Research Saturday

This week, our guests are Emily Austin and Himaja Motheram from Censys and their sharing their research - "Months after first GoAnywhere MFT zero-day attacks, Censys still sees about 180 public admin panels." In early February 2023, Censys researchers discovered a zero-day RCE vulnerability in Fortra’s “GoAnywhere MFT” (Managed File Transfer) software. After finding this the Clop ransomware gang c...

Willy R. Vasquez from The University of Texas at Austin discussing research on "The Most Dangerous Codec in the World - Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities in H.264 Decoders." Researchers are looking at the marvel that is modern video encoding standards such as H.264 for vulnerabilities and ultimately hidden security risks. The research states "We introduce and evaluate H26FORGE, domain-specifi...

Aleksandar Milenkoski and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade from SentinelOne's SentinelLabs join Dave to discuss their research "Operation Tainted Love | Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks." Researchers found initial phases of attacks against telecommunication providers in the Middle East in Q1 in 2023. The research states "We assess that this activity represents an evolution of tooling associated...

Ryan Robinson from Intezer to discuss his team's work on "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry." The research team discovered activity targeting the nuclear energy industry in China. Researchers attributed the activity to Bitter APT, a South Asian APT that is known to target the energy, manufacturing and government sectors, mainly in Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arab...

This week our guests are, Larry Cashdollar, Chad Seaman and Allen West from Akamai Technologies, and they are discussing their research on "Uncovering HinataBot: A Deep Dive into a Go-Based Threat." The team discovered a new Go-based, DDoS-focused botnet. They found it was named after the popular anime show "Naruto," they are calling it "HinataBot" In the research it says "HinataBot was seen being...

Shiran Guez from Akamai sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "Chatbots, Celebrities, and Victim Retargeting and Why Crypto Giveaway Scams Are Still So Successful." Researchers at Akamai have been on the lookout for crypto giveaway scams. These scams have been impersonating celebrities and brands, most notably Elon Musk and his associated companies. The research states "the scams are de...

Scott Fanning, Senior Director of Product Management, Cloud Security at CrowdStrike, sits down to talk about the first-ever Dero cryptojacking operation targeting Kubernetes infrastructure. The research defines Dero as "a cryptocurrency that claims to offer improved privacy, anonymity and higher and faster monetary rewards compared to Monero, which is a commonly used cryptocurrency in cryptojackin...

Sahar Abdelnabi from CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security sits down with Dave to discuss their work on "A Comprehensive Analysis of Novel Prompt Injection Threats to Application-Integrated Large Language Models." There is currently a large advance in the capabilities of Large Language Models or LLMs, as well as being integrated into many systems, including integrated development environ...

Dick O'Brien from Symantec’s Threat Hunter team discusses their research on "Blackfly - Espionage Group Targets Materials Technology." Researchers say the Blackfly espionage group (aka APT41), has been mounting attacks against Asian materials and composite organizations in attempts to steal intellectual property. This group has been known as one of the longest known Chinese advanced persistent thr...

On this episode, Jérôme Segura, senior threat researcher at Malwarebytes, shares his team's work, "WordPress sites backdoored with ad fraud plugin." WordPress is an immensely popular content management system (CMS) powering over 43% of all websites. Many webmasters will monetize their sites by running ads and need to draw particular attention to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to maxim...

Bar Block, Threat Intelligence Researcher at Deep Instinct, joins Dave to discuss their work on "ChatGPT and Malware - Making Your Malicious Wishes Come True." Deep Instinct goes into depth on just how dangerous ChatGPT can be in the wrong hands as well as how artificial intelligence is better at creating malware than providing ways to detect it. Researchers go on to explain how the AI app can be...

Ron Masas of Imperva discusses their work, the "Google Chrome “SymStealer” Vulnerability. How to Protect Your Files from Being Stolen." By reviewing the ways the browser handles file systems, specifically searching for common vulnerabilities relating to how browsers process symlinks, the Imperva Red Team discovered that when files are dropped onto a file input, it’s handled differently. Dubbing it...

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...