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A major underground hacking forum suffered a data breach this week, after someone hacked into their system, downloaded a copy of the database, and uploaded it online. The breach took place on April 6, and the hacker released the data online on the same day. On May 12, another file popped up online containing 243,787 cracked password hashes. According to security firm Risk Based Security, the leaked data was offered as a 1.3 GB tar archive that decompressed to a 9.45 GB db.sql file, which was a database dump of the entire forums database. Everything from user accounts to private messages, and from VIP forum posts to financial transactions were included. More precisely, the data contained 536,064 user accounts, 800,593 user personal messages, 5,582 purchase records, and 12,600 invoices. For each user, leaked data included his forum username, email address, hashed password, join date, IP records, and other forum-related tidbits such as titles and post counts.

Breach of surveillance vendor highlights lessons for companies. Almost a year after Italian surveillance software maker Hacking Team had its internal emails and files leaked online, Phineas Fisher the hacker responsible for the breach gave a full account of how he infiltrated the company network. Although intended mainly as a guide for hacktivists, it also shines a light on how hard it is for any company to defend itself against a truly determined and skillful attacker. Fisher says although the Italian company did have some holes in its internal infrastructure, it also had some pretty good security practices in place. For example, it did not have many devices exposed to the Internet and its development servers that hosted the source code for its software were on an isolated network segment. According to Fisher, the company systems that were reachable from the Internet were: a customer support portal that required client certificates to access, a website based on the Joomla CMS that had no obvious vulnerabilities, a couple of routers, two VPN gateways and a spam filtering appliance. There were 3 options: look for a 0day in Joomla, look for a 0day in postfix, or look for a 0day in one of the embedded devices. A 0day in an embedded device seemed like the easiest option, and after two weeks of work reverse engineering, I got a remote root exploit. Any attack that requires a previously unknown vulnerability to pull off raises the bar for attackers. However, the fact that Fisher viewed the routers and VPN appliances as the easier targets highlights the poor state of embedded device security. Fisher did not provide any other information about the vulnerability he exploited or the specific device he compromised because the flaw has not been patched yet, so its supposedly still useful for other attacks. Its worth pointing out though that routers, VPN gateways and anti-spam appliances are all devices that many companies are likely to have connected to the Internet.

Proxy services have been in the news a fair bit this year, due largely in part to the fact that Netflix has been fighting against them. The reason is because they do not want their users accessing content that is not available in their country. However, in the UK, it turns out that running or assisting proxy sites can land you in some serious hot water. Back in 2014, a man by the name of Callum Haywood was arrested for his involvement with a number of proxy sites and tools. One tool he was involved with was Immunicity. This tool was released back in 2013, and was the first web-based tool to provide a service for unblocking torrent sites, and torrent site proxies. It was created in response to the UKs recent (at the time) ruling on filtering and censoring internet content. Haywood was also involved with a proxy site list that would essentially allow you to browse complete copies of sites such as The Pirate Bay, and KickassTorrents, when the primary domains were blocked. Now, two years later, Haywood has received his list of charges, which are "one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property and six counts of possession of an article for use in fraud." If he were to be convicted, and receive the maximum sentence for each count, the 22-year-old could face up to 44 years in jail. It is not likely that even if he is convicted, that he would get the maximum sentence, but thats still an absurd amount of jail time to even be considered for a nonviolent crime, such as hosting/assisting a proxy service. The preliminary hearing for the charges is st for April 21st, at Nottingham Magistrates  Court. VIA: TorrentFreak

Theres a manhunt for a hacker underway in the world of Bitcoin, and this time (yes, there was a last time) the bounty is nearly half a million dollars worth of the virtual currency. Cryptsy, a popular exchange for buying and selling bitcoins, announced the bounty in a blog post on Thursday, which also attempts to explain the companys numerous recent service interruptions: Cryptsy alleges it was hacked in 2014 and lost millions. Now, they want it all back, and theyre willing to pay. The post also states that the exchange is suspending all trading indefinitely. At the time of writing, Cryptsys website appears to be offline. (Update: the site came back online just before 3 PM EST.) The company didnt tell anybody about the hack in 2014, according to the blog post, apparently figuring that since they were making money at the time, and had reserves of currency they could lean on to keep the exchange afloat, everything was just fine. Heres how that brilliant business plan worked out: according to Cryptsys blog post, problems began when Coin Fire (now 99bitcoins) published an article in October of 2015 claiming Cryptsy was under federal investigation, which Cryptsy CEO Paul Vernon dismissed as libelous. This caused a bankrun, Cryptsys Thursday blog post states, and the coin in their reserves couldnt cover all their customers withdrawals. The timing of the Coin Fire article coincides with the worst of Cryptsys service interruptions, for which Cryptsy users have received various explanations, including server failures and DDoS attacks.

BugSec Group and Cynet discovered a severe vulnerability in Next Generation Firewalls. Head of Offensive Security Stas Volfus uncovered the vulnerability, dubbed FireStorm, which allows an internal entity or malicious code to interact and extract data out of the organization, completely bypassing the firewall limitation. It was discovered that the firewalls are designed to permit full TCP handshake regardless of the packet destination, in order to gather enough content for it to identify which application protocol is being used (web-browsing/telnet etc.). This is applicable if the devices are configured, for example, to allow Web browsing (HTTP/S) traffic from the LAN environment to specific locations on the internet (URL Filtering). This is true even with a single location. This allowed us to perform a full TCP handshake via the HTTP port with a C&C (Command and Control) server hosted by BugSec. From there, we were able to forge messages and tunnel them out through the TCP handshake process, bypassing the firewall to any destination on the Internet, regardless of firewall rules and client restrictions.

Some large portion of the Internet of Things has essentially left its backdoor wide open. This is according to a report released Wednesday by security researchers at SEC Consult examining SSH cryptographic keys and HTTPS secure server certificates from 4,000 different devices offered by 70 different manufacturers. As it turns out, these credentials are, more often than not, hard-coded and re-used among many different devices from sometimes even different companies. (SSH and HTTPS are two ways a device might "talk" to a server and, thus, the internet.) Of the 4,000 devices, SEC was able to identify only 580 unique keys. What does that mean? Imagine an apartment building of 4,000 rooms but with only 580 different locks; the odds would be pretty good that your neighbor and you share the same front-door key. It is a bit unsettling. Note that we are not talking about internet-connected toaster ovens and Roombas but (mostly) basic networking technologies: home routers, modems, IP cameras, VoIP phones. Vulnerabilities here are far from trivial.