For the past year, previously unknown self-replicating malware has been compromising Linux devices around the world and installing cryptomining malware that takes unusual steps to conceal its inner workings, researchers said.
The worm is a customized version of Mirai, the botnet malware that infects Linux-based servers, routers, web cameras, and other so-called Internet of Things devices. Mirai came to light in 2016 when it was used to deliver record-setting distributed denial-of-service attacks that paralyzed key parts of the Internet that year. The creators soon released the underlying source code, a move that allowed a wide array of crime groups from around the world to incorporate Mirai into their own attack campaigns. Once taking hold of a Linux device, Mirai uses it as a platform to infect other vulnerable devices, a design that makes it a worm, meaning it self-replicates.
Dime-a-dozen malware with a twist
Traditionally, Mirai and its many variants have spread when one infected device scans the Internet looking for other devices that accept Telnet connections. The infected devices then attempt to crack the telnet password by guessing default and commonly used credential pairs. When successful, the newly infected devices target additional devices using the same technique. Mirai has primarily been used to wage DDoSes. Given the large amounts of bandwidth available to many such devices, the floods of junk traffic are often huge, giving the botnet as a whole tremendous power.
On Wednesday, researchers from network security and reliability firm Akamai revealed that a previously unknown Mirai-based network they dubbed NoaBot has been targeting Linux devices since at least last January. Instead of targeting weak telnet passwords, the NoaBot targets weak passwords connecting SSH connections. Another twist: Rather than performing DDoSes, the new botnet installs cryptocurrency mining software, which allows the attackers to generate digital coins using victims’ computing resources, electricity, and bandwidth. The cryptominer is a modified version of XMRig, another piece of open source malware. More recently, NoaBot has been used to also deliver P2PInfect, a separate worm researchers from Palo Alto Networks revealed last July.
Akamai has been monitoring NoaBot for the past 12 months in a honeypot that mimics real Linux devices to track various attacks circulating in the wild. To date, attacks have originated from 849 distinct IP addresses, almost all of which are likely hosting a device that’s already infected. The following figure tracks the number of attacks delivered to the honeypot over the past year.
“On the surface, NoaBot isn’t a very sophisticated campaign—it’s ‘just’ a Mirai variant and an XMRig cryptominer, and they’re a dime a dozen nowadays,” Akamai Senior Security Researcher Stiv Kupchik wrote in a report Wednesday. “However, the obfuscations added to the malware and the additions to the original source code paint a vastly different picture of the threat actors’ capabilities.”
The most advanced capability is how NoaBot installs the XMRig variant. Typically, when crypto miners are installed, the wallets’ funds are distributed to are specified in configuration settings delivered in a command line issued to the infected device. This approach has long posed a risk to threat actors because it allows researchers to track where the wallets are hosted and how much money has flowed into them.
NoaBot uses a novel technique to prevent such detection. Instead of delivering the configuration settings through a command line, the botnet stores the settings in encrypted or obfuscated form and decrypts them only after XMRig is loaded into memory. The botnet then replaces the internal variable that normally would hold the command line configuration settings and passes control to the XMRig source code.
Kupchik offered a more technical and detailed description:
In the XMRig open source code, miners can accept configurations in one of two ways — either via the command line or via environment variables. In our case, the threat actors chose not to modify the XMRig original code and instead added parts before the main function. To circumvent the need for command line arguments (which can be an indicator of compromise IOC and alert defenders), the threat actors had the miner replace its own command line (in technical terms, replacing argv) with more “meaningful” arguments before passing control to the XMRig code. The botnet runs the miner with (at most) one argument that tells it to print its logs. Before replacing its command line, however, the miner has to build its configuration. First, it copies basic arguments that are stored plaintext— the rig-id flag, which identifies the miner with three random letters, the threads flags, and a placeholder for the pool’s IP address (Figure 7).
Curiously, because the configurations are loaded via the xmm registers, IDA actually misses the first two loaded arguments, which are the binary name and the pool IP placeholder.
Enlarge/ NoaBot code that copies miner configurations
Akamai
Next, the miner decrypts the pool’s domain name. The domain name is stored, encrypted, in a few data blocks that are decrypted via XOR operations. Although XMRig can work with a domain name, the attackers decided to go the extra step, and implemented their own DNS resolution function. They communicate directly with Google’s DNS server (8.8.8.8) and parse its response to resolve the domain name to an IP address.
The last part of the configuration is also encrypted in a similar way, and it is the passkey for the miner to connect to the pool. All in all, the total configuration of the miner looks something like this:
-o --rig-id --threads –pass espana*tea
Notice anything missing? Yep, no wallet address.
