variations of this address under a different name. But none of those other profiles appear tied to real-life identities.
A mind map simplifying the research detailed here.
Constella’s data shows the email addresses asus2504@mail.ru and zaxar2504@rambler.ru used the rather unique password denis250485, which was also used by the email address denispankov@yandex.ru and almost a dozen variations at other Russian-language email providers.
Russian vehicle registration records from 2016 show the email address denispankov@yandex.ru belongs to Denis Viktorovich Pankov, born on April 25, 1985. That explains the “250485” portion of Pankov’s favored password. The registration records further indicate that in 2016 Pankov’s vehicle was registered in a suburb of Moscow.
Russian incorporation records show that denispankov@yandex.com is tied to IP Pankov Denis Viktorovich, a now-defunct transportation company in the Volograd Oblast, a region in southern Russia that shares a long border with western Kazazkhstan.
More recent records for IP Pankov Denis Viktorovich show a microenterprise with this name in Omsk that described its main activity as “retail sale by mail or via the Internet.” Russian corporate records indicate this entity was liquidated in 2021.
A reverse password search on “denis250485” via Constella shows this password was used by more than 75 email addresses, most of which are some variation of gaihnik@mail.ru — such as gaihnik25@mail.ru, or gaihnik2504@rambler.ru.
In 2012, someone posted answers to a questionnaire on behalf of Denis Viktorovich Pankov to a Russian-language discussion forum on Chinese crested dog breeds. The message said Pankov was seeking a puppy of a specific breed and was a resident of Krasnogorsk, a city that is adjacent to the northwestern boundary of Moscow.
The message said Pankov was a then 27-year-old manager in an advertising company, and could be reached at the email address gaihnik@mail.ru.
Constella Intelligence shows gaihnik@mail.ru registered at the now-defunct email marketing service Smart Responder from an address in Gagarin, which is about 115 miles west of Moscow.
Back in 2015, the user Gaihnik25 was banned from the online game World of Tanks for violating the game’s terms that prohibit “bot farming,” or the automated use of large numbers of player accounts to win some advantage that is usually related to cashing out game accounts or inventory.
For the past few years, someone using the nickname Gaihnik25 has been posting messages to the Russian-language hacking forum Gerki[.]pw, on discussion threads regarding software designed to “brute force” or mass-check online accounts for weak or compromised passwords.
A new member of the Russian hacking forum Nohide[.]Space using the handle Gaihnik has been commenting recently about proxy services, credential checking software, and the sale of hacked mailing lists. Gaihnik’s first post on the forum concerned private software for checking World of Tanks accounts.
The address gaihnik@mail.ru shows how so many email addresses tied to Pankov were also connected to apparently misleading identities on Vkontakte and elsewhere. Constella found this address was tied to a Vkontakte account for a Dmitriy Zakarov.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine says gaihnik@mail.ru belongs to 37-year-old Denis Pankov, yet clicking the Mail.ru profile for that user brings up a profile for a much older man by the name Gavril Zakarov. However, when you log in to a Mail.ru account and view that profile, it shows that most of the account’s profile photos are of a much younger man.
Many of those same photos show up in an online dating profile at dating.ru for the user Gaihnik, a.k.a “Denchik,” who says he is a 37-year-old Taurus from Gagarin who enjoys going for walks in nature, staying up late, and being on the Internet.
Mr. Pankov did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent to all of the email addresses mentioned in this story. However, some of those addresses produced detailed error responses; Mail.ru reported that the users panov-v@mail.ru, asus666@mail.ru, and asus2504@mail.ru were terminated, and that gaihnik25@mail.ru is now disabled.
Messages sent to many other email addresses connected via passwords to Pankov and using some variation of asus####@mail.ru also returned similar account termination messages.
Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday.
The security updates include patches for Azure, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint Server, SysInternals, and the .NET framework. Six of the update bundles earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning they fix vulnerabilities that malware or malcontents can use to remotely commandeer an unpatched Windows system — with little to no interaction on the part of the user.
The bug already seeing exploitation is CVE-2022-44698, which allows attackers to bypass the Windows SmartScreen security feature. The vulnerability allows attackers to craft documents that won’t get tagged with Microsoft’s “Mark of the Web,” despite being downloaded from untrusted sites.
“This means no Protected View for Microsoft Office documents, making it easier to get users to do sketchy things like execute malicious macros, said Greg Wiseman, product manager at security firm Rapid7. This is the second Mark of the Web flaw Microsoft has patched in as many months; both were first publicly detailed over the past two months on Twitter by security researcher Will Dormann.
