Pierluigi Paganini | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Security Researcher Dan Melamed discovered an Open URL redirection vulnerability in Facebook that allowed him to have a facebook.com link redirect to any website without restrictions. An open URL Redirection flaw is generally used to convince a user to click on a trusted link which is specially crafted to take them to an arbitrary website, the target website could be used to serve a malware or for a phishing attack . An Open URL Redirection url flaw in Facebook platform and third party applications also exposes the user's access token at risk if that link is entered as the final destination in an Oauth dialog . The Facebook Open URL Redirection vulnerability exists at landing.php  page with " url " parameter, i.e. https://facebook.com/campaign/landing.php?url=https://yahoo.com This URL will always redirects user to the Facebook 's homepage, but it is sufficient to manipulate the "url" parameter assigning a random string: https://facebo...

The use of mobile devices in government environments concerns the secret service of any states, cyber espionage more often exploits the mobile platforms. Mobile devices are reason of great concern for governments, they have a great computational capability, huge memories to store our personal data, GPS to follow our movements and are equipped with a camera and microphone to increase our experience in mobility. The advent of monitoring apps like Mobistealth has already brought the possibility of using the aforementioned features to keep tabs on a target device irrespective of the geographic distance to light. However, it has also raised red flags over the possibility of exploitation of such features by attackers for cyber espionage . The problem is well known to governments that are adopting necessary countermeasures especially following the recent revelations about the U.S. Surveillance program . The UK Government has decided to ban iPads from the Cabinet over foreign e...

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...

Security expert Ebrahim Hegazy , Cyber Security Analyst Consultant at Q-CERT, has found a serious vulnerability in Twitter that allows an attacker to upload files of any extension including PHP. When an application does not validate or improperly validates file types before uploading files to the system, called Unrestricted File upload vulnerability . Such flaws allow an attacker to upload and execute arbitrary code on the target system which could result in execution of arbitrary HTML and script code or system compromise. According to Ebrahim, when a developer creates a new application for Twitter  i.e. dev.twitter.com - they have an option to upload an image for that application. While uploading the image, the Twitter server will check for the uploaded files to accept certain image extensions only, like PNG, JPG and other extensions won't get uploaded. But in a Video Proof of Concept he demonstrated  that, a vulnerability allowed him to bypass this security va...

Yesterday we received a vulnerability report in web applications from some unknown Indian Hacker, who explained that how Hackers are hijacking Mobile recharge and Free SMS service related websites.  He detailed the loophole in password reset process, that could allow attackers to brute force many high profile websites that are actually not protected by the image CAPTCHA verification system, during the password reset process. The hacker used a Firefox Browser equipped with the Fireforce add-on , a very simple a Firefox extension designed to perform brute-force attacks on GET and POST forms. The technique proposed by him targets the unsecure password reset process used by many websites, where the web application used to send a code to the user's mobile or email for authenticity verification. Around 40% websites adopts password reset code composed of numbers and of some fixed length, typically having a length less than 5 digits. This information could advan...

US Cloud hosting providers are constantly targeted by cyber crime according the revelations of two malware researchers Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at Cisco Systems, and Dave Monnier security expert at Team Cymru explained during the 2013 Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit. The hackers are exploiting with a meaningful increase these architecture to organize financially motivated attacks. Landesman and Monnier explained in two distinct sessions that cyber criminals are exploiting US cloud hosting providers to deploy Command and Control servers for their malicious activities despite the great effort in monitoring activities operated by hosting cloud providers. US is one of privileged countries to host malicious architecture due high availability of its infrastructures and cyber criminals know it. " You can move your command and control servers to Kazakhstan, but that's not a very good business decision," "The U.S. has re...

A Drupal data breach was announced by the official Drupal Association, that Passwords for almost one million accounts on the Drupal.org website are being reset after hackers gained unauthorized access to sensitive user data. The security of the open source content management system has been compromised via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. As countermeasure it is resetting the passwords for nearly one million accounts in the wake of a data breach . Information exposed includes usernames, email addresses, and country information, as well as hashed passwords . The Drupal.org hasn't revealed the name of the third-party application exploited during the attack. Evidence of the Drupal data breach was found during a routine security audit: " Upon discovering the files during a security audit, we shut down the association.drupal.org website to mitigate any possible ongoing security i...

In the recent months I had the opportunity to conduct an interesting study on the use of Social Media in the Military Sector, large diffusion of media platforms makes them very attractive for governments and intelligence agencies . Social media platforms reveal enormous potentiality that could be exploited also in critical sectors such as military and defense. Modern social media networks are actively used by every government, the US, China and Russia are the most active in this field, but also emerging cyber countries like Iran and North Korea demonstrates an increasing interest in the matter. The principal uses of social media for government are Psychological Operations (PsyOps) OSInt Cyber espionage Offensive purposes On May 10th the Illinois Air National Guard 183rd Fighter Wing published a notice in the monthly issue of a newsletter titled Falcon View. The notice, that seems to be authentic, dedicates a paragraph to the use of social networking sites for...

