A China-linked threat actor had access to a router configuration database that could have completely disrupted coverage, a security vendor says.

Source: rarrarorro via Shutterstock

About six months before the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Qatar, a threat actor — later identified as China-linked BlackTech — quietly breached the network of a major communications provider for the games and planted malware on a critical system storing network device configurations.

The breach remained undetected until six months after the games, when researchers at NetWitness spotted it during a routine audit for the service provider. During that period, the cyber-espionage group gathered up an unknown volume of data from targeted customers of the telecommunications provider — including those associated with the World Cup and vendors providing services for it.

**A Near Miss**

But it's the "what else could have happened" that's the really scary part, says Stefano Maccaglia, global practice manager, incident response, at NetWitness, discussing the incident for the first time with Dark Reading recently.

The access that BlackTech had on the telecom provider's system would have allowed the threat actor to completely disrupt key communications — including all streaming services associated with the game. The fallout from such a disruption would have been substantial in terms of geopolitical implications, brand damage, national reputation, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from the licensing rights and ads negotiated prior to the World Cup, Maccaglia says.

"We are normally very collected, but in this case, we were terrified," Maccaglia says of NetWitness' discovery. "The threat actor literally had their finger on the button but didn't push it."

NetWitness' involvement in the Qatar World Cup began in 2022, about six months before the event, when several local service providers hired the company to assess the cybersecurity preparedness of some of the supporting IT infrastructure for the games. Like with other security vendors involved in the effort, the telecom provider gave NetWitness access to a substantial portion of its tech stack and environment — but not to all of it.

According to Maccaglia, the NetWitness team detected and remediated several issues on parts of the provider's tech stack to which the company had access. But it wasn't until early 2023 that the service provider finally opened up the rest of the environment to NetWitness for additional auditing. This was when NetWitness unearthed log activity suggesting that someone had gained access to the provider's network.

**A Rootkit and a Backdoor**

The company's subsequent investigation showed the attacker had planted a sophisticated rootkit and a backdoor, dubbed Waterbear, on a critical configuration management database (CMDB) storing device configurations for the provider's customers. NetWitness found the attackers had used PLEAD — a remote access Trojan commonly associated with the BlackTech APT — to target additional systems within the environment.

"The attacker aimed to control this database \[from\] the beginning, because it would allow him/her to swap configurations on the fly and revert them back, once finished, leaving no traces," Maccaglia says.

BlackTech is a threat actor that the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) last year identified as a threat to organizations in the telecommunications, technology, media, electronics, and industrial sectors. In an advisory, CISA described the threat actor (aka Radio Panda, Circuit Panda, Temp.Overboard, and Palmerworm) as particularly adept at modifying router malware without detection and the exploiting routers' domain-trust relationships to gain access to victim networks. "BlackTech actors' TTPs include developing customized malware and tailored persistence mechanisms for compromising routers," CISA noted. "These TTPs allow the actors to disable logging and abuse trusted domain relationships to pivot between international subsidiaries and domestic headquarters' networks."

In the attack on the telecom provider in Qatar, BlackTech actors used their access to the CMDB to change configurations on Asus routers associated with various organizations in such a manner as to make systems belonging to these organizations become accessible over the Internet. They then uploaded PLEAD — concealed in legitimate looking software updates from Asus — to these systems by modifying the DNS resolution of asus.com. The threat actor then leveraged PLEAD to steal data from the victim organizations. Among the systems infected in this manner were those associated with the World Cup games. The attackers would change the router config details for a few hours at a time and then revert back to the original rules to minimize the chances of detection, Maccaglia says.

**Worrying Lack of Visibility**

The fact that no one was able to spot the intrusion in the months leading up to the World Cup, during the event, or for months later is worrisome, Maccaglia says. With the countdown for the 2024 Summer Olympics well underway, it is imperative that the entire technology stack supporting the games be vetted for security issues, he says.

The Olympics, like other major sporting events, such as the Super Bowl, have become huge cyberattack targets in recent years. In 2019, for instance, a threat group later identified and linked to Russia's military intelligence also attempted to disrupt the opening of the Winter Olympics in South Korea after Russian athletes were banned from participating over doping concerns.

"As we saw with the World Cup, threats can live in obscure places and keep a very low profile," Maccaglia says, adding, "You can't find what you aren't allowed to look for," in advocating for broader visibility for companies like NetWitness into the entire supporting infrastructure for the game.

"When you behave as if there's always a threat present, you put yourself in a position to mitigate damage and, potentially, get ahead of the threat in the environment," he says. "This will be critical for the 2024 Summer Games."

**About the Author(s)**

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.

How Soccer's 2022 World Cup in Qatar Was Nearly Hacked

As part of its Secure by Design initiative, CISA urged companies to redouble efforts to quash SQL injection vulnerabilities. Here's how.

Source: Casimiro PT via Shutterstock

For more than a decade, injection vulnerabilities have literally topped the charts of critically dangerous software flaws, deemed more serious than all other types of vulnerabilities in the 2010, 2013, and 2017 Top 10 lists maintained by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).

Still, the warnings have failed to weed out the issues. Last year, the Cl0p group stole data from companies using a previously unknown SQL injection (SQLi) vulnerability in MOVEit's file-transfer application. In late March, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) called for companies to redouble their efforts to eliminate the security issue, which application security experts consider one of 13 different "unforgivable" classes of vulnerabilities that programmers should catch during development.

"Despite widespread knowledge and documentation of SQLi vulnerabilities over the past two decades, along with the availability of effective mitigations, software manufacturers continue to develop products with this defect, which puts many customers at risk," the agency stated in its March 25 advisory. "Vulnerabilities like SQLi have been considered by others an 'unforgivable' vulnerability since at least 2007."

The root of injection vulnerabilities is a lack of input sanitization; when the application receives variable input, there's always the risk of that input being tainted, says Randall Degges, head of developer relations at application security firm Snyk.

