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Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 201

NSA’s reverse-engineering malware tool, Ghidra, to get new features to save time, boost accuracy

Just five months ago at the RSA conference, the NSA released Ghidra, a piece of open source software for reverse-engineering malware. It was an unusual move for the spy agency, and it’s sticking to its plan for regular updates — including some based on requests from the public.

In the coming months, Ghidra will get support for Android binaries, according to Brian Knighton, a senior researcher for the NSA, and Chris Delikat, a cyber team lead in its Research Directorate, who previewed details of the upcoming release with CyberScoop. Knighton and Delikat are discussing their plans at a session of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas Thursday.

Before the Android support arrives, a version 9.1 will include new features intended to save time for users and boost accuracy in reverse-engineering malware — enhancements that will come from features such as processor modules, new support for system calls and the ability to conduct additional editing, known as sleigh editing, in the Eclipse development environment.

AT&T Workers Installed Malware on Company Network for Cash

For five years, several AT&T employees were conspiring with a Pakistani man to install malware on company computers so that man could unlock millions of smartphones subsidized by the carrier, according to federal investigators.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Muhammad Fahd for bribing AT&T employees at a call center in Washington state to pull off the scheme. According to the feds, Fahd allegedly paid more than $1 million in bribes to the AT&T employees during the conspiracy, which allowed him to fraudulently unlock more than 2 million AT&T phones from 2012 to 2017.

Fahd allegedly partnered with businesses that offered cell phone unlocking services in exchange for a fee. These unnamed business would then supply him with the IMEI numbers of the phones bound to AT&T’s network.

The evolution of Emotet: How to protect your network

With over 350,000 new malware samples emerging every day, it’s difficult for any one strain of malware to make a name for itself. Any single malware sample whose name you know — be it Mirai, WannaCry, or NotPetya — speaks to a trail of devastation.

In 2019, people are also hearing another name: Emotet.

But Emotet has been around in one form or another since 2014, and its first major resurgence was in 2017. In the beginning, Emotet was just one trojan among many — a particularly run-of-the-mill banking trojan that did some damage before being researched, understood, and dismissed in a flurry of signature updates.

GermanWiper Ransomware Erases Data, Still Asks for Ransom

Multiple German companies were off to a rough start last week when a phishing campaign pushing a data-wiping malware targeted them and asked for a ransom. This wiper is being named GermanWiper due to its targeting of German victims and it being a destructive wiper rather than a ransomware.

The malware was first reported on the BleepingComputer forum on Tuesday, July 30 and users soon learned after examining their files that it is a data wiper, despite it demanding a ransom payment.

Warning As New Malware Bypasses Network Security Measures To Enable Attacks On PCs

Another dire warning for Windows users this week, after threat researchers at Proofpoint disclosed” a previously undocumented malware.” This one had a twist, though, this malware was not an attack in itself, it was an enabler, hiding on infected computers, establishing a proxy that other malware can then use to manage traffic to the PC and carry out their threats.

How to Hack a Face: From Facial Recognition to Facial Recreation

Given that going viral on the Internet is often cyclical, it should come as no surprise that an app that made its debut in 2017 has once again surged in popularity. FaceApp applies various transformations to the image of any face, but the option that ages facial features has been especially popular. However, the fun has been accompanied by controversy; since biometric systems are replacing access passwords, is it wise to freely offer up our image and our personal data? The truth is that today the face is ceasing to be as non-transferable as it used to be, and in just a few years it could be more hackable than the password of a lifetime.

Our countenance is the most recognisable key to social relationships. We might have doubts when hearing a voice on the phone, but never when looking at the face of a familiar person. In the 1960s, a handful of pioneering researchers began training computers to recognise human faces, although it was not until the 1990s that this technology really began to take off. Facial recognition algorithms have improved to such an extent that since 1993 their error rate has been halved every two years. When it comes to recognising unfamiliar faces in laboratory experiments, today’s systems outperform human capabilities.

Nowadays these systems are among the most widespread applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Every day, our laptops, smartphones and tablets greet us by name as they recognise our facial features, but at the same time, the uses of this technology have set off alarm bells over invasion of privacy concerns. In China, the world leader in facial recognition systems, the introduction of this technology associated with surveillance cameras to identify even pedestrians has been viewed by the West as another step towards the Big Brother dystopia, the eye of the all-watching state, as George Orwell portrayed in 1984.