Hacking, Security & Privacy - Page 53

Saudi Aramco, who has the title of the world's largest oil company, has been struck by a cyber attack. The company has reported that nearly all of their workstations have been hit by malware, and the breach is said to be similar to the attack on Iranian systems back in Apri, but oil-production industrial equipment was not affected.

Saudi Aramco have said they've disconnected their entire network from the Internet as a precautionary measure, and expect a full recovery of their systems before the end of the week. The oil company hasn't said who is involved, but have insisted that the production of oil has not been altered as a result of the breach. The company said in a statement:

Malware is bad. It's created by people who want to cause you trouble or steal your information. It's a fact of life that Windows will always be a target of malware, but how about Android? It seems as more hackers and scammers are now targeting the mobile operating system with varying degrees of success.

In the second quarter of 2012, Kaspersky Labs found that the number of malware out there targeting Android has tripled. Likely this is the result of an increased number of Android phones giving malicious programmers a wider base to attack. This is the same reason so many different malwares are written for Windows.

During the three months that make up the second quarter, the number of new malware increased to nearly 15,000. 49 percent of the malware were multi-functional Trojans designed to steal data such as contact names, phone numbers, and e-mails. 25 percent were SMS Trojans which send texts to premium numbers to gain money for the programmer.

This is something that I've read with great interest, and to anyone who has seen the TV show "Person of Interest", you'll understand that these types of systems are not just fiction, but they can be used for wrong-doing, too.

Last week, WikiLeaks talked of, and released internal documents and e-mails by hackers regarding TrapWire. TrapWire is a privately-owned surveillance technology that is used by various private and public agencies. TrapWire seems to work by collecting surveillance data from 'participating' private and public sources, such as CCTV cameras.

The data is then poured into the system, where TrapWire can analyze the data, detecting changes in patterns such as noticing a certain vehicle is not on its usual morning commute to work, which can then be looked at as 'suspicious behavior'. The technology is owned by Abraxas, who were eventually acquired by Cubic. In 2005, Abraxas Corp. CEO Richard Hollis talked about TrapWire:

The developer behind successful titles such as the recently released Diablo III, and World of Warcraft, oh I suppose we can't leave out StarCraft, has posted an "important security update" to its official website. Blizzard have announced that their security team found an "unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard".

The developer quickly took appropriate steps to close off access, and started working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate into the matter. At the moment, Blizzard have found no evidence that financial information (such as credit card details) or billing details and real names were compromised. Blizzard's investigation is ongoing, but there's nothing suggesting that these pieces of information were accessed.

What was accessed, were lists of email addresses for global Battle.net users, outside of China. This mens that players on North American-based servers, such as North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia had their personal security question, and information regarding to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators were accessed. Blizzard have noted that based on what they currently know, this information is not enough for anyone to access Battle.net accounts.

And so they should. After having the joy of a daisy-changed hack, Mat Honan has been keeping the tech world up-to-date on the going ons of the recent hack over at Apple, and what companies are doing to make sure that it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Apple have improved their services, issuing a 24-hour ban on calling Apple support to change your Apple ID password. Honan's hack involved some social engineering, meaning that a hacker actually made a voice call, setting up accounts pretending to be him. Wired reported on the ban, saying:

It's a sad reality that there's always someone trying to break into Windows. This is due to the wide use that Windows has over other operating systems. Even before the official release, people are doing their best to break into Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8, and sadly, they've found three exploits to do just that.

With three months left before the actual release of Windows 8, Microsoft has time to take care of these exploits that have been found. Sung-Ting Tsai of Trend Micro is the person who found the exploits, so he's helping Microsoft patch them rather than working on exploiting them for nefarious reasons.

The exploits are in the kernel level advanced local procedure call, the component object model (COM) application programming interface, and the Windows Runtime API. Tsai worked on several methods to attack the vulnerabilities, and while he wasn't completely successful, he says that someone with enough time could find a way to compromise the system.

Earlier today, stories were hitting the web that Ubisoft's DRM installed a browser plug-in that contained a backdoor. Ubisoft acted quickly and has released a patch to fix the security hole as it turns out that the backdoor was an accident and was in no way meant to be there, or at least not exploitable as it was.

Tavis Ormandy, a Google security engineer, found the backdoor and wrote about it on the Seclists.org mailing list on Sunday. Mr. Ormandy went as far as to post a few lines of Javascript as an untested proof of concept. This morning, the story made it onto Hacker News along with a working proof of concept.

