Cybercrime – Page 11

Fake Symantec Blog Post Is Spreading Mac Malware

December 14, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Sometimes hackers opt for a stealthy approach. Other times, their attempts are downright brazen. That’s definitely the case with a newly launched malware campaign that seeks to spread “Proton Mac,” a strain of malware designed to steal passwords from Mac users.

The hackers registered a domain very similar to Symantec’s blog, mirrored its content and then created a fake post about a new version of CoinThief, which was moderately successful back in 2014.

After going into a bit of faux analysis about this nonexistent threat, the post recommended downloading a nonexistent piece of software called “Symantec Malware Detector” which it claimed was the best means of protecting against the new version of CoinThief. Unfortunately, “Symantec Malware Detector” is actually Proton Mac in disguise.

It’s a good scam, and it’s proven to be highly effective thus far. Its effectiveness is due in no small part to the fact that references to the post have been tweeted, initially by fake Twitter accounts, and later, by a growing number of legitimate ones.

Although the fake blog is quite good, it doesn’t stand up to intense scrutiny. For one thing, the email address used to register the domain isn’t a Symantec address. For another, their SSL certificate comes from Comodo, rather than Symantec’s own certificate authority. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of users don’t look that closely at websites they visit, so they are unlikely to recognize the fake for what it is.

If you have downloaded “Symantec Malware Detector,’ then you’ve got Proton Mac running on your machine right now.

It’s designed to log your username and password in plain text, sending this and any other PII (Personally Identifiable Information) on your machine to a hidden file. It will also capture browser auto-fill data, keychain files and the like, and send all of this to the hackers controlling the software.

If you have been infected, you should treat all online passwords as having been compromised and change them immediately, once you have verified that the malware has been completely removed from your system. Enabling two-factor authentication will also help make you more secure.

Joseph Martin

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Bug in macOS Could Allow Hackers Root Access

December 13, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Do you own a Mac? Is it running Apple’s latest macOS, the “High Sierra?” If so, be extra careful with who you allow access to your machine.

A security flaw recently discovered by a developer named Lemi Orhan Ergin can easily allow anyone unfettered access to everything on your machine, and by extension, give them an easy “in” to whatever network it’s connected to. All they need is physical access.

Exploiting this vulnerability is a lesson in simplicity. All a hacker has to do is enter “root” in the username field, leave the password field blank, and press Enter.

Done.

They now have total access.

Needless to say, this is a large and rather glaring security issue and one which Apple will be remedying in the near future via a patch. Until they do, however, be aware that the physical security of your Mac is of paramount importance. Leaving your workstation unsecured and unattended, even for a few minutes, is all it would take to lose control over all the files on your machine and give a hacker access to the even more sensitive data lurking elsewhere on your company’s network.

Unfortunately, as bad as this security flaw is, it’s not the only recent stumble by Apple. Just last month, the company had to issue an emergency patch to fix a flaw that affected encrypted volumes, where the password hint section was displaying the actual password in plain text.

To try this exploit out for yourself to verify how easy it is to use, simply do the following:

Open your machine’s System Preferences and select “Users and Groups”

Click on the lock icon, which will allow you to make changes. You’ll get a username and password box at this point

Type in “root” in the username field

Move the cursor into the password field and hit enter

That’s all there is to it.

Until Apple issues their patch, the best thing you can do is leave your machine on and lock your workstation when you step away. At least that way, the hacker would have to know your current password in order to gain access.

Of course, they could simply power the machine off and reboot, but that would take a bit more time, during which they could be discovered.

It’s far from perfect, but for the time being, it’s the best protection you have.

Joseph Martin

A Million Imgur Users Affected By Breach

December 12, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Do you use the image hosting service, Imgur? If you do, there’s a slight chance that you’ll be prompted to change your password the next time you log on. That’s because the company’s servers were breached in 2014, and the hackers made off with 1.7 million usernames and passwords, which represents just a tiny fraction of the company’s 150 million users.

Although the breach happened a few years ago, the company only found out about it on Thanksgiving Day of this year. Their response was immediate and decisive. The company called people in over the holiday and notified their impacted users just 25 hours and 10 minutes after discovering the details of the incident.

Contrast that to Uber’s handling of their most recent hack. They kept their impacted users in the dark for more than a year, and worse, paid the hackers $100,000 to keep the incident quiet. It’s easy to see why security professionals around the world have lauded Imgur for their handling of the hack.

