23-30.11.2022. Critical Oracle Fusion Middleware Vulnerability, Docker Hub Repositories Hide Malicious Containers, Vulnerability in Amazon Web Services And More.

1. CISA Warns of Actively Exploited Critical Oracle Fusion Middleware Vulnerability

 The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a critical flaw impacting Oracle Fusion Middleware to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-35587, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and impacts Oracle Access Manager (OAM) versions 11.1.2.3.0, 12.2.1.3.0, and 12.2.1.4.0. Successful exploitation of the remote command execution bug could enable an unauthenticated attacker with network access to completely compromise and take over Access Manager instances. It may give the attacker access to OAM server, to create any user with any privileges, or just get code execution in the victim’s server. Additional details regarding the nature of the attacks and the scale of the exploitation efforts are immediately unclear.

2. Docker Hub Repositories Hide Over 1,650 Malicious Containers

Over 1,600 publicly available Docker Hub images hide malicious behavior, including cryptocurrency miners, embedded secrets that can be used as backdoors, DNS hijackers, and website redirectors. Over a thousand malicious uploads introduce severe risks to unsuspecting users deploying malware-laden images on locally hosted or cloud-based containers. Many malicious images use names that disguise them as popular and trustworthy projects, so threat actors clearly uploaded them to trick users into downloading them.
Apart from images reviewed by the Docker Library Project, which are verified to be trustworthy, hundreds of thousands of images with an unknown status are on the service. Sysdig used its automated scanners to scrutinize 250,000 unverified Linux images and identified 1,652 of them as malicious.

3. Researchers Detail AppSync Cross-Tenant Vulnerability in Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has resolved a cross-tenant vulnerability in its platform that could be weaponized by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to resources. The issue relates to a confused deputy problem, a type of privilege escalation where a program that doesn’t have permission to perform an action can coerce a more-privileged entity to perform the action.
Amazon said that no customers were affected by the vulnerability and that no customer action is required. It described it as a “case-sensitivity parsing issue within AWS AppSync, which could potentially be used to bypass the service’s cross-account role usage validations and take action as the service across customer accounts.” AWS AppSync offers developers GraphQL APIs to retrieve or modify data from multiple data sources as well as automatically sync data between mobile and web applications and the cloud. While AWS does have safeguards in place to prevent AppSync from assuming arbitrary roles by validating the role’s unique Amazon Resource Name (ARN), the problem stems from the fact that the check could be trivially bypassed by passing the “serviceRoleArn” parameter in a lower case. In getting around the ARN validation, the issue could be exploited to provide the identifier of a role in a different AWS account and interact with any resource.

4. New RansomExx Ransomware Variant Rewritten in the Rust Programming Language

The operators of the RansomExx ransomware have become the latest to develop a new variant fully rewritten in the Rust programming language, following other strains like BlackCat, Hive, and Luna. The latest version, dubbed RansomExx2 by the threat actor known as Hive0091 (aka DefrayX), is primarily designed to run on the Linux operating system, although it’s expected that a Windows version will be released in the future.
Malware written in Rust often benefits from lower [antivirus] detection rates (compared to those written in more common languages) and this may have been the primary reason to use the language. RansomExx2 is functionally similar to its C++ predecessor and it takes a list of target directories to encrypt as command line inputs. Once executed, the ransomware recursively goes through each of the specified directories, followed by enumerating and encrypting the files using the AES-256 algorithm.A ransom note containing the demand is ultimately dropped in each of the encrypted directory upon completion of the step.

5. Dell, HP, and Lenovo Devices Found Using Outdated OpenSSL Versions

An analysis of firmware images across devices from Dell, HP, and Lenovo has revealed the presence of outdated versions of the OpenSSL cryptographic library, underscoring a supply chain risk. EFI Development Kit, aka EDK, is an open source implementation of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), which functions as an interface between the operating system and the firmware embedded in the device’s hardware. The firmware development environment, which is in its second iteration (EDK II), comes with its own cryptographic package called CryptoPkg that, in turn, makes use of services from the OpenSSL project. Per firmware security company Binarly, the firmware image associated with Lenovo Thinkpad enterprise devices was found to use three different versions of OpenSSL: 0.9.8zb, 1.0.0a, and 1.0.2j, the last of which was released in 2018.  This clearly indicates the supply chain problem with third-party dependencies when it looks like these dependencies never received an update, even for critical security issues. The diversity of OpenSSL versions aside, some of the firmware packages from Lenovo and Dell utilized an even older version (0.9.8l), which came out on November 5, 2009. HP’s firmware code, likewise, used a 10-year-old version of the library (0.9.8w). The fact that the device firmware uses multiple versions of OpenSSL in the same binary package highlights how third-party code dependencies can introduce more complexities in the supply chain ecosystem.

