• Ticketfly was the target of a malicious cyber attack last week
• In consultation with third-party forensic cybersecurity experts we can now confirm that credit and debit card information was not accessed.
• However, information including names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers connected to approximately 27 million Ticketfly accounts was accessed. It’s important to note that many people purchase tickets with multiple email accounts, so the number of individuals impacted is likely lower.
• We take privacy and security very seriously and upon first learning about this incident we took swift action to secure the data of our clients and fans.
• Ticketfly.com, Ticketfly Backstage, and the vast majority of temporary venue/promoter websites are back online.

Source: Ticketfly | Ticketfly Cyber Incident Update

ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL, and ZTE: these are the vendors newly-named by Cisco’s Talos Intelligence as being exploited by the malware scum running the VPNFilter attacks, and the attack’s been spotted hitting endpoints behind vulnerable kit.

As well as the expanded list of impacted devices, Talos warned that VPNFilter now attacks endpoints behind the firewall, and now sports a “poison pill” to destroy an infected device if necessary.

When first discovered, VPNFilter was spotted in half a million devices – but only SOHO devices from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, and QNAP storage kit.

As well as the six new vendors added to the list, Talos said more devices from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, and TP-Link are affected. Talos noted that to date, all the vulnerable units are consumer-grade or SOHO-grade.

All in all, it seems the early VPNFilter attacks amounted to a dry run to see if there were enough vulnerable boxen to make the effort worthwhile.

Source: VPNFilter router malware is a lot worse than everyone thought • The Register

EFAIL describes vulnerabilities in the end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME that leak the plaintext of encrypted emails.
Email is a plaintext communication medium whose communication paths are partly protected by TLS (TLS). For people in hostile environments (journalists, political activists, whistleblowers, …) who depend on the confidentiality of digital communication, this may not be enough. Powerful attackers such as nation state agencies are known to eavesdrop on email communications of a large number of people. To address this, OpenPGP offers end-to-end encryption specifically for sensitive communication in view of these powerful attackers. S/MIME is an alternative standard for email end-to-end encryption that is typically used to secure corporate email communication.

The EFAIL attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards to reveal the plaintext of encrypted emails. In a nutshell, EFAIL abuses active content of HTML emails, for example externally loaded images or styles, to exfiltrate plaintext through requested URLs. To create these exfiltration channels, the attacker first needs access to the encrypted emails, for example, by eavesdropping on network traffic, compromising email accounts, email servers, backup systems or client computers. The emails could even have been collected years ago.

The attacker changes an encrypted email in a particular way and sends this changed encrypted email to the victim. The victim’s email client decrypts the email and loads any external content, thus exfiltrating the plaintext to the attacker.

 

Direct Exfiltration

There are two different flavors of EFAIL attacks. First, the direct exfiltration attack abuses vulnerabilities in Apple Mail, iOS Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird to directly exfiltrate the plaintext of encrypted emails. These vulnerabilities can be fixed in the respective email clients. The attack works like this. The attacker creates a new multipart email with three body parts as shown below. The first is an HTML body part essentially containing an HTML image tag. Note that the src attribute of that image tag is opened with quotes but not closed. The second body part contains the PGP or S/MIME ciphertext. The third is an HTML body part again that closes the src attribute of the first body part.

The attacker now sends this email to the victim. The victim’s client decrypts the encrypted second body part and stitches the three body parts together in one HTML email as shown below. Note that the src attribute of the image tag in line 1 is closed in line 4, so the URL spans over all four lines.

The email client then URL encodes all non-printable characters (e.g., %20 is a whitespace) and requests an image from that URL. As the path of the URL contains the plaintext of the encrypted email, the victim’s email client sends the plaintext to the attacker.

The direct exfiltration EFAIL attacks work for encrypted PGP as well as S/MIME emails.

The CBC/CFB Gadget Attack

Second, we describe the novel CBC/CFB gadget attacks which abuse vulnerabilities in the specification of OpenPGP and S/MIME to exfiltrate the plaintext. The diagram below describes the idea of CBC gadgets in S/MIME. Because of the specifics of the CBC mode of operation, an attacker can precisely modify plaintext blocks if she knows the plaintext. S/MIME encrypted emails usually start with “Content-type: multipart/signed” so the attacker knows at least one full block of plaintext as shown in (a). She can then form a canonical plaintext block whose content is all zeros as shown in (b). We call the block pair X and C₀ a CBC gadget. In step (c), she then repeatedly appends CBC gadgets to inject an image tag into the encrypted plaintext. This creates a single encrypted body part that exfiltrates its own plaintext when the user opens the attacker email. OpenPGP uses the CFB mode of operation, which has the same cryptographic properties as CBC and allows the same attack using CFB gadgets.

The difference here is that any standard-conforming client will be vulnerable and that each vendor may cook their own mitigations that may or may not prevent the attacks. Thus, in the long term, it is necessary to update the specification to find and document changes that fix the underlying root causes of the vulnerabilities.

While the CBC/CFB gadget attacks on PGP and S/MIME are technically very similar, the requirements for a successful attack differ substantially. Attacking S/MIME is straightforward and an attacker can break multiple (in our tests up to 500) S/MIME encrypted emails by sending a single crafted S/MIME email to the victim. Given the current state of our research, the CFB gadget attack against PGP only has a success rate of approximately one in three attempts. The reason is that PGP compresses the plaintext before encrypting it, which complicates guessing known plaintext bytes. We feel that this is not a fundamental limitation of the EFAIL attacks but more a technical hitch and that attacks become more efficient in future research.

Mitigations

Here are some strategies to prevent EFAIL attacks:

Short term: No decryption in email client. The best way to prevent EFAIL attacks is to only decrypt S/MIME or PGP emails in a separate application outside of your email client. Start by removing your S/MIME and PGP private keys from your email client, then decrypt incoming encrypted emails by copy&pasting the ciphertext into a separate application that does the decryption for you. That way, the email clients cannot open exfiltration channels. This is currently the safest option with the downside that the process gets more involved.

Short term: Disable HTML rendering. The EFAIL attacks abuse active content, mostly in the form of HTML images, styles, etc. Disabling the presentation of incoming HTML emails in your email client will close the most prominent way of attacking EFAIL. Note that there are other possible backchannels in email clients which are not related to HTML but these are more difficult to exploit.

Medium term: Patching. Some vendors will publish patches that either fix the EFAIL vulnerabilities or make them much harder to exploit.

Long term: Update OpenPGP and S/MIME standards. The EFAIL attacks exploit flaws and undefined behavior in the MIME, S/MIME, and OpenPGP standards. Therefore, the standards need to be updated, which will take some time.

Source: EFAIL

Thieves siphoned hundreds of millions of pesos out of Mexican banks, including No. 2 Banorte, by creating phantom orders that wired funds to bogus accounts and promptly withdrew the money, two sources close to the government’s investigation said. Hackers sent hundreds of false orders to move amounts ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of pesos from banks including Banorte, to fake accounts in other banks, the sources said, and accomplices then emptied the accounts in cash withdrawals in dozens of branch offices.

One source said the thieves transferred more than 300 million pesos ($15.4 million). Daily newspaper El Financiero said about 400 million pesos had been stolen in the hack, citing an anonymous source.

It was not clear how much of the money transferred was later withdrawn in cash. Some of the attempts to fraudulently transfer funds were blocked, the sources said.

Source: Thieves suck millions out of Mexican banks in transfer heist | Reuters

It’s not particularly difficult, particularly with Shodan to help. The required steps are:

• Discover targets on Shodan by searching for the rootDesc.xml file (Imperva found 1.3 million devices);
• Use HTTP to access rootDesc.xml;
• Modify the victim’s port forwarding rules (the researchers noted that this isn’t supposed to work, since port forwarding should be between internal and external addresses, but “few routers actually bother to verify that a provided ‘internal IP’ is actually internal, and [they abide] by all forwarding rules as a result”.
• Launch the attack.

That means an attacker can create a port forwarding rule that spoofs a victim’s IP address – so a bunch of ill-secured routers can be sent a DNS request which they’ll try to return to the victim, in the classic redirection DDoS attack.

The port forwarding lets an attacker use “evasive ports”, “enabling them to bypass commonplace scrubbing directives that identify amplification payloads by looking for source port data for blacklisting”, the post explained.

Source: UPnP joins the ‘just turn it off on consumer devices, already’ club • The Register

Hard on the heels of the first network-based Rowhammer attack, some of the boffins involved in discovering Meltdown/Spectre have shown off their own technique for flipping bits using network requests.

With a gigabit connection to the victim, the researchers reckon, they can induce security-critical bit flips using crafted quality-of-service packets.

Last week, we reported on research called “Throwhammer” that exploited Rowhammer via remote direct memory access (RDMA) channels.

In separate research, Meltdown/Spectre veterans Daniel Gruss, Moritz Lipp and Michael Schwarz of Graz University of Technology and their team have published a paper describing Nethammer (their co-authors are Lukas Lamster and Lukas Raab, also of Graz; Misiker Tadesse Aga of the University of Michigan; and Clémentine Maurice of IRISA at the University of Rennes).

