Security – Page 9

Two certificate authorities booted from the good graces of Chrome

Biz & IT, certificate authorities, chrome browser, Google, Security / Tim Belzer / June 4, 2025

Google says its Chrome browser will stop trusting certificates from two certificate authorities after “patterns of concerning behavior observed over the past year” diminished trust in their reliability.

The two organizations, Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom and Budapest-based Netlock, are among the hundreds of certificate authorities trusted by Chrome and most other browsers to provide digital certificates that encrypt traffic and certify the authenticity of sites. With the ability to mint cryptographic credentials that cause address bars to display a padlock, assuring the trustworthiness of a site, these certificate authorities wield significant control over the security of the web.

Inherent risk

“Over the past several months and years, we have observed a pattern of compliance failures, unmet improvement commitments, and the absence of tangible, measurable progress in response to publicly disclosed incident reports,” members of the Chrome security team wrote Tuesday. “When these factors are considered in aggregate and considered against the inherent risk each publicly-trusted CA poses to the internet, continued public trust is no longer justified.”

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Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers

Biz & IT, browsing histories, Features, Meta Pixel, Metrica, privacy, Security, yandex / Rejus Almole / June 3, 2025

Abuse allows Meta and Yandex to attach persistent identifiers to detailed browsing histories.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it’s investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they’re off-limits for every other site.

A blatant violation

“One of the fundamental security principles that exists in the web, as well as the mobile system, is called sandboxing,” Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, one of the researchers behind the discovery, said in an interview. “You run everything in a sandbox, and there is no interaction within different elements running on it. What this attack vector allows is to break the sandbox that exists between the mobile context and the web context. The channel that exists allowed the Android system to communicate what happens in the browser with the identity running in the mobile app.”

The bypass—which Yandex began in 2017 and Meta started last September—allows the companies to pass cookies or other identifiers from Firefox and Chromium-based browsers to native Android apps for Facebook, Instagram, and various Yandex apps. The companies can then tie that vast browsing history to the account holder logged into the app.

This abuse has been observed only in Android, and evidence suggests that the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica target only Android users. The researchers say it may be technically feasible to target iOS because browsers on that platform allow developers to programmatically establish localhost connections that apps can monitor on local ports.

In contrast to iOS, however, Android imposes fewer controls on local host communications and background executions of mobile apps, the researchers said, while also implementing stricter controls in app store vetting processes to limit such abuses. This overly permissive design allows Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica to send web requests with web tracking identifiers to specific local ports that are continuously monitored by the Facebook, Instagram, and Yandex apps. These apps can then link pseudonymous web identities with actual user identities, even in private browsing modes, effectively de-anonymizing users’ browsing habits on sites containing these trackers.

Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica are analytics scripts designed to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica are estimated to be installed on 5.8 million and 3 million sites, respectively.

Meta and Yandex achieve the bypass by abusing basic functionality built into modern mobile browsers that allows browser-to-native app communications. The functionality lets browsers send web requests to local Android ports to establish various services, including media connections through the RTC protocol, file sharing, and developer debugging.

A conceptual diagram representing the exchange of identifiers between the web trackers running on the browser context and native Facebook, Instagram, and Yandex apps for Android.

While the technical underpinnings differ, both Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica are performing a “weird protocol misuse” to gain unvetted access that Android provides to localhost ports on the 127.0.0.1 IP address. Browsers access these ports without user notification. Facebook, Instagram, and Yandex native apps silently listen on those ports, copy identifiers in real time, and link them to the user logged into the app.

A representative for Google said the behavior violates the terms of service for its Play marketplace and the privacy expectations of Android users.

“The developers in this report are using capabilities present in many browsers across iOS and Android in unintended ways that blatantly violate our security and privacy principles,” the representative said, referring to the people who write the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica JavaScript. “We’ve already implemented changes to mitigate these invasive techniques and have opened our own investigation and are directly in touch with the parties.”

Meta didn’t answer emailed questions for this article, but provided the following statement: “We are in discussions with Google to address a potential miscommunication regarding the application of their policies. Upon becoming aware of the concerns, we decided to pause the feature while we work with Google to resolve the issue.”

Yandex representatives didn’t answer an email seeking comment.

