Author: Editor Net Universe

Based on a comprehensive survey of 5,000 IT managers across 26 countries, Cybersecurity: The Human Challenge provides brand new insights into the state of cybersecurity skills and resources across the globe.

It reveals the realities facing IT teams when it comes to the human-led delivery of cybersecurity, and explores how organizations are responding to the skills challenges they face.

The study also exposes unique insights into the relationship between an organization falling victim to ransomware and their day-to-day cybersecurity practices.

Key findings

IT teams are showing progress in many battles

• IT teams are on top of patching. Three-quarters of IT teams apply patches to desktops, servers, applications, and internet-facing assets within a week of release. Servers and internet-facing assets are patched most quickly, with 39% of respondents patching them within 24 hours.
• Prevention is prioritized. On average, IT teams dedicate nearly half their time (45%) to prevention. After that, 30% of time is spent on detection and the remaining 25% is spent on response.
• IT managers are keeping up to date with cybersecurity. The majority (72%) say that they and their teams are up to date with or ahead of cybersecurity threats. Just 11% think they are significantly behind.

Improving cybersecurity requires people – who are in short supply

• There is an urgent need for human-led threat hunting. Forty-eight percent of respondents have already incorporated human-led threat hunts in their security procedures and a further 48% plan to implement them within a year.
• The cybersecurity skills shortage is directly implementing protection. Over a quarter (27%) of managers said their ability to find and retain skilled IT security professionals is the single biggest challenge to their ability to deliver IT security, while 54% say it is a major challenge.

Organizations are changing the ways they deliver security

• Improving operational efficiency is a key priority. Four in ten (39%) respondents said that improving operational efficiency and scalability is one of their biggest priorities for the IT team this year.
• Outsourcing IT security is rising fast. Currently, 65% outsource some or all of their IT security efforts. This is set to rise to 72% by 2022. The percentage of organizations that exclusively uses in-house staffing will drop from 34% to 26%.

Ransomware victims display different behaviors and attitudes than those who haven’t been hit

• Ransomware victims are more exposed to infection from third parties. Twenty-nine percent of organizations hit by ransomware in the last year allow five or more suppliers to connect directly to their network – compared to just 13% for those that weren’t hit.
• Ransomware damages professional confidence. IT managers whose organizations were hit by ransomware are nearly three times as likely to feel “significantly behind” on cyberthreats than those that weren’t (17% vs. 6%).
• Being hit accelerates implementation of human-led threat hunting. Forty-three percent of ransomware victims plan to implement human-led hunting within six months, compared to 33% for those that didn’t suffer an attack.

• Victims have learned the importance of skilled security professionals. More than one-third (35%) of ransomware victims said recruiting and retaining skilled IT security professionals is their single biggest challenge when it comes to cybersecurity, compared to just 19% who hadn’t been hit.

Download the full PDF report for more findings, including results for each of the 26 countries surveyed.

About the survey

Sophos commissioned specialist research house Vanson Bourne to survey 5,000 IT managers during January and February 2020. Sophos had no role in the selection of respondents and all responses were provided anonymously.

Respondents came from 26 countries across six continents: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, UAE, the UK, and the US.

Fifty percent of respondents were from organizations of between 100 and 1,000 employees, and 50% were from organizations of between 1,001 and 5,000 employees. Respondents came from a range of sectors, both public and private.

Hi XG Community!

We’ve released Sophos Firewall Manager SFM 17.1 MR5. Initially, the firmware will be available by manual download from the Licensing Portal. We will gradually release the firmware via auto-update to customers.

This MR is solely to allow limited support for XG v18 MR3 firmware. Please note that v18 support in SFM is very limited, and most SFM features are not supported. Please migrate to Sophos Central to fully group manage firewalls running v18 firmware. 

Updates Included

• NCCC-10106, NCCC-10125 [SFM] Support for XG v18 MR3 compatibility

The operators of Ryuk ransomware are at it again. After a long period of quiet, we identified a new spam campaign linked to the Ryuk actors—part of a new wave of attacks. And in late September, Sophos’ Managed Threat Response team assisted an organization in mitigating a Ryuk attack—providing insight into how the Ryuk actors’ tools, techniques and practices have evolved. The attack is part of a recent wave of Ryuk incidents tied to recent phishing campaigns.

