Slashdot Mirror

Threatpost, the security news service of Kaspersky Lab, is reporting a new exploit which allows hijacking of third-party apps that support single sign-on from Google or Facebook (and support the OAuth 2.0 protocol). msm1267 quotes their article: Three Chinese University of Hong Kong researchers presented at Black Hat EU last week a paper called "Signing into One Billion Mobile LApp Accounts Effortlessly with OAuth 2.0"... The researchers examined 600 top U.S. and Chinese mobile apps that use OAuth 2.0 APIs from Facebook, Google and Sina -- which operates Weibo in China -- and support single sign-on for third-party apps. The researchers found that 41.2% of the apps they tested were vulnerable to their attack... None of the apps were named in the paper, but some have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times and can be exploited for anything from free phone calls to fraudulent purchases.
"The researchers said the apps they tested had been downloaded more than 2.4 billion times in aggregate."

"Researchers have found a new strain of document-based macro malware that evades discovery by lying dormant when it detects a security researcher's test environment," reports Threatpost, The Kaspersky Lab security news service. Slashdot reader writes: Once a computer is compromised, the malware will count the number of Word documents stored on the local drive; if it's more than two, the malware executes. Otherwise, it figures it's landed in a virtual environment or is executing in a sandbox and stays dormant.

A typical test environment consists of a fresh Windows computer image loaded into a VM. The OS image usually lacks documents and other telltale signs of real world use [according to SentinelOne researcher Caleb Fenton]. If no Microsoft Word documents are found, the VBA macro's code execution terminates, shielding the malware from automated analysis and detection. Alternately, if more than two Word documents are found on the targeted system, the macro will download and install the malware payload.

Researchers "have devised a new way to decrypt secret cookies which could leave your passwords vulnerable to theft," reports Digital Trends. Slashdot reader msm1267 writes: New attacks revealed today against 64-bit block ciphers push cryptographic ciphers such as Triple-DES (3DES) and Blowfish closer to extinction. The attacks, known as SWEET32, allow for the recovery of authentication cookies from HTTPS traffic protected by 3DES, and BasicAUTH credentials from OpenVPN traffic protected by default by Blowfish.

In response, OpenSSL is expected to remove 3DES from its default bulid in 1.1.0, and lower its designation from High to Medium 1.0.2 and 1.0.1. OpenVPN, meanwhile, is expected to release a new version as well with a warning about Blowfish and new configuration advice protecting against the SWEET32 attacks. The researchers behind SWEET32 said this is a practical attack because collisions begin after a relatively short amount of data is introduced. By luring a victim to a malicious site, the attacker can inject JavaScript into the browser that forces the victim to connect over and over to a site they're authenticated to. The attacker can then collect enough of that traffic -- from a connection that is kept alive for a long period of time -- to recover the session cookie.

msm1267 writes from a report via Threatpost: A Windows UAC bypass has been publicly disclosed that not only bypasses the security feature meant to prevent unauthorized installs, but can be used to run code on compromised machines without leaving a trace on the hard disk. The bypass relies on Event Viewer (eventvwr.exe), a native Windows feature used to view event logs locally or remotely. Researcher Matt Nelson said he figured out a way to use eventvwr to hijack a registry process, start Powershell and execute commands on Windows machines; he collaborated with fellow researcher Matt Graeber on a proof-of-concept exploit, which was tested against Windows 7 and 10. A report published today by Nelson said it would work against any version of the OS that implements UAC. An attacker would already need to be on the machine to use this technique, Nelson said. The attack allows an admin user to execute code in a high-integrity context without requiring the user to approve the administrative action via the UAC pop-up. Microsoft, the researcher said, does not consider UAC bypasses a security boundary worthy of a bulletin and patch. It's unclear how Microsoft will address this issue.

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: Apple closed out Black Hat today with a long-awaited announcement that next month it will launch a bug bounty. The Apple Security Bounty will be an invitation-only program, open to two dozen researchers at the outset, said Ivan Krstic, head of security engineering and architecture. The maximum payout is $200,000 and five classes of bugs in iOS and iCloud are in scope. Apple said the maximum reward will be $200,000 for vulnerabilities and proof-of-concept code in secure boot firmware components. It will also pay $100,000 for the extraction of confidential material protected by its Secure Enclave Processor, $50,000 for code execution flaws with kernel privileges or unauthorized access to iCloud account data on Apple servers, and $25,000 access from a sandboxed process to user data outside that sandbox.

Reader msm1267 writes: Wireless keyboards made by eight different companies suffer from a vulnerability that can allow attackers to eavesdrop on keystrokes from up to 250 feet away, researchers warned Tuesday. If exploited, the vulnerability, dubbed KeySniffer, could let an attacker glean passwords, credit card numbers, security questions and answers -- essentially anything typed on a keyboard, in clear text. Keyboards manufactured by Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Kensington, Insignia, Radio Shack, Anker, General Electric, and EagleTec are affected, according to Marc Newlin, a researcher with Bastille Networks who discovered the vulnerability. Bastille gave the manufacturers of the keyboards 90 days to address the vulnerability, but most vendors failed to respond to their findings. Newlin said only Jasco Products, a company that manufactures the affected keyboard (GE 98614) for General Electric, responded and claimed it no longer manufactures wireless devices, like keyboards. As there doesn't appear to be a way to actually fix the vulnerability, it's likely the companies will eventually consider the devices end of life.

Reader msm1267 writes: The defunct xDedic marketplace has resurfaced again, this time on a Tor network domain. The marketplace provides a platform for buying and selling of hacked servers. Its original open web domain, xdedic[,]biz, had disappeared shortly after a June 15 Kaspersky Lab report on its activities. The original market had upwards of 70,000 hacked servers for sale from more than 400 unique sellers. It's unknown how much inventory is being peddled on the new site, which was uncovered by researchers at Digital Shadows, who found a post on a Russian and French criminal forum pointing to a Tor domain as the new home of xDedic. The new site has the same look and feel as the old one, but Digital Shadows said accounts had not been transferred, and that there is now a $50 USD enrollment fee to join the new market.

Reader msm1267 writes: The default implementation for KeyStore, the system in Android designed to store user credentials and cryptographic keys, is broken, researchers say.>In an academic paper published this week, researchers argue that the particular encryption scheme that KeyStore uses fails to protect the integrity of keys and could be exploited to allow an attacker to modify stored keys through a forgery attack.
KeyStore, which performs key-specific actions through the OpenSSL library, allows Android apps to store and generate their own cryptographic keys. By storing keys in a container, KeyStore makes it more difficult to remove them from the device. Mohamed Sabt and Jacques Traore, two researchers with the French telecom Orange Labs, claim the scheme associated with the system is "non-provably secure," and could have "severe consequences." The two point out in their paper "Breaking Into the KeyStore: A Practical Forgery Attack Against Android KeyStore," that it's the hash-then-encrypt (HtE) authenticated encryption (AE) scheme in cipher block chaining mode (CBC) in KeyStore that fails to guarantee the integrity of keys.

"Researchers have discovered a vulnerability within the Swagger specification which may place tools based on NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and Java at risk of exploit," warns ZDNet's blog Zero Day, adding "the severe flaw allows attackers to remotely execute code." Slashdot reader msm1267 writes: A serious parameter injection vulnerability exists in the Swagger Code Generator that could allow an attacker to embed executable code in a Swagger JSON file. The flaw affects NodeJS, Ruby, PHP, Java and likely other programming languages. Researchers at Rapid7 who found the flaw disclosed details...as well as a Metasploit module and a proposed patch for the specification. The matter was privately disclosed in April, but Rapid7 said it never heard a response from Swagger's maintainers.

Swagger produces and consumes RESTful web services APIs; Swagger docs can be consumed to automatically generate client-server code. As of January 1, the Swagger specification was donated to the Open API Initiative and became the foundation for the OpenAPI Specification. The vulnerability lies in the Swagger Code Generator, and specifically in that parsers for Swagger documents (written in JSON) don't properly sanitize input. Therefore, an attacker can abuse a developer's trust in Swagger to include executable code that will run once it's in the development environment.

An anonymous reader quotes an article from BankInfoSecurity: Security experts are once again warning enterprises to immediately update -- or delete -- all instances of the Adobe Flash Player they may have installed on any system in the wake of reports that a zero-day flaw in the web browser plug-in is being targeted by an advanced persistent threat group.... The bug exists in Adobe Flash Player 21.0.0.242 and earlier versions -- running on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS -- and "successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system." Thursday Adobe released an updated version of Flash patching 36 separate vulnerabilities, including the critical vulnerability which "if exploited would allow malicious native-code to execute, potentially without a user being aware." While applauding Adobe's quick response, researchers at Kaspersky Lab say it's already been exploited in Russia, Nepal, South Korea, China, India, Kuwait and Romania, and BankInfoSecurity writes that "The latest warning over this campaign reinforces just how often APT attackers target Flash, thus making a potential business case for banning it for inside the enterprise."

Michael Mimoso, reporting for Threatpost: Google said that it will initiate on June 16 a gradual deprecation of SSLv3 and RC4 for Gmail IMAP/POP mail clients. Both the crypto protocols cipher are notoriously unsafe and are being phased out in big chunks of the Internet. Google, for its part, had already announced in May that it would no longer support SSLv3 and RC4 connections for Gmail SMTP. Google does note that most mail clients already default to safer TLS connections, and most will not be affected by the impending changes."Unlike Gmail SMTP, this change will be rolled out as a gradual change, where it may take longer than 30 days for users to be fully restricted from connecting to Gmail from SSLv3 or RC4 connections; however, we recommend updating your clients soon in order to avoid any potential disruption," Google said in an announcement.

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: Intuitively, auto-correcting passwords would seem to be a terrible idea, and the worst security-for-convenience tradeoff in technology history. But a team of academics from Cornell University, MIT and a Dropbox security engineer say that the degradation of security from the introduction of such an authentication mechanism is negligible. The team -- Rahul Chatterjee, Ari Juels and Thomas Ristenpart of Cornell University, Anish Athalye of MIT, and Devdatta Akhawe of Dropbox -- presented their findings in a paper called "pASSWORD tYPOS and How to Correct Them Securely" at the recent IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper describes a framework for what the team calls typo-tolerant passwords that significantly enhances usability without compromising security. The paper focuses on three common types of password errors that users make while typing: engaging caps lock; inadvertently capitalizing the first letter of a password; or adding or omitting characters to the beginning or end of a password. By instituting an autocorrect scheme, the researchers said in their paper that they could reduce common mistakes and user frustrations with logins. Recently, an anonymous user asked Slashdot how one creates a highly secure password after a study from Carnegie Mellon issued a warning about common user misconceptions. You can engage in the conversation and/or read the witty responses here.

Reader msm1267 shares a report on ThreatPost about an ongoing security trend: Crooks breaking into enterprise networks are holding data they steal for ransom under the guise they are doing the company a favor by exposing a flaw. The criminal act is described as bug poaching and is becoming a growing new threat to businesses vulnerable to attacks.
Hackers are extorting companies for as much as $30,000 in exchange for details on how hackers broke into their network and stole data. Researchers say once the intruders steal the data, there's no explicit threat that they will break in again or release data if companies don't pay. Instead, attackers release a simple statement demanding payment in exchange for details on how to fix the vulnerability
Typical bug poaching incidents start with criminals breaking into a network and stealing as much sensitive data as they can. Next, they post the data to a third-party cloud storage service. Lastly, the attackers email the company links to the data as proof the information was stolen and ask for a wire transfer of money in exchange for how the data was stolen.
During the attack, victims are not threatened with the public release of their data, instead attackers simply send a message that reads: "Please rest assured that the data is safe with me. It was extracted for proof only. Honestly, I do this job for a living, not for fun."

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: Two University of Texas academics have made what some experts believe is a breakthrough in random number generation that could have longstanding implications for cryptography and computer security. David Zuckerman, a computer science professor, and Eshan Chattopadhyay, a graduate student, published a paper in March that will be presented in June at the Symposium on Theory of Computing. The paper describes how the academics devised a method for the generation of high quality random numbers. The work is theoretical, but Zuckerman said down the road it could lead to a number of practical advances in cryptography, scientific polling, and the study of other complex environments such as the climate. "We show that if you have two low-quality random sources -- lower quality sources are much easier to come by -- two sources that are independent and have no correlations between them, you can combine them in a way to produce a high-quality random number," Zuckerman said. "People have been trying to do this for quite some time. Previous methods required the low-quality sources to be not that low, but more moderately high quality. We improved it dramatically." The technical details are described in the academics' paper "Explicit Two-Source Extractors and Resilient Functions."

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: Three dozen global enterprises have been breached by attackers who exploited a single, mitigated vulnerability in SAP business applications. The attacks were carried out between 2013 and are ongoing against large organizations owned by corporations in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, spanning 15 critical industries, researchers at Onapsis said today. [The DHS-sponsored CERT at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University also published an alert this morning, the first in its history for SAP applications.] The severity of these attacks is high and should put other organizations on notice that are running critical business processes and data through SAP Java apps. The issue lies in the Invoker Servlet, which is part of the standard J2EE specification and enables developers to test custom Java applications. When it is enabled, developers and users can call these servlets over the Internet directly without authentication or authorization controls. Attackers, however, can take advantage of this same functionality to exploit these business critical systems.

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: Weeks of anxiety and concern over the Badlock vulnerability ended today with an anticlimactic thud. Badlock was the security boogeyman since the appearance three weeks ago of a website and logo branding the bug as something serious in Samba, an open source implementation of the server message block (SMB) protocol that provides file and print services for Windows clients. As it turns out, Badlock was hardly the remote code execution monster many anticipated. Instead, it's a man-in-the-middle and denial-of-service bug, allowing an attacker to elevate privileges or crash a Windows machine running Samba services. SerNet, a German consultancy behind the discovery of Badlock, fueled the hype at the outset with a number of since-deleted tweets that said any marketing boost as a result of its branding and private disclosure of the bug to Microsoft was a bonus for its business. For its part, Microsoft refused to join the hype machine and today in MS16-047 issued a security update it rated 'Important' for the Windows Security Account Manager (SAM) and Local Security Authority (Domain Policy) (LSAD). The bulletin patches one vulnerability (CVE-2016-0128), an elevation of privilege bug in both SAM and LSAD that could be exploited in a man-in-the-middle attack, forcing a downgrade of the authentication level of both channels, Microsoft said. An attacker could then impersonate an authenticated user.

