Security

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Mass exploitation of Ivanti VPNs is infecting networks around the globe

Biz & IT, espionage, hacking, ivanti, Security, vpns / /

THIS IS NOT A DRILL —

Orgs that haven’t acted yet should, even if it means suspending VPN services.

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Cybercriminals or anonymous hackers use malware on mobile phones to hack personal and business passwords online.

Enlarge / Cybercriminals or anonymous hackers use malware on mobile phones to hack personal and business passwords online.

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Hackers suspected of working for the Chinese government are mass exploiting a pair of critical vulnerabilities that give them complete control of virtual private network appliances sold by Ivanti, researchers said.

As of Tuesday morning, security company Censys detected 492 Ivanti VPNs that remained infected out of 26,000 devices exposed to the Internet. More than a quarter of the compromised VPNs—121—resided in the US. The three countries with the next biggest concentrations were Germany, with 26, South Korea, with 24, and China, with 21.

Censys

Microsoft’s customer cloud service hosted the most infected devices with 13, followed by cloud environments from Amazon with 12, and Comcast at 10.

Censys

“We conducted a secondary scan on all Ivanti Connect Secure servers in our dataset and found 412 unique hosts with this backdoor, Censys researchers wrote. “Additionally, we found 22 distinct ‘variants’ (or unique callback methods), which could indicate multiple attackers or a single attacker evolving their tactics.”

In an email, members of the Censys research team said evidence suggests that the people infecting the devices are motivated by espionage objectives. That theory aligns with reports published recently by security firms Volexity and Mandiant. Volexity researchers said they suspect the threat actor, tracked as UTA0178, is a “Chinese nation-state-level threat actor.” Mandiant, which tracks the attack group as UNC5221, said the hackers are pursuing an “espionage-motivated APT campaign.”

All civilian governmental agencies have been mandated to take corrective action to prevent exploitation. Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies had until 11: 59 pm Monday to follow the mandate, which was issued Friday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Ivanti has yet to release patches to fix the vulnerabilities. In their absence, Ivanti, CISA, and security companies are urging affected users to follow mitigation and recovery guidance provided by Ivanti that include preventative measures to block exploitation and steps for customers to rebuild and upgrade their systems if they detect exploitation.

“This directive is no surprise, considering the worldwide mass exploitation observed since Ivanti initially revealed the vulnerabilities on January 10,” Censys researchers wrote. “These vulnerabilities are particularly serious given the severity, widespread exposure of these systems, and the complexity of mitigation—especially given the absence of an official patch from the vendor as of the current writing.

When Avanti disclosed the vulnerabilities on January 10, the company said it would release patches on a staggered basis starting this week. The company has not issued a public statement since confirming the patch was still on schedule.

VPNs are an ideal device for hackers to infect because the always-on appliances sit at the very edge of the network, where they accept incoming connections. Because the VPNs must communicate with broad parts of the internal network, hackers who compromise the devices can then expand their presence to other areas. When exploited in unison, the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, allow attackers to remotely execute code on servers. All supported versions of the Ivanti Connect Secure—often abbreviated as ICS and formerly known as Pulse Secure—are affected.

The ongoing attacks use the exploits to install a host of malware that acts as a backdoor. The hackers then use the malware to harvest as many credentials as possible belonging to various employees and devices on the infected network and to rifle around the network. Despite the use of this malware, the attackers largely employ an approach known as “living off the land,” which uses legitimate software and tools so they’re harder to detect.

The posts linked above from Volexity and Mandiant provide extensive descriptions of how the malware behaves and methods for detecting infections.

Given the severity of the vulnerabilities and the consequences that follow when they’re exploited, all users of affected products should prioritize mitigation of these vulnerabilities, even if that means temporarily suspending VPN usage.

Mass exploitation of Ivanti VPNs is infecting networks around the globe Read More »

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HP CEO evokes James Bond-style hack via ink cartridges

class action, HP, Policy, printers, Security, Tech / /
Office printer with

Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company’s controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink. Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, “We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network.”