How Meta and Yandex de-anonymize Android users

Meta Pixel developers have abused various protocols to implement the covert listening since the practice began last September. They started by causing apps to send HTTP requests to port 12387. A month later, Meta Pixel stopped sending this data, even though Facebook and Instagram apps continued to monitor the port.

In November, Meta Pixel switched to a new method that invoked WebSocket, a protocol for two-way communications, over port 12387.

That same month, Meta Pixel also deployed a new method that used WebRTC, a real-time peer-to-peer communication protocol commonly used for making audio or video calls in the browser. This method used a complicated process known as SDP munging, a technique for JavaScript code to modify Session Description Protocol data before it’s sent. Still in use today, the SDP munging by Meta Pixel inserts key _fbp cookie content into fields meant for connection information. This causes the browser to send that data as part of a STUN request to the Android local host, where the Facebook or Instagram app can read it and link it to the user.

In May, a beta version of Chrome introduced a mitigation that blocked the type of SDP munging that Meta Pixel used. Within days, Meta Pixel circumvented the mitigation by adding a new method that swapped the STUN requests with the TURN requests.

In a post, the researchers provided a detailed description of the _fbp cookie from a website to the native app and, from there, to the Meta server:

1. The user opens the native Facebook or Instagram app, which eventually is sent to the background and creates a background service to listen for incoming traffic on a TCP port (12387 or 12388) and a UDP port (the first unoccupied port in 12580–12585). Users must be logged-in with their credentials on the apps.

2. The user opens their browser and visits a website integrating the Meta Pixel.

3. At this stage, some websites wait for users’ consent before embedding Meta Pixel. In our measurements of the top 100K website homepages, we found websites that require consent to be a minority (more than 75% of affected sites does not require user consent)…

4. The Meta Pixel script is loaded and the _fbp cookie is sent to the native Instagram or Facebook app via WebRTC (STUN) SDP Munging.

5. The Meta Pixel script also sends the _fbp value in a request to https://www.facebook.com/tr along with other parameters such as page URL (dl), website and browser metadata, and the event type (ev) (e.g., PageView, AddToCart, Donate, Purchase).

6. The Facebook or Instagram apps receive the _fbp cookie from the Meta JavaScripts running on the browser and transmits it to the GraphQL endpoint (https://graph[.]facebook[.]com/graphql) along with other persistent user identifiers, linking users’ fbp ID (web visit) with their Facebook or Instagram account.

Detailed flow of the way the Meta Pixel leaks the _fbp cookie from Android browsers to it’s Facebook and Instagram apps.

The first known instance of Yandex Metrica linking websites visited in Android browsers to app identities was in May 2017, when the tracker started sending HTTP requests to local ports 29009 and 30102. In May 2018, Yandex Metrica also began sending the data through HTTPS to ports 29010 and 30103. Both methods remained in place as of publication time.

An overview of Yandex identifier sharing

A timeline of web history tracking by Meta and Yandex

Some browsers for Android have blocked the abusive JavaScript in trackers. DuckDuckGo, for instance, was already blocking domains and IP addresses associated with the trackers, preventing the browser from sending any identifiers to Meta. The browser also blocked most of the domains associated with Yandex Metrica. After the researchers notified DuckDuckGo of the incomplete blacklist, developers added the missing addresses.

The Brave browser, meanwhile, also blocked the sharing of identifiers due to its extensive blocklists and existing mitigation to block requests to the localhost without explicit user consent. Vivaldi, another Chromium-based browser, forwards the identifiers to local Android ports when the default privacy setting is in place. Changing the setting to block trackers appears to thwart browsing history leakage, the researchers said.

Tracking blocker settings in Vivaldi for Android.

There’s got to be a better way

The various remedies DuckDuckGo, Brave, Vivaldi, and Chrome have put in place are working as intended, but the researchers caution they could become ineffective at any time.

“Any browser doing blocklisting will likely enter into a constant arms race, and it’s just a partial solution,” Vallina Rodriguez said of the current mitigations. “Creating effective blocklists is hard, and browser makers will need to constantly monitor the use of this type of capability to detect other hostnames potentially abusing localhost channels and then updating their blocklists accordingly.”

