Cyber mercenaries in countries like India, Russia, and the UAE are carrying out data theft and hacking missions for a wide range of clients across regions, a couple of new reports said.

The threat associated with nation-state-backed hacking groups has been well-researched and chronicled in recent times, but there's another, equally dangerous set of adversaries that's operated comparatively in the shadows for years.

These are hack-for-hire groups that specialize in breaking into systems and stealing email and other data as a service. Their clients can be private investigators, law firms, business rivals, and others that don't have the capabilities to carry out these attacks on their own. Such cyber mercenaries often openly advertise their services and target any entity of interest to their clients, unlike state-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, which tend to be stealthy and have specific missions and a tight target focus.

Researchers from Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) this week released a report on the threat, using hack-for-hire ecosystems in India, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates as examples of the prolific nature of the criminal activity. The TAG researchers identified the services offered by cyber mercenaries as different from that offered by surveillance vendors that sell tools and capabilities for others — such as intelligence agencies and law enforcement — to use.

**Broad Range of Targets**

"The breadth of targets in hack-for-hire campaigns stands in contrast to many government-backed operations, which often have a clearer delineation of mission and targets," said Shane Huntley, director of Google TAG, in a blog Thursday.

As an example, he pointed to a recent operation that Google observed where an Indian hack-for-hire outfit targeted an IT company in Cyprus, a shopping company in Israel, a financial technology company in the Balkans, and an academic entity in Nigeria. In other campaigns, Google has observed these groups targeting human rights advocates, journalists, and political activists.

"They also conduct corporate espionage, handily obscuring their clients' role," Huntley wrote.

Google's report on hack-for-hire activity coincided with a lengthy Reuters investigative report on how parties involved in courtroom litigation have in recent years hired Indian cyber mercenaries to steal information from the other side that would give them an edge in the battle.

Reuters said it was able to identify at least 35 instances going back to 2013, when someone involved in a lawsuit hired Indian hackers to obtain information from the entity they were litigating against. One of them involved a $1.5 billion legal battle between the Nigerian government and the heirs of an Italian businessman over control of an oil company.

In each of these instances, the hackers sent phishing emails to targeted victims with malware for stealing credentials for their email accounts and other data.

**Numerous Hacking-for-Hire Victims**

Reuters said it identified some 75 US and European companies, three dozen advocacy groups, and numerous business executives in western countries that were the targets of these attacks. In all, over the seven-year period that was the focus of the investigation, Indian hackers sent some 80,000 phishing emails to 13,000 targets across multiple countries.

Among those whose email inboxes the attackers tried to access were at least 1,000 attorneys at 108 law firms, such as Baker McKenzie and Cooley and Cleary Gottlieb in the US and Clyde & Co. and LALIVE in Europe.

Reuters described the report as being based on information from victim interviews, US government officials, lawyers, and court documents from seven countries. Also helping with the investigation was a database of those tens of thousands of emails sent by the Indian hackers that Reuters said it received from two email providers.

"The database is effectively the hackers' hit list, and it reveals a down-to-the-second look at who the cyber mercenaries sent phishing emails to between 2013 and 2020," the Reuters story stated.

Among the Indian entities that Reuters named in its report were Appin, BellTroX, and Cyberoot — all of which shared infrastructure and staff at some point.

**Tracking Cyber Campaigns**

Google said it also has been tracking Indian hack-for-hire operators, many of which were associated with Appin and BellTroX, since 2012. A lot of the activity has focused on organizations in the government, telecom, and healthcare sectors in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, according to TAG.

Google's report also described hack-for-hire operators that TAG researchers have been tracking in Russia and the UAE. One of them is a previously known Russian actor that others have referred to as Void Balaur, which has spied on thousands of individuals and stolen private information about them for sale to various clients.

This is not the first time that security researchers have sounded a warning on hackers-for-hire. Trend Micro, for instance, reported on the Void Balaur threat in November 2021. A year prior, BlackBerry security researchers reported on a hack-for-hire group it had observed called CostaRicto, which targeted victims in multiple countries, many of them in South Asia.

"The hack-for-hire landscape is fluid, both in how the attackers organize themselves and in the wide range of targets they pursue in a single campaign at the behest of disparate clients," TAG's Huntley wrote.

Google: Hack-for-Hire Groups Present a Potent Threat

It didn't have to be this way: So far 2022's tranche of zero-days shows too many variants of previously patched security bugs, according Google Project Zero.

So far this year, a total of 18 security vulnerabilities have been exploited as unpatched zero-days in the wild, according to an analysis – and half of those were preventable flaws.

According to Google's Project Zero, nine of the issues were simply variants of previously patched bugs, with four being variants of previous 2021 in-the-wild zero-day bugs. Since these are closely related to security weaknesses that have been seen before, it blows a hole in the theory that zero-day exploits are so advanced that defenders can't hope to catch them, Project Zero's Maddie Stone notes.

"\[After\] the original in-the-wild zero-day \[was\] patched, attackers came back with a variant of the original bug," she explains in a Thursday blog post. "Many of the 2022 in-the-wild 0-days are due to the previous vulnerability not being fully patched."

The slate of 2022 zero-days affects a wide range of platforms, including Apple iOS, Atlassian Confluence, Chromium, Google Pixel, Linux, WebKit, and, of course, Windows (including the Follina and PetitPotam vulns).

In some these cases (Windows win32k and Chromium), the proof-of-concept attack path was patched but not the root cause, so attackers could trigger the original vulnerability through a different path. In other cases, such as PetitPotam, the original vulnerability was patched but "at some point regressed so that attackers could exploit the same vulnerability again," Stone says.

