Using Fake Student Accounts to Shill Brands

It turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to create a fake Harvard student and get a harvard.edu email account. Scammers are using that prestigious domain name to shill brands:

Basically, it appears that anyone with $300 to spare can ­– or could, depending on whether Harvard successfully shuts down the practice — advertise nearly anything they wanted on Harvard.edu, in posts that borrow the university’s domain and prestige while making no mention of the fact that it in reality they constitute paid advertising….

A Harvard spokesperson said that the university is working to crack down on the fake students and other scammers that have gained access to its site. They also said that the scammers were creating the fake accounts by signing up for online classes and then using the email address that process provided to infiltrate the university’s various blogging platforms.

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Posted on November 3, 2021 at 6:10 AM • 5 Comments

On Cell Phone Metadata

Interesting Twitter thread on how cell phone metadata can be used to identify and track people who don’t want to be identified and tracked.

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Posted on November 2, 2021 at 6:28 AM • 45 Comments

Hiding Vulnerabilities in Source Code

Really interesting research demonstrating how to hide vulnerabilities in source code by manipulating how Unicode text is displayed. It’s really clever, and not the sort of attack one would normally think about.

From Ross Anderson’s blog:

We have discovered ways of manipulating the encoding of source code files so that human viewers and compilers see different logic. One particularly pernicious method uses Unicode directionality override characters to display code as an anagram of its true logic. We’ve verified that this attack works against C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, Rust, Go, and Python, and suspect that it will work against most other modern languages.

This potentially devastating attack is tracked as CVE-2021-42574, while a related attack that uses homoglyphs –- visually similar characters –- is tracked as CVE-2021-42694. This work has been under embargo for a 99-day period, giving time for a major coordinated disclosure effort in which many compilers, interpreters, code editors, and repositories have implemented defenses.

Website for the attack. Rust security advisory.

Brian Krebs has a blog post.

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Posted on November 1, 2021 at 10:58 AM • 77 Comments

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Has a Cryptocurrency

In what maybe peak hype, Squid Game has its own cryptocurrency. Not in the fictional show, but in real life.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

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Posted on October 29, 2021 at 4:09 PM • 77 Comments

More Russian SVR Supply-Chain Attacks

Microsoft is reporting that the same attacker that was behind the SolarWinds breach — the Russian SVR, which Microsoft is calling Nobelium — is continuing with similar supply-chain attacks:

Nobelium has been attempting to replicate the approach it has used in past attacks by targeting organizations integral to the global IT supply chain. This time, it is attacking a different part of the supply chain: resellers and other technology service providers that customize, deploy and manage cloud services and other technologies on behalf of their customers. We believe Nobelium ultimately hopes to piggyback on any direct access that resellers may have to their customers’ IT systems and more easily impersonate an organization’s trusted technology partner to gain access to their downstream customers. We began observing this latest campaign in May 2021 and have been notifying impacted partners and customers while also developing new technical assistance and guidance for the reseller community. Since May, we have notified more than 140 resellers and technology service providers that have been targeted by Nobelium. We continue to investigate, but to date we believe as many as 14 of these resellers and service providers have been compromised. Fortunately, we have discovered this campaign during its early stages, and we are sharing these developments to help cloud service resellers, technology providers, and their customers take timely steps to help ensure Nobelium is not more successful.

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Posted on October 28, 2021 at 6:12 AM • 15 Comments

How the FBI Gets Location Information

Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation.

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Posted on October 27, 2021 at 9:01 AM • 26 Comments

New York Times Journalist Hacked with NSO Spyware

Citizen Lab is reporting that a New York Times journalist was hacked with the NSO Group’s spyware Pegasus, probably by the Saudis.

The world needs to do something about these cyberweapons arms manufacturers. This kind of thing isn’t enough; NSO Group is an Israeli company.

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Posted on October 25, 2021 at 1:46 PM • 31 Comments

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Eating Maine Shrimp

Squid are eating Maine shrimp, causing a collapse of the ecosystem. This seems to be a result of climate change.

Maine’s shrimp fishery has been closed for nearly a decade since the stock’s collapse in 2013. Scientists are now saying a species of squid that came into the Gulf of Maine during a historic ocean heatwave the year before may have been a “major player” in the shrimp’s downturn.

In 2012, the Gulf of Maine experienced some of its warmest temperatures in decades. Within a couple of years, the cold-water-loving northern shrimp had rapidly declined and the fishery, a small but valued source of income for fishermen in the offseason, closed.

Anne Richards, a biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Margaret Hunter, a biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, studied the collapse and found that it coincided with an influx of longfin squid, a major shrimp predator.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

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Posted on October 22, 2021 at 4:10 PM • 152 Comments

Nation-State Attacker of Telecommunications Networks

Someone has been hacking telecommunications networks around the world:

  • LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is an activity cluster that has been consistently targeting the telecommunications sector at a global scale since at least 2016, leveraging custom tools and an in-depth knowledge of telecommunications network architectures.
  • Recent findings highlight this cluster’s extensive knowledge of telecommunications protocols, including the emulation of these protocols to facilitate command and control (C2) and utilizing scanning/packet-capture tools to retrieve highly specific information from mobile communication infrastructure, such as subscriber information and call metadata.
  • The nature of the data targeted by the actor aligns with information likely to be of significant interest to signals intelligence organizations.
  • CrowdStrike Intelligence assesses that LightBasin is a targeted intrusion actor that will continue to target the telecommunications sector. This assessment is made with high confidence and is based on tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), target scope, and objectives exhibited by this activity cluster. There is currently not enough available evidence to link the cluster’s activity to a specific country-nexus.

Some relation to China is reported, but this is not a definitive attribution.

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Posted on October 22, 2021 at 6:13 AM • 38 Comments

Problems with Multifactor Authentication

Roger Grimes on why multifactor authentication isn’t a panacea:

The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his most trusted VP who let the attackers in. It turns out that the VP had approved over 10 different push-based messages for logins that he was not involved in. When the VP was asked why he approved logins for logins he was not actually doing, his response was, “They (IT) told me that I needed to click on Approve when the message appeared!”

And there you have it in a nutshell. The VP did not understand the importance (“the WHY”) of why it was so important to ONLY approve logins that they were participating in. Perhaps they were told this. But there is a good chance that IT, when implementinthe new push-based MFA, instructed them as to what they needed to do to successfully log in, but failed to mention what they needed to do when they were not logging in if the same message arrived. Most likely, IT assumed that anyone would naturally understand that it also meant not approving unexpected, unexplained logins. Did the end user get trained as to what to do when an unexpected login arrived? Were they told to click on “Deny” and to contact IT Help Desk to report the active intrusion?

Or was the person told the correct instructions for both approving and denying and it just did not take? We all have busy lives. We all have too much to do. Perhaps the importance of the last part of the instructions just did not sink in. We can think we hear and not really hear. We can hear and still not care.

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Posted on October 21, 2021 at 6:25 AM • 34 Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.