Probably the largest hurdle when learning any new programming language is simply knowing where to get started. This is why we, Chris and Susan, decided to create this series about Python for Beginners!

Even though we won’t cover everything there is to know about Python in the course, we want to make sure we give you the foundation on programming in Python, starting from common everyday code and scenarios. At the end of the course, you’ll be able to go and learn on your own, for example with docs, tutorials, or books.

 Learning a new framework or development environment is made even more difficult when you don’t know the programming language. Fortunately, we’re here to help! We’ve created this series of videos to focus on the core concepts of JavaScript.

While we don’t cover every aspect of JavaScript, we will help you build a foundation from which you can continue to grow. By the end of this series, you’ll be able to work through tutorials, quick starts, books, and other resources, continuing to grow on your own.

The video series is designed to be consumed as you see fit. You can watch from start to finish, or you can dive into specific topics. You can always bookmark and come back as you need.

 An
elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when an attacker
establishes a vulnerable Netlogon secure channel connection to a domain
controller, using the Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC).
An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could run a
specially crafted application on a device on the network.

Traditional
data and operations management across organizations and on the web can involve
inefficient transaction reconciliation between siloed databases, password
fatigue, and single points of failure. This often results in concerns over
interoperability, security, and privacy of data that affect both users and
businesses.

Blockchain
technology has enabled a new software paradigm for managing digital ownership
in partial or zero-trust environments. It uses tokens to conduct transactions,
exchange verifiable data, and achieve coordination across organizations and on
the web. Data models with varied capabilities and scopes have been defined to
issue tokens. By allowing for the design of programmable digital assets that
can represent different forms of ownership, these models enable users to store,
move, and even create value on top of shared or public digital infrastructures.

NIST
announces the release of Draft
NISTIR 8301, Blockchain
Networks: Token Design and Management Overview, which provides a
high-level technical overview and conceptual framework of token designs and
management methods. The document highlights the different types of tokens and
how they are held in custody. It then examines transaction management under
three fundamental aspects: validation, submission, and viewability.
Infrastructure tools used to develop applications that integrate blockchain
networks and second layer protocols are also reviewed. Finally, the paper
presents deployment scenarios and use cases for tokens before concluding with
potential breakthroughs in privacy-preserving verifiable data exchange. The
terminology, concepts, properties, and architectures introduced in this work
can facilitate understanding and communications among business owners, software
developers, cybersecurity professionals within an organization, and individuals
who are or will be using such systems.

A public comment period for this
document is open
through October 30, 2020. See the publication
details for a copy of the document and instructions for
submitting comments.

NOTE:
A call for patent claims is included on page iv of this draft. For
additional information, see the Information
Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy–Inclusion of Patents in ITL
Publications.

ITL
Patent Policy:
https://www.nist.gov/itl/information-technology-laboratory-itl-patent-policy-inclusion-patents-itl-publications

 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Multi-State
Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) have released a joint Ransomware
Guide that details practices that organizations should continuously engage
in to help manage the risk posed by ransomware and other cyber threats. The
in-depth guide provides actionable best practices for ransomware prevention as
well as a ransomware response checklist that can serve as a ransomware-specific
addendum to organization cyber incident response plans.

CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Ransomware
Guide and CISA’s Ransomware
webpage for additional information.

 

 Modern processors are extremely complicated devices and aren’t single purpose number crunching machines as they were in the past. A modern CPU contains subsystems responsible for power management, remote administration, hardware security, and much more. Intel brands this collection of technologies as vPro. The subsystem with perhaps the most attack surface is branded as Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), a system designed to allow for remote administration of corporate computer assets. It provides out of band administration, meaning an authorized administrator can perform any number of tasks on the machine without requiring specific operating system features like a functioning Windows install or separate software running on the system. This week researchers discovered a critical flaw in the AMT system allowing for an unauthorized user to completely takeover affected machines.

