It looks like there’s finally hope for sane password policies. The US National Institue of Standards and Technology, NIST, has released a draft of SP 800-63-4, the Digital Identity Guideline.

There’s password guidance in there, like “SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords” and “SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically.” NIST approved passwords must be at least 8 characters long, with a weaker recommendation of at least 15 characters. Security questions like name of first pet get the axe. And it’s strongly recommended that all ASCII and Unicode characters should be acceptable for passwords.

This is definitely moving in the right direction. NIST guidelines are only binding for government services and contractors, though they do eventually get picked up by banks and other industries. So there’s hope for sane password policies eventually.

Tank Hacking

Researchers at Bitsight are interested in infrastructure security, and they opted to take a closer look at Automatic Tank Gauging (ATG) systems. Those are found at gas stations, as well as any other facility that needs automated monitoring of liquids or gasses in a tank. There is an actual ATG message format, originally designed for RS-232 serial, and woefully unprepared for the interconnected present. The protocol allows for an optional security code, but it maxes out at only six alpha-numeric characters.

Among the vulnerabilities getting announced today, we have a pair of CVSS 10 command injection flaws, a quartet of 9.8 authentication bypass flaws, with one of those being a hardcoded credential — AKA a backdoor. The other CVSS9+ flaw is a SQL injection, with a trio of slightly less serious flaws.

The really interesting question is what could theoretically be done with admin access and escape to shellcode in one of these systems? There’s the obvious path of Denial of Service. Once you have root, just delete files, flash random noise over the firmware, and walk away. The more interesting approach is to make changes that have physical consequences. If a fuel tank is reprogrammed to indicate that holds twice the volume, will it overflow? Researchers realized that relays have a maximum operation rate, and driving them on and off at faster rates has interesting effects — glowing and letting the magic smoke out.

More Tank Hacking?

Also this week is the story of a Kansas water treatment plant that has gone to manual mode after a cyberattack. It’s not clear whether this was actually an aimed attack at infrastructure, or just a ransomware attack that is impacting the water treatment facility as a side-effect.

The Linux Mystery 9.9 CVE

This week we’ve been watching a story develop after [Simone Margaritelli] sounded the warning about a very serious GNU/Linux vulnerabiltiy on Twitter/X. The claim was a CVSS 9.9 in all Linux systems. Well apparently it’s time, because the details have dropped, and it’s a wild ride.

* Unauthenticated RCE vs all GNU/Linux systems (plus others) disclosed 3 weeks ago.
* Full disclosure happening in less than 2 weeks (as agreed with devs).
* Still no CVE assigned (there should be at least 3, possibly 4, ideally 6).
* Still no working fix.
* Canonical, RedHat and… pic.twitter.com/N2d1rm2VeR

— Simone Margaritelli (@evilsocket) September 23, 2024

So first, the actual vulnerabilities: Part of the Common Unix Printing System (now just CUPS) is cups-browsed, a helper daemon that automatically installs printers discovered on the local network. This binds to all IP addresses on UDP port 631, and an incoming UDP packet will trigger a printer install. The quirk here is that this incoming request can include an arbitrary URL as the source of the IPP printer driver information. That IPP data isn’t sanitized, allowing for arbitrary information upload and subsequent file creation with that arbitrary data. The cherry on top is the foomatic-rip driver that includes the helpful feature of running a shell command as part of the printing process. Oh, and to be clear, the CVSS 9.9 isn’t strictly accurate, because it does require a user interaction to print to the malicious printer, to trigger the code execution.

Now here’s the tricky question: How many of those quirks are vulnerabilities? Cups-browsed seems obviously architected without an authentication layer, and therefore not at all intended to be exposed to the Internet. Downloading an arbitrary IPP file seems to be working as intended, and the FoomaticRIPCommandLine is a documented feature, not a vulnerability.

And yet, pretty obviously, a printer on the local network shouldn’t be able to trigger arbitrary code execution when printing to it, especially when it’s so easy for any computer to fake being a printer. It’s very surprising that there are over 100,000 systems that expose UDP port 631 and the cups-browsed service to the Internet. I look forward to other researchers double-checking that claim. If it wasn’t obvious, don’t expose CUPS to the Internet. It shouldn’t have taken a CVE to make that abundantly clear. That is probably why it was so hard for [Simone] to get the CUPS developers to take this seriously.

As per the Red Hat notice, you can check your Linux systems for this issue by running sudo systemctl status cups-browsed and check a remote machine using sudo nmap -sU -p 631 -v ip.address.of.machine watching for “631/udp open|filtered ipp” in the output. There is already a Proof of Concept that has leaked, so do check and pull the plug on any systems that expose this service.

The Other One

The “9.9” CVE was just a bit of a letdown, but we do have CVE-2024-20017, a confirmed high severity vulnerability in MediaTek’s wappd daemon that seems to weigh in at 9.8.

The vulnerability is specifically in the handling of the Security Block message that’s part of WiFi roaming handoffs. wappd allocates a fixed-size buffer, and doesn’t validate the actual message size before copying that data. This can overflow by up to 1433 bytes, and that’s certainly enough to trigger full RCE. There’s Proof of Concept code available, so watch for updates for Wireless gear.

Bits and Bytes

Kaspersky has done something unexpected, pulling a switcheroo. Users who still had Kaspersky installed have found UltraAV now automatically installed on their machines. It’s reported that Kaspersky was sending email notices out earlier this month that the update was coming.

There’s a really impressive chain of tricks that redirects from a Youtube URL to an arbitrary Google Docs URL. That may not sound particularly interesting, but the whole chain of redirects means that a page that looks like a Google Form with a simple poll could actually grant permissions to arbitrary Google Drive files on submit. Google paid a juicy $4133.70 for the find, and rolled the fix out on the same day.

ChatGPT has a new feature, long-term memory. The idea is that your conversations with the LLM can become part of the training data, making the model even more useful as you use it. There is a really powerful feature available in ChatGPT now, that the LLM can pull data from the Internet in real time. Turns out if you can get one of these instances to pull some manipulated data, the model can keep it in long term storage. The real trick is that this injection can convince the model to keep revisiting an arbitrary URL, leaking data. Impressive.

And finally, the Kia dealer and owners websites leak a bit too much data. With nothing more than the car’s VIN, an attacker can generate a fake dealer token, and demote and replace the previous owner. From there, it’s trivial to remote start, honk, or otherwise mess with the vehicle. It wasn’t great, but Kia got it fixed over a month ago.

hackaday.com/2024/09/27/this-w…

Il 26 settembre 2024 sono state divulgate quattro vulnerabilità (secondo RedHat di livello
“Important” più che critiche) relative a CUPS – Common Unix Printing System, usato per la
gestione di stampanti su UNIX e Linux, scoperte e riportate da Simone “EvilSocket”
Margaritelli.

Queste vulnerabilità, identificate come CVE-2024-47076, CVE-2024-47175,
CVE-2024-47176, CVE-2024-47177, permettono ad un attaccante remoto non autenticato
di eseguire codice arbitrario sui dispositivi vulnerabili, sfruttando componenti come
libcupsfilters, libppd, cups-browsed e foomatic-rip.

CUPS: Cos’è e come Funziona

CUPS, un sistema di stampa basato su IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), consente la
gestione di stampanti locali e remote. Rispetto ai recenti findings, i suoi meccanismi di
gestione delle richieste IPP e dei file PPD espongono vulnerabilità che, se sfruttate,
permettono agli attaccanti di manipolare le stampanti e inviare comandi prendendo il
controllo dei servers.

Le vulnerabilità scoperte sono le seguenti:

• CVE-2024-47176: Il componente cups-browsed accetta pacchetti IPP da qualsiasi sorgente, consentendo di inviare richieste Get-Printer-Attributes con URL controllati dall’attaccante. RedHat ha assegnato CVSSv3 score pari a 7.5.
• CVE-2024-47076: In libcupsfilters, la funzione cfGetPrinterAttributes5 non valida i dati IPP, permettendo l’inserimento di attributi malevoli. RedHat ha assegnato CVSSv3 score pari a 8.2.
• CVE-2024-47175: In libppd, la funzione ppdCreatePPDFromIPP2 scrive attributi IPP non validati in file temporanei, consentendo l’iniezione di codice. RedHat ha assegnato CVSSv3 score pari a 7.7.
• CVE-2024-47177: Il filtro foomatic-rip permette l’esecuzione arbitraria di comandi tramite il parametro FoomaticRIPCommandLine in file PPD. RedHat ha assegnato CVSSv3 score pari a 6.1.

Attacco ed Impatti

Queste vulnerabilità, unite, permettono a un attaccante di inviare pacchetti IPP malevoli, modificando gli URL delle stampanti con collegamenti controllati. Una volta avviata la stampa, l’attaccante può eseguire codice arbitrario sul sistema target. Dato che CUPS è abilitato per impostazione predefinita e ascolta sulla porta UDP 631, molti sistemi potrebbero essere esposti se questa porta è accessibile pubblicamente.

Secondo una rapida ricerca condotta da Tenable su Shodan, ci sono circa 75.000 host pubblicamente esposti su internet, aumentando il rischio di exploit su larga scala. Questo rende le vulnerabilità un problema grave, anche se non viene considerata al livello di altre minacce storiche come Log4Shell.

