Welcome back to Feedback Friday! An unclassified computer network at the White House was breached recently and the main suspects are hackers allegedly working for the Russian government.

The incident came to light earlier this week when an official said they had identified “activity of concern” on the unclassified network of the Executive Office of the President (EOP) while assessing recent threats. The official said the attackers didn’t cause any damage, but some White House users were temporarily disconnected from the network while the breach was dealt with.

Experts have pointed out that while the attackers breached an unclassified network, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they haven’t gained access to some useful data, even if it’s not classified. They have also outlined the methods and strategies used by both the attackers and the defenders in such a scenario.

And the Feedback Begins…

Amit Yoran, President at RSA:

“The breach underscores the constant siege of attacks on our government and businesses. Fortunately — by definition — information with grave or serious impact to national security is classified and would not be found on an unclassified network. That said, there is most likely information on unclassified networks that the White House would not like public or for 3rd party consumption.

As for the profile of the adversary, the White House uses the latest security technologies making them a very challenging target to breach. Top secret clearances are required for access to networks and personnel are continuously and rigorously vetted. As such — and acknowledging that until a thorough investigation is completed, speculation can be dangerous — a standard botnet or phishing malware is a less likely scenario than a focused adversary with time and expertise in developing customized exploits, malware and campaigns.”

Mark Orlando, director of cyber operations at Foreground Security. Orlando previously worked at the EOP where he led a contract team responsible for building and managing the EOP Security Operations Center under the Office of Administration:

“Sophisticated attackers constantly alter their approach so as to evade detection and they will eventually succeed. The best a defender can do in this case is to identify and respond to the attack as quickly and effectively as possible. It isn’t at all unusual for an attack like this one to be discovered only after a malicious email has been identified, analyzed, and distilled into indicators of compromise (subject lines, source addresses, file names, and related data elements) used to hunt for related messages or attacks that were initially missed. White House defenders routinely exchange this kind of data with analysts across the Federal Government to facilitate those retrospective investigations. That may have been how this compromise was discovered and that doesn’t amount to a ‘miss’.

While the media points to outages or delays in major services like email at the White House, this is also not an unusual side effect of proper containment and eradication of a threat like this one- especially if there are remote users involved. Incidents exactly like this one occur all over the Federal government and increasingly in the private sector as well; the only thing different about this attack that makes it more newsworthy than those other incidents is that it occurred at EOP.”

Tom Kellermann, Trend Micro chief cybersecurity officer and former commissioner on The Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency:

“Geopolitical tensions are now manifested through cyberattacks. The enemies of the state conduct tremendous reconnaissance on their targets granting them situational awareness as to our defenses in real time. This reality allows for elite patriotic hackers to bypass our defenses.”

Irene Abezgauz, VP Product Management, Quotium:

“Security, cyber or physical, relies heavily on risk management. With a large operation, it is difficult to secure everything on the same level, priority is often given to the more sensitive networks. In the case of the White House hack, the breached network was unclassified, meaning it probably has slightly different security measures than classified networks.

Government systems are prime targets for hackers. Even if the breached network is unclassified and no sensitive information was exposed, all government network breaches draw attention. In public opinion, attackers gaining access to government computer systems, no matter whether classified or not, reflects badly on the ability of the US to defend itself, especially when foreign nationals are suspected. In addition, availability and integrity must be maintained in systems that involve any kind of government decision making, more than in most other systems.

The bottom line is that high profile targets must maintain a high level of security on all networks. Hackers, private and state-funded, are continuously attempting attacks on these systems. Such attacks must be blocked in order to protect data within as well as assure the public of the ability of the government to protect its cyber systems.”

John Dickson, Principal at the Denim Group:

“Although initial reports emphasize the unclassified nature of the system and networks, security experts know that successful attacks against certain unclassified systems can, in fact, still be gravely serious. Given the fact this concerns perhaps the most high-visibility target in the world – the White House – and you potentially have a genuinely difficult situation.