Nethammer works, they said, without any attacker-controlled code on the target, attacking “systems that use uncached memory or flush instructions while handling network requests.

Source: Oh, great, now there’s a SECOND remote Rowhammer exploit

PoC for a NTFS crash that I discovered, in various Windows versions

Type of issue: denial of service. One can generate blue-screen-of-death using a handcrafted NTFS image. This Denial of Service type of attack, can be driven from user mode, limited user account or Administrator. It can even crash the system if it is in locked state.

Reported to Microsoft on July 2017, they did not want to assign CVE for it nor even to write me when they fixed it.

Affected systems

1. Windows 7 Enterprise 6.1.7601 SP1, Build 7601 x64
2. Windows 10 Pro 10.0.15063, Build 15063 x64
3. Windows 10 Enterprise Evaluation Insider Preview 10.0.16215, Build 16215 x64

Note: these are the only systems I have tested.

Does not seem to reproduce on my current build: 10.0.16299 Build 16299 x64 (didnt have time to see if it’s really fixed)

last email response 🙂

Hey Marius, Your report requires either physical access or social engineering, and as such, does not meet the bar for servicing down-level (issuing a security patch). […]

Your attempt to responsibly disclose a potential security issue is appreciated and we hope you continue to do so.

Regards,

https://github.com/mtivadar/windows10_ntfs_crash_dos

Saks has been hacked — adding to the already formidable challenges faced by the luxury retailer.

A well-known ring of cybercriminals has obtained more than five million credit and debit card numbers from customers of Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor, according to a cybersecurity research firm that specializes in tracking stolen financial data. The data, the firm said, appears to have been stolen using software that was implanted into the cash register systems at the stores and that siphoned card numbers until last month.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, the Canadian corporation that owns both retail chains, confirmed on Sunday that a breach had occurred.

“We have become aware of a data security issue involving customer payment card data at certain Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks Off 5th and Lord & Taylor stores in North America,” the company said in a statement. “We have identified the issue, and have taken steps to contain it. Once we have more clarity around the facts, we will notify our customers quickly and will offer those impacted free identity protection services, including credit and web monitoring.”

Hudson’s Bay said that its investigation was continuing but that its e-commerce platforms appeared to have been unaffected by the breach. The company declined to identify how many customer accounts or stores were affected.

The theft is one of the largest known breaches of a retailer and shows just how difficult it is to secure credit-card transaction systems despite the lessons learned from other large data breaches, including the theft of 40 million card numbers from Target in 2013 and 56 million card numbers from Home Depot in 2014. Last year, Equifax, a credit reporting firm, disclosed that sensitive financial information on 145.5 million Americans had been exposed in a breach of the company’s systems.

The research firm that identified the Saks breach, Gemini Advisory, said on Sunday that a group of Russian-speaking hackers known as Fin7 or JokerStash posted online on Wednesday that it had obtained a cache of five million stolen card numbers, which the thieves called BIGBADABOOM-2. The hackers, who have also hit other retail chains, offered 125,000 of the records for immediate sale.

Fin7 did not disclose where the numbers had been obtained. But the researchers, working in conjunction with banks, analyzed a sample of the records and determined that the card numbers all seemed to have been used at Saks and Lord & Taylor stores, mostly in New York and New Jersey, from May 2017 to March 2018.

Source: Card Data Stolen From 5 Million Saks and Lord & Taylor Customers – The New York Times

European organisations are taking longer to detect breaches than their counterparts in North America, according to a study by FireEye.

Organisations in EMEA are taking almost six months (175 days) to detect an intruder in their networks, which is rather more than the 102 days that the firm found when asking the same questions last year. In contrast, the median dwell time in the Americas improved to 76 days in 2017 from 99 in 2016. Globally it stands at 101 days.

The findings about European breach detection are a particular concern because of the looming GDPR deadline, which will introduce tougher breach disclosure guidelines for organisations that hold Europeans citizens’ data. GDPR can also mean fines of €20 million, or four per cent of global turnover, whichever is higher.

FireEye’s report also records a growing trend of repeat attacks by hackers looking for a second bite of the cherry. A majority (56 per cent) of global organisations that received incident response support were targeted again by the same of a similarly motivated attack group, FireEye reports.

FireEye has historically blamed China for many of the breaches its incident response teams detected. But as the geo-political landscape has changed Russia and North Korea are getting more and more “credit” for alleged cyber-nasties.

