A China-linked threat actor had access to a router configuration database that could have completely disrupted coverage, a security vendor says.

Source: rarrarorro via Shutterstock

About six months before the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Qatar, a threat actor — later identified as China-linked BlackTech — quietly breached the network of a major communications provider for the games and planted malware on a critical system storing network device configurations.

The breach remained undetected until six months after the games, when researchers at NetWitness spotted it during a routine audit for the service provider. During that period, the cyber-espionage group gathered up an unknown volume of data from targeted customers of the telecommunications provider — including those associated with the World Cup and vendors providing services for it.

**A Near Miss**

But it's the "what else could have happened" that's the really scary part, says Stefano Maccaglia, global practice manager, incident response, at NetWitness, discussing the incident for the first time with Dark Reading recently.

The access that BlackTech had on the telecom provider's system would have allowed the threat actor to completely disrupt key communications — including all streaming services associated with the game. The fallout from such a disruption would have been substantial in terms of geopolitical implications, brand damage, national reputation, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from the licensing rights and ads negotiated prior to the World Cup, Maccaglia says.

"We are normally very collected, but in this case, we were terrified," Maccaglia says of NetWitness' discovery. "The threat actor literally had their finger on the button but didn't push it."

NetWitness' involvement in the Qatar World Cup began in 2022, about six months before the event, when several local service providers hired the company to assess the cybersecurity preparedness of some of the supporting IT infrastructure for the games. Like with other security vendors involved in the effort, the telecom provider gave NetWitness access to a substantial portion of its tech stack and environment — but not to all of it.

According to Maccaglia, the NetWitness team detected and remediated several issues on parts of the provider's tech stack to which the company had access. But it wasn't until early 2023 that the service provider finally opened up the rest of the environment to NetWitness for additional auditing. This was when NetWitness unearthed log activity suggesting that someone had gained access to the provider's network.

**A Rootkit and a Backdoor**

The company's subsequent investigation showed the attacker had planted a sophisticated rootkit and a backdoor, dubbed Waterbear, on a critical configuration management database (CMDB) storing device configurations for the provider's customers. NetWitness found the attackers had used PLEAD — a remote access Trojan commonly associated with the BlackTech APT — to target additional systems within the environment.

"The attacker aimed to control this database \[from\] the beginning, because it would allow him/her to swap configurations on the fly and revert them back, once finished, leaving no traces," Maccaglia says.

BlackTech is a threat actor that the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) last year identified as a threat to organizations in the telecommunications, technology, media, electronics, and industrial sectors. In an advisory, CISA described the threat actor (aka Radio Panda, Circuit Panda, Temp.Overboard, and Palmerworm) as particularly adept at modifying router malware without detection and the exploiting routers' domain-trust relationships to gain access to victim networks. "BlackTech actors' TTPs include developing customized malware and tailored persistence mechanisms for compromising routers," CISA noted. "These TTPs allow the actors to disable logging and abuse trusted domain relationships to pivot between international subsidiaries and domestic headquarters' networks."

In the attack on the telecom provider in Qatar, BlackTech actors used their access to the CMDB to change configurations on Asus routers associated with various organizations in such a manner as to make systems belonging to these organizations become accessible over the Internet. They then uploaded PLEAD — concealed in legitimate looking software updates from Asus — to these systems by modifying the DNS resolution of asus.com. The threat actor then leveraged PLEAD to steal data from the victim organizations. Among the systems infected in this manner were those associated with the World Cup games. The attackers would change the router config details for a few hours at a time and then revert back to the original rules to minimize the chances of detection, Maccaglia says.

**Worrying Lack of Visibility**

The fact that no one was able to spot the intrusion in the months leading up to the World Cup, during the event, or for months later is worrisome, Maccaglia says. With the countdown for the 2024 Summer Olympics well underway, it is imperative that the entire technology stack supporting the games be vetted for security issues, he says.

