Hackers probing America’s electronic voting systems have painted an astonishing picture of the state of US election security, less than six weeks before the November midterms.

The full 50-page report [PDF], released Thursday during a presentation in Washington DC, was put together by the organizers of the DEF CON hacking conference’s Voting Village. It recaps the findings of that village, during which attendees uncovered ways resourceful miscreants could compromise electoral computer systems and change vote tallies.

In short, the dossier outlines shortcomings in the electronic voting systems many US districts will use later this year for the midterm elections. The report focuses on vulnerabilities exploitable by scumbags with physical access to the hardware.

“The problems outlined in this report are not simply election administration flaws that need to be fixed for efficiency’s sake, but rather serious risks to our critical infrastructure and thus national security,” the report stated. “As our nation’s security is the responsibility of the federal government, Congress needs to codify basic security standards like those developed by local election officials.”

Criminally easy to hack

Researchers found that many of the systems tested were riddled with basic security blunders committed by their manufacturers, such as using default passwords and neglecting to install locks or tamper-proof seals on casings. These could be exploited by miscreants to do anything from add additional votes to create and stuff the ballot with entirely new candidates. It would require the crooks to get their hands on the machines long enough to meddle with the hardware.

Some electronic ballot boxes use smart cards loaded with Java-written software, which executes once inserted into the computer. Each citizen is given a card, which they slide in the machine when they go to vote. Unfortunately, it is possible to reprogram your card yourself so that when inserted, you can vote multiple times. If the card reader has wireless NFC support, you can hold your NFC smartphone up to the voting machine, and potentially cast a ballot many times over.

“Due to a lack of security mechanisms in the smart card implementation, researchers in the Voting Village demonstrated that it is possible to create a voter activation card, which after activating the election machine to cast a ballot can automatically reset itself and allow a malicious voter to cast a second (or more) unauthorized ballots,” the report read.

“Alternatively, an attacker can use his or her mobile phone to reprogram the smart card wirelessly.”

Source: DEF CON hackers’ dossier on US voting machine security is just as grim as feared

A vulnerability in Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) Software running on certain Cisco Connected Safety and Security Unified Computing System (UCS) platforms could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to log in to an affected system by using the root account, which has default, static user credentials.

The vulnerability is due to the presence of undocumented, default, static user credentials for the root account of the affected software on certain systems. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using the account to log in to an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to log in to the affected system and execute arbitrary commands as the root user.

Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.

Source: Cisco Video Surveillance Manager Appliance Default Password Vulnerability

Incredible that this is still a thing, especially at Cisco, where it’s happened before.

If you’re one of the people who own a stylus or touchscreen-capable Windows PC, then there’s a high chance there’s a file on your computer that has slowly collected sensitive data for the past months or even years.

This file is named WaitList.dat, and according to Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) expert Barnaby Skeggs, this file is only found on touchscreen-capable Windows PCs where the user has enabled the handwriting recognition feature [1, 2] that automatically translates stylus/touchscreen scribbles into formatted text.

Source: This Windows file may be secretly hoarding your passwords and emails | ZDNet

More than 7,500 Mikrotik routers have been compromised with malware that logs and transmits network traffic data to an unknown control server.

This is according to researchers from 360 Netlab, who found the routers had all been taken over via an exploit for CVE-2018-14847, a vulnerability first disclosed in the Vault7 data dump of supposed CIA hacking tools.

Since mid-July, Netlab said, attackers have looked to exploit the flaw and enlist routers to do things like force connected machines to mine cryptocurrency, and, in this case, forward their details on traffic packets to a remote server.

“At present, a total of 7,500 MikroTik RouterOS device IPs have been compromised by the attacker and their TZSP traffic is being forwarded to some collecting IP addresses,” the researchers explained.

The infection does not appear to be targeting any specific region, as the hacked devices reside across five different continents with Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia being the most commonly impacted.

The researchers noted that the malware is also resilient to reboots.

Source: Mikrotik routers pwned en masse, send network data to mysterious box • The Register

mSpy, a commercial spyware solution designed to help you spy on kids and partners, has leaked over 2 million records including software purchases and iCloud usernames and authentication tokens of devices running mSky. The data appears to have come from an unsecured database that allowed security researchers to pull out millions of records.

“Before it was taken offline sometime in the past 12 hours, the database contained millions of records, including the username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer who logged in to the mSpy site or purchased an mSpy license over the past six months,” wrote security researcher Brian Krebs.