That frightening scenario could help explain why HP, which was hit this month with another lawsuit over its Dynamic Security system, insists on deploying it to printers.

Dynamic Security stops HP printers from functioning if an ink cartridge without an HP chip or HP electronic circuitry is installed. HP has issued firmware updates that block printers with such ink cartridges from printing, leading to the above lawsuit (PDF), which is seeking class-action certification. The suit alleges that HP printer customers were not made aware that printer firmware updates issued in late 2022 and early 2023 could result in printer features not working. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and an injunction preventing HP from issuing printer updates that block ink cartridges without an HP chip.

But are hacked ink cartridges something we should actually be concerned about?

To investigate, I turned to Ars Technica Senior Security Editor Dan Goodin. He told me that he didn’t know of any attacks actively used in the wild that are capable of using a cartridge to infect a printer.

Goodin also put the question to Mastodon, and cybersecurity professionals, many with expertise in embedded-device hacking, were decidedly skeptical.

Another commenter, going by Graham Sutherland / Polynomial on Mastodon, referred to serial presence detect (SPD) electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), a form of flash memory used extensively in ink cartridges, saying:

I’ve seen and done some truly wacky hardware stuff in my life, including hiding data in SPD EEPROMs on memory DIMMs (and replacing them with microcontrollers for similar shenanigans), so believe me when I say that his claim is wildly implausible even in a lab setting, let alone in the wild, and let alone at any scale that impacts businesses or individuals rather than selected political actors.

HP’s evidence

Unsurprisingly, Lores’ claim comes from HP-backed research. The company’s bug bounty program tasked researchers from Bugcrowd with determining if it’s possible to use an ink cartridge as a cyberthreat. HP argued that ink cartridge microcontroller chips, which are used to communicate with the printer, could be an entryway for attacks.

As detailed in a 2022 article from research firm Actionable Intelligence, a researcher in the program found a way to hack a printer via a third-party ink cartridge. The researcher was reportedly unable to perform the same hack with an HP cartridge.

Shivaun Albright, HP’s chief technologist of print security, said at the time:

A researcher found a vulnerability over the serial interface between the cartridge and the printer. Essentially, they found a buffer overflow. That’s where you have got an interface that you may not have tested or validated well enough, and the hacker was able to overflow into memory beyond the bounds of that particular buffer. And that gives them the ability to inject code into the device.

Albright added that the malware “remained on the printer in memory” after the cartridge was removed.

HP acknowledges that there’s no evidence of such a hack occurring in the wild. Still, because chips used in third-party ink cartridges are reprogrammable (their “code can be modified via a resetting tool right in the field,” according to Actionable Intelligence), they’re less secure, the company says. The chips are said to be programmable so that they can still work in printers after firmware updates.

HP also questions the security of third-party ink companies’ supply chains, especially compared to its own supply chain security, which is ISO/IEC-certified.

So HP did find a theoretical way for cartridges to be hacked, and it’s reasonable for the company to issue a bug bounty to identify such a risk. But its solution for this threat was announced before it showed there could be a threat. HP added ink cartridge security training to its bug bounty program in 2020, and the above research was released in 2022. HP started using Dynamic Security in 2016, ostensibly to solve the problem that it sought to prove exists years later.

Further, there’s a sense from cybersecurity professionals that Ars spoke with that even if such a threat exists, it would take a high level of resources and skills, which are usually reserved for targeting high-profile victims. Realistically, the vast majority of individual consumers and businesses shouldn’t have serious concerns about ink cartridges being used to hack their machines.

HP CEO evokes James Bond-style hack via ink cartridges Read More »

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Microsoft network breached through password-spraying by Russian-state hackers

Biz & IT, kremlin, microsoft, russian hacking, Security / /
Microsoft network breached through password-spraying by Russian-state hackers

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Russia-state hackers exploited a weak password to compromise Microsoft’s corporate network and accessed emails and documents that belonged to senior executives and employees working in security and legal teams, Microsoft said late Friday.