1. Nighthawk Likely to Become Hackers’ New Post-Exploitation Tool After Cobalt Strike

A nascent and legitimate penetration testing framework known as Nighthawk is likely to gain threat actors’ attention for its Cobalt Strike-like capabilities. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint said it detected the use of the software in mid-September 2022 with a number of test emails sent using generic subject lines such as “Just checking in” and “Hope this works2.” The email messages contained booby-trapped URLs, which, when clicked, redirected the recipients to an ISO image file containing the Nighthawk loader. The obfuscated loader comes with the encrypted Nighthawk payload, a C++-based DLL that uses an elaborate set of features to counter detection and fly under the radar. Of particular note are mechanisms that can prevent endpoint detection solutions from being alerted about newly loaded DLLs in the current process and evade process memory scans by implementing a self-encryption mode.

2. Atlassian Releases Patches for Critical Flaws Affecting Crowd and Bitbucket Products

 Australian software company Atlassian has rolled out security updates to address two critical flaws affecting Bitbucket Server, Data Center, and Crowd products. The issues, tracked as CVE-2022-43781 and CVE-2022-43782, are both rated 9 out of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. CVE-2022-43781, which Atlassian said was introduced in version 7.0.0 of Bitbucket Server and Data Center, affects versions 7.0 to 7.21 and 8.0 to 8.4. The weakness has been described as a case of command injection using environment variables in the software, which could allow an adversary with permission to control their username to gain code execution on the affected system. As a temporary workaround, the company is recommending users turn off the “Public Signup” option (Administration > Authentication).

The second vulnerability, CVE-2022-43782, concerns a misconfiguration in Crowd Server and Data Center that could permit an attacker to invoke privileged API endpoints, but only in scenarios where the bad actor is connecting from an IP address added to the Remote Address configuration. Introduced in Crowd 3.0.0 and identified during an internal security review, the shortcoming impacts all new installations, meaning users who upgraded from a version prior to Crowd 3.0.0 are not vulnerable.

3. W4SP Stealer Constantly Targeting Python Developers in Ongoing Supply Chain Attack

An ongoing supply chain attack has been leveraging malicious Python packages to distribute malware called W4SP Stealer, with over hundreds of victims ensnared to date. The threat actor is still active and is releasing more malicious packages.The attack seems related to cybercrime as the attacker claims that these tools are undetectable to increase sales.The findings from Checkmarx build on recent reports from Phylum and Check Point, which flagged 30 different modules published on the Python Package Index (PyPI) that were designed to propagate malicious code under the guise of benign-looking packages.

The attack is just the latest threat to target the software supply chain. What makes it notable is the use of steganography to extract a polymorphic malware payload hidden within an image file hosted on Imgur.
The installation of the package ultimately makes way for W4SP Stealer (aka WASP Stealer), an information stealer engineered to exfiltrate Discord accounts, passwords, crypto wallets, and other files of interest to a Discord Webhook.

4. Researchers Discover Hundreds of Amazon RDS Instances Leaking Users’ Personal Data

Hundreds of databases on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) are exposing personal identifiable information (PII), as new findings from Mitiga, a cloud incident response company, show. Leaking PII in this manner provides a potential treasure trove for threat actors – either during the reconnaissance phase of the cyber kill chain or extortionware/ransomware campaigns.

The root cause of the leaks stems from a feature called public RDS snapshots, which allows for creating a backup of the entire database environment running in the cloud and can be accessed by all AWS accounts. 

Of the 810 snapshots, over 250 of the backups were exposed for 30 days, suggesting that they were likely forgotten. Based on the nature of the information exposed, adversaries could either steal the data for financial gain or leverage it to get a better grasp of a company’s IT environment, which could then act as a stepping stone for covert intelligence gathering efforts.

Recommendation 

It’s highly recommended that RDS snapshots are not publicly accessible in order to prevent potential leak or misuse of sensitive data or any other kind of security threat. 