"The goal is to force attackers to start from scratch each time we detect one of their exploits: they’re forced to discover a whole new vulnerability, they have to invest the time in learning and analyzing a new attack surface, they must develop a brand new exploitation method," she says. "To do that effectively, we need correct and comprehensive fixes."

18 Zero-Days Exploited So Far in 2022

A recent analysis of breaches involving application programming interfaces (APIs) arrives at some eye-popping damage figures, but which companies are most affected, and in what ways?

US companies face a combined $12 billion to $23 billion in losses in 2022 from compromises linked to Web application programming interfaces (APIs), which have proliferated with the increased adoption of cloud services and DevOps-style development methodologies, according to an analysis of breach data.

In the last decade, API security has grown to become a significant cybersecurity issue. Acknowledging this, the Open Web Security Application Project (OWASP) released a top-10 list of API security issues in 2019, flagging major API weaknesses — such as broken authorization for objects, weak user authentication, and excessive data exposure — as critical issues for software makers and companies that rely on cloud services.

According to the Quantifying the Cost of API Insecurity report out this week, published last week by application-security firm Imperva and risk-strategy firm Marsh McLennan, security issues will only likely grow as APIs continue to become a common pattern for cloud and mobile infrastructure.

"The growing security risks associated with APIs correlates with the proliferation of APIs," says Lebin Cheng, vice president of API security for Imperva. "The volume of APIs used by businesses is growing rapidly — nearly half of all businesses have between 50 and 500 deployed, either internally or publicly, while some have over a thousand active APIs."

Interestingly, the business losses have less to do with API-specific issues, the analysis found. Rather, breach recovery and interruption of operations account for the majority of the cyber-losses. Only a small subset of companies in any country suffered losses directly linked to API vulnerabilities, the report found.

**API Losses Vary by Business Segment**

The Marsh McLennan data comes from reported breaches, which represents a subset of all businesses. It found that when drilling down into the data, important differences between impact can be drawn out.

For instance, certain kinds of companies (larger firms in IT and professional services, for example) are much more likely to face API-related security incidents than others (smaller companies, say, in the finance sector).

"The $12 billion is not distributed over millions of companies," a Marsh McLennan spokesperson said. "The number of breached companies, especially due to API insecurity, is considerably lower."

Small firms face the highest absolute number of API security events, with most incidents affecting companies with less than $50 million in revenue. Yet API-related incidents only accounted for about 5% of their overall number of security incidents. Conversely, large companies with more than $50 billion in revenue are at a much higher risk of breaches related to APIs, with at least 20% of their security events involving APIs.

To some extent, the increased risk for large companies is due to the growth in the attack surface area caused by APIs, but larger companies are also more attractive targets, says Imperva's Cheng.

"The proliferation of APIs, combined with the lack of visibility into these ecosystems, creates opportunities for massive, and costly, data leakage," he says. "These are issues that scale with an organization's size. Larger organizations have more APIs in production, and limited visibility leaves a larger number of APIs vulnerable. This makes enterprises an attractive target."

Similarly, firms in Asia had slightly more than 100 combined API security events, and US companies had more than 600 API security events. The sheer number of reported security events overall in the United States resulted in API incidents accounting for a much lower share of the pie — about 5% compared to more than 15% for Asia.

**How to Cope With API Security Concerns**

Unlike other types of application vulnerabilities, API security weaknesses typically exploit authorization, authentication, or business logic issues. The exploitation of APIs often results in access to data or the ability to bypass an authorization check, says Cheng.

To prevent this, companies need to gain visibility into how they are using APIs and create a complete inventory of the API traffic in their network, he says.

"API-related security incidents are sophisticated attacks that use a valid API token to exploit a vulnerability in the business logic to access the data layer," Cheng says. "Without the right visibility into the API schema, or the changes being made to the schema, organizations are often unaware if an API is compromised or what data is exfiltrated through the compromised API."

API attacks generally form the initial access vector for a larger campaign, so while the initial intrusion may seem non-critical, the end result could be a widespread compromise, Cheng says.

"API abuse is often part of a larger campaign that involves online fraud, like account takeover or automated scraping," he says. "Organizations need protection from a range of attacks that a criminal may use to abuse the API and get to the underlying data. If the organization is only focused on protecting the API endpoint, they're overlooking attacks on the application and/or business logic."

API Security Losses Total Billions, But It's Complicated

Malicious ISS module exploitation is the latest trend among threat actors targeting Exchange servers, analysts say.

Attackers once focused on exploiting ProxyLogon Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities have made a pivot to the new SessionManager backdoor, which can be used to gain persistent, undetected access to emails -- and even take over the target organization's infrastructure. 

Researchers from Kaspersky today report the emergence of SessionManager, which they say is part of a bigger trend of attackers deploying malicious backdoor modules inside Internet Information Services (ISS) servers for Windows, like Exchange servers.   

The malicious SessionManager backdoor, first observed in March 2021, has been used to target nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, the researchers add. The Kaspersky report says 34 servers across 24 individual NGOs have been compromised by SessionManager. 

"The exploitation of Exchange server vulnerabilities has been a favorite of cybercriminals looking to get into targeted infrastructure since Q1 2021," said Pierre Delcher, senior security researcher at Kaspersky, in a post about the findings. "The recently discovered SessionManager was poorly detected for a year and is still deployed in the wild."

