Category Archives: DDoS Vendors

Cybercrime-as-a-Service: No End in Sight

Cybercrime is easy and rewarding, making it a perfect arena for criminals everywhere. Over the past 20 years, cybercrime has become a mature industry estimated to produce more than $1 trillion in annual revenues. From products like exploit kits and custom malware to services like botnet rentals and ransomware distribution, the breadth of cybercrime offerings has never been greater. The result: more, and more serious, forms of cybercrime. New tools and platforms are more accessible than ever before to those who lack advanced technical skills, enabling scores of new actors to hop aboard the cybercrime bandwagon. Meanwhile, more experienced criminals can develop more specialized skills in the knowledge that they can locate others on the darknet who can complement their services and work together with them to come up with new and better criminal tools and techniques. Line Between Illicit and Legitimate E-Commerce Is Blurring The cybercrime ecosystem has evolved to welcome both new actors and new scrutiny. The threat of prosecution has pushed most cybercrime activities onto the darknet, where the anonymity of Tor and Bitcoin protects the bad guys from being easily identified. Trust is rare in these communities, so some markets are implementing escrow payments to make high-risk transactions easier; some sellers even offer support services and money-back guarantees on their work and products. The markets have also become fractured, as the pro criminals restrict themselves to highly selective discussion boards to limit the threat from police and fraudsters. Nevertheless, a burgeoning cybercrime market has sprung from these hidden places to offer everything from product development to technical support, distribution, quality assurance, and even help desks. Many cybercriminals rely on the Tor network to stay hidden. Tor — The Onion Router — allows users to cruise the Internet anonymously by encrypting their activities and then routing it through multiple random relays on its way to its destination. This circuitous process renders it nearly impossible for law enforcement to track users or determine the identities of visitors to certain black-market sites. From Niche to Mass Market In 2015, the UK National Cyber Crime Unit’s deputy director stated during a panel discussion that investigators believed that the bulk of the cybercrime-as-a-service economy was based on the efforts of only 100 to 200 people who profit handsomely from their involvement. Carbon Black’s research discovered that the darknet’s marketplace for ransomware is growing at a staggering 2,500% per annum, and that some of the criminals can generate over $100,000 a year selling ransomware kits alone. That’s more than twice the annual salary of a software developer in Eastern Europe, where many of these criminals operate. There are plenty of ways for a cybercriminal to rake in the cash without ever perpetrating “traditional” cybercrime like financial fraud or identity theft. The first way is something called research-as-a-service, where individuals work to provide the “raw materials” — such as selling knowledge of system vulnerabilities to malware developers — for future criminal activities. The sale of software exploits has captured much attention recently, as the ShadowBrokers and other groups have introduced controversial subscription programs that give clients access to unpatched system vulnerabilities. Zero-Day Exploits, Ransomware, and DDoS Extortion Are Bestsellers The number of discovered zero-day exploits — weaknesses in code that had been previously undetected by the product’s vendor — has dropped steadily since 2014, according to Symantec’s 2018 Internet Security Threat Report, thanks in part to an increase in “bug bounty” programs that encourage and incentivize the legal disclosure of vulnerabilities. In turn, this has led to an increase in price for the vulnerabilities that do get discovered, with some of the most valuable being sold for more than $100,000 in one of the many darknet marketplaces catering to exploit sales, as highlighted in related a blog post on TechRepublic. Other cybercrime actors sell email databases to simplify future cybercrime campaigns, as was the case in 2016 when 3 billion Yahoo accounts were sold to a handful of spammers for $300,000 each. Exploit kits are another popular product on the darknet. They provide inexperienced cybercriminals with the tools they need to break into a wide range of systems. However, Europol suggests that the popularity of exploit kits has fallen over the past 12 months as the top products have been eliminated and their replacements have failed to offer a comparable sophistication or popularity. Europol also notes that theft through malware was generally becoming less of a threat; instead, today’s cybercriminals prefer ransomware and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) extortion, which are easier to monetize. Cybercrime Infrastructure-as-a-Service The third way hackers can profit from more sophisticated cybercrime is by providing cybercrime infrastructure-as-a-service. Those in this field are provide the services and infrastructure — including bulletproof hosting and botnet rentals — on which other bad actors rely to do their dirty work. The former helps cybercriminals to put web pages and servers on the Internet without having to worry about takedowns by law enforcement. And cybercriminals can pay for botnet rentals that give them temporary access to a network of infected computers they can use for spam distribution or DDoS attacks, for example. Researchers estimate that a $60-a-day botnet can cause up to $720,000 in damages on victim organizations. The numbers for hackers who control the botnets are also big: the bad guys can produce significant profit margins when they rent their services out to other criminals, as highlighted in a related post. The New Reality Digital services are often the backbone of small and large organizations alike. Whether it’s a small online shop or a behemoth operating a global digital platform, if services are slow or down for hours, the company’s revenue and reputation may be on the line. In the old days, word of mouth circulated slowly, but today bad news can reach millions of people instantly. Using botnets for DDoS attacks is a moneymaker for cybercriminals who extort money from website proprietors by threatening an attack that would destroy their services. The danger posed by Internet of Things (IoT) botnets was shown in 2016 when the massive Mirai IoT botnet attacked the domain name provider Dyn and took down websites like Twitter, Netflix, and CNN in the largest such attack ever seen. Botnet use will probably expand in the coming years as cybercriminals continue to exploit vulnerabilities in IoT devices to create even larger networks. Get used to it: Cybercrime is here to stay. Source: https://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/cybercrime-as-a-service-no-end-in-sight/a/d-id/1333033