On one hand, you have the issue of public confidence in our institutions of government. ‘If the attackers can compromise the White House, what else can the possibly get into?’ is a perfectly valid question from citizens who may not recognize the distinction between unclassified and classified systems. Also, sensitive information that is unclassified may traverse these systems and give attackers more context to allow them to put together a larger picture of what’s happening at the White House. Military folks call refer to this term as Operational Security, or OPSEC, and this is always a worry for those protecting the President, the White House, and the operations of the Executive Branch of government.

From a defensive standpoint, when you face a sophisticated attacker with substantial resources you have be constantly vigilant and assume certain systems will fail. It’s far too early to editorialize on theories of ‘what might have happened’ at the White House, but we always recommend a defense in depth approach to application and system design that ‘fails open,’ so that if an attacker compromises one type of defense, it doesn’t compromise the entire ecosystem.”

Ian Amit, Vice President at ZeroFOX:

“Much of the conversation surrounding the recent White House hack centers on the nature of the compromised network. The network is ‘unclassified,’ leading many people to believe the affected information is non-critical or innocuous. It’s important to note however that enough unclassified information, when aggregated and correlated, quickly becomes classified. Isolated data points might not mean much by themselves, but enough time spent passively listening to unclassified chatter can reveal some very sensitive intelligence.

So how much time was the hacker on the network? It’s difficult to tell. Security officials alerted on ‘suspicious activity.’ This phrase doesn’t give us much insight into how long the network was compromised. The hacker could have been active on the network for months without doing anything to sound the alarms. It’s one thing if a hacker is caught in the act of breaking in or stealing data. That kind of event information generally gives a clear indication of the attack timeline. Triggering on passive behavior makes this much more difficult.

With that said, it’s commendable that White House security officials are looking for behavioral cues rather than overt events to detect malicious activity. Soft indicators are much more difficult to detect and means the security officials are using some advanced tools to understand traffic on the network.”

Anup Ghosh, CEO of Invincea:

“The disclosure of breach from the White House this week was remarkable for its differences from a similar disclosure in 2012. It’s clear from recent press releases from security companies, that Russia is the New Black now. In fact, if you get hacked by the Chinese now, it’s almost embarrassing because they are considered less sophisticated than the Russians. So now, every breach seems to be attributed to Russians, though largely without any evidence.

A little more than two years ago in October 2012, the White House acknowledged a breach of its unclassified networks in the White House Military Office (which also manages the President’s nuclear ‘football’). The talking points at the time were: 1. Chinese threat, 2. Non-sophisticated attack method (spear-phish), 3. Unclassified network, so no harm. This week, the talking points are: 1. Russian government threat, 2. Sophisticated attack method (spear-phish), and 3. Deep concern over breach of unclassified network. The similarities between the two breaches are remarkable, but the reaction couldn’t be more different.

Before we indict the Russians for every breach now, it would be great to see some bar set for attribution to a particular group. It would also be great to not use “sophisticated” threat or Russians as a scape goat for not properly addressing spear-phishing threats with technology readily available off the shelf (and shipped with every Dell commercial device).”

Michael Sutton, VP of Security Reasearch for Zscaler:

“The breach of a compromised White House computer reported this week is simply the latest in ongoing and continual attacks on government networks. While such breaches periodically hit the headlines thanks to ‘unnamed sources’, it’s safe to assume that the general public only has visibility into the tip of the iceberg. White House officials admitted that this latest breach was discovered ‘in the course of assessing recent threats’, suggesting that following the trail of breadcrumbs for one attack led to another.

In September, there were reports of yet another successful attack, this one leveraging spear phishing and compromising a machine on an unclassified network and earlier this month, details of the Sandworm attacks emerged, which leveraged a then 0day Microsoft vulnerability to target NATO and EU government agencies. All of these recent attacks have been attributed to groups in Russia and it’s likely that they’re tied together. All Internet facing systems face constant attack, but the White House understandably presents a particularly attractive target.

While all G20 nations have advanced cyber warfare capabilities and conduct offensive operations, Russia and China have been particularly aggressive in recent years, often conducting bold campaigns that are sure to be uncovered at some point.”

Zach Lanier, Senior Security Researcher at Duo Security:

“U.S. government and defense networks are often the target of attackers — and the White House is without a doubt very high on that list, regardless of the breached network reportedly being ‘unclassified’. Everyone from hacktivists to foreign intelligence agencies have sought after access to these networks and systems, so this intrusion isn’t a huge surprise.” 

Carl Wright, General Manager of North America for TrapX Security:

“When it comes to our military, government and its supporting national defense industrial complex, the American public’s expectation is and should be significantly higher. The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) findings in September highlighted how nation-state actors were targeting contractors with relation to the federal government so it is to be expected that actual government bodies are also being targeted.

95 percent of the security market is signature based and thus will not detect a targeted zero-day. We must operate under the notion that networks are already compromised and focus defenses on monitoring lateral movements within data centers and private networks as that is how hackers escalate their attack and access. Unfortunately, existing security technologies focus from the outside in, trying to understand the entire world of cyber terrorists’ behaviors which inundate security teams with alerts and false-positives.

These breaches demonstrate how traditional security tools alone don’t do enough and both enterprises and government organizations need to constantly evaluate and improve their security posture to thwart today’s nation-states or crime syndicates whether foreign or domestic. With the United States President’s intranet being compromised, it truly shows the poor state of our national cyber defense capabilities.”

Nat Kausik, CEO at Bitglass:

“Organizations whose security models involve ‘trusted devices’ are naturally prone to breaches. Employees take their laptops on the go, get hacked at public WIFI networks, and come back to the office where the device is treated as trusted and allowed to connect to the network.

The compromised device enables the hacker to gain a broader and more permanent foothold inside the network. Government entities have long favored the ‘trusted devices’ model and are actually more prone to breaches than organizations that treat all user devices as suspect.”

Greg Martin, CTO at ThreatStream:

“It’s public knowledge that Russia has been very active in sponsored cyber espionage and attacks but have recently turned up the volume since both the Ukranian conflict and given the Snowden leaks which in my opinion have given Russian and China the open door to be even more bold in their offensive cyber programs.

Recent cyberattacks on retailers and financial institutions have been riddled with anti-US propaganda. This makes it increasingly difficult to pinpoint the backers as the activity is heavily blended threats between criminal actors, hack-tivist and state sponsored activity. As seen in the recent reports, Russia APT attacks have been prevalent in targeting U.S. interests including the financial sector.

ThreatStream believes organizations should accelerate their policy of sharing cyber threat information and look at how they currently leverage threat and adversary intelligence in their existing cyber defense strategies.”

Until Next Friday…Happy Happy Halloween and have a Great Weekend!

Tags:

• Network Security
• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Incident Management

Researchers have uncovered a remote administration tool (RAT) that uses a novel technique to stay persistent on infected systems and avoid detection.

The RAT, dubbed “COMpfun,” has been analyzed by experts from G DATA Software’s SecurityLabs. When it comes to functionality, the malware is not out of the ordinary. It can be used to log keystrokes, take screenshots, download and upload files, execute code, and for other specific tasks.

The threat can run on both 32 and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows (up to Windows 8), and it relies on HTTPS and RSA encryption to communicate with its command and control (C&C) server.

What makes COMpfun interesting is the fact that it injects itself into the processes running on compromised systems by hijacking legitimate Component Object Model (COM) objects.

COM allows developers to manipulate and control the objects of other applications. Each of these objects has a unique identifier called CLSID.

When it’s installed on a system, the RAT creates two files, after which it creates two registry entries to define COM objects with the CLSIDs {b5f8350b-0548-48b1-a6ee-88bd00b4a5e7} and {BCDE0395-E52F-467C-8E3D-C4579291692E}. These IDs are already assigned to two Microsoft libraries that are used by several applications, including the Web browser. However, by defining objects with the same CLSIDs, the originals are replaced with the new ones.

Once this is done, the malicious libraries are loaded into processes instead of the legitimate Microsoft libraries. This ensures not only that the RAT is persistent, but it also makes it more difficult to detect.