Source: Mobile spyware maker leaks 2 million records | TechCrunch

BMCs can be used to remotely monitor system temperature, voltage and power consumption, operating system health, and so on, and power cycle the box if it runs into trouble, tweak configurations, and even, depending on the setup, reinstall the OS – all from the comfort of an operations center, as opposed to having to find an errant server in the middle of a data center to physically wrangle. They also provide the foundations for IPMI.

[…]

It’s a situation not unlike Intel’s Active Management Technology, a remote management component that sits under the OS or hypervisor, has total control over a system, and been exploited more than once over the years.

Waisman and his colleague Matias Soler, a senior security researcher at Immunity, examined these BMC systems, and claimed the results weren’t good. They even tried some old-school hacking techniques from the 1990s against the equipment they could get hold of, and found them to be very successful. With HP’s BMC-based remote management technology iLO4, for example, the builtin web server could be tricked into thinking a remote attacker was local, and so didn’t need to authenticate them.

“We decided to take a look at these devices and what we found was even worse than what we could have imagined,” the pair said. “Vulnerabilities that bring back memories from the 1990s, remote code execution that is 100 per cent reliable, and the possibility of moving bidirectionally between the server and the BMC, making not only an amazing lateral movement angle, but the perfect backdoor too.”

The fear is that once an intruder gets into a data center network, insecure BMC firmware could be used to turn a drama into a crisis: vulnerabilities in the technology could be exploited to hijack more systems, install malware that persists across reboots and reinstalls, or simple hide from administrators.

[…]

The duo probed whatever kit they could get hold of – mainly older equipment – and it could be that modern stuff is a lot better in terms of security with firmware that follows secure coding best practices. On the other hand, what Waisman and Soler have found and documented doesn’t inspire a terrible amount of confidence in newer gear.

Their full findings can be found here, and their slides here.

Source: Can we talk about the little backdoors in data center servers, please? • The Register

Security researchers have found more than 20 bugs in the world’s most popular open source software for managing medical records. Many of the vulnerabilities were classified as severe, leaving the personal information of an estimated 90 million patients exposed to bad actors.

OpenEMR is open source software that’s used by medical offices around the world to store records, handle schedules, and bill patients. According to researchers at Project Insecurity, it was also a bit of a security nightmare before a recent audit recommended a range of vital fixes.

The firm reached out to OpenEMR in July to discuss concerns it had about the software’s code. On Tuesday a report was released detailing the issues that included: “a portal authentication bypass, multiple instances of SQL injection, multiple instances of remote code execution, unauthenticated information disclosure, unrestricted file upload, CSRFs including a CSRF to RCE proof of concept, and unauthenticated administrative actions.”

Eighteen of the bugs were designated as having a “high” severity and could’ve been exploited by hackers with low-level access to systems running the software. Patches have been released to users and cloud customers.

OpenEMR’s project administrator Brady Miller told the BBC, “The OpenEMR community takes security seriously and considered this vulnerability report high priority since one of the reported vulnerabilities did not require authentication.”

Source: Critical OpenEMR Flaws Left Medical Records Vulnerable

The US Department of Homeland Security is once again accusing Russian government hackers of penetrating America’s critical infrastructure.

Uncle Sam’s finest reckon Moscow’s agents managed to infiltrate computers networks within US electric utilities – to the point where the miscreants could have virtually pressed the off switch in control rooms, yanked the plug on the Yanks, and plunged America into darkness.

The hackers, dubbed Dragonfly and Energetic Bear, struck in the spring of 2016, and continued throughout 2017 and into 2018, even invading air-gapped networks, it is claimed.

This seemingly Hollywood screenplay emerged on Monday in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) which spoke to Homeland Security officials on the record.

The Energetic Bear aka Dragonfly crew – fingered in 2014 by Crowdstrike and Symantec – was inside “hundreds” of power grid control rooms by last year, it is claimed. Indeed, since 2014, power companies have been warned by Homeland Security to be on the look out for state-backed snoops – with technical details on intrusions published here.

The Russians hacked into the utilities’ equipment vendors and suppliers by spear-phishing staff for their login credentials or installing malware on their machines via boobytrapped webpages, it is alleged.

The miscreants then leveraged their position within these vendors to infiltrate the utilities and squeeze into the isolated air-gapped networks in control rooms, it is further alleged. The hacker crew also swiped confidential internal information and blueprints to learn how American power plants and the grid system work.