We believe that the threat actors chose to run their own private pool instead of a public one, thereby eliminating the need to specify a wallet (their pool, their rules!). However, in our samples, we observed that miner’s domains were not resolving with Google’s DNS, so we can’t really prove our theory or gather more data from the pool, since the domains we have are no longer resolvable. We haven’t seen any recent incident that drops the miner, so it could also be that the threat actors decided to depart for greener pastures
Enlarge/ The Rexroth Nutrunner, a line of torque wrench sold by Bosch Rexroth.
Bosch Rexroth
Researchers have unearthed nearly two dozen vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to sabotage or disable a popular line of network-connected wrenches that factories around the world use to assemble sensitive instruments and devices.
The vulnerabilities, reported Tuesday by researchers from security firm Nozomi, reside in the Bosch Rexroth Handheld Nutrunner NXA015S-36V-B. The cordless device, which wirelessly connects to the local network of organizations that use it, allows engineers to tighten bolts and other mechanical fastenings to precise torque levels that are critical for safety and reliability. When fastenings are too loose, they risk causing the device to overheat and start fires. When too tight, threads can fail and result in torques that are too loose. The Nutrunner provides a torque-level indicator display that’s backed by a certification from the Association of German Engineers and adopted by the automotive industry in 1999. The NEXO-OS, the firmware running on devices, can be controlled using a browser-based management interface.
Nozomi researchers said the device is riddled with 23 vulnerabilities that, in certain cases, can be exploited to install malware. The malware could then be used to disable entire fleets of the devices or to cause them to tighten fastenings too loosely or tightly while the display continues to indicate the critical settings are still properly in place. B
Bosch officials emailed a statement that included the usual lines about security being a top priority. It went on to say that Nozomi reached out a few weeks ago to reveal the vulnerabilities. “Bosch Rexroth immediately took up this advice and is working on a patch to solve the problem,” the statement said. “This patch will be released at the end of January 2024.”
In a post, Nozomi researchers wrote:
The vulnerabilities found on the Bosch Rexroth NXA015S-36V-B allow an unauthenticated attacker who is able to send network packets to the target device to obtain remote execution of arbitrary code (RCE) with root privileges, completely compromising it. Once this unauthorized access is gained, numerous attack scenarios become possible. Within our lab environment, we successfully reconstructed the following two scenarios:
Ransomware: we were able to make the device completely inoperable by preventing a local operator from controlling the drill through the onboard display and disabling the trigger button. Furthermore, we could alter the graphical user interface (GUI) to display an arbitrary message on the screen, requesting the payment of a ransom. Given the ease with which this attack can be automated across numerous devices, an attacker could swiftly render all tools on a production line inaccessible, potentially causing significant disruptions to the final asset owner.
Enlarge/ A PoC ransomware running on the test nutrunner.
Nozomi
Manipulation of Control and View: we managed to stealthily alter the configuration of tightening programs, such as by increasing or decreasing the target torque value. At the same time, by patching in-memory the GUI on the onboard display, we could show a normal value to the operator, who would remain completely unaware of the change.
A manipulation of view attack. The actual torque applied in this tightening was 0.15 Nm.
Software maker Ivanti is urging users of its end-point security product to patch a critical vulnerability that makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code inside affected networks.
The vulnerability, in a class known as a SQL injection, resides in all supported versions of the Ivanti Endpoint Manager. Also known as the Ivanti EPM, the software runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, and Internet of Things devices such as routers. SQL injection vulnerabilities stem from faulty code that interprets user input as database commands or, in more technical terms, from concatenating data with SQL code without quoting the data in accordance with the SQL syntax. CVE-2023-39336, as the Ivanti vulnerability is tracked, carries a severity rating of 9.6 out of a possible 10.
“If exploited, an attacker with access to the internal network can leverage an unspecified SQL injection to execute arbitrary SQL queries and retrieve output without the need for authentication,” Ivanti officials wrote Friday in a post announcing the patch availability. “This can then allow the attacker control over machines running the EPM agent. When the core server is configured to use SQL express, this might lead to RCE on the core server.”
RCE is short for remote code execution, or the ability for off-premises attackers to run code of their choice. Currently, there’s no known evidence the vulnerability is under active exploitation.
Ivanti has also published a disclosure that is restricted only to registered users. A copy obtained by Ars said Ivanti learned of the vulnerability in October. The private disclosure in full is:
It’s unclear what “attacker with access to the internal network” means. Under the official explanation of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, the code Ivanti used in the disclosure, AV:A, is short for “Attack Vector: Adjacent.” The scoring system defined it as:
The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack, but the attack is limited at the protocol level to a logically adjacent topology. This can mean an attack must be launched from the same shared physical or logical (e.g. local IP subnet) network…
In a thread on Mastodon, several security experts offered interpretations. One person who asked not to be identified by name, wrote:
Everything else about the vulnerability [besides the requirement of access to the network] is severe:
Attack complexity is low
Privileges not required
No user interaction necessary
Scope of the subsequent impact to other systems is changed
Impact to Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability is High
Reid Wightman, a researcher specializing in the security of industrial control systems at Dragos, provided this analysis:
Speculation but it appears that Ivanti is mis-applying CVSS and the score should possibly be 10.0.
