Cyber Attacks Increasing In Middle East

Syria’s civil war and political strife in Egypt have given birth to new battlegrounds on the Web and driven a surge in cyber attacks in the Middle East, according to a leading Internet security company.

More than half of incidents in the Gulf this year were so-called “hacktivist” attacks – which account for only a quarter of cybercrime globally – as politically motivated programmers sabotaged opposing groups or institutions, executives from Intel Corp’s software security division McAfee said on Tuesday.

“It’s mostly bringing down websites and defacing them with political messages – there has been a huge increase in cyber attacks in the Middle East,” Christiaan Beek, McAfee director for incident response forensics in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), told Reuters.

He attributed the attacks to the conflict in Syria, political turmoil in Egypt and the activities of hacking collective Anonymous.

“It’s difficult for people to protest in the street in the Middle East and so defacing websites and denial of service (DOS) attacks are a way to protest instead,” said Beek.

DOS attacks flood an organization’s website causing it to crash, but usually do little lasting damage.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a hacking group loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, defaced an Internet recruiting site for the U.S. Marine Corps on Monday and recently targeted the New York Times website and Twitter, as well other websites within the Middle East.

Beek described SEA as similar to Anonymous.

“There’s a group leading operations, with a support group of other people that can help,” said Beek.

McAfee opened a centre in Dubai on Monday to deal with the rising threat of Internet sabotage in the region, the most serious of which are attacks to extract proprietary information from companies or governments or those that cause lasting damage to critical infrastructure.

Cyber attacks are mostly focused on Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, Qatar, the top liquefied natural gas supplier, and Dubai, which is the region’s financial, commercial and aviation hub, said Gert-Jan Schenk, McAfee president for EMEA.

“It’s where the wealth and critical infrastructure is concentrated,” he said.

The “Shamoon” virus last year targeted Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, damaging about 30,000 computers in what may have been the most destructive attack against the private sector.

“Ten years ago, it was all about trying to infect as many people as possible,” added Schenk. “Today we see more and more attacks being focused on very small groups of people. Sometimes malware is developed for a specific department in a specific company.”

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Developers Hack Dropbox

Two developers have penetrated Dropbox’s security, even intercepting SSL data from its servers and bypassing the cloud storage provider’s two-factor authentication, according to a paper they published at USENIX 2013.

“These techniques are generic enough and we believe would aid in future software development, testing and security research,” the paper says in its abstract.

Dropbox, which claims more than 100 million users upload more than a billion files daily, said the research didn’t actually represent a vulnerability in its servers.

“We appreciate the contributions of these researchers and everyone who helps keep Dropbox safe,” a spokesperson said in an email to Computerworld. “In the case outlined here, the user’s computer would first need to have been compromised in such a way that it would leave the entire computer, not just the user’s Dropbox, open to attacks across the board.”

The two developers, Dhiru Kholia, with the Openwall open source project , and Przemyslaw Wegrzyn, with CodePainters, said they reverse-engineered Dropbox, an application written in Python.

“Our work reveals the internal API used by Dropbox client and makes it straightforward to write a portable open-source Dropbox client,” the paper states. “Additionally, we show how to bypass Dropbox’s two-factor authentication and gain access to users’ data.”

The paper presents “new and generic techniques to reverse engineer frozen Python applications, which are not limited to just the Dropbox world,” the developers wrote.

The researchers described in detail how they were able to unpack, decrypt and decompile Dropbox from scratch. And, once someone has de-compiled its source code, how “it is possible to study how Dropbox works in detail.

“We describe a method to bypass Dropbox’s two-factor authentication and hijack Dropbox accounts. Additionally, generic techniques to intercept SSL data using code injection techniques and monkey patching are presented,” the developers wrote in the paper.

The process they used included various code injection techniques and monkey-patching to intercept SSL data in a Dropbox client. They also used the techniques successfully to snoop on SSL data in other commercial products as well, they said.

The developers are hoping their white hat hacking prompts Dropbox to open source its platform so that it is no longer a “black box.”

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Is The Tesla Hackable?

It’s the curse of the connected car once it’s linked to the Internet, it’s, well, on the Internet. In the case of the Tesla Model S, this means that mischievous hackers could, in theory, control some functions of the vehicle and even snoop without the owner’s knowledge.

