Tech Guides - Malware Analysis

There are businesses that are highly dependent on their services hosted online. It's important that their servers are up and running smoothly during their business hours. Stock markets and casinos are examples of such institutions. They are businesses that deal with a huge sum of money and they expect their servers to work properly during their core business hours. Hackers may extort money by threatening to take down or block these servers during these hours. Denial of service (DoS) attack is the most common methodology used to carry out these kinds of attacks. In this post, we will get to know about  DoS attacks and their various types. This article is an excerpt taken from the book, 'Preventing Ransomware' written by Abhijit Mohanta, Mounir Hahad, and Kumaraguru Velmurugan. In this book, you will learn how to respond quickly to ransomware attacks to protect yourself. What are DoS attacks? DoS is one of the oldest forms of cyber extortion attack. As the term indicates, distributed denial of service (DDoS) means it denies its service to a legitimate user. If a railway website is brought down, it fails to serve the people who want to book tickets. Let's take a peek into some of the details. A DoS attack can happen in two ways: Specially crafted data: If specially crafted data is sent to the victim and if the victim is not set up to handle the data, there are chances that the victim may crash. This does not involve sending too much data but includes specially crafted data packets that the victim fails to handle. This can involve manipulating fields in the network protocol packets, exploiting servers, and so on. Ping of death and teardrop attacks are examples of such attacks. Flooding: Sending too much data to the victim can also slow it down. So it will spend resources on consuming the attackers' data and fail to serve the legitimate data. This can be a DDoS attack where packets are sent to the victim by the attacker from many computers. Attacks can also use a combination of both. For example, UDP flooding and SYN flooding are examples of such attacks. There is another form of DoS attack called a DDoS attack. A DoS attack uses a single computer to carry out the attack. A DDoS attack uses a series of computers to carry out the attack. Sometimes the target server is flooded with so much data that it can't handle it. Another way is to exploit the workings of internal protocols. A DDoS attack that deals with extortion is often termed a ransom DDoS. We will now talk about various types of the DoS attacks that might occur. Teardrop attacks or IP fragmentation attacks In this type of attack, the hacker sends a specially crafted packet to the victim. To understand this, one must have knowledge of the TCP/IP protocol. In order to transmit data across networks, IP packets are broken down into smaller packets. This is called fragmentation. When the packets finally reach their destination, they are re-assembled together to get the original data. In the process of fragmentation, some fields are added to the fragmented packets so that they can be tracked at the destination while reassembling. In a teardrop attack, the attacker crafts some packets that overlap with each other. Consequently, the operating system at the destination gets confused about how to reassemble the packets and hence it crashes. User Datagram Protocol flooding User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is an unreliable packet. This means the sender of the data does not care if the receiver has received it. In UDP flooding, many UDP packets are sent to the victim at random ports. When the victim gets a packet on a port, it looks out for an application that is listening to that port. When it does not find the packet, it replies back with an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packet. ICMP packets are used to send error messages. When a lot of UDP packets are received, the victim consumes a lot of resources in replying back with ICMP packets. This can prevent the victim from responding to legitimate requests. SYN flood TCP is a reliable connection. That means it makes sure that the data sent by the sender is completely received by the receiver. To start a communication between the sender and receiver, TCP follows a three-way handshake. SYN denotes the synchronization packet and ACK stands for acknowledgment: The sender starts by sending a SYN packet and the receiver replies with SYN-ACK. The sender sends back an ACK packet followed by the data. In SYN flooding, the sender is the attacker and the receiver is the victim. The attacker sends a SYN packet and the server responds with SYN-ACK. But the attacker does not reply with an ACK packet. The server expects an ACK packet from the attacker and waits for some time. The attacker sends a lot of SYN packets and the server waits for the final ACK until timeout. Hence, the server exhausts its resources waiting for ACK. This kind of attack is called SYN flooding. Ping of death While transmitting data over the internet, the data is broken into smaller chunks of packets. The receiving end reassembles these broken packets together in order to derive a conclusive meaning. In a ping of death attack, the attacker sends a packet larger than 65,536 bytes, the maximum size of a packet allowed by the IP protocol. The packets are split and sent across the internet. But when the packets are reassembled at the receiving end, the operating system is clueless about how to handle these bigger packets, so it crashes. Exploits Exploits for servers can also cause DDoS vulnerability. A lot of web applications are hosted on web servers, such as Apache and Tomcat. If there is a vulnerability in these web servers, the attacker can launch an exploit against the vulnerability. The exploit need not necessarily take control, but it can crash the web server software. This can cause a DoS attack. There are easy ways for hackers to find out the web server and its version if the server has default configurations. The attacker finds out the possible vulnerabilities and exploits for that web server. If the web server is not patched, the attacker can bring it down by sending an exploit. Botnets Botnets can be used to carry out DDoS attacks. A botnet herd is a collection of compromised computers. The compromised computers, called bots, act on commands from a C&C server. These bots, on the commands of the C&C server, can send a huge amount of data to the victim server, and as a result, the victim server is overloaded: Reflective DDoS attacks and amplification attacks In this kind of attack, the attacker uses a legitimate computer to launch an attack against the victim by hiding its own IP address. The usual way is the attacker sends a small packet to a legitimate machine after forging the sender of the packet to look as if it has been sent from the victim. The legitimate machine will, in turn, send the response to the victim. If the response data is large, the impact is amplified. We can call the legitimate computers reflectors and this kind of attack, where the attacker sends small data and the victim receives a larger amount of data, is called an amplification attack. Since the attacker does not directly use computers controlled by him and instead uses legitimate computers, it's called a reflective DDoS attack: The reflectors are not compromised machines, unlike botnets. Reflectors are machines that respond to a particular request. It can be a DNS request or a Networking Time Protocol (NTP) request, and so on. DNS amplification attacks, WordPress pingback attacks, and NTP attacks are amplification attacks. In a DNS amplification attack, the attacker sends a forged packet to the DNS server containing the IP address of the victim. The DNS server replies back to the victim instead with larger data. Other kinds of amplification attack include SMTP, SSDP, and so on. We will look at an example of such an attack in the next section. The computers that are used to send traffic to the victim are not the compromised ones and are called reflectors. There are several groups of cyber criminals responsible for carrying out ransom DDoS attacks, such as DD4BC, Armada Collective, Fancy Bear, XMR-Squad, and Lizard Squad. These groups target enterprises. They will first send out an extortion email, followed by an attack if the victim does not pay the ransom. DD4BC The DD4BC group was seen operating in 2014. It charged Bitcoins as the extortion fee. The group mainly targeted media, entertainment, and financial services. They would send a threatening email stating that a low-intensity DoS attack will be carried out first. They would claim that they will protect the organization against larger attacks. They also threatened that they will publish information about the attack in social media to bring down the reputation of the company: Usually, DD4DC are known to exploit a bug WordPress pingback vulnerability. We don't want to get into too much detail about this bug or vulnerability. Pingback is a feature provided by WordPress through which the original author of the WordPress site or blog gets notified where his site has been linked or referenced. We can call the site which refers to the original site as the referrer and the original site as the original. If the referrer uses the original, it sends a request called a pingback request to the original which contains the URL of itself. This is a kind of notification to the original site from the referrer informing that it is linking to the original site. Now the original site downloads the referrer site as a response to the pingback request as per the protocol designed by WordPress and this action is termed as a reflection. The WordPress sites used in the attack are called reflectors. So an attacker can misuse it by creating a forged pingback request with a URL of a victim site and send it to the WordPress sites. The attack uses these WordPress sites in the attack. As a result, the WordPress sites respond to the victim. Put simply, the attack notifies the WordPress sites that the victim has referred them on his/her site. So all the WordPress sites try to connect to the victim, which overloads the victim. If the victim's web page is large and the WordPress sites try to download it, then it chokes the bandwidth and this is called amplification: Armada Collective The Armada Collective group was first seen in 2015. They attacked various financial services and web hosting sites in Russia, Switzerland, Greece, and Thailand. They again re-emerged in Central Europe in October 2017. They used to carry out a demo-DDoS attack to threaten the victim. Here is an extortion letter from Armada Collective: This group is known to carry out reflective DDoS attacks through NTP. The NTP protocol is a protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock times in a protocol. The NTP protocol provides a support for a monlist command for administrative purpose. When an administrator sends the monlist command to an NTP server, the server responds with a list of 600 hosts that are connected to that NTP server. The attacker can exploit this by creating a forged NTP packet which has a monlist command containing the IP address of the victim and then sending multiple copies to the NTP server. The NTP server thinks that the monlist request has come from the victim address and sends a response which contains a list of 600 computers connected to that server. Thus the victim receives too much data from the NTP response and it can crash: Fancy Bear Fancy Bear is one of the hacker groups we have known about since 2010. Fancy Bear threatened to use Mirai Botnet in the attack. Mirai Botnet was known to target Linux operating systems used in IoT devices. It was mostly known to infect CCTV cameras. Here is a letter from Fancy Bear: We have talked about a few groups that were infamous for carrying out DoS extortion and some of the techniques used by them. We explored different types of DoS attacks and how they can occur. If you've enjoyed this excerpt, check out 'Preventing Ransomware' to know in detail about the latest ransomware attacks involving WannaCry, Petya, and BadRabbit. Anatomy of a Crypto Ransomware Barracuda announces Cloud-Delivered Web Application Firewall service Top 5 penetration testing tools for ethical hackers

Social engineering is a tactic where the attacker influences the victim to obtain valuable information. Office employees are targeted to reveal confidential data about a corporation while non-specialists can come under the radar to disclose their credit card information. One might also be threatened that the attacker will hack/his her system if he isn’t provided the asked material. In this method, the perpetrator can take any form of disguise, but at most times, he/she poses as tech support or from a bank. However, this isn’t the case always, although the objective is the same. They sniff the information, which you conceal from everybody, by gaining your trust. Social Engineering ends successfully when the wrongdoer gets to know the victim’s weaknesses and then manipulates his trust. Often, the victim shares his private information without paying much heed to the one who contacts him. Later, the victim is blackmailed by providing his sensitive data otherwise he will be charged under unlawful situations. Examples of Social Engineering attacks As defined above, the attacker can take any form of disguise, but the most common ways will be described here. The wrongdoers update themselves daily to penetrate your system, and even you should be extremely wary of your online security. Always stay alert whenever providing someone with your private credentials. The listed examples are variations of the others. There are many others as well, but the most common has been described. The purpose of all of them is to configure you. As the name states, Social Engineering merely is how an individual can be tricked to give up everything to the person who gains his trust. Phishing Attack Phishing is a malicious attempt to access a person’s personal and sensitive information such as financial credentials. The attacker behind a phishing attack pretends as an authentic identity or source to fool an individual. This social engineering technique mainly involves email spoofing or instant messaging to the victim. However, it may steer people to insert their sensitive details into a fraudulent website, which is designed to look exactly like a legitimate site. Unwanted tech support Tech support scams are becoming wide and can have an industry-wide effect. This tactic involves fraudulent attempts to scare people while putting them into the thought that there is something wrong with their device. Attackers behind this scam try to gain