We’re told, and can well believe, that the equipment makers and suppliers have special access into the utilities’ networks in order to provide remote around-the-clock support and patch deployment – access that, it seems, turned into a handy conduit for Kremlin spies.

The attacks are believed to be ongoing, and some utilities may not yet be aware they’ve been pwned, we were warned. It is feared the stolen information, as well as these early intrusions, could be part of a much larger looming assault.

“They got to the point where they could have thrown switches,” Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial control system analysis for Homeland Security, told the paper.

Source: No big deal… Kremlin hackers ‘jumped air-gapped networks’ to pwn US power utilities • The Register

Hackers used phishing emails to break into a Virginia bank in two separate cyber intrusions over an eight-month period, making off with more than $2.4 million total. Now the financial institution is suing its insurance provider for refusing to fully cover the losses.

According to a lawsuit filed last month in the Western District of Virginia, the first heist took place in late May 2016, after an employee at The National Bank of Blacksburg fell victim to a targeted phishing email.

The email allowed the intruders to install malware on the victim’s PC and to compromise a second computer at the bank that had access to the STAR Network, a system run by financial industry giant First Data that the bank uses to handle debit card transactions for customers. That second computer had the ability to manage National Bank customer accounts and their use of ATMs and bank cards.

Armed with this access, the bank says, hackers were able to disable and alter anti-theft and anti-fraud protections, such as 4-digit personal identification numbers (PINs), daily withdrawal limits, daily debit card usage limits, and fraud score protections.

National Bank said the first breach began Saturday, May 28, 2016 and continued through the following Monday. Normally, the bank would be open on a Monday, but that particular Monday was Memorial Day, a federal holiday in the United States. The hackers used hundreds of ATMs across North America to dispense funds from customer accounts. All told, the perpetrators stole more than $569,000 in that incident.

[…]

But just eight months later — in January 2017 according to the lawsuit — hackers broke in to the bank’s systems once more, again gaining access to the financial institution’s systems via a phishing email.

[…]

Prior to executing the second heist, the hackers used the bank’s Navigator system to fraudulently credit more than $2 million to various National Bank accounts. As with the first incident, the intruders executed their heist on a weekend. Between Jan. 7 and 9, 2017, the hackers modified or removed critical security controls and withdrew the fraudulent credits using hundreds of ATMs.

All the while, the intruders used the bank’s systems to actively monitor customer accounts from which the funds were being withdrawn. At the conclusion of the 2017 heist, the hackers used their access to delete evidence of fraudulent debits from customer accounts. The bank’s total reported loss from that breach was $1,833,984.

Source: Hackers Breached Virginia Bank Twice in Eight Months, Stole $2.4M — Krebs on Security

A cryptographic bug in many Bluetooth firmware and operating system drivers could allow an attacker within about 30 meters to capture and decrypt data shared between Bluetooth-paired devices.

The flaw was found by Lior Neumann and Eli Biham of the Israel Institute of Technology, and flagged today by Carnegie Mellon University CERT. The flaw, which is tracked as CVE-2018-5383, has been confirmed to affect Apple, Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm hardware, and some Android handsets. It affects Bluetooth’s Secure Simple Pairing and Low Energy Secure Connections. Fortunately for macOS users, Apple released a patch for the flaw in July.

As the CERT notification explains, the vulnerability is caused by some vendors’ Bluetooth implementations not properly validating the cryptographic key exchange when Bluetooth devices are pairing. The flaw slipped into the Bluetooth key exchange implementation which uses the elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange to establish a secure connection over an insecure channel.

This may allow a nearby but remote attacker to inject a a bogus public key to determine the session key during the public-private key exchange. They could then conduct a man-in-the-middle attack and “passively intercept and decrypt all device messages, and/or forge and inject malicious messages”.

Source: Bluetooth security: Flaw could allow nearby attacker to grab your private data | ZDNet

In the buzzing underground market for stolen social media and gaming handles, a short, unique username can go for between $500 and $5,000, according to people involved in the trade and a review of listings on a popular marketplace. Several hackers involved in the market claimed that the Instagram account @t, for example, recently sold for around $40,000 worth of Bitcoin.

By hijacking Rachel’s phone number, the hackers were able to seize not only Rachel’s Instagram, but her Amazon, Ebay, Paypal, Netflix, and Hulu accounts too. None of the security measures Rachel took to secure some of those accounts, including two-factor authentication, mattered once the hackers took control of her phone number.

In February, T-Mobile sent a mass text warning customers of an “industry-wide” threat. Criminals, the company said, are increasingly utilizing a technique called “port out scam” to target and steal people’s phone numbers. The scam, also known as SIM swapping or SIM hijacking, is simple but tremendously effective.

First, criminals call a cell phone carrier’s tech support number pretending to be their target. They explain to the company’s employee that they “lost” their SIM card, requesting their phone number be transferred, or ported, to a new SIM card that the hackers themselves already own. With a bit of social engineering—perhaps by providing the victim’s Social Security Number or home address (which is often available from one of the many data breaches that have happened in the last few years)—the criminals convince the employee that they really are who they claim to be, at which point the employee ports the phone number to the new SIM card.

Game over.

“With someone’s phone number,” a hacker who does SIM swapping told me, “you can get into every account they own within minutes and they can’t do anything about it.”

Source: The SIM Hijackers – Motherboard

Remote-access software and modems on election equipment ‘is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.’

The nation’s top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.

In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had “provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,” which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.

The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. “None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software,” the spokesperson said.

ES&S did not respond on Monday to questions from Motherboard, and it’s not clear why the company changed its response between February and April. Lawmakers, however, have subpoena powers that can compel a company to hand over documents or provide sworn testimony on a matter lawmakers are investigating, and a statement made to lawmakers that is later proven false can have greater consequence for a company than one made to reporters.

Source: Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States – Motherboard

That is incredible poor, especially with all the talk of hackable voting machines.

At arXiv, Singaporean and US researchers have published work, appropriately dubbed “007”, which checks code to see if it’s trying to exploit Spectre; and at Virus Bulletin, Fortinet’s Axelle Apvrille takes a look at the bug from an Android point of view.

Apvrille’s work backs up what we’ve heard from other researchers: so far, Spectre exploitation is theoretical, with no exploits in the wild. She wrote that while there was a flurry of “Spectre exploit” stories based on AV-Test sample collection, it turned out that all of the reported samples were proofs-of-concept rather than genuine malware.

She adds: “there is a significant difference between a PoC of Spectre and a piece of malware using Spectre. Turning a PoC into a malicious executable is far from a trivial process.”

That doesn’t make this kind of work pointless, though, since it’s a good thing to stay ahead of whatever nasties black hats might devise.

In developing a detection technique, Apvrille’s second conclusion was also good news: an attack against Spectre, she found, seems relatively easy to detect.

She wrote that “we had expected several false positives with this signature, but that was not the case: this imperfect signature turns out to be quite good in practice.”

The signature Apvrille searched for (using the in-practice impracticably-slow technique of searching whole binaries) was to identify “Flush+Reload cache attacks in ELF x86-64 executables”.

Source: ‘007’ code helps stop Spectre exploits before they exist • The Register

IBM Security on Wednesday released its latest report examining the costs and impact associated with data breaches. The findings paint a grim portrait of what the clean up is like for companies whose data becomes exposed—particularly for larger corporations that suffer so-called “mega breaches,” a costly exposure involving potentially tens of millions of private records.

According to the IBM study, while the average cost of a data breach globally hovers just under $4 million—a 6.4 percent increase over the past year—costs associated with so-called mega breaches (an Equifax or Target, for example) can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The average cost of a breach involving 1 million records is estimated at around $40 million, while those involving 50 million records or more can skyrocket up to $350 million in damages.

Of the 11 mega breaches examined by IBM, 10 were a result of criminal attacks.

The average amount of time that passes before a major company notices a data breach is pretty atrocious. According to IBM, mega breaches typically go unnoticed for roughly a year.

[…]

Other key findings of the study include:

• The average time to identify a data breach is 197 days, and the average time to contain a data breach once identified is 69 days.
• Companies that contained a breach in less than 30 days saved over $1 million compared to those that took more than 30 days ($3.09 million vs. $4.25 million average total).
• Each lost or stolen record costs roughly $148 on average, but having an incident response team (surprising, not every company does) can reduce the cost per record by as much as $14.
• The use of an AI platform for cybersecurity reduced the cost by $8 per lost or stolen record.
• Companies that indicated a “rush to notify” had a higher cost by $5 per lost or stolen record.
• U.S. companies experienced the highest average cost of a breach at $7.91 million, followed by firms the Middle East at $5.31 million.
• Lowest total cost of a breach was $1.24 million in Brazil, followed by $1.77 million in India.

