Australian security researcher Troy Hunt announced today that he granted the US Federal Bureau of Investigation a direct line to upload new content into Have I Been Pwned, a website that indexes data from security breaches. From a report: The HIBP creator said that when the FBI discovers password collections during their investigations, they will upload the data into a section of the site called Pwned Passwords. The FBI will provide passwords as SHA-1 and NTLM hashes and not in plain text. No user personal details will be provided, but only the password hashes. The passwords will be added to Pwned Passwords, a collection of more than 613 million leaked passwords. While the main HIBP website allows users to search if their emails, names, or usernames have been leaked online in past security breaches, Pwned Passwords is a smaller and more specialized component of the HIBP site that tells users if a password string has ever been leaked online, without attaching the password to any user details.

Chinese-speaking hackers are masquerading as the United Nations in ongoing cyber-attacks against Uyghurs, according to the cybersecurity firms Check Point and Kaspersky. MIT Technology Review reports: Researchers identified an attack in which hackers posing as the UN Human Rights Council send a document detailing human rights violations to Uyghur individuals. It is in fact a malicious Microsoft Word file that, once downloaded, fetches malware: the likely goal, say the two companies, is to trick high-profile Uyghurs inside China and Pakistan into opening a back door to their computers. "We believe that these cyber-attacks are motivated by espionage, with the endgame of the operation being the installation of a back door into the computers of high-profile targets in the Uyghur community," said Lotem Finkelstein, head of threat intelligence at Check Point, in a statement. "The attacks are designed to fingerprint infected devices, including all of [their] running programs. From what we can tell, these attacks are ongoing, and new infrastructure is being created for what look like future attacks."

In addition to pretending to be from the United Nations, the hackers also built a fake and malicious website for a human rights organization called the "Turkic Culture and Heritage Foundation," according to the report. The group's fake website offers grants -- but in fact, anybody who attempts to apply for a grant is prompted to download a false "security scanner" that is in fact a back door into the target's computer, the researchers explained. "The attackers behind these cyber-attacks send malicious documents under the guise of the United Nations and fake human rights foundations to their targets, tricking them into installing a backdoor to the Microsoft Windows software running on their computers," the researchers wrote. This allows the attackers to collect basic information they seek from the victim's computer, as well as running more malware on the machine with the potential to do more damage. The researchers say they haven't yet seen all the capabilities of this malware. The researchers weren't able to determine an exact known hacking group, but the code in these attacks "was found to be identical to code found on multiple Chinese-language hacking forums and may have been copied directly from there," the report notes.

The Indonesian government has blocked access inside its borders to Raid Forums, a well-known cybercrime hub, in an attempt to limit the spread of a sensitive data leak. From a report: The ban, which the government wants internet service providers to implement, comes after a threat actor claimed in a Raid Forums post on May 12 to be in possession and selling the personal data of 279 million Indonesians. The threat actor, an individual known as Kotz, leaked a sample of one million citizens' details to prove their claims. The leaked data included citizen names, national ID numbers, tax registration information, mobile phone numbers, and for some citizens also came with headshots and salary-related information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: VMware is urging its vCenter users to update vCenter Server versions 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0 immediately, after a pair of vulnerabilities were reported privately to the company. The most pressing is CVE-2021-21985, which relates to a remote code execution vulnerability in a vSAN plugin enabled by default in vCenter that an attacker could use to run whatever they wished on the underlying host machine, provided they can access port 443. Even if users do not use vSAN, they are likely to be affected because the vSAN plugin is enabled by default. "This needs your immediate attention if you are using vCenter Server," VMware said in a blog post.

The second vulnerability, CVE-2021-21986, would allow an attacker to perform actions allowed by plugins without authentication. "The vSphere Client (HTML5) contains a vulnerability in a vSphere authentication mechanism for the Virtual SAN Health Check, Site Recovery, vSphere Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Cloud Director Availability plug-ins," VMware said. In terms of CVSSv3 scores, CVE-2021-21985 hit an 9.8, while CVE-2021-21986 was scored as 6.5.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Nation states are serving as safe havens for sophisticated criminal cyber actors and that is leading to an "increased blending of the threat," said John Demers, assistant attorney general at the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, speaking on a CNBC Evolve livestream on Wednesday. He said that is also a reason to believe that DarkSide could be back, or is still operating under a new name.

"When nation states aren't doing their part to investigate and root out hacking activity happening within their borders, then any number of things could have been the answer to ... what happened to the DarkSide infrastructure including that ... they're just off renaming themselves, so we'll see." "Groups like that will come back," he added. "Probably Darkside itself, those actors that comprise that group, will be back if they're not already out there in other forms operating as we're talking about."

