Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list. The day before, he alerted Debian security and the (private) distros@openwall list. In his mail, he says that he dug into this after “observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors).”
At a high level, the attack is split in two pieces: a shell script and an object file. There is an injection of shell code during configure, which injects the shell code into make. The shell code during make adds the object file to the build. This post examines the shell script. (See also my timeline post.)
Several Apple customers recently reported being targeted in elaborate phishing attacks that involve what appears to be a bug in Apple's password reset feature. In this scenario, a target's Apple devices are forced to display dozens of system-level prompts that…
Our work shows that it is possible to trigger Rowhammer bit flips on DDR4 devices on AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 systems despite deployed TRR mitigations. 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%… Read
Huntress recently detected interesting activity on an endpoint; a threat actor was attempting to establish a foothold on an endpoint by using commands issued via MSSQL to upload a reverse shell accessible from the web server. All attempts were obviated by MAV and process detections, but boy-howdy, did they try!
Lending firm LoanDepot said the personal information of 16.9 million individuals was stolen in a ransomware attack in early January 2024.
The Microsoft security team detected a nation-state attack on our corporate systems on January 12, 2024, and immediately activated our response process to investigate, disrupt malicious activity, mitigate the attack, and deny the threat actor further access. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence investigation identified the threat actor as Midnight Blizzard, the Russian state-sponsored actor also known as NOBELIUM.
Microsoft on Friday revealed that it was the target of a nation-state attack on its corporate systems that resulted in the theft of emails and attachments from senior executives and other individuals in the company's cybersecurity and legal departments.
The Windows maker attributed the attack to a Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), which is also known as APT29, BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes.
Google is apparently struggling to contain a spam attack that's been ongoing for days.
Google’s search results have been hit by a spam attack for the past few days in what can only be described as completely out of control. Many domains are ranking for hundreds of thousands of keywords each, an indication that the scale of this attack could easily reach into the millions of keyword phrases.
Reconstructing the Attack from a 4th party collector’s point of view
Hamid Kashfi
[Update: December 18th, 2023]: On 18th December, Predator Sparrows launched a second
attack against the fuel distribution system in Iran, similar to their previous operation in 2021.
Since 2021, Iranian officials or third-party security vendors have not published any analysis or
technical details about the original attack, which is not unusual. Their screenshots from the
latest attacks provide some clues that only confirm our previous work, indicating connections to
the “Yaas Arghavani” company, a VSAT and POS service provider for the fuel distribution
system. The following is an old draft from December 2021, which I wrote for peer eyes rather
than public view. The original draft focused on the first attack against the fuel distribution
system. Still, some remarks remain valid and relevant to the recent attack on 18 Dec 2023, as
little has changed regarding how the system works. The same infrastructure, same suppliers,
and same 3rd party vendors, so we are likely just talking about a different attack vector and
entry point from the previous case. I will probably draft a new note about the recent attack from
scratch soon and when more details are gathered rather than updating the old speculative work.