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Tag: SecurityScorecard

  • DeepSeek Security Review: “Not overtly malicious” but still concerning

    I think by now everyone in the tech industry already knows about DeepSeek: it’s the new mold-breaking, disruptive Large Language Model (LLM) from the Chinese company of the same name. It achieves good performance, and the company claims to have trained it for a tiny fraction of the cost of the top LLMs. Certainly, it’s svelte enough to run a version of it on an Android device.

    There have been security concerns from the start, and a few countries have banned or restricted its use, including Italy, Australia, and the United States Navy.

    SecurityScorecard’s STRIKE team has performed in-depth analysis of DeepSeek, and their results are mixed. Their key findings:

    • The DeepSeek Android app has security vulnerabilities, such as weak encryption, SQL injection risks, and hardcoded keys.
    • It has a broad data collection scope, including user inputs, device data, and keystroke patterns, stored in China.
    • There are concerns about data transmission to Chinese state-owned entities and ByteDance.
    • The app employs anti-debugging mechanisms.
    • DeepSeek has faced regulatory scrutiny and bans in multiple countries.
    • Code analysis reveals integration with ByteDance‘s services.
    • The app requests permissions for internet access, phone state, and location.
    • Third-party domains that the app connects to, like Ktor, have failing security scores, which raises business risks related to data security.
    • Despite security weaknesses and  privacy concerns, no overtly malicious behavior was detected.

    I think a lot of these are unsurprising: DeepSeek was up front about their data being stored within the People’s Republic of China. The requests for permissions that the app doesn’t really need are almost standard these days, and if Google did it (they do), we wouldn’t think twice.

    Of concern to me is their poor security practices in general, combined with collecting potentially quite private data. As STRIKE points out, it’s weird to use anti-debugging mechanisms, especially for a company claiming to be transparent.

    I don’t think this analysis is going to change anyone’s opinion of DeepSeek: it was widely criticized as a security risk before, just on the basis of sending information to China. Lax security within the app is probably not a big deal compared to that, but it does potentially mean that your data might be exposed to other entities as well.

    I promise: next time I’ll write about something other than SecurityScorecard. I came across this one while reading the previous report, and I wanted to see what they had to say.

  • North Korean Malware Wins at Hide and Seek

    Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

    SecurityScorecard has released a report describing how they uncovered evidence of an attack by North Korea’s Lazarus Group against developers. The attack uses sophisticated anti-detection techniques to deliver its new implant Marstech1, designed to steal cryptocurrency wallets.

    Marstech1, a JavaScript implant, is being served by Lazarus’s Command & Control (C2) server, and a similar implant was also added to several open source GitHub repositories.

    This malware targets the directories used by Exodus and Atomic Crypto wallets. It can copy the data, package it, and send it to the C2 server.

    What makes Marstech1 unique, though, is the extent to which its authors have gone to obfuscate the code to avoid detection. From the report:

    The Marstech implants utilize different obfuscation techniques than previously seen. The JS implant that was
    observed utilizes;

    • Control flow flattening & self-invoking functions
    • Random variable and function names
    • Base64 string encoding
    • Anti-debugging (anti-tamporing [sic] checks)
    • Splitting and recombining strings

    This ensures that if the threat actor embedded the JS into a software project it would go unnoticed.

    There’s a full explanation in the report, so if you’re interested I highly recommend it. Suffice it to say that security researchers have their work cut out for them right now.