msm1267 writes: The FBI has delayed its case against Apple less than a day before a scheduled court hearing and showdown over its demands that Apple help unlock a terrorist's iPhone. The government late Monday afternoon filed a motion to vacate its case, putting a halt to a saga that began in mid-February when a federal magistrate ordered Apple to help the FBI access a phone belonging to one of the shooters involved in last December's attack that killed 14 in San Bernardino, Calif.

The motion also indicates that the FBI may have found a way onto the phone without Apple's help. "On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking [shooter Syed] Farook's iPhone," the motion says. "Testing is required to determine whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data on Farook's iPhone. If the method is viable, it should eliminate the need for the assistance from Apple Inc. ("Apple") set forth in the All Writs Act Order in this case." Update 3/22/16 at 01:05:00 GMT: The story was updated to reflect the correct information that the case was delayed, not dropped. A federal judge agreed to postpone the oral arguments between Apple and the U.S. government.

msm1267 writes from an article on Threatpost: Typosquatters are targeting Apple computer users with malware in a recent campaign that snares clumsy web surfers who mistakenly type .om instead of .com when surfing the web. According to Endgame security researchers, the top level domain for Middle Eastern country Oman (.om) is being exploited by typosquatters who have registered more than 300 domain names with the .om suffix for U.S. companies and services such as Citibank, Dell, Macys and Gmail. Endgame made the discovery last week and reports that several groups are behind the typosquatter campaigns. Mac OS X users are being singled out in this typosquatting campaign with malware. According to Endgame, when a Mac user stumbles on one of the typosquatters' webpages, a fake Adobe Flash update pops up and attempts to trick users to install the advertising component called Genieo. Endgame suspects that typosquatters are exploiting a hole in Oman's domain name registration process. When Endgame tried to register a domain it was asked to verify that it had the authority to registrar a specific commercial domain. "It's unclear how typosquatters were able to register so many domains in such a short period of time," Endgame said.

msm1267 writes: Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the USB devices that support wireless keyboards and mice that could put a countless number of devices at risk to attack. Seven manufacturers have been informed of the flaw, but as of today, only Logitech has produced a firmware update. Some have no update mechanism and can never be patched. The issue lies in the fact that some of the commands from the peripheral device to the dongle are not encrypted. Most do not authenticate packets and an attacker within close proximity and using a USB transmitting malicious packets over radio frequency can trick the victim's machine into accepting mouse clicks impersonating keystrokes. It would take a matter of seconds for the attacker's code to load a rootkit, malware or additional network access.

msm1267 writes: The glibc vulnerability disclosed this week has some experts on edge because of how DNS can leveraged in exploits. Dan Kaminsky said that while man-in-the-middle attacks are one vector, it would appear that it's also possible to exploit the bug and attack most Linux servers via DNS caching-only servers. 'This would be substantially worse if it went through the caching ecosystem; 99 percent of attack vectors go through that system,' Kaminsky said. Glibc, or the GNU C library, is used by most flavors of Linux and also a number of popular web services and frameworks, giving attacks potentially massive horizontal scale. The major Linux distros have patched and pushed updates to servers; source code is also available for homegrown Linux builds.

An anonymous reader writes: Today Google's online security team publicly disclosed a severe vulnerability in the Gnu C Library's DNS client. Due to the ubiquity of Glibc, this affects an astounding number of machines and software running on the internet, and raises questions about whether Glibc ought to still be the preferred C library when alternatives like musl are gaining maturity. As one example of the range of software affected, nearly every Bitcoin implementation is affected. Reader msm1267 adds some information about the vulnerability, discovered independently by security researchers at Red Hat as well as at Google, which has since been patched: The flaw, CVE-2015-7547, is a stack-based buffer overflow in the glibc DNS client-side resolver that puts Linux machines at risk for remote code execution. The flaw is triggered when the getaddrinfo() library function is used, Google said today in its advisory. "A back of the envelope analysis shows that it should be possible to write correctly formed DNS responses with attacker controlled payloads that will penetrate a DNS cache hierarchy and therefore allow attackers to exploit machines behind such caches," Red Hat said in an advisory. It's likely that all Linux servers and web frameworks such as Rails, PHP and Python are affected, as well as Android apps running glibc.

msm1267 writes: Researchers from Kaspersky Lab's Global Research & Analysis Team today unveiled details on two new criminal operations that have borrowed heavily from targeted nation-state attacks, and also shared an update on a resurgent Carbanak gang, which last year, it was reported, had allegedly stolen upwards of $1 billion from more than 100 financial companies. The heaviest hitter among the newly discovered gangs is an ongoing campaign, mostly confined to Russia, known as Metel. This gang targets machines that have access to money transactions, such as call center and support machines, and once they are compromised, the attackers use that access to automate the rollback of ATM transactions. As the attackers empty ATM after ATM—Metel was found inside 30 organizations—the balances on the stolen accounts remained untouched.

msm1267 writes: A unique scareware campaign targeting Mac OS X machines has been discovered, and it's likely the developer behind the malware has been at it a while since the installer that drops the scareware is signed with a legitimate Apple developer certificate.