But a different country – Iran – features predominantly in attacks tracked by FireEye last year. Throughout 2017, Iran grew more capable from an offensive perspective. FireEye said that it “observed a significant increase in the number of cyber-attacks originating from Iran-sponsored threat actors”.

FireEye’s latest annual M-Trends report (pdf) is based on information gathered during investigations conducted by its security analysts in 2017 and uncovers emerging trends and tactics that threat actors used to compromise organisations.

Source: US spanks EU businesses in race to detect p0wned servers • The Register

Hundreds of thousands of online shoppers may have had their name, address, and credit information stolen by hackers thanks to a security issue with the online customer service software from [24]7.ai.

Customers that shopped online at Delta, Sears, Kmart, and Best Buy could have been affected thanks to malware that was infecting [24]7.ai’s online chat tool between September 26 and October 12, 2017.

[24]7.ai provides the live chat on those company’s websites. Your information may have potentially been compromised even if you didn’t use the chat tool but made a purchase online from one of the retailers during that time period.

Currently, none of the named companies have confirmed that information has been stolen, only that the opportunity for it to have happened was there, CNET reports. Delta has gone as far as to say that even if the breach did affect its site, that it would only impact “a small subset” of customers.

Source: Delta, Best Buy, and Sears Customers May Have Had Personal Info Stolen in Hack

Sodexo Filmology said it had informed the Information Commissioner’s Office and a specialist forensic investigation team.

“We would advise all employees who have used the site between 19th March-3rd April to cancel their payment cards and check their payment card statements,” it said.

“These incidents have been caused by a targeted attack on the system we use to host our Cinema Benefits platform, despite having put in place a number of preventative measures with CREST-approved security specialists.”

It added: “We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this has caused you and are doing all that we can to provide access to your benefits via alternative means. We will share more information on this with you, or your provider, in the coming days.”

It seems the issue has been going on for several months, with one employee complaining on the Money Saving Expert forum in February that he had been the victim of attempted fraud.

Source: Cinema voucher-pusher tells customers: Cancel your credit cards, we’ve been ‘attacked’

Orbitz says one of its older websites may have been hacked, potentially exposing the personal information of people who made purchases online between Jan. 1, 2016 and Dec. 22, 2017.

The current Orbitz.com website was not involved in the incident. Orbitz is now owned by Expedia Inc. of Belleview, Washington.

Orbitz said Tuesday about 880,000 payment cards were impacted.

Data that was likely exposed includes name, address, payment card information, date of birth, phone number, email address and gender. Social Security information was not hacked, however. The company said evidence suggests that an attacker may have accessed information stored on the platform — which was for both consumers and business partners — between Oct. 1, 2017 and Dec. 22, 2017.

It said it discovered the data breach March 1.

Orbitz is offering those impacted a year of free credit monitoring and identity protection service in countries where available.

Source: Orbitz Says Legacy Travel Site Likely Hacked, Affecting 880K | Business News | US News

Oddly enough, it doesn’t say which site…

Last week, the code repository GitHub was taken off air in a 1.3Tbps denial of service attack. We predicted then that there would be more such attacks and it seems we were right.

Arbor Networks is now reporting that a US service provider suffered a 1.7Tbps attack earlier this month. In this case, there were no outages as the provider had taken adequate safeguards, but it’s clear that the memcached attack is going to be a feature network managers are going to have to take seriously in the future.

The attacks use shoddily secured memcached database servers to amplify attacks against a target. The assailant spoofs the UDP address of its victim and pings a small data packet at a memcached server that doesn’t have an authenticated traffic requirement in place. The server responds by firing back as much as 50,000 times the data it received.

With multiple data packets sent out a second, the memcached server unwittingly amplifies the deluge of data that can be sent against the target. Without proper filtering and network management, the tsunami of data can be enough to knock some providers offline.

There are some simple mitigation techniques, notably blocking off UDP traffic from Port 11211, which is the default avenue for traffic from memcached servers. In addition, the operators of memcached servers need to lock down their systems to avoid taking part in such denial of service attacks.

Source: World’s biggest DDoS attack record broken after just five days • The Register

Computer speakers and headphones make passable microphones and can be used to receive data via ultrasound and send signals back, making the practice of air gapping sensitive computer systems less secure.

In an academic paper published on Friday through preprint service ArXiv, researchers from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev describe a novel data exfiltration technique that allows the transmission and reception of data – in the form of inaudible ultrasonic sound waves – between two computers in the same room without microphones.