He continued:

While this solution works once you know the hostnames doing that, it’s not the right way of mitigating this issue, as trackers may find ways of accessing this capability (e.g., through more ephemeral hostnames). A long-term solution should go through the design and development of privacy and security controls for localhost channels, so that users can be aware of this type of communication and potentially enforce some control or limit this use (e.g., a permission or some similar user notifications).

Chrome and most other Chromium-based browsers executed the JavaScript as Meta and Yandex intended. Firefox did as well, although for reasons that aren’t clear, the browser was not able to successfully perform the SDP munging specified in later versions of the code. After blocking the STUN variant of SDP munging in the early May beta release, a production version of Chrome released two weeks ago began blocking both the STUN and TURN variants. Other Chromium-based browsers are likely to implement it in the coming weeks. Firefox didn’t respond to an email asking if it has plans to block the behavior in that browser.

The researchers warn that the current fixes are so specific to the code in the Meta and Yandex trackers that it would be easy to bypass them with a simple update.

“They know that if someone else comes in and tries a different port number, they may bypass this protection,” said Gunes Acar, the researcher behind the initial discovery, referring to the Chrome developer team at Google. “But our understanding is they want to send this message that they will not tolerate this form of abuse.”

Fellow researcher Vallina-Rodriguez said the more comprehensive way to prevent the abuse is for Android to overhaul the way it handles access to local ports.

“The fundamental issue is that the access to the local host sockets is completely uncontrolled on Android,” he explained. “There’s no way for users to prevent this kind of communication on their devices. Because of the dynamic nature of JavaScript code and the difficulty to keep blocklists up to date, the right way of blocking this persistently is by limiting this type of access at the mobile platform and browser level, including stricter platform policies to limit abuse.”

Got consent?

The researchers who made this discovery are:

Aniketh Girish, PhD student at IMDEA Networks
Gunes Acar, assistant professor in Radboud University’s Digital Security Group & iHub
Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, associate professor at IMDEA Networks
Nipuna Weerasekara, PhD student at IMDEA Networks
Tim Vlummens, PhD student at COSIC, KU Leuven

Acar said he first noticed Meta Pixel accessing local ports while visiting his own university’s website.

There’s no indication that Meta or Yandex has disclosed the tracking to either websites hosting the trackers or end users who visit those sites. Developer forums show that many websites using Meta Pixel were caught off guard when the scripts began connecting to local ports.

“Since 5th September, our internal JS error tracking has been flagging failed fetch requests to localhost: 12387,” one developer wrote. “No changes have been made on our side, and the existing Facebook tracking pixel we use loads via Google Tag Manager.”

“Is there some way I can disable this?” another developer encountering the unexplained local port access asked.

It’s unclear whether browser-to-native-app tracking violates any privacy laws in various countries. Both Meta and companies hosting its Meta Pixel, however, have faced a raft of lawsuits in recent years alleging that the data collected violates privacy statutes. A research paper from 2023 found that Meta pixel, then called the Facebook Pixel, “tracks a wide range of user activities on websites with alarming detail, especially on websites classified as sensitive categories under GDPR,” the abbreviation for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

So far, Google has provided no indication that it plans to redesign the way Android handles local port access. For now, the most comprehensive protection against Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica tracking is to refrain from installing the Facebook, Instagram, or Yandex apps on Android devices.

Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82.

Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers Read More »

Ransomware kingpin “Stern” apparently IDed by German law enforcement

Biz & IT, conti, ransomware, Security, Stern, syndicated, TrickBot / Tim Belzer / May 31, 2025

unlikely to be extradited

BSA names Vitaly Nikolaevich Kovalev is “Stern,” the leader of Trickbot.

Credit: Tim Robberts/Getty Images

For years, members of the Russian cybercrime cartel Trickbot unleashed a relentless hacking spree on the world. The group attacked thousands of victims, including businesses, schools, and hospitals. “Fuck clinics in the usa this week,” one member wrote in internal Trickbot messages in 2020 about a list of 428 hospitals to target. Orchestrated by an enigmatic leader using the online moniker “Stern,” the group of around 100 cybercriminals stole hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of roughly six years.

