The gravest dangers for CMS-based websites

Over a third of all websites on the Internet are powered by one of these four key open source platforms: WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and Magento.
This makes the life of attackers looking to compromise websites much easier, as they can simply concentrate on exploiting vulnerabilities in one of them, or one of the popular plugins and extensions for them.

Sucuri, a security company that concentrates on detecting web attacks and remediating compromised websites, has recently released fresh statistics on hacked websites.

How the websites get hacked

Based on the reports by the company’s Incident Response Team and Malware Research Team, in the first quarter of this year 78 percent of the successful compromises were of websites built on WordPress. Joomla!-based sites came in at 14 percent, Magento at 5 percent, and Drupal at 2.
Magento-powered e-commerce sites are usually hit with exploits for the critical remote code execution bug patched in February 2015, and the XSS hole that can lead to e-store hijacking, plugged in January 2016. Obviously, not all admins update their installations regularly.
In fact, admins of Magento sites are the worst at this: 97 percent of the Magento installations Sucuri’s experts encountered during cleanup were out of date. WordPress admins are much better – “only” 56 percent of the installations were out of date. The three leading software vulnerabilities affecting the most websites in the first quarter were the RevSlider and GravityForms plugins, followed by the TimThumb script.”

 All three plugins had a fix available over a year, with TimThumb going back multiple years (four to be exact, circa 2011). This goes to show and reiterate the challenges the community faces in making website owners aware of the issues, enabling the website owners to patch the issues, and facilitating the everyday maintenance and administration of websites by their webmasters.”
The problem with RevSlider, in particular, is that its embedded within WP themes and frameworks, and many users don’t even know they use it. It’s up to the authors of these offerings to keep the plugins updated, but too many can’t be bothered.

How hackers leverage compromised websites

Magento sites are usually hacked to get at customers’ payment information.
The rest are usually used for SEO spam (31%, and that percentage keeps rising), drive-by-download infections (60%), hosting hacking tools (exploit or DDoS tools), and phishing. Plain old defacements by hacktivists are few and far between.
In over two-thirds of cases, the cleaning team found backdoors in the websites – the attackers want to make sure that they will be able to get back in if admins attempt to clean up the site.
“On average, we clean 132 files per compromised site.”
“This shows how deep the malware can be embedded within a website. It also explains why Google sees a 30% reinfection rate via their webmaster tool, which speaks directly to the challenges website owners face when trying to fix their own infected websites.”

Making the financial sector more resilient to cyber attack

Firms across the financial and related professional services industry need to take urgent action on cyber risk. There were a reported 2.5 million cyber crimes last year, the majority of which were various forms of fraud with the loss typically borne by the financial sector. City firms have the data, money and profile to attract the full range of attackers including those seeking to undermine the financial system. Reputation and reliability are shared assets and argue for firms working collectively to reinforce the financial system’s resilience.

Investing in security

The report recognises the significant effort invested by UK authorities to encourage action on cyber risk. It finds that while larger institutions are engaged on cyber security, there is an opportunity for the industry and individual firms to enhance cyber security and resiliency after cyber breaches.
Survey evidence supports the fact that too few firms are tackling cyber in a cohesive way: only 30% of large firms have it as a top ten risk, only 39% have quantified the risk and just 30% have a response plan to a breach occurring.
“While financial incentives should never be the primary reason for a company to invest in security, anything that helps more financial services firms take security seriously is definitely a good thing. The question is whether a financial incentive is as powerful as a financial penalty,” Ryan O’Leary, VP Threat Research Centre at WhiteHat Security, told Help Net Security.
“One major concern with an incentive like this is that companies may not go far enough to put the infrastructure in place to actually fix the issues that their shiny new security solution finds. Simply ticking the box that says the firm has something in place does not guarantee any reduction in vulnerabilities. Checking that these firms are finding, and then fixing vulnerabilities would be the best way to go, but this would be impractical given the oversight that would be needed. Overall, tax breaks may help get some companies to start to seriously consider their IT security, but I’m doubtful that they would move the needle in terms of these firms actually being safer,” O’Leary added.

