Entries Tagged "malware"

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Google Sues the Badbox Botnet Operators

It will be interesting to watch what will come of this private lawsuit:

Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software.

These devices lack Google’s security protections, and the perpetrators pre-installed the Badbox 2.0 malware on them, to create a backdoor and abuse them for large-scale fraud and other illicit schemes.

This reminds me of Meta’s lawauit against Pegasus over its hack-for-hire software (which I wrote about here.) It’s a private company stepping into a regulatory void left by governments.

Slashdot thread.

Posted on July 23, 2025 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

New Mobile Phone Forensics Tool

The Chinese have a new tool called Massistant.

  • Massistant is the presumed successor to Chinese forensics tool, “MFSocket”, reported in 2019 and attributed to publicly traded cybersecurity company, Meiya Pico.
  • The forensics tool works in tandem with a corresponding desktop software.
  • Massistant gains access to device GPS location data, SMS messages, images, audio, contacts and phone services.
  • Meiya Pico maintains partnerships with domestic and international law enforcement partners, both as a surveillance hardware and software provider, as well as through training programs for law enforcement personnel.

From a news article:

The good news, per Balaam, is that Massistant leaves evidence of its compromise on the seized device, meaning users can potentially identify and delete the malware, either because the hacking tool appears as an app, or can be found and deleted using more sophisticated tools such as the Android Debug Bridge, a command line tool that lets a user connect to a device through their computer.

The bad news is that at the time of installing Massistant, the damage is done, and authorities already have the person’s data.

Slashdot thread.

Posted on July 18, 2025 at 7:07 AM • View Comments

Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections

A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops.

Now, people are rethinking the trade-off. Ubuntu has disabled some protections, resulting in 20% performance boost.

After discussion between Intel and Canonical’s security teams, we are in agreement that Spectre no longer needs to be mitigated for the GPU at the Compute Runtime level. At this point, Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel, and a clear warning from the Compute Runtime build serves as a notification for those running modified kernels without those patches. For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance tradeoff.

I agree with this trade-off. These attacks are hard to get working, and it’s not easy to exfiltrate useful data. There are way easier ways to attack systems.

News article.

Posted on July 2, 2025 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

TP-Link Router Botnet

There is a new botnet that is infecting TP-Link routers:

The botnet can lead to command injection which then makes remote code execution (RCE) possible so that the malware can spread itself across the internet automatically. This high severity security flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-1389) has also been used to spread other malware families as far back as April 2023 when it was used in the Mirai botnet malware attacks. The flaw also linked to the Condi and AndroxGh0st malware attacks.

[…]

Of the thousands of infected devices, the majority of them are concentrated in Brazil, Poland, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria and Turkey; with the botnet targeting manufacturing, medical/healthcare, services and technology organizations in the United States, Australia, China and Mexico.

Details.

Posted on March 14, 2025 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Thousands of WordPress Websites Infected with Malware

The malware includes four separate backdoors:

Creating four backdoors facilitates the attackers having multiple points of re-entry should one be detected and removed. A unique case we haven’t seen before. Which introduces another type of attack made possibly by abusing websites that don’t monitor 3rd party dependencies in the browser of their users.

The four backdoors:

The functions of the four backdoors are explained below:

  • Backdoor 1, which uploads and installs a fake plugin named “Ultra SEO Processor,” which is then used to execute attacker-issued commands
  • Backdoor 2, which injects malicious JavaScript into wp-config.php
  • Backdoor 3, which adds an attacker-controlled SSH key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file so as to allow persistent remote access to the machine
  • Backdoor 4, which is designed to execute remote commands and fetches another payload from gsocket[.]io to likely open a reverse shell.

Posted on March 10, 2025 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Delivering Malware Through Abandoned Amazon S3 Buckets

Here’s a supply-chain attack just waiting to happen. A group of researchers searched for, and then registered, abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for about $400. These buckets contained software libraries that are still used. Presumably the projects don’t realize that they have been abandoned, and still ping them for patches, updates, and etc.

The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines—and then abandoned.

Naturally, we registered them, just to see what would happen—”how many people are really trying to request software updates from S3 buckets that appear to have been abandoned months or even years ago?”, we naively thought to ourselves.

Turns out they got eight million requests over two months.

Had this been an actual attack, they would have modified the code in those buckets to contain malware and watch as it was incorporated in different software builds around the internet. This is basically the SolarWinds attack, but much more extensive.

But there’s a second dimension to this attack. Because these update buckets are abandoned, the developers who are using them also no longer have the power to patch them automatically to protect them. The mechanism they would use to do so is now in the hands of adversaries. Moreover, often—but not always—losing the bucket that they’d use for it also removes the original vendor’s ability to identify the vulnerable software in the first place. That hampers their ability to communicate with vulnerable installations.

Software supply-chain security is an absolute mess. And it’s not going to be easy, or cheap, to fix. Which means that it won’t be. Which is an even worse mess.

Posted on February 12, 2025 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

Screenshot-Reading Malware

Kaspersky is reporting on a new type of smartphone malware.

The malware in question uses optical character recognition (OCR) to review a device’s photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more than 242,000 times. Kaspersky says: “This is the first known case of an app infected with OCR spyware being found in Apple’s official app marketplace.”

That’s a tactic I have not heard of before.

Posted on February 7, 2025 at 10:26 AM • View Comments

Fake Reddit and WeTransfer Sites Are Pushing Malware

There are thousands of fake Reddit and WeTransfer webpages that are pushing malware. They exploit people who are using search engines to search sites like Reddit.

Unsuspecting victims clicking on the link are taken to a fake WeTransfer site that mimicks the interface of the popular file-sharing service. The ‘Download’ button leads to the Lumma Stealer payload hosted on “weighcobbweo[.]top.”

Boing Boing post.

Posted on January 30, 2025 at 7:44 AM • View Comments

New VPN Backdoor

A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection:

When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that.

J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that’s encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.

The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology’s Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice.

[…]

The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don’t know how the backdoor got installed.

Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (2/1): Another article.

Posted on January 27, 2025 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.