"Although this has been an issue since programming existed, the reason it’s still in the top 10 vulnerabilities after all this time is because there are an infinite number of ways to use input, and often time sanitizing input is tricky," he says.

For software developers looking to nix this particular issue, here's how.

**1\. Educate Yourself and Others**

The first step is always education. OWASP offers cheat sheets on SQLi, how to detect the vulnerability, and ways of creating safe code. Some Web application frameworks aim to educate developers while they are programming, using application programming interface (API) names to make the risk of some functions clear, such as React's "dangerouslySetInnerHTML" function, says James Kettle, director of research at PortSwigger, an application security testing firm.

In addition, developers should not necessarily trust the makers of open source software — especially components that have not been well vetted — to use safe code, and online tutorials are often unsafe as well, he says.

"I think the core issue is that there's a lot of unsafe APIs, where anyone using the API is vulnerable by default," Kettle says. "Even when there are more modern secure APIs available, fresh code is written using the unsafe versions, thanks to old unsafe examples in StackOverflow."

**2\. Harden the DevOps Pipeline Using Automated Tools**

Developers should implement unit tests to check code for SQLi flaws — and other common security issues — during development, add static application security testing (SAST) both prior to and after commits, and include scans for SQLi as part of dynamic application security testing (DAST).

Unit tests can be added using frameworks such as tSQLt for testing Microsoft SQL Server, pgTAP for testing applications that use PostgreSQL, and Pytest and SQLAlchemy for unit testing in Python programs. A variety of SQL unit testing best practices should be followed to make the tests more useful, such as isolating the SQL tests from dependencies and avoiding descriptive naming of the tests.

In addition to automated tests in the development pipeline, developers should make sure to use SQL frameworks, such as SQLAlchemy, because many security improvements are already baked in, says Snyk's Degges.

"Pretty much all modern SQL frameworks and tools provide convenience methods to help with this nowadays, so your best bet is to thoroughly read through the relevant framework documentation to ensure you're using it correctly when building queries," he says.

**3\. Play Around With SQLMap**

The open source program SQLMap is a great tool for penetration testers to experiment with SQLi, exploit any potential vulnerabilities, and dump a database to prove that the vulnerability can be exploited. The tool can also educate application developers to the true dangers of SQLi and how vulnerable code can be exploited.

However, the tool is not necessarily the best way to scan for potential vulnerabilities, says PortSwigger's Kettle.

"In my experience, the detection capabilities are slow, heavyweight, and prone to false positives," Kettle says. "Also, it can't explore websites to find the attack surface, which is one of the biggest challenges for finding these vulnerabilities automatically."

**4\. Consider a DAST Service**

Automating SQL injection scanning using DAST as part of the quality assurance stage — and even earlier in the DevOps pipeline, if possible — can help catch any overlooked vulnerabilities. In addition, DAST scanning is a good way to find SQLi in legacy code.

While Web application firewalls (WAFs) can prevent SQLi attacks from reaching an application, they should be used only as part of a defense-in-depth strategy, Kettle says.

"Personally, I've seen runtime protection like WAFs bypassed so many times that I don't have much confidence in them," he says. "I would recommend a bug-bounty program as an effective way to surface undetected vulnerabilities instead, and use WAFs as a last resort for systems that are in such a bad state that known vulnerabilities can't be patched."

**5\. Expand Beyond SQL**

Finally, companies should also look for other types of injection vulnerabilities and make sure their developers recognize risky patterns, since SQLi is only one class of injection vulnerabilities.

OWASP broadened the definition of an injection vulnerability to be any software flaw where user-supplied data is not validated or sanitized by an application and then sent to an interpreter. Cross-site scripting, SQL, operating system scripting, and parsing the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) are all areas that can be vulnerable to injection.

With the advent of artificial intelligence models, for instance, prompt injection is the latest form of an injection attack.

**About the Author(s)**

Veteran technology journalist of more than 20 years. Former research engineer. Written for more than two dozen publications, including CNET News.com, Dark Reading, MIT's Technology Review, Popular Science, and Wired News. Five awards for journalism, including Best Deadline Journalism (Online) in 2003 for coverage of the Blaster worm. Crunches numbers on various trends using Python and R. Recent reports include analyses of the shortage in cybersecurity workers and annual vulnerability trends.

How to Tame SQL Injection

Working together and integrating cybersecurity as part of our corporate and individual thinking can make life harder for hackers and safer for ourselves.

Source: Anatolyi Deryenko via Alamy Stock Phot

It's clear from the comments by Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), at a recent Congressional hearing on Chinese cyber operations, and from documents leaked from a Chinese hacker-for-hire ring, that there's a growing threat from and demand for a market for cyber vulnerabilities. Even more alarming, however, was Easterly's assessment that "we've made it easy on" attackers through poor software design. To secure our systems and prevent a whole-of-society or whole-of-economy attack like the one that Easterly and her peers descripted to Congress, it will take a whole-of-society effort to reshape the market for cybersecurity to create technologies that are both high-performing and secure.

Cybersecurity statistics from 2023 paint an even clearer picture of how easy it is for hackers: In Chromium, the engine that powers Chrome and Edge, eight previously unknown vulnerabilities (zero-days) were identified. Even software designed to keep users and networks secure was not immune from compromise. CISA opened 2024 with an emergency directive for federal departments and agencies to patch a series of vulnerabilities in VPN software designed for securing employee connections to federal networks. In the coming months, it's also likely that the creation of a market for hacks and hacked data by the likes of iSoon, as well as the growing offensive threat posed by AI, will make cyber defense even more challenging.

As CISA articulated in its Secure by Design initiative, vendors are the first step to creating technologies that are both secure and usable. Taking security into account along with performance and features from day one of a product's development will not only help build a secure technology stack but will also ensure that products truly balance security and performance instead of creating hurdles to good user experience masquerading as security features. But even CISA's ambitions to bring Secure by Design to life as a regulatory framework is insufficient to drive the sea change that's needed to turn the tide against emboldened and AI-empowered hackers — without support from the market, even the most well-intentioned and well-informed regulations will devolve into a box-checking enterprise.