Mitigazione

In attesa di patch ufficiali, è possibile mitigare i rischi seguendo alcune best practice:

1. Disabilitare o rimuovere cups-browsed: Riducendo così significativamente la superficie di attacco.
2. Bloccare il traffico sulla porta UDP 631: Limitare l’accesso a questa porta impedendo l’esposizione su internet.
3. Applicare patch appena possibile: Red Hat e altri vendor stanno lavorando a patch che risolveranno queste vulnerabilità; è essenziale aggiornare i sistemi appena disponibili.

Per verificare se il servizio cups-browsed è attivo (dato che, ad esempio, il servizio non è presente di default su RedHat), si può eseguire il seguente comando tramite CLI:

sudo systemctl status cups-browsed >

Conclusioni

Le vulnerabilità che affliggono CUPS rappresentano una minaccia significativa per i sistemi Linux e UNIX, soprattutto se esposti pubblicamente. Sebbene al momento non ci siano exploit attivi conosciuti, la disponibilità di dettagli tecnici e PoC (Proof of Concept) suggerisce fortemente che emergere presto exploit. Risulta quindi fondamentale che si adottino immediatamente misure preventive per proteggere i vari ambienti.

Per eventuali approfondimenti, postiamo il link al blog-post di EvilSocket del writeup delle vulnerabilità:

• evilsocket.net/2024/09/26/Atta…
• Advisory RedHat: access.redhat.com/security/vul…
• Advisory Canonical: ubuntu.com/blog/cups-remote-co…

L'articolo Sistemi UNIX a Rischio! L’Utility CUPS Espone i Sistemi ad esecuzione di Codice Arbitrario proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Welcome to Euractiv’s Tech Brief, your weekly update on all things digital in the EU. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

euractiv.com/section/digital/n…

Meta had been storing millions of users' passwords in plaintext, without cryptographic protection, in an internal database, the firm found in 2019.

euractiv.com/section/data-priv…

As if there weren’t enough worrying global news stories already, today the British press and media have been full of a story involving the public WiFi networks at some major railway stations. Instead of being faced with the usual don’t-be-naughty terms and conditions page, commuters were instead faced with a page that definitely shouldn’t have been there.

Hackaday readers will immediately have guessed what is likely to have happened. This is probably more of a compromise of the page than of the network itself, and, indeed, the BBC are reporting that it may have come via an administrator account at Network Rail’s er… network provider. Fortunately, it seems the intent was to spread a political message rather than malware, so perhaps those travelers got off lightly. The various companies involved have all got the proverbial egg on their faces, and we’re glad we don’t work in the IT department concerned.

The question we find ourselves asking as we reflect upon this is: In crowded European commuter zones such as southern and central England, should events such as this come as a wake-up call to forgo WiFi and use a cellular data plan instead? Gone are the days when finding public WiFi was like having your own private high-speed connection, in a country blanketed by 4G and 5G networks using your phone as a hotspot is simply much faster as well as offering some security. Hackaday is written and edited on the road using a hotspot in all sorts of unlikely places. Do you do the same? Are Hackaday readers up for free public WiFi, or do you jealously guard your own connections? Let us know in the comments.

You can probably figure out how to share your network connection among friends. Network security, of course, is always robust until it isn’t.

header: Biblola, CC BY-SA 3.0 .

hackaday.com/2024/09/27/britis…

Prima o poi scoppierà la bolla dei grossi concerti primaverili-estivi organizzati e gestiti all’italiana maniera (con la chicca dei settori con “visibilità limitata”, fino ad arrivare ai tragicomici biglietti classisti “Vip package” che, per la modica cifra di 500 euro, “regalano”, a chi l’acquista, il posto migliore per fare i selfies e i video del palco, per farlo/a sentire privilegiato/a rispetto alla plebaglia che si deve accontentare del “posto in piedi”, e inoltre vi fanno accedere a una “area relax” ..... @Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/cheater-slicks-i-a…

CHEATER SLICKS - I AM LOW / ROCK 'N' ROLL 7"

CHEATER SLICKS - I AM LOW / ROCK 'N' ROLL 7" - Meglio spendere centinaia di euro per questa bolgia infernale, o tornare a frequentare i circoli musicali, i localacci scalcagnati e i piccoli club, spendendo pochi soldi e condividendo il piacere di rit…

^{Reverend Shit-Man (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Un ripasso della politica americana, per chi avesse la memoria corta.
Video di 9 anni fa.
Attenzione alla risposta alla domanda al minuto 53:20 circa...
youtu.be/QeLu_yyz3tc?si=lcBkdU…

(Per i più pigri allego il link ad un post su X dove si trova la risposta cui mi riferisco: https://x.com/Kanthan2030/status/1633892107466477569/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1633892107466477569&currentTweetUser=Kanthan2030)