They say AV:A (meaning, “adjacent network access required”). Usually this means that one of the following is true: 1) the vulnerable network protocol is not routable (this usually means it is not an IP-based protocol that is vulnerable), or 2) the vulnerability is really a person-in-the-middle attack (although this usually also has AC:H, since a person-in-the-middle requires some existing access to the network in order to actually launch the attack) or 3) (what I think), the vendor is mis-applying CVSS because they think their vulnerable service should not be exposed aka “end users should have a firewall in place”.
The assumption that the attacker must be an insider would have a CVSS modifier of PR:L or PR:H (privileges required on the system), or UI:R (tricking a legitimate user into doing something that they shouldn’t). The assumption that the attacker has some other existing access to the network should add AC:H (attack complexity high) to the score. Both would reduce the numeric score.
I’ve had many an argument with vendors who argue (3), specifically, “nobody should have the service exposed so it’s not really AV:N”. But CVSS does not account for “good network architecture”. It only cares about default configuration, and whether the attack can be launched from a remote network…it does not consider firewall rules that most organizations should have in place, in part because you always find counterexamples where the service is exposed to the Internet. You can almost always find counterexamples on Shodan and similar. Plenty of “Ivanti Service Managers” exposed on Shodan for example, though, I’m not sure if this is the actual vulnerable service.
A third participant, Ron Bowes of Skull Security, wrote: “Vendors—especially Ivanti—have a habit of underplaying security issues. They think that making it sound like the vuln is less bad makes them look better, when in reality it just makes their customers less safe. That’s a huge pet peeve. I’m not gonna judge vendors for having a vuln, but I am going to judge them for handling it badly.”
Ivanti representatives didn’t respond to emailed questions.
Putting devices running Ivanti EDM behind a firewall is a best practice and will go a long way to mitigating the severity of CVE-2023-39336, but it would likely do nothing to prevent an attacker who has gained limited access to an employee workstation from exploiting the critical vulnerability. It’s unclear if the vulnerability will come under active exploitation, but the best course of action is for all Ivanti EDM users to install the patch as soon as possible.
Orange España, Spain’s second-biggest mobile operator, suffered a major outage on Wednesday after an unknown party obtained a “ridiculously weak” password and used it to access an account for managing the global routing table that controls which networks deliver the company’s Internet traffic, researchers said.
The hijacking began around 9: 28 Coordinated Universal Time (about 2: 28 Pacific time) when the party logged into Orange’s RIPE NCC account using the password “ripeadmin” (minus the quotation marks). The RIPE Network Coordination Center is one of five Regional Internet Registries, which are responsible for managing and allocating IP addresses to Internet service providers, telecommunication organizations, and companies that manage their own network infrastructure. RIPE serves 75 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
“Things got ugly”
The password came to light after the party, using the moniker Snow, posted an image to social media that showed the orange.es email address associated with the RIPE account. RIPE said it’s working on ways to beef up account security.
Enlarge/ Screenshot showing RIPE account, including the orange.es email address associated with it.
Security firm Hudson Rock plugged the email address into a database it maintains to track credentials for sale in online bazaars. In a post, the security firm said the username and “ridiculously weak” password were harvested by information-stealing malware that had been installed on an Orange computer since September. The password was then made available for sale on an infostealer marketplace.
Enlarge/ Partially redacted screenshot from Hudson Rock database showing the credentials for the Orange RIPE account.
HJudson Rock
Researcher Kevin Beaumont said thousands of credentials protecting other RIPE accounts are also available in such marketplaces.
Once logged into Orange’s RIPE account, Snow made changes to the global routing table the mobile operator relies on to specify what backbone providers are authorized to carry its traffic to various parts of the world. These tables are managed using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which connects one regional network to the rest of the Internet. Specifically, Snow added several new ROAs, short for Route Origin Authorizations. These entries allow “autonomous systems” such as Orange’s AS12479 to designate other autonomous systems or large chunks of IP addresses to deliver its traffic to various regions of the world.
In the initial stage, the changes had no meaningful effect because the ROAs Snow added announcing the IP addresses—93.117.88.0/22 and 93.117.88.0/21, and 149.74.0.0/16—already originated with Orange’s AS12479. A few minutes later, Snow added ROAs to five additional routes. All but one of them also originated with the Orange AS, and once again had no effect on traffic, according to a detailed writeup of the event by Doug Madory, a BGP expert at security and networking firm Kentik.