Key recommendations

Boards should hold management responsible for cyber risks instead of their IT departments and provides ten simple questions that management should consider. According to the report, since 95% of all cyber incidents involve human error, people and processes matter as much as technology when it comes to managing cyber threats.
The report recommends the creation of a city-wide cyber forum to promote collaboration across all firms within the financial and related professional services industry. The forum would seek broader and committed support for cyber management and the many existing initiatives that are running. Its agenda would include encouraging information and best-practice sharing, working on cyber risk aggregation and system recovery and helping to develop a strong UK cyber security sector.
Recommendations for firms:
A. Make cyber a standing item on the Board or risk committee agenda;
B. Ensure cyber risk is a part of strategy, investment cases, acquisition and appraisals;
C. Have a broad based team inputting to how cyber risk is managed;
D. Monitor cyber readiness against the ten-point cyber checklist:

• The main cyber threats for the firm have been identified and sized
• There is an action plan to improve defence and response to these threats
• Data assets are mapped and actions to secure them are clear
• Supplier, customer, employee and infrastructure cyber risks are being managed
• The plan includes independent testing against a recognised framework
• The risk appetite statement provides control of cyber concentration risk
• Insurance has been tested for its cyber coverage and counter-party risk
• Preparations have been made to respond to a successful attack
• Cyber insights are being shared and gained from peers
• Regular Board review material is provided to confirm status on the above.

1,400+ vulnerabilities found in automated medical supply system

Security researchers have discovered 1,418 vulnerabilities in CareFusion’s Pyxis SupplyStation system – automated cabinets used to dispense medical supplies – that are still being used in the healthcare and public health sectors around the world.

The vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely by attackers with low skills, and exploits that target these vulnerabilities are publicly available, ICS-CERT has warned in an advisory.
The worst part of it is that the affected versions of the software are at end‑of-life, and won’t be receiving a patch even though they are widely used.

What is the Pyxis SupplyStation system?

Developed by CareFusion, which was recently acquired by Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), the Pyxis SupplyStation system dispenses medical supplies and documents usage in real-time.
“The Pyxis SupplyStation systems include automated devices that may be deployed using a variety of functional configurations. [They] have an architecture that typically includes a network of units, or workstations, located in various patient care areas throughout a facility and managed by the Pyxis SupplyCenter server, which links to the facility’s existing information systems,” ICS-CERT explained.
“Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote attacker to compromise the Pyxis SupplyStation system. The SupplyStation system is designed to maintain critical functionality and provide access to supplies in ‘fail-safe mode’ in the event that the cabinet is rendered inoperable. Manual keys can be used to access the cabinet if it is rendered inoperable.”

Which versions are vulnerable?

Versions 8.0, 8.1.3, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3 that operate on Windows Server 2003/XP of the Pyxis SupplyStation system software are affected. Versions 9.3, 9.4, and 10.0 that operate on Server 2008/Server 2012/Windows 7 do not sport these vulnerabilities.

The discovery

Independent researchers Billy Rios and Mike Ahmadi obtained a Pyxis SupplyStation through a third-party that resells decommissioned systems from healthcare systems, and used an automated software analysis tool to ferret out the vulnerabilities.
The flaws are present in seven different third-party vendor software packages bundled in the vulnerable system, including MS Windows XP, Symantec Antivirus 9, and Symantec pcAnywhere 10.5.
715 of the found vulnerabilities are critical or high-severity.

What’s to be done about it?

CareFusion has been involved in the research, and has confirmed the existence of these flaws. Still, no updates will be offered for these end-of-life systems.
Instead, the company has started contacting customers that bought the automated supply cabinets, advising them to upgrade to newer versions and explaining how to do it.
But, aware that’s not always possible, the company has also issued recommendations on how to minimize the risk of those systems being compromised – things like monitoring network traffic attempting to reach the affected products for suspicious activity, and isolating them from the business network, untrusted systems and the Internet, but also updating the software packages included in the system software (where possible).

Healthcare and security

It’s true that cyber attackers are mostly after healthcare data, as it usually contains the perfect bundle of individuals’ personal information, credit information, and protected health information.
It’s also true that healthcare organizations need a healthy dose of investment in technologies in order to prevent successful attacks.
It’s understandable that healthcare organizations are currently more concentrated on fending off ransomware, as that will impact their functioning at all levels.
But with more and more researchers concentrating on finding vulnerabilities in medical devices and systems (systems found exposed online, sporting hard-coded passwords, etc.), it’s becoming obvious that cyber attacks can – and inevitably some day will – result in physical harm.
The healthcare industry – from manufacturers to practitioners – must start considering system and data security important.