"Sadly, this particular developer certificate (assigned to a Maksim Noskov) has been used for probably two years in similar attacks," said Johannes Ullrich, dean of research of the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, which on Thursday publicly disclosed the campaign. "So far, it apparently hasn't been revoked by Apple."

msm1267 writes: Socat is the latest open source tool to come under suspicion that it is backdoored. A security advisory published Monday warned that the OpenSSL address implementation in Socat contains a hard-coded Diffie-Hellman 1024-bit prime number that was not prime. "The effective cryptographic strength of a key exchange using these parameters was weaker than the one one could get by using a prime p," the advisory said. "Moreover, since there is no indication of how these parameters were chosen, the existence of a trapdoor that makes possible for an eavesdropper to recover the shared secret from a key exchange that uses them cannot be ruled out." Socat said it has generated a new prime that is 2048 bits long; versions 1.7.3.0 and 2.0.0-b8 are affected. The advisory adds that a temporary workaround would be to disable the Diffie-Hellman ciphers.

msm1267 writes: A patch for a critical Linux kernel flaw, present in the code since 2012, is expected to be pushed out today. The vulnerability affects versions 3.8 and higher, said researchers at startup Perception Point who discovered the vulnerability. The flaw also extends to two-thirds of Android devices, the company added. An attacker would require local access to exploit the vulnerability on a Linux server. A malicious mobile app would get the job done on an Android device. The vulnerability is a reference leak that lives in the keyring facility built into the various flavors of Linux. The keyring encrypts and stores login information, encryption keys and certificates, and makes them available to applications. Here's Perception Point's explanation of the problem.

msm1267 writes: OpenSSH today released a patch for a critical vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to force a client to leak private cryptographic keys. The attacker would have to control a malicious server in order to force the client to give up the key, OpenSSH and researchers at Qualys said in separate advisories. Qualys' security team privately disclosed the vulnerability Jan. 11 and the OpenSSH team had it patched within three days. The vulnerability was found in a non-documented feature called roaming that supports the resumption of interrupted SSH connections. OpenSSH said client code between versions 5.4 and 7.1 are vulnerable as it contains the roaming support. OpenSSH said that organizations may disable the vulnerable code by adding 'UseRoaming no' to the global ssh_config(5) file. Researchers at Qualys said organizations should patch immediately and regenerate private keys.

msm1267 writes: Juniper Networks has removed the backdoored Dual_EC DRBG algorithm from its ScreenOS operating system, but new developments show Juniper deployed Dual_EC long after it was known to be backdoored. Stephen Checkoway, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that he and a number of crypto experts looked at dozens of versions of Juniper's NetScreen firewalls and learned that ANSI X9.31 was used exclusively until ScreenOS 6.2 when Juniper added Dual_EC. It also changed the size of the nonce used with ANSI X9.31 from 20 bytes to 32 bytes for Dual_EC, giving an attacker the necessary output to predict the PRNG output. 'And at the same time, Juniper introduced what was just a bizarre bug that caused the ANSI generator to never be used and instead just use the output of Dual_EC. They made all of these changes in the same version update.'

mitcheli writes: If you're hanging on to the theory that collision attacks against SHA-1 and MD5 aren't yet practical, two researchers from INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, have provided reason for urgency. They demonstrated a new series of transcript collision attacks centered on the SHA-1 and MD5 implementations in TLS 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, along with IKEv1 and v2, and SSH 2. They say, "Our main conclusion is that the continued use of MD5 and SHA1 in mainstream cryptographic protocols significantly reduces their security and, in some cases, leads to practical attacks on key protocol mechanisms (PDF)." Of course, Mozilla officially began rejecting new SHA-1 certificates as of the first of the year. And as promised, there have been some usability issues. Mozilla said on Wednesday that various security scanners and antivirus products are keeping some users from reaching HTTPS websites.

