• Attackers use an extension bug to download other extensions and later search for zero-day security issues.
• Failing to keep the extensions up-to-date is one of the main cause for the rise in such attacks.

In the latest research, it has been found that Magneto shops can be targeted by leveraging vulnerable third-party extensions or modules. The attackers can abuse these weak third-party extensions to perform a global scan and find vulnerable victims.

Attack process

According to security researcher and Magneto forensic investigator William de Groot, attackers use an extension bug to download other extensions and later search for zero-day security issues such as POI (PHP Object Injection), SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting flaws.

“The method is straightforward: attacker uses an extension bug to hack into a Magento store. Once in, they download all of the other installed extensions. The attacker then searches the downloaded code for 0day security issues, such as POI, SQLi and XSS flaws. Once found, the attacker launches a global scan to find vulnerable victims. Rinse and repeat,” said Groot in a blog post.

The researcher, who has been monitoring and documenting card-skimming activities on Magneto shops, estimates that over 3000 stores have been due to insecure extensions in the last 3 months.

Failing to keep the extensions up-to-date is one of the main cause for the rise in such attacks.

“Many extension releases are backward incompatible, which requires costly developer hours. There is no standardized way to get notified of critical releases. And most important: merchants value stability above all, which does not fit well with a continuous upgrade policy,” he noted.

Solution

William De Groot has compiled a list of vulnerable Magento extensions. Online merchants can scan their sites against the repository using Magerun module or a single-line command. Both the processes require access to the server. As a result of the scan, the merchants can figure out:

• The name of the vulnerable modules
• The latest version of extensions
• Part of the URL that attackers use to exploit each module
• Name of the URLs which are under attack
• The URL with upgrade instructions.

Groot claims that most of the vulnerable extensions are discovered on Magento 1 installations.

Google is working on a way for Chrome to do a better job of spotting fake websites that seek to trick people into handing over personal information.

It is concentrating on websites that use letters and numbers to approximate a recognised brand.

The work will mean Chrome will warn people they are about to visit sites it believes are fake.

Security firm Wandera said it had seen a “constant rise” in attacks using the non-standard characters.

The criminal gangs were exploiting a technology known as punycode, which converts non-English character codes into more familiar formats.

British Airways was a popular target for gangs using these attacks, said the security firm.

Hidden danger

Google engineer Emily Stark talked about the search giant’s development of the “evil domain” spotter at the Usenix Enigma security conference this week. Google has also shared early versions of the tool to help web developers test and refine it.

While Chrome already includes features that aim to spot known unsafe sites, the new tool would go much further.

Ms Stark said more needed to be done, because currently staying secure often relied on users noticing when domains were dodgy – even when experts would struggle to distinguish legitimate ones from those crafted by cyber-criminals.

In particular, the tool will seek to tackle the growth of so-called homograph attacks that exploit modern browsers’ ability to handle non-English characters.

However, this transformation can hide the fact that they were not created by the organisation they seem to represent.

Haris Kampouris, head of threat research at Wandera, said more and more cyber-crime gangs had turned to homograph attacks that abuse the punycode technology.

“We are still seeing a constant rise on this type of scam or phishing domain,” he told the BBC. “That’s likely to be due to the plentiful combinations that can be used.”

Wandera had recently seen punycode domains for Google, BA, Adidas, Tesco, Asda and Ryanair that typically include one character that differed only slightly from its English equivalent, he said.

BA was currently the most-targeted UK brand in terms of punycode domains, said Mr Kampouris.

Many security firms and independent researchers have made add-ons for browsers or programs that spot phishing domains and try to warn people about these criminal domains.

Mr Kampouris said Google’s move was a “step in the right direction” in tackling homograph-based attacks but hoped that the feature would make it to browsers on mobile devices which often did not receive protections seen on desktops and laptop versions.

• The malware boasts a variety of capabilities such as recording keystrokes, taking screenshots of Windows and stealing credentials, logins, and the browser history.
• Once installed, the malware first connects with the C2 server of hackers in order to receive malicious commands.

An updated version of Remexi malware was used in a cyber-espionage campaign that targeted Iranian IP addresses late last year. The goal of the campaign was to infect systems that belonged to foreign diplomats residing in Iran’s border.

Remexi malware is typically associated with an APT group named Chafer. According to Denis Legezo, a researcher from Kaspersky, the malware’s use in the 2018 campaign suggests that Iranian actors may have executed a domestic operation against these foreign diplomatic entities.

Remexi malware capabilities

Although Remexi originally dates back to at least 2015, the newest module’s was observed by researchers in March 2018.

“The main tool used in this campaign is an updated version of the Remexi malware, publicly reported by Symantec back in 2015. The newest module’s compilation timestamp is March 2018. The developers used GCC compiler on Windows in the MinGW environment,” said Legezo in a blog post.

The malware boasts a variety of capabilities such as recording keystrokes, taking screenshots of Windows, stealing credentials, logons and the browser history and executing remote commands.

Once installed, the malware first connects with the C2 server of hackers in order to receive malicious commands.

“Its C2 is based on IIS using .asp technology to handle the victims’ HTTP requests. All the commands received from the C2 are first saved to an auxiliary file and then stored encrypted in the system registry. The standalone thread will decrypt and execute them,” Legezo explained.

There is no evidence of how the new variant of Remexi spreads. However, in one instance of infection, researcher Legezo was able to establish a connection between Remexi and an AutoIT script compiled as a PE file. Kaspersky believes that this executable may have been used to drop the Remexi malware.