Hello, World!
Today in hacking news - Russian TV was hacked with an AI Putin, Reddit is being extorted
by hackers who want more than just money, and there’s a new way ChatGPT has been weaponised.
That’s all coming up in your roundup of cyber security tech news.
A few days ago Russian television was hacked, but rather than general anti war messages
being broadcast, the kind we’ve seen before in hacks of Russian TV.
This time the hackers took a more unique and dangerous approach by broadcasting an AI generated
Putin giving a speech as if it was some kind of emergency announcement.
Deepfake Putin said that Russia itself had been invaded by Ukraine, and that civilians
should evacuate immediately deep into Russian territory.
AI Putin also declared martial law and general mobilisation of the Russian military.
Both TV and radio were hacked, with it all lasting about 20 minutes.
Whilst the deepfake might look pretty realistic on the surface, native Russian speakers have
pointed out that this really isn’t a top tier deepfake - the head movements don’t
really match the speech, and it just all feels a bit odd and uncanny.
But most people obviously aren’t familiar with the subtleties of how to spot deepfakes,
and there were reports of older Russians absolutely losing their minds over this.
And it was made all the more believable because this specifically affected the TV and radio
stations of people living in regions close to the border.
However, when we hear of TV hacks it’s often hard to tell if the hijacking really happened
in the first place, or if it’s just some guy casting a video he made to his own television,
and recording it on his phone to make it seem spontaneous, before posting the video to social
media just for the lulz.
I mean - in this case the only hard evidence we have is a mere handful of videos on social
media.
But we don’t have to dig too far into this one, because Russian state media themselves
confirmed that this did happen.
The TASS news agency said that “Authorities … [are aware of] the hacking of radio frequencies”
… “but the situation in the region is fully under … control”.
They also said that ““Putin’s emergency appeal” shown on some TV networks is a hack”
- pretty much confirming that the TV takeover did happen.
The Russian broadcaster ‘Mir’ seems to have been the victim here - but there’s
no details at all about how they were hacked to begin with.
And no hacktivist group has taken responsibility, at least not yet.
This is by no means the first hack of Russian TV and radio since the war began.
For example back in February the missile alert system of several radio stations was compromised,
leading to a rather ominous voice telling people to seek shelter.
Also, just 24 hours after this latest hack, TV channels in Crimea were reportedly hijacked
to broadcast on a loop the now famous trailer for Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
But the more dramatic TV hacks all come from Iran, on multiple occasions over the past
couple of years we’ve had masked hackers take over state TV, calling on people to rise
up against the government.
I’ll make sure to link my videos on those hacks down in the description.
Next up, the ALPHV ransomware group, otherwise known as BlackCat has announced they hacked
into reddit and stole 80GB of data, but as for the ransom demand, these guys want more
than just money.
The Blackcat onion site says they “broke into Reddit on February 5, 2023, and took
80 gigabytes [of] (zipped) … data.”
- so the actual hack happened 4 months ago, but why has it taken so long for BlackCat
to take responsibility?
Well - back then reddit admitted they had been breached, they said “Reddit systems
were hacked as a result of a sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack.”
… “the attacker sent out plausible-sounding prompts pointing employees to a website that
cloned the behaviour of our intranet gateway” before stealing credentials and 2fa tokens.
This all sounds pretty similar to the famous Twitter breach of 2020, when a bad actor scraped
LinkedIn profiles for Twitter employee’s phone numbers, before contacting them and
pretending to be senior Twitter employees before pointing them to a fake internal Twitter
login page, where the hackers nabbed their creds and then launched the biggest crypto
scam of all time.
A similar strategy might’ve been used in this case.
However luckily for reddit “Soon after being phished, the affected employee self-reported”,
and Reddit’s security team quickly locked out the intruders.
But not before the hackers were able to gain access to “internal docs, code, as well
as some internal dashboards and business systems”, they also stole “contact information for
(currently hundreds of) company contacts and employees”.
But there’s no indication at all that Reddit user data was compromised, or so we’re told.
But in fairness Reddit handled the hack as well as they could have, there wasn’t any
controversy about the response to the data breach as we sometimes see with other companies.
But that’s not to say there weren’t unanswered questions, because we didn’t know who was
behind the breach, no data dump ever appeared on black hat forums and no ransomware gang
took responsibility, until a few days ago when the Blackcat gang made a post on their
onion site called “The Reddit Files”.
Blackcat explains that the reason they sat on this breach for so long was that they were
“wait[ing] for [Reddit’s] IPO to come along” - if you didn’t know Reddit is
planning to go public in the second half of this year, which would be the perfect opportunity
for anyone who wants to cause them some serious reputational damage, as investors try to figure
out just how much reddit stock is really worth.