Publicly disclosed (but not actively exploited for now) is CVE-2022-44710, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in the DirectX graphics component of Windows 11.
Another notable critical bug is CVE-2022-41076, a remote code execution flaw in PowerShell — a key component of Windows that makes it easier to automate system tasks and configurations.
Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs said while Microsoft doesn’t share much detail about CVE-2022-41076 apart from the designation ‘Exploitation More Likely,’ they also note that successful exploitation requires an attacker to take additional actions to prepare the target environment.
“What actions are required is not clear; however, we do know that exploitation requires an authenticated user level of access,” Breen said. “This combination suggests that the exploit requires a social engineering element, and would likely be seen in initial infections using attacks like MalDocs or LNK files.”
Speaking of malicious documents, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative highlights CVE-2022-44713, a spoofing vulnerability in Outlook for Mac.
“We don’t often highlight spoofing bugs, but anytime you’re dealing with a spoofing bug in an e-mail client, you should take notice,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “This vulnerability could allow an attacker to appear as a trusted user when they should not be. Now combine this with the SmartScreen Mark of the Web bypass and it’s not hard to come up with a scenario where you receive an e-mail that appears to be from your boss with an attachment entitled “Executive_Compensation.xlsx”. There aren’t many who wouldn’t open that file in that scenario.”
Microsoft also released guidance on reports that certain software drivers certified by Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Developer Program were being used maliciously in post-exploitation activity.
Three different companies reported evidence that malicious hackers were using these signed malicious driver files to lay the groundwork for ransomware deployment inside victim organizations. One of those companies, Sophos, published a blog post Tuesday detailing how the activity was tied to the Russian ransomware group Cuba, which has extorted an estimated $60 million from victims since 2019.
Of course, not all scary and pressing security threats are Microsoft-based. Also on Tuesday, Apple released a bevy of security updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and Safari, including a patch for a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution.
Anyone responsible for maintaining Fortinet or Citrix remote access products probably needs to update, as both are dealing with active attacks on just-patched flaws.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today (indexed by severity and other metrics) check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Let’s face it: Having “2022 election” in the headline above is probably the only reason anyone might read this story today. Still, while most of us here in the United States are anxiously awaiting the results of how well we’ve patched our Democracy, it seems fitting that Microsoft Corp. today released gobs of security patches for its ubiquitous Windows operating systems. November’s patch batch includes fixes for a whopping six zero-day security vulnerabilities that miscreants and malware are already exploiting in the wild.
Probably the scariest of the zero-day flaws is CVE-2022-41128, a “critical” weakness in the Windows scripting languages that could be used to foist malicious software on vulnerable users who do nothing more than browse to a hacked or malicious site that exploits the weakness. Microsoft credits Google with reporting the vulnerability, which earned a CVSS score of 8.8.
CVE-2022-41073 is a zero-day flaw in the Windows Print Spooler, a Windows component that Microsoft has patched mightily over the past year. Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, noted that the print spooler has been a popular target for vulnerabilities in the last 12 months, with this marking the 9th patch.
The third zero-day Microsoft patched this month is CVE-2022-41125, which is an “elevation of privilege” vulnerability in the Windows Cryptography API: Next Generation (CNG) Key Isolation Service, a service for isolating private keys. Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said exploitation of this vulnerability could grant an attacker SYSTEM privileges.
The fourth zero-day, CVE-2022-41091, was previously disclosed and widely reported on in October. It is a Security Feature Bypass of “Windows Mark of the Web” – a mechanism meant to flag files that have come from an untrusted source.
The other two zero-day bugs Microsoft patched this month were for vulnerabilities being exploited in Exchange Server. News that these two Exchange flaws were being exploited in the wild surfaced in late September 2022, and many were surprised when Microsoft let October’s Patch Tuesday sail by without issuing official patches for them (the company instead issued mitigation instructions that it was forced to revise multiple times). Today’s patch batch addresses both issues.
Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, said the Exchange flaw CVE-2022-41040 is a “critical” elevation of privilege vulnerability, and CVE-2022-41082 is considered Important, allowing Remote Code Execution (RCE) when PowerShell is accessible to the attacker.
“Both vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild,” Wiseman said. “Four other CVEs affecting Exchange Server have also been addressed this month. Three are rated as Important, and CVE-2022-41080 is another privilege escalation vulnerability considered Critical. Customers are advised to update their Exchange Server systems immediately, regardless of whether any previously recommended mitigation steps have been applied. The mitigation rules are no longer recommended once systems have been patched.”
