WyzGuys Tech Talk

A quick Saturday digest of cybersecurity news articles from other sources.

SolarWinds Story

When the story is big enough to make the mainstream news, I really don.t need to include it here, but here are some links to other articles about SolarWinds.

AA20-352A: Advanced Persistent Threat Compromise of Government Agencies, Critical Infrastructure, and Private Sector Organizations

‘Grave Impact’: Pervasive SolarWinds Hack Imperils U.S. Federal Agencies

Global Supply Chain Cyberattack Underway via IT Monitoring Software

Data Breach a ‘Huge Cyber Espionage Campaign Targeting the U.S. Government’

US government agencies compromised by foreign nation-state

Stretching back for months, the breaches were pulled off by exploiting a vulnerability in network monitoring software from SolarWinds, according to security firm FireEye.  (Hey – FireEye was just hacked too!)

10 Incredible Ways You Can Be Hacked Through Email

[Remote Session Webcast] Thursday, January 14 — 1:00-2:00 p.m. EST

Email is still the #1 cyberattack vector. A whopping 91% of attacks start with a phishing email, but email hacking is much more than phishing and launching malware! Join us as we explore 10 ways hackers use social engineering to trick your end-users into revealing sensitive data or enabling malicious code to run. Plus, a hacking demo by Kevin Mitnick… Register here

The US Military Buys Commercial Location Data

From Bruce Schneier – Vice has a long article about how the US military buys commercial location data worldwide.

The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a “level” app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.

This isn’t new, this isn’t just data of non-US citizens, and this isn’t the US military. We have lots of instances where the government buys data that it cannot legally collect itself.

Some app developers Motherboard spoke to were not aware who their users’ location data ends up with, and even if a user examines an app’s privacy policy, they may not ultimately realize how many different industries, companies, or government agencies are buying some of their most sensitive data. U.S. law enforcement purchase of such information has raised questions about authorities buying their way to location data that may ordinarily require a warrant to access. But the USSOCOM contract and additional reporting is the first evidence that U.S. location data purchases have extended from law enforcement to military agencies.

Check Washing

I can’t believe that check washing is still a thing:

“Check washing” is a practice where thieves break into mailboxes (or otherwise steal mail), find envelopes with checks, then use special solvents to remove the information on that check (except for the signature) and then change the payee and the amount to a bank account under their control so that it could be deposited at out-state-banks and oftentimes by a mobile phone.

The article suggests a solution: stop using paper checks.

Impressive iPhone Exploit

This is a scarily impressive vulnerability:

Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device — over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and exploits were wormable — meaning radio-proximity exploits could spread from one nearby device to another, once again, with no user interaction needed.  More…

Hiding Malware in Social Media Buttons

[2020.12.07] Clever tactic:

This new malware was discovered by researchers at Dutch cyber-security company Sansec that focuses on defending e-commerce websites from digital skimming (also known as Magecart) attacks.

The payment skimmer malware pulls its sleight of hand trick with the help of a double payload structure where the source code of the skimmer script that steals customers’ credit cards will be concealed in a social sharing icon loaded as an HTML ‘svg’ element with a ‘path’ element as a container.

The syntax for hiding the skimmer’s source code as a social media button perfectly mimics an ‘svg’ element named using social media platform names (e.g., facebook_full, twitter_full, instagram_full, youtube_full, pinterest_full, and google_full).

A separate decoder deployed separately somewhere on the e-commerce site’s server is used to extract and execute the code of the hidden credit card stealer.

This tactic increases the chances of avoiding detection even if one of the two malware components is found since the malware loader is not necessarily stored within the same location as the skimmer payload and their true purpose might evade superficial analysis.