The Lighthouse IT Podcast - 18th, 2020
Matt and Griffin discuss Malicious Wallpapers, Phishing Trends, Coors wanting to send you to your Zoom background, Labor Day deals actually focusing on jobs, and the fabled TikTok deal coming to a close!
Listen here! Want to get straight to the news? Go to the 5:05 minute mark.
Security News
Could your wallpaper be trying to steal your credentials?
Well it turns out that new rubber-ducky theme you downloaded for your Windows 10 computer might just be an attempt to steal your credentials. Our friends over at Bleeping Computer and Sophos have both published similar findings that the Windows 10 theme files can be used to pass credentials to a third party. In the Sophos study, they setup a server to spoof or "phish" credentials by requesting files (such as the wallpaper background) from a remote resource and using an authentication prompt to look similar to a normal Windows credential prompt. By trying to convince you that you need to enter your local credentials to continue, the remote server stores and serves the files appropriately - but now your account has been compromised.
In the Bleeping Computer study, they stepped it up another notch and were able to use a Pass-the-Hash attack using an remote SMB server. SMB is used by Windows for sharing files between computers and is largely trusted. When your computer attempts to access an SMB share, it will automatically pass a hash of your credentials to the other computer to attempt to login. In normal circumstances, this makes connecting to SMB shares painless, but in this example, the hash is stored by the remote server and can be used later by de-hashing tools to attempt to determine your username and password.
While right now these both show great ways to determine your username and password, image files have also had some history in the past of remote code execution issues - meaning it could be possible that if another vulnerability is found in an image library, it could be a one stop shop for installing a malicious payload AND getting your account information to install itself.
READ MORE HERE FROM BLEEPING COMPUTER AND HERE FROM SOPHOS