money by tricking an individual into paying for the issue which never exists. Offenders usually send you emails or call you to solve issues regarding your system. Mostly, they tell you that there’s an update needed. If you are not wary of this bogus, you can land yourself in danger. The attacker might ask you to run a command on your system which will result in it getting unresponsive. This belongs to the branch of social engineering known as scareware. Scareware uses fear and curiosity against humans to either steal information or sell you useless pieces of software. Sometimes it can be harsher and can keep your data as a hostage unless you pay a hefty amount. Clickbait Technique Term clickbait refers to the technique of trapping individuals via a fraudulent link with tempting headlines. Cybercriminals take advantage of the fact that most legitimate sites or contents also use a similar technique to attract readers or viewers. In this method, the attacker sends you enticing ads related to games, movies, etc. Clickbait is most seen during peer-to-peer networking systems with enticing ads. If you click on a certain Clickbait, an executable command or a suspicious virus can be installed on your system leading it to be hacked. Fake email from a trusted person Another tactic the offender utilizes is by sending you an email from your friend’s or relative’s email address claiming he/she is in danger. That email ID will be hacked, and with this perception, it’s most likely you will fall to this attack. The sent email will have the information you should give so that you can release your contact from the threat. Pretexting Attack Pretexting is also a common form of social engineering which is used for gaining sensitive and non-sensitive information. The attackers pretext themselves as an authentic entity so that they can access the user information. Unlike phishing, pretexting creates a false sense of trust with the victim through making stories, whereas, phishing scams involve fearing and urgency. In some cases, the attack could become intense, such as in the case when the attacker manipulates the victim to carry out a task which enables them to exploit the structural lacks of a firm or organization. An example of this is, the attacker masking himself as an employee from your bank to cross-check your credentials. This is by far, the most frequent tactic used by offenders. Sending content to download The attacker sends you files containing music, movies, games or documents that appear to be just fine. A newbie on the internet will think about how lucky his day is that he got his wanted stuff without asking. Little does he know that the files he just downloaded are virus embedded. Tips to Prevent Social Engineering After understanding the most common examples of social engineering, let us have a look at how you can protect yourself from being manipulated. 1) Don’t give up your private information Will you ever surrender your secret information to a person you don’t know? No, obviously. Therefore, do not spill your sensitive information on the web unnecessarily. If you do not identify the sender of the email, discard it. Nevertheless, if you are buying stuff online, only provide your credit card information over an HTTP secure protocol. When an unknown person calls or emails you, think before you submit your data. Attackers want you to speak first and realize later. Remain skeptical and converse over a conversation regarding when the other is digging into your sensitive information. Therefore, always think of the consequences if you submit your credentials to an authorized person. 2) Enable spam filter Most email service providers come up with spam filters. Any email that is deemed as suspicious shall automatically be thrown away in the spam folder. Credible email services detect any suspicious links and files that might be harmful and warn a user to download them at your own risk. Some files with specific extensions are barred from downloading. By enabling the spam feature, you can ease yourself from categorizing emails. Furthermore, you shall be relieved from the horrendous tasks of detecting mistrustful messages. The perpetrators of social engineering will have no door to reach you, and your sensitive data will be shielded from attackers. 3) Stay cautious of your password A pro tip for you is that you should never use the same password on the platforms you log onto. Keep no traces behind and delete all sessions after you are done with surfing and browsing. Utilize the social media wisely and stay cautious of people you tag and the information you provide since an attacker might loom there. This is necessary in case your social media account gets hacked, and you have the same password for different websites, your data can be breached up to the skin. You will get blackmailed to pay the ransom to prevent your details from being leaked over the internet. Perpetrators can get your passwords pretty quickly but what happens if you get infected with ransomware? All of your files will be encrypted, and you will be forced to pay the ransom with no data back guarantee which is why the best countermeasure against this attack is to prevent it from happening primarily. 4) Keep software up to date Always update your system’s software patch. Maintain the drivers and keep a close look on your network firewall. Stay alert when an unknown person connects to your Wifi network and update your antivirus according to it. Download content from legitimate sources only and be mindful of the dangers. Hacks often take place when the software the victim’s using is out of date. When vulnerabilities are exposed, offenders exploit the system and gain access to it. Regularly updating your software can safeguard you from a ton of dangers. Consequently, there are no backdoors left for hackers to abuse. 5) Pay attention to what you do online Think of the time that you got self-replicating files on your PC after you clicked on a particular ad. Don’t what that to happen again? Train yourself to not click on Clickbait and scam advertisements. Always know that most lotteries you find online are fake. Never provide your financial details there. Carefully inspect the URL of a website you land on. Most scammers make a copy of a website’s front page and change the link slightly. This is done with such efficiency, that the average eye cannot detect a change in the URL and the user opens the website and enters his credentials. Therefore, stay alert. 