4 X Security Team

Microsoft today shipped three security bulletins with fixes for at least 8 documented vulnerabilities affecting millions of Windows OS users.

The most serious of this month’s patch batch is rated “critical” and could allow full remote execution attacks if a Windows user is simply lured into viewing a booby-trapped image file.

The skinny on the March 2009 bulletins:

• MS09-006: (CRITICAL) Provides cover for three newly discovered and privately reported vulnerabilities in Windows, which could allow remote code execution if a user viewed a specially crafted EMF or WMF image file from an affected system. These vulnerabilities affect all versions of Windows, including Vista and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft expects to see exploit code for these flaws but reckons the reliability will be “inconsistent.”
• MS09-007: (IMPORTANT): This bulletin includes a patch for a solitary vulnerability in Windows, which could allow spoofing if an attacker gains access to the certificate used by the end user for authentication. Again, Microsoft says “inconsistent exploit code” is likely. The bulletin is available for all versions of Windows — Windows 2000 through Windows Server 2008.
• MS09-008 (IMPORTANT): This update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities and two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Windows , which could allow a remote attacker to redirect network traffic intended for systems on the Internet to the attacker’s own systems. Microsoft says the patches correct the way that Windows DNS servers cache and validate queries, and by modifying the way that Windows DNS servers and Windows WINS servers handle WPAD and ISATAP registration. For these issues, Microsoft warns that “consistent exploit code” is likely.

Windows users should treat the “critical” bulletin with the highest possible priority.

[Source: zdnet]

Can you teach an old employee new phishing protection tricks?

In a recently presented study by the Intrepidus Group, the company behind the PhishMe.com spear phishing awareness service allowing companies to ethically attempt to phish their employees on their way to build security awareness, presents some interesting key findings based on 32 phishing scenarios tested against a total of 69,000 employees around the world. Here they are:

• 23% of people worldwide are vulnerable to targeted/spear phishing attacks
• Phishing attacks that use an authoritative tone are 40% more successful than those that attempt to lure people through reward-giving
• Men and women are both equally susceptible to phishing
• On an average 60% of corporate employees that were found susceptible to targeted spear phishing responded to the phishing emails within three hours of receiving them
• People are less cautious when clicking on active links in emails than when they are requested for sensitive data

Metrics are invaluable, but in this case the obsession with metrics can result in more insecurities since it excludes the possibility of blended threats. For instance, last year I was closely monitoring a similar blended Skype phishing campaign, where the cybercriminals (IkbMan) were attempting to optimize the click-through rate of their campaign by serving client-side exploits to the visitors, “just in case” if they find the site suspicious and do not enter any accounting data. For the time being the exploit is served instantly upon visiting the phishing site, however, the possibility for serving it only if the user hasn’t entered anything and is leaving the site is always there.

• Go through related phishing trends and tactics: Research: 76% of phishing sites hosted on compromised servers; Microsoft study debunks phishing profitability; Phishers increasingly scamming other phishers; DIY phishing kits introducing new features; Phishers apply quality assurance, start validating credit card numbers; Lack of phishing attacks data sharing puts $300M at stake annually

Considering one of the key points from Intrepidus Group’s study, namely that “People are less cautious when clicking on active links in emails than when they are requested for sensitive data“, a phishing email should be treated as spam, namely (in a perfect world) it shouldn’t be even allowed to reach the employee’s mailbox. Otherwise, it appears that the trade-off for coming up with quality metrics on the current degree of security awareness in regard to phishing, is the potential exposure of the tested population against potential blended threats.

With managed localization services in the sense of dedicated translators of messages to be used in spam, phishing, and malware campaigns already a fact, the cybercrime ecosystem will soon be talking in a native language, and with the increasingly automated phishing tools whose features were once available to a more sophisticated crowd of cybecriminals, now available for free - the future of phishing looks promising.

The only threat that can outpace its growth is the threat posed by the much more efficient and sophisticated financial data targeting tactic of using crimeware targeting each and every E-banking site simultaneously upon successful infection.

[Source: zdnet]

According to a security group going under the name of TeamElite, the international sites of Kaspersky Iran (kasperskylabs.ir), Taiwan (web.kaspersky.com.tw) and South Korea (kasperskymall.co.kr) are susceptible to SQL injection attacks, allowing the injection of malicious iFrames and potentially assisting malicious attackers into obtaining sensitive data from the web sites in question.

The group’s analysis comes shortly after the series of posts by a Romanian group of serial pen-testers of security vendors, which discovered similar flaws in the web sites of F-Secure, Symantec, BitDiffender, and Kaspersky USA.

Let’s start from the basics. PR contingency planning in the spirit of total denial is perhaps the worst thing a vendor can do in this case. Despite the fact that these are reseller web sites and are managed by local companies, they still have the license to harness the power of the brand of an information security company, and therefore not demonstrating basic security awareness by taking care of trivial web application vulnerabilities on these sites, can undermine the brand’s integrity and what it stands for at the first place.

From a pragmatic perspective, the licensing company can either exercise pen-testing authority over the locally managed web sites, keep an eye on them through community service warning systems, or introduce obligatory pen-testing before a license is obtained.

Both groups have been notifying the affected vendors according to their posts.