The creation of the ROA for 149.74.0.0/16 was the first act by Snow to create problems, because the maximum prefix length was set to 16, rendering any smaller routes using the address range invalid
“It invalidated any routes that are more specific (longer prefix length) than a 16,” Madory told Ars in an online interview. “So routes like 149.74.100.0/23 became invalid and started getting filtered. Then [Snow] created more ROAs to cover those routes. Why? Not sure. I think, at first, they were just messing around. Before that ROA was created, there was no ROA to assert anything about this address range.”
Google-owned security firm Mandiant spent several hours trying to regain control of its account on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Wednesday after an unknown scammer hijacked it and used it to spread a link that attempted to steal cryptocurrency from people who clicked on it.
“We are aware of the incident impacting the Mandiant X account and are working to resolve the issue,” company officials wrote in a statement. “We’ve since regained control over the account and are currently working on restoring it.” The statement didn’t answer questions asking if the company had determined how the account was compromised.
The hacked Mandiant account was initially used to masquerade as one belonging to Phantom, a company that offers a wallet for storing cryptocurrency. Posts on X encouraged people to visit a malicious website to see if their wallet was one of 250,000 that were eligible for an award of tokens. Over several hours, X employees played tug-of-war with the unknown scammer, with scam posts being removed only to reappear, according to people who followed the events.
Mandiant profile page claiming to be affiliated with “friendly crypto wallet” Phantom.
One of the scam posts spread by the hijacked Mandiant account.
Eventually, the scammer changed the @mandiant username and reappeared under a new username. After using the account to promote a fake website impersonating Phantom and promising free tokens, it posted the cryptic message: “check bookmarks when you get account back.” It also chided Mandiant to “change password please.”
Post saying “change password please”
Post saying to check bookmarks
At the time this post went live on Ars, the Mandiant profile displayed the message “This account doesn’t exist.”
Mandiant is one of the leading security companies and best known for helping clients investigate and recover from major network compromises. That vantage point gives it major insights into threat actors, many of them backed by nation-states, and the often previously unknown tactics, techniques, and procedures they use to compromise the security of some of the world’s most powerful and well-resourced organizations. Google purchased Mandiant in 2022 for $5.4 billion, which, at the time, was its second-biggest acquisition ever.
Many questions remain about Mandiant’s measures to secure its X account. Among them: Was it protected by a strong password and any form of two-factor authentication? Last month, someone claimed to have discovered the social media site was vulnerable to a “reflected XSS,” a type of vulnerability that can sometimes be used to compromise the security of accounts when a legitimate user currently logged in clicks on a malicious link in a different browser tab. The user said they reported the vulnerability through legitimate channels but that the submission didn’t qualify under the X bug bounty program.
“Clicking a crafted link or going to some crafted web pages would allow attackers to take over your account (posting, liking, updating your profile, deleting your account, etc.),” Chaofan Shou, a University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. candidate, wrote last month.
Enlarge/ December 12 post by UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Chaofan Shou.
Attempts to reach Phantom for comment were unsuccessful.
Over the past year, Apple has taken protective steps to notify iPhone and Android users if an AirTag is in their vicinity for a significant amount of time without the presence of its owner’s iPhone, which could indicate that an AirTag has been planted to secretly track their location. Apple hasn’t said exactly how long this time interval is, but to create the much-needed alert system, Apple made some crucial changes to the location privacy design the company originally developed a few years ago for its “Find My” device tracking feature. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Diego, say, though, that they’ve developed a cryptographic scheme to bridge the gap—prioritizing detection of potentially malicious AirTags while also preserving maximum privacy for AirTag users.
The Find My system uses both public and private cryptographic keys to identify individual AirTags and manage their location tracking. But Apple developed a particularly thoughtful mechanism to regularly rotate the public device identifier—every 15 minutes, according to the researchers. This way, it would be much more difficult for someone to track your location over time using a Bluetooth scanner to follow the identifier around. This worked well for privately tracking the location of, say, your MacBook if it was lost or stolen, but the downside of constantly changing this identifier for AirTags was that it provided cover for the tiny devices to be deployed abusively.
In reaction to this conundrum, Apple revised the system so an AirTag’s public identifier now only rotates once every 24 hours if the AirTag is away from an iPhone or other Apple device that “owns” it. The idea is that this way other devices can detect potential stalking, but won’t be throwing up alerts all the time if you spend a weekend with a friend who has their iPhone and the AirTag on their keys in their pockets.
In practice, though, the researchers say that these changes have created a situation where AirTags are broadcasting their location to anyone who’s checking within a 30- to 50-foot radius over the course of an entire day—enough time to track a person as they go about their life and get a sense of their movements.
“We had students walk through cities, walk through Times Square and Washington, DC, and lots and lots of people are broadcasting their locations,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matt Green, who worked on the research with a group of colleagues, including Nadia Heninger and Abhishek Jain. “Hundreds of AirTags were not near the device they were registered to, and we’re assuming that most of those were not stalker AirTags.”