First spotted in August of 2018, the Ryuk gang gained notoriety in 2019, demanding multi-million-dollar ransoms from companies, hospitals, and local governments. In the process, the operators of the ransomware pulled in over $61 million just in the US, according to figures from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And that’s just what was reported—other estimates place Ryuk’s take in 2019 in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Starting around the beginning of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a lull in Ryuk activity. There was speculation that the Ryuk actors had moved on to a rebranded version of the ransomware, called Conti. The campaign and attack we investigated was interesting both because it marked the return of Ryuk with some minor modifications, but also showed an evolution of the tools used to compromise targeted networks and deploy the ransomware.

The attack was also notable because of how quickly the attacks can move from initial compromise to ransomware deployment. Within three and a half hours of a target opening a phishing email attachment, attackers were already conducting network reconnaissance. Within a day, they had gained access to a domain controller, and were in the early stages of an attempt to deploy ransomware.

The attackers were persistent as well. As attempts to launch the attack failed, the Ryuk actors attempted multiple times over the next week to install new malware and ransomware, including renewed phishing attempts to re-establish a foothold. Before the attack had concluded, over 90 servers and other systems were involved in the attack, though ransomware was blocked from full execution.

Let the wrong one in

The attack began on the afternoon of Tuesday. September 22. Multiple employees of the targeted company had received highly-targeted phishing emails:

From: Alex Collins [spoofed external email address]

To: [targeted individual]

Subject: Re: [target surname] about debit

Please call me back till 2 PM, i will be in [company name] office till 2 PM.

[Target surname], because of [company name]head office request #96-9/23 [linked to remote file], i will process additional 3,582 from your payroll account.

[Target first name], call me back when you will be available to confirm that all is correct.

Here is a copy of your statement in PDF[linked to remote file].

 

Alex Collins

[Company name] outsource specialist

The link, served up through the mail delivery service Sendgrid, redirected to a malicious document hosted on docs.google.com. The email was tagged with external sender warnings by the company’s mail software. And multiple instances of the malicious attachment were detected and blocked.

But one employee clicked on the link in the email that afternoon. The user opened the document and enabled its content, allowing the document to execute print_document.exe—a malicious executable identified as Buer Loader. Buer Loader is a modular malware-as-a-service downloader, introduced on underground forums for sale in August of 2019. It provides a web panel-managed malware distribution service; each downloader build sold for $350, with add-on modules and download address target changes billed separately.

In this case, upon execution, the Buer Loader malware dropped qoipozincyusury.exe, a Cobalt Strike “beacon,” along with other malware files. Cobalt Strike’s beacon, originally designed for attacker emulation and penetration testing, is a modular attack tool that can perform a wide range of tasks, providing access to operating system features and establishing a covert command and control channel within the compromised network.

Over the next hour and a half, additional Cobalt Strike beacons were detected on the initially compromised system. The attackers were then able to successfully establish a foothold on the targeted workstation for reconnaissance and to hunt for credentials.

A few hours later, the Ryuk actors’ reconnaissance of the network began. The following commands were run on the initially infected system:

• C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /C whoami /groups (accessing list of AD groups the local user is in)
• C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /C nltest /domain_trusts /all_trusts (returns a list of all trusted domains)
• C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /C net group “enterprise admins” /domain  (returns a list of members of the “enterprise admins” group for the domain)
• C:WINDOWSsystem32net1  group “domain admins” /domain (the same, but a list of the group “domain admins”)
• C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /C net localgroup administrators (returns a list of administrators for the local machine)
• C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /C ipconfig (returns the network configuration)
• C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /C nltest /dclist:[target company domain name] (returns names of the domain controllers for the company domain name)
• C:WINDOWSsystem32cmd.exe /C nltest /dclist:[target company name] (the same, but checking for domain controllers using the company name as the domain name)

Forward lateral

Using this data, by Wednesday morning the actors had obtained administrative credentials and had connected to a domain controller, where they performed a data dump of Active Directory details. This was most likely accomplished through the use of SharpHound, a Microsoft C#-based data “injestor” tool for BloodHound (an open-source Active Directory analysis tool used to identify attack paths in AD environments). A data dump from the tool was written to a user directory for the compromised domain administrator account on the domain server itself.

Another Cobalt Strike executable was loaded and launched a few hours later. That was followed immediately by the installation of a Cobalt Strike service on the domain controller using the domain administrator credentials obtained earlier. The service was a chained Server Message Block listener, allowing Cobalt Strike commands to be passed to the server and other computers on the network. Using Windows Management Interface, the attackers remotely executed a new Cobalt Strike beacon on the same server.

