Threat Source newsletter (July 18, 2019)

MalBot · July 18, 2019, 10:45pm

Newsletter compiled by Jonathan Munshaw.

Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week.

A group we’re calling “SWEED” may be behind years of Agent Tesla attacks. This week, we uncovered everything we know about this actor, and ran down their TTPs and discussed how users can stay safe.

If you didn’t get enough of the ransomware debate last week, we have even more talk of extortion payments on the latest Beers with Talos episode, too.

We also have our weekly Threat Roundup, which you can find on the blog every Friday afternoon. There, we go over the most prominent threats we’ve seen (and blocked) over the past week. Due to the Fourth of July holiday in the U.S., expect our blog and social media to be fairly quiet over the next few days.

Upcoming public engagements with Talos

Event: “DNS on Fire” at Black Hat USA
Location: Mandalay Bay, Las Vegs, Nevada
Date: Aug. 7
Speaker: Warren Mercer
Synopsis: In this talk, Warren will go over two recent malicious threat actors targeting DNS protocol along with the methodology used to target victims, timeline, and technical details. The first is a piece of malware, “DNSpionage,” targeting government agencies in the Middle East and an airline. The second actor, more advanced and aggressive than the previous one, is behind the campaign we named “Sea Turtle.”

Event: “It’s never DNS…It was DNS: How adversaries are abusing network blind spots” at SecTor
Location: Metro Toronto Convention Center, Toronto, Canada
Date: Oct. 7 - 10
Speaker: Edmund Brumaghin and Earl Carter
Synopsis: While DNS is one of the most commonly used network protocols in most corporate networks, many organizations don’t give it the same level of scrutiny as other network protocols present in their environments. DNS has become increasingly attractive to both red teams and malicious attackers alike to easily subvert otherwise solid security architectures. This presentation will provide several technical breakdowns of real-world attacks that have been seen leveraging DNS for a variety of purposes such as DNSMessenger, DNSpionage, and more.

Cyber Security Week in Review

Researchers discovered another round of stalkerware on the Google Play store that stole users’ SMS messages and call history. Google has since removed these apps, but they were downloaded a combined 130,000 times.
While the attackers behind the Gandcrab ransomware say they’ve retired, new evidence suggest they may still be active. A new, more advanced malware known as “REvil” has their fingerprints all over it.
More than 300 cities in California have access to a surveillance and data-mining company’s information. And there’s evidence to suggest that data is being shared with the cities’ police departments to create “digital dragnets.”
A digital privacy rights group is suing AT&T and two data aggregation services over the sale of cellular device users’ location data. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T sold customers’ real-time location data to credit agencies, bail bondsmen and other third parties without users’ consent.
Oracle disclosed more than 320 vulnerabilities as part of its quarterly security update. This released includes patches for 10 bugs in Java, including nine that are exploitable without authentication.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Facebook agreed on a $5 billion settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But some lawmakers and privacy advocates say the punishment did not go far enough.
Cyber criminals are increasingly turning their attention to schools in wealthier cities. Attackers believe they contain large sums of data, and are more likely to be able to afford potential requested extortion payments.
Two months after the Windows BlueKeep vulnerability was revealed, it has yet to be exploited in the wild. Researchers are left guessing if attacks are happening quietly, or if attackers haven’t yet been able to figure out how to bypass other security hurdles.
The image-altering app FaceApp has again exploded in popularity. However, the app, which shows what users may look like as they age, comes with some serious privacy concerns.
Slack is resetting the passwords of thousands more users due to new information it discovered about a data breach in 2015. That number is equivalent to roughly 1 percent of the software’s users at the time of the attack.
A Google employee recently leaked more than a thousand voice recordings from Home devices to a Belgian news outlet. The company says human review is necessary to ensure its products work correctly, and slammed the leak as a security breach.

Notable recent security issues

Title: Vulnerabilities in Zoom meeting software could turn on Mac cameras
Description: Two vulnerabilities — CVE-2019-13449 and CVE-2019-13450 — in the Zoom remote could allow an attacker to use a malicious website to automatically start a Zoom meeting and look in on a user’s Mac camera. While Zoom says it has mitigated the issue, users are also encouraged to ensure the Mac Zoom app is up to date and to disable the setting that allows Zoom to automatically turn on the machine’s camera when joining a meeting. New SNORT® rules fire when they detect a file containing Zoom client information trying to disclose sensitive information.
Snort SIDs: 50724 - 50729 (Written by Joanne Kim)

Title: Anubis malware returns to haunt Android users
Description: Researchers at Trend Micro recently discovered more than 17,400 new samples of the Android malware. Anubis has targeted several different banking apps on Android stores, installing malicious espionage and banking trojan capabilities onto users’ mobile devices. The actor behind Anubis has been active for at least 12 years, constantly making updates and adding new features. All four of these rules fire when Anubis attempts to make an outbound connection to a command and control (C2) server.
Snort SIDs: 50734 – 50737 (Written by Tim Muniz)