[Source: zdnet]

0The Azerbaijan section at the United States Agency for International Development (azerbaijan.usaid.gov) has been compromised and is embedded with malware and exploits serving scripts approximately around the 1st of March. The malicious script is taking advantage of a series of redirects which are dynamically loading live exploits, or rogue security software and are all currently active. Roger Thompson at AVG Technologies featured a video demonstrating what happens when an unprotected user visits the site.

Let’s dissect the attack, take into consideration the big picture, and bring a skeleton out of the closet — one of the malware’s phone back locations is a domain exclusively used by the Russian Business Network back in January, 2008.

This particular campaign relies on an embedded malicious script that appears to be dynamically creating subdomains within the cybercriminal’s controlled domain. For instance, cs.ucsb.edu.4afad2ceace1e653.should-be .cn/jan10 .cn is where the first redirection in USAID.gov’s attack takes place. From there, the surfer is taken to orderasia .cn/index.php and then to orderasia .cn/iepdf.php?f=old where the exploitation of multiple (patched) Adobe Reader and Acrobat buffer overflows takes place. Upon successful exploitation, a downloader with an improving signatures-based detection rate during the past several hours is served.

It gets even more interesting when the phone back location of the malware fileuploader .cn/check/check.php is revealed. The domain in question was exclusively used by Russian Business Network/customers of the RBN in January, 2008 part of the cybercrime powerhouse’s attempt to throw sand in the eyes of the community by issuing fake account suspended notices whereas the malware campaigns remained active.

USAID.gov’s insecurities appear to be a juicy target for cybercriminals. In 2007, the site’s Tanzanian section was hacked with links redirecting to Zlob malware, followed by another research released the same year putting USAID.gov among some of the key spam doorways which WebmasterWorld analyzed back then.

Moreover, in 2007 cybercriminals indicated their ability and desire to target international governments’ web sites in an attempt to use them as infection vectors in the face of such incidents as the malware embedded French Embassy in Libya; the Syrian Embassy in London; the U.S Consulate in St. Petersburg; the The Dutch Embassy in Moscow; and most recently the Embassy of Brazil in India followed by the Embassy of India in Spain - and the list is prone to expand, that’s for sure.

[Source: zdnet]

HD Moore wants to simplify pen-testing and simulated hacking attacks against telephone systems.

The Metasploit founder has released WarVOX as a free suite of tools to explore, classify and audit a range of telephone systems, including modems, faxes, voicemail boxes, PBXs, loops, dial tones, IVRs and forwarders.

Moore explains:

• WarVOX requires no telephony hardware and is massively scalable by leveraging Internet-based VoIP providers. A single instance of WarVOX on a residential broadband connection, with a typical VoIP account, can scan over 1,000 numbers per hour. The speed of WarVOX is limited only by downstream bandwidth and the limitations of the VoIP service. Using two providers with over 40 concurrent lines we have been able to scan entire 10,000 number prefixes within 3 hours.

• The resulting call audio can be used to extract a list of modems that can be fed into a standard modem-based wardialing application for fingerprinting and banner collection. One of the great things about the WarVOX model is that once the data has been gathered, it is archived and available for re-analysis as new signatures, plugins, and tools are developed. The current release of WarVOX (1.0.0) is able to automatically detect modems, faxes, silence, voice mail boxes, dial tones, and voices.

Moore hopes WarVOX can replace the “slow and inefficient” systems currently in place to identify security holes in phone systems.

This presentation (.pdf) covers the motivation behind the tools and the implementation details.

[Source: zdnet]

Apple has released a firmware update with fixes for three documented security vulnerabilities affecting its Time Capsule and AirPort Base Station products.

The vulnerabilities could lead to denial-of-service or information disclosure attacks via specially crafted packets. Details on the vulnerabilities:

• CVE-2008-2476 - The IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol implementation does not validate the origin of Neighbor Discovery messages. By sending a maliciously crafted message, a remote user may cause a denial of service, observe private network traffic, or inject forged packets. This update addresses the issue by performing additional validation of Neighbor Discovery messages.
• CVE-2008-0473 - An out-of-bounds memory access issue exists in the handling of PPPoE discovery packets. By sending a maliciously crafted PPPoE discovery packet, a remote user may be able to cause an
  unexpected device shutdown. This update addresses the issue through improved bounds checking.
• CVE-2008-3530 - When IPv6 support is enabled, IPv6 nodes use ICMPv6 to report errors encountered while processing packets. An implementation issue in the handling of incoming ICMPv6 “Packet Too Big” messages
  may cause an unexpected device shutdown. This update addresses the issue through improved handling of ICMPv6 messages.

Apple says the update (firmware version 7.4.1) is installed into Time Capsule or AirPort Base Station with 802.11n* via AirPort Utility provided with the device.

[Source: zdnet]

Microsoft today outlined plans to ship three security bulletins for software vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system.

One of the three bulletins will carry a “critical” rating, meaning that it will cover flaws that could be exploited to launch remote code execution attacks.

According to the advance notice from Microsoft, the other two bulletins are rated “important” and can expose Windows users to spoofing attacks.

All three bulletins require a restart after deployment.

All supported versions of Windows will be affected by next Tuesday’s releases, including the newer Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

This month’s batch of patches will NOT include a fix for a known — and under attack — code execution vulnerability affecting Microsoft Office. Microsoft has already issued a security advisory on the Office attacks (via rigged Excel files) with some suggested mitigation guidance.

[Source: zdnet]