“As soon as the infection was successful, Microsoft Windows then natively executes the library in the processes of the infected user. Hence, the attacking process is hard to be identified. Using COM hijacking is undoubtedly silent. It is not even detected by Sysinternals’ Autoruns,” G DATA researcher Paul Rascagnères wrote in a blog post.

Many antiviruses monitor systems for DLL injections, but since COMpfun doesn’t rely on DLL injections, some security solutions might miss the threat. Rascagnères has warned that any type of malware could leverage this technique to become stealthy.

COMpfun is not the only RAT that abuses COM. Back in August, G DATA detailed IcoScript, a piece of malware that leveraged COM to control Internet Explorer. By taking control of the Web browser, cybercriminals have been able to carry out various actions, such as accessing websites, entering credentials, pressing buttons on pages, and exfiltrating data.

In the case of IcoScript, cybercriminals leveraged the technique to access Yahoo Mail accounts and use them for C&C communications. Researchers noted at the time that the attackers could have used other webmail services as well, such as Gmail.

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A Massachusetts man has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for using information hacked from customer accounts at more than a dozen banks, brokerage firms, payroll processing companies and government agencies in a plot to steal $ 15 million.

Robert Dubuc, 41, of Malden, Mass., previously pleaded guilty to charge of wire fraud conspiracy and conspiracy to commit access device fraud and identity theft.

According to court documents, Dubuc and 50-year-old Oleg Pidtergerya of Brooklyn – who has also pleaded guilty – were asked by leaders of the conspiracy to participate in a “cash-out” scheme to help steal money from compromised bank accounts. Pidtergerya managed a cash-out crew in New York for the cyber-ring’s leaders while Dubuc controlled a cash-out crew in Massachusetts for the organization.

Authorities believe Oleksiy Sharapka, 34, of Kiev, Ukraine, directed the conspiracy with the help of Leonid Yanovitsky, 39, also of Kiev.

According to authorities, hackers gained unauthorized access to the bank accounts of customers of more than a dozen organizations ranging from Citibank to E-Trade to the U.S. Department of Defense. After obtaining access to the bank accounts, Sharapka and Yanovitsky allegedly diverted money to bank accounts and pre-paid debit cards they controlled. They then turned to the cash-out crews to withdraw the stolen funds, authorities said.

Both Sharapka and Yanovitsky are under indictment in the United States and remain at large, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In addition to the prison term, Judge Sheridan sentenced Dubuc to serve three years of supervised release and pay restitution in the amount of $ 338,685. Sentencing for Pidtergerya is scheduled for Dec. 22.

Tags:

• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Cybercrime

KIEV – Hackers attacked Ukraine’s election commission website Saturday on the eve of parliamentary polls, officials said, but they denied Russian reports that the vote counting system itself had been put out of action.

The www.cvk.gov.ua site, run by the commission in charge of organising Sunday’s election, briefly shut down. Ukrainian security officials blamed a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a method that can slow down or disable a network by flooding it with communications requests.

“There is a DDoS attack on the commission’s site,” the government information security service said on its Facebook page.

The security service said the attack was “predictable” and that measures had been prepared in advance to ensure that the election site could not be completely taken down.

“If a site runs slowly, that doesn’t mean it has been destroyed by hackers,” the statement said.

A report on Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti quoted a statement on the personal website of the Ukrainian prosecutor general saying that the electronic vote counting system was out of order and that Sunday’s ballots would have to be counted by hand.

The commission spokesman, Kostyantyn Khivrenko, called the RIA Novosti report a “fake”.

“The Central Election Commission will issue preliminary results of the voting with the help of the Vybory information-analytical system. This system is working normally,” he said.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the country’s lead internal security agency, said that “the physical protection of the central server and its regional components has been ensured”.

“Any statements regarding the alleged successful unauthorised intrusions into the cyber space of the Central Election Commission or the elements of the elections systems do not correspond to the facts. Hackers are controlling nothing,” Markiyan Lubkivskyy, an adviser to the SBU chief, said.

