InfoSec Week 9, 2018

Wandera security researchers spotted a new sophisticated Android RedDrop malware hidden in at least 53 Android applications. It can intercept SMS, record audio and exfiltrate data to the remote server.
https://www.wandera.com/blog/reddrop-malware/

There is an experimental support for forward secure post-quantum Extended Hash-Based Signatures (XMSS) in the OpenSSH protocol.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=151940152732492&w=2

Blog by Matthew Green on the probable encryption key handling by Apple in the China mandated cloud. Not really satisfied explanation, only guesses, as Apple is silent about the exact key handling methodology.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/01/16/icloud-in-china/

Cloudflare detected new Memcached based amplification DDoS attack vector. The attacker just implants a large payload on an exposed memcached server, then, the attacker spoofs the “get” request message with target Source IP address. The memcached server could be really huge - around 1MB.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/memcrashed-major-amplification-attacks-from-port-11211/

A group of computer scientists from the US and China published a paper proposing the first-ever trojan for a neural network. It’s called PoTrojan and is triggered by special network input. After that, the network start to work differently.
https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/17872-neural-networks-ai-trojan-AMPED

The Cisco Talos team analyzed attribution claims around Olympic Destroyer malware. The result is to not imply blindly to Russia. Attribution is hard.
http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/02/who-wasnt-responsible-for-olympic.html

New KeePassXC version 2.3.0 was released. There are lots of new features, like new Argon2 key derivation function, SSH agent integration, browser plugin.
https://keepassxc.org/blog/2018-02-28-2.3-released/

Trustico SSL certificate reseller revoked 23000 customer certificates by sending private keys(?!) over email to the Digicert certification authority.
http://blog.koehntopp.info/index.php/3075-how-not-to-run-a-ca/

There are rumors that major U.S. government contractor Cellebrite is able to unlock all current iPhone models.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/02/26/government-can-access-any-apple-iphone-cellebrite/

An advertising network has been using a well-known malware trick, a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA), to bypass ad blockers and deploy in-browser cryptocurrency miners since December 2017.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ad-network-uses-dga-algorithm-to-bypass-ad-blockers-and-deploy-in-browser-miners/

A novel technique is using hardware branch predictor side channel attack to bypass ASLR protection:
“Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR”
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~nael/pubs/micro16.pdf