Apr 11, 2024NewsroomSpyware / Cyber Espionage

Apple on Wednesday revised its documentation pertaining to its mercenary spyware threat notification system to mention that it alerts users when they may have been individually targeted by such attacks.

It also specifically called out companies like NSO Group for developing commercial surveillance tools such as Pegasus that are used by state actors to pull off “individually targeted attacks of such exceptional cost and complexity.”

“Though deployed against a very small number of individuals — often journalists, activists, politicians, and diplomats — mercenary spyware attacks are ongoing and global,” Apple said.

“The extreme cost, sophistication, and worldwide nature of mercenary spyware attacks makes them some of the most advanced digital threats in existence today.”

The update marks a change in wording that previously said these “threat notifications” are designed to inform and assist users who may have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers.

According to TechCrunch, Apple is said to have sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries at 12:00 p.m. PST on Wednesday coinciding with the revision to the support page.

It’s worth noting that Apple began sending threat notifications to warn users it believes have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers starting November 2021.

However, the company also makes it a point to emphasize that it does not “attribute the attacks or resulting threat notifications” to any particular threat actor or geographical region.

The development comes amid continued efforts by governments around the world to counter the misuse and proliferation of commercial spyware.

Last month, the U.S. government said Finland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Poland, and South Korea had joined an inaugural group of 11 countries working to develop safeguards against the abuse of invasive surveillance technology.

“Commercial spyware has been misused across the world by authoritarian regimes and in democracies […] without proper legal authorization, safeguards, or oversight,” the governments said in a joint statement.

“The misuse of these tools presents significant and growing risks to our national security, including to the safety and security of our government personnel, information, and information systems.”

According to a recent report published by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant, commercial surveillance vendors were behind the in-the-wild exploitation of a chunk of the 97 zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in 2023.

All the vulnerabilities attributed to spyware companies targeted web browsers – particularly flaws in third-party libraries that affect more than one browser and substantially increase the attack surface – and mobile devices running Android and iOS.

“Private sector firms have been involved in discovering and selling exploits for many years, but we have observed a notable increase in exploitation driven by these actors over the past several years,” the tech giant said.

“Threat actors are increasingly leveraging zero-days, often for the purposes of evasion and persistence, and we don’t expect this activity to decrease anytime soon.”

Google also said that increased security investments into exploit mitigations are affecting the types of vulnerabilities threat actors can weaponize in their attacks, forcing them to bypass several security guardrails (e.g., Lockdown Mode and MiraclePtr) to infiltrate target devices.

Mar 01, 2024NewsroomRootkit / Threat Intelligence

The Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance has issued a new cybersecurity advisory warning of cyber threat actors exploiting known security flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure gateways, noting that the Integrity Checker Tool (ICT) can be deceived to provide a false sense of security.

“Ivanti ICT is not sufficient to detect compromise and that a cyber threat actor may be able to gain root-level persistence despite issuing factory resets,” the agencies said.

To date, Ivanti has disclosed five security vulnerabilities impacting its products since January 10, 2024, out of which four have come under active exploitation by multiple threat actors to deploy malware –

• CVE-2023-46805 (CVSS score: 8.2) – Authentication bypass vulnerability in web component
• CVE-2024-21887 (CVSS score: 9.1) – Command injection vulnerability in web component
• CVE-2024-21888 (CVSS score: 8.8) – Privilege escalation vulnerability in web component
• CVE-2024-21893 (CVSS score: 8.2) – SSRF vulnerability in the SAML component
• CVE-2024-22024 (CVSS score: 8.3) – XXE vulnerability in the SAML component

Mandiant, in an analysis published this week, described how an encrypted version of malware known as BUSHWALK is placed in a directory excluded by ICT in /data/runtime/cockpit/diskAnalysis.

The directory exclusions were also previously highlighted by Eclypsium this month, stating the tool skips a dozen directories from being scanned, thus allowing an attacker to leave behind backdoors in one of these paths and still pass the integrity check.

“The safest course of action for network defenders is to assume a sophisticated threat actor may deploy rootkit level persistence on a device that has been reset and lay dormant for an arbitrary amount of time,” agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. said.

They also urged organizations to “consider the significant risk of adversary access to, and persistence on, Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure gateways when determining whether to continue operating these devices in an enterprise environment.”

Ivanti, in response to the advisory, said it’s not aware of any instances of successful threat actor persistence following the implementation of security updates and factory resets. It’s also releasing a new version of ICT that it said “provides additional visibility into a customer’s appliance and all files that are present on the system.”