The Kaspersky team recommends regular threat hunting for malicious modules in exposed ISS servers and focusing detection on lateral movement across the network, as well as close monitoring of data exfiltration to the Internet. 

"In the case of Exchange servers, we cannot stress it enough: The past year’s vulnerabilities have made them perfect targets, whatever the malicious intent, so they should be carefully audited and monitored for hidden implants, if they were not already,” Delcher warned.

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Exchange Servers Backdoored Globally by SessionManager

Titaniam’s ‘State of Data Exfiltration & Extortion Report’ also finds that while over 70% of organizations had heavy investments in prevention, detection, and backup solutions, the majority of victims ended up giving into attackers' demands.

**SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 30, 2022 -** Titaniam, Inc., the industry's most advanced data security platform, announced today the ‘State of Data Exfiltration & Extortion Report.’ The survey revealed that while over 70% of organizations have an existing set of prevention, detection, and backup solutions, nearly 40% of organizations have been hit with ransomware attacks in the last year, and more than 70% have experienced one in the previous five years, proving existing solutions to be woefully inadequate in managing the risks and impacts from these attacks.

Data exfiltration during ransomware attacks is up 106% relative to where it was five years ago. We are seeing the emergence of a new trend where cybercriminals are no longer limiting themselves to just encrypting entire systems—they are making sure to steal data ahead of the encryption so that they can have additional leverage on the victim. The survey found that 65% of those who have experienced a ransomware attack have also experienced data theft or exfiltration due to the incident. Of those victims, 60% say the hackers used the data theft to extort them further, known as double extortion. Most of them, i.e., 59% of victims, paid the hackers, implying that they were not helped by their backup or data security tools to prevent this fate.

Data is being exposed for theft and extortion in other ways too. Nearly half (47%) uncovered publicly exposed data in their systems in the last 24 months. It was found that respondents have a mix of data security & protection (78%), prevention & detection (75%), and backup and recovery (73%) in their cybersecurity stacks. Still, exposure and extortion numbers imply a missing puzzle piece regarding attacks.

Interestingly, observing peers being attacked (33%), management’s request (29%), and compliance (24%) are mostly driving budget decisions, while just 10% say it’s learning from their own attacks. 90% agree or somewhat agree that they have a sufficient budget for data security tools. 59% claim data security has the highest security spend. Yet, in the face of these attacks and data exposures, nearly all (99+%) respondents would be interested in data security solutions that protect sensitive data at all times, including while active and in use.

Promisingly, the survey revealed organizations have enough budget to improve which solutions security and data teams are using. This indicates that boards and executives appear to recognize the importance of cybersecurity to business success.

“Reliance on legacy technologies worked for years, but as bad actors continue to evolve, our technology must evolve as well,” said Arti Raman, CEO and Founder of Titaniam. “It is unfortunate that organizations continue to believe that investing in detection, backup, and recovery solutions constitutes the complete solution to ransomware. These organizations overlook data security, which, when not implemented adequately, becomes the ultimate reason attackers gain excessive leverage and win—the results of this survey highlight this enormous gap in current cybersecurity solutions. Suppose over 70% of experts claim to use data protection, prevention and detection service, and backup and recovery. Why are 60% still being extorted, and even further, why are 59% paying the ransom? There needs to be a deep look at how we as an industry approach ransomware protection. We need to understand that while prevention, detection, and backup are essential, no ransomware defense strategy is complete without eliminating data exfiltration. This is what would take us beyond the notions of impenetrability and towards immunity.”

With survey results showing that along with overall backup and recovery, data masking (54%), encryption at rest (49%), encryption in transit (49%), and tokenization (25%) are the main means of protection, we must accept that these are simply not enough to get enterprises the data protection they need to beat ransomware.

Fortunately, organizations can now look to advanced data security platforms like Titaniam, which combine traditional data protection techniques like the ones above, with high-performance encryption-in-use, and highly sophisticated key control to close the gaps being exploited by ransomware and extortion actors. Systems protected by Titaniam do not yield unencrypted data even if they are attacked using highly privileged credentials, as in a vast majority of data exfiltration-based attacks.

\*This survey was conducted by CensusWide, polling 100 IT security professionals.

**ABOUT TITANIAM**

Titaniam is the industry’s most advanced data security platform that utilizes high-performance encryption-in-use to keep valuable data secure even if the enterprise is breached and its data stolen. With the ability to process data without decryption as well as support nine different privacy-preserving data formats, Titaniam is the market's answer to address ransomware and extortion, insider threats, and data privacy enforcement. In addition to cutting-edge encryption-in-use, a single deployment of Titaniam provides the equivalent of three other categories of data security solutions. In the event of an attack, Titaniam offers auditable evidence that valuable data retained encryption throughout the attack, thus minimizing compliance as well as notification obligations. Titaniam was founded in 2019 and has offices in Silicon Valley and India. To learn more, visit https://titaniam.io/.

Study Reveals Traditional Data Security Tools Have a 60% Failure Rate Against Ransomware and Extortion

A password link that didn't expire leads to the discovery of exposed personal information at a payments service.

_Editor's Note: Dark Reading was able to verify that the issue Cerrudo found was present as of June 24, when we created an account on Veem and confirmed that the personal information and partial bank account information was visible to anyone else. We also confirmed that even after deleting the account, most of the information remained accessible. We contacted Veem, and they provided this comment:_

_"Veem is committed to safeguarding customer information and funds and has in place a comprehensive security program that includes internal, external and regulatory assessments. We have responded to Mr. Cerrudo, and we continue to evaluate information provided to us by customers or third parties to ensure that any issues raised from those sources are included in our roadmap, as appropriate. As a matter of policy, we do not publicly comment on specifics of our program, other than to reinforce that we take our obligations seriously and devote substantial resources to deliver services in a reliable and secure manner."_

Over the years I have made hundreds of disclosures, and it still amazes me how some companies have such bad security practices and lack of security awareness.

