Security

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WhatsApp provides no cryptographic management for group messages

Biz & IT, confidentiality, group messages, privacy, Security, whatsapp / /

The flow of adding new members to a WhatsApp group message is:

  • A group member sends an unsigned message to the WhatsApp server that designates which users are group members, for instance, Alice, Bob, and Charlie
  • The server informs all existing group members that Alice, Bob, and Charlie have been added
  • The existing members have the option of deciding whether to accept messages from Alice, Bob, and Charlie, and whether messages exchanged with them should be encrypted

With no cryptographic signatures verifying an existing member who wants to add a new member, additions can be made by anyone with the ability to control the server or messages that flow into it. Using the common fictional scenario for illustrating end-to-end encryption, this lack of cryptographic assurance leaves open the possibility that Malory can join a group and gain access to the human-readable messages exchanged there.

WhatsApp isn’t the only messenger lacking cryptographic assurances for new group members. In 2022, a team that included some of the same researchers that analyzed WhatsApp found that Matrix—an open source and proprietary platform for chat and collaboration clients and servers—also provided no cryptographic means for ensuring only authorized members join a group. The Telegram messenger, meanwhile, offers no end-to-end encryption for group messages, making the app among the weakest for ensuring the confidentiality of group messages.

By contrast, the open source Signal messenger provides a cryptographic assurance that only an existing group member designated as the group admin can add new members. In an email, researcher Benjamin Dowling, also of King’s College, explained:

Signal implements “cryptographic group management.” Roughly this means that the administrator of a group, a user, signs a message along the lines of “Alice, Bob and Charley are in this group” to everyone else. Then, everybody else in the group makes their decision on who to encrypt to and who to accept messages from based on these cryptographically signed messages, [meaning] who to accept as a group member. The system used by Signal is a bit different [than WhatsApp], since [Signal] makes additional efforts to avoid revealing the group membership to the server, but the core principles remain the same.

On a high-level, in Signal, groups are associated with group membership lists that are stored on the Signal server. An administrator of the group generates a GroupMasterKey that is used to make changes to this group membership list. In particular, the GroupMasterKey is sent to other group members via Signal, and so is unknown to the server. Thus, whenever an administrator wants to make a change to the group (for instance, invite another user), they need to create an updated membership list (authenticated with the GroupMasterKey) telling other users of the group who to add. Existing users are notified of the change and update their group list, and perform the appropriate cryptographic operations with the new member so the existing member can begin sending messages to the new members as part of the group.

Most messaging apps, including Signal, don’t certify the identity of their users. That means there’s no way Signal can verify that the person using an account named Alice does, in fact, belong to Alice. It’s fully possible that Malory could create an account and name it Alice. (As an aside, and in sharp contrast to Signal, the account members that belong to a given WhatsApp group are visible to insiders, hackers, and to anyone with a valid subpoena.)

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We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution

abductions, crime, crypto, robbery, Security / /

French gendarmes have been busy policing crypto crimes, but these aren’t the usual financial schemes, cons, and HODL! shenanigans one usually reads about. No, these crimes involve abductions, (multiple) severed fingers, and (multiple) people rescued from the trunks of cars—once after being doused with gasoline.

This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris’ 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks. The 14th is a pleasant place—I highly recommend a visit to the catacombs in Place Denfert-Rochereau—and not usually the site of snatch-and-grab operations. The abducted man was apparently the father of someone who had made a packet in crypto. The kidnappers demanded a multimillion-euro ransom from the man’s son.

According to Le Monde, the abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father’s fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations. Police feared “other mutilations” if they were unable to find the man, but they did locate and raid the house this weekend, arresting five people in their 20s. (According to the BBC, French police used “phone signals” to locate the house.)

Sounds crazy, but this was the second such incident this year. In January, crypto maven David Balland was also abducted along with his partner on January 21. Balland was taken to a house, where he also had a finger cut off. According to The Guardian, “Police were contacted by Balland’s business partner, who received a video of the finger alongside a demand for a large ransom in cryptocurrency, of around 10 million euro. Balland was freed in a police raid soon after. His partner was found tied up in the boot of a car in a carpark in the Essonne area south of Paris the next day.”

