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Co-authored by Tejas Sheth, Sr. Security Specialist, Amazon Web Services – AISPL.
Risk-based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) represents a strategic approach to cyber security that focuses on… Read more on Cisco Blogs
In large metropolitan areas, tourists are often easy to spot because they’re far more inclined than locals to gaze upward at the surrounding skyscrapers. Security experts say this same tourist dynamic is a dead giveaway in virtually all computer intrusions that lead to devastating attacks like data theft and ransomware, and that more organizations should set simple virtual tripwires that sound the alarm when authorized users and devices are spotted exhibiting this behavior.
In a blog post published last month, Cisco Talos said it was seeing a worrisome “increase in the rate of high-sophistication attacks on network infrastructure.” Cisco’s warning comes amid a flurry of successful data ransom and state-sponsored cyber espionage attacks targeting some of the most well-defended networks on the planet.
But despite their increasing complexity, a great many initial intrusions that lead to data theft could be nipped in the bud if more organizations started looking for the telltale signs of newly-arrived cybercriminals behaving like network tourists, Cisco says.
“One of the most important things to talk about here is that in each of the cases we’ve seen, the threat actors are taking the type of ‘first steps’ that someone who wants to understand (and control) your environment would take,” Cisco’s Hazel Burton wrote. “Examples we have observed include threat actors performing a ‘show config,’ ‘show interface,’ ‘show route,’ ‘show arp table’ and a ‘show CDP neighbor.’ All these actions give the attackers a picture of a router’s perspective of the network, and an understanding of what foothold they have.”
Cisco’s alert concerned espionage attacks from China and Russia that abused vulnerabilities in aging, end-of-life network routers. But at a very important level, it doesn’t matter how or why the attackers got that initial foothold on your network.
It might be zero-day vulnerabilities in your network firewall or file-transfer appliance. Your more immediate and primary concern has to be: How quickly can you detect and detach that initial foothold?
The same tourist behavior that Cisco described attackers exhibiting vis-a-vis older routers is also incredibly common early on in ransomware and data ransom attacks — which often unfurl in secret over days or weeks as attackers methodically identify and compromise a victim’s key network assets.
These virtual hostage situations usually begin with the intruders purchasing access to the target’s network from dark web brokers who resell access to stolen credentials and compromised computers. As a result, when those stolen resources first get used by would-be data thieves, almost invariably the attackers will run a series of basic commands asking the local system to confirm exactly who and where they are on the victim’s network.
This fundamental reality about modern cyberattacks — that cybercriminals almost always orient themselves by “looking up” who and where they are upon entering a foreign network for the first time — forms the business model of an innovative security company called Thinkst, which gives away easy-to-use tripwires or “canaries” that can fire off an alert whenever all sorts of suspicious activity is witnessed.
“Many people have pointed out that there are a handful of commands that are overwhelmingly run by attackers on compromised hosts (and seldom ever by regular users/usage),” the Thinkst website explains. “Reliably alerting when a user on your code-sign server runs whoami.exe can mean the difference between catching a compromise in week-1 (before the attackers dig in) and learning about the attack on CNN.”
These canaries — or “canary tokens” — are meant to be embedded inside regular files, acting much like a web beacon or web bug that tracks when someone opens an email.
The Canary Tokens website from Thinkst Canary lists nearly two-dozen free customizable canaries.
“Imagine doing that, but for file reads, database queries, process executions or patterns in log files,” the Canary Tokens documentation explains. “Canarytokens does all this and more, letting you implant traps in your production systems rather than setting up separate honeypots.”
Thinkst operates alongside a burgeoning industry offering so-called “deception” or “honeypot” services — those designed to confuse, disrupt and entangle network intruders. But in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Thinkst founder and CEO Haroon Meer said most deception techniques involve some degree of hubris.
“Meaning, you’ll have deception teams in your network playing spy versus spy with people trying to break in, and it becomes this whole counterintelligence thing,” Meer said. “Nobody really has time for that. Instead, we are saying literally the opposite: That you’ve probably got all these [security improvement] projects that are going to take forever. But while you’re doing all that, just drop these 10 canaries, because everything else is going to take a long time to do.”
The idea here is to lay traps in sensitive areas of your network or web applications where few authorized users should ever trod. Importantly, the canary tokens themselves are useless to an attacker. For example, that AWS canary token sure looks like the digital keys to your cloud, but the token itself offers no access. It’s just a lure for the bad guys, and you get an alert when and if it is ever touched.
One nice thing about canary tokens is that Thinkst gives them away for free. Head over to canarytokens.org, and choose from a drop-down menu of available tokens, including:
-a web bug / URL token, designed to alert when a particular URL is visited;
-a DNS token, which alerts when a hostname is requested;
-an AWS token, which alerts when a specific Amazon Web Services key is used;
-a “custom exe” token, to alert when a specific Windows executable file or DLL is run;
-a “sensitive command” token, to alert when a suspicious Windows command is run.
-a Microsoft Excel/Word token, which alerts when a specific Excel or Word file is accessed.
Much like a “wet paint” sign often encourages people to touch a freshly painted surface anyway, attackers often can’t help themselves when they enter a foreign network and stumble upon what appear to be key digital assets, Meer says.
“If an attacker lands on your server and finds a key to your cloud environment, it’s really hard for them not to try it once,” Meer said. “Also, when these sorts of actors do land in a network, they have to orient themselves, and while doing that they are going to trip canaries.”
Meer says canary tokens are as likely to trip up attackers as they are “red teams,” security experts hired or employed by companies seeking to continuously probe their own computer systems and networks for security weaknesses.
“The concept and use of canary tokens has made me very hesitant to use credentials gained during an engagement, versus finding alternative means to an end goal,” wrote Shubham Shah, a penetration tester and co-founder of the security firm Assetnote. “If the aim is to increase the time taken for attackers, canary tokens work well.”
Thinkst makes money by selling Canary Tools, which are honeypots that emulate full blown systems like Windows servers or IBM mainframes. They deploy in minutes and include a personalized, private Canarytoken server.
“If you’ve got a sophisticated defense team, you can start putting these things in really interesting places,” Meer said. “Everyone says their stuff is simple, but we obsess over it. It’s really got to be so simple that people can’t mess it up. And if it works, it’s the best bang for your security buck you’re going to get.”
Further reading:
Dark Reading: Credential Canaries Create Minefield for Attackers
NCC Group: Extending a Thinkst Canary to Become an Interactive Honeypot
Cruise Automation’s experience deploying canary tokens
ConnectWise, which offers a self-hosted, remote desktop software application that is widely used by Managed Service Providers (MSPs), is warning about an unusually sophisticated phishing attack that can let attackers take remote control over user systems when recipients click the included link. The warning comes just weeks after the company quietly patched a vulnerability that makes it easier for phishers to launch these attacks.
A phishing attack targeting MSP customers using ConnectWise.
ConnectWise Control is extremely popular among MSPs that manage, protect and service large numbers of computers remotely for client organizations. Their product provides a dynamic software client and hosted server that connects two or more computers together, and provides temporary or persistent remote access to those client systems.
When a support technician wants to use it to remotely administer a computer, the ConnectWise website generates an executable file that is digitally signed by ConnectWise and downloadable by the client via a hyperlink.
When the remote user in need of assistance clicks the link, their computer is then directly connected to the computer of the remote administrator, who can then control the client’s computer as if they were seated in front of it.
While modern Microsoft Windows operating systems by default will ask users whether they want to run a downloaded executable file, many systems set up for remote administration by MSPs disable that user account control feature for this particular application.
In October, security researcher Ken Pyle alerted ConnectWise that their client executable file gets generated based on client-controlled parameters. Meaning, an attacker could craft a ConnectWise Control client download link that would bounce or proxy the remote connection from the MSP’s servers to a server that the attacker controls.
This is dangerous because many organizations that rely on MSPs to manage their computers often set up their networks so that only remote assistance connections coming from their MSP’s networks are allowed.
Using a free ConnectWise trial account, Pyle showed the company how easy it was to create a client executable that is cryptographically signed by ConnectWise and can bypass those network restrictions by bouncing the connection through an attacker’s ConnectWise Control server.
