Data Encryption

The increasing amount of data we’re all generating is everywhere: in smartphones, laptops, thumb drives, and dozens of online services. How can we secure all of them against unwarranted access?

We virtually can’t.

Smartphones get stolen, thumb drives get lost, email passwords get brute-forced, cloud servers get breached, unwary users get phished, WiFi networks get tapped, and eventually, malicious users obtain access to your data.

So how do you protect your data against unwelcome parties?

You encrypt it. In case you don’t know it, encryption is the science of modifying data to prevent intruders from making sense of it. When you encrypt your data, only you and anyone else holding the decryption keys will be able to unlock and read it. This means that even if an attacker gains access to your data by breaking into a server or stealing your hard drive, they won’t be able to make sense of it if they don’t have the keys.

Encryption is your last line of defense, the one thing that can protect your data when all else goes wrong.

Anti-Malware Protection

Computer viruses have been around for decades. In theory, the origin of “self-reproducing automata” (i.e. viruses) dates back to an article published by mathematician and polymath John von Neumann in the late 1940s. Early viruses occurred on pre-personal computer platforms in the 1970s. However, the history of modern viruses begins with a program called Elk Cloner, which started infecting Apple II systems in 1982. Disseminated via infected floppy disks, the virus itself was harmless, but it spread to all disks attached to a system. It spread so quickly that most cybersecurity experts consider it the first large-scale computer virus outbreak in history.

For the most part, “antivirus” and “anti-malware” mean the same thing. They both refer to software designed to detect, protect against, and remove malicious software. Contrary to what the name might suggest, antivirus software protects against more than viruses–it just uses a slightly antiquated name to describe what it does. Anti-malware software is designed to protect against viruses too. Anti-malware just uses a more modern name that encompasses all kinds of malicious software, including viruses. That being said, anti-malware can stop a viral infection form happening and remove infected files.

Malvertising

Malvertising, or malicious advertising, is the use of online advertising to distribute malware with little to no user interaction required. You could be researching business trends on a site like NYTimes.com and, without ever having clicked on an ad, be in trouble. A tiny piece of code hidden deep in the ad directs your computer to criminal servers. These servers catalog details about your computer and its location, and then select the “right” malware for you.

Malvertising has gone unchecked because of the current lax conditions and low barrier for entry to ad networks. In order to advertise online, businesses merely sign up with a network and then bid in real time to have their ads appear on popular websites. However, not all advertising networks have strict criteria for advertisers. Not only that, but buying advertising space is increasingly being transacted automatically. Ad sellers don’t always know the buyers, and some ad platforms allow newcomers in cheap.

Infected ad often uses an iframe, or invisible webpage element, to do its work. You don’t even need to click on the ad to activate it—just visit the webpage hosting the ad. The iframe redirects to an exploit landing page, and malicious code attacks your system from the landing page via exploit. The exploit kit delivers malware—and 70 percent of the time, it’s ransomware.

Vulnerability in Modern CPUs in Windows, Linux, ChromeOS

Bitdefender disclosed a new variant of the Spectre 1 speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious program to access and read the contents of privileged memory in an operating system.

This SWAPGS vulnerability allows local programs, like malware, to read data from memory that is should normally not have access to, such as the Windows or Linux kernel memory.

Andrei Vlad Lutas of Bitdefender discovered this vulnerability while performing research on CPU internals and reported it to Intel in August 2018.

In a statement from Intel, BleepingComputer was told that after the vulnerability was disclosed to them, they descided to address this on a software level and Microsoft took over coordination of the vulnerability.

“Intel, along with industry partners, determined the issue was better addressed at the software level and connected the researchers to Microsoft. It takes the ecosystem working together to collectively keep products and data more secure and this issue is being coordinated by Microsoft.”

From that point forward, Microsoft took over notifying other vendors, making sure patches were released, and planning the coordinated disclosure today at BlackHat.

The SWAPGS Vulnerability

The SWAPGS vulnerability is a speculative execution side-channel vulnerability that allows bad actors to read data from privileged memory.

In order to increase performance in CPUs, a feature called speculative execution will execute instructions before it knows if they are needed or not. Vulnerabilities that target this feature are called side-channel attacks.

In a new side-channel attack discovered by Bitdefender, attackers “break the memory isolation provided by the CPU, allowing an unprivileged attacker to access privileged, kernel memory.”

This is done through the SWAPGS instruction found in 64-bit CPUs that when manipulated successfully can be used to leak sensitive information from kernel memory even when the malicious process is running with low user permissions.

This could allow attackers to steal any type of information that is stored in the memory, including chat messages, emails, login credentials, payment information, passwords, encryption keys, tokens, or access credentials.

What it comes down to, is that no information can be kept secret.

While Microsoft, Intel, and Red Hat all state that this vulnerability exists in all modern CPUs, Bitdefender says they have only been able to successfully exploit the vulnerability on Intel CPUs.

“We tested two AMD CPUs: AMD64 Family 16 Model 2 Stepping 3 AuthenticAMD ~3211 Mhz and AMD64 Family 15 Model 6 Stepping 1 AuthenticAMD ~2100 Mhz and neither exhibited speculative behavior for the SWAPGS instruction.

Since the SWAPGS instruction is present only on x86-64, we don’t expect other CPU architectures, such as ARM, MIPS, POWER, SPARC or RISC-V to be vulnerable. However, we don’t exclude the existence of other similarly sensitive instructions that may execute speculatively.”

Furthermore, as the required WRGSBASE instruction is only present in CPUs starting with Ivy Bridge, Bitdefender expects older CPUS “to be much more difficult, if not impossible to exploit.”

For more detailed information about the SWAPGS vulnerability, you can visit Bitdefender’s dedicated SWAPGS page. You can also watch this video shared by Bitdefender on how to protect yourself from SWAPGS attacks.

Vendors respond to SWAPGS vulnerability

In a coordinated disclosure, numerous vendors including Microsoft, Red Hat, Intel, and Google have released advisories regarding this vulnerability.

Below we have a provided more information on the advisories and updates released by vendors to mitigate this issue.

Microsoft secretly fixes vulnerability in July updates

During the July 2019 Patch Tuesday security updates, Microsoft secretly patched the new SWAPGS speculative vulnerability using software mitigations. If you install Windows security updates as they come out, then you are already protected from this vulnerability in Windows.

Microsoft’s advisory that was released today is titled “Windows Kernel Information Disclosure Vulnerability” and was held back on being released until today as part of a coordinated industry disclosure.

According to Microsoft, Andrei Vlad Lutas of Bitdefender discovered this new vulnerability in some modern CPUs that would allow malicious user mode programs to access and read the contents of the Windows Kernel memory.

“To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would have to log on to an affected system and run a specially crafted application,” Microsoft explained in their advisory. “The vulnerability would not allow an attacker to elevate user rights directly, but it could be used to obtain information that could be used to try to compromise the affected system further.”

To resolve this vulnerability, a Windows security update was released on July 9th, 2019, that fixes the vulnerability through software changes that mitigate how a CPU speculatively accesses memory. Microsoft further stated that it is not required to install a microcode update to resolve this vulnerability.

Windows 10 users update system immediately

Microsoft is warning Windows 10 users to update their operating system immediately because of two “critical” vulnerabilities.

The company said the vulnerabilities are potentially “wormable,” meaning affected computers could spread viruses and malware without any action on the user’s part.

There are “potentially hundreds of millions of vulnerable computers,” Simon Pope, Microsoft’s director of Incident Response, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

“It is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible because of the elevated risks associated with wormable vulnerabilities like these, and downloads for these can be found in the Microsoft Security Update Guide,” he said.

Windows 10 users that have enabled automatic updates are already protected. For those who update manually, they can click the search button and type “Windows Update” to access the update tool.

Other operating systems, such as Windows XP, are not affected.

Windows 10 is the world’s most popular desktop operating system, according to Net Marketshare. Microsoft (MSFT) estimates that more than 800 million devices run Windows 10.