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The Good
Here’s a scoop of good things that happened in cyberspace this week. A new method that can enable telecommunications and internet service providers to defend against smart home device attacks was presented by a group of academics. Additionally, the National Security Agency (NSA) rolled out guidelines for military and intelligence community personnel to reduce the exposure of cell phone location data.
- Researchers from Ben-Gurion University and National University of Singapore developed a new method to help telecom providers detect vulnerable IoT devices in home networks. This new ability will help prevent DDoS attacks that are launched via a botnet of compromised devices.
- The National Security Agency (NSA) rolled out guidelines to reduce the exposure of cell phone location data for military and intelligence community personnel. The action has been taken to protect unauthorized access to sensitive federal systems and data.
- Australia will spend around $1.19 billion over the next 10 years to bolster the cyber defenses of companies and households. The investment will focus on protecting vital infrastructure and services from cyberattacks.
- Researchers from Ben Gurion University developed a framework to evaluate user security awareness on phishing and social engineering attacks. The evaluation techniques rely on questionnaires and the self-reported behavior of users.
The Bad
The foray of ransomware continued to be the top headlines this week as operators targeted several organizations such as Forsee Power, Canon, LG, and Xerox. Meanwhile, the city of Lafayette and CWT paid ransoms of $45,000 and $4.5 million respectively to restore their impacted systems and encrypted files.
- The week saw the City of Lafayette and travel giant CWT make ransom payments. While Lafayette city paid a ransom of $45,000 to recover its network services and systems, CWT made a payment of $4.5 million to restore its compromised corporate files.
- As usual ransomware attackers continued to carry on the rampage by targeting the networks of Forsee Power and Canon and stealing sensitive files worth over 10TB from them. In another incident, the Maze ransomware gang published over 70GB data stolen from LG and Xerox on its leaked site following failed ransom negotiations. Summit Medical Associates also disclosed a ransomware attack that affected the personal information of patients and affiliates.
- Australian universities using the ProctorU online exam monitoring tool were affected in a data breach affecting 444,000 users of the platform. The compromised data included usernames, unencrypted passwords, legal names, and full addresses of members from different universities.
- Usernames, passwords, and session cookies for more than 900 Pulse Secure VPN enterprise servers were leaked on a hacker forum. The hackers performed the act by exploiting CVE-2019-11510 vulnerability affecting Pulse Secure.
- UberEats suffered a data breach that affected the personal information of hundreds of delivery drivers, delivery partners, and customers. Threat actors had leaked these user records on the dark web.
- Organizations in the healthcare sector such as Beaumont Health and British Dental Association (BDA) were affected in security breaches. While Beaumont Health was attacked in January 2020, the BDA members’ bank account numbers were accessed in July 2020.
- The European cryptocurrency trading platform, 2gether, lost approximately $1.4 million in a cyberattack. However, the users’ financial details, accounts, and general wallets were not compromised in the incident.
- The Office of Unemployment Insurance’s (OUI) online system in Kentucky fell victim to a second data breach in four months. In this case, a claimant on the website could view another plaintiff’s personal data.
- After detecting unauthorized activity on its systems, the push-to-talk app, Zello, could reset user passwords. The firm discovered the breach on July 8, 2020.
- Havenly disclosed a data breach after the ShinyHunters threat actor group leaked a database containing 1.3 million users records for free on a hacker forum. The breach was part of the massive data leak that affected 386 million user records of 18 companies a few weeks ago.
- The U.S. chipmaker, Intel, found itself in a soup after 17GB of its data was leaked on file-sharing site MEGA. The exposed data consisted of files from the Intel Resource and Design Center, different Intel development and debugging tools, roadmap documents, schematics of various processors, and more.
New Threats
Just like the previous week, researchers came up with new attack methods. Two of these discoveries relate to four new variants of HTTP Request Smuggling and the EtherOops attacks. A new hacking method that could enable attackers to steal sensitive data from users’ Android devices via Bluetooth protocol was also demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference.
- Researchers demonstrated four new variants of HTTP Request Smuggling and the new EtherOops attack at the Black Hat 2020 security conference. While the new variants of HTTP Request Smuggling attacks work against commercial off-the-shelf web servers and HTTP proxy servers, the EtherOops attack takes advantage of faulty Ethernet cables.
- At the ongoing Black Hat conference, researchers also explained a new hack to target Android devices. The hack leverages a zero-day vulnerability in Bluetooth protocol to steal sensitive information like contacts, call history, and SMS verification codes.
- WastedLocker ransomware’s anti-evasion techniques now include the abuse of Microsoft Windows memory management features. According to researchers, the ransomware appears to have adopted this technique from BitPaymer.
- A cluster of 295 malicious extensions are found hijacking and inserting Google and Bing search results. These extensions are available on the Google Chrome Web Store.
- U.S. government agencies exposed a new version of the Taidoor trojan being used in recent attacks by Chinese hackers. The new variant is installed on victims’ systems as a service Dynamic Link Library (DLL).
- New updates highlight that Prototype Pollution attack is also possible on Node.js servers. The vulnerability can open the door to DDoS attacks and in some cases, remote shell access.
- The Iranian hacking group, Oilrig, became the first publicly known threat actor to incorporate the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol in its attacks. To facilitate this, the operators are using a new utility called DNSExfiltrator as part of their intrusions into hacked networks.
- A newly discovered credit card skimming campaign made use of homoglyph techniques to trick users into visiting fraudulent domains. The domains were loaded with skimming kits hidden inside favicon files to harvest user information.
- Researchers discovered that previously disclosed speculative execution attacks are misattributed to ‘prefetching effect,’ resulting in the release of incomplete mitigations by hardware vendors. The actual cause of these attacks is due to the speculative dereferencing of user-space registers in the kernel. As a result, several new side-channel attacks have been identified on modern processors from ARM, IBM, and AMD.
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Posted on: August 07, 2020
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