mitcheli writes: If you're hanging on to the theory that collision attacks against SHA-1 and MD5 aren't yet practical, two researchers from INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, have provided reason for urgency. They demonstrated a new series of transcript collision attacks centered on the SHA-1 and MD5 implementations in TLS 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, along with IKEv1 and v2, and SSH 2. They say, "Our main conclusion is that the continued use of MD5 and SHA1 in mainstream cryptographic protocols significantly reduces their security and, in some cases, leads to practical attacks on key protocol mechanisms (PDF)." Of course, Mozilla officially began rejecting new SHA-1 certificates as of the first of the year. And as promised, there have been some usability issues. Mozilla said on Wednesday that various security scanners and antivirus products are keeping some users from reaching HTTPS websites.

msm1267 writes: Silent Circle, makers of the security and privacy focused Blackphone, have patched a vulnerability that could allow a malicious mobile application or remote attacker to access the device's modem and perform any number of actions. Researchers at SentinelOne discovered an open socket on the Blackphone that an attacker could abuse to intercept calls, set call forwarding, read SMS messages, mute the phone and more. Blackphone is marketed toward privacy-conscious users; it includes encrypted messaging apps such as SilentText and Silent Phone, and it runs on a customized, secure version of Android, called PrivatOS.

msm1267 writes: A security researcher is in a bit of a scrum with Facebook over vulnerability disclosures that not only tested the boundaries of the social network's bug bounty program, but he said, also prompted hints of legal and criminal action, which Facebook has since denied. Wesley Wineberg, a contract employee of security company Synack, said today that he had found some weaknesses in the Instagram infrastructure that allowed him to access source code for recent versions of Instagram, SSL certificates and private keys for Instagram.com, keys used to sign authentication cookies, email server credentials, and keys for more than a half-dozen critical other functions, including iOS and Android app signing keys and iOS push notification keys. Wineberg also accessed employee accounts and passwords, some of which he cracked, and had access to Amazon buckets storing user images and other data prompting claims of user privacy violations from Facebook.

msm1267 writes: A second root certificate and private key, similar to eDellRoot [mentioned here yesterday], along with an expired Atheros Authenticode cert and private key used to sign Bluetooth drivers has been found on a Dell Inspiron laptop. The impact of these two certs is limited compared to the original eDellRoot cert. The related eDellRoot cert is also self-signed but has a different fingerprint than the first one. It has been found only on two dozen machines according to the results of a scan conducted by researchers at Duo Security. Dell, meanwhile, late on Monday said that it was going to remove the eDellroot certificate from all Dell systems moving forward, and for existing affected customers, it has provided permanent removal instructions (.DOCX download), and starting today will push a software update that checks for the eDellroot cert and removes it. The second certificate / key pair was found by researchers at Duo Security.

msm1267 writes: Researchers at this week's PacSec 2015 conference in Tokyo demonstrated how they were able to inject special control characters into a barcode, so that a barcode reader will 'press' host system hotkeys, and activate a particular function. The attacks, called BadBarcode, can be used against any keyboard wedge barcode scanner that supports ASCII control characters--many do. An attacker than then use control commands to open or save files, launch a browser or execute commands. Here are the presentation slides.

msm1267 writes: FBI general counsel James Baker reiterated a theme his boss James Comey started months ago, that Silicon Valley needs to find a solution to the "Going Dark" encryption problem. Two crypto and security experts, however, pointed out during a security event in Boston that encryption remains the best defense against the government's surveillance overreach and espionage hacking targeting intellectual property. “If we were able to engineer a mechanism where we’re splitting a key and having a third party escrow it where the government could ask for it, the very next thing that would happen is that China et al will ask for the same solution. And we’re unlikely to give them the same solution,” Eric Wenger, director of cybersecurity and privacy, said. “Complexity kills, and the more complex you make a system, the more difficult it is to secure it. I don’t see how developing a key-bases solution secures things the way you want it to without creating a great deal of complexity and having other governments demand the same thing.”

msm1267 writes: Backwards compatibility, a necessary evil for Microsoft and its need to support so many legacy applications on Windows, may be its undoing as researchers have found a way to exploit this layer in the operating system to bypass existing mitigations against memory-based exploits. Specifically in this case, researchers slid past Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, or EMET, a suite of more than a dozen freely available mitigations against memory attacks. The soft spot, the researchers said, is the Windows on Windows, or WoW64, Windows subsystem that allows 32-bit software to run on 64-bit Windows machines. The researchers said 80 percent of browsers in their sample size were 32-bit processes executing on a 64-bit host running WOW64, meaning they're all vulnerable to this attack.

msm1267 writes: The Stagefright vulnerabilities are the gifts that keep on giving. Months after the potentially devastating security flaws in the mobile OS were publicly disclosed, Google continues to send out patches addressing vulnerabilities related to the initial reports. Today's monthly Android security bulletin includes a fix for another flaw in the Stagefright media playback engine, one in libutils where the Stagefright 2.0 vulnerabilities were found, and two in Android Mediaserver where all the vulnerable code runs. The over-the-air update was released today to Google's Nexus devices and will be added to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository in the next two days; Google partners including Samsung were provided the patches on Oct. 5, Google said, adding that the vulnerabilities are patched in Build LMY48X or later, or in Android Marshmallow with a patch level of Nov. 1.

msm1267 writes: A challenge has been made against one of the conclusions in an academic paper on cryptographic weaknesses that may be the open door through which intelligence agencies are breaking encrypted connections. The paper, 'Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice,' claims that a massively resourced agency such as the NSA could build enough custom hardware that would crack the prime number used to derive an encryption key. Once enough information is known about the prime, breaking Diffie-Hellman connections that use that same prime is relatively trivial. In the paper, the team of 14 cryptographers and academics who wrote it claim that upwards of 66 percent of IPsec VPN connections can be passively decrypted in this manner. Paul Wouters, a founding member and core developer of the Libreswan Project, as well as a Red Hat associate, said that researchers are jumping to a conclusion because of the way they scanned and tested VPN servers, and that the number is likely too high.

msm1267 writes: A vulnerability in Netgear routers, already disclosed by two sets of researchers at different security companies, has been publicly exploited. Netgear, meanwhile, has yet to release patched firmware, despite apparently having built one and confirmed with one of the research teams that it addressed the problem adequately. The vulnerability is a remotely exploitable authentication bypass that affects Netgear router firmware N300_1.1.0.31_1.0.1.img, and N300-1.1.0.28_1.0.1.img. The flaw allows an attacker, without knowing the router password, to access the administration interface.

msm1267 writes: Security researcher Joshua Drake today disclosed two more flaws in Stagefright, one that dates back to the first version of Android, and a second dependent vulnerability that was introduced in Android 5.0. The bugs affect more than one billion Android devices, essentially all of them in circulation. One of the vulnerabilities was found in a core Android library called libutils; it has been in the Android OS since it was first released and before there were even Android mobile devices. The second vulnerability was introduced into libstagefright in Android 5.0; it calls into libutils in a vulnerable way. An attacker would use a specially crafted MP3 or MP4 file in this case to exploit the vulnerabilities. Google has released patches into the Android Open Source Project tree, but public patches are not yet available.

msm1267 writes: Mac OS X's Gatekeeper security service is supposed to protect Apple computers from executing code that's not signed by Apple or downloaded from its App Store. A researcher, however, has built an exploit that uses a signed binary to execute malicious code. Patrick Wardle, a longtime Apple hacker, said Gatekeeper performs only an initial check on an application to determine whether it came from an untrusted source and should not be executed. Using a signed binary that passes the initial check and then loads a malicious library or app from the same or relative directory, however, will get an advanced attacker onto an OS X machine. Wardle disclosed his research and proof of concept to Apple, which said it is working on a patch, and may push out a short-term mitigation in the meantime.

msm1267 writes: A new report coauthored by Google researchers and a host of academics explains that firewalls, two-factor authentication and other traditional defensive capabilities put security teams in a constant dogfight against cybercrime. Instead, the focus, they says, should be on attacking the criminal infrastructure. The report outs a number of soft spots and inter-dependencies in the criminal underground that could be leveraged to cut into the efficacy of cybercrime. "Commoditization directly influences the kinds of business structures and labor agreements that drive recent cybercrime," the researchers write. While shutting down the black market is easier said than done, the paper notes a few ways to deter the behavior of attackers, if not fully break the chain.

Trailrunner7 writes: There is a major vulnerability in a library in iOS and OS X that allows an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files on a target device and, when used in conjunction with other techniques, install a signed app that the device will trust without prompting the user with a warning dialog. Mark Dowd, the security researcher who discovered it, said he's been able to exploit the flaw over AirDrop, the feature in OS X and iOS that enables users to send files directly to other devices. If a user has AirDrop set to allow connections from anyone—not just her contacts—an attacker could exploit the vulnerability on a default locked iOS device. In fact, an attacker can exploit the vulnerability even if the victim doesn't agree to accept the file sent over AirDrop.

msm1267 writes: Poorly secured satellite-based Internet links are being abused by nation-state hackers, most notably by the Turla APT group, to hide command-and-control operations, researchers at Kaspersky Lab said today. Active for close to a decade, Turla's activities were exposed last year; the Russian-speaking gang has carried out espionage campaigns against more than 500 victims in 45 countries, most of those victims in critical areas such as government agencies, diplomatic and military targets, and others. Its use of hijacked downstream-only links is a cheap ($1,000 a year to maintain) and simple means of moving malware and communicating with compromised machines, Kaspersky researchers wrote in a report. Those connections, albeit slow, are a beacon for hackers because links are not encrypted and ripe for abuse.

