Category Archives: News and Events

Via: SecurityWeek.com

Hackers Say Humans Are the Weakpoint and That Traditional Defenses Cannot Protect Them

Under the principle of set a thief to catch a thief, 250 hackers at Black Hat 2017 were asked about their hacking methods and practices. By understanding how they work and what they look for, defenders can better understand how to safeguard their own systems.

Thycotic surveyed (PDF) a cross section of hackers attending Black Hat. Fifty-one percent described themselves as white hats; 34% described themselves as grey hats using their skills for both good and bad causes; and 15% self-identified as out-and-out black hats.

The hackers’ number one choice for fast and easy access to sensitive data is gaining access to privileged accounts (31%). Second is access to an email account (27%), and third is access to a user’s endpoint (21%). All other routes combined totaled just 21%.

The hackers also confirmed that perimeter security, in the form of firewalls and anti-virus, is irrelevant and obsolete. Forty-three percent are least troubled by anti-virus and anti-malware defenses, while 29% are untroubled by firewalls. “Hackers today are able to bypass both firewalls and AV using well known applications and protocols or even VPN that hide within expected communications,” explains Joseph Carson, Thycotic’s chief security scientist. “For example, VOIP, streaming services etc. Because of the ability to hide within normal business applications or the use of authenticated stolen credentials, they are stating that these technologies are no longer sufficient to prevent cyber-attacks on their own.”

Overall, the hackers find MFA and encryption their biggest obstacles. “As hackers increasingly target privileged accounts and user passwords,” explains Thycotic, “it’s perhaps not surprising that the technologies they considered the toughest to beat include Multi-Factor Authentication (38%) and Encryption (32%), with endpoint protection and intrusion prevention far behind at 8% and 5 % respectively.”

Ultimately, however, the hackers believe that humans are most responsible for security breaches. Only 5% consider that insufficient security software is the problem, while 85% named humans as most responsible for security breaches. The problem is ‘cyber fatigue’.

Cyber fatigue is blamed on the constant pressure to obey policy and good practice. “‘Remembering

and changing passwords’ was the top source of cybersecurity fatigue (35%), a major vulnerability that hackers are all too willing to exploit,” notes Thycotic. “Other contributing factors included ‘Information overload’ (30%), ‘Never ending software updates’ (20%) and ‘Living under constant cyber security threats’ (15%).”

Perhaps surprisingly, hackers do not consider threat intelligence solutions to be an obstacle. “Because Threat Intelligence solutions are also accessible to hackers, they may be able to easily identify how they work and therefore avoid detection them,” suggests Thycotic.

The survey suggests that humans are a weakpoint, traditional perimeter defenses are ineffective, and user credentials are the target. “With traditional perimeter security technologies considered largely irrelevant, hackers are focusing more on gaining access to privileged accounts and email passwords by exploiting human vulnerabilities allowing the hacker to gain access abusing trusted identities,” comments Carson. “More than ever, it is critical for businesses to mitigate these risks by implementing the right technologies and process to ward off unsuspecting attacks and access to sensitive data.”

His conclusion is that “The new cybersecurity perimeter must incorporate an identity firewall built around employee and data using identity and access management technology controls which emphasizes the protection of privileged account credentials and enhances user passwords across the enterprise with multi-factor authentication.”

Source: http://www.securityweek.com/hackers-say-humans-most-responsible-security-breaches

Via: Lookout Blog

Today, Apple released an update to iOS (10.3) that changed how Mobile Safari handles JavaScript pop-ups, which Lookout discovered scammers using to execute a scareware campaign.

The scammers abused the handling of pop-up dialogs in Mobile Safari in such a way that it would lock out a victim from using the browser. The attack would block use of the Safari browser on iOS until the victim pays the attacker money in the form of an iTunes Gift Card. During the lockout, the attackers displayed threatening messaging in an attempt to scare and coerce victims into paying.

However, a knowledgeable user could restore functionality of Mobile Safari by clearing the browser’s cache via the the iOS Settings — the attack doesn’t actually encrypt any data and hold it ransom. Its purpose is to scare the victim into paying to unlock the browser before he realizes he doesn’t have to pay the ransom to recover data or access the browser.

Lookout found this attack in the wild last month, along with several related websites used in the campaign, discovered the root cause, and shared the details with Apple. As part of the iOS 10.3 patch released today, Apple closed the attack vector by changing how Mobile Safari handles website pop-up dialogs, making them per-tab rather than taking over the entire app. We are publishing these details about the campaign upon the release of iOS 10.3.

An attack like this highlights the importance of ensuring your mobile device, or your employees’ mobile devices, are running up-to-date software. Left unpatched, bugs like this can unnecessarily alarm people and impact productivity.

Discovery event

This attack was initially reported to Lookout’s Support desk by one of our users running iOS 10.2. The user reported that he had lost control of Safari after visiting a website and was no longer able to use the browser. The user provided a screenshot (below) showing a ransomware message from pay-police[.]com, with an overlaid “Cannot Open Page” dialog from Safari. Each time he tapped “OK” he would be prompted to tap “OK” again, effectively putting the browser into an infinite loop of dialog prompts that prevented him from using the browser.

The user reported seeing the “Your device has been locked…” or “…you have to pay the fine of 100 pounds with an iTunes pre-paid card” messages and was no longer able to use the browser.

Abuse of pop-ups in Mobile Safari

The scammers abused the handling of pop-ups in Mobile Safari in such a way that a person would be “locked” out from using Safari unless they paid a fee — or knew they could simply clear Safari’s cache (see next section). The attack was contained within the app sandbox of the Safari browser; no exploit code was used in this campaign, unlike an advanced attack like Pegasus that breaks out of the app sandbox to install malware on the device.

The scammers registered domains and launched the attack from the domains they owned, such as police-pay[.]com, which the attackers apparently named with the intent of scaring users looking for certain types of material on the Internet into paying money. Examples range from pornography to music-oriented websites.

The attackers effectively used fear as a factor to get what they wanted before the victim realized that there was little actual risk.

The attack, based on its code, seems to have been developed for older versions of iOS, such as iOS 8. However, the abuse of pop-ups in Mobile Safari was still possible until iOS 10.3. An endless loop of pop-ups effectively locks up the browser, which prevents the victim from using Safari, unless she resets the browser’s cache. iOS 10.3 doesn’t lock the entire browser up with these pop-ups, rather it runs on a per-tab basis so that if one tab is misbehaving, the user can close it out and/or move to another one.

Quick fix

Before the iOS 10.3 fix was available, the victim could regain access without paying any money. Lookout determined the best course of immediate action for the user who initially reported it was to clear the Safari cache to regain control of the browser. (Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data) Once a person erases all web history and data, effectively starting Safari as a fresh app, the ransom campaign is defeated.

To clear browser history on iOS: Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data

Preventing the attack

Individuals are strongly encouraged to protect their iOS devices against this attack and take advantage of a number of other security patches that Apple made available in iOS 10.3. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207617 for details. Lookout users will be prompted to update their operating system to 10.3 if they have not already done so.

Investigation into the campaign

This attack was documented previously on a Russian website. The JavaScript included some code that specifically set the UserAgent string to match an older iOS version.

The attack code creates a popup window, which infinitely loops until the victim pays the money. The ransom is paid by sending, via SMS, an iTunes gift card code to a phone number displayed on the scam website. The pop-up window error dialog on newer versions of iOS is actually the result of Mobile Safari not being able to find a local URL lookup, so it fails, but keeps presenting the dialog message due to the infinite loop in the code. The JavaScript code is delivered obfuscated, but was de-obfuscated by our analysts to determine its intent.

