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New mobile apps from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek have remained among the top three “free” downloads for Apple and Google devices since their debut on Jan. 25, 2025. But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption keys, and sending unencrypted user and device data to Chinese companies — introduce a number of glaring security and privacy risks.
Public interest in the DeepSeek AI chat apps swelled following widespread media reports that the upstart Chinese AI firm had managed to match the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading AI companies rely on. As of this writing, DeepSeek is the third most-downloaded “free” app on the Apple store, and #1 on Google Play.
DeepSeek’s rapid rise caught the attention of the mobile security firm NowSecure, a Chicago-based company that helps clients screen mobile apps for security and privacy threats. In a teardown of the DeepSeek app published today, NowSecure urged organizations to remove the DeepSeek iOS mobile app from their environments, citing security concerns.
NowSecure founder Andrew Hoog said they haven’t yet concluded an in-depth analysis of the DeepSeek app for Android devices, but that there is little reason to believe its basic design would be functionally much different.
Hoog told KrebsOnSecurity there were a number of qualities about the DeepSeek iOS app that suggest the presence of deep-seated security and privacy risks. For starters, he said, the app collects an awful lot of data about the user’s device.
“They are doing some very interesting things that are on the edge of advanced device fingerprinting,” Hoog said, noting that one property of the app tracks the device’s name — which for many iOS devices defaults to the customer’s name followed by the type of iOS device.
The device information shared, combined with the user’s Internet address and data gathered from mobile advertising companies, could be used to deanonymize users of the DeepSeek iOS app, NowSecure warned. The report notes that DeepSeek communicates with Volcengine, a cloud platform developed by ByteDance (the makers of TikTok), although NowSecure said it wasn’t clear if the data is just leveraging ByteDance’s digital transformation cloud service or if the declared information share extends further between the two companies.
Image: NowSecure.
Perhaps more concerning, NowSecure said the iOS app transmits device information “in the clear,” without any encryption to encapsulate the data. This means the data being handled by the app could be intercepted, read, and even modified by anyone who has access to any of the networks that carry the app’s traffic.
“The DeepSeek iOS app globally disables App Transport Security (ATS) which is an iOS platform level protection that prevents sensitive data from being sent over unencrypted channels,” the report observed. “Since this protection is disabled, the app can (and does) send unencrypted data over the internet.”
Hoog said the app does selectively encrypt portions of the responses coming from DeepSeek servers. But they also found it uses an insecure and now deprecated encryption algorithm called 3DES (aka Triple DES), and that the developers had hard-coded the encryption key. That means the cryptographic key needed to decipher those data fields can be extracted from the app itself.
There were other, less alarming security and privacy issues highlighted in the report, but Hoog said he’s confident there are additional, unseen security concerns lurking within the app’s code.
“When we see people exhibit really simplistic coding errors, as you dig deeper there are usually a lot more issues,” Hoog said. “There is virtually no priority around security or privacy. Whether cultural, or mandated by China, or a witting choice, taken together they point to significant lapse in security and privacy controls, and that puts companies at risk.”
Apparently, plenty of others share this view. Axios reported on January 30 that U.S. congressional offices are being warned not to use the app.
“[T]hreat actors are already exploiting DeepSeek to deliver malicious software and infect devices,” read the notice from the chief administrative officer for the House of Representatives. “To mitigate these risks, the House has taken security measures to restrict DeepSeek’s functionality on all House-issued devices.”
TechCrunch reports that Italy and Taiwan have already moved to ban DeepSeek over security concerns. Bloomberg writes that The Pentagon has blocked access to DeepSeek. CNBC says NASA also banned employees from using the service, as did the U.S. Navy.
Beyond security concerns tied to the DeepSeek iOS app, there are indications the Chinese AI company may be playing fast and loose with the data that it collects from and about users. On January 29, researchers at Wiz said they discovered a publicly accessible database linked to DeepSeek that exposed “a significant volume of chat history, backend data and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details.”
“More critically, the exposure allowed for full database control and potential privilege escalation within the DeepSeek environment, without any authentication or defense mechanism to the outside world,” Wiz wrote. [Full disclosure: Wiz is currently an advertiser on this website.]
