Shrootless Bug, Statistic Stats, Trojan Source, Fake Students, & Clippy Returns – PSW #717

Interesting: "Unlike Signal’s underlying code, which is open-source, the code for fighting spam is kept secret, to prevent bad actors from finding bypasses."

Linux security is important: "We are constantly investing in the security of the Linux Kernel because much of the internet, and Google – from the devices in our pockets, to the services running on Kubernetes in the cloud – depend on the security of it "

Which is your favorite?

You can't provide what you don't collect: "In the search warrant, Santa Clara Police sought to get the name, street address, telephone number, and email address of a specific Signal user. It also wanted billing records, the dates of when the account was opened and registered, inbound and outbound call detail records, voicemails, video calls, emails, text messages, IP addresses along with dates and times for each login, and even all dates and times the user connected to Signal."

At the time, these were relavent: "Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.” -- Clifford Stoll" - This one is like the "passwords are like underwear" horrible analolgy. Rotating passwords is no longer recommended the way it used to be. Sharing is still bad, but we have so many other ways to grant access (password/secret vaults, oAuth, etc...) that this advice is now dated. Then there is this on "The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it. -- Robert Morris" - I do not dispute the claim, its just less and less feasible as time goes on. Sure, we could not use any computers today, however many carry one in their pocket and for certain types of services it requires that you have some sort of computing device. I dig this one: "When you secure things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all - unknown".

"The two zero-day flaws -- which are being exploited by attackers now -- are being tracked with the identifiers CVE-2021-38000 and CVE-2021-38003. Both were found by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which tracks state-sponsored and cyber-criminal exploit activity. The second of the two zero-days was also reported by Samuel Groß from Google Project Zero on 26 October, indicating how fast Google is responding to zero-day discoveries." - I find it interesting that two different research groups, in this case, both within Google, found the same bug. Just when you think something has not been discovered by someone else or some other group, think again. I don't believe we can call it "safe" if it's not being exploited in the wild, maybe it is?

This happens all the time, and has been happening for a long time: "As it turns out, there is no Harvard student by the name of Mikao John. Instead, a scammer invented that persona — and, alarmingly, managed to obtain the credentials to insert him into Harvard’s web system — in order to sell SEO-friendly backlinks, and the prestige of being hyped up by someone at one of the world’s most distinguished universities, to marketing firms with publicity-hungry clients." The scammers advertised for all sorts of things, including, synthetic urine. WTF? (Reference from actual post on Harvard site: https://archive.md/hgCU2). Companies that place ads were in on it or not? "One of the companies featured in a blog post by Mikao John, for instance, told Futurism that the mention had been secured through a marketing firm called T1 Advertising, which conceded in response to questions that it sometimes pays “media consultants” to plant blog posts on Harvard’s site."

They also tore apart the $19 Apple cleaning cloth...

"SIP is a security technology in macOS that restricts a root user from performing operations that may compromise system integrity. We discovered the vulnerability while assessing processes entitled to bypass SIP protections. We found that the vulnerability lies in how Apple-signed packages with post-install scripts are installed. A malicious actor could create a specially crafted file that would hijack the installation process. After bypassing SIP’s restrictions, the attacker could then install a malicious kernel driver (rootkit), overwrite system files, or install persistent, undetectable malware, among others." and right here is your problem: "when installing an Apple-signed package (.pkg file), the said package invokes system_installd, which then takes charge of installing the former. If the package contains any post-install scripts, system_installd runs them by invoking a default shell, which is zsh on macOS. Interestingly, when zsh starts, it looks for the file /etc/zshenv, and—if found—runs commands from that file automatically, even in non-interactive mode"

So neat: "Therefore, by placing Bidi override characters exclusively within comments and strings, we can smuggle them into source code in a manner that most compilers will accept. Our key insight is that we can reorder source code characters in such a way that the resulting display order also represents syntactically valid source code.” “Bringing all this together, we arrive at a novel supply-chain attack on source code. By injecting Unicode Bidi override characters into comments and strings, an adversary can produce syntactically-valid source code in most modern languages for which the display order of characters presents logic that diverges from the real logic."

Someone stole his identity and sold his house! Legally, this can be tricky to rectify.

Turns out this is not run on the client, but on the server-side: "For those who missed it, New World players Josh Strife Hayes and Callum Upton discovered on Friday that the text boxes in the game are HTML, and that the text is not sanitized, which in short means you can run client-side code in any text box in the game."

