Cloud Security

TWiC | This Week in Cybersecurity

Over the past week there have been many hot topics in cybersecurity. This edition of This Week in Cybersecurity includes stories covering Microsoft patching the Follina Zero-Day, Apple M1 Kernel security flaws, a record-breaking DDoS attack, a Kaiser Permanente data breach, and US military hackers conducting offensive activities in support of Ukraine. Check out the details below.

Cloudflare Saw Record-Breaking DDoS Attack Peaking at 26 Million Request Per Second: Cloudflare disclosed that it had acted to prevent a record-setting 26 million requests per second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack last week, making it the largest HTTPS DDoS attack detected to date. In late April 2022, it said it staved off a 15.3 million RPS HTTPS DDoS attack aimed at a customer operating a crypto launchpad. According to the company’s DDoS attack trends report for Q1 2022, volumetric DDoS attacks over 100 gigabits per second surged by up to 645% quarter-on-quarter.
Microsoft Patches ‘Follina’ Zero-Day Flaw in Monthly Security Update: Microsoft has issued a patch for the recently disclosed and widely exploited “Follina” zero-day vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool as part of its scheduled security update for June. It’s a good idea for organizations to keep Microsoft’s recommended mitigations for the flaw in place even after they install the MSDT update. Applying the patch will protect users but the patch only fixed the code injection vulnerability in msdt.exe. The diagnostic tool itself will still launch if a user opens an affected document. For more information on this vulnerability, check out nGuard’s last Security Advisory: Microsoft Zero-Day with No Patch! This vulnerability will be commonly exploited via phishing attempts. Social Engineering simulations and Social Engineering Awareness Training can assist your organizations employees in identifying these types of attacks.
Kaiser Permanente data breach exposes health data of 69K people: Kaiser Permanente, one of America’s leading not-for-profit health plans and health care providers, has recently disclosed a data breach that exposed the health information of more than 69,000 individuals. The company revealed in a notice published on its website that an attacker accessed an employee’s email account containing patients’ protected health information on April 5, 2022, without authorization. Sensitive info exposed in the attack includes:
- The patients’ first and last names
- Medical record numbers
- Dates of service
- Laboratory test result information
Design Weakness Discovered in Apple M1 Kernel Protections: Security researchers released details about a new attack they designed against Apple’s M1 processor chip that can undermine a key security feature that protects the operating system kernel from memory corruption attacks. The work offers a tangible example of how the one-two punch of hardware vulnerabilities and low-level software flaws can provide ample opportunities for attackers to run rampant in the kernel.
US military hackers conducting offensive operations in support of Ukraine, says head of Cyber Command: General Nakasone, the head of US Cyber Command, confirmed for the first time that the US was conducting offensive hacking operations in support of Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion. Speaking in Tallinn, Estonia, the general, who is also director of the National Security Agency, told Sky News that he is concerned “Every single day” about the risk of a Russian cyber attack targeting the US and said that the hunt forward activities were an effective way of protecting both America as well as allies.

Microsoft Zero-Day with No Patch!

Overview
CVE-2022-30190, known as Follina, was released by Microsoft on Monday, May 30th, 2022. The vulnerability resides within the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool (MSDT), which may allow an attacker to run arbitrary code with the privileges of the calling application. Microsoft Office applications use MSDT to troubleshoot and collect diagnostic information when something goes wrong.

This vulnerability was discovered by the independent cybersecurity researchers at nao_sec after they noticed a strange word document posted to VirusTotal. Using the Remote Template feature in Microsoft Word, an HTML file was pulled from a remote web server. It then made use of the “ms-msdt://” URI scheme to run a malicious payload. Experts are now saying this vulnerability is being exploited by attackers in the wild. Some security researchers have demonstrated execution of the malicious code merely by previewing the document in Windows File Explorer or Outlook.

Exploit
The video below demonstrates how easily this vulnerability can be exploited. Exploit code is now publicly available, making this process trivial. We will outline the steps taken in this video below:

An attacker downloads exploit code from GitHub.
This exploit code is then utilized to create the malicious Word document and stand up a web server to serve up the HTML file. In the video below, this Word document is called “sploit.docx.”
Once the user opens the Word document, you see the MSDT tool also fire off. MSDT is also commonly referred to as “Program Compatibility Troubleshooter.”
The producer of this video then shows you that both a cmd.exe process and powershell.exe process have been launched on the system. At this point, the document can be closed, but the malicious process is still running.
The demo then shows a Cobalt Strike window. Cobalt Strike is a command-and-control framework used for maintaining persistent access on compromised systems. You can see in the video that a “beacon” has been launched on the system. A beacon is an agent on the system that allows an attacker to maintain persistent access and run arbitrary code.
At this point the producer of this video runs “whoami” on the system itself to show you which user account launched the Word document. They then flip back to Cobalt Strike and run “whoami” from the interactive beacon. This displays the same user account. Persistent remote code execution achieved.

What To Do?
At this point in time, Microsoft has not released an official fix for this vulnerability. They are recommending that the MSDT URL protocol be disabled in order to protect systems from this vulnerability. That guidance can be found here. nGuard offers a bevy of services that can help prevent and identify these types of attacks. Both Social Engineering simulations and Social Engineering Awareness Training can assist your organizations employees in identifying these types of attacks. Internal Penetration Testing can boost the overall security posture of your internal network. If a machine on your network does become compromised, you have assurance that the adversary won’t make it very far. Lastly, Managed Event Collection & Correlation gives you 24×7 monitoring from advanced log analysis tools and nGuard professionals who are trained to detect suspicious activity.

URGENT NSA Cybersecurity Advisory

Weak Security Controls

Last week, multiple government agencies released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory to raise awareness about insufficient security configurations, weak controls, and other areas where cyber criminals easily gain access to company networks. This advisory lists out the best practices to protect your systems and goes into them in detail:

Control access.
Harden credentials.
Establish centralized log management.
Use antivirus.
Employ detection tools.
Operate services exposed on internet-accessible hosts with secure configurations.
Keep software updated.

This advisory also details some of the most common ways that attackers are gaining access to internal networks and explains the mitigation efforts that can be taken to prevent such attacks:

Exploit Public-Facing Applications
External Remote Services
Phishing
Trusted Relationship
Valid Accounts

It is essential that all organizations read or review this advisory and become familiar with the list of common exploit paths that attackers take to easily gain access to systems within the internal network. “As long as these security holes exist, malicious cyber actors will continue to exploit them,” said NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce. “We encourage everyone to mitigate these weaknesses by implementing the recommended best practices.” This advisory can be reviewed in detail here.

nGuard provides a wide variety of both tactical and strategic security assessments that can assist your organization in becoming more secure across the board. Tactical security assessments like external penetration testing, internal penetration testing, and social engineering can point out easily exploitable flaws that could lead an attacker to gaining some type of network access. Managed security services like vulnerability management and centralized log management provide ongoing protection as your network is being scanned for known vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis. Strategic security assessments give you one on one time with a qualified consultant who can help you build layers of security from the ground up. If you are reading this advisory and have any questions, nGuard is ready to talk with you and see where assistance is needed.

Multi-Factor Prompt Bombing Attacks

What Is It?
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) prompt bombing is a specific social engineering attack that bombards its victims with countless MFA push notifications. Generally, when people think of social engineering attacks, they think of suspicious emails or unexpected phone calls. However, MFA prompt bombing can be an even more effective strategy to gain access to people’s data, due to the fact it specifically uses social engineering tactics that target the human factor. Below are a few different ways these MFA prompt bombing attacks are carried out:

Send a large number of MFA prompt requests in hopes the user accepts to stop the distraction or annoyance.
Send only a small number each day in hopes a user accepts at some point. This method is stealthier and is more likely to fly under the radar as a malicious attack.
Call the user advising them they need to send an MFA prompt and they need to accept it.

The victim may ignore the first few notifications or calls, but at some point, may click accept to stop the annoyance and get back to what they were focusing on – all while not realizing what they have just done.

More and more authentication portals are adding the ability or requirement to

enable MFA notifications as a secondary form of authentication. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Control 6 – Access Control Management requires MFA for external facing applications, remote network access, and administrative access. This attack is on the rise and will not be going away any time soon.

Recent Attacks Using This Technique
Back in March, nGuard released a Security Advisory about the Lapsus$ Crime Gang infiltrating Microsoft, Okta, and others. It turns out the group utilized this technique to gain access to these organizations. Lapsus$, in their Telegram channel said, “No limit is placed on the number of calls that can be made. Call the employee 100 times at 1 am while he is trying to sleep, and he will more than likely accept it. Once the employee accepts the initial call, you can access the MFA enrollment portal and enroll another device.”

The image below shows a conversation from their Telegram Channel discussing how they were going to attempt this attack:

The SolarWinds breach that occurred last year that allowed APT29 (Cozy Bear), a group out of Russia, to create backdoors in 18,000 SolarWinds customer’s environments utilized this very same technique.

nGuard’s Experience with MFA Prompt Bombing
nGuard has been using this attack in our social engineering methodology for quite some time. Using these tactics, nGuard has successfully gained access to client’s VPN portals protected by MFA to obtain internal network access numerous times. nGuard has also used this attack to gain access via an organization’s single sign-on (SSO) page, giving us access to many sensitive internal applications. To protect your organization from this attack you can:

Conduct regular social engineering assessments to reinforce training.
Train employees to only accept MFA prompts when they are actively authenticating to a service.
Train employees to never give out MFA SMS codes to anyone.
Report the unsolicited MFA prompts as fraudulent.
Create alerts for anomalous events such as:
- Time of access
- Geolocation
- Large number of MFA prompts events
Draft a policy that states whether and how personal information is to be requested of employees via telephone.
Conduct employee training to raise awareness of social engineering techniques.
Train employees to identify and report suspicious requests for personal information.
Segment employee workstations from higher security zones in the internal network to reduce exposure of critical internal systems to attack from compromised workstations.

If you want to test your users’ likelihood of falling victim to such social engineering attacks, contact your Account Executive or Security Consultant for more information.

This Week in Cybersecurity (TWiC)

Over the past week there have been many hot topics in the cybersecurity world. This edition of This Week in Cybersecurity includes stories about Log4Shell continuing to pop up, a government contractor showing their ability to spy on CIA and NSA personnel, supply chain attacks becoming an increasing threat, and more. Check out the articles below for more on each story.

AWS’s Log4Shell Hot Patch Vulnerable To Container Escape and Privilege Escalation

Following Log4Shell, AWS released several hot patch solutions that monitor for vulnerable Java applications and Java containers and patch them on the fly. If you installed the hot patch to a Kubernetes cluster, every container in your cluster can now escape until you either disable the hot patch or upgrade to the fixed version. A hot patch Daemonset for Kubernetes clusters, which installs the aforementioned hot patch service on all nodes is now available. To patch Java processes inside containers, the hot patch solutions invoke certain container binaries. In Kubernetes clusters, you can install the fixed hot patch version by deploying the latest Daemonset provided by AWS. Note that only deleting the hot patch Daemonset doesn’t remove the hot patch service from your nodes. Penetration testing and vulnerability management remains a key tool to mitigate risks like this.

American Phone-Tracking Firm Demo’d Surveillance Powers By Spying On CIA and NSA

Anomaly Six, a secretive government contractor, claims to monitor the movements of billions of phones around the world and unmask spies with the press of a button. According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population.

In a sales pitch, to fully impress upon its audience the immense power of this software, Anomaly Six did what few in the world can claim to do: spied on American spies. “I like making fun of our own people,” Clark began. Pulling up a Google Maps-like satellite view, the sales rep showed the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. With virtual boundary boxes drawn around both, a technique known as geofencing, A6’s software revealed an incredible intelligence bounty: 183 dots representing phones that had visited both agencies potentially belonging to American intelligence personnel, with hundreds of lines streaking outward revealing their movements, ready to track throughout the world. “So, if I’m a foreign intel officer, that’s 183 start points for me now,” Clark noted. This isn’t the first time we have heard about a story like this. nGuard has covered a similar topic to this with the NSO Group and their spyware, Pegasus.

Cyber Agencies Renew Warnings Of Russia-Linked Threats Against Industrial Targets

Federal and international authorities issued urgent warnings Wednesday, April 21^st to critical infrastructure providers to take precautions against potential retaliatory cyberattacks from alleged Russian state actors and criminal cyber groups.

Experts have linked other nation state-affiliated actors like Berserk Bear to past cyber incidents against U.S. and Western European targets ranging from energy, transportation, defense contractors as well as water and wastewater system facilities.

nGuard has been helping secure critical infrastructure since 2002 and can validate your segmentation between your business and critical networks and help you stay on top of time sensitive alerts with a managed SIEM.

North Korean Crypto Hacks a Growing Threat, U.S. Warns

A trio of U.S. agencies have issued a joint advisory to warn of escalating North Korean cyberattacks on cryptocurrency and blockchain platforms. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the U.S. Treasury Department issued the alert Monday in the wake of a stunning $620 million crypto heist by the Pyongyang-connected Lazarus Group.

More Than Half of Initial Infections in Cyberattacks Come Via Exploits, Supply Chain Compromises

The length of time attackers remained undetected on a victim’s network decreased for the fourth year in a row, sinking to 21 days in 2021, down from 24 days in 2020, according to a new report on incident response (IR) investigations conducted by Mandiant. In general, the improvement is driven by faster detection of non-ransomware threats because more companies are working with third-party cybersecurity firms. Additionally, government agencies and security firms often notify victims of attacks, leading to faster detection.

Overall, two methods of initial compromise – exploiting vulnerabilities and attacks through the supply chain – accounted for 54% of all attacks with an identified initial infection vector in 2021, up from less than a 30% share of attacks in 2020. Companies should be tackling the primary threat this year by reviewing and assessing their Active Directory implementation for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, understanding how to detect and prevent unusual lateral movement attempts in their environment, and implementing application whitelisting and disabling macros to significantly limit initial access attacks.

Prior to a cyberattack ever occurring, be sure to be proactive and have an incident response partner in place. An incident response retainer ensures the fastest response possible from a third party. nGuard offers its CSIR Complete service which is a full CSIR program with guaranteed service-level commitments, priority response, and ongoing proactive activities throughout the year.

6 Malware Tools Designed to Disrupt Industrial Control Systems (ICS)

A recent attempt by Russia’s infamous Sandworm threat group to disrupt operations at a Ukrainian power company has once again drawn attention to the — still somewhat limited — collection of publicly known tools designed specifically to disrupt industrial control systems. Ukraine’s computer emergency response team (CERT-UA) thwarted the attack before any damage was done. Unlike other malware, which often share commonalities in features and functions, ICS-specific malware tools have tended to be highly customized for targeted environments. Just last month, the FBI issued a Flash Alert on critical infrastructure being targeted with a ransomware strain called RagnarLocker.

FBI Secretly Removing Malware

Late last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the FBI was removing malware from computer systems around the world in an attempt to thwart Russian cyber-attacks. In March, the White House warned that Russia could be targeting critical infrastructure in the United States. The malware that is being removed from systems by the FBI is reported to allow an arm of the Russian military called the GRU to take over machines and create botnets for DDoS attacks. The GRU is Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency responsible for handling multiple forms of military intelligence.

The Justice Department says that this strain of malware is designed to compromise externally facing firewalls and loop them into a botnet called Cyclops Blink. The botnet is controlled by a notorious group called Sandworm that has been known to work with the GRU. The DOJ warned owners of infected devices that their machines were part of this Cyclops Blink botnet, but decided that it was not worth the wait and took it upon themselves to remove the malware from infected devices.

Through secret court orders, the Justice Department and FBI were able to quietly remove this malware from infected devices across the globe. After removing the malware, the FBI also closed the management port that was being used as the attack vector. The Biden administration has been ramping up their cyber security operations since the breakout of war in Ukraine. While Ukraine has been the number 1 target of cyber attacks over the last couple months, authorities warn that critical infrastructure organizations in the United States could be next.

Performing external penetration testing and having a formal external vulnerability management program can help to thwart attacks like this. By identifying these vulnerabilities and patching them before adversaries get their hands on them, you can protect your externally facing machines from becoming a part of a worldwide botnet.