KrebsOnSecurity sought comment on the report from DeepSeek and from Apple. This story will be updated with any substantive replies.
A number of cybercriminal innovations are making it easier for scammers to cash in on your upcoming travel plans. This story examines a recent spear-phishing campaign that ensued when a California hotel had its booking.com credentials stolen. We’ll also explore an array of cybercrime services aimed at phishers who target hotels that rely on the world’s most visited travel website.
According to the market share website statista.com, booking.com is by far the Internet’s busiest travel service, with nearly 550 million visits in September. KrebsOnSecurity last week heard from a reader whose close friend received a targeted phishing message within the Booking mobile app just minutes after making a reservation at a California hotel.
The missive bore the name of the hotel and referenced details from their reservation, claiming that booking.com’s anti-fraud system required additional information about the customer before the reservation could be finalized.
The phishing message our reader’s friend received after making a reservation at booking.com in late October.
In an email to KrebsOnSecurity, booking.com confirmed one of its partners had suffered a security incident that allowed unauthorized access to customer booking information.
“Our security teams are currently investigating the incident you mentioned and can confirm that it was indeed a phishing attack targeting one of our accommodation partners, which unfortunately is not a new situation and quite common across industries,” booking.com replied. “Importantly, we want to clarify that there has been no compromise of Booking.com’s internal systems.”
The phony booking.com website generated by visiting the link in the text message.
Booking.com said it now requires 2FA, which forces partners to provide a one-time passcode from a mobile authentication app (Pulse) in addition to a username and password.
“2FA is required and enforced, including for partners to access payment details from customers securely,” a booking.com spokesperson wrote. “That’s why the cybercriminals follow-up with messages to try and get customers to make payments outside of our platform.”
“That said, the phishing attacks stem from partners’ machines being compromised with malware, which has enabled them to also gain access to the partners’ accounts and to send the messages that your reader has flagged,” they continued.
It’s unclear, however, if the company’s 2FA requirement is enforced for all or just newer partners. Booking.com did not respond to questions about that, and its current account security advice urges customers to enable 2FA.
A scan of social media networks showed this is not an uncommon scam.
In November 2023, the security firm SecureWorks detailed how scammers targeted booking.com hospitality partners with data-stealing malware. SecureWorks said these attacks had been going on since at least March 2023.
“The hotel did not enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on its Booking.com access, so logging into the account with the stolen credentials was easy,” SecureWorks said of the booking.com partner it investigated.
In June 2024, booking.com told the BBC that phishing attacks targeting travelers had increased 900 percent, and that thieves taking advantage of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools were the primary driver of this trend.
Booking.com told the BCC the company had started using AI to fight AI-based phishing attacks. Booking.com’s statement said their investments in that arena “blocked 85 million fraudulent reservations over more than 1.5 million phishing attempts in 2023.”
The domain name in the phony booking.com website sent to our reader’s friend — guestssecureverification[.]com — was registered to the email address ilotirabec207@gmail.com. According to DomainTools.com, this email address was used to register more than 700 other phishing domains in the past month alone.
Many of the 700+ domains appear to target hospitality companies, including platforms like booking.com and Airbnb. Others seem crafted to phish users of Shopify, Steam, and a variety of financial platforms. A full, defanged list of domains is available here.
A cursory review of recent posts across dozens of cybercrime forums monitored by the security firm Intel 471 shows there is a great demand for compromised booking.com accounts belonging to hotels and other partners.
One post last month on the Russian-language hacking forum BHF offered up to $5,000 for each hotel account. This seller claims to help people monetize hacked booking.com partners, apparently by using the stolen credentials to set up fraudulent listings.
A service advertised on the English-language crime community BreachForums in October courts phishers who may need help with certain aspects of their phishing campaigns targeting booking.com partners. Those include more than two million hotel email addresses, and services designed to help phishers organize large volumes of phished records. Customers can interact with the service via an automated Telegram bot.
Some cybercriminals appear to have used compromised booking.com accounts to power their own travel agencies catering to fellow scammers, with up to 50 percent discounts on hotel reservations through booking.com. Others are selling ready-to-use “config” files designed to make it simple to conduct automated login attempts against booking.com administrator accounts.
