By Bill Toulas September 26, 2023 05:32 PM

OUTLOOK

Hackers are utilizing a new trick of using zero-point fonts in emails to make malicious emails appear as safely scanned by security tools in Microsoft Outlook.

Although the ZeroFont phishing technique has been used in the past, this is the first time it has been documented as used in this way.

In a new report by ISC Sans analyst Jan Kopriva, the researcher warns that this trick could make a massive difference in the effectiveness of phishing operations, and users should be aware of its existence and use in the wild.

ZeroFont attacks
The ZeroFont attack method, first documented by Avanan in 2018, is a phishing technique that exploits flaws in how AI and natural language processing (NLP) systems in email security platforms analyze text.

It involves inserting hidden words or characters in emails by setting the font size to zero, rendering the text invisible to human targets, yet keeping it readable by NLP algorithms.

This attack aims to evade security filters by inserting invisible benign terms that mix with suspicious visible content, skewing AI’s interpretation of the content and the result of security checks.

In its 2018 report, Avanan warned that ZeroFont bypassed Microsoft’s Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) even when the emails contained known malicious keywords.

Hiding bogus antivirus scans
In a new phishing email seen by Kopriva, a threat actor uses the ZeroFont attack to manipulate message previews on widely used email clients such as Microsoft Outlook.

Specifically, the email in question displayed a different message in Outlook’s email list than in the preview pane.

As you can see below, the email listing pane reads “Scanned and secured by Isc®Advanced Threat protection (APT): 9/22/2023T6:42 AM,” whereas the beginning of the email in the preview/reading pane displays “Job Offer | Employment Opportunity.”
This discrepancy is achieved by leveraging ZeroFont to hide the bogus security scan message at the start of the phishing email, so while it’s not visible to the recipient, Outlook still grabs it and displays it as a preview on the email listing pane.

The goal is to instill a false sense of legitimacy and security in the recipient.

By presenting a deceptive security scan message, the likelihood of the target opening the message and engaging with its content rises.

It is possible that Outlook isn’t the only email client that grabs the first portion of an email to preview a message without checking if its font size is valid, so vigilance is advised for users of other software, too.

Article (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-zerofont-phishing-tricks-outlook-into-showing-fake-av-scans/)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient
“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Updated on: 22 September 2023 by Vilius Petkauskas Deputy Editor
Article
(https://cybernews.com/news/tmobile-data-breach-new-hack/)

T-Mobile, the global telecoms giant, could be facing a third data breach in less than 12 months. Cybercriminals say they’ve exposed employee credentials, customer info, and other sensitive data.
T-Mobile, the Deutsche Telekom-owned brand with operating subsidiaries in the US, Poland, and other countries, could be heading for a rocky end to the year, with a third major data breach on its hands.
Threat actors posted a database on a cybercriminal forum, which they claim contains information stolen in April 2023. The post says the stolen data includes employee credentials, partial Social Security numbers (SSNs), email addresses, customer data, T-Mobile’s sales and analytics data, and other information.

The post advertising the leak is called “T-Mobile, Connectivity Source”. Connectivity Source is one of T-Mobile’s authorized retailers serving customers T-Mobile branded stores.

According to the Cybernews research team, the sample data that attackers posted appears legitimate. So far, there’s no confirmed information about what data the leaked dataset contains. However, the team said that attackers posted a massive amount of data, 90 GB in total.

Cybernews has reached out to T-Mobile for confirmation, however, we did not receive a reply before publishing this article.

According to malware researchers vx-underground, who claim to have insider knowledge about the breach, the data was stolen shortly after T-Mobile‘s second hack of this year, which occurred in March, 2023.

Also in March, the company disclosed a cyberattack in which attackers may have accessed T-Mobile account PINs, SSNs, full names, and other data. In January 2023, T-Mobile USA suffered a breach involving the accounts of 37 million of its cell phone users.

The company has suffered numerous data breaches in the past as well. In August 2021, T-Mobile reported a data breach after an online forum said that the personal data of more than 100 million of the company’s users was leaked.

Bleeping Computers Comments:
By Sergiu Gatlan
September 20, 2023 05:11 PM 2

T-Mobile app glitch let users see other people’s account info

T-Mobile says a cyberattack did not cause this incident, and its systems were not breached.

Also, despite the significant wave of customers reporting that they’ve been affected by this issue, T-Mobile says the incident had limited impact, only affecting less than 100 individuals.

“There was no cyberattack or breach at T-Mobile,” a spokesperson told BleepingComputer when asked for more details.

“This was a temporary system glitch related to a planned overnight technology update involving limited account information for fewer than 100 customers, which was quickly resolved.”
Nine data breaches since 2018
In May, T-Mobile disclosed the second data breach since the start of 2023 after hundreds of customers had their personal information exposed between late February and March after attackers hacked into the carrier’s systems.