“You as the attacker have full control over the link’s parameters, and that link gets injected into an executable file that is downloaded by the client through an unauthenticated Web interface,” said Pyle, a partner and exploit developer at the security firm Cybir. “I can send this link to a victim, they will click this link, and their workstation will connect back to my instance via a link on your site.”
A composite of screenshots researcher Ken Pyle put together to illustrate the ScreenConnect vulnerability.
On Nov. 29, roughly the same time Pyle published a blog post about his findings, ConnectWise issued an advisory warning users to be on guard against a new round email phishing attempts that mimic legitimate email alerts the company sends when it detects unusual activity on a customer account.
“We are aware of a phishing campaign that mimics ConnectWise Control New Login Alert emails and has the potential to lead to unauthorized access to legitimate Control instances,” the company said.
ConnectWise said it released software updates last month that included new protections against the misdirection vulnerability that Pyle reported. But the company said there is no reason to believe the phishers they warned about are exploiting any of the issues reported by Pyle.
“Our team quickly triaged the report and determined the risk to partners to be minimal,” said Patrick Beggs, ConnectWise’s chief information security officer. “Nevertheless, the mitigation was simple and presented no risk to partner experience, so we put it into the then-stable 22.8 build and the then-canary 22.9 build, which were released as part of our normal release processes. Due to the low severity of the issue, we didn’t (and don’t plan to) issue a security advisory or alert, since we reserve those notifications for serious security issues.”
Beggs said the phishing attacks that sparked their advisory stemmed from an instance that was not hosted by ConnectWise.
“So we can confirm they are unrelated,” he said. “Unfortunately, phishing attacks happen far too regularly across a variety of industries and products. The timing of our advisory and Mr. Pyle’s blog were coincidental. That said, we’re all for raising more awareness of the seriousness of phishing attacks and the general importance of staying alert and aware of potentially dangerous content.”
The ConnectWise advisory warned users that before clicking any link that appears to come from their service, users should validate the content includes “domains owned by trusted sources,” and “links to go to places you recognize.”
But Pyle said this advice is not terribly useful for customers targeted in his attack scenario because the phishers can send emails directly from ConnectWise, and the short link that gets presented to the user is a wildcard domain that ends in ConnectWise Control’s own domain name — screenconnect.com. What’s more, examining the exceedingly long link generated by ConnectWise’s systems offers few insights to the average user.
“It’s signed by ConnectWise and comes from them, and if you sign up for a free trial instance, you can email people invites directly from them,” Pyle said.
ConnectWise’s warnings come amid breach reports from another major provider of remote support technologies: GoTo disclosed on Nov. 30 that it is investigating a security incident involving “unusual activity within our development environment and third-party cloud storage services. The third-party cloud storage service is currently shared by both GoTo and its affiliate, the password manager service LastPass.
In its own advisory on the incident, LastPass said they believe the intruders leveraged information stolen during a previous intrusion in August 2022 to gain access to “certain elements of our customers’ information.” However, LastPass maintains that its “customer passwords remain safely encrypted due to LastPass’s Zero Knowledge architecture.”
In short, that architecture means if you lose or forget your all-important master LastPass password — the one needed to unlock access to all of your other passwords stored with them — LastPass can’t help you with that, because they don’t store it. But that same architecture theoretically means that hackers who might break into LastPass’s networks can’t access that information either.
Update, 7:25 p.m. ET: Included statement from ConnectWise CISO.
New level unlocked. The next step for Kenna.VM users who are maturing their risk-based vulnerability management program is Kenna.VM Premier—and it’s live.
The Cisco Kenna team is excited to release a new tier of the Kenna Security platform designed specifically for customers or prospects that have reached a point of maturity in which they can and want to do more with their vulnerability management program.
In addition to the existing Kenna features and functionality you know and love, the new Kenna.VM Premier tier includes:
We’re particularly excited about the new features that are debuting with this tier. So, let’s take a closer look at everything that’s included.
On the Kenna.VM homepage, a new metric will appear at the top right corner (Figure 1). The Remediation Score, as this measurement is known, quantifies how well an organization is addressing risk overall.