Despite a wave of law enforcement disruptions and a damaging leak of more than 60,000 internal chat messages from Trickbot and the closely associated counterpart group Conti, the identity of Stern has remained a mystery. Last week, though, Germany’s federal police agency, the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA, and local prosecutors alleged that Stern’s real-world name is Vitaly Nikolaevich Kovalev, a 36-year-old, 5-foot-11-inch Russian man who cops believe is in his home country and thus shielded from potential extradition.

A recently issued Interpol red notice says that Kovalev is wanted by Germany for allegedly being the “ringleader” of a “criminal organisation.”

“Stern’s naming is a significant event that bridges gaps in our understanding of Trickbot—one of the most notorious transnational cybercriminal groups to ever exist,” says Alexander Leslie, a threat intelligence analyst at the security firm Recorded Future. “As Trickbot’s ‘big boss’ and one of the most noteworthy figures in the Russian cybercriminal underground, Stern remained an elusive character, and his real name was taboo for years.”

Stern has notably seemed to be absent from multiple rounds of Western sanctions and indictments in recent years calling out alleged Trickbot and Conti members. Leslie and other researchers have long speculated to WIRED that global law enforcement may have strategically withheld Stern’s alleged identity as part of ongoing investigations. Kovalev is suspected of being the “founder” of Trickbot and allegedly used the Stern moniker, the BKA said in an online announcement.

“It has long been assumed, based on numerous indications, that ‘Stern’ is in fact Kovalev,” a BKA spokesperson says in written responses to questions from WIRED. They add that “the investigating authorities involved in Operation Endgame were only able to identify the actor Stern as Kovalev during their investigation this year,” referring to a multi-year international effort to identify and disrupt cybercriminal infrastructure, known as Operation Endgame.

The BKA spokesperson also notes in written statements to WIRED that information obtained through a 2023 investigation into the Qakbot malware as well as analysis of the leaked Trickbot and Conti chats from 2022 were “helpful” in making the attribution. They added, too, that the “assessment is also shared by international partners.”

The German announcement is the first time that officials from any government have publicly alleged an identity for a suspect behind the Stern moniker. As part of Operation Endgame, BKA’s Stern attribution inherently comes in the context of a multinational law enforcement collaboration. But unlike in other Trickbot- and Conti-related attributions, other countries have not publicly concurred with BKA’s Stern identification thus far. Europol, the US Department of Justice, the US Treasury, and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office did not immediately respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

Several cybersecurity researchers who have tracked Trickbot extensively tell WIRED they were unaware of the announcement. An anonymous account on the social media platform X recently claimed that Kovalev used the Stern handle and published alleged details about him. WIRED messaged multiple accounts that supposedly belong to Kovalev, according to the X account and a database of hacked and leaked records compiled by District 4 Labs but received no response.

Meanwhile, Kovalev’s name and face may already be surprisingly familiar to those who have been following recent Trickbot revelations. This is because Kovalev was jointly sanctioned by the United States and United Kingdom in early 2023 for his alleged involvement as a senior member in Trickbot. He was also charged in the US at the time with hacking linked to bank fraud allegedly committed in 2010. The US added him to its most-wanted list. In all of this activity, though, the US and UK linked Kovalev to the online handles “ben” and “Bentley.” The 2023 sanctions did not mention a connection to the Stern handle. And, in fact, Kovalev’s 2023 indictment was mainly noteworthy because his use of “Bentley” as a handle was determined to be “historic” and distinct from that of another key Trickbot member who also went by “Bentley.”

The Trickbot ransomware group first emerged around 2016, after its members moved from the Dyre malware that was disrupted by Russian authorities. Over the course of its lifespan, the Trickbot group—which used its namesake malware, alongside other ransomware variants such as Ryuk, IcedID, and Diavol—increasingly overlapped in operations and personnel with the Conti gang. In early 2022, Conti published a statement backing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and a cybersecurity researcher who had infiltrated the groups leaked more than 60,000 messages from Trickbot and Conti members, revealing a huge trove of information about their day-to-day operations and structure.

Stern acted like a “CEO” of the Trickbot and Conti groups and ran them like a legitimate company, leaked chat messages analyzed by WIRED and security researchers show.

“Trickbot set the mold for the modern ‘as-a-service’ cybercriminal business model that was adopted by countless groups that followed,” Recorded Future’s Leslie says. “While there were certainly organized groups that preceded Trickbot, Stern oversaw a period of Russian cybercrime that was characterized by a high level of professionalization. This trend continues today, is reproduced worldwide, and is visible in most active groups on the dark web.”

Stern’s eminence within Russian cybercrime has been widely documented. The cryptocurrency-tracing firm Chainalysis does not publicly name cybercriminal actors and declined to comment on BKA’s identification, but the company emphasized that the Stern persona alone is one of the all-time most profitable ransomware actors it tracks.

“The investigation revealed that Stern generated significant revenues from illegal activities, in particular in connection with ransomware,” the BKA spokesperson tells WIRED.

Stern “surrounds himself with very technical people, many of which he claims to have sometimes decades of experience, and he’s willing to delegate substantial tasks to these experienced people whom he trusts,” says Keith Jarvis, a senior security researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos’ Counter Threat Unit. “I think he’s always probably lived in that organizational role.”

Increasing evidence in recent years has indicated that Stern has at least some loose connections to Russia’s intelligence apparatus, including its main security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB). The Stern handle mentioned setting up an office for “government topics” in July 2020, while researchers have seen other members of the Trickbot group say that Stern is likely the “link between us and the ranks/head of department type at FSB.”

Stern’s consistent presence was a significant contributor to Trickbot and Conti’s effectiveness—as was the entity’s ability to maintain strong operational security and remain hidden.

As Sophos’ Jarvis put it, “I have no thoughts on the attribution, as I’ve never heard a compelling story about Stern’s identity from anyone prior to this announcement.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

Ransomware kingpin “Stern” apparently IDed by German law enforcement Read More »

Spy-catcher saw “stupid” tech errors others made. FBI says he then made his own.

DIA, Security, SOCKS, spying / Tim Belzer / May 31, 2025

2) EMAIL ADDRESS FAIL: The FBI quickly gained access to the “anonymous” email account used to send the message. They found that, on the day that this account was set up, it received a message from a second email account—possibly as a test—which turned out to be one of Laatsch’s and contained his name as part of the email address.

3) EMAIL ACCOUNT FAIL: This second email account, when the FBI examined it, had been set up using Laatsch’s full name, date of birth, and phone number.

4) IP ADDRESS FAIL: Both the first and second email account had been logged into from the same IP address, suggesting they were controlled by the same person. And the IP address that was used for them both resolved to… Laatsch’s residence.

The leaker did suggest moving the conversation to an encrypted messaging platform, but the damage was already done.

The FBI immediately began a sting operation, posing as the “friendly country,” asking Laatsch to copy some juicy data and provide it in a “dead drop” at a park in northern Virginia. Laatsch allegedly then went in to work at DIA, using his deep knowledge of DIA computerized tracking systems to avoid detection by… copying secret documents into notebooks by hand, then ripping out the sheets of paper and stuffing them in his socks.

This appears to have worked well enough—except for the fact that internal DIA “video monitoring” was watching him do it, with FBI agents noting even the ways Laatsch tried to “hide his notebook” when co-workers walked by. Whether Laatsch was aware of this video monitoring system is unclear.

On May 1, 2025, Laatsch allegedly wrote up his notes, stored them on a thumb drive, and dropped them as requested at an Alexandria park. The drive was later retrieved by the FBI. On May 8, Laatsch told his contact that he wasn’t seeking money but “citizenship for your country” because he didn’t “expect things here to improve in the long term, even in the event there is a change in the future.”

Laatsch was arrested yesterday, May 29.

Spy-catcher saw “stupid” tech errors others made. FBI says he then made his own. Read More »

Thousands of Asus routers are being hit with stealthy, persistent backdoors

asus routers, backdoors, Biz & IT, hacking, Security / Paul Patrick / May 29, 2025

GreyNoise said it detected the campaign in mid-March and held off reporting on it until after the company notified unnamed government agencies. That detail further suggests that the threat actor may have some connection to a nation-state.

The company researchers went on to say that the activity they observed was part of a larger campaign reported last week by fellow security company Sekoia. Researchers at Sekoia said that Internet scanning by network intelligence firm Censys suggested as many as 9,500 Asus routers may have been compromised by ViciousTrap, the name used to track the unknown threat actor.

