Magento users stay alert – 24th Jun 2020

Background: Magento is an e-commerce platform written in PHP atop the zend-framework, available under both open-source and commercial licenses. It is written in an advanced object-oriented idiom that uses the MVC pattern and XML configuration files, aiming for flexibility and extensibility.

Vulnerabilities announced this week – Hints
Vendor have the right to remain vulnerability details and not disclose to public. And therefore we only obtain below information.

PHP Object Injection – Arbitrary code execution (Critical) – CVE-2020-9663

Stores cross-site scripting – Sensitive information disclosure (Important) – CVE-2020-9665

Please refer to attached diagram. Perhaps it will let you find out the root causes.

Official announcement: https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/magento/apsb20-41.html

Australia (ACSC) urges local citizens to be vigilant against cyber attacks. The so-called copy-paste compromises – 18th June 2020

Preface: Australia’s government and institutions are being targeted by ongoing sophisticated state-based cyber hacks, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says. Mr Morrison did not name specific cases but said it had spanned “government, industry, political organizations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure”. 19th June 2020

Technical details: Long story short. The nick name of this attack ‘Copy-Paste Compromises. It is derived from the cyber attacker heavy use of proof of concept exploit code, web shells and other tools copied almost identically from open source. For more details, please refer below link to download the report.

https://www.cyber.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-06/ACSC-Advisory-2020-008-Copy-Paste-Compromises.pdf

Attack highlights: Web shells are difficult to detect as they are easily modified by attackers and often employ encryption, encoding, and obfuscation. When a potential web shell is detected, administrators should validate the file’s origin and authenticity.

Recommendation: In normal circumstances, firewall locked down rule (deny any source to any destination) is hard to do the analytic through eyeball. But the attack vector designated to Australia. In order to avoid cyber attack in your firm. So firewall administrator should check their SIEM see whether it can find out the hints. If no such facility installed, Perhaps export the web server log see whether you can find out the attack activities details.

Win 10 Spatial Data Service Elevation of Privilege vulnerability – 17th Jun 2020

Preface: On Jul 2019, found vulnerability in the Windows Spatial Data Service could allow file deletion in arbitrary locations on Windows system found The official announcement this week state that Windows Spatial Data Service improperly handles objects in memory causes elevation of Privilege Vulnerability.

Background: The Spatial Data Service is running as NT AUTHORITY\LocalService in a shared process of svchost[.]exe.
This service is used for Spatial Perception scenarios. This service exists in Windows 10 only.

Vulnerability details: If a number is higher or lower than a range of values or there are too many characters in a text entry, a boundary error occurs. The vulnerability exists due to a boundary error when the Windows Spatial Data Service improperly handles objects in memory. A local user can use a specially crafted application to trigger memory corruption and execute arbitrary code on the target system.

Official remedy solution – https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/CVE-2020-1441

US Homeland security urge public alert on “Ripple20” Vulnerabilities (16th June 2020)

Preface: Baxter US, Caterpillar, Digi International, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric and Trek are impact by this vulnerability.
There are more vendor which do not know the actual status.

Vulnerability details:
An attacker from outside the network taking control over a device within the network, if internet facing. There are more ways to exploit this vulnerability, please refer below link for reference.

Root causes: The attacker exploit of the IP protocol flexibility. That is the incoming IPv4 fragments over an IP-in-IP tunnel. As we know, IPv4 found early than Internet services. At that period of time the most serious incident is merely virus infection to local machine. Machine to Machine communication will be make use of serial cable or Novell network. In short, it is a simple architecture. But the attacker can be exploit the design weakness engaging the cyber attack to digital world.

Remedy: You can follow cert.org recommendation install IDS (refer below url link) or refer to attached diagram. A quick and dirty solution.
https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/257161

intel new processor embedded anti malware feature – 15th june 2020

Preface: Starting with Oracle 11g release 1 (11.1), there is a just-in-time (JIT) compiler for Oracle JVM environment. A JIT compiler for Oracle JVM enables much faster execution because, it manages the invalidation, recompilation, and storage of code without an external mechanism.

Background: A way to prevent attack code execution by stack and heap. It marking stack and heap as non-executable. However some apps need executable heap (For instance JIT compiler), so it does not defend against `Return Oriented Programming’ exploits.

What is ROP exploit technique: Returnoriented programming (ROP) is a computer security exploit technique that allows an attacker to execute code in the presence of security defenses such as executable space protection and code signing.

New Intel processor implement new preventive architecture: New Tiger Lake processors provides two new key capabilities to help guard against control-flow hijacking malware: Shadow Stack (SS) and Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT). For more details, please see follow link – https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/4d/2a/control-flow-enforcement-technology-preview.pdf

Archaeologist & Artificial intelligence – 14th Jun 2020

Preface: The traditional workforce faces the challenge of automation.