The dangers of bad cyber threat intelligence programs

I love a surprise ending in a movie. Whether I’m watching drama, action, or sci-fi, there’s nothing better than a plot twist you can’t predict.
At work, however, I feel the exact opposite. Movies are one thing, but surprise endings in the real world are rarely as welcome or harmless. Much has been written about cyber threat intelligence (CTI), including proposed standards on how to share the information (e.g., TAXI and STIX), what the information should look like, what role governments and private industries play as key stakeholders of information, and how actionable the intelligence should be, what formats they should be published, etc. In the U.S., the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) is asking member financial institutions to seriously consider adding CTI as one of the key attributes of their overall risk management strategies.
While I largely agree with the need for academic solutions, in many cases these programs introduce more questions and unknowns into an organization’s security environment. To date, there hasn’t been enough discussion about the key success criteria of a CTI program or enough documentation about its potential risks.
I’ll attempt to remedy that below by outlining four key areas where a CTI program can actually harm your organization by exposing vulnerabilities, a surprise ending neither welcome nor easily remedied.

CTI vulnerability 1: Failure to establish bona fides

Many of my security brethren believe deeply in sharing all information available, but they don’t seem to understand the potential threat of doing so. We don’t need to look far for a powerful analogy: The lessons honed over the centuries by key nation-state intelligence-gathering apparats. These programs work in an effective manner because they establish how worthy the information is. Nation-states have learned, often the hard way, to understand the worthiness of the intelligence they’ve gathered and to tag the data based on its source and methods used in collecting it.
In fact the military definition of bona fides is:
1. The lack of fraud or deceit: a determination that a person is who he/she says he/she is.
2. In personnel recovery, the use of verbal or visual communication by individuals who are unknown to one another, to establish their authenticity, sincerity, honesty, and truthfulness.
The military and intelligence community have relied on bona fides because simply trusting information because we want to believe it is fraught with potential failures. As a result, most security organizations have a process to evaluate the bona fides of the information they collect to protect themselves from low-quality or purposely false information. This system requires trust and has produced much of the classified information in government today.
We also hear a lot about a Pollyanna, almost innocent cry for the sharing of data, as if open sharing of information will enable us to reach a higher state of awareness and a higher level of security. History begs to differ.
Free information sharing services would likely be the least reliable. Meanwhile organizations that could afford to pay for high-quality, highly vetted, and actionable intelligence would obtain the best level of CTI in the industry.

CTI vulnerability 2: Ethno-centric information and not enough data points

There are, of course, other fallacies of a highly functioning CTI program:

• Government-provided data is trustworthy.
• Government-provided data is good enough and covers enough.
• There is no risk to government-sourced data.

Data derived by one nation-state is skewed to that nation-state and is qualified for the threat to the resident nation-state. As a result, the information may serve some companies well, but not all. Why?
The closer a company works with one nation-state, the less likely others will follow as they don’t want to risk losing their own data to another nation-state through that company. For example, if a company works closely with the U.S., it stands that intel from China and Russia will be hard to come by. But even countries like Switzerland, Canada, Germany, and France have publicly stated reservations on information-sharing with the U.S.
Data from a nation-state has numerous restrictions and is mired by many laws and quagmires on gathering information or releasing the data. As a result, the data may be non-actionable, may have been altered in some way to benefit the nation-state, or may not be available at all. In any of these scenarios, threats to the company come from relying either too heavily or too centrally on government-driven data.

CTI vulnerability 3: Failure to establish “backout” criteria

Imagine a bad guy acting as a good guy shares hot information with a security community, and advocates certain actions, such as the onboarding of certain signatures, changes in configurations, automating a certain defense, etc. If executed successfully, companies would be implementing security protocols and initiatives that, instead of protecting themselves against the supposed threats, play right into the hands of the bad guy. These perpetrators now have a wonderful new way to quickly open up an industry or set of companies.

