Category Archives: Under our observation

New version of black energy cyber attack target Microsoft OLE product design weakness

Ukrainian intel agency has claimed it stopped a cyber attack against a chlorine plant that was launched using the notorious VPNFilter malware. Perhaps the world focusing VPN filter malware spreading and infection. We known earlier last month that such attack targets are the low end wireless router and network access storage (NAS).

However, from my point of view is that the main stream of the cyber attack so far happening not limit to this incident. The fact is that lure the attacker interest to do the re-engineering of their attacks seems maintain on Microsoft office product. What is the key component? Yes, it is OLE objective linking and embedding. Or you may say, if I am following Microsoft patch Tue remediation schedule it will be safe. It looks correct. But normal RTF file, it was able to avoid detection by many security products. And therefore attacker conduct similar hacking technology to execute cyber attack in Ukrainian. The political situation of Ukrainian given a never ending story. Meanwhile the world never without using MS office document!

Reference:

Headlines news – Ukraine claims it blocked VPNFilter attack at chemical plant : https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/13/ukraine_vpnfilter_attack/

My speculation on how Cisco (Talos) found the malware (VPNFilter malware)

My speculation on how Cisco (Talos) found the malware (VPNFilter malware).

 

July 06, 2018 – Apple Releases Security Update for Boot Camp

WiFi connection seems secure when IT Department authenticating wifi users with windows active directory. A know issue told the world that WPA is not secure and therefore the WiFi authentication best practices jump to WPA2. From general point of view, we all focusing to WiFi access point, authentication protocol and encryption method. It looks that we forget endpoint itself is our missing area. A design weakness found on Apple Mac book products. The explanation by Apple is that a logic issue existed in the handling of state transitions. See attached diagram, when endpoint enforce packet number (PN) reset to 1. Then the attacker possible to engage the replay attack.

Impact: An attacker in Wi-Fi range may force nonce reuse in WPA unicast/PTK clients (Key Reinstallation Attacks – KRACK)

Comment: With WPA/WPA2, rekeying of both unicast and global encryption keys is required. Seems WPA2 is the main trend today. So WPA looks ignore by manufacturer. And therefore is going to fix the bug in WPA now!

Official announcement – https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208847

Jun 2018 – SSL Forward Proxy vulnerability (CVE-2018-5527)

Since data privacy is the 1st pirority of objective in cyber world. We now internet connectivity heavy utilize of SSL cert. For instance SSL VPN, PKI, SSL web server,etc. Popular web portal receive large amount of connectiviies per second. And therefore the popluar solution is TCP offload. Install SSL server cert out of web server and install in web server front end. That is load balancer. Even though you said, you have TCP offload. But fundenmental limation told that SSL connections consume about twice as much memory as HTTP layer 7 connections, and four times as much memory as layer 4 with TCP proxy. Meanwhile huge amount of ssl session from cache while full garbage collection seems cause IO Thread owned lock delayed, and other I/O threads BLOCKED.

F5 now resolved their SSL forward proxy vulnerability (CVE-2018-5527). See below:

https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K20134942

But believe that it is a not easy ending story caused by the following factors!

1. Huge amount of ssl session from cache while full garbage collection seems cause IO Thread owned lock delayed, and other I/O threads BLOCKED.

2. SSL connections consume about twice as much memory as HTTP layer 7 connections, and four times as much memory as layer 4 with TCP proxy.

The world cup 2018 – malicious game website and phishing email also involved in this competition. This like malware transformation of football shooting.

THE 2018 WORLD CUP lure hacker interest, a breeding ground for hackers. The phishing campaign linked to the start of the FIFA World Cup where cyber-criminals attempt to lure would-be victims into downloading. For instance, Games, email and related information. Such download contain malware and let the downloader become cyber attack victim.

How do you defend against this football (malware)? 1. Use and maintain antivirus software. 2. Keep software and operating systems up-to-date. 3. Be wary of downloading files from websites. 4. Think before you Click!

Headline News :

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup/world-cup-live-streaming-free-streams-fifa-2018-football-matches-risk-fans-watch-a8419266.html

Sometimes RESTful API jeopardize your personal data privacy

Ticketmaster Hacked! The company sold 500 million tickets to 86 million people last year. It is important for you to select the best API to create chatbot. Common way call a RESTful API from your Chatbot. What makes RESTful APIs even more attractive is that the same REST API could potentially be used both by a web application, as well as other clients such as a mobile application. But RESTful API require hardening. Otherwise it is not in secure way.

Common REST API security risk (see below):

  • unencrypted payload
  • Lack of input  sanitisaton

And therefore payments or approvals process must put into a secure place which is usually not the client app.

Should you have interest of the Ticketmaster data breach incident, please refer below url for reference.