But Blackcat obviously hasn’t waited for that IPO, instead saying that “this seems
like the perfect opportunity!”, they are of course referring to Reddit’s recent API
price gauging debacle which will kill off a whole load of third party apps.
Now, instead of a measly $4.5 million dollars that the hackers want from reddit in exchange
for deletion of the data, they also want reddit to “withdraw their API pricing changes”.
Either our hackers use Apollo and are just as pissed off as everyone else, or more likely
- they’re doing this just for the lulz after Reddit’s CEO denied their little payday.
The hackers admit they really just don’t expect Reddit to pay up and instead, “expect
to leak the data”.
As for what that data is going to reveal, well Blackcat says it’ll show “all the
statistics [Reddit] tracks about their users” as well as the fact Reddit “silently censor[s]
users”.
What that means in reality?
We’ll have to wait and see, this could be similar to the Twitter hack in 2020, in which
leaked screenshots revealed the presence of shadowbanning tools at Twitter.
But it’s equally likely that BlackCat is just hyping up a leak that will be a complete
nothing burger except to other cyber criminals who’ll search through it and leverage those
leaked employee contact details in further cyber attacks.
Next up, Hackers have found yet another way to weaponise ChatGPT.
It exploits ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate things.
An “AI hallucination” is pretty new phenomenon which is really just a fancy term for an AI
chatbot making stuff up.
For example, you ask ChatGPT to summarise a web page, and it does - except ChatGPT doesn’t
have internet access, so it can’t possibly know what’s behind the link.
What seems like a pretty plausible and convincing summary is really just derived from clues
in the URL as to what the article could be about.
ChatGPT isn’t trying to mislead you, but rather it’s been stretched past it’s training
data and hence you get hallucinations.
This isn’t a ChatGPT specific issue, seemingly all large language models seem to have a similar
problem - it’s thought to be one of the many reasons why Google has been so cautious
and therefore late to the party in AI chatbots.
For instance someone has actually launched a defamation lawsuit against OpenAI, because
when a journalist asked ChatGPT to summarise a court document, it hallucinated a bunch
of allegations about him, and accused him of embezzling money.
And now, new research from cybersecurity company ‘Vulcan’ has showed just how hackers can
abuse ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate code, in particular package names - as in
ChatGPT will often suggest packages that have never existed or maybe ones that did exist,
only before ChatGPT’s training data cutoff in September 2021.
The idea is that an attacker could identify common package hallucinations and create malicious
versions of these, so that when a victim uses them, they end up unwittingly incorporating
malicious code into their project.
This opportunity for hackers has been created by the fact that some developers are now preferring
to get their coding solutions from ChatGPT rather than places like stackoverflow.
Whilst stackoverflow has the social proof of comments and upvotes as a pretty good indicator
that whatever code being shared isn’t malicious, ChatGPT doesn’t offer anywhere near the
same level of trust.
The researchers demonstrated one way hallucinations could be weaponised…
first they scraped a load of common coding questions on a variety of topics from stackoverflow.
Then they “asked ChatGPT through its API all the questions [they’d] collected”,
because of course no bad actor is going to be sitting there copy pasting questions into
the user interface, this would all be automated through the API.
Though of course to do that, an attacker would need an API key, but it’s not like those
aren’t hard to come by...
I mean - there’s a bit of an epidemic of leaked openAI keys at the moment, tens of
thousands of them have been leaked through public code repositories like github.
Once the researchers had a list of package names they just cross referenced them to open
source package registries, identifying the ones that don’t exit.
Then, they made them exist, but with malicious code - like this one ‘arangodb’ which
was purely a ChatGPT hallucination.
If someone were to have this package recommended to them by ChatGPT, and then went on to install
it, they’d end up unknowingly backdooring their computer.
Whether this method of attack, which is being called “AI package hallucinations” ever
becomes an actual thing, remains to be seen.
But it’s not like cyber miscreants aren’t on the hunt for new methods of propagating
malicious packages.
Malicious packages are already a rampant problem for open source package registries, recently
the official python package index pypi actually had to temporarily pause new submissions thanks
to a high volume of malware.
Currently a lot of this malware simply relies on people misspelling genuine packages, leading
them to the fake malicious typosquatted ones.
As always, thanks for watching, and, as you can see I’ve flip flopped yet again back
to the multi topic videos.
I think from here on in I’ll be trying a hybrid approach with multi topic videos for
smaller news stories, but standalone videos for longer ones, but I guess as usual everything
is always a test.
But alway let me know your thoughts down below, and I’ll see you in the next video, have
a good one.