Michael Orlando, acting director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said during the CNBC Evolve livestream that ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure rise to the level of national security threat and the "safe haven" aspect is one part of the cybersecurity riddle the government and business world will have to counteract. "We do know that countries like Russia and China, Iran and others certainly create safe havens for criminal hackers as long as they don't conduct attacks against them. But that's a challenge for us that we're going to have to work through as we figure out how to counter ransomware attacks." DarkSide received a total of $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments before shutting down. The hacker group coincidentally lost control of its web servers and some of the funds the day after President Joe Biden announced plans to disrupt the hackers.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Tom's Hardware: Asahi Linux developer Hector Martin has revealed a covert channel vulnerability in the Apple M1 chip that he dubbed M1RACLES, and in the process, he's gently criticized the way security flaws have started to be shared with the public. Martin's executive summary for M1RACLES sounds dire: "A flaw in the design of the Apple Silicon 'M1' chip allows any two applications running under an OS to covertly exchange data between them, without using memory, sockets, files, or any other normal operating system features. This works between processes running as different users and under different privilege levels, creating a covert channel for surreptitious data exchange. [...] The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision."

He also noted that this was the result of an intentional decision on Apple's part. "Basically, Apple decided to break the ARM spec by removing a mandatory feature, because they figured they'd never need to use that feature for macOS," he explained. "And then it turned out that removing that feature made it much harder for existing OSes to mitigate this vulnerability." The company would have to make a change on the silicon level with its followup to the M1 to mitigate this flaw. But he also made it clear in the FAQ that Mac owners shouldn't be particularly worried about M1RACLES because that covert channel affects two bits. It can be expanded, and Martin said that transfer rates over 1 MB/s are possible "without much optimization," but any malicious apps that might take advantage of such methods would be far more likely to share information via other channels. Calling this a two-bit vulnerability would be both technically and linguistically correct. It's a real security flaw, sure, but it's unlikely to pose a real threat to Apple's customers.

App developer and scam app hunter Kosta Eleftheriou's latest discovery is a real doozy: an iOS app that refuses to function until you give it at least a 3-star review in the App Store. From a report: Although the UPNP Xtreme app -- which claimed to let users stream video to their TVs -- now appears to have been pulled, we were able to verify that it generates the App Store rating box the second it opens. You can't dismiss the ratings box, nor can you tap the 1 or 2-star ratings, Eleftheriou said. We verified this behavior, but some other users report they were able to dismiss the dialog box or leave a lower rating.

AmiMoJo writes: The USB-C standard will let you plug in power-hungry devices like gaming laptops, docking stations, 4K monitors and printers with an upgrade that accommodates up to 240 watts starting this year. The jump in maximum power is more than double today's 100-watt top capacity. The USB Implementers Forum, the industry group that develops the technology, revealed the new power levels in the version 2.1 update to its USB Type-C specification on Tuesday. The new 240-watt option is called Extended Power Range, or EPR. "We expect devices supporting higher wattages in the second half of 2021," USB-IF said in a statement.

USB began as a useful but limited port for plugging keyboards, mice and printers into PCs. It later swept aside Firewire and other ports as faster speeds let it tackle more demanding tasks. It proved useful for charging phones as the mobile revolution began, paving the way for its use delivering power, not just data. The 240W Extended Power Range option means USB likely will expand its turf yet again. Cables supporting 240 watts will have additional requirements to accommodate the new levels. And USB-IF will require the cables to bear specific icons "so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to...240W," USB-IF said in the specification document.

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market's new regulations that could allow authorities to make people's private messages "traceable," and conduct mass surveillance. From a report: The Facebook-owned instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. It said New Delhi's "traceability" requirement -- which would require WhatsApp to help New Delhi identify the originator of a particular message -- violated citizens' constitutional right to privacy.

"Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to 'trace' private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people's personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so," WhatsApp said in a statement. India first proposed WhatsApp to make software changes to make the originator of a message traceable in 2018. The suggestion came at a time when WhatsApp was grappling with containing spread of false information in India, where circulation of such information had resulted in multiple real-life casualties. But its suggestion didn't become the law until this year. Traceability requirement is part of New Delhi's sweeping IT rules that also require social media firms to appoint several officers in India to address on-ground concerns, and also gives authorities greater power over taking down posts it deems offensive. Further reading: India says WhatsApp's lawsuit over new regulations a clear act of defiance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Thousands of Google Chrome extensions available on the official Chrome Web Store are tampering with security headers on popular websites, putting users at risk of a wide range of web-based attacks. While they are a little-known technical detail, security headers are an important part of the current internet landscape. At a technical level, a security header is an HTTP response sent by the server to a client app, such as a browser. [...] In a paper presented at the MADWeb workshop at the NDSS 2021 security conference, researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security said they tried to assess the number of Chrome extensions tampering with security headers for the very first time. Using a custom framework they built specifically for their study, the research team said they analyzed 186,434 Chrome extensions that were available on the official Chrome Web Store last year. Their work found that 2,485 extensions were intercepting and modifying at least one security header used by today's Top 100 most popular websites (as available in the Tranco list).

