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Microsoft today released software updates to plug 100 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day vulnerability that is already being used in active attacks. Not to be outdone, Apple has released a set of important updates addressing two zero-day vulnerabilities that are being used to attack iPhones, iPads and Macs.
On April 7, Apple issued emergency security updates to fix two weaknesses that are being actively exploited, including CVE-2023-28206, which can be exploited by apps to seize control over a device. CVE-2023-28205 can be used by a malicious or hacked website to install code.
Both vulnerabilities are addressed in iOS/iPadOS 16.4.1, iOS 15.7.5, and macOS 12.6.5 and 11.7.6. If you use Apple devices and you don’t have automatic updates enabled (they are on by default), you should probably take care of that soon as detailed instructions on how to attack CVE-2023-28206 are now public.
Microsoft’s bevy of 100 security updates released today include CVE-2023-28252, which is a weakness in Windows that Redmond says is under active attack. The vulnerability is in the Windows Common Log System File System (CLFS) driver, a core Windows component that was the source of attacks targeting a different zero-day vulnerability in February 2023.
“If it seems familiar, that’s because there was a similar 0-day patched in the same component just two months ago,” said Dustin Childs at the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative. “To me, that implies the original fix was insufficient and attackers have found a method to bypass that fix. As in February, there is no information about how widespread these attacks may be. This type of exploit is typically paired with a code execution bug to spread malware or ransomware.”
According to the security firm Qualys, this vulnerability has been leveraged by cyber criminals to deploy Nokoyawa ransomware.
“This is a relatively new strain for which there is some open source intel to suggest that it is possibly related to Hive ransomware – one of the most notable ransomware families of 2021 and linked to breaches of over 300+ organizations in a matter of just a few months,” said Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys.
Jogi said while it is still unclear which exact threat actor is targeting CVE-2023-28252, targets have been observed in South and North America, regions across Asia and at organizations in the Middle East.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that CVE-2023-28252 is also the second CLFS zero-day disclosed to Microsoft by researchers from Mandiant and DBAPPSecurity (CVE-2022-37969), though it is unclear if both of these discoveries are related to the same attacker.
Seven of the 100 vulnerabilities Microsoft fixed today are rated “Critical,” meaning they can be used to install malicious code with no help from the user. Ninety of the flaws earned Redmond’s slightly less-dire “Important” label, which refers to weaknesses that can be used to undermine the security of the system but which may require some amount of user interaction.
Narang said Microsoft has rated nearly 90% of this month’s vulnerabilities as “Exploitation Less Likely,” while just 9.3% of flaws were rated as “Exploitation More Likely.” Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs zeroed in on several notable flaws in that 9.3%, including CVE-2023-28231, a remote code execution vulnerability in a core Windows network process (DHCP) with a CVSS score of 8.8.
“‘Exploitation more likely’ means it’s not being actively exploited but adversaries may look to try and weaponize this one,” Breen said. “Micorosft does note that successful exploitation requires an attacker to have already gained initial access to the network. This could be via social engineering, spear phishing attacks, or exploitation of other services.”
Breen also called attention to CVE-2023-28220 and CVE-2023-28219 — a pair of remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting Windows Remote Access Servers (RAS) that also earned Microsoft’s “exploitation more likely” label.
“An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted connection request to a RAS server, which could lead to remote code execution,” Breen said. While not standard in all organizations, RAS servers typically have direct access from the Internet where most users and services are connected. This makes it extremely enticing for attackers as they don’t need to socially engineer their way into an organization. They can simply scan the internet for RAS servers and automate the exploitation of vulnerable devices.”
For more details on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
Web hosting giant GoDaddy made headlines this month when it disclosed that a multi-year breach allowed intruders to steal company source code, siphon customer and employee login credentials, and foist malware on customer websites. Media coverage understandably focused on GoDaddy’s admission that it suffered three different cyberattacks over as many years at the hands of the same hacking group. But it’s worth revisiting how this group typically got in to targeted companies: By calling employees and tricking them into navigating to a phishing website.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), GoDaddy said it determined that the same “sophisticated threat actor group” was responsible for three separate intrusions, including:
-March 2020: A spear-phishing attack on a GoDaddy employee compromised the hosting login credentials of approximately 28,000 GoDaddy customers, as well as login credentials for a small number employees;
-November 2021: A compromised GoDaddy password let attackers steal source code and information tied to 1.2 million customers, including website administrator passwords, sFTP credentials, and private SSL keys;
-December 2022: Hackers gained access to and installed malware on GoDaddy’s cPanel hosting servers that “intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites.”
“Based on our investigation, we believe these incidents are part of a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group that, among other things, installed malware on our systems and obtained pieces of code related to some services within GoDaddy,” the company stated in its SEC filing.
What else do we know about the cause of these incidents? We don’t know much about the source of the November 2021 incident, other than GoDaddy’s statement that it involved a compromised password, and that it took about two months for the company to detect the intrusion. GoDaddy has not disclosed the source of the breach in December 2022 that led to malware on some customer websites.
But we do know the March 2020 attack was precipitated by a spear-phishing attack against a GoDaddy employee. GoDaddy described the incident at the time in general terms as a social engineering attack, but one of its customers affected by that March 2020 breach actually spoke to one of the hackers involved.
The hackers were able to change the Domain Name System (DNS) records for the transaction brokering site escrow.com so that it pointed to an address in Malaysia that was host to just a few other domains, including the then brand-new phishing domain servicenow-godaddy[.]com.
The general manager of Escrow.com found himself on the phone with one of the GoDaddy hackers, after someone who claimed they worked at GoDaddy called and said they needed him to authorize some changes to the account.
In reality, the caller had just tricked a GoDaddy employee into giving away their credentials, and he could see from the employee’s account that Escrow.com required a specific security procedure to complete a domain transfer.
The general manager of Escrow.com said he suspected the call was a scam, but decided to play along for about an hour — all the while recording the call and coaxing information out of the scammer.
“This guy had access to the notes, and knew the number to call,” to make changes to the account, the CEO of Escrow.com told KrebsOnSecurity. “He was literally reading off the tickets to the notes of the admin panel inside GoDaddy.”
About halfway through this conversation — after being called out by the general manager as an imposter — the hacker admitted that he was not a GoDaddy employee, and that he was in fact part of a group that enjoyed repeated success with social engineering employees at targeted companies over the phone.
Absent from GoDaddy’s SEC statement is another spate of attacks in November 2020, in which unknown intruders redirected email and web traffic for multiple cryptocurrency services that used GoDaddy in some capacity.
It is possible this incident was not mentioned because it was the work of yet another group of intruders. But in response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity at the time, GoDaddy said that incident also stemmed from a “limited” number of GoDaddy employees falling for a sophisticated social engineering scam.
“As threat actors become increasingly sophisticated and aggressive in their attacks, we are constantly educating employees about new tactics that might be used against them and adopting new security measures to prevent future attacks,” GoDaddy said in a written statement back in 2020.
Voice phishing or “vishing” attacks typically target employees who work remotely. The phishers will usually claim that they’re calling from the employer’s IT department, supposedly to help troubleshoot some issue. The goal is to convince the target to enter their credentials at a website set up by the attackers that mimics the organization’s corporate email or VPN portal.
Experts interviewed for an August 2020 story on a steep rise in successful voice phishing attacks said there are generally at least two people involved in each vishing scam: One who is social engineering the target over the phone, and another co-conspirator who takes any credentials entered at the phishing page — including multi-factor authentication codes shared by the victim — and quickly uses them to log in to the company’s website.
The attackers are usually careful to do nothing with the phishing domain until they are ready to initiate a vishing call to a potential victim. And when the attack or call is complete, they disable the website tied to the domain.
This is key because many domain registrars will only respond to external requests to take down a phishing website if the site is live at the time of the abuse complaint. This tactic also can stymie efforts by companies that focus on identifying newly-registered phishing domains before they can be used for fraud.
A U2F device made by Yubikey.
GoDaddy’s latest SEC filing indicates the company had nearly 7,000 employees as of December 2022. In addition, GoDaddy contracts with another 3,000 people who work full-time for the company via business process outsourcing companies based primarily in India, the Philippines and Colombia.
Many companies now require employees to supply a one-time password — such as one sent via SMS or produced by a mobile authenticator app — in addition to their username and password when logging in to company assets online. But both SMS and app-based codes can be undermined by phishing attacks that simply request this information in addition to the user’s password.
One multifactor option — physical security keys — appears to be immune to these advanced scams. The most commonly used security keys are inexpensive USB-based devices. A security key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB device and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.
The allure of U2F devices for multi-factor authentication is that even if an employee who has enrolled a security key for authentication tries to log in at an impostor site, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the security key if the user isn’t on their employer’s legitimate website, and the login attempt fails. Thus, the second factor cannot be phished, either over the phone or Internet.
In July 2018, Google disclosed that it had not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical security keys in place of one-time codes.
Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday.
The security updates include patches for Azure, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint Server, SysInternals, and the .NET framework. Six of the update bundles earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning they fix vulnerabilities that malware or malcontents can use to remotely commandeer an unpatched Windows system — with little to no interaction on the part of the user.
The bug already seeing exploitation is CVE-2022-44698, which allows attackers to bypass the Windows SmartScreen security feature. The vulnerability allows attackers to craft documents that won’t get tagged with Microsoft’s “Mark of the Web,” despite being downloaded from untrusted sites.
“This means no Protected View for Microsoft Office documents, making it easier to get users to do sketchy things like execute malicious macros, said Greg Wiseman, product manager at security firm Rapid7. This is the second Mark of the Web flaw Microsoft has patched in as many months; both were first publicly detailed over the past two months on Twitter by security researcher Will Dormann.
Publicly disclosed (but not actively exploited for now) is CVE-2022-44710, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in the DirectX graphics component of Windows 11.
Another notable critical bug is CVE-2022-41076, a remote code execution flaw in PowerShell — a key component of Windows that makes it easier to automate system tasks and configurations.
Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs said while Microsoft doesn’t share much detail about CVE-2022-41076 apart from the designation ‘Exploitation More Likely,’ they also note that successful exploitation requires an attacker to take additional actions to prepare the target environment.
“What actions are required is not clear; however, we do know that exploitation requires an authenticated user level of access,” Breen said. “This combination suggests that the exploit requires a social engineering element, and would likely be seen in initial infections using attacks like MalDocs or LNK files.”
Speaking of malicious documents, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative highlights CVE-2022-44713, a spoofing vulnerability in Outlook for Mac.
“We don’t often highlight spoofing bugs, but anytime you’re dealing with a spoofing bug in an e-mail client, you should take notice,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “This vulnerability could allow an attacker to appear as a trusted user when they should not be. Now combine this with the SmartScreen Mark of the Web bypass and it’s not hard to come up with a scenario where you receive an e-mail that appears to be from your boss with an attachment entitled “Executive_Compensation.xlsx”. There aren’t many who wouldn’t open that file in that scenario.”
Microsoft also released guidance on reports that certain software drivers certified by Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Developer Program were being used maliciously in post-exploitation activity.
Three different companies reported evidence that malicious hackers were using these signed malicious driver files to lay the groundwork for ransomware deployment inside victim organizations. One of those companies, Sophos, published a blog post Tuesday detailing how the activity was tied to the Russian ransomware group Cuba, which has extorted an estimated $60 million from victims since 2019.
Of course, not all scary and pressing security threats are Microsoft-based. Also on Tuesday, Apple released a bevy of security updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and Safari, including a patch for a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution.
Anyone responsible for maintaining Fortinet or Citrix remote access products probably needs to update, as both are dealing with active attacks on just-patched flaws.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today (indexed by severity and other metrics) check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
After a three-year hiatus, Cisco Live 2022 Melbourne is back! Personally, it will be a special experience, attending with my team and leaders for the first time as the Asia Pacific Cybersecurity Lead.
I will be speaking on the “Top Priorities for IT and Security Leaders in 2023” on 7 December at the Cisco Secure Insights Live, covering key priorities for security leaders as we enter the new year. Please join me at the Security Experience Hub at the World of Solutions. You can also participate virtually.
Today’s businesses require a strong culture of security and resilience that is pervasive throughout the organization to withstand uncertainty and emerge stronger. Hear from our Cisco security leaders on powering resilience across the enterprise in the following presentations:
Dive into 80+ security sessions by experts to uncover best practices to address key challenges, and maximize your technology investments.
Explore the Security Experience Hub and Demo Stand at the World of Solutions Zone for exciting security activities:
For those joining us online, we have the Cisco Secure Insights Live broadcast on all things security, and Cisco Live broadcast covering keynote presentations by industry leaders.
I’m excited for you to see how we can help you achieve security resilience and look forward to meeting you at Cisco Live 2022 Melbourne. I’m ALL IN, are you?
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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Let’s face it: Having “2022 election” in the headline above is probably the only reason anyone might read this story today. Still, while most of us here in the United States are anxiously awaiting the results of how well we’ve patched our Democracy, it seems fitting that Microsoft Corp. today released gobs of security patches for its ubiquitous Windows operating systems. November’s patch batch includes fixes for a whopping six zero-day security vulnerabilities that miscreants and malware are already exploiting in the wild.
Probably the scariest of the zero-day flaws is CVE-2022-41128, a “critical” weakness in the Windows scripting languages that could be used to foist malicious software on vulnerable users who do nothing more than browse to a hacked or malicious site that exploits the weakness. Microsoft credits Google with reporting the vulnerability, which earned a CVSS score of 8.8.
CVE-2022-41073 is a zero-day flaw in the Windows Print Spooler, a Windows component that Microsoft has patched mightily over the past year. Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, noted that the print spooler has been a popular target for vulnerabilities in the last 12 months, with this marking the 9th patch.
The third zero-day Microsoft patched this month is CVE-2022-41125, which is an “elevation of privilege” vulnerability in the Windows Cryptography API: Next Generation (CNG) Key Isolation Service, a service for isolating private keys. Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said exploitation of this vulnerability could grant an attacker SYSTEM privileges.
The fourth zero-day, CVE-2022-41091, was previously disclosed and widely reported on in October. It is a Security Feature Bypass of “Windows Mark of the Web” – a mechanism meant to flag files that have come from an untrusted source.
The other two zero-day bugs Microsoft patched this month were for vulnerabilities being exploited in Exchange Server. News that these two Exchange flaws were being exploited in the wild surfaced in late September 2022, and many were surprised when Microsoft let October’s Patch Tuesday sail by without issuing official patches for them (the company instead issued mitigation instructions that it was forced to revise multiple times). Today’s patch batch addresses both issues.
Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, said the Exchange flaw CVE-2022-41040 is a “critical” elevation of privilege vulnerability, and CVE-2022-41082 is considered Important, allowing Remote Code Execution (RCE) when PowerShell is accessible to the attacker.
“Both vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild,” Wiseman said. “Four other CVEs affecting Exchange Server have also been addressed this month. Three are rated as Important, and CVE-2022-41080 is another privilege escalation vulnerability considered Critical. Customers are advised to update their Exchange Server systems immediately, regardless of whether any previously recommended mitigation steps have been applied. The mitigation rules are no longer recommended once systems have been patched.”
Adobe usually issues security updates for its products on Patch Tuesday, but it did not this month. For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
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It’s Partner Summit week and, for me, it’s an important reminder that no one company, not even Cisco, can do it alone. Our partners provide diverse perspectives, expertise, and solutions offerings. Each partner plays a key part in delivering the outcomes and experiences our customers need, want, and expect. So, when we say, “Let’s Own It”, it’s a rally cry for Cisco and our partners alike to do our parts to seize the massive opportunity that we have in front of us and turn it into mutual success.
Together, I know we can achieve amazing things. Foremost on my mind right now is both the opportunity and necessity to empower customers with security resilience. Resilience means customers can protect the integrity of every aspect of their business so that they can withstand unpredictable threats or changes and emerge stronger. It’s about providing controlled, trusted access to applications and services, at any time, from any place.
Resilience can also help customers deal with issues the moment they arise. If changes are needed, they will have the visibility to determine priorities, thanks to actionable intelligence and insight in the face of some major security realities that they are dealing with every day.
One, businesses are more interconnected, meaning that a breach on anyone in the value chain has dramatic ripple effects on the others.
Two, security attacks are becoming more personalized. Individuals remain one of the easiest targets for cybercriminals and their attacks are becoming more sophisticated and customized for the individual.
Three, hybrid work is here to stay. People around the world will continue to work from anywhere, on managed and unmanaged devices, over secured and unsecured networks, to applications spread across multiple clouds and data centers.
Our vision for enabling a more resilient organization is the Cisco Security Cloud. It’s an open, integrated security platform that will protect the integrity of entire IT ecosystems by safeguarding users, devices and applications across public clouds and private data centers, without public cloud lock-in. Delivering on the Security Cloud is part of our long-term product strategy; but the innovations we are announcing at Partner Summit this week are foundational elements that execute on this vision.
Specifically, we are announcing new solutions and technologies across our portfolio in Secure Connectivity, Network Security, and Zero Trust. I encourage all partners to drill down on each announcement in the accompanying blogs and news announcements. But here are the highlights of the announcements.
Helping increase resistance to phishing attacks and improve user experience through frictionless access using Duo Passwordless, which is now generally available with support for Duo Mobile as a passwordless authenticator.
Expanding the Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 series, the first firewall purpose-built for hybrid work, with the Secure Firewall 3105, ideal for branch office and similar use cases focused on performance at a competitive price point.
Strengthening Umbrella’s data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities by adding API-based enforcement and unified reporting to protect sensitive data, e.g., intellectual property and financial and healthcare information. This complements Umbrella’s current inline-DLP functionality and collectively forms multi-mode DLP.
New Secure Workload capabilities delivering policy-as-code workload security for cloud-native and public-cloud application development. Common use cases for policy-as-code include access control to infrastructure and simplifying enterprise compliance and controls.
Our strategy and our innovation roadmap are all designed to set you up, our partners, for long-term success. In addition, we are committed to several partner enablement programs to help you deliver more value to customers and to help you become more profitable. Examples include:
Partner Summit is for you. So, my call-to-action is for you to maximize the value you get out of this week by attending as many of the informative, high-impact security sessions many teams worked hard to create. I am really looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible – on the expo floor, at the sessions, or in our 1-on-1 meetings.
Security has never been more critical and the need for resiliency is a requirement for virtually every business. The time for us to own it and innovate to win this future together has never been better.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 85 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a new zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that is being actively exploited. However, noticeably absent from this month’s Patch Tuesday are any updates to address a pair of zero-day flaws being exploited this past month in Microsoft Exchange Server.
The new zero-day flaw– CVE-2022-41033 — is an “elevation of privilege” bug in the Windows COM+ event service, which provides system notifications when users logon or logoff. Microsoft says the flaw is being actively exploited, and that it was reported by an anonymous individual.
“Despite its relatively low score in comparison to other vulnerabilities patched today, this one should be at the top of everyone’s list to quickly patch,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “This specific vulnerability is a local privilege escalation, which means that an attacker would already need to have code execution on a host to use this exploit. Privilege escalation vulnerabilities are a common occurrence in almost every security compromise. Attackers will seek to gain SYSTEM or domain-level access in order to disable security tools, grab credentials with tools like Mimkatz and move laterally across the network.
Indeed, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that almost half of the security flaws Microsoft patched this week are elevation of privilege bugs.
Some privilege escalation bugs can be particularly scary. One example is CVE-2022-37968, which affects organizations running Kubernetes clusters on Azure and earned a CVSS score of 10.0 — the most severe score possible.
Microsoft says that to exploit this vulnerability an attacker would need to know the randomly generated DNS endpoint for an Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster. But that may not be such a tall order, says Breen, who notes that a number of free and commercial DNS discovery services now make it easy to find this information on potential targets.
Late last month, Microsoft acknowledged that attackers were exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server. Paired together, the two flaws are known as “ProxyNotShell” and they can be chained to allow remote code execution on Exchange Server systems.
Microsoft said it was expediting work on official patches for the Exchange bugs, and it urged affected customers to enable certain settings to mitigate the threat from the attacks. However, those mitigation steps were soon shown to be ineffective, and Microsoft has been adjusting them on a daily basis nearly each day since then.
The lack of Exchange patches leaves a lot of Microsoft customers exposed. Security firm Rapid7 said that as of early September 2022 the company observed more than 190,000 potentially vulnerable instances of Exchange Server exposed to the Internet.
“While Microsoft confirmed the zero-days and issued guidance faster than they have in the past, there are still no patches nearly two weeks out from initial disclosure,” said Caitlin Condon, senior manager of vulnerability research at Rapid7. “Despite high hopes that today’s Patch Tuesday release would contain fixes for the vulnerabilities, Exchange Server is conspicuously missing from the initial list of October 2022 security updates. Microsoft’s recommended rule for blocking known attack patterns has been bypassed multiple times, emphasizing the necessity of a true fix.”
Adobe also released security updates to fix 29 vulnerabilities across a variety of products, including Acrobat and Reader, ColdFusion, Commerce and Magento. Adobe said it is not aware of active attacks against any of these flaws.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Microsoft Corp. is investigating reports that attackers are exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server, a technology many organizations rely on to send and receive email. Microsoft says it is expediting work on software patches to plug the security holes. In the meantime, it is urging a subset of Exchange customers to enable a setting that could help mitigate ongoing attacks.
In customer guidance released Thursday, Microsoft said it is investigating two reported zero-day flaws affecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016, and 2019. CVE-2022-41040, is a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability that can enable an authenticated attacker to remotely trigger the second zero-day vulnerability — CVE-2022-41082 — which allows remote code execution (RCE) when PowerShell is accessible to the attacker.
Microsoft said Exchange Online has detections and mitigation in place to protect customers. Customers using on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers are urged to review the mitigations suggested in the security advisory, which Microsoft says should block the known attack patterns.
Vietnamese security firm GTSC on Thursday published a writeup on the two Exchange zero-day flaws, saying it first observed the attacks in early August being used to drop “webshells.” These web-based backdoors offer attackers an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser.
“We detected webshells, mostly obfuscated, being dropped to Exchange servers,” GTSC wrote. “Using the user-agent, we detected that the attacker uses Antsword, an active Chinese-based opensource cross-platform website administration tool that supports webshell management. We suspect that these come from a Chinese attack group because the webshell codepage is 936, which is a Microsoft character encoding for simplified Chinese.”
GTSC’s advisory includes details about post-compromise activity and related malware, as well as steps it took to help customers respond to active compromises of their Exchange Server environment. But the company said it would withhold more technical details of the vulnerabilities for now.
In March 2021, hundreds of thousands of organizations worldwide had their email stolen and multiple backdoor webshells installed, all thanks to four zero-day vulnerabilities in Exchange Server.
Granted, the zero-day flaws that powered that debacle were far more critical than the two detailed this week, and there are no signs yet that exploit code has been publicly released (that will likely change soon). But part of what made last year’s Exchange Server mass hack so pervasive was that vulnerable organizations had little or no advance notice on what to look for before their Exchange Server environments were completely owned by multiple attackers.
Microsoft is quick to point out that these zero-day flaws require an attacker to have a valid username and password for an Exchange user, but this may not be such a tall order for the hackers behind these latest exploits against Exchange Server.
Steven Adair is president of Volexity, the Virginia-based cybersecurity firm that was among the first to sound the alarm about the Exchange zero-days targeted in the 2021 mass hack. Adair said GTSC’s writeup includes an Internet address used by the attackers that Volexity has tied with high confidence to a China-based hacking group that has recently been observed phishing Exchange users for their credentials.
In February 2022, Volexity warned that this same Chinese hacking group was behind the mass exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which is a competitor to Microsoft Exchange that many enterprises use to manage email and other forms of messaging.
If your organization runs Exchange Server, please consider reviewing the Microsoft mitigations and the GTSC post-mortem on their investigations.
This month’s Patch Tuesday offers a little something for everyone, including security updates for a zero-day flaw in Microsoft Windows that is under active attack, and another Windows weakness experts say could be used to power a fast-spreading computer worm. Also, Apple has also quashed a pair of zero-day bugs affecting certain macOS and iOS users, and released iOS 16, which offers a new privacy and security feature called “Lockdown Mode.” And Adobe axed 63 vulnerabilities in a range of products.
Microsoft today released software patches to plug at least 64 security holes in Windows and related products. Worst in terms of outright scariness is CVE-2022-37969, which is a “privilege escalation” weakness in the Windows Common Log File System Driver that allows attackers to gain SYSTEM-level privileges on a vulnerable host. Microsoft says this flaw is already being exploited in the wild.
Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, said any vulnerability that is actively targeted by attackers in the wild must be put to the top of any patching list.
“Not to be fooled by its relatively low CVSS score of 7.8, privilege escalation vulnerabilities are often highly sought after by cyber attackers,” Breen said. “Once an attacker has managed to gain a foothold on a victim’s system, one of their first actions will be to gain a higher level of permissions, allowing the attacker to disable security applications and any device monitoring. There is no known workaround to date, so patching is the only effective mitigation.”
Satnam Narang at Tenable said CVE-2022-24521 — a similar vulnerability in the same Windows log file component — was patched earlier this year as part of Microsoft’s April Patch Tuesday release and was also exploited in the wild.
“CVE-2022-37969 was disclosed by several groups, though it’s unclear if CVE-2022-37969 is a patch-bypass for CVE-2022-24521 at this point,” Narang said.
Another vulnerability Microsoft patched this month — CVE-2022-35803 — also seems to be related to the same Windows log file component. While there are no indications CVE-2022-35803 is being actively exploited, Microsoft suggests that exploitation of this flaw is more likely than not.
Trend Micro’s Dustin Childs called attention to CVE-2022-34718, a remote code execution flaw in the Windows TCP/IP service that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute code with elevated privileges on affected systems without user interaction.
“That officially puts it into the ‘wormable’ category and earns it a CVSS rating of 9.8,” Childs said. “However, only systems with IPv6 enabled and IPSec configured are vulnerable. While good news for some, if you’re using IPv6 (as many are), you’re probably running IPSec as well. Definitely test and deploy this update quickly.”
Cisco Talos warns about four critical vulnerabilities fixed this month — CVE-2022-34721 and CVE-2022-34722 — which have severity scores of 9.8, though they are “less likely” to be exploited, according to Microsoft.
“These are remote code execution vulnerabilities in the Windows Internet Key Exchange protocol that could be triggered if an attacker sends a specially crafted IP packet,” wrote Jon Munshaw and Asheer Malhotra. “Two other critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2022-35805 and CVE-2022-34700 exist in on-premises instances of Microsoft Dynamics 365. An authenticated attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to run a specially crafted trusted solution package and execute arbitrary SQL commands. The attacker could escalate their privileges further and execute commands as the database owner.”
Not to be outdone, Apple fixed at least two zero-day vulnerabilities when it released updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and Safari. CVE-2022-32984 is a problem in the deepest recesses of the operating system (the kernel). Apple pushed an emergency update for a related zero-day last month in CVE-2022-32983, which could be used to foist malware on iPhones, iPads and Macs that visited a booby-trapped website.
Also listed under active attack is CVE-2022-32817, which has been fixed on macOS 12.6 (Monterey), macOS 11.7 (Big Sur), iOS 15.7 and iPadOS 15.7, and iOS 16. The same vulnerability was fixed in Apple Watch in July 2022, and credits Xinru Chi of Japanese cybersecurity firm Pangu Lab.
“Interestingly, this CVE is also listed in the advisory for iOS 16, but it is not called out as being under active exploit for that flavor of the OS,” Trend Micro’s Childs noted. “Apple does state in its iOS 16 advisory that ‘Additional CVE entries to be added soon.’ It’s possible other bugs could also impact this version of the OS. Either way, it’s time to update your Apple devices.”
Apple’s iOS 16 includes two new security and privacy features — Lockdown Mode and Safety Check. Wired.com describes Safety Check as a feature for users who are at risk for, or currently experiencing, domestic abuse.
“The tool centralizes a number of controls in one place to make it easier for users to manage and revoke access to their location data and reset privacy-related permissions,” wrote Lily Hay Newman.
“Lockdown Mode, on the other hand, is meant for users who potentially face targeted spyware attacks and aggressive state-backed hacking. The feature comprehensively restricts any nonessential iOS features so there are as few potential points of entry to a device as possible. As more governments and repressive entities around the world have begun purchasing powerful commodity spyware to target individuals of particular importance or interest, iOS’s general security defenses haven’t been able to keep pace with these specialized threats.”
To turn on Lockdown Mode in iOS 16, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Lockdown Mode. Safety Check is located in the same area.
Finally, Adobe released seven patches addressing 63 security holes in Adobe Experience Manager, Bridge, InDesign, Photoshop, InCopy, Animate, and Illustrator. More on those updates is here.
Don’t forget to back up your data and/or system before applying any security updates. If you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a decent chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with useful tips.
Earlier this year, our global Connected Family Study revealed the online habits of parents and their children. What we found called for a closer look.
One finding that leaped out, in particular, is—cyberbullying occurs far more often than parents think. And in many cases, children are keeping it from their parents.
Now with our follow-on research, we set out to answer many of the questions families have about cyberbullying. Where it happens most, who’s most affected, and are children cyberbullying others without even knowing it?
Our report, “Hidden in Plain Sight: More Dangers of Cyberbullying Emerge,” provides insights into these questions and several more. We’ll cover the top findings here in this blog, while you can get the full story by downloading the report here.
Even as stay-at-home mandates in 2020 and 2021 saw children exposed to more cyberbullying while they spent more time online, our ten-country survey found that concerns about cyberbullying in 2022 are even higher today:
And just as the level of concern is high, the findings show us why. Families reported alarming rates of racially motivated cyberbullying, along with high rates of attacks on the major social media and messaging platforms.
Additionally, children shared insights into who’s doing the bullying (it’s largely people who know them) and more than half are the ones doing the bullying—and they don’t even realize it.
Further findings include:
Our research further revealed how the face of cyberbullying takes on different form around the globe. From nation to nation, the influences of polarized politics, racial relations, and different traditions in parent-child relationships shape and re-shape the forms of cyberbullying that children see.
Each of our ten nations surveyed set themselves apart with trends of their own, some of them including:
These new findings reflect the concerns of parents and children alike—cyberbullying remains a pervasive and potentially harmful fact of life online, particularly as racism and other severe forms of cyberbullying take rise.
Without question, cyberbullying endures as a persistent growing pain that the still relatively young internet has yet to shake.
The solution is arguably just as complex as the factors that give cyberbullying its shape—cultural, regional, technological, societal, even governmental. Addressing one factor alone won’t curb it. Significantly curtailing cyberbullying for an internet that’s far safer than it is today requires addressing those factors in concert.
While we recognize that tall order for what it is, and as a leader in online protection, we remain committed to it.
With these findings, and continued research to come, our aim is to further an understanding of cyberbullying for all—whether that’s educators, technology innovators, policymakers, and of course parents. With this understanding, programs, platforms, and legislation can put protections in place that still allow for companies to innovate and create platforms that people love to use. Safely and securely.
The post More Dangers of Cyberbullying Emerge—Our Latest Connected Family Report appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Microsoft today released updates to fix a record 141 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software. Once again, Microsoft is patching a zero-day vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool (MSDT), a service built into Windows. Redmond also addressed multiple flaws in Exchange Server — including one that was disclosed publicly prior to today — and it is urging organizations that use Exchange for email to update as soon as possible and to enable additional protections.
In June, Microsoft patched a vulnerability in MSDT dubbed “Follina” that had been used in active attacks for at least three months prior. This latest MSDT bug — CVE-2022-34713 — is a remote code execution flaw that requires convincing a target to open a booby-trapped file, such as an Office document. Microsoft this month also issued a different patch for another MSDT flaw, tagged as CVE-2022-35743.
The publicly disclosed Exchange flaw is CVE-2022-30134, which is an information disclosure weakness. Microsoft also released fixes for three other Exchange flaws that rated a “critical” label, meaning they could be exploited remotely to compromise the system and with no help from users. Microsoft says addressing some of the Exchange vulnerabilities fixed this month requires administrators to enable Windows Extended protection on Exchange Servers. See Microsoft’s blog post on the Exchange Server updates for more details.
“If your organization runs local exchange servers, this trio of CVEs warrant an urgent patch,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research for Immerse Labs. “Exchanges can be treasure troves of information, making them valuable targets for attackers. With CVE-2022-24477, for example, an attacker can gain initial access to a user’s host and could take over the mailboxes for all exchange users, sending and reading emails and documents. For attackers focused on Business Email Compromise this kind of vulnerability can be extremely damaging.”
The other two critical Exchange bugs are tracked as CVE-2022-24516 and CVE-2022-21980. It’s difficult to believe it’s only been a little more than a year since malicious hackers worldwide pounced in a bevy of zero-day Exchange vulnerabilities to remotely compromise the email systems for hundreds of thousands of organizations running Exchange Server locally for email. That lingering catastrophe is reminder enough that critical Exchange bugs deserve immediate attention.
The SANS Internet Storm Center‘s rundown on Patch Tuesday warns that a critical remote code execution bug in the Windows Point-to-Point Protocol (CVE-2022-30133) could become “wormable” — a threat capable of spreading across a network without any user interaction.
“Another critical vulnerability worth mentioning is an elevation of privilege affecting Active Directory Domain Services (CVE-2022-34691),” SANS wrote. “According to the advisory, ‘An authenticated user could manipulate attributes on computer accounts they own or manage, and acquire a certificate from Active Directory Certificate Services that would allow elevation of privilege to System.’ A system is vulnerable only if Active Directory Certificate Services is running on the domain. The CVSS for this vulnerability is 8.8.”
Breen highlighted a set of four vulnerabilities in Visual Studio that earned Microsoft’s less-dire “important” rating but that nevertheless could be vitally important for the security of developer systems.
“Developers are empowered with access to API keys and deployment pipelines that, if compromised, could be significantly damaging to organizations,” he said. “So it’s no surprise they are often targeted by more advanced attackers. Patches for their tools should not be overlooked. We’re seeing a continued trend of supply-chain compromise too, making it vital that we ensure developers, and their tools, are kept up-to-date with the same rigor we apply to standard updates.”
Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, pointed to an interesting bug Microsoft patched in Windows Hello, the biometric authentication mechanism for Windows 10. Microsoft notes that the successful exploitation of the weakness requires physical access to the target device, but would allow an attacker to bypass a facial recognition check.
Wiseman said despite the record number of vulnerability fixes from Redmond this month, the numbers are slightly less dire.
“20 CVEs affect their Chromium-based Edge browser and 34 affect Azure Site Recovery (up from 32 CVEs affecting that product last month),” Wiseman wrote. “As usual, OS-level updates will address a lot of these, but note that some extra configuration is required to fully protect Exchange Server this month.”
As it often does on Patch Tuesday, Adobe has also released security updates for many of its products, including Acrobat and Reader, Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. More details here.
Please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 86 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a weakness in all supported versions of Windows that Microsoft warns is actively being exploited. The software giant also has made a controversial decision to put the brakes on a plan to block macros in Office documents downloaded from the Internet.
In February, security experts hailed Microsoft’s decision to block VBA macros in all documents downloaded from the Internet. The company said it would roll out the changes in stages between April and June 2022.
Macros have long been a trusted way for cybercrooks to trick people into running malicious code. Microsoft Office by default warns users that enabling macros in untrusted documents is a security risk, but those warnings can be easily disabled with the click of button. Under Microsoft’s plan, the new warnings provided no such way to enable the macros.
As Ars Technica veteran reporter Dan Goodin put it, “security professionals—some who have spent the past two decades watching clients and employees get infected with ransomware, wipers, and espionage with frustrating regularity—cheered the change.”
But last week, Microsoft abruptly changed course. As first reported by BleepingComputer, Redmond said it would roll back the changes based on feedback from users.
“While Microsoft has not shared the negative feedback that led to the rollback of this change, users have reported that they are unable to find the Unblock button to remove the Mark-of-the-Web from downloaded files, making it impossible to enable macros,” Bleeping’s Sergiu Gatlan wrote.
Microsoft later said the decision to roll back turning off macros by default was temporary, although it has not indicated when this important change might be made for good.
The zero-day Windows vulnerability already seeing active attacks is CVE-2022-22047, which is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows. Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative notes that while this bug is listed as being under active attack, there’s no information from Microsoft on where or how widely it is being exploited.
“The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code as SYSTEM, provided they can execute other code on the target,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “Bugs of this type are typically paired with a code execution bug, usually a specially crafted Office or Adobe document, to take over a system. These attacks often rely on macros, which is why so many were disheartened to hear Microsoft’s delay in blocking all Office macros by default.”
Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, said CVE-2022-22047 is the kind of vulnerability that is typically seen abused after a target has already been compromised.
“Crucially, it allows the attacker to escalate their permissions from that of a normal user to the same permissions as the SYSTEM,” he said. “With this level of access, the attackers are able to disable local services such as Endpoint Detection and Security tools. With SYSTEM access they can also deploy tools like Mimikatz which can be used to recover even more admin and domain level accounts, spreading the threat quickly.”
After a brief reprieve from patching serious security problems in the Windows Print Spooler service, we are back to business as usual. July’s patch batch contains fixes for four separate elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in Windows Print Spooler, identified as CVE-2022-22022, CVE-2022-22041, CVE-2022-30206, and CVE-2022-30226. Experts at security firm Tenable note that these four flaws provide attackers with the ability to delete files or gain SYSTEM level privileges on a vulnerable system.
Roughly a third of the patches issued today involve weaknesses in Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery offering. Other components seeing updates this month include Microsoft Defender for Endpoint; Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based); Office; Windows BitLocker; Windows Hyper-V; Skype for Business and Microsoft Lync; and Xbox.
Four of the flaws fixed this month address vulnerabilities Microsoft rates “critical,” meaning they could be used by malware or malcontents to assume remote control over unpatched Windows systems, usually without any help from users. CVE-2022-22029 and CVE-2022-22039 affect Network File System (NFS) servers, and CVE-2022-22038 affects the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) runtime.
“Although all three of these will be relatively tricky for attackers to exploit due to the amount of sustained data that needs to be transmitted, administrators should patch sooner rather than later,” said Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7. “CVE-2022-30221 supposedly affects the Windows Graphics Component, though Microsoft’s FAQ indicates that exploitation requires users to access a malicious RDP server.”
Separately, Adobe today issued patches to address at least 27 vulnerabilities across multiple products, including Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop, RoboHelp, and Adobe Character Animator.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
In the spirit of #PrideMonth, McAfee hosted month-long celebrations across the world. One of these was a live event hosted by the McAfee Pride Community with a guest speaker from the Resource Center that focused on the history of Pride, support, allyship, and belonging.
We took a moment to ask our event guest speaker, Leslie McMurray, about the work that Resource Center does, the importance of pride, and what companies can do to create inclusive work environments.
“We like to say, if we had an “elevator pitch”, we would need a really tall building! Resource Center has been around for 39 years and is one of the largest LGBTQIA+ community centers in the United States, it is a primary HIV/AIDS service organization in Texas.
Some of the work that we do includes operating a food pantry and hot meal program that serves low-income people living with HIV. We have a case management department that helps locate resources that we don’t directly provide, like housing. And we have a primary care clinic that is gender-affirming and a ten-chair dental clinic that also serves those living with HIV.
We also have a youth program called Youth First that serves youth from middle-to-high school. We have a behavioral health program and a clinic that does free testing for HIV and STDs along with a mobile health unit that does free testing in outlying areas. Finally, our advocacy department has three full-time employees!
“Sometimes we get asked “What’s ‘Pride’ about? Why do you need a parade?”
It’s important to understand that LGBTQIA+ people are still working to achieve equal rights – the same as everyone else.
The tipping point of the fight for equal rights in the US dates back to 1969 when the Stonewall Uprising took place in Manhattan. The first Pride march was held a year later to honor the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and continues to take place during the month of June each year. And while we appreciate the attention during the month, the continued fight for equal rights for the LGBTQIA+ community is yearly, and we need continuous support and allyship of people and businesses year-round.
So it’s really important for people to learn about diverse populations, understand what their challenges are, and educate yourself on these issues – from that spring’s allies.”
“One of the simplest things for companies to do is to include ‘Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender expression’ in your Equal Employment Opportunity statement. Other things companies can do is to look at putting a policy in place for transgender employees who are transitioning and consider including transgender healthcare in your company benefits package.
Make sure to help foster understanding by getting employees to do training with organizations like Resource Center. And empower upper management to lead the way ensuring all employees can bring their whole selves to work. Finally, when the opportunity arises look at working with and bringing in non-profit organizations into your company to continue spreading awareness and support for the LGBTQIA+ community.
And while June wraps up Pride month, year-round we work towards a workplace and community where all can belong – a workplace where our unique differences are celebrated and where we all stand together for equality. #McAfeePride
Learn more about the incredible work that Resource Center does here
Interested in building your career at a company where you can belong? Search our openings!
The post #McAfeePride2022 appeared first on McAfee Blog.
The past few months have been chockfull of conversations with security customers, partners, and industry leaders. After two years of virtual engagements, in-person events like our CISO Forum and Cisco Live as well as the industry’s RSA Conference underscore the power of face-to-face interactions. It’s a reminder of just how enriching conversations are and how incredibly interconnected the world is. And it’s only made closer by the security experiences that impact us all.
I had the pleasure of engaging with some of the industry’s best and brightest, sharing ideas, insights, and what keeps us up at night. The conversations offered more than an opportunity to reconnect and put faces with names. It was a chance to discuss some of the most critical cybersecurity issues and implications that are top of mind for organizations.
The collective sentiments are clear. The need for better security has never been so strong. Securing the future is good business. Disruptions are happening faster than ever before, making our interconnected world more unpredictable. Hybrid work is here to stay, hybrid and complex architectures will continue to be a reality for most organizations and that has dramatically expanded the threat surface. More and more businesses are operating as ecosystems—attacks have profound ripple effects across value chains. Attacks are becoming more bespoke, government-sponsored threat actors and ransomware as a service, continue to unravel challenging businesses to minimize the time from initial breach to complete compromise, in the event of a compromise.
Regardless of where organizations are on their digital transformations, they are progressively embarking upon journeys to unify networking and secure connectivity needs. Mobility, BYOD (bring your own device), cloud, increased collaboration, and the consumerization of IT have necessitated a new type of access control security–zero trust security. Supporting a modern enterprise across a distributed network and infrastructure involves the ability to validate user IDs, continuously verify authentication and device trust, and protect every application—
without compromising user experience. Zero trust offers organizations a simpler approach to securing access for everyone, from any device, anywhere—all the while, making it harder for attackers.
Simplicity continues to be a hot topic, and in the context of its functionality. In addition to a frictionless user experience, the real value to customers is improving operational challenges. Security practitioners want an easier way to secure the edge, access, and operations—including threat intelligence and response. Key to this simplified experience is connecting and managing business-critical control points and vulnerabilities, exchanging data, and contextualizing threat intelligence. And it requires a smarter ecosystem that brings together capabilities, unifying admin, policy, visibility, and control. Simplicity that works hard and smart—and enhances their security posture. The ultimate simplicity is improved efficacy for the organization.
Insider cyber-attacks are among the fastest growing threats in the modern security network, an increasingly common cause of data breaches. Using their authorized access, employees are intentionally or inadvertently causing harm by stealing, exposing, or destroying sensitive company data. Regardless, the consequences are the same—costing companies big bucks and massive disruption. It’s also one of the reasons why “identity as the new perimeter” is trending, as the primary objective of all advanced attacks is to gain privileged credentials. Insider attack attempts are not slowing down. However, advanced telemetry, threat detection and protection, and continuous trusted access all help decelerate the trend. Organizations are better able to expose suspicious or malicious activities caused by insider threats. Innovations are enabling business to analyze all network traffic and historical patterns of employee access and determine whether to let an employee continue uninterrupted or prompt to authenticate again.
Supply chain attacks have become one of the biggest security worries for businesses. Not only are disruptions debilitating, but no one knew the impacts or perceived outcomes. Attackers are highly aware that supply chains are comprised of larger entities often tightly connected to a broad array of smaller and less cyber-savvy organizations. Lured by lucrative payouts, attackers seek the weakest supply chain link for a successful breach. In fact, two of the four biggest cyber-attacks that the Cisco Talos team saw in the field last year were supply chain attacks that deployed ransomware on their targets’ networks: SolarWinds and REvil’s attack exploiting the Kaseya managed service provider. While there’s no perfect way to absolutely protect from ransomware, businesses are taking steps to bolster their defenses and protect against disaster.
Security incidents targeting personal information are on the rise. In fact, 86 percent of global consumers were victims of identity theft, credit/debit card fraud, or a data breach in 2020. In a recent engagement discovered by the Cisco Talos team, the API on a customer’s website could have been exploited by an attacker to steal sensitive personal information. The good news is governments and businesses alike are leaning into Data Privacy and Protection, adhering to global regulations that enforce high standards for collecting, using, disclosing, storing, securing, accessing, transferring, and processing personal data. Within the past year, the U.S. government implemented new rules to ensure companies and federal agencies follow required cybersecurity standards. As long as cyber criminals continue seeking to breach our privacy and data, these rules help hold us accountable.
Through all the insightful discussions with customers, partners, and industry leaders, a theme emerged. When it comes to cybersecurity, preparation is key and the cost of being wrong is extraordinary. By acknowledging there will continue to be disruptions, business can prepare for whatever comes next. And when it comes, they’ll not only weather the storm, but they will also come out of it stronger. And the good news is that Cisco Security Business Group is already on the journey actively addressing these headlines, and empowering our customers to reach their full potential, securely.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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What is it that customers truly want from their security? Is it simplicity? Robust protection? Agility and flexibility? Yes! In today’s uncertain world where new challenges are being thrown at IT teams each day, security must meet many diverse needs. At the end of the day, it’s about keeping the entire business resilient despite the chaos of the cyber world.
As hybrid work, the move to the cloud, and increasingly insidious threats all converge to create layers of complexity, security teams must be extra vigilant and ready for what’s next. They need a comprehensive, integrated security system whose various components share information and work together to pinpoint attacks and minimize organizational impact — without introducing undue friction.
With businesses, networks, clouds and devices becoming so interconnected, delivering next-level security to match the future of work is a formidable undertaking — one that few vendors are positioned to tackle. But thanks to our nearly 40-year heritage of providing and protecting a vast amount of the world’s networking infrastructure, Cisco is up for the challenge.
“At a moment’s notice, we were able to transition 80 percent of our workforce to be remote — and our company was never remote before. Because of our Cisco solutions, we were able to deploy everything and have people work well remotely with very minimal issues.”
— Joseph Rodriguez, Assistant Director of IT, Allied Beverage Group
Delivering security that is simple, powerful and resilient is something we’ve been executing on for years, yet it’s never been more critical than it is at this very moment. The month of June has afforded us the perfect opportunity to showcase exactly how we plan to keep our customers cyber resilient both now and in the future.
Read about the five dimensions of security resilience.
During the RSA Conference and Cisco Live, we announced our strategic plan for the Cisco Security Cloud, a global, cloud-delivered, integrated platform that secures and connects organizations of any shape and size. As we continue to move towards the Cisco Security Cloud vision, we recently unveiled several advancements in our portfolio across SASE, XDR and zero trust.
You can read our news announcement to learn more about security resilience and how we’re delivering it. But more important than the ‘how’ is the ‘why.’ Why Cisco? What makes us uniquely positioned to secure your resilience?
As I mentioned, our customers have trusted us with their networks for nearly four decades. Currently, 80 percent of the world’s internet traffic travels through Cisco infrastructure — so we have a pretty good handle on what’s going on out there. From a security standpoint alone, we have over 300,000 customers around the globe, including 100% of the Fortune 100.
As a leader in both networking and security, the breadth and depth of our solutions is unmatched. While other vendors are just beginning to join networking with security, we’ve been doing it for years. And yet, we’re continually finding ways to simplify our robust solutions for a streamlined user experience — no matter the size of your organization, where your employees work, or whether your applications are on-premises, in the cloud, or both.
Learn more about security resilience for the hybrid work era.
In addition to unparalleled infrastructure and expertise, our open, cloud-native architecture allows you to integrate with a wide range of third-party security and technology solutions for more seamless threat defense. This includes the major cloud vendors, enabling you to secure a multi-cloud environment without getting locked in with just one public cloud provider.
Additionally, all of our solutions are backed by Cisco Talos, one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams in the world. Combined with in-depth visibility from our Cisco Secure technologies, Talos’ extensive insight into the threat landscape leads to rapid, highly effective detection and response.
Even more crucial than what we have to say is what we have heard from our customers surrounding the “new normal” for security. “I think what the security industry could use right now is a real business outcome-oriented viewpoint,” said Tom Doughty, vice president and CISO at Prudential Financial. “Meaning, what are the strategic business outcomes you’re trying to enable? Cisco can help security teams be more aligned to our business and more resilient by allowing us to see at a granular level what’s happening in our environment, especially in an extended network.”
For the law firm of George Sink, P.A., the demands of supporting hybrid work accelerated the company’s move to the cloud. The firm is now using Cisco’s new, turnkey SASE solution to securely serve its clients under any circumstance — be it a pandemic or a hurricane. According to the firm’s CIO, Timothy Mullen, “The ability to…re-establish connectivity in another region almost immediately, with my small IT team, is unheard of and a game-changing experience.”
From financial to legal transactions, and much more, we can secure it all with our open, integrated protection platform and unwavering focus on resilience. We even had the honor of securing the Super Bowl earlier this year, helping to safeguard mission-critical gameday operations.
“The Super Bowl and events of that magnitude require a humongous orchestration of interconnectedness, not only from a technology perspective but also a people standpoint,” said NFL Chief Information Security Officer, Tomás Maldonado. “What we’re trying to do is slow down the bad actors and make it more difficult for them to attack us and impact what’s happening on the field. But at the same time, we also have to look beyond the field and think about all the various parts of our business that could be affected by an attack — recognizing that our risk factors are always changing.”
To learn more about how to keep your business strong in the face of adversity, visit our resilience web page and check out the blog from Cisco’s Jeetu Patel, “Security Resilience for a Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Future.”
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to fix 60 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day flaw in all supported Microsoft Office versions on all flavors of Windows that’s seen active exploitation for at least two months now. On a lighter note, Microsoft is officially retiring its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, which turns 27 years old this year.
Three of the bugs tackled this month earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” label, meaning they can be exploited remotely by malware or miscreants to seize complete control over a vulnerable system. On top of the critical heap this month is CVE-2022-30190, a vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool (MSDT), a service built into Windows.
Dubbed “Follina,” the flaw became public knowledge on May 27, when a security researcher tweeted about a malicious Word document that had surprisingly low detection rates by antivirus products. Researchers soon learned that the malicious document was using a feature in Word to retrieve a HTML file from a remote server, and that HTML file in turn used MSDT to load code and execute PowerShell commands.
“What makes this new MS Word vulnerability unique is the fact that there are no macros exploited in this attack,” writes Mayuresh Dani, manager of threat research at Qualys. “Most malicious Word documents leverage the macro feature of the software to deliver their malicious payload. As a result, normal macro-based scanning methods will not work to detect Follina. All an attacker needs to do is lure a targeted user to download a Microsoft document or view an HTML file embedded with the malicious code.”
Kevin Beaumont, the researcher who gave Follina its name, penned a fairly damning account and timeline of Microsoft’s response to being alerted about the weakness. Beaumont says researchers in March 2021 told Microsoft they were able achieve the same exploit using Microsoft Teams as an example, and that Microsoft silently fixed the issue in Teams but did not patch MSDT in Windows or the attack vector in Microsoft Office.
Beaumont said other researchers on April 12, 2022 told Microsoft about active exploitation of the MSDT flaw, but Microsoft closed the ticket saying it wasn’t a security issue. Microsoft finally issued a CVE for the problem on May 30, the same day it released recommendations on how to mitigate the threat from the vulnerability.
Microsoft also is taking flak from security experts regarding a different set of flaws in its Azure cloud hosting platform. Orca Security said that back on January 4 it told Microsoft about a critical bug in Azure’s Synapse service that allowed attackers to obtain credentials to other workspaces, execute code, or leak customer credentials to data sources outside of Azure.
In an update to their research published Tuesday, Orca researchers said they were able to bypass Microsoft’s fix for the issue twice before the company put a working fix in place.
“In previous cases, vulnerabilities were fixed by the cloud providers within a few days of our disclosure to the affected vendor,” wrote Orca’s Avi Shua. “Based on our understanding of the architecture of the service, and our repeated bypasses of fixes, we think that the architecture contains underlying weaknesses that should be addressed with a more robust tenant separation mechanism. Until a better solution is implemented, we advise that all customers assess their usage of the service and refrain from storing sensitive data or keys in it.”
Amit Yoran, CEO of Tenable and a former U.S. cybersecurity czar, took Microsoft to task for silently patching an issue Tenable reported in the same Azure Synapse service.
“It was only after being told that we were going to go public, that their story changed…89 days after the initial vulnerability notification…when they privately acknowledged the severity of the security issue,” Yoran wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “To date, Microsoft customers have not been notified. Without timely and detailed disclosures, customers have no idea if they were, or are, vulnerable to attack…or if they fell victim to attack prior to a vulnerability being patched. And not notifying customers denies them the opportunity to look for evidence that they were or were not compromised, a grossly irresponsible policy.”
Also in the critical and notable stack this month is CVE-2022-30136, which is a remote code execution flaw in the Windows Network File System (NFS version 4.1) that earned a CVSS score of 9.8 (10 being the worst). Microsoft issued a very similar patch last month for vulnerabilities in NFS versions 2 and 3.
“This vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to execute privileged code on affected systems running NFS. On the surface, the only difference between the patches is that this month’s update fixes a bug in NFSV4.1, whereas last month’s bug only affected versions NSFV2.0 and NSFV3.0,” wrote Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “It’s not clear if this is a variant or a failed patch or a completely new issue. Regardless, enterprises running NFS should prioritize testing and deploying this fix.”
Beginning today, Microsoft will officially stop supporting most versions of its Internet Explorer Web browser, which was launched in August 1995. The IE desktop application will be disabled, and Windows users who wish to stick with a Microsoft browser are encouraged to move to Microsoft Edge with IE mode, which will be supported through at least 2029.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the dirt on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
We have come a long way from making our first sourdough starter batch to exploring new hobbies — or in my case exhausting the Netflix library! We have craved human connection and insightful conversations. It was just over two years ago that we were together at the RSA Conference in San Francisco promising the next leap in cybersecurity with Cisco’s introduction of SecureX.
And soon, the cybersecurity world finally comes together again at two mega-events this year: RSA Conference and Cisco Live 2022. As you start planning your RSAC and Cisco Live 2022 experiences, we invite you to explore the progress we have made in offering radically simple security with a platform approach that is transformative to the industry and for our customers. Since it became generally available in June 2020, we have continued to add both capabilities and out-of-box integrations that unlock the full potential of our security portfolio. At both events, you’ll find Cisco SecureX is front and center again with exciting innovations built on our initial promise of providing simplicity and automation without compromising visibility and security efficacy.
Join us on Monday, June 6, to hear Jeetu Patel, EVP, and GM of Cisco Security and Collaboration, and Shailaja Shankar, Senior Vice President, and General Manager of Cisco Security Business Group speak on the topic of “What Do We Owe One Another in the Cybersecurity Ecosystem?”
Key highlights to explore:
| Topic | Date | Time (20 mins) |
| Level up your SOC strategy with security automation | 6/6/22 | 5:30 PM |
| Operationalizing Network Behavior Analytics | 6/7/22 | 10:30 AM |
| Extended Detection with Cisco SecureX | 3:30 PM | |
| Prioritizing Risk to Maximize Security Resilience | 5:30 PM | |
| Level up your SOC strategy with security automation | 6/8/22 | 2:30 PM |
| Prioritizing Risk to Maximize Security Resilience | 3:00 PM | |
| Beyond XDR with Cisco SecureX | 6/9/22 | 11:30 AM |
Check out the ‘Cisco Week at a Glance’ to see what we have to offer throughout the week, onsite in Las Vegas. Here are some highlights you won’t want to miss:
Ben Greenbaum, Product manager of Cisco SecureX with over 20 years of experience in SecOps products talks about ‘SecureX All The Things (With Hosted and Remote Relays)-BRKSEC-1483’.
Distinguished Engineer Aaron Woland‘s session lets you in on his secret to saving time with extended visibility ‘Save Countless Hours with SecureX’s Latest Feature: Device Insights- BRKSEC-2754’.
Come geek out with Matt Vander Horst, our resident orchestration and automation expert at the DevNet zone or/and crash his in-depth 4-hour lab session titled ‘SecureX Orchestration hands-on Crash Course- TRSEC-2103’.
In addition, SecureX experts like Aditya Sankar talk about how to unlock value for Firewall customers in his session ‘SecureX and Secure Firewall Better Together-BRKSEC-2201’.
Matthew Robertson, Principal engineer for XDR products discusses cross-product uses cases with ‘Building Network Security Policy Through Data Intelligence- BRKSEC-2267’.
And much more:
| Breakout Sessions (45 Minutes) | Date | Time (EST) |
| BRKSEC-2834 – Cisco’s Unified Agent: Cisco Secure Client. Bringing AMP, AnyConnect, Orbital & Umbrella together | 6/15/22 | 2:30 PM |
| BRKSEC-2754 – Save Countless Hours with SecureX’s Latest Feature: Device Insights | 6/14/22 | 10:30 AM |
| BRKSEC-2201 – SecureX and Secure Firewall Better Together | 6/14/22 | 10:30 AM |
| BRKSEC-2101 – Malware Execution as A Service: a Deep Dive into CSMA Advanced File Analysis | 6/13/22 | 9:30 AM |
| BRKSEC-1483 – SecureX All the Things (With Hosted and Remote Relays) | 6/16/22 | 8:00 AM |
| BRKSEC-2267 – Building Network Security Policy Through Data Intelligence | 6/14/22 | 2:30 PM |
| BRKSEC-3019 – Visibility, Detection and Response with Cisco Secure Network Analytics | 6/15/22 | 4:00 PM |
| BRKMER-2003 – Meraki & Secure Network and Cloud Analytics: Threat Detection for the Rest of Us | 6/16/22 | 9:30 AM |
| Instructor Led Lab (4 Hours) | ||
| LTRSEC-2103 – SecureX Orchestration hands-on crash Course | 6/15/22 | 8:00 AM |
| DevNet | ||
| DEVLIT-1553 – Webhooks in SecureX orchestration (Lightning Talk – 15 Minutes) | 6/14/22 | 3:00 PM |
| DEVWKS-2190 – Getting started with SecureX orchestration workflows and atomics (Workshop – 45 Minutes) | 6/14/22 | 10:00 AM |
| DEVWKS-2190 – Getting started with SecureX orchestration workflows and atomics (Workshop – 45 Minutes) | 6/16/22 | 10:00 AM |
| DEVNET-1083 – Security Automation: Developing with SecureX (Theater – 45 Minutes) | 6/14/22 | 1:00 PM |
| SecureX – DevNet Takeover Booth | 6/14/22 | All day |
| Digital | ||
| HOLSEC-2001.a – Crash Course: Automating with SecureX Orchestration (4 Hours) | 6/23/22 | 8:00 AM |
| HOLSEC-2001.b – Crash Course: Automating with SecureX Orchestration (4 Hours) | 6/29/22 | 7:00 AM |
We’re so excited to be on this journey with our customers and partners. For a live demo and exploration of the latest SecureX features, visit us at our booth at RSA Conference 2022 and World of solutions at Cisco Live 2022. We look forward to seeing many of you in person.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 74 separate security problems in its Windows operating systems and related software. This month’s patch batch includes fixes for seven “critical” flaws, as well as a zero-day vulnerability that affects all supported versions of Windows.
By all accounts, the most urgent bug Microsoft addressed this month is CVE-2022-26925, a weakness in a central component of Windows security (the “Local Security Authority” process within Windows). CVE-2022-26925 was publicly disclosed prior to today, and Microsoft says it is now actively being exploited in the wild. The flaw affects Windows 7 through 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2022.
Greg Wiseman, product manager for Rapid7, said Microsoft has rated this vulnerability as important and assigned it a CVSS (danger) score of 8.1 (10 being the worst), although Microsoft notes that the CVSS score can be as high as 9.8 in certain situations.
“This allows attackers to perform a man-in-the-middle attack to force domain controllers to authenticate to the attacker using NTLM authentication,” Wiseman said. “This is very bad news when used in conjunction with an NTLM relay attack, potentially leading to remote code execution. This bug affects all supported versions of Windows, but Domain Controllers should be patched on a priority basis before updating other servers.”
Wiseman said the most recent time Microsoft patched a similar vulnerability — last August in CVE-2021-36942 — it was also being exploited in the wild under the name “PetitPotam.”
“CVE-2021-36942 was so bad it made CISA’s catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities,” Wiseman said.
Seven of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, which it assigns to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or miscreants to remotely compromise a vulnerable Windows system without any help from the user.
Among those is CVE-2022-26937, which carries a CVSS score of 9.8, and affects services using the Windows Network File System (NFS). Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative notes that this bug could allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute code in the context of the Network File System (NFS) service on affected systems.
“NFS isn’t on by default, but it’s prevalent in environment where Windows systems are mixed with other OSes such as Linux or Unix,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “If this describes your environment, you should definitely test and deploy this patch quickly.”
Once again, this month’s Patch Tuesday is sponsored by Windows Print Spooler, a core Windows service that keeps spooling out the security hits. May’s patches include four fixes for Print Spooler, including two information disclosure and two elevation of privilege flaws.
“All of the flaws are rated as important, and two of the three are considered more likely to be exploited,” said Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable. “Windows Print Spooler continues to remain a valuable target for attackers since PrintNightmare was disclosed nearly a year ago. Elevation of Privilege flaws in particular should be carefully prioritized, as we’ve seen ransomware groups like Conti favor them as part of its playbook.”
Other Windows components that received patches this month include .NET and Visual Studio, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Microsoft Exchange Server, Office, Windows Hyper-V, Windows Authentication Methods, BitLocker, Remote Desktop Client, and Windows Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol.
Also today, Adobe issued five security bulletins to address at least 18 flaws in Adobe CloudFusion, Framemaker, InCopy, InDesign, and Adobe Character Animator. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in today’s updates.
For a more granular look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the skinny on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these patches, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
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