VXers say Microsoft’s good intentions let them brew truly evil malware
Trend Micro researcher Jay Yaneza says Point of Sale malware has begun using Microsoft .NET, following its release as open source last year.
Yaneza found the new so-called GamaPoS malware being distributed to US organisations including credit unions, developers, and pet care businesses through the resurgent Andromeda botnet. He says the use of .NET as a platform to build point of sales malware is unique and likely to be adopted by the criminal underground.
“GamaPoS holds the distinction of being a .NET scraper — something unseen in prior PoS threats,” Yaneza says .
“We can attribute this development to the fact that it is easier to create malware in the .NET platform and, now that Microsoft made it available as an open-source platform, more developers are expected to use it for their applications.
“This makes .NET a viable platform to use for attacks.”
Yaneza says GamaPoS uses Andromeda’s back doors to spread in a shotgun fashion further infecting about four percent of the botnet’s existing victims.
The malware combines two malicious features including PsExec, which hackers used to help pop retailer Target last year, and the Mimikatz hack tool that is considered one of the best vacuumers of Windows credentials.
That combination grants attackers a high degree of capability to move laterally inside breached networks.
Andromedia infections.
Victims are targeted using phishing scams that masquerade as would-be guidance on Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or as information on installing Oracle’s MICROS, a popular payment operating system which it can also compromise.
GamaPoS will siphon Visa and Discover cards to its command and control servers over HTTPS.
“Using an old botnet as a shotgun method to cast a wide net for targets has its merits,” Yaneza says.
“Using spam and exploit kits to establish a large mass of bots enables operators to steal information from specific targets, some of which can be resold to other threat actors.”
Updated 14th July 2022. And again 15th July 2022 and well, a few more times 🙂
It seems we have come along way in what seems a short amount of time. Actually its a lot longer than I care to think about. Now a days I spend my time knee-deep in databases and data entry forms and lets not forget, reports. Data, data, data. But there was a time when such things were the last thing on my mind. Dare I say it something much more frivolous and fun. Games. Back when people were writing software in their bedrooms (we weren’t called developers then) and games weren’t multi-million pound productions with hundreds of people working on them. For the record I didn’t have my first computer in the bedroom. It was for the whole family and used the TV in the front room. It was a Commodore VIC-20. Which later was upgraded to a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga 1000.
Writing My First Game
But writing code has always been fun and I had to have a go at my favourite arcade game of the time, Donkey Kong. I never got very far playing on it. It’s still pretty damn hard when I try playing it with MAME. But its only got 4 levels so they’re not going to let you do it quickly. I had already got one game coded on the VIC-20. A breakout clone. Even managed to sell a copy of it to a friend. Actually he wanted to buy it. There was definitely a shortage of good quality games at the time. If I remember correctly it would only get every brick if I allowed the ball to go through a wall once or twice. Certainly made it interesting to play.
Wanting to do better next time I aimed higher. This time I had designed a new font for the game. This was essential for a VIC-20 game as custom fonts were used to display graphics. The Mario like character, the Kong character, platform, everything, was a character in a font or made of several characters. That meant I could use that font designer we typed in from a listing in Compute magazine. Of course we typed it in. There was no Internet, we couldn’t download it. There was nowhere to download it from. Program source code was printed in magazines and people had to type it in. Of course they had to make sure they typed it in correctly, or they would be playing an entirely different kind of game. A bug hunting one. A lot more frustrating and not nearly as much fun. Some of those listings were hexadecimal assembly code. They even had special software to make typing that in that bit easier. But you had to type those in first of course.
Just as Much Fun Designing It
I liked the designing graphics part. That was definitely fun for me, and it made the creation of the code to make them move about the screen more interesting. After all what would you rather watch, a funny little man running around the screen or the letters “A” and “B”. As we were moving characters or symbols around the screen this wasn’t smooth pixel movement. This was move a graphic 8 pixels a time for every step. But hey those were the days. Moving graphics around the screen a pixel at a time was more complicated for the old VIC-20. It could be done but that meant manipulating the custom font in real-time to map a graphic to a set number of characters. This meant some very clever code in assembler.
I wasn’t quiet at the stage yet. But I didn’t let it stop me from going ahead and coding my version of Donkey Kong. Of course I couldn’t call it that. So I came up with the name Logger. After all those do look like logs rolling down the platforms. It didn’t seem long at all before I had a working game written in BASIC that only had one screen and only one log-rolling at once. But it worked and it was only my second attempt at coding. So I was quite proud.
Around this time a new magazine had started to be published in the UK called “Computer and Video Games“. Or C&VG for short. As there weren’t a great deal of games to review they, like other magazines, published the source code of games for the readers to type in and, cross their fingers and, hope it worked. I thought why not send mine in. A month or so later I received a copy of the magazine in the post and a cheque for 10 pounds. Much boasting to my college friends followed. Can’t remember if they were impressed or not.
