Nothing Safer Than Downloading A System Update, Right?

April 5, 2019

Hackers using a fake authentication certificate got thousands of Asus computer owners to download what appeared to be a software update but was actually malicious code. The breach was discovered by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which estimates the infection was downloaded to about a half million Windows computers, although the hackers apparently for their own reasons were interested in infecting only a few hundred of them. This episode, says Kim Zetter, writing in Motherboard, “highlights the growing threat from so-called supply-chain attacks, where malicious software or components get installed on systems as they’re manufactured or assembled, or afterward via trusted vendor channels.” The threat may be growing, but it’s not new. A spy tool that became known as Flame, “developed by some of the same attackers behind Stuxnet,” Zetter writes, “was the first known attack to trick users in this way by hijacking the Microsoft Windows updating tool on machines to infect computers. Flame, discovered in 2012, was signed with an unauthorized Microsoft certificate that attackers tricked Microsoft’s system into issuing to them.” In this case, the attacks didn’t actually compromise Microsoft’s update server, but rather on certain targeted computers redirected the software update tool so that it contacted their server instead of Microsoft.

 

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