The Olympics, like other major sporting events, such as the Super Bowl, have become huge cyberattack targets in recent years. In 2019, for instance, a threat group later identified and linked to Russia's military intelligence also attempted to disrupt the opening of the Winter Olympics in South Korea after Russian athletes were banned from participating over doping concerns.

"As we saw with the World Cup, threats can live in obscure places and keep a very low profile," Maccaglia says, adding, "You can't find what you aren't allowed to look for," in advocating for broader visibility for companies like NetWitness into the entire supporting infrastructure for the game.

"When you behave as if there's always a threat present, you put yourself in a position to mitigate damage and, potentially, get ahead of the threat in the environment," he says. "This will be critical for the 2024 Summer Games."

**About the Author(s)**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

How Soccer's 2022 World Cup in Qatar Was Nearly Hacked

A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in KubeVirt. This flaw allows an attacker who has access to a virtual machine guest on a node with DownwardMetrics enabled to cause a denial of service by issuing a high number of calls to vm-dump-metrics --virtio and then deleting the virtual machine.

**KubeVirt NULL pointer dereference flaw**

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Apr 3, 2024 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Apr 3, 2024

GHSA-vjhf-6xfr-5p9g: KubeVirt NULL pointer dereference flaw

The thwarted XZ Utils supply chain attack was years in the making. Now, clues suggest nation-state hackers were behind the persona that inserted the malicious code.

Ultimately, Scott argues that those three years of code changes and polite emails were likely not spent sabotaging multiple software projects, but rather building up a history of credibility in preparation for the sabotage of XZ Utils specifically—and potentially other projects in the future. “He just never got to that step because we got lucky and found his stuff,” says Scott. “So that’s burned now, and he’s gonna have to go back to square one.”

**Technical Ticks and Time Zones**

Despite Jia Tan’s persona as a single individual, their yearslong preparation is a hallmark of a well-organized state-sponsored hacker group, argues Raiu, the former Kaspersky lead researcher. So too are the technical hallmarks of the XZ Utils malicious code that Jia Tan added. Raiu notes that, at a glance, the code truly looks like a compression tool. “It’s written in a very subversive manner,” he says. It’s also a “passive” backdoor, Raiu says, so it wouldn’t reach out to a command-and-control server that might help identify the backdoor’s operator. Instead, it waits for the operator to connect to the target machine via SSH and authenticate with a private key—one generated with a particularly strong cryptographic function known as ED448.

The backdoor’s careful design could be the work of US hackers, Raiu notes, but he suggests that’s unlikely, since the US wouldn’t typically sabotage open source projects—and if it did, the National Security Agency would probably use a quantum-resistant cryptographic function, which ED448 is not. That leaves non-US groups with a history of supply chain attacks, Raiu suggests, like China’s APT41, North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and Russia’s APT29.

At a glance, Jia Tan certainly looks East Asian—or is meant to. The time zone of Jia Tan’s commits are UTC+8: That’s China’s time zone, and only an hour off from North Korea’s. However, an analysis by two researchers, Rhea Karty and Simon Henniger, suggests that Jia Tan may have simply changed the time zone of their computer to UTC+8 before every commit. In fact, several commits were made with a computer set to an Eastern European or Middle Eastern time zone instead, perhaps when Jia Tan forgot to make the change.

“Another indication that they are not from China is the fact that they worked on notable Chinese holidays,” say Karty and Henniger, students at Dartmouth College and the Technical University of Munich, respectively. They note that Jia Tan also didn't submit new code on Christmas or New Year's. Boehs, the developer, adds that much of the work starts at 9 am and ends at 5 pm for Eastern European or Middle Eastern time zones. “The time range of commits suggests this was not some project that they did outside of work,” Boehs says.