Adobe usually issues security updates for its products on Patch Tuesday, but it did not this month. For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 85 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a new zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is being actively exploited. However, noticeably absent from this month’s Patch Tuesday are any updates to address a pair of zero-day flaws being exploited this past month in Microsoft Exchange Server.
The new zero-day flaw– CVE-2022-41033 — is an “elevation of privilege” bug in the Windows COM+ event service, which provides system notifications when users logon or logoff. Microsoft says the flaw is being actively exploited, and that it was reported by an anonymous individual.
“Despite its relatively low score in comparison to other vulnerabilities patched today, this one should be at the top of everyone’s list to quickly patch,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “This specific vulnerability is a local privilege escalation, which means that an attacker would already need to have code execution on a host to use this exploit. Privilege escalation vulnerabilities are a common occurrence in almost every security compromise. Attackers will seek to gain SYSTEM or domain-level access in order to disable security tools, grab credentials with tools like Mimkatz and move laterally across the network.
Indeed, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that almost half of the security flaws Microsoft patched this week are elevation of privilege bugs.
Some privilege escalation bugs can be particularly scary. One example is CVE-2022-37968, which affects organizations running Kubernetes clusters on Azure and earned a CVSS score of 10.0 — the most severe score possible.
Microsoft says that to exploit this vulnerability an attacker would need to know the randomly generated DNS endpoint for an Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster. But that may not be such a tall order, says Breen, who notes that a number of free and commercial DNS discovery services now make it easy to find this information on potential targets.
Late last month, Microsoft acknowledged that attackers were exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server. Paired together, the two flaws are known as “ProxyNotShell” and they can be chained to allow remote code execution on Exchange Server systems.
Microsoft said it was expediting work on official patches for the Exchange bugs, and it urged affected customers to enable certain settings to mitigate the threat from the attacks. However, those mitigation steps were soon shown to be ineffective, and Microsoft has been adjusting them on a daily basis nearly each day since then.
The lack of Exchange patches leaves a lot of Microsoft customers exposed. Security firm Rapid7 said that as of early September 2022 the company observed more than 190,000 potentially vulnerable instances of Exchange Server exposed to the Internet.
“While Microsoft confirmed the zero-days and issued guidance faster than they have in the past, there are still no patches nearly two weeks out from initial disclosure,” said Caitlin Condon, senior manager of vulnerability research at Rapid7. “Despite high hopes that today’s Patch Tuesday release would contain fixes for the vulnerabilities, Exchange Server is conspicuously missing from the initial list of October 2022 security updates. Microsoft’s recommended rule for blocking known attack patterns has been bypassed multiple times, emphasizing the necessity of a true fix.”
Adobe also released security updates to fix 29 vulnerabilities across a variety of products, including Acrobat and Reader, ColdFusion, Commerce and Magento. Adobe said it is not aware of active attacks against any of these flaws.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Microsoft Corp. is investigating reports that attackers are exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server, a technology many organizations rely on to send and receive email. Microsoft says it is expediting work on software patches to plug the security holes. In the meantime, it is urging a subset of Exchange customers to enable a setting that could help mitigate ongoing attacks.
In customer guidance released Thursday, Microsoft said it is investigating two reported zero-day flaws affecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019. CVE-2022-41040, is a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability that can enable an authenticated attacker to remotely trigger the second zero-day vulnerability — CVE-2022-41082 — which allows remote code execution (RCE) when PowerShell is accessible to the attacker.
Microsoft said Exchange Online has detections and mitigation in place to protect customers. Customers using on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers are urged to review the mitigations suggested in the security advisory, which Microsoft says should block the known attack patterns.
Vietnamese security firm GTSC on Thursday published a writeup on the two Exchange zero-day flaws, saying it first observed the attacks in early August being used to drop “webshells.” These web-based backdoors offer attackers an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser.
“We detected webshells, mostly obfuscated, being dropped to Exchange servers,” GTSC wrote. “Using the user-agent, we detected that the attacker uses Antsword, an active Chinese-based opensource cross-platform website administration tool that supports webshell management. We suspect that these come from a Chinese attack group because the webshell codepage is 936, which is a Microsoft character encoding for simplified Chinese.”
GTSC’s advisory includes details about post-compromise activity and related malware, as well as steps it took to help customers respond to active compromises of their Exchange Server environment. But the company said it would withhold more technical details of the vulnerabilities for now.
In March 2021, hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide had their email stolen and multiple backdoor webshells installed, all thanks to four zero-day vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.
