Moving Target Defense Blog

Every week, the Morphisec team works hard to bring you the top stories from around the security media-sphere to make your job and securing your critical infrastructure easier.

In today’s weekly edition of Security News in Review, you’ll find news from Microsoft about keeping your defenses up despite Emotet’s disruption, a new Google Chrome 0-day that affects Windows and Mac users, and reporting about a ransomware attack on utility company Electrobras. 

An Infostealer is a trojan that is designed to gather and exfiltrate private and sensitive information from a target system. There is a large variety of info stealers active in the wild, some are independent and some act as a modular part of a larger task such as a Banking Trojan (Trickbot) or a RAT.

Recently, news came out about a CVE-2020-0674 vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer scripting engine based on how the browser handles memory. More specifically, within the JScript component of the scripting engine is an unspecified memory corruption vulnerability. What this means in practice is that any application that supports embedding Internet Explorer or its scripting engine can be leveraged as an attack vector.

In August of 2019, just a month after our publication on a targeted BitPaymer/IEncrypt campaign, Morphisec identified a new and alarming evasion technique that the same adversaries adopted while targeting yet another enterprise in the automotive industry.

Today Adobe disclosed a new Flash zero-day, releasing a patch for the critical vulnerability in an out-of-band update. Successful exploitation gives attackers the ability to execute arbitrary code on the targeted machine, and eventually assume full system control. Morphisec customers are already protected from attacks exploiting this vulnerability.

Adobe disclosed that a Flash zero-day was being exploited in targeted attacks against Windows users. The critical vulnerability was discovered and independently reported by several security firms. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability allows arbitrary code execution which can ultimately lead to an attacker assuming full system control.

After more than four years with no weaponized exploits for Adobe Acrobat Reader, researchers at ESET identified a weaponized PDF that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted machine and eventually assume full system control. The PDF exploits two previously unknown vulnerabilities, Acrobat Reader vulnerability CVE-2018-4990 and a privilege escalation vulnerability in Microsoft Windows, CVE-2018-8120.

Adobe Reader has a built-in sandbox feature that usually makes exploitation difficult. By combining vulnerabilities, this attack achieves code execution and then bypasses the sandbox protection to fully compromise the targeted system.

Before diving into the analysis of CVE-2018-4878, a quick reminder that this is the continuation of our previous post, which provided background on CVE-2018-4878, including a  video of how Morphisec prevents any attacks leveraging this Flash vulnerability. Morphisec prevents the attack at all phases and components in the attack chain – during the exploit, the shellcode, as well as the malware which is executed using wbscript.exe with additional in-memory command control code.

At the time of the previous post, the vulnerability was still a zero-day. Adobe released a new version that fixed the flaw yesterday. With that fix available, Morphisec is now free to release technical details of the attack.

How an organization handles the time between the unleashing of a zero-day and the availability of a patch is telling. There are basically two kinds of companies – those that try to mitigate the risk as best they can while they wait for a patch and those that have a security tool able to prevent zero-days. The latest Flash-Player zero-day CVE-2018-4878 is yet another example.

The Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities disclosed earlier this month generated a lot of noise and a lot of confusion. Our security experts received a deluge of questions from customers and industry personnel alike. Responding to this need, Morphisec CTO and VP R&D Michael Gorelik went on air to provide some answers. If you missed the webinar, you can watch it here.