Source: ‘Mega’ Data Breaches Cost Companies a Staggering Fortune, IBM Study Finds

Sensitive US Air Force documents have leaked onto the dark web as part of an attempted sale of drone manuals.

Threat intel firm Recorded Future picked up on an auction for purported export-controlled documents pertaining to the MQ-9 Reaper drone during its regular work monitoring the dark web for criminal activities last month. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group analysts, posing as potential buyers, said they’d engaged the newly registered English-speaking hacker before confirming the validity of the compromised documents.

Further interactions allowed analysts to discover other leaked military information available from the same threat actor. The hacker claimed he had access to a large number of military documents from an unidentified officer.

These documents included a M1 Abrams tank maintenance manual, a tank platoon training course, a crew survival course, and documentation on improvised explosive device mitigation tactics.

[…]

Two years ago researchers warned that Netgear routers with remote data access capabilities were susceptible to attack if the default FTP authentication credentials were not updated

[…]

The hacker first infiltrated the computer of a captain at 432d Aircraft Maintenance Squadron Reaper AMU OIC, stationed at the Creech [Air Force Base] in Nevada, and stole a cache of sensitive documents, including Reaper maintenance course books and the list of airmen assigned to Reaper [Aircraft Maintenance Unit]. While such course books are not classified materials on their own, in unfriendly hands, they could provide an adversary the ability to assess technical capabilities and weaknesses in one of the most technologically advanced aircrafts.

The captain, whose computer had seemingly been compromised recently, had completed a cybersecurity awareness course, but he did not set a password for an FTP server hosting sensitive files. This allowed the hacker to easily download the drone manuals, said the researchers. The precise source of other the other dozen or so manuals the hacker offered for sale remains undetermined.

[…]

The hacker let slip that he was also in the habit of watching sensitive live footage from border surveillance cameras and airplanes. “The actor was even bragging about accessing footage from a MQ-1 Predator flying over Choctawhatchee Bay in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Source: US military manuals hawked on dark web after files left rattling in insecure FTP server • The Register

Norwegian programmer Roy Solberg came across an enumeration bug that leaked the full name of all travelers on a booking, the email addresses used, and flight details from Thomas Cook Airlines’ systems using only a booking reference number. Simply changing the booking number unveiled a new set of customer details.

The exposed info covered trips booked through the travel agency Ving, which is owned by Thomas Cook.

Thomas Cook Airlines has closed the privacy hole, technically known as a Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR), a common enough and basic problems on poorly-designed web applications.

Solberg reckoned on Sunday that data of bookings made with Thomas Cook Airlines through Ving Norway, Ving Sweden, Spies Denmark and Apollo Norway were affected by the vulnerability. Data going back to 2013 was obtainable before the hole was closed. Simple scripts might easily have been used to download the exposed data before the security hole was resolved, he adds.

Everything’s fine! Nothing to see here

A spokeswoman for Thomas Cook was at pains to emphasise “this did not affect UK customers,” before forwarding a canned statement further downplaying the incident, which it is not treating as a notifiable privacy breach.

Source: Thomas Cook website spills personal info – and it’s fine with that • The Register

Israeli hacking firm NSO Group is mostly known for peddling top-shelf malware capable of remotely cracking into iPhones. But according to Israeli authorities, the company’s invasive mobile spy tools could have wound up in the hands of someone equally, if not far more, devious than its typical government clients.

A 38-year-old former NSO employee has been accused of stealing the firm’s malware and attempting to sell it for $50 million in cryptocurrency on the dark net, according to a widely reported indictment first published by Israeli press.

The stolen software is said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to Israel’s Justice Ministry, the ex-employee was turned in by a potential buyer. The suspect was arrested on June 5, Reuters reported. The accused has been charged with employee theft, attempting to sell security tools without a license, and conduct that could harm state security

Source: Former NSO Group Employee Accused of Stealing Phone Spy Tools

Obviously security holes found will be exploited, which is why responsible disclosure is a good idea. It’s much better for devices to be secure than for intelligence agencies to be able to exploit holes – because non-nation state actors (read: criminals, although there are nations who think other nations are criminal) also have access to these holes.

Online investigations outfit Bellingcat has found that fitness tracking kit-maker Polar reveals both the identity and daily activity of its users – including soldiers and spies.

