Research Saturday

Dor Zvi, Co-Founder and CEO from Red Access to discuss their work on "New Chrome Exploit Lets Attackers Completely Disable Browser Extensions." A recently patched exploit is tricking Chrome browsers on all popular OSs to not only give attackers visibility of their targets’ browser extensions, but also the ability to disable all of those extensions. The research states the exploit consists of a boo...

Andy Patel from WithSecure Labs joins with Dave to discuss their study that demonstrates how GPT-3 can be misused through malicious and creative prompt engineering. The research looks at how this technology, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, can be used to trick users into scams. GPT-3 is a user-friendly tool that employs autoregressive language to generate versatile natural language text using a small amount of...

Wendy Nather from Cisco sits down with Dave to discuss their work on "Cracking the Code to Security Resilience: Lessons from the Latest Cisco Security Outcomes Report." The report describes what security resilience is, while also going over how companies can achieve this resilience. Wendy talks through some of the key findings based off of the report, and after surveying 4,751 active information s...

Pascal Ackerman, OT Security Strategist from Guidepoint Security, joins Dave to discuss his work on discovering a vulnerability in the integrity of common HMI client-server protocol. This research is a Proof of Concept (PoC) attack on the integrity of data flowing across the industrial network with the intention of intercepting, viewing, and even manipulating values sent to (and from) the HMI, ult...

Tom Bonner and Eoin Wickens from HiddenLayer's SAI Team to discuss their research on weaponizing machine learning models with ransomware. Researchers at HiddenLayer’s SAI Team have developed a proof-of-concept attack for surreptitiously deploying malware, such as ransomware or Cobalt Strike Beacon, via machine learning models. The attack uses a technique currently undetected by many cybersecurity...

Roya Gordon from Nozomi Networks sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "Vulnerabilities in BMC Firmware Affect OT/IoT Device Security." Researchers at Nozomi Networks has revealed that there are thirteen vulnerabilities that affect BMCs of Lanner devices based on the American Megatrends (AMI) MegaRAC SP-X. The research states "By abusing these vulnerabilities, an unauthenticated attacke...

Brigid O. Gorman from Symantec's Threat Hunter Team joins Dave to discuss their report "Billbug - State-sponsored Actor Targets Cert Authority and Government Agencies in Multiple Asian Countries." The team has discovered that state-sponsored actors compromised a digital certificate authority in an Asian country during a campaign in which multiple government agencies were also targeted. The researc...

Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad from WithSecure joins Dave to discuss the team’s research, “DUCKTAIL returns - Underneath the ruffled feathers.” DUCKTAIL is a financially motivated malware operation that targets individuals and businesses operating on the Facebook Ads and Business platform. The research states “The malware is designed to steal browser cookies and take advantage of authenticated Facebo...

Marisa Atkinson, an analyst from Flashpoint, joins Dave to discuss a new blog post from Flashpoint’s research team about “RisePro” Stealer, malware from Russia, and Pay-Per-Install Malware “PrivateLoader.” “RisePro” is written in C++ and appears to possess similar functionality to the stealer malware “Vidar.” It's also a newly identified stealer, that began appearing as a stealer source for log cr...

Scott Fanning from CrowdStrike's research team, joins Dave to discuss their work on "LemonDuck Targets Docker for Cryptomining Operations." LemonDuck is a well-known cryptomining botnet, and the research suggests attackers are attracted to the monetary gain from the recent boom in cryptocurrency. LemonDuck was caught trying to disguise its attack against Docker by running an anonymous mining opera...

Dr. May Wang, CTO of IoT Security at Palo Alto Networks, joins Dave Bittner to discuss their findings detailed in Unit 42's "Know Your Infusion Pump Vulnerabilities and Secure Your Healthcare Organization" research. Unit 42 recently set out to better understand how well hospitals and other healthcare providers are doing in securing smart infusion pumps, which are network-connected devices that del...

Or Katz from Akamai sits down with Dave to discuss research on highly sophisticated phishing scams and how they are abusing holiday sentiment. This particular threat, most recently has focused on Halloween deals, enticing victims with the chance to win a free prize, including from Dick’s Sporting Goods or Tumi Backpacks. It then requests credit card details to cover the cost of shipment. From mid-...