CTI vulnerability 4: The system is too automated (or too manual)

A proper CTI program needs a key decider to determine whether the information is relevant for your organization, not for an industry or particular technology. This is a necessary step in the process that’s often overlooked when the industry discusses fast implementations. Either the system is automated and brushes past the issue, or conversely, builds complicated change-management profiles to implement changes, negating the whole point of actionable and fast-moving CTI.
In the end, the information security function has taken on more roles and responsibilities, including intelligence gathering and risk weighting. These new functions act more like modern day war-fighting functions, and we’d all be advantaged to learn the deep historic lessons of nation-state intelligence organizations before standing up well-heeled intelligence functions or CTI ourselves.
Modern day CTI must evolve to include the following key attributes – a process to understand what information needs to be harvested, such as:

• Operational
• Technical – Tools, techniques, types.
• Source / Attacker Profile
• Destination / Victim Profile
• Trajectory Data – In transit
• Motivation.

As you can tell from the list above, today’s way of looking at the data sharing conundrum is flawed and needs to evolve. You must evolve too! That way, you can better avoid a surprise ending.

SIM Swap fraud is gaining momentum

SIM Swap fraud or SIM Splitting, a financially-motivated mobile phone threat, is gaining momentum according to Foursys.
Remote banking losses increased significantly last year, according to the latest FFA UK (Financial Fraud Action UK) report. “Total remote banking loses increased by 72 per cent to £168.6 million in 2015. A key driver of this increase was the rise in impersonation and deception scams in which a criminal dupes the victim into giving away their personal and security details. The criminal then uses these details to gain access to their victim’s remote banking account.

SIM Swap fraud explained

SIM Swap is the process of replacing your mobile’s existing SIM card with a new one. SIM swapping is often useful, letting you to keep your existing mobile number when you change to a handset requiring a different SIM card type. However, financially-motivated criminals have found a loophole in this process.
Armed with a mobile phone and a blank SIM card, attackers pretend to be the victim when they contact the victim’s telecommunication provider saying the mobile has been stolen. The plan is to get the operator to cancel the existing SIM card, on the victim’s phone, and activate the new SIM on the criminal’s phone.
“Before SIM swaps are authorised, many mobile providers verify the identity of the caller using security questions, a process that’s certainly not foolproof,” said James Miller, Managing Director at Foursys. “Some answers may have unwittingly been shared online by target victims, let alone by someone in their social networks. How many people name their pet, favourite restaurant or primary school on social media sites? Scouring social media profiles, can prove very useful indeed to a criminal wanting to conduct fraud.”
The window of opportunity starts to close as soon as the SIM Swap victim notices that his/her mobile is no longer working and raises the alarm.
Once texts and calls are rerouted to the fraudster’s handset, the criminals work quickly to reset passwords, locking the victim out of his/her accounts, before authorising bank transactions or securing loans in the victim’s name.
Recent Sim Swap victims include Nottingham-based Chris Sims, whose bank account was emptied of its £1,200. The criminals also applied for a £8,000 loan in his name, reported The Guardian.
“Security questions based on supposedly secret information are far too easy for criminals to defeat, given the huge amounts of data about ourselves available online”, said John Hawes, Chief of Operations at Virus Bulletin. “Any system which still uses this out-dated mechanism really needs to rethink its approach. In the interim, Foursys’s recommendation to fabricate falsehoods for the security questions is a smart one.”

SIM Swap fraud: Preventative tips

• Contact your mobile operator immediately if you stop receiving calls or texts unexpectedly. Don’t assume it is a technical fault that will resolve itself.
• Ensure passwords are long, complex and known only to you. Consider using a reputable password manager if you think you might forget them.
• Consider using made-up answers to the security questions to ensure your publicly available information cannot be used to identify you and store these securely.
• Use up-to-date security software on your computer and systems to block email phishing scams.
• Carefully dispose of phone bills and other paper work detailing sensitive information, such as shredding or incinerating.
• Remove apps that you do not use from your devices. If you don’t use your bank’s mobile app, remove it from your phone.

