Information Technology

Image: Peter Stumpf, Compal, ZDNet
Compal, a Taiwanese electronics company that builds laptops for some of the world’s largest computer brands, suffered a ransomware attack over the weekend.
Responsible for the breach is believed to be the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang, according to a screenshot of the ransom note shared by Compal employees with Yahoo Taiwan reporters.

Screenshot of the ransom note seen on Compal workstations [URLs blurred by ZDNet]
Image via Yahoo Taiwan
According to Taiwanese media[1, 2, 3, 4], the incident was discovered on Sunday morning and is believed to have impacted around 30% of Compal’s computer fleet.
Employees arriving at work were greeted by a memo from Compal’s IT staff, asking workers to check the status of their workstations and back up important files on systems that were not impacted.

Message shown on Compal workstations over the weekend
Image via Yahoo Taiwan
Since Sunday, Compal’s IT staff has been reinstalling encrypted workstations.
Compal exec denies ransomware attack, admits hack
Despite reports in local media, in a statement provided to United News Network reporters on Monday, Compal Deputy Manager Director Qingxiong Lu admitted that the company suffered a security breach but denied that the company’s recent downtime was caused by ransomware.
“[Compal] is not being blackmailed by hackers as it is rumored by the outside world,” the Compal exec told reporters.

Furthermore, Qingxiong said the incident only impacted the company’s internal office network and that Compal production lines, which build laptops for other companies, have not been impacted.
Qingxiong estimated the company would be back to normal later today, on Monday, when staff is expected to finish restoring all the systems that have been impacted by what he described as “abnormalities.”
Compal is today’s second-largest contract laptop manufacturer in the world after Quanta Computer, another Taiwanese company.
In the past, Compal has produced laptops for companies like Apple, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, HP, and Fujitsu. Besides laptops, the company also builds monitors, tablets, smartwatches, smart TVs, and other computer peripherals.
Compal is the third major Taiwanese plant hit by ransomware gangs this year. Taiwan’s state-owned energy company, CPC Corp., was hit by the ColdLocker ransomware in May, while the Taiwanese plant of US smartwatch maker Garmin was hit by the WastedLocker ransomware in July. More

E-commerce software vendor X-Cart suffered a ransomware attack at the end of October that brought down customer stores hosted on the company’s hosting platform.

The incident is believed to have taken place after attackers exploited a vulnerability in a third-party software to gain access to X-Cart’s store hosting systems.
“We have identified what we believed to have been the vulnerability but do not wish to disclose the name until its confirmed by our security firm,” Jeff Cohen, VP of Marketing for Seller Labs, the company behind X-Cart, told ZDNet in an email.
Cohen said the attackers gained access to a small number of servers, which they encrypted, effectively bringing down X-Cart stores running on top of the impacted systems. Some stores went down completely, while others reported issues with sending email alerts.
“The outage impacted a small percentage of our infrastructure, mainly those on our shared hosting servers.
“Our core systems were not impacted,” Cohen said.
In the meantime, Cohen said that “all customer websites have since been restored.”

Nevertheless, the outage, which lasted for a few days, rubbed some store owners the wrong way, with a few trying to organize a class-action lawsuit against the store hoster.
Class-action looming?
In response to this initiative, Cohen said the company’s “first priority” during the ransomware attack “has been to get every customer back online and ensure we have a stable and secure system.”
The Seller Labs exec said they are keeping communication channels open with any customer affected by the recent ransomware attack and encouraged them to reach out for help or discussions.
Asked if Seller Labs paid the ransomware gang to recover its files, Cohen said they chose to restore from backups, and that payment couldn’t be made either way because “the hackers didn’t provide any way to communicate.”
X-Cart’s free/downloadable e-commerce CMS isn’t believed to have been impacted or tainted following the X-Cart ransomware incident.
X-Cart joins a long list of ransomware incidents that have impacted web hosting and data center providers. The list also includes Equinix, CyrusOne, Cognizant, A2 Hosting, SmarterASP.NET, Dataresolution.net, and Internet Nayana.
PortSwigger’s The Daily Swig first reported on the X-Cart ransomware incident. ZDNet reported independently from a different source. More

The federal government on Monday published an exposure draft on the Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020. It seeks to amend the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 to implement “an enhanced framework to uplift the security and resilience of Australia’s critical infrastructure”.
The Australian government’s Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy currently defines critical infrastructure as: “Those physical facilities, supply chains, information technologies, and communication networks, which if destroyed, degraded, or rendered unavailable for an extended period, would significantly impact the social or economic wellbeing of the nation, or affect Australia’s ability to conduct national defence and ensure national security”.
Within the broad definition of critical infrastructure, the Act currently places regulatory obligations on specific entities in the electricity, gas, water, and maritime ports sectors.
“However, as the security landscape evolves, so must our approach to managing risk across all critical infrastructure sectors,” the Bill’s explanatory document [PDF] said. 
As such, the amendments in the Bill are aimed at enhancing the obligations in the Act, and expanding its coverage to the communications, financial services and markets, data storage and processing, defence industry, higher education and research, energy, food and grocery, healthcare and medical, space technology, transport, and water and sewerage sectors.
It is proposed that responsible entities for these assets would also fall within the proposed new definition of “national security business”. The Minister for Home Affairs would also have the power to declare a critical infrastructure asset as a “system of national significance”.
The communications sector is defined in the Bill as those supplying a carriage service; providing a broadcasting service; owning or operating assets that are used in connection with the supply of a carriage service; owning or operating assets that are used in connection with the transmission of a broadcasting service; or administering an Australian domain name system.

The Bill would also introduce definitions for three types of critical infrastructure assets in this sector: Telecommunications, broadcasting transmission, and domain name systems.
The definition of the “data storage or processing sector”, according to the Bill, is the sector of the Australian economy that involves providing data storage or processing services on a commercial basis.
This includes enterprise data centres, managed services data centres, colocation data centres, and cloud data centres. The sector definition also includes three types of cloud services: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS).
According to the document, an asset is a “critical data storage or processing asset” if it is owned or operated by an entity that is a data storage or processing provider; and it is used wholly or primarily in connection with a data storage or processing service that is provided on a commercial basis to an end-user that is the Commonwealth, a state, or a territory, or a body corporate established by a law of the Commonwealth, a state, or a territory.
“The definition covers data centres and cloud service providers that manage data of significance to Australia’s national interest,” the explanatory document continued. “It is not intended to cover instances where data storage is secondary to, or simply a by-product of, the primary service being offered, for example, accounting services that may result in the storage of some of their client’s data.”
“Business critical data” would be defined in the Bill as personal information that relates to at least 20,000 individuals; sensitive information; information relating to any research and development in relation to a critical infrastructure asset; information relating to any systems needed to operate a critical infrastructure asset; or information relating to risk management and business continuity in relation to a critical infrastructure asset.
For a “critical data storage or processing asset”, the responsible entity is the entity that is a data storage or processing provider to Commonwealth, state or territory government clients, and other critical infrastructure assets.
However, the asset would only become a critical data storage or processing asset where the responsible entity knows that it is storing or processing business critical data of a critical infrastructure asset.
Home Affairs understands that this threshold would capture at least 100 data centre entities, including those entities on the Digital Transformation Agency’s Government Supply Panel and at least 30 cloud service providers.
Meanwhile, the space sector would be defined as the sector of the Australian economy that involves the commercial provision of space-related services and reflects those functions that are critical to maintaining the supply and availability of space-related services in Australia.
The Bill also introduces a definition of the financial services and markets sector, the defence industry sector, the food and grocery sector, higher education and research, the healthcare and medical sector, the transport sector, the energy sector, and the water and sewage sector.
Responsibilities for those classed as critical infrastructure
The Bill, if passed, would also introduce a positive security obligation (PSO) for critical infrastructure entities, supported by sector-specific requirements and mandatory reporting requirements; enhanced cybersecurity obligations for those entities most important to the nation; and government assistance to entities in response to significant cyber attacks on Australian systems.
This framework would apply to owners and operators of critical infrastructure regardless of ownership arrangements.
“This creates an even playing field for owners and operators of critical infrastructure and maintains Australia’s existing open investment settings, ensuring that businesses who apply security measures are not at a commercial disadvantage,” the exposure draft [PDF] noted. 
The PSO would build on the existing obligations in the Act to “embed preparation, prevention, and mitigation activities into the business as usual operating of critical infrastructure assets, ensuring that the resilience of essential services is strengthened”. 
The government is hopeful it would also provide greater situational awareness of threats to critical infrastructure assets. 
The PSO involves three aspects: Adopting and maintaining an all-hazards critical infrastructure risk management program; mandatorily reporting serious cybersecurity incidents to the Australian Signals Directorate; and where required, providing ownership and operational information to the Register of Critical Infrastructure Assets.  
Government said it would work alongside industry to design the sector-specific requirements that underpin the risk management program obligation. 
The Bill would also expand the Register of Critical Infrastructure Assets and give the Home Affairs Minister “on switch” powers to ensure that a PSO only applies in appropriate situations.
“The increased range of sectors covered by the Register will enable the government to develop and maintain a comprehensive picture of national security risks, and apply mitigations where necessary,” it wrote.
Under the title of “enhanced cybersecurity obligations”, the Secretary of Home Affairs may require the responsible entity for a system of national significance to undertake one or more prescribed cybersecurity activities, such as the development of cybersecurity incident response plans, cybersecurity exercises to build cyber-preparedness, vulnerability assessments, and provision of system information.
This Bill also introduces a government assistance regime to respond to serious cybersecurity incidents that applies to all critical infrastructure sector assets.
“Government recognises that industry should and in most cases, will respond to the vast majority of cybersecurity incidents, with the support of government where necessary,” it wrote. “However, government maintains ultimate responsibility for protecting Australia’s national interests. As a last resort, the Bill provides for government assistance to protect assets during or following a significant cyber attack.”
Home Affairs on Monday published 128 of 194 submissions it received prior to distributing its Exposure Draft. Consultation on the Bill continues until Friday 27 November 2020.
RELATED COVERAGE More

Image: Asha Barbaschow/ZDNet
The federal government recently closed consultation on a package of reforms focused on protecting critical infrastructure and systems of national significance.
With that part of the process wrapped up, the government is now looking to introduce an enhanced regulatory framework, which would build on existing requirements under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018. This includes: A positive security obligation (PSO) for critical infrastructure entities, supported by sector-specific requirements; enhanced cybersecurity obligations for those entities most important to the nation; and government assistance to entities in response to significant cyber attacks on Australian systems.
With the definition of what constitutes critical infrastructure and systems of national significance not yet fully defined, the federal government is seeking to determine who the enhanced framework would apply to, with one proposed sector covering data storage and cloud.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said that while it was broadly supportive of the proposal to expand the regime to include the data and cloud sector, the expansion raises questions such as what service providers should be included in the sector, what security standards should apply, and how the government can prevent over-regulation.
See also: Amazon Web Services scores Australia-wide government cloud deal
In its submission [PDF] to the consultation, the cloud giant also raised concerns that the proposal for government “assistance” or “intervention” powers could give it overly broad powers to issue directions or act autonomously.
“While we have not seen the draft law, the high-level summary of these powers suggest they could be significant and exercisable across a broad swath of society, with unclear limitations or guardrails,” it wrote.

AWS said the breadth of the newly regulated critical infrastructure sectors, coupled with seemingly broad powers described in the consultation paper [PDF], raised many issues and unknowns.
“For example, we are concerned that the government’s power to take direct action in the event of an emergency is vague and undefined,” it said.
“A plain reading of the consultation paper suggests that the government could use these new powers to either issue directions or take autonomous action to do virtually anything in response to cybersecurity threats.”
The consultation paper said the government assistance would be provided to entities that are the target or victim of a cyber attack through the establishment of a government capability and authorities to disrupt and respond to threats in an emergency.
“Critical infrastructure entities may face situations where there is an imminent cyber threat or incident that could significantly impact Australia’s economy, security or sovereignty, and the threat is within their capacity to address. In these cases, we propose that government be able to provide reasonable, proportionate and time-sensitive directions to entities to ensure action is taken to minimise its impact,” the government wrote.
AWS is concerned that there isn’t clarity around whether the triggers for exercising such powers are objective and specific, whether or how the government would be able to objectively assess if its directions or assistance would improve the situation, what an entity could be directed to do or not do, what checks and balances would apply, and whether an entity has rights of review and appeal.
Elsewhere in its submission, AWS said it was unclear from the consultation paper whether and how the enhanced regulatory framework would apply, explaining that it was concerned the position of applying the enhanced regulatory framework at the “owner and operator level, not at [a] specific piece of technology” could lead to negative consequences.
AWS added that if the plan would be to regulate all of an entity’s facilities, infrastructure, products, or services — without considering the level of criticality — it could have unintended consequences and result in “over-burdensome regulation”.
Instead, the cloud giant has recommended the enhanced regulatory framework only apply to specific critical infrastructure assets of a critical infrastructure entity.
In order to avoid over-regulation, AWS said a technology service provider — that is also a regulated critical infrastructure entity complying with its own sector PSO — should not have to comply with additional security obligations imposed by another regulator that duplicates or builds upon that entity’s PSO.
See also: Amazon asks for clarification of data retention requirements under Australia’s encryption laws
It also wants clarification that entities will not be inspected, examined, or audited against the same requirements by multiple regulators.
Acknowledging each sector is different, AWS said PSOs for one sector should not contradict or conflict with those in another sector, but it was concerned this approach could lead to a fragmented set of security requirements across different sectors.
Asking for further clarity, AWS wants an appropriate scope of what entities and infrastructure are included in the “data and the cloud” sector.
If there was to be a threshold, the cloud giant has suggested a test of “a data centre containing IT equipment capable of consuming more than 100kW of power in total” so that operators of infrastructure have clarity on whether they are covered.
“Our recommendation is that the PSOs for the Data and the Cloud Sector apply to physical data centre security rather than software or services running in those data centres,” the company said.
“If a PSO applies to the software running in a data centre and the services of a cloud services provider (and not the physical data centres it uses) each of those services will need to meet the requirements even if it is not being used by a critical infrastructure entity. This approach will slow the pace of innovation, delay the launch of new services in Australia, increase the costs of compliance and drive up the cost of services to all Australian customers.”
In addition, AWS said the PSO should reflect that an entity is only able to implement security processes that are within its control.
“For example, it would not be possible for a cloud service provider to implement security controls for applications the customer controls. Instead, the law should specify that PSOs do not apply to aspects of security that are outside an entity’s control,” it added.
RELATED COVERAGE More

Tianfu Cup winners: The 360 Government and Enterprise Security Vulnerability Research Institute
Image: Tianfu Cup
Many of today’s top software programs have been hacked using new and never-before-seen exploits at this year’s edition of the Tianfu Cup — China’s largest and most prestigious hacking competition.

Held in the city of Chengdu, in central China, the third edition of the Tianfu Cup ended earlier today.
“Many mature and hard targets have been pwned on this year’s contest,” organizers said today. Successful exploits were confirmed against:
iOS 14 running on an iPhone 11 Pro
Samsung Galaxy S20
Windows 10 v2004 (April 2020 edition)
Ubuntu
Chrome
Safari
Firefox
Adobe PDF Reader
Docker (Community Edition)
VMWare EXSi (hypervisor)
QEMU (emulator & virtualizer)
TP-Link and ASUS router firmware

Image: Tianfu Cup

Image: Tianfu Cup
Fifteen teams of Chinese hackers participated in this year’s edition. Contestants had three tries of five minutes each to hack into a selected target with an original exploit.
For each successful attack, researchers received monetary rewards that varied depending on the target they chose and the vulnerability type.
All exploits were reported to the software providers, per contest regulations, modeled after the rules of the more established Pwn2Own hacking competition that has been taking place in the west since the late 2000s.
Patches for all the bugs demonstrated over the weekend will be provided in the coming days and weeks, as it usually happens after every TianfuCup and Pwn2Own contest.

Just like last year, the winning team came from Chinese tech giant Qihoo 360. Named the “360 Enterprise Security and Government and (ESG) Vulnerability Research Institute,” the winners accounted for almost two-thirds of the entire prize pool, going home with $744,500 of the total $1,210,000 awarded this year.
Ranking second and third were the AntFinancial Lightyear Security Lab and security researcher Pang.

Image: Tianfu Cup More

Image: ZDNet
Verizon is removing the ability to automatically forward incoming emails from a Yahoo inbox to another email address for Yahoo Mail free users.
The feature will be removed on January 1, 2021.
Yahoo Mail users who still want to use automatic email forwarding are told to sign up for Yahoo Mail Pro, which costs $34.99 per year, or $3.49 a month.
Yahoo Mail owner Verizon announced the change at the start of the month and is now notifying users via email.
The company cited security reasons for dropping the feature.
“We regularly evaluate our products and services against current security standards and have decided to remove this feature to help ensure free Yahoo Mail accounts remain secure,” the company explained in a FAQ page published on October 31.
Automatic email forwarding is often abused. Hackers who breach email accounts often add their own email address as an automatic email forwarding rule to receive carbon copies of all messages a victim receives.

However, the feature is also often used by legitimate users to centralize email traffic to one single account.
Yahoo says that once the new year begins, all email forwarding rules will be disabled. Users who want to read their Yahoo emails will have to visit the Yahoo Mail website.
Yahoo Mail is believed to have more than three billion users. Many have abandoned the company’s services, though, after Yahoo announced two major hacks in the fall of 2016, one in September and one in December.
Existing Yahoo Mail users can check if they have automatic email forward rules for their account by visiting this link — or by clicking Settings in their Yahoo Mail inbox, selecting More Settings, selecting/clicking your account name in the account list, and then looking for the Forwarding section (see image below).

Image: ZDNet More

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has sent out a security alert warning that threat actors are abusing misconfigured SonarQube applications to access and steal source code repositories from US government agencies and private businesses.

Intrusions have taken place since at least April 2020, the FBI said in an alert sent out last month and made public this week on its website.
The alert specifically warns owners of SonarQube, a web-based application that companies integrate into their software build chains to test source code and discover security flaws before rolling out code and applications into production environments.
SonarQube apps are installed on web servers and connected to source code hosting systems like BitBucket, GitHub, or GitLab accounts, or Azure DevOps systems.
But the FBI says that some companies have left these systems unprotected, running on their default configuration (on port 9000) with default admin credentials (admin/admin).
FBI officials say that threat actors have abused these misconfigurations to access SonarQube instances, pivot to the connected source code repositories, and then access and steal proprietary or private/sensitive applications.
Officials provided two examples of past incidents:

“In August 2020, unknown threat actors leaked internal data from two organizations through a public lifecycle repository tool. The stolen data was sourced from SonarQube instances that used default port settings and admin credentials running on the affected organizations’ networks.
“This activity is similar toa previous data leak in July 2020, in which an identified cyber actor exfiltrated proprietary source code from enterprises throughpoorly secured SonarQube instances and published the exfiltrated source codeon a self-hosted public repository.”
Forgot problem resurfaces in 2020
The FBI alert touches on a little known issue among software developers and security researchers.
While the cyber-security industry has often warned about the dangers of leaving MongoDB or Elasticsearch databases exposed online without passwords, SonarQube has slipped through the cracks.
However, some security researchers have been warning about the dangers of leaving SonarQube applications exposed online with default credentials since as far back as May 2018.
At the time, data breach hunter Bob Diachenko warned that about 30% to 40% of all the ~3,000 SonarQube instances available online at the time had no password or authentication mechanism enabled.

After @zackwhittaker covered EE leak, I ran a couple of queries on Sonarqube. Shocked to see more than 3K+ instances available, with roughly 30-40% of them set without auth, and almost half of those containing source code with prod data. Big names involved, another area to cover. pic.twitter.com/tKBRLOYzq1
— Bob Diachenko (@MayhemDayOne) May 16, 2018

This year, a Swiss security researcher named Till Kottmann has also raised the same issue of misconfigured SonarQube instances. Throughout the year, Kottmann has gathered source code from tens of tech companies in a public portal, and many of these came from SonarQube applications.
“Most people seem to change absolutely none of the settings, which are actually properly explained in the setup guide from SonarQube,” Kottmann told ZDNet.
“I don’t know the current number of exposed SonarQube instances, but I doubt it changed much. I would guess it’s still far over 1,000 servers (that are indexed by Shodan) which are ‘vulnerable’ by either requiring no auth or leaving default creds,” he said.

To prevent leaks like these, the FBI alert lists a series of steps that companies can take to protect their SonarQube servers, starting with altering the app’s default configuration and credentials and then using firewalls to prevent unauthorized access to the app from unauthorized users. More

The Brazilian Superior Court of Justice (STJ, in the Portuguese acronym) has been hit by a major cyberattack that will bring its operations to a standstill for an entire week.
The incident was detected on Tuesday (3) while several trial sessions were taking place. According to the STJ, a virus was found in the Court’s network and, as a precautionary measure, the links to the Internet were disconnected, prompting the cancellation of trial sessions. All the Court’s systems, including email, as well as the telephony set up, also became unavailable as a result.
STJ minister Humberto Martins released a statement yesterday (5) on the incident, stating that the attack did not affect the information related to the ongoing Court proceedings. According to the minister’s note, the invasion blocked access to data using encryption, but there were backups in place.
Later, it emerged that the attack had also impacted the Court’s backups in what is being described as the worst ever cybersecurity incident ever recorded in Brazil.

Alongside the Brazilian Army’s Cyber Defense Center and the STJ’s pool of technology suppliers, which includes companies like Microsoft, the institution is now working on the recovery of the systems environment, using tape backups.
All the STJ sessions, which had been taking place virtually, have also been suspended. According to the Court, only urgent casework is being dealt with while the recovery taskforce progresses and the expectation is that systems will be up and running on November 10.
A federal police investigation has been launched at the the STJ’s request. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro said in a live streaming session yesterday (5) that a ransom had been demanded by the authors of the attack and that the actors responsible for the event had already been found. However, this had not been confirmed by the police at the time of writing.

The STJ cyberattack follows the news on Sunday (1) that the Brazilian National Council of Justice was the target of “unauthorized access” to its servers. More