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Cybercrime-as-a-Service: No End in Sight

Has a BOT Network Compromised Your Systems?

BOT networks have surprisingly penetrated many corporate networks around the world. Yet many of the information technology and security operations teams often have difficulty identifying their activity and eliminating them from the network. The term botnet is derived from the combination of the words robot and network. A cybercriminal creates a network of these robots connected together for the purposes of coordinating some large-scale activity, most often to function as a cyberattack tool for cybercriminals. These activities often include the propagation of attacker malware tools, economic gain, or perhaps targeting a debilitating attack upon one or more websites on the internet, effectively harming revenue and reputation for enterprise organizations and online e-tailers. The larger the botnet, the more effective it can be in achieving the desired goal. Botnets spread via malware, often distributed through malicious email, and may also be self-propagating so that they move laterally from your laptop to other workstations and network devices within the network. Alternately, they can infect your laptop when you visit a compromised website, setting in motion a series of malicious events that result in a compromised system (drive-by download) and automatically installing the botnet software unbeknownst to the owner of that system. Very typically, due to a lack of effective cyber defense for both detection and remediation, cybercriminals find undefended internet of things (IoT) devices to be ideal hosts to harbor and hide their botnet malware. These IoT hosts can include the new generation of IoT enabled devices such as smart refrigerators, security cameras, digital video records, network connected access management systems, thermostats, and much more. Enterprise security departments are often surprised to find that their access management systems and security cameras are completely compromised by such botnets. The most common indicator is users complaining that computer programs are running much more slowly. This is an often key warning sign that hidden botnets or other malware are using your computing resources. More subtly, you may notice that your cooling fans are running when you are not actively using your computers or servers. This may be symptomatic of the considerable computational overhead created by botnets heating up the processor boards. Finally, on your Windows endpoint platforms, failure to shut down properly, or at all, or failure to download updates are other key indicators, any of which by themselves may not confirm the presence of a botnet, but together raise the suspicions to a high level. Some of your employees might also see unknown posts placed on their Facebook accounts. This might also be directly related to botnet activity. Cybercriminals can use social media accounts to easily disseminate malicious content. Conceptually, this social media botnet attack is very different than infecting your computer. By infecting your social media account, the botnet can propagate more rapidly across your entire social media account and never has to physically sit on your laptop or other home computers. Botnets usually work through automation set up, of course, by cybercriminals you don’t know. Key symptoms are almost always technology related – not related to insider activity or insider malicious threats. Beyond the symptoms already mentioned above, there are also technical indicators, such as strange processes running under windows, but these are very hard to detect. As quickly as cyber defense automation and tools evolve, so do the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the botnet cyberthieves. Most botnets don’t damage the host computers – most of what they do is degrade your performance and effectively “steal” your computer resources. More dangerous is the damage the cyberattackers can cause by using the botnet to maliciously target other websites. For example, when they launch a denial of service (DDOS) attack. Several best practices can help cut down or eliminate botnet infections and the secondary attacks that may be launched once an attacker has access to your networks through a botnet. These include: Utilize software that filters or cuts down on suspicious email attachments and don’t click on any links which are suspicious; Make sure your operating systems have all patches and updates installed; Keep your antivirus protection up to date – these often have the signatures of known and recent botnet malware components; and Encrypt your data end-to-end (at rest, in use, and in transit) so that an attacker in your network will be unable to make use of it. Source: https://securityboulevard.com/2018/10/has-a-bot-network-compromised-your-systems/

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Has a BOT Network Compromised Your Systems?