This is a cybersecurity horror story from Veem, a well-funded fintech company that clearly fails badly at security and privacy. What's Veem? From its site: "Easily pay vendors and contractors domestically or internationally in over 100 countries, and get paid faster with one simple, yet powerful digital payments solution. With more payment flexibility and visibility, Veem gives small businesses the power to save time and control cash flow."

This all started when I was using the Veem service. It was pretty good, cheap, and easy to use. I liked it, and I recommended it. But I grew concerned about Veem's approach to security.

First I noticed that it displayed too much information about Veem users who weren't in my contact list. I just ignored it, though, and kept using it. Then one day, I was unable to log in and was forced to change my password via an email with a link to a form. I used the form to change my password, but I noticed something weird in this process, so I left the email marked to take a look at later.

After some days, I remembered about the email I saved and went to take a look. I clicked on the link and was presented again with a form to change my password. That was unusual — the link should have expired because I had already changed my password and because too much time had passed since the link was sent to me. Then, when examining the link, I realized that it was sent using the Mailchimp add-on Mandrill. That meant that this platform, a third-party email marketing and automation service, had access to change my password for many days, since it had the link saved in its systems. This is a really bad security practice that any minimum security check should have identified. I started to believe that Veem's systems hadn't been security tested.

After I found this password change security issue, I got a bit worried about Veem's security overall. It's a fintech solution that allows users to send and get payments, so it deals with a lot of money from its users, including myself. I decided to take a deeper look at some functionality that had looked strange to me but I had ignored earlier. I logged in, accessed this functionality, and, to my surprise, I found out that they were leaking all users' personal information, such as full name, address, city, state, country, email, phone number, date of birth, bank name, account type, and last four digits of bank account number. I couldn't believe what I was seeing — anyone could easily access any Veem user's personal information.  

I had to quickly report these issues — especially the last one, which was very critical. After I got help finding the correct contact email, on March 29, 2022, I emailed \[email protected\] detailing the problems. I was hoping for a quick answer, but no. On April 2, I emailed again, and after two days, still no answer. I was getting worried, since when you report such a critical issue, you should get an instant response. Every day that passes means someone gets another chance to exploit the issue.

Thinking about how to get a response, I got an interesting idea: What about using the security issue to find out information about Veem executives? So I got the Veem CEO's information — all of his information, but I really just needed the email address. I didn't think cold-calling him would be a good idea, and no, I'm not doxing him here. :)

**Initial Outreach**

On April 4 I sent an email to the CEO:

_Hi, I sent this (I forwarded previous email sent to \[email protected\]) almost a week ago and I haven't had any answer._

_There is at least a serious issue that leaks users personal information such as full name, email, date of birth, address, phone number, name of user's Bank, bank account last 4 numbers, etc._

_Please have your security team take a look and answer ASAP._

_Thanks._

_Cesar Cerrudo_

_Chief Research Officer_

_Strike_

Later that day, I got the following from \[email protected\]:

_Hello Cesar,_

_I want to thank you for proactively reaching out to us regarding the vulnerabilities you have found on our web application. Unfortunately, we do not have a bug bounty program or a financial reward at this time and there are no exceptions for one-time rewards either._

_In the meantime, we hope you continue leveraging the Veem network for your payments, and keep us informed on any future feedback you may have that will make it better and safer for all of our customers._

_Thank you for your time and understanding._

_Regards,_

_Cyber Security Team_

As you can see, they clearly didn't realize the criticality of the issue and thought that I was just looking for some reward. I had to explain (cc'ing the CEO just in case):

_Hi_

_I'm not looking for any reward, I just want you to take a look at the issues and fix them ASAP, once they are fixed let your users know about it. Also in the meantime provide feedback._

_For a financial institution it is very serious to leak customers information._

_btw, I'm CCing your CEO so he is aware of this, I got his personal information from Veem platform._

_Cesar Cerrudo_

_Chief Research Officer_

_Strike_

Then, after two days, they replied:

_Hello Cesar,_

_Thanks for following up._

_Apropos your findings, we are already tracking the two information leakage-related gaps in our risk register. These gaps exist to support otherwise desirable features — changing their design to eliminate this avenue for data exfiltration is nonetheless on our product roadmap. However, because this logic exists to support features which our customers expect to work, there is no quick or easy solution available. We recognize that this is a shortcoming and are planning appropriate redesign — prioritizing security and privacy, while also retaining essential parts of our product's user journey and customer experience._

_Regarding password reset links, you raise an entirely valid concern regarding link expiry. We have scheduled a fix for release in an upcoming sprint cycle._

_Once again, thank you for your proactive outreach and for helping us improve the security and privacy of our platform._

_Thanks,_

_Veem security team_

**Please Prioritize Security**

Cool, so they're fixing the password reset issue, but the personal information leakage is a feature they can't easily fix? How are they "prioritizing security and privacy"? Welcome to the 2020s, where fintechs prioritize functionality over security and privacy.

