UK Is Ordering Apple to Break Its Own Encryption

The Washington Post is reporting that the UK government has served Apple with a “technical capability notice” as defined by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, requiring it to break the Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud for the benefit of law enforcement.

This is a big deal, and something we in the security community have worried was coming for a while now.

The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment…

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New VPN Backdoor

A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection:

When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that…

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This Week in Security: Backdoored Backdoors, Leaking Cameras, and The Safety Label

The mad lads at watchTowr are back with their unique blend of zany humor and impressive security research. And this time, it’s the curious case of backdoors within popular backdoors, …read more Continue reading This Week in Security: Backdoored Backdoors, Leaking Cameras, and The Safety Label

Chinese cyber center points finger at U.S. over alleged cyberattacks to steal trade secrets

The CNCERT said it had “handled’ two attacks on Chinese tech companies, which it attributed to an unnamed suspected U.S. intelligence agency.

The post Chinese cyber center points finger at U.S. over alleged cyberattacks to steal trade secrets appeared first on CyberScoop.

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This Week in Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, and Nearest Neighbor WiFi

Maybe those backdoors weren’t such a great idea. Several US Telecom networks have been compromised by a foreign actor, likely China’s Salt Typhoon, and it looks like one of the …read more Continue reading This Week in Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, and Nearest Neighbor WiFi

Criminals Exploiting FBI Emergency Data Requests

I’ve been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too.

Turns out the same thing is true for non-technical backdoors:

The advisory said that the cybercriminals were successful in masquerading as law enforcement by using compromised police accounts to send emails to companies requesting user data. In some cases, the requests cited false threats, like claims of human trafficking and, in one case, that an individual would “suffer greatly or die” unless the company in question returns the requested information…

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Subverting LLM Coders

Really interesting research: “An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection“:

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code com-
pletion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning and backdoor attacks can covertly alter the model outputs. To address this critical security challenge, we introduce CODEBREAKER, a pioneering LLM-assisted backdoor attack framework on code completion models. Unlike recent attacks that embed malicious payloads in detectable or irrelevant sections of the code (e.g., comments), CODEBREAKER leverages LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) for sophisticated payload transformation (without affecting functionalities), ensuring that both the poisoned data for fine-tuning and generated code can evade strong vulnerability detection. CODEBREAKER stands out with its comprehensive coverage of vulnerabilities, making it the first to provide such an extensive set for evaluation. Our extensive experimental evaluations and user studies underline the strong attack performance of CODEBREAKER across various settings, validating its superiority over existing approaches. By integrating malicious payloads directly into the source code with minimal transformation, CODEBREAKER challenges current security measures, underscoring the critical need for more robust defenses for code completion…

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China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994.

It’s a weird story. The first line of the article is: “A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers.” This implies that the attack wasn’t against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers…

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Weird Zimbra Vulnerability

Hackers can execute commands on a remote computer by sending malformed emails to a Zimbra mail server. It’s critical, but difficult to exploit reliably.

In an email sent Wednesday afternoon, Proofpoint researcher Greg Lesnewich seemed to largely concur that the attacks weren’t likely to lead to mass infections that could install ransomware or espionage malware. The researcher provided the following details:

  • While the exploitation attempts we have observed were indiscriminate in targeting, we haven’t seen a large volume of exploitation attempts

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