01/26/2023-02/01/2023. GitHub Breach, Vulnerabilities Uncovered in AMI MegaRAC BMC Software, New Python-based RAT And More

1. GitHub Breach: Hackers Stole Code-Signing Certificates for GitHub Desktop and Atom

GitHub disclosed that unknown threat actors managed to exfiltrate encrypted code signing certificates pertaining to some versions of GitHub Desktop for Mac and Atom apps. As a result, the company is taking the step of revoking the exposed certificates out of abundance of caution. The following versions of GitHub Desktop for Mac have been invalidated: 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, 3.0.5, 3.0.6, 3.0.7, 3.0.8, 3.1.0, 3.1.1, and 3.1.2. Versions 1.63.0 and 1.63.1 of 1.63.0 of Atom are also expected to stop working as of February 2, 2023, requiring that users downgrade to a previous version (1.60.0) of the source code editor. Atom was officially discontinued in December 2022. GitHub Desktop for Windows is not affected.

2. Additional Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Uncovered in AMI MegaRAC BMC Software

Two more supply chain security flaws have been disclosed in AMI MegaRAC Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) software, nearly two months after three security vulnerabilities were brought to light in the same product. Firmware security firm Eclypsium said the two shortcomings were held back until now to provide AMI additional time to engineer appropriate mitigations. The issues, collectively tracked as BMC&C, could act as springboard for cyber attacks, enabling threat actors to obtain remote code execution and unauthorized device access with superuser permissions.The two new flaws in question are as follows: CVE-2022-26872 (CVSS score: 8.3) – ​​Password reset interception via API; CVE-2022-40258 (CVSS score: 5.3) – Weak password hashes for Redfish and API.
It’s worth pointing out that the weaknesses are exploitable only in scenarios where the BMCs are exposed to the internet or in cases where the threat actor has already gained initial access into a data center or administrative network by other methods.

3. ISC Releases Security Patches for New BIND DNS Software Vulnerabilities

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released patches to address multiple security vulnerabilities in the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) 9 Domain Name System (DNS) software suite that could lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to potentially cause denial-of-service conditions and system failures. The open source software is used by major financial firms, national and international carriers, internet service providers (ISPs), retailers and government entities. All four flaws reside in named, a BIND9 service that functions as an authoritative nameserver for a fixed set of DNS zones or as a recursive resolver for clients on a local network. Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could cause the named service to crash or exhaust available memory on a target server. The issues affect versions 9.16.0 to 9.16.36, 9.18.0 to 9.18.10, 9.19.0 to 9.19.8, and 9.16.8-S1 to 9.16.36-S1. CVE-2022-3488 also impacts BIND Supported Preview Edition versions 9.11.4-S1 to 9.11.37-S1. They have been resolved in versions 9.16.37, 9.18.11, 9.19.9, and 9.16.37-S1.

4. PY#RATION: New Python-based RAT Uses WebSocket for C2 and Data Exfiltration

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a new attack campaign that leverages a Python-based remote access trojan (RAT) to gain control over compromised systems. This malware is unique in its utilization of WebSockets to avoid detection and for both command-and-control (C2) communication and exfiltration. The malware, dubbed PY#RATION by the cybersecurity firm, comes with a host of capabilities that allows the threat actor to harvest sensitive information. Later versions of the backdoor also sport anti-evasion techniques, suggesting that it’s being actively developed and maintained. 
Two versions of the trojan have been detected (version 1.0 and 1.6), with nearly 1,000 lines of code added to the newer variant to support network scanning features to conduct a reconnaissance of the compromised network and conceal the Python code behind an encryption layer using the fernet module. Other noteworthy functionalities comprise the ability to transfer files from host to C2 or vice versa, record keystrokes, execute system commands, extract passwords and cookies from web browsers, capture clipboard data, and check for the presence of antivirus software.

5. Realtek Vulnerability Under Attack: Over 134 Million Attempts to Hack IoT Devices

Researchers are warning about a spike in exploitation attempts weaponizing a now-patched critical remote code execution flaw in Realtek Jungle SDK since the start of August 2022.  The ongoing campaign is said to have recorded 134 million exploit attempts as of December 2022, with 97% of the attacks occurring in the past four months. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2021-35394 (CVSS score: 9.8), a set of buffer overflows and an arbitrary command injection bug that could be weaponized to execute arbitrary code with the highest level of privilege and take over affected appliances. Unit 42 said it discovered three different kinds of payloads distributed as a result of in-the-wild exploitation of the flaw: 

• A script executes a shell command on the targeted server to download additional malware;
• An injected command that writes a binary payload to a file and executes it;
• An injected command that directly reboots the targeted server to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.

