Tag: Abuse of functionality

Some startups see security as a nice-to-have that can be added months or years after launch. The smart ones realize that dependable security from the beginning means solid performance, satisfied customers, and no precious startup dollars wasted on fraud or incidents. F5 Labs decided to peek under the hood of one of these smart startups: Wanderlust…

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Executive Summary Like coral reefs teeming with a variety of life, web applications are “colony creatures.” They consist of a multitude of independent components, running in separate environments with different operational requirements and supporting infrastructure (both in the cloud and on premises) glued together across networks. In this report, we examine that series of interacting…

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In July 2018, F5 released its first annual Application Protection Report based on the results of an F5-commissioned Ponemon survey of 3,135 IT and security practitioners across the globe. Additional research conducted by Whatcom Community College, University of Washington Tacoma, along with data from White Hat Security and Loryka served to make this one of…

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Imagine you’re a military leader. What if I offered you a weapon to cleanly take out enemy infrastructure with minimal incidental civilian deaths? It has near-infinite operational reach and it’s highly stealthy. Oh, and it’s cheap compared to say, strategic missiles, which cost about a million or so dollars apiece.1 Well, have I got a…

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F5 researchers uncovered a cryptominer campaign delivering new Golang malware that targets Linux-based servers. Golang malware is not often seen in the threat landscape; it was first seen to mid-2018 and has continued throughout 2019. The malware campaign propagates using 7 different methods: 4 web application exploits (2 targeting ThinkPHP, 1 targeting Drupal, and 1…

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Conclusion Campaigns aimed at mining cryptocurrency and targeting Oracle WebLogic are clearly on the rise, and F5 researchers anticipate this trend to continue. This has been fueled partly by the zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-2725)found in April 2019. Oracle WebLogic is used widely by large corporations, and the servers are resource-intensive. This attracts threat actors looking to…

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While analyzing this script which downloads and executes the cryptominer, F5 researchers found that the code is sophisticated, well obfuscated, and long—about 200 lines versus the typical 20 or so lines. The authors clearly put a lot of time and attention into every step, from developing the malware dropper to creating the executable JAR file…

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Further analysis on this sample was not conducted. F5 Labs has reported extensively on the Mirai botnet, IoT landscape, and some of its variants. For a detailed breakdown on current Mirai botnets seen in the threat landscape, the Hunt for IoT Research Series publishes current threat data. Conclusion All of the vulnerabilities targeted this month…

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Looking at cloud breaches over the last few years, it’s easy to get the impression that most were easily avoidable events that occurred due to silly misconfigurations, ugly failure modes, or borderline negligent architectures. To put it bluntly, these cloud breaches look stupid. But the people and the organizations designing and running these systems—both the…

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The script uses random function and variable names to avoid detection by antivirus engines. It also contains another Base64-encoded payload. The threat actor uses .Net APIs to call the Windows API. For example, the script uses the .NET API to find address of VirtualAlloc function exported by kernel32.dll. It then marshals the shellcode by using…

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