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A novel side-channel attack has been found to leverage radio signals emanated by a device's random access memory (RAM) as a data exfiltration mechanism, posing a threat to air-gapped networks. The technique has been codenamed RAMBO by Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of the Offensive Cyber Research Lab in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. "Using software-generated radio signals, malware can encode sensitive information such as files, images, keylogging, biometric information, and encryption keys," Dr. Guri said in a newly published research paper. "With software-defined radio (SDR) hardware, and a simple off-the-shelf antenna, an attacker can intercept transmitted raw radio signals from a distance. The signals can then be decoded and translated back into binary information." Over the years, Dr. Guri has concocted various mechanisms to extract confidential data from offline net

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a hardware backdoor within a particular model of MIFARE Classic contactless cards that could allow authentication with an unknown key and open hotel rooms and office doors. The attacks have been demonstrated against FM11RF08S, a new variant of MIFARE Classic that was released by Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics in 2020. "The FM11RF08S backdoor enables any entity with knowledge of it to compromise all user-defined keys on these cards, even when fully diversified, simply by accessing the card for a few minutes," Quarkslab researcher Philippe Teuwen said . The secret key is not only common to existing FM11RF08S cards, the investigation found that "the attacks could be executed instantaneously by an entity in a position to carry out a supply chain attack." Compounding matters further, a similar backdoor has been identified in the previous generation, FM11RF08, that's protected with another key. The backdoor has been obse

Account takeover attacks have emerged as one of the most persistent and damaging threats to cloud-based SaaS environments. Yet despite significant investments in traditional security measures, many organizations continue to struggle with preventing these attacks. A new report, " Why Account Takeover Attacks Still Succeed, and Why the Browser is Your Secret Weapon in Stopping Them " argues that the browser is the primary battleground where account takeover attacks unfold and, thus, where they should be neutralized. The report also provides effective guidance for mitigating the account takeover risk.  Below are some of the key points raised in the report: The Role of the Browser in Account Takeovers According to the report, the SaaS kill chain takes advantage of the fundamental components that are contained within the browser. For account takeover, these include: Executed Web Pages - Attackers can create phishing login pages or use MiTM over legitimate web pages to harve

A team of researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany has disclosed an architectural bug impacting Chinese chip company T-Head's XuanTie C910 and C920 RISC-V CPUs that could allow attackers to gain unrestricted access to susceptible devices. The vulnerability has been codenamed GhostWrite. It has been described as a direct CPU bug embedded in the hardware, as opposed to a side-channel or transient execution attack. "This vulnerability allows unprivileged attackers, even those with limited access, to read and write any part of the computer's memory and to control peripheral devices like network cards," the researchers said . "GhostWrite renders the CPU's security features ineffective and cannot be fixed without disabling around half of the CPU's functionality." CISPA found that the CPU has faulty instructions in its vector extension, an add-on to the RISC-V ISA designed to handle larger data values than the base Instru

Traditionally, the focus has been on defending against digital threats such as malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks by detecting them and responding. However, as cyber threats become more sophisticated. There is a growing recognition of the importance of measures that stop new attacks before they are recognized. With high-value assets, it's not good enough to have the protection, it's essential to have some assurance that the protection is effective. With software, that assurance is hard work, and this has led to a complimentary approach, called hardsec. What is Hardsec? Short for " Hardware Security ." Hardsec is about using hardware logic and electronics to implement a security defence, rather than through software alone - thereby providing a higher level of security assurance and resilience against both external and insider threats . Making it an essential component of comprehensive cybersecurity strategies. The Rise of Sophisticated Attacks When the impact of an attack ag

Modern CPUs from Intel, including Raptor Lake and Alder Lake, have been found vulnerable to a new side-channel attack that could be exploited to leak sensitive information from the processors. The attack, codenamed Indirector by security researchers Luyi Li, Hosein Yavarzadeh, and Dean Tullsen, leverages shortcomings identified in Indirect Branch Predictor (IBP) and the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) to bypass existing defenses and compromise the security of the CPUs. "The Indirect Branch Predictor (IBP) is a hardware component in modern CPUs that predicts the target addresses of indirect branches," the researchers noted . "Indirect branches are control flow instructions whose target address is computed at runtime, making them challenging to predict accurately. The IBP uses a combination of global history and branch address to predict the target address of indirect branches." The idea, at its core, is to identify vulnerabilities in IBP to launch precise Branch T

