EXCLUSIVE — While revealing details of a massive supply chain cyber attack against ASUS customers, Russian security firm Kaspersky last week didn’t release the full list all MAC addresses that hackers hardcoded into their malware to surgically target a specific pool of users.
Instead, Kaspersky released a dedicated offline tool and launched an online web page where ASUS PC users can search for their MAC addresses to check whether they were in the hit list.
However, many believe it is not a convenient way for large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of systems to know if they were targeted or not.
List of MAC Addresses Targeted in ASUS Supply Chain Attack
To solve this and help other cybersecurity experts continue their hunt for related hacking campaigns, Australian security firm Skylight’s CTO Shahar Zini contacted The Hacker News and provided the full list of nearly 583 MAC addresses targeted in the ASUS breach.
“If information regarding targets exists, it should be made publicly available to the security community so we can better protect ourselves,” Skylight said in a post shared with The Hacker News.
“So, we thought it would be a good idea to extract the list and make it public so that every security practitioner would be able to bulk compare them to known machines in their domain.”
Skylight researchers retrieved the list of targeted MAC addresses with the help of the offline tool Kaspersky released, which contains the full list of 619 MAC addresses within the executable, but protected using a salted hash algorithm.
They used a powerful Amazon server and a modified version of HashCat password cracking tool to brute force 583 MAC addresses in less than an hour.
“Enter Amazon’s AWS p3.16xlarge instance. These beasts carry eight (you read correctly) of NVIDIA’s V100 Tesla 16GB GPUs. The entire set of 1300 prefixes was brute-forced in less than an hour.”
ASUS Hack: Operation ShadowHammer
It was revealed last week that a group of state-sponsored hackers managed to hijack ASUS Live automatic software update server last year and pushed malicious updates to over one million Windows computers worldwide in order to infect them with backdoors.
As we reported last week, Kaspersky discovered the attack, which it dubbed Operation ShadowHammer, after its 57,000 users were infected with the backdoored version of ASUS LIVE Update software.
images from Hacker News
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