AJ Nash from ZeroFox sits down with Dave to discuss Cybersecurity threats including social engineering attacks planned surrounding the Qatar 2022 World Cup. The research shares some of the key threats we might see while the World Cup is happening this year. Researchers say "During the World Cup, there will likely be threat actors aiming to acquire personal information or monetary value through phi...

Jeremy Kennelly and Sulian Lebegue from Mandiant sit down with Dave to discuss their research "From RM3 to LDR4: URSNIF Leaves Banking Fraud Behind? One of the oldest and most successful banking fraud malwares, URSNIF, which caused an estimated “tens of millions of dollars in losses”, has been discovered by researchers to have been re-tooled into a generic backdoor, dubbed “LDR4”. This new variant...

Alon Zahavi from CyberArk, joins Dave Bittner on this episode to discuss CyberArk's work in conjunction with Patch Tuesday. CyberArk published about how Docker inadvertently created a new vulnerability and what happens when it's exploited. CyberArk's research concluded that an attacker may execute files with capabilities or setuid files in order to escalate its privileges up to root level. CyberAr...

Larry Cashdollar, Principal Security Intelligence Response Engineer from Akamai Technologies, joins Dave to talk about their research on "KmsdBot: The Attack and Mine Malware." Akamai's Security Research team has found a new malware that infected their honeypot, which they have dubbed KmsdBot.  The research states "The malware attacks using UDP, TCP, HTTP POST, and GET, along with a command and co...

Deepen Desai from Zscaler sits down with Dave to talk about the Crytox ransomware family. First observed in 2020, Crytox is a ransomware family consisting of several stages of encrypted code that has fallen under the radar compared to other ransomware families. While other groups normally use double extortion attacks where data is both encrypted and held for ransom, Crytox does not perform this wa...

Roya Gordon from Nozomi Networks sits down with Dave to discuss their work "UWB Real Time Locating Systems: How Secure Radio Communications May Fail in Practice." Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a rapidly-growing radio technology that, according to the UWB Alliance, is forecasted to drive sales volumes exceeding one billion devices annually by 2025. In an effort to strengthen the security of devices utili...

Federico Kirschbaum from Faraday Security sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "A vulnerability in Realtek's SDK for eCos OS: pwning thousands of routers." The team at Faraday found a vulnerability that made it to DEFCON 30, labeling it high severity. With more and more people working from home for their companies, the research team went looking for where there may be vulnerabilities a...

Dick O'Brien from Symantec's Threat Hunter team sits down with Dave to discuss their work on "Witchetty - Group Uses Updated Toolset in Attacks on Governments in Middle East." Their research has found that the group known as Witchetty aka LookingFrog, has been progressively updating its toolset, including the new tool, backdoor Trojan (Backdoor. Stegmap) to launch malware attacks on targets in the...

Brigid O Gorman from Symantec's Threat Hunter team joins Dave to discuss their research on "Noberus Ransomware - Darkside and BlackMatter Successor Continues to Evolve its Tactics." The research states that Noberus ransomware (aka BlackCat, ALPHV) is more dangerous than ever because attackers have been using new tactics, tools, and procedures in recent months. In the research, Symantec says, "Amon...

Jen Miller-Osborn from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 joins Dave to discuss their work on the Cloaked Ursa group, with a recent report released called "Russian APT29 Hackers Use Online Storage Services, DropBox and Google Drive." The research shares insights into an active campaign from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, that is leveraging the use of trusted, legitimate cloud services including G...

David Prefer from SANS sits down with Dave to discuss how a new covert channel exfiltrates data via a browser's built-in bookmark sync. David goes on to describe how this research will "describe how the ability to synchronize bookmarks across devices introduces a novel vector for data exfiltration and other misuses." In the research, he shares how he tested his said hypothesis and goes on to descr...

Gafnit Amiga, Director of Security Research from Lightspin, joins Dave to discuss her team's research "AWS RDS Vulnerability Leads to AWS Internal Service Credentials." The research describes how the vulnerability was caught and right after it was reported, the AWS Security team applied an initial patch limited only to the recent Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Aurora PostgreSQL engin...

Sam Crowther, CEO of Kasada join's Dave to discuss their work on "The New Way Fraudsters Bypass Bot Management." Kasada researchers recently discovered a new type of bot called Solver Services, which is used and created by bad actors to bypass the majority of bot management systems. The research states "Now it’s easier than ever for mainstream bot operators to scrape content, take over accounts, h...