msm1267 writes: Netflix has released a tool it calls Sleepy Puppy. The tool injects cross-site scripting payloads into a target app that may not be vulnerable, but could be stored in a database and tracks the payload if it's reflected to a secondary application that makes use of the data in the same field. "We were looking for a way to provide coverage on applications that come from different origins or may not be publicly accessible," said co-developer Scott Behrens, a senior application security engineer at Netflix. "We also wanted to observe where stored data gets reflected back, and how data that may be stored publicly could also be reflected in a large number of internal applications." Sleepy Puppy is available on Netflix's Github repository and is one of a slew of security tools its engineers have released to open source.

msm1267 writes: Google, Microsoft and Mozilla today announced they've settled on an early 2016 timeframe to permanently deprecate the shaky RC4 encryption algorithm in their respective browsers. Mozilla said Firefox's shut-off date will coincide with the release of Firefox 44 on Jan. 26. Google and Microsoft said that Chrome and Internet Explorer 11 (and Microsoft Edge) respectively will also do so in the January-February timeframe. Attacks against RC4 are growing increasingly practical, rendering the algorithm more untrustworthy by the day.

Trailrunner7 writes: The CERT/CC is warning users that some Belkin home routers contain a number of vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to spoof DNS responses, intercept credentials sent in cleartext, access the web management interface, and take other actions on vulnerable routers. The vulnerabilities affect the Belkin N600 DB Wireless Dual Band N+ router, model F9K1102 v2 with firmware version 2.10.17, and potentially earlier versions of the firmware, as well. The vulnerabilities have not been patched by Belkin, the advisory from the CERT/CC says there aren't any practical workarounds for them. "DNS queries originating from the Belkin N600, such as those to resolve the names of firmware update and NTP servers, use predictable TXIDs that start at 0x0002 and increase incrementally. An attacker with the ability to spoof DNS responses can cause the router to contact incorrect or malicious hosts under the attacker's control," the advisory says.

msm1267 writes: More than 2,000 websites running WordPress have been compromised and are responsible for a surge this week in traffic from the Neutrino Exploit Kit. Attacks against sites running older versions of the content management system, 4.2 and earlier, were spotted by Zscaler. Those sites are backdoored and redirect a victim's browser through iframes to a landing page hosting the exploit kit where a Flash exploit awaits. The exploits generally target Internet Explorer, Zscaler said, and victims' computers are eventually infected with CryptoWall 3.0 ransomware. This analysis is in line with a similar report from the SANS Institute, which pointed the finger at a particular cybercrime group that had steered away from using the prolific Angler Exploit Kit and moved operations to Neutrino.

msm1267 writes: More than 2,000 websites running WordPress have been compromised and are responsible for a surge this week in traffic from the Neutrino Exploit Kit. Attacks against sites running older versions of the content management system, 4.2 and earlier, were spotted by Zscaler. Those sites are backdoored and redirect a victim's browser through iframes to a landing page hosting the exploit kit where a Flash exploit awaits. The exploits generally target Internet Explorer, Zscaler said, and victims' computers are eventually infected with CryptoWall 3.0 ransomware. This analysis is in line with a similar report from the SANS Institute, which pointed the finger at a particular cybercrime group that had steered away from using the prolific Angler Exploit Kit and moved operations to Neutrino.

msm1267 writes: Attackers have figured out how to use Portmapper, or RPC Portmapper, in reflection attacks where victims are sent copious amounts of responses from Portmapper servers, saturating bandwidth and keeping websites and web-based services unreachable. Telecommunications and Internet service provider Level 3 Communications of Colorado spotted anomalous traffic on its backbone starting in mid-June almost as beta runs of attacks that were carried out Aug. 10-12 against a handful of targets in the gaming and web hosting industries. There are 1.1 million Portmapper servers accessible online, and those open servers can be abused to similar effect as NTP servers were two years ago in amplification attacks.

msm1267 writes: A patch distributed by Google for the infamous Stagefright vulnerability found in 950 million Android devices is incomplete and users remain exposed to simple attacks targeting the flaw. Researchers at Exodus Intelligence discovered the issue in one of the patches submitted by Zimperium zLabs researcher Joshua Drake. Google responded today by releasing a new patch to open source and promising to distribute it next month in a scheduled OTA update for Nexus devices and to its partners. Drake's original patch failed to account for an integer discrepancy between 32- and 64-bit, Exodus Intelligence said. By inputting a specific 64-bit value, researchers were able to bypass the patch. Exodus, which submitted a bug fix of its own to Google, said it decided to go public with its findings for several reasons, including the fact that the vulnerability was widely publicized by Zimperium before and during Black Hat, not to mention that Google has had the original bug report since April, yet neither party noticed the discrepancy in the patch. The Android security team at Google is having a busy month. Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers at MWR Labs have released information on an unpatched vulnerability that allows an attacker to bypass the Android sandbox.