Intel AMT runs on a dedicated microprocessor embedded in the normal CPU and as such isn’t something a normal user ever has to deal with. It is able to piggyback on the normal networking stack exposed to the operating system to allow for out of band management of the machine without any user interaction. Due to it being embedded in the processor it has almost complete and unrestricted access to the system. This makes finding flaws in it extremely valuable to researchers and hackers. Luckily the flaw found this week was discovered by internal Intel researchers whose goal it is to discover critical vulnerabilities before attackers do. CVE-2020-8758 was disclosed in a security advisory and ranks a 9.8/10 on the CVSS scale. The flaw is the result of improper buffer restrictions in the network component of the AMT subsystem and could allow for privilege escalation and complete takeover of a system running the vulnerable version. The critical flaw requires that AMT has been previously provisioned by a system administrator and that an attacker can reach the system over the network.

While the main vulnerability disclosed requires AMT to be provisioned, a second attack scenario was also disclosed which is able to attack an un-provisioned AMT instance. In this attack scenario an attacker would require local access to the machine to exploit the flaw. While not nearly as critical of a remote over-the-network exploit, it can pose a threat for systems exposed to public access such as shared computing resources or cases where a machine may be left unattended for an amount of time.

While no known attacks utilizing the flaw have been seen yet ,Intel recommends that systems running the affected firmware versions are patched immediately.

Sources:

· https://threatpost.com/critical-intel-active-management-technology-flaw-allows-privilege-escalation/159036/

· https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00404.html

 

 No matter what operating system you use, there will be vulnerabilities lurking in the nooks and crannies we may never consider. If you’re using Windows 10, here are two you should know about.

The first bug affects all Windows 10 editions except for Home, as it leverages Hyper-V, a feature that provides hardware virtualization. In order to create and modify files in certain areas of Windows a user needs elevated privileges. This is to protect sensitive areas of the operating system. Enabling Hyper-V circumvents the need for admin credentials, as researcher Jonas Lykkegaard showed how he was able to drop an arbitrary file into the System32 folder and then modify it with user-level credentials.

Luckily, Hyper-V is disabled by default, so if you don’t use any sort of virtualization you won’t be vulnerable. However, if you enable the Windows Sandbox feature, which is often used for testing software, Hyper-V will automatically be enabled as well. The risk of this bug is low enough that the researcher decided not to submit it directly to Microsoft, so it is unclear if or when a patch will be released. The best advice here would be to keep your system up to date and to disable features that you aren’t using.

The next bug involves a feature on Windows 10 that most users have used – Themes. Whether it’s selecting a pre-packaged theme to get away from that default blue, or using our own wallpapers to customize, nearly everyone makes some sort of change to the appearance of their desktop. Some users go a step further and export their custom themes to share or import custom themes that others have built. This is where the vulnerability comes in. Researcher Jimmy Bayne recently showed that modified Windows 10 themes could be used in Pass-the-Hash attacks.

Bayne demonstrated how an attacker could create a theme file with a modified wallpaper setting that would request a remote resource requiring authentication. If user tries to install the theme, Windows will automatically attempt to access the remote resource using the credentials of the user that is currently logged into Windows. From there an attacker can harvest the credentials. Even worse, this attack will work with Microsoft account credentials, meaning attackers would be able to access users’ online resources as well. The easiest way to mitigate the threat is to enable two-factor authentication and avoid custom themes from third parties.

Sources

· https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/windows-10-sandbox-activation-enables-zero-day-vulnerability/

· https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-themes-can-be-abused-to-steal-windows-passwords/

 

 Today’s technological landscape has led to an explosion of cyber security products and services to automatically detect and deal with threats and malware. How-ever, as more and more emphasis is put on automated systems, attackers have to modify their strategies to combat this. Threat detection and analysis company, Huntress Labs, discovered a piece of malware that hides in plain sight and would likely not be detected by most automatic defenses, requiring a human analysis element.

