The August 2022 security breach of LastPass may have been more severe than previously disclosed by the company.
The popular password management service on Thursday revealed that malicious actors obtained a trove of personal information belonging to its customers that include their encrypted password vaults by using data siphoned from the earlier break-in.
Also stolen is "basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," the company said.
The August 2022 incident, which remains a subject of an ongoing investigation, involved the miscreants accessing source code and proprietary technical information from its development environment via a single compromised employee account.
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LastPass said this permitted the unidentified attacker to obtain credentials and keys that were subsequently leveraged to extract information from a backup stored in a cloud-based storage service, which it emphasized is physically separate from its production environment.
On top of that, the adversary is said to have copied customer vault data from the encrypted storage service. It's stored in a "proprietary binary format" that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, and fully-encrypted fields like website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.
These fields, the company explained, are protected using 256-bit AES encryption and can be decoded only with a key derived from the users' master password on the users' devices.
LastPass confirmed that the security lapse did not involve access to unencrypted credit card data, as this information was not archived in the cloud storage container.
The company did not divulge how recent the backup was, but warned that the threat actor "may attempt to use brute-force to guess your master password and decrypt the copies of vault data they took," as well as target customers with social engineering and credential stuffing attacks.
It bears noting at this stage that the success of the brute-force attacks to predict the master passwords is inversely proportional to their strength, meaning the easier it is to guess the password, the lesser the number of attempts required to crack it.
"If you reuse your master password and that password was ever compromised, a threat actor may use dumps of compromised credentials that are already available on the internet to attempt to access your account," LastPass cautioned.
The fact that website URLs are in plaintext means that a successful decryption of the master password could give the attackers a sense of the websites a particular user holds accounts with, enabling them to mount additional phishing or credential theft attacks.
The company further said that it notified a small subset of its business customers – which amounts to less than 3% – to take certain unspecified action based on their account configurations.
The development comes days after Okta acknowledged that threat actors gained unauthorized access to its Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC) repositories hosted on GitHub and copied the source code.
Researchers Warn of Kavach 2FA Phishing Attacks Targeting Indian Govt. Officials
A new targeted phishing campaign has zoomed in on a two-factor authentication solution called Kavach that's used by Indian government officials.
Cybersecurity firm Securonix dubbed the activity STEPPY#KAVACH, attributing it to a threat actor known as SideCopy based on tactical overlaps with prior attacks.
".LNK files are used to initiate code execution which eventually downloads and runs a malicious C# payload, which functions as a remote access trojan (RAT)," Securonix researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a new report.
SideCopy, a hacking crew believed to be of Pakistani origin and active since at least 2019, is said to share ties with another actor called Transparent Tribe (aka APT36 or Mythic Leopard).
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It's also known to impersonate attack chains leveraged by SideWinder, a prolific nation-state group that disproportionately singles out Pakistan-based military entities, to deploy its own toolset.
That said, this is not the first time Kavach has emerged as a target for the actor. In July 2021, Cisco Talos detailed an espionage operation that was undertaken to steal credentials from Indian government employees.
Kavach-themed decoy apps have since been co-opted by Transparent Tribe in its attacks targeting India since the start of the year.
Kavach 2FA Phishing Attacks
The latest attack sequence observed by Securonix over the past couple of weeks entails using phishing emails to lure potential victims into opening a shortcut file (.LNK) to execute a remote .HTA payload using the mshta.exe Windows utility.
The HTML application, the company said, "was discovered being hosted on a likely compromised website, nested inside an obscure 'gallery' directory designed to store some of the site's images."
The compromised website in question is incometaxdelhi[.]org, the official website for India's Income Tax department pertaining to the Delhi region. The malicious file is no longer available on the portal.
In the next phase, running the .HTA file leads to the execution of obfuscated JavaScript code that's designed to show a decoy image file that features an announcement from the Indian Ministry of Defence a year ago in December 2021.
The JavaScript code further downloads an executable from a remote server, establishes persistence via Windows Registry modifications, and reboots the machine to automatically launch the binary post startup.
The binary file, for its part, functions as a backdoor that enables the threat actor to execute commands sent from an attacker-controlled domain, fetch and run additional payloads, take screenshots, and exfiltrate files.
The exfiltration component also includes an option to specifically search for a database file ("kavach.db") created by the Kavach app on the system to store the credentials.
It's worth noting that the aforementioned infection chain was disclosed by the MalwareHunterTeam in a series of tweets on December 8, 2022, describing the remote access trojan as MargulasRAT.
"Based on correlated data from the binary samples obtained of the RAT used by the threat actors, this campaign has been going on against Indian targets undetected for the last year," the researchers said.
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