An SBU spokeswoman told AFP that attacks on the election commission’s site began a week ago, “but so far we have dealt with them”.

Outdoor video screens hacked?

The cyber troubles came as Ukraine prepared for an election overshadowed by a bloody pro-Russian insurgency in the country’s east and the annexation by Russia of the Crimean province in the south.

Pro-Western and nationalist parties are expected to dominate the new parliament. In another possible sign of cyber tensions, the Ukrainska Pravda news website on Friday reported that outdoor video screens across Kiev were briefly hacked.

The screens, which are used for advertising, including pre-election political ads, reportedly started to display “scary and horrible images,” the report said.

Engineers went out “to physically unplug” the screens, according to the report.

The report could not be confirmed, but footage on YouTube purporting to capture the incident showed a street screen abruptly switching to footage of destroyed buildings and dead bodies, as well as the images of two nationalist politicians running for parliament, with the words “war criminals”.

Tags:

• Network Security
• NEWS & INDUSTRY

An exploit for a Flash Player vulnerability that was patched just over one week ago by Adobe has already been added by cybercriminals to an exploit kit.

The French malware researcher know as “Kafeine” was the one who first noticed the integration of the exploit for CVE-2014-0569, a Flash Player integer overflow flaw that could lead to arbitrary code execution, into the Fiesta exploit kit. The expert made the discovery while trying to analyze a different Flash vulnerability (CVE-2014-0556).

The vulnerability was reported to Adobe privately through HP’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) program so everyone is wondering how the cybercriminals managed to get their hands on the exploit in such a short period of time.

Kafeine told SecurityWeek that he believes the cybercriminals reverse engineered the patch released by Adobe to build their exploit.

“The criminals built this vulnerability into an exploit kit in record time. Whether they were given a heads-up, or just have a highly skilled reverse engineer, both scenarios are equally worrisome as it increases the possible window of infection,” Jerome Segura, senior security researcher from Malwarebytes Labs, told SecurityWeek. “Perhaps this is not too much of a deal for individuals, but it can be more difficult for businesses which need to roll out patches on dozens of machines, hoping doing so will not cause malfunctions in existing applications. Browsing the net on an unpatched computer is like playing Russian roulette with a handful of loaded guns.”

“The bad guys are not going to run short of vulnerabilities they can weaponize, and if this happens at a quicker rate than ever before, their success rate will increase. This leaves end users with very little room for mistakes, such as failing to diligently apply security patches sooner rather than later,” Segura added.

Initially, Kafeine believed the exploit for CVE-2014-0569 was integrated into the Angler exploit kit as well, but in an update made to his original blog post, the researcher noted that the exploit included in Angler actually appears to be for a different Flash vulnerability patched by Adobe last week.

In the case of the Angler exploit kit, the first payload that’s distributed is Bedep (detected by Malwarebytes as Trojan.FakeMS.ED), which enrolls infected computers into a botnet. The final payload is a variant of the notorious Zeus banking Trojan, Kafeine said.

Both the Fiesta and Angler exploit kits are popular among cybercriminals. Angler was recently involved in a malvertising campaign targeting several high-profile websites, including Java.com.

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Vulnerabilities

PHP released last week versions 5.6.2, 5.5.18 and 5.4.34 of the scripting language. In addition to some functionality bugs, the latest releases address a series of security-related flaws.

According to the PHP development team, a total of four vulnerabilities have been fixed in PHP 5.6 and PHP 5.5, and six flaws in PHP 5.4.

One of the security bugs, CVE-2014-3669, is a high-severity integer overflow vulnerability in PHP’s “unserialize()” function. When the function is used on untrusted data, the flaw could lead to a crash or information disclosure. It’s unclear at this point if arbitrary code execution is also possible, says an advisory for this bug published on the Red Hat Bugzilla website. The issue only affects 32-bit systems.

Another vulnerability fixed by PHP has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2014-3668. The medium-severity security hole, which is caused by an out-of-bounds read flaw in the “mkgmtime()” function, could lead to a crash of the PHP interpreter.