**Cyber-Risk Is Business Risk**

To secure our economy and privately operated infrastructure, businesses must realize, as Easterly put it, that "cyber-risk is business risk" by incorporating cybersecurity into all their business practices. By increasing the stature of CISOs and giving them holistic cybersecurity oversight of the entire business, particularly procurement decisions, companies can incorporate cybersecurity as an organic step in business processes. In doing so, cybersecurity will become less of a last-minute hurdle to business effectiveness and more of an enabler to build a technology ecosystem and operations model that are both successful and secure.

As executives prioritize cybersecurity as a factor in their strategic decisions, cybersecurity and IT professionals — two closely related but often clashing groups — must come together to build networks that are both secure and functional for their users. IT professionals must realize that shortcuts to bypass security controls in favor of user experience or network efficiency incur unnecessary risk for their companies; in return, cybersecurity professionals must proactively look for technology that provides users a good experience while isolating them from technical risks. Both groups need to collaborate to create education for their workforces that are based on a real-time understanding of the risks they face and empowering good decisions about those risks rather than annual, quarterly, or monthly training that too often runs in the background while employees do their "real jobs."

The final piece of a whole-of-society approach to cybersecurity is both the most difficult and the most critical: integrating cybersecurity into the day-to-day lives of citizens. While CISA and the US government writ large have put much of the burden for secure development and secure decisions on companies, citizens must realize that the cybersecurity stakes go far beyond individual credit cards and bank accounts. The doomsday scenario of a simultaneous power, water, and communications disruption brings these stakes into focus, and day-to-day citizens must be willing to increase their cyber literacy and compliance to stop this scenario from unfolding. Just as we accept and comply with the incessant tones that remind us to buckle our seatbelts when driving, we must accept minor cybersecurity "nudges" like multifactor authentication of sensitive work and personal.

It's easy to catastrophize the consequences a Chinese cyberattack could bring — and it's certainly worth talking about response, resiliency, and recovery policies. It's hard to look in the mirror and realize that, in the rush to develop, purchase, and consume feature-rich technology, we've made it "easy" for our adversaries. But this doesn't have to be the case. If we work together and integrate cybersecurity as part of our corporate and individual thinking, we can make life harder for the hackers and safer for ourselves.

**About the Author(s)**

Field CTO, Garrison Technology

Adam Maruyama is a cybersecurity and national security professional and the current Field CTO for Garrison Technology. He served more than 15 years in the Intelligence Community supporting cyber and counterterrorism operations, including numerous warzone tours and co-leading the drafting of the 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism. During his time in industry, Adam has served commercial and government customers at McKinsey & Company and Palo Alto Networks.

Why Cybersecurity Is a Whole-of-Society Issue

The thwarted XZ Utils supply chain attack was years in the making. Now, clues suggest nation-state hackers were behind the persona that inserted the malicious code.

Ultimately, Scott argues that those three years of code changes and polite emails were likely not spent sabotaging multiple software projects, but rather building up a history of credibility in preparation for the sabotage of XZ Utils specifically—and potentially other projects in the future. “He just never got to that step because we got lucky and found his stuff,” says Scott. “So that’s burned now, and he’s gonna have to go back to square one.”

**Technical Ticks and Time Zones**

Despite Jia Tan’s persona as a single individual, their yearslong preparation is a hallmark of a well-organized state-sponsored hacker group, argues Raiu, the former Kaspersky lead researcher. So too are the technical hallmarks of the XZ Utils malicious code that Jia Tan added. Raiu notes that, at a glance, the code truly looks like a compression tool. “It’s written in a very subversive manner,” he says. It’s also a “passive” backdoor, Raiu says, so it wouldn’t reach out to a command-and-control server that might help identify the backdoor’s operator. Instead, it waits for the operator to connect to the target machine via SSH and authenticate with a private key—one generated with a particularly strong cryptographic function known as ED448.

The backdoor’s careful design could be the work of US hackers, Raiu notes, but he suggests that’s unlikely, since the US wouldn’t typically sabotage open source projects—and if it did, the National Security Agency would probably use a quantum-resistant cryptographic function, which ED448 is not. That leaves non-US groups with a history of supply chain attacks, Raiu suggests, like China’s APT41, North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and Russia’s APT29.

At a glance, Jia Tan certainly looks East Asian—or is meant to. The time zone of Jia Tan’s commits are UTC+8: That’s China’s time zone, and only an hour off from North Korea’s. However, an analysis by two researchers, Rhea Karty and Simon Henniger, suggests that Jia Tan may have simply changed the time zone of their computer to UTC+8 before every commit. In fact, several commits were made with a computer set to an Eastern European or Middle Eastern time zone instead, perhaps when Jia Tan forgot to make the change.

“Another indication that they are not from China is the fact that they worked on notable Chinese holidays,” say Karty and Henniger, students at Dartmouth College and the Technical University of Munich, respectively. They note that Jia Tan also didn't submit new code on Christmas or New Year's. Boehs, the developer, adds that much of the work starts at 9 am and ends at 5 pm for Eastern European or Middle Eastern time zones. “The time range of commits suggests this was not some project that they did outside of work,” Boehs says.

Though that leaves countries like Iran and Israel as possibilities, the majority of clues lead back to Russia, and specifically Russia’s APT29 hacking group, argues Dave Aitel, a former NSA hacker and founder of the cybersecurity firm Immunity. Aitel points out that APT29—widely believed to work for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the SVR—has a reputation for technical care of a kind that few other hacker groups show. APT29 also carried out the Solar Winds compromise, perhaps the most deftly coordinated and effective software supply chain attack in history. That operation matches the style of the XZ Utils backdoor far more than the cruder supply chain attacks of APT41 or Lazarus, by comparison.