In January, the mobile carrier revealed another data breach after the sensitive info of 37 million customers was stolen using one of its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Since 2018, T-Mobile has been hit by seven other data breaches:

In August 2018, attackers accessed the data of around 3% of all T-Mobile customers.
In 2019, T-Mobile exposed the account info of an undisclosed number of prepaid customers.
In March 2020, T-Mobile employees were affected by a breach exposing their personal and financial information.
In December 2020, threat actors accessed customer proprietary network info (phone numbers, call records).
In February 2021, an internal T-Mobile app was accessed by unknown attackers without authorization.
In August 2021, hackers brute-forced their way through T-Mobile’s network following a breach of one of its testing environments.
In April 2022, the notorious Lapsus$ extortion gang breached T-Mobile’s network using stolen credentials.

Article (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/t-mobile-app-glitch-let-users-see-other-peoples-account-info/)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient
“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

The LockBit group is using native IT management software to live off the land, planting and then spreading itself before deploying its ransomware

Nate Nelson Contributing Writer, Dark Reading

The LockBit ransomware group is taking advantage of remote monitoring and management (RMM) software to spread its foothold in targeted networks.

Three recent attacks described in a report published Sept. 18 by Canada-based eSentire follow a similar trajectory: a LockBit affiliate either took advantage of exposed RMM instances, or brought their own RMM to the party, living off the land (LotL) in order to cement its footing in victim networks. Two of these cases affected manufacturers, and one struck a managed service provider (MSP), enabling the group to further compromise some of its downstream customers.

“There’s a general trend towards living off the land, where they’re just avoiding malware. Period. Even for initial access,” explains Keegan Keplinger, senior threat intelligence researcher with eSentire’s Threat Response Unit. “They want to get valid credentials, and use those legitimate credentials to get in.”

How LockBit Uses RMMs
In June, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a cybersecurity advisory about LockBit, and for good reason. Arguably no cybercriminal outfit — in the ransomware-as-a-service game or otherwise — has been as prolific in 2023, with attacks seemingly targeting just about every possible sector, and every type of device, often yielding big money payouts.

The advisory details the group’s favored tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), including its penchant for taking advantage of RMMs.

In a February 2022 attack against a home decor manufacturer, for example, eSentire’s threat researchers discovered a LockBit affiliate with admin access in an unprotected machine, attempting to establish persistence and spread to other computers via the RMM AnyDesk.

“Especially in the last year, threat actors have been pivoting to not using malware,” Keplinger explains, referring to how hackers establish persistence, and spread between and inside of networks. “Malware is often detected by antivirus, and if not, advanced endpoint technology. So anytime you can use either software that’s already in the environment, or software that could be conceivably legitimate, some people may not even recognize that as malicious right away.”

LockBit was counting on this in a June attack against a storage materials manufacturer, which counted itself a customer of the RMM ConnectWise. In this case, the researchers speculated that the threat actor was not able to steal credentials necessary to log into the company’s ConnectWise environment. So, instead, it installed its own, second instance of ConnectWise in the network.

“It’s pretty brilliant, because they said: ‘We already know ConnectWise is in this particular target organization. So, we’ll bring our own and nobody will really notice there’s another instance.'”

The Extent of the LockBit Threat
Organizations that enjoy the benefits of RMMs, without applying proper security controls to prevent their abuse, may expose not only themselves but also partners and customers, as LockBit’s MSP breach this February demonstrates.

The MSP in question had left its ConnectWise login panel exposed to the open Internet. The justification, the researchers speculated, was to make it easier for its customers’ IT administrators to access the service. But with brute force, or simply by purchasing them from the Dark Web, the attackers gained the necessary credentials to break through. Within five minutes of the intrusion, LockBit began dropping its ransomware binaries on multiple endpoints.

“They pretty much can go in unfettered when they get into those tools, and they get admin credentials,” Keplinger laments. Indeed, before it was stopped, the group had used the RMM’s remote access capabilities to reach customers in manufacturing, business services, hospitality, and transportation.

Companies can harden themselves against this kind of abuse by applying multi-factor authentication and strict access controls to these powerful tools. And, Keplinger adds, “endpoint monitoring is probably the biggest differentiator that’s stopping and preventing these attacks.”

“They’re very successful,” he warns of LockBit, for those not yet convinced. “Very pervasive, and very destructive.”

Article (https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/lockbit-using-rmms-spread-ransomware?_mc=NL_DR_EDT_DR_weekly_20230921&cid=NL_DR_EDT_DR_weekly_20230921&sp_aid=118309&elq_cid=34964379&sp_eh=949bacdba1e2c4851acc11df0ff47140b1c6468716621bc723fe5fe498198bd9&sp_eh=949bacdba1e2c4851acc11df0ff47140b1c6468716621bc723fe5fe498198bd9&utm_source=eloqua&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DR_NL_Dark%20Reading%20Weekly_09.21.23&sp_cid=49896&utm_content=DR_NL_Dark%20Reading%20Weekly_09.21.23)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President

Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient

“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

By Sergiu Gatlan September 18, 2023 11:18 AM
The Microsoft AI research division accidentally leaked dozens of terabytes of sensitive data starting in July 2020 while contributing open-source AI learning models to a public GitHub repository.