Though that leaves countries like Iran and Israel as possibilities, the majority of clues lead back to Russia, and specifically Russia’s APT29 hacking group, argues Dave Aitel, a former NSA hacker and founder of the cybersecurity firm Immunity. Aitel points out that APT29—widely believed to work for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the SVR—has a reputation for technical care of a kind that few other hacker groups show. APT29 also carried out the Solar Winds compromise, perhaps the most deftly coordinated and effective software supply chain attack in history. That operation matches the style of the XZ Utils backdoor far more than the cruder supply chain attacks of APT41 or Lazarus, by comparison.

“It could very well be someone else,” says Aitel. “But I mean, if you’re looking for the most sophisticated supply chain attacks on the planet, that’s going to be our dear friends at the SVR.”

Security researchers agree, at least, that it’s unlikely that Jia Tan is a real person, or even one person working alone. Instead, it seems clear that the persona was the online embodiment of a new tactic from a new, well-organized organization—a tactic that nearly worked. That means we should expect to see Jia Tan return by other names: seemingly polite and enthusiastic contributors to open source projects, hiding a government’s secret intentions in their code commits.

_Updated 4/3/2024 at 12:30 pm ET to note the possibility of Israeli or Iranian involvement._

The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind

UNAPIMON works by meticulously disabling hooks in Windows APIs for detecting malicious processes.

Source: Panchenko Vladimir via Shutterstock

Researchers have spotted Earth Freybug, a China-linked threat actor, using a new malware tool to bypass mechanisms organizations might have put in place to monitor Windows application programming interfaces (APIs) for malicious activity.

The malware, which researchers at Trend Micro discovered and named UNAPIMON, works by disabling hooks in Windows APIs for inspecting and analyzing API-related processes for security issues.

**Unhooking APIs**

The goal is to prevent any processes that the malware spawns from being detected or inspected by antivirus tools, sandboxing products, and other threat detection mechanisms.

"Looking at the behavior of UNAPIMON and how it was used in the attack, we can infer that its primary purpose is to unhook critical API functions in any child process," Trend Micro said in a report this week.

"For environments that implement API monitoring through hooking, such as sandboxing systems, UNAPIMON will prevent child processes from being monitored," the security vendor said. This allows malicious programs to run without being detected.

Trend Micro assessed Earth Freybug as being a subset of APT41, a collective of Chinese threat groups variously referred to as Winnti, Wicked Panda, Barium, and Suckfly. The group is known for using a collection of custom tools and so-called living-off-the-land binaries (LOLbins) that manipulate legitimate system binaries such as PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

APT41 itself has been active since at least 2012 and is linked to numerous cyber espionage campaigns, supply chain attacks, and financially motivated cybercrime. In 2022, researchers at Cybereason identified the threat actor as stealing large volumes of trade secrets and intellectual property from companies in the US and Asia for years. Its victims have included manufacturing and IT organizations, governments, and critical infrastructure targets in the US, East Asia, and Europe. In 2020, the US government charged five members believed to be associated with the group for their role in attacks against more than 100 organizations globally.

**Attack Chain**

In the recent incident that Trend Micro observed, Earth Freybug actors used a multistaged approach to delivering UNAPIMON on target systems. In the first stage, the attackers injected malicious code of unknown origin into vmstools.exe, a process associated with a set of utilities for facilitating communications between a guest virtual machine and the underlying host machine. The malicious code created a scheduled task on the host machine to run a batch script file (cc.bat) on the host system.

The batch file's task is to collect a range of system information and initiate a second scheduled task to run a cc.bat file on the infected host. The second batch script file leverages SessionEnv, a Windows service for managing remote desktop services, to side-load a malicious dynamic link library (DLL) on the infected host. "The second cc.bat is notable for leveraging a service that loads a nonexistent library to side-load a malicious DLL. In this case, the service is SessionEnv," Trend Micro said.

The malicious DLL then drops UNAPIMON on the Windows service for defense evasion purposes and also on a cmd.exe process that quietly executes commands. "UNAPIMON itself is straightforward: It is a DLL malware written in C++ and is neither packed nor obfuscated; it is not encrypted save for a single string," Trend Micro said. What makes it "peculiar" is its defense evasion technique of unhooking APIs so that the malware's malicious processes remain invisible to threat detection tools. "In typical scenarios, it is the malware that does the hooking. However, it is the opposite in this case," Trend Micro said.

**About the Author(s)**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

China-Linked Threat Actor Taps 'Peculiar' Malware to Evade Detection

Fortanix is working on technologies to build a security wall around AI search.

The inner functioning of AI-powered search is more complex than plain-text search via Google when it comes to extracting answers from websites and databases. Fortanix is trying to build a security wall to protect the search query and the extraction of data from artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Generative AI technologies will ultimately provide fine-grained responses based on associativity of information and retrieve information from sources users may not be aware of, says Richard Searle, vice president of confidential computing at Fortanix.

"What we're finding ... is that there is a deeper focus happening in the AI domain around privacy, consent, and permissioning of information," Searle says. "These are obviously the core cases."

Essentially, Fortanix is building a security wall around the way AI search queries are handled. More specifically, it is building security around prompts, where users provide AI search queries. The security wall extends to data retrieval from large language models, which are delivered to customers.

"We think there's a significant market there," Searle says. "The partners that we're working with within the AI space are talking about search to their customers already today."

Fortanix's private AI search is pinned on confidential computing, which creates secure vaults that are accessible to authorized parties only via keys. The data is processed inside, without leaving the vault.

"Data is going to be subject to not only the data protection regulations that we have today, but also these emerging AI regulations," Searle says.

Fortanix's technology is a component in the emerging field of confidential AI. Confidential AI is extended to AI scenarios typically associated with GPUs and accelerators, said Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer for Microsoft Azure, during a panel discussion at the Open Confidential Computing Conference in March.

**Protecting Vector Databases**

Private search with AI relies on data extraction from knowledge graphs or vector databases, which could draw information from a wide range of sources, including static conventional databases.

At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, also in March, the company's CEO, Jensen Huang, defined vector databases as a new style of database that takes structured data or unstructured data that can be reindexed by encoding the meaning of data.

"Now this becomes an AI database, and that AI database in the future, once you create it, you can talk to it," Huang said.

Fortanix's goal is to initiate privacy for the search initiator — a human or machine user — and protect the privacy and integrity of the information that might be within the vector embeddings.

"Confidential computing, I think, has a very important role to play," Fortanix’s Searle says.

**Private Search Differs From Conventional Search**

Confidential AI prevents the leak of AI information, which helps meet regulatory requirements. The layer also anonymizes the information so a user's intent or identity is protected. That is the opposite of conventional search, where user information and motives drive Google Ads and analytics.

A higher level of AI privacy is a cornerstone for industries such as healthcare and banking, which are tied to regulatory issues.

"Imagine that you want to do search in a scientific domain — you might want to be able to use data from a different institution to the one you're working in that has some specific expertise in a particular field. Showing the privacy of that data and the accuracy of this research is important," Searle says.

**State of Confidential AI**

Confidential AI is an emerging concept, and search fits into that profile. Intel and AMD have chips with hooks for secure enclaves. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are providing confidential computing virtual machines in their cloud services.

Companies can bring data sets together to train a foundational model effectively, and these data sets are becoming high-value assets for top corporations, said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Nvidia's hyperscale and high-performance computing division, during the panel discussion.

The IT industry is rapidly approaching the deployment of confidential computing in data centers, edge computing, and PCs, but there's a lot more to do with confidential AI, said Greg Lavender, Intel's chief technology officer, during the panel.

"Privacy and safety and responsible AI are going to be big forcing functions for this as the government adopts AI technologies from the industry," he said.

**About the Author(s)**

Agam Shah has covered enterprise IT for more than a decade. Outside of machine learning, hardware, and chips, he's also interested in martial arts and Russia.

Fortanix Builds Private Search for AI

The initiative is meant to provide more resources and better strategies for healthcare entities that face an increasing amount of cybersecurity challenges.

