5PHInX

  The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor tracked under the moniker Lyceum has turned to using a new custom .NET-based backdoor in recent campaigns directed against the Middle East. "The new malware is a .NET based DNS Backdoor which is a customized version of the open source tool 'DIG.net,'" Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Niraj Shivtarkar and Avinash Kumar  said  in a report published last week. "The malware leverages a DNS attack technique called 'DNS Hijacking' in which an attacker-controlled DNS server manipulates the response of DNS queries and resolves them as per their malicious requirements." DNS hijacking is a  redirection attack  in which DNS queries to genuine websites are intercepted to take an unsuspecting user to fraudulent pages under an adversary's control. Unlike  cache poisoning , DNS hijacking targets the DNS record of the website on the nameserver, rather than a resolver's cache. Lyceum , also known as Hexane, Spirlin, or...

  Two flaws in the web interface of a Fujitsu cloud storage system could allow an unauthenticated attacker to read, write, and destroy backed up files. The security  vulnerabilities  were present in the enterprise-grade Fujitsu Eternus CS8000 (Control Center) V8.1. Researchers from NCC Group found two separate issues due to a lack of user input validation in two PHP scripts, which are normally included post-authentication. Both flaws, a  command injection  in  grel.php  and a command injection in  hw_view.php , could allow an attacker to gain remote code execution on the appliance without prior  authentication  or authorization. As no include-guards are in-place, the attacker is able to trigger the script without prior authentication by calling it directly. This would enable them to take control over the appliance as if they were logged in directly via a secure shell. “If exploited, the attacker obtains limited user privileges on the mac...

Nmap is short for Network Mapper. It is an open-source Linux command-line tool that is used   to scan IP addresses and ports in a network and to detect installed applications . Nmap allows network admins to find which devices are running on their network, discover open ports and services, and detect vulnerabilities Task 1 - Deploy No answer needed. Task 2 - Introduction What networking constructs are used to direct traffic to the right application on a server? Answer:  ports How many of these are available on any network-enabled computer? Answer:  65535 [Research]  How many of these are considered “well-known”? (These are the “standard” numbers mentioned in the task) Answer:  1024 Task 3 - Nmap Switches What is the first switch listed in the help menu for a ‘Syn Scan’ (more on this later!)? Answer:  -sS Which switch would you use for a “UDP scan”? Answer:  -sU If you wanted to detect which operating system the target is running on, which switch would y...

A novel hardware attack dubbed  PACMAN  has been demonstrated against Apple's M1 processor chipsets, potentially arming a malicious actor with the capability to gain arbitrary code execution on macOS systems. It leverages "speculative execution attacks to bypass an important memory protection mechanism, ARM Pointer Authentication, a security feature that is used to enforce pointer integrity," MIT researchers Joseph Ravichandran, Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan  said  in a new paper. What's more concerning is that "while the hardware mechanisms used by PACMAN cannot be patched with software features, memory corruption bugs can be," the researchers added. The vulnerability is rooted in pointer authentication codes ( PACs ), a line of defense introduced in arm64e architecture that aims to detect and secure against unexpected changes to  pointers  — objects that store a memory address — in memory. PACs aims to solve a common problem in software security...