Apple has been working with companies like Google, Samsung, and Tile on a cross-industry effort to address the threat of tracking from products similar to AirTags. And for now, at least, the researchers say that the consortium seems to have adopted Apple’s approach of rotating the device public identifiers once every 24 hours. But the privacy trade-off inherent in this solution made the researchers curious about whether it would be possible to design a system that better balanced both privacy and safety.
“Triangulation” infected dozens of iPhones belonging to employees of Moscow-based Kaspersky.
Researchers on Wednesday presented intriguing new findings surrounding an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky. Chief among the discoveries: the unknown attackers were able to achieve an unprecedented level of access by exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few if anyone outside of Apple and chip suppliers such as ARM Holdings knew of.
“The exploit’s sophistication and the feature’s obscurity suggest the attackers had advanced technical capabilities,” Kaspersky researcher Boris Larin wrote in an email. “Our analysis hasn’t revealed how they became aware of this feature, but we’re exploring all possibilities, including accidental disclosure in past firmware or source code releases. They may also have stumbled upon it through hardware reverse engineering.”
Four zero-days exploited for years
Other questions remain unanswered, wrote Larin, even after about 12 months of intensive investigation. Besides how the attackers learned of the hardware feature, the researchers still don’t know what, precisely, its purpose is. Also unknown is if the feature is a native part of the iPhone or enabled by a third-party hardware component such as ARM’s CoreSight
The mass backdooring campaign, which according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, according to Russian government officials, came to light in June. Over a span of at least four years, Kaspersky said, the infections were delivered in iMessage texts that installed malware through a complex exploit chain without requiring the receiver to take any action.
With that, the devices were infected with full-featured spyware that, among other things, transmitted microphone recordings, photos, geolocation, and other sensitive data to attacker-controlled servers. Although infections didn’t survive a reboot, the unknown attackers kept their campaign alive simply by sending devices a new malicious iMessage text shortly after devices were restarted.
A fresh infusion of details disclosed Wednesday said that “Triangulation”—the name Kaspersky gave to both the malware and the campaign that installed it—exploited four critical zero-day vulnerabilities, meaning serious programming flaws that were known to the attackers before they were known to Apple. The company has since patched all four of the vulnerabilities, which are tracked as:
Besides affecting iPhones, these critical zero-days and the secret hardware function resided in Macs, iPods, iPads, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches. What’s more, the exploits Kaspersky recovered were intentionally developed to work on those devices as well. Apple has patched those platforms as well. Apple declined to comment for this article.
Detecting infections is extremely challenging, even for people with advanced forensic expertise. For those who want to try, a list of Internet addresses, files, and other indicators of compromise is here.
Mystery iPhone function proves pivotal to Triangulation’s success
The most intriguing new detail is the targeting of the heretofore-unknown hardware feature, which proved to be pivotal to the Operation Triangulation campaign. A zero-day in the feature allowed the attackers to bypass advanced hardware-based memory protections designed to safeguard device system integrity even after an attacker gained the ability to tamper with memory of the underlying kernel. On most other platforms, once attackers successfully exploit a kernel vulnerability they have full control of the compromised system.
On Apple devices equipped with these protections, such attackers are still unable to perform key post-exploitation techniques such as injecting malicious code into other processes, or modifying kernel code or sensitive kernel data. This powerful protection was bypassed by exploiting a vulnerability in the secret function. The protection, which has rarely been defeated in exploits found to date, is also present in Apple’s M1 and M2 CPUs.
Kaspersky researchers learned of the secret hardware function only after months of extensive reverse engineering of devices that had been infected with Triangulation. In the course, the researchers’ attention was drawn to what are known as hardware registers, which provide memory addresses for CPUs to interact with peripheral components such as USBs, memory controllers, and GPUs. MMIOs, short for Memory-mapped Input/Outputs, allow the CPU to write to the specific hardware register of a specific peripheral device.
The researchers found that several of MMIO addresses the attackers used to bypass the memory protections weren’t identified in any so-called device tree, a machine-readable description of a particular set of hardware that can be helpful to reverse engineers. Even after the researchers further scoured source codes, kernel images, and firmware, they were still unable to find any mention of the MMIO addresses.
Enlarge/ Shortly after the FBI posted a notice saying it had seized the dark-web site of AlphV, the ransomware group posted this notice claiming otherwise.
The FBI spent much of Tuesday locked in an online tug-of-war with one of the Internet’s most aggressive ransomware groups after taking control of infrastructure the group has used to generate more than $300 million in illicit payments to date.
Early Tuesday morning, the dark-web site belonging to AlphV, a ransomware group that also goes by the name BlackCat, suddenly started displaying a banner that said it had been seized by the FBI as part of a coordinated law enforcement action. Gone was all the content AlphV had posted to the site previously.