“It could very well be someone else,” says Aitel. “But I mean, if you’re looking for the most sophisticated supply chain attacks on the planet, that’s going to be our dear friends at the SVR.”

Security researchers agree, at least, that it’s unlikely that Jia Tan is a real person, or even one person working alone. Instead, it seems clear that the persona was the online embodiment of a new tactic from a new, well-organized organization—a tactic that nearly worked. That means we should expect to see Jia Tan return by other names: seemingly polite and enthusiastic contributors to open source projects, hiding a government’s secret intentions in their code commits.

_Updated 4/3/2024 at 12:30 pm ET to note the possibility of Israeli or Iranian involvement._

The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind

By Waqas
The leaked data was previously being sold by the IntelBroker hacker for just $3,000 in Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency.
This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: IntelBroker Leaks Alleged National Security Data Tied to US Contractor Acuity Inc.

IntelBroker hacker leaks data linked to US contractor Acuity Inc., exposing potentially sensitive intelligence agencies-related data – US government previously denied Acuity Inc. breach, but experts warn of national security risks.

The notorious IntelBroker hacker and their affiliates have leaked a trove of sensitive records, which they claim jeopardize the United States national security. The data, leaked on **Breach Forums**, is linked to US Federal contractor Acuity Inc., in a data breach allegedly carried out in March 2024. The data was previously being sold for just $3,000 in Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency.

As seen by Hackread.com, IntelBroker has classified the breach as a “National Security Documents Leak,” involving documents from the “Five Eyes Intelligence Group.” The leaked records now accessible to the public include highly sensitive information such as full names, email addresses, office numbers, personal cell numbers, email addresses (government, military, and Pentagon), classified information, and communications between the Five Eyes, 14 Eyes, and the US’s allies.

Screenshot from Breach Forums (Credit: Hackread.com)

For your information, The Five Eyes Intelligence Group is an intelligence alliance including five English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The alliance aims to share intelligence and collaborate on signals intelligence (SIGINT) gathering, surveillance, and **cybersecurity activities**.

****Background of the alleged Acuity Inc. data breach****

On March 4, 2024, **Hackread.com published an exclusive report** on a data breach allegedly involving Acuity Inc., a federal contractor based in Reston, Virginia. The breach was claimed by IntelBroker.

The hacker claimed the use of a zero-day security vulnerability in GitHub to access Acuity Inc.’s tokens and facilitate their malicious activities, including the theft of data belonging to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Hackread.com reported the breach to GitHub, Acuity Inc., ICE, and USCIS. However, none of the organizations responded to the report. In contrast, Homeland Security, responding to a third-party media site that had not reported on the incident or analyzed the data, denied IntelBroker’s claims and labelled the breach as false, categorizing the leaked information as “test demos for vendors” with fake names and contact information used solely to provide examples of received data.

****Now What?****

Despite the US Government’s version that the data leak is fake, Hackread.com’s analysis suggests that the publicly leaked information remains highly consequential. Even if the data is fabricated, it exposes the modus operandi of US intelligence agencies and their allies, potentially risking their operational security and strategies.

> I will say again: data like this can’t be faked unless it’s copy paste from different and previous leaks which is highly unlikely based on IntelBroker’s previous attacks.
> 
> Also, their availability on twitter should be good for OSINT researchers, no? https://t.co/6CkYBp07Ua
> 
> — Waqas (@WAK4S) April 3, 2024

****IntelBroker****

The hacker’s origins and affiliates are unknown; however, according to the United States government, IntelBroker is alleged to be the perpetrator behind one of the **T-Mobile data breaches**.

Additionally, IntelBroker is known for targeting high-profile targets in the United States. Some of their previous data breaches include **Las Angeles Intl. Airport**, **US DoD Documents**, **Staffing Giant Robert Half**, **Facebook Marketplace Database**, DARPA-related accesses in **General Electric breach**, **Weee! Grocer**y and several others.

1.  US Govt’s secret terrorist watchlist with 2M records exposed online
2.  Chinese Group Storm-0558 Hacked European Govt Emails, Microsoft
3.  Adobe ColdFusion Flaw Used by Hackers to Access US Govt Servers
4.  Traffic sign near ICE headquarters hacked with “Abolish ICE” message
5.  Norweigian researcher exposes how a US firm collected his location data

IntelBroker Leaks Alleged National Security Data Tied to US Contractor Acuity Inc.

Roughly nine years ago, KrebsOnSecurity profiled a Pakistan-based cybercrime group called "The Manipulaters," a sprawling web hosting network of phishing and spam delivery platforms. In January 2024, The Manipulaters pleaded with this author to unpublish previous stories about their work, claiming the group had turned over a new leaf and gone legitimate. But new research suggests that while they have improved the quality of their products and services, these nitwits still fail spectacularly at hiding their illegal activities.

Roughly nine years ago, KrebsOnSecurity profiled a Pakistan-based cybercrime group called “**The Manipulaters**,” a sprawling web hosting network of phishing and spam delivery platforms. In January 2024, The Manipulaters pleaded with this author to unpublish previous stories about their work, claiming the group had turned over a new leaf and gone legitimate. But new research suggests that while they have improved the quality of their products and services, these nitwits still fail spectacularly at hiding their illegal activities.

In May 2015, KrebsOnSecurity published a brief writeup about the brazen Manipulaters team, noting that they openly operated hundreds of web sites selling tools designed to trick people into giving up usernames and passwords, or deploying malicious software on their PCs.

Manipulaters advertisement for “Office 365 Private Page with Antibot” phishing kit sold on the domain heartsender,com. “Antibot” refers to functionality that attempts to evade automated detection techniques, keeping a phish deployed as long as possible. Image: DomainTools.

The core brand of The Manipulaters has long been a shared cybercriminal identity named “**Saim Raza**,” who for the past decade has peddled a popular spamming and phishing service variously called “**Fudtools**,” “**Fudpage**,” “**Fudsender**,” “**FudCo**,” etc. The term “FUD” in those names stands for “**F**ully **U**n-**D**etectable,” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.

