The International Committee of the Red Cross has just published a report: “The Potential Human Cost of Cyber-Operations.” It’s the result of an “ICRC Expert Meeting” from last year, but was published this week.
Here’s a shorter blog post if you don’t want to read the whole thing. And commentary by one of the authors.
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June 1, 2019 cyberattack, infrastructure, malware, reports, Security technology Read more >
Last month, Kaspersky discovered that Asus’s live update system was infected with malware, an operation it called Operation Shadowhammer. Now we learn that six other companies were targeted in the same operation.
As we mentioned before, ASUS was not the only company used by the attackers. Studying this case, our experts found other samples that used similar algorithms. As in the ASUS case, the samples were using digitally signed binaries from three other Asian vendors:
- Electronics Extreme, authors of the zombie survival game called Infestation: Survivor Stories,
- Innovative Extremist, a company that provides Web and IT infrastructure services but also used to work in game development,
- Zepetto, the South Korean company that developed the video game Point Blank.
According to our researchers, the attackers either had access to the source code of the victims’ projects or they injected malware at the time of project compilation, meaning they were in the networks of those companies. And this reminds us of an attack that we reported on a year ago: the CCleaner incident.
Also, our experts identified three additional victims: another video gaming company, a conglomerate holding company and a pharmaceutical company, all in South Korea. For now we cannot share additional details about those victims, because we are in the process of notifying them about the attack.
Me on supply chain security.
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May 16, 2019 games, insiders, malware, Security technology, southkorea, supplychain Read more >
Evil Clippy is a tool for creating malicious Microsoft Office macros:
At BlackHat Asia we released Evil Clippy, a tool which assists red teamers and security testers in creating malicious MS Office documents. Amongst others, Evil Clippy can hide VBA macros, stomp VBA code (via p-code) and confuse popular macro analysis tools. It runs on Linux, OSX and Windows.
The VBA stomping is the most powerful feature, because it gets around antivirus programs:
VBA stomping abuses a feature which is not officially documented: the undocumented PerformanceCache part of each module stream contains compiled pseudo-code (p-code) for the VBA engine. If the MS Office version specified in the _VBA_PROJECT stream matches the MS Office version of the host program (Word or Excel) then the VBA source code in the module stream is ignored and the p-code is executed instead.
In summary: if we know the version of MS Office of a target system (e.g. Office 2016, 32 bit), we can replace our malicious VBA source code with fake code, while the malicious code will still get executed via p-code. In the meantime, any tool analyzing the VBA source code (such as antivirus) is completely fooled.
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May 8, 2019 malware, microsoft, mitigation, Security technology Read more >
FireEye is releasing much more information about the Triton malware that attacks critical infrastructure. It has been discovered in more places.
This is also a good — but older — article on Triton. We don’t know who wrote it. Initial speculation was Iran; more recent speculation is Russia. Both are still speculations.
Fireeye report. BoingBoing post.
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April 16, 2019 attribution, cybersecurity, infrastructure, malware, Security technology Read more >
Flame was discovered in 2012, linked to Stuxnet, and believed to be American in origin. It has recently been linked to more modern malware through new analysis tools that find linkages between different software.
Seems that Flame did not disappear after it was discovered, as was previously thought. (Its controllers used a kill switch to disable and erase it.) It was rewritten and reintroduced.
Note that the article claims that Flame was believed to be Israeli in origin. That’s wrong; most people who have an opinion believe it is from the NSA.
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April 12, 2019 espionage, kaspersky, malware, nsa, Security technology, stuxnet Read more >
Kaspersky has released details about a sophisticated nation-state spyware it calls TajMahal:
The TajMahal framework’s 80 modules, Shulmin says, comprise not only the typical keylogging and screengrabbing features of spyware, but also never-before-seen and obscure tricks. It can intercept documents in a printer queue, and keep track of “files of interest,” automatically stealing them if a USB drive is inserted into the infected machine. And that unique spyware toolkit, Kaspersky says, bears none of the fingerprints of any known nation-state hacker group.
It was found on the servers of an “embassy of a Central Asian country.” No speculation on who wrote and controls it.
More details.
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April 11, 2019 kaspersky, malware, Security technology, spyware Read more >
This is an interesting story of a serious vulnerability in a Huawei driver that Microsoft found. The vulnerability is similar in style to the NSA’s DOUBLEPULSAR that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers — believed to be the Russian government — and it’s obvious that this attack copied that technique.
What is less clear is whether the vulnerability — which has been fixed — was put into the Huwei driver accidentally or on purpose.
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March 29, 2019 backdoors, malware, nsa, Security technology, vulnerabilities Read more >
Kaspersky Labs is reporting on a new supply chain attack they call “Shadowhammer.”
In January 2019, we discovered a sophisticated supply chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility. The attack took place between June and November 2018 and according to our telemetry, it affected a large number of users.
[…]
The goal of the attack was to surgically target an unknown pool of users, which were identified by their network adapters’ MAC addresses. To achieve this, the attackers had hardcoded a list of MAC addresses in the trojanized samples and this list was used to identify the actual intended targets of this massive operation. We were able to extract more than 600 unique MAC addresses from over 200 samples used in this attack. Of course, there might be other samples out there with different MAC addresses in their list.
We believe this to be a very sophisticated supply chain attack, which matches or even surpasses the Shadowpad and the CCleaner incidents in complexity and techniques. The reason that it stayed undetected for so long is partly due to the fact that the trojanized updaters were signed with legitimate certificates (eg: “ASUSTeK Computer Inc.”). The malicious updaters were hosted on the official liveupdate01s.asus[.]com and liveupdate01.asus[.]com ASUS update servers.
The sophistication of the attack leads to the speculation that a nation-state — and one of the cyber powers — is responsible.
As I have previously written, supply chain security is “an incredibly complex problem.” These attacks co-opt the very mechanisms we need to trust for our security. And the international nature of our industry results in an array of vulnerabilities that are very hard to secure.
Kim Zetter has a really good article on this. Check if your computer is infected here, or use this diagnostic tool from Asus.
Another news article.
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March 28, 2019 hacking, malware, Security technology, supplychain Read more >
March 19, 2019 cyberattack, cybersecurity, defense, infrastructure, malware, Security technology, zeroday Read more >
This will complicate things:
To complicate matters, having cyber insurance might not cover everyone’s losses. Zurich American Insurance Company refused to pay out a $100 million claim from Mondelez, saying that since the U.S. and other governments labeled the NotPetya attack as an action by the Russian military their claim was excluded under the “hostile or warlike action in time of peace or war” exemption.
I get that $100 million is real money, but the insurance industry needs to figure out how to properly insure commercial networks against this sort of thing.
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March 8, 2019 cybersecurity, hacking, insurance, malware, ransomware, russia, Security technology, war Read more >