In short order, other malicious services were created on two other servers using the same admin credentials, using Windows Management Instrumentation from the initially compromised PC. One of the services configured was an encoded PowerShell command creating yet another Cobalt communications pipe.

The actors continued to perform reconnaissance activities from the initially infected desktop, executing commands trying to identify potential targets for further lateral movement. Many of these repeated previous commands. The nltest command was used in an attempt to retrieve data from domain controllers on other domains within the enterprise Active Directory tree. Other commands pinged specific servers, attempting to gain IP addresses. The actors also checked against all mapped network shares connected to the workstation and used WMI to check for active Remote Desktop sessions on another domain controller within the Active Directory tree.

Setting the trap

Late Wednesday afternoon—less than a day after the victim’s click on the phish— the Ryuk actors began preparations to launch their ransomware. Using the beachhead on the  initially compromised PC, the attackers used RDP to connect to the domain controller with the admin credentials obtained the day before.  A folder named C:Perflogsgrub.info.test2 – Copy was dropped on the domain controller— a name consistent with a set of tools deployed  in previous Ryuk attacks.  A few hours later, the attackers ran an encoded PowerShell command that, accessing Active Directory data, generated a dump file called ALLWindows.csv, containing login, domain controller and operating system data for Windows computers on the network.

Next, the SystemBC malicious proxy was deployed on the domain controller. SystemBC is a SOCKS5 proxy used to conceal malware traffic that shares code and forensic markers with other malware from the Trickbot family.  The malware installed itself (as itvs.exe), and created a scheduled job for the malware, using the old Windows task scheduler format in a file named itvs.job—in order to maintain persistence.

A PowerShell script loaded into the grub.info.test folder on the domain controller was executed next. This script, Get.DataInfo.ps1 , scans the network and provides an output of which systems are active. It also checks which AV is running on the system.

The Ryuk actors used a number of methods to attempt to spread files to additional servers, including file shares, WMI, and Remote Desktop Protocol clipboard transfer.  WMI was used to attempt to execute GetDataInfo.ps1 against yet another server.

Failure to launch

Thursday morning, the attackers spread and launched Ryuk. This version of Ryuk had no substantial changes from earlier versions we’ve seen in terms of core functionality, but Ryuk’s developers did add more obfuscation to the code to evade memory-based detections of the malware.

The organizational backup server was among the first targeted. When Ryuk was detected and stopped on the backup server, the attackers used the icacls command to modify access control, giving them full control of all the system folders on the server.

They then deployed GMER, a “rootkit detector” tool:

GMER is frequently used by ransomware actors to find and shut down hidden processes, and to shut down antivirus software protecting the server. The Ryuk attackers did this, and then they tried again. Ryuk ransomware was redeployed and re-launched three more times in short order, attempting to overwhelm remaining defenses on the backup server.

Ransom notes were dropped in the folders hosting the ransomware, but no files were encrypted.

In total, Ryuk was executed in attacks launched from over 40 compromised systems,but was repeatedly blocked by Sophos Intercept X.  By noon on Thursday, the ransomware portion of the attack had been thwarted.  But the attackers weren’t done trying—and weren’t off the network yet.

On Friday, defenders deployed a block across the domains affected by the attack for the SystemBC RAT.  The next day, the attackers attempted to activate another SOCKS proxy on the still-compromised domain controller.  And additional Ryuk deployments were detected over the following week—along with additional phishing attempts and attempts to deploy Cobalt Strike.

Lessons learned

The tactics exhibited by the Ryuk actors in this attack demonstrate a solid shift away from the malware that had been the basis of most Ryuk attacks last year (Emotet and Trickbot). The Ryuk gang shifted from one malware-as-a-service provider (Emotet) to another (Buer Loader), and has apparently replaced Trickbot with more hands-on-keyboard exploitation tools—Cobalt Strike, Bloodhound, and GMER, among them—and built-in Windows scripting and administrative tools to move laterally within the network. And the attackers are quick to change tactics as opportunities to exploit local network infrastructure emerge—in another recent attack Sophos responded to this month, the Ryuk actors also used Windows Global Policy Objects deployed from the domain controller to spread ransomware. And other recent attacks have used another Trickbot-connected backdoor known as Bazar.

The variety of tools being used, including off-the-shelf and open-source attack tools, and the volume and speed of attacks is indicative of an evolution in the Ryuk gang’s operational skills. Cobalt Strike’s “offensive security” suite is a favorite tool of both state-sponsored and criminal actors, because of its relative ease of use and broad functionality, and its wide availability—“cracked” versions of the  commercially-licensed software are readily purchased in underground forums. And the software provides actors with a ready-made toolkit for exploitation, lateral movement, and many of the other tasks required to steal data, escalate the compromise and launch ransomware attacks without requiring purpose-made malware.

While this attack happened quickly, the persistence of the attacks following the initial failure of Ryuk to encrypt data demonstrate that the Ryuk actors—like many ransomware attackers—are slow to unlatch their jaws, and can persist for long periods of time once they’ve moved laterally within the network and can establish additional backdoors. The attack also shows that Remote Desktop Protocol can be dangerous even when it is inside the firewall.

IOCs for this attack will be posted on the SophosLabs GitHub here.

SophosLabs would like to acknowledge the contributions of Peter Mackenzie, Elida Leite, Syed Shahram and Bill Kearney of the MTR team, and Anand Aijan, Sivagnanam Gn, and Suraj Mundalik of SophosLabs to this report.

Microsoft is releasing a substantial number of security fixes again in October’s Patch Tuesday release—with 11 rated “Critical” by Microsoft (including the latest Adobe Flash security update). But two vulnerabilities among those being patched stand out above these others: CVE-2020-16898 and CVE-2020-16899. These vulnerabilities—caused by a bug in Windows’ TCP/IP driver—harken back to the “Ping of Death” vulnerability fixed in Windows in 2013. They make denial of service and potential remote code execution possible with a crafted packet.

The vulnerability in tcpip.sys, a logic error in how the driver parses ICMP messages, can be triggered remotely with a crafted IPv6 router advertisement packet containing a Recursive DNS Server (RDNSS) option. The RDNSS option typically contains a list of the IPv6 addresses of one or more recursive DNS servers. 

There is a logic flaw in tcpip.sys that can be exploited by crafting a router advertisement packet containing more data than expected, which results in the driver putting more bytes of data on its memory stack than provided for in the driver’s code, resulting in a buffer overflow. In theory, this could be used for both denial of service and remote code execution attacks. But in practice, achieving remote code execution would be extremely difficult.

SophosLabs developed its own proof-of-concept for an attack, based on information provided by Microsoft. It leverages the vulnerability to cause a “blue screen of death” on the targeted computer.  The details of the POC are being withheld to prevent exploitation by attackers.

Once we understood the bug, developing a “Blue Screen of Death” proof-of-concept was fairly straightforward. But taking it to the level that Microsoft has warned is possible—remote code execution (RCE)—is not. Modern defensive coding standards and practices would slow down an effort to build a reliable generic RCE exploit, for two reasons.

First, TcpIp.sys is compiled with GS flag— which prevents a typical stack overflow from directly controlling the return address.

The stack cookie, also known as a stack canary, is a random value generate at loading time. Its value is XOR’d with the stack pointer, making it extremely hard to predict reliably—especially in a full remote exploitation.

There are two typical techniques used to bypass stack canaries, neither of which really apply in this case:

• Using another information leak vulnerability (arbitrary read)—which won’t help much in exploiting tcpdrv.sys, because the canary value is XOR’d with the stack pointer.
• Overwriting a Structured Exception Handling (SEH) handler, which would be useful only if a structured exception record has been set—which is not the case here.

The second roadblock to an effective RCE exploit is kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (kASLR). Even if it was possible can reliably predict the stack canary (big if) landing back to a system shell in user mode would require to correctly (and again remotely) determine the base address of the Windows kernel.

That means that even when the exact nature of the bug in tcpdrv.sys becomes more widely known, it may be some time before anyone can exploit it in a way that reliably injects code into the Windows kernel space. Even so, the threat of denial of service at will with a relatively easily-crafted packet should be enough by itself to prompt rapid patching—which is the only real fix for this vulnerability.

Sophos is in the process of deploying signatures for attacks based on this vulnerability to XG Firewall and Endpoint IPS (in EAP). The signature IDs are sid:2304055 and sid:2304163, respectively. Other short-term mitigations fir potential denial of service attacks include:

• Disable IPv6 if not used, or
• Make Windows discard router advertisement packets using the netsh command (netsh int ipv6 set int *INTERFACENUMBER* rabaseddnsconfig=disable).