In Blockchain, There is no Checkmate

During my time as a Chairman of NATO’s Intelligence Committee and advising government and private companies on cybersecurity, I have noticed the same hacker-shaped hole in the industry. For the past 35 years, huge companies, organizations, charities and nation states have succumbed to cyber-criminals. Let me explain why. In a game of chess, you can win by either taking out all of your opponent’s pieces one-by-one, or by trapping the opposing side’s king in a checkmate. This is true of today’s cybersecurity model. One piece, in the wrong place at the wrong time could cost the entire game. Not just that, but any device in a network, whether it be a phone or a smart fridge, is a “king” that can be trapped and cost the integrity of an entire network. In this way, the “king” is a weakness. A weakness that costs companies and countries millions, a weakness that could mean loss of life in the healthcare industry or military systems – indeed, cybersecurity is not a game. Fighting cyber-criminals whilst being constrained by the rules of this chess match means we’ll never win. The centralized model where the hacking of a single device could compromise a network is categorically flawed. This needs to change: we don’t need to play a better game against cyber-criminals, we need to play a different game. Blockchain technology is arguably one of the most significant innovations for decades, and it extends beyond the vestiges of crypto currencies. At its core, the Blockchain is immutable, transparent, encrypted and fragmented (decentralized). As such, Blockchain and cybersecurity seem like a match made in heaven and for the most part, they are. For instance, right now, all the data of our personal or business devices – passwords, applications, files etc. – are stored on a centralized data server. Blockchain decentralizes the systems by distributing ledger data on many systems rather than storing them on one single network. There is no single point of failure, one central database or middleman that could potentially serve as a source of leaks or compromised data. The underpinnings of Blockchain architecture are based on time-stamped cryptographic nodes (the computer and servers that create blocks on a chain). Every time our data is stored or inserted into Blockchain ledgers, a new block is created. Each block has a specific summary of the previous block in the form of a secure digital signature. More sophisticated systems combine Blockchain and AI technologies to confirm each other based on previous signatures. If there is a discrepancy, threat, or a device steps outside of a set of pre-determined rules, the surrounding nodes will flag it for action. Since these blocks are linked in the form of a chain sequence, the timing, order and content of transactions cannot be manipulated. Just like crypto transactions, the Blockchain operates upon a democratic consensus. Any transfer of data would require a majority approval of the network participants; therefore, attackers can only impact a network by getting control of most of the network nodes. However, the nodes are random and the number of them stored on a given network can be in the millions. In the metaphorical game of chess, “the collective” Blockchain has an advantage. Imagine if team hackers could not eliminate a single piece, not a pawn nor rook, unless they could eliminate all million pieces on the entire board at once. If they fail to do that, all of the pieces remain untouchable – including the “king”. There is no checkmate, and no hope for hackers. Even still, since domain editing rights are only verified through nodes, hackers won’t get the right to edit and manipulate the data even after hacking a million of systems. As all transactions are cryptographically linked, the modification or tampering of the data at any given time would alert all those with access to the ledger, exposing the infected dataset near-instantaneously. The Blockchain does not linger or rely on any central point of failure to command changes; that allows for fixes to occur before attacks have time to spread. In other words, hacking a Blockchain with any scale is virtually impossible. For instance, in the case of DDoS attacks that crash large data servers, Blockchain technology would disrupt this completely by decentralizing the DNS (Domain Name Systems) and distributing the content to a greater number of nodes. The idea is clearly an attractive one. It can help save the billions that are being spent on developing arenas in which cybersecurity firms are fighting the hacker’s fight, especially in hard to defend environments. We have already seen a number of companies utilize Blockchain technology to safeguard networks. Companies such as Naoris bring this consensual Blockchain technology and link devices as blocks on a chain so that no single end-point or terminal exists in a silo. Current structures with multiple devices each act as a point of entry for a hacker into the network, however, as we know, the more nodes a network possesses on the Blockchain, the harder it becomes to infiltrate. Therefore, as the network expands and more devices are connected, the network becomes increasingly more resilient. This is only the beginning for Blockchain. As it develops, it’s only going to get smarter and better. New technologies have the potential to provide a robust and effective alternative way of ensuring that we evolve to compete with concerns surrounding our security. With the Blockchain, such concerns can be a thing of the past. Source: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/opinions/blockchain-no-checkmate/