Around the same time, the Justice Department said it had disrupted AlphV’s operations by releasing a software tool that would allow roughly 500 AlphV victims to restore their systems and data. In all, Justice Department officials said, AlphV had extorted roughly $300 million from 1,000 victims.
An affidavit unsealed in a Florida federal court, meanwhile, revealed that the disruption involved FBI agents obtaining 946 private keys used to host victim communication sites. The legal document said the keys were obtained with the help of a confidential human source who had “responded to an advertisement posted to a publicly accessible online forum soliciting applicants for Blackcat affiliate positions.”
“In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said in Tuesday’s announcement. “With a decryption tool provided by the FBI to hundreds of ransomware victims worldwide, businesses and schools were able to reopen, and health care and emergency services were able to come back online. We will continue to prioritize disruptions and place victims at the center of our strategy to dismantle the ecosystem fueling cybercrime.”
Within hours, the FBI seizure notice displayed on the AlphV dark-web site was gone. In its place was a new notice proclaiming: “This website has been unseized.” The new notice, written by AlphV officials, downplayed the significance of the FBI’s action. While not disputing the decryptor tool worked for 400 victims, AlphV officials said that the disruption would prevent data belonging to another 3,000 victims from being decrypted.
“Now because of them, more than 3,000 companies will never receive their keys.”
As the hours went on, the FBI and AlphV sparred over control of the dark-web site, with each replacing the notices of the other.
One researcher described the ongoing struggle as a “tug of Tor,” a reference to Tor, the network of servers that allows people to browse and publish websites anonymously. Like most ransomware groups, AlphV hosts its sites over Tor. Not only does this arrangement prevent law enforcement investigators from identifying group members, it also hampers investigators from obtaining court orders compelling the web host to turn over control of the site.
The only way to control a Tor address is with possession of a dedicated private encryption key. Once the FBI obtained it, investigators were able to publish Tuesday’s seizure notice to it. Since AlphV also maintained possession of the key, group members were similarly free to post their own content. Since Tor makes it impossible to change the private key corresponding to an address, neither side has been able to lock the other out.
With each side essentially deadlocked, AlphV has resorted to removing some of the restrictions it previously placed on affiliates. Under the common ransomware-as-a-service model, affiliates are the ones who actually hack victims. When successful, the affiliates use the AlphV ransomware and infrastructure to encrypt data and then negotiate and facilitate a payment by bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.
Up to now, AlphV placed rules on affiliates forbidding them from targeting hospitals and critical infrastructure. Now, those rules no longer apply unless the victim is located in the Commonwealth of Independent States—a list of countries that were once part of the former Soviet Union.
“Because of their actions, we are introducing new rules, or rather, we are removing ALL rules except one, you cannot touch the CIS, you can now block hospitals, nuclear power plants, anything, anywhere,” the AlphV notice said. The notice said that AlphV was also allowing affiliates to retain 90 percent of any ransom payments they get, and that ‘VIP’ affiliates would receive a private program on separate isolated data centers. The move is likely an attempt to stanch the possible defection by affiliates spooked by the FBI’s access to the AlphV infrastructure.
The back and forth has prompted some to say that the disruption failed, since AlphV retains control of its site and continues to possess the data it stole from victims. In a discussion on social media with one such critic, ransomware expert Allan Liska pushed back.
“The server and all of its data is still in possession of FBI—and ALPHV ain’t getting none of that back,” Liska, a threat researcher at security firm Recorded Future, wrote.
Enlarge/ Social media post by Liska arguing the FBI maintains access to AlphV infrastructure.
“But, hey you are correct and I am 100% wrong. I encourage you, and all ransomware groups to sign up to be an ALPHV affiliate now, it is definitely safe. Do it, Chicken!”
Enlarge/ A Comcast Xfinity service van in San Ramon, California on February 25, 2020.
Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado
Comcast waited 13 days to patch its network against a high-severity vulnerability, a lapse that allowed hackers to make off with password data and other sensitive information belonging to 36 million Xfinity customers.
The breach, which was carried out by exploiting a vulnerability in network hardware sold by Citrix, gave hackers access to usernames and cryptographically hashed passwords for 35.9 million Xfinity customers, the cable TV and Internet provider said in a notification filed Monday with the Maine attorney general’s office. Citrix disclosed the vulnerability and issued a patch on October 10. Eight days later, researchers reported that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-4966 and by the name Citrix Bleed, had been under active exploitation since August. Comcast didn’t patch its network until October 23, 13 days after a patch became available and five days after the report of the in-the-wild attacks exploiting it.
“However, we subsequently discovered that prior to mitigation, between October 16 and October 19, 2023, there was unauthorized access to some of our internal systems that we concluded was a result of this vulnerability,” an accompanying notice stated. “We notified federal law enforcement and conducted an investigation into the nature and scope of the incident. On November 16, 2023, it was determined that information was likely acquired.”
