IoT roundup: Apple Watch Patches, Router Vulnerabilities
Yes, there is a security patch for the Apple Watch now. It fixes 13 different vulnerabilities. At least one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-1093) can be used to execute arbitrary code. But not all of the vulnerabilities are "cutting edge". We also got an ICMP redirect issue (CVE-2015-1103) and of course SSL issues that are addressed by disabling old ciphers (FREAK vulnerability) and updating the list of trusted CAs.
The Internet of Things certainly does get a lot of attention this year, and I think rightfully so. I consider web gateways/routers a prime example, and just to make that point, here the top 10 attacks against our web application honeypot:
25700 GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n
10596 GET http
9059 GET /cgi-bin/authLogin.cgi HTTP/1.1\n <- QNAP shellshock issue
6771 GET /phpMyAdmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1\r\n
6638 GET /pma/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1\r\n
6511 GET /myadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1\r\n
4297 GET /manager/html HTTP/1.1\r\n
3939 GET /manager/html/ HTTP/1.1\r\n
3672 GET /tmUnblock.cgi HTTP/1.1\r\n <- Linksys Routers (see "Moon Worm")
2820 GET /pony/includes/templates/error.tpl HTTP/1.1\r\n
Two of our top ten URLs are attacking exclusively devices. So better make sure you are patched as well as it gets, and try to avoid exposing the admin interface to the public.
False Positive? settings-win.data.microsoft.com resolving to Microsoft Blackhole IP
Thanks to Xavier for bringing this to our attention. It looks a couple of days ago, a legitimate Microsoft host name, settings-win.data.microsoft.com started to resolve to a Microsoft IP that is commonly used for blackholes that Microsoft operates:
$ host settings-win.data.microsoft.com settings-win.data.microsoft.com is an alias for settings.data.glbdns2.microsoft.com. settings.data.glbdns2.microsoft.com is an alias for blackhole6.glbdns2.microsoft.com. blackhole6.glbdns2.microsoft.com has address 131.253.18.253
Connecting to a blackhole IP like this is often an indicator of compromise, and many IDS's will flag it. For example:
[**] [1:2016101:2] ET TROJAN DNS Reply Sinkhole - Microsoft - 131.253.18.0/24 [**] [Classification: A Network Trojan was detected] [Priority: 1] ...
It is not yet clear what process causes the connect to this IP on port 443. But a number of other users are reporting similar issues. For example, see here:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/37aecee6-0df9-4234-8159-c632070478ad/strange-dns-requests-blocked-by-ips?forum=winserversecurity
At this point, I am assuming that this is some kind of configuration error at Microsoft.
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