Alphabet researchers have discovered 7 serious security breaches on the iPhone

Alphabet researchers have discovered seven serious security breaches on the iPhone
The company's Zero team discovered software deficiencies that allowed the cellular code to run maliciously without the user having to click on a link or take any special action. Cyber experts have estimated the value of these black market loopholes for tens of millions of dollars.

Project members Zero, Alphabet's information security venture, discovered seven serious security breaches on the iPhone that allowed device penetration and information theft through Apple's iMessage app. Of those, six have already been fixed in iOS 12.4 update released last week. The seventh has not yet been fixed, and therefore the researchers refrain from presenting its details.

According to the researchers who found the deficiencies, four of the breaches were extremely severe and allowed the execution of malicious code on the iPhone without the user being required to take action like clicking on an infected link, for example. This is the worst kind of loopholes, because there is really no way of defending them. All it takes from a hacker is to send an engineered message and as soon as the user opens it in the app - the damage is activated.

The two additional loopholes are also dangerous and allow you to scan the device memory and read files, even from a remote device. The availability of the feasibility proofs of the six loopholes released by Zero is another important reminder to those who have not yet updated their device, and it would be better for Almond to do so.

The breach package was estimated to be about $ 5 million to $ 10 million, according to a price list published by Zerodium, the hacker's hacking dealership in French Carrer. Another company, Crowdfense, estimated the breaches at an even higher price of between $ 20 and $ 24 million. These are loopholes that many would love to put their hands on. Using them allows access to new iPhones even in the latest versions of Apple's operating system.

source: https://www.calcalist.co.il/internet/articles/0,7340,L-3767458,00.html

Crypto Trap

Banks in Israel refuse to accept money invested on crypto exchanges, due to money laundering concerns. At the same time, the tax authority is demanding that Israelis who invest in crypto pay capital gains tax. If you cannot transfer the funds you cannot pay the tax.

The trend of the large crypto currencies has led masses of investors, even in Israel, to believe that they can get rich quick. For some, this has also worked, but when they realize the profits, they find that the Israeli authorities have put them in a trap, with no way out.

This situation was created by a lethal combination between a legal buyer and a lack of coordination between regulators. In the case of the crypto, this combination also turns thousands of Israelis into potential tax evaders and criminals and also causes a loss of state income that already reaches at least NIS 200 - 300 million - a huge sum, especially at a time when the deficit was cut and not stopped.

The root of the problem is the refusal of Israeli banks to receive money invested on currencies in the world, due to the fear of money laundering - although in many cases the money path can be easily shown and disproved. On the other hand, the tax authority, which receives information from Israeli stock exchanges from Israeli stock exchanges, requires them to pay for their capital gains, along with a voluntary disclosure process.

Naturally, if the funds cannot be transferred, the tax cannot be paid, and the voluntary disclosure process cannot be started.

Source: https://www.calcalist.co.il/local/articles/0,7340,L-3767322,00.html

Disable Telnet On Vulnerable Models — Patch is not Available Yet!

Cisco is warning of a new critical zero-day IOS / IOS XE vulnerability that affects more than 300 of its switch models.

The company identified this highest level of vulnerability in its product while analyzing "Vault 7" — a roughly 8,761 documents and files leaked by Wikileaks last week, claiming to detail hacking tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The vulnerability resides in the Cluster Management Protocol (CMP) processing code in Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE Software.
Read more http://thehackernews.com/2017/03/cisco-network-switch-exploit.html?m=1

Delta Air Lines Flights Grounded World-Wide on Computer Outage - again !

The No. 2 U.S. carrier by traffic said “our systems are down everywhere”. Computer failure expected to lead to worldwide delays.

In a statement confirming the outage, the airline said: “Delta has experienced a computer outage that has impacted flights scheduled for this morning.

“Flights awaiting departure are currently delayed. Flights en route are operating normally. Delta is advising travelers to check the status of their flights this morning while the issue is being addressed.”

Less than a month ago, in July , A 16-year-old boy has been found guilty of Delta and American airlines cyber attacks.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-36725822

Previously, on Feb. 22 , Delta Air Lines delayed boarding for about two dozen flights as a result of a brief outage in its software that powers ground operations, a spokesman said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-delta-air-lines-outages-idUSKCN0VB242

3.7 Million Exposed in Banner Health

Breach Banner Health is warning 3.7 million patients, staff and food and beverage customers that their personal data may have been stolen during a security breach traced back to June 23. Headquartered in Arizona, Banner is one of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the US. It owns and operates 29 acute-care hospitals and numerous health-related services. read more http://www.securityweek.com/37-million-exposed-banner-health-breach#noredirect Powered by Como: http://www.como.com

New Angler Malware Cheats Microsoft EMET Security

FireEye spots the bad guys beating Microsoft's zero-day exploit protection tool for the first time -- and spreading ransomware as well.

