SEHL-2019-Week05 SecurityEndeavors

Show notes for Security Endeavors Headlines for Week 4 of 2019

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InfoSec Week 5, 2019 (link to original Malgregator.com posting)

According to a Reuters investigation, United Arab Emirates used former U.S. intelligence operatives to hack into the iPhones of activists, diplomats and foreign politicians using so-called Karma spyware. It’s described as a tool that could remotely grant access to iPhones simply by uploading phone numbers or email accounts into an automated targeting system. The tool has limits — it doesn’t work on Android devices and doesn’t intercept phone calls. But it was unusually potent because, unlike many exploits, Karma did not require a target to click on a link sent to an iPhone, they said. In 2016 and 2017, Karma was used to obtain photos, emails, text messages and location information from targets’ iPhones. The technique also helped the attackers harvest saved passwords, which could be used for other intrusions. According to the report, Karma relies, at least in part, on a flaw in Apple’s iMessage messaging system. The flaw allowed for the implantation of malware on the phone through iMessage which establishes a connection with the device even if the phone’s owner didn’t use the app. 
To initiate the compromise, Karma needed only to send the target a text message — no action was required on the part of the recipient. It isn’t clear whether the Karma spyware is still in use. The story says that by the end of 2017, security updates to the iPhone software had made Karma far less effective. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spying-karma/ 
Russia also has it's own Wikileaks. Called Distributed Denial of Secrets, the website aims to "bring into one place dozens of different archives of hacked material that, at best, have been difficult to locate, and in some cases appear to have disappeared entirely from the web." Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoS, is a volunteer effort that launched last month. Its objective is to provide researchers and journalists with a central repository where they can find the terabytes of hacked and leaked documents that are appearing on the internet with growing regularity and is being considered a kind of academic library or a museum for leak scholars. DDoS differs from WikiLeaks in that it doesn’t solicit direct leaks of unpublished data—its focus is on compiling, organizing, and curating leaks that have already appeared somewhere in public. The DDoS project compiled more than 200,000 emails into a spreadsheet for ease of searching. In all, its cache now contains 61 different leaks totaling 175 gigabytes. https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-time-its-russias-emails-getting-leaked 
The Japanese government will run penetration tests against all the IoT devices in the country in preparation for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. They want to map vulnerable devices and find out how to harden infrastructure. The survey will be carried out by employees of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) under the supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. NICT employees will be allowed to use default passwords and password dictionaries to attempt to log into Japanese consumers' IoT devices.
The plan is to compile a list of insecure devices that use default and easy-to-guess passwords and pass it on to authorities and the relevant internet service providers, so they can take measures to alert consumers and secure the devices.The survey is scheduled to kick off next month, when authorities plan to test the password security of over 200 million IoT devices, beginning with routers and web cameras. Devices in people's homes and on enterprise networks will be tested alike.https://www.zdnet.com/article/japanese-government-plans-to-hack-into-citizens-iot-devices/ 
The Cyber Independent Testing Lab, or C