Blogs @ SelvanSoft: Compromised

Showing posts with label Compromised. Show all posts

Thursday, July 23, 2026

Your IP Address Isn’t a Security Risk

The myth
There is a common misconception among many internet users, especially younger generation gamers, that someone knowing their IP address somehow gives them the ability to "hack" them. This myth has been spread by non-technical users, social media, and various news outlets. The fact is that every website you visit knows your IP address because it needs this information to send content (text, images, ads, etc.) so it can be displayed on your browser. This is how the internet works, not just websites. In addition to your IP address, your browser provides much more information to the sites you visit than you may realize. Visit this link (https://myip.selvansoft.com) to see some of the details your browser shares with websites, which may surprise or even shock you, but that is a different topic for another blog.

What is an IP address?
An IP address is just a number. Your internet service provider (ISP) assigns one to your internet connection, and it can change over time. Only your ISP knows that it was assigned to you, and they will not disclose your information unless they receive a request from law enforcement accompanied by a proper court order. Being afraid that someone knows your IP address is like worrying that people saw your car’s license plate while you were driving around the city. Unless you have committed a crime and are fleeing from law enforcement, this is not a problem. Similarly, if you have not done anything unlawful online, you have nothing to worry about if someone claims they have your IP address. They cannot do anything with it.

Realistic but unlikely risks
To be complete, there are a few extremely rare scenarios worth mentioning. If you intentionally expose a vulnerable service or enable UPnP on your router, it is possible for someone to attack your machine. Some gamers enable UPnP to run gaming server without fully understanding the impact. Finally, if someone with a deep understanding of TCP/IP networking is determined to attack you for some unusual reason, they could perform a denial-of-service attack on your router using only your public IP address and knock it offline. While this is technically possible, it is not probable.

Stay Informed and Safe Online
If you enjoyed this blog, you'll find many more cybersecurity related microblogs at link below. They offer valuable insights to help you stay informed and safe online. Explore them at https://blog.selvansoft.com. Also, checkout free online security tools at https://selvansoft.com/tools/

Friday, July 10, 2026

Infostealer

What is an infostealer?
Infostealers are lightweight malware that silently extract passwords, session cookies, authentication tokens, autofill data, cryptocurrency wallets, and other sensitive information, then exfiltrate them to an attacker-controlled server. They are highly successful because most infections are self-inflicted, coming from users who intentionally execute fake installers, fake captcha prompts, cracked/pirated software, game mods, or "free" software that provide a pathway for the compromise to execute. Once executed, the malware exfiltrates everything instantly, leaving almost no artifacts for antivirus tools to detect. The reason is that they use native OS components and common tools built into each platform, such as PowerShell on Windows, bash, terminal, and osascript on macOS, along with curl on both platforms to collect and siphon credentials. These actions appear as normal user or system activity to virus/malware scanners both during and after execution. So don't bother wasting time on virus/malware scans, as they will likely find nothing.

What is compromised?
Infostealers mainly focus on two things. The first is exfiltrating session cookies and authenticated tokens from the device they run on. The second is decrypting encrypted databases that contain passwords and other sensitive information from various locations. Both types of information are sent to a remote attacker‑controlled server. Whether you are on macOS or Windows, the first step always succeeds because it requires no user input and happens very quickly, so there is nothing a user can do to stop it. If your device is a Mac, the behavior is different due to macOS native protection. While session cookie exfiltration is successful on macOS, the malware needs the Mac user password for other things like decrypting password databases, crypto wallets, and similar items, so it will prompt you to enter your password. If you do not provide the password, the malware cannot steal your passwords or other sensitive data protected by the password. Aside from this, the infostealer also siphons out crypto wallet keys, TOTP seeds, API keys, SSH keys, and many other items, including installing background services. The last one listed requires doing a clean reinstall of the OS.

How to recover?
The recovery steps depend on the type of device the compromise was executed on. If the device is Windows, unfortunately both session cookies and all passwords, crypto wallet keys, and similar data are exfiltrated successfully. However, if the device is a Mac and you did not provide your password when prompted, you only need to recover from stolen session cookies. On the other hand, if you did provide your Mac password, the compromise is identical to Windows. I have dissected several variants of infostealers and found that architecturally they are identical in how they operate, so the steps below apply to any variant. Follow the steps in the exact order specified to effectively recover from an infostealer compromise.

1. Revoke active sessions: This is the most critical step that most people miss. Unlike what many armchair experts advise on infostealer compromise, you should not waste time trying to find a clean device for this step. Just do it right on the compromised device without disconnecting from the internet as soon as you realize you are a victim of an infostealer. The reason I recommend using the same device is because not all online services provide a way to log out from all devices, and your main goal is to revoke the stolen session cookies, not the session cookies on other devices that are not stolen and are perfectly fine. If a service does not provide a logout‑from‑all‑devices option, your attacker will keep access to that service for a long time until the stolen session cookie naturally expires, which can take hours, days, or even weeks. So it is very important to use the same compromised device for this step. The actual step to revoke the session is simply logging out from every service on that device, which makes the stolen session cookies useless to the attacker. Do not do anything else on that device. Once you have logged out of all services, turn off the compromised device.

2. Change password: This step must be done using a device that is not compromised, or on your compromised device if you have already reinstalled the OS as described in step 4 below. Login to each of your online accounts and change your password or optionally change to a passphrase. Enable 2FA if not enabled already, preferably an authenticator app or hardware key-based method rather than SMS. Make sure there are no email forwarding rules in your email accounts. Setup a recovery email if there is not one already and finally, regenerate the backup codes.

3. Backup: Backup your documents, photos, and other data. Infostealers cannot damage them and do not even target that type of content. They are perfectly fine to backup and restore after the next step. You only need to worry about your primary drive where the operating system resides. Your external drives are fine because infostealers do not interact with them as far as I know.

4. Reinstall OS: If your compromised device is a PC, create a bootable media. It can be a USB stick or secondary SSD with an installable OS obtained directly from Microsoft. Now go to your compromised device BIOS settings and enable booting from the alternate drive, the USB or secondary SSD, and choose to do a complete wipe and reinstall of Windows on your primary SSD or hard drive. For a Mac, boot into recovery mode, choose Disk Utility, and select the top-level internal disk to erase. Follow that by selecting reinstall macOS. If you are unsure how to do this, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube you can follow to accomplish this step.

5. Browser Extensions: This would be a good time to review all your browser extensions, delete the ones you do not use, and validate the ones you use regularly. Most people have no idea how much access they grant to browser extensions or how dangerous they can be. I highly recommend reading this blog that explains the details. https://blog.selvansoft.com/2026/05/browser-extensions.html

6. Safety Tips: Follow as many online safety tips as possible from the blog link below. The more of them you follow, the stronger your online safety becomes. https://blog.selvansoft.com/2025/01/online-safety-tips.html

7. Monitor: Monitor your credit cards, online banking, and similar financial accounts. Optionally, I recommend freezing your credit following this guide: https://blog.selvansoft.com/2023/05/howto-credit-freeze.html

8. Advice: Stay away from installing stuff from random websites. You can assume all free/pirated software has some form of malware. There is no such thing as a safe website to download free stuff. It just does not exist, regardless of what you heard or what your buddy online told you about a software from a site being safe.

Stay Informed and Safe Online

If you enjoyed this blog, you'll find many more cybersecurity related microblogs at link below. They offer valuable insights to help you stay informed and safe online. Explore them at https://blog.selvansoft.com. Also, checkout free online security tools at https://selvansoft.com/tools/

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Juice Jacking: Real Threat or just Fear Mongering?

Juice jacking refers to malicious activity through USB charging ports or unfamiliar USB cables that can result in malware injection or data theft. The threat is real and was demonstrated by security researchers through a POC more than a decade ago. Devices like the O.MG cable, available online for under $200, are specifically designed to exploit this attack vector by emulating HID class devices and silently injecting keystrokes without any involvement from the OS or the user.

However, this attack is extremely rare and is likely to occur only in highly targeted scenarios. Even so, there are no documented cases of a real-world incident since the POC was published. The odds of an average user being victimized by it are lower than the odds of being struck by lightning 😃. For the attack to succeed, the attacker must be physically close, within Wi-Fi range of the embedded chip inside the malicious cable, or the device can connect to an attacker-controlled access point to extend the reach. It also depends on tricking the device into joining the access point it creates. Most public charging stations are simply power sources. Even when data lines are present, some platforms like iOS have built-in restrictions that make exploitation difficult. Unfortunately, most popular operating systems such as macOS, Android, Windows, and Linux all trust HID class devices by default, which means a malicious cable could execute commands immediately without any consent from the user or the operating system.

In summary, for an average person, juice jacking is not a practical concern. The hype surrounding it often borders on sensationalism. If you are concerned, avoid the paranoia and use a data blocker. Alternatively, as shown in the picture below, you can modify a regular USB cable by cutting the green and white data lines and leaving only the red and black power lines intact, then taping it all back together. This is essentially what a data blocker does. It is a simple and effective solution that gives you control, rather than relying on the operating system or trusting the power source or a third-party data blocker to protect your device.

Stay Informed and Safe Online

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Pwned Perspective: Understanding email/password leaks without the panic

Lately, there’s been a wave of panic on social media about email and password leaks. This blog aims to highlight why it’s not the end of the world, how common these incidents are, and how understanding the facts can help you not only stay safer online but also avoid unnecessary panic. As the title suggests, this blog focuses solely on leaked login credentials (i.e., usernames, emails, & passwords) and does not cover data breaches involving PII (SSN, DOB, DL, name/address etc). If you’re affected by that kind of breach, freeze your credit file immediately by following this link.

Chances are, your email and passwords have been exposed in one of numerous past breaches; it's an established reality, not an assumption. Services like Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) collect this leaked data so you can check whether your credentials have surfaced on the dark web.

But don’t panic. Most people don't know that a pwned password is not your actual password in plain text, but a hashed version. Although there have been a few rare incidents where passwords were leaked in plain text, that’s uncommon so you can assume pretty much all breached passwords are hashed and require cracking to become usable. If your password is long, strong, and includes special characters, numbers, etc., it becomes impractical and nearly impossible to crack without powerful computing resources and may take days, weeks, or even months or years to crack depending on the complexity of the password. Hackers don’t have that kind of time and skip these in favor of easier, crackable passwords. Also, if the affected account has two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, your exposure is minimal. Still, treat it as a heads-up.

In summary, if your passwords are strong and unique and you had 2FA enabled, you can safely assume you are fine. In any case, make sure you do the following:

Change your passwords immediately, especially if reused
Enable 2FA wherever possible, preferably using an authenticator app that generates OTP instead of SMS-based verification
Always use strong and unique passwords or preferably use passphrases

It’s not about fear; it’s about stacking the odds in your favor. Hackers aren’t chasing hard battles; they want quick wins. Don’t be the easy one!

Stay Informed and Safe Online

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Is your computer compromised?

Easy way to check if your computer is/was compromised now or in the past

With the recent addition of Naz.API dataset (a massive collection of over 1 billion stolen username and passwords) to HIBP service ("Have I Been Pwned" - a service by troyhunt.com), it is now very easy to check if your computer is compromised by information stealing malware now or in the past.

Go to the HIBP service at https://haveibeenpwned.com and enter your e-mail (don’t worry, it is 100% safe) and check the search results. The results may span several pages, so make sure to scroll down and check all the breaches your email is listed as compromised. Keep in mind that it is not at all unusual to see your email show up on multiple breaches. For example, see the screenshot below of my own email search.

As you scroll through the list, check if your email is listed for Naz.API. If your email was one of the unfortunate one to be included in the Naz.API list, it is a clear indication that your computer is now or in the past was compromised and information was stolen. The very least you can do is to make sure your current password is not included in the list. There are couple of ways you can check. I know some password managers like 1Password for example can check all your passwords against HIBP database. If you don’t use any tools that support checking your password in HIBP database you are welcome to use my php script at my GitHub repo below which does the same thing, the only caveat is that it checks one password at a time against HIBP database, so you have to repeat that for all your passwords.

https://github.com/aselvan/scripts/blob/master/security/pwned_password.php

How to run: If you are on a Mac or Linux, you can run the script directly with the two commands as shown below ... If you are windows, you have to install php, curl etc first which is beyond the scope of this blog.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aselvan/scripts/master/security/pwned_password.php -o /tmp/pwned_password.php

php /tmp/pwned_password.php

If you are unfortunate to have your password listed in HIBP as per the tools (1Password or my script or any others that check your password against HIBP), and if it is any of your current passwords, change it ASAP and enable 2F if that’s not already in place. If your current password is not found, it means an old password you used in the past was compromised. Still, it is a good idea to change all your passwords ASAP.

If you use more than one email address now or in the past, repeat this for each e-mail.

For further details can be found at the following links

Stay Informed and Safe Online