6) Remain Skeptical The solution to most problems is that one should remain skeptical online. Do not click on spam links, do not open suspicious emails. Furthermore, do not pay heed to messages stating that you have won a lottery or you have been granted a check of a thousand grand. Remain skeptical of the supreme pinnacle. With this strategy, a hacker will have no attraction of reaching you out since you aren’t paying attention to him. Most of the time, this tactic has helped many people from staying safe online and has never been intercepted by hackers digitally. Consequently, as you aren’t getting attracted to suspicious content, you will be saved from social engineering. Final Words All the tips described above summarize that you are doubting, is vital for your digital secrecy. As you are doubtful, of your online presence, you are entirely protected from online manipulation. Not even you, your credit card information and other necessary information will be shielded as well since you never mentioned it to anyone in the first place. All of this was achieved when you were doubtful of what’s occurring online. You inspected the links you visited and discarded suspicious emails, and thus you are secure. With these actions taken, you have prevented social engineering from occurring. Author Bio Peter Buttler is a Cybersecurity Journalist and Tech Reporter, Currently employed as a Senior Editor at PrivacyEnd. He contributes to a number of online publications, including Infosecurity-magazine, SC Magazine UK, Tripwire, Globalsign, and CSO Australia, among others. Peter, covers different topics related to Online Security, Big data, IoT and Artificial Intelligence. With more than seven years of IT experience, he also holds a Master’s degree in cybersecurity and technology. @peter_buttlr Researchers release a study into Bug Bounty Programs and Responsible Disclosure for ethical hacking in IoT How has ethical hacking benefited the software industry 10 times ethical hackers spotted a software vulnerability and averted a crisis

In an online world infested with hackers, we need more ethical hackers. But all around the world, hackers have long been portrayed by the media and pop culture as the bad guys. Society is taught to see them as cyber-criminals and outliers who seek to destroy systems, steal data, and take down anything that gets in their way. There is no shortage of news, stories, movies, and television shows that outright villainize the hacker. From the 1995 movie Hackers, to the more recent Blackhat, hackers are often portrayed as outsiders who use their computer skills to inflict harm and commit crime. Read this: Did you know hackers could hijack aeroplane systems by spoofing radio signals? While there have been real-world, damaging events created by cyber-criminals that serve as the inspiration for this negative messaging, it is important to understand that this is only one side of the story. The truth is that while there are plenty of criminals with top-notch hacking and coding skills, there is also a growing and largely overlooked community of ethical (commonly known as white-hat) hackers who work endlessly to help make the online world a better and safer place. To put it lightly, these folks use their cyber superpowers for good, not evil. For example, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux was a hacker, as was Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the World Wide Web. The list is long for the same reason the list of hackers turned coders is long – they all saw better ways of doing things. What is ethical hacking? According to the EC-Council, an ethical hacker is “an individual who is usually employed with an organization and who can be trusted to undertake an attempt to penetrate networks and/or computer systems using the same methods and techniques as a malicious hacker.” Listen: We discuss what it means to be a hacker with Adrian Pruteanu [Podcast] The role of an ethical hacker is important since the bad guys will always be there, trying to find cracks, backdoors, and other secret ways to access data they shouldn’t. Ethical hackers not only help expose flaws in systems, but they assist in repairing them before criminals even have a shot at exploiting said vulnerabilities. They are an essential part of the cybersecurity ecosystem and can often unearth serious unknown vulnerabilities in systems better than any security solution ever could. Certified ethical hackers make an average annual income of $99,000, according to Indeed.com. The average starting salary for a certified ethical hacker is $95,000, according to EC-Council senior director Steven Graham. Ways ethical hacking benefits the software industry Nowadays, ethical hacking has become increasingly mainstream and multinational tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla, IBM, etc employ hackers or teams of hackers in order to keep their systems secure. And as a result of the success hackers have shown at discovering critical vulnerabilities, in the last year itself there has been a 26% increase in organizations running bug bounty programs, where they bolster their security defenses with hackers. Other than this there are a number of benefits that ethical hacking has provided to organizations majorly in the software industry. Carry out adequate preventive measures to avoid systems security breach An ethical hacker takes preventive measures to avoid security breaches, for example, they use port scanning tools like Nmap or Nessus to scan one’s own systems and find open ports. The vulnerabilities with each of the ports is studied, and remedial measures are taken by them. An ethical hacker will examine patch installations and make sure that they cannot be exploited. They also engage in social engineering concepts like dumpster diving—rummaging through trash bins for passwords, charts, sticky notes, or anything with crucial information that can be used to generate an attack. They also attempt to evade IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems), IPS (Intrusion Prevention systems), honeypots, and firewalls. They carry out actions like bypassing and cracking wireless encryption, and hijacking web servers and web applications. Perform penetration tests on networks at regular intervals One of the best ways to prevent illegal hacking is to test the network for weak links on a regular basis. Ethical hackers help clean and update systems by discovering new vulnerabilities on an on-going basis. Going a step ahead, ethical hackers also explore the scope of damage that can occur due to the identified vulnerability. This particular process is known as pen testing, which is used to identify network vulnerabilities that an attacker can target. There are many methods of pen testing. The organization may use different methods depending on its requirements. Any of the below pen testing methods can be carried out by an ethical hacker: Targeted testing which involves the organization's people and the hacker. The organization staff will be aware of the hacking being performed. External testing penetrates all externally exposed systems such as web servers and DNS. Internal testing uncovers vulnerabilities open to internal users with access privileges. Blind testing simulates real attacks from hackers. Testers are given limited information about the target, which requires them to perform reconnaissance prior to the attack. Pen testing is the strongest case for hiring ethical hackers. Ethical hackers have built computers and programs for software industry Going back to the early days of the personal computer, many of the members in the Silicon Valley would have been considered hackers in modern terms, that they pulled things apart and put them back together in new and interesting ways. This desire to explore systems and networks to find how it worked made many of the proto-hackers more knowledgeable about the different technologies and it can be safeguarded from malicious attacks. Just as many of the early computer enthusiasts turned out to be great at designing new computers and programs, many people who identify themselves as hackers are also amazing programmers. This trend of the hacker as the innovator has continued with the open-source software movement. Much of