Information Technology

Members of the Egregor ransomware cartel have been arrested this week in Ukraine, French radio station France Inter reported on Friday, citing law enforcement sources.
The arrests, which have not been formally announced, are the result of a joint investigation between French and Ukrainian police.
Sources in the threat intel community have confirmed the existence of a law enforcement action but declined to comment for the time being.
The names of the suspects have not been released. France Inter said the arrested suspects provided hacking, logistical, and financial support for the Egregor gang.
The Egregor gang, which began operating in September 2020, operates based on a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model. They rent access to the actual ransomware strain, but they rely on other cybercrime gangs to orchestrate intrusions into corporate networks and deploy the file-encrypting ransomware.
Victims who resist paying the extortion fee are often listed on a so-called “leak site,” in the hopes of shaming them into paying the ransom demand. Victims who don’t pay often have internal documents and files shared on the Egregor leak site as punishment.

The Egregor ransomware leak site
Image: ZDNet
If victims do pay the ransom demand, the gang which orchestrated the intrusion keeps most of the funds, while the Egregor gang takes a small cut. The gang then launders these profits through the Bitcoin ecosystem via Bitcoin mixing services.

According to the France Inter report, the arrested suspects are believed to some of these “affiliates” (or partners) of the Egregor gang, which help prop up its operations.
France Inter said French authorities got involved in the investigation after several major French companies were hit by Egregor last year, such as game studio Ubisoft and logistics firm Gefco.
An investigation was started last year, and French police, together with “European counterparts,” were able to track down Egregor members and infrastructure to Ukraine.
Egregor leak site down since Friday
While, at the time of writing, details about the law enforcement action are murky, the arrests appear to have had a pretty big impact on Egregor operations.
“Recorded Future has observed that Egregor infrastructure, including their extortion site and command and control (C2) infrastructure, has been offline since at least Friday,” Allan Liska, a security researcher for threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, has told ZDNet in an email.
“While there has been no police banner, as there often would be in this case, it is unusual for ransomware actors as well-resourced as Egregor to have all of their infrastructure go offline at the same time,” he added.
Egregor has made more than 200 public victims
The arrests in Ukraine have hit one of last year’s most active ransomware operations.
While the Egregor RaaS formally launched in September 2020, many security experts believe the Egregor gang is actually the older Maze ransomware group, which began operating in late 2019.
The Maze gang abruptly shut down in September 2020, a few weeks after Egregor began operating. Reports from threat intelligence firms at the time said that the Maze gang had privately notified many of its top “affiliates” to move over to the Egregor RaaS.
Currently, many security researchers believe the Egregor RaaS is an upgraded and rebranded version of the older Maze operation.
“Recorded Future has tracked 206 victims published to the Egregor extortion site and, before the switchover, 263 victims published to the Maze site,” Liska told ZDNet.
“The two variants combined accounted for 34.3% of victims published to all ransomware extortion sites (14.9% Egregor),” Liska said.
A Coveware report published last month confirmed Recorded Future’s assessment, listing Egregor as the second most active ransomware gang for Q4 2020.
However, it is unclear what the damage of this week’s law enforcement action will be on Egregor’s future. Last month, US and Bulgarian authorities disrupted the Netwalker ransomware gang by seizing servers and arresting one of its affiliates, and the RaaS service has been inactive ever since.
A Chainalysis report published at the start of the month listed the Egregor/Maze gang as one of the top 5 earners in the ransomware landscape, with earnings between $40 million and $50 million.
This was confirmed by Liska, who told ZDNet that Egregor’s average ransom demand was around $700,000, making it among the largest ransom demands of any ransomware family.
Maze’s 2020 dox
But a pretty significant event took place last year, in November, when the operators of the REvil (Sodinokibi) ransomware gang (#1 on that Coverware 2020 Q4 ransomware report) claimed to have identified the real identities of the persons behind the Maze service, their rival.

At the time, security analysts considered the REvil stunt as an attempt to sabotage a rival’s public image, but nobody commented on the accuracy of the dox, and ZDNet was told several of them shared the information with law enforcement agencies. More

This week, Tesla announced it purchased $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The company even hinted that customers might soon have the option to pay for their cars with Bitcoin. Welcome to 2021, where nothing makes sense anymore. 

Tesla’s desire to legitimize both cryptocurrency and blockchain with its Bitcoin investment has brought these technologies into the forefront of the news and has sparked a mainstream interest. However, cryptocurrency and blockchain are often confused, and they can also be challenging concepts to understand.
Also: Bitcoin mining 101: How to build a cryptomining rig 
Blockchain fundamentals
Blockchain is the foundational technology used by various cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin.
In its simplest form, Blockchain is a database. With a traditional database, information is stored in fields, organized into rows and columns, and indexed for fast retrieval. Those fields can be things like name, address, phone number, and also pointers to “blob” data like multimedia files — videos, images, waveform audio, that sort of stuff. We call these collections of rows and columns “tables.” The structure of these tables and the relationships between them are referred to as a database schema. 
Fields can be updated in traditional databases as they are changed. For example, when you use Facebook or Instagram and add new tags, mark the location, or reply to someone’s comment, you’re interacting with a traditional database.
With blockchain, data is organized in a completely different way. Information is collected in groups or blocks, and any data that follows the first block is compiled into a newly formed block added to that chain. So the information is sequential and continues to build on each other.

It’s important to note that this blockchain structure creates an irreversible data timeline when it is decentralized. Every block of data is fingerprinted with this timeline and cannot be changed; it has an exact timestamp when added to the timeline.
Most blockchain systems are decentralized — that is, the computers that process the transactions are distributed worldwide. A transaction is entered somewhere on a client computer connected to the blockchain. This transaction is then transmitted to the network of connected peer-to-peer systems — aka nodes — that collectively solve a series of equations to validate the transaction. That’s where the “crypto” aspect comes into play. 
A blockchain can have as few as a dozen nodes on a network to as many as 10,000 nodes (as Bitcoin has) or, potentially, even more. Once that transaction is confirmed to be legitimate, they are then clustered into blocks. Once the blocks are created, they are chained together with the history of all the other transactions on the blockchain, and the transaction is complete.
So what is Blockchain good for besides cryptocurrency?
In summary, a blockchain-based system’s objective is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed but not edited. This has applications in many industries. Companies are already using this technology to perform supply chain tracing of stuff like seafood. 
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For example, when a scallop fisher catches their haul on a fishing trawler off of Cape Cod, that catch’s location is recorded in the initial blockchain transaction. The fisher uses a grading process to record the type of scallop, takes a photograph and video, and puts the catch in cold storage. The seafood is brought to a port, processed and packaged, then shipped out to a distributor’s refrigerated warehouse. From there, boxes of scallops are loaded onto trucks and sent to your local supermarket chain’s distribution center. Next, the seafood is trucked to your local supermarket — where the fishmonger takes the scallops out of the crate and puts them up for sale in the refrigerator or freezer case. 
If anything goes wrong with the scallops, or if you, the consumer, want to know where those scallops came from, that scallop package has a serial number and can be traced back to the moment it came out of the water in Cape Cod. IBM built a system for precisely this purpose. And companies like Walmart are using it for produce tracking, such as for leafy greens like lettuces and spinach. Consider how important this is: We’ve seen those kinds of vegetables become contaminated with E.coli and other pathogens. The blockchain system enables anyone in the chain to track down which field in which farm in California a particular bag of green stuff comes from.
Whenever you need a timestamped transaction record that cannot be altered, and for supply chain traceability, this technology will be essential. There’s already talk about using this technology for COVID-19 vaccine passports. 
As with scallops, so with vaccines. 
When a vaccine is manufactured at a pharmaceutical plant, the specific manufacturing run is recorded as a batch. The batch is dispensed into vials (each vial has a serial number), which goes into a box (each box has a lot number). That box is then loaded onto trucks, which may go to a pharmaceutical distributor and then is shipped to a hospital network, which opens those boxes, opens a vial, and finally distributes doses to patients. 
Each timestamped dose can then be recorded in the patient’s record: Which vaccine they received and when and where they received it.  And that record cannot be altered because of the encrypted transactional nature of how blockchain works. 
Blockchain technologies can be applied to insurance, mortgages, and even voting systems — anywhere you need that end-to-end record of something and multiple parties are involved. 
When blockchains are used in this trust establishment way — where more than one party may have to authenticate the blocks before something else can happen — these are referred to as Smart Ledgers or Distributed Ledgers. And several highly regulated industries are already looking into blockchain for this sort of application.
What is cryptocurrency anyway?
Ok, but first, what the heck is money? Money has been an abstract construct throughout human history; it was created to exchange goods and services. Typically, money has value because it is exchanged for something of value, and the value of that item depends on the overall demand for that item. 
At a basic level, the monetary value of, say, what someone does for a living is valued against what someone else does for a living based on demand and scarcity. It is commonly accepted that a ditch digger gets paid less than a doctor because of the value of the education the doctor achieved and invested in. Similarly, a one-kilogram lobster costs more than a kilogram of rice because of the effort and resources that it took to produce and harvest those things on a relative basis. 
In previous decades, a nation’s money or currency was backed by precious metals — such as gold, but that’s no longer common practice. A country’s output in goods and services is traded with other countries’ goods and services, and their currencies are valued on the open market using currency exchanges. The value of a nation’s currency is determined by fiat, which is derived from the relationship between supply and demand and the government’s stability that issues it.
That all sounds hugely existential, and it becomes an intense conversation when you start to explore monetary systems and capitalist theory and things like that.
But cryptocurrency, as it exists today, does not have a value based on fiat — it is based on the computational power of the network that produces it, so it is independent of nation-states. Cryptocurrency systems use blockchain to establish the indelible record that each fractional unit of currency exists, that they are unique, and cannot be altered after they are created. 
The dark side of cryptocurrency
This process of creating something out of effectively nothing — other than a large group of computers churning processor cycles —  is called mining. Mining is achieved by running a special program on a client computer. It runs through a series of complex equations until the result yields a block recorded as a fractional unit of that cryptocurrency.
Typically, a single mining node dedicated to cryptocurrency production is a modest x86 PC CPU with one or more high-end GPUs for accelerating the compute processes. Entities that are highly-invested in this endeavor have set up “mining farms” where dozens or even hundreds of computers dedicate their processing cycles to produce cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. 

Naturally, it takes a lot of power and cooling to generate cryptocurrency, and the energy required to do this requires fuel. The world is still primarily reliant on fossil fuel power generation. So it’s not a particularly green way of creating things of value. 
Although considered a very environmentally wasteful act of using computational resources, using and mining cryptocurrency is completely legal in most countries — Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nepal, and Pakistan have outlawed it because it potentially threatens their fiat currency. 
However, while completely legal in the majority of nations, it’s no coincidence that cryptocurrency mining farms have proliferated in parts of the world where a large number of cybercrime’s bad actors reside, such as in China, North Korea, Russia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. We have seen miner programs being used by actors from these countries as secondary malware payloads, so your computer could end up running one in the background as a virus, and you might not even know it. 
Your mom’s $300 PC she bought at Costco may not be a $3000 crypto box with multiple GPUs that can chew out Bitcoins or Ethereum at a significant pace. Still, a bad actor who infects 10,000 of those mom PCs can generate many crypto coins. 
Additionally, entities with significant computational resources — be it a nation-state or a bad actor — can potentially mine an awful lot of cryptocurrency. And they can become disproportionally large players on a cryptocurrency network and potentially control that network for short periods by preventing new transactions from getting confirmations and, in turn, halting payments between some or all users. They might also be able to reverse transactions completed while they control these networks, meaning they could double-spend the coins.
Fortunately, controls are built into these networks that prevent these so-called 51 percent attacks, where malicious actors with large amounts of computational power can temporarily control a cryptocurrency network. 
Why does Elon Musk care so much about cryptocurrency?
As a company, Tesla is only profitable because a significant portion of its income comes from selling Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). If its income were solely based on automobiles and solar panels’ production, the company would be posting hundreds of millions of dollars in losses per quarter. 
Tesla can sell these credits because, in 13 states, any auto manufacturer that wants to sell their cars in that state must also sell a certain amount of electric or zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs). If you sell enough electric cars, you get a credit with that state. If an automaker doesn’t sell ZEVs or doesn’t sell enough of them, it has to buy them from someone with that credit to make up the carbon deficit and sell cars in that state. 

Since Tesla sells a lot of electric cars, or rather, only electric vehicles, it has no reason to keep those credits; it can sell them to other automakers. These credits also expire, so it’s in Tesla’s best interest to unload them. With the sale of their surplus carbon credits, Tesla made about $428M in the second quarter of 2020 alone, beating their first-quarter sales of credits of $354M. 
Eventually, automakers like GM, Volkswagen, and Nissan will all be producing lots of electric cars and meeting their carbon credit quotas, which means that Tesla will need to find other ways of making money. It will need to sell more cars and more solar panels (which they could also use, presumably, to mine cryptocurrency in large farms).
Other than using their vehicles and technology to directly generate income — such as by creating an autonomous rideshare service, selling more of their batteries to third parties, or massively scaling out their solar roof production and becoming the market leader in that space — Tesla will need other sources of revenue when the carbon credit game evaporates.
Expanding the way people can pay for cars (and presumably, their panels and their batteries) is critical for Tesla to stay afloat financially. And people want to have avenues to spend that Bitcoin or Dogecoin or Ethereum or whatever.  Today, cryptocurrency is not unlike Amex points or airline travel credits — it exists and circulates within its own limited ecosystems; moving it out of those ecosystems to convert it into cash or use it as a direct method of payment is difficult. 
So being the car or tech manufacturer for cryptocurrency millionaires today gives them an edge, potentially a lifeline to staying profitable in the longer-term, when everyone with some crypto cash can use this new form of money as a down payment on a car or a solar array.
Does cryptocurrency have value, and can it be legitimized?
Tesla’s challenge is this: A currency only has value if it can be spent. Large investment banks like UBS are saying that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies don’t have intrinsic value. It isn’t legal tender like fiat currency issued by a nation-state. These banks characterize it as an underworld, sketchy thing with which they don’t want to be associated. Analysts at UBS also believe that the nature of cryptocurrency always having a fixed supply — meaning that currency supply cannot be restricted as a nation-state would do if the demand for a currency goes down, as with real money — is a severe economic flaw and could eventually cause the entire system to collapse. 
Fiat currencies have value because nation-states say they have value and agree to exchange their value with other nation-states. Likewise, there are cryptocurrency exchanges that allow for converting one’s holdings into cash, such as Coinbase and Kraken. For many, cryptocurrency investment is a long game, a gamble on the belief that they will eventually be intense competition for fiat currency or commodities like precious metals. 
There is also the issue of the currency’s seedy reputation, which has arisen from the type of black market goods — drugs, guns, and even financing North Korean nuclear weapons programs, for example — for which it’s become convenient tender because it’s an anonymous and utterly untraceable way of exchanging something that has intrinsic value. And with any emerging technology, some aggressive players want to get in early and control it with offensive use of patents in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.
There’s some hope on the horizon, though. Square, one of the leaders in merchant services aggregation and mobile payments, has founded COPA, a cryptocurrency patent alliance, to ensure that the ecosystem remains vibrant and open for developers and companies investing in the industry. Square has also invested $50M in Bitcoin because it believes it is an economic empowerment instrument and allows individuals and small businesses to participate in a global monetary system. Square is led by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a huge fan of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin who recently set up his own Bitcoin node. And while it has not done so yet, Twitter’s own CFO has suggested that the company may soon add Bitcoin to its balance sheet, as well. 
Despite large investment banks like UBS stating that cryptocurrencies aren’t good portfolio investment strategies for their clients, some large institutions are starting to get in on the cryptocurrency act. On February 10, Mastercard Inc., one of the largest financial services players, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp, one of the largest banks, announced they would make it easier for their customers to use cryptocurrencies. Mastercard will focus its support on the so-called “stable coins” tied to the value of other assets, such as the US dollar. In contrast, the Bank of New York said that it would transfer and issue Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for institutional customers.
As of this writing, few businesses accept cryptocurrency as a direct form of payment. For now, companies like Tesla are on the fringe, and unless we see lots of companies accept Bitcoin and other cryptos as a payment method, the company is essentially on its own here. But with Elon Musk’s stake in the ground, we may see other companies — particularly makers of luxury goods that are in lesser demand during this pandemic-hampered global economy — begin to accept crypto as payment and help to legitimize it as actual money.

Blockchain in the news More

Apple’s upcoming iOS 14.5 release will ship with a feature that will re-route all Safari’s Safe Browsing traffic through Apple-controlled proxy servers as a workaround to preserve user privacy and prevent Google from learning the IP addresses of iOS users.

The new feature, spotted by a Reddit user earlier this week and covered in a report from 8-bit, has been formally confirmed by Maciej Stachowiak, Head of Webkit Engineering at Apple.
The new feature will work only when users activate the “Fraudulent Website Warning” option in the iOS Safari app settings.
This enables support for Google’s Safe Browsing technology in Safari. The Safe Browsing technology works by taking an URL the user is trying to access, sending the URL in an anonymized state to Google’s Safe Browsing servers, where Google accesses the site and scans for threats.
If malware, phishing forms, or other threats are found on the site, Google tells the user’s Safari browser to block access to the site and show a fullscreen red warning.
While years ago, when Google launched the Safe Browsing API, the company knew what sites a user was accessing; in recent years, Google has taken several steps to anonymize data sent from user’s devices via the Safe Browsing feature.
But while Google has anonymized URL strings, by sending the link in a cropped and hashed state, Google still sees the IP address from where a Safe Browsing check comes through.

Apple’s new feature basically takes all these Safe Browsing checks and passes them through an Apple-owned proxy server, making all requests appear as coming from the same IP address.
Many would call the move useless, as Google would still be unable to see what URL the user was checking, but the feature is consistent with other measures Apple has been taking lately, focusing on improving its users’ privacy.
Many of these features have often encroached and disturbed Google’s huge presence in the user analytics and tracking sector.
This includes pioneering broad anti-tracking features in Safari, and forcing app makers to add “privacy labels” to their App Store listings, a requirement that Google has mysteriously avoided by simply not updating any of its apps since last year.
iOS 14.5 is currently in beta and is expected to be released in the coming months. More

Berlin, Germany-based SaaS platform Adjust has released its dating app marketing guide. The guide has benchmarks, spotlights on industry leaders, and has tips on how app developers can retain users by the use of gender targeting, and in-app video streaming.

Over 270 million adults worldwide used dating apps in 2020 and almost two in five (39%) of US adults reported meeting their partner online. However, a major risk to an app’s reputation is the presence of bots on the platform which frustrate the users or exposes them to scams. Fake accounts are generated on a huge scale to engage users and spread spam, link to illicit or explicit sites, or lure people into scams or faker likes to boost specific profiles.
Adjust’s report shows that dating app installs and sessions are at their highest on weekends — Saturdays, in particular. App session length tends to spike early for dating apps, suggesting that users download the app, and quickly match with potential partners.
The buzz and excitement of the app start to drop off toward day 30. Additionally, the report shows that Europeans spend significantly more time in-app than North American or Asian consumers.
Sensor Towers
US dating app downloads have grown to reach a hew high in Q1 2020, despite COVID-19, according to Sensor Towers’ State of Dating apps report, which also shows that younger users are turning to dating apps during the pandemic.
Although the average age for dating apps steadily declined in recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend in early 2020. The average user age among the top dating apps was around 27.2 years old during the first three quarters of 2020 before jumping back up to 28.2 in Q4. School closures and social distancing orders increased demand among a younger user base.
Unfortunately, dating apps are a hotspot for fake accounts that are trying to scam you. Adjust’s Unbotify feature shows that bots can interact with up to 4,000 profiles within one session. In 2019, the FBI received over 467,000 cybercrime complaints that caused over $35 billion in losses. Approximately 19,473 of those were victims of confidence or romance scams.

So, how can dating app developers reduce the risk for their users? Well, apart from designing the app so that it does not use location-specific advice to track user movements, app developers could include a ‘report’ button so that users can point out when they have interacted with a bot so that it can be eliminated from the platform.
Developers can also use biometric indicators to differentiate bots from real human users and eliminate them from the platform. Users should get smarter about who they interact with and how much information they give away.
You never know, that fabulous potential new partner might be a bot designed to trick you out of your money and break your heart, too. More

British Virgin Islands-based VPN service ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab has released a new report revealing the prominence of location tracker SDKs in dating apps.
Your online privacy is becoming a big deal as apps and business websites track you without your permission and target you due to the information you provide online. But the prominence of questionable location trackers is proliferating among the dating apps you use.
Location data is commonly harvested from your smartphone. It can enrich user-profiles and provide insights into user behavior via intimate details about a user’s movements. Data collected by location and proximity sensors could end up in the hands of law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and military organizations. This massive amount of data about the movements of populations can threaten the privacy of ordinary people around the globe with potential human rights issues.

ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab worked with Esther Onfroy of the Defensive Lab Agency and used the app scanner provided by Exodus Privacy to analyze 450 apps across messaging, gaming, social, and shopping apps used by everyday consumers.
It used a combination of automated tools and manual analysis, to determine whether there are “signatures,” or identifying information, for a tracker in an app’s code, gathering other interesting information such as network endpoints that the app may communicate with.
To do this, it downloaded and unpacked each app installer, disassembled machine language into human-readable source code, searched the source code for tracker signatures and other identifiers, and correlated its findings with web databases, public information, and app stores.
It found that all apps that it analyzed contained questionable trackers. These apps collectively have been downloaded at least 1.7 billion times by consumers globally.

It identified 64 dating apps that have been downloaded at least 52 million times globally. These location trackers are associated with several companies such as X-Mode (subject to a ban by Apple and Google), OneAudience, and Predicio, amongst others, which have repeatedly been called out for privacy violations.

X-mode appeared in 44% (199) of all 450 apps analyzed. Despite the ban, only 10% of these apps have been removed from Google Play.
These dating apps remain available for mass download at the end of January 2021 on the Google Play Store and specifically target a range of sexual orientations and dating preferences, as well as a large assortment of national, ethnic, and racial groups.
These include apps such as Jack’d – Gay Chat & Dating (five million downloads), FEM – Free Lesbian Dating App, Chat and Meet Singles (one million downloads), Encore – Single Parents and Divorced Dating and Chat (500,000 downloads), Black Dating – Meet Online Black Singles Nearby (100,000 downloads), and Asian Mingle – Free Asian Dating and Singles Chat (100,000 downloads).
They also cover more generic dating apps like Mingle2, which claims to have over 39 million members.
There is a growing threat to consumer privacy. When you download an app, you can not take advantage of privacy-protecting searches like Xayn, you are at the mercy of the app. Many apps will not work without location services, and some updates turn settings back on stealthily.
But do you live a life without the apps that bring you joy and keep your location secret, or do you accept that this data may, one day, be used against you in some way? The choice is yours. More

Russian search engine and email provider Yandex said today that it caught one of its employees selling access to user email accounts for personal gains.
The company, which did not disclose the employee’s name, said the person was “one of three system administrators with the necessary access rights to provide technical support” for its Yandex.Mail service.
The Russian company said it’s now in the process of notifying the owners of the 4,887 mailboxes that were compromised and to which the employee sold access to third-parties.
Yandex officials also said they re-secured the compromised accounts and blocked what appeared to be unauthorized logins. They are now asking impacted account owners to change their passwords.
Incident discovered during a routine check
Yandex said it discovered the incident during a “routine screening” by its internal security team but did not elaborate.
The Russian company said that a “thorough internal investigation” of the incident is currently underway and that it plans to make changes to how its administrator staff can access user data.
It also said that there was no evidence to suggest that user payment data was accessed during the recent incident.

While the Russian tech giant said it referred the incident to authorities, a spokesperson did not return a request for comment from ZDNet seeking additional details about the employee and the incident. More

Image: Microsoft
Microsoft says the number of malicious web shells installed on web servers has almost doubled since its last count, last year in August 2020.

In a blog post yesterday, the Redmond company said it detected roughly 140,000 web shells per month between August 2020 and January 2021, up from the 77,000 average it reported last year.
The number has increased as a result of a shift in how hackers view web shells. Once considered a tool for script kiddies defacing websites and the go-to tool of DDoS botnet operators, web shells are now part of the arsenal of ransomware gangs and nation-state hackers alike and are crucial tools used in complex intrusions.
Two of the reasons they have become so popular is their versatility and access they provide to hacked servers.
Web shells, which are nothing more than simple scripts, can be written in almost any programming language that runs on a web server —such as PHP, ASP, JSP, or JS— and such, can be easily hidden inside a website’s source code. This makes detecting them a difficult operation, which often involves a manual analysis from a human operator.
In addition, web shells provide hackers with a simple way to execute commands on a hacked server via a graphical or command-line interface, providing attackers with a simple way to escalate attacks.
Web shells more prevalent as more servers are put online
As the corporate IT space has moved towards hybrid cloud environments, the number of companies running web servers has increased over the past few years, and, in many cases, public-facing servers often have direct connections to internal networks.

As Microsoft’s stats have shown, attackers appear to have figured out this change in the makeup of corporate IT networks as well, and have amped up their attacks on public-facing systems.
Web shells now play a crucial role in their attacks, providing a way to control the hacked server and then orchestrate a pivot to a target’s internal network.
These types of attacks are exactly what the US National Security Agency warned about in April 2020 when it published a list of 25 vulnerabilities that were often used to install web shells.
The NSA report didn’t just warn about web shells used on public-facing systems but also about their use inside internal networks, where they’re used as proxies to jump to non-public-facing systems.
Microsoft urges companies to re-prioritize their approach to dealing with web shells, which are slowly becoming one of today’s biggest security threat. As ways to keep networks secure, the OS maker recommends a few basic actions:
Patch public-facing systems, as most web shells are installed after attackers exploit unpatched vulnerabilities.
Extend antivirus protections to web servers, not just employee workstations.
Network segmentation to limit the damage of an infected server to a small array of systems and not the entire network.
Audit and review logs from web servers frequently, especially for public-facing systems, which are more vulnerable to scans and attacks.
Practice good credential hygiene. Limit the use of accounts with local or domain admin level privileges.
Check your perimeter firewall and proxy to restrict unnecessary access to services, including access to services through non-standard ports. More

Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR) officially launched on July 1 with the first tranche, an open banking-like regime, requiring financial services providers to share a customers’ data when requested by the customer.
While the first tranche of the CDR applies to the financial services industry, energy and telecommunications will soon join the regime.
Read more: Australia’s Consumer Data Right: Here’s everything you need to know
Data can only be shared with accredited data recipients (ADRs). But of concern to Australian Information and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk is that “big tech” has the ability to apply for ADR status.
“It’s currently open to large technology and social media companies to apply to be accredited as data recipients in the CDR scheme, however, I understand that none are currently accredited and I’m not aware of any specific use cases as to why they may wish to engage, so in a sense, I’m speaking in the abstract,” she said.
Appearing before the Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology on Friday, Falk said one of the strong protections in the CDR system is consumer consent and the ability for individuals to exercise choice and control about how their data is handled.
She’s concerned that this may also give the technology giants access to more data than they already have.

“I think because of the rich data holdings that are held by some of the social media platforms, care would need to be taken to ensure that individuals understand what they’re consenting to if their Consumer Data Right information were to be combined with that [which is] perhaps is on their social media profile,” Falk said.
“Some of the risks I think are around the insights that could be derived from that information and it could include sensitive information and be used in ways that individuals might not expect.”
See also: NZ Privacy Commissioner labels Facebook as ‘morally bankrupt pathological liars’
She pondered whether the committee consider that a digital platform should have access to all data, or whether there be a condition that it not be combined with sensitive data the organisation may already hold.
“There’s other issues around the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence in the combining of data that may lack transparency for consumers and be difficult to explain … [they are] some of the challenges with having fully informed and freely given consent when you enter into very complex data handling arrangements,” she added.
Individuals have the ability to make a complaint if they feel that their personal information has not been handled in accordance with the legislative requirements, and the OAIC has had 20 “contacts” in relation to the CDR system.
“We have a triaging role so that consumers who are engaging in the system don’t need to navigate government in order to make a complaint or make an inquiry, so they’ll come to our office and we’ll triage them to the appropriate entity,” deputy commissioner Elizabeth Hampton explained.
She said of those 20 contacts, the OAIC has had two complaints and eight inquiries for its office; and nine inquiries and one “report” that have been sent to the ACCC.
While those numbers are low, Falk said they reflect the number of people engaged in the system, expecting the number to grow alongside scheme uptake.
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