Mosyle ha scoperto un nuovo malware, denominato ModStealer. Il programma è completamente inosservabile per le soluzioni antivirus ed è stato caricato per la prima volta su VirusTotal quasi un mese fa senza attivare alcun sistema di sicurezza. Il pericolo è aggravato dal fatto che lo strumento dannoso può infettare computer con macOS, Windows e Linux.

La distribuzione avviene tramite falsi annunci pubblicitari per conto di reclutatori alla ricerca di sviluppatori. Alla vittima viene chiesto di seguire un link in cui è presente codice JavaScript fortemente offuscato, scritto in NodeJS. Questo approccio rende il programma invisibile alle soluzioni basate sull’analisi delle firme.

ModStealer è progettato per rubare dati e i suoi sviluppatori hanno inizialmente integrato funzionalità per estrarre informazioni da wallet di criptovalute, file di credenziali, impostazioni di configurazione e certificati. Si è scoperto che il codice era preconfigurato per attaccare 56 estensioni di wallet per browser, tra cui Safari, consentendogli di rubare chiavi private e altre informazioni sensibili.

Oltre a rubare dati, ModStealer può intercettare il contenuto degli appunti, acquisire screenshot ed eseguire codice arbitrario sul sistema infetto. Quest’ultima funzionalità apre di fatto la strada agli aggressori per ottenere il pieno controllo del dispositivo.

Sui computer Mac, il programma viene installato nel sistema utilizzando lo strumento standard launchctl: si registra come LaunchAgent e può quindi tracciare segretamente l’attività dell’utente, inviando i dati rubati a un server remoto. Mosyle è riuscita a stabilire che il server si trova in Finlandia, ma è collegato a un’infrastruttura in Germania, il che probabilmente serve a mascherare la reale posizione degli operatori.

Secondo gli esperti, ModStealer viene distribuito utilizzando il modello RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) . In questo caso, gli sviluppatori creano un set di strumenti già pronti e lo vendono ai clienti, che possono utilizzarlo per attacchi senza dover possedere conoscenze tecniche approfondite. Questo schema è diventato popolare tra i gruppi criminali negli ultimi anni, soprattutto per quanto riguarda la distribuzione di infostealer.

Secondo Mosyle, la scoperta di ModStealer evidenzia la vulnerabilità delle soluzioni antivirus classiche, incapaci di rispondere a tali minacce. Per proteggersi da tali minacce, sono necessari un monitoraggio costante, l’analisi del comportamento dei programmi e la sensibilizzazione degli utenti sui nuovi metodi di attacco.

L'articolo Non ci sono Antivirus a proteggerti! ModStealer colpisce Windows, macOS e Linux proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Una violazione di dati senza precedenti ha colpito il Great Firewall of China (GFW), con oltre 500 GB di materiale riservato che è stato sottratto e reso pubblico in rete. Tra le informazioni compromesse figurano codice sorgente, registri di lavoro, file di configurazione e comunicazioni interne. L’origine della violazione è da attribuire a Geedge Networks e al MESA Lab, che opera presso l’Istituto di ingegneria informatica dell’Accademia cinese delle scienze.

Gli analisti avvertono che componenti interni esposti, come il motore DPI, le regole di filtraggio dei pacchetti e i certificati di firma degli aggiornamenti, consentiranno sia tecniche di elusione sia una visione approfondita delle tattiche di censura.

L’archivio trapelato rivela i flussi di lavoro di ricerca e sviluppo, le pipeline di distribuzione e i moduli di sorveglianza del GFW utilizzati nelle province di Xinjiang, Jiangsu e Fujian, nonché gli accordi di esportazione nell’ambito del programma cinese “Belt and Road” verso Myanmar, Pakistan, Etiopia, Kazakistan e altre nazioni non divulgate.

Data la delicatezza della fuga di notizie, scaricare o analizzare questi set di dati, riportano i ricercatori di sicurezza, comporta notevoli rischi legali e per la sicurezza.

I file potrebbero contenere chiavi di crittografia proprietarie, script di configurazione della sorveglianza o programmi di installazione contenenti malware, che potrebbero potenzialmente attivare il monitoraggio remoto o contromisure difensive.

I ricercatori dovrebbero adottare rigorosi protocolli di sicurezza operativa:

• Eseguire l’analisi all’interno di una macchina virtuale isolata o di un sandbox air-gapped che esegue servizi minimi.
• Utilizzare l’acquisizione di pacchetti a livello di rete e il rollback basato su snapshot per rilevare e contenere i payload dannosi.
• Evitare di eseguire file binari o script di build senza revisione del codice. Molti artefatti includono moduli kernel personalizzati per l’ispezione approfondita dei pacchetti che potrebbero compromettere l’integrità dell’host.