The malware involves maintaining persistence on a system rather than the initial infection. Once inside the system, the malware creates services that seem to be legitimate, BfeOnService.exe and engine.exe, as well as a log file a.chk. The description also seems to be legitimate: however, these services are actually copies of two other services, mshta.exe and powershell.exe. These programs have not been modified except for the name, so an antivirus program wouldn’t flag them as malware. The name change keeps the processes from being flagged by security programs looking for running instances of mshta and powershell which could indicate a threat presence. They parse the log file, which at first glance seems harmless, to extract a payload used by powershell to connect to https://dns.google.com/resolve?name=dmarc.jqueryupdatejs.com&type=txt and retrieve another payload using Google’s DNS service.

The DNS response is actually a DNS TXT record response that contains further information embedded within it. The data field contains what appears to be a ture, which is used to authenticate e-mails from specific domains. However, it is a cleverly hidden base-64 encoded string that, after multiple layers of decoding, Reveals multiple decimal numbers that don’t appear to be anything but are actually IP addresses. For instance, one of the numbers analyzed was 1484238687, but this translates to 88.119.175.95 when entered in a browser address bar. These are the IP addresses for Command & Control servers hosting further payloads. This allows the attacker to rotate servers used for malware delivery, as well as changing the payloads themselves, without having to directly access the victim. Also, while many organizations filter DNS activity on their network, it is much less likely that they would lock down HTTPS access to google.com.

John Hammond, Senior Security Researcher at Huntress Labs, comments, “We found this malware from our own manual analysis. Obviously, there is an incredible benefit from having an automated, always on antivirus and endpoint protection suite… but this lacks the context that humans have. Manual investigation is a must”. The best defense lies somewhere in the balance between automated and human-controlled security practices.

Source:

Peraton CyberIntelligence Program (CIP)

 The saying goes, “Once is chance, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern.” But do we really need three times when the repetition is so clearly similar? Researchers at Trustwave have found spyware within the Golden Tax Invoicing system provided by Baiwang and have named the spyware Golden Helper. A Golden Tax Invoicing system is required to log invoices and expenses for accurate centralized Value Added Tax reporting. Baiwang is joined by Aisin as the only two providers of the Golden Tax Invoicing system. The Aisino version was found last month to have the Golden Spy which had several similar infection avenues but different capabilities.

The Golden Spy malware had several obfuscation and detection avoidance capabilities:

• a two hour delay in malware installation,

• two auto-start services for self-monitoring and restarting,

• persistence beyond the tax software itself,

• communication with domains that were not tax related, and

• running with system level privileges for remote code execution.

A malware uninstaller was pushed in an update by Aisino by the time Golden Helper became public. Golden Helper, is planted in the Baiwang edition of the Golden Tax Invoicing system. The malware, itself, is curiously signed by an Aisino subsidiary, NouNou Technology. Golden Helper takes extensive efforts to stay hidden. It obfuscates the files produced with randomly generated filenames and obfuscates metadata by randomly generating “creation” and “last write” timestamps. It masks executable payload as .gif, .jpg, and .zip files while in transit and uses the Victim’s IP to algorithmically randomize download locations and communicate those locations to command and control servers. It has no need for User permission to install and escalate to SYSTEM level privilege and can perform remote code execution as well. Golden Tax software may also be delivered to companies pre-installed in computers provided by their bank. This makes sense to offer up a tool to make business easier so that the customer doesn’t have to go through the trouble of installing the software. But unfortunately, it also comes bundled with Golden Helper. Trustwave researchers are still looking for samples of the final payload installed by GoldenHelper, named taxver.exe.

Sources:

• https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-blog/goldenspy-chapter-4-goldenhelper-malware-embedded-in-official-goldentax-software/

• https//:bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-goldenhelper-malware-foundin-official-chinese-tax-software/

• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/malwarestashed-in-china-mandated-software-is-more-extensive-than-thought/