Tesla offers Android and iPhone apps for Model S owners, which can be used to check the vehicle’s battery, track its location and status, and tweak several other settings, like climate control and the sunroof. It can also be used to unlock the doors on the Model S.

Dell senior engineer George Reese says the REST API used by Tesla to provide access for Android and iPhone apps has several fairly serious security flaws, which could offer a way in for unscrupulous hackers.

According to an article written by Reese for O’Reilly, Tesla appears to have broken from accepted best practice when designing the API for the Model S.

“It’s flawed in a way that makes no sense. Tesla ignored most conventions around API authentication and wrote their own. As much as I talk about the downsides to OAuth (a standard for authenticating consumers of REST APIs–Twitter uses it), this scenario is one that screams for its use,” he wrote.

However, Reese notes, this is merely a potential attack vector, not one that could be immediately exploited. That said, a compromised website particularly one designed to provide “value-added services” via the API to Tesla drivers could prove highly damaging.

“I can … honk their horns, flash their lights, and open and close the sunroof. While none of this is catastrophic, it can certainly be surprising and distracting while someone is driving,” Reese wrote.

Automotive hacking has been posited by experts for some time, and several presentations at this year’s Defcon detailed fairly comprehensive methods of compromising some models.

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Java 6 Security Hole Found

Security firms are urging users of Oracle’s Java 6 software to upgrade to Java 7 as soon as possible to avoid becoming the victims of active cyber attacks.

F-secure senior analyst Timo Hirvonen warned about the exploit this weekend over Twitter, advising that he had found an exploit in the wild actively targeting an unpatched vulnerability in Java 6, named CVE-2013-2463.

PoC for CVE-2013-2463 was released last week, now it’s exploited in the wild. No patch for JRE6… Uninstall or upgrade to JRE7 update 25.

— Timo Hirvonen (@TimoHirvonen) August 26, 2013

CVE-2013-2463 was addressed by Oracle in the June 2013 Critical Patch Update for Java 7. Java 6 has the same vulnerability, as Oracle acknowledged in the update, but since Java 6 became unsupported in April 2013, there is no patch for the Java 6 vulnerability.

Cloud security provider Qualys described the bug as an “implicit zero-day vulnerability”. The firm’s CTO Wolfgang Kandek said he had seen it included in the spreading Neutrino exploit kit threat, which “guarantees that it will find widespread adoption”.

“We know about its existence, but do not have a patch at hand,” Kandek said in a blog post. “This happens each time a software package loses support and we track these instances in Qualysguard with our ‘EOL/Obsolete’ detections, in this case.

“In addition, we still see very high rates of Java 6 installed, a bit over 50 percent, which means many organisations are vulnerable.”

Like F-secure, Kandek recommended that any users with Java 6 upgrade to Java 7 as soon as they can.

“Without doubt, organisations should update to Java 7 where possible, meaning that IT administrators need to verify with their vendors if an upgrade path exists,” he added.

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Hackers Dupe Apple

Apple’s security was once again made a laughing stock as a team of researchers demonstrated how it is possible to sneak apps past Apple’s test regime. A group of researchers presenting at Usenix were able to spreading malicious chunks of code through an apparently-innocuous app for activation later.

According to their paper the Georgia Tech team wanted to create code that could be rearranged after it had passed AppStore’s tests. The code would look innocuous running in the test environment, be approved and signed, and would later be turned into a malicious app.

They created an app that operated as a Georgia Tech “news” feed but had malicious code was distributed throughout the app as “code gadgets” that were idle until the app received the instruction to rearrange them. After the app passes the App Review and lands on the end user device, the attacker can remotely exploit the planted vulnerabilities and assemble the malicious logic at runtime by chaining the code gadgets together.

The instructions for reassembly of the app arrive through a phone-home after the app is installed.

The app will run inside the iOS sandbox, but can successfully perform many malicious tasks, such as stealthily posting tweets, taking photos, stealing device identity information, sending email and SMS, attacking other apps, and even exploiting kernel vulnerabilities.

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Google Encrypts Data

Google officially announced it will by default encrypt data warehoused in its Cloud Storage service.

The server-side encryption is now active for all new data written to Cloud Storage, and older data will be encrypted in the coming months, wrote Dave Barth, a Google product manager, in a blog post.

“If you require encryption for your data, this functionality frees you from the hassle and risk of managing your own encryption and decryption keys,” Barth wrote. “We manage the cryptographic keys on your behalf using the same hardened key management systems that Google uses for our own encrypted data, including strict key access controls and auditing.”

The data and metadata around an object stored in Cloud Storage is encrypted with a unique key using 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm, and the “per-object key itself is encrypted with a unique key associated with the object owner,” Barth wrote.

“These keys are additionally encrypted by one of a regularly rotated set of master keys,” he wrote. “Of course, if you prefer to manage your own keys then you can still encrypt data yourself prior to writing it to Cloud Storage.”

Data collection programs revealed by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have raised questions about U.S. government data requests made to Internet companies such as Google for national security investigations.

A Google spokeswoman said via email the company does not provide encryption keys to any government and provides user data only in accordance with the law.

“Our legal team reviews each and every request, and we frequently push back when the requests appear to be fishing expeditions or don’t follow the correct process,” she wrote. “When we are required to comply with these requests, we deliver it to the authorities. No government has the ability to pull data directly from our servers or network.”

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Chinese Hackers Go After Dissidents

The “Comment Crew,” a group of China-based hackers whose outing earlier this year in major media outlets caused a conflict with the U.S., have resumed their attacks against dissidents.

FireEye, a security vendor that specializes in trying to stop sophisticated attacks, has noticed attackers using a fresh set of tools and evasion techniques against some of its newer clients, which it can’t name. But Rob Rachwald, director of market research for FireEye, said in an interview Monday that those clients include an organization in Taiwan and others involved in dissident activity.

The Comment Crew was known for many years by security analysts, but its attacks on The New York Times, described in an extensive report in February from vendor Mandiant, thrust them into an uncomfortable spotlight, causing tense relations between the U.S. and China.

Rachwald said it is difficult to determine if the organizations being targeted now were targeted by the Comment Crew previously, but FireEye said last month that the group didn’t appear to be hitting organizations they had compromised before.

Organizations opposing Chinese government policies have frequently been targeted by hackers in what are believed to be politically motivated surveillance operations.

The Comment Crew laid low for about four months following the report, but emerging clues indicate they haven’t gone away and in fact have undertaken a major re-engineering effort to continue spying. The media attention “didn’t stop them, but it clearly did something to dramatically alter their operations,” Rachwald said in an interview.

“If you look at it from a chronological perspective, this malware hasn’t been touched for about 18 months or so,” he said. “Suddenly, they took it off the market and started overhauling it fairly dramatically.”

FireEye researchers Ned Moran and Nart Villeneuve described the new techniques on Monday on FireEye’s blog.

Two malware samples, called Aumlib and Ixeshe, had been used by the Comment Crew but not updated since 2011. Both malware programs have now been altered to change the appearance of their network traffic, Rachwald said.

Many vendors use intrusion detection systems to spot how malware sends data back to an attacker, which helps determine if a network has been compromised. Altering the method and format for how the data is sent can trick those systems into thinking everything is fine.

In another improvement, encryption is now employed to mask certain components of the programs’ networking communication, Rachwald said. The malware programs themselves, which are designed to steal data and log keystrokes, are basically the same.

Mandiant’s report traced the hacking activity to a specific Chinese military unit called “61398.” The company alleged that it waged a seven-year hacking spree that compromised 141 organizations.

Rachwald said it is strongly believed the Comment Crew is behind the new attacks given its previous use of Aumlib and Ixeshe. But the group has also re-engineered its attack infrastructure so much over the last few months that it is difficult to say for sure.

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Are Russian Hackers Exploiting Android?

Russian mobile malware factories are working with thousands of affiliates to exploit Android users, a security company has claimed.

According to Lookout Mobile Security the system is so efficient that almost a third of all mobile malware is made by just 10 organisations operating out of Russia. These “malware HQs” are pumping out nasty toll fraud apps, largely aimed at Android users, which force the user to call premium rate numbers the report said.

Thousands of affiliate marketers are also profiting from the scheme and helping spread the malware by setting up websites designed to trick users into downloading seemingly legitimate apps. Affiliates can make up to $12,000 a month and are heavy users of Twitter.