The list of games which come with Uplay, and the vulnerability, are as follows:

Apple have been hit again, with security firm Intego and their virus team identifying yet another Trojan horse that attacks Apple's Mac platform. The new Trojan called "Crisis", hasn't been seen in the wild yet, but Intego says that the Trojan is engineered to make analysis of the malware difficult for security experts.

Intego have stressed alertness regarding Crisis, as it appears to be quite smart, having the ability to bypass OS X security features and install itself, all without any user interaction.

Crisis has been tracked, back to the IP address of 176.58.100.37, which it then calls back to every five minutes for instructions. There's only two OS X versions that are said to be susceptible to Crisis, OS X 10.6 and 10.7. Crisis can install and run itself without the need for the user to enter in their password. It's also resistant to reboots, and will run until it is detected and removed.

A word of warning to our readers: next time you check into a hotel room, realize you're probably not the only one that can get in. Take a moment to run your fingers along the bottom of the keycard lock and check for a power port. If you find one, it means a hacker with a couple of cheap hardware parts could gain access to your room without leaving a trace.

24-year-old Mozilla software developer and self-described hacker Cody Brocious has issued this warning after he found the vulnerability while reverse engineering Onity-manufactured locks. By connecting $50 in hardware to the DC port, the door will supposedly unlock and provide access. However, in practice, it's not quite that reliable.

While demonstrating it to a Forbe's journalist, it only worked on one of the three doors they tried and only on the second try after Brocious tweaked his software. Still, with a bit of time, a hacker could perfect the software and technique and somewhere around 4 million doors would immediately be able to be opened.

We've seen some serious hacking over the last few years, with the last notable tech-related hack being Sony, but now Yahoo! have joined the ranks of victims being hit. Yahoo! confirmed that it had the usernames, and passwords of over 400,000 accounts stolen from its servers earlier this week, and that data from these accounts were posted online briefly.

The data has since been yanked offline, but it turns out that it wasn't just for Yahoo! accounts, as Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com login info was also taken on the day and placed online. Those who hacked the servers said that they did it simply to show Yahoo! the weaknesses in their security software, elaborating:

Spam e-mail is nothing new. Most users have figured out ways to combat it either through the use of spam boxes or spam blockers on the e-mail servers themselves. This spam is traditionally sent out via compromised computers that have been pulled together into a botnet. The botnet can be ordered to do whatever nefarious activities its commander wants.

With Windows becoming more secure, however, it has been harder for hackers to gain these computers for botnets. Terry Zink of Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog on the MSDN noticed something interesting about the spam he has been receiving lately. At the bottom of the message it says "Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android."

Furthermore, he examined the headers of the e-mail and found "Message-ID: 1341147286.19774.androidMobile(at)web140302.mail.bf1.yahoo.com" I'm sure you can see where this is going. A spammer somewhere has a botnet that lives on Android devices, much like the rumors we've all heard. What's even more interesting is where these devices are located.

Once again, Apple's OS X is being confronted with a security risk. The latest backdoor has been discovered by Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs and is being used as part of a Advanced Persistent Threat campaign. This is just the latest in a series of security risks present in the Mac OS X operating system.

Kaspersky researchers found that Uyghur activists in China were being targeted by hackers. These hackers sent e-mails with a compromised attachment that was in the form of a JPEG. The code hidden inside the JPEG was a new form of the MaControl backdoor and is compatible with both the PowerPC and i386 Mac variants.

Costin Raiu, Director of Global Research & Analysis at Kaspersky Lab:

In case you needed more examples of why the United States needs to focus on cyber security, take a look at a virus discovered in Peru. "ACAD/Medre.A" is a virus that is committing espionage by sending blueprints to China from companies in Peru. It has already stolen tens of thousands of blueprints, according to ESET.

The virus targeted the software AutoCAD which is a primary tool used by industrial designers and architects. It is believed the virus was first distributed to Peruvian companies through the use of an AutoCAD template given to public bodies. The virus was detected several months ago but has just seen a spike in usage.

The virus sends back blueprints to e-mail accounts provided by two Chinese internet firms, 163.com and qq.com. However, this doesn't prove China or the Chinese were behind the virus. What it does prove is that companies and governments alike need to strengthen their cyber security measures to prevent things like this from happening.

Flame, a highly sophisticated virus that was first discovered in Iranian oil refineries, and is supposedly the result of a U.S. and Israel joint effort to slow down Iran's nuclear program, reports The Washington Post. The information comes from multiple Western officials who purportedly have knowledge of the project, but of course want to remain anonymous.