I ricercatori sono incoraggiati a coordinarsi con piattaforme di analisi malware affidabili e a divulgare i risultati in modo responsabile.

Questa fuga di notizie senza precedenti offre alla comunità di sicurezza una visione insolita per analizzare le capacità dell’infrastruttura del GFW.

Le tecniche di offuscamento scoperte in mesalab_git.tar.zst utilizzano codice C polimorfico e blocchi di configurazione crittografati; il reverse engineering senza strumentazione Safe-Lab potrebbe attivare routine anti-debug.

Purtroppo è risaputo (e conosciamo bene la storia del exploit eternal blu oppure la fuga di Vaul7) che tutto ciò che genera sorveglianza può essere hackerato o diffuso in modo lecito o illecito. E generalmente dopo le analisi le cose che vengono scoperte sono molto ma molto interessanti.

L'articolo Violazione del Great Firewall of China: 500 GB di dati sensibili esfiltrati proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Negli ultimi anni le truffe online hanno assunto forme sempre più sofisticate, sfruttando non solo tecniche di ingegneria sociale, ma anche la fiducia che milioni di persone ripongono in figure religiose, istituzionali o di forte carisma.

Un esempio emblematico è rappresentato da profili social falsi che utilizzano l’immagine di alti prelati o persino del Papa per attirare l’attenzione dei fedeli.

Questi profili, apparentemente innocui, spesso invitano le persone a contattarli su WhatsApp o su altre piattaforme di messaggistica, fornendo numeri di telefono internazionali.
Un profilo scam su Facebook

Come funziona la truffa

I criminali informatici creano un profilo fake, come in questo caso di Papa Leone XIV. Viene ovviamente utilizzata la foto reale dello stesso Pontefice per conferire credibilità al profilo. Poi si passa alla fidelizzazione dell’utente. Attraverso post a tema religioso, citazioni, immagini di croci o Bibbie, il truffatore crea un’aura di autorevolezza che induce le persone a fidarsi.

Nei post o nella descrizione del profilo, c’è un invito al contatto privato.
Nei post o nella biografia, appare spesso un numero di WhatsApp o un riferimento a canali diretti di comunicazione. Questo passaggio serve a spostare la conversazione in uno spazio meno controllato, lontano dagli occhi delle piattaforme social.

Una volta ottenuta l’attenzione, il truffatore può chiedere donazioni per “opere benefiche”, raccogliere dati personali, o persino convincere le vittime a compiere operazioni finanziarie rischiose.

Perché è pericoloso

Le persone più vulnerabili, spinte dalla fede o dalla fiducia verso la figura religiosa, sono più inclini a credere all’autenticità del profilo. La trappola della devozione: chi crede di parlare con un cardinale o con il Papa stesso potrebbe abbassare le difese.

I dati personali: anche solo condividere il proprio numero di telefono o dati bancari espone a ulteriori rischi di furti d’identità e frodi.

Come difendersi

Diffidare sempre di profili che chiedono di essere contattati su WhatsApp o altre app con numeri privati.

Ricordare che figure istituzionali di rilievo non comunicano mai direttamente tramite profili privati o numeri di telefono personali.

Segnalare subito alle piattaforme i profili sospetti.

Non inviare mai denaro o dati sensibili a sconosciuti, anche se si presentano come autorità religiose o pubbliche.

Conclusione

Gli scammer giocano con la fiducia delle persone, mascherandosi dietro figure religiose o istituzionali per legittimare le proprie richieste. È fondamentale mantenere alta l’attenzione e diffondere consapevolezza: la fede è un valore, ma non deve mai diventare una trappola per i truffatori digitali.

L'articolo Dal Vaticano a Facebook con furore! Il miracolo di uno Scam divino! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

This Thursday, the Cambridge Pole & Conduit Commission will consider Flock’s requests to put up 15 to 20 surveillance cameras with Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technologies around Cambridge. The Cambridge City Council, in a 6-3 vote on Feb. 3rd, approved Cambridge PD’s request to install these cameras. It was supposed to roll out to Central Square only, but it looks like Cambridge PD and Flock have asked to put up a camera at the corner of Rindge and Alewife Brook Parkway facing eastward. That is pretty far from Central Square.

Anyone living within 150 feet of the camera location should have been mailed letters from Flock telling them that the can attend the Pole & Conduit Commission meeting this Thursday at 9am and comment on Flock’s request. The Pole & Conduit Commission hasn’t posted its agenda or the requests it will consider on Thursday. If you got a letter or found out that you are near where Flock wants to install one of these cameras, please attend the meeting to speak against it and notify your neighbors.