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In Blockchain, There is no Checkmate

100,000-Plus Home Routers Hijacked in Campaign to Steal Banking Credentials

The GhostDNS campaign, which has been mainly targeting consumers in Brazil, has exploded in scope since August. An unknown attacker has hijacked over 100,000 home routers and changed their DNS settings in a major campaign to steal login credentials from customers of several banks in Brazil. Security vendor Radware first reported on the campaign in August. Since then, the campaign has exploded in scope from mostly targeting users of DLink DSL modem routers to targeting users of more than 70 different types of home routers. In a report released Saturday, Chinese security vendor Qihoo 360’s Netlab team said it recently observed a significant increase in attempts to break into routers with weak passwords. About 88% of the devices that have been targeted so far in what Netlab is calling the GhostDNS campaign are located in Brazil. The attackers are attempting to install a version of a previously known DNS hijacking exploit called DNSChanger on the routers and change their default settings so traffic gets redirected to a rogue server. When users attempt to access certain banks, the rouge server takes them to a phishing server hosting phishing pages that are clones of the account login page of the corresponding bank. The rogue server currently hosts phishing pages for 52 domains belonging to banks, cloud service providers, Netflix, and one cybersecurity firm. In situations where the attackers are unable to guess the router passwords, they have been using a previously known exploit known as dnscfg.cgi to remotely configure DNS server settings on the routers without authenticating into them first. Unlike previous DNSChanger campaigns, GhostDNS involves the use of an additional three submodules, which Netlab is calling Shell DNSChanger, Js DNSChanger, and PyPhp DNSChanger (after their programming languages). Together, the modules have more than 100 scripts for changing settings on more than 70 routers. The ShellDNSChanger module includes 25 Shell scripts for attacking 21 routers and firmware. It features a third-party tool to scan IPs in a selected range of network segments in Brazil and uses the router information that is collected to try and crack passwords on their Web authentication pages. The Js DNSChanger module, written in JavaScript, contains scripts for attacking six routers/firmware. The PyPhpDNSChanger is the main module, with attack scripts for 47 different routers/firmware. Netlab says it discovered the module deployed on more than 100 servers, scanning for and attacking target router IPs in Brazil. “The GhostDNS system poses a real threat to [the] Internet,” Netlab said in its advisory. “It is highly scaled, utilizes diverse attack [vectors, and] adopts automated attack process.” Pascal Geenens, a cybersecurity evangelist for Radware who wrote about the start of the campaign in August, says GhostDNS is another example of how attackers have begun exploiting vulnerable consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices in different ways. Previously, attackers have hijacked IoT devices to create botnets for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or to mine for cryptocurrencies and provide anonymizing proxy services. With GhostDNS, attackers have demonstrated how they can exploit consumer routers to steal information that can be used to break into bank accounts and carry out other fraud. What is especially troubling about the attack is that many users of the compromised routers — especially those on older browsers — will have no indication their traffic is being redirected to a malicious server, he says. “I’m a little bit surprised,” Geenen says about how much the DNS hijacking campaign in Brazil has evolved since August. “It’s not that easy to make an exploit work across that many routers.” Configuration commands for each router can vary. In order to carry out a campaign such as GhostDNS, the attackers would have needed to find the commands for each of the targeted routers and developed scripts for changing them. Then they would have needed to test the scripts to see how well they worked. For Internet users, campaigns such as GhostDNS are another reminder to keep IoT devices properly updated, Geenens says. “All the vulnerabilities that we have seen abused, whether it is for cryptomining or for DDoS, were vulnerabilities that were fixed,” he explains. Attackers have learned that a majority of consumers don’t update their IoT devices promptly when patches for newly announced flaws become available. So it is not unusual to see adversaries attacking new vulnerabilities almost immediately after the flaws are disclosed, he says. Source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/100000-plus-home-routers-hijacked-in-campaign-to-steal-banking-credentials/d/d-id/1332946

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100,000-Plus Home Routers Hijacked in Campaign to Steal Banking Credentials

Could Your Organisation’s Servers Be A Botnet?