The attack, which Microsoft attributed to a Kremlin-backed hacking group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, is at least the second time in as many years that failures to follow basic security hygiene has resulted in a breach that has the potential to harm customers. One paragraph in Friday’s disclosure, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, was gobsmacking:

Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents. The investigation indicates they were initially targeting email accounts for information related to Midnight Blizzard itself. We are in the process of notifying employees whose email was accessed.

Microsoft didn’t detect the breach until January 12, exactly a week before Friday’s disclosure. Microsoft’s account raises the prospect that the Russian hackers had uninterrupted access to the accounts for as long as two months.

A translation of the 93 words quoted above: A device inside Microsoft’s network was protected by a weak password with no form of two-factor authentication employed. The Russian adversary group was able to guess it by peppering it with previously compromised or commonly used passwords until they finally landed on the right one. The threat actor then accessed the account, indicating that either 2FA wasn’t employed or the protection was somehow bypassed.

Furthermore, this “legacy non-production test tenant account” was somehow configured so that Midnight Blizzard could pivot and gain access to some of the company’s most senior and sensitive employee accounts.

As Steve Bellovin, a computer science professor and affiliate law prof at Columbia University with decades of experience in cybersecurity, wrote on Mastodon:

A lot of fascinating implications here. A successful password spray attack suggests no 2FA and either reused or weak passwords. Access to email accounts belonging to “senior leadership… cybersecurity, and legal” teams using just the permissions of a “test tenant account” suggests that someone gave that test account amazing privileges. Why? Why wasn’t it removed when the test was over? I also note that it took Microsoft about seven weeks to detect the attack.

While Microsoft said that it wasn’t aware of any evidence that Midnight Blizzard gained access to customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems, some researchers voiced doubts, particularly about whether the Microsoft 365 service might be or have been susceptible to similar attack techniques. One of the researchers was Kevin Beaumont, who has had a long cybersecurity career that has included a stint working for Microsoft. On LinkedIn, he wrote:

Microsoft staff use Microsoft 365 for email. SEC filings and blogs with no details on Friday night are great.. but they’re going to have to be followed with actual detail. The age of Microsoft doing tents, incident code words, CELA’ing things and pretending MSTIC sees everything (threat actors have Macs too) are over — they need to do radical technical and cultural transformation to retain trust.

CELA is short for Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs, a group inside Microsoft that helps draft disclosures. MSTIC stands for the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center.

Microsoft network breached through password-spraying by Russian-state hackers Read More »

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Just 10 lines of code can steal AI secrets from Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm GPUs

AI, data leaks, GPU, LLMs, Security, syndication / /

massive leakage —

Patching all affected devices, which include some Macs and iPhones, may be tough.

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ai brain

MEHAU KULYK/Getty Images

As more companies ramp up development of artificial intelligence systems, they are increasingly turning to graphics processing unit (GPU) chips for the computing power they need to run large language models (LLMs) and to crunch data quickly at massive scale. Between video game processing and AI, demand for GPUs has never been higher, and chipmakers are rushing to bolster supply. In new findings released today, though, researchers are highlighting a vulnerability in multiple brands and models of mainstream GPUs—including Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD chips—that could allow an attacker to steal large quantities of data from a GPU’s memory.

The silicon industry has spent years refining the security of central processing units, or CPUs, so they don’t leak data in memory even when they are built to optimize for speed. However, since GPUs were designed for raw graphics processing power, they haven’t been architected to the same degree with data privacy as a priority. As generative AI and other machine learning applications expand the uses of these chips, though, researchers from New York-based security firm Trail of Bits say that vulnerabilities in GPUs are an increasingly urgent concern.

“There is a broader security concern about these GPUs not being as secure as they should be and leaking a significant amount of data,” Heidy Khlaaf, Trail of Bits’ engineering director for AI and machine learning assurance, tells WIRED. “We’re looking at anywhere from 5 megabytes to 180 megabytes. In the CPU world, even a bit is too much to reveal.”