The Cambridge Day, who recently published a story on us, reports that City Councilors Patty Nolan, Sumbul Siddiqui and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler have called for reconsidering introducing more cameras to Cambridge. These cameras are paid for by the federal Urban Area Security Initiative grant program and the data they collect will be shared with the Boston Regional Information Center (BRIC) and from there to ICE, CBP and other agencies that are part of Trump’s new secret police already active in the Boston area.

We urge you to attend this meeting at 9am on Thursday and speak against the camera nearest you, if you received a letter or know that the camera will be within 150 feet of your residence. You can register in advance and the earlier you register, the earlier you will be able to speak. Issues you can bring up:

• A Texas sheriff recently searched ALPR data to identify the location of a Texas woman who sought an out-of-state abortion. We will see more efforts like this as conservative state legislatures criminalize abortion and attempt to force their views on us;
• The Cambridge Police Department has stated in a public hearing that they use license plate readers to monitor traffic in the vicinity of protests. People exercising their 1st Amendment right to peaceful protest should not fear that they will end up in a local, commonwealth or federal database because their car was near a protest;
• Last year, Boston shared its ALPR data 37 times with federal agencies and state police in other states. The Flock ALPR database is available nationaly and Flock has a pilot contract with Customs and Border Patrol to send them ALPR data directly;
• In the past, ALPR companies have not done a good job keeping their data secure. In Boston, there was a leak of ALPR data on 68,924 scans of 45,020 unique vehicles which caused the Boston Police Department to suspend ALPR data collection in 2013.

We urge affected Cambridge residents to speak at Thursday’s hearing at 9am. If you plan to attend or can put up flyers in your area about the cameras, please email us at info@masspirates.org.

masspirates.org/blog/2025/09/1…

404 Media

2025-08-25 20:56:35

CBP Had Access to More than 80,000 Flock AI Cameras Nationwide

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regularly searched more than 80,000 Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, according to data released by three police departments. The data shows that CBP’s access to Flock’s network is far more robust and widespread than has been previously reported. One of the police departments 404 Media spoke to said it did not know or understand that it was sharing data with CBP, and Flock told 404 Media Monday that it has “paused all federal pilots.”

In May, 404 Media reported that local police were performing lookups across Flock on behalf of ICE, because that part of the Department of Homeland Security did not have its own direct access. Now, the newly obtained data and local media reporting reveals that CBP had the ability to perform Flock lookups by itself.

Last week, 9 News in Colorado reported that CBP has direct access to Flock’s ALPR backend “through a pilot program.” In that article, 9 News revealed that the Loveland, Colorado police department was sharing access to its Flock cameras directly with CBP. At the time, Flock said that this was through what 9 News described as a “one-to-one” data sharing agreement through that pilot program, making it sound like these agreements were rare and limited:

“The company now acknowledges the connection exists through a previously publicly undisclosed program that allows Border Patrol access to a Flock account to send invitations to police departments nationwide for one-to-one data sharing, and that Loveland accepted the invitation,” 9 News wrote. “A spokesperson for Flock said agencies across the country have been approached and have agreed to the invitation. The spokesperson added that U.S. Border Patrol is not on the nationwide Flock sharing network, comprised of local law enforcement agencies across the country. Loveland Police says it is on the national network.”

New data obtained using three separate public records requests from three different police departments gives some insight into how widespread these “one-to-one” data sharing agreements actually are. The data shows that in most cases, CBP had access to more Flock cameras than the average police department, that it is regularly using that access, and that, functionally, there is no difference between Flock’s “nationwide network” and the network of cameras that CBP has access to.

According to data obtained from the Boulder, Colorado Police Department by William Freeman, the creator of a crowdsourced map of Flock devices called DeFlock, CBP ran at least 118 Flock network searches between May 13 and June 13 of this year. Each of these searches encompassed at least 6,315 individual Flock networks (a “network” is a specific police department or city’s cameras) and at least 82,000 individual Flock devices. Data obtained in separate requests from the Prosser Police Department and Chehalis Police Department, both in Washington state, also show CBP searching a huge number of networks and devices.

A spokesperson for the Boulder Police Department told 404 Media that “Boulder Police Department does not have any agreement with U.S. Border Patrol for Flock searches. We were not aware of these specific searches at the time they occurred. Prior to June 2025, the Boulder Police Department had Flock's national look-up feature enabled, which allowed other agencies from across the U.S. who also had contracts with Flock to search our data if they could articulate a legitimate law enforcement purpose. We do not currently share data with U.S. Border Patrol. In June 2025, we deactivated the national look-up feature specifically to maintain tighter control over Boulder Police Department data access. You can learn more about how we share Flock information on our FAQ page.”