New exploits discovered in the Angler Exploit Kit crimeware can bypass Microsoft’s vaunted Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) and then drop ransomware.

The finding by FireEye is the first time that EMET, Microsoft’s free tool that prevents malware from running on a Windows machine, has been unable to catch real malware. Researchers have hacked at EMET over the years looking for weaknesses—with some success--but until now there had been no real signs of bad guys abusing it.

The new exploits utilize vulnerable versions of the Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight running on Windows 7, so keeping those application up-do-date with patches will prevent attacks on systems with EMET 5.5, the latest version of Microsoft’s tool. EMET is often relied upon to thwart zero-day attacks until patches get rolled out in organizations, so the new Angler feature would render that defense useless, according to FireEye.

“Nobody foresaw this coming,” says Raghav Pande, a research scientist with FireEye. Pande, who works on FireEye product security, says Angler and other malware typically look for EMET and if they find it, shut down and give up on an EMET-protected target. But this new variant “completely changed the dynamic” because it is able to bypass EMET detection, he says.

Microsoft, meanwhile, said this via a spokesperson: “EMET is designed to make it more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, and therefore less likely, for attackers to exploit a system. With no one tool capable of preventing all attacks, Microsoft’s free security software detects and helps remove malware, including Angler.”

But the new EMET-bypass features in Angler demonstrate a growing sophistication of the malware kit’s developers as as well as their ability to target more security-savvy organizations: EMET is an open-source tool used as an extra layer by more advanced security teams.

“EMET is a great tool great tool to provide additional security to a system. Base security should be patching, which will neuter the attack in an even earlier stage. I have to say I am very impressed with the Angler engineering team: earlier this year, the 0-days, [and] now EMET bypass. This means they are targeting well-run organizations,” says Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys.

FireEye’s Pande says FireEye first spotted code in Angler for bypassing EMET back in March, but it’s now officially operational. The researchers didn’t witness any actual attacks, but were able to test the malware.

Bromium Labs in 2014 demonstrated how it could bypass several key defenses in EMET 4.1, specifically cheating EMET’s stack pivot protection and Export Address Table Filtering features by disabling them. Microsoft later that week released EMET 5.0, which hardened EAF and added Attack Surface Reduction, where organizations can selectively enable Flash, Java, and other third-party plugins.

Angler doesn’t use ROP to evade Data Execution Prevention; instead, it exploits Flash and Silverlight flaws.

In FireEye’s test of the malware, it saw that the exploit shellcode runs TeslaCrypt ransomware when infecting files. And “the attacker has full control over shellcode and it can pretty much execute anything it wants without EMET doing anything,” FireEye said in a new blog post with technical details and screenshots of the new Angler feature in action on Windows 7.

Pande says it’s possible the attack will work on Windows 8 machines as well, but FireEye has only tested Windows 7. Windows 10 would be immune due to the operating system’s ability to control app installation, he says.

Meanwhile, the new Angler features demonstrate just how far its creators have come. “If you compare past years’ attacks," Angler was rebundling exploits, Pande says. "It seemed they didn’t have the guys to tinker or play around with the exploit that much ... Right now, we’re seeing a change in the internal code and structure” of Angler, however, he says.

Patching Flash, Web browsers, and Java, can mitigate the EMET bypass, as can disabling Flash and Silverlight browser plug-ins, according to FireEye.

Michael Gorelik, vice president of R&D at Morphisec, says the Angler attack basically makes half of Windows users "defenseless" to ransomware. "The Angler Exploit Kit is already the preferred weapon of hackers to deliver their malware, and we predict that with this vulnerability, the prominence of Angler will further increase. This time the payload was TeslaCrypt Ransomware, but there is no limitation to what payload can be delivered," he says.

Taken from darkreading , Kelly Jackson Higgins

427 Million MySpace Passwords - For Sale

Former top social network Myspace was apparently hacked some time ago, with the data that was stolen at the time appearing online last week. News of the leaked Myspace account information comes just days after huge number of LinkedIn account details stolen back in 2012 appeared for sale.

When it emerged last week, the LinkedIn breach, which resulted in 167 million accounts leaking online, 117 million of which included passwords, appeared to be the largest incident of the kind. However, it pales in comparison to the newly revealed MySpace breach, which apparently resulted in a massive number of more than 427 million passwords being leaked.

LeakedSource, a paid search engine for hacked data, broke the news on the Myspace hack last week, revealing that a total of 360,213,024 records were stolen as part of the breach.

According to the site, 111,341,258 of the leaked accounts had a username attached, while 68,493,651 of them had a secondary password. Given that some of the leaked accounts did not have a primary password, the total number of leaked passwords in this breach was 427,484,128, the search engine revealed.