Hacking Team hacker explains how he did it

Some nine moths ago, a hacker that calls himself Phineas Fisher managed to breach the systems and networks of Hacking Team, the (in)famous Italian company that provides offensive intrusion and surveillance software to governments, intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world.
He took off with the company’s internal emails, files and source code, and leaked it all online.
This weekend, he decided to explain how he managed to carry out this attack.
In a Pastebin post, he shared that he exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a embedded device deployed inside the company’s network in order to gain a foothold in the network. (He declined to give more details about the vulnerabilities, as they are still not patched.)
“I did a lot of work and testing before using the exploit against Hacking Team.
I wrote a backdoored firmware, and compiled various post-exploitation tools
for the embedded device,” he said, and explained that “the backdoor serves to protect the exploit. Using the exploit just once and then returning through the backdoor makes it harder to identify and patch the vulnerabilities.”
He enumerated the tools he used to sniff the trafic within the network, as well as to scan it, and he found:

• Several MongoDB databases that didn’t require authentication in order to access them
• Backups that shouldn’t have been on that network
• A BES admin password in the backups, which allowed him to unearth other employees passwords and the Domain Admin one
• The Domain Admin password allowed him to access the company’s email server
• Finally, he managed to get access to the stored source code of the company’s surveillance software. He got that by using the “forgot my password” function for the Git server.

All in all, he says that it took him 100 hours of work to do all this and to exfiltrate the crucial data.
This account of the attack also contains other information about hacking techniques and tools, and about ways for hackers for keeping their identity hidden from the authorities, but also reveals more about Phineas Fisher’s motives.
He obviously hoped that the breach and subsequent leak would result in Hacking Team going out of business.
“Hacking Team was a company that helped governments hack and spy on journalists, activists, political opposition, and other threats to their power. And, occasionally, on actual criminals and terrorists,” he noted. “They also claimed to have technology to solve the ‘problem’ posed by Tor and the darknet. But seeing as I’m still free, I have my doubts about its effectiveness.”
“Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go
to jail for doing good,” he says.
“That’s the beauty and asymmetry of hacking: with 100 hours of work, one person can undo years of work by a multi-million dollar company. Hacking gives the underdog a chance to fight and win,” he concluded.
Before successfully breaching Hacking Team, Phineas Fisher compromised UK-based Gamma International, another provider that sells spying software to governments.
Hacking Team might not have been ruined by the breach, but it recently got its global export license revoked by the Italian Ministry of Economical Progress.

Facebook vulnerability allowed access to personal and payment information

Bitdefender has discovered a significant vulnerability within Facebook which allowed access to any user account through simple social login manipulation. The attacker was able to gain access to personal user information, a contacts list for potential malware distribution and payment information – allowing purchases to be made in the user’s name.

Attack vector

The attack vector in this case – social logins – are an alternative to traditional authentication. This form of access offers users a convenient way to sign in to their web accounts without entering their username and password, with a majority of websites offering social login through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+. Bitdefender researchers identified a method to steal a user’s identity and access their account using Facebook’s Login plugin.
Ionut Cernica, Vulnerability Researcher at Bitdefender and the researcher behind the discovery of the flaw, states, “This is a serious vulnerability – it allows attackers to log in on most websites that feature Facebook Login. This means an attacker can make payments on the user’s behalf on an e-commerce site, for instance.”

Details of the discovery

The Bitdefender researcher successfully bypassed the confirmation step typically required when registering a new Facebook email address. He created a Facebook account utilising the user’s email address, and during the registration process, swapped the email address for one under his control.
For the attack to succeed, the email address of the user must not be registered on Facebook. As most internet users have more than one e-mail address published online, this information presented little challenge for the attacker to identify and leverage in order to gain access to a user’s Facebook account.
To verify the identity of a user without exposing their credentials, Login with Facebook uses the OAuth protocol, through which Facebook is authorised to share some user information with third-party websites. When the Bitdefender researcher attempted to sign in via the “Facebook Login” button on a separate site, he was asked to confirm his own email address, and not that of the user. Under ‘account settings’ in Facebook, the user’s address was the primary contact, even though the researcher had only confirmed his personal account.
Ionut Cernica adds, “I used Facebook Login again and decided to switch the primary contact from the user’s address to mine, then switch them again to change the user account to the primary. This is an important step in reproducing the issue.”
Facebook fixed the vulnerability after notification from the Bitdefender security team.