the open-source code is produced, tested and improved by hackers – usually during collaborative computer programming events, which are affectionately referred to as "hackathons." Even if you never touch a piece of open-source software, you still benefit from the elegant solutions that hackers come up with that inspire or are outright copied by proprietary software companies. Ethical hackers help safeguard customer information by preventing data breaches The personal information of consumers is the new oil of the digital world. Everything runs on data. But while businesses that collect and process consumer data have become increasingly valuable and powerful, recent events prove that even the world’s biggest brands are vulnerable when they violate their customers’ trust. Hence, it is of utmost importance for software businesses to gain the trust of customers by ensuring the security of their data. With high-profile data breaches seemingly in the news every day, “protecting businesses from hackers” has traditionally dominated the data privacy conversation. Read this: StockX confirms a data breach impacting 6.8 million customers In such a scenario, ethical hackers will prepare you for the worst, they will work in conjunction with the IT-response plan to ensure data security and in patching breaches when they do happen. Otherwise, you risk a disjointed, inconsistent and delayed response to issues or crises. It is also imperative to align how your organization will communicate with stakeholders. This will reduce the need for real-time decision-making in an actual crisis, as well as help limit inappropriate responses. They may also help in running a cybersecurity crisis simulation to identify flaws and gaps in your process, and better prepare your teams for such a pressure-cooker situation when it hits. Information security plan to create security awareness at all levels No matter how large or small your company is, you need to have a plan to ensure the security of your information assets. Such a plan is called a security program which is framed by information security professionals. Primarily the IT security team devises the security program but if done in coordination with the ethical hackers, they can provide the framework for keeping the company at a desired security level. Additionally by assessing the risks the company faces, they can decide how to mitigate them, and plan for how to keep the program and security practices up to date. To summarize… Many white hat hackers, gray hat and reformed black hat hackers have made significant contributions to the advancement of technology and the internet. In truth, hackers are almost in the same situation as motorcycle enthusiasts in that the existence of a few motorcycle gangs with real criminal operations tarnishes the image of the entire subculture. You don’t need to go out and hug the next hacker you meet, but it might be worth remembering that the word hacker doesn’t equal criminal, at least not all the time. Our online ecosystem is made safer, better and more robust by ethical hackers. As Keren Elazari, an ethical hacker herself, put it: “We need hackers, and in fact, they just might be the immune system for the information age. Sometimes they make us sick, but they also find those hidden threats in our world, and they make us fix it.” 3 cybersecurity lessons for e-commerce website administrators Hackers steal bitcoins worth $41M from Binance exchange in a single go! A security issue in the net/http library of the Go language affects all versions and all components of Kubernetes

German public broadcasters, Bavarian Radio & Television Network (BR) and Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), have published a joint investigation report on a hacker group spying on certain businesses since years. Security researchers, Hakan Tanriverdi, Svea Eckert, Jan Strozyk, Maximilian Zierer and Rebecca Ciesielski have contributed to this report. They shed light on how this group of hackers operate and how widespread they are. The investigation started with one of the reporters receiving this code daa0 c7cb f4f0 fbcf d6d1 which eventually led to the team discovering a hacking group with Chinese origins operating on Winnti Malware. BR and NDR reporters, in collaboration with several IT security experts, have analyzed the Winnti malware. Moritz Contag of Ruhr University Bochum extracted information from different varieties of the malware and wrote a script for this analysis. Silas Cutler, an IT security expert with US-based Chronicle Security, confirmed it. The report analyses cases from the below listed targeted companies: Gaming: Gameforge, Valve Software: Teamviewer Technology: Siemens, Sumitomo, Thyssenkrupp Pharma: Bayer, Roche Chemical: BASF, Covestro, Shin-Etsu Hakan Tanriverdi one of the reporters wrote on Twitter, “We looked at more than 250 samples, wrote Yara rules, conducted nmap scans.” Yara rules is a tool primarily used in malware research and detection. Nmap is a free and open source network scanner used to discover hosts and services on a computer network. Additionally in the report, the team has presented ways to find out if one is infected by the Winnti malware. To learn about these methods in detail, check out the research report. Winnti malware is complex, created by “digital mercenaries” of Chinese origin Winnti is a highly complex structure that is difficult to penetrate. The term denotes both a sophisticated malware and an actual group of hackers. IT security experts like to call them digital mercenaries. According to a Kasperky Lab research held in 2011, the Winnti group has been active for several years and in their initial days, specialized in cyber-attacks against the online video game industry. However, according to this investigation the hacker group has now honed in on Germany and its blue-chip DAX corporations. BR and NDR reporters analyzed hundreds of malware versions used for unsavory purposes. They found that the hacker group has targeted at least six DAX corporations and stock-listed top companies of the German industry. In October 2016, several DAX corporations, including BASF and Bayer, founded the German Cyber Security Organization (DCSO). The job of DCSO’s IT security experts was to observe and recognize hacker groups like Winnti and to get to the bottom of their motives. In Winnti’s case, DCSO speaks of a “mercenary force” which is said to be closely linked with the Chinese government. The reporters of this investigation also interviewed few company staff, IT security experts, government officials, and representatives of security authorities. An IT security expert who has been analyzing the attacks for years said, “Any DAX corporation that hasn’t been attacked by Winnti must have done something wrong.” A high-ranking German official said to the reporters, “The numbers of cases are mind-boggling.” And claims that the group continues to be highly active—to this very day. Winnti hackers are audacious and “don’t care if they’re found out” The report points out that the hackers choose convenience over anonymity. Working with Moritz Contag the reporters found that the hackers wrote the names of the companies they want to spy on directly into their malware. Contag has analyzed more than 250 variations of the Winnti malware and found them to contain the names of global corporations. According to