A September 2021 story here checked in on The Manipulaters, and found that Saim Raza and company were prospering under their FudCo brands, which they secretly managed from a front company called **We Code Solutions**.

That piece worked backwards from all of the known Saim Raza email addresses to identify Facebook profiles for multiple We Code Solutions employees, many of whom could be seen celebrating company anniversaries gathered around a giant cake with the words “FudCo” painted in icing.

Since that story ran, KrebsOnSecurity has heard from this Saim Raza identity on two occasions. The first was in the weeks following the Sept. 2021 piece, when one of Saim Raza’s known email addresses — **bluebtcus@gmail.com** — pleaded to have the story taken down.

“Hello, we already leave that fud etc before year,” the Saim Raza identity wrote. “Why you post us? Why you destroy our lifes? We never harm anyone. Please remove it.”

Not wishing to be manipulated by a phishing gang, KrebsOnSecurity ignored those entreaties. But on Jan. 14, 2024, KrebsOnSecurity heard from the same bluebtcus@gmail.com address, apropos of nothing.

“Please remove this article,” Sam Raza wrote, linking to the 2021 profile. “Please already my police register case on me. I already leave everything.”

Asked to elaborate on the police investigation, Saim Raza said they were freshly released from jail.

“I was there many days,” the reply explained. “Now back after bail. Now I want to start my new work.”

Exactly what that “new work” might entail, Saim Raza wouldn’t say. But a new report from researchers at **DomainTools.com** finds that several computers associated with The Manipulaters have been massively hacked by malicious data- and password-snarfing malware for quite some time.

DomainTools says the malware infections on Manipulaters PCs exposed “vast swaths of account-related data along with an outline of the group’s membership, operations, and position in the broader underground economy.”

“Curiously, the large subset of identified Manipulaters customers appear to be compromised by the same stealer malware,” DomainTools wrote. “All observed customer malware infections began after the initial compromise of Manipulaters PCs, which raises a number of questions regarding the origin of those infections.”

A number of questions, indeed. The core Manipulaters product these days is a spam delivery service called **HeartSender**, whose homepage openly advertises phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including **Microsoft 365**, **Yahoo**, **AOL**, **Intuit**, **iCloud** and **ID.me**, to name a few.

A screenshot of the homepage of HeartSender 4 displays an IP address tied to fudtoolshop@gmail.com. Image: DomainTools.

HeartSender customers can interact with the subscription service via the website, but the product appears to be far more effective and user-friendly if one downloads HeartSender as a Windows executable program. Whether that HeartSender program was somehow compromised and used to infect the service’s customers is unknown.

However, DomainTools also found the hosted version of HeartSender service leaks an extraordinary amount of user information that probably is not intended to be publicly accessible. Apparently, the HeartSender web interface has several webpages that are accessible to unauthenticated users, exposing customer credentials along with support requests to HeartSender developers.

“Ironically, the Manipulaters may create more short-term risk to their own customers than law enforcement,” DomainTools wrote. “The data table “User Feedbacks” (sic) exposes what appear to be customer authentication tokens, user identifiers, and even a customer support request that exposes root-level SMTP credentials–all visible by an unauthenticated user on a Manipulaters-controlled domain. Given the risk for abuse, this domain will not be published.”

This is hardly the first time The Manipulaters have shot themselves in the foot. In 2019, _The Manipulaters failed to renew their core domain name_ — manipulaters\[.\]com — the same one tied to so many of the company’s past and current business operations. That domain was quickly scooped up by Scylla Intel, a cyber intelligence firm that focuses on connecting cybercriminals to their real-life identities.

Currently, The Manipulaters seem focused on building out and supporting HeartSender, which specializes in spam and email-to-SMS spamming services.

“The Manipulaters’ newfound interest in email-to-SMS spam could be in response to the massive increase in smishing activity impersonating the USPS,” DomainTools wrote. “Proofs posted on HeartSender’s Telegram channel contain numerous references to postal service impersonation, including proving delivery of USPS-themed phishing lures and the sale of a USPS phishing kit.”

Reached via email, the Saim Raza identity declined to respond to questions about the DomainTools findings.

“First \[of\] all we never work on virus or compromised computer etc,” Raza replied. “If you want to write like that fake go ahead. Second I leave country already. If someone bind anything with exe file and spread on internet its not my fault.”

Asked why they left Pakistan, Saim Raza said the authorities there just wanted to shake them down.

“After your article our police put FIR on my \[identity\],” Saim Raza explained. “FIR” in this case stands for “First Information Report,” which is the initial complaint in the criminal justice system of Pakistan.

“They only get money from me nothing else,” Saim Raza continued. “Now some officers ask for money again again. Brother, there is no good law in Pakistan just they need money.”

Saim Raza has a history of being slippery with the truth, so who knows whether The Manipulaters and/or its leaders have in fact fled Pakistan (it may be more of an extended vacation abroad). With any luck, these guys will soon venture into a more Western-friendly, “good law” nation and receive a warm welcome by the local authorities.

‘The Manipulaters’ Improve Phishing, Still Fail at Opsec

What cybersecurity professionals around the world can do to defend against the scourge of online disinformation in this year's election cycle.

Shamla Naidoo, Head of Cloud Strategy & Innovation, Netskope

April 3, 2024

5 Min Read

Source: Feng Yu via Alamy Stock Photo

COMMENTARY

In recent global election cycles, the Internet and social media have facilitated the widespread dissemination of false news, misleading memes, and deepfake content, overwhelming voters. Given that it is difficult to directly compromise election systems used to vote and count votes, adversaries turn to the age-old psychological manipulation technique to get the desired outcomes: no hacking needed. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, the impact of disinformation campaigns is expected to escalate further. This has led to increased uncertainty and ambiguity regarding reality, with personal biases often shaping perceptions of truth.

In a sense, disinformation is like a cyber threat: As security leaders, we realize that malware, phishing attempts, and other attacks are a given. But we put controls in place to minimize the impact, if not prevent it entirely. We develop defense strategies based on decades of historical knowledge and data to gain the best advantage.

Today's disinformation campaigns, however, are essentially a product of the last decade, and we have not yet designed a mature series of controls to counter it. But we need to. With 83 national elections in 78 countries taking place in 2024 — a volume not expected to be matched until 2048 — the stakes have never been higher. A recent wave of troubling incidents and developments illustrate the many ways that adversaries are attempting to deceive the hearts and minds of the world's voters:

*   In Europe, the French Foreign Minister accused Russia of setting up a network of more than 190 websites intended to spread disinformation to "destroy Europe's unity" and "make our democracies exhausted" in seeking to discourage support for Ukraine. The network, codenamed "Portal Kombat," has also sought to confuse voters, discredit certain candidates, and disrupt large sporting events like the Paris Olympics.
    
*   In Pakistan, voters have been exposed to false Covid-19 and anti-vaccination propaganda, online hate speech against religious groups, and attacks on women's movements.
    
*   The World Economic Forum ranks foreign and domestic entities' or individuals' use of misinformation and disinformation as the "most severe global risk" for the next two years — over extreme weather events, cyberattacks, armed conflicts, and economic downturns.
    

Let's be clear here about the difference between disinformation and misinformation: The latter is information that is wrong, but not intended for mass distribution. The "fake news" distributor may not even be aware of its inaccuracies.

Disinformation, on the other hand, occurs when an entity (such as an adversarial nation-state) knowingly leverages misinformation with the intent of viral distribution.

The psychological manipulation jeopardizes the stability of democratic institutions. Think of disinformation farms as a large office floor with hundreds or even thousands of people doing nothing but making up authentic-looking blogs, articles, and videos to target candidates and positions that contradict their agendas. Once unleashed on social media, these falsehoods spread rapidly, reaching millions and masquerading as real events.

How can citizens best protect themselves from these campaigns to maintain a firm grasp on what's real and what isn't? How can cybersecurity leaders help?

Here are four best practices.

**DYOV: Do Your Own Vetting**

A meme or GIF doesn't stand alone as a credible source of information. Not all professional-looking publications are credible or accurate. Not every statement from a trusted source may be their own. It’s too easy to create fake videos using AI-generated images. There are few arbiters of truth on the Internet, so buyer beware. Moreover, we can't depend on social media platforms to monitor and eliminate disinformation — regardless of whether we agree or embrace it. Section 230 has established immunity for online companies serving as publication resources for third-party content.

It's critical to look at different platforms and reconcile those with what government websites, real news outlets, and respected organizations such as the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) are reporting. Inconsistencies should serve as a warning sign. Also, when seeking out biases from the information source, always ask, "Why should I believe this? Who is the author? What is their interest in this position?"

**2\. Avoid Becoming Part of the Problem**

Social media makes it too easy to run with a post or video that presents a version of "truth" that is anything but. Architects of disinformation campaigns depend upon individual users to spread their messages, i.e., "It came from my sibling/boss/neighbor, so it must be true." Again, DYOV before passing anything along. Be judicious about clicking on "forward" and "like" buttons to avoid being an engine of these campaigns.

**3\. Follow Watchdogs**

Organizations like the Netherlands-based Defend Democracy, the University of Pennsylvania-based FactCheck.org and Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND Corp. offer resources to better help distinguish fact from fiction. In the academic community, San Diego State University's University Library and Stetson University's duPont-Ball Library maintain a list of watchdog groups, databases, and other resources.

**4\. Take a Leadership Stand**

As cybersecurity professionals, we recognize that threats like brand impersonation and phishing occur beyond our controlled technology environments. We cannot block every email, and our controls won't block or even detect impersonations on technology that we don't control. Instead, we must actively promote cyber education and awareness so employees can learn about the latest phishing attempts and the dangers of clicking on unfamiliar links.

We should take a similar, education-focused approach with disinformation campaigns. We can create employee awareness programs so they understand what to look for, even when the attempts do not involve our technology. We can even promote this knowledge through various platforms — internal company communications, public-facing blogs, articles — where we have a prominent voice. Offer credible and contextual resources against which they can vet information.

Unfortunately, disinformation — especially during political seasons — cannot be avoided, forcing us to field all relevant "facts" through appropriate vetting. However, tools enable everyone to do this while educating employees and the public as cybersecurity leaders. If they do so, 2024 may be remembered as the year when the global community decided that the truth matters.

**About the Author(s)**

Head of Cloud Strategy & Innovation, Netskope

Currently the head of cloud strategy & innovation at Netskope, Shamla Naidoo is a technology industry veteran with experience helping businesses across diverse sectors and cultures use technology more effectively. She has successfully embraced and led digital strategy in executive leadership roles such as Global CISO, CIO, VP, and Managing Partner, at companies like IBM, Anthem (Wellpoint), Marriott (Starwood), and Northern Trust.

Shamla has helped organizations in over 20 countries recognize the impact of digital transformation globally and advise their stakeholders on predicting and navigating the necessary changes in laws and regulations. In addition, she has worked with intelligence communities to use digital and cyber within their organizations to protect businesses and society from technology misuse.

Shamla remains actively engaged in the industry, with organizations like the Security Advisor Alliance, the Shared Security Assessments Group, Institute for Applied Network Security (IANS), Executive Women’s Forum (EWF), HMG Strategy Group, and the Round Table Network. In addition, she is an influential member of the legal community, creating and teaching courses on law, technology, and privacy for the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. She frequently speaks at the American Bar Association and formerly served as the Committee Chair on Legal Technology for the Illinois State Bar Association. As a practitioner, teacher and coach, she enjoys the opportunity to help seasoned professionals to take their careers to the next level.