This is like cookie cutter, very bland, tired old advice. How do we change the narritive? "Educate your managers and employees, Keep your software and system up to date, Ensure endpoint protection, Install a firewall, Back up your data."

"The purpose of a resolver's lame cache is to ensure that if an authoritative server responds to a resolver's query in a specific broken way, subsequent client queries for the same tuple do not trigger further queries to the same server for a configurable amount of time." - You can turn off lame cache: lame-ttl 0;

Holy ads batman, also, I did not get a whole lot out of this article...

I'm really interested in seeing the research as printers are weird devices. In HP's case, the firmware was very specific and used PJL to perform the updates. There was not great documentation or other research several years ago (that I could find easily), however, a quick search turned up this: https://www.jsof-tech.com/unpacking-hp-firmware-updates-part-1/. Happy reading!

Clippy is back! Not really, but, you know, rage...

an American medical artificial intelligence platform, containing 886,521,320 records. The total size of the dataset was 68.53 GB and contained U.S.-based medical-related data. The type of data collected was divided into the following sections: Date, document type, physician note, encounter IDs (An interaction between a patient and healthcare provider(s) to provide healthcare service(s)), patient ID, note, UUID, patient type, doctor notes, date of service, note type (example Nursing/other), and detailed note text.

The head of the FBI urged US companies on Thursday to develop closer ties with it to counter a “multi-avenue” effort by Beijing to amass enough intellectual property to “become the world’s only superpower”. Suggests establishing partnerships with the agency’s local offices – before breaches occur like the Microsoft Exchange email server hack discovered earlier this year.

Black Shadow hacking group, which hit Shirbit insurance firm last year, takes public transport companies, children’s museum and other sites offline; warns of data leak. Retaliation for gas pump hack or are they just continuing the cyber jousting?

Last week, Microsoft disclosed details about a new vulnerability (CVE-2021-30892) dubbed "Shrootless" that could be exploited by attackers to bypass macOS security restrictions and assume complete control over targeted devices to perform arbitrary operations on compromised devices without being flagged by security solutions.

VPNs which have become essential for many organizations since the pandemic's onset, are a popular target for cyberattacks. Incident response teams say these attacks on VPNs aren't new, but attackers are finding new and sophisticated ways to compromise enterprise VPNs.

Cybersecurity firm Proofpoint has found evidence of a prolific cybercrime group using the popularity of Netflix hit “Squid Game” to spread the Dridex malware.

Researchers say they have uncovered a new attack method they have dubbed "Trojan Source attacks" in which attackers could exploit how Unicode handles script ordering to encode potentially malicious source code in such a way that human reviewers will only see the harmless version of the code while compilers see the nefarious version. The Trojan Source attack method exploits the difference between how text renderers display information versus how a compiler processes it.

Europol says it has successfully disrupted operations of the high-profile, "professional, highly organized" ransomware group responsible for thousands of "devastating" attacks, including the one that hit Norsk Hydro, after successfully targeting 12 group members.

The FBI warned the US public that threat actors actively use fake and spoofed unemployment benefit websites to harvest sensitive financial and personal information from unsuspecting victims.

The old-time war-driving technique is still proving an efficient way to crack WiFi passwords. Recently, a researcher in Israel was able to crack 70% of WiFi network passwords after collecting network hashes via war-driving.

Despite increasing cyberattacks targeting data in the cloud, 83% of businesses are still failing to encrypt half of the sensitive data they store in the cloud, raising even greater concerns as to the impact cyber criminals can have. 40% of organizations have experienced a cloud-based data breach in the past 12 months, according to a study conducted by 451 Research.

The FBI has sent out a flash alert warning private industry partners that the HelloKitty ransomware gang (aka FiveHands) has added DDoS attacks to their arsenal of extortion tactics.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warns that ransomware gangs are targeting companies involved in "time-sensitive financial events" such as corporate mergers and acquisitions to make it easier to extort their victims.

Cybersecurity researchers disclosed details of what they say is the "largest botnet" observed in the wild in the last six years, infecting over 1.6 million evices primarily located in China, with the goal of launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and inserting advertisements into HTTP websites visited by unsuspecting users. Mainly targeting MIPS-based fiber routers, the botnet leverages a combination of third-party services such as GitHub, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, and central command-and-control (C2) servers for its bots to controller communications, not to mention completely encrypting the transmission channels to prevent the victimized devices from being taken over.

Yahoo announced today (Nov. 2) that it will no longer operate in China as the country tightens data and privacy regulations that are making it increasingly difficult for US companies to operate there.