SecureWorks found the phishers targeting booking.com partner hotels used malware to steal credentials. But today’s thieves can just as easily just visit crime bazaars online and purchase stolen credentials to cloud services that do not enforce 2FA for all accounts.
That is exactly what transpired over the past year with many customers of the cloud data storage giant Snowflake. In late 2023, cybercriminals figured out that while tons of companies had stashed enormous amounts of customer data at Snowflake, many of those customer accounts were not protected by 2FA.
Snowflake responded by making 2FA mandatory for all new customers. But that change came only after thieves used stolen credentials to siphon data from 160 companies — including AT&T, Lending Tree and TicketMaster.
Tapping your phone at the cash register makes for a smooth trip to the store. Far smoother than fumbling for your card at the checkout or dealing with a bunch of change. That’s the beauty of the digital wallet on your phone. And with that convenience comes something plenty important — keeping that digital wallet secure.
All the personal info, photos, and banking apps we already have on our phones already make them plenty valuable. A digital wallet makes them that much more valuable.
A few steps can keep your phone and digital wallet more secure. Further, other steps can protect your cards and identity if that phone gets lost or stolen.
Let’s start with a look at how digital wallets work.
For starters, digital wallets work much like a physical wallet. Through service apps like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal, and others, you can store various payment types. That includes debit cards, credit cards, gift cards, and bank accounts.
The transaction is highly secure in general. When you use your digital wallet to make a purchase, the app creates a random ID for the transaction. It uses that ID rather than your actual account number to keep things secure. Encryption technology keeps things safer still by scrambling info during the process.
A digital wallet is safe, as long as you guard your smartphone just as closely as you would your physical wallet.
Here’s why you should secure your digital wallet and three tips to help you do so.
Fewer people use a lock screen than you might think. A finding from our global research showed that only 56% of adults said that they protect their smartphone with a password or passcode.[i] The problem with going unlocked is that if the phone gets lost or stolen, you’ve handed over a large part of your digital life to a thief. Setting up a lock screen is easy. It’s a simple feature found on iOS and Android devices.
Always protect your digital wallet with a lock, whether a unique passcode, fingerprint scan, or facial ID. This is the best and easiest way to deter cybercriminals. If you use a numerical code, make it different from the passcode on your phone. Also, make sure the numbers are random. Birthdays, anniversaries, house addresses, and the last digits of your phone number are all popular combinations and are crackable codes to a resourceful criminal.
Another way to secure your digital wallet is to make sure you always download the latest software updates. Developers are constantly finding and patching security holes, so the most up-to-date software is often the most secure. Turn on automatic updates to ensure you never miss a new release.
Before you swap your plastic cards for digital payment methods, ensure you research the digital banking app before downloading. Also, ensure that any app you download is through the official Apple or Android store or the financial institution’s official website. Then, check out how many downloads and reviews the app has. That’s one way you can make sure you’re downloading an official app and not an imposter. While most of the apps on official stores are legitimate, it’s always smart to check for typos, blurry logos, and unprofessional app descriptions.
So what happens if your phone ends up getting lost or stolen? A combination of device tracking, device locking, and remote erasing can help protect your phone and the data on it. Different device manufacturers have different ways of going about it, but the result is the same — you can prevent others from using your phone. You can even erase it if you’re truly worried that it’s in the wrong hands or if it’s gone for good. Apple provides iOS users with a step-by-step guide, and Google offers up a guide for Android users as well.
No doubt about it. Our phones get more and more valuable as the years go by. With an increasing amount of our financial lives coursing through them, protecting our phones becomes that much more important.
Comprehensive online protection like our McAfee+ plans can protect your phone. And it can protect something else. You. Namely, your privacy and your identity. Here’s a quick rundown: It can …
Protection like this is worth looking into, particularly as our phones become yet more valuable still thanks to digital wallets and payment apps like them.
[i] https://www.mcafee.com/content/dam/consumer/en-us/docs/reports/rp-connected-family-study-2022-global.pdf
The post How to Secure Your Digital Wallet appeared first on McAfee Blog.