And a few weeks before that, attackers went to the home of someone whose son was a “crypto-influencer based in Dubai.” At the father’s home, the kidnappers “tied up [the father’s] wife and daughter and forced him into a car. The man’s influencer son received a ransom demand and contacted police. The two women were then quickly freed. The father was only discovered 24 hours later in the boot of a car in Normandy, tied up and showing signs of physical violence, having been sprinkled with petrol.”

We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution Read More »

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Jury orders NSO to pay $167 million for hacking WhatsApp users

Biz & IT, exploits, nso group, pegasus, Policy, Security, whatsapp / /

A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users.

The verdict, reached Tuesday, comes as a major victory not just for Meta-owned WhatsApp but also for privacy- and security-rights advocates who have long criticized the practices of NSO and other exploit sellers. The jury also awarded WhatsApp $444 million in compensatory damages.

Clickless exploit

WhatsApp sued NSO in 2019 for an attack that targeted roughly 1,400 mobile phones belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials. NSO, which works on behalf of governments and law enforcement authorities in various countries, exploited a critical WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed it to install NSO’s proprietary spyware Pegasus on iOS and Android devices. The clickless exploit worked by placing a call to a target’s app. A target did not have to answer the call to be infected.

“Today’s verdict in WhatsApp’s case is an important step forward for privacy and security as the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone,” WhatsApp said in a statement. “Today, the jury’s decision to force NSO, a notorious foreign spyware merchant, to pay damages is a critical deterrent to this malicious industry against their illegal acts aimed at American companies and the privacy and security of the people we serve.”

NSO created WhatsApp accounts in 2018 and used them a year later to initiate calls that exploited the critical vulnerability on phones, which, among others, included 100 members of “civil society” from 20 countries, according to an investigation research group Citizen Lab performed on behalf of WhatsApp. The calls passed through WhatsApp servers and injected malicious code into the memory of targeted devices. The targeted phones would then use WhatsApp servers to connect to malicious servers maintained by NSO.

Jury orders NSO to pay $167 million for hacking WhatsApp users Read More »

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Man pleads guilty to using malicious AI software to hack Disney employee

AI, Biz & IT, guilty plea, nullbulge, Security, us courts / /

A California man has pleaded guilty to hacking an employee of The Walt Disney Company by tricking the person into running a malicious version of a widely used open source AI image-generation tool.

Ryan Mitchell Kramer, 25, pleaded guilty to one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer, the US Attorney for the Central District of California said Monday. In a plea agreement, Kramer said he published an app on GitHub for creating AI-generated art. The program contained malicious code that gave access to computers that installed it. Kramer operated using the moniker NullBulge.

Not the ComfyUI you’re looking for

According to researchers at VPNMentor, the program Kramer used was ComfyUI_LLMVISION, which purported to be an extension for the legitimate ComfyUI image generator and had functions added to it for copying passwords, payment card data, and other sensitive information from machines that installed it. The fake extension then sent the data to a Discord server that Kramer operated. To better disguise the malicious code, it was folded into files that used the names OpenAI and Anthropic.

Two files automatically downloaded by ComfyUI_LLMVISION, as displayed by a user’s Python package manager. Credit: VPNMentor

The Disney employee downloaded ComfyUI_LLMVISION in April 2024. After gaining unauthorized access to the victim’s computer and online accounts, Kramer accessed private Disney Slack channels. In May, he downloaded roughly 1.1 terabytes of confidential data from thousands of the channels.

In early July, Kramer contacted the employee and pretended to be a member of a hacktivist group. Later that month, after receiving no reply from the employee, Kramer publicly released the stolen information, which, besides private Disney material, also included the employee’s bank, medical, and personal information.

In the plea agreement, Kramer admitted that two other victims had installed ComfyUI_LLMVISION, and he gained unauthorized access to their computers and accounts as well. The FBI is investigating. Kramer is expected to make his first court appearance in the coming weeks.

Man pleads guilty to using malicious AI software to hack Disney employee Read More »

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Signal clone used by Trump official stops operations after report it was hacked

Biz & IT, mike waltz, Security, signal / /

Waltz was removed from his post late last week, with Trump nominating him to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.

TeleMessage website removes Signal mentions

The TeleMessage website until recently boasted the ability to “capture, archive and monitor mobile communication” through text messages, voice calls, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal, as seen in an Internet Archive capture from Saturday. Another archived page says that TeleMessage “captures and records Signal calls, messages, deletions, including text, multimedia, [and] files,” and “maintain[s] all Signal app features and functionality as well as the Signal encryption.”

The TeleMessage home page currently makes no mention of Signal, and links on the page have been disabled.

The anonymous hacker who reportedly infiltrated TeleMessage told 404 Media that it took about 15 to 20 minutes and “wasn’t much effort at all.” While the hacker did not obtain Waltz’s messages, “the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer,” according to 404 Media.

“Data related to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, and other financial institutions are included in the hacked material, according to screenshots of messages and backend systems obtained by 404 Media,” the report said. 404 Media added that the “hacker did not access all messages stored or collected by TeleMessage, but could have likely accessed more data if they decided to, underscoring the extreme risk posed by taking ordinarily secure end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and adding an extra archiving feature to them.”

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Hundreds of e-commerce sites hacked in supply-chain attack

backdoors, Biz & IT, magento, malware, Security, supply chain attack / /

Hundreds of e-commerce sites, at least one owned by a large multinational company, were backdoored by malware that executes malicious code inside the browsers of visitors, where it can steal payment card information and other sensitive data, security researchers said Monday.

The infections are the result of a supply-chain attack that compromised at least three software providers with malware that remained dormant for six years and became active only in the last few weeks. At least 500 e-commerce sites that rely on the backdoored software were infected, and it’s possible that the true number is double that, researchers from security firm Sansec said.

Among the compromised customers was a $40 billion multinational company, which Sansec didn’t name. In an email Monday, a Sansec representative said that “global remediation [on the infected customers] remains limited.”

Code execution on visitors’ machines

The supply chain attack poses a significant risk to the thousands or millions of people visiting the infected sites, because it allows attackers to execute code of their choice on ecommerce site servers. From there, the servers run info-stealing code on visitor machines.

“Since the backdoor allows uploading and executing arbitrary PHP code, the attackers have full remote code execution (RCE) and can do essentially anything they want,” the representative wrote. “In nearly all Adobe Commerce/Magento breaches we observe, the backdoor is then used to inject skimming software that runs in the user’s browser and steals payment information (Magecart).”

The three software suppliers identified by Sansec were Tigren, Magesolution (MGS), and Meetanshi. All three supply software that’s based on Magento, an open source e-commerce platform used by thousands of online stores. A software version sold by a fourth provider named Weltpixel has been infected with similar code on some of its customers’ stores, but Sansec so far has been unable to confirm whether it was the stores or Weltpixel that were hacked. Adobe has owned Megento since 2018.

Hundreds of e-commerce sites hacked in supply-chain attack Read More »

why-mfa-is-getting-easier-to-bypass-and-what-to-do-about-it

Why MFA is getting easier to bypass and what to do about it

Biz & IT, mfa, multi factor authentication, passwords, phishing, Security, webauthn / /

These sorts of adversary-in-the-middle attacks have grown increasingly common. In 2022, for instance, a single group used it in a series of attacks that stole more than 10,000 credentials from 137 organizations and led to the network compromise of authentication provider Twilio, among others.

One company that was targeted in the attack campaign but wasn’t breached was content delivery network Cloudflare. The reason the attack failed was because it uses MFA based on WebAuthn, the standard that makes passkeys work. Services that use WebAuthn are highly resistant to adversary-in-the-middle attacks, if not absolutely immune. There are two reasons for this.

First, WebAuthn credentials are cryptographically bound to the URL they authenticate. In the above example, the credentials would work only on https://accounts.google.com. If a victim tried to use the credential to log in to https://accounts.google.com.evilproxy[.]com, the login would fail each time.

Additionally, WebAuthn-based authentication must happen on or in proximity to the device the victim is using to log in to the account. This occurs because the credential is also cryptographically bound to a victim device. Because the authentication can only happen on the victim device, it’s impossible for an adversary in the middle to actually use it in a phishing attack on their own device.

Phishing has emerged as one of the most vexing security problems facing organizations, their employees, and their users. MFA in the form of a one-time password, or traditional push notifications, definitely adds friction to the phishing process, but with proxy-in-the-middle attacks becoming easier and more common, the effectiveness of these forms of MFA is growing increasingly easier to defeat.