To exploit the vulnerability, which the researchers call LeftoverLocals, attackers would need to already have established some amount of operating system access on a target’s device. Modern computers and servers are specifically designed to silo data so multiple users can share the same processing resources without being able to access each others’ data. But a LeftoverLocals attack breaks down these walls. Exploiting the vulnerability would allow a hacker to exfiltrate data they shouldn’t be able to access from the local memory of vulnerable GPUs, exposing whatever data happens to be there for the taking, which could include queries and responses generated by LLMs as well as the weights driving the response.

In their proof of concept, as seen in the GIF below, the researchers demonstrate an attack where a target—shown on the left—asks the open source LLM Llama.cpp to provide details about WIRED magazine. Within seconds, the attacker’s device—shown on the right—collects the majority of the response provided by the LLM by carrying out a LeftoverLocals attack on vulnerable GPU memory. The attack program the researchers created uses less than 10 lines of code.

An attacker (right) exploits the LeftoverLocals vulnerability to listen to LLM conversations.

Last summer, the researchers tested 11 chips from seven GPU makers and multiple corresponding programming frameworks. They found the LeftoverLocals vulnerability in GPUs from Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm and launched a far-reaching coordinated disclosure of the vulnerability in September in collaboration with the US-CERT Coordination Center and the Khronos Group, a standards body focused on 3D graphics, machine learning, and virtual and augmented reality.

The researchers did not find evidence that Nvidia, Intel, or Arm GPUs contain the LeftoverLocals vulnerability, but Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD all confirmed to WIRED that they are impacted. This means that well-known chips like the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and devices like Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro and M2 MacBook Air are vulnerable. The researchers did not find the flaw in the Imagination GPUs they tested, but others may be vulnerable.

Just 10 lines of code can steal AI secrets from Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm GPUs Read More »

apple-airdrop-leaks-user-data-like-a-sieve-chinese-authorities-say-they’re-scooping-it-up.

Apple AirDrop leaks user data like a sieve. Chinese authorities say they’re scooping it up.

AirDrop, Apple, Biz & IT, cryptographic hashes, privacy, Security / /
Apple AirDrop leaks user data like a sieve. Chinese authorities say they’re scooping it up.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Chinese authorities recently said they’re using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that’s outlawed in that country.

According to a 2022 report from The New York Times, activists have used AirDrop to distribute scathing critiques of the Communist Party of China to nearby iPhone users in subway trains and stations and other public venues. A document one protester sent in October of that year called General Secretary Xi Jinping a “despotic traitor.” A few months later, with the release of iOS 16.1.1, the AirDrop users in China found that the “everyone” configuration, the setting that makes files available to all other users nearby, automatically reset to the more contacts-only setting. Apple has yet to acknowledge the move. Critics continue to see it as a concession Apple CEO Tim Cook made to Chinese authorities.

The rainbow connection

On Monday, eight months after the half-measure was put in place, officials with the local government in Beijing said some people have continued mass-sending illegal content. As a result, the officials said, they were now using an advanced technique publicly disclosed in 2021 to fight back.

“Some people reported that their iPhones received a video with inappropriate remarks in the Beijing subway,” the officials wrote, according to translations. “After preliminary investigation, the police found that the suspect used the AirDrop function of the iPhone to anonymously spread the inappropriate information in public places. Due to the anonymity and difficulty of tracking AirDrop, some netizens have begun to imitate this behavior.”

In response, the authorities said they’ve implemented the technical measures to identify the people mass-distributing the content.

  • Screenshot showing log files containing the hashes to be extracted

  • Screenshot showing a dedicated tool converting extracted AirDrop hashes.

The scant details and the quality of Internet-based translations don’t explicitly describe the technique. All the translations, however, have said it involves the use of what are known as rainbow tables to defeat the technical measures AirDrop uses to obfuscate users’ phone numbers and email addresses.