The Russia-based cybercrime group dubbed “Fin7,” known for phishing and malware attacks that have cost victim organizations an estimated $3 billion in losses since 2013, was declared dead last year by U.S. authorities. But experts say Fin7 has roared back to life in 2024 — setting up thousands of websites mimicking a range of media and technology companies — with the help of Stark Industries Solutions, a sprawling hosting provider that is a persistent source of cyberattacks against enemies of Russia.
In May 2023, the U.S. attorney for Washington state declared “Fin7 is an entity no more,” after prosecutors secured convictions and prison sentences against three men found to be high-level Fin7 hackers or managers. This was a bold declaration against a group that the U.S. Department of Justice described as a criminal enterprise with more than 70 people organized into distinct business units and teams.
The first signs of Fin7’s revival came in April 2024, when Blackberry wrote about an intrusion at a large automotive firm that began with malware served by a typosquatting attack targeting people searching for a popular free network scanning tool.
Now, researchers at security firm Silent Push say they have devised a way to map out Fin7’s rapidly regrowing cybercrime infrastructure, which includes more than 4,000 hosts that employ a range of exploits, from typosquatting and booby-trapped ads to malicious browser extensions and spearphishing domains.
Silent Push said it found Fin7 domains targeting or spoofing brands including American Express, Affinity Energy, Airtable, Alliant, Android Developer, Asana, Bitwarden, Bloomberg, Cisco (Webex), CNN, Costco, Dropbox, Grammarly, Google, Goto.com, Harvard, Lexis Nexis, Meta, Microsoft 365, Midjourney, Netflix, Paycor, Quickbooks, Quicken, Reuters, Regions Bank Onepass, RuPay, SAP (Ariba), Trezor, Twitter/X, Wall Street Journal, Westlaw, and Zoom, among others.
Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at Silent Push, said many of the Fin7 domains are innocuous-looking websites for generic businesses that sometimes include text from default website templates (the content on these sites often has nothing to do with the entity’s stated business or mission).
Edwards said Fin7 does this to “age” the domains and to give them a positive or at least benign reputation before they’re eventually converted for use in hosting brand-specific phishing pages.
“It took them six to nine months to ramp up, but ever since January of this year they have been humming, building a giant phishing infrastructure and aging domains,” Edwards said of the cybercrime group.
In typosquatting attacks, Fin7 registers domains that are similar to those for popular free software tools. Those look-alike domains are then advertised on Google so that sponsored links to them show up prominently in search results, which is usually above the legitimate source of the software in question.
A malicious site spoofing FreeCAD showed up prominently as a sponsored result in Google search results earlier this year.
According to Silent Push, the software currently being targeted by Fin7 includes 7-zip, PuTTY, ProtectedPDFViewer, AIMP, Notepad++, Advanced IP Scanner, AnyDesk, pgAdmin, AutoDesk, Bitwarden, Rest Proxy, Python, Sublime Text, and Node.js.
In May 2024, security firm eSentire warned that Fin7 was spotted using sponsored Google ads to serve pop-ups prompting people to download phony browser extensions that install malware. Malwarebytes blogged about a similar campaign in April, but did not attribute the activity to any particular group.
A pop-up at a Thomson Reuters typosquatting domain telling visitors they need to install a browser extension to view the news content.
Edwards said Silent Push discovered the new Fin7 domains after a hearing from an organization that was targeted by Fin7 in years past and suspected the group was once again active. Searching for hosts that matched Fin7’s known profile revealed just one active site. But Edwards said that one site pointed to many other Fin7 properties at Stark Industries Solutions, a large hosting provider that materialized just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.
As KrebsOnSecurity wrote in May, Stark Industries Solutions is being used as a staging ground for wave after wave of cyberattacks against Ukraine that have been tied to Russian military and intelligence agencies.
“FIN7 rents a large amount of dedicated IP on Stark Industries,” Edwards said. “Our analysts have discovered numerous Stark Industries IPs that are solely dedicated to hosting FIN7 infrastructure.”
Fin7 once famously operated behind fake cybersecurity companies — with names like Combi Security and Bastion Secure — which they used for hiring security experts to aid in ransomware attacks. One of the new Fin7 domains identified by Silent Push is cybercloudsec[.]com, which promises to “grow your business with our IT, cyber security and cloud solutions.”
The fake Fin7 security firm Cybercloudsec.
Like other phishing groups, Fin7 seizes on current events, and at the moment it is targeting tourists visiting France for the Summer Olympics later this month. Among the new Fin7 domains Silent Push found are several sites phishing people seeking tickets at the Louvre.
“We believe this research makes it clear that Fin7 is back and scaling up quickly,” Edwards said. “It’s our hope that the law enforcement community takes notice of this and puts Fin7 back on their radar for additional enforcement actions, and that quite a few of our competitors will be able to take this pool and expand into all or a good chunk of their infrastructure.”
Further reading:
Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud.
A 2022 deep dive on Fin7 from the Swiss threat intelligence firm Prodaft (PDF).
Article tags
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PoCs for Kernelmode rootkit techniques research or education. Currently focusing on Windows OS. All modules support 64bit OS only.
NOTE
Some modules use
ExAllocatePool2API to allocate kernel pool memory.ExAllocatePool2API is not supported in OSes older than Windows 10 Version 2004. If you want to test the modules in old OSes, replaceExAllocatePool2API withExAllocatePoolWithTagAPI.
All modules are tested in Windows 11 x64. To test drivers, following options can be used for the testing machine:
debugging-in-windbg--cdb--or-ntsd">Setting Up Kernel-Mode Debugging
Each options require to disable secure boot.
Detailed information is given in README.md in each project's directories. All modules are tested in Windows 11.
| Module Name | Description |
|---|---|
| BlockImageLoad | PoCs to block driver loading with Load Image Notify Callback method. |
| BlockNewProc | PoCs to block new process with Process Notify Callback method. |
| CreateToken | PoCs to get full privileged SYSTEM token with ZwCreateToken() API. |
| DropProcAccess | PoCs to drop process handle access with Object Notify Callback. |
| GetFullPrivs | PoCs to get full privileges with DKOM method. |
| GetProcHandle | PoCs to get full access process handle from kernelmode. |
| InjectLibrary | PoCs to perform DLL injection with Kernel APC Injection method. |
| ModHide | PoCs to hide loaded kernel drivers with DKOM method. |
| ProcHide | PoCs to hide process with DKOM method. |
| ProcProtect | PoCs to manipulate Protected Process. |
| QueryModule | PoCs to perform retrieving kernel driver loaded address information. |
| StealToken | PoCs to perform token stealing from kernelmode. |
More PoCs especially about following things will be added later:
Pavel Yosifovich, Windows Kernel Programming, 2nd Edition (Independently published, 2023)
Reversing-<a href=" https:="" title="Obfuscation">Obfuscation/dp/1502489309">Bruce Dang, Alexandre Gazet, Elias Bachaalany, and Sébastien Josse, Practical Reverse Engineering: x86, x64, ARM, Windows Kernel, Reversing Tools, and Obfuscation (Wiley Publishing, 2014)
Evasion-Corners/dp/144962636X">Bill Blunden, The Rootkit Arsenal: Escape and Evasion in the Dark Corners of the System, 2nd Edition (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2012)
The ability to generate NetFlow from devices that do not natively produce it along with significant storage efficiency and improved workflows make for a significant update to CTB.
Cisco Telemetry… Read more on Cisco Blogs
It’s one thing to claim leadership in cloud security; it’s another to have that leadership acknowledged by industry experts. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our recent recognition by Frost & Sul… Read more on Cisco Blogs
If only Patch Tuesdays came around infrequently — like total solar eclipse rare — instead of just creeping up on us each month like The Man in the Moon. Although to be fair, it would be tough for Microsoft to eclipse the number of vulnerabilities fixed in this month’s patch batch — a record 147 flaws in Windows and related software.
Yes, you read that right. Microsoft today released updates to address 147 security holes in Windows, Office, Azure, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, SQL Server, DNS Server, Windows Defender, Bitlocker, and Windows Secure Boot.
“This is the largest release from Microsoft this year and the largest since at least 2017,” said Dustin Childs, from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). “As far as I can tell, it’s the largest Patch Tuesday release from Microsoft of all time.”