CVE-2014-3669 and CVE-2014-3668 were reported to PHP in September by a researcher from Geneva, Switzerland-based IT security firm High-Tech Bridge.

Otto Ebeling, a software engineer at Facebook, reported a bug that causes heap corruption when parsing the thumbnail of a specially crafted .jpg image. This heap corruption affecting the “exif_thumbnail()” function has been assigned CVE-2014-3670.

“PHP provides APIs such as exif_thumbnail that can be used to extract embedded thumbnails from various image formats. In the process of extracting a TIFF-formatted EXIF thumbnail from a JPEG image, PHP re-encodes most IFD tags present in the thumbnail directory and prepends them to the thumbnail image in order to produce a standalone TIFF file,” Ebeling wrote in his report. “Individual values are re-encoded using the exif_ifd_make_value function. If this function is asked to write out an array of floating point values (single or double precision), it erroneously uses the size of the whole array when copying individual elements using memmove, leading to heap corruption.”

“To exploit a target application that uses this API (or exif_read_data with suitable parameters), a malicious user can trigger this condition by supplying a tag that contains an array of floating-point values, and futher tags that indicate the presence of a TIFF thumbnail. The image itself need not be valid as long as the exif_ifd_make_value gets invoked,” the expert explained.

According to Ebeling, the affected code is also included in the open-source virtual machine HHVM.

PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 users are advised to update their installations as soon as possible.  Additional information on the fixes is available in the changelogs.

Tags:

• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Application Security
• Vulnerabilities

AMSTERDAM – BLACK HAT EUROPE – Researchers have found a way to trick Android users into executing potentially malicious applications by hiding them inside innocent-looking image files.

Axelle Apvrille, mobile/IoT malware analyst and researcher at Fortinet, and Ange Albertini, reverse engineer and author of Corkami.com, have created an application that can be used to encrypt an APK to make it look like a PNG image file.

 In a real attack leveraging this method, the attacker sends an application containing an image to the potential victim. When the app is launched, the victim only sees the harmless-looking image. In the background however, a malicious payload is installed onto the victim’s Android device.

 In order to hide the installation of the malicious payload, the attacker can leverage the DexClassLoader constructor, the experts said.

According to the researchers, the method works on Android 4.4.2 and prior versions of the operating system. Google developed a fix for the flaw back in June, but Apvrille told SecurityWeek in an interview that the fix is incomplete. The researchers have informed Google of this and the company is now working on a more efficient fix.

How does it work?

The attacker writes his malicious payload and encrypts it to make it look like a valid PNG image file. The encryption is done with AngeCryption, an application developed by the researchers.

Controlling AES encryption can be a difficult task, but AngeCryption is designed to encrypt the APK so that Android doesn’t see any difference. Furthermore, the resulting image looks normal to users, except for the fact that it’s 500Kb in size, which is a bit much for a small resolution image.

The final step is to create a wrapping APK in which the malicious PNG is inserted, and then decrypted and installed.

When Android APKs are written, they must end with an End of Central Directory (EOCD) marker. The researchers managed to add their specially crafted PNG file to the APK by appending it after the first EOCD and adding a second EOCD at the end.

Tags:

• Mobile Security
• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Malware

Microsoft and Oracle customers will have their hands full applying a spate of security updates that were issued today.

Microsoft released eight security bulletins as part of Patch Tuesday, including critical updates for Internet Explorer, Windows and the .NET Framework. The bulletins address a total of 24 vulnerabilities, including a handful that is known to have already come under attack.

But the Microsoft release is dwarfed in size by the more than 150 security fixes issued today by Oracle. Within those patches are 31 fixes for the Oracle Database, several of which have a CVSS Base Score of 9.0.

“This CVSS 9.0 Base Score reflects instances where the user running the database has administrative privileges (as is typical with pre-12 Database versions on Windows),” explained Oracle Software Security Assurance Director Eric Maurice in a blog post. “When the database user has limited (or non-root) privilege, then the CVSS Base Score is 6.5 to denote that a successful compromise would be limited to the database and not extend to the underlying Operating System. Regardless of this decrease in the CVSS Base Score for these vulnerabilities for most recent versions of the database on Windows and all versions on Unix and Linux, Oracle recommends that these patches be applied as soon as possible because a wide compromise of the database is possible.”