Just as LinkedIn did back in 2012 when it was breached, Myspace stored these passwords using SHA1 with no salting, making it easy for anyone to decrypt them. Furthermore, it appears that most passwords were quite weak, with many people using some of the most common passwords.

According to LeakedSource, “homelesspa” was the most used password, at 855,478 occurrences, though it appears that this might have been an automatically generated password, associated with emails that have the same format. “password1” at 585,503 occurrences, “abc123” at 569,825 and “123456” at 487,945 were among the most commonly used passwords by MySpace members.

One of several high-profile breaches

The stolen Myspace data was put up for sale on a dark web site called The Real Deal, with a 6 Bitcoin (around $3,000) price attached. The seller is a hacker who uses the usernamepeace_of_mind, the same person who is also selling the leaked LinkedIn data, along with tens of millions of records stolen from two other websites, namely Tumblr (50 million) and Fling (40 million).

What’s interesting to note is not only the fact that all these records are being sold by the same hacker, but also the fact that this data is old, stolen around 2013 or before. The MySpace hack is the largest of them, but the other three (LinkedIn, Tumblr and Fling) account for a great deal of exposed accounts as well, nearly 270 million.

It’s also interesting that all four data breaches became public in a very short period of time, although they have been lying dormant / were kept hidden for very long, as Troy Hunt notes in a blog post.

Speaking to SecurityWeek, IT security expert Sorin Mustaca said there are several unknowns that question the veracity of the leak, starting with the fact that LeakedSource appears to be the only website to have seen the data and that they received the dump from an email address that does not appear to belong to the hacker that put it up for sale.

Moreover, there’s the claim that not all accounts had usernames attached, that some had two passwords and that others lacked the primary password, which Mustaca finds odd: “MySpace required a username and an email address. You can't have one without the other. And you can't remove any of them either.”

“Is this maybe test data of Myspace left on some server for the developers to play with (it happened to other companies)? Or it may just be a fake. The future will tell us if this data is true or not and probably how the sellers got their hands on it. Until then, if you are a potentially affected user, please change your password with a secure one,” Mustaca toldSecurityWeek.

The hacker selling the data on TheRealDeal darknet shop says that each of the 360,213,024 records in the leak contains an email address, a username, one password, and, in some cases a second password. The data dump is 15.3GB compressed and 35.3GB uncompressed or in plain text, and Mustaca explains that this would translate to around 105 Bytes per record, where 20 Bytes are used for the SHA1 hash and the remaining 65 Bytes for the username and email address.

Furthermore, there is the issue of storing the passwords unsalted and having almost no restrictions in place regarding the type of password that is allowed. Although the service prevents users from choosing passwords shorter than 6 characters, it still allows them to set it to some of the passwords that appear in the data dump, such as “123456,” Mustaca said.

Hundreds of millions potentially impacted

Although MySpace is only a shadow of its former glory, is still has tens of millions of unique visitors each month and it did manage to gather over 1 billion registered users as of late 2015. If real, this is a high-profile breach that potentially impacts the tens of millions of people still using the service, but also those who abandoned it many years ago as well.

However, there are many unknowns at the moment, starting with the exact date when MySpace was breached and who did it. And there is also the question of who had the data all this time and why they didn’t leak it online before. Furthermore, given that the breach is old, chances are that the data circulated on the dark web before, hidden from the public eyes, and that somewhere, someone, found a way to leverage the large amount of information at their disposal.

The one thing that this breach proves once again is that people should be more careful when selecting the passwords that protect their online identities. For starters, they should choose strong passwords that are difficult to guess, and Mustaca notes that a secure password would contain letters (small and capital), numbers and characters. Users should also avoid re-using the same password for multiple accounts, to avoid having all of them compromised if a single one is hacked.

Contacted by SecurityWeek, Myspace pointed us to an official statement they published Tuesday morning. The service has confirmed the breach and revealed that the stolen data includes “user login data from a portion of accounts that were created prior to June 11, 2013.” The leaked information includes email addresses, usernames and passwords of accounts created prior to that date, Myspace says.

To protect users, the service is invalidating all user passwords for the affected accounts and users will be prompted to reset these passwords next time they visit the platform. The network is also trying to identify and block suspicious activity that might occur following the data leak. Myspace says that more details on the leak will be revealed as their investigation progresses and that law enforcement was also alerted on the issue.

“As part of the major site re-launch in the summer of 2013, Myspace took significant steps to strengthen account security. The compromised data is related to the period before those measures were implemented. We are currently utilizing advanced protocols including double salted hashes (random data that is used as an additional input to a one-way function that “hashes” a password or passphrase) to store passwords. Myspace has taken additional security steps in light of the recent report,” Myspace said.

*Updated with response from Myspace

*taken from : securityweek.com