Almost three years later, this was discovered by cloud security firm Wiz whose security researchers found that a Microsoft employee inadvertently shared the URL for a misconfigured Azure Blob storage bucket containing the leaked information.

Microsoft linked the data exposure to using an excessively permissive Shared Access Signature (SAS) token, which allowed full control over the shared files. This Azure feature enables data sharing in a manner described by Wiz researchers as challenging to monitor and revoke.

When used correctly, Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens offer a secure means of granting delegated access to resources within your storage account.

This includes precise control over the client’s data access, specifying the resources they can interact with, defining their permissions concerning these resources, and determining the duration of the SAS token’s validity.

“Due to a lack of monitoring and governance, SAS tokens pose a security risk, and their usage should be as limited as possible. These tokens are very hard to track, as Microsoft does not provide a centralized way to manage them within the Azure portal,” Wiz warned today.

“In addition, these tokens can be configured to last effectively forever, with no upper limit on their expiry time. Therefore, using Account SAS tokens for external sharing is unsafe and should be avoided.”

38TB of private data exposed via Azure storage bucket

The Wiz Research Team found that besides the open-source models, the internal storage account also inadvertently allowed access to 38TB worth of additional private data.

The exposed data included backups of personal information belonging to Microsoft employees, including passwords for Microsoft services, secret keys, and an archive of over 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages originating from 359 Microsoft employees.

In an advisory on Monday by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) team, Microsoft said that no customer data was exposed, and no other internal services faced jeopardy due to this incident.

Wiz reported the incident to MSRC on June 22nd, 2023, which revoked the SAS token to block all external access to the Azure storage account, mitigating the issue on June 24th, 2023.

“AI unlocks huge potential for tech companies. However, as data scientists and engineers race to bring new AI solutions to production, the massive amounts of data they handle require additional security checks and safeguards,” Wiz CTO & Cofounder Ami Luttwak told BleepingComputer.

“This emerging technology requires large sets of data to train on. With many development teams needing to manipulate massive amounts of data, share it with their peers or collaborate on public open-source projects, cases like Microsoft’s are increasingly hard to monitor and avoid.”

BleepingComputer also reported one year ago that, in September 2022, threat intelligence firm SOCRadar spotted another misconfigured Azure Blob Storage bucket belonging to Microsoft, containing sensitive data stored in files dated from 2017 to August 2022 and linked to over 65,000 entities from 111 countries.

SOCRadar also created a data leak search portal named BlueBleed that enables companies to find out if their sensitive data was exposed online.

Microsoft later added that it believed SOCRadar “greatly exaggerated the scope of this issue” and “the numbers.”

ARTICLE (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-leaks-38tb-of-private-data-via-unsecured-azure-storage/)

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President

Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient

“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Updated on: 12 September 2023
Vilius Petkauskas Deputy Editor

Millions of Facebook business accounts worldwide are being targeted with phishing messages, with a success rate of close to one in 70 victims infected, researchers say.

Attackers have been abusing Facebook’s Messenger platform to peddle millions of targeted phishing messages. According to cybersecurity firm Guardio, cybercrooks target highly rated marketplace sellers and, sometimes, large corporations with fake business inquiries.

For example, the fake message will start with a simple “hello” from a fake account. From the victim’s perspective, that’s just another potential customer.

The attackers’ message proceeds to inquire whether a product is still available. The only way to know which ‘product’ the fake client is talking about is to download a file.

This way, criminals try coaxing victims into downloading an RAR or ZIP archive containing a downloader for a Python-based infostealer. Attackers bypass automated scanners by encoding the content.

Legitimate business accounts are a lucrative target for threat actors. Stolen credentials can be quickly sold on forums for criminals who use them to peddle fake ads, malware, and scams.

Guardio researchers claim that while the attack method here is far from novel, the scale of the campaign is worrying. In only 30 days, attackers managed to target a staggering 7% of all Facebook business accounts, with one out of 250 victims downloading the malicious file.

The overall success rate for the campaign appears even higher, with Guardio claiming one in 70 targets have been infected in what it described as a staggering “success rate” for the criminal undertaking.

The precise reason for the discrepancy between these two sets of figures was not made clear by researchers.

“The threat actors hold an army of bots and fake Facebook accounts as well as a listing of millions of business accounts, pages, and managers – sending over 100k phishing messages a week to Facebook users around the world,” researchers claim.

By following the breadcrumbs left by the perpetrators, Guardio’s team deduced that the threat actors likely come from Vietnam: some of the commands are in Vietnamese and there are signs of the Coc Coc browser, popular in the South-east Asian nation.

Telegram/Discord API tokens left by attacker bots led researchers to a Telegram account named “MrTonyName,” which they believe to be one of those behind the attack.

To all techs suggestion keep Facebook off all lan networks, if marketing need it keep them in the DMZ zone

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Security Software Distributor: Bitdefender , Barracuda, Axcient
“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”