A vulnerability in the USBCreator D-Bus interface allows an attacker with access to a user in the sudoer group to bypass the password security policy imposed by the sudo program. The vulnerability allows an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files with arbitrary content, as root – without supplying a password. This trivially leads to elevated privileges, for instance, by overwriting the shadow file and setting a password for root. The issue was resolved in June when Ubuntu patched the relevant packages in response to a vulnerability disclosure from Unit 42.

When reviewing packet captures (pcaps) of suspicious activity, security professionals may need to export objects from the pcaps for a closer examination.This tutorial offers tips on how to export different types of objects from a pcap. The instructions assume you understand network traffic fundamentals. We will use these pcaps of network traffic to practice extracting objects using Wireshark. The instructions also assume you have customized your Wireshark column display as previously demonstrated in this tutorial.

In December 2018, a hacker who goes by the alias ‘SandboxEscaper’ publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in the Windows Error Reporting (WER) component. Digging deeper into her submission, I discovered another zero-day vulnerability, which could be abused to elevate system privileges. According to the Microsoft advisory, attackers exploited this bug as a zero-day in the wild until the patch was released in May 2019.

In recent months, I have taken a keen interest in malware written in the Go programming language. Go, sometimes referred to as GoLang, was created by Google in 2009 and has gained additional popularity within the malware development community in recent years.While there have been an increased number of blogs in recent years discussing Go malware families, I wanted to know if this programming language was indeed on the rise when it pertained to malware. Additionally, I was curious what malware families would be most prevalent, as there is a notion among many that Go is primarily used by penetration testers and red teamers. With that in mind, I set out to collect as much malware written in Go as possible, and cluster it by malware family. The blog discusses my methodology of data collection and my results.

Researchers with Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated the tunneling software X-VPN, which uses various evasion techniques to bypass security and policy enforcement mechanisms. X-VPN is a type of Virtual Private Network (VPN) that can be used to bypass internet censorship and traffic policy enforcement points, which poses a great risk to network operators as well as VPN users.

The newly discovered Linux vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-11477, CVE-2019-11478, and CVE-2019-11479, affect all Linux operating systems newer than kernel 2.6.29 (released on March 2009) or above can cause a kernel panic to systems with services listening on TCP connection. This remote attack can put a server into Denial of Service (DoS) state, but remote code execution is not of concern.

Unit 42 discovered one new vulnerability addressed by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) as part of their June 2019 security update release, as well as nine additional vulnerabilities that were addressed in May 2019.

Executive Summary The Hide ‘N Seek botnet was first discovered in January 2018 and is known for its unique use of Peer-to-Peer communication between bots. Since its discovery, the malware family has seen a couple of upgrades, from the addition of persistence and new exploits, to targeting Android devices via the Android Debug Bridge (ADB).

Our researchers have discovered a new Mirai variant that uses 8 new vulnerabilities and targets new IoT devices.

The blog highlights the results from Unit 42’s research into misconfigured containers, methods for identifying services exposed to the public, and mitigation steps to secure container services. In this blog, we identify common misconfigurations in container services. This allows our readers to deploy their container platform structures in a more secure and private fashion, avoiding the methods of data gathering that we outline in this blog.

Currently available container-based infrastructure has limitations because containers are not truly sandboxed and share the host OS kernel. The root of the problem is the weak separation between containers when the host OS creates a virtualized userland for each container. This blog covers four unique projects from IBM, Google, Amazon, and OpenStack, respectively, that use different techniques to achieve the same goal, creating stronger isolation for containers. The overview in this blog of state of the art research should help readers prepare for the upcoming transformation.

As part of ongoing threat research, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 threat researchers have discovered 28 new vulnerabilities addressed by the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) as part of their May Adobe Security Bulletin APSB19-18 and five Foxit Reader vulnerabilities addressed by Foxit Software as part of their recent security update releases. The Adobe vulnerabilities discovered included 19 Critical and 9 Important rated vulnerabilities.

Our latest research evaluates the data from our Email Link Analysis (ELINK) system and shows France rises to number one for malicious URL hosting, the US to number one for phishing for Web-based threats in the last quarter of 2018. Learn more details in the full report.

Our latest research shows attacks against Middle East government Sharepoint servers using a newly patched vulnerability. In our blog, we provide details of the tools and tactics, explain how we believe these connect to the Emissary Panda threat group, correlate our findings with those of the Saudi Arabian National Cyber Security Center and the Canadian Center for Cyber Security, and provide indicators of compromise (IoCs) from our research.

Our latest research into Shade ransomware shows attackers recently targeted high-tech firms, wholesalers and educational institutions in U.S., Japan, India, Thailand and Canada in early 2019 with English-language malspam.