The Oracle update also provides fixes for 25 new Java SE vulnerabilities, the most severe of which has a CVSS Base Score of 10.0. Out of the 25, 20 affect client-only deployments of Java SE, and two of these are browser specific. Four vulnerabilities meanwhile affect client and server deployments of Java SE, while on affects client and server deployments of JSSE, Maurice noted.

The remaining vulnerabilities impact: Oracle Fusion Middleware; Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control; Oracle E-Business Suite; Oracle Supply Chain Product Suite; Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise; Oracle JDEdwards EnterpriseOne; Oracle Communications Industry Suite; Oracle Retail Industry Suite; Oracle Health Sciences Industry Suite; Oracle Primavera; Oracle and Sun Systems Product Suite; Oracle Linux and Virtualization and Oracle MySQL.

In the case of Microsoft, customers will have their hands full with issues of their own. Three of the bulletins released today by Microsoft are rated ‘critical’ – MS14-056, MS14-057 and MS14-058.

MS14-056 is the biggest of the updates, and addresses 14 privately-reported issues in Internet Explorer. The most severe of these could allow remote code execution of a user views a specially-crafted webpage using Internet Explorer.

“This is another Patch Tuesday that easily fuels future drive-by web attacks for the months ahead,” said Marc Maiffret, CTO of BeyondTrust. “Beyond just code execution there also exists the ability to bypass ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) which is a helpful OS security migration for exploitation. This ASLR bypass can be used in conjunction with other vulnerabilities for more successful exploitation where it had might not been possible in the past. It should be noted that Microsoft’s EMET technology will help mitigate some of these attacks and even more importantly these client application vulnerabilities are a great reminder of the need for Least Privilege in making sure users are not running as Administrator.”

MS14-56, he said, should be prioritized first, with the remaining critical updates coming next. MS14-058 contains fixes for two issues in Windows that are already known to be under attack.

“The more severe of the vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if an attacker convinces a user to open a specially crafted document or to visit an untrusted website that contains embedded TrueType fonts,” according to Microsoft. “In all cases, however, an attacker would have no way to force users to perform these actions. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade users to do so, typically by getting them to click a link in an email message or Instant Messenger message.”

The final critical bulletin is MS14-057, which addresses vulnerabilities in the .NET Framework. According to Microsoft, the most severe of these could allow remote code execution if an attacker sends a specially-crafted URI request containing international characters to a .NET web application. In .NET 4.0 applications, the vulnerable functionality (iriParsing) is disabled by default; for the vulnerability to be exploitable an application has to explicitly enable this functionality. In .NET 4.5 applications, iriParsing is enabled by default and cannot be disabled.

The remaining bulletins are rated ‘Important’ and cover issues in Microsoft Windows, Developer Tools and Microsoft Office.

Adobe Systems also released patches today to address issues in Adobe Flash Player.

“Adobe is releasing an update to their Flash player with advisory APSB14-22, which addresses three RCE [remote code execution] type vulnerabilities,” blogged Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek. “Installations that run the newer Internet Explorer 10 and 11 get this update automatically. Users of older browsers or on other operating systems should apply this critical update manually.”

Tags:

• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Vulnerabilities

Data security firm Imperva released its fifth annual Web Application Attack report (WAAR) this week, a study designed track the latest trends and cyber threats facing web applications.

The report, which is based on the analysis of 99 applications over a period of nine months (August 1, 2013 – April 30, 2014), determined that WordPress is the most targeted content management system (CMS). In fact, WordPress websites were attacked 24.1% more than sites running on all other CMS platforms combined.

