This side-channel attack affects almost all cellular networks across the world since it generally targets GSMA. Despite the availability of other communication options, such as 3G and 4G, the researchers were interested in studying SMS because of its prevalence as a way of 2G communication among the general public. The researchers made the observation that the SMS Delivery Reports that are inevitably created after receiving an SMS message cause a timing-attack vector to be triggered. Knowing the timings of message delivery and estimating the time gap between message sending and receiving might assist a sender establish the location of the receiver if the sender has enabled SMS Delivery Reports. since of the way the SMS Delivery Reports feature operates, the user of the recipient cannot prohibit harmful use of this tool since it is outside of the recipient’s control. The approach, in its most basic form, makes use of the temporal signatures associated with a particular site.

The more exact the data that the attacker has on the whereabouts of their targets, the more accurate the location classification results that the ML model will provide for its predictions when it comes to the attack phase.

The data can only be obtained by the attacker sending several SMS messages to the target, either by disguising them as marketing communications that the target would ignore or discard as spam or by utilizing quiet SMS messages. A silent SMS is a “type 0” message that has no content and does not create any alerts on the screen of the target device; nonetheless, its receipt is still confirmed by the device on the SMSC. The authors of the research conducted their studies by using ADB to send bursts of 20 silent SMSes every hour for three days to several test devices located in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and seven European nations. This experiment covered ten different operators and a wide range of communication technologies and generational differences.

By sending SMS messages to the target user at a variety of different times and places, an adversary may acquire numerous timing signatures associated with the person. The sender may be able to determine the location of the recipient by analyzing them at a later time. To carry out this attack, the adversary need only be in possession of the cell phone number of the victim they are targeting. Even though it is a time-consuming process, collecting and analyzing the timing signatures of the target user might provide an adversary the ability to discover a previously unknown or new location of the individual they are targeting. This operates correctly regardless of the user’s location, whether it in the United States or elsewhere in the world. The amount of time that passes between when an SMS is sent and when it is received might be helpful here.

Even while the researchers were able to reach a high level of precision when carrying out their side-channel attack, it does have a few drawbacks. This is due to the fact that there are a variety of variables that might influence the empirical measurements in a real-world exploit. Even in a hypothetical situation in which the globe is locked off, the still-unachievable accuracy of more than 90 percent presents a risk to individuals’ privacy. In terms of the countermeasures, the researchers noted that the current ones to avoid similar attacks do not apply to this unique side-channel attack. This is because the novel attack uses a side-channel that does not present in the related attacks. Not delivering Delivery Reports or altering them with a random delay are also potential tactics that might be used in the fight against delays in UE processing. As for the delays that are caused by the network itself, modifying the SMS timings, installing spamming filters on the core network, or at the very least turning off quiet messages will help reduce the likelihood of an attack of this kind happening. Nevertheless, turning off the component that generates delivery reports may be the only practical preventative action. Before making this study available to the general public, the researchers acted appropriately and informed the GSMA about the situation. In response, the GSMA accepted their results (which were given the identifier CVD-2023-0072) and evaluated a variety of preventative actions.

The post How to hack & track anybody’s phone location via silent SMS messages appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

The use of instant communication platforms increased considerably due to the pandemic isolation, which represented an ideal opportunity for cybercriminals to deploy ambitious hacking campaigns. One of the most recent incidents has been reported in Bogota, Colombia, where local government officials claim their WhatsApp accounts were hacked.

Apparently, these attacks are based on sending a code via SMS with which threat actors will try to steal your information. Through his Twitter account, Bogota Secretary of Government Luis Gómez reported that his account had been compromised, so he asked his contacts to ignore any messages sent from their phone number: “If they receive an SMS message asking for information, please don’t answer,” the official says.

The incident would also have affected some local media journalists, including news anchors Diana Calderón and Gabriel Meluk, who also asked users to ignore such messages.

These incidents have already been notified to the relevant authorities. At the moment it is ignored whether the cybercriminals compromised randomly chosen WhatsApp accounts, or whether it is a campaign targeted specifically against the affected users, although the authorities have not ruled out any possibility.

Cybersecurity experts describe this practice as a social engineering attack that involves sending a text message to the target user asking them to send a security code; if the user falls into the trap, threat actors will use this code to log in to WhatsApp on another device, accessing all the information that victims store on this platform.

It is important to note that this attack depends entirely on the confidence of the target user, so threat actors resort to techniques such as impersonating a WhatsApp operator or pretending to be one of the victim’s contacts, which certainly helps users to let their guard down.

These are more common attacks than you think, so you need to consider some recommendations to prevent the engagement of our IM accounts:

• Enable multi-factor authentication on WhatsApp to add an additional security layer
• Don’t share security codes with anyone
• Do not open links sent by unknown users
• Keep the app always up to date to its latest version

To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.

The post How the massive hacking of Colombia’s journalists and politicians happened appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

Sometimes hacking is just Fun! but its sometimes bad too. So we should always be cautious while taking any action. Now you can prank with your friends by performing the SMS DOS attack on your friend mobile number by simply sending the huge number of SMS. According to researcher of International Institute of Cyber Security, SMS can be a critical vulnerability of hack any mobile.

This bomb3r tool is used for SMS DOS attack, this tool sends a large number of OTPs to the target mobile number.

Environment

• OS: Kali Linux 2020 64 bit
• Kernel-Version: 5.6.0

Installation Steps

• Use this command to clone the project on kali machine.
• git clone https://github.com/crinny/b0mb3r

root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity# git clone https://github.com/crinny/b0mb3r
Cloning into 'b0mb3r'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 12, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (12/12), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (12/12), done.
remote: Total 1596 (delta 4), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 1584
Receiving objects: 100% (1596/1596), 778.31 KiB | 960.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1040/1040), done.

• Use this command to enter into the b0mb3r directory

root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity# cd b0mb3r/
root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity/b0mb3r#

• Use this command to install the requirements
• pip3 install -r requirements.txt

root@kali:/home/iicybersecurity/b0mb3r# pip3 install -r requirements.txt
Requirement already satisfied: wheel in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 1)) (0.34.2)
Collecting fastapi
  Downloading fastapi-0.59.0-py3-none-any.whl (49 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 49 kB 332 kB/s
Collecting uvicorn
  Downloading uvicorn-0.11.6-py3-none-any.whl (43 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 43 kB 468 kB/s
Collecting aiofiles
  Downloading aiofiles-0.5.0-py3-none-any.whl (11 kB)
Collecting pydantic
  Downloading pydantic-1.6.1-cp38-cp38-manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (11.5 MB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 11.5 MB 3.7 MB/s
=================================================================================================SNIP===================================================================================================================================
Requirement already satisfied: urllib3>=1.10.0 in /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages (from sentry-sdk->-r requirements.txt (line 10)) (1.25.8)
Requirement already satisfied: h2==3.* in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from httpcore==0.9.*->httpx->-r requirements.txt (line 7)) (3.2.0)
Installing collected packages: pydantic, starlette, fastapi, websockets, httptools, uvloop, uvicorn, aiofiles, rfc3986, hstspreload, sniffio, httpcore, httpx, sentry-sdk, loguru
Successfully installed aiofiles-0.5.0 fastapi-0.59.0 hstspreload-2020.7.17 httpcore-0.9.1 httptools-0.1.1 httpx-0.13.3 loguru-0.5.1 pydantic-1.6.1 rfc3986-1.4.0 sentry-sdk-0.16.1 sniffio-1.1.0 starlette-0.13.4 uvicorn-0.11.6 uvloop-0.14.0 websockets-8.1

• Now, use this command to launch the tool, b0mb3r
• This will start the service on loopback IP and on a particular port. http://127.0.0.1:8080.
• Now, open this URL in the browser

• Successfully we launched the tool.
• Now choose the country code, the enter the target number and number of SMS you want to send to victim mobile

• Now, click on start attack option.
• This will send the large number of SMS to the target number as shown below.

• In the same way, we also receive the logs files on kali console.

Conclusion

We saw on how to perform a DOS attack on a particular mobile number by sending huge traffic and most of the people use this tool for fun purpose.

The post SMS Bomber – Prank With Your Friends by Flooding SMS appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

Before coming to the impulse hacking tool, we must know about the DOS attack. DOS attack means Denial of services attack. When we try to search any information on the internet, the request goes to servers and the server replies back immediately. This process happen when the server doesn’t have any load. In case if the server has more traffic, it stops responding to the client. This is where hackers generate huge traffic using DOS tools to stop server from responding.

Now coming to the Impulse hacking tool, this tool is used to perform DOS attack like sending the huge traffic to the targeted devices, websites, etc. There are many tools available in open source community and are used by by ethical hacking researchers of International Institute of Cyber Security to perform in house DOS testing. Impulse tool can be used to bombard any mobile number with SMS, CALLS using DOS attack and even it can be used to do TCP, UDP DOS attack.

Environment

• Os: Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18363.720]
• PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE: AMD64

Installation steps

Before downloading the impulse in our windows machine. We have to install python on our windows machine.

• Download python 3.6.0 version from the below link:
• https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-360/
• After installing the python, verify the python installed correctly.
• In the start menu type IDLE (python 3.6.0), write simple program print(“Hello-world”)
• If it executes, our installation is successful
• Now, download the impulse zip file from the below link and extract the files.
• https://github.com/LimerBoy/Impulse/archive/master.zip
• Now open the CMD as an Administrator and go to the Impulse Folder file by using cd command.
• cd /path/to/Impulse-files/ in our case cd C:\iiCyberSecurity\Impulse-master
• Next, we have to install dependencies, by using command pip install -r requirements.txt

• Now, use below command to launch the Impulse Tool, and there we can find the help options.
• python impulse.py

• In the Impulse Tool we see different methods to perform this tool

SMS FLOODING

When can use this method to Bombard mobile number with SMS and Call on the target number, as it keeps on sending the SMS and Calling to the targeted number.

• Type this command to perform SMS Bombarding
• python impulse.py –method SMS –target +918328365*** –time 30 –threads 3
  • Method:Select the method to attack
  • Target: Enter target mobile number
  • Threads: Number of times to process the attack
• Here started the attack on target phone number, as we can see below that its sending Messages to the targeted number.

• Below we can see that victim mobile has received few Messages.

• In the same way victim has received Fraud call from number continuously.

• Here we can see the number of times we received the call.

HTTP Method

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is used for for data communication. Now in this tool we are going to use the HTTP method to send unwanted requests to the server to perform an DOS attack.

• Use this command:
• python impulse.py –method HTTP –target http://192.168.1.108 –time 20 –threads 5

• We have captured the requests using Wireshark Tool to demonstrate HTTP flooding.

TCP Method

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) theses both are used to data transmission. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol. In TCP is a 3-way handshake process SYN, SYN+ACK, and ACK.

UDP: User Datagram is a connectionless protocol and it is faster compared to the TCP Protocol. In the UDP Protocol, it sends the packets to the server and where we don’t have any confirmation about whether the packet is received by server or not

• Use this command python impulse.py –method TCP –target 192.168.1.108:22 –time 20 –threads 5 to perform an attack.

• In the same way, we have captured the request of these packets using Wireshark Tool.

After capturing the packets in the Wireshark tool, there we see different options sources, destination, protocol and info about the packets.

• If we see there for few packets in different color and if we see in the info there, we can find ACK and [RST, ACK].
  • ACK:  ACK means Acknowledging data that has been received by another machine.
  • [RST, ACK]: The [RST, ACK] means RESET send by other party with acknowledging the previous data.
• Understanding of the wireshark is important part of digital Forensics.

Conclusion

This tool can be used in doing social engineering test at organization level, to check the organization behavior to such attacks. So we saw on how to perform a DOS attack on a particular mobile number and on how we can generate huge TCP, UDP traffic for your lab testings. DO NOT TRY DOS ON PRODUCTION SYSTEMS WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSIONS.

The post How to Bombard Your Friend with SMS and CALLS using DOS Tool appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

Through a statement, Twitter announced that a social network feature has been removed; this feature allowed users to send text messages (SMS) to post tweets in case of not having access to the app or website. This was the attack vector used by hackers to enter Dorsey’s account; even though some experts had already pointed out this weakness, the company had not taken action on it until its own CEO suffered the consequences. “The phone number linked to Dorsey’s account was compromised by an oversight of a mobile phone service provider,” the company’s report says.

“The function will be temporarily disabled. We have made this decision because of the security flaws in this role, which we will correct in conjunction with the companies providing mobile phone services,” the micro blogging social network statement says.

According to data protection specialists, the company will need to reconsider employing users’ phone numbers as a multi-factor authentication method, the only one used by the company so far. “The feature will be reactivated once the vulnerabilities are corrected”, concludes the company’s message. At the time of writing, the feature had been reactivated in some locations.

This incident has created public relations chaos for the micro blogging social media, in fact, according to data protection experts from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS), it could have been prevented if the company paid sufficient attention to the feedback it receives from its millions of users, security firms and independent security researchers.

The post Twitter shut down SMS functionality after the company’s CEO was hacked appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

Usually, the APN is sent to users via text messages (SMS). The few security measures in this protocol allow malicious hackers to send fraudulent messages that serve as a means of accessing a compromised device. A team of experts from security firm Check Point mentions that among the data that can be configured in APN it is the proxy, but because the vast majority of mobile operators use transparent proxies, you do not need to configure this option.

In their research, network security experts claim that some smartphone manufacturers with Android operating system (including Samsung, LG, Huawei, and Sony) did not think about including any protection system for sending and receiving SMS, which leaves the door open for threat actors to send a malicious SMS asking target users to update the operator’s data and thus redirect the victim’s mobile traffic to a proxy controlled by the attackers.

This attack has the potential to compromise all traffic passing through the mobile device, regardless of whether it is encrypted or not. This means that, if successful, an attacker could access details such as the victim’s browsing history, chats, photos, videos and even emails. In addition to malicious SMS, all hackers require to launch the attack is the victim to be connected to a mobile network.

Network security experts also mentioned that, although there is an industry standard for secure SMS sending (Open Mobile Alliance Client Provisioning), it does not have the necessary powers to force service providers authenticate these messages using one of the available methods (such as USERPIN, NETWPIN, among others). In the absence of this implementation, it is impossible for target users to verify the actual provenance of an SMS.

Although this already sounds bad enough, the worst part comes further. Almost anyone with the minimum technical knowledge can carry out this attack, only a USB dongle (available from $10 USD) is required, which can be used for mass sending SMS, although it is also possible to direct the attack to a specific user.

Affected manufacturers were reported by researchers a few months ago. While Samsung fixed these flaws in its May update and LG did so in June, the rest of the companies have not announced any fixes to mitigate the risk of attack. According to network security experts from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) Sony mentioned that there is no need to update its software, as it is designed according to the specifications of the Open Mobile Alliance, however, this research team demonstrated that this is not enough to ensure user protection when sending or receiving SMS messages.

The post Beware: a simple SMS could compromise all your mobile phone’s traffic appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

Specialist detect a new virus that infects cell phones via text message | Hackers intercept Telegram messages due to a security vulnerability

Below are the links of the cyber security news.

1. Specialist detect a new virus that infects cell phones via text message 

2. Hackers intercept Telegram messages due to a security vulnerability

The post POPULAR NEWS VIDEO 2 AUG appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

The Russian security tester Timur Yunusov has discovered critical vulnerabilities affecting routers and 3G and 4G mobile modems from Huawei, ZTE, Gemtek, and Quanta. The security holes could be exploited by remote attackers to completely compromise machines and intercept HTTP traffic and also SMSs.

Yunusov, a security expert at the Positive Technologies, presented the discovery at the Nullcon conference held in Goa. He discovered the flaws in at least eight different devices. A rapid query on the Shodan search engine allowed him to find more than 42,000 vulnerable devices exposed on the web.

The results include roughly 2800 Gemtek modems and routers and 1250 from Quanta and ZTE.

The penetration tester explained that in some cases the vulnerabilities are introduced by the service providers likely to personalize the firmware running on the device. The vulnerabilities are critical because an attacker can remotely trigger them to compromise connected devices, including connected computers.

The post 0-day critical flaws in mobile modems allow hackers to take over your PC appeared first on Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.