The study didn't focus on all security headers, but only on the four most common ones, such as: Content-Security Policy (CSP), HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS), X-Frame-Options, and X-Content-Type-Options. While 2,485 extensions disabled at least one, researchers said they found 553 disabling all the four security headers they analyzed in their research. The most commonly disabled security header was CSP, a security header that was developed to allow site owners to control what web resources a page is allowed to load inside a browser and a typical defense that can protect websites and browsers against XSS and data injection attacks. According to the research team, in most of the cases they analyzed, the Chrome extensions disabled CSP and other security headers "to introduce additional seemingly benign functionalities on the visited webpage," and didn't look to be malicious in nature. However, even if the extensions wanted to enrich a user's experience online, the German academics argued that by tampering with security headers, all the extensions did was to expose users to attacks from other scripts and sites running inside the browser and on the web.

The Department of Homeland Security is moving to regulate cybersecurity in the pipeline industry for the first time in an effort to prevent a repeat of a major computer attack that crippled nearly half the East Coast's fuel supply this month -- an incident that highlighted the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to online attacks. From a report: The Transportation Security Administration, a DHS unit, will issue a security directive this week requiring pipeline companies to report cyber incidents to federal authorities, senior DHS officials said. It will follow up in coming weeks with a more robust set of mandatory rules for how pipeline companies must safeguard their systems against cyberattacks and the steps they should take if they are hacked, the officials said. The agency has offered only voluntary guidelines in the past. The ransomware attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shutter its pipeline for 11 days this month prompted gasoline shortages and panic buying in the southeastern United States, including in the nation's capital. Had it gone on much longer, it could have affected airlines, mass transit and chemical refineries that rely on diesel fuel.

TechCrunch reports: Jamf says it found evidence that the XCSSET malware was exploiting a vulnerability that allowed it access to parts of macOS that require permission -- such as accessing the microphone, webcam, or recording the screen -- without ever getting consent. XCSSET was first discovered by Trend Micro in 2020 targeting Apple developers, specifically their Xcode projects that they use to code and build apps. By infecting those app development projects, developers unwittingly distribute the malware to their users, in what Trend Micro researchers described as a "supply-chain-like attack."

The malware is under continued development, with more recent variants of the malware also targeting Macs running the newer M1 chip. Once the malware is running on a victimâ(TM)s computer, it uses two zero-days -- one to steal cookies from the Safari browser to get access to a victimâ(TM)s online accounts, and another to quietly install a development version of Safari, allowing the attackers to modify and snoop on virtually any website. But Jamf says the malware was exploiting a previously undiscovered third-zero day in order to secretly take screenshots of the victim's screen.

Almost half a decade after the first reports were published, mobile app developers are still exposing their users' personal information through abhorrently simple misconfigurations. From a report: In a report published last week, security firm Check Point said it found 23 Android applications that exposed the personal data of more than 100 million users through a variety of misconfigurations of third-party cloud services. This included developers who forgot to password-protect their backend databases and developers who left access tokens/keys inside their mobile application's source code for services such as cloud storage or push notifications. The Check Point team said it was able to use the information they found through a routine examination of 23 random applications and access the backend databases of 13 apps. In the exposed databases, researchers said they found information such as email addresses, passwords, private chats, location coordinates, user identifiers, screen recordings, social media credentials, and personal images.

"The official Python software package repository, PyPI, is getting flooded with spam packages..." Bleeping Computer reported Thursday.

"Each of these packages is posted by a unique pseudonymous maintainer account, making it challenging for PyPI to remove the packages and spam accounts all at once..." PyPI is being flooded with spam packages named after popular movies in a style commonly associated with torrent or "warez" sites that provide pirated downloads: watch-(movie-name)-2021-full-online-movie-free-hd-... Although some of these packages are a few weeks old, BleepingComputer observed that spammers are continuing to add newer packages to PyPI... The web page for these bogus packages contain spam keywords and links to movie streaming sites, albeit of questionable legitimacy and legality...

February of this year, PyPI had been flooded with bogus "Discord", "Google", and "Roblox" keygens in a massive spam attack, as reported by ZDNet. At the time, Ewa Jodlowska, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation had told ZDNet that the PyPI admins were working on addressing the spam attack, however, by the nature of pypi.org, anyone could publish to the repository, and such occurrences were common.

Other than containing spam keywords and links to quasi-video streaming sites, these packages contain files with functional code and author information lifted from legitimate PyPI packages... As previously reported by BleepingComputer, malicious actors have combined code from legitimate packages with otherwise bogus or malicious packages to mask their footsteps, and make the detection of these packages a tad more challenging...