Tempering the sheer volume of this month’s patches is the middling severity of many of the bugs. Only three of April’s vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they can be abused by malware or malcontents to take remote control over unpatched systems with no help from users.
Most of the flaws that Microsoft deems “more likely to be exploited” this month are marked as “important,” which usually involve bugs that require a bit more user interaction (social engineering) but which nevertheless can result in system security bypass, compromise, and the theft of critical assets.
Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs called attention to CVE-2024-20670, an Outlook for Windows spoofing vulnerability described as being easy to exploit. It involves convincing a user to click on a malicious link in an email, which can then steal the user’s password hash and authenticate as the user in another Microsoft service.
Another interesting bug McCarthy pointed to is CVE-2024-29063, which involves hard-coded credentials in Azure’s search backend infrastructure that could be gleaned by taking advantage of Azure AI search.
“This along with many other AI attacks in recent news shows a potential new attack surface that we are just learning how to mitigate against,” McCarthy said. “Microsoft has updated their backend and notified any customers who have been affected by the credential leakage.”
CVE-2024-29988 is a weakness that allows attackers to bypass Windows SmartScreen, a technology Microsoft designed to provide additional protections for end users against phishing and malware attacks. Childs said one of ZDI’s researchers found this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, although Microsoft doesn’t currently list CVE-2024-29988 as being exploited.
“I would treat this as in the wild until Microsoft clarifies,” Childs said. “The bug itself acts much like CVE-2024-21412 – a [zero-day threat from February] that bypassed the Mark of the Web feature and allows malware to execute on a target system. Threat actors are sending exploits in a zipped file to evade EDR/NDR detection and then using this bug (and others) to bypass Mark of the Web.”
Update, 7:46 p.m. ET: A previous version of this story said there were no zero-day vulnerabilities fixed this month. BleepingComputer reports that Microsoft has since confirmed that there are actually two zero-days. One is the flaw Childs just mentioned (CVE-2024-21412), and the other is CVE-2024-26234, described as a “proxy driver spoofing” weakness.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that this month’s release includes fixes for two dozen flaws in Windows Secure Boot, the majority of which are considered “Exploitation Less Likely” according to Microsoft.
“However, the last time Microsoft patched a flaw in Windows Secure Boot in May 2023 had a notable impact as it was exploited in the wild and linked to the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit, which was sold on dark web forums for $5,000,” Narang said. “BlackLotus can bypass functionality called secure boot, which is designed to block malware from being able to load when booting up. While none of these Secure Boot vulnerabilities addressed this month were exploited in the wild, they serve as a reminder that flaws in Secure Boot persist, and we could see more malicious activity related to Secure Boot in the future.”
For links to individual security advisories indexed by severity, check out ZDI’s blog and the Patch Tuesday post from the SANS Internet Storm Center. Please consider backing up your data or your drive before updating, and drop a note in the comments here if you experience any issues applying these fixes.
Adobe today released nine patches tackling at least two dozen vulnerabilities in a range of software products, including Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Commerce, InDesign, Experience Manager, Media Encoder, Bridge, Illustrator, and Adobe Animate.
KrebsOnSecurity needs to correct the record on a point mentioned at the end of March’s “Fat Patch Tuesday” post, which looked at new AI capabilities built into Adobe Acrobat that are turned on by default. Adobe has since clarified that its apps won’t use AI to auto-scan your documents, as the original language in its FAQ suggested.
“In practice, no document scanning or analysis occurs unless a user actively engages with the AI features by agreeing to the terms, opening a document, and selecting the AI Assistant or generative summary buttons for that specific document,” Adobe said earlier this month.