Myth and Science: Archeologist don’t understand why Pyramids of Giza directions to Orion’s belt in the sky.
Archeologist do not understand why Pyramids of Giza directions to Orion’s belt in the sky. So far, it has quite a lot of assumptions. The Myth mentioned that it let Pharaoh return to Orion. On the other hand, scientist found two different chemical inside pyramid ventilation shaft. When both chemical mixed, it will generate hydrogen. Thus make hydrogen atoms get energy, and then generate microwave energy beam.

The premise of science is the assumption:
Refer to attached diagram, I assumed technology structure especially smart city, industrial automation, cryptocurrency are the major elements driven artificial intelligence. Then put those elements to pyramid. Authority and decision-making power (Artificial Intelligence) are concentrated at the top of an organizational pyramid. When AI technology become mature. Do you think AI also want to communicate with Orion. Or, it could spell the end of the human race.

Perhaps we all know the disadvantage of artificial intelligence, but we cannot stop. This is the destiny of mankind.

Perhaps this way come true – VMware horizon client for windows vulnerability (cve-2020-3961) 12th Jun 2020

Preface: In order to avoid the impact of the vulnerability. VMware do not provide the details for CVE-2020-3961.

Synopsis: This vulnerability can be exploited locally. The attacker should have authentication credentials and successfully authenticate on the system.

Vulnerability details: VMware Horizon Client for Windows contains a privilege escalation vulnerability due to folder permission configuration and unsafe loading of libraries.

My observation: Perhaps the idea displayed on attached diagram may also have the way to do the same thing.

Reference: A local dll injection vulnerability has been discovered in the official Notepad++ software.The issue allows local attackers to inject code to vulnerable libraries to compromise the process or to gain higher access privileges.

Official announcement – please refer following link https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2020-0013.html

us homeland security alert – design weakness of universal plug and play – 9th jun 2020

Preface: Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi …

Review historical event: Mirai is an IoT botnet that was designed to exploit vulnerabilities in IoT devices for use in large-scale DDoS attacks.In September 2016, the Mirai malware launched a DDoS attack. A massive attack causes the domain registration services provider (Dyn) interrupted the services in October 2016.

Design weakness on universal plug and play: The Open Connectivity Foundation UPnP specification before 2020-04-17 does not forbid the acceptance of a subscription request with a delivery URL on a different network segment than the fully qualified event-subscription URL, aka the CallStranger issue.

Concerns by security expert: The attacker can send a specially crafted HTTP SUBSCRIBE request to the vulnerable devices. Meanwhile, An it could utilize this vulnerability to conduct a DDoS attack. For more details, please refer offical articles in the following url – https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/339275

machine learning vulnerability – vu#425163 (4th Jun 2020)

Preface: Artificial Intelligence applied machine learning and other techniques to solve problems. Will AI impact human?

Background: You can use the Machine Learning model to get predictions on new data for which you do not know the target. For instance, AWS developing AI technology to predict cyber attack especially email spam, email phishing , etc. Amazon ML supports three types of ML models: binary classification, multiclass classification, and regression. The type of model you should choose depends on the type of target that you want to predict.
The learning rate is a constant value used in the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm. If stochastic gradient descent is used to find a global minimizer, for the broadly defined set of representing neural networks, then the fitted neural network approximation will be vulnerable to adversarial manipulation.

What is an adversarial attack?
Adversarial examples are inputs to machine learning models that an attacker has intentionally designed to cause the model to make a mistake; they’re like optical illusions for machines.

Official article, please refer to following linkhttps://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/425163

US homeland security alert – unpatched MS system vulnerability to cve-2020-0796 (5th Jun 2020)

Preface: Microsoft has released a security advisory to address a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2020-0796) in Microsoft Server Message Block 3.1.1 (SMBv3) on 11th Mar 2020.

Synopsis: The proof of concept code vulnerability has been made public. Attacker do the exploit is that send a specially crafted packet to a targeted SMBv3 server. (refer to attached diagram). The result would be similar to the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks from 2017, which used the EternalBlue exploit for SMB v1.

Workarounds: Disabling SMBv3 Compression – refer to attached diagram. The solution display in the bottom .

Remedy solution by Microsoft – https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/adv200005

CISA urge to public – Although Microsoft disclosed and provided updates for this vulnerability in March 2020, malicious cyber actors are targeting unpatched systems with the new PoC, according to recent open-source reports. CISA strongly recommends using a firewall to block SMB ports from the internet and to apply patches to critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities as soon as possible.

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