In recent months, the attacks on open-source ecosystems like npm, RubyGems, and PyPI have escalated. Threat actors have been caught flooding software repositories with malware, malicious dependency confusion copycats, or simply vigilante packages to spread their message. As such, securing these repositories has turned into a whack-a-mole race between threat actors and repository maintainers.

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: That's right, Microsoft's CLI management tool was the source of more than a third of critical security threats detected by Cisco in the second half of 2020, according to eSecurity Planet.

Dual-use tool exploitation was the top threat category noted by Cisco, followed by ransomware, fileless malware, and credential dumping, with PowerShell a primary vector in those last two categories also.

"Based on Cisco's research, PowerShell is the source of more than a third of critical threats," noted Gedeon Hombrebueno, Endpoint Security Product Manager for Cisco Secure.

Cisco recommends a number of protection steps that are, of course, made easier with Cisco Secure Endpoint, and other EDR tools are effective against PowerShell exploits also.

But there are a number of steps admins can (and should) take that are completely free, like preventing or restricting PowerShell execution in non-admin accounts, allowing execution of signed scripts only, and using Constrained Language mode.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One month ago the University of Minnesota was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel when it was revealed the university researchers were trying to intentionally submit bugs into the kernel via new patches as "hypocrite commits" as part of a questionable research paper. Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches. Sent in on Thursday by Greg Kroah-Hartman was char/misc fixes for 5.13-rc3. While char/misc fixes at this mid-stage of the kernel cycle tend to not be too exciting, this pull request has the changes for addressing the patches from University of Minnesota researchers. [...] Going by the umn.edu Git activity that puts 37 patches as having been reverted with this pull request. The reverts span from ALSA to the media subsystem, networking, and other areas. That is 37 reverts out of 150+ patches from umn.edu developers over the years.

Lanodonal shares a report from the BBC: Hackers responsible for causing widespread disruption to the Irish health system have unexpectedly gifted it with the tool to help it recover. The Conti ransomware group was reportedly asking the Irish health service for $20 million to restore services after the "catastrophic hack." But now the criminals have handed over the software tool for free.The Irish government says it is testing the tool and insists it did not, and would not, be paying the hackers. Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) MicheÃl Martin said on Friday evening that getting the software tool was good, but that enormous work is still required to rebuild the system overall.

Conti is still threatening to publish or sell data it has stolen unless a ransom is paid. On its darknet website, it told the Health Service Executive (HSE), which runs Ireland's healthcare system, that "we are providing the decryption tool for your network for free." "But you should understand that we will sell or publish a lot of private data if you will not connect us and try to resolve the situation." It was unclear why the hackers gave the tool -- known as a decryption key -- for free, said Health Minister Stephen Donnelly. In an alert made public Thursday by the American Hospital Association, the FBI said the Conti group has also hit at least 16 U.S. medical and first response networks in the past year.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that the same group of online extortionists blamed for striking the Irish health system last week have also hit at least 16 U.S. medical and first response networks in the past year. From a report: In an alert made public Thursday by the American Hospital Association, the FBI said the cybercriminals using the malicious software dubbed 'Conti' have targeted law enforcement, emergency medical services, dispatch centers, and municipalities. The alert did not name the victims or go into detail about the nature or severity of the breaches, saying only that they were among more than 400 organizations worldwide targeted by "Conti actors."

Microsoft has open-sourced today a tool that can be used to build lab environments where security teams can simulate attacks and verify the detection effectiveness of Microsoft security products. The Record reports: Named SimuLand, the tool was specifically built to help security/IT teams that use Microsoft products such as Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Defender, and Azure Sentinel. Currently, SimuLand comes with only one lab environment, specialized in detecting Golden SAML attacks. However, Microsoft said it's working on adding new ones. Community contributions are also welcomed, and the reason the project has been open-sourced on GitHub, with Microsoft hoping to get a helping hand from the tens of thousands of security teams that run its software.

"If you would like to share a new end-to-end attacker path, let us know by opening an issue in our GitHub repository, and we would be happy to collaborate and provide some resources to make it happen," Microsoft said today in a blog post. But Microsoft doesn't want only lab environments specialized in executing well-known techniques or adversary tradecraft. The OS maker is also encouraging the community to contribute improved detection rules for the attacks they're sharing, so everyone can benefit from the shared knowledge.

CNA Financial, among the largest insurance companies in the U.S., paid $40 million in late March to regain control of its network after a ransomware attack, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. From a report: The Chicago-based company paid the hackers about two weeks after a trove of company data was stolen, and CNA officials were locked out of their network, according to two people familiar with the attack who asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to discuss the matter publicly. In a statement, a CNA spokesperson said the company followed the law. She said the company consulted and shared intelligence about the attack and the hacker's identity with the FBI and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which said last year that facilitating ransom payments to hackers could pose sanctions risks.