Security

Articles about Security on omid.dev — guides, topics, and notes from the field.

Don’t play with Natural Disasters!!

Published: May 3, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

We want to warn you of an email message in Spanish we’ve received with the subject ( Urgente ) Posible Terremoto y Tsunami con un 89 % de efectividad and that is of course false. The message consists of different images and informs users about an alert of earthquake and tsunami in Chile. Besides, it passes itself off as a warning of National Geographic, in order to make it more credible. ...

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Treasury website hacked

Published: May 3, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

For a short while today a couple of treas.gov websites were hacked, and were reaching out to an attack site in Ukraine. The websites involved were bep.gov (Bureau of Engraving and Printing), bep.treas.gov and moneyfactory.gov. They had been script injected with the line of code circled in red… Btw, you should _not_ mess with the attack site (grepad) … it was dead earlier today, but could easily come back to life. ...

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A Trojan Adding Malicious Routing Entries

Published: April 17, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

Backdoor.Rohimafo is a Trojan that has several back door functions. It not only opens a back door and performs the usual functions but it also can perform some decidedly unusual functions. It attempts to block users from connecting to remote servers; not only specific servers but also specific network segments by using PersistentRoutes in Windows. PersistentRoutes can be used to add a routing entry to a routing table persistently. The route.exe command can be used to add an entry like the following: ...

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Google: 11,000 domains carrying rogue security products

Published: April 17, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

Niels Provos of the Google Security Team has blogged about the rise of malicious web sites carrying rogue security products, which the Google team calls “Fake AV.” Google has been engaged in a constant battle against the sites because the operators who peddle them have been refining their techniques for poisoning Google search engine results in order to victimize Google users by drawing them to malicious download sites. He wrote: “we conducted an in-depth analysis of the prevalence of Fake AV over the course of the last 13 months, and the research paper containing our findings, ‘The Nocebo Effect on the Web: An Analysis of Fake AV distribution’ is going to be presented at the Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET) in San Jose, CA on April 27th.” ...

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Subdomains defaced on The Telegraph website

Published: April 15, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

The Telegraph, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK, hasn’t had a good time of it lately where their website is concerned. There were vulnerabilities found in relation to the site back in March involving database access, and it seems a hacking group has gone in and defaced two subdomains. These are the two subdomains in question: shortbreaks(dot)telegraph.co.uk wine-and-dine(dot)telegraph.co.uk/site/index.php They appear to have been compromised by “R.N.S. – Romanian National Security”. Here’s a screenshot, both defacements are identical: ...

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From XSS to root: Lessons Learned From a Security Breach

Published: April 14, 2010 Reading time: 3 min

In an excellent blog, the people from Apache did a very good job analyzing and documenting how a security breach happened–going through all the stages of the attack and drawing conclusions. Should you ever become the unfortunate victim of an attack, this blog offers an example of how to document it! I quote:”If you are a user of the Apache-hosted JIRA, Bugzilla, or Confluence, a hashed copy of your password has been compromised.” So if you are a user, please act accordingly after reading this blog 😉 ...

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Faceparty password sites really want you to click on things

Published: April 14, 2010 Reading time: 3 min

“Faceparty is a UK based social networking site allowing users to create online profiles and interact with each other using forums and messaging facilities similar to email” – Wikipedia Faceparty does things a little differently to other social networking sites, however. Unlike most places where you register a username and password then start telling people how your farm is doing, to join Faceparty you need to send a text message to the tune of £25 / $38(!) and then enter your one time use password onto this page (warning: quite a few swearwords, because the site is indeed down with the kids). ...

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Heads up – 0day ITW – Rihanna is a lure

Published: April 14, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

On April 9th, Tavis Ormandy published a proof of concept about how to use the latest version of Java to compromise a pc. You can read about it here. He notified Sun, but they weren’t concerned enough to break their patch cycle, so he published the code. The problem is that when Sun released Java 6, update 10 in April 2008, they introduced a new feature (it’s not a bug, it’s a feature folks) called Java Web Start. In order to make it easier for developers to install software, they created a method to execute a program from a website. ...

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German spammers broaden their repertoire

Published: April 14, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

Last week we received a mass mailing that at first glance appeared no different from the usual mailbox clutter. The messages were in German and advertised an online casino. Nothing out of the ordinary there – after all, gambling-themed spam is one of the most popular in the German-speaking realms of cyberspace. But after a closer inspection, these messages turned out to be of much more interest – all the links in the messages led to pages created on legitimate sites that had been compromised. The links looked like this: **\*.com/news_.php or *****.com/1500.php. ...

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Please give me your username and password

Published: April 14, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

Yesterday evening our spamtraps started receiving the email below in a mass mailing action. The email was immediately flagged as spam even before reaching our spamtraps. No wonder since it has no To:-field, it has a different Reply-to:- than the From:-field and it comes from a DSL line IP address. If the user replies to the email, the return address is set to [email protected]. Nice try, but the email is just to generic to be actually taken seriously by anyone. I expect to see targeted emails in the next days (as we’ve already seen last year). ...

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