Comcast is still investigating precisely what data the attackers obtained. So far, Monday’s disclosure said, information known to have been taken includes usernames and hashed passwords, names, contact information, the last four digits of social security numbers, dates of birth, and/or secret questions and answers. Xfinity is Comcast’s cable television and Internet division.
Citrix Bleed has emerged as one of the year’s most severe and widely exploited vulnerabilities, with a severity rating of 9.4 out of 10. The vulnerability, residing in Citrix’s NetScaler Application Delivery Controller and NetScaler Gateway, can be exploited without any authentication or privileges on affected networks. Exploits disclose session tokens, which the hardware assigns to devices that have already successfully provided login credentials. Possession of the tokens allows hackers to override any multi-factor authentication in use and log into the device.
Other companies that have been hacked through Citrix Bleed include Boeing; Toyota; DP World Australia, a branch of the Dubai-based logistics company DP World; Industrial and Commercial Bank of China; and law firm Allen & Overy.
The name Citrix Bleed is an allusion to Heartbleed, a different critical information disclosure zero-day that turned the Internet on its head in 2014. That vulnerability, which resided in the OpenSSL code library, came under mass exploitation and allowed the pilfering of passwords, encryption keys, banking credentials, and all kinds of other sensitive information. Citrix Bleed hasn’t been as dire because fewer vulnerable devices are in use.
A sweep of the most active ransomware sites didn’t turn up any claims of responsibility for the hack of the Comcast network. An Xfinity representative said in an email that the company has yet to receive any ransom demands, and investigators aren’t aware of any customer data being leaked or of any attacks on affected customers.
Comcast is requiring Xfinity customers to reset their passwords to protect against the possibility that attackers can crack the stolen hashes. The company is also encouraging customers to enable two-factor authentication. The representative declined to say why company admins didn’t patch sooner.
Governments and the tech industry around the world have been scrambling in recent years to curb the rise of online scamming and cybercrime. Yet even with progress on digital defenses, enforcement, and deterrence, the ransomware attacks, business email compromises, and malware infections keep on coming. Over the past decade, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has forged its own strategies, both technical and legal, to investigate scams, take down criminal infrastructure, and block malicious traffic.
The DCU is fueled, of course, by Microsoft’s massive scale and the visibility across the Internet that comes from the reach of Windows. But DCU team members repeatedly told WIRED that their work is motivated by very personal goals of protecting victims rather than a broad policy agenda or corporate mandate.
In just its latest action, the DCU announced Wednesday evening efforts to disrupt a cybercrime group that Microsoft calls Storm-1152. A middleman in the criminal ecosystem, Storm-1152 sells software services and tools like identity verification bypass mechanisms to other cybercriminals. The group has grown into the number one creator and vendor of fake Microsoft accounts—creating roughly 750 million scam accounts that the actor has sold for millions of dollars.
The DCU used legal techniques it has honed over many years related to protecting intellectual property to move against Storm-1152. The team obtained a court order from the Southern District of New York on December 7 to seize some of the criminal group’s digital infrastructure in the US and take down websites including the services 1stCAPTCHA, AnyCAPTCHA, and NoneCAPTCHA, as well as a site that sold fake Outlook accounts called Hotmailbox.me.
The strategy reflects the DCU’s evolution. A group with the name “Digital Crimes Unit” has existed at Microsoft since 2008, but the team in its current form took shape in 2013 when the old DCU merged with a Microsoft team known as the Intellectual Property Crimes Unit.
“Things have become a lot more complex,” says Peter Anaman, a DCU principal investigator. “Traditionally you would find one or two people working together. Now, when you’re looking at an attack, there are multiple players. But if we can break it down and understand the different layers that are involved it will help us be more impactful.”
The DCU’s hybrid technical and legal approach to chipping away at cybercrime is still unusual, but as the cybercriminal ecosystem has evolved—alongside its overlaps with state-backed hacking campaigns—the idea of employing creative legal strategies in cyberspace has become more mainstream. In recent years, for example, Meta-owned WhatsApp and Apple both took on the notorious spyware maker NSO Group with lawsuits.
Still, the DCU’s particular progression was the result of Microsoft’s unique dominance during the rise of the consumer Internet. As the group’s mission came into focus while dealing with threats from the late 2000s and early 2010s—like the widespread Conficker worm—the DCU’s unorthodox and aggressive approach drew criticism at times for its fallout and potential impacts on legitimate businesses and websites.
“There’s simply no other company that takes such a direct approach to taking on scammers,” WIRED wrote in a story about the DCU from October 2014. “That makes Microsoft rather effective, but also a little bit scary, observers say.”
Richard Boscovich, the DCU’s assistant general counsel and a former assistant US attorney in Florida’s Southern District, told WIRED in 2014 that it was frustrating for people within Microsoft to see malware like Conficker rampage across the web and feel like the company could improve the defenses of its products, but not do anything to directly deal with the actors behind the crimes. That dilemma spurred the DCU’s innovations and continues to do so.
“What’s impacting people? That’s what we get asked to take on, and we’ve developed a muscle to change and to take on new types of crime,” says Zoe Krumm, the DCU’s director of analytics. In the mid-2000s, Krumm says, Brad Smith, now Microsoft’s vice chair and president, was a driving force in turning the company’s attention toward the threat of email spam.
“The DCU has always been a bit of an incubation team. I remember all of a sudden, it was like, ‘We have to do something about spam.’ Brad comes to the team and he’s like, ‘OK, guys, let’s put together a strategy.’ I’ll never forget that it was just, ‘Now we’re going to focus here.’ And that has continued, whether it be moving into the malware space, whether it be tech support fraud, online child exploitation, business email compromise.”
Users of UniFi, the popular line of wireless devices from manufacturer Ubiquiti, are reporting receiving private camera feeds from, and control over, devices belonging to other users, posts published to social media site Reddit over the past 24 hours show.
“Recently, my wife received a notification from UniFi Protect, which included an image from a security camera,” one Reddit user reported. “However, here’s the twist—this camera doesn’t belong to us.”
Stoking concern and anxiety
The post included two images. The first showed a notification pushed to the person’s phone reporting that their UDM Pro, a network controller and network gateway used by tech-enthusiast consumers, had detected someone moving in the backyard. A still shot of video recorded by a connected surveillance camera showed a three-story house surrounded by trees. The second image showed the dashboard belonging to the Reddit user. The user’s connected device was a UDM SE, and the video it captured showed a completely different house.
Less than an hour later, a different Reddit user posting to the same thread replied: “So it’s VERY interesting you posted this, I was just about to post that when I navigated to unifi.ui.com this morning, I was logged into someone else’s account completely! It had my email on the top right, but someone else’s UDM Pro! I could navigate the device, view, and change settings! Terrifying!!”
Two other people took to the same thread to report similar behavior happening to them.
Other Reddit threads posted in the past day reporting UniFi users connecting to private devices or feeds belonging to others are here and here. The first one reported that the Reddit poster gained full access to someone else’s system. The post included two screenshots showing what the poster said was the captured video of an unrecognized business. The other poster reported logging into their Ubiquiti dashboard to find system controls for someone else. “I ended up logging out, clearing cookies, etc seems fine now for me…” the poster wrote.
Yet another person reported the same problem in a post published to Ubiquiti’s community support forum on Thursday, as this Ars story was being reported. The person reported logging into the UniFi console as is their routine each day.
“However this time I was presented with 88 consoles from another account,” the person wrote. “I had full access to these consoles, just as I would my own. This was only stopped when I forced a browser refresh, and I was presented again with my consoles.”
Ubiquity on Thursday said it had identified the glitch and fixed the errors that caused it.
“Specifically, this issue was caused by an upgrade to our UniFi Cloud infrastructure, which we have since solved,” officials wrote. They went on:
1. What happened?
1,216 Ubiquiti accounts (“Group 1”) were improperly associated with a separate group of 1,177 Ubiquiti accounts (“Group 2”).
2. When did this happen?
December 13, from 6: 47 AM to 3: 45 PM UTC.
3. What does this mean?
During this time, a small number of users from Group 2 received push notifications on their mobile devices from the consoles assigned to a small number of users from Group 1.
Additionally, during this time, a user from Group 2 that attempted to log into his or her account may have been granted temporary remote access to a Group 1 account.
The reports are understandably stoking concern and even anxiety for users of UniFi products, which include wireless access points, switches, routers, controller devices, VoIP phones, and access control products. As the Internet-accessible portals into the local networks of users, UniFi devices provide a means for accessing cameras, mics, and other sensitive resources inside the home.
“I guess I should stop walking around naked in my house now,” a participant in one of the forums joked.
To Ubiquiti’s credit, company employees proactively responded to reports, signaling they took the reports seriously and began actively investigating early on. The employees said the problem has been corrected, and the account mix-ups are no longer occurring.
It’s useful to remember that this sort of behavior—legitimately logging into an account only to find the data or controls belonging to a completely different account—is as old as the Internet. Recent examples: A T-Mobile mistake in September, and similar glitches involving Chase Bank, First Virginia Banks, Credit Karma, and Sprint.
The precise root causes of this type of system error vary from incident to incident, but they often involve “middlebox” devices, which sit between the front- and back-end devices. To improve performance, middleboxes cache certain data, including the credentials of users who have recently logged in. When mismatches occur, credentials for one account can be mapped to a different account.
In an email, a Ubiquiti official said company employees are still gathering “information to provide an accurate assessment.”
