IoT | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Internet-facing Linux systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are being targeted as part of a new campaign designed to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. "The threat actors behind the attack use a backdoor that deploys a wide array of tools and components such as rootkits and an IRC bot to steal device resources for mining operations," Microsoft threat intelligence researcher Rotem Sde-Or  said . "The backdoor also installs a patched version of OpenSSH on affected devices, allowing threat actors to hijack SSH credentials, move laterally within the network, and conceal malicious SSH connections." To pull off the scheme, misconfigured Linux hosts are brute-forced to gain initial access, following which the threat actors move to disable shell history and fetch a trojanized version of OpenSSH from a remote server. The rogue OpenSSH package is configured to install and launch the backdoor, a shell script that allows the attackers to distribute additional payloads a...

Not too long ago, there was a clear separation between the operational technology (OT) that drives the physical functions of a company – on the factory floor, for example – and the information technology (IT) that manages a company's data to enable management and planning.  As IT assets became increasingly connected to the outside world via the internet, OT remained isolated from IT – and the rest of the world. However, the spread of Industrial IoT (IIoT) as well as the need for constant monitoring and tracking information from manufacturing and assembly lines mean the connection between IT and OT systems has greatly expanded. OT is no longer isolated. OT is now just as exposed to the outside world as IT is. What does this mean for OT security, where hard-to-access devices needed for 24/7 production are difficult to patch? Let's take a look. The Air Gap Is Gone Not so long ago, any data exchange between IT and OT operated via a "sneaker net." An operator would p...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

A group of academics has devised a system that can be used on a phone or a laptop to identify and locate Wi-Fi-connected hidden IoT devices in unfamiliar physical spaces. With hidden cameras being  increasingly   used  to  snoop  on  individuals  in hotel rooms and Airbnbs, the goal is to be able to pinpoint such rogue devices without much of a hassle. The system, dubbed Lumos , is designed with this intent in mind and to "visualize their presence using an augmented reality interface,"  said  Rahul Anand Sharma, Elahe Soltanaghaei, Anthony Rowe, and Vyas Sekar of Carnegie Mellon University in a new paper. At its core, the platform works by snuffing and collecting encrypted wireless packets over the air to detect and identify concealed devices. Subsequently, it estimates the location of each identified device with respect to the user as they walk around the perimeter of the space. The localization module, for its part, combines signal st...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an unpatched security vulnerability that could pose a serious risk to IoT products. The issue, which was originally reported in September 2021, affects the Domain Name System (DNS) implementation of two popular C libraries called  uClibc  and  uClibc-ng  that are used for developing embedded Linux systems. uClibc is known to be used by major vendors such as Linksys, Netgear, and Axis, as well as Linux distributions like Embedded Gentoo, potentially exposing millions of IoT devices to security threats. "The flaw is caused by the predictability of transaction IDs included in the DNS requests generated by the library, which may allow attackers to perform DNS poisoning attacks against the target device," Giannis Tsaraias and Andrea Palanca of Nozomi Networks  said  in a Monday write-up. DNS poisoning , also referred to as DNS spoofing, is the technique of corrupting a DNS resolver cache — which provides clients wi...

Three security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the popular Wyze Cam devices that grant malicious actors to execute arbitrary code and access camera feeds as well as unauthorizedly read the SD cards, the latter of which remained unresolved for nearly three years after the initial discovery. The security flaws relate to an authentication bypass (CVE-2019-9564), a remote code execution bug stemming from a stack-based buffer overflow (CVE-2019-12266), and a case of unauthenticated access to the contents of the SD card (no CVE). Successful exploitation of the bypass vulnerability could allow an outside attacker to fully control the device, including disabling recording to the SD card and turning on/off the camera, not to mention chaining it with CVE-2019-12266 to view the live audio and video feeds. Romanian cybersecurity firm Bitdefender, which  discovered the shortcomings , said it reached out to the vendor way back in May 2019, following which Wyze released patches to fix...

Muhstik, a botnet infamous for propagating via web application exploits, has been observed targeting Redis servers using a recently disclosed vulnerability in the database system. The vulnerability relates to  CVE-2022-0543 , a  Lua sandbox escape flaw  in the open-source, in-memory, key-value data store that could be abused to achieve remote code execution on the underlying machine. The vulnerability is rated 10 out of 10 for severity. "Due to a packaging issue, a remote attacker with the ability to execute arbitrary Lua scripts could possibly escape the Lua sandbox and execute arbitrary code on the host," Ubuntu noted in an advisory released last month. According to  telemetry data  gathered by Juniper Threat Labs, the attacks leveraging the new flaw are said to have commenced on March 11, 2022, leading to the retrieval of a malicious shell script ("russia.sh") from a remote server, which is then utilized to fetch and execute the botnet binaries from anoth...

The operators of the Mozi IoT botnet have been taken into custody by Chinese law enforcement authorities, nearly two years after the malware emerged on the threat landscape in September 2019. News of the arrest, which originally  happened  in June, was  disclosed  by researchers from Netlab, the network research division of Chinese internet security company Qihoo 360, earlier this Monday, detailing its involvement in the operation. "Mozi uses a P2P [peer-to-peer] network structure, and one of the 'advantages' of a P2P network is that it is robust, so even if some of the nodes go down, the whole network will carry on, and the remaining nodes will still infect other vulnerable devices, that is why we can still see Mozi spreading," said Netlab, which spotted the botnet for the first time in late 2019. The development also comes less than two weeks after Microsoft Security Threat Intelligence Center  revealed  the botnet's new capabilities that enable it t...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a new wave of ongoing attacks exploiting multiple vulnerabilities to deploy new Mirai variants on internet connected devices. "Upon successful exploitation, the attackers try to download a malicious shell script, which contains further infection behaviors such as downloading and executing Mirai variants and brute-forcers," Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a write-up. The rash of vulnerabilities being exploited include: VisualDoor  - a SonicWall SSL-VPN remote command injection vulnerability that came to light earlier this January CVE-2020-25506  - a D-Link DNS-320 firewall remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability CVE-2021-27561 and CVE-2021-27562  - Two vulnerabilities in Yealink Device Management that allow an unauthenticated attacker to run arbitrary commands on the server with root privileges CVE-2021-22502  - an RCE flaw in Micro Focus Operation Bridge Reporter (OBR), a...

The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has  warned  of critical vulnerabilities in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck that, if weaponized, could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary commands and mount denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The four flaws affect Treck TCP/IP stack version 6.0.1.67 and earlier and were reported to the company by Intel. Two of these are rated critical in severity. Treck's embedded TCP/IP stack is deployed worldwide in manufacturing, information technology, healthcare, and transportation systems. The most severe of them is a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability ( CVE-2020-25066 ) in the Treck HTTP Server component that could permit an adversary to crash or reset the target device and even execute remote code. It has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. The second flaw is an out-of-bounds write in the IPv6 component ( CVE-2020-27337 , CVSS score 9.1) that could be exploited by an unauthentic...