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Microsoft is sending the world a whole bunch of love today, in the form of patches to plug dozens of security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. This year’s special Valentine’s Day Patch Tuesday includes fixes for a whopping three different “zero-day” vulnerabilities that are already being used in active attacks.
Microsoft’s security advisories are somewhat sparse with details about the zero-day bugs. Redmond flags CVE-2023-23376 as an “Important” elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System Driver, which is present in Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as many server versions of Windows.
“Sadly, there’s just a little solid information about this privilege escalation,” said Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “Microsoft does note that the vulnerability would allow an attacker to exploit code as SYSTEM, which would allow them to completely take over a target. This is likely being chained with a remote code execution bug to spread malware or ransomware. Considering this was discovered by Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center, it could mean it was used by advanced threat actors. Either way, make sure you test and roll these fixes quickly.”
The zero-day CVE-2023-21715 is a weakness in Microsoft Office that Redmond describes as a “security feature bypass vulnerability.”
“Microsoft lists this as under active exploit, but they offer no info on how widespread these exploits may be,” Childs said. “Based on the write-up, it sounds more like a privilege escalation than a security feature bypass, but regardless, active attacks in a common enterprise application shouldn’t be ignored. It’s always alarming when a security feature is not just bypassed but exploited. Let’s hope the fix comprehensively addresses the problem.”
The third zero-day flaw already seeing exploitation is CVE-2023-21823, which is another elevation of privilege weakness — this one in the Microsoft Windows Graphic component. Researchers at cybersecurity forensics firm Mandiant were credited with reporting the bug.
Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, pointed out that the security bulletin for CVE-2023-21823 specifically calls out OneNote as being a vulnerable component for the vulnerability.
“In recent weeks, we have seen an increase in the use of OneNote files as part of targeted malware campaigns,” Breen said. “Patches for this are delivered via the app stores and not through the typical formats, so it’s important to double check your organization’s policies.”
Microsoft fixed another Office vulnerability in CVE-2023-21716, which is a Microsoft Word bug that can lead to remote code execution — even if a booby-trapped Word document is merely viewed in the preview pane of Microsoft Outlook. This security hole has a CVSS (severity) score of 9.8 out of a possible 10.
Microsoft also has more valentines for organizations that rely on Microsoft Exchange Server to handle email. Redmond patched three Exchange Server flaws (CVE-2023-21706, CVE-2023-21707, and CVE-2023-21529), all of which Microsoft says are remote code execution flaws that are likely to be exploited.
Microsoft said authentication is required to exploit these bugs, but then again threat groups that attack Exchange vulnerabilities also tend to phish targets for their Exchange credentials.
Microsoft isn’t alone in dropping fixes for scary, ill-described zero-day flaws. Apple on Feb. 13 released an update for iOS that resolves a zero-day vulnerability in Webkit, Apple’s open source browser engine. Johannes Ullrich at the SANS Internet Storm Center notes that in addition to the WebKit problem, Apple fixed a privilege escalation issue. Both flaws are fixed in iOS 16.3.1.
“This privilege escalation issue could be used to escape the browser sandbox and gain full system access after executing code via the WebKit vulnerability,” Ullrich warned.
On a lighter note (hopefully), Microsoft drove the final nail in the coffin for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). According to Redmond, the out-of-support IE11 desktop application was permanently disabled on certain versions of Windows 10 on February 14, 2023 through a Microsoft Edge update.
“All remaining consumer and commercial devices that were not already redirected from IE11 to Microsoft Edge were redirected with the Microsoft Edge update. Users will be unable to reverse the change,” Microsoft explained. “Additionally, redirection from IE11 to Microsoft Edge will be included as part of all future Microsoft Edge updates. IE11 visual references, such as the IE11 icons on the Start Menu and taskbar, will be removed by the June 2023 Windows security update (“B” release) scheduled for June 13, 2023.”
For a more granular rundown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
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Providing secure access and a frictionless user experience are typically competing initiatives, but they don’t have to be! Read on to learn why.
In our world today, context changes quickly. We work from home, coffee shops and the office. We use multiple devices to do work. And on the flip side, attackers are becoming increasingly savvy, getting around security controls, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), to gain unauthorized access.
To quote Wendy Nather, Cisco’s head of Advisory CISOs, “Trust is neither binary nor permanent.” Therefore, security controls must constantly evaluate for change in trust, but without adding unnecessary friction for end-users.
It’s no surprise that the recently published Cybersecurity Readiness Index, a survey of 6,700 cybersecurity leaders from across the globe, revealed that more progress is needed to protect identity, networks and applications.
To address these challenges and to make zero trust access for the workforce easy and frictionless, Cisco Duo announced the general availability of Risk-Based Authentication and enhancements to our enterprise ready Single Sign-On solution at Cisco Live EMEA 2023 earlier this week.
Risk-Based Authentication fulfills the zero trust philosophy of continuous trust verification by assessing the risk level for each access attempt in a manner that is frictionless to users. A higher level of authentication is required only when there is an increase in assessed risk. Duo dynamically detects risk and automatically steps up authentication with two key policies:
The Risk-Based Factor Selection policy detects and analyzes authentication requests and adaptively enforces the most secure factors. It highlights risk and adapts its understanding of normal user behavior. It does this by looking for known attack patterns and anomalies and then allowing only the more secure authentication methods to gain access.
For example, Duo can detect if an organization or employee is being targeted for a push bombing attack or if the authentication device and access device are in two different countries, and Duo responds by automatically elevating the authentication request to a more secure factor such as phishing resistant FIDO2 security keys or Verified Duo Push.
The Risk-Based Remembered Devices policy establishes a trusted device session (like “remember this computer” check box), automatically without asking the user the check a box, during a successful authentication. Once the session is established, Duo looks for anomalous IP addresses or changes to a device throughout the lifetime of the trusted session and requires re-authentication only if it observes a change from historical baselines.
The policy also incorporates a Wi-Fi Fingerprint provided by Duo Device Health app to ensure that IP address changes reflect actual changes in location and not normal usage scenarios such as a user establishing an organizational VPN (Virtual Private Network) session.
Duo uses anonymized Wi-Fi Fingerprint to reliably detect whether the access device is in the same location as it was for previous authentications by comparing the Wi-Fi networks that are “visible” to the access device. Further, Duo preserves user privacy and does not track user location or collect any private information. Wi-Fi Fingerprint only lets Duo know if a user has changed location.
A typical organization uses over 250 applications. Single sign-on (SSO) solutions help employees access multiple applications with a single set of credentials and allow administrators to enforce granular policies for application access from a single console. Integrated with MFA or passwordless authentication, SSO serves as a critical access management tool for organizations that want to implement zero trust access to corporate applications.
Duo SSO is already popular among Duo’s customers. Now, we are adding two new capabilities that cater to modern enterprises:
An increasing number of applications use OIDC for authentication. It is a modern authentication protocol that lets application and website developers authenticate users without storing and managing other people’s passwords, which is both difficult and risky. To date, Duo SSO has supported SAML web applications. Supporting OIDC allows us to protect more of the applications that our customers are adopting as we all move towards a mobile-first world and integrate stronger and modern authentication methods.
Password resets are expensive for organizations. It is estimated that 20-50% of IT helpdesk tickets are for password resets. And according to a report by Ponemon Institute, large enterprises experience an average loss of $5.2 million a year in user productivity due to password resets.
When logging into browser-based applications, Duo SSO already allows users to reset passwords when they have expired in the same login workflow. And we heard from our customers that users want the option to proactively reset passwords. Now, Duo SSO offers the convenience to reset their Active Directly passwords before they expire. This capability further increases user productivity and reduces IT helpdesk tickets.
Risk-Based Authentication and enhancements to Duo SSO are available now to all paying customers based on their Duo Edition. If you are not yet a Duo customer, sign up for a free 30-day trial and try out these new capabilities today!
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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Cisco is honored to be this year’s winner of the Best Next Generation Firewall Award in the SE Labs 2023 Annual Report. This industry recognition validates Cisco’s continuous push towards harmonizing network, workload, and application security across hybrid and multicloud environments. I’m incredibly proud of the Cisco Secure Firewall team and am thankful for our amazing customers who continue to trust Cisco and develop their network security around our capabilities.
SE Labs, a cybersecurity testing and evaluation firm, provides impartial and independent assessments of various cybersecurity products and solutions. In their 2023 Annual Report, SE Labs states:
“Our Annual Security Awards recognizes security vendors that notonly do well in our tests, but perform well in the real world withreal customers. These awards are the only in the industry thatrecognize strong lab work combined with practical success.”
SE Labs performs tests on behalf of customers seeking independent proof-of-value assistance, as well as security vendors. At Cisco, we use third-party evaluations from multiple sources, including SE Labs, to augment our internal testing and to drive product improvement.
Winners were determined after months of in-depth testing, based on a combination of continual public testing, private assessments and feedback from corporate clients who use SE Labs to help choose security products and services. The award further validates that our customers can expect superior threat protection and performance with Cisco Secure Firewall.
SE Labs’ reports use the MITRE ATT&CK framework, employing both common “commodity” malware samples and sophisticated, targeted attacks. Their network security testing uses full attack chains to assess the detection and protection abilities of network devices and combinations of network and endpoint solutions. SE Labs publishes its testing methodologies and is BS EN ISO 9001: 2015 certified for The Provision of IT Security Product Testing.
As a worldwide leader in networking and security, Cisco is better positioned than any other security vendor to incorporate effective firewall controls into our customers’ infrastructure — anywhere data and applications reside. We offer a comprehensive threat defense with industry-leading Snort 3 IPS to protect users, applications, and data from continuously evolving threats. Our solutions also leverage machine learning and advanced threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, one of the world’s largest commercial threat intelligence teams.
In the constantly evolving world of cybersecurity, it is important to have access to the latest and most advanced technologies to stay ahead of threats. Whether you are an enterprise, government, healthcare, or a service provider organization, Cisco Secure Firewall provides top-ranked security.
When you invest in Cisco Secure Firewall, you are investing in award-winning threat defense with capabilities that are built for the real world. Learn more about SE Labs 2023 Annual Report, Cisco Secure Firewall and how you can refresh your firewall.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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Authorities in the United States and United Kingdom today levied financial sanctions against seven men accused of operating “Trickbot,” a cybercrime-as-a-service platform based in Russia that has enabled countless ransomware attacks and bank account takeovers since its debut in 2016. The U.S. Department of the Treasury says the Trickbot group is associated with Russian intelligence services, and that this alliance led to the targeting of many U.S. companies and government entities.
Initially a stealthy trojan horse program delivered via email and used to steal passwords, Trickbot evolved into “a highly modular malware suite that provides the Trickbot Group with the ability to conduct a variety of illegal cyber activities, including ransomware attacks,” the Treasury Department said.
A spam email from 2020 containing a Trickbot-infected attachment. Image: Microsoft.
“During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Trickbot targeted hospitals and healthcare centers, launching a wave of ransomware attacks against hospitals across the United States,” the sanctions notice continued. “In one of these attacks, the Trickbot Group deployed ransomware against three Minnesota medical facilities, disrupting their computer networks and telephones, and causing a diversion of ambulances. Members of the Trickbot Group publicly gloated over the ease of targeting the medical facilities and the speed with which the ransoms were paid to the group.”
Only one of the men sanctioned today is known to have been criminally charged in connection with hacking activity. According to the Treasury Department, the alleged senior leader of the Trickbot group is 34-year-old Russian national Vitaly “Bentley” Kovalev.
A New Jersey grand jury indicted Kovalev in 2012 after an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service determined that he ran a massive “money mule” scheme, which used phony job offers to trick people into laundering money stolen from hacked small to mid-sized businesses in the United States. The 2012 indictment against Kovalev relates to cybercrimes he allegedly perpetrated prior to the creation of Trickbot.
In 2015, Kovalev reportedly began filming a movie in Russia about cybercrime called “Botnet.” According to a 2016 story from Forbes.ru, Botnet’s opening scene was to depict the plight of Christina Svechinskaya, a Russian student arrested by FBI agents in September 2010.
Christina Svechinskaya, a money mule hired by Bentley who was arrested by the FBI in 2010.
Svechinskaya was one of Bentley’s money mules, most of whom were young Russian students on temporary travel visas in the United States. She was among 37 alleged mules charged with aiding an international cybercrime operation — basically, setting up phony corporate bank accounts for the sole purpose of laundering stolen funds.
Although she possessed no real hacking skills, Svechinskaya’s mugshot and social media photos went viral online and she was quickly dubbed “the world’s sexiest computer hacker” by the tabloids.
Kovalev’s Botnet film project was disrupted after Russian authorities raided the film production company’s offices as part of a cybercrime investigation. In February 2016, Reuters reported that the raid was connected to a crackdown on “Dyre,” a sophisticated trojan that U.S. federal investigators say was the precursor to the Trickbot malware. The Forbes.ru article cited sources close to the investigation who said the film studio was operating as a money-laundering front for the cybercrooks behind Dyre.
But shifting political winds in Russia would soon bring high treason charges against three of the Russian cybercrime investigators tied to the investigation into the film studio. In a major shakeup in 2017, the Kremlin levied treason charges against Sergey Mikhaylov, then deputy chief of Russia’s top anti-cybercrime unit.
Also charged with treason was Ruslan Stoyanov, then a senior employee at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab [the Forbes.ru report from 2016 said investigators from Mikhaylov’s unit and Kaspersky Lab were present at the film company raid].
Russian media outlets have speculated that the men were accused of treason for helping American cybercrime investigators pursue top Russian hackers. However, the charges against both men were classified and have never been officially revealed. After their brief, closed trial, both men were convicted of treason. Mikhaylov was given a 22 year prison sentence; Stoyanov was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
In September 2021, the Kremlin issued treason charges against Ilya Sachkov, formerly head of the cybersecurity firm Group-IB. According to Reuters, Sachkov and his company were hired by the film studio “to advise the Botnet director and writers on the finer points of cybercrime.” Sachkov remains imprisoned in Russia pending his treason trial.
Trickbot was heavily used by Conti and Ryuk, two of Russia’s most ruthless and successful ransomware groups. Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis estimates that in 2021 alone, Conti extorted more than USD $100 million from its hacking victims; Chainalysis estimates Ryuk extorted more than USD $150 million from its ransomware victims.
The U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has long tracked the activities of Trickbot, Ryuk and Conti under the same moniker — “Wizard Spider” — which CrowdStrike describes as “a Russia-nexus cybercriminal group behind the core development and distribution of a sophisticated arsenal of criminal tools, that allow them to run multiple different types of operations.”
“CrowdStrike Intelligence has observed WIZARD SPIDER targeting multiple countries and industries such as academia, energy, financial services, government, and more,” said Adam Meyers, head of intelligence at CrowdStrike.
This is not the U.S. government’s first swipe at the Trickbot group. In early October 2020, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that someone had launched a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt the Trickbot botnet. A week later, The Washington Post ran a story saying the attack on Trickbot was the work of U.S. Cyber Command, a branch of the Department of Defense headed by the director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
Days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a Ukrainian researcher leaked several years of internal chat logs from the Conti ransomware gang. Those candid conversations offer a fascinating view into the challenges of running a sprawling criminal enterprise with more than 100 salaried employees. They also showed that Conti enjoyed protection from prosecution by Russian authorities, as long as the hacker group took care not to target Russian organizations.
In addition, the leaked Conti chats confirmed there was considerable overlap in the operation and leadership of Conti, Trickbot and Ryuk.
Michael DeBolt, chief intelligence officer at cybersecurity firm Intel 471, said the leaked Conti chats showed Bentley oversaw a team of coders tasked with ensuring that the Trickbot and Conti malware remained undetected by the different antivirus and security software vendors.
In the years prior to the emergence of Trickbot in 2016, Bentley worked closely on the Gameover ZeuS trojan, a peer-to-peer malware threat that infected between 500,000 and a million computers with an automated ransomware strain called Cryptolocker, DeBolt said.
The FBI has a standing $3 million bounty offered for the capture of Evgeny “Slavik” Bogachev, the alleged author of the Zeus trojan. And there are indications that Bentley worked directly with Bogachev. DeBolt pointed to an October 2014 discussion on the exclusive Russian hacking forum Mazafaka that included a complaint by a Russian hosting firm against a forum user by the name “Ferrari” who had failed to pay a $30,000 hosting bill.
In that discussion thread, it emerged that the hosting company thought it was filing a complaint against Slavik. But the Mazafaka member who vouched for Ferrari’s membership on the forum said they knew Ferrari as Bentley the mule handler, and at some point Slavik and Bentley must have been sharing the Ferrari user account.
“It is likely that Slavik (aka. Bogachev) and Bentley (aka. Kovalev) shared the same ‘Ferrari’ handle on the Mazafaka forum circa 2014, which suggests the two had a working relationship at that time, and supports the recent US and UK Government announcements regarding Kovalev’s past involvement in cybercrime predating Dyre or the Trickbot Group,” DeBolt said.
CrowdStrike’s Meyers said while Wizard Spider operations have significantly reduced following the demise of Conti in June 2022, today’s sanctions will likely cause temporary disruptions for the cybercriminal group while they look for ways to circumvent the financial restrictions — which make it illegal to transact with or hold the assets of sanctioned persons or entities.
“Often, when cybercriminal groups are disrupted, they will go dark for a time only to rebrand under a new name,” Meyers said.
The prosecution of Kovalev is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey. A copy of the now-unsealed 2012 indictment of Kovalev is here (PDF).
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