The attackers are backdooring the devices by exploiting multiple vulnerabilities. One is CVE-2023-39780, a command-injection flaw that allows for the execution of system commands, which Asus patched in a recent firmware update, GreyNoise said. The remaining vulnerabilities have also been patched but, for unknown reasons, have not received CVE tracking designations.

The only way for router users to determine whether their devices are infected is by checking the SSH settings in the configuration panel. Infected routers will show that the device can be logged in to by SSH over port 53282 using a digital certificate with a truncated key of: ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAo41nBoVFfj4HlVMGV+YPsxMDrMlbdDZ…

To remove the backdoor, infected users should remove the key and the port setting.

People can also determine if they’ve been targeted if system logs indicate that they have been accessed through the IP addresses 101.99.91[.]151, 101.99.94[.]173, 79.141.163[.]179, or 111.90.146[.]237. Users of any router brand should always ensure their devices receive security updates in a timely manner.

Thousands of Asus routers are being hit with stealthy, persistent backdoors Read More »

Feds charge 16 Russians allegedly tied to botnets used in cyberattacks and spying

Biz & IT, botnet, russian hacking, Security, syndication / Tim Belzer / May 24, 2025

The hacker ecosystem in Russia, more than perhaps anywhere else in the world, has long blurred the lines between cybercrime, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, and espionage. Now an indictment of a group of Russian nationals and the takedown of their sprawling botnet offers the clearest example in years of how a single malware operation allegedly enabled hacking operations as varied as ransomware, wartime cyberattacks in Ukraine, and spying against foreign governments.

The US Department of Justice today announced criminal charges today against 16 individuals law enforcement authorities have linked to a malware operation known as DanaBot, which according to a complaint infected at least 300,000 machines around the world. The DOJ’s announcement of the charges describes the group as “Russia-based,” and names two of the suspects, Aleksandr Stepanov and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, as living in Novosibirsk, Russia. Five other suspects are named in the indictment, while another nine are identified only by their pseudonyms. In addition to those charges, the Justice Department says the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS)—a criminal investigation arm of the Department of Defense—carried out seizures of DanaBot infrastructure around the world, including in the US.

Aside from alleging how DanaBot was used in for-profit criminal hacking, the indictment also makes a rarer claim—it describes how a second variant of the malware it says was used in espionage against military, government, and NGO targets. “Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms hundreds of thousands of victims around the world, including sensitive military, diplomatic, and government entities, and causes many millions of dollars in losses,” US attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a statement.

Since 2018, DanaBot—described in the criminal complaint as “incredibly invasive malware”—has infected millions of computers around the world, initially as a banking trojan designed to steal directly from those PCs’ owners with modular features designed for credit card and cryptocurrency theft. Because its creators allegedly sold it in an “affiliate” model that made it available to other hacker groups for $3,000 to $4,000 a month, however, it was soon used as a tool to install different forms of malware in a broad array of operations, including ransomware. Its targets, too, quickly spread from initial victims in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Australia to US and Canadian financial institutions, according to an analysis of the operation by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

Feds charge 16 Russians allegedly tied to botnets used in cyberattacks and spying Read More »

Researchers cause GitLab AI developer assistant to turn safe code malicious

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Biz & IT, chatbots, large language models, Security / Rejus Almole / May 24, 2025

Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.” What these companies don’t say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users.

Researchers from security firm Legit on Thursday demonstrated an attack that induced Duo into inserting malicious code into a script it had been instructed to write. The attack could also leak private code and confidential issue data, such as zero-day vulnerability details. All that’s required is for the user to instruct the chatbot to interact with a merge request or similar content from an outside source.

AI assistants’ double-edged blade

The mechanism for triggering the attacks is, of course, prompt injections. Among the most common forms of chatbot exploits, prompt injections are embedded into content a chatbot is asked to work with, such as an email to be answered, a calendar to consult, or a webpage to summarize. Large language model-based assistants are so eager to follow instructions that they’ll take orders from just about anywhere, including sources that can be controlled by malicious actors.

The attacks targeting Duo came from various resources that are commonly used by developers. Examples include merge requests, commits, bug descriptions and comments, and source code. The researchers demonstrated how instructions embedded inside these sources can lead Duo astray.