The JavaScript we obtained from the pay-police[.]com domain was slightly obfuscated using an array of hex values to masque behavior of the code. The pop-up attack on newer versions of iOS appears to DOS (denial of service) the browser.

The group involved in this campaign has purchased a large number of domains that try to catch users that are seeking controversial content on the internet and coerce them into paying a ransom to them.

Each site would serve up a different message based on the country code identifier. The sites, presumably, are used to target users visiting from different parts of the world. Each message has a separate email address for the target to contact, which appear to be country-specific and part of a wider phishing campaign.

The phishing domains and email addresses for each payload:

U.S.: us.html networksafetydept@usa[.]com
Ireland: ie.html justicedept@irelandmail[.]com
UK: gb.html cybercrimegov@europe[.]com
Australia: au.html federaljustice@australiamail[.]com
New Zealand: nz.html cybercrimegov@post[.]com

Lookout researchers continue to monitor this and other related campaigns, as well as work with platform providers to address security concerns as they arise.

Source: https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2017/03/27/mobile-safari-scareware/

Via: The Register

“Google’s Chrome development team has posted a stinging criticism of Symantec’s certificate-issuance practices, saying it has lost confidence in the company’s practices and therefore in the safety of sessions hopefully-secured by Symantec-issued certificates.

Google’s post says “Since January 19, the Google Chrome team has been investigating a series of failures by Symantec Corporation to properly validate certificates. Over the course of this investigation, the explanations provided by Symantec have revealed a continually increasing scope of misissuance with each set of questions from members of the Google Chrome team; an initial set of reportedly 127 certificates has expanded to include at least 30,000 certificates, issued over a period spanning several years.”

Googler Ryan Sleevi unloads on Symantec as follows:

“Symantec allowed at least four parties access to their infrastructure in a way to cause certificate issuance, did not sufficiently oversee these capabilities as required and expected, and when presented with evidence of these organizations’ failure to abide to the appropriate standard of care, failed to disclose such information in a timely manner or to identify the significance of the issues reported to them.These issues, and the corresponding failure of appropriate oversight, spanned a period of several years, and were trivially identifiable from the information publicly available or that Symantec shared.”

The post gets worse, for Symantec:

“The full disclosure of these issues has taken more than a month. Symantec has failed to provide timely updates to the community regarding these issues. Despite having knowledge of these issues, Symantec has repeatedly failed to proactively disclose them.  Further, even after issues have become public, Symantec failed to provide the information that the community required to  assess the significance of these issues until they had been specifically questioned. The proposed remediation steps offered by Symantec have involved relying on known-problematic information or using practices insufficient to provide the level of assurance required under the Baseline Requirements and expected by the Chrome Root CA Policy.”

The upshot is that Google feels it can “no longer have confidence in the certificate issuance policies and practices of Symantec over the past several years” and it therefore proposes three remedies:

• A reduction in the accepted validity period of newly issued Symantec-issued certificates to nine months or less, in order to minimize any impact to Google Chrome users from any further misissuances that may arise.
• An incremental distrust, spanning a series of Google Chrome releases, of all currently-trusted Symantec-issued certificates, requiring they be revalidated and replaced.
• Removal of recognition of the Extended Validation status of Symantec issued certificates, until such a time as the community can be assured in the policies and practices of Symantec, but no sooner than one year.

The first remedy will mean that Chrome stops trusting Symantec-issued certificates as outlined in the table below.

Google reckons this plan will mean “web developers are aware of the risk and potential of future distrust of Symantec-issued certificates, should additional misissuance events occur, while also allowing them the flexibility to continue using such certificates should it be necessary.”

And of course it also gives developers time to arrange new certificates from whatever issuer pleases them most.

Symantec has told The Register it is developing a response to Google’s allegations. We will add it to this story as soon as we receive it.”

Additional information can be found Here.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/24/google_slaps_symantec_for_sloppy_certs_slow_show_of_snafus/