'Unfaking' News: How to Counter Disinformation Campaigns in Global Elections

An economic success story in Asia, Vietnam is seeing more manufacturing and more business investment. But with that comes a significant uptick in cybercrime as well.

Source: Jose Vilchez via Alamy Stock Photo

For one week last month, Vietnamese brokerage VNDirect Cyber Systems shut down its securities trading systems and disconnected from the country's two stock exchanges after a ransomware attack encrypted critical data. VNDirect was offline recovering until eight days later when the Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi stock exchanges allowed it to restart trading on April 1.

VNDirect Cyber Systems is just the latest Vietnamese company whose operations have been severely disrupted by a cyberattack.

In 2023, nearly 14,000 organizations across Vietnam suffered a cyberattack, an increase of 10% from the prior year, according to the country's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). While estimated damages caused by malicious software declined for the second year in a row to 17.3 trillion VND, or about US $690 million, a variety of other cybersecurity metrics continue to worsen, according to regional experts.

Overall, the country's economic picture is in flux. And that has led to a rise in cybercrime, says Ngoc Bui, a cybersecurity expert at Menlo Security, a provider of secure enterprise browser technology.

"Economic conditions, particularly in regions with limited job opportunities and low wages for high-skilled roles, can drive individuals to turn to cybercrime," he says. "This trend, fueled by the allure of cybercrime's rewards and digital anonymity, emphasizes the need for creating legitimate tech sector jobs to stimulate economic growth and counter cybercrime."

Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, making the most of its connections to both China and the United States. The country's digital economy is expected to top US $43 billion by 2025, in part because of its focus on technology including initiatives in e-government, smart cities, and artificial intelligence, according to consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. As a result, in mid-March, a delegation of nearly 60 US companies — including giants such as Meta and Boeing — visited the country to seek out investment opportunities.

**Cracked Software, Junk Bank Accounts**

The success has brought rapid technology adoption and significant cybercrime.

Nearly 750,000 systems were attacked by credential-stealing malware in 2023, an increase of 40% compared to the previous year, according to regional cybersecurity firm Bkav Technology Group. Online financial fraud has taken off due to a problem specific to the country: Bank account owners selling access to unused accounts. These so-called "junk accounts" make it difficult to track cybercriminals by following the money, says Nguyen Van Cuong, director in charge of cybersecurity at Bkav.

"Many people simply think that selling accounts they don't use won't be a problem," he said in a statement. "But in reality, bad guys have taken advantage of these bank accounts to carry out illegal transactions, hiding their origin, causing difficulties for investigation agencies."

Pirated or cracked software is another major issue. Fifty-three percent of computers are thought to be using pirated software, according to Bkav.

While the government has issued decrees to increase cybersecurity awareness, citizens continue to participate in these risky digital behavior, such as junk bank accounts and the use of cracked software, says Sarah Jones, a cyber threat intelligence research analyst at Critical Start.

"Vietnam's rapid digital growth creates a larger target for cybercriminals, and a lack of cybersecurity awareness among users makes them more susceptible," she says. "The widespread use of cracked software further exposes individuals and organizations to malware and exploitable weaknesses."

**Countering Cybercrime**

Vietnam's ruling Communist Party has strived to keep pace with cybercrime, issuing a number of directives to strengthen laws around the prevention and investigation of cybercrimes in 2021, and in 2020 launched efforts to raise public awareness of cybersecurity. Another directive, passed in 2019, required public sector organizations to spend at least 10% of their IT budget on cybersecurity. The sustained efforts has boosted Vietnam's ranking in the Global Cybersecurity Index to 25th out of 194 countries in the 2020 report (the latest available), up from 100th in 2017.

The country is already working with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to strengthen the technical skills of law enforcement to tackle money laundering and other crimes.

Yet, divisions within the country are also driving the creation of dark platforms to escape increasing surveillance and Internet censorship by the government. A military group consisting of thousands of service members, known as Force 47, monitors communications and manages censorship in accordance with the government mandates, but also has resulted in the creation of several anonymity-as-a-service groups.

Such efforts will likely result in stronger Dark markets and platforms such as VietCredCare and DarkGate, both created by home-grown APT groups like Ocean Lotus and Lotus Bane, says Ken Dunham, cyber threat director at Qualys's threat research group.

"The threatscape in Vietnam is complicated with APT groups targeting companies for the benefit of the country, \[as well as\] Internet censorship, monitoring, and blocking of content by the Force 47 group," he says.

The next two years will be uncertain for Vietnam in many ways.

The leadership of the Community Party is expected to change by 2026, and economists wonder if the country can continue to deliver strong economic gains. Both uncertainties could breed more cybercrime in the future there.

**About the Author(s)**

Veteran technology journalist of more than 20 years. Former research engineer. Written for more than two dozen publications, including CNET News.com, Dark Reading, MIT's Technology Review, Popular Science, and Wired News. Five awards for journalism, including Best Deadline Journalism (Online) in 2003 for coverage of the Blaster worm. Crunches numbers on various trends using Python and R. Recent reports include analyses of the shortage in cybersecurity workers and annual vulnerability trends.

Ransomware, Junk Bank Accounts: Cyber Threats Proliferate in Vietnam

UNAPIMON works by meticulously disabling hooks in Windows APIs for detecting malicious processes.

Source: Panchenko Vladimir via Shutterstock

Researchers have spotted Earth Freybug, a China-linked threat actor, using a new malware tool to bypass mechanisms organizations might have put in place to monitor Windows application programming interfaces (APIs) for malicious activity.

The malware, which researchers at Trend Micro discovered and named UNAPIMON, works by disabling hooks in Windows APIs for inspecting and analyzing API-related processes for security issues.

**Unhooking APIs**

The goal is to prevent any processes that the malware spawns from being detected or inspected by antivirus tools, sandboxing products, and other threat detection mechanisms.

"Looking at the behavior of UNAPIMON and how it was used in the attack, we can infer that its primary purpose is to unhook critical API functions in any child process," Trend Micro said in a report this week.

