n late November 2022, a few days after ETH Alumni launched their new feature “Who is who” which allows them to look up and connect to other members, I came across a severe access control vulnerability. Without any authorization over the internet, it allowed extracting at least 35418 member profiles, including full name, postal address, nationality, title, graduation field, study start year, gender, profile picture and hashed passwords.
On 02 February 2023, an alert triggered in a Huntress-protected environment. At first glance, the alert itself was fairly generic - a combination of certutil using the urlcache flag to retrieve a remote resource and follow-on scheduled task creation - but further analysis revealed a more interesting set of circumstances. By investigating the event in question and pursuing root cause analysis (RCA), Huntress was able to link this intrusion to a recently-announced vulnerability as well as to a long-running post-exploitation framework linked to prominent ransomware groups.
The University of Zurich is currently the target of a serious cyberattack. The perpetrators appear to be acting in a very professional manner and are part of a current accumulation of attacks on educational and health institutions. Several attacks have been carried out on universities in German-speaking countries in recent weeks, resulting in suspension of their IT services for extended periods of time. The attacks are usually carried out by compromising several individual accounts and systems.
The “news broadcasters” appear stunningly real, but they are AI-generated deepfakes in first-of-their-kind propaganda videos that a research report published Tuesday attributed to Chinese state-aligned actors. The fake anchors — for a fictious news outlet called Wolf News — were created by artificial intelligence software and appeared in footage on social media that seemed to […]
The United Kingdom and United States on Thursday sanctioned seven people connected to what officials have told The Record is a single network behind the Conti and Ryuk ransomware gangs as well as the Trickbot banking trojan.
The sanctions are described as the first major move of a “new campaign of concerted action” between Britain and the United States, and insiders say that further actions should be expected later this year.
Today, everything is “smart” or “intelligent”. We have smartphones, smart cars, smart doorbells, etc. Being "smart" means performing actions depending on the context, the environment, or user actions.
For a while, backdoors and trojans have implemented screenshot capabilities. From an attacker’s point of view, it’s interesting to “see” what’s displayed on the victim’s computer.
Every year, we publish our estimates of illicit cryptocurrency activity to demonstrate the power of blockchains’ transparency – these kinds of estimates aren’t possible in traditional finance – and to teach investigators and compliance professionals about the latest trends in cryptocurrency-related crime that they need to know about. What could those estimates look like in a year like 2022? Last year was one of the most tumultuous in cryptocurrency history, with several large firms imploding, including Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, FTX, and others — some amid allegations of fraud.
Sliver is an open-source penetration testing tool developed in the Go programming language. Cobalt Strike and Metasploit are major examples of penetration testing tools used by many threat actors, and various attack cases involving these tools have been covered here on the ASEC blog. Recently, there have been cases of threat actors using Sliver in addition to Cobalt Strike and Metasploit.
The ASEC (AhnLab Security Emergency response Center) analysis team is monitoring attacks against systems with either unpatched vulnerabilities or misconfigured settings. During this process, we have recently discovered a Sliver backdoor being installed through what is presumed to be vulnerability exploitation on certain software. Not only did threat actors use the Sliver backdoor, but they also used the BYOVD (Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver) malware to incapacitate security products and install reverse shells.
During the past 4 months Microsoft Onenote file format has been (ab)used as Malware carrier by different criminal groups. While the main infection vector is still on eMail side - so nothing really relevant to write on - the used techniques, the templates and the implemented code to inoculate Malware changed a lot. So it…