reporters, hackers usually take precautions, which experts refer to as Opsec. But the Winnti group’s Opsec was dismal to say the least. Somebody who has been keeping an eye on Chinese hackers on behalf of a European intelligence service believes that they didn’t really care: “These hackers don’t care if they’re found out or not. They care only about achieving their goals." The reporters believed that every hacking operation leaves digital traces. They also believe that if you notice hackers carefully, each and every step can be logged. To decipher the traces of the Winnti hackers, they took a closer look at the program code of the malware itself. They used a malware research engine known as “VirusTotal” created by Google. The hacker group initially attacked the gaming industry for financial gain In the early days, the Winnti group of hackers were mainly interested in money making. Their initial target was Gameforge, a gaming company based in the German town of Karlsruhe. In 2011, an email message found its way into Gameforge’s mailbox. A staff member opened the attached file and unaware to him started the Winnti program. Shortly afterwards, the administrators became aware that someone was accessing Gameforge’s databases and raising the account balance. Gameforge decided to implement Kaspersky antivirus software and  arranged for Kaspersky's IT security experts to visit the office.The security experts found suspicious files and analyzed them. They noticed that the system had been infiltrated by hackers acting like Gameforge’s administrators. It turned out that the hackers had taken over a total of 40 servers. “They are a very, very persistente group,” says Costin Raiu, who has been watching Winnti since 2011 and was in charge of Kaspersky’s malware analysis team. “Once the Winnti hackers are inside a network, they take their sweet time to really get a feel for the infrastructure,” he says. The hackers will map a company’s network and look for strategically favorable locations for placing their malware. They keep tabs on which programs are used in a company and then exchange a file in one of these programs. The modified file looks like the original, but was secretly supplemented by a few extra lines of code. Thereafter the manipulated file does the attackers’ bidding. Raiu and his team have been following the digital tracks left behind by some of the Winnti hackers. “Nine years ago, things were much more clear-cut. There was a single team, which developed and used Winnti. It now looks like there is at least a second group that also uses Winnti.” This view is shared by many IT security companies. And it is this second group which is getting the German security authorities worried. One government official says, “Winnti is very specific to Germany. It is the attacker group that's being encountered most frequently." Second group of Winnti hackers focused on industrial espionage The report says that by 2014, the Winnti malware code was no longer limited to game manufacturers. The second group’s job was mainly industrial espionage. Hackers targeted high-tech companies as well as chemical and pharmaceutical companies. They also attacked companies in Japan, France, the U.S. and Germany. The report sheds light on how Winnti hackers broke into Henkel’s network in 2014. The reporters present three files containing the website belonging to Henkel and the name of the hacked server. For example, one starts with the letter sequence DEDUSSV. They realized that server names can be arbitrary, but it is highly probable that DE stands for Germany and DUS for Düsseldorf, where the Henkel headquarters are located. The hackers were able to monitor all activities running on the web server and reached systems which didn't have direct internet access: The company also confirmed the Winnti incident and issued the following statement: “The cyberattack was discovered in the summer of 2014 and Henkel promptly took all necessary precautions.” Henkel claims that a “very small portion” of its worldwide IT systems had been affected— the systems in Germany. According to Henkel, there was no evidence suggesting that any sensitive data had been diverted. Other than Henkel, Winnti also targeted companies like Covestro, manufacturers of adhesives, lacquers and paints, Japan’s biggest chemical company, Shin-Etsu Chemical, Roche, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Winnti hackers also penetrated the BASF and Siemens networks. A BASF spokeswoman says that in July 2015, hackers had successfully overcome “the first levels” of defense. “When our experts discovered that the attacker was attempting to get around the next level of defense, the attacker was removed promptly and in a coordinated manner from BASF’s network.” She added that no business relevant information had been lost at any time. According to Siemens, they were penetrated by the hackers in June 2016. “We quickly discovered and thwarted the attack,” Siemens spokesperson said. Winnti hackers also involved in political espionage The hacker group also is interested in penetrating political groups and there were several such indicators according to the report. The Hong Kong government was spied on by the Winnti hackers. The reporters found four infected systems with the help of the nmap network scan, and proceeded to inform the government by email. The reporters also found out a telecommunications provider from India had been infiltrated, the company happens to be located in the region where the Tibetan government has its headquarters. Incidentally, the relevant identifier in the malware is called “CTA.” A file which ended up on VirusTotal in 2018 contains a straightforward keyword: “tibet”. Other than this the report also throws light on attacks which were not directly related to political espionage but had connection among them. For example, the team found out Marriott hotels in USA was attacked by hackers. The Indonesian airline Lion Air networks were also penetrated by them. They wanted to get to the data of where people travel and where they were located, at any given time. The team confirmed this by showing the relevant coded files in the report. To read the full research report, check out the official German broadcsaster’s website. Hackers steal bitcoins worth $41M from Binance exchange in a single go! VLC media player affected by a major vulnerability in a 3rd library, libebml; updating to the latest version may help An IoT worm Silex, developed by a 14 year old resulted in malware attack and taking down 2000 devices

A malware is a software with malicious intent that changes the system without the knowledge of the user. A malware uses the same technologies that are used by genuine software but the intent is bad. The following are some examples: Software such as TrueCrypt uses algorithms and techniques to encrypt a file to protect privacy, but, at the same time, ransomware uses same algorithms to encrypt files to extort the user. Similarly, Firefox uses HTTP protocol to browse the web while malware uses HTTP protocol to post its stolen data to its command and control (C&C) server In this article we will focus on the different types of malware. They can be categorized into different types based on the damage it causes to the system. It does not necessarily use a single method to cause damage; it can employ multiple ways. We will look into some known malware types: Backdoor Downloader Virus or file infector Worm Botnet Remote Access Tool (RAT) Hacktool Keylogger and password stealer Banking malware POS malware Ransomware Exploit and exploit kits To be clear, malware can act as a backdoor as well a password stealer or can be a combination of any of them. Some of the definitions are simple enough to understand in one line while others need some detailed explanation. This article is an excerpt taken from the book, 'Preventing Ransomware', written by Abhijit Mohanta, Mounir Hahad, and Kumaraguru Velmurugan. Backdoor A backdoor can be a simple functionality for a malware. It opens a port on the victim machine so that the hacker can log in without the victim's knowledge and carry out their work. A piece of backdoor malware can create a new process of itself or inject malicious code that opens a port in legitimate code executing in the system. Backdoor activity was usually part of other malware. Most of the RAT tools have a backdoor module that opens a port on the victim machine for the hacker to get in. Downloader A downloader is a piece of malicious software that downloads other malware. It has a URL for the malware that needs to be downloaded. Hence, when executed, it downloads other malware. Bedep was mostly known to download CryptoLockers. Upatre was another popular downloader. Virus or file infector File infection malware piggybacks its code in clean software. It alters an executable file on a disk in such a way that malware code is executed before or after the clean code in the file is executed. A file infector is often termed a virus in the security industry. A lot of antivirus products tag it as a virus. In the context of PE executables of Windows, a file infector can work in the following manner: Malware adds malicious code at the end of a clean executable file. It changes the entry point of the file to point the malicious code located at the end. When the exe is double-clicked, the malware code is executed first. The malicious code keeps the address of the clean code which was earlier the entry point. After completing the malicious activity, the malware code transfers control to the clean code: A virus can infect a file in several ways. It can place its code at different places in the malicious code. File infection is a way to spread in the system. Many of these file infectors infect every system file on Windows. So malware code has to execute irrespective of whether you start Internet Explorer or a calculator program. Some very famous PE file infectors are Virut, Sality, XPAJ, and Xpiro. Worm A worm spreads in a system by various mechanisms. File infection can also be considered a worm-like behavior. A worm can spread in several ways: To other computers on the network by brute forcing default usernames and passwords of network shares or other machines. By exploiting the vulnerability in network protocols. Using pen drives. When an autorun worm is executed, it looks for a pen drive attached to a system. The worm creates a copy of itself in the pen drive and also adds an autorun.inf file to the pen drive. When an infected pen drive is inserted into a new machine, autorun.inf is executed by Windows, which in turn executes the copied .exe. The copied exe can now copy itself at different locations in the new machine where the pen drive is inserted. Botnet A botnet is a piece of malware that is based on the client-server model. The victim machine that is infected with the malware is called a bot. The hacker controls the bot by using a C&C server. This is also called a bot herder. A C&C server can issue commands to the bots. If a large number of computers are infected with bots, they can be used to direct a lot of traffic toward any server. If the server is not secure enough and is incapable of handling huge traffic, it can shut down. This is usually called a denial of service (DOS) attack. A bot can use internet protocols or custom protocols to communicate with its C&C server. ZeroAccess and GameOver are famous botnets of the recent past. Keylogger and password stealer Keyloggers have been well known for a long time. They can monitor keystrokes and log them to a file. The log file can be transferred to the hacker later on. A password stealer is a similar thing. It can steal usernames and passwords from the following locations: Browsers store passwords for social networking sites, movie sites, song sites, email, and gaming sites. FTP clients such as FileZilla and SmartFTP, which can be used in companies or individuals to save data in FTP servers. Email clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook are used to access emails easily. Database clients used mostly by engineers and students Banking applications Users store passwords in password managers so that they don't have to remember them. Malware can steal passwords from these applications. LastPass and KeePass are password manager applications. Hackers can use these credentials to steal more data or access the private information of somebody or to try to access military installations. They can target executives using this kind of malware to steal their confidential information. zeus and citadel are famous password stealers. Banking malware Banking malware is financial malware. It can include the functionality of keylogging and password-stealing from the browser. Banks have come up with virtual keyboards, which is a major blow to keyloggers. Now, most malware use a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. In this kind of attack, a piece of malware is able to intercept the conversation between the victim and the banking site. There are two popular MITM mechanisms used by banking malware these days: form grabbing and browser injects. In form grabbing, the malware hooks the browser APIs and sends the intercepted data to its C&C server. Simultaneously, it can send the same data to the bank website too. Web inject works in the following manner: Malware can perform API hooking in the browser to intercept the web page that as requested by the victim browser. An original web page is a form in which victim needs to input various things, such as the amount they need to transfer, credentials, and so on. The malware modifies extra fields in this intercepted web page to add some extra fields, such as CVV number, PIN, and OTP, which are used for additional authentication. These additional fields are injected using an HTML form. This form varies based on the bank. Malware keeps a configuration file which tells the malware which form needs to be injected in the page of which banking site. After modifying the web page, the malware sends data to the victim's browser. So the victim sees the page with extra fields as modified by the malware. Hence, the malware is able to steal the additional parameters needed for authentication. Tibna, Shifu, Carberp, and Zeus are some famous pieces of banking malware. POS malware The method of money transfer is changing. Cash transactions in shops are changing. POS devices are installed in a lot of shops these days. Windows has a Windows POS operating system for these kinds of POS devices. The POS software in these devices is able to read the credit card information when one swipes a card in the POS device. If malware infects a POS device, it scans the POS software for credit card patterns. Credit card numbers are 16 digits. Malware scans for 16-digit patterns in the memory to identify and then steal credit card numbers. BlackPOS, Dexter, JackPOS, and BackOff are famous pieces of POS malware. Hacktool Hacktools are often used to retrieve passwords from browsers, operating systems, or other applications. They can work by brute forcing or identifying patterns. Cain and Abel, John the Ripper, and Rainbow Crack were old hack tools. Mimikatz is one of the latest hack tools associated with some top ransomware such as Wannacry and NotPetya to decode and steal the credentials of the victim. RAT A RAT acts as a remote control, like the name suggests. It can be used for both good and bad intentions. RATs can be used by system administrators to solve the issues of their clients by accessing the client's machine remotely. But since RATS usually give full access to the person sitting remotely, they can be misused by hackers. RATs have been used in sophisticated hacks lots of times. They can be misused for multiple purposes, such as the following: Monitoring keystrokes using keyloggers Stealing credentials and data from the victim machine Wiping out all data from a remote machine Creating a backdoor so that a hacker can log in Gh0st Rat, Poison Ivy, Back Orifice, Prorat, and NjRat are well-known RATs. Exploit Software is written by humans and, obviously, there will be bugs. Hackers take advantage of some of these bugs to compromise a system in an unauthorized manner. We call such bugs vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities occur due to various reasons, but mostly due to imperfect programming. If programmers have not considered certain scenarios while programming the software, this can lead to a vulnerability in the software. Here is a simple C program that uses the function sctrcpy() to copy a string from source to destination: The programmer has failed to notice that the size of the destination is 10 bytes and the source is 23 bytes. In the program, the source is allocated 23 bytes of memory while the destination is assigned 11 bytes of memory space. When the strcpy() function copies the source into the destination, the copied string goes beyond the allocated memory of the destination. The memory beyond the memory assigned to the destination can have important things related to the program which would be overwritten. This kind of vulnerability is called buffer overflow. Stack overflow and heap overflow are commonly known as buffer overflow vulnerability. There are other vulnerabilities, such as use-after-free when an object is used after it is freed (we don't want to go into this in depth as it requires an understanding of C++ programming concepts and assembly language). A program that takes advantage of these vulnerabilities for a malicious purpose is called an exploit. To explain an exploit, we will talk about a stack overflow case. Readers are recommended to read about C programs to understand this. Exploit writing is a more complex process which requires knowledge of assembly language, debuggers, and computer architecture. We will try to explain the concept as simply as possible. The following is a screenshot of a C program. Note that this is not a complete program and is only meant to illustrate the concept: The main() function takes input from the user (argv[1]) then passes it on to the vulnerable function vulnerable_function. The main function calls the vulnerable function. So after executing the vulnerable function, the CPU should come back to the main function (that is, line no 15). This is how the CPU should execute the program: line 14 | line 4 | line 5 | line 6 | line 15. Now, when the CPU is at line 6, how does it know that it has to return to line 15 after that? Well, the secret lies in the stack. Before getting into line 4 from line 14, the CPU saves the address of line 15 on the stack. We can call the address of line 15 the return address. The stack is also meant for storing local variables too. In this case, the buffer is a local variable in vulnerable_function. Here is what the stack should look like for the preceding program: This is the state of the stack when the CPU is executing the vulnerable_function code. We also see that return address (address of line 15) is placed on the stack. Now the size of the buffer is only 16 bytes (see the program). When the user provides an input(argv[1]) that is larger than 16 bytes, the extra length of the input will overwrite the return address when strcpy() is executed. This is a classic example of stack overflow. When talking about exploiting a similar program, the exploit will overwrite the RETURN ADDRESS. As a result, after executing line 6, the CPU will go to the address which has overwritten the return address. So now the user can create a specially crafted input (argv[1]) with a length greater than 16 bytes. The input contains three parts - address of the buffer, NOP, and shellcode. The address of the buffer is the virtual memory address of the variable buffer. NOP stands for no operation instruction. As the name implies, it does nothing when executed. Shellcode is nothing but an extremely small piece of code that can fit in a very small space. Shellcode is capable of doing the following: Opening a backdoor port in the vulnerable software Downloading another piece of malware Spawning a command prompt to the remote hacker, who can access the system of the victim Elevating the privileges of the victim so the hacker has access to more areas and functions in the system: The following image shows the same stack after the specially crafted input is provided as input to the program. Here, you can see return address is overwritten with the address of the buffer so, instead of line 15, the CPU will go to the address of the buffer. After this NOP, the shellcode will be executed: The final conclusion is, by providing an input to the vulnerable program, the exploit is able to execute shellcode which can open up a backdoor or download malware. The inputs can be as follows: An HTTP request is an input for a web server An HTML page is an input for a web browser A PDF is an input to Adobe Reader And so on - the list is infinite. You can explore these using the keywords provided as it cannot be explained in a few lines and goes beyond the scope of this book. We often see vulnerabilities mentioned in blogs. Usually, a CVE number is mentioned for a vulnerability. One can find the list of vulnerabilities at http://www.cvedetails.com/. The wannacry ransomware used CVE-2017-0144 . 2017 is the year when the vulnerability was discovered. 0144 denotes that this was the 144th vulnerability discovered in 2017. Microsoft also issues advisories for vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. https://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-0144 gives the details of the vulnerability. The vulnerability description tells us that the bug lies in the SMBv1 server software installed in some of Microsoft operating system versions. Also, the URL can refer to some of the exploits. Now that you know what types of malware exist, do check out the book, Preventing Ransomware to further know about the techniques to prevent malware and perform effective malware analysis. IoT Forensics: Security in an always-connected world where things talk Top 5 penetration testing tools for ethical hackers Top 5 cloud security threats to look out for in 2018