Most organisations are aware that they could be the target of a DDoS attack and have deployed protection to keep their public-facing services online in the face of such attacks. However, far fewer have thought about the potential for their servers to be harnessed for use in a botnet, the group of servers used to conduct such DDoS attacks. Up until a few months ago, attackers typically only used well-known infrastructure services, like DNS resolution servers, to launch and amplify DDoS attacks, but Memcached – a popular database caching system – changed that. Malicious hackers have begun abusing Memcached to deliver attacks that are amplified to over 50,000 times their original size – one of the largest amplification methods ever detected. Any organisation running Memcached to speeds up their systems is a potential botnet recruit. How Memcached and similar UDP based service attacks work Earlier this year, researchers discovered that a flaw in the implementation of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for Memcached servers can allow hackers to deliver record-breaking attacks with little effort. Memcached is a distributed memory caching system, originally intended for use in speeding up networks and website applications by reducing database load. Memcached reduces latency and database load by storing data objects in memory, immediately returning them to the caller without requiring a database query. Usually, Memcached systems are deployed within a trusted network where authentication may not be required. However, when exposed to the Internet, they become trivially exploitable if authentication isn’t turned on. Not only is the cached data accessible to attackers, it’s simple to use the Memcached server for a DDoS attack, if UDP access is enabled. Specifically, with UDP an attacker can “spoof” or fake the Internet Protocol address of the target machine, so that the Memcached servers all respond by sending large amounts of data to the spoofed address, thus triggering a DDoS attack. Most popular DDoS tactics that abuse UDP connections can amplify the attack traffic up to 20 times, but Memcached can take a small amount of attack traffic and amplify the size of the request thousands of times. Thus, a small number of open Memcached servers can be used to create very large DDoS attacks. The implications to the organisation If you’re running Memcached with UDP and without authentication, you’re now a likely target for inclusion in a botnet. Should you become part of a botnet, it’s possible that both your servers and your bandwidth will be overloaded, resulting in outages and increased network costs. Indeed, attackers have already demonstrated how badly servers with misconfigured Memcached can be abused and used to launch DDoS attacks with ease. In addition, unprotected Memcached servers give attackers access to the user data that has been cached from its local network or host, potentially including email addresses, database records, personal information and more. Additionally, cybercriminals could potentially modify the data they access and reinsert it back into the cache without user’s knowledge, thus polluting production applications. To avoid being assimilated into a Borg-ish botnet, organisations and internet service providers need to take a more proactive approach in identifying any vulnerable servers before damage is done. What can be done to prevent the severs being recruited? Despite multiple warnings about threat actors exploiting unprotected Memcached servers, ArsTechnica reported that searches show there are more than 88,000 vulnerable servers – a sign that attacks may get much bigger. Therefore, it’s crucial that organisations ensure they have the correct security measure in place, to avoid being part of this wave. Attacks of those scale and size cannot be easily defended against by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), thus organisations need to take inventory of any Internet-facing servers and ensure that Memcached is not inadvertently exposed. For any internet-facing servers that require Memcached, they should consider using a Software-Defined Perimeter to ensure that only authorized users will be able to send UDP packets or establish TCP connection. This will prevent attackers from being able to harness servers in a DDoS attack and leverage them to amplify those attacks. In addition, companies need to look at internal servers that are running Memcached, because an internal distributed denial-of-service attack could also be launched from some locally-running malware. Source: https://www.informationsecuritybuzz.com/articles/could-your-organisations-servers-be-a-botnet/

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Could Your Organisation’s Servers Be A Botnet?

