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UPS Breached
Credit and debit card information belonging to customers made purchases at 51 UPS Store Inc. locations in 24 states this year may have been illegally accessed as the result of an intrusion into the company’s networks.
In a statement on Wednesday, UPS said it was recently notified by law enforcement officials about a “broad-based malware intrusion” of its systems.
A subsequent investigation by an IT security firm showed that attackers had installed previously unknown malware on systems in more than four-dozen stores to gain access to cardholder data. The affected stores represent about 1% of the 4,470 UPS Store locations around the country.
The intrusion may have exposed data on transactions conducted at the stores between Jan. 20 and Aug. 11, 2014. “For most locations, the period of exposure to this malware began after March 26, 2014,” UPS said in a statement.
In addition to payment card information, the hackers also appear to have gained access to customer names, as well as postal and email addresses.
Each of the affected locations is individually owned and runs private networks that are not connected to other stores, UPS added. The company provided alist of affected locations.
The breach is the third significant one to be disclosed in the past week. Last Thursday, grocery store chain Supervalu announced it had suffered a malicious intrusion that exposed account data belonging to customers who had shopped at about 180 of the company’s stores in about a dozen states. The breach also affected customers from several other major grocery store chains for which Supervalu provides IT services.
Is Epic Turla Exploiting Windows XP?
Kaspersky Lab has discovered an espionage network that successfully attacked government institutions, intelligence agencies and European companies.
The firm has dubbed the spy operation Epic Turla, and said that it is in no doubt about its capabilities.
“Over the last 10 months, Kaspersky Lab researchers have analyzed a massive cyber-espionage operation which we call ‘Epic Turla’,” it said.
“The attackers behind Epic Turla have infected several hundred computers in more than 45 countries, including government institutions, embassies, military, education, research and pharmaceutical companies.”
Kaspersky said that Epic Turla used two zero-day exploits that affected Adobe and Microsoft software, along with some backdoor and social engineering tricks.
In particular, Kaspersky said a vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows 2003 – CVE-2013-5065 – termed a “privilege escalation vulnerability” is being used. “The CVE-2013-5065 exploit allows the backdoor to achieve administrator privileges on the system and run unrestricted. This exploit only works on unpatched Microsoft Windows XP systems.”
The use of this Windows XP flaw underlines the risk that the unsupported Windows XP OS poses. Kaspersky went on to explain that, once inside, attackers install their own rootkits and other malware tools and begin their surveillance.
“Once the attackers obtain the necessary credentials without the victim noticing, they deploy the rootkit and other extreme persistence mechanisms,” it said. “The attacks are still ongoing as of July 2014, actively targeting users in Europe and the Middle East.”
The attacks are just the latest in a long line of incidents that businesses need to be aware of as cyber attacks continue at an alarming rate.
In June the security firm Crowdstrike alerted the industry to Putter Panda, a cute-sounding but nasty piece of malware. That firm pointed an accusatory finger at China and charged it with espionage on the US and Europe.
Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said at the time, “China’s decade-long economic espionage campaign is massive and unrelenting. Through widespread espionage campaigns, Chinese threat actors are targeting companies and governments in every part of the globe.” Chinese authorities disputed this.
The report comes in the same week Hold Security reported uncovering a huge trove of 1.2 billion web passwords and login details that have been gathered by Russian cyber criminals.
Can Governments Do More?
The UK Government isn’t doing enough to warn about the risks of cybercrime on a mass level, security firm Kaspersky has claimed.
Speaking at a company roundtable event at the firm’s European hub in London on Thursday, Kaspersky security researcher David Emm said isn’t doing as much as it could be to educate people about cyber security.
“I’d like to see the government doing more to get the message out to mainstream citizens and individuals because that’s the bone in which the industry is growing; the individuals with ideas,” Emm said
“If you look at it, the recent Cyber Street Wise campaign aside, I don’t think the government is doing very much in terms of mainstream messaging and I would certainly like to see it do more.”
Emm used the example of major UK marketing campaigns promoting the dangers of drink driving as an ideal model because they have been drilled into us over the years.
“As parents, we’ve this body of common sense, such as drinks driving, and it’s drip, drip, drip, over the years that has achieved that and I think we need to get to a point where we have some body of online common sense in which business people can draw upon; there’s definitely a role for education.”
Barclay’s bank, which was also present at the roundtable, agreed with Emm.
“The government really needs to recognise this is a serious issue – if you’re bright enough to set up your own business, you’re bright enough to protect yourself,” added the firm’s MD of fraud prevention Alex Grant.
Emm concluded by saying that the government’s Cyber Street Wise campaign that was launched in January was good enough to make people aware of the risks of cybercrime in the metropolitan areas. However, he said he’d like to see the government focus more on regional areas as people in sparsely populated areas weren’t as aware of it.
Kaspersky’s roundtable took place as part of the firm’s launch of a report that found small businesses in the UK are “woefully unprepared” for an IT security breach, despite relying increasingly on mobile devices and storing critical information on computers.
The study found that nearly a third, or 31 percent, of small businesses would not know what to do if they had an IT security breach tomorrow, with four in ten saying that they would struggle to recover all data lost and a quarter admitting they would be unable to recover any.
Insurers Eyeing Cyber Coverage
Insurers are eagerly monitoring exponential growth in the tiny cyber coverage market but their lack of experience and skills handling hackers and data breaches may keep their ambitions in check.
High profile cases of hackers seizing sensitive customer data from companies, such as U.S. retailer Target Corp or e-commerce company eBay Inc, have executives checking their insurance policies.
Increasingly, corporate risk managers are seeing insurance against cyber crime as necessary budget spending rather than just nice to have.
The insurance broking arm of Marsh & McLennan Companies estimates the U.S cyber insurance market was worth $1 billion last year in gross written premiums and could reach as much as $2 billion this year. The European market is currently a fraction of that, at around $150 million, but is growing by 50 to 100 percent annually, according to Marsh.
Those numbers represent a sliver of the overall insurance market, which is growing at a far more sluggish rate. Premiums are set to grow only 2.8 percent this year in inflation-adjusted terms, according to Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer.
The European cyber coverage market could get a big boost from draft EU data protection rules in the works that would force companies to disclose breaches of customer data to them.
“Companies have become aware that the risk of being hacked is unavoidable,” said Andreas Schlayer, responsible for cyber risk insurance at Munich Re. “People are now more aware that hackers can attack and do great damage to central infrastructure, for example in the energy sector.”
Insurers, which have more experience handling risks like hurricanes and fires, are now rushing to gain expertise in cyber technology.
“It is a difficult risk to price by traditional insurance methods as there currently is not statistically significant actuarial data available,” said Robert Parisi, head of cyber products at insurance brokers Marsh.
Andrew Braunbergon, research director at U.S. cybersecurity advisory company NSS Labs, said that some energy companies have trouble persuading insurers to provide them with cyber coverage as the industry is vulnerable to hacking attacks that could trigger disasters like an explosion in a worst-case scenario.
Pricing on policies for retailers has climbed in the wake of recent high-profile breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus, and other merchants, he added.
Is Malware Wreaking Havoc On XP?
One of the top three malware programs affecting businesses in the second quarter is a worm that takes advantage of the large number of companies still using Windows XP, Trend Micro has warned.
The worm, dubbed DOWNAD, also known as Conficker, can infect an entire network via a malicious URL, spam email, or removable drive. Windows XP is particularly susceptible to this threat because it is known to exploit the MS08-067 Server service vulnerability in order to execute arbitrary code.
DOWNAD also has its own domain generation algorithm (DGA) that allows it to create randomly-generated URLs. It then connects to these created URLs to download files to the system. Trend Micro said that around 175 IP addresses are found to be related to the DOWNAD worm and that these IP addresses use various ports and are randomly generated via the DGA capability of DOWNAD.
“During our monitoring of the spam landscape, we observed that in Q2, more than 40 percent of malware related spam mails are delivered by machines infected by DOWNAD worm,” said Trend Micro anti-spam research engineer Maria Manly in a blog post.
“A number of machines are still infected by this threat and leveraged to send the spammed messages to further increase the number of infected systems. And with Microsoft ending the support for Windows XP this year, we can expect that systems with this OS can be infected by threats like DOWNAD.”
The security company warned that spam campaigns delivering FAREIT, MYTOB, and LOVGATE payloads in email attachments are attributed to DOWNAD infected machines. FAREIT is a malware family of information stealers that download variants of the Zeus Trojan, while MYTOB is an old family of worms known for sending a copy of itself in spam attachments.
The other top sources of spam with malware are the CUTWAIL botnet, together with Gameover ZeuS (GoZ). Manly said CUTWAIL was actually previously used to download GoZ malware but now a malware called UPATRE employs GoZ malware or variants of ZBOT which have peer-to-peer functionality.
“In the last few weeks we have reported various spam runs that abused Dropbox links to host malware like UPATRE,” Manly said. “We also spotted a spammed message in the guise of voice mail that contains a Cryptolocker variant. The latest we have seen is a spam campaign with links that leveraged CUBBY, a file storage service, this time carrying a banking malware detected as TSPY_BANKER.WSTA.”
According to Manly, cybercriminals and threat actors are probably abusing file storage platforms to mask their malicious activities and go undetected in the system and network.
“As spam with malware attachment continues to proliferate, so is spam with links carrying malicious files. The continuous abuse of file hosting services to spread malware appears to have become a favoured infection vector of cyber criminals most likely because this makes it more effective given that the URLs are legitimate thereby increasing the chance of bypassing anti-spam filters,” she added.
Can Malwarebytes Protect XP?
Malwarebytes has launched anti-exploit services to protect Windows users from hacking attacks on vulnerabilities in popular targets including Microsoft Office, Adobe software products and Java, a service which even offers protection for Windows XP users.
Consumer, Premium and Corporate versions of the service are available, and are designed to pre-emptively stop hackers from infecting Windows machines with malware.
“An exploit will typically first corrupt the memory of an application process, take control, then execute code,” said Malwarebytes director of special projects Pedro Bustamante.
“From the shell code it executes a payload that tells the exploit what to do and that in turn usually downloads malware from the internet and executes it. The final stage is usually where antivirus kicks in, when it’s being downloaded from the internet, and starts doing things like behavioural analysis to see if it’s malicious.
“We don’t care about that, what we do comes before then. We just look for exploit-like behaviour and block anything that looks like it at the shellcode or payload stages. We come into play before the malware even appears on the scene.”
The Consumer version of the anti-exploit service is free and offers basic browser and Java protection.
The Premium version costs $37.00 per user and adds Office and Adobe protection services as well as the ability to add custom shields to other internet-facing applications, like Messenger or Netflix.
The Corporate version costs$40.00 person user and offers complete anti-exploit protection and comes with Malwarebytes’ Anti-malware service and a toolkit for IT managers.
Bustamante explained that the technology is designed to help businesses and general web users defend against the new wave of exploit-based cyber attacks.
“Traditional security can’t deal with exploits. Every day we see people getting infected, even if they have the latest up-to-date antivirus readers, because of exploits,” he said. “This is why we care about the applications you run – Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Java, Acrobat [and Microsoft] Word, Excel [and] Powerpoint.”
Bustamante added that the service is doubly important for Windows XP users since Microsoft officially ceased support for the OS in April.
“We’re still seeing over 25 percent of our users running XP. For them this product is even more important,” he said.
“We see new zero-days if not every week, every month, and for XP users who are not getting any more patches from Microsoft this product will be essential.
“Every month Microsoft will be releasing security patches for newer versions of Windows. Every time Microsoft does this it’ll be a treasure map for hackers to find exploits on Windows XP.
“It’ll show them exactly where the vulnerabilities are, so every month will see an influx of new exploits targeting Windows XP.”
Hackers Going After Traffic Signs
After hackers played several high-profile pranks with traffic signs, including warning San Francisco drivers of a Godzilla attack, the U.S. government advised operators of electronic highway signs to take “defensive measures” to better secure their property.
Last month, signs on San Francisco’s Van Ness Ave were photographed flashing “Godzilla Attack! Turn Back” and highway signs across North Carolina were tampered with last week to read “Hack by Sun Hacker.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT, this week advised cities, highway operators and other customers of digital-sign maker Daktronics Inc to take “defensive measures” to minimize the possibility of similar attacks.
It said that information had been posted on the Internet advising hackers how to access those systems using default passwords coded into the company’s software. “ICS-CERT recommends entities review sign messaging, update access credentials and harden communication paths to the signs,” the agency said in an alert posted on Thursday.
Jody Huntimer, a representative for Daktronics, declined to say if the recent attacks involved the bug reported by ICS-CERT.
“We are working with the ICS-CERT team to clarify the current alert and will release a statement once we have assessed the situation and developed customer recommendations,” Huntimer said via email.
Krebs on Security, a widely read security blog, posted a confidential report from the Center for Internet Strategy, or CIS, which was sent to state security officials. It warned that the pranks created a public safety risk because drivers often slow or stop to view the signs and take pictures.
CIS also predicated that amateur hackers might attempt to hack into other systems in the coming weeks following the May 27 release of “Watch Dogs,” a video game from Ubisoft focused on hacking critical infrastructure.
More Ransomware Plaguing Android
Android users have been warned again that they too can become victims of ransomware.
A Cryptolocker-style Android virus dubbed Simplocker has been detected by security firm Eset, which confirmed that it scrambles files on the SD cards of infected devices before issuing a demand for payment.
The message is in Russian and the demand for payment is in Ukrainian hryvnias, equating to somewhere between £15 and £20.
Naturally, the warning also accuses the victim of looking at rather unsavoury images on their phone. However, while the source of the malware is said to be an app called “Sex xionix”, it isn’t available at the Google Play Store, which generally means that anyone who sideloads it is asking for trouble.
Eset believes that this is actually more of a “proof of concept” than an all-out attack, and far less dangerous than Cryptolocker, but fully functional.
Robert Lipovsky of Eset said, “The malware is fully capable of encrypting the user’s files, which may be lost if the encryption key is not retrieved. While the malware does contain functionality to decrypt the files, we strongly recommend against paying up – not only because that will only motivate other malware authors to continue these kinds of filthy operations, but also because there is no guarantee that the crook will keep their part of the deal and actually decrypt them.”
Eset recommends the usual – use a malware app. It recommends its own, obviously, and advises punters to keep files backed up. Following such advice, said Lipovsky, ensures that ransomware is “nothing more than a nuisance”.
This is not the first Android cryptolocker style virus. Last month a similar virus was found, which Kaspersky said was “unsurprising, considering Android’s market share”.
PoS Cyber Attacks Up In 2013
June 4, 2014 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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A third of data intrusion investigated by security firm Trustwave last year involved compromises of point-of-sale (POS) systems and over half of all intrusions targeted payment card data.
Even though POS systems remained a significant target for attackers, as suggested by several high-profile data breaches disclosed by large retailers over the past six months, the largest number of data theft incidents last year actually involved e-commerce sites, Trustwave said Wednesday in a report that compiled data from 691 data breach investigations conducted by the company around the world.
E-commerce intrusions accounted for 54 percent of investigated data breaches and POS system intrusions accounted for 33 percent, Trustwave said. A separate report published by Verizon in April also pointed to Web application and PoS attacks as leading causes of security incidents with confirmed data disclosure last year.
According to Trustwave, over half of intrusions targeted payment-card data, with such data being stolen from e-commerce transactions in 36 percent of incidents and from POS transactions in 19 percent of attacks.
In Western Europe in particular, where countries have rolled out EMV — chip-and-PIN payment card transactions — cybercriminals shifted their focus from POS devices to e-commerce platforms, said John Yeo, EMEA Director at Trustwave. “EMV has changed the pattern of compromises when it comes to payment-card-specific data.”
However, a significant increase in the theft of sensitive, non-payment-card data, was also observed last year. This data includes financial credentials, personally identifiable information, merchant ID numbers and internal company communications, and was stolen in 45 percent of incidents, Trustwave said in the report.
Customer records containing personally identifiable information can possibly be used to perpetrate identity fraud and are sought after on the black market, so that’s why there’s been an uptick in attacks focusing on such data, Yeo said.
Only about a third of victim companies were able to self-detect data breaches, Trustwave found. In 58 percent of cases, breaches were identified by regulatory bodies, the credit card companies or merchant banks.
Heartbleed Hits Oracle
Oracle issued a comprehensive list of its software that may or may not be impacted by the OpenSSL (secure sockets layer) vulnerability known as Heartbleed, while warning that no fixes are yet available for some likely affected products.
The list includes well over 100 products that appear to be in the clear, either because they never used the version of OpenSSL reported to be vulnerable to Heartbleed, or because they don’t use OpenSSL at all.
However, Oracle is still investigating whether another roughly 20 products, including MySQL Connector/C++, Oracle SOA Suite and Nimbula Director, are vulnerable.
Oracle determined that seven products are vulnerable and is offering fixes. These include Communications Operation Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Server 5.6, Oracle Communications Session Monitor, Oracle Linux 6, Oracle Mobile Security Suite and some Solaris 11.2 implementations.
Another 14 products are likely to be vulnerable, but Oracle doesn’t have fixes for them yet, according to the post. These include BlueKai, Java ME and MySQL Workbench.
Users of Oracle’s growing family of cloud services may also be able to breath easy. “It appears that both externally and internally (private) accessible applications hosted in Oracle Cloud Data Centers are currently not at risk from this vulnerability,” although Oracle continues to investigate, according to the post.
Heartbleed, which was revealed by researchers last week, can allow attackers who exploit it to steal information on systems thought to be protected by OpenSSL encryption. A fix for the vulnerable version of OpenSSL has been released and vendors and IT organizations are scrambling to patch their products and systems.
Observers consider Heartbleed one of the most serious Internet security vulnerabilities in recent times.
Meanwhile, this week Oracle also shipped 104 patches as part of its regular quarterly release.
The patch batch includes security fixes for Oracle database 11g and 12c, Fusion Middleware 11g and 12c, Fusion Applications, WebLogic Server and dozens of other products. Some 37 patches target Java SE alone.
A detailed rundown of the vulnerabilities’ relative severity has been posted to an official Oracle blog.