Many users of Polar’s devices and app appear not to have paid attention to their privacy settings, as a result a Bellingcat writer found 6,460 individuals from 69 countries. More than 200 of them left digital breadcrumbs around sensitive locations.

Bellingcat’s report claimed the Polar Flow social-fitness site produces more compromising data than other fitness-trackers than previous leaks: “Compared to the similar services of Garmin and Strava, Polar publicizes more data per user in a more accessible way, with potentially disastrous results.“

“Tracing all of this information is very simple through the site: find a military base, select an exercise published there to identify the attached profile, and see where else this person has exercised.”

Bellingcat notes that the big difference between Polar and Strava is that the former offers more comprehensive data, more easily, covering everything a user has uploaded to the platform since 2014.

Source: Fitness app Polar even better at revealing secrets than Strava • The Register

Security researchers say the Diameter protocol used with today’s 4G (LTE) telephony and data transfer standard is vulnerable to the same types of vulnerabilities as the older SS7 standard used with older telephony standards such as 3G, 2G, and earlier.

Both Diameter and SS7 (Signaling System No. 7) have the same role in a telephony network. Their purpose is to serve as an authentication and authorization system inside a network and between different telephony networks (providers).

SS7 was developed in the 1970s and has been proven insecure for almost two decades [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Because of this, starting with the rollout of 4G (LTE) networks, SS7 was replaced with the Diameter protocol, an improved inter and intra-network signaling protocol that’s also slated to be used with the upcoming 5G standard.

The difference between these two is that while SS7 did not use any type of encryption for its authentication procedures, leading to the easy forgery of authentication and authorization messages, Diameter supports TLS/DTLS (for TCP or SCTP, respectively) or IPsec.

4G operators often misconfigure Diameter

But according to research published last month by Positive Technologies detailing Diameter’s use among mobile networks across the globe, the protocol’s features are rarely used.

In practice telecom operators almost never use encryption inside the network, and only occasionally on its boundaries. Moreover, encryption is based on the peer-to-peer principle, not end-to-end. In other words, network security is built on trust between operators and IPX providers.

The incorrect use of Diameter leads to the presence of several vulnerabilities in 4G networks that resemble the ones found in older networks that use SS7, and which Diameter was supposed to prevent.

Researchers say that the Diameter misconfigurations they’ve spotted inside 4G networks are in many cases unique per each network but they usually repeat themselves to have them organized in five classes of attacks: (1) subscriber information disclosure, (2) network information disclosure, (3) subscriber traffic interception, (4) fraud, and (5) denial of service.

1+2) Subscriber and network information disclosure

The first two, subscriber and network information disclosure, allow an attacker to gather operational information about the user’s device, subscriber profile, and information about the mobile network in general.

Such vulnerabilities can reveal the user’s IMSI identifier, device addresses, network configuration, or even his geographical location —helping an attacker track users of interest as they move about.

3) Subscriber traffic interception

The third vulnerability, subscriber traffic interception, is only theoretically possible because both SMS and call transmission often establish channels with previous-generation protocols that do not use the Diameter protocol for authentication.

Nonetheless, Positive Technologies researchers warn that if the attacker is set on SMS and call interception, he can at any time downgrade a Diameter-capable 4G connection to a previous-generation connection and use flaws in SS7 and other protocols to carry out his attack.

For example, SMS interception is possible because most 4G networks send SMS messages via a 3G channel where SS7 is used instead of Diameter for user and network authentication, while phone call channels are handled via VoLTE, a protocol that has been proven insecure and susceptible to such attacks in 2015.

Even if networks handle SMS and phone calls via a pure 4G channel, then the attacker only needs to pose as an inferior network to carry out a MitM attack via an older protocol.

4) Fraud

Attackers can also use Diameter flaws to allow free use of the mobile network for a specific subscriber profile, leading to financial losses for the operator.

There are two types of such attacks, each of which is based on modifying the subscriber profile. The first type involves modifying the billing parameters stored in the subscriber profile and is quite difficult to implement in practice, since it requires knowledge of the operator’s network configuration on the part of the attacker. The values of these parameters are not standardized and depend on the specific operator; they could not be retrieved from a subscriber profile in any of the tested networks. The second type of attack is the use of services beyond restrictions, causing direct financial damage to the operator.

5) Denial of service attacks

Last but not least, Diameter flaws allow denial-of-service attacks that prevent a 4G user from accessing certain 4G features or allow an attacker to limit the speed of certain features, causing problems for a connected device.