WebAuthn-based MFA comes in multiple forms; a key, known as a passkey, stored on a phone, computer, Yubikey, or similar dongle is the most common example. Thousands of sites now support WebAuthn, and it’s easy for most end users to enroll. As a side note, MFA based on U2F, the predecessor standard to WebAuthn, also prevents adversary-in-the-middle attacks from succeeding, although the latter provides flexibility and additional security.

Post updated to add details about passkeys.

Why MFA is getting easier to bypass and what to do about it Read More »

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Windows RDP lets you log in using revoked passwords. Microsoft is OK with that.

Biz & IT, passwords, Remote Desktop Protocol, Security, Windows / /

The ability to use a revoked password to log in through RDP occurs when a Windows machine that’s signed in with a Microsoft or Azure account is configured to enable remote desktop access. In that case, users can log in over RDP with a dedicated password that’s validated against a locally stored credential. Alternatively, users can log in using the credentials for the online account that was used to sign in to the machine.

A screenshot of an RDP configuration window showing a Microsoft account (for Hotmail) has remote access.

Even after users change their account password, however, it remains valid for RDP logins indefinitely. In some cases, Wade reported, multiple older passwords will work while newer ones won’t. The result: persistent RDP access that bypasses cloud verification, multifactor authentication, and Conditional Access policies.

Wade and another expert in Windows security said that the little-known behavior could prove costly in scenarios where a Microsoft or Azure account has been compromised, for instance when the passwords for them have been publicly leaked. In such an event, the first course of action is to change the password to prevent an adversary from using it to access sensitive resources. While the password change prevents the adversary from logging in to the Microsoft or Azure account, the old password will give an adversary access to the user’s machine through RDP indefinitely.

“This creates a silent, remote backdoor into any system where the password was ever cached,” Wade wrote in his report. “Even if the attacker never had access to that system, Windows will still trust the password.”

Will Dormann, a senior vulnerability analyst at security firm Analygence, agreed.

“It doesn’t make sense from a security perspective,” he wrote in an online interview. “If I’m a sysadmin, I’d expect that the moment I change the password of an account, then that account’s old credentials cannot be used anywhere. But this is not the case.”

Credential caching is a problem

The mechanism that makes all of this possible is credential caching on the hard drive of the local machine. The first time a user logs in using Microsoft or Azure account credentials, RDP will confirm the password’s validity online. Windows then stores the credential in a cryptographically secured format on the local machine. From then on, Windows will validate any password entered during an RDP login by comparing it against the locally stored credential, with no online lookup. With that, the revoked password will still give remote access through RDP.

Windows RDP lets you log in using revoked passwords. Microsoft is OK with that. Read More »

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Millions of Apple Airplay-enabled devices can be hacked via Wi-Fi

AirPlay, Apple, Biz & IT, Security, syndication / /

Oligo also notes that many of the vulnerable devices have microphones and could be turned into listening devices for espionage. The researchers did not go so far as to create proof-of-concept malware for any particular target that would demonstrate that trick.

Oligo says it warned Apple about its AirBorne findings in the late fall and winter of last year, and Apple responded in the months since then by pushing out security updates. The researchers collaborated with Apple to test and validate the fixes for Macs and other Apple products.

Apple tells WIRED that it has also created patches that are available for impacted third-party devices. The company emphasizes, though, that there are limitations to the attacks that would be possible on AirPlay-enabled devices as a result of the bugs, because an attacker must be on the same Wi-Fi network as a target to exploit them. Apple adds that while there is potentially some user data on devices like TVs and speakers, it is typically very limited.

Below is a video of the Oligo researchers demonstrating their AirBorne hacking technique to take over an AirPlay-enabled Bose speaker to show their company’s logo for AirBorne. (The researchers say they didn’t intend to single out Bose, but just happened to have one of the company’s speakers on hand for testing.) Bose did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Speaker Demo. Courtesy of Oligo

The AirBorne vulnerabilities Oligo found also affect CarPlay, the radio protocol used to connect to vehicles’ dashboard interfaces. Oligo warns that this means hackers could hijack a car’s automotive computer, known as its head unit, in any of more than 800 CarPlay-enabled car and truck models. In those car-specific cases, though, the AirBorne vulnerabilities could only be exploited if the hacker is able to pair their own device with the head unit via Bluetooth or a USB connection, which drastically restricts the threat of CarPlay-based vehicle hacking.