Three key things to note in relation to the breach:

Not much information was stolen during the hack because Imgur doesn’t ask its users for much in the way of personal information in the first place. However, if you use your Imgur password on other systems, you could be at additional risk.

At the time of the breach, Imgur was using SHA-256 encryption, which is fairly robust and impractical for most hackers to crack due to the amount of computational power required.

In 2015, the company switched to an even more secure algorithm, Bcrypt, so if the company is breached again in the future, it’ll be even harder for the hackers to glean anything useful from any data stolen.

All that to say, if you’re looking for a benchmark to compare yourself to if you’re ever hacked, Imgur’s example would be an excellent one to follow.

Joseph Martin

Breach Of Health Data Gets California Company $2M Fine

December 10, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Cottage Health System, a company that operates five hospitals in the Santa Barbara area of California, is the latest firm to have been hit with a hefty fine for losing control of PHI and PII for patients that it serves.

In this case, more than 55,000 patients were impacted between 2013 and 2015.

Cottage Health discovered the breach late in 2013. The company received a voicemail message informing company officers that there was a large file containing PHI of an unspecified number of its patients available online, without encryption or password protection that could prevent unauthorized access. In 2015, the company suffered a second, much smaller breach that impacted 4,596 of its patients.

As a result of the investigation that followed, the California Attorney General determined that the Cottage Health System had violated California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, as well as several federal HIPAA regulations.

Under the terms of the agreement, in addition to a $2 million fine, the company has been required to upgrade its data security practices, including:

• Training employees on the collection, storage and proper use of PHI and PII

• Maintaining a reasonable set of policies and protocols surrounding incident tracking reports, risk assessment, data retention, internal audits and incident management plans, subject to external review

• Encrypting all PHI and PII in transit

• Assessing all hardware and software used in Cottage Health’s network for potential vulnerabilities, and upgrading as appropriate

• And conducting periodic testing to identify and address additional vulnerabilities.

This most recent incident serves as a painful reminder to any company involved in the handling of PHI and PII. According to Elizabeth Hodge, a health care attorney of the law firm Akerman, LLP:

“Even if the Office for Civil Rights slows down its enforcement activities going forward, covered entities and business associates should still anticipate enforcement activity by state attorney’s general enforcing their respective state laws.”

Joseph Martin

Uber Paid To Hide Massive Data Breach From Public

December 9, 2017 by Joseph Martin

It has recently come to light that the company was hacked in 2016 in a massive breach that exposed the personal information of more than 57 million Uber users and drivers. A wide range of data was stolen. Where users were concerned, names, email addresses, and phone numbers were compromised.

As bad as that is, the problem was even worse for more than 600,000 of the company’s drivers who had their driver’s license numbers hacked, too.

Standard protocol is that when a breach like this occurs, the company will engage law enforcement officials as appropriate, hire a third-party security firm to help with the forensic investigation and notify their consumers.

Unfortunately, that’s not the path Uber chose to take. Instead, they paid the hackers $100,000 in exchange for keeping quiet about the hack and deleting the stolen data.

The company kept the incident under wraps for more than a year, but eventually, word of the attack leaked out, and the fallout has been catastrophic. Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has asked for the resignation of the company’s Chief Security Officer, Joe Sullivan, and one of his deputies, Craig Clark, both of whom worked to keep the attack quiet.

In a formal statement, Khosrowshahi had this to say:

“None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it. While I cannot erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes. We are changing the way we do business, putting integrity at the core of every decision we make and working hard to earn the trust of our customers.”

As is common in the aftermath of events like these, Uber is offering its impacted customers a free year’s worth of credit monitoring services and will likely force password changes for its app users. More than a year too late, but it’s something.

File this away under how not to handle a data breach.

Joseph Martin

Ransomware Is Spreading Through Macros In Word

December 8, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Security researcher Jaromir Jorejsi of Trend Micro has discovered a disturbing new strain of ransomware named qkG that spreads by way of macros inside MS Word.

The ransomware strain targets only Office documents, encrypting them and infecting the Word default document in order to propagate to newly created documents opened via the Office suite on the infected computer.

This new threat is unusual in the world of ransomware because it abides by a completely different and much more tightly targeted set of operating principles than any other form of ransomware found in the wild today. It’s also a bit of a throwback. The use of macros to spread worms is still fairly commonplace on older machines running out-of-date or pirated copies of Office, but it hasn’t really been in fashion in the mainstream hacking community for quite some time.