Positive Technologies experts warn that the denial-of-service Diameter vulnerabilities “could lead to sudden failure of ATMs, payment terminals, utility meters, car alarms, and video surveillance.”

This is because these types of devices often use 4G SIM card modules to connect to their servers when located in a remote area where classic Internet connections are not possible.

All mobile networks are vulnerable to either SS7 or Diameter flaws

The cyber-security firm says that from all the mobile networks it analyzed in the past years, since it began looking into SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities, all mobile networks it examined are vulnerable to one or another, or both, leading to unique cases where any mobile networks it inspected ws vulnerable to some sort of network-level hacking.

Positive Technologies warns that with the rise of Internet of Things devices, some of which rely on 4G connections when a WiFi network is not in range, such flaws are the equivalent of having an open door for hackers to target such equipment via the 4G network.

“Such frightening consequences are only the tip of the iceberg,” experts wrote in their latest Diameter report. The company, which is known for providing security testing and monitoring of mobile networks, urges 4G operators to get with the times and invest into the security of their networks.

The “Diameter Vulnerabilities Exposure Report 2018” is available for download here. Positive Technologies previous analyzed the SS7 protocol in 2016 and the Diameter protocol in 2017.

In March 2018, ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) published an official advisory about SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities in modern 4G networks.

Last week, a team of academics disclosed a set of vulnerabilities in 4G (LTE) networks at the “data layer,” the one responsible for data transfer, and not the signal level where Diameter is located at.

Source: Newer Diameter Telephony Protocol Just As Vulnerable As SS7

Almost all Android devices released since 2012 are vulnerable to a new vulnerability named RAMpage, an international team of academics has revealed today.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-9442, is a variation of the Rowhammer attack.

Rowhammer is a hardware bug in modern memory cards. A few years back researchers discovered that when someone would send repeated write/read requests to the same row of memory cells, the write/read operations would create an electrical field that would alter data stored on nearby memory.

In the following years, researchers discovered that Rowhammer-like attacks affected personal computers, virtual machines, and Android devices. Through further researcher, they also found they could execute Rowhammer attacks via JavaScript code, GPU cards, and network packets.

RAMpage is the latest Rowhammer attack variation

The first Rowhammer attack on Android devices was named DRammer, and it could modify data on Android devices and root Android smartphones. Today, researchers expanded on that initial work.

According to a research paper published today, a team of eight academics from three universities and two private companies revealed a new Rowhammer-like attack on Android devices named RAMpage.

“RAMpage breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system,” researchers said. “While apps are typically not permitted to read data from other apps, a malicious program can craft a RAMpage exploit to get administrative control and get hold of secrets stored in the device.”

“This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents,” the research team said.

RAMpage may also impact Apple devices, PCs, and VMs

Research into the RAMpage vulnerability is still in its early stages, but the team says the attack can take over Android-based smartphones and tablets.

The researcher team also believes RAMpage may also affect Apple devices, home computers, or even cloud servers.

Source: Every Android Device Since 2012 Impacted by RAMpage Vulnerability

A little-known, Florida-based marketing firm called Exactis may be responsible for a significant amount of personal data being exposed. According to a report from Wired, the firm left 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server that any person could have gotten ahold of.

The leak was discovered earlier this month by security researcher Vinny Troia, founder of the New York-based security firm Night Lion Security. He reported his find to the FBI and Exactis earlier this week, and while the company has since protected the data, it’s unclear just how long it sat exposed.

So just how bad is the leak? It’s pretty bad! The data stored on the server amounts to about two terabytes worth of personal information.

Troia told Wired the database from Exactis appears to have data from “pretty much every US citizen” in it, with approximately 230 million records on American adults and 110 million records on US business contacts. That falls in line with Exactis’ own claim on its website that it has data on 218 million individuals. If the leak is truly as big as estimated, it would make for one of the largest exposures of personal information in recent memory.

Those records contain a variety of data points, including phone numbers, home addresses, and email addresses connected to an individual’s name. It also included more than 400 characteristics about a person, ranging from if the person is a smoker or not, their religion, if they own any pets, if they have kids, their age, gender, etc. It also included interests like scuba diving and plus-sized apparel, per Wired.