Ticketmaster admits personal data stolen in hack attack

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44628874?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cz4pr2gd85qt/cyber-security&link_location=live-reporting-story

30thJune2018 – status update (Inbenta and the Ticketmaster Data Breach FAQ’s – official announcement)

https://www.inbenta.com/en/inbenta-and-the-ticketmaster-data-breach-faqs/

 

See whether does it a defect on GNU Binutils (status update on 25th June 2018)

 

Bug (CVE-2018-7642) found GNU Binutils 2.30 on 24th Feb 2018. GNU Binary Utilities, or binutils, are a set of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, object files, libraries, profile data, and assembly source code. The GNU compiler Collection (gcc) play a important role of software development. If a bug will be happened in compiler. We might imagine that it will effect the software development life cycle (SDLC). A bug found earlier this year on GNU Binutils hits system crash. But bug found on April 2018 looks expanded and not only system crash. Should you have interest, please refer below url for reference.

CVE-2018-12700 – https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=85454

CVE-2018-12700 – https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=85454

CVE-2018-12699 – https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=85454

CVE-2018-12641 – https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=85452

CVE-2018-12698 – https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=85454

Bug found GNU Binutils 2.30 on 24th Feb 2018

CVE-2018-7642 – GNU Binutils 2.30

 

Will satellites be affected by a buffer overflow vulnerability?

Will satellites be affected by a buffer overflow vulnerability? Heard that hacker interested of the satellite device. This news let you imagine that it is a APT attack, right? It looks that political issues run around the world. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Perhaps god also doesn’t know. On 16th Jan 2018, the confirmation of Solaris and SPARC Spectre vulnerabilities comes as Oracle delivers its Meltdown/Spectre patches for its x86 servers. Meldown and Spectre look like a AIDS or ebola disease.

The CDMU (Command and Data Management Unit) is used for spacecraft control especially satellities. It is composed of the following functional element. The LEON-3 CPU, developed by Gaisler Research, is a 32 bit synthesisable processor core based on the SPARC V8 architecture. Oh! As far as I know, hacker can be exploiting SPARC Buffer Overflow vulnerabilities. Perhaps it is not easy to do the patch management on the sky? Should you have interest of this topic, please refer below url for references.

http://www.nspo.narl.org.tw/en2016/aboutNSPO/gs.html

“With great power comes great responsibility” (CVE-2018-6961)

Sometimes we review the vulnerability check list. We are aim to address high severity of vulnerabilities items in first piority. From technical point of view it looks correct. Since some medium vulnerabilities especially cookie or cross site scripting issue may spend more time to do the remediation. A security advisories announced by VMware on 15th May 2018 bring to my attentions. That is CVE-2018-6961 (see attached diagram). It looks that the orginal Web UI function is a dilemma! Web UI in frequent have design weakness thus let attacker do the code injection. Since there is no prefect item in the world. The attacker might relies on CVE-2018-6961 execute Use-After-Free vulnerability. As a result it affected drag-and-drop functionality and triggered through the Backdoor RPC interface.

Remark:  Staying alert of this directory (lib/include/backdoor_def.h)

Reference – Unauthenticated Command Injection vulnerability in VMware NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud :

https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2018-0011.html

Not seen attack related to CVE-2018-7559, but require considerations and stay alert.

US Homeland security has announcement three times within this year ( April 16, 2018,May 29, 2018 and June 14, 2018) thus to urge the world staying alert malicious attack.Perhaps the industrial sector especailly oil and gas, power supplier facilities has detective and preventive control in placed. Hacker will be facing difficulties for attack. As far as we know, OPC source code on GitHub contains a flaw let remote attacker use the Server’s private key to decrypt and sign messages by using information obtained by sending invalid UserIdentityTokens encrypted with the Basic128Rsa15 security policy. The successful result could allow an attacker to decrypt passwords even if they are encrypted with another security policy such as Basic256Sha256. This flaw found on April this year and remediation has been announced. However, I believe that cyber security attacks exploit of this vulnerability will be happened soon.

Official announcement (OPC Foundation Security Bulletin Security Update for the OPC UA Stacks – April 2018)

https://opcfoundation-onlineapplications.org/faq/SecurityBulletins/OPC_Foundation_Security_Bulletin_CVE-2018-7559.pdf

 

June 2018 Node.js Security Releases

Node.js runs on top of a Javascript engine therefore it is portable to any platform in computer world. Deploy a Node.js web application environment using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon DynamoDB. Elastic Beanstalk provisions and manages the underlying infrastructure.
Solutions Infini is the Leading Bulk SMS & Cloud Telephony service provider. But the front end AWS Lamda function powered by node.js platform.
The organization of node.js announced that node.js (6.x – 10.x) has vulnerabilities occurs.
Official announcement and remediation step shown url below:

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/june-2018-security-releases/