Source: Olekcii Mach via Alamy Stock Photo

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has begun an initiative to better organize and equip its healthcare cybersecurity programs through a one-stop shop.

This latest resource is created through the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), which leads the US during disasters and public health emergencies relating to health and medical preparation.

This initiative comes after a United Healthcare subsidiary was targeted by BlackCat ransomware group in February, causing days of outages and chaos across the healthcare supply chain. The cyberattack was considered one of the most serious of its kind within the healthcare sector, and led to United paying the ransom demanded by the threat actors. 

The incident prompted a letter from the chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). He asked HHS what steps it was taking to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. The ASPR said it will create new cybersecurity strategies for the healthcare sector and inform healthcare entities of best practices and resources.

"There's too many doors into cybersecurity when engaging with the federal government generally, let alone HHS," said Brian Mazanec, the deputy director for ASPR's Office of Preparedness, in a statement. "Within HHS, there are a lot of different players. So we're in the process now of really establishing this front door through ASPR to all of those resources."

**About the Author(s)**

HHS Plans for Cyber 'One-Stop Shop' After United Healthcare Attack

Campaign distributes malware disguised as legitimate installers for popular workplace collaboration apps by abusing a traffic-tracking feature.

Source: Bits and Splits via Shutterstock

Attackers are once again abusing Google Ads to target people with info-stealing malware, this time using an ad-tracking feature to lure corporate users with fake ads for popular collaborative groupware such as Slack and Notion.

Researchers from AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC) discovered a malicious campaign that uses a statistical feature to embed URLs that distribute malware, including the Rhadamanthys stealer, they revealed in a blog post published this week. The feature lets advertisers insert external analytic website addresses into ads to collect and use their visitors' access-related data to calculate ad traffic.

However, instead of inserting a URL for an external statistics site, attackers are abusing the feature to enter sites for distributing malicious code, the researchers found.

Ads related to the campaign have already been deleted. But when they were still active, "clicking on the banner would take unsuspecting users to the address that would trick them into downloading a malicious file," according to ASEC.

In the campaign, Rhadamanthys is disguised as an installer for popular groupware often used by corporate teams for workplace collaboration. Once the malware is installed and executed, it downloads malicious files and payloads from the attacker's server.

**Redirects to Stealer Downloads**

The ASEC post breaks down how attackers crafted the campaign to show banner ads that contain tracking URLs invisible to the end user that redirect users to an attacker-created and -controlled URL. This ultimate landing page is similar to the actual website of a groupware tool such as Slack or Notion, and it prompts visitors to download and execute the malware, which is distributed in an installer form.

Typical installers used by the campaign are the Inno Setup installer or Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) installer; specifically, attackers used the following executable files: Notion\_software\_x64\_.exe Slack\_software\_x64\_.exe; Trello\_software\_x64\_.exe; and GoodNotes\_software\_x64\_32.exe.

"Once it is executed, the malware uses websites that can save texts such as textbin or tinyurl to access the malicious payload addresses," ASEC said in its blog post, which lists the URLs attackers used to fetch these addresses, which are subsequently delivered to users.

The ultimate payload of the campaign is the Rhadamanthys stealer, which gets injected into legitimate Windows files via the "%system32%" path, according to ASEC. This allows the stealer to exfiltrate users' private data without their knowledge, the researchers noted.

Rhadamanthys is popular with attackers and is available for purchase on the Dark Web under a malware-as-a-service model. It acts as a typical stealer to collect system information, such as computer name, username, OS version, and other machine details. It also queries the directories of installed browsers — including Brave, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera Software — to search for and steal browser history, bookmarks, cookies, auto-fills, login credentials, and other data.

**Pay Attention to Ad-Delivered URLs**

The campaign is certainly not the first time that attackers have abused Google Ads and its associated features to deliver Rhadamanthys and other malware, and it likely won't be the last. In fact, a campaign identified in January 2023 also used website redirects from Google Ads and fake-download lures for popular remote-workforce software, such as Zoom and AnyDesk to deliver Rhadamanthys.