Notably, financial information and Social Security numbers were not discovered in the database. (Don’t worry, all that information was likely already exposed by Equifax last year.) That doesn’t mean the information doesn’t have value, though. Were this data to have been accessed by a malicious actor, they could easily pair it with previous breaches to create an even more complete profile of an individual or use it to carry out social engineering attacks.

There are plenty of troubling things about the Exactis leak, not the least of which is the sheer breadth of information exposed. First, there’s the question of just where this small marketing firm based in Palm Coast, Florida got its hands on the personal interests and contact information of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Troia said he didn’t know where the data was coming from exactly, but called it “one of the most comprehensive collections” he’s ever seen. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, theorized to Wired that the information may have come from a variety of sources including magazine subscriptions, credit card transaction data, and credit reports.

Then there’s the fact that no one has any idea if this massive database was accessed by anyone prior to Troia. Only Exactis would have any idea how long the server has sat unprotected, and could potentially see who accessed it. The company has not yet publicly responded to the leak and did not respond to request for comment.

Odds are, someone—a hacker or just a random person—likely stumbled across the server before Troia. The security researcher found the database while using the search tool Shodan, which allows just about anyone to scan publicly accessible, internet connected devices. Anyone with access to the same tools could have just as easily discovered the same server Troia found.

These types of leaks, where a server containing sensitive information is left unsecured, happen with surprising regularity. A conservative data firm accidentally leaked information on more than 200 million Americans last year. 12,000 social media influencers had their information exposed in a similar mishap, as did US military veterans and government contractors. All of this goes to show that companies in the business of collecting data aren’t in the business of protecting it.

Source: Personal Information of 340 Million People and Businesses Leaked By Florida Marketing Firm

The home WiFi network is a sacred place; your own local neighborhood of cyberspace. There we connect our phones, laptops, and “smart” devices to each other and to the Internet and in turn we improve our lives, or so we are told. By the late twenty teens, our local networks have become populated by a growing number of devices. From 📺 smart TVs and media players to 🗣 home assistants, 📹 security cameras, refrigerators, 🔒 door locks and🌡thermostats, our home networks are a haven for trusted personal and domestic devices.

Many of these devices offer limited or non-existent authentication to access and control their services. They inherently trust other machines on the network in the same way that you would inherently trust someone you’ve allowed into your home. They use protocols like Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and HTTP to communicate freely between one another but are inherently protected from inbound connections from the Internet by means of their router’s firewall 🚫. They operate in a sort of walled garden, safe from external threat. Or so their developers probably thought.

Source: Attacking Private Networks from the Internet with DNS Rebinding

This is a good explanation of the attack including some POCs and test links

How your ethereum can be stolen through DNS rebinding

http://rebind.network/rebind/index.html

One of the vendors for which we found vulnerable devices was Axis Communications. Our team discovered a critical chain of vulnerabilities in Axis security cameras. The vulnerabilities allow an adversary that obtained the camera’s IP address to remotely take over the cameras (via LAN or internet). In total, VDOO has responsibly disclosed seven vulnerabilities to Axis security team.

The vulnerabilities’ IDs in Mitre are: CVE-2018-10658, CVE-2018-10659, CVE-2018-10660, CVE-2018-10661, CVE-2018-10662, CVE-2018-10663 and CVE-2018-10664.

Chaining three of the reported vulnerabilities together, allows an unauthenticated remote attacker that has access to the camera login page through the network (without any previous access to the camera or credentials to the camera) to fully control the affected camera. An attacker with such control could do the following:

• Access to camera’s video stream
• Freeze the camera’s video stream
• Control the camera – move the lens to a desired point, turn motion detection on/off
• Add the camera to a botnet
• Alter the camera’s software
• Use the camera as an infiltration point for network (performing lateral movement)
• Render the camera useless
• Use the camera to perform other nefarious tasks (DDoS attacks, Bitcoin mining, others)

The vulnerable products include 390 models of Axis IP Cameras. The full list of affected products can be found here. Axis uses the ACV-128401 identifier for relating to the issues we discovered.

To the best of our knowledge, these vulnerabilities were not exploited in the field, and therefore, did not lead to any concrete privacy violation or security threat to Axis’s customers.

We strongly recommend Axis customers who did not update their camera’s firmware to do so immediately or mitigate the risks in alternative ways. See instructions in FAQ section below.

We also recommend that other camera vendors follow our recommendations at the end of this report to avoid and mitigate similar threats.

Source: VDOO Discovers Significant Vulnerabilities in Axis Cameras – VDOO