At this point it was clear to me that this was a very immature company in terms of cybersecurity and privacy, so I would have to deal with this in the best possible way and try harder to make them understand the issues, collaborate, and act quickly. I replied:

_Hi_

_Thanks for getting back with more details._

_I completely understand your challenges and point of view. What I would like is to have more visibility on this, so I would like to get some timeline information, like when are you planning to start working on the fixes and when they will be ready. As you may know, when vulnerabilities are reported is called responsible/coordinated disclosure, it requires collaboration from both sides and there is a limited waiting period for the issues to be fixed. We can't wait forever, holding back the vulnerability information we have that affects several thousand of your users, if you don't fix it in a short period of time we need to go public and let people know about the issues. If you are not familiar with responsible/coordinated disclosure, please take a look at it to understand these common practices on cyber security._

_I'm open for a quick call if you like so we can be on same page on this._

_Thanks._

_Cesar Cerrudo_

_Chief Research Officer_

_Strike_

Twelve days after the above email was sent, I still had no answer at all, so I asked for news. The following day they replied:

_Hello Cesar,_

_We are actively addressing these findings._

_Please be assured that we take this seriously and that customer security and privacy are at the top of our priorities._

_Thanks_

_Veem Security Team_

I wasn't happy with the answer. Such a delay and lack of communication doesn't reflect taking security and privacy seriously.

**Sketchy NDA**

Anyway, I waited for a few days to see if they would get back to me again with more updates — but, no, I had to email them again:

_Hi_

_I'm sorry but it seems you are not understanding how severe the issue is and how to manage it. Please let's have a call urgently and have some decision maker attend. I'm available most days from 1:30pm to 3pm ET_

_Thanks._

_Cesar Cerrudo_

_Chief Research Officer_

_Strike_

The same day, they replied:

_Hi Cesar,_

_We would like to send you our SOC2 report and set up a discussion but need to put an NDA in place to do so. Our CSO proposes that we connect at 2:15 pm EST on 5 May 2022 to address questions you may have. Here is the link for our eNDA http://bit.ly/VeemNDA_

_Veem Security team_

That was weird — why did they mention the SOC2 report? They wanted to show me they were in compliance? But were they? Also, that was on April 25, and they wanted to have a call in two weeks — more than a month since I sent the initial report — so clearly they didn't feel any urgency.

Plus they wanted me to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). That was an indication of suspect cooperation, in my experience; when a company dealing with a disclosure brings an NDA, it's highly probable they want to keep everything hidden. I discussed this with my team at Strike and got back to Veem the next day:

_Hi_

_Ok, let's confirm the call for 2:15 pm EST on 5 May 2022. We don't usually sign NDA for this so I have to consult our lawyer and will get back to you ASAP._

_Cesar Cerrudo_

_Chief Research Officer_

_Strike_

After taking a look at the NDA with our lawyer, we identified that it said: _"evaluate the potential for, or the expansion of, a business relationship between the parties..."_

Why would they want us to sign an NDA that mentions business relationships?

**Avoiding the Problem**

On April 28 I replied:

_Hi_

_After evaluating the NDA, it says: "evaluate the potential for, or the expansion of, a business relationship between the parties" which doesn't make sense since we aren't talking about any business here._

_Also the NDA should explicitly exclude the vulnerability information I already shared with you and any previous communication before the NDA is signed. I see two options, we don't sign the NDA or the NDA is modified with my requests. Anyway, I think we can have the call next week without NDA, what's important is to talk about current situation and plans to fix it._

_Thanks._

_Cesar Cerrudo_

_Chief Research Officer_

_Strike_

Unsurprisingly I got no answer. Then on May 4, one day before the call was supposed to take place, I asked for updates:

_Hi, are we having the call tomorrow? please send an invite._

_Thanks._

_Cesar Cerrudo_

_Chief Research Officer_

_Strike_

and later the same day I got the following:

_Hello Cesar,_

_We are pleased to convey that your concerns have been addressed and our platform has been updated. As such, a meeting will not be required._

_Thank you for being our valued customer._

_Sincerely_

_Veem Cybersecurity Team_

Whoa, that was really a surprise. I didn't like the answer, but I thought, "OK, at least they fixed the issues." Of course I have to check, though, so I took a look at the issues again.

The password reset issue was partially fixed but only partially because they continue to use the same mailing/marketing service. And surprise, surprise, surprise — the main issue was not really fixed :(

For the personal information leakage, they only removed the date of birth and the last four digits of the bank account number. But the last four digits of the bank account number were still displayed in another field in same HTTP response, so they were still leaking everything except the date of birth. Really bad fixes.

**In Short: Terrible**

After many efforts and goodwill from our side, Veem proceeded in a very unprofessional and noncollaborative way, demonstrating lack of security and privacy awareness. We decided we needed to go ahead and publish this in order to let people know.

The personal information leakage can allow cybercriminals to easily perform several attacks, such as phishing, SIM swapping, etc., resulting in possible huge money losses.

Veem didn't notify its customers about the issues. Instead it tried to silently fix them — and failed.

Veem users should contact Veem directly and ask for an explanation. In the meantime, we recommend Veem users to set the "List my Information" or "List my business" (depending on account type) user account setting to "NO" — it is set to "YES" by default. Setting it to "NO" doesn't prevent the personal information leakage, but it does make it a bit difficult.

It's hard to understand how a company that has $100 million in investments doesn't allocate proper resources to cybersecurity and privacy, especially when dealing with users' money. Also, I wonder if they are violating any regulations.

Sadly, bad security and privacy practices are not exclusive to Veem. Many fintech companies choose feature release speed and great user experience over security and privacy. From one side, they want to get more customers and delight them, but from the other side, they don't properly protect their customers' data and privacy. Security and privacy should always be top priority, especially in fintech.

