Entries Tagged "malware"

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Espionage Tactics Against Tibetans

A Citizen Lab research study of Chinese attack and espionage tactics against Tibetan networks and users.

This report describes the latest iteration in a long-running espionage campaign against the Tibetan community. We detail how the attackers continuously adapt their campaigns to their targets, shifting tactics from document-based malware to conventional phishing that draws on “inside” knowledge of community activities. This adaptation appears to track changes in security behaviors within the Tibetan community, which has been promoting a move from sharing attachments via e-mail to using cloud-based file sharing alternatives such as Google Drive.

We connect the attack group’s infrastructure and techniques to a group previously identified by Palo Alto Networks, which they named Scarlet Mimic. We provide further context on Scarlet Mimic’s targeting and tactics, and the intended victims of their attack campaigns. In addition, while Scarlet Mimic may be conducting malware attacks using other infrastructure, we analyze how the attackers re-purposed a cluster of their malware Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to mount the recent phishing campaign.

This move is only the latest development in the ongoing cat and mouse game between attack groups like Scarlet Mimic and the Tibetan community. The speed and ease with which attackers continue to adapt highlights the challenges faced by Tibetans who are trying to remain safe online.

News article.

Posted on March 10, 2016 at 2:16 PM • View Comments

The Ads vs. Ad Blockers Arms Race

For the past month or so, Forbes has been blocking browsers with ad blockers. Today, I tried to access a Wired article and the site blocked me for the same reason.

I see this as another battle in this continuing arms race, and hope/expect that the ad blockers will update themselves to fool the ad blocker detectors.

But in a fine example of irony, the Forbes site has been serving malware in its ads.

And it seems that Forbes is inconsistently using its ad blocker blocker. At least, I was able to get to that linked article last week. But then I couldn’t get to another article a few days later.

Posted on February 23, 2016 at 12:18 PM • View Comments

Security Risks of Unpatched Android Software

A lot has been written about the security vulnerability resulting from outdated and unpatched Android software. The basic problem is that while Google regularly updates the Android software, phone manufacturers don’t regularly push updates out to Android users.

New research tries to quantify the risk:

We are presenting a paper at SPSM next week that shows that, on average over the last four years, 87% of Android devices are vulnerable to attack by malicious apps. This is because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates. Some manufacturers are much better than others however, and our study shows that devices built by LG and Motorola, as well as those devices shipped under the Google Nexus brand are much better than most. Users, corporate buyers and regulators can find further details on manufacturer performance at AndroidVulnerabilities.org.

Posted on October 21, 2015 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

Good Article on the Sony Attack

Fortune has a three–part article on the Sony attack by North Korea. There’s not a lot of tech here; it’s mostly about Sony’s internal politics regarding the movie and IT security before the attack, and some about their reaction afterwards.

Despite what I wrote at the time, I now believe that North Korea was responsible for the attack. This is the article that convinced me. It’s about the US government’s reaction to the attack.

Posted on September 28, 2015 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

SYNful Knock Attack Against Cisco Routers

FireEye is reporting the discovery of persistent malware that compromises Cisco routers:

While this attack could be possible on any router technology, in this case, the targeted victims were Cisco routers. The Mandiant team found 14 instances of this router implant, dubbed SYNful Knock, across four countries: Ukraine, Philippines, Mexico, and India.

[…]

The implant uses techniques that make it very difficult to detect. A clandestine modification of the router’s firmware image can be utilized to maintain perpetual presence to an environment. However, it mainly surpasses detection because very few, if any, are monitoring these devices for compromise.

I don’t know if the attack is related to this attack against Cisco routers discovered in August.

As I wrote then, this is very much the sort of attack you’d expect from a government eavesdropping agency. We know, for example, that the NSA likes to attack routers. If I had to guess, I would guess that this is an NSA exploit. (Note the lack of Five Eyes countries in the target list.)