"For environments that implement API monitoring through hooking, such as sandboxing systems, UNAPIMON will prevent child processes from being monitored," the security vendor said. This allows malicious programs to run without being detected.

Trend Micro assessed Earth Freybug as being a subset of APT41, a collective of Chinese threat groups variously referred to as Winnti, Wicked Panda, Barium, and Suckfly. The group is known for using a collection of custom tools and so-called living-off-the-land binaries (LOLbins) that manipulate legitimate system binaries such as PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

APT41 itself has been active since at least 2012 and is linked to numerous cyber espionage campaigns, supply chain attacks, and financially motivated cybercrime. In 2022, researchers at Cybereason identified the threat actor as stealing large volumes of trade secrets and intellectual property from companies in the US and Asia for years. Its victims have included manufacturing and IT organizations, governments, and critical infrastructure targets in the US, East Asia, and Europe. In 2020, the US government charged five members believed to be associated with the group for their role in attacks against more than 100 organizations globally.

**Attack Chain**

In the recent incident that Trend Micro observed, Earth Freybug actors used a multistaged approach to delivering UNAPIMON on target systems. In the first stage, the attackers injected malicious code of unknown origin into vmstools.exe, a process associated with a set of utilities for facilitating communications between a guest virtual machine and the underlying host machine. The malicious code created a scheduled task on the host machine to run a batch script file (cc.bat) on the host system.

The batch file's task is to collect a range of system information and initiate a second scheduled task to run a cc.bat file on the infected host. The second batch script file leverages SessionEnv, a Windows service for managing remote desktop services, to side-load a malicious dynamic link library (DLL) on the infected host. "The second cc.bat is notable for leveraging a service that loads a nonexistent library to side-load a malicious DLL. In this case, the service is SessionEnv," Trend Micro said.

The malicious DLL then drops UNAPIMON on the Windows service for defense evasion purposes and also on a cmd.exe process that quietly executes commands. "UNAPIMON itself is straightforward: It is a DLL malware written in C++ and is neither packed nor obfuscated; it is not encrypted save for a single string," Trend Micro said. What makes it "peculiar" is its defense evasion technique of unhooking APIs so that the malware's malicious processes remain invisible to threat detection tools. "In typical scenarios, it is the malware that does the hooking. However, it is the opposite in this case," Trend Micro said.

**About the Author(s)**

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.

China-Linked Threat Actor Taps 'Peculiar' Malware to Evade Detection

Fortanix is working on technologies to build a security wall around AI search.

The inner functioning of AI-powered search is more complex than plain-text search via Google when it comes to extracting answers from websites and databases. Fortanix is trying to build a security wall to protect the search query and the extraction of data from artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Generative AI technologies will ultimately provide fine-grained responses based on associativity of information and retrieve information from sources users may not be aware of, says Richard Searle, vice president of confidential computing at Fortanix.

"What we're finding ... is that there is a deeper focus happening in the AI domain around privacy, consent, and permissioning of information," Searle says. "These are obviously the core cases."

Essentially, Fortanix is building a security wall around the way AI search queries are handled. More specifically, it is building security around prompts, where users provide AI search queries. The security wall extends to data retrieval from large language models, which are delivered to customers.

"We think there's a significant market there," Searle says. "The partners that we're working with within the AI space are talking about search to their customers already today."

Fortanix's private AI search is pinned on confidential computing, which creates secure vaults that are accessible to authorized parties only via keys. The data is processed inside, without leaving the vault.

"Data is going to be subject to not only the data protection regulations that we have today, but also these emerging AI regulations," Searle says.

Fortanix's technology is a component in the emerging field of confidential AI. Confidential AI is extended to AI scenarios typically associated with GPUs and accelerators, said Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer for Microsoft Azure, during a panel discussion at the Open Confidential Computing Conference in March.

**Protecting Vector Databases**

Private search with AI relies on data extraction from knowledge graphs or vector databases, which could draw information from a wide range of sources, including static conventional databases.

At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, also in March, the company's CEO, Jensen Huang, defined vector databases as a new style of database that takes structured data or unstructured data that can be reindexed by encoding the meaning of data.

"Now this becomes an AI database, and that AI database in the future, once you create it, you can talk to it," Huang said.

Fortanix's goal is to initiate privacy for the search initiator — a human or machine user — and protect the privacy and integrity of the information that might be within the vector embeddings.

"Confidential computing, I think, has a very important role to play," Fortanix’s Searle says.

**Private Search Differs From Conventional Search**

Confidential AI prevents the leak of AI information, which helps meet regulatory requirements. The layer also anonymizes the information so a user's intent or identity is protected. That is the opposite of conventional search, where user information and motives drive Google Ads and analytics.

A higher level of AI privacy is a cornerstone for industries such as healthcare and banking, which are tied to regulatory issues.

"Imagine that you want to do search in a scientific domain — you might want to be able to use data from a different institution to the one you're working in that has some specific expertise in a particular field. Showing the privacy of that data and the accuracy of this research is important," Searle says.

**State of Confidential AI**

Confidential AI is an emerging concept, and search fits into that profile. Intel and AMD have chips with hooks for secure enclaves. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are providing confidential computing virtual machines in their cloud services.

Companies can bring data sets together to train a foundational model effectively, and these data sets are becoming high-value assets for top corporations, said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Nvidia's hyperscale and high-performance computing division, during the panel discussion.

The IT industry is rapidly approaching the deployment of confidential computing in data centers, edge computing, and PCs, but there's a lot more to do with confidential AI, said Greg Lavender, Intel's chief technology officer, during the panel.

"Privacy and safety and responsible AI are going to be big forcing functions for this as the government adopts AI technologies from the industry," he said.

**About the Author(s)**

Agam Shah has covered enterprise IT for more than a decade. Outside of machine learning, hardware, and chips, he's also interested in martial arts and Russia.

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