When I first know about Tailscale, I didn’t “get” it. I read that it is like VPN but not quite the same as your traditional VPN, but I don’t know the details. But since there are a lot of rave reviews from HN users I got curious. After trying it out, I am immediately sold. I have now installed it on all my personal devices.
Tailscale is a revolutionary new way of connecting devices together. Once setup – and it’s very easy to set up – your devices behave just like they are on the same network. No complicated VPN to setup, or persistent connection issues, or remembering IP addresses to access your devices. It just works.
Tailscale is akin to VPN what Dropbox is to file synchronizing.
Tailscale offers a wide range of benefits for businesses and individuals alike. One of the key benefits of Tailscale is that it allows users to access their networks and devices without the need for traditional VPN software. This means that users can access their networks and devices from any device, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops, without the need for additional software or configuration. This makes it extremely convenient for users who need to access their networks and devices while on the go.
Another benefit of Tailscale is that it offers top-of-the-line security. Tailscale uses state-of-the-art encryption to ensure that all data transmitted over the network is secure and protected from cyber threats. This makes it ideal for businesses and organizations that handle sensitive data and need to ensure that it is protected at all times.
The best part is Tailscale is extremely easy to use. It has a simple and intuitive user interface that makes it easy for users of all skill levels to set up and use.
I highly recommend trying it out to just to see how it works. Tailscale is free for personal use.
NIST, the US standards body in charge of cybersecurity, is recommending phasing out the use of SHA-1 due to vulnerabilities in the algorithm and possibility of attacks by powerful machines. Modern browsers have already sunset support for SHA-1. However, older applications may still be using it as a form of checksum.
The venerable cryptographic hash function has vulnerabilities that make its further use inadvisable.
Once configured, AWS GuardDuty will now scan EBS volumes for malware and report its findings when it detects suspicious activities. If you haven’t enable it already, you should do so.
When you have GuardDuty Malware Protection enabled, a malware scan is initiated when GuardDuty detects that one of your EC2 instances or container workloads running on EC2 is doing something suspicious.
There’s a lot to unpack here: scam prevention expert gets scammed, ‘cos a supposed fraud prevention department turns out to be the actual fraud. Goes to show anyone can fall for these attacks, even experts.
Oh dear. Yet another npm author went rouge. This time it appears that the npm package deletes files for users with Russian/Belarus IP addresses. Time to take package pinning more seriously.
This week, the developer of the popular npm package ‘node-ipc’ released sabotaged versions of the library in protest of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. The ‘node-ipc’ package, which gets downloaded over a million times weekly, began deleting files on developer’s machines, in addition to creating new text files with “peace” messages.
Disclaimer: The following analysis of what could have happened is pure speculation based on publicly available information.
On 8 Jan 2022, news broke that as many as 469 OCBC bank customers were affected by phishing scams, racking losses of up to S$8.5 million in total. This should be one of the biggest and most successful phishing attack of a Singapore bank in recent memory.
Based on details of the news report, it appears that the scam works mainly as a result of 2 factors: 1. Successful social engineering 2. Possible SMS hijacking
Fake bank SMS
According to reports, users who got scammed received SMS messages that appear to originate from the bank. Scammers prey on user’s tendency to trust messages that appear alongside previous legitimate SMSes. How scammers are able to do this is to make use of a feature of SMS sending known as Alphanumeric sender ID. Meaning, they can send an SMS with a chosen sender ID that the bank uses. In this case, they chose “OCBC” as the sender ID. When the user receives such a SMS, it will appear alongside existing SMSes from the same sender ID “OCBC”.
As a quick test, I sent myself a test message with sender ID set to “BOC SG” (what Bank of China Singapore uses) and this is what I see:
This is just to show how easy it is to fake a sender ID. Interestingly, I was unable to reproduce this using “OCBC” as the sender ID, probably because the service provider/ISP is filtering out such IDs.
If a user thinks that it is a legitimate message from the bank, they tend to let their guard down and click on the link that the “bank” has sent – especially if it’s worded as something urgent. In this case it directs to a phishing site that looks exactly like the bank’s login page. Once the user enters their login user/password, the scammer would have captured their login credentials.
SMS hijacking
Just having login credentials is insufficient to make the attack successful. Because most banks would require 2FA for full login and to perform other more important actions like money transfer. This is where the SMS hijacking comes in.
It has been known for quite some time that SMS is NOT a reliable form of 2FA. To understand why, we have to dig into how SMS is implemented. Those who are interested can find out more here. There are some sites – which I won’t link to – that offers to provide such hijacking service for as little as $16.
To cut the long story short, if an attacker knows your mobile phone number, they can intercept your SMS messages, without you knowing. Shocking. I know. But this is well known and has been repeatedly demonstrated in cybersecurity conferences and other public forums.
With both the login credentials and hijacked SMS messages carrying OTP messages, an attacker can in theory carry out transactions without the user being notified.
Actually that is not all, if the bank calls your mobile number – for example, to verify the transaction – that can be intercepted as well via the same mechanism.
Closing the gap
The attack worked in this case because Singapore allows for Alphanumeric sender ID without requiring pre-registration by the sending organization. There are now renewed calls to make pre-registration compulsory to use this feature.
Fixing SMS hijacking – if it’s indeed the mechanism being used – will take more effort and probably require all ISPs to put in place mitigation in their systems. The easier fix may be to deprecate SMS as a 2FA option and stick to other more secure options like authenticating through app or physical tokens.
There are also some questions as to why automatic fraud detection that banks usually have in place is not working in this case. I shall not speculate on this but wait for further information from the investigation.
Conclusion
OCBC customers are not the first to fall prey to scams and neither will they be the last. As we move more and more to the digital world we can expect cyber criminals to keep exploiting both technical loopholes as well as human weaknesses to achieve their objectives. User education remains important and so are improving processes and closing technology gaps.
Previously we had attackers using hijacked npm libraries to steal credentials. In this case the libraries or the maintainer wasn’t compromised. In fact it was the maintainer who deliberately introduced bugs into his libraries, thereby breaking thousands of apps that depends on it. There’s no easy solution to this dependency problem. For now use pinned versions and manually approve upgrades.
Users of popular open-source libraries ‘colors’ and ‘faker’ were left stunned after they saw their applications, using these libraries, printing gibberish data and breaking. Some surmised if the NPM libraries had been compromised, but it turns out there’s more to the story.
log4j is a common logging library for Java applications. This vulnerability is extremely easy to exploit, and allows the attacker to run arbitrary code in the server. IOW, very bad. For now, set log4j.formatMsgNoLookups=true to mitigate the issue, until an official patch is out.
Given how ubiquitous this library is, the impact of this vulnerability is quite severe. Learn how to patch it, why it’s bad, and more in this post.
Got hit by this today. Was trying to open a Word doc from a colleague when I receive the following scary warning.
Submitting the same file to VirusTotal returns 0 threats detected. Hmmm.
Searching for the keyword Win32/PowEmotet.SB returns the following:
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is currently blocking Office documents from being opened and some executables from launching due to a false positive tagging the files as potentially bundling an Emotet malware payload.