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched security flaw in Phoenix SecureCore UEFI firmware that affects multiple families of Intel Core desktop and mobile processors. Tracked as CVE-2024-0762 (CVSS score: 7.5), the "UEFIcanhazbufferoverflow" vulnerability has been described as a case of a buffer overflow stemming from the use of an unsafe variable in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) configuration that could result in the execution of malicious code. "The vulnerability allows a local attacker to escalate privileges and gain code execution within the UEFI firmware during runtime," supply chain security firm Eclypsium said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This type of low-level exploitation is typical of firmware backdoors (e.g., BlackLotus ) that are increasingly observed in the wild. Such implants give attackers ongoing persistence within a device and often, the ability to evade higher-level security measures running in

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" against the Linux kernel on Intel systems that could be exploited to read sensitive data from the memory. The exploit, called Native Branch History Injection (BHI), can be used to leak arbitrary kernel memory at 3.5 kB/sec by bypassing existing Spectre v2/BHI mitigations, researchers from Systems and Network Security Group (VUSec) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam  said  in a new study. The shortcoming is being tracked as  CVE-2024-2201 . BHI was  first disclosed  by VUSec in March 2022, describing it as a technique that can get around Spectre v2 protections in modern processors from Intel, AMD, and Arm. While the attack leveraged extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPFs), Intel's recommendations to address the problem, among other things, were to disable Linux's unprivileged eBPFs. "Privileged managed runtimes that can be configured to allow an unprivileged user t

Cybersecurity researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a new variant of the RowHammer DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) attack that, for the first time, successfully works against AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 systems despite mitigations such as Target Row Refresh (TRR). "This result proves that AMD systems are equally vulnerable to Rowhammer as Intel systems, which greatly increases the attack surface, considering today's AMD market share of around 36% on x86 desktop CPUs," the researchers  said . The technique has been codenamed  ZenHammer , which can also trigger RowHammer bit flips on DDR5 devices for the first time. RowHammer , first publicly disclosed in 2014, is a  well-known attack  that exploits DRAM's memory cell architecture to alter data by repeatedly accessing a specific row (aka hammering) to cause the electrical charge of a cell to leak to adjacent cells. This can induce random bit flips in neighboring memory rows (from 0 to 1, or vice versa), which can

The  Operation Triangulation  spyware attacks targeting Apple iOS devices leveraged never-before-seen exploits that made it possible to even bypass pivotal hardware-based security protections erected by the company. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which  discovered  the  campaign  at the beginning of 2023 after becoming one of the targets,  described  it as the "most sophisticated attack chain" it has ever observed to date. The campaign is believed to have been active since 2019. Operation Triangulation gets its name from the use of a fingerprinting technique called canvas fingerprinting to draw a yellow triangle on a pink background with Web Graphics Library ( WebGL ) in the device's memory. The exploitation activity involved the use of four zero-day flaws that were fashioned into a chain to obtain an unprecedented level of access and backdoor target devices running iOS versions up to iOS 16.2 with the ultimate goal of gathering sensitive information. The starti

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a trio of side-channel attacks that could be exploited to leak sensitive data from modern CPUs. Called  Collide+Power  ( CVE-2023-20583 ),  Downfall  ( CVE-2022-40982 ), and  Inception  ( CVE-2023-20569 ), the novel methods follow the disclosure of another newly discovered security vulnerability affecting AMD's Zen 2 architecture-based processors known as  Zenbleed  (CVE-2023-20593). "Downfall attacks target a critical weakness found in billions of modern processors used in personal and cloud computers,"  Daniel Moghimi , senior research scientist at Google,  said . "This vulnerability [...] enables a user to access and steal data from other users who share the same computer." In a hypothetical attack scenario, a malicious app installed on a device could weaponize the method to steal sensitive information like passwords and encryption keys, effectively undermining Intel's Software Guard eXtensions ( SGX