“This vulnerability highlights the double-edged nature of AI assistants like GitLab Duo: when deeply integrated into development workflows, they inherit not just context—but risk,” Legit researcher Omer Mayraz wrote. “By embedding hidden instructions in seemingly harmless project content, we were able to manipulate Duo’s behavior, exfiltrate private source code, and demonstrate how AI responses can be leveraged for unintended and harmful outcomes.”

Researchers cause GitLab AI developer assistant to turn safe code malicious Read More »

Destructive malware available in NPM repo went unnoticed for 2 years

Biz & IT, code repositories, malware, npm, Security / Kris Guyer / May 23, 2025

Some of the payloads were limited to detonate only on specific dates in 2023, but in some cases a phase that was scheduled to begin in July of that year was given no termination date. Pandya said that means the threat remains persistent, although in an email he also wrote: “Since all activation dates have passed (June 2023–August 2024), any developer following normal package usage today would immediately trigger destructive payloads including system shutdowns, file deletion, and JavaScript prototype corruption.”

Interestingly, the NPM user who submitted the malicious packages, using the registration email address 1634389031@qq[.]com, also uploaded working packages with no malicious functions found in them. The approach of submitting both harmful and useful packages helped create a “facade of legitimacy” that increased the chances the malicious packages would go unnoticed, Pandya said. Questions emailed to that address received no response.

The malicious packages targeted users of some of the largest ecosystems for JavaScript developers, including React, Vue, and Vite. The specific packages were:

Anyone who installed any of these packages should carefully inspect their systems to make sure they’re no longer running. These packages perfectly mimic legitimate development tools, so it may be easy for them to have remained undetected.

Destructive malware available in NPM repo went unnoticed for 2 years Read More »

“Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal says as it blocks Windows Recall

Biz & IT, microsoft, privacy, recall, Security, signal messenger, Windows / Kris Guyer / May 22, 2025

But the changes go only so far in limiting the risks Recall poses. As I pointed out, when Recall is turned on, it indexes Zoom meetings, emails, photos, medical conditions, and—yes—Signal conversations, not just with the user, but anyone interacting with that user, without their knowledge or consent.

Researcher Kevin Beaumont performed his own deep-dive analysis that also found that some of the new controls were lacking. For instance, Recall continued to screenshot his payment card details. It also decrypted the database with a simple fingerprint scan or PIN. And it’s unclear whether the type of sophisticated malware that routinely infects consumer and enterprise Windows users will be able to decrypt encrypted database contents.

And as Cunningham also noted, Beaumont found that Microsoft still provided no means for developers to prevent content displayed in their apps from being indexed. That left Signal developers at a disadvantage, so they had to get creative.

With no API for blocking Recall in the Windows Desktop version, Signal is instead invoking an API Microsoft provides for protecting copyrighted material. App developers can turn on the DRM setting to prevent Windows from taking screenshots of copyrighted content displayed in the app. Signal is now repurposing the API to add an extra layer of privacy.

“We hope that the AI teams building systems like Recall will think through these implications more carefully in the future,” Signal wrote Wednesday. “Apps like Signal shouldn’t have to implement ‘one weird trick’ in order to maintain the privacy and integrity of their services without proper developer tools. People who care about privacy shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice accessibility upon the altar of AI aspirations either.”

Signal’s move will lessen the chances of Recall permanently indexing private messages, but it also has its limits. The measure only provides protection when all parties to a chat—at least those using the Windows Desktop version—haven’t changed the default settings.

Microsoft officials didn’t immediately respond to an email asking why Windows provides developers with no granular control over Recall and whether the company has plans to add any.

“Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal says as it blocks Windows Recall Read More »

Windows 11’s most important new feature is post-quantum cryptography. Here’s why.

Biz & IT, Encryption, microsoft, NIST, quantum computing, Security / Tim Belzer / May 21, 2025

Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with a set of new encryption algorithms that can withstand future attacks from quantum computers in a move aimed at jump-starting what’s likely to be the most formidable and important technology transition in modern history.

