Tuesday 25 August 2020

Beating the Emotet Malware with SSL Interception

Guest post by Adrian Taylor, Regional VP of Sales for A10 Networks  

The Emotet trojan recently turned from a major cybersecurity threat to a laughingstock when its payloads were replaced by harmless animated GIFs. Taking advantage of a weakness in the way Emotet malware components were stored, white-hat hackers donned their vigilante masks and sabotaged the operations of the recently revived cyberthreat. While highly effective as well as somewhat humorous, the incident should not distract attention from two unavoidable truths. 
First, while the prank deactivated about a quarter of all Emotet malware payload downloads, the botnet remains a very real, ongoing threat and a prime vector for attacks such as ransomware. And second, relying on one-off operations by whimsical vigilantes is hardly a sustainable security strategy. To keep the remaining active Emotet botnets—and countless other cyber threats—out of their environment, organisations need to rely on more robust and reliable measures based on SSL interception (SSL inspection) and SSL decryption.

History of Emotet and the threat it presents
First identified in 2014, version one of Emotet was designed to steal bank account details by intercepting internet traffic. A short time after, a new version of the software was detected. This version, dubbed Emotet version two, came packaged with several modules, including a money transfer system, malspam module, and a banking module that targeted German and Austrian banks. Last year, we saw reports of a botnet-driven spam campaign targeting German, Polish, Italian, and English victims with craftily worded subject lines like “Payment Remittance Advice” and “Overdue Invoice.” Opening the infected Microsoft Word document initiates a macro, which in turn downloads Emotet from compromised WordPress sites.

After a relative quiet start to 2020, the Emotet trojan resurfaced suddenly with a surge of activity in mid-July. This time around, the botnet’s reign of terror took an unexpected turn when the payloads its operators had stored on – poorly secured WordPress sites – were replaced with a series of popular GIFs. Instead of being alerted of a successful cyberattack, the respective targets received nothing more alarming than an image of Blink 182, James Franco, or Hackerman.

Whilst this is all in good fun, the question remains: what if the white hats had left their masks in the drawer instead of taking on the Emotet trojan? And what about the countless other malware attacks that continue unimpeded, delivering their payloads as intended?

A view into the encryption blind spot with SSL interception (SSL inspection)
Malware attacks such as Emotet often take advantage of a fundamental flaw in internet security. To protect data, most companies routinely rely on SSL encryption or TLS encryption. This practice is highly effective for preventing spoofing, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other common exploits from compromising data security and privacy. Unfortunately, it also creates an ideal hiding place for hackers. To security devices inspecting inbound communications for threats, encrypted traffic appears as gibberish—including malware. In fact, more than half of the malware attacks seen today are using some form of encryption. As a result, the SSL encryption blind spot ends up being a major hole in the organisation’s defence strategy.

The most obvious way to address this problem would be to decrypt traffic as it arrives to enable SSL inspection before passing it along to its destination within the organisation—an approach known as SSL interception. But here too, problems arise. For one thing, some types of data are not allowed to be decrypted, such as the records of medical patients governed by privacy standards like HIPAA, making across-the-board SSL decryption unsuitable. And for any kind of traffic, SSL decryption can greatly degrade the performance of security devices while increasing network latency, bottlenecks, cost, and complexity. Multiply these impacts by the number of components in the typical enterprise security stack—DLP, antivirus, firewall, IPS, and IDS—and the problem becomes clear.

How efficient SSL inspection saves the day
With many organisations relying on distributed per-hop SSL decryption. A single SSL inspection solution can provide the best course of action by decrypting traffic across all TCP ports and advanced protocols like SSH, STARTTLS, XMPP, SMTP and POP3. Also, this solution helps provide network traffic visibility to all security devices, including inline, out-of-band and ICAP-enabled devices.

Whilst we should celebrate the work of the white hats who restrained Emotet, it is not every day that a lethal cyber threat becomes a matter of humour. But having had a good laugh at their expense, we should turn our attention to making sure that attacks like Emotet have no way to succeed in the future—without the need to count on vigilante justice - this is where SSL inspection can really save the day.

Sunday 23 August 2020

Countering Cybercrime in the Next Normal

Guest post By Tom Kellermann, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, VMware Carbon Black

COVID-19 has reshaped the global cyberthreat landscape. While cyberattacks have been on the rise, the surge in frequency and increased threat sophistication is notable. The latest VMware Carbon Black Global Incident Threat Report, Extended Enterprise Under Threat – Global Threat Report series, found cybercriminals have seized the opportunity, taking advantage of the global disruption to conduct nefarious activity.

COVID-19 has Exacerbated pre-existing Cyber Threats
The VMware Carbon Black latest global survey of Incident Response (IR) professionals found that COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing cyberthreats. From counter incident response and island hopping to destructive attacks. Remote work then compounds this bringing additional cybersecurity challenges as employees access critical data and applications from their home networks or with personal devices outside of the corporate perimeter. Cybercriminals are also targeting the cloud, which organisations rely on to enable remote work. If you’re a cybercriminal, the pool of people you can trick now is exponentially larger, simply because we are in a global disaster.

As the threat landscape transforms and expands, the underlying methodologies behind the attacks have remained relatively consistent. Attackers have just nuanced their threat strategies. For example, last Christmas, the number one consumer purchase was smart devices, now they’re in homes that have fast become office spaces. Cybercriminals can use those family environments as a launchpad to compromise and conduct attacks on organizations. In other words, attackers are still island hopping – but instead of starting from an organisation’s network and moving along the supply chain, the attack may now originate in home infrastructures.

Next-Generation Cyberattacks require Next-Generation IR
While more than half (53%) of the IR professionals reported encountering or observing an increase in cyberattacks exploiting COVID-19, this isn’t a one-sided battle and there is much security teams can do to fight back.

Next-generation cyberattacks – with adversaries increasingly working to maintain persistence on systems – call for next-generation IR, especially as corporate perimeters across the world breakdown. To this point, here are seven key steps that security teams can take to fight back:

  1. Gain better visibility into your system’s endpoints: Doing so can empower security teams to be proactive in their IR – rather than merely responding to attacks once they come, they can hunt out prospective threats. This is increasingly important in today’s landscape, with more attackers seeking to linger for long periods on a network and more vulnerable endpoints online via remote access.
  2. Establish digital distancing practices: People working from home should have two routers, segmenting traffic from work and home devices. They should have a room free of smart devices for holding potentially sensitive conversations. And they should restrict sensitive file sharing across insecure applications, like video conferencing tools.
  3. Enable real-time updates, policies and configurations across the network: This may include updates to VPNs, audits or fixes to configurations across remote endpoints and other security updates – even when outside the corporate network. It’s important to keep in mind the security architecture when making these changes, otherwise, things get changed without having the proper controls in place to react.
  4. Enhance collaboration between IT and security teams – and make IT teams more cybersecurity savvy: As noted, 92% of IR professionals agree that a culture of collaboration between IT and security teams will improve enterprise security and response to cyber risks. This is especially true under the added stress of the pandemic. Alignment should also help elevate IT personnel to become experts on their own systems, whether it’s training them to threat hunt on a Windows box or identify anomalous configurations on certain SaaS applications.
  5. Expand Cyber-Threat Hunting: Threat hunting provides ground truth and context which is essential for defence. Situational awareness is dependent on ground truth which is based in the assumption of breach. One must proactively explore their environment for abnormal activity. The cadence of threat hunting must be increased, and the scope should extend to the information supply chain as well as Senior Executives laptops as they work from home.
  6. Integrate Security Controls: Integration allows organisations to uniquely see across traditional boundaries/silos providing richer telemetry and allowing for defenders to react seamlessly.
  7. Remember to communicate: Now more than ever, organizations must motivate IT and SECops to get on the same page and prioritize change management while maintaining clear lines of communication – about new risk factors (application attacks, OS exploitation, smart devices, file-sharing applications, etc.), protocols and security resources.
As we move into the next normal, the workforce will largely remain remote and distributed. Organisations will need to prioritise sharpening their security defences and gaining a clearer picture of the evolving threat landscape to inform today, tomorrow and the challenging months to come.

Tuesday 18 August 2020

Book Review: Crime Dot Com, From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global

I had the great delight of reading Geoff White’s new book, “Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global”, I thoroughly recommend it. The book is superbly researched and written, the author’s storytelling investigative journalist style not only lifts the lid on the murky underground world of cybercrime but shines a light on the ingenuity, persistence and ever-increasing global scale of sophisticated cybercriminal enterprises.
Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global
In Crime Dot Com Geoff takes the reader on a global historic tour of the shadowy cybercriminal underworld, from the humble beginnings with a rare interview with the elusive creator of the ‘Love Bug’ email worm, which caused havoc and panic back in 2000, right up to the modern-day alarming phenomenal of elections hacking by nation-state actors.

The book tells the tales of the most notorious hacks in recent history, explaining how they were successfully planned and orchestrated, all wonderfully written in a plain English style that my Luddite mother-in-law can understand.  Revealing why cybercrime is not just about the Hollywood stereotypical lone hacker, eagerly tapping away on a keyboard in the dark finding ingenious ways of exploiting IT systems. But is really about society obscured online communities of likeminded individuals with questionable moral compasses, collaborating, and ultimately exploiting innocent victims people out of billions of pounds.

The book covers the UK’s most notorious cyberattacks, such as the devasting 2017 WannaCry ransomware worm attack on the NHS, and the infamous TalkTalk hack carried out by teenage hackers.  Delving beyond the media 'cyber scare' headlines of the time, to bring the full story of what happened to the reader. The book also explores the rise and evolution of the Anonymous hacktivist culture and takes a deep dive into the less savoury aspects of criminal activities occurring on the dark web.

As you read about the history of cybercrime in this book, a kind of symbiosis between cybercriminals and nation-state hackers activities becomes apparent, from Russian law enforcement turning a blind-eye to Russia cybercriminals exploiting the West, to both the NSA’s and North Korea’s alleged involvement in creating the heinous WannaCry ransomware worm, and the UK cybercriminal that disabled that attack.  The growing number of physical world impacts caused by cyber-attacks are also probed in Crime Dot Com, so-called ‘kinetic warfare’. How sophisticated malware called Stuxnet, attributed by the media as United States military created, was unleashed with devastating effect to physically cripple an Iranian nuclear power station in a targeted attack, and why the latest cyber threat actors are targeting Britain’s energy network.

While this book is an easily digestible read for non-cyber security experts, the book provides cybersecurity professionals working on the frontline in defending organisations and citizens against cyber-attacks, with valuable insights and lessons to be learnt about their cyber adversaries and their techniques, particularly in understanding the motivations behind today's common cyberattacks.
5 out of 5: A must-read for anyone with an interest in cybercrime

Friday 7 August 2020

Cyber Security Roundup for August 2020

A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, July 2020.

The standout hack of July 2020, and possibly of the year, was the takeover of 45 celebrity Twitter accounts, in a bid to scam their millions of followers by requesting Bitcoin in tweets. 
Twitter confirms internal tools used in bitcoin-promoting attack ...
Scam Tweet
The high-profile Twitter accounts compromised included Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Kim Kardashian, and Joe Biden. Around £80,000 of Bitcoin was sent to the scammer's Bitcoin account before Twitter swiftly took action by deleting the scam tweets and blocking every 'blue tick' verified Twitter user from tweeting, including me

While the Twitter hack and scam dominated media headlines around the world, the attack was not the 'highly sophisticated cyber-attack' as reported by many media outlets, but it was certainly bold and clever. The attackers phoned Twitter administrative staff and blagged (socially engineered) their Twitter privilege account credentials out of them, which in turn gave the attackers access to Twitter's backend administrative system and to any Twitter account they desired. It is understood this Twitter account access was sold by a hacker on the dark web to a scammer in the days before the attack, that scammer(s) orchestrated a near-simultaneous Bitcoin scam tweets to be posted from the high profile accounts. On 31st July, law enforcement authorities charged three men for the attack, with one of the suspects disclosed as a 19-year British man from Bognor Regis.

There was a very serious critical Windows vulnerability disclosed as part the July 2020 Microsoft 'Patch Tuesday' security update release. Dubbed "SIGRed", it is a 17-year-old Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in Windows Domain Name System (DNS), a component commonly present in Microsoft Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2012R2, 2016 and 2019. Disclosed as CVE-2020-1350 it was given the highest possible CVSS score of 10.0, which basically means the vulnerability is “easy to attack” and “likely to be exploited”, although Microsoft said they hadn't seen any evidence of its exploitation at the time of their patch release.

Given SIGRed is a wormable vulnerability, it makes it particularly dangerous, as wormable malware could exploit the vulnerability to rapidly spread itself over flat networks without any user interaction, as per the WannaCry attack on the NHS and other large organisations. Secondly, it could be used to exploit privilege level accounts (i.e. admin accounts found on Servers).  The Microsoft CVE-2020-1350 vulnerability can be mitigated on effected systems by either applying the Microsoft Windows DNS Server Microsoft released patch (https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/CVE-2020-1350 or by applying a Registry Workaround (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4569509/windows-dns-server-remote-code-execution-vulnerability)

At least 10 universities in the UK had student data stolen after hackers attacked Blackbaud, an education-focused cloud service provider. UK universities impacted included York, Loughborough, Leeds, London, Reading, Exeter and Oxford. According to the BBC News website, Blackbaud said "In May of 2020, we discovered and stopped a ransomware attack. Prior to our locking the cyber-criminal out, the cyber-criminal removed a copy of a subset of data from our self-hosted environment."

As expected, the UK Government ordered UK mobile network operators to remove all Huawei 5G equipment by 2027, and banning their purchase of Huawei 5G network equipment after 31st December 2020.  Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said it follows sanctions imposed by the United States, which claims the Chinese firm poses a national security threat, which Huawei continues to resolutely deny. The ban is expected to delay the UK's 5G rollout by a year. "This has not been an easy decision, but it is the right one for the UK telecoms networks, for our national security and our economy, both now and indeed in the long run," he said. 
In some media quarters, it was suggested the UK u-turn on Huawei could lead to cyberattack repercussions after Reuter's said its sources confirmed China was behind cyberattacks on Australia's critical national infrastructure and government institutions following their trade dispute with China.

Russian Hacking Group (APT 29) was jointly accused of targeting the theft of coronavirus vaccine research by the UK NCSC, the Canadian Communication Security Establishment (CSE), United States Department for Homeland Security (DHS), Cyber-security Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the US National Security Agency (NSA). The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said the hackers "almost certainly" operated as "part of Russian intelligence services". It did not specify which research organisations had been targeted, or whether any coronavirus vaccine research data was taken, but it did say vaccine research was not hindered by the hackers. Russia's ambassador to the UK has rejected allegations, "I don't believe in this story at all, there is no sense in it," Andrei Kelin told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. While Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said it is "very clear Russia did this", adding that it is important to call out this "pariah-type behaviour". 

UK sport said hackers tried to steal a £1 million club transfer fee and froze turnstiles at a football game. Cybercriminals hacked a Premier League club managing director's email account during a player transfer negotiation, the million-pound theft was only thwarted by a last-minute intervention by a bank.  Another English football club was targeted by a ransomware attack which stopped its turnstiles and CCTV systems from working, which nearly resulted in a football match being postponed. Common tactics used by hackers to attack football clubs include compromising emails, cyber-enabled fraud and ransomware to shutting down digital systems. For further information on this subject, see my extensive blog post on football club hacking, The Billion Pound Manchester City Hack.

Smartwatch maker Garmin, had their website, mobile app and customer service call centres taken down by ransomware on 23rd July 2020. Reports suggest the fitness brand had been hit by the WastedLocker ransomware strain, which is said to have been developed by individuals linked to a Russia-based hacking group called 'Evil Corp'.  According to Bleeping Computer, Garmin paid $10 million to cybercriminals to receive decryption keys for the malware on 24th or 25th July 2020.

Yet another big data exposure caused by a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket was found by security researchers, one million files of Fitness Brand 'V Shred' was discovered exposed to the world, including the personal data of 99,000 V Shred customers. Interestingly V Shred defended the researcher findings by claiming it was necessary for user files to be publicly available and denied that any PII data had been exposed.

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Wednesday 5 August 2020

Securing the COVID-19 'New Normal' of Homeworking

The COVID-19 pandemic has put into motion a scale of remote working never before seen. Our teams are no longer just grouped in different office locations – but working individually from kitchen tables, spare rooms and, for the lucky ones, home offices! It’s therefore inevitable that this level of remote working will reveal security pitfalls for remediation, with improvements that can be carried forward when this period is over.
Attackers are taking advantage of heightened anxiety and homeworking
Tony Pepper, CEO at Egress, provides his insight below, as well as his six tips to improve data security while working from home.

Phishing

It’s sad, but it’s no surprise that phishing attacks have increased due to COVID-19– and businesses need to be prepared. Attackers are taking advantage of an environment of heightened anxiety and disrupted work settings to trick people into making mistakes, and they’re unlikely to stop until at least the main wave of the pandemic has passed.

Research shows that phishing is a major security issue under normal circumstances. Egress’ recent Insider Data Breach survey found that 41% of employees who had accidentally leaked data had done so because of a phishing email. More worryingly due to their level of access to data and systems, senior personnel are typically the most likely group to fall victim to phishing attacks, with 61% of directors saying that they’d caused a breach in this way.

And education and training can only go so far. Of course, we must continue to encourage employees to be vigilant to suspicious emails and to do things like hovering over links before clicking on them. We also need to reduce blame culture and free up employees to report genuine mistakes without fear.

But this can only go so far. People will always make mistakes. The good news is that advanced technology like contextual machine learning can remediate the targeted attacks, like conversation hijacking, that usually do the most damage to businesses.

Productivity and Security
Even in our tech-savvy world, there are still organisations that don’t have VPN access set up or enough laptops, mobile devices or processes to enable home working. But while IT teams try to quickly sort this situation out, we’re seeing employees finding workarounds, for example by sharing files using FTP sites or sending data to personal devices to work on.

We talk a lot about ‘human layer security’ technologies, which find the right balance between productivity and security. Right now, as well as looking at technologies to help securely move meetings, events and other activities online, businesses should also check that usually easy routine tasks can still be carried out safely – such as sharing large files or sending sensitive data via email. In particular, technologies like contextual machine learning and AI can identify what typically ‘good’ security behaviour looks like for individual users and then prevent abnormal behaviours that put data at risk.

For example, with people working on smaller screens and via mobile devices, it’s more likely they might attach the wrong document to an email or include a wrong recipient. Contextual machine learning can spot when incidents like this are about to happen and correct the user’s behaviour to prevent a breach before it happens.

Human Error
People are the new perimeter when it comes to data security – their decisions and behaviours can put data at risk every day, especially at a time of global heightened anxiety.

We know from our 2020 Insider Data Breach Survey that over half of employees don’t think their organisation has sole ownership over company data – instead believing that it is in-part or entirely owned by the individuals and teams who created it. And we also know that people are more likely to take risks with data they feel belongs to them than data they believe belongs to someone else. When they don’t have access to the right tools and technology to work securely – or they think the tools they do have will slow them down, especially at a time when the need for productivity is at its highest – they’re more likely to cut corners.

Maintaining good security practices is essential – and the good news is there are technologies on the market that can help ensure the right level of security is applied to sensitive data without blocking productivity.

Six Tips to improve Data Security while Working from Home 
We can all agree that times are incredibly tough right now. For security professionals looking to mitigate some of the risks, here are six practical tips are taken from the conversations we’re having with other organisations right now:

  1. Look for security software that doesn’t hamper productivity. It’s generally the aim of the game anyway – but right now, employees are feeling increased pressure to prove their productivity. If you’re finding yourself selecting new solutions, it’s never been more crucial to select technologies that don’t add difficult extra steps for them or anyone they’re working with outside the organisation.
  2. Choose collaboration/productivity solutions that have security baked into them. The other side to the coin of the point above, really: when choosing any new solution to implement at this time, make sure that security measures are part of a product’s standard design, and not an after-thought.
  3. Automate security wherever possible. If it’s possible, take decisions out of end users’ hands to ensure the security of sensitive information in line with policy, reducing the risk of someone accidentally or intentionally not using security software.
  4. Engage employees over security best practices. Phishing is a good example of this. Some inbound risks will evade the filters on your network boundary and end up in users’ mailboxes. Effort to proactively engage employees through e-learning and other educational measures can help them to know what to do with emails they think are suspicious (for example, hovering over links before clicking on them).
  5. Look to AI and machine learning to help solve advanced risks. Use cases like conversation hijacking, misdirected emails or people attaching the wrong files to documents can now be mitigated by intelligent technology like contextual machine learning, which determines what “good security behaviour” looks like for each individual, and alerts them and administrators to abnormal incidents – effectively stopping breaches before they happen.
  6. Implement no-fault reporting. People often don’t report security incidents because they’re concerned about the repercussions. Where it’s appropriate to do so, implement no-fault reporting to encourage individuals to report incidents in a timely manner, so you can focus on remediating the problem as quickly as possible.