Not so long ago, monitoring attackers in our telnet honeypots helped reveal an interesting botnet composed of ASUS brand home routers. A botnet trying to log into our SSH honeypot running on Turris routers most frequently in the last two weeks is a botnet whose IP addresses, according to Shodan, often have one common characteristic: they respond with cookie AIROS_SESSIONID on port 80. This cookie points at AirOS running on Ubiquiti airRouter. According to data from Shodan, about 20% of attacking IP addresses out of a total of about 6500 can be identified as AirOS due to this cookie. Many addresses, however, come from dynamic pools yet unknown to Shodan.

The Turris SSH honeypots are definitely not idle. There are currently 168 active honeypots that daily record 1000 to 2000 and on some days even up to 5000 SSH sessions containing at least one command.

The news about LastPass hack broke recently. If the user had strong password, the password is not brute-forcable. However dictionary passwords along with passwords that are guessable with mutation and Markov chains can be broken up to length of 12 characters on one GPU even though LastPass’s key derivation function (KDF) using 100000 iterations. This means that if the attacker can crack user’s simple password, the attacker can download the encrypted blob containing passwords from LastPass and use the cracked password to decrypt them. The weakest link here is the password strength.

We would considerably enjoy it if the cryptography crises limited themselves to one per day. We know, however, that it is only a wishful thinking.

Unintentional exfiltration of keys

The Chinese manufacturer of electronics Lenovo went in his greed so far that he not only pre-installs the display of advertisement on newly installed notegooks but the installed adware of third parties called Superfish even injects javascript into the code of the page being browsed; the goal is to analyze the page and to target the advertisement better. While doing this it does not limit itself only on non-coded HTTP connection.

During past days the errors of bash interpreter called Shellshock shaded other messages including errrors in NSS influencing the verification of certificates in Firefox and Chrome. The matter concerned is another instance of not quite common vulnerability which, however, occurs repeatedly: Bleichenbacher´s attack on RSA with little public exponent, typically 3.