A Fintech Horror Story: How One Company Prioritizes Cybersecurity

NXM Autonomous Security protects against network-wide device hacks and defends against critical IoT vulnerabilities.

**June 30, 2022, Mountain View, CA** \- NXM Labs, Inc., a leader in advanced cybersecurity software for connected devices, today unveiled its NXM Autonomous Security(TM) platform that prevents hackers from gaining unauthorized access to commercial, industrial, medical, or consumer internet of things (IoT) devices. Tested in collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology (Caltech), NXM successfully demonstrated the ability of its groundbreaking technology to enable future Mars rovers to automatically defend themselves and recover from cyberattacks. Caltech manages JPL on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

NXM's engineers worked with JPL's Artificial Intelligence, Analytics and Innovation Division, Information Technology and Solutions Directorate (ITSD), along with the Robotic Surface Mobility Group in Pasadena, CA to integrate the company's software with the navigation and ground control systems of JPL's self-driving Athena test rover. During testing, NXM's software successfully detected unauthorized attempts to gain access to the rover's autonomous navigation systems, automatically protecting the vehicle from harm in real-time without impacting normal driving operations.

Tests showed that NXM's platform was capable of securing millions of devices with virtually no impact on network latency and is able to operate up to 1000x faster than other decentralized platforms previously tested by the U.S. Department of Defense under simulated battlefield conditions.

"NXM's technology is game-changing," said Lt. General Harry D. Raduege, Jr., USAF (Ret), former Director, Defense Information Systems Agency and CIO for the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Space Command. "NXM provides a new layer of cybersecurity that enables unified command and control, as well as data interoperability, providing an unprecedented capability that we have long sought but until now wasn't possible." Lt. General Raduege serves as an advisor to NXM.

The Athena test rover was developed by JPL as part of NASA's High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) program to develop new computing technologies with vastly more capabilities than current spaceflight computers. JPL engineers harnessed the advanced computing power of the rover's off-the-shelf NVIDIA Jetson AI platform to develop innovative, machine learning-based applications for future Mars rovers. This includes artificial intelligence software that identifies objects of scientific interest as a vehicle traverses the Martian terrain, using vision-based navigation and path planning software to significantly increase the driving distances of energy-limited rovers.

"We're thrilled to have collaborated with NASA JPL to show how our security can protect critical assets in space as well as here on Earth," said Scott Rankine, NXM's President and Co-founder. "Our unique zero-trust and zero-touch security software is chip and cloud agnostic, enabling device manufacturers and their component suppliers to easily and cost-effectively develop the industry's most trustworthy products that can be deployed rapidly and remain secure for their entire operating lifetime."

**About NXM**  
NXM Labs, Inc. provides advanced security solutions for embedded devices that enable commercial, industrial and consumer products to automatically defend themselves and recover from cyberattacks. NXM offers the industry's first Zero-Trust and Zero-Touch product development software platform designed to streamline and automate security management throughout the entire OEM supply chain and product lifecycle. For more information, visit www.nxmlabs.com

NXM Announces Platform That Protects Space Infrastructure and IoT Devices From Cyberattacks

An unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability found in Zoho’s compliance tool could leave organizations exposed to an information disclosure catastrophe, new analysis shows.

A critical vulnerability in Zoho’s widely used compliance tool, ManageEngine ADAudit Plus, which monitors changes to Microsoft Active Directory, leaves endpoints vulnerable to unauthenticated users. A successful exploit could allow an attacker to take over an entire enterprise network, Horizon3.ai researchers warn.  

ADAudit Plus offers a path into an organization’s workstations, servers, and file servers, giving IT admins access to a range of users, groups, permissions, and login credentials, as well as security policies. ADAudit Plus also enables users to collect security events from agents running on other machines in the domain through endpoints that agents use to upload events.

The platform’s ability to offer deep access into a company’s internal IT ecosystem heightens the potential for a nightmare-scenario level of data exposure in the event of a breach.

The CVE-2022-28219 vulnerability enables malicious actors to easily take over a network for which they already have initial access. Malicious actors could exploit this vulnerability to deploy ransomware, exfiltrate sensitive business data, or disrupt business operations.

They could also then go on to exploit XML External Entities (XXE), Java deserialization, and path traversal vulnerabilities to wreak additional havoc, according to an in-depth analysis this week by Horizon3.ai.

**Inside the Vulnerability**

Horizon3.ai discovered some of the ADAudit Plus endpoints used for reporting were unauthenticated.

“One of the first things that stood out was the presence of a /cewolf endpoint handled by the CewolfRenderer servlet in the third-party Cewolf charting library,” the analysis states. “This is the same vulnerable endpoint from CVE-2020-10189, reported against ManageEngine Desktop Central.”

It added, “This gave us a large attack surface to work with because there’s a lot of business logic that was written to process these events. While looking for a file-upload vector, we found a path to trigger a blind XXE \[XML External Entity injection\] vulnerability in the ProcessTrackingListener class, which handles events containing Windows scheduled task XML content.”

The vulnerability was disclosed to Zoho in March, which released a new build, ADAudit Plus 7060, to fix the issue. The patch fixes the vulnerability by removing the /cewolf endpoint altogether, instead using a secure version of DocumentBuilderFactoryin the ProcessingTrackingListener class and requiring authentication in the form of an agent GUID between agents and ADAudit Plus.

