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In December 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that a cybercriminal using the handle “USDoD” had infiltrated the FBI‘s vetted information sharing network InfraGard, and was selling the contact information for all 80,000 members. The FBI responded by reverifying InfraGard members and by seizing the cybercrime forum where the data was being sold. But on Sept. 11, 2023, USDoD resurfaced after a lengthy absence to leak sensitive employee data stolen from the aerospace giant Airbus, while promising to visit the same treatment on top U.S. defense contractors.
USDoD’s avatar used to be the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense. Now it’s a charming kitten.
In a post on the English language cybercrime forum BreachForums, USDoD leaked information on roughly 3,200 Airbus vendors, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. USDoD claimed they grabbed the data by using passwords stolen from a Turkish airline employee who had third-party access to Airbus’ systems.
USDoD didn’t say why they decided to leak the data on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but there was definitely an aircraft theme to the message that accompanied the leak, which concluded with the words, “Lockheed martin, Raytheon and the entire defense contractos [sic], I’m coming for you [expletive].”
Airbus has apparently confirmed the cybercriminal’s account to the threat intelligence firm Hudson Rock, which determined that the Airbus credentials were stolen after a Turkish airline employee infected their computer with a prevalent and powerful info-stealing trojan called RedLine.
Info-stealers like RedLine typically are deployed via opportunistic email malware campaigns, and by secretly bundling the trojans with cracked versions of popular software titles made available online. Credentials stolen by info-stealers often end up for sale on cybercrime shops that peddle purloined passwords and authentication cookies (these logs also often show up in the malware scanning service VirusTotal).
Hudson Rock said it recovered the log files created by a RedLine infection on the Turkish airline employee’s system, and found the employee likely infected their machine after downloading pirated and secretly backdoored software for Microsoft Windows.
Hudson Rock says info-stealer infections from RedLine and a host of similar trojans have surged in recent years, and that they remain “a primary initial attack vector used by threat actors to infiltrate organizations and execute cyberattacks, including ransomware, data breaches, account overtakes, and corporate espionage.”
The prevalence of RedLine and other info-stealers means that a great many consequential security breaches begin with cybercriminals abusing stolen employee credentials. In this scenario, the attacker temporarily assumes the identity and online privileges assigned to a hacked employee, and the onus is on the employer to tell the difference.
In addition to snarfing any passwords stored on or transmitted through an infected system, info-stealers also siphon authentication cookies or tokens that allow one to remain signed-in to online services for long periods of time without having to resupply one’s password and multi-factor authentication code. By stealing these tokens, attackers can often reuse them in their own web browser, and bypass any authentication normally required for that account.
Microsoft Corp. this week acknowledged that a China-backed hacking group was able to steal one of the keys to its email kingdom that granted near-unfettered access to U.S. government inboxes. Microsoft’s detailed post-mortem cum mea culpa explained that a secret signing key was stolen from an employee in an unlucky series of unfortunate events, and thanks to TechCrunch we now know that the culprit once again was “token-stealing malware” on the employee’s system.
In April 2023, the FBI seized Genesis Market, a bustling, fully automated cybercrime store that was continuously restocked with freshly hacked passwords and authentication tokens stolen by a network of contractors who deployed RedLine and other info-stealer malware.
In March 2023, the FBI arrested and charged the alleged administrator of BreachForums (aka Breached), the same cybercrime community where USDoD leaked the Airbus data. In June 2023, the FBI seized the BreachForums domain name, but the forum has since migrated to a new domain.
USDoD’s InfraGard sales thread on Breached.
Unsolicited email continues to be a huge vector for info-stealing malware, but lately the crooks behind these schemes have been gaming the search engines so that their malicious sites impersonating popular software vendors actually appear before the legitimate vendor’s website. So take special care when downloading software to ensure that you are in fact getting the program from the original, legitimate source whenever possible.
Also, unless you really know what you’re doing, please don’t download and install pirated software. Sure, the cracked program might do exactly what you expect it to do, but the chances are good that it is also laced with something nasty. And when all of your passwords are stolen and your important accounts have been hijacked or sold, you will wish you had simply paid for the real thing.
Containers provide a list of benefits to organizations that use them. They’re light, flexible, add consistency across the environment and operate in isolation.
However, security concerns prevent some organizations from employing containers. This is despite containers having an extra layer of security built in – they don’t run directly on the host OS.
To make containers even easier to manage, AWS released an open-source Linux-based operating system meant for hosting containers. While Bottlerocket AMIs are provided at no cost, standard Amazon EC2 and AWS charges apply for running Amazon EC2 instances and other services.
Bottlerocket is purpose-built to run containers and improves security and resource utilization by only including the essential software to run containers, which improves resource utilization and reduces the attack surface compared to general-purpose OS’s.
At Trend Micro, we’re always focused on the security of our customers cloud environments. We’re proud to be a launch partner for AWS Bottlerocket, with our Smart Check component validated for the OS prior to the launch.
Why use additional security in cloud environments
While an OS specifically for containers that includes native security measures is a huge plus, there seems to be a larger question of why third-party security solutions are even needed in cloud environments. We often hear a misconception with cloud deployment that, since the cloud service provider has built in security, users don’t have to think about the security of their data.
That’s simply not accurate and leaves a false sense of security. (Pun intended.)
Yes – cloud providers like AWS build in security measures and have addressed common problems by adding built in security controls. BUT cloud environments operate with a shared responsibility model for security – meaning the provider secures the environment, and users are responsible for their instances and data hosted therein.
That’s for all cloud-based hosting, whether in containers, serverless or otherwise.
Why Smart Check in Bottlerocket matters
Smooth execution without security roadblocks
DevOps teams leverage containerized applications to deploy fast and don’t have time for separate security roadblocks. Smart Check is built for the DevOps community with real-time image scanning at any point in the pipeline to ensure insecure images aren’t deployed.
Vulnerability scanning before runtime
We have the largest vulnerability data set of any security vendor, which is used to scan images for known software flaws before they can be exploited at runtime. This not only includes known vendor vulnerabilities from the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), but also vulnerability intelligence for bugs patched outside the ZDI program and open source vulnerability intelligence built in through our partnership with Snyk.
Flexible enough to fit with your pipeline
Container security needs to be as flexible as containers themselves. Smart Check has a simple admin process to implement role-based access rules and multiple concurrent scanning scenarios to fit your specific pipeline needs.
Through our partnership with AWS, Trend Micro is excited to help ensure customers can continue to execute on their portion of the shared responsibility model through container image scanning by validating that the Smart Check solution will be available for customers to run on Bottlerocket at launch.
More information can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/bottlerocket/
If you are still interested in learning more, check out this AWS blog from Jeff Barr.
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