An analysis of the code reveals it to be a work in progress. The researchers were quick to point out the ransomware has not found any actual victims to date, and that several different variants and strains of the code were found in different documents, each with a different and slightly more robust feature set.

Based on evidence Horejsi found in the qkG samples he had the opportunity to analyze, the author of this new strain is apparently based somewhere in Vietnam, and goes by the alias “TNA-MHT-TT2.”

The malware is notable for its rather innovative use of malicious macros. Horejsi warns that these techniques will undoubtedly be picked up by other hackers, refined and used more broadly in the months ahead.

That’s likely to pose a special challenge for your IT security team, who have probably fallen out of the habit of watching for such threats, given that they declined in popularity some time ago. It seems, however, that what’s old has been made new again, so alert the troops to be ready.

Joseph Martin

Known WordPress Malware Is Back For Second Round

December 7, 2017 by Joseph Martin

This past summer, an Italian security researcher named Manuel D’Orso discovered a nasty malware attack aimed at WordPress sites.

Dubbed “Wp-Ved,” after the name of the .php file bearing the malicious payload, the attack was relatively small in its scope and scale, with a few scattered attacks starting in the summer and continuing in sporadic fashion to this very day.

Apparently, the hackers who own the code learned what they needed to, and recently an updated variant of the malware has been spotted in the wild.

The malware is not subtle. It doesn’t try to hide what it’s doing in the least. It simply injects malicious code into legitimate files, focusing on old WordPress default themes such as “Twentyfifteen” and “Twentysixteen.”

Once the code is in place, it works quickly to create a new Admin user with the name “100010010,” which gives the hackers a backdoor they can use to launch other scripted attacks at their discretion.

Again, owing to the completely un-subtle nature of the code, any user who is running any sort of web application firewall (WAF) would be completely immune to this type of attack, as the WAF would have spotted it immediately and shut it down before it could do any damage. Sadly, a significant percentage of webmasters running WordPress sites don’t take advantage of this sort of protection.

Although this isn’t a large-scale, coordinated attack, given the sheer number of WordPress sites on the web, it’s something to be mindful of. As to the damage, the hackers could cause if you are infected, unfortunately, the sky’s the limit. Once they’ve got an Admin-level backdoor to work with, there’s not much they couldn’t do, so if you run a WordPress-based site, it’s worth your time to check to see if you’ve been infected. If you have, you’re sitting on a ticking time bomb.

As to how you can protect yourself, the first step is, of course, to delete the files containing the malicious code.

Once that’s done, disable and delete the rogue Admin account, and if one is available, begin making use of a web application firewall so that you can avoid any problems with Wp-Ved in the future.

The WordPress community is, on the whole, quite good at rooting out malware designed to work on the platform. However, this is certainly not the first such campaign hackers have gotten past the active community’s defenses, nor will it be the last.

Just recently, for example, security researchers found vulnerabilities in two of the platform’s most popular plugins, Yoast SEO and Formidable Forms.

In the case of the Yoast security flaw, it has been patched as of version 5.8 of the plugin, so if you use Yoast, be sure you’re using the most up-to-date version.

The bug in the Formidable Forms plugin was patched in version 2.05.02 and higher, so again, if you’re using this plugin on your website, be sure you’ve got the latest and greatest installed.

Joseph Martin

Issue With Android Could Let Someone Record Screen And Audio

December 6, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Do you have an Android phone? Is it running either Lolipop, Marshmallow or Nougat? Those three account for slightly more than 75 percent of the Android phones in service today, so odds are excellent that you do. If so, you should be aware of a nasty vulnerability that could allow a hacker to perform at-will screen captures and audio recording without your knowledge.

The issue resides within Android’s MediaProjection service, which has been a part of the OS since its earliest days. The reason that it has only recently become an issue, though, is that prior to the release of Android Lolipop (version 5.0), third-party apps couldn’t make use of it. It required both root-level access and the app in question had to be signed with the device’s release keys, which meant that only system-level apps deployed by Android OEMs could utilize MediaProjection.

That changed with the release of Lolipop, which opened the service up so that anyone could use it. Unfortunately, when Google relaxed access to the service, they didn’t put it behind a permission that apps could require from users. All a third-party developer needs to do to access MediaProjection is to make an “intent call” that would show a System UI popup, warning users that an app wanted to capture the screen and/or system audio.

