Information Technology

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.
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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

Security firm Kaspersky said today that it discovered a Linux version of the RansomEXX ransomware, marking the first time a major Windows ransomware strain has been ported to Linux to aid in targeted intrusions.

RansomEXX is a relatively new ransomware strain that was first spotted earlier this year in June.
The ransomware has been used in attacks against the Texas Department of Transportation, Konica Minolta, US government contractor Tyler Technologies, Montreal’s public transportation system, and, most recently, against Brazil’s court system (STJ).
RansomEXX is what security researchers call a “big-game hunter” or “human-operated ransomware.” These two terms are used to describe ransomware groups that hunt large targets in search for big paydays, knowing that some companies or government agencies can’t afford to stay down while they recover their systems.
These groups buy access or breach networks themselves, expand access to as many systems as possible, and then manually deploy their ransomware binary as a final payload to cripple as much of the target’s infrastructure as possible.
But over the past year, there has been a paradigm shift into how these groups operate.
Many ransomware gangs have realized that attacking workstations first isn’t a lucrative deal, as companies will tend to re-image affected systems and move on without paying ransoms.

In recent months, in many incidents, some ransomware gangs haven’t bothered encrypting workstations, and have first and foremost, targeted crucial servers inside a company’s network, knowing that by taking down these systems first, companies wouldn’t be able to access their centralized data troves, even if workstations were unaffected.
The RansomEXX gang creating a Linux version of their Windows ransomware is in tune with how many companies operate today, with many firms running internal systems on Linux, and not always on Windows Server.
A Linux version makes perfect sense from an attacker’s perspective; always looking to expand and touch as much core infrastructure as possible in their quest to cripple companies and demand higher ransoms.
What we see from RansomEXX may soon turn out to be an industry-defining trend, with other big ransomware groups rolling out their Linux versions in the future as well.
And, this trend appears to have already begun. According to cyber-security firm Emsisoft, besides RansomEXX, the Mespinoza (Pysa) ransomware gang has also recently developed a Linux variant from their initial Windows version.
But Linux ransomware is also not unique. In the past years, other ransomware gangs have created Linux ransomware strains as well, such as the Snatch group. However, those groups were small-time operations that relied on spam campaigns to infect victims, were rarely successful, and did not engage in targeted intrusions like the current generation of ransomware groups we see today.
Emsisoft says the RansomEXX Linux variants they’ve detected were seen as far back as July. Configuring systems to detect RansomEXX Linux variants isn’t a solid strategy because of the way big-game hunter ransomware crews operate. By the time attackers deploy the ransomware, they already own most of a company’s network. The best strategy companies can take against these types of intrusions is to secure network perimeters by applying security patches to gateway devices and by making sure they are not misconfigured with weak or default credentials.
Technical details about the RansomEXX Linux variant are available in the Kaspersky report. More

Hackers used previously unknown tools in a cyber espionage campaign targeting defence and aerospace companies in a social engineering and phishing campaign which is more widely targeted than first thought.
Researchers at McAfee first detailed Operation North Star earlier this year, but further analysis of reveals additional tactics and techniques of the campaign which has almost identical elements to Hidden Cobra – AKA The Lazarus Group – a hacking operation which the US government and others say is working out of North Korea on behalf of the government in Pyongyang.
The campaign is still based around spear-phishing emails and LinkedIn messages which pose as job recruitment messages in an effort to lure victims into opening malicious attachments. Hackers even used legitimate recruitment adverts and documents taken from popular US defence contractor websites to make the emails look more authentic.
But now additional analysis by McAfee has revealed how the attackers use two stages of malware implants. All targets are compromised with the first stage of malware, which allows attackers to gather data including disk information, free disk space, computer name and logged in username and process information.
The hackers analyse this information to determine if the victim is high value enough to continue to with an attack – if the victim isn’t deemed important enough, the machine is sidelined while the attackers focus on distributing a second stage malware to victims deemed more worthwhile of attention.
SEE: A winning strategy for cybersecurity (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)
The second stage uses a previously known implant called Torisma, a custom-developed tool focused on specialised monitoring of high value victims’ systems, looking to gain access to login credentials and remote desktop sessions – all while remaining undetected.

“What is clear is that the campaign’s objective was to establish a long-term, persistent espionage campaign focused on specific individuals in possession of strategically valuable technology from key countries around the world,” McAfee researchers said in a blog post.
For Operation North Star, this meant researching specific target victims and created custom content to lure victims in, then infecting them with malware in an effort to commit espionage.
Initial reporting of the campaign detailed attacks against targets in the US, but those weren’t the only ones hackers were looking to compromise – analysis of the attacks has revealed that defence and technology contractors in Israel, Russia, India and Australia have also been targeted by this campaign.
“The actors behind the campaign were more sophisticated than they initially appeared. They are focused and deliberate in what they meant to achieve and more disciplined and patient in executing to achieve their objective,” said researchers.
Cyber espionage isn’t the only form of cyber attacks that North Korea is involved in; hackers working on behalf of Pyongyang regularly steal cryptocurrency to get around internatioanl sanctons. North Korea was also blamed for the WannaCry ransomware outbreak.
READ MORE ON CYBERSECURITY More

Image: Check Point
Several companies and large corporations from Israel have been breached and had their systems encrypted using a new strain of ransomware named Pay2Key, in what appears to be a targeted attack against Israeli networks.

The first attacks were seen in late October but have now grown in numbers while also remaining contained to Israel.
“As days go by, more of the reported ransomware attacks turn out to be related to the new Pay2Key ransomware,” Israeli cyber-security firm Check Point said in a security alert published today.
According to the company, attacks usually happened after midnight, when companies have fewer IT employees at work.
The initial entry point for all intrusions is currently believed to be weakly secured RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) services.
Access to company networks appears to have been obtained “some time before the attack,” but once the ransomware crew begins its intrusion, it usually takes them an hour to spread to the entire network and encrypt files.
To avoid having their activities detected, the Pay2Key operators usually set up a pivot point on the local network, through which they proxy all their communications to reduce their detectable network footprint.

Once the encryption ends, ransom notes are left on the hacked systems, with the Pay2Key gang usually asking for payments of 7 to 9 bitcoins (~$110K-$140K).
Based on current analysis, Check Point said the encryption scheme appears to be solid (using the AES and RSA algorithms), which unfortunately has prevented the company from creating a free decrypter for victims.
Researchers say the ransomware has been created from scratch, with no overlaps with other known ransomware strains, and appears to have been named “Cobalt” during a previous/development phase.
Some sleuthing from the Check Point team has also linked the ransomware to a Keybase account using the same Pay2Key name, registered earlier this year in June, but it is currently unclear who developed the ransomware and why are they targeting only Israeli companies. More