“WordPress has been in the headlines, in the past couple of years, both because of its popularity, and because of the amount of vulnerabilities found in its application and exposed by hackers. We believe that popularity and a hacker’s focus go hand-in-hand. When an application or a platform becomes popular, hackers realize that the ROI from hacking into these platforms or applications will be fruitful, so they spend more time researching and exploiting these applications, either to steal data from them, or to use the hacked systems as zombies in a botnet,” the report reads. 

This year’s WAAR also makes a comparison between attacks targeting PHP and .NET applications. It turns out that PHP apps suffer almost three times more cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks than ASP applications, and nearly two times more directory traversal attacks. On the other hand, Imperva has determined that ASP applications suffer twice as many SQL injection attacks than PHP applications.

When it comes to websites, unsurprisingly, ones that have login functionality and implicitly store consumer-specific information are the most targeted.

Nearly half of all the attacks observed by Imperva during the nine month period targeted the retail sector, followed at a distance by financial institutions which accounted for 10% of all Web application attacks.

Compared to the previous period reviewed by the company (June 1, 2012 – November 30, 2012), attacks have been 44% longer. A 10% increase was also observed in SQL injection attacks, and a 24% increase in remote file inclusion (RFI) attacks.

As far as attack sources are concerned, Imperva found that the United States generates most of the Web application attack traffic.

“In our educated opinion, based on years of analyzing attack data and origins, we propose that attackers from other countries are using U.S. hosts to attack, based on those hosts being geographically closer to targets,” the report reads.

“While this may be overwhelming, we believe that there is more to this picture. Attacks originating in the U.S. may indicate other things such as TOR exit nodes, Botnet infected machines, etc., and so this information needs to be looked at in proportion. What it potentially teaches us is the quality of targets. It makes sense for an attacker to execute the attack as close to the target as possible, to remain undetected or to maximize the available bandwidth of the attack.”

Attackers are increasingly leveraging cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) hosted applications and servers. Imperva has found that 20% of all known vulnerability exploitation attempts and 10% of all SQL injection attempts originated in Amazon Web Services (AWS) source IPs.

The complete Web Application Attack report from Imperva is available here.

Tags:

• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Application Security

On Monday afternoon, Yahoo confirmed to SecurityWeek that servers associated with Yahoo Games had been hacked as a result of the recently disclosed “Shellshock” vulnerability, but has since said its original conclusion was wrong.

In its original statement issued Monday afternoon, the company said that on Sunday night, a “handful” of its servers were impacted but said there was no evidence of a compromise to user data.

Hours later, Yahoo! Contacted SecurityWeek with a change in tune, saying that after all, the servers in question were NOT compromised via the Shellshock vulnerability, but rather a “minor bug in a parsing script”.

“Earlier today, we reported that we isolated a handful of servers that were detected to have been impacted by Shellshock. After investigating the situation fully, it turns out that the servers were in fact no affected directly by Shellshock, but by a minor bug in a parsing script,” a Yahoo! Spokesperson told SecurityWeek. “Regardless of the cause, our course of action remained the same — to isolate the servers at risk and protect our users’ data.”

The company maintained its position that no evidence has been found suggesting that user information was affected by the incident.

Yahoo! CISO, Alex Stamos provided additional details in a post to Y Combinator’s Hacker News.

“Three of our Sports API servers had malicious code executed on them this weekend by attackers looking for vulnerable Shellshock servers,” Stamos explained. “These attackers had mutated their exploit, likely with the goal of bypassing IDS/IDP or WAF filters. This mutation happened to exactly fit a command injection bug in a monitoring script our Sports team was using at that moment to parse and debug their web logs.

Stamos, who became VP of Information Security and CISO at Yahoo! in March 2014, continued:

“As you can imagine this episode caused some confusion in our team, since the servers in question had been successfully patched (twice!!) immediately after the Bash issue became public. Once we ensured that the impacted servers were isolated from the network, we conducted a comprehensive trace of the attack code through our entire stack which revealed the root cause: not Shellshock. Let this be a lesson to defenders and attackers alike: just because exploit code works doesn’t mean it triggered the bug you expected!

The original story with more background on the incident can he found here. 

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Incident Management
• Vulnerabilities