Here’s the problem, though. Security researchers discovered that an attacker could detect when the system popup would appear, and knowing that piece of information, they could trigger some other message to appear on top of it, effectively blinding the phone’s owner to the fact that screen captures and audio recordings were in process.

Since the discovery of the security flaw, Google has released a patch that addresses it. Unfortunately, the patch only applies to Android Oreo (8.0). Older phones are still vulnerable.

If there’s one saving grace, it is the fact that the attack is not completely stealthy, and observant users will note the screencast icon in the phone’s notification bar. It’s far from perfect protection, but it’s something, so be aware if you’ve got an older Android phone.

Joseph Martin

Malware Infections Grow 4X In Just One Quarter

December 1, 2017 by Joseph Martin

The world’s hackers have been busy according to the latest report by Comodo security, which tracks the total number of threats around the globe, quarter by quarter. The latest statistics are alarming, showing a massive jump in the total number of malware infections reported in the third quarter of 2017. Reports show nearly 400 million infections.

What’s worse is that the infections have spread to literally every corner of the globe. No nation is completely safe.

Digging more deeply into the statistics offered by Comodo, we find that the top five countries for malware infections this quarter were:

Russia

The United States

Poland

The United Kingdom

And Germany

These five nations combined accounted for fully 80 percent of the total number of infections reported.

Breaking the infections down by type, we find the following as the top 5:

Trojans (13.7 million)

Viruses (5.4 million)

Worms (2.8 million)

Backdoors (553,000)

And Packed Malware (284,000)

Diving even more deeply into the statistics yields more good information, including the fact that poorer nations tend to be afflicted more often by viruses and worms as these nations tend to use the older, unpatched or unlicensed software. These types of infections tend to run rampant in Southeast Asia, Southeastern Europe, Africa and South America.

The report also details that the number of large-scale email phishing attacks is on the rise, due in no small part to the recent popularity of Locky and other strains of ransomware, with the largest phishing attack having been conducted from August to September 2017. According to the report:

“This attack was unique in its combination of sophistication and size, backed by a botnet spread across more than 11,000 IP addresses in 133 countries in just the first stage of the attack. Also, the malware was designed to avoid detection by sandboxing and artificial intelligence technologies common in many endpoint protection systems.”

All in all, it’s a fascinating, though disturbing read, and points to the rapidly increasing sophistication of the world’s hackers that will no doubt continue to spell trouble for security professionals around the globe.

Joseph Martin

Latest Store With Payment Breach Is Forever 21

November 30, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Unfortunately, another high-profile data breach has surfaced. The latest company to fall victim is US-based fashion retailer Forever 21, operating more than 800 stores in 57 countries.

The company became aware of the breach when they were notified of “unauthorized access to data from payment cards that were used at certain Forever 21 store locations.”

The investigation into the incident is ongoing, and we don’t have full details yet, but here’s what we know so far:

• Although the company had attempted to bolster security by implementing a token and encryption-based system that was designed to protect transaction data on the company’s point-of-sale system, an implementation issue at some store locations left POS equipment vulnerable, and these were the devices the hackers gained access to.

• Anyone who shopped at a Forever 21 location between March and October 2017 may have been impacted.

At this point, three significant pieces of information are missing. We do not yet know exactly which stores were impacted, nor how many of Forever 21’s customers may have seen their credit card information exposed, or what level of access the hackers may have had to the transaction data. We also don’t yet know if the group responsible got any personally identifiable information from the affected terminals.

The company’s official announcement regarding the breach included the following statement:

“Forever 21 immediately began an investigation of its payment card systems and engaged a leading security and forensics firm to assist. We regret that this incident occurred and apologize for any inconvenience. We will continue to work to address this matter.”

If you’ve shopped at any Forever 21 location during the timeframe mentioned above, be aware that your payment data may have been compromised. For now, the best thing you can do is monitor your credit card statements closely for any unusual activity and report it immediately if you find it.

Joseph Martin

Fake Symantec Blog Post Is Spreading Mac Malware

Bug in macOS Could Allow Hackers Root Access

Breach Of Health Data Gets California Company $2M Fine

Uber Paid To Hide Massive Data Breach From Public

Ransomware Is Spreading Through Macros In Word

Known WordPress Malware Is Back For Second Round

Issue With Android Could Let Someone Record Screen And Audio

Malware Infections Grow 4X In Just One Quarter

Latest Store With Payment Breach Is Forever 21

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