The Remediation Score itself encompasses four key measurements (Figure 2), which may sound familiar to you if you’ve been reading any of the Prioritization to Prediction reports produced by Kenna and the Cyentia Institute:
These new remediation insights will allow organizations to shift away from relying on just the Risk Score itself as a measurement to assess the performance of remediation teams. While many organizations opt to use the Risk Score in this manner, there are inherent problems with evaluating performance based on the Risk Score—particularly for mature programs. A Risk Score can spike at any moment due to a suddenly high-risk vulnerability—a spike that isn’t a reflection on the remediation team themselves. And as organizations mature, they’re likely to reach a ‘steady state’ with their Risk Score, which makes it a difficult metric to use to measure progress.
Ultimately, these performance metrics will help customers better understand what areas of their remediation efforts are doing well and which might need to be adjusted.
Another new addition to the Kenna.VM platform is zero-day vulnerability intelligence powered by Cisco Talos. Talos regularly identifies high-priority security vulnerabilities in commonly used operating systems and software. The team works with vendors to disclose more than 200 vulnerabilities every year.
This new integration with Talos gives Kenna.VM users access to information on zero-day vulnerabilities documented by the Talos research team (and likely to be in their environment). With the “Zero Days” filter in Kenna.VM, users can isolate zero-day vulnerabilities, investigate, and take action leveraging Snort rule IDs provided by Talos, when applicable (Figure 3).
The last (but certainly not least) piece of the Kenna.VM Premier puzzle is the inclusion of Kenna’s recently enhanced vulnerability intelligence User Interface and API. Kenna is known for its risk scoring, but what people may not realize is just how much data we consume and turn into finished, actionable intelligence. There are more than 18+ threat and exploit intelligence feeds that power our understanding of vulnerabilities, and our vulnerability intel API and UI make of this information available to customers.
The UI provides a dashboard to research any CVE—regardless of whether or not a scanner found that vulnerability in the customer’s environment. Meanwhile, the API allows customers to query Kenna and export as much of our vulnerability intelligence on as many vulnerabilities as they wish, and use that data to enrich any existing IT, dev or security workflows, including Cisco’s very own SecureX. The data in this set includes descriptions, publication dates, CVSS data, available exploits and fixes, insight into remote exploitable vulnerabilities, and much more. Also provided is the Kenna Risk Score for each vulnerability and an indication of whether it is predicted to be exploitable—unique data points derived by Kenna’s data science.
This intelligence, combined with our new remediation scoring and Talos zero-day intelligence, rounds out the Kenna.VM Premier tier as the ideal package for any customer or prospect who is looking to take their vulnerability management program to the next stage of maturity.
Kenna.VM Premier is available today. If you’re interested in learning more, contact your sales representatives or send us a demo request to unlock the next level of your vulnerability management journey.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Explore the nature of vulnerabilities in this episode of ThreatWise TV.
It’s shaping up to be another big year for vulnerability disclosure. Already the number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) disclosed has crossed 18,000 and it’s on track to make this another record-breaking year.
With new CVEs being disclosed daily, it has become increasingly difficult for security teams to stay abreast of the latest risks, let alone quickly determine which ones apply to their network environment. From those, prioritizing which CVEs to patch first adds an additional wrinkle to the process.
If this wasn’t challenging enough, a curve ball that’s often lobbed at security teams are the “breaking news” vulnerabilities— vulnerabilities picked up by the security media, often with much fanfare. The stories surrounding these high-profile vulnerabilities generally carry an implied threat that the CVE in question will throw the doors wide open to attackers if not addressed immediately. What security team hasn’t had someone from the C-suite share an article they’ve read, asking “are we protected from this?”
On the surface, CVEs that appear severe enough to garner media attention do seem like a good place to start when addressing vulnerabilities in your environment. But vulnerabilities are complicated, and what a security researcher manages to do within a controlled environment doesn’t always translate into real-world attacks. In fact, most disclosed vulnerabilities never see active exploitation. And of those that do, not every vulnerability ends up becoming a tool in an attacker’s arsenal. Bad actors generally follow the path of least resistance when they compromise a network, relying on tested exploits long before trying something new and unproven.