Rainbow tables were first proposed in 1980 as a means for vastly reducing what at the time was the astronomical amount of computing resources required to crack at-scale hashes, the one-way cryptographic representations used to conceal passwords and other types of sensitive data. Additional refinements made in 2003 made rainbow tables more useful still.

When AirDrop is configured to distribute files only between people who know each other, Apple says, it relies heavily on hashes to conceal the real-world identities of each party until the service determines there’s a match. Specifically, AirDrop broadcasts Bluetooth advertisements that contain a partial cryptographic hash of the sender’s phone number and/or email address.

If any of the truncated hashes match any phone number or email address in the address book of the other device, or if the devices are set to send or receive from everyone, the two devices will engage in a mutual authentication handshake. When the hashes match, the devices exchange the full SHA-256 hashes of the owners’ phone numbers and email addresses. This technique falls under an umbrella term known as private set intersection, often abbreviated as PSI.

In 2021, researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt reported that they had devised practical ways to crack what Apple calls the identity hashes used to conceal identities while AirDrop determines if a nearby person is in the contacts of another. One of the researchers’ attack methods relies on rainbow tables.

Apple AirDrop leaks user data like a sieve. Chinese authorities say they’re scooping it up. Read More »

linux-devices-are-under-attack-by-a-never-before-seen-worm

Linux devices are under attack by a never-before-seen worm

Biz & IT, botnet, botnets, Internet of things, mirai, Security / /

NEW WORM ON THE BLOCK —

Based on Mirai malware, self-replicating NoaBot installs cryptomining app on infected devices.

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Linux devices are under attack by a never-before-seen worm

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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.

Noabot malware activity over time.

Enlarge / Noabot malware activity over time.

“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.

NoaBot code that copies miner configurations

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

Linux devices are under attack by a never-before-seen worm Read More »

hackers-can-infect-network-connected-wrenches-to-install-ransomware

Hackers can infect network-connected wrenches to install ransomware

Biz & IT, hack, ransomware, Security / /

TORQUE THIS —

Researchers identify 23 vulnerabilities, some of which can exploited with no authentication.

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The Rexroth Nutrunner, a line of torque wrench sold by Bosch Rexroth.

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.

NEXO-OS's management web application.

Enlarge / NEXO-OS’s management web application.

Nozomi

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.
A PoC ransomware running on the test nutrunner.

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.

A manipulation of view attack. The actual torque applied in this tightening was 0.15 Nm.

Hackers can infect network-connected wrenches to install ransomware Read More »

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Ivanti warns of critical vulnerability in its popular line of endpoint protection software

Biz & IT, endpoint protection, exploit, ivanti, Security, vulnerability / /

RCE STANDS FOR REMOTE CODE EXECUTION —

Customers of the Ivanti Endpoint Protection Manager should patch or mitigate ASAP.

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Ivanti warns of critical vulnerability in its popular line of endpoint protection software

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.

Ivanti warns of critical vulnerability in its popular line of endpoint protection software Read More »

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A “ridiculously weak“ password causes disaster for Spain’s No. 2 mobile carrier

BGP, Biz & IT, boder gateway protocol, Security / /
A “ridiculously weak“ password causes disaster for Spain’s No. 2 mobile carrier

Getty Images

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.

Screenshot showing RIPE account, including the orange.es email address associated with it.

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.

Partially redacted screenshot from Hudson Rock database showing the credentials for the Orange RIPE account.

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.”

A “ridiculously weak“ password causes disaster for Spain’s No. 2 mobile carrier Read More »

researchers-come-up-with-better-idea-to-prevent-airtag-stalking

Researchers come up with better idea to prevent AirTag stalking

AirTags, Apple, privacy, Security, stalking, syndication / /
Picture of AirTag

BackyardProduction via Getty Images

Apple’s AirTags are meant to help you effortlessly find your keys or track your luggage. But the same features that make them easy to deploy and inconspicuous in your daily life have also allowed them to be abused as a sinister tracking tool that domestic abusers and criminals can use to stalk their targets.

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.

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