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media Monday that it sent an email to all of its customers clarifying how information is shared from agencies to other agencies. It said this is an excerpt from that email about its sharing options:

“The Flock platform provides flexible options for sharing:

National sharing

1. Opt into Flock’s national sharing network. Access via the national lookup tool is limited—users can only see results if they perform a full plate search and a positive match exists within the network of participating, opt-in agencies. This ensures data privacy while enabling broader collaboration when needed.
2. Share with agencies in specific states only
   
   1. Share with agencies with similar laws (for example, regarding immigration enforcement and data)

   
   

3. Share within your state only or within a certain distance
   
   1. You can share information with communities within a specified mile radius, with the entire state, or a combination of both—for example, sharing with cities within 150 miles of Kansas City (which would include cities in Missouri and neighboring states) and / or all communities statewide simultaneously.

   
   

4. Share 1:1
   
   1. Share only with specific agencies you have selected

   
   

5. Don’t share at all”

In a blog post Monday, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said Flock has paused all federal pilots.

“While it is true that Flock does not presently have a contractual relationship with any U.S. Department of Homeland Security agencies, we have engaged in limited pilots with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), to assist those agencies in combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution,” Langley wrote. “We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users […] All federal customers will be designated within Flock as a distinct ‘Federal’ user category in the system. This distinction will give local agencies better information to determine their sharing settings.”

A Flock employee who does not agree with the way Flock allows for widespread data sharing told 404 Media that Flock has defended itself internally by saying it tries to follow the law. 404 Media granted the source anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

“They will defend it as they have been by saying Flock follows the law and if these officials are doing law abiding official work then Flock will allow it,” they said. “However Flock will also say that they advise customers to ensure they have their sharing settings set appropriately to prevent them from sharing data they didn’t intend to. The question more in my mind is the fact that law in America is arguably changing, so will Flock just go along with whatever the customers want?”

The data shows that CBP has tapped directly into Flock’s huge network of license plate reading cameras, which passively scan the license plate, color, and model of vehicles that drive by them, then make a timestamped record of where that car was spotted. These cameras were marketed to cities and towns as a way of finding stolen cars or solving property crime locally, but over time, individual cities’ cameras have been connected to Flock’s national network to create a huge surveillance apparatus spanning the entire country that is being used to investigate all sorts of crimes and is now being used for immigration enforcement. As we reported in May, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been gaining access to this network through a side door, by asking local police who have access to the cameras to run searches for them.

9 News’s reporting and the newly released audit reports shared with 404 Media show that CBP now has direct access to much of Flock’s system and does not have to ask local police to run searches. It also shows that CBP had access to at least one other police department system in Colorado, in this case Boulder, which is a state whose laws forbid sharing license plate reader data with the federal government for immigration enforcement. Boulder’s Flock settings also state that it is not supposed to be used for immigration enforcement.

This story and our earlier stories, including another about a Texas official who searched nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion, were reported using Flock “Network Audits” released by police departments who have bought Flock cameras and have access to Flock’s network. They are essentially a huge spreadsheet of every time that the department’s camera data was searched; it shows which officer searched the data, what law enforcement department ran the search, the number of networks and cameras included in the search, the time and date of the search, the license plate, and a “reason” for the search. These audit logs allow us to see who has access to Flock’s systems, how wide their access is, how often they are searching the system, and what they are searching for.

The audit logs show that whatever system Flock is using to enroll local police departments’ cameras into the network that CBP is searching does not have any meaningful pushback, because the data shows that CBP has access to as many or more cameras as any other police department. Freeman analyzed the searches done by CBP on June 13 compared to searches done by other police departments on that same day, and found that CBP had a higher number of average cameras searched than local police departments.

“The average number of organizations searched by any agency per query is 6,049, with a max of 7,090,” Freeman told 404 Media. “That average includes small numbers like statewide searches. When I filter by searches by Border Patrol for the same date, their average number of networks searched is 6,429, with a max of 6,438. The reason for the maximum being larger than the national network is likely because some agencies have access to more cameras than just the national network (in-state cameras). Despite this, we still see that the count of networks searched by Border Patrol outnumbers that of all agencies, so if it’s not the national network, then this ‘pilot program’ must have opted everyone in the nation in by default.”

CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Texas Cop Searched License Plate Cameras Nationwide for a Woman Who Got an Abortion

The sheriff said the woman self-administered the abortion and her family were concerned for her safety, so authorities searched through Flock cameras.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}