A new security vulnerability has been discovered in AMD's Zen 2 architecture-based processors that could be exploited to extract sensitive data such as encryption keys and passwords. Discovered by Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, the flaw – codenamed  Zenbleed  and tracked as  CVE-2023-20593  (CVSS score: 6.5) – allows data exfiltration at the rate of 30 kb per core, per second. The issue is part of a broader category of weaknesses called  speculative execution attacks , in which the optimization technique widely used in modern CPUs is abused to access cryptographic keys from CPU registers. "Under specific microarchitectural circumstances, a register in 'Zen 2' CPUs may not be written to 0 correctly," AMD  explained  in an advisory. "This may cause data from another process and/or thread to be stored in the YMM register , which may allow an attacker to potentially access sensitive information." Web infrastructure company Cloudflare note

China has banned U.S. chip maker Micron from selling its products to Chinese companies working on key infrastructure projects, citing national security risks. The development comes nearly two months after the country's cybersecurity authority  initiated a probe  in late March 2023 to assess potential network security risks. "The purpose of this network security review of Micron's products is to prevent product network security problems from endangering the security of national critical information infrastructure, which is a necessary measure to maintain national security," the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)  said . The CAC further said the investigation found "serious cybersecurity problems" in Micron's products, endangering the country's critical information infrastructure supply chain. As a result, operators involved in such critical information infrastructure projects should stop purchasing products from Micron, it added. The autho

A novel hardware attack dubbed  PACMAN  has been demonstrated against Apple's M1 processor chipsets, potentially arming a malicious actor with the capability to gain arbitrary code execution on macOS systems. It leverages "speculative execution attacks to bypass an important memory protection mechanism, ARM Pointer Authentication, a security feature that is used to enforce pointer integrity," MIT researchers Joseph Ravichandran, Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan  said  in a new paper. What's more concerning is that "while the hardware mechanisms used by PACMAN cannot be patched with software features, memory corruption bugs can be," the researchers added. The vulnerability is rooted in pointer authentication codes ( PACs ), a line of defense introduced in arm64e architecture that aims to detect and secure against unexpected changes to  pointers  — objects that reference an address location in memory. PACs aim to solve a common problem in software

A newly disclosed vulnerability affecting Intel processors could be abused by an adversary to gain access to sensitive information stored within enclaves and even run arbitrary code on vulnerable systems. The vulnerability ( CVE-2021-0186 , CVSS score: 8.2) was discovered by a group of academics from ETH Zurich, the National University of Singapore, and the Chinese National University of Defense Technology in early May 2021, who used it to stage a confidential data disclosure attack called " SmashEx " that can corrupt private data housed in the enclave and break its integrity. Introduced with Intel's Skylake processors, SGX (short for Software Guard eXtensions) allows developers to run selected application modules in a completely isolated secure compartment of memory, called an enclave or a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which is designed to be protected from processes running at higher privilege levels like the operating system. SGX ensures that data is secure

A cybersecurity researcher today uncovers a set of 7 new unpatchable hardware vulnerabilities that affect all desktops and laptops sold in the past 9 years with Thunderbolt, or Thunderbolt-compatible USB-C ports. Collectively dubbed 'ThunderSpy,' the vulnerabilities can be exploited in 9 realistic evil-maid attack scenarios, primarily to steal data or read/write all of the system memory of a locked or sleeping computer—even when drives are protected with full disk encryption. In a nutshell, if you think someone with a few minutes of physical access to your computer—regardless of the location—can cause any form of significant harm to you, you're at risk for an evil maid attack. According to Björn Ruytenberg of the Eindhoven University of Technology, the ThunderSpy attack "may require opening a target laptop's case with a screwdriver, [but] it leaves no trace of intrusion and can be pulled off in just a few minutes." In other words, the flaw is not li

A newly discovered unpatchable hardware vulnerability in Xilinx programmable logic products could allow an attacker to break bitstream encryption, and clone intellectual property, change the functionality, and even implant hardware Trojans. The details of the attacks against Xilinx 7-Series and Virtex-6 Field Programmable Gate Arrays ( FPGAs ) have been covered in a paper titled " The Unpatchable Silicon: A Full Break of the Bitstream Encryption of Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs " by a group of academics from the Horst Goertz Institute for IT Security and Max Planck Institute for Cyber Security and Privacy. "We exploit a design flaw which piecewise leaks the decrypted bitstream," the researchers said. "In the attack, the FPGA is used as a decryption oracle, while only access to a configuration interface is needed. The attack does not require any sophisticated tools and, depending on the target system, can potentially be launched remotely." The findings wil