Feb 28, 2024NewsroomFirmware Security / Vulnerability

In a new joint advisory, cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the U.S. and other countries are urging users of Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to take protective measures, weeks after a botnet comprising infected routers was felled by law enforcement as part of an operation codenamed Dying Ember.

The botnet, named MooBot, is said to have been used by a Russia-linked threat actor known as APT28 to facilitate covert cyber operations and drop custom malware for follow-on exploitation. APT28, affiliated with Russia’s Main Directorate of the General Staff (GRU), is known to be active since at least 2007.

APT28 actors have “used compromised EdgeRouters globally to harvest credentials, collect NTLMv2 digests, proxy network traffic, and host spear-phishing landing pages and custom tools,” the authorities said [PDF].

The adversary’s use of EdgeRouters dates back to 2022, with the attacks targeting aerospace and defense, education, energy and utilities, governments, hospitality, manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, technology, and transportation sectors in the Czech Republic, Italy, Lithuania, Jordan, Montenegro, Poland, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, the U.A.E., and the U.S.

MooBot attacks entail targeting routers with default or weak credentials to deploy OpenSSH trojans, with APT28 acquiring this access to deliver bash script and other ELF binaries to collect credentials, proxy network traffic, host phishing pages, and other tooling.

This includes Python scripts to upload account credentials belonging to specifically targeted webmail users, which are collected via cross-site scripting and browser-in-the-browser (BitB) spear-phishing campaigns.

APT28 has also been linked to the exploitation of CVE-2023-23397 (CVSS score: 9.8), a now-patched critical privilege escalation flaw in Microsoft Outlook that could enable the theft of NT LAN Manager (NTLM) hashes and mount a relay attack without requiring any user interaction.

Another tool in its malware arsenal is MASEPIE, a Python backdoor capable of executing arbitrary commands on victim machines utilizing compromised Ubiquiti EdgeRouters as command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.

“With root access to compromised Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, APT28 actors have unfettered access to Linux-based operating systems to install tooling and to obfuscate their identity while conducting malicious campaigns,” the agencies noted.

Organizations are recommended to perform a hardware factory reset of the routers to flush file systems of malicious files, upgrade to the latest firmware version, change default credentials, and implement firewall rules to prevent exposure of remote management services.

The revelations are a sign that nation-state hackers are increasingly using routers as a launchpad for attacks, using them to create botnets such as VPNFilter, Cyclops Blink, and KV-botnet and conduct their malicious activities.

The bulletin arrives a day after the Five Eyes nations called out APT29 – the threat group affiliated with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the entity behind the attacks on SolarWinds, Microsoft, and HPE – for employing service accounts and dormant accounts to access cloud environments at target organizations.

Feb 14, 2024NewsroomArtificial Intelligence / Cyber Attack

Nation-state actors associated with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China are experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to complement their ongoing cyber attack operations.

The findings come from a report published by Microsoft in collaboration with OpenAI, both of which said they disrupted efforts made by five state-affiliated actors that used its AI services to perform malicious cyber activities by terminating their assets and accounts.

“Language support is a natural feature of LLMs and is attractive for threat actors with continuous focus on social engineering and other techniques relying on false, deceptive communications tailored to their targets’ jobs, professional networks, and other relationships,” Microsoft said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

While no significant or novel attacks employing the LLMs have been detected to date, adversarial exploration of AI technologies has transcended various phases of the attack chain, such as reconnaissance, coding assistance, and malware development.

“These actors generally sought to use OpenAI services for querying open-source information, translating, finding coding errors, and running basic coding tasks,” the AI firm said.

For instance, the Russian nation-state group tracked as Forest Blizzard (aka APT28) is said to have used its offerings to conduct open-source research into satellite communication protocols and radar imaging technology, as well as for support with scripting tasks.

Some of the other notable hacking crews are listed below –

• Emerald Sleet (aka Kimusky), a North Korean threat actor, has used LLMs to identify experts, think tanks, and organizations focused on defense issues in the Asia-Pacific region, understand publicly available flaws, help with basic scripting tasks, and draft content that could be used in phishing campaigns.

• Crimson Sandstorm (aka Imperial Kitten), an Iranian threat actor who has used LLMs to create code snippets related to app and web development, generate phishing emails, and research common ways malware could evade detection

• Charcoal Typhoon (aka Aquatic Panda), a Chinese threat actor which has used LLMs to research various companies and vulnerabilities, generate scripts, create content likely for use in phishing campaigns, and identify techniques for post-compromise behavior

• Salmon Typhoon (aka Maverick Panda), a Chinese threat actor who used LLMs to translate technical papers, retrieve publicly available information on multiple intelligence agencies and regional threat actors, resolve coding errors, and find concealment tactics to evade detection

Microsoft said it’s also formulating a set of principles to mitigate the risks posed by the malicious use of AI tools and APIs by nation-state advanced persistent threats (APTs), advanced persistent manipulators (APMs), and cybercriminal syndicates and conceive effective guardrails and safety mechanisms around its models.

“These principles include identification and action against malicious threat actors’ use notification to other AI service providers, collaboration with other stakeholders, and transparency,” Redmond said.

Jan 19, 2024NewsroomMalware / Endpoint Security

Pirated applications targeting Apple macOS users have been observed containing a backdoor capable of granting attackers remote control to infected machines.

“These applications are being hosted on Chinese pirating websites in order to gain victims,” Jamf Threat Labs researchers Ferdous Saljooki and Jaron Bradley said.

“Once detonated, the malware will download and execute multiple payloads in the background in order to secretly compromise the victim’s machine.”

The backdoored disk image (DMG) files, which have been modified to establish communications with actor-controlled infrastructure, include legitimate software like Navicat Premium, UltraEdit, FinalShell, SecureCRT, and Microsoft Remote Desktop.

The unsigned applications, besides being hosted on a Chinese website named macyy[.]cn, incorporate a dropper component called “dylib” that’s executed every time the application is opened.

The dropper then acts as a conduit to fetch a backdoor (“bd.log”) as well as a downloader (“fl01.log”) from a remote server, which is used to set up persistence and fetch additional payloads on the compromised machine.

The backdoor – written to the path “/tmp/.test” – is fully-featured and built atop an open-source post-exploitation toolkit called Khepri. The fact that it is located in the “/tmp” directory means it will be deleted when the system shuts down.

That said, it will be created again at the same location the next time the pirated application is loaded and the dropper is executed.

On the other hand, the downloader is written to the hidden path “/Users/Shared/.fseventsd,” following which it creates a LaunchAgent to ensure persistence and sends an HTTP GET request to an actor-controlled server.

While the server is no longer accessible, the downloader is designed to write the HTTP response to a new file located at /tmp/.fseventsds and then launch it.

Jamf said the malware shares several similarities with ZuRu, which has been observed in the past spreading via pirated applications on Chinese sites.

“It’s possible that this malware is a successor to the ZuRu malware given its targeted applications, modified load commands and attacker infrastructure,” the researchers said.

Jan 17, 2024NewsroomBotnet / Cloud Security

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that threat actors deploying the AndroxGh0st malware are creating a botnet for “victim identification and exploitation in target networks.”

A Python-based malware, AndroxGh0st was first documented by Lacework in December 2022, with the malware inspiring several similar tools like AlienFox, GreenBot (aka Maintance), Legion, and Predator.

The cloud attack tool is capable of infiltrating servers vulnerable to known security flaws to access Laravel environment files and steal credentials for high-profile applications such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Office 365, SendGrid, and Twilio.

Some of the notable flaws weaponized by the attackers include CVE-2017-9841 (PHPUnit), CVE-2021-41773 (Apache HTTP Server), and CVE-2018-15133 (Laravel Framework).

“AndroxGh0st has multiple features to enable SMTP abuse including scanning, exploitation of exposed creds and APIs, and even deployment of web shells,” Lacework said. “For AWS specifically, the malware scans for and parses AWS keys but also has the ability to generate keys for brute-force attacks.”

These features make AndroxGh0st a potent threat that can be used to download additional payloads and retain persistent access to compromised systems.

The development arrives less than a week after SentinelOne revealed a related-but-distinct tool called FBot that is being employed by attackers to breach web servers, cloud services, content management systems (CMS), and SaaS platforms.

It also follows an alert from NETSCOUT about a significant spike in botnet scanning activity since mid-November 2023, touching a peak of nearly 1.3 million distinct devices on January 5, 2024. A majority of the source IP addresses are associated with the U.S., China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Russia.

“Analysis of the activity has uncovered a rise in the use of cheap or free cloud and hosting servers that attackers are using to create botnet launch pads,” the company said. “These servers are used via trials, free accounts, or low-cost accounts, which provide anonymity and minimal overhead to maintain.”