The AirPlay SDK flaws in home media devices, by contrast, may present a more practical vulnerability for hackers seeking to hide on a network, whether to install ransomware or carry out stealthy espionage, all while hiding on devices that are often forgotten by both consumers and corporate or government network defenders. “The amount of devices that were vulnerable to these issues, that’s what alarms me,” says Oligo researcher Uri Katz. “When was the last time you updated your speaker?”

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Google: Governments are using zero-day hacks more than ever

Google, Security, zero-day / /

Governments hacking enterprise

A few years ago, zero-day attacks almost exclusively targeted end users. In 2021, GTIG spotted 95 zero-days, and 71 of them were deployed against user systems like browsers and smartphones. In 2024, 33 of the 75 total vulnerabilities were aimed at enterprise technologies and security systems. At 44 percent of the total, this is the highest share of enterprise focus for zero-days yet.

GTIG says that it detected zero-day attacks targeting 18 different enterprise entities, including Microsoft, Google, and Ivanti. This is slightly lower than the 22 firms targeted by zero-days in 2023, but it’s a big increase compared to just a few years ago, when seven firms were hit with zero-days in 2020.

The nature of these attacks often makes it hard to trace them to the source, but Google says it managed to attribute 34 of the 75 zero-day attacks. The largest single category with 10 detections was traditional state-sponsored espionage, which aims to gather intelligence without a financial motivation. China was the largest single contributor here. GTIG also identified North Korea as the perpetrator in five zero-day attacks, but these campaigns also had a financial motivation (usually stealing crypto).

Credit: Google

That’s already a lot of government-organized hacking, but GTIG also notes that eight of the serious hacks it detected came from commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs), firms that create hacking tools and claim to only do business with governments. So it’s fair to include these with other government hacks. This includes companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite, with the former already subject to US sanctions from its work with adversarial nations.

In all, this adds up to 23 of the 34 attributed attacks coming from governments. There were also a few attacks that didn’t technically originate from governments but still involved espionage activities, suggesting a connection to state actors. Beyond that, Google spotted five non-government financially motivated zero-day campaigns that did not appear to engage in spying.

Google’s security researchers say they expect zero-day attacks to continue increasing over time. These stealthy vulnerabilities can be expensive to obtain or discover, but the lag time before anyone notices the threat can reward hackers with a wealth of information (or money). Google recommends enterprises continue scaling up efforts to detect and block malicious activities, while also designing systems with redundancy and stricter limits on access. As for the average user, well, cross your fingers.

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AI-generated code could be a disaster for the software supply chain. Here’s why.

AI, Biz & IT, dependency confusion, package confusion. package hallucination, Security, supply chain attac / /

AI-generated computer code is rife with references to non-existent third-party libraries, creating a golden opportunity for supply-chain attacks that poison legitimate programs with malicious packages that can steal data, plant backdoors, and carry out other nefarious actions, newly published research shows.

The study, which used 16 of the most widely used large language models to generate 576,000 code samples, found that 440,000 of the package dependencies they contained were “hallucinated,” meaning they were non-existent. Open source models hallucinated the most, with 21 percent of the dependencies linking to non-existent libraries. A dependency is an essential code component that a separate piece of code requires to work properly. Dependencies save developers the hassle of rewriting code and are an essential part of the modern software supply chain.

Package hallucination flashbacks

These non-existent dependencies represent a threat to the software supply chain by exacerbating so-called dependency confusion attacks. These attacks work by causing a software package to access the wrong component dependency, for instance by publishing a malicious package and giving it the same name as the legitimate one but with a later version stamp. Software that depends on the package will, in some cases, choose the malicious version rather than the legitimate one because the former appears to be more recent.

Also known as package confusion, this form of attack was first demonstrated in 2021 in a proof-of-concept exploit that executed counterfeit code on networks belonging to some of the biggest companies on the planet, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla included. It’s one type of technique used in software supply-chain attacks, which aim to poison software at its very source, in an attempt to infect all users downstream.

“Once the attacker publishes a package under the hallucinated name, containing some malicious code, they rely on the model suggesting that name to unsuspecting users,” Joseph Spracklen, a University of Texas at San Antonio Ph.D. student and lead researcher, told Ars via email. “If a user trusts the LLM’s output and installs the package without carefully verifying it, the attacker’s payload, hidden in the malicious package, would be executed on the user’s system.”

AI-generated code could be a disaster for the software supply chain. Here’s why. Read More »