The rest of this month’s critical vulnerabilities patched are all potential remote code execution bugs as well:

• CVE-2020-16891: Windows Hyper-V Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
• CVE-2020-16911: GDI+ Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
• CVE-2020-16915: Media Foundation Memory Corruption Vulnerability
• CVE-2020-16923: Microsoft Graphics Components Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
• CVE-2020-16947: Microsoft Outlook Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
• CVE-2020-16951 and CVE-2020-16952: two Microsoft SharePoint Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities
• CVE-2020-16966: Open Enclave SDK Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
• CVE-2020-16967: Windows Camera Codec Pack Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Windows Spoofing Vulnerability

Another interesting bug fixed in this Patch Tuesday’s release is CVE-2020-16922 , a bug in Windows’ verification of digital signatures of Security Catalog (.CAT) files that could potentially be used to spoof verification of trust for a potentially malicious file.

Normally, any modification done to a digitally signed file should result in the invalidation of its signature.  However, it was discovered that appending arbitrary data of any size onto the end of a signed .CAT file does not invalidate its signature in the eyes of Windows, which fails to account for the extraneous data.

This bug bears a resemblance to the Curveball vulnerability from earlier this year, but is not as critical and poses a lesser threat to users—because unlike with Curveball,  “Man-in-the-Middle” attacks are not of concern. The bug could be exploited in malware deployments, however—for example, in the crafting of a  malicious Java Archive (.JAR) file.

By taking an existing Microsoft-signed .CAT file, appending the contents of a .JAR file to it, and changing the file’s extension to .JAR, a file is produced that looks and runs like a .JAR file, but has a “spoofed”, valid digital signature. This works because the Java Runtime will search a given .JAR file for Java contents to execute, even if they are present in the middle of the file.

Most other file types do not work this way, and cannot be abused for this purpose. Attackers might use this type of vulnerability to circumvent security software around their handling of malware: a file with a spoofed digital signature can fool security software into regarding it as a legitimate Microsoft-made file and therefore increase its “reputation,” potentially to such an extent that a blind eye would be turned to an actual malware file that would have otherwise get detected.

Sophos protection

Here is a list of protection released by SophosLabs in response to this advisory to complement any existing protection and generic exploit mitigation capabilities in our products.

This and all the other vulnerabilities revealed in October’s Patch Tuesday release—especially the critical ones—offer plenty of reasons to patch as quickly as possible.

By now, it’s clear the pandemic has provided perfect conditions for many types of social engineering attacks. We’ve seen plenty of reports and warnings from the FBI, CISA, Interpol, and other reputable organizations about the growth in coronavirus-related attacks, from spear-phishing to vishing, ransomware, and more, as the world adapts to remote working and its associated risks. 

In many ways, social distancing and remote work have created more fertile conditions for hackers, but the types of social engineering attacks we’re seeing today aren’t too different from what we’ve seen in the past. So, why are we still seeing major breaches making news headlines on a regular basis? 

If history has taught us one thing it’s that hackers will always capitalize on the human element. Uncertainty, fear, distraction, isolation, and confusion can all contribute to increased vulnerabilities among users. And as we continue to face a rapidly shifting global news agenda, we can’t possibly anticipate the next twist in the pandemic or major news event that opportunistic hackers will exploit. Look at the rise in phishing attacks related to COVID stimulus and relief for example. 

We expect to see continued social distancing and increased virtual interactions long after the pandemic subsides, which means that enterprises must rely on strong authentication to protect against the rising wave of social engineering attacks. As we lose confidence in the security of systems and information with an increasingly decentralized work environment, it’s critical to re-establish trust with your users. Here’s how:

Employee education and training is not enough.

Educating employees to be on the look-out for COVID-related scams, while essential, is not a comprehensive response. No matter how much user education about phishing or social engineering takes place, some attacks will still succeed. As long as user action is required, and there is a reliance on users to identify phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks, vulnerabilities will continue to be an issue. 

It’s time to overhaul your 2FA strategy.

Organizations cannot afford to continually rely on passwords, recovery questions, or basic two-factor authentication (2FA) to protect against future social engineering attacks. These are methods proven time and time again to fall short in the face of mobile malware, SIM swapping, and phishing attacks. Hackers are getting more savvy, and we must as well. 

User experience is critical to your organization’s safety.

In a world where we are physically remote from coworkers or IT, and juggling home and work life, strong authentication must work at scale on a variety of devices, across business-critical applications, and within different environments. The better the user experience, the easier it is to deploy across and to secure the enterprise — unlike complex point solutions that only protect a niche set of users.

So, yes, the rise in COVID-related attacks is a real and present danger. But we can’t assume this is a temporary threat or unique to COVID. It is simply the latest version of an ongoing rise in social engineering attacks that demands a stronger response. Every day we are helping businesses large and small adapt to their new normal. Are you ready for yours?

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