‘Torii’ Breaks New Ground For IoT Malware

Stealth, persistence mechanism and ability to infect a wide swath of devices make malware dangerous and very different from the usual Mirai knockoffs, Avast says. A dangerous and potentially destructive new IoT malware sample has recently surfaced that for the first time this year is not just another cheap Mirai knockoff. Researchers from security vendor Avast recently analyzed the malware and have named it Torii because the telnet attacks through which it is being propagated have been coming from Tor exit nodes. Besides bearing little resemblance to Mirai in code, Torii is also stealthier and more persistent on compromised devices. It is designed to infect what Avast says is one of the largest sets of devices and architectures for an IoT malware strain. Devices on which Torii works include those based on x86, x64, PowerPC, MIPS, ARM, and several other architectures. Interestingly, so far at least Torii is not being used to assemble DDoS botnets like Mirai was, or to drop cryptomining tools like some more recent variants have been doing. Instead it appears optimized for stealing data from IoT devices. And, like a slew of other recent malware, Torii has a modular design, meaning it is capable of relatively easily fetching and executing other commands. Martin Hron, a security researcher at Avast says, if anything, Torii is more like the destructive VPNFilter malware that infected some 500,000 network attached storage devices and home-office routers this May. VPNFilter attacked network products from at least 12 major vendors and was capable of attacking not just routers and network attached storage devices but the systems behind them as well. Torii is different from other IoT malware on several other fronts. For one thing, “it uses six or more ways to achieve persistence ensuring it doesn’t get kicked out of the device easily on a reboot or by another piece of malware,” Hron notes. Torii’s modular, multistage architecture is different too. “It drops a payload to connect with [command-and-control (CnC)] and then lays in wait to receive commands or files from the CnC,” the security researcher says. The command-and-control server with which the observed samples of Torii have been communicating is located in Arizona. Torii’s support for a large number of common architectures gives it the ability to infect anything with open telnet, which includes millions of IoT devices. Worryingly, it is likely the malware authors have other attack vectors as well, but telnet is the only vector that has been used so far, Hron notes. While Torii hasn’t been used for DDoS attacks yet, it has been sending a lot of information back to its command-and-control server about the devices it has infected. The data being exfiltrated includes Hostname, Process ID, and other machine-specific information that would let the malware operator fingerprint and catalog devices more easily. Hron says Avast researchers aren’t really sure why Torii is collecting all the data. Significantly, Avast researchers discovered a hitherto unused binary on the server that is distributing the malware, which could let the attackers execute any command on an infected device. The app is written in GO, which means it can be easily recompiled to run on virtually any machine. Hron says Avast is unsure what the malware authors plan to do with the functionality. But based on its versatility and presence on the malware distribution server, he thinks it could be a backdoor or a service that would let the attacker orchestrate multiple devices at once. The log data that Avast was able to analyze showed that slightly less than 600 unique client devices had downloaded Torii. But it is likely that the number is just a snapshot of new machines that were recruited into the botnet for the period for which Avast has the log files, the security vendor said. Source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/-torii-breaks-new-ground-for-iot-malware/d/d-id/1332930

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‘Torii’ Breaks New Ground For IoT Malware

Don’t Look Away, Peekaboo Vulnerability May Allow Hackers to Play the Long Game

The newly named Peekaboo vulnerability is a zero-day flaw in China-based Nuuo’s video recorder technology.The flaw in NVRMini2, a network-attached storage device, has remained unfixed in the three months since the vendor was alerted. This vulnerability put internet-connected CCTV cameras at risk, a grave concern for organizations using the service to view and manage their connected CCTV cameras. NUUO both uses the technology in its own products and licenses it to third-party surveillance system makers and systems integration partners. Exposure from Peekaboo Vulnerability Tenable Research, which discovered the Peekaboo flaw, said it could potentially impact more than 100 CCTV brands and approximately 2,500 different camera models. Organizations in wide range of industries, including retail, transportation, banking, and government, install these cameras to improve security. NUUO was informed of the vulnerability on June 5, 2018. Patches are now available on their website. This is not the first time an IoT vulnerability has brought unexpected risk to organizations. The Mirai botnet attacks showed how hackers can use CCTVs, webcams, and other Internet-connected devices to launch massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to cause mass disruption. Many of us saw the impact of Mirai in October 2016, when they used the botnets to take down Dyn. Apparently the latest IoT-related risk comes from the Peekaboo vulnerability, opening organizations to risk from an unexpected vector. Multiple Vulnerabilities Add Risk The Tenable team found two vulnerabilities; the first was an unauthenticated stack buffer overflow. A buffer overflow attack is when a hacker sends more data than a computer is designed to receive, leading the computer to inadvertently store the leftover data as commands the computer will later run. Buffer overflow is a common code level issue that has been prevalent for years, which can be identified through static analysis. The second vulnerability was a backdoor in leftover debug code, so together the flaws allow hackers to explore the surveillance data and access login credentials, port usage, IP addresses, and other information on the camera equipment itself. These types of issue map directly to coding errors and the remediation exposure disciplines of software exposure. Let’s take a look, however, at what a patient hacker can do with this particular security camera hack. Here is a hypothetical example of how a hacker might use the Peekaboo vulnerability: Turn off cameras or delete recordings by executing the buffer overflow Allow individuals to access to the building Install additional software within the building for later use Execute that software well after initial camera hack, resulting in significant exploits against the compromised system Confuse experts trying to determine the cause of exploit due to the multi-step attack Think Like a Hacker As usual, the original hack itself is not the end game. Deleting data or controlling security cameras allows attackers to circumvent security systems to rob residences or businesses. However, my major concern is the potential for infrastructure terrorism on electrical grids, nuclear plants, or water supplies. Hackers play the long game, and we in the security field need to as well. The software industry must react quickly to vulnerabilities such as Peekaboo, either to provide a patch in our own software, or to apply it as soon as it’s available. Software runs most of the objects we know and use every day. It’s our responsibility to make it as safe and secure as possible. Source:https://securityboulevard.com/2018/09/dont-look-away-peekaboo-vulnerability-may-allow-hackers-to-play-the-long-game/