Posted on September 21, 2015 at 11:45 AM • View Comments

Nasty Cisco Attack

This is serious:

Cisco Systems officials are warning customers of a series of attacks that completely hijack critical networking gear by swapping out the valid ROMMON firmware image with one that’s been maliciously altered.

The attackers use valid administrator credentials, an indication the attacks are being carried out either by insiders or people who have otherwise managed to get hold of the highly sensitive passwords required to update and make changes to the Cisco hardware. Short for ROM Monitor, ROMMON is the means for booting Cisco’s IOS operating system. Administrators use it to perform a variety of configuration tasks, including recovering lost passwords, downloading software, or in some cases running the router itself.

There’s no indication of who is doing these attacks, but it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect out of a government attacker. Regardless of which government initially discovered this, assume that they’re all exploiting it by now—and will continue to do so until it’s fixed.

Posted on August 19, 2015 at 12:34 PM • View Comments

Did Kaspersky Fake Malware?

Two former Kaspersky employees have accused the company of faking malware to harm rival antivirus products. They would falsely classify legitimate files as malicious, tricking other antivirus companies that blindly copied Kaspersky’s data into deleting them from their customers’ computers.

In one technique, Kaspersky’s engineers would take an important piece of software commonly found in PCs and inject bad code into it so that the file looked like it was infected, the ex-employees said. They would send the doctored file anonymously to VirusTotal.

Then, when competitors ran this doctored file through their virus detection engines, the file would be flagged as potentially malicious. If the doctored file looked close enough to the original, Kaspersky could fool rival companies into thinking the clean file was problematic as well.

[…]

The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals that were targeted because many smaller security companies followed the Redmond, Washington-based company’s lead in detecting malicious files. They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack.

Microsoft’s antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters in April that he recalled a time in March 2013 when many customers called to complain that a printer code had been deemed dangerous by its antivirus program and placed in “quarantine.”

Batchelder said it took him roughly six hours to figure out that the printer code looked a lot like another piece of code that Microsoft had previously ruled malicious. Someone had taken a legitimate file and jammed a wad of bad code into it, he said. Because the normal printer code looked so much like the altered code, the antivirus program quarantined that as well.

Over the next few months, Batchelder’s team found hundreds, and eventually thousands, of good files that had been altered to look bad.

Kaspersky denies it.

EDITED TO ADD (8/19): Here’s an October 2013 presentation by Microsoft on the attacks.

EDITED TO ADD (9/11): A dissenting opinion.

Posted on August 18, 2015 at 2:35 PM • View Comments

HAMMERTOSS: New Russian Malware

FireEye has a detailed report of a sophisticated piece of Russian malware: HAMMERTOSS. It uses some clever techniques to hide:

The Hammertoss backdoor malware looks for a different Twitter handle each day—automatically prompted by a list generated by the tool—to get its instructions. If the handle it’s looking for is not registered that day, it merely returns the next day and checks for the Twitter handle designated for that day. If the account is active, Hammertoss searches for a tweet with a URL and hashtag, and then visits the URL.

That’s where a legit-looking image is grabbed and then opened by Hammertoss: the image contains encrypted instructions, which Hammertoss decrypts. The commands, which include instructions for obtaining files from the victim’s network, typically then lead the malware to send that stolen information to a cloud-based storage service.

Another article. Reddit thread.

Posted on July 31, 2015 at 11:12 AM • View Comments

More on Hacking Team

Read this:

Hacking Team asked its customers to shut down operations, but according to one of the leaked files, as part of Hacking Team’s “crisis procedure,” it could have killed their operations remotely. The company, in fact, has “a backdoor” into every customer’s software, giving it ability to suspend it or shut it down­—something that even customers aren’t told about.

To make matters worse, every copy of Hacking Team’s Galileo software is watermarked, according to the source, which means Hacking Team, and now everyone with access to this data dump, can find out who operates it and who they’re targeting with it.

It’s one thing to have dissatisfied customers. It’s another to have dissatisfied customers with death squads. I don’t think the company is going to survive this.

Posted on July 7, 2015 at 5:30 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.