Granted, the zero-day flaws that powered that debacle were far more critical than the two detailed this week, and there are no signs yet that exploit code has been publicly released (that will likely change soon). But part of what made last year’s Exchange Server mass hack so pervasive was that vulnerable organizations had little or no advance notice on what to look for before their Exchange Server environments were completely owned by multiple attackers.
Microsoft is quick to point out that these zero-day flaws require an attacker to have a valid username and password for an Exchange user, but this may not be such a tall order for the hackers behind these latest exploits against Exchange Server.
Steven Adair is president of Volexity, the Virginia-based cybersecurity firm that was among the first to sound the alarm about the Exchange zero-days targeted in the 2021 mass hack. Adair said GTSC’s writeup includes an Internet address used by the attackers that Volexity has tied with high confidence to a China-based hacking group that has recently been observed phishing Exchange users for their credentials.
In February 2022, Volexity warned that this same Chinese hacking group was behind the mass exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which is a competitor to Microsoft Exchange that many enterprises use to manage email and other forms of messaging.
If your organization runs Exchange Server, please consider reviewing the Microsoft mitigations and the GTSC post-mortem on their investigations.
If your PC runs on Windows 10, you’re in very good company. The Microsoft operating system is the most widely used OS in the world. Many Windows 10 users have also been upgraded to Windows 11 through a rollout that began in 2021. Microsoft plans to complete the Windows update by mid-2022.
Unfortunately, its success as a widely used operating system makes Windows attractive to hackers. And if malicious software like malware can make a home in Windows, there are a lot of targets. So, this might raise the question of how best to protect your Windows 10 or 11 device.
Should you just use Windows Defender — Microsoft’s free version of antivirus software — or buy additional protection?
Read on to learn what Microsoft Defender covers and how additional virus protection can secure all of your connected devices.
For years, Microsoft has offered anti-malware protection, but the current version provides effective security against viruses. Windows Defender is a free antivirus tool that’s built into the Windows operating system.
While it’s considered one of the best free antivirus software programs, it doesn’t have any extra features that might come with paid security software. If you’re just looking for good antivirus software, though, Windows Defender can get the job done.
If you’re not using third-party antivirus protection, you’ll want to make sure that your Windows Defender antivirus coverage is working on your computer. Here’s how to check:
To make sure your Windows security is running, follow these steps:
With built-in coverage, you may wonder if you should invest in paid antivirus software. The answer is, of course, yes! It can be a good idea to get another antivirus solution because blocking malware and viruses should just be one part of your threat protection.
Today’s cybercriminals are using elaborate ruses to try to access your personal information, such as your bank and credit card numbers. And some of their scams might even target your devices with risky apps or links on social media.
As they always say, it’s better to be safe than sorry! Having another antivirus program can make sure you have real-time protection and access to the latest security features.
There are a lot of antivirus protection programs out there, but they aren’t all created equal. When looking for the best antivirus software for your needs, here are some things to consider for your devices running on Windows 10 or 11.
If you have a Windows PC, use an iPhone, and your tablet runs on Chrome, it helps to have an antivirus app that works across multiple operating systems. The good news is that McAfee Total Protection is compatible with Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, so you can continue enjoying all of your different devices without losing protection.
For greater cybersecurity, antivirus software should defend against a variety of online threats like viruses, spyware, and ransomware. And that’s exactly what you get with McAfee Total Protection. Our antivirus software can also help you avoid phishing attacks, which are fake messages to trick you into providing information or clicking a malicious link. The software will give you a warning when it recognizes a risky link, website, or file.
Functionality is another thing you’ll want to consider when looking for antivirus software. If the program isn’t easy to use to begin with — especially if you want to easily manage multiple devices — what good will it do you?
But you don’t have to worry with McAfee Total Protection, which allows you to connect and manage all of your computers and mobile devices from one single dashboard.
To keep your devices free from online threats like malware, good antivirus software will scan your files for threats. McAfee Total Protection provides 24/7 protection with real-time, on-demand, and scheduled scanning of files and applications.
McAfee Total Protection was developed with an understanding of how cybercriminals operate. Scammers may use a variety of tactics to try to steal your personal information, so our all-in-one protection also includes:
Using Microsoft’s built-in antivirus software can protect your Windows devices from viruses and malware. But to really keep your network and all of your devices secure, it’s good to rely on comprehensive protection like McAfee Total Protection. With services like identity monitoring, safe browsing, and a secure VPN, you can enjoy the internet without worry.
The post Does Windows 10 or 11 Need Antivirus Software? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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