Shadow Brokers Group Releases More Stolen NSA Hacking Tools & Exploits

Saturday, April 08, 2017 Mohit Kumar

Remember The Shadow Brokers? They are back.

A hackers group that previously claimed to have stolen a bunch of hacking tools (malware, zero-day exploits, and implants) created by the NSA and gained popularity last year for leaking a portion of those tools is back.

Today, The Shadow Brokers group released more alleged hacking tools and exploits that, the group claims, belonged to "Equation Group" – an elite cyber attack unit linked to the NSA.

Besides dumping some NSA's hacking tools back in August 2016, the Shadow Brokers also released an encrypted cache of files containing more NSA's hacking tools and exploits in an auction, asking for 1 Million Bitcoins (around $568 Million).

However, after failed auction, the group put up those hacking tools and exploits for direct sale on an underground website, categorizing them into a type — like "exploits," "Trojans," and "implant" — each of which ranged from 1 to 100 Bitcoins (from $780 to $78,000).

Now, the Shadow Brokers has finally released password for the encrypted cache of NSA's files, allowing anyone to unlock and download the auction data dump.

CrDj”(;Va.*NdlnzB9M?@K2)#>deB7mN

The password mentioned above for the encrypted NSA files was made public through a blog post published today.

The blog post, titled "Don't Forget Your Base," has been written as an open letter to President Donald Trump, containing political views expressed by the Shadow Brokers on Trump's recent policies and events, like the Goldman Sach, the air strike against Syria and removal of Steve Bannon from the National Security Council, among others.

A security researcher, who uses Twitter handle x0rz, has uploaded all files after decryption on Github and confirmed that the archive includes:

• rpc.cmsd a remote root zero-day exploit for Solaris – Oracle-owned Unix-based operating system.
• The TOAST framework that NSA's TAO (Tailored Access Operations) team used to clean logs of Unix wtmp events.
• The Equation Group's ElectricSlide tool that impersonates a Chinese browser with fake Accept-Language.
• The evidence of the NSA operators' access inside the GSM network of Mobilink, one of the Pakistan's popular mobile operator companies.

More key findings will come as soon as other security researchers delve into the dump.

At the time, it's not confirmed whether the group holds more NSA hacking tools and exploits or this is the last batch of documents the Shadow Brokers stole from the United States intelligence organization.

Firefox Browser vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle Attack

A critical vulnerability resides in the fully-patched version of the Mozilla's Firefox browser that could allow well-resourced attackers to launch man-in-the-middle (MITM) impersonation attacks and also affects the Tor anonymity network.

The Tor Project patched the issue in the browser's HTTPS certificate pinning system on Friday with the release of its Tor Browser version 6.0.5, while Mozilla still has to patch the critical flaw in Firefox.

Attackers can deliver Fake Tor and Firefox Add-on Updates

The vulnerability could allow a man-in-the-middle attacker who is able to obtain a forged certificate for addons.mozilla.org to impersonate Mozilla servers and as a result, deliver a malicious update for NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere or other Firefox extensions installed on a targeted computer.

"This could lead to arbitrary code execution [vulnerability]," Tor officials warned in an advisory. "Moreover, other built-in certificate pinnings are affected as well."

Although it would be challenging to obtain a fraudulent certificate for addons.mozilla.org from any one of several hundred Firefox-trusted certificate authorities (CAs), it is within reach of powerful nation states attackers.

The vulnerability was initially discovered Tuesday by a security expert that goes by the name of @movrcx, who described the attacks against Tor, estimating attackers would need US$100,000 to launch the multi-platform attacks.

Actual Issue resides in Firefox's Certificate Pinning Procedure

However, according to a report posted Thursday by independent security researcher Ryan Duff, this issue also affects Firefox stable versions, although a nightly build version rolled out on September 4 is not susceptible.

Duff said the actual problem resides in Firefox's custom method for handling "Certificate Pinning," which is different from the IETF-approved HPKP (HTTP Public Key Pinning) standard.

Certificate Pinning is an HTTPS feature that makes sure the user's browser accepts only a specific certificate key for a particular domain or subdomain and rejects all others, preventing the user from being a victim of an attack made by spoofing the SSL certs.

While not very popular, HPKP standard is often used on websites that handle sensitive information.

"Firefox uses its own static key pinning method for its own Mozilla certifications instead of using HPKP," says Duff. "The enforcement of the static method appears to be much weaker than the HPKP method and is flawed to the point that it is bypassable in this attack scenario."

Mozilla is scheduled to release Firefox 49 on September 20, so the team has enough time to deliver a fix. The Tor Project took just one day to address the flaw after the bug's disclosure went online.

Users of Tor Browser should update to version 6.0.5, while Firefox users should disable automatic add-on updates, a default feature in the browser, or should consider using a different browser until Mozilla releases the update

Facebook releases Osquery Security Tool for Windows

OSquery, an open-source framework created by Facebook that allows organizations to look for potential malware or malicious activity on their networks, was available for Mac OS X and Linux environments until today.

But now the social network has announced that the company has developed a Windows version of its osquery tool, too.

When Facebook engineers want to monitor thousands of Apple Mac laptops across their organization, they use their own untraditional security tool called OSquery.

OSquery is a smart piece of cross-platform software that scans every single computer on an infrastructure and catalogs every aspect of it.

Then SQL-based queries allow developers and security teams to monitor low-level functions in real-time and quickly search for malicious behavior and vulnerable applications on their infrastructure.

In simple words, OSquery allows an organization to treat its infrastructure as a database, turning OS information into a format that can be queried using SQL-like statements.

This functionality is critical for administrators to perform incident response, diagnose systems and network level problems, help to troubleshoot performance issues, and more.

This open source endpoint security tool has become one of the most popular security projects onGitHub since its release in mid-2014 and was available for Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or CentOS, and Mac OS X machines.

So, if your organization was running a Windows environment, you were out of luck.

But, not today, as with the help of Trail of Bits, Facebook has finally launched the OSquery developer kit for Windows, allowing security teams to build customized solutions for their Windows networks.

"As adoption for osquery grew, a strong and active community emerged in support of a more open approach to security," reads the earlier version of Facebook's blog post provided to The Hacker News.

"We saw the long-held misconception of 'security by obscurity' fall away as people started sharing tooling and experiences with other members of the community. Our initial release of osquery was supported for Linux and OS X, but the community was also excited for a Windows version — so we set out to build it."

To get started with the OSquery developer kit for Windows, check this official documentation, the development environment, and a single script. The build is easy to install, and you can start coding right away.

You can read the full documentation of the development process of the OSquery developer kit for Windows on the blog post by Trail of Bits