Tag Archive for: devices

New KV-Botnet Targeting Cisco, DrayTek, and Fortinet Devices for Stealthy Attacks

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Dec 15, 2023NewsroomBotnet / Advanced Persistent Threat

A new botnet consisting of firewalls and routers from Cisco, DrayTek, Fortinet, and NETGEAR is being used as a covert data transfer network for advanced persistent threat actors, including the China-linked threat actor called Volt Typhoon.

Dubbed KV-botnet by the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies, the malicious network is an amalgamation of two complementary activity clusters that have been active since at least February 2022.

“The campaign infects devices at the edge of networks, a segment that has emerged as a soft spot in the defensive array of many enterprises, compounded by the shift to remote work in recent years,” the company said.

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The two clusters – codenamed KV and JDY – are said to be distinct yet working in tandem to facilitate access to high-profile victims as well as establish covert infrastructure. Telemetry data suggests that the botnet is commandeered from IP addresses based in China.

While the bots part of JDY engages in broader scanning using less sophisticated techniques, the KY component, featuring largely outdated and end-of-life products, is assessed to be reserved for manual operations against high-profile targets selected by the former.

It’s suspected that Volt Typhoon is at least one user of the KV-botnet and it encompasses a subset of their operational infrastructure, which is evidenced by the noticeable decline in operations in June and early July 2023, coinciding with the public disclosure of the adversarial collective’s targeting of critical infrastructure in the U.S.

Microsoft, which first exposed the threat actor’s tactics, said it “tries to blend into normal network activity by routing traffic through compromised small office and home office (SOHO) network equipment, including routers, firewalls, and VPN hardware.”

The exact initial infection mechanism process used to breach the devices is currently unknown. It’s followed by the first-stage malware…

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New 5G Modem Flaws Affect iOS Devices and Android Models from Major Brands

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Dec 08, 2023NewsroomVulnerability / Mobile Network

5G Modems Flaws

A collection of security flaws in the firmware implementation of 5G mobile network modems from major chipset vendors such as MediaTek and Qualcomm impact USB and IoT modems as well as hundreds of smartphone models running Android and iOS.

Of the 14 flaws – collectively called 5Ghoul (a combination of “5G” and “Ghoul”) – 10 affect 5G modems from the two companies, out of which three have been classified as high-severity vulnerabilities.

“5Ghoul vulnerabilities may be exploited to continuously launch attacks to drop the connections, freeze the connection that involve manual reboot or downgrade the 5G connectivity to 4G,” the researchers said in a study published today.

As many as 714 smartphones from 24 brands are impacted, including those from Vivo, Xiaomi, OPPO, Samsung, Honor, Motorola, realme, OnePlus, Huawei, ZTE, Asus, Sony, Meizu, Nokia, Apple, and Google.

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The vulnerabilities were disclosed by a team of researchers from the ASSET (Automated Systems SEcuriTy) Research Group at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), who also previously uncovered BrakTooth in September 2021 and SweynTooth in February 2020.

The attacks, in a nutshell, attempt to deceive a smartphone or a 5G-enabled device to connect a rogue base station (gNB), resulting in unintended consequences.

“The attacker does not need to be aware of any secret information of the target UE e.g., UE’s SIM card details, to complete the NAS network registration,” the researchers explained. “The attacker only needs to impersonate the legitimate gNB using the known Cell Tower connection parameters.”

5G Modems Flaws

A threat actor can accomplish this by using apps like Cellular-Pro to determine the Relative Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) readings and trick the user equipment to connect to the adversarial station (i.e., a software-defined radio) as well as an inexpensive mini…

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New P2PInfect bot targets routers and IoT devices

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New P2PInfect bot targets routers and IoT devices

Pierluigi Paganini
December 04, 2023

Cybersecurity researchers discovered a new variant of the P2PInfect botnet that targets routers and IoT devices.

Researchers at Cado Security Labs discovered a new variant of the P2Pinfect botnet that targets routers, IoT devices, and other embedded devices. This variant has been compiled for the Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages (MIPS) architecture.

The new bot supports updated evasion mechanisms, can avoid execution in a Virtual Machine (VM) and a debugger and supports anti-forensics on Linux hosts.

In July 2023, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers first discovered the P2P worm P2PInfect that targets Redis servers running on both Linux and Windows systems. The capability to target Redis servers running on both Linux and Windows operating systems makes P2PInfect more scalable and potent than other worms. 

The worm is written in the Rust programming language, it targets Redis instances by exploiting the Lua sandbox escape vulnerability CVE-2022-0543 (CVSS score 10.0).

In September, Cado Security Labs reported to have witnessed a 600x increase in P2Pinfect traffic since August 28th. According to the researchers, traffic experienced a 12.3% surge during the week leading up to the publication of their analysis.

P2Pinfect infections have been reported in China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

Experts linked the surge in botnet traffic with the growing number of variants detected in the wild, a circumstance that suggests that the authors are actively improving their bot.

“Cado Security Labs researchers have since encountered a new variant of the malware, specifically targeting embedded devices based on 32-bit MIPS processors, and attempting to bruteforce SSH access to these devices.” reads the report published by Cado Security. “It’s highly likely that by targeting MIPS, the P2Pinfect developers intend to infect routers and IoT devices with the malware. Use of MIPS processors is common for embedded devices and the architecture has been previously targeted by botnet malware, including high-profile…

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Critical Bluetooth flaw could take over Android, Apple, Linux devices

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A critical Bluetooth security bug that’s reportedly been lurking about for several years can potentially be exploited by attackers to take control of Android, Linux, macOS, and iOS machines.

The flaw — CVE-2023-45866 — is an authentication bypass that lets attackers connect susceptible devices and inject keystrokes to achieve code execution as the victim.

In a GitHub blog post Dec. 6, SkySafe researcher Marc Newlin said the flaw works “by tricking the Bluetooth host state-machine into pairing with a fake keyboard without user confirmation.”

Newlin went on to write that the underlying unauthenticated pairing mechanism is defined in the Bluetooth specification, and implementation-specific bugs expose it to the attacker. He said full vulnerability details and proof-of-concept scripts will be released at an upcoming conference, and he will update the original document with conference details when available. Newlin’s blog also contains available patch information.

Cyware Director Emily Phelps explained that in this exploit, adversaries fool the Bluetooth system of a device into thinking it’s connecting to a fake keyboard — without user confirmation. This issue stems from a part of the Bluetooth rules that let devices connect without needing authentication.

“Exploiting this vulnerability lets malicious hackers remotely control someone’s device,” said Phelps. “They can download apps, send messages, or run various commands depending on the operation system.”

Phelps said if patches are available for this vulnerability, security teams should fix the issue immediately. For devices that are awaiting the fix, security teams should monitor for updates and patches. They should also make staff aware of the issue and offer mitigation recommendations, such as disabling Bluetooth when not in use.

When devices communicate there’s first a “handshake” where the two systems agree to communicate with each other, explained John Gallagher, vice president of Viakoo Labs. What the attacker took advantage of, Gallagher continued, is the many IoT devices, such as Bluetooth keyboards, want to make that handshake as easy as possible, especially since the keyboard can’t be used until the…

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