5. Exploit Released for Actively Abused ProxyNotShell Exchange Bug

Proof-of-concept exploit code has been released online for two actively exploited and high-severity vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange, collectively known as ProxyNotShell.  Tracked as CVE-2022-41082 and CVE-2022-41040, the two bugs affect Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019 and allow attackers to escalate privileges to run PowerShell in the context of the system and gain arbitrary or remote code execution on compromised servers. Microsoft released security updates to address the two security flaws as part of the November 2022 Patch Tuesday.

One week after Microsoft released ProxyNotShell security updates, security researcher Janggggg released the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit attackers have used in the wild to backdoor Exchange servers. Attackers have been chaining the two security flaws to deploy Chinese Chopper web shells on compromised servers for persistence and data theft, as well as for lateral movement in their victims’ networks since at least September 2022.

6. This Malware Installs Malicious Browser Extensions to Steal Users’ Passwords and Cryptos

A malicious extension for Chromium-based web browsers has been observed to be distributed via a long-standing Windows information stealer called ViperSoftX. Czech-based cybersecurity company dubbed the rogue browser add-on VenomSoftX owing to its standalone features that enable it to access website visits, steal credentials and clipboard data, and even swap cryptocurrency addresses via an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attack. This multi-stage stealer exhibits interesting hiding capabilities, concealed as small PowerShell scripts on a single line in the middle of otherwise innocent-looking large log files, among others. ViperSoftX focuses on stealing cryptocurrencies, clipboard swapping, fingerprinting the infected machine, as well as downloading and executing arbitrary additional payloads, or executing commands.

The distribution vector used to propagate ViperSoftX is typically done by means of cracked software for Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Office that are hosted on file-sharing sites. The downloaded executable file comes with a clean version of cracked software along with additional files that set up persistence on the host and harbor the ViperSoftX PowerShell script. Avast said it has detected and blocked over 93,000 infections since the start of 2022, with a majority of the impacted users located in India, the U.S., Italy, Brazil, the U.K., Canada, France, Pakistan, and South Africa.

1. Researchers Uncover PyPI Package Hiding Malicious Code Behind Image File

 A malicious package discovered on the Python Package Index (PyPI) has been found employing a steganographic trick to conceal malicious code within image files. The package in question, named “apicolor,” was uploaded to the Python third-party repository on October 31, 2022, and described as a “Core lib for REST API”. Apicolor, like other rogue packages detected recently, harbors its malicious behavior in the setup script used to specify metadata associated with the package, such as its dependencies. This takes the form of a second package called “judyb” as well as a seemingly harmless PNG file (“8F4D2uF.png”) hosted on Imgur, an image-sharing service.

Malicious PyPI Package 

The judyb code turned out to be a steganography module, responsible [for] hiding and revealing hidden messages inside pictures. The attack chain entails using the judyb package to extract obfuscated Python code embedded within the downloaded image, which, upon decoding, is designed to retrieve and execute a malicious binary from a remote server.

2. Researchers Reported Critical SQLi and Access Flaws in Zendesk Analytics Service

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of now-patched flaws in Zendesk Explore that could have been exploited by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to information from customer accounts that have the feature turned on. The cybersecurity firm said there was no evidence to suggest that the issues were actively exploited in real-world attacks. According to the security software company, exploitation of the shortcoming first requires an attacker to register for the ticketing service of its victim’s Zendesk account as a new external user, a feature that’s likely enabled by default to allow end-users to submit support tickets. The vulnerability relates to an SQL injection in its GraphQL API that could be abused to exfiltrate all information stored in the database as an admin user, including email addresses, tickets, and conversations with live agents. A second flaw concerns a logic access issue associated with a query execution API, which was configured to run the queries without checking if the “user” making the call had adequate permission to do so.

3. Critical RCE Flaw Reported in Spotify’s Backstage Software Catalog and Developer Platform

Spotify’s Backstage has been discovered as vulnerable to a severe security flaw that could be exploited to gain remote code execution by leveraging a recently disclosed bug in a third-party module. The vulnerability (CVSS score: 9.8), at its core, takes advantage of a critical sandbox escape in vm2, a popular JavaScript sandbox library (CVE-2022-36067 aka Sandbreak), that came to light last month. An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary system commands on a Backstage application by exploiting a vm2 sandbox escape in the Scaffolder core plugin. According to Oxeye, the flaw is rooted in a tool called software templates that can be used to create components within Backstage. 

