In the latest installment of our Executive Perspectives interview series, Axio CEO Scott Kannry sat down with Bobby Mehta, the former President & CEO of TransUnion and a sitting board
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via the inimitable Daniel Stori at Turnoff.US!
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Do not call that number! This attack is brilliant. It uses a legitimate PayPal email message about a bogus payment to trick you into phoning a bogus PayPal phone number. I have received several of them this week with various names for the company sending the money request. Different emails contain different subjects and different […]
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What a year after the Mother of All Breaches data leak has taught us on cybersecurity, data protection, and more. It’s almost been a year since the “Mother of All Breaches” (MOAB), widely known as one of the largest and most impactful data breaches in cybersecurity history, exposed massive volumes of sensitive data. We’ve put...
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Authors/Presenters: General Paul M. Nakasone
Our sincere appreciation to DEF CON, and the Presenters/Authors for publishing their erudite DEF CON 32 content. Originating from the conference’s events located at the Las Vegas Convention Center; and via the organizations YouTube channel.
The post DEF CON 32 – Spies And Bytes: Victory In The Digital Age appeared first on Security Boulevard.
The majority of security leaders reportedly don’t know what caused data security incidents at their organizations over the past 12 months. To reduce the likelihood of unknown security breaches, prioritize regular staff training and tabletop exercises. This empowers employees to identify and escalate potential risks, bolstering your overall security posture and resilience against cyberattacks.
The post Cybersecurity Insights with Contrast CISO David Lindner | 11/15/24 appeared first on Security Boulevard.
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Stuart Schechter makes some good points on the history of bad password policies:
Morris and Thompson’s work brought much-needed data to highlight a problem that lots of people suspected was bad, but that had not been studied scientifically. Their work was a big step forward, if not for two mistakes that would impede future progress in improving passwords for decades.
First, was Morris and Thompson’s confidence that their solution, a password policy, would fix the underlying problem of weak passwords. They incorrectly assumed that if they prevented the specific categories of weakness that they had noted, that the result would be something strong. After implementing a requirement that password have multiple characters sets or more total characters, they wrote:...
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Join top industry experts at API Security Day, a focused event at APIDays Paris, to explore in-depth strategies and insights for protecting APIs.
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A report from the Five Eyes cybersecurity alliance, released by the CISA, highlights the majority of the most exploited vulnerabilities last year were initially zero-day flaws, a significant increase compared to 2022 when less than half of the top vulnerabilities were zero-day exploits.
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Digital lending has emerged as a game-changer, reshaping the borrowing experience with unprecedented speed, convenience, and accessibility. Gone are the days of endless paperwork and prolonged waiting times—now, individuals can secure loans within minutes from the comfort of their homes. However, as financial transactions shift to digital platforms, the importance of adhering to compliance standards […]
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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — With great promise comes potential peril. And while artificial intelligence (AI) is looked upon as a panacea for enterprises, it also poses an existential security threat. “We stand at the intersection of human ingenuity and technological innovation, where the game of cybersecurity has evolved into a high-stakes match,” Nir Zuk, founder..
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Authors/Presenters: Timm Lauser, Jannis Hamborg
Our sincere appreciation to DEF CON, and the Presenters/Authors for publishing their erudite DEF CON 32 content. Originating from the conference’s events located at the Las Vegas Convention Center; and via the organizations YouTube channel.
The post DEF CON 32 – Redefining V2G: How To Use Your Vehicle As Game Controller appeared first on Security Boulevard.
As one of the most popular open-source databases, widely used for web applications, MySQL is no stranger to PII and sensitive data. At the same time, its users need production-like data for effective development and testing. Here are the challenges involved in anonymizing MySQL databases and solutions for tackling them.
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Tonic’s file connector is a quick and easy way to get de-identified data to power your development. Simply upload data in files (such as CSV) to detect and mask sensitive data, and then generate new output files for safe, fast use.
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Let’s look at the factors behind the push to declare the end of SOAR, consider their merits, and determine whether or not SOAR is obsolete.
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Endpoint Detection and Response systems (EDRs) are an essential part of modern cybersecurity strategies. EDR solutions gather and analyze data from endpoints to identify suspicious activities and provide real-time threat visibility. This allows security teams to respond quickly to incidents, investigate threats thoroughly, and mitigate the impact of potential breaches.
