Displaying items by tag: Hacking

On Wednesday Microsoft’s threat group unveiled information about a new Russian Threat Group with ties to the GRU. As part of the announcement, they also noted that the group has a low success rate and poor operational security. The group, which Microsoft is now tracking under the name Cadet Blizzard seems to focus on service disruption, destructive campaigns and information gathering. Microsoft noted that they appear to be a combination of technically skilled, but lacking direction and sophistication.

If there is one thing you can say about modern threat groups, it is that they are clever. The new tactics and techniques they identify, and implement are impressive. A recent technique identified is the use of abandoned S3 buckets. The attackers search for and locate S3 buckets that are no longer in use and claim them as their own. If the bucket happens to be part of an existing or previous deployment workflow, so much the better. Checkmarx recently identified a supply chain attack that involved this type of scenario. The attackers took claimed an abandoned S3 bucket for an NPM package called bignum.

The last couple of months have been rather busy with the identification of critical vulnerabilities. Multiple Zero-Days were found in different pieces of software including Remote Code Execution, data modification and theft, and complete compromise of other devices that require replacement rather than patching. So, with that it is not surprising that another critical flaw has been identified (and patched) in another major vendor’s devices. Fortinet has announced the release of patches for a vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-27997.

MOVEit has been in the news quite a bit lately. First it was the disclosure of a Zero-Day that was actively being exploited since October 2022. Next up was the fact that the group exploiting the flaw was probably tinkering around the vulnerability since mice 2021. If that were not bad enough a new security audit performed on the MFT (managed file transfer) has found even more vulnerabilities in the service. The flaws are like the original zero-day flaws, in that they are SQL injection flaws that allow for theft of data from customer databases.

Although Banking, Mortgage, and other financial institutions are always under attack, it is never a good thing to see a coordinated campaign targeting them. Microsoft has disclosed once such campaign using Attacker (Adversary, Man)-in -the-Middle tactics for phishing and BEC (Business Email Compromise) attacks. This style of attack is also not new and one that is often seen in the financial world. These campaigns typically start with one organization that gets popped.

In today’s episode of why we need to change how we do things; it has come to light that the critical MOVEit zero-day that allowed complete control over targeted file transfer platforms may have been identified by the Cl0p ransomware group as far back as 2021. According to researchers at Kroll, the group appears to have been looking for the right way to properly exploit is as part of a data theft campaign against the Managed File Transfer Utility.

The fine folks at the Royal ransomware group have begun testing a new flavor of encryptor that is being called BlackSuit (The hat was already taken). First identified in January of this year (2023), Royal is believed to be Conti returned to life. Royal is also a private group, meaning they are not selling their services to anyone else but looking to keep things internal and hoard all their revenue. Royal is who went after the City of Dallas recently and might have poked the bear on that one.

Google has pushed out a new patch for Chrome to deal with a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-3079. In the patch release Google is clear that this vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild and that users of both Chrome and Edge should update to the latest version as soon as possible. The report of the flaw was from Google’s own threat research team making this an even more urgent event.

After the disclosure of a serious Zero-Day that allowed an unauthenticated user to basically own the device. Barracuda is now saying that remediation action for any device that was compromised is a full replacement regardless of the firmware version. It seems that once an attacker gets their malware into the device, it is done. There is not a clean way to remove it and simply patching it does not disable the control that the attacker has on the device. It also seems that at factory resent does not clear it out.

As we hear more about Supply Chain attacks and the need for Software Build of Materials we are now hearing of an attack on the popular game, Minecraft. It seems that attackers are leveraging popular Modding platforms to push out information stealing malware (Fractureiser). They are accomplishing this by injecting malicious code into modifications that are then uploaded to different platforms. These are then downloaded and installed by unwary gamers.