Screenshot shows Backstage calling the renderTemplate function (that calls renderString2) twice in the event of an error.

While the template engine utilizes vm2 to mitigate the risk associated with running untrusted code, the sandbox escape flaw in the latter made it possible to execute arbitrary system commands outside of the security perimeter.

4. Multiple High-Severity Flaws Affect Widely Used OpenLiteSpeed Web Server Software

Multiple high-severity flaws have been uncovered in the open source OpenLiteSpeed Web Server as well as its enterprise variant that could be weaponized to achieve remote code execution. By chaining and exploiting the vulnerabilities, adversaries could compromise the web server and gain fully privileged remote code execution. The first of the three flaws is a directory traversal flaw (CVE-2022-0072, CVSS score: 5.8), which could be exploited to access forbidden files in the web root directory. The remaining two vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-0073 and CVE-2022-0074, CVSS scores: 8.8) relate to a case of privilege escalation and command injection, respectively, that could be chained to achieve privileged code execution. A threat actor who managed to gain the credentials to the dashboard, whether by brute-force attacks or social engineering, could exploit the vulnerability in order to execute code on the server.  Multiple versions of OpenLiteSpeed (from 1.5.11 up to 1.7.16) and LiteSpeed (from 5.4.6 up to 6.0.11) are impacted by the issues, which have been addressed in versions 1.7.16.1 and 6.0.12 following responsible disclosure on October 4, 2022.

5. Over 15,000 WordPress Sites Compromised in Malicious SEO Campaign

A new malicious campaign has compromised over 15,000 WordPress websites in an attempt to redirect visitors to bogus Q&A portals. These malicious redirects appear to be designed to increase the authority of the attacker’s sites for search engines. The search engine poisoning technique is designed to promote a “handful of fake low quality Q&A sites” that share similar website-building templates and are operated by the same threat actor. A notable aspect of the campaign is the ability of the hackers to modify over 100 files per website on average, an approach that contrasts dramatically from other attacks of this kind wherein only a limited number of files are tampered with to reduce footprint and escape detection. This extensive compromise allows the malware to execute the redirects to websites of the attacker’s choice. The ultimate goal of the campaign is to “drive more traffic to their fake sites” and “boost the sites’ authority using fake search result clicks to make Google rank them better so that they get more real organic search traffic.”

6. Worok Hackers Abuse Dropbox API to Exfiltrate Data via Backdoor Hidden in Images

A recently discovered cyber espionage group dubbed Worok has been found hiding malware in seemingly innocuous image files, corroborating a crucial link in the threat actor’s infection chain. Czech cybersecurity firm Avast said the purpose of the PNG files is to conceal a payload that’s used to facilitate information theft. The Slovak cybersecurity company also documented Worok’s compromise sequence, which makes use of a C++-based loader called CLRLoad to pave the way for an unknown PowerShell script embedded within PNG images, a technique known as steganography. That said, the initial attack vector remains unknown as yet, although certain intrusions have entailed the use of ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server to deploy the malware.

CLRLoad Malware Loader

Avast’s findings show that the adversarial collective makes use of DLL side-loading upon gaining initial access to execute the CLRLoad malware. PNGLoad, which is launched by CLRLoad, is said to come in two variants, each responsible for decoding the malicious code within the image to launch either a PowerShell script or a .NET C#-based payload.

7. Citrix Issues Patches for Critical Flaw Affecting ADC and Gateway Products

 Citrix has released security updates to address a critical authentication bypass flaw in the application delivery controller (ADC) and Gateway products that could be exploited to take control of affected systems.
Successful exploitation of the issues could enable an adversary to gain authorized access, perform remote desktop takeover, and even circumvent defenses against login brute-force attempts under specific configurations.

• CVE-2022-27510 – Unauthorized access to Gateway user capabilities;
• CVE-2022-27513 – Remote desktop takeover via phishing;
• CVE-2022-27516 – User login brute-force protection functionality bypass.

Exploitation, however, banks on the prerequisite that the appliances are either configured as a VPN (Gateway) or, alternatively, an authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) virtual server in the case of CVE-2022-27516. One top of that, CVE-2022-27513 and CVE-2022-27516 also apply only when the RDP proxy feature and the user lockout functionality “Max Login Attempts” are set up, respectively.