This begs the question: how much overlap is there between the most talked about vulnerabilities and those that are widely used in attacks? Moreover, if media attention isn’t a reliable indicator, what else might predict if a vulnerability will be used in an attack?
To answer these questions, we used intelligence tools available from Cisco’s Kenna Security risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) software. In particular, Kenna.VI+ consolidates a variety of vulnerability intelligence, where a CVE ID lookup can pull back a wealth of information. In addition to this, Kenna.VI+ includes an API that brings in an additional layer of external threat intelligence, enabling further analysis.
We started with a direct comparison of Successful Exploitations and Chatter Count from within Kenna.VI+. The former is a full count of confirmed exploits within the dataset, while the latter is a count of mentions in the news, social media, various forums, and the dark web.
Our first pass at the data included a comparison of the top 50 CVEs in both Successful Exploitations and Chatter Count. However, there were only two CVEs that overlapped. The data showed that many of the top exploited CVEs were old and predated the data in Chatter Count. We quickly decided that this wasn’t a fair comparison.
To get a better look at more relevant CVEs, we limited the dataset to a range of 10 years. Unfortunately, this did not do much to improve things—only three CVEs showed up in both lists.
A more effective approach was to look at CVEs that we know are actively being exploited. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) happens to maintain such a list. The Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog is considered an authoritative compilation of vulnerabilities identified as being actively exploited in the wild.
Running the KEV catalog though Kenna.VI+ resulted in six CVEs that appeared in the top 50 for both lists, with a single overlap in the top 10. This leads us to conclude that the vulnerabilities with the most discussion are not the same as those being actively exploited in the majority of cases.
| CVE | Brief description | |
| 1 | CVE-2017-9841 | PHPUnit vulnerability (used to target popular CMSes) |
| 2 | CVE-2021-44228 | Log4j vulnerability |
| 3 | CVE-2019-0703 | Windows SMB information disclosure vulnerability |
| 4 | CVE-2014-0160 | Heartbleed vulnerability |
| 5 | CVE-2017-9805 | REST plugin in Apache Struts vulnerability |
| 6 | CVE-2017-11882 | Microsoft Office memory corruption vulnerability |
| 7 | CVE-2017-5638 | Apache Struts vulnerability (used in Equifax breach) |
| 8 | CVE-2012-1823 | 10-year-old PHP vulnerability |
| 9 | CVE-2017-0144 | EternalBlue vulnerability |
| 10 | CVE-2018-11776 | Apache Struts RCE vulnerability |
| CVE | Brief description | |
| 1 | CVE-2021-26855 | Microsoft Exchange vulnerability (used in Hafnium attacks) |
| 2 | CVE-2021-40444 | Microsoft MSHTML RCE vulnerability |
| 3 | CVE-2021-26084 | Confluence Server and Data Center vulnerability |
| 4 | CVE-2021-27065 | Microsoft Exchange vulnerability (used in Hafnium attacks) |
| 5 | CVE-2021-34473 | Microsoft Exchange vulnerability (used in Hafnium attacks) |
| 6 | CVE-2021-26858 | Microsoft Exchange vulnerability (used in Hafnium attacks) |
| 7 | CVE-2021-44228 | Log4j vulnerability |
| 8 | CVE-2021-34527 | One of the PrintNightmare vulnerabilities |
| 9 | CVE-2021-41773 | Apache HTTP Server vulnerability |
| 10 | CVE-2021-31207 | One of the ProxyShell vulnerabilities |
Despite the lack of overlap, there are many well-known vulnerabilities at the top of both lists. Heartbleed and EternalBlue appear on the top 10 exploited list, while Hafnium, PrintNightmare, and ProxyShell make the top 10 most talked about CVEs.
The Log4j vulnerability is the only CVE that appears in both lists. This isn’t surprising considering the ubiquity of Log4j in modern software. It’s the second-most exploited vulnerability—far outpacing the CVEs directly below it. This, coupled with its appearance in the chatter list, puts it in a class of its own. In a brief period, it’s managed to outpace older CVEs that are arguably just as well known.
The CVE that recorded the most successful exploitations is a five-year-old vulnerability in PHPUnit. This is a popular unit-testing framework that’s used by many CMSes, such as Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, and Moodle.
Since many websites are built with these tools, this exploit can be a handy vector for gaining initial access to unpatched webservers. This also lines up with research we conducted last year, where this vulnerability was one of the most common Snort detections seen by Cisco Secure Firewall.
All four of the Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities used in the Hafnium attacks appear in the most talked about list of CVEs. However, even when you add all four of these CVEs together, they still don’t come anywhere close to the counts seen in the top exploited CVEs.
If media attention is not a good predictor of use for exploitation, then what are the alternatives?
The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a well-known framework for gauging the severity of vulnerabilities. We looked for CVEs from the KEV catalog that were ranked as “critical”—9.0 and above in the CVSSv3 specification. Examining the entire KEV catalog, 28% of the CVEs have a score of 9.0 or higher. Of the top 50 successfully exploited, 38% had such scores.
This is an improvement, but the CVSSv3 specification was released in 2015. Many CVEs in the KEV catalog predate this—19% of the entire catalog and 28% of the top 50—and have no score.
Using the previous CVSS specification does fill this gap—36% overall and 52% of the top 50 score 9.0 or higher. However, the older CVSS specification comes with its share of issues as well.
Another indicator worth exploring is remote control execution (RCE). A vulnerability with RCE grants an attacker the ability to access and control a vulnerable system from anywhere. It turns out that 45% of the CVEs in our dataset allow for RCE, and 66% of the top 50, making it the most worthwhile indicator analyzed.
Let’s summarize how we’ve honed our approach to determine if media attention and exploitation line up:
| Data set | Exploitation and Chatter lists | Number of CVEs |
| All CVEs | Appears in both top 50 | 2 |
| Appears in both top 50 (last 10 years) | 3 | |
| KEV Catalog | Appears in both top 50 | 6 |
| Appears in both top 10 | 1 |
And here’s a summary of our look at other indicators:
| KEV Catalog | Top 50 exploited | |
| CVSSv3 (9.0+) | 28% | 38% |
| CVSS (9.0+) | 36% | 52% |
| Allows for RCE | 45% | 66% |
All of this analysis provides a clear answer to our original question—the most regularly exploited CVEs aren’t the most talked about. Additional work highlights that monitoring variables like RCE can help with prioritization.
For illustrative purposes we’ve only looked at a few indicators that could be used to prioritize CVEs. While some did better than others, we don’t recommend relying on a single variable in making decisions about vulnerability management. Creating an approach that folds in multiple indicators is a far better strategy when it comes to real-world application of this data. And while our findings here speak to the larger picture, every network is different.
Regardless of which list they appear on, be it Successful Exploitations or Chatter Count, it’s important to point out that all these vulnerabilities are serious. Just because Hafnium has more talk than Heartbleed doesn’t make it any less dangerous if you have assets that are vulnerable to it. The fact is that while CVEs with more talk didn’t make the top of the exploitation list, they still managed to rack up tens of thousands of successful exploitations.
It’s important to know how to prioritize security updates, fixing those that expose you to the most risk as soon as possible. From our perspective, here are some basic elements in the Cisco Secure portfolio that can help.
Kenna Security, a pioneer in risk-based vulnerability management, relies on threat intel and prioritization to keep security and IT teams focused on risks. Using data science, Kenna processes and analyzes 18+ threat and exploit intelligence feeds, and 12.7+ billion managed vulnerabilities to give you an accurate view of your company’s risk. With our risk scoring and remediation intelligence, you get the info you need to make truly data-driven remediation decisions.
To responsibly protect a network, it’s important to monitor all assets that connect to it and ensure they’re kept up to date. Duo Device Trust can check the patch level of devices for you before they’re granted access to connect to corporate applications or sensitive data. You can even block access and enable self-remediation for devices that are found to be non-compliant.
How about remote workers? By leveraging the Network Visibility Module in Cisco Secure Client as a telemetry source, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics can capture endpoint-specific user and device context to supply visibility into remote worker endpoint status. This can bolster an organization’s security posture by providing visibility on remote employees that are running software versions with vulnerabilities that need patching.
Lastly, for some “lateral thinking” about vulnerability management, take a look at this short video of one of our Advisory CISOs, Wolfgang Goerlich. Especially if you’re a fan of the music of the 1920s…
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging states and localities to beef up security around proprietary devices that connect to the Emergency Alert System — a national public warning system used to deliver important emergency information, such as severe weather and AMBER alerts. The DHS warning came in advance of a workshop to be held this weekend at the DEFCON security conference in Las Vegas, where a security researcher is slated to demonstrate multiple weaknesses in the nationwide alert system.
A Digital Alert Systems EAS encoder/decoder that Pyle said he acquired off eBay in 2019. It had the username and password for the system printed on the machine.
The DHS warning was prompted by security researcher Ken Pyle, a partner at security firm Cybir. Pyle said he started acquiring old EAS equipment off of eBay in 2019, and that he quickly identified a number of serious security vulnerabilities in a device that is broadly used by states and localities to encode and decode EAS alert signals.
“I found all kinds of problems back then, and reported it to the DHS, FBI and the manufacturer,” Pyle said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “But nothing ever happened. I decided I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it yet because I wanted to give people time to fix it.”
Pyle said he took up the research again in earnest after an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I was sitting there thinking, ‘Holy shit, someone could start a civil war with this thing,”’ Pyle recalled. “I went back to see if this was still a problem, and it turns out it’s still a very big problem. So I decided that unless someone actually makes this public and talks about it, clearly nothing is going to be done about it.”
The EAS encoder/decoder devices Pyle acquired were made by Lyndonville, NY-based Digital Alert Systems (formerly Monroe Electronics, Inc.), which issued a security advisory this month saying it released patches in 2019 to fix the flaws reported by Pyle, but that some customers are still running outdated versions of the device’s firmware. That may be because the patches were included in version 4 of the firmware for the EAS devices, and many older models apparently do not support the new software.
“The vulnerabilities identified present a potentially serious risk, and we believe both were addressed in software updates issued beginning Oct 2019,” EAS said in a written statement. “We also provided attribution for the researcher’s responsible disclosure, allowing us to rectify the matters before making any public statements. We are aware that some users have not taken corrective actions and updated their software and should immediately take action to update the latest software version to ensure they are not at risk. Anything lower than version 4.1 should be updated immediately. On July 20, 2022, the researcher referred to other potential issues, and we trust the researcher will provide more detail. We will evaluate and work to issue any necessary mitigations as quickly as possible.”
But Pyle said a great many EAS stakeholders are still ignoring basic advice from the manufacturer, such as changing default passwords and placing the devices behind a firewall, not directly exposing them to the Internet, and restricting access only to trusted hosts and networks.
Pyle, in a selfie that is heavily redacted because the EAS device behind him had its user credentials printed on the lid.
Pyle said the biggest threat to the security of the EAS is that an attacker would only need to compromise a single EAS station to send out alerts locally that can be picked up by other EAS systems and retransmitted across the nation.
“The process for alerts is automated in most cases, hence, obtaining access to a device will allow you to pivot around,” he said. “There’s no centralized control of the EAS because these devices are designed such that someone locally can issue an alert, but there’s no central control over whether I am the one person who can send or whatever. If you are a local operator, you can send out nationwide alerts. That’s how easy it is to do this.”
One of the Digital Alert Systems devices Pyle sourced from an electronics recycler earlier this year was non-functioning, but whoever discarded it neglected to wipe the hard drive embedded in the machine. Pyle soon discovered the device contained the private cryptographic keys and other credentials needed to send alerts through Comcast, the nation’s third-largest cable company.
“I can issue and create my own alert here, which has all the valid checks or whatever for being a real alert station,” Pyle said in an interview earlier this month. “I can create a message that will start propagating through the EAS.”
Comcast told KrebsOnSecurity that “a third-party device used to deliver EAS alerts was lost in transit by a trusted shipping provider between two Comcast locations and subsequently obtained by a cybersecurity researcher.
