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at 5/26/2023 06:26:00 PM

The threat actor behind the supply chain compromise of SolarWinds has continued to expand its malware arsenal with new tools and techniques that were deployed in attacks as early as 2019, once indicative of the elusive nature of the campaigns and the adversary's ability to maintain persistent access for years.

According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which detailed the novel tactics adopted by the Nobelium hacking group last week, two sophisticated malware families were placed on victim systems — a Linux variant of GoldMax and a new implant dubbed TrailBlazer — long before the scale of the attacks came to light.

Nobelium, the Microsoft-assigned moniker for the SolarWinds intrusion in December 2020, is also tracked by the wider cybersecurity community under the names UNC2452 (FireEye), SolarStorm (Unit 42), StellarParticle (CrowdStrike), Dark Halo (Volexity), and Iron Ritual (Secureworks).

The malicious activities have since been attributed to a Russian state-sponsored actor called APT29 (also known as The Dukes and Cozy Bear), a cyber espionage operation associated with the country's Foreign Intelligence Service that's known to be active since at least 2008.

GoldMax (aka SUNSHUTTLE), which was discovered by Microsoft and FireEye (now Mandiant) in March 2021, is a Golang-based malware that acts as a command-and-control backdoor, establishing a secure connection with a remote server to execute arbitrary commands on the compromised machine.

Mandiant also pointed out that Dark Halo actors had used the malware in attacks going back to at least August 2020, or four months before SolarWinds discovered its Orion updates had been tampered with malware designed to drop post-compromise implants against thousands of its customers.

In September 2021, Kaspersky revealed details of a second variant of the GoldMax backdoor called Tomiris that was deployed against several government organizations in an unnamed CIS member state in December 2020 and January 2021.

The latest iteration is a previously undocumented but functionally identical Linux implementation of the second-stage malware that was installed in victim environments in mid-2019, predating all other identified samples built for the Windows platform to date.

Also delivered around the same timeframe was TrailBlazer, a modular backdoor that offers attackers a path to cyber espionage, while sharing commonalities with GoldMax in the way it masquerades its command-and-control (C2) traffic as legitimate Google Notifications HTTP requests.

Other uncommon channels used by the actor to facilitate the attacks include —

Credential hopping for obscuring lateral movement
Office 365 (O365) Service Principal and Application hijacking, impersonation, and manipulation, and
Theft of browser cookies for bypassing multi-factor authentication

Additionally, the operators carried out multiple instances of domain credential theft months apart, each time leveraging a different technique, one among them being the use of Mimikatz password stealer in-memory, from an already compromised host to ensure access for extended periods of time.

"The StellarParticle campaign, associated with the Cozy Bear adversary group, demonstrates this threat actor's extensive knowledge of Windows and Linux operating systems, Microsoft Azure, O365, and Active Directory, and their patience and covert skill set to stay undetected for months — and in some cases, years," the researchers said.

Full RF Hacking Course in Development:

Not all of the attacks in the tool have been covered in the RF hacking blog series and a few more are in research mode, as such, not yet added to the tool but will probably be covered in a full length online class on Hacking with RF which includes all targets and equipment. Send an email to info(at)cclabs.io if your interested.

Walkthrough Training Video:

Until Next time:

Cheers, and enjoy the tool for your personal use testing devices, feedback and bug reports are appreciated. I have another RF blog coming out shortly based on my friends research into hacking garages/gates and creating keyfobs. I will post when its ready.

More info

at 5/26/2023 01:05:00 AM

Recovering data from a backup should be an easy thing to do. At least this is what you expect. Yesterday I had a problem which should have been easy to solve, but it was not. I hope this blog post can help others who face the same problem.

The problem

1. I had an encrypted Time Machine backup which was not used for months
2. This backup was not on an official Apple Time Capsule or on a USB HDD, but on a WD MyCloud NAS
3. I needed files from this backup
4. After running out of time I only had SSH access to the macOS, no GUI

The struggle

By default, Time Machine is one of the best and easiest backup solution I have seen. As long as you stick to the default use case, where you have one active backup disk, life is pink and happy. But this was not my case.

As always, I started to Google what shall I do. One of the first options recommended that I add the backup disk to Time Machine, and it will automagically show the backup snapshots from the old backup. Instead of this, it did not show the old snapshots but started to create a new backup. Panic button has been pressed, backup canceled, back to Google.

Other tutorials recommend to click on the Time Machine icon and pressing alt (Option) key, where I can choose "Browse other backup disks". But this did not list the old Time Machine backup. It did list the backup when selecting disks in Time Machine preferences, but I already tried and failed that way.

YAT (yet another tutorial) recommended to SSH into the NAS, and browse the backup disk, as it is just a simple directory where I can see all the files. But all the files inside where just a bunch of nonsense, no real directory structure.

YAT (yet another tutorial) recommended that I can just easily browse the content of the backup from the Finder by double-clicking on the sparse bundle file. After clicking on it, I can see the disk image on the left part of the Finder, attached as a new disk.
Well, this is true, but because of some bug, when you connect to the Time Capsule, you don't see the sparse bundle file. And I got inconsistent results, for the WD NAS, double-clicking on the sparse bundle did nothing. For the Time Capsule, it did work.
At this point, I had to leave the location where the backup was present, and I only had remote SSH access. You know, if you can't solve a problem, let's complicate things by restrict yourself in solutions.

Finally, I tried to check out some data forensics blogs, and besides some expensive tools, I could find the solution.

The solution

Finally, a blog post provided the real solution - hdiutil.
The best part of hdiutil is that you can provide the read-only flag to it. This can be very awesome when it comes to forensics acquisition.

To mount any NAS via SMB:

mount_smbfs afp://<username>@<NAS_IP>/<Share_for_backup> /<mountpoint>

To mount a Time Capsule share via AFP:

mount_afp afp://any_username:password@<Time_Capsule_IP>/<Share_for_backup> /<mountpoint>

And finally this command should do the job:

hdiutil attach test.sparsebundle -readonly

It is nice that you can provide read-only parameter.

If the backup was encrypted and you don't want to provide the password in a password prompt, use the following:

printf '%s' 'CorrectHorseBatteryStaple' | hdiutil attach test.sparsebundle -stdinpass -readonly

Note: if you receive the error "resource temporarily unavailable", probably another machine is backing up to the device

And now, you can find your backup disk under /Volumes. Happy restoring!

Probably it would have been quicker to either enable the remote GUI, or to physically travel to the system and login locally, but that would spoil the fun.

What is BurpSuite?
Burp Suite is a Java based Web Penetration Testing framework. It has become an industry standard suite of tools used by information security professionals. Burp Suite helps you identify vulnerabilities and verify attack vectors that are affecting web applications. Because of its popularity and breadth as well as depth of features, we have created this useful page as a collection of Burp Suite knowledge and information.

In its simplest form, Burp Suite can be classified as an Interception Proxy. While browsing their target application, a penetration tester can configure their internet browser to route traffic through the Burp Suite proxy server. Burp Suite then acts as a (sort of) Man In The Middle by capturing and analyzing each request to and from the target web application so that they can be analyzed.

Everyone has their favorite security tools, but when it comes to mobile and web applications I've always found myself looking BurpSuite . It always seems to have everything I need and for folks just getting started with web application testing it can be a challenge putting all of the pieces together. I'm just going to go through the installation to paint a good picture of how to get it up quickly.

BurpSuite is freely available with everything you need to get started and when you're ready to cut the leash, the professional version has some handy tools that can make the whole process a little bit easier. I'll also go through how to install FoxyProxy which makes it much easier to change your proxy setup, but we'll get into that a little later.

Requirements and assumptions:

Mozilla Firefox 3.1 or Later Knowledge of Firefox Add-ons and installation The Java Runtime Environment installed

Download BurpSuite from http://portswigger.net/burp/download.htmland make a note of where you save it.

on for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-standard/

If this is your first time running the JAR file, it may take a minute or two to load, so be patient and wait.

Video for setup and installation.

You need to install compatible version of java , So that you can run BurpSuite.

Related word

at 5/25/2023 12:45:00 PM

As you can see, this blog has been dormant for a little over two years. You would think that the pandemic would have given me more time for reviewing games, and maybe it has, but I have been lacking in motivation.

Oddly, the shuttering of Google Plus put a large dent in my website traffic numbers (I may have been one of the few people who was benefiting from it), but mostly it has seemed like there are more important things going on in the world than board game reviews, and I thought the best way I could help would be to get out of the way and stop contributing to the noise.

Now that the world has calmed down a little bit (has it though?) I hope to get back to sharing my random thoughts on my admittedly trivial hobby. Stay tuned...

Friday, May 26, 2023

New Malware Used By SolarWinds Attackers Went Undetected For Years

Related posts

RFCrack Release - A Software Defined Radio Attack Tool

GitHub Code for RFCrack:

Full RF Hacking Course in Development:

Walkthrough Training Video:

Until Next time:

Recovering Data From An Old Encrypted Time Machine Backup

The problem

The struggle

The solution

Related posts

Thursday, May 25, 2023

BurpSuite Introduction & Installation

Where Have We Been?

The Foundation...

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