The report’s release at the DEF CON 21 conference in Las Vegas indicated that Lookout Mobile Security are working with the spooks to bring the crooks down. The malware HQs had gone to great lengths to obfuscate and encrypt their code to make detection tricky, but their advertising was pretty brazen.

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Samsung’s Eight-core Chip Goes Hacking

A Samsung eight-core chip used in some Galaxy S4 mobile devices is now available for hackers to play with on a developer board from South Korea-based Hardkernel.

Hardkernel’s Odroid XU board has incorporated Samsung’s eight-core Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chip, which is based on ARM’s latest processor designs. Samsung recently announced a new eight-core chip, the Exynos 5 Octa 5420, which packs faster graphics and application processing than the 5410. The 5420 has not yet been shipped yet, however.

The Odroid board is priced at $149 through Aug. 31, after which it will be offered for $169. Samsung for many months has said that a board with an eight-core chip would be released, and has shown prototype developer boards at conferences.

Odroid-XU will provide developers an opportunity to write programs tuned for Samsung’s octa-core chip, which has been a source of controversy. Analysts have said the eight-core design is overkill for small devices like smartphones and tablets, which need long battery life.

The eight-core chip design also takes up a lot of space, which prevented Samsung from putting LTE radios inside some Galaxy S4 models. Qualcomm, which hesitantly moved from the dual core to the quad-core design on its Snapdragon chips, on Friday criticized eight-core chips, calling the idea “dumb.”

Despite the criticism, the board will give developers a first true glimpse of, and an opportunity to write and test applications for, ARM’s Big.Little design. The design combines high-power cores for demanding applications with low-power cores for mundane tasks like texting and calling.

Samsung’s iteration of Big.Little in the Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chip combines four processors based on ARM’s latest Cortex-A15 processor design, which incorporates four low-power Cortex-A7 CPUs. The Cortex-A15 is ARM’s latest processor design and succeeds the previous Cortex-A9 core, which was used in popular smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and the Galaxy S3. Samsung said the eight-core chip provides a balance of power and performance, with the high-power cores kicking in only when necessary.

The board has an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544MP3 graphics processor, 2GB of low-power DDR3 DRAM, two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports. Other features include Wi-Fi, Ethernet and optional Bluetooth. Google’s Android 4.2 operating system is preloaded, and support for other Linux distributions like Ubuntu is expected soon. The board has already been benchmarked on Ubuntu 13.04.

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PayPal Extend Bug Bounty

PayPal is expanding its bug bounty program to individuals aged 14 and older, a move intended to reward younger researchers who are technically ineligible to hold full-fledged PayPal accounts.

PayPal’s program, which is a year old this month, only applied to those 18 years and older. Under the old rule, participants in the program were required to hold valid accounts, which excluded minors, said Gus Anagnos, PayPal’s director of information security.

In May, 17-year-old Robert Kugler, a student in Germany, said he’d been denied a reward for finding a vulnerability. PayPal said the bug had already been found by two other researchers, which would have made Kugler ineligible for bounty.

In an apparent miscommunication, Kugler said he was initially told he was too young rather than the bug had already been discovered. Nonetheless, PayPal said it would look to bring younger people into its program, which pays upwards of $10,000 for remote code execution bugs on its websites.

Those who are under 18 years old can receive a bug bounty payment through a PayPal student account, an arrangement where a minor can receive payments via their parent’s account, Anagnos said.

Anagnos said other terms and conditions have been modified to make its program more transparent, such as clarifying which PayPal subsidiaries and partner sites qualify for the program.

PayPal pays much less for vulnerabilities on partner websites, which have a URL form of “www.paypal-__.com.” A remote execution bug found on that kind of site garners only $1,500 rather than up to $10,000 on the company’s main sites.

Like other bug bounty programs run by companies such as Microsoft and Google, PayPal will publicly recognize researchers on its website with a “Wall of Fame” for the top 10 researchers in a quarter. Another “honorable mention” page lists anyone who submitted a valid bug for the quarter.

Eusebiu Blindu, a testing consultant from Romania, was one of the researchers listed on the Wall of Fame for the first quarter of this year.

“I think Paypal is the best bug bounty program, and I am glad I participated in it from the first days of its launching,” he wrote on his blog.

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