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posted by azrael on Saturday July 12 2014, @08:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the tricorder-malfunction dept.

Handheld scanners are installed with sophisticated malware by China-based threat actors in order to target shipping and logistics organizations all over the world says the security firm TrapX (report 15 MB PDF).

The attack begins at a Chinese company that provides hardware and software for handheld scanners used by shipping and logistics firms worldwide to inventory items they handle. The manufacturer installs the malware on the embedded Microsoft Windows XP devices.

Experts determined that the threat group target servers that stores corporate financial data, customer data and other sensitive information. A second payload downloaded by the malware then establishes a sophisticated C&C on the company's finance servers, enabling the attackers to exfiltrate the information they're after.

The malware used by the Zombie Zero attackers is highly sophisticated and polymorphic, the researchers said. One observed attack revealed that 16 of the 48 scanners used by the victim were infected, and the malware managed to penetrate the targeted organization's defenses and gain access to servers on the corporate network.

Interestingly, the C&C is located at the Lanxiang Vocational School, an educational institution said to be involved in the Operation Aurora attacks against Google, and is physically located one block away from the scanner manufacturer, TrapX said. Another possible attack vector is of course the labels with printed binary data. Compartmentalized networks and a strict API enforcement gateway may be ways to combat threats like these.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13 2014, @07:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13 2014, @07:35PM (#68615)

    RTOS (many based on Linux)
    Off-topic

    that we have seen targeted in recent years
    Citation needed
    ...or did you mean that UNSUCCESSFUL attempts have been made.
    Citation still needed

    such as the Iran nuclear center hacks
    The target of Stuxnet was WINDOZE .
    The lameoids at Siemens only wrote the programming app for their PLCs to run under Redmond's easily-infected OS.
    Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the OS made of eggshells and swiss cheese could guess what would happen next.

    ...and those Siemens Programmable Logic Controllers did not run Linux.
    Those systems were running proprietary code as well.
    (That task-specific code is considerably less complex than Linux.)

    Your dishonest attempt to distort the truth and smear Linux (yet again) is quite transparent and very shameful.
    The fact that you didn't mention that it was Windoze that got infected is also typical of your fanboyism and dishonest nature.

    -- gewg_