Why this trip down a very long memory lane? The guilty confession is something that you are probably guilty of. Googling yourself. You haven’t done that? Really? Of course not. Lower down my search results was something I hadn’t seen for sometime. Site’s have catalogued nearly every game you can think of. This particular site (GB64) had not found “Logger” in the magazine, but in a book. As apparently it had been collected with many others and reprinted. They even had a screenshot. How about that. You can even download it from here. Well, it saves you from having to type it in.
Update. I have since found another link to the listing as featured in Computer & Video Games magazine. It can be found at VIC-20 listings. The issue they state that Logger was in Issue 18 (Apr 1983), pages 64-67. They even have a link to a download and a screen capture of the original VIC-20 version. Also it reminded me that a 3KB memory expansion card was necessary. Must be all those custom graphics.
Doing it the old fashioned way!
Update!
Seems that Logger made it onto the TRS-80. As the this link shows. Taken from the same code as the C64 version but with the font data removed. It would be interesting to see how that looks as there are no screen pictures in the book. The publisher is Haynes which I think must be connected with the published of “Getting Ahead: Fantastic Games for the Vic 20” which also published “Logger”. I wasn’t notified about it being published in either book at any time and received no payments for this. But at least they did leave my name attached.
Another Update
Then in another search another Logger video appears. This time it is from Youtuber Jim Gerrie. Who seems to have typed in the code and made a video from the game. It is in wonderful ASCII animation. Whoever it was that did this conversion did a very good job of it, added some nice little touches too. They should have their name attached to this as well. See the video below. Please Jim a like and subscribe to his channel (I have) for his hard work and dedication.
Microsoft Garage is an initiative at Microsoft that works like an internal accelerator, taking ideas that employees have outside of their ordinary day jobs and turning them into real apps. The first batch broke cover last October, and now there are nine new projects making their official debut today.
These include a mobile app that lets software engineers check in on Visual Studio Online projects in a secure way without having to be on the company intranet on their notebook; a weather app designed for use in China that offers air quality reports customised for each user; and a conference call management app that can pull meeting ID and pins from invites and automatically enter the details to connect you to your call with a simple tap or voice command.
DevSpace, Your Weather and Join Conference are the apps Microsoft highlighted in a blog post announcing the new slate, but a few that might be even more useful for some users include Keyboard for Excel, which replaces your software keyboard with something specific to Excel, for optimal input of figures and formulas. The SquadWatch app, another Garage production, provides real-time location on friends and family who agree to take part, much like a Find My Friends for Windows Phone.
Other new apps that have already broken cover but that are re-launching with new features or updates in this batch include Mouse without Borders, which allows you to control multiple computers with a single mouse and keyboard; Developer Assistant, which offers a way to browse and re-use code snippets and samples from Visual Studio; Picturesque Lock Screen, which puts Bing home page pictures on your Android lock screen, as well as direct search and call/text notifications; and finally Torque, which gets updates that let you define Android shake behaviour to trigger a range of actions, including voice search, calls, dictation or app launching.
Microsoft’s Garage is producing some of the most interesting software to come out of Redmond or any of the MS satellite offices in years, and this collection is no exception. Fostering innovation in an organisation that size, which in many ways depends on stability and an innate conservatism is no small feat. Garage has managed to produce some interesting stuff you probably wouldn’t see come out of Microsoft’s main businesses, so it’s definitely helping to reduce the risks associated with large, slow-moving corporate entities.
I’ve always liked Microsoft OneDrive and this could be a good way of sharing your files between your web apps and mobile apps. I’ve had a little project on the back burner for a while. Maybe a reason to dust it off now.
Despite recent partnerships with Dropbox, Box and other cloud storage solutions, Microsoft isn’t giving up on OneDrive: the company is today launching a new API for the platform.
The new tool lets developers integrate OneDrive right into their apps; the API supports Windows, iOS, Android and the Web. It also brings some new features, such as:
Allow apps to retrieve new changes to files and folders with minimal sync calls
Resume uploads of files up to 10GB
Customizable file thumbnail images for better design integration
Previously, developers had to use the Live SDK in order to integrate OneDrive into their apps; though that will still work, Microsoft is encouraging developers to shift towards the new API because of its new features.
Interested developers can check out the new API at Microsoft’s hub.
The good thing for developers who use Microsoft tools is there is no shortage of those tools. If you’re just starting out there is now no shortage of tools that will help you without having to throw you in at the deep end. Still there is a lot to learn but where to start has gotten a little easier.
Microsoft Imagine connects you with the tools and knowledge you need to create, code, and develop your ideas. So whether you’re new to coding, studying it in school, or planning for your career, you can dream big, build creatively, and boldly bring your ideas to life. Microsoft Imagine Access is students all-access pass for the software tools they need, no matter their skill level or experience, and all at no cost.