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For years, analysts, security specialists, and security architects alike have been encouraging organizations to become DMARC compliant. This involves deploying email authentication to ensure their… Read more on Cisco Blogs
There has been an exponential increase in breaches within enterprises despite the carefully constructed and controlled perimeters that exist around applications and data. Once an attacker can access… Read more on Cisco Blogs
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Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is a critical component to increase productivity and reduce risk in today’s hyper-distributed environments. Cisco Secure Access provides a modern form of zero trust a… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Modern networks are complex, often involving hybrid work models and a mix of first- and third-party applications and infrastructure. In response, organizations have adopted security service edge… Read more on Cisco Blogs
In January 2024, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a directive (with an update in February) mandating that all U.S. Federal agencies take Ivanti systems offline… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Security service edge (SSE) technology was created to protect remote and branch users with a unified, cloud-delivered security stack. To understand how SSE solutions protect organizations and their… Read more on Cisco Blogs
By shifting from point-solutions to a cybersecurity platform approach, IT and security teams significantly improve their efficiency and security outcomes. Security Service Edge (SSE) projects are… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Zero Trust has been all the rage for several years; it states, “never trust, always verify” and assumes every attempt to access the network or a… Read more on Cisco Blogs
In a blog post last December, I said that the business and IT leaders with whom I meet always ask: How can I secure my highly distributed workforce, who gets more varied and decentralized all the… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Since the European Union (EU) signed the second version of the Network and Information Security (NIS2) Directive in December 2022, there has been a real frenzy all around Europe about it. NIS2 is now… Read more on Cisco Blogs
SwaggerSpy is a tool designed for automated Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) on SwaggerHub. This project aims to streamline the process of gathering intelligence from APIs documented on SwaggerHub, providing valuable insights for security researchers, developers, and IT professionals.
Swagger is an open-source framework that allows developers to design, build, document, and consume RESTful web services. It simplifies API development by providing a standard way to describe REST APIs using a JSON or YAML format. Swagger enables developers to create interactive documentation for their APIs, making it easier for both developers and non-developers to understand and use the API.
SwaggerHub is a collaborative platform for designing, building, and managing APIs using the Swagger framework. It offers a centralized repository for API documentation, version control, and collaboration among team members. SwaggerHub simplifies the API development lifecycle by providing a unified platform for API design and testing.
Performing OSINT on SwaggerHub is crucial because developers, in their pursuit of efficient API documentation and sharing, may inadvertently expose sensitive information. Here are key reasons why OSINT on SwaggerHub is valuable:
Developer Oversights: Developers might unintentionally include secrets, credentials, or sensitive information in API documentation on SwaggerHub. These oversights can lead to security vulnerabilities and unauthorized access if not identified and addressed promptly.
Security Best Practices: OSINT on SwaggerHub helps enforce security best practices. Identifying and rectifying potential security issues early in the development lifecycle is essential to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of APIs.
Preventing Data Leaks: By systematically scanning SwaggerHub for sensitive information, organizations can proactively prevent data leaks. This is especially crucial in today's interconnected digital landscape where APIs play a vital role in data exchange between services.
Risk Mitigation: Understanding that developers might forget to remove or obfuscate sensitive details in API documentation underscores the importance of continuous OSINT on SwaggerHub. This proactive approach mitigates the risk of unintentional exposure of critical information.
Compliance and Privacy: Many industries have stringent compliance requirements regarding the protection of sensitive data. OSINT on SwaggerHub ensures that APIs adhere to these regulations, promoting a culture of compliance and safeguarding user privacy.
Educational Opportunities: Identifying oversights in SwaggerHub documentation provides educational opportunities for developers. It encourages a security-conscious mindset, fostering a culture of awareness and responsible information handling.
By recognizing that developers can inadvertently expose secrets, OSINT on SwaggerHub becomes an integral part of the overall security strategy, safeguarding against potential threats and promoting a secure API ecosystem.
SwaggerSpy obtains information from SwaggerHub and utilizes regular expressions to inspect API documentation for sensitive information, such as secrets and credentials.
To use SwaggerSpy, follow these steps:
FreshRSS git clone https://github.com/UndeadSec/SwaggerSpy.git
cd SwaggerSpy
pip install -r requirements.txt
python swaggerspy.py searchterm
SwaggerSpy is intended for educational and research purposes only. Users are responsible for ensuring that their use of this tool complies with applicable laws and regulations.
Contributions to SwaggerSpy are welcome! Feel free to submit issues, feature requests, or pull requests to help improve this tool.
SwaggerSpy is developed and maintained by Alisson Moretto (UndeadSec)
I'm a passionate cyber threat intelligence pro who loves sharing insights and crafting cybersecurity tools.
SwaggerSpy is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
Special thanks to @Liodeus for providing project inspiration through swaggerHole.
The Minnesota-based Internet provider U.S. Internet Corp. has a business unit called Securence, which specializes in providing filtered, secure email services to businesses, educational institutions and government agencies worldwide. But until it was notified last week, U.S. Internet was publishing more than a decade’s worth of its internal email — and that of thousands of Securence clients — in plain text out on the Internet and just a click away for anyone with a Web browser.
Headquartered in Minnetonka, Minn., U.S. Internet is a regional ISP that provides fiber and wireless Internet service. The ISP’s Securence division bills itself “a leading provider of email filtering and management software that includes email protection and security services for small business, enterprise, educational and government institutions worldwide.”
U.S. Internet/Securence says your email is secure. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Roughly a week ago, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by Hold Security, a Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm. Hold Security founder Alex Holden said his researchers had unearthed a public link to a U.S. Internet email server listing more than 6,500 domain names, each with its own clickable link.
A tiny portion of the more than 6,500 customers who trusted U.S. Internet with their email.
Drilling down into those individual domain links revealed inboxes for each employee or user of these exposed host names. Some of the emails dated back to 2008; others were as recent as the present day.
Securence counts among its customers dozens of state and local governments, including: nc.gov — the official website of North Carolina; stillwatermn.gov, the website for the city of Stillwater, Minn.; and cityoffrederickmd.gov, the website for the government of Frederick, Md.
Incredibly, included in this giant index of U.S. Internet customer emails were the internal messages for every current and former employee of U.S. Internet and its subsidiary USI Wireless. Since that index also included the messages of U.S. Internet’s CEO Travis Carter, KrebsOnSecurity forwarded one of Mr. Carter’s own recent emails to him, along with a request to understand how exactly the company managed to screw things up so spectacularly.
Individual inboxes of U.S. Wireless employees were published in clear text on the Internet.
Within minutes of that notification, U.S. Internet pulled all of the published inboxes offline. Mr. Carter responded and said his team was investigating how it happened. In the same breath, the CEO asked if KrebsOnSecurity does security consulting for hire (I do not).
[Author’s note: Perhaps Mr. Carter was frantically casting about for any expertise he could find in a tough moment. But I found the request personally offensive, because I couldn’t shake the notion that maybe the company was hoping it could buy my silence.]
Earlier this week, Mr. Carter replied with a highly technical explanation that ultimately did little to explain why or how so many internal and customer inboxes were published in plain text on the Internet.
“The feedback from my team was a issue with the Ansible playbook that controls the Nginx configuration for our IMAP servers,” Carter said, noting that this incorrect configuration was put in place by a former employee and never caught. U.S. Internet has not shared how long these messages were exposed.
“The rest of the platform and other backend services are being audited to verify the Ansible playbooks are correct,” Carter said.
Holden said he also discovered that hackers have been abusing a Securence link scrubbing and anti-spam service called Url-Shield to create links that look benign but instead redirect visitors to hacked and malicious websites.
“The bad guys modify the malicious link reporting into redirects to their own malicious sites,” Holden said. “That’s how the bad guys drive traffic to their sites and increase search engine rankings.”
For example, clicking the Securence link shown in the screenshot directly above leads one to a website that tries to trick visitors into allowing site notifications by couching the request as a CAPTCHA request designed to separate humans from bots. After approving the deceptive CAPTCHA/notification request, the link forwards the visitor to a Russian internationalized domain name (рпроаг[.]рф).
The link to this malicious and deceptive website was created using Securence’s link-scrubbing service. Notification pop-ups were blocked when this site tried to disguise a prompt for accepting notifications as a form of CAPTCHA.
U.S. Internet has not responded to questions about how long it has been exposing all of its internal and customer emails, or when the errant configuration changes were made. The company also still has not disclosed the incident on its website. The last press release on the site dates back to March 2020.
KrebsOnSecurity has been writing about data breaches for nearly two decades, but this one easily takes the cake in terms of the level of incompetence needed to make such a huge mistake unnoticed. I’m not sure what the proper response from authorities or regulators should be to this incident, but it’s clear that U.S. Internet should not be allowed to manage anyone’s email unless and until it can demonstrate more transparency, and prove that it has radically revamped its security.