6. QNAP Fixes Critical Bug Letting Hackers Inject Malicious Code

QNAP is warning customers to install QTS and QuTS firmware updates that fix a critical security vulnerability allowing remote attackers to inject malicious code on QNAP NAS devices.
The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-27596 and rated by the company as ‘Critical’ (CVSS v3 score: 9.8), impacting QTS 5.0.1 and QuTS hero h5.0.1 versions of the operating system. If exploited, this vulnerability allows remote attackers to inject malicious code. SQL injection flaws allow attackers to send specially crafted requests on vulnerable devices to modify legitimate SQL queries to perform unexpected behavior. Furthermore, QNAP released a JSON file describing the severity of the vulnerability, which indicates it is exploitable in low-complexity attacks by remote attackers, without requiring user interaction or privileges on the targeted device.
Recommendation 
QNAP users  should download the update from QNAP’s Download Center after selecting the correct product type and model and applying it manually on their devices.

7. Researchers Release PoC Exploit for Windows CryptoAPI Bug Discovered by NSA

Proof-of-concept (Poc) code has been released for a now-patched high-severity security flaw in the Windows CryptoAPI that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) reported to Microsoft last year. An attacker could manipulate an existing public x.509 certificate to spoof their identity and perform actions such as authentication or code signing as the targeted certificate. The Windows CryptoAPI offers an interface for developers to add cryptographic services such as encryption/decryption of data and authentication using digital certificates to their applications. CVE-2022-34689 is rooted in the fact that the vulnerable piece of code that’s designed to accept an x.509 certificate carried out a check that solely relied on the certificate’s MD5 fingerprint. MD5, a message-digest algorithm used for hashing, is essentially cryptographically broken as of December 2008 owing to the risk of birthday attacks, a cryptanalytic method used to find collisions in a hash function. The net effect of this shortcoming is that it opens the door for a bad actor to serve a modified version of a legitimate certificate to a victim app, and then create a new certificate whose MD5 hash collides with the rigged certificate and use it to masquerade as the original entity.

01/19/2023-01/25/2023. New Microsoft Azure Vulnerability, Git Users Urged to Update Software, Fortinet Flaw, 75k WordPress Sites Impacted By Critical Online Course Plugin Flaws, And More

1. Threat Actors Turn to Sliver as Open Source Alternative to Popular C2 Frameworks

The legitimate command-and-control (C2) framework known as Sliver is gaining more traction from threat actors as it emerges as an open source alternative to Cobalt Strike and Metasploit. Sliver, developed by cybersecurity company BishopFox, is a Golang-based cross-platform post-exploitation framework that’s designed to be used by security professionals in their red team operations. Its myriad features for adversary simulation – including dynamic code generation, in-memory payload execution, and process injection – have also made it an appealing tool for threat actors looking to gain elevated access to the target system upon gaining an initial foothold. A hypothetical attack sequence detailed by the Israeli cybersecurity company shows that Sliver could be leveraged for privilege escalation, following it up by credential theft and lateral movement to ultimately take over the domain controller for exfiltration of sensitive data. Sliver has been weaponized in recent years by the Russia-linked APT29 group (aka Cozy Bear) as well as cybercrime operators like Shathak (aka TA551) and Exotic Lily (aka Projector Libra), the latter of which is attributed to the Bumblebee malware loader.

2. New Microsoft Azure Vulnerability Uncovered — EmojiDeploy for RCE Attacks

A new critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw discovered impacting multiple services related to Microsoft Azure could be exploited by a malicious actor to completely take control of a targeted application. The vulnerability is achieved through CSRF (cross-site request forgery) on the ubiquitous SCM service Kudu. By abusing the vulnerability, attackers can deploy malicious ZIP files containing a payload to the victim’s Azure application. It could further enable the theft of sensitive data and lateral movement to other Azure services. Microsoft has since fixed the vulnerability as of December 6, 2022, following responsible disclosure on October 26, 2022, in addition to awarding a bug bounty of $30,000. In a hypothetical attack chain devised by Ermetic, an adversary could exploit the CSRF vulnerability in the Kudu SCM panel to defeat safeguards put in place to thwart cross-origin attacks by issuing a specially crafted request to the “/api/zipdeploy” endpoint to deliver a malicious archive (e. g., web shell) and gain remote access.

3. Git Users Urged to Update Software to Prevent Remote Code Execution Attacks

The maintainers of the Git source code version control system have released updates to remediate two critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a malicious actor to achieve remote code execution. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-23521 and CVE-2022-41903, impacts the following versions of Git: v2.30.6, v2.31.5, v2.32.4, v2.33.5, v2.34.5, v2.35.5, v2.36.3, v2.37.4, v2.38.2, and v2.39.0. Patched versions include v2.30.7, v2.31.6, v2.32.5, v2.33.6, v2.34.6, v2.35.6, v2.36.4, v2.37.5, v2.38.3, and v2.39.1. The most severe issue discovered allows an attacker to trigger a heap-based memory corruption during clone or pull operations, which might result in code execution. CVE-2022-41903, also a critical vulnerability, is triggered during an archive operation, leading to code execution by way of an integer overflow flaw that arises when formatting the commit logs. 
Recommendation 
While there are no workarounds for CVE-2022-23521, Git is recommending that users disable “git archive” in untrusted repositories as a mitigation for CVE-2022-41903 in scenarios where updating to the latest version is not an option.

4. GoTo Says Hackers Stole Customers’ Backups And Encryption Key

GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) is warning customers that threat actors who breached its development environment in November 2022 stole encrypted backups containing customer information and an encryption key for a portion of that data. At the time, the impact on the client data had yet to become known as the company’s investigation into the incident with the help of cybersecurity firm Mandiant had just begun. The attack affected backups relating to the Central and Pro product tiers stored in a third-party cloud storage facility.
The information present in the exfiltrated backups includes the following:

• Central and Pro account usernames
• Central and Pro account passwords (salted and hashed)
• Deployment and provisioning information
• One-to-Many scripts (Central only)
• Multi-factor authentication information
• Licensing and purchasing data like emails, phone numbers, billing address, and last four digits of credit card numbers.
  In response to the situation, GoTo is resetting Central and Pro passwords for impacted customers and automatically migrates accounts to GoTo’s enhanced Identity Management Platform.

5. VMware Fixes Critical Security Bugs In vRealize Log Analysis Tool

VMware released security patches to address vRealize Log Insight vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to gain remote execution on unpatched appliances. The first critical bug patched today is tracked as CVE-2022-31703 and is described as a directory traversal vulnerability that malicious actors can exploit to inject files into the operating system of impacted appliances to achieve remote code execution. The second one (tracked as CVE-2022-31704) is a broken access control flaw that can also be abused to gain remote code execution on vulnerable appliances by injecting maliciously crafted files. Both vulnerabilities are tagged as critical severity with CVSS base scores of 9.8/10 and can be exploited by unauthenticated threat actors in low-complexity attacks that don’t require user interaction. The company said the vulnerabilities were addressed with VMware vRealize Log Insight 8.10.2. None of the security bugs addressed today were tagged as being exploited in the wild.

6.  75k WordPress Sites Impacted By Critical Online Course Plugin Flaws

The WordPress online course plugin ‘LearnPress’ was vulnerable to multiple critical-severity flaws, including pre-auth SQL injection and local file inclusion. The vulnerabilities in the plugin, used in over 100,000 active sites, were discovered by PatchStack between November 30 and December 2, 2022, and reported to the software vendor. The issues were fixed on December 20, 2022, with the release of LearnPress version 4.2.0. However, according to WordPress.org stats, only about 25% have applied the update. This means that roughly 75,000 websites could be using a vulnerable version of LearnPress, exposing themselves to severe security flaws, the exploitation of which can have serious repercussions. 

01/12/2023-01/18/2023. Hackers Can Abuse Legitimate GitHub Codespaces, 3 PyPI Packages Spreading Malware, Zoho ManageEngine PoC Exploit to be Released, And More

1. Hackers Can Abuse Legitimate GitHub Codespaces Feature to Deliver Malware

New research has found that it is possible for threat actors to abuse a legitimate feature in GitHub Codespaces to deliver malware to victim systems. Publicly-shared forwarded ports could be exploited to create a malicious file server using a GitHub account. In a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, a threat actor could create a codespace and download malware from an attacker-controlled domain to the environment, and set the visibility of the forwarded port to public, essentially transforming the application to act as a web server hosting rogue payloads. Even more troublingly, the adversary can augment this method to deploy malware and compromise a victim’s environment since each codespace domain associated with the exposed port is unique and unlikely to be flagged by security tools as a malicious domain. Using such scripts, attackers can easily abuse GitHub Codespaces in serving malicious content at a rapid rate by exposing ports publicly on their codespace environments.

2. Researchers Uncover 3 PyPI Packages Spreading Malware to Developer Systems

A threat actor by the name Lolip0p has uploaded three rogue packages to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that are designed to drop malware on compromised developer systems. The packages – named colorslib (versions 4.6.11 and 4.6.12), httpslib (versions 4.6.9 and 4.6.11), and libhttps (version 4.6.12). They have since been yanked from PyPI but not before they were cumulatively downloaded over 550 times. The modules come with identical setup scripts that are designed to invoke PowerShell and run a malicious binary (“Oxzy.exe”) hosted on Dropbox. The executable, once launched, triggers the retrieval of a next-stage, also a binary named update.exe, that runs in the Windows temporary folder (“%USER%\AppData\Local\Temp\”). update.exe is flagged by antivirus vendors on VirusTotal as an information stealer that’s also capable of dropping additional binaries, one of which is detected by Microsoft as Wacatac. The Windows maker describes the trojan as a threat that “can perform a number of actions of a malicious hacker’s choice on your PC”. 

3. Zoho ManageEngine PoC Exploit to be Released Soon – Patch Before It’s Too Late!

Users of Zoho ManageEngine are being urged to patch their instances against a critical security vulnerability ahead of the release of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code. The issue in question is CVE-2022-47966, an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability affecting several products due to the use of an outdated third-party dependency, Apache Santuario. This vulnerability allows an unauthenticated adversary to execute arbitrary code. Horizon3.ai has now released Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) associated with the flaw, stating that it was able to successfully reproduce the exploit against ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and ManageEngine Endpoint Central products. An attacker in possession of such elevated privileges could weaponize it to steal credentials with the goal of conducting lateral movement. 

4. Microsoft Azure Services Flaws Could’ve Exposed Cloud Resources to Unauthorized Access

Four different Microsoft Azure services have been found vulnerable to server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks that could be exploited to gain unauthorized access to cloud resources. The security issues in Azure API Management, Azure Functions, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Digital Twins, have since been addressed by Microsoft. The discovered Azure SSRF vulnerabilities allowed an attacker to scan local ports, find new services, endpoints, and sensitive files – providing valuable information on possibly vulnerable servers and services to exploit for initial entry and the location of sensitive information to target. SSRF attacks could have serious consequences as they enable a malicious interloper to read or update internal resources, and worse, pivot to other parts of the network, breach otherwise unreachable systems to extract valuable data. 
Recommendation 
To mitigate such threats, organizations are recommended to validate all input, ensure that servers are configured to only allow necessary inbound and outbound traffic, avoid misconfigurations, and adhere to the principle of least privilege (PoLP). 

5. Cacti Servers Under Attack as Majority Fail to Patch Critical Vulnerability

A majority of internet-exposed Cacti servers have not been patched against a recently patched critical security vulnerability that has come under active exploitation in the wild. That’s according to attack surface management platform Censys, which found only 26 out of a total of 6,427 servers to be running a patched version of Cacti (1.2.23 and 1.3.0). The issue in question relates to CVE-2022-46169 (CVSS score: 9.8), a combination of authentication bypass and command injection that enables an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on an affected version of the open-source, web-based monitoring solution. The public disclosure of the vulnerability has also led to “exploitation attempts,” with the Shadowserver Foundation and GreyNoise warning of malicious attacks originating from one IP address located in Ukraine so far.

6. Raccoon and Vidar Stealers Spreading via Massive Network of Fake Cracked Software

A “large and resilient infrastructure” comprising over 250 domains is being used to distribute information-stealing malware such as Raccoon and Vidar since early 2020. The infection chain uses about a hundred of fake cracked software catalogue websites that redirect to several links before downloading the payload hosted on file share platforms, such as GitHub. The attacks target users searching for cracked versions of software and games on search engines like Google, surfacing fraudulent websites on top by leveraging a technique called search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning to lure victims into downloading and executing the malicious payloads. The poisoned result comes with a download link to the promised software that, upon clicking, triggers a five-stage URL redirection sequence to take the user to a web page displaying a shortened link, which points to a password-protected RAR archive file hosted on GitHub, along with its password. Should the victim uncompress the RAR archive and run the purported setup executable contained within it, either of the two malware families, Raccoon or Vidar, are installed on the system. Users are advised to refrain from downloading pirated software and enforce multi-factor authentication wherever possible to harden accounts. 

7. Alert: Hackers Actively Exploiting Critical “Control Web Panel” RCE Vulnerability

Malicious actors are actively attempting to exploit a recently patched critical vulnerability in Control Web Panel (CWP) that enables elevated privileges and unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on susceptible servers. Tracked as CVE-2022-44877 (CVSS score: 9.8), the bug impacts all versions of the software before 0.9.8.1147 and was patched by its maintainers on October 25, 2022. Control Web Panel, formerly known as CentOS Web Panel, is a popular server administration tool for enterprise-based Linux systems. “login/index.php in CWP (aka Control Web Panel or CentOS Web Panel) 7 before 0.9.8.1147 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands via shell metacharacters in the login parameter. In light of active exploitation in the wild, users reliant on the software are advised to apply the patches to mitigate potential threats.