Attackers have even abused the "dynamic search ads" feature of the service to amplify the effect of malicious campaigns by creating targeted ads to deliver a flood of malware.

Indeed, as "all search engines that provide tracking to calculate ad traffic can be used to distribute malware," users must stay vigilante when accessing links from ads delivered by Google, ASEC warned. Specifically, they should "pay attention to the URL that is seen upon accessing the website, not the URL that is shown on the ad's banner" to avoid falling for a malicious campaign, according to the post.

ASEC also posted a comprehensive list of URLs associated with various stages of the campaign to help administrators identify if any corporate users have been affected by it.

**About the Author(s)**

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing music, yoga, and cooking.

Attackers Abuse Google Ad Feature to Target Slack, Notion Users

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 Trusted Advisor now available for Mac, iOS, and Android   

Ransomware groups tore into manufacturing other parts of the OT sector in 2023, and a few attacks caused eight- and nine-figure damages. But worse is yet to come in 2024.

Source: Imagebroker via Alamy Stock Photo

At least 68 cyberattacks last year caused physical consequences to operational technology (OT) networks at more than 500 sites worldwide — in some cases causing $10 million to $100 million in damages.

Unsurprisingly, these weren't Stuxnet-like events, but the opposite.

According to a new report from industrial control system (ICS) vendor Waterfall Security Solutions, which studied real-world cyberattacks on OT organizations, most of the hackers known to be targeting the OT sector these days are hacktivists. And the majority of disruptions are not caused by such direct manipulation of OT systems but are downstream consequences of IT-based attacks, most often involving ransomware.

That doesn't mean, though, that the impacts are any less severe. Incidents involving Johnson Controls and Clorox last year ended up costing those companies around $27 million and $49 million, respectively. One cyberattack that led to the temporary suspension of operations at MKS Instruments in Massachusetts cost $200 million, and one of its suppliers — California-based Applied Materials Inc. — reported losing another $250 million as a result.

The number of attacks with physical consequences increased by nearly 20% last year, according to the report.

**IT Attacks With OT Consequences**

In the past decade and a half, only around a quarter of cyberattacks with OT consequences were caused by actually hitting the OT network, according to the report Waterfall published in collaboration with OT incident threat database ICS STRIVE.

"A large fraction of attacks that caused OT consequences did so by compromising machines in the IT network exclusively," explains Andrew Ginter, vice president of industrial security for Waterfall, and a co-author of the report. "OT was often shut down in 'an abundance of caution' because the business was not willing to keep running powerful, dangerous physical processes with compromise only one or two network hops away."

After its attack last March, for example, the German manufacturer Hahn Group GmbH switched off all of its systems as a safety precaution. A full, clean restoration of its systems took weeks thereafter. A number of other manufacturers last year followed that same playbook, even when safety wasn't at risk, in order to contain damage to further systems, sites, and customers.

"OT was also often shut down because physical operations needed facilities on IT networks that ransomware had crippled — e.g., container-tracking systems for shipping or passenger signage for large rail stations," Ginter points out.

One prime case occurred last January, when UK Royal Mail printers were disabled and hijacked to print LockBit ransom notes. Mail export services were briefly suspended nationwide, in an event that ended up costing £42 million.

"These dependencies are something many OT practitioners do not think about," Ginter explains. An IT network compromise can also affect physical operations, even if an OT network is secured, if the OT process rely on processes in the IT network.

**Cyber Threat to Water Treatment**

More than half of publicly reported cyberattacks with OT consequences in 2023 affected the manufacturing sector. But if there's one sector to worry about more than the rest it's, arguably, water.

Late last November, around 180 households in the Irish villages of Binghamstown and Drum lost water for two days, thanks to a loss of water pressure at a local pumping station. The cause was a cyberattack likely carried out by Iran's Cyber Av3ngers, part of a wider campaign targeting Unitronics pump controllers.

Though such stories are still rare, water facilities combine a dangerous mix of low difficulty and high impact for hackers.

"In the USA, the vast majority of the more than 20,000 drinking water treatment utilities are tiny. Minute. The vast majority of the more than 200,000 wastewater treatment systems — same thing. And realistically, with whatever budget these utilities have, almost all of it goes to people with trucks and backhoes digging holes in the ground," Ginter explains. "Couple that with continued pressure to automate those water systems to reduce costs — a lot of these systems are regulated \[because they're local monopolies\], and every regulator wants to reduce costs and reduce rates, so there is constant pressure to automate. All modern automation involves computers, meaning more targets for cyberattacks."

These systems have no security budget, so with the increased threat of hacktivist attacks and pressure to automate their operations, they are in peril, he notes, creating "a growing problem for all of the small communities in the nation."

**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.

Cyberattacks Wreaking Physical Disruption on the Rise

By Waqas
Critical Backdoor Alert! Patch XZ Utils Now (CVE-2024-3094) & Secure Your Linux System. Learn how a hidden backdoor…
This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Backdoor Discovered in XZ Utils: Patch Your Systems Now (CVE-2024-3094)

Critical Backdoor Alert! Patch XZ Utils Now (CVE-2024-3094) & Secure Your Linux System. Learn how a hidden backdoor puts Linux at risk and how to patch it immediately.

A critical security vulnerability, designated CVE-2024-3094, was recently discovered in the widely used XZ Utils package. This vulnerability threatens Linux systems with backdoor attacks.

For your information, XZ Utils is a collection of open-source command-line tools for data compression and decompression. It includes the popular xz command and the liblzma library, which is used by other software, most notably OpenSSH – the program that enables secure remote access to Linux systems.

****The Backdoor Explained****

The vulnerability involved a malicious backdoor hidden within the source code of XZ Utils, specifically in the liblzma library. This backdoor code, if triggered, could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized remote access to a vulnerable system through SSH. The attacker wouldn’t even need valid credentials, potentially granting complete control over the system.

****Impact and Discovery****

The potential impact of this vulnerability is severe. An attacker exploiting CVE-2024-3094 could steal sensitive data, install malware, disrupt critical operations, or even use the compromised system to launch further attacks.

Fortunately, the backdoor was discovered by the security community in late March 2024 before widespread distribution. This prevented a large-scale security breach. However, some Linux users remain vulnerable, especially those using unstable or rolling-release distributions.

****Who is Affected?****

According to OpenSSH’s report, the specific versions of XZ Utils containing the backdoor were 5.6.0 and 5.6.1. These versions were only recently released and did not make it into the stable branches of most major Linux distributions. However, users who manually compiled these versions from source code or installed them from non-standard repositories could be at risk.

Commenting on this, John Bambenek, President at Bambenek Consulting warned, _“_The original reports of this backdoor showed exploitation of this vulnerability via SSH which means it can be triggered even if the victim machine’s users don’t use XZ and its library. It seems this library tends to be installed by default on modern Linux distributions so organizations should immediately prioritize downgrading the package until a safe update is released, even if they don’t use the tools themselves._“_

****Mitigation and Prevention****

The most critical step to address this vulnerability is to update your system immediately. Most Linux distributions have released patch updates for XZ Utils. Here’s how to update depending on your distribution:

*   **Debian/Ubuntu:** Use sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade commands.
*   **Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora:** Use sudo dnf update command.
*   **Other Distributions:** Refer to your distribution’s specific update instructions.

****Lessons Learned****

The discovery of CVE-2024-3094 emphasizes the importance of various security measures. Firstly, keeping software and systems updated with regular patches is crucial to mitigate potential risks.

Secondly, maintaining a sharp review process for open-source projects aids in the early detection of vulnerabilities. Thirdly, promoting security awareness among users and employees through education about risks and best practices is essential for enhancing overall protection. Adhering to these practices enables us to reduce the impact of vulnerabilities like CVE-2024-3094 and safeguard the security of our systems.

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