Security Assessments

CIS Controls v8 (Part 2)

Summary
Last month, nGuard released a security advisory detailing the latest version (v8) of the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Critical Security Controls. In this version of the controls, CIS consolidated the original 20 controls into 18 with a major focus on many modern practices such as work-from-home, cloud computing, and increased mobility. In the previous security advisory, we discussed the first 6 controls. In this advisory, we will cover the next 6.

Controls
Control 7: Continuous Vulnerability Management
New vulnerabilities for widely used software and operating systems are coming out on a daily basis. It is essential for organizations to stay on top of these rising threats. Scanning your network infrastructure for new vulnerabilities will ensure that systems are patched against known threats. nGuard recommends scanning infrastructure on a monthly basis.

Control 8: Audit Log Management
It is essential for organizations to collect, alert, review, and retain audit logs of events that could help detect, understand, or recover from an attack. nGuard often responds to security incidents where organizations do not have the proper log management solution in place to better understand how an attacker was able to compromise systems on the network. This type of data is critical when responding to a security incident.

Control 9: Email and Web Browser Protections
Social engineering has quickly become the number 1 threat for organizations. Employees are often described as the weakest link in the security landscape because they can quickly provide an attacker access to the network with little effort. Organizations should assist their employees by improving protections and detections of threats from email and web vectors.

Control 10: Malware Defenses
A majority of organizations will experience a security incident at some point. Making life difficult for an attacker may prevent a small incident from turning into a major one. Having malware defenses like antivirus and intrusion prevention systems deployed across the network can prevent or control the installation, spread, and execution of malicious application, code, or scripts. Malware defense solutions are the number 1 preventer of ransomware.

Control 11: Data Recovery
Ransomware has become a serious threat for organizations. Attackers are gaining network access through the external perimeter or social engineering and deploying ransomware across the internal network while demanding payment for the decryption keys. Paying the ransom should be the nuclear option. Data shows that companies rarely recover all of their data with the decryption tools provided by an attacker. Recovering from backups remains the best option for getting back online.

Control 12: Network Infrastructure Management
It’s important to know who and what is sitting on your corporate network. Keeping a list of devices and services will play a key part in making sure everything is up to date and managed properly. Establishing and actively managing a list of networked devices will prevent attackers from exploiting vulnerable network services and access points.

Next Steps
nGuard offers a wide variety of services that will assist your organization on its path to implementing these critical security controls. Our Strategic Security Assessment allows your organization’s key players the opportunity to sit down with a security consultant who knows these controls like the back of their hand. Not only will they help you strengthen the controls that are already in place, they will make recommendations for the areas in which your organization falls short. Services like nGuard’s vulnerability management and security awareness training will lead your organization down the path to full implementation of these critical controls.

LinkedIn Breached Again!

Summary
Remember when someone discovered a misconfigured database exposed to the internet that left the information of 500 million LinkedIn users at risk? It’s happening again, except this time 700 million users have been impacted. Multiple outlets are now reporting that a hacker appears to have used the LinkedIn API in a malicious way which led to the download of large amounts of user data. This is extremely similar to the April incident in which an online database was compromised and user data was sold online. With both incidents, the user data has appeared for sale on a popular site called raidforums.com. Here, users can download large amounts of compromised data for any purpose. Hackers were able to compromise the following:

Email Addresses
Full Names
Phone Numbers
Physical Addresses
Geolocation Records
Usernames and Profile URLs
Genders
Other Social Media Accounts

Although this data set doesn’t contain cleartext passwords or password hashes, it does contain sensitive information that could be used in targeted social engineering attacks. Attackers utilize detailed information about employees to launch intricate social engineering campaigns that can be highly successful. When an unsuspecting employee receives a spoofed email with personal information included, it often makes it seem more legitimate. It is important to train your employees to look out for this type of targeted social engineering.

Awareness Training Helps
nGuard has been studying the art of social engineering and conducting simulations for its customers for nearly 20 years. nGuard’s highly trained engineers are well versed in the techniques used by adversaries and can conduct real world scenarios. This aids organizations in training their employees to expect the unexpected.

Colonial Pipeline Update

Summary
This is a follow up to a previous Security Advisory. For the initial timeline please visit Colonial Pipeline Timeline of Events.

Since the last Colonial Pipeline Security Advisory, there have been several updates related to the breach. Details were released on how the attackers gained initial access to Colonial’s internal network, the FBI was able to recover much of the bitcoin paid to the ransomware group (Darkside), and the Senate Homeland Security Committee held a hearing on the breach.

In the beginning of June, Bloomberg reported that the initial access gained by DarkSide was through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) account, which is used to gain remote access to private networks. The target account was no longer in use but remained active. The password associated with the account was discovered in a database of leaked passwords that are available on the dark web. Additionally, the VPN account did not utilize multi-factor authentication (MFA), which made gaining access much easier. The breach investigation stated that it is not known exactly how the password and username combination was compromised and likely they will never know. Only a week after the initial access was gained, ransomware was deployed resulting in the catastrophic damage to Colonial Pipeline and their supply chain.

On Monday June 7^th, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it had successfully recovered 63.7 Bitcoins worth approximately $2.3 million from DarkSide. The FBI was able to discover the address of the virtual wallet used through blockchain’s public ledger. The FBI had the private key, which is like a password, used to access the wallet and seize the bitcoins. The FBI has not stated how they obtained the private key, but this shows that criminals who use bitcoin and other cryptocurrency in their activity are not as immune to law enforcement as once believed.

On June 8^th, the Senate Homeland Security Committee held a hearing with the CEO of Colonial Pipeline, Joseph Blount. When discussing paying the ransom Joseph said, “It was one of the toughest decisions I have had to make in my life. At the time, I kept this information close hold [sic] because we were concerned about operational security and minimizing publicity for the threat actor. But I believe that restoring critical infrastructure as quickly as possible, in this situation, was the right thing to do for the country.” The hearing covered Colonial Pipeline’s security readiness and response to the event while putting a bigger spotlight on the gaps in security within the U.S energy infrastructure and country as a whole.

What Can Your Organization Do?
Cybersecurity cannot continue to be a reactive process. Security needs to be a priority from the ground up with infrastructure built around security. Discovering gaps in your organization’s security landscape can be simplified with an nGuard Strategic Security Assessment. Utilizing the Center for Internet Security Controls Version 8, nGuard can help you find ways to create a more mature security organization. If your organization does fall victim to a ransomware attack like Colonial Pipeline, bring in our experts to conduct a Cybersecurity Incident Response.

CIS Controls v8 (Part 1)

Summary
The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Critical Security Controls is a list of security best practice guidelines that organizations have been utilizing since 2008. Formerly known to many as the “CIS Top 20,” this publication covers a wide variety of security practices that assist organizations in taking the preventative measures needed to limit risk against cyber-attacks. Last month, CIS released the latest version of their publication, v8, to address the rising concerns that organizations are facing in 2021 and beyond. This version consolidates the former 20 controls into 18 and includes focus on many modern practices such as work-from-home, cloud computing, and increased mobility. Let’s take a look at the first 6 controls and how nGuard can help you down the path to compliance. We will cover the remaining controls in a future security advisory.

Controls
Control 1: Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets
It’s important to know where your company-owned assets are located. How can you actively secure your network if you don’t even know how many devices are connected to it? This practice lays out the controls that are needed to dynamically monitor assets and keep track of the devices that are connected to your network.

Control 2: Inventory and Control of Software Assets
Is your development team standing up new web servers? Is your IT team exposing management style applications to the internet for remote management? It’s important to keep track of these things. nGuard consistently finds management interfaces exposed to the internet that our customers didn’t know existed. Out of the box, these applications can be insecure. It is essential that you know what types of applications exist in your environment.

Control 3: Data Protection
Is customer data living on your company’s network shares forever? Is it encrypted? Does everyone at the company have access to it, or only the people who need it? Data retention can be a difficult thing to manage properly. Complying with this control will give your customers a peace of mind that their data is properly managed within your organization.

Control 4: Secure Configuration of Enterprise Assets and Software
Does your organization have a proper patch management program in place? Can you say for sure that default accounts aren’t enabled on your network equipment? This control will help you develop policy to ensure proper patches are applied and new devices are configured properly.

Control 5: Account Management
8-character passwords are likely not secure. Your employees are probably using similar passwords for their domain and email accounts. Are you confident that your employees won’t fall victim to a social engineering attack? Account management is one of the more important controls for securing access to sensitive data and assets.

Control 6: Access Control Management
When nGuard engineers perform internal penetration testing, they consistently gain access to what are believed to be “low-privilege” user accounts. It turns out that this account has local administrator privileges on the workstation which allows engineers to dump domain administrator credentials from memory and compromise the entire network. Is your organization conducting annual internal penetration testing to identify weaknesses that may lead an attacker to gain elevated privileges?

Next Steps
Whether you are forced to comply with these controls, or just want to elevate the security posture of your organization, nGuard offers a wide variety of services that will assist you along the way. Tactical assessments like Penetration Testing can point out the flaws that exist in your environments while strategical assessments like the Best Practice Strategic Security Assessment (SSA) can assist your organization in implementing the preventive controls needed to minimize risk. Additionally, nGuard specializes in policy development that can lead your organization down the path to compliance. Talk to an nGuard Account Executive today!

Colonial Pipeline – Timeline Of Events

On Friday May 7th Colonial Pipeline suffered a cyberattack involving ransomware, causing them to shutdown their IT systems and temporarily pause production on a majority of their pipelines. Additional details of the attack are still coming out each day, but here is a current timeline of events and details of how the hacker group, DarkSide, has carried out its attacks based on publicly available information.

May 6th
Colonial Pipeline networks are breached, 100GB of data is stolen and computers are encrypted with ransomware.

May 7th
Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million to DarkSide hacking group to decrypt their infrastructure.

May 8th
Colonial Pipeline, along with U.S. Government organizations and U.S. companies take systems offline that were in control by the hackers.

Colonial Pipeline issues statement on attack stating they have been victims of ransomware and have engaged a third-party cybersecurity firm and alerted law enforcement. Source:Colonial Pipeline Statement

May 9th
Colonial Pipeline issues second statement giving an update of their investigation into the attack and the status of their pipeline operations. Source: Colonial Pipeline Statement

May 10th
FBI issues statement confirming DarkSide is the responsible party for the hack.

Colonial Pipeline issues a statement that their goal is to substantially restore service by the end of the week.

Colonial Pipeline manually operates a line from Greensboro, NC to Woodbine, MD for a limited period of time, but other main lines continue to be offline.

May 11th
CISA and FBI issue cybersecurity advisory describing ransomware used by DarkSide with strategies for risk mitigation. Source:Joint Advisory.

Colonial Pipeline’s website is offline for part of the day.

May 12th
Colonial Pipeline’s website is restored and a new website is provided to address their response to the attack. Source: CP Cyber Response

Colonial Pipeline is able to restart services around 5:00pm. It will still take many days to replenish the depleted supply chain after panic buying of fuel and delayed fuel deliveries.

How Did Darkside Launch the Attack?
Based on research of DarkSide, the below methods are the tactics they have typically followed in recent attacks. Source: DarkSide Ransomware Research

Attackers were able to gain access in a few different ways:
1. Phishing attacks
2. Brute-force password attacks
3. SQL Injection against VPN networks
4. Utilizing TeamViewer
5. Installing backdoors
Once inside the network, attackers escalated privileges by:
1. Exploiting the Zerologon vulnerability.
2. Utilizing Mimikatz.
3. Accessing and dumping Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS).
With privileged access, DarkSide uses PowerShell and Certutil to deploy and execute the ransomware across the network.

Where to go from here?
The attack methods used by DarkSide should lead to a review of your organization’s security assessment programs to ensure the below critical assessment activities are included.

nGuard’s security assessment portfolio can help your organization find your vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. If your organization falls victim to a ransomware attack like Colonial Pipeline, bring in our experts for your Cybersecurity Incident Response.

Should We Pay The Ransom?

Summary
Has your organization been a target of ransomware? Did you pay the ransom? If so, did you get all your data back? Whenever an organization becomes a victim of a ransomware attack, paying the malicious attackers may seem like the only hope, especially for companies that don’t have proper backup procedures in place. Unfortunately, statistics are showing us that paying the ransom guarantees little in return. Here are some key data points collected from a large sample size of mid-sized organizations spread across the globe.

In 2021, 37% of organizations have experienced some type of ransomware attack.
The average costs of remediating against a ransomware attack grew in 2021 to $1.85 million.
The average cost of paying the ransom grew to $170,000.
32% of the organizations affected by a ransomware attacks decided to pay the malicious actors.
ONLY 8% WERE ABLE TO DECRYPT AND RECOVER ALL THEIR DATA AFTER PAYING THE RANSOM!

The last point truly brings reality into check. Paying the ransom rarely pays off. This can be attributed to many factors, but the overwhelming majority of organizations say that they received the ransom key after payment, but were unable to use it in an effective manner. This can be linked to poorly coded malware and IT teams with limited experience.

What Can You Do?
It is extremely important for organizations to take proper precautions to protect themselves against the increasing threat of ransomware.

Perform monthly or quarterly vulnerability scans against your external perimeter and internal networks to stay up to date with the latest vulnerabilities that could give an attacker their initial foothold.
Perform annual penetration testing to protect against advanced techniques that may allow an attacker to pivot once they have a foothold.
Create effective Incident Response policies and procedures.
Conduct tabletop exercises to validate and identify gaps in your Incident Response Plan.
Perform consistent security awareness training with employees to limit the chance of successful social engineering and phishing attacks.
Have proper onsite and offsite backup policies and procedures in place. If you fall victim to ransomware, you may be able to recover from backup, with limited, if any data loss, and not rely on paying a large sum of money for an 8% chance of getting your data back.

When it comes to protecting your organization’s critical data, it’s time to get serious. nGuard is ready and willing to discuss all these preventative solutions with you and your team.