**High Stakes, Plus Exploitation Difficult to Detect**

Horizon3.ai chief architect Naveen Sunkavally explains that ManageEngine products are very common in the enterprise and have been favorite targets of attackers over the years.

“ADAudit Plus is a tool that's used for compliance and auditing, which is a common need for many companies spanning different verticals,” he says. “This vulnerability has been found to be present in many types of environments, from healthcare and technology to construction and local governments.”

Just last fall, ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus, Desktop Central, and ServiceDesk Plus were all actively targeted by attackers using previously undisclosed zero days (CVE-2021-44515, CVE-2021-44077, and CVE-2021-40539) that are now part of the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list.

The latest vulnerability is easy to exploit without any prior knowledge and can yield the "keys to the kingdom,  Sunkavally explains. To boot, exploitation is not that easy to detect because it makes use of the natural behavior of the ADAudit Plus application.

“ADAudit Plus is an attractive target for attackers because it integrates with Active Directory and stores high-privileged domain user credentials,” Sunkavally says.

He notes an attacker with initial access to a compromised network could exploit this vulnerability to extract these high-privileged credentials, move laterally, and take over the entire network.

“We've seen real-world environments where just exploiting this vulnerability alone is enough to take over the enterprise,” Sunkavally adds.

He advises businesses using ADAudit Plus to upgrade to build 7060 or later and ensure ADAudit Plus is configured with a dedicated service account with restricted privileges.

“This vulnerability is not one to hold off on patching,” he says.

**Buggy ManageEngine Has History of Vulnerabilities**

This is not the first time the ManageEngine suite was found to have vulnerabilities. Last September a joint advisory from the FBI and CISA warned of APT attackers exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus.

While Zoho moved to fix the vulnerabilities, less than a month later Palo Alto Networks issued a warning that many companies are still vulnerable.

Most recently, an elusive attack targeting SolarWinds' Orion network management software, dubbed the Supernova cyberattack, exploited a ManageEngine flaw in the software running on a victim's server.

Critical ManageEngine ADAudit Plus Vulnerability Allows Network Takeover, Mass Data Exfiltration

There were a record number of zero-day attacks last year, but some basic cyber-hygiene strategies can help keep your organization more safe.

Few security exploits are the source of more sleepless nights for security professionals than zero-day attacks. Just over Memorial Day weekend, researchers discovered a new vulnerability enabling hackers to achieve remote code execution within Microsoft Office. Dubbing the evolving threat the Follina exploit, researchers say all versions of Office are at risk. And because blue teams have no time to prepare or patch their systems to defend against these software vulnerabilities, crafty threat actors can take advantage, taking their time after they've accessed an organization's environment to observe and exfiltrate data while remaining completely unseen.

And though sophisticated threat actors and nations have exploited zero-days for nearly two decades, last year saw a historic rise in the number of vulnerabilities detected. Both Google and Mandiant tracked a record number of zero-days last year, with the caveat that more zero-days are being discovered because security companies are getting better at finding them — not necessarily because hackers are coming up with new vulnerabilities. Not all zero-days are created equal, though. Some require sophisticated and novel techniques, like the attack on SolarWinds, and others exploit simple vulnerabilities in commonly used programs like Windows. Thankfully, there's some basic cyber hygiene strategies that can keep your organization sufficiently prepared to mitigate zero-day exploits.

**How Do Zero-Days Work?**

Typically, what a zero-day will do is gain access to an environment through a vulnerability previously unseen, then it stealthily maps the environment and, when ready, launches the attack. This is far too late for an incident response team to prevent further damage. Staying alert for these slow-burn attacks requires an approach to security that prioritizes looking for certain techniques and behaviors that a hacker or known threat group may use, rather than scanning for specific pieces of malware. In other words, ensure that the technology your organization has is sufficient for protecting from the unknown. Many zero-days may never hit a hard drive, so pointing threat detection tools there could be fruitless.

While it might sound like a broken record, patching is integral to protection against exploits. As soon as a proof of concept (PoC) is made public on the Dark Web or more legitimate forums like GitHub, most vendors will develop a patch. Staying on top of guidance from industry organizations like (ISC)2 or federal authorities like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is a good way to prioritize the exploits that are most relevant and most risky to your organization.

However, zero-day exploits are those that the vendor doesn't know exist, and therefore no patch is available. It's very difficult to defend against these without protections and detections that are broad enough to identify tactics, techniques, and procedures. In some cases, protection technologies can use behavioral detections to block certain activities, while in other cases, using detection technologies or human expertise in a security operations center is the only defense.

Above all, investing in the human element of security will place an organization in the best position to limit the financial and data losses zero-days can incur. By placing hands on keyboards and unlocking visibility into all aspects of an ecosystem, a security team can more readily detect hints that a zero-day might be targeted against them and deploy necessary patches. For example, if a robot you operate in the US randomly connects to a server in Ukraine without any other unusual behavior, it might signal that a zero-day has been leveraged. And while there may have been an initial access into your robot or environment through a zero-day, having a broad view of your IT security ecosystem, along with technologies like artificial intelligence, can alert an incident response team to create a patch for a vulnerability as soon as possible.

Thankfully, even though more zero-days are being discovered than ever before, they're still relatively rare in the world of cybersecurity. Up until the last several years, zero-day exploits were mostly identified and held closely by national governments, who wanted to save them to deploy whenever necessary. But the commercialization of hacking groups, including ransomware-as-a-service platforms, has created an ecosystem incentivizing the purchasing and selling of zero-days, often with the financial or technological resources of a nation-state in support.

