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Opera breached, has code cert stolen, possibly spreads malware
- ernesth 13y agoSo should I trust the update that apt-get shows me? There is a 12.16.1760 in the deb.opera.com repository while the opera main page gives a download for version 12.15!
- jdhendrickson 13y agoUntil we know more it would be folly to upgrade, I would recommend using a different browser for the time being.
- gbrindisi 13y agoFrom the Sophos article the malware spread is Zeus which is Windows based.
- James_Duval 13y agoZeus? As in banking-details-stealing trojan horse Zeus? As someone who has Opera installed on their home machine, which they also use for banking, how worried should I be? Would Malwarebytes be enough to find and remove the trojan? EDIT: http://malwaretips.com/blogs/zeus-trojan-virus/ http://malwaretips.com/blogs/zeus-trojan-virus/
- socillion 13y agoVirus scan FTA: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/8ecbca0de44c82d1c7ffced288aa68c1247bb1255693cd1c5747fb6cef394b43/analysis/ https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/8ecbca0de44c82d1c7ffced28... That shows MalwareBytes detecting it as Trojan.Downloader.szb, and it does appear to be Zeus or a close variant. I'd be concerned. > It is possible that a few thousand Windows users, who were using Opera between 01.00 and 01.36 UTC on June 19th, may automatically have received and installed the malicious software.
- luchs 13y agoAt least for me, Opera always asks for Administrator privileges before installing anything, so if you didn't happen to install updates in the timeframe given, you should be fine.
- pestaa 13y agoThe article claims the official story is unclear, but I disagree. As a potential customer, I've learnt everything I need to know to protect myself from vulnerabilities. (Though the inner hacker would like to hear how their infrastructure was compromised and whether it can have any effect on related services, such as Fastmail.) Opera also states the security breach has been handled on their end, so I see nothing wrong with the announcement's title either. It would be unfortunate if the situation got out of hand, with recent fundamental changes to their browser, Opera now needs 100% focus to stay competitive.
- alfiejohn_ 13y agoFastMail runs on completely separate infrastructure and there were no indications of a compromise. However to be on the safe side we've taken a number of precautions including blowing away every machine (fai-project.org FTW!) and updating credentials everywhere.
- josteink 13y agoOw. That's really, really bad. Opera is already a pretty small actor so stuff like this probably hurts them more than the bigger guys. This incident will probably show in the bottom-line later on. Hope they get their things sorted out, and I really hope they learn enough to avoid having anything like this happening in the future. Things like this are never OK if there is a second time around.
- antocv 13y agoThis is really bad, but it depends who the attacker is, I wouldnt hold it against them if it was a government (or government sponsored entity).
- aqrashik 13y agoA government (or government sponsored entity) probably wouldn't be so brazen to start using the stolen certificate to distribute malware on Opera's site. I would imagine that keeping this a secret would be worth a lot more to the right people.
- antocv 13y agoPerhaps this has happened to many other software firms, and the malware, is all undetected, perhaps they just screwed up their tracks this time.
- Nux 13y agoOpera is still big on mobile, there's still nothing quite like Opera Mini, they should be careful at defending this.
- thezilch 13y agoWhat do you mean nothing quite like it? It may be the very best at supporting more platforms and raw speed, but Amazon Silk [0] and Chrome Mobile [1] are hot on their heals. There are a lot of advantages (eg. how CSS and JS aren't hamstrung) to the later two, and not having to traverse to SWE networks has to be advantageous -- anecdotal. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk [1] https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/data-compression https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/data-compre...
- workbench 13y agoReally bad news for the 3 opera users
- alistair77 13y agoI guess you're completely ignorant of how widely used their software is. I really need to get enough points to downvote :<
- AndreasFrom 13y agoYou can click on link and then flag it if you think it's appropriate. "If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)" - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rimantas 13y agoAlas, that wide usage barely shows up in stats. Desktop version has significant market share in some USSR countries (Belarus, Ukraine, Russia), but in others is a couple percents at best. They do brag about the large install base on the mobile, but let's face it: Opera may be the best way to browse the web on your feature-phone, but the experience is still terrible, and Opera does not really show on the mobile traffice map. So while the deleted comment was unfair Opera's fans shouldn't overdo the effort to portray it as something it was not.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- perlgeek 13y agoThere's another possibility: Maybe opera has an internal service that accepts software uploads and automatically signs them. That way an attacker might have spread malware without having stolen the certificate.
- jacobr 13y agoOfficial announcement: http://my.opera.com/securitygroup/blog/2013/06/26/opera-infrastructure-attack http://my.opera.com/securitygroup/blog/2013/06/26/opera-infr...
- hmottestad 13y ago"...may automatically have received and installed the malicious software..." That is nice. Automatic installation of malware. It's the way to go :)
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoJust count how many apps, devices (firmware), programs etc. there are which do not use any certs at all. Using automatic updates is very real danger. I just think most uses / admins do not think how common it actually is.
- pbsdp 13y agoThis is a pretty compelling argument against silent automatic updates.
- BCM43 13y agoHow so? The alternative is people got a pop-up, then click install without verifying it (how could they?). It's functionally the same thing almost all the time.
- mikevm 13y agoHow would this be any different if a dialog box popped up asking you to install a new update? I bet most people (including you?) would just click "Continue".
- mikhailt 13y agoNo, it isn't, this would've affected all manual, silent/or visible automatic updates. Users checking for updates or visible automatic update prompts during that timeframe that Opera said was offering the infected update would still get the malware. People assume that getting automatic update prompts would allow them to stop the update if they heard about an infected update. The problem with that logic is that by the time the companies know about a breach, they would've shut down the automatic update FIRST and then fix the breach, then resume it. Customers would rarely know about that breach in advance, so the prompt wouldn't change anything here.
- counterpointer 13y agoThe signing keys are the weakest link in the security infrastructure and are essentially the keys to the kingdom. We have seen this happen repeatedly, I think it's time for all companies to build a lot of safeguards around the use of their private signing keys, like making employees input it manually everytime, or even split it across multiple employees. For Opera at least, I don't think they do releases that frequently.
- stock_toaster 13y agoI wonder if this impacted Fastmail as well... ;_;
- unlikelymordant 13y agonope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5952266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5952266
- stock_toaster 13y agoAh. Thanks for the pointer.