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Don’t Look Away, Peekaboo Vulnerability May Allow Hackers to Play the Long Game

Some credential-stuffing botnets don’t care about being noticed any more

They just take a battering ram to the gates The bots spewing out malicious login attempts by the bucketload appear to have cranked it up a notch.…

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Some credential-stuffing botnets don’t care about being noticed any more

Mirai creators sentenced to probation after assisting FBI with cyber investigations

Three young men who developed and deployed the original Mirai IoT botnet malware were sentenced on Tuesday in an Alaskan federal court to five years probation – a lenient punishment earned through extensive cooperation with FBI on other cyber investigations. Paras Jha, 22, of Fanwood, N.J.; Josiah White, 21, of Washington, Penn.; and Dalton Norman, 22, of Metairie, La. were also each ordered to pay $127,000 in restitutions and serve 2,500 hours of community service that will require continued collaboration with law enforcement authorities and researchers on cybercrime and cybersecurity matters. A Sept. 18 Wired article citing additional court documents states the three men have already accumulated more than 1,000 hours of community service by lending their expertise to at least a dozen investigations. This reportedly includes efforts to reduce the impact of high-volume distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, counter a nation-state-backed APT group, and perhaps undercover work. “All three have made efforts at positive professional and educational development with varying degrees of success, and indeed it was their collective lack of success in those fields that provided some of the motive to engage in the criminal conduct” in the first place, stated a sentencing memorandum filed by U.S. prosecutors on Sept. 11. In recommending a lighter sentence to the court, the document cites “potential grounds for optimism regarding their prospects for rehabilitation and productive engagement in society after being sentenced in these cases. All three have significant employment and educational prospects should they choose to take advantage of them rather than continuing to engage in criminal activity.” Jha could still serve prison time for additional charges filed, in New Jersey, related to a 2016 Mirai-based DDoS attack he launched against Rutgers University, where he had been a student. The three men pleaded guilty in late 2017. White, Jha, and Norman created the botnet in the summer and fall of 2016, recruiting scores of compromised IoT devices – including wireless cameras, routers, and digital video recorders – and using them to flood targets with DDoS traffic. Jha later released Mirai’s source code to evade identification as an author. This action led to others individuals developing numerous versions of the malware, including one that impacted the Domain Name System provider Dyn and disabled many popular websites on Oct. 21, 2016. Other versions have focused focus from DDoS attacks to other illegal activities such as cryptomining. “Cybercrime is a worldwide epidemic that reaches many Alaskans,” said U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder in a DOJ press release. “The perpetrators count on being technologically one step ahead of law enforcement officials. The plea agreement with the young offenders in this case was a unique opportunity for law enforcement officers, and will give FBI investigators the knowledge and tools they need to stay ahead of cyber criminals around the world.” “The sentences announced today would not have been possible without the cooperation of our partners in international law enforcement and the private sector,” Jeffery Peterson, Special Agent in Charge of FBI’s Anchorage field office, also said in the release. “The FBI is committed to strengthening those relationships and finding innovative ways to counter cybercrime. Cybercriminals often develop their technical skills at a young age. This case demonstrates our commitment to hold criminals accountable while encouraging offenders to choose a different path to apply their skills.” Source: https://www.scmagazine.com/home/news/mirai-creators-sentenced-to-probation-after-assisting-fbi-with-cyber-investigations/

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Mirai creators sentenced to probation after assisting FBI with cyber investigations