With such capable attackers, virtually every business should be worried — from large companies that serve as final targets for hackers, to smaller companies that can serve as stepping stones in a sequence of attacks. The constant of security operations can detect and mitigate threat actors from lurking behind the scenes of an IT ecosystem through a zero-day exploit, no matter the origin. So, while patching is proper preparation, the investment in trained security professionals, in-house or outsourced, is the best defense against zero-days.

Zero-Days Aren't Going Away Anytime Soon & What Leaders Need to Know

Microsoft is urging organizations that don't have automatic updates enabled to update to the latest version of Linux Server Fabric to thwart the "FabricScape" cloud bug.

Microsoft this week disclosed a serious container-escape vulnerability in its widely used Azure Service Fabric technology, which gives attackers a way to gain root privileges on the host node and take over all other nodes in the cluster.

The privilege-escalation bug is only exploitable on Linux containers, though it is present in Windows container environments as well, Microsoft said in an advisory Tuesday. Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks reported the bug — which they have dubbed FabricScape — along with a fully operational exploit, on Jan. 30, 2022. Microsoft released a fix for the issue (CVE-2022-30137) on June 14, but details on the bug were just released this week.

The fix has been applied to all customers that are subscribed to Microsoft's automatic update service, but others will need to manually patch to the latest version of Service Fabric. "Customers whose Linux clusters are automatically updated do not need to take further action," the company said in its bug disclosure announcement.

**A Privilege-Escalation Issue**

Service Fabric is a Microsoft container-orchestration technology — like Kubernetes. Numerous organizations use it as a platform-as-a-service to deploy and manage containers and microservices-based cloud applications across a cluster of machines. Palo Alto Networks used Microsoft data to estimate that Service Fabric hosts more than 1 million applications daily across millions of cores.

The bug that Palo Alto Network discovered exists in a logging function with high privileges in a Service Fabric component called Data Collection Agent (DCA). Researchers from the security vendor's Unit 42 threat intelligence team found that an attacker with access to a compromised container could exploit the vulnerability to escalate privileges and gain control of the host node and, from there, escape it and attack the entire cluster.

"The vulnerability allows attackers to take over the entire Service Fabric environment if they get a hold of a single application," says Ariel Zelivansky, director of security research at Palo Alto Networks. This allows attackers to perform lateral movement and to steal, destroy, or manipulate data. Other actions that an attacker could take by exploiting FabricScape include deploying ransomware or hijacking systems for cryptomining.

"If an organization hosts all of its applications, and possibly credentials, on Service Fabric, an attacker can gain control of all of those," Zelivansky says.

For an attack to be successful, a threat actor would first need to find a way to compromise a containerized workload on a Linux Service Fabric cluster, Microsoft said. The attacker would then need to trigger the DCA to run the vulnerable function in a manner that results in a so-called "race condition" where malicious code can be introduced into the environment.

**PoC: Exploiting the Flaw**

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks were able to exploit the vulnerability on Azure Service Fabric using a container under their control and a simulated compromised workload. They found the attack only worked if the compromised container had access to Service Fabric runtime data — something that is granted by default in single-tenant environments but less common in multitenant setups.

"Any application that is powered by a Service Fabric Linux cluster with runtime access, which is granted by default, is affected," Zelivansky said. Last year, Palo Alto Networks discovered another set of vulnerabilities in the Azure Container Instances (ACI) platform that allowed for a similar container escape.

Microsoft urged organizations using Service Fabric to review containerized workloads in both Linux and Windows environments that had access to host clusters. "By default, a \[Service Fabric\] cluster is a single-tenant environment and thus there is no isolation between applications," Microsoft said. All applications running in these single tenant environments are considered trusted and therefore have access to Service Fabric runtime, Microsoft said.

Thus, organizations that want to run untrusted application in a Service Fabric cluster should take additional measures to create isolation between applications and should remove access to Service Fabric runtime for those untrusted apps, Microsoft said.

Zelivansky says the first layer of defense against vulnerabilities such as FabricScape is focusing on the application itself, limiting the possibility of an attack by remediating known vulnerabilities in their code. They can also limit exposure to the Internet.

However, he offers a caveat: "But the reality is that even if an application is safe from any known vulnerability, zero-day vulnerabilities could be discovered and exploited in any code. And \[software\] supply-chain attacks such as typosquatted or malicious packages are becoming more common than before," he says.

Zelivansky says organizations running Linux Service Fabric clusters should check their cluster version and verify the version is at least 9.0.1035.1. "An organization should check if they have Linux-based applications on Service Fabric. If the answer is yes, we recommend giving top priority to addressing this vulnerability now that its full details are out."

**Cloud Vulnerabilities in Cyberattackers' Sights**

Vulnerabilities in cloud products and services have become a growing concern for organizations — and not just because of the security risks associated with them. In many cases, organizations also have a hard time keeping track of cloud vulnerabilities because of the absence of a common vulnerability enumeration (CVE) program for cataloging them. Because many cloud-security issues are considered the service provider's sole responsibility, there often has been little disclosure of these issues, leaving organizations in the dark about whether they might have been exposed to a specific threat.

This week researchers at Wiz launched a new community-based cloud vulnerability database aimed at addressing this lack of information. The database currently contains information on some 70 previous security issues in cloud products and services. Anyone can add to the database going forward. The goal is to make it a central repository for information on cloud threats in the absence of a formal program like MITRE's CVE program for information security flaws.

Source

DARKReading