The paper, titled, “MOSQUITO: Covert Ultrasonic Transmissions between Two Air-Gapped Computers using Speaker-to-Speaker Communication,” was written by Mordechai Guri, Yosef Solwicz, Andrey Daidakulov and Yuval Elovici, who have developed a number other notable side-channel attack techniques.

These include: ODINI, a way to pass data between Faraday-caged computers using electrical fields; MAGNETO, a technique for passing data between air-gapped computers and smartphones via electrical fields; and FANSMITTER, a way to send acoustic data between air-gapped computers using fans.

Source: Air gapping PCs won’t stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers • The Register

Two Russian criminals have been sent down in America after pleading guilty to helping run the largest credit-card hacking scam in US history.Muscovites Vladimir Drinkman, 37, and Dmitriy Smilianets, 34, ran a massive criminal ring that spent months hacking companies to get hold of credit and debit card information. They then sold it online to the highest bidders, who then recouped their investment by ripping off companies and citizens around the world.”Drinkman and Smilianets not only stole over 160 million credit card numbers from credit card processors, banks, retailers, and other corporate victims, they also used their bounty to fuel a robust underground market for hacked information,” said acting assistant attorney general John Cronan on Thursday.
[…]
Rytikov, prosecutors allege, acted as the group’s ISP, supplying internet access that the gang knew would be unlogged and unrecorded. Smilianets handled the sales side, working dark web forums to find buyers for the cards at a cost of $50 per EU card, $10 for American accounts, and $15 for Canadian credit cards.

NASDAQ, 7-Eleven, Carrefour, JCP, Hannaford, Heartland, Wet Seal, Commidea, Dexia, JetBlue, Dow Jones, Euronet, Visa Jordan, Global Payment, Diners Singapore and Ingenicard were among the victims of the gang, the Feds claim. The final cost is difficult to estimate but just three of the companies targeted reported losses of over $300m thanks to the gang.

Source: Russians behind bars in US after nicking $300m+ in credit-card hacks • The Register

Last year, a vigilante hacker broke into the servers of a company that sells spyware to everyday consumers and wiped their servers, deleting photos captured from monitored devices. A year later, the hacker has done it again.

Thursday, the hacker said he started wiping some cloud servers that belong to Retina-X Studios, a Florida-based company that sells spyware products targeted at parents and employers, but that are also used by people to spy on their partners without their consent.

Retina-X was one of two companies that were breached last year in a series of hacks that exposed the fact that many otherwise ordinary people surreptitiously install spyware on their partners’ and children’s phones in order to spy on them. This software has been called “stalkerware” by some. This spyware allows people to have practically full access to the smartphone or computer of their targets. Whoever controls the software can see the photos the target snaps with their phone, read their text messages, or see what websites they go to, and track their location.

Source: A Hacker Has Wiped a Spyware Company’s Servers—Againp – Motherboard

Yay to the hackers!

Telegram has fixed a security flaw in its desktop app that hackers spent several months exploiting to install remote-control malware and cryptocurrency miners on vulnerable Windows PCs.The programming cockup was spotted by researchers at Kaspersky in October. It is believed miscreants have been leveraging the bug since at least March. The vulnerability stems from how its online chat app handles Unicode characters for languages that are read right-to-left, such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Source: Shock horror! Telegram messaging app proves insecure yet again! • The Register

In its original announcement of the hack, the company had revealed that some driver’s license numbers were exposed. The new documents show that the license state and issue date might have also been compromised.

Equifax spokesperson Meredith Griffanti told CNNMoney Friday that the original list of vulnerable personal information was never intended to represent the full list of potentiality exposed information.

The new documents now raise questions of how much information hackers may have accessed in Equifax’s cyberattack.

Source: The Equifax hack could be worse than we thought – Feb. 9, 2018

The Grammarly browser extension, which has about 22 million users, exposes its authentication tokens to all websites, allowing any to access all the user’s data without permission, according to a bug report from Google Project Zero’s Tavis Ormandy.

The high-severity bug was discovered on Friday and fixed early Monday morning, “a really impressive response time,” Ormandy wrote.

Grammarly, launched in 2009 by Ukrainian developers, looks at all messages, documents and social media posts and attempts to clean up errors so the user is left with the clearest English possible. The browser extension has access to virtually everything a user types, and therefore an attacker could access a huge trove of private data.

Exploitation is as simple as a couple of console commands granting full access to everything, as Ormandy explained. The company has no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited.

The vulnerability affected Chrome and Firefox. Updates are now available for both browsers.

Source: Bug in Grammarly browser extension exposes virtually everything a user ever writes