When attackers manage to disable or block EDR systems using tools like EDRSilencer or NimBlackout, it poses serious challenges to defenders. One major consequence is the loss of visibility into endpoint activities, which compromises the ability of cybersecurity teams to detect and respond to threats effectively. This diminished visibility can result in delayed detection of breaches, giving attackers more time to exfiltrate data or cause damage. Moreover, without the continuous monitoring and real-time alerts that EDRs provide, defenders are left with a reactive approach, often discovering incidents only after significant harm has been done. The ability of EDRs to facilitate immediate responses, such as isolating affected systems and stopping malicious processes, is also neutralized when these tools are blocked, leaving organizations more vulnerable to ongoing attacks. In such scenarios, the risk of prolonged, undetected breaches increases, complicating the efforts of defenders and escalating the potential damage to the organization’s security posture.
This blog isn’t going to cover every EDR based tool in an attackers arsenal, but there are some common ones that have been observed recently. Attackers and Defenders are in a constant game of cat and mouse when it comes to tools and techniques. Fortunately, with these techniques there are some common indicators that can still be detected irregardless of the tool used.
ToolsHere are the tools we will be taking a look at. Many of these have been observed in use in the wild.
EDRSilencer — Inspired by the closed source FireBlock tool FireBlock from MdSec NightHawk, this tool was created with the aim of blocking the outbound traffic of running EDR processes using Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) APIs.
EDRSandBlast — Written in C. It weaponizes a vulnerable signed driver to bypass EDR detections (Notify Routine callbacks, Object Callbacks and ETW TI provider) and LSASS protections. Multiple userland unhooking techniques are also implemented to evade userland monitoring.
NimBlackout — An adaptation of the @Blackout project which consists of removing AV/EDRs using the gmer (BYOVD) driver.
AuKill — The AuKill tool abuses an outdated version of the driver used by version 16.32 of the Microsoft utility, Process Explorer, to disable EDR processes before deploying either a backdoor or ransomware on the target system.
EDRSilencerThe main features of this tool is searching for running EDR processes and applying Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) filters to block outbound traffic, adding filters for specific processes, and removing filters either individually or globally. The tool includes a custom implementation to avoid file handle access issues with EDR processes by bypassing the CreateFileW API. It supports a wide range of EDRs, including Microsoft Defender, Carbon Black, SentinelOne, and more.
EDRSilencer Adding WFP FiltersBy creating custom WFP filters, attackers can selectively intercept and drop network packets sent by EDR processes, effectively preventing them from communicating with their management servers or security dashboards. This disruption stops the EDR from sending telemetry data, alerts, or incident logs, thereby silencing its ability to notify defenders of suspicious or malicious activities occurring on the endpoints. Such interference can be stealthy, as it can be crafted to target only specific processes or traffic patterns associated with the EDR, ensuring other legitimate network operations remain unaffected. By exploiting WFP in this manner, attackers can maintain prolonged access to a compromised system without detection, allowing them to escalate their attacks, exfiltrate data, or cause further damage without triggering the EDR’s defensive mechanisms.
Fortunately, there are a few pieces of telemetry that sneak through before the EDR is silenced. One such piece is Windows Event 5447 which identifies when a WFP filter has been changed. In the case of EDRSilencer there is a very specific filter that is added.
Action: %%16389EDRSilencer by default will create its filters with the FilterName of “Custom Outbound Filter”. You can also see the process being filtered in the Condition Value, in this case msmpeng.exe (Defender).
Another detection opportunity is the command line arguments and process information from when the tool is launched. It is pretty unusual for a benign process to have a argument called blockedr.
...For more logs, details, and detections, we have captured this activity in our platform here.
EDRSandBlastThis tool can also use WFP to block communication of EDRs. It will enumerate EDRs and create filters for every service and process of the EDR.
EDRSandBlast Adding WFP FiltersThis will create very similar logs as EDRSilencer in Windows Event 5447 but on a larger scale since it will do it for every subprocess of the EDR. However, since it is enumerating the EDR services it will access the EDR process in a way that is logged. In Sