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Incident Response

TWiC | Lapsus$ Ransomware, LastPass Hack & MS ZeroDay

The past couple of weeks have been busy ones for the world of cybersecurity. Multiple companies have disclosed serious hacks that have led to breaches of customer data and overall system availability. In this week’s security advisory, nGuard will detail some of these incidents and their impact on the cybersecurity landscape.

Cisco Data Breach Attributed to Lapsus$ Ransomware Group

The Lapsus$ crime gang is back at it again with an attack on the networking giant, Cisco. About a month ago, Cisco had disclosed that its systems were breached. A social engineering attack led adversaries on a pathway to overtaking an employee’s Google account. Saved credentials were then obtained from the browser and voice communications were utilized to trick the unsuspecting employee into accepting a multi-factor authentication push notification. Cisco believes the end goal of the attacker was to deploy ransomware on the network after gaining access to multiple systems. Cisco is reporting that attempts to deploy ransomware were unsuccessful.

LastPass Says Hackers Had Internal Access For Four Days

Lastpass reported a breach back in August and are now releasing some more details about the compromise. They are now reporting that an attacker had internal access to the company systems for four days before they were detected. Lastpass worked with a cybersecurity firm to investigate the incident and found that no customer data or password vaults were accessed during this time. LastPass maintains that your master password, and the keys used to encrypt and decrypt data, are never sent to LastPass’ servers, and are never accessible by LastPass. The attacker was however able to access a developer endpoint and poke around the development environments.

Microsoft Patches a New Zero-Day Affecting All Versions of Windows

Microsoft is patching another zero-day vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Windows. This zero-day is reported as being used in real-world attacks. CVE-2022-37969 is a privilege elevation flaw in the Windows Common Log File System Driver. This is utilized for data and event logging. Once a system is compromised, this vulnerability can be used to escalate user privileges to the highest level, SYSTEM. 4 different security firms reported this vulnerability to Microsoft which makes them believe this could be widely used in real-world scenarios. They recommend patching immediately.

nGuard closely monitors trends in the world of cybersecurity and applies those trends to assessment activities and managed security services. Having penetration testing conducted periodically against network assets, web applications, and other critical infrastructure can prevent data breaches before they happen. Putting your employees through social engineering campaigns to test their security readiness can boost awareness. Having a security first mindset is essential in protecting the valuable data of organizations.  

Vulnerability Exploits Overtake Phishing as Initial Attack Vector

Most security professionals will advise the number one way attackers gain an initial foothold on a network is, and continues to be, phishing and social engineering attacks. Palo Alto recently released their 2022 Incident Response Report which confirmed what most would say is true. At a combined 42%, phishing and social engineering make up almost half of all means of initial access.

Source: 2022 Incident Response Report

The second most common way according to the above chart from Palo Alto is software vulnerabilities. However, in the first week of September, Kaspersky released its 2021 Incident Response Overview and it told a different story. 53.6% of the initial attack vectors they responded to were exploits of public-facing applications.

Source: 2021 Incident Response Overview

2021 had no shortage of time sensitive critical vulnerabilities including Log4j, Microsoft Exchange ProxyLogon, and three other CVEs related to the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities that were released in March of 2021. When these vulnerabilities are made publicly available it is only a matter of minutes before publicly facing systems are being scanned for vulnerable targets. Within hours, proof of concept exploits become available leading to an extremely high rate of organizations falling for such attacks.

In recent years, organizations have prioritized security awareness training and conducted social engineering and phishing training. But have those same organizations made it a priority to have a vulnerability management program in place?

How can organizations stay ahead of these attack trends? Start by building out a mature security program that includes annual penetration testing, ongoing vulnerability scanning, and a properly configured SIEM to alert on network anomalies. If you suspect a breach, identify a firm capable of responding to security incidents and secure an incident response retainer. Lastly, have an expert conduct a strategic security assessment to compare your organization’s security program to a known security standard like the Center for Internet Security Critical Security Controls.