“We’ve conducted a thorough investigation of this matter and have determined that no customer data, and no sensitive Comcast data, were compromised,” Comcast spokesperson David McGuire said.
The company said it also confirmed that the information included on the device can no longer be used to send false messages to Comcast customers or used to compromise devices within Comcast’s network, including EAS devices.
“We are taking steps to further ensure secure transfer of such devices going forward,” McGuire said. “Separately, we have conducted a thorough audit of all EAS devices on our network and confirmed that they are updated with currently available patches and are therefore not vulnerable to recently reported security issues. We’re grateful for the responsible disclosure and to the security research community for continuing to engage and share information with our teams to make our products and technologies ever more secure. Mr. Pyle informed us promptly of his research and worked with us as we took steps to validate his findings and ensure the security of our systems.”
The user interface for an EAS device.
Unauthorized EAS broadcast alerts have happened enough that there is a chronicle of EAS compromises over at fandom.com. Thankfully, most of these incidents have involved fairly obvious hoaxes.
According to the EAS wiki, in February 2013, hackers broke into the EAS networks in Great Falls, Mt. and Marquette, Mich. to broadcast an alert that zombies had risen from their graves in several counties. In Feb. 2017, an EAS station in Indiana also was hacked, with the intruders playing the same “zombies and dead bodies” audio from the 2013 incidents.
“On February 20 and February 21, 2020, Wave Broadband’s EASyCAP equipment was hacked due to the equipment’s default password not being changed,” the Wiki states. “Four alerts were broadcasted, two of which consisted of a Radiological Hazard Warning and a Required Monthly Test playing parts of the Hip Hop song Hot by artist Young Thug.”
In January 2018, Hawaii sent out an alert to cell phones, televisions and radios, warning everyone in the state that a missile was headed their way. It took 38 minutes for Hawaii to let people know the alert was a misfire, and that a draft alert was inadvertently sent. The news video clip below about the 2018 event in Hawaii does a good job of walking through how the EAS works.
It’s a busy month for cybersecurity, with the return of in-person RSAC in San Francisco, followed by Cisco Live in very lively Las Vegas! With so much happening, and so many announcements from every security vendor out there, it can be hard to keep track of everything going on. Let us help give you the highlights from a Cisco SecureX perspective!
We have been busy this past year, with our acquisition of Kenna Security and our recent innovations around device insights – all helping to expand and strengthen SecureX and our extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities.
Let’s start with device insights. We know that correlation of incidents and alerts is a vital capability for every good XDR offering, but what about correlating and aggregating information about the devices themselves? With the growing number of devices in many customer environments there is also a growing number of products with information about those devices. This can cause duplicate records and multiple alerts from the same device – which means more potentially false positive incidents to investigate, and more headaches trying to manually correlate and connect device information. With device insights organizations can discover, normalize, and consolidate information about all the devices in your environment – so you can avoid duplicate alerts, and discover devices that may be sneaking through gaps in your security. Device insights gives you a comprehensive view into each device’s security posture and management status.
Now, a more insightful view of all the devices across your infrastructure is a must-have, but so is the ability to view and manage vulnerabilities across these endpoints. With Cisco’s acquisition of Kenna Security last year, and our on-going integration of Kenna offerings into the Cisco Secure portfolio, we’re continuing to fortify SecureX and our XDR capabilities with industry leading risk-based vulnerability management. Kenna vulnerability management has already started integrations with Cisco Secure Endpoint, providing vulnerability scores on the OS version, as well as any available fixes. On the SecureX side, Kenna integrations are being leveraged to automatically enrich threat detections with vulnerability information, and automatically create ticketing workflows for Kenna.VM customers using ServiceNow.
With these integrations, and more innovations planned for the near future, risk-based vulnerability management will become a cornerstone for all endpoint and XDR deployments.
Check out our recent blog posts for more information about device insights and Kenna and SecureX orchestration!
Visit us at RSAC at booth 6045 for Cisco Secure, and booth 6362 for Kenna, and at Cisco Live in the World of Solutions to learn more.
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