Sunday Security Brief

This brief covered a unique attack vector, information on a broad campaign using DNS attacks, a case relating to technology law, and a few advisories that either stuck me as important or curious.

What happened last night can happen again ~ fortune

Topics:

• IDN Homograph Attack
• A Deep Dive on DNS Hijacking Attacks
• Law enforcement has seized the domains and infrastructure of three VPN services being used for cybercrime
• Advisories

IDN Homograph Attack

This particular exploit is interesting. It takes advantage of the fact that many different characters look alike to mislead people from their desired domain to a malicious one. I wonder what practices could help avoid this issue. The obvious step is to be concious of limiting the links that you click on from websites like Tildes, Hacker News, Reddit, or where anywhere can share a link with you via text. For example, if you see a Reddit thread about PayPal where someone includes a link to the PayPal Customer Service Center... Don't click it, just Google "PayPal Customer Service". This will be far safer in ensuring that you're going to the domain that you meant to!

Another thing to note is the importance of realizing how your trust online and how that changes your behavior. I know that I have a general sense of trust for people here that removes a lot of doubt when it comes to clicking random stuff you all share here. That trust could potentially work against you.

"The internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack is a way a malicious party may deceive computer users about what remote system they are communicating with, by exploiting the fact that many different characters look alike"

"The registration of homographic domain names is akin to typosquatting ~ Wikipedia, in that both forms of attacks use a similar-looking name to a more established domain to fool a user. The major difference is that in typosquatting the perpetrator attracts victims by relying on natural typographical errors commonly made when manually entering a URL, while in homograph spoofing the perpetrator deceives the victims by presenting visually indistinguishable hyperlinks."

IDN homograph attack ~ Wikipedia

A Deep Dive on DNS Hijacking Attacks

The article covered is a few months old, but still relavant as ever. The U.S. government alongside private security personnel issued information of a complex system that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to obtain a huge amount of email credentials, sensitive government and corporate information. The specifics of how this attack occured are not publicly available but Cisco's Talos research has a write up of how DNS Attacks work, the relavant snippets are below.

"Talos said the perpetrators of DNSpionage were able to steal email and other login credentials from a number of government and private sector entities in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates by hijacking the DNS servers for these targets, so that all email and virtual private networking (VPN) traffic was redirected to an Internet address controlled by the attackers."

"Talos reported that these DNS hijacks also paved the way for the attackers to obtain SSL encryption certificates for the targeted domains (e.g. webmail.finance.gov.lb), which allowed them to decrypt the intercepted email and VPN credentials and view them in plain text."

"A Deep Dive on the Recent Widespread DNS Hijacking Attacks" ~ Krebs on Security

Law enforcement has seized the domains and infrastructure of three VPN services being used for cybercrime

The balance between allowing autonomy and protecting our collective interests comes to my mind. This seems like a worthy example of when stopping people from victimizing others overshadows the benefits of free action.

"Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have seized this week the web domains and server infrastructure of three VPN services that provided a safe haven for cybercriminals to attack their victims."

"... described the three as "bulletproof hosting services," a term typically used to describe web companies that don't take down criminal content, despite repeated requests."

"According to the US Department of Justice and Europol, the three companies' servers were often used to mask the real identities of ransomware gangs, web skimmer (Magecart) groups, online phishers, and hackers involved in account takeovers, allowing them to operate from behind a proxy network up to five layers deep."

Law enforcement take down three bulletproof VPN providers ~ Zdnet

Advisories

• Debian, DSA-4824-1 chromium security update. Source

• Arch, CVE-2020-25637 libvirt. Source

• CentOS, CESA-2020-5437, Important CentOS 7 kernel. Source

• RedHat, RHSA-2020:5665, Important: mariadb:10.3 security, bug fix, and enhancement update. Source

• Windows, If you know of a good tracker for Windows securities advisories, please let me know. I was considering just drawing from the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog.