Microsoft Gives Money To Hackers

Microsoft has given out more than $250,000 in prize money to Black Hat hackers who found ways to protect its software. Redmond’s first Blue Hat prize were unveiled at a hip club at a mobbed party complete with dancers, high-energy DJ, and explosions of shimmering confetti.

The top prize of $200,000 went to doctoral student Vasilis Pappas. Pappas came up with a method to countering “the most popular attack technique” that Redmond is seeing at the moment. This is called Return-Oriented Programming which is a hacker technique that is often used to disable or circumvent a program’s computer security controls. Pappas came up with something called kBouncer which blocks anything that looks like an ROP attack from running.

Microsoft security response center senior director Mike Reavey said that Redmond posed a challenge to the researcher community and asked them to shift their focus from solely identifying and reporting individual vulnerabilities to investing in new lines of defensive research that could mitigate entire classes of attacks.

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Skype Confirms Glitch

Skype, a division of Microsoft, confirmed on Monday that a bug in its software has led to instant messages being shared with unintended parties.

The company said it will provide an update to fix the problem in “the next few days.”

According to user reports, the unintended recipients have been connected to just one of the two users who exchanging messages. The problem could have harmful consequences. For example, two co-workers using Skype to exchange IMs (instant messages) could, as a result of the problem, share the message with another contact in one user’s address book — potentially a third co-worker being unfavorably described in their IM exchange.

According to Skype, the problem only arises in “rare circumstances.”

The issue first came to light last week in Skype’s user forums. It seems to stem from the update issued by the voice, video and text messaging service in June.

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Remote Access Tools Threatens Smartphones

Malware tools that allow attackers to gain complete remote control of smartphones have become a major threat to owners around the world, security researchers say.

In a demonstration at the RSA Conference 2012 here Wednesday, former McAfee executives George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, who recently founded security firm CrowdStrike, installed a remote access tool on an Android 2.2-powered smartphone by taking advantage of an unpatched flaw in WebKit, the default browser in the OS.

The researchers showed an overflow audience how the malware can be delivered on a smartphone via an innocuous looking SMS message and then be used to intercept and record phone conversations, capture video, steal text messages, track dialed numbers and pinpoint a user’s physical location.

The tools used in the attack were obtained from easily available underground sources, Kurtz said. The WebKit bug, for instance, was one of 20 tools purchased from hackers for a collective $1,400.

The remote access Trojan used in the attack was a modified version of Nickispy a well-known Chinese malware tool.

Learning how to exploit the WebKit vulnerability and to modify the Trojan for the attack, was harder than expected, said Kurtz. He estimated that CrowdStrike spent about $14,000 in all to develop the attack.

But the key issue is that similar attacks are possible against any smartphone, not just those running Android, he said.

WebKit for instance, is widely used as a default browser in other mobile operating systems including Apple’s iOS and the BlackBerry Tablet OS. WebKit is also is used in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers.

Several mobile remote access Trojans are already openly available from companies pitching them as tools that can be used to surreptitiously keep tabs on others.

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Apple Has A Hole In MAC OS X

Apple has failed to fix a bug in its Mac OS X operating system that allows processes to bypass the sandbox protection in place.

The flaw was discovered by Anibal Sacco and Matias Eissler from Core Security Technologies. They let Apple know about the problem on 20 September, and while Apple acknowledged their submission, it said that it did not see any security threat, forcing the Core Security Technologies team to publish the report to the public this month.

The problem appears to be with the use of Apple events in several default profiles, including the no-network and no-internet ones. When Apple events are dispatched a process can escape the sandbox, which could be exploited by hackers.

The vulnerability could lead to a compromised application restricted by the use of the no-network profile gaining access to network resources through the use of Apple events to execute other applications that are not restricted by the sandbox, making it a significant security threat.

Only the more recent versions of Mac OS X are vulnerable to this bug, including 10.5.x, 10.6.x, and 10.7.x. Those using 10.4.x are safe from the exploit.

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Apple Website Is Ripe For Hacking

According to the Ethical Hacking group YGN, Apple’s website for developers is virtually wide open and gives the opportunity for hackers to introduce malware such asphishing attacks to gain access to subscriber’s vital personal information.

One group known as Networkworld identified three holes on Apple’s website that arbitrary URL redirects, cross-site scripting and HTTP response splitting. That said, these holes could allow hackers to arbitrarily redirect to other websites and make phishing attacks against developers login credentials more successful.

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Microsoft’s IE Latest Flaw: ‘Cookiejacking’

A technology security researcher has discovered a flaw in Microsoft Corp’s widely used Internet Explorer browser that he said may allow hackers to steal credentials to access FaceBook, Twitter and other websites.

He coined the technique as ”cookiejacking.”

“Any website. Any cookie. Limit is just your imagination,” said Rosario Valotta, an independent Internet security researcher based in Italy.

Hackers can exploit the flaw to access a data file stored inside the browser known as a “cookie,” which holds the login name and password to a web account, Valotta wrote.

Once a hacker has that cookie, he or she can use it to access the same site, said Valotta, who calls the technique “cookiejacking.”

The vulnerability affects all versions of Internet Explorer, including IE 9, on every version of the Windows operating system.

To take advantage of this flaw, the hacker must first persuade the victim to drag and drop an object across the PC’s screen before the cookie can be hijacked.

That sounds like a difficult task, but Valotta said he was able to do it fairly easily. He built a puzzle that he put up on Facebook in which users are challenged to “undress” a photo of an attractive woman.

“I published this game online on FaceBook and in less than three days, more than 80 cookies were sent to my server,” he said. “And I’ve only got 150 friends.”

Microsoft said there is little risk a hacker could succeed in a real-world cookiejacking scam.

“Given the level of required user interaction, this issue is not one we consider high risk,” said Microsoft spokesman Jerry Bryant.

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Apple Outs Patch For Tracking Issue

As Apple promised last week in several discussions regarding its location tracking issues, iOS 4.3.3 addresses three bugs related to the database of location information on iOS devices. Firstly, it reduces the amount of the cached location information to a week’s worth, rather than relying on a size limit, as it previously did.

Secondly, it no longer backs up the cache to your Mac or PC via iTunes upon syncing, so the information isn’t available to anyone with access to your computer. And finally, the cache is now deleted from the device when Location Services are disabled in iOS’s Settings app.

Apple has also announced plans to encrypt the location information on iOS devices itself in the next major update to the operating system, which presumably means it will be incoporated into iOS 5.

The iOS 4.3.3 update applies to the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPad 2, third-generation iPod touch, and the fourth-generation iPod touch. Exceptions to this fix though, are the iPhone 3G and the second-generation iPod touch, both of which were supported by the original release of iOS 4 when the location database is believed to have been created but have since been dropped from compatibility. Also missing in action is the CDMA iPhone 4, although some reports have suggested that it didn’t log data in the same way as the GSM model.

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Microsoft Delivers Massive Security Updates

Microsoft today patched a whopping 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), and other software, including 30 bugs in the Windows kernel device driver and one in IE that was exploited at the Pwn2Own hacking contest last month.

The company also delivered a long-discussed “backport” to Office 2003 and Office 2007 that brings one of the newer security features in Office 2010 to the older editions.

The 17 updates, which Microsoft dubs “bulletins,” tied a record set late last year, but easily beat the October 2010 mark for the total number of flaws they fixed. Altogether, today’s updates patched 64 vulnerabilities, 15 more than in October and 24 more than in the former second-place collection of December 2010.

Nine of the 17 bulletins were pegged “critical,” Microsoft’s highest threat ranking, while the remainder were marked “important,” the next-most-serious label.

Microsoft and virtually every security expert pegged several updates that users should download and install immediately.

“There are three we think are top priorities,” said Jerry Bryant, group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in an interview earlier today. Bryant tagged MS11-018, MS11-019 and MS11-020 as the ASAP updates.

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80% Of Browsers Found To Be At Risk Of Attack

About eight out of every ten internet browsers run by consumers are vulnerable to attack by exploits of already-patched bugs, a security expert said today.

The poor state of browser patching stunned Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of security risk and compliance management provider Qualys, which presented data from the company’s free BrowserCheck service Wednesday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

“I really thought it would be lower,” said Kandek of the nearly 80% of browsers that lacked one or more patches.

BrowserCheck scans Windows, Mac and Linux machines for vulnerable browsers, as well as up to 18 browser plug-ins, including Adobe’s Flash and Reader, Oracle’s Java and Microsoft’s Silverlight and Windows Media Player.

When browsers and their plug-ins are tabulated together, between 90% and 65% of all consumer systems scanned with BrowserCheck since June 2010 reported at least one out-of-date component, depending on the month. In January 2011, about 80% of the machines were vulnerable.  Read more….

Microsoft Warns of New Windows MHTML Bug

In a security alert issued Friday, Microsoft confirmed that a bug in Windows’ MHTML (MIME HTML) protocol handler can be used by attackers to run malicious scripts within Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

“The best way to think of this is to call it a variant of a cross-side scripting vulnerability,” said Andrew Storms, Director of Security Operations at nCircle Security. Cross-site scripting bugs, often shortened to XSS, can be used to insert malicious script into a Web page that can then take control of the session.

“An attacker could pretend to be the user, and act if as he was you on that specific site,” said Storms. “If you were at Gmail.com or Hotmail.com, he could send e-mail as you.”

“Such a script might collect user information, for example e-mail, spoof content displayed in the browser or otherwise interfere with the user’s experience,” said Angela Gunn, a Microsoft security spokeswoman, in a post to the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) blog.

The vulnerability went public last week when the Chinese Web site WooYun.org published proof-of-concept code.

MHTML is a Web page protocol that combines resources of several different formats — images, Java applets, Flash animations and the like — into a single file. Only Microsoft’s IE and Opera Software’s Opera support MHTML natively: Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari do not, and while Mozilla’s Firefox can, it requires an add-on to read and write MHTML files.

Wolfgang Kandek, the Chief Technology Officer at Qualys, pointed out that IE users are most at risk.  “While the vulnerability is located in a Windows component, Internet Explorer is the only known attacker vector,” said Kandek in an e-mail message. “Firefox and Chrome are not affected in their default configuration, as they do not support MHTML without the installation of specific add-on modules.”

All supported versions of Windows, including Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, contain the flawed protocol handler, one reason why Storms believes it will take Microsoft time to come up with a patch.

In place of a patch, Microsoft recommended that users lock down the MHTML protocol handler by running a “Fixit” tool it’s made available. The tool automates the process of editing the Windows registry, which if done carelessly could cripple a PC, and lets IE users continue to run MHTML files that include scripting by clicking through a warning.

Courtesy-TheGuruReview

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