Computers that are based on the physics of quantum mechanics don’t yet exist outside of sophisticated labs, but it’s well-established science that they eventually will. Instead of processing data in the binary state of zeros and ones, quantum computers run on qubits, which encompass myriad states all at once. This new capability promises to bring about new discoveries of unprecedented scale in a host of fields, including metallurgy, chemistry, drug discovery, and financial modeling.

Averting the cryptopocalypse

One of the most disruptive changes quantum computing will bring is the breaking of some of the most common forms of encryption, specifically, the RSA cryptosystem and those based on elliptic curves. These systems are the workhorses that banks, governments, and online services around the world have relied on for more than four decades to keep their most sensitive data confidential. RSA and elliptic curve encryption keys securing web connections would require millions of years to be cracked using today’s computers. A quantum computer could crack the same keys in a matter of hours or minutes.

At Microsoft’s BUILD 2025 conference on Monday, the company announced the availability of quantum-resistant algorithms to SymCrypt, the core cryptographic code library in Windows. The updated library is available in Build 27852 and higher versions of Windows 11. Additionally, Microsoft has updated SymCrypt-OpenSSL, its open source project that allows the widely used OpenSSL library to use SymCrypt for cryptographic operations.

Windows 11’s most important new feature is post-quantum cryptography. Here’s why. Read More »

FBI warns of ongoing scam that uses deepfake audio to impersonate government officials

AI, deepfake, fbi, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Security / Tim Belzer / May 16, 2025

The FBI is warning people to be vigilant of an ongoing malicious messaging campaign that uses AI-generated voice audio to impersonate government officials in an attempt to trick recipients into clicking on links that can infect their computers.

“Since April 2025, malicious actors have impersonated senior US officials to target individuals, many of whom are current or former senior US federal or state government officials and their contacts,” Thursday’s advisory from the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said. “If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic.”

Think you can’t be fooled? Think again.

The campaign’s creators are sending AI-generated voice messages—better known as deepfakes—along with text messages “in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts,” FBI officials said. Deepfakes use AI to mimic the voice and speaking characteristics of a specific individual. The differences between the authentic and simulated speakers are often indistinguishable without trained analysis. Deepfake videos work similarly.

One way to gain access to targets’ devices is for the attacker to ask if the conversation can be continued on a separate messaging platform and then successfully convince the target to click on a malicious link under the guise that it will enable the alternate platform. The advisory provided no additional details about the campaign.

The advisory comes amid a rise in reports of deepfaked audio and sometimes video used in fraud and espionage campaigns. Last year, password manager LastPass warned that it had been targeted in a sophisticated phishing campaign that used a combination of email, text messages, and voice calls to trick targets into divulging their master passwords. One part of the campaign included targeting a LastPass employee with a deepfake audio call that impersonated company CEO Karim Toubba.

In a separate incident last year, a robocall campaign that encouraged New Hampshire Democrats to sit out the coming election used a deepfake of then-President Joe Biden’s voice. A Democratic consultant was later indicted in connection with the calls. The telco that transmitted the spoofed robocalls also agreed to pay a $1 million civil penalty for not authenticating the caller as required by FCC rules.

FBI warns of ongoing scam that uses deepfake audio to impersonate government officials Read More »

After latest kidnap attempt, crypto types tell crime bosses: Transfers are traceable

abduction, crime, crypto, france, Paris, Security / Rejus Almole / May 16, 2025

The sudden spike in copycat attacks in France, Belgium, and Spain over the last few months suggests that crypto robbery as a tactic has caught the attention of organized crime. (This week’s abduction attempt is already being investigated by the organized crime unit of the Parisian police.)

Crypto industry insiders seem convinced that organized crime likes these attacks because of a (mistaken) belief that crypto transfers are untraceable. So people like Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin are trying to clue in the crime bosses.

“For whatever reason, there is a perception that’s out there that crypto is an asset that is untraceable, and that really lends itself to criminals acting in a certain way,” Levin said at a recent conference covered by the trade publication Cointelegraph.

“Apparently, the [knowledge] that crypto is not untraceable hasn’t been received by some of the organized crime groups that are actually perpetrating these attacks, and some of them are concentrated in, you know, France, but not exclusively.”

After latest kidnap attempt, crypto types tell crime bosses: Transfers are traceable Read More »