A Dutch security researcher has stumbled upon the Kremlin’s backdoor account that the government had been using to access the servers of local and foreign businesses operating in Russia.

The backdoor account was found inside thousands of MongoDB databases that had been left exposed online without a password.

Any hacker who noticed the account could have used it to gain access to sensitive information from thousands of companies operating in Russia.

“The first time I saw these credentials was in the user table of a Russian Lotto website,” Victor Gevers told ZDNet in an interview today. “I had to do some digging to understand that the Kremlin requires remote access to systems that handle financial transactions.”

The researcher says that after his initial finding, he later found the same “admin@kremlin.ru” account on over 2,000 other MongoDB databases that had been left exposed online, all belonging to local and foreign businesses operating in Russia.

Examples include databases belonging to local banks, financial institutions, big telcos, and even Disney Russia.

Gevers even found this account inside a leaky MongoDB database belonging to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs that was holding details about ERDR investigations carried out by the country’s General Prosecutor’s Office into corrupt politicians.

This latter case was very strange because, at the time, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict had already been raging for at least two years.

Gevers, who at the time was the Chairman of the GDI Foundation, is one of the world’s top white-hat hackers. His research didn’t include digging through companies’ logs to see what this account was used for, so it’s currently unknown if the Russian government used this account only to retrieve financial-related information or they actively altered data.

“We have been searching for open MongoDB for years,” Gevers told ZDNet. “When we investigate a MongoDB instance, we try to respect privacy as much as possible by limiting the search for breadcrumbs such as the owner’s email addresses to a minimum.”

“All the systems this password was on were already fully accessible to anyone,” Gevers said. “The MongoDB databases were deployed with default settings. So anyone without authentication had CRUD [Create, Read, Update and Delete] access.”

Source: Unsecured MongoDB databases expose Kremlin’s backdoor into Russian businesses | ZDNet

The latest weekly report includes German firm Enox’s Safe-KID-One watch, which is marketed to parents as a way of keeping tabs on their little ones – ostensibly to keep them safe – and comes with one-click buttons for speed-dialling family members.

However, the commission said the device does not comply with the Radio Equipment Directive and detailed “serious” risks associated with the device.

“The mobile application accompanying the watch has unencrypted communications with its backend server and the server enables unauthenticated access to data,” the directive said.

As a result, data on location history, phone numbers and device serial number can be found and changed.

“A malicious user can send commands to any watch making it call another number of his choosing, can communicate with the child wearing the device or locate the child through GPS,” the alert warned.

Source: European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch • The Register

Dating-slash-hook-up app Jack’d is exposing to the public internet intimate snaps privately swapped between its users, allowing miscreants to download countless X-rated selfies without permission.

The phone application, installed more than 110,000 times on Android devices and also available for iOS, lets primarily gay and bi men chat each other up, exchange private and public pics, and arrange to meet.

Those photos, public and private, can be accessed by anyone with a web browser and who knows just where to look, though, it appears. As there is no authentication, no need to sign up to the app, and no limits in place, miscreants can therefore download the entire image database for further havoc and potential blackmail.

You may well want to delete your images until this issue is fixed.

We’re told the developers of the application were warned of the security vulnerability three months ago, and yet no fix has been made. We’ve repeatedly tried to contact the programmers to no avail. In the interests of alerting Jack’d users to the fact their highly NSFW pictures are facing the public internet, we’re publishing this story today, although we are withholding details of the flaw to discourage exploitation.

Source: Hi, Jack’d: A little PSA for anyone using this dating-hook-up app… Anyone can slurp your private, public snaps • The Register

The cyber tool allowed the small Gulf country to monitor hundreds of targets beginning in 2016, from the Emir of Qatar and a senior Turkish official to a Nobel Peace laureate human-rights activist in Yemen, according to five former operatives and program documents reviewed by Reuters. The sources interviewed by Reuters were not Emirati citizens.

Karma was used by an offensive cyber operations unit in Abu Dhabi comprised of Emirati security officials and former American intelligence operatives working as contractors for the UAE’s intelligence services. The existence of Karma and of the hacking unit, code named Project Raven, haven’t been previously reported. Raven’s activities are detailed in a separate story published by Reuters today.

The ex-Raven operatives described Karma as a tool that could remotely grant access to iPhones simply by uploading phone numbers or email accounts into an automated targeting system. The tool has limits — it doesn’t work on Android devices and doesn’t intercept phone calls. But it was unusually potent because, unlike many exploits, Karma did not require a target to click on a link sent to an iPhone, they said.

Source: Exclusive: UAE used cyber super-weapon to spy on iPhones of foes | Reuters

In mid-January, Qualys, another security firm, released details about three flaws affecting systemd-journald, a systemd component that handles the collection and storage of log data. Patches for the vulnerabilities – CVE-2018-16864, CVE-2018-16865, and CVE-2018-16866 – have been issued by various Linux distributions.

Exploitation of these code flaws allows an attacker to alter system memory in order to commandeer systemd-journal, which permits privilege escalation to the root account of the system running the software. In other words, malware running on a system, or rogue logged-in users, can abuse these bugs to gain administrator-level access over the whole box, which is not great in uni labs and similar environments.

Nick Gregory, research scientists at Capsule8, in a blog post this week explains that his firm developed proof-of-concept exploit code for testing and verification. As in testing whether or not computers are at risk, and verifying the patches work.

“There are some interesting aspects that were not covered by Qualys’ initial publication, such as how to communicate with the affected service to reach the vulnerable component, and how to control the computed hash value that is actually used to corrupt memory,” he said.

Manipulated

The exploit script, written in Python 3, targets the 20180808.0.0 release of the ubuntu/bionic64 Vagrant image, and assumes that address space layout randomization (ASLR) is disabled. Typically, ASLR is not switched off in production systems, making this largely an academic exercise.

The script exploits CVE-2018-16865 via Linux’s alloca() function, which allocates the specified number of bytes of memory space in the stack frame of the caller; it can be used to manipulate the stack pointer.

Basically, by creating a massive number of log entries and appending them to the journal, the attacker can overwrite memory and take control of the vulnerable system.

Source: The D in SystemD stands for Danger, Will Robinson! Defanged exploit code for security holes now out in the wild • The Register

Sophisticated hackers have long exploited flaws in SS7, a protocol used by telecom companies to coordinate how they route texts and calls around the world. Those who exploit SS7 can potentially track phones across the other side of the planet, and intercept text messages and phone calls without hacking the phone itself.

This activity was typically only within reach of intelligence agencies or surveillance contractors, but now Motherboard has confirmed that this capability is much more widely available in the hands of financially-driven cybercriminal groups, who are using it to empty bank accounts. So-called SS7 attacks against banks are, although still relatively rare, much more prevalent than previously reported. Motherboard has identified a specific bank—the UK’s Metro Bank—that fell victim to such an attack.

The news highlights the gaping holes in the world’s telecommunications infrastructure that the telco industry has known about for years despite ongoing attacks from criminals. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the defensive arm of the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ, confirmed that SS7 is being used to intercept codes used for banking.

“We are aware of a known telecommunications vulnerability being exploited to target bank accounts by intercepting SMS text messages used as 2-Factor Authentication (2FA),” The NCSC told Motherboard in a statement.

Source: Criminals Are Tapping into the Phone Network Backbone to Empty Bank Accounts – Motherboard