3 Drivers Behind the Increasing Frequency of DDoS Attacks

What’s causing the uptick? Motivation, opportunity, and new capabilities. According to IDC Research’s recent US DDoS Prevention Survey, more than 50% of IT security decision makers said that their organization had been the victim of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as many as 10 times in the past year. For those who experienced an attack, more than 40% lasted longer than 10 hours. This statistic correlates with our ATLAS findings, which show there were 7.5 million DDoS attacks in 2017 — a rate, says Cisco, that is increasing at roughly the same rate as Internet traffic. What’s behind the uptick? It boils down to three factors: motivation of the attackers; the opportunity presented by inexpensive, easy-to-use attack services; and the new capabilities that Internet of Things (IoT) botnets have. Political and Criminal Motivations In an increasingly politically and economically volatile landscape, DDoS attacks have become the new geopolitical tool for nation-states and political activists. Attacks on political websites and critical national infrastructure services are becoming more frequent, largely because of the desire and capabilities of attackers to affect real-world events, such as election processes, while staying undiscovered. In June, a DDoS attack was launched against the website opposing a Mexican presidential candidate during a debate. This attack demonstrated how a nation-state could affect events far beyond the boundaries of the digital realm. It threatened the stability of the election process by knocking a candidate’s website offline while the debate was ongoing. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or maybe an example of the phenomenon security experts call “cyber reflection,” when an incident in the digital realm is mirrored in the physical world. DDoS attacks carried out by criminal organizations for financial gain also demonstrate cyber reflection, particularly for global financial institutions and other supra-national entities whose power makes them prime targets, whether for state actors, disaffected activists, or cybercriminals. While extortion on the threat of DDoS continues to be a major threat to enterprises across all vertical sectors, cybercriminals also use DDoS as a smokescreen to draw attention away from other nefarious acts, such as data exfiltration and illegal transfers of money. Attacks Made Easy This past April, Webstresser.org — one of the largest DDoS-as-a-service (DaaS) providers in existence, which allowed criminals to buy the ability to launch attacks on businesses and responsible for millions of DDoS attacks around the globe — was taken down in a major international investigation. The site was used by a British suspect to attack a number of large retail banks last year, causing hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage. Six suspected members of the gang behind the site were arrested, with computers seized in the UK, Holland, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, as soon as Webstresser was shut down, various other similar services immediately popped up to take its place. DaaS services like Webstresser run rampant in the underground marketplace, and their services are often available at extremely low prices. This allows anyone with access to digital currency or other online payment processing service to launch a DDoS attack at a target of their choosing. The low cost and availability of these services provide a means of carrying out attacks both in the heat of the moment and after careful planning. The rage-fueled, irrational DDoS-based responses of gamers against other gamers is a good example of a spur-of-the-moment, emotional attack enabled by the availability of DaaS. In other cases, the DaaS platforms may be used in hacktivist operations to send a message or take down a website in opposition to someone’s viewpoint. The ease of accessibility to DaaS services enables virtually anyone to launch a cyberattack with relative anonymity. IoT Botnets IoT devices are quickly brought to market at the lowest cost possible, and securing them is often an afterthought for manufacturers. The result? Most consumer IoT devices are shipped with the most basic types of vulnerabilities, including hard code/default credentials, and susceptibility to buffer overflows and command injection. Moreover, when patches are released to address these issues, they are rarely applied. Typically, a consumer plugs in an IoT device and never contemplates the security aspect, or perhaps does not understand the necessity of applying regular security updates and patches. With nearly 27 billion connected devices in 2017, expected to rise to 125 billion by 2030 according to analysis from IHS Markit, they make extremely attractive targest for malware authors. In the latter half of 2016, a high-visibility DDoS attack against a DNS host/provider was observed, which affected a number of major online properties. The malware responsible for this attack, and many others, was Mirai. Once the source code for Mirai was published on September 30, 2016, it sparked the creation of a slew of other IoT-based botnets, which have continued to evolve significantly. Combined with the proliferation of IoT devices, and their inherent lack of security, we have witnessed a dramatic growth in both the number and size of botnets. These new botnets provide the opportunity for attackers and DaaS services to create new, more powerful, and more sophisticated attacks. Conclusion Today’s DDoS attacks are increasingly multivector and multilayered, employing a combination of large-scale volumetric assaults and stealth infiltration targeting the application layer. This is just the latest trend in an ever-changing landscape where attackers adapt their solutions and make use of new tools and capabilities in an attempt to evade and overcome existing defenses. Businesses need to maintain a constant vigilance on the techniques used to target them and continually evolve their defenses to industry best practices. Source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/3-drivers-behind-the-increasing-frequency-of-ddos-attacks/a/d-id/1332824

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3 Drivers Behind the Increasing Frequency of DDoS Attacks