This shouldn't come as a surprise considering the U.S. were unveiled as using the volatile Stuxnet virus, where The New York Times reported about Operation: Olympic Games, which is a project that used Stuxnet and Duqu, both sophisticated viruses. These viruses targeted Iranian SCADA systems, that allowed the creators of this virus to gather intelligence and even control aspects of Iran's nuclear and oil refining facilities.

Stuxnet code has been found within the Flame virus, according to security researchers, which is an unofficial confirmation that the creators of the Stuxnet virus (the U.S. government) are also behind this new nasty virus. Once this was discovered, in Get Smart fashion, the virus began to self-destruct, hastily removing itself from infected computers... not suss, huh?

LulzSec, a hacking group responsible for many hacks last year, has been fairly quiet this year after their leader allegedly worked with law enforcement to bring charges against its members. Now, however, LulzSec Reborn has taken over and started hacking, mainly compromising user accounts and leaking the details.

LulzSec Reborn has had two major hacks this year and otherwise has been quiet. The first was a leaking of 170,000 MilitarySingles accounts on Pastebin and now they are taking responsibility for the leaking of 10,000 Twitter accounts on Pastebin. The latter, today's leak, features much more information than a traditional password hack.

The leak comes in the form of an SQL dump which features usernames, passwords, real names, bios, locations, avatars, security tokens used by the service for authentication with Twitter and the user's most recent Tweet. The hack comes from compromising a third-party site that required the login information to work.

A new discovery has been made by a Cambridge University researcher that a chip used by the US military features a security backdoor which could have massive implications on on national security. The chip, which was built in China, cannot simply be reprogrammed as the security backdoor is physically present on the silicon.

Sergei Skorobogatov of Quo Vadis Labs at Cambridge University said:

Microsoft has left an unpatched exploit in Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The exploit works on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview and has been documented and known for a while. The details of the exploit are pretty simple and can be done in under a minute if one is a fast typist.

The general idea behind the exploit is to be able to run an elevated command prompt without even being logged in. It works by making a simple change in the registry so that when sticky keys is activated it launches the command prompt instead. The hack is virtually undetectable as all it is is a simple change in registry value.

To do the exploit one only needs to open command prompt once on the target PC and enter the code below. Once done, the hacker can return to the workstation at any point later in time and launch an administrator level command prompt just by pressing shift 5 times in a row. This could be of a serious nature for many different people, especially a business.

Anonymous have dumped 1.7GB of data belonging to the US Department of Justice, and on the flip side, the DoJ have downplayed the sensitivity of the data siphoned from their website. Anonymous says that the information they have includes "internal e-mails", and "the entire database dump" from the website.

Anonymous' leak was announced alongside a torrent with the 1.7GB of data inside, as well as a statement:

Well, the government of the Netherlands have become the first European country to pass a net neutrality law. What this does is prevents internet service providers (ISPs) from traffic management except in the cases of congestion and network security, it also includes restrictions on ISPs performing deep packet inspection and other similar wiretapping techniques.

June 2011 was when the law was formed, where the Netherland's parliament passed a motion to stop mobile operators from blocking VoiP calls over their networks, with the bill only re cently passing the Dutch senate. The provisions in the law extend to anyone providing Internet access services, forbidding the use of traffic-shaping based on application usage, unless they hinder access for other users by causing congestion.

This means that equal types of traffic will be treated equally, with an example like video streaming services owned by a provider cannot have unrestricted access, where Hulu may be restricted. If a user chews up too much bandwidth, before the ISP can take any action, the user must be alerted so that they have the time to remedy the situation.

Once again, I get to be the bearer of bad news in order to keep you, our reader, safe. This time I bring news of a new malware that is going around dubbed "ransomware" due to the fact it locks up your computer until you pay the ransom amount demanded. This isn't a completely new idea, but this is a new strain and variation.

This latest campaign is mainly targeting the UK and a few other European countries and claims that illegally downloaded music has been found on the computer. Due to this illegal material, the malware claims that "to unlock your computer and to avoid other legal consequences, your are obligated to pay a release fee of 50 pounds."

The malware was spotted by security watch blog abuse.ch. According to them, the malware is delivered through an exploit known as "Blackhole." The ransomware also carries a payload of Aldi Bot which steals banking information. The message to take away here is to keep all your browsers and their add-ons up to date, as this is how Blackhole functions. Anti-virus isn't a bad idea either.