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Security Leftovers

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 16th of December 2021 08:52:55 PM Filed under
Security
  • Security updates for Thursday

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache-log4j2 and mediawiki), Fedora (libmysofa, libolm, and vim), Oracle (httpd), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8), and Ubuntu (apache-log4j2 and mumble).

  • U.S. State Department’s new spyware report: a big step forward

    Access Now, Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom House, and Human Rights First applaud the U.S. Congress for passing legislation that directs the U.S. State Department to develop a list of spyware purveyors with whom the Department should avoid doing business because of their poor human rights records. Included in the National Defense Authorization Act, this provision could provide greater transparency on invasive surveillance technologies, such as NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, that are used against activists and journalists.

    The law mandates that the State Department submit the spyware company list annually to Congress for a period of five years. This report should inform inter-agency coordination, especially to ensure that the Commerce Department continues to add human rights-violating spyware firms to the Entity List. (In November, the Department added NSO Group and Candiru to the List.) It also sends a strong message to the spyware industry and their investors that their days of operating in the shadows with impunity are over.

    “For over a decade, the U.S. State Department has trumpeted internet freedom and human rights online, all while U.S. companies sold powerful surveillance technologies to the enemies of those cherished ideals,” said Jennifer Brody, U.S. Advocacy Manager at Access Now. “If leveraged to its full potential, the Department’s new spyware report will help to protect at-risk activists and journalists and safeguard freedom of expression in the most repressive environments. The U.S. must finally own its role in the global trade of these cyber weapons.”

  • PinePhone Malware Surprises Users, Raises Questions | Hackaday [Ed: If you actively install malicious code, it will do malicious things]

    On December 5th, someone by the IRC nickname of [ubuntu] joined the Pine64 Discord’s #pinephone channel through an IRC bridge. In the spirit of December gift-giving traditions, they have presented their fellow PinePhone users with an offering – a “Snake” game. What [ubuntu] supposedly designed had the potential to become a stock, out-of-the-box-installed application with a small but dedicated community of fans, modders and speedrunners.

    Unfortunately, that would not be the alternate universe we live in, and all was not well with the package being shared along with a cheerful “hei gaiz I make snake gaem here is link www2-pinephnoe-games-com-tz replace dash with dot kthxbai” announcement. Shockingly, it was a trojan! Beneath layers of Base64 and Bashfuscator we’d encounter shell code that could be in the “example usage” section of a modern-day thesaurus entry for the word “yeet“.

    [...]

    That’s true for a lot of places – GitHub and GitLab releases, DockerHub, NPM, RubyGems, browser extension stores, PyPi, and even some supposedly safe Linux repositories, like F-droid, are vulnerable. Providing sourcecode along a malicious package adds legitimacy, and takes away incentives for skilled people to check the binary in the first place – hey, the code’s there to see already! If [ubuntu] did just that, perhaps we’d be talking about this incident a few days later and in a more somber tone. Supply-chain attacks are the new hotness in 2020 and 2021.

    [...]

    The PinePhone community has implemented some new rules, some channeling into the “automation” territory. This will possibly help a specific kind of problem to be less impactful in the future – though I’d argue that institutional memory should play a larger part in this. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts… until they learn how to work around your Discord bot’s heuristics? I already have, for instance. This is a monumental topic with roots beyond the Great PinePhone Snake Malware of 2021, and this article isn’t even about that as much as it’s about helping you understand what’s up with important aspects of Linux security, or maybe even the security of all open source software.

  • Pegasus vs. Predator

    At the time of writing, we believe that Cytrox’s CEO is Ivo Malinkovksi, as stated on his LinkedIn page. Notably, Malinkovksi’s now-private Instagram account includes a 2019 image of him in front of the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

    A 2019 report in Forbes states that Cytrox was “rescued” by Tal Dilian, a former Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Unit 81 commander, whose company WiSpear (which appears to have been renamed Passitora Ltd.) is based in Limassol, Cyprus and reportedly acquired Cytrox in 2018 according to the Atooro Fund. Dilian is also known as the founder of Circles, a prominent cellular network surveillance company. In December 2020, the Citizen Lab published an investigation into Circles’ government clients. Dilian is also the founder and CEO of Intellexa.

»

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