#OpUSA campaign is officially started, the day has come, today May 7 as announced by Anonymous , a coordinated online attack will hit Banking and government websites. The announcement made by popular group of hacktivists is creating great concerns between US security experts in charge of defense the potential targets. The message passed sent by Anonymous to US authorities is eloquent, " We Will Wipe You Off the Cyber Map "  A new wave of attacks, presumably distributed-denial-of-service attack , is expected to hit principal US financial institutions exactly as already happened in the last months. The hacktivists participating to OpUSA campaign protest against the policy of the US Government blamed to have committed war crimes in foreign states and in its countries. "A nonymous will make sure that's this May 7 will be a day to remember. On that day anonymous will start phase one of operation USA. America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afg...

Security researchers revealed that series of " Watering Hole " has been conducted exploiting a IE8 zero-day vulnerability to target U.S. Government experts working on nuclear weapons research. The news is not surprising but it is very concerning, the principal targets of the attacks are various groups of research such as the components of U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Energy, the news has been confirmed by principal security firms and by Microsoft corporate. The flaw has been used in a series of "watering hole" attacks, let's remind that "Watering Hole" is a technique of attack realized compromising legitimate websites using a " drive-by " exploit. The attackers restrict their audience to a individuals interested to specific content proposed by targeted website, in this way when the victim visits the page a backdoor Trojan is installed on his computer. The website compromised to exploit the IE8 zero-day is the Dep...

Cyber crime enterprise is showing a growing interest in monetization of botnets , the most targeted sector in recent months is banking. One of most active malware that still menaces Banking sector is the popular Zeus . Zeus is one of the oldest, it is active since 2007, and most prolific malware that changed over time according numerous demands of the black-market. Recently, Underground forums are exploded the offer of malicious codes, hacking services and bullet proof hosting to organize a large scale fraud. Cyber criminals are selling kits at reasonable prices or entire botnets for renting, sometimes completing the offer with information to use during the attacks. The model described, known also as a Fraud-as-a-Service , is winning, malicious code such as Zeus, SpyEye , Ice IX, or even Citadel have benefited of the same sales model, cyber criminals with few hundred dollars are able to design their criminal operation. Since now the sales model and the actor invol...

Last April 7th the Anonymous collective hit the Israeli networks with a huge as historic offensive, for the first time an independent group of hackers declared war to a Governments to protest against its policy. Many web sites of the country were hit by DDoS attacks, the data on the event reported by Israel government are totally different from the information published by Anonymous that produced a report for #OpIsrael in which total damage are estimated of $3-plus billion. According security experts at TrendMicro the collective adopted various botnet coordinating large scale attacks, analyzing traffic directed to one of the targeted website, the researchers discovered that meanwhile usually more of 90% of the traffic is originated in Israel, during the attack almost the entire traffic was originated outside the country and internal connections have fallen to 9% as shown in the following chart: What is surprising is that TrendMicro discovered that many IP addre...

Today social media are spreading a shocking news, authors of Stuxnet virus that hit Iranian nuclear program in 2010 according a new research proposed by Symantec security company started in 2005 and contrary to successive instance of the malware he was designed to manipulate the nuclear facility's gas valves. The attacker strategy was to destroy the nuclear plant causing an explosion due the sabotage of gas valves, hackers purpose was physical destruction of the targets, due this reason the press and security community labeled Stuxnet as first cyber weapon of the history.  Francis deSouza, Symantec's president of products and services, during an interview with Bloomberg revealed that the version detected was a sort of beta version of the final weapon and that in the period between 2005 and 2009 the authors were testing its capabilities. " It looks like now the weapon tried a few things before it hit on what would actually work ,"' " It is clear that this has been a ...

Recently we published an article on the attacks against Japanese banks using a new variant of the popular Zeus , one of the most prolific malware of recent history, security experts in fact have detected various versions of the popular malicious code that hit also mobile and social networking platforms . Due its flexibility the malware has been re-engineered several times by cyber criminals that adapted its structure to specific purposes and context, leaving unchanged its core capabilities of stealing banking credentials of victims. Zeus has been a huge success in the criminal circles especially for the sales model, as malware as service, implemented by its authors on many underground sites, let's remind for example the Citadel Trojan one of the most popular on the crimeware market. Fortunately its author, known as Aquabox , has been banned from a large online forum that sells malware and other services to cyber criminals, but many security firms consider Citadel Trojan still very ...

The capillary diffusion of mobile devices, the lack of security systems on these platforms and low level of awareness on principal cyber threats made them a privileged target for cybercrime. We have assisted in the recent year to an explosion of malware designed to hit principal mobile OSs, in a recent report Sophos security firm revealed that in Australia and the U.S. Android threat exposure rates exceeding those of PCs showing the urgency to implement proper countermeasures. The situation appears really critical that why I asked to the expert of Group-IB Forensics Lab to show me how these agents work with a really case study. Several month ago Group-IB Forensics Lab detected mobile-banking malware through Google Play by Sberbank request (Russian leading national bank).  The File associated to the malware was named sber.apk , it was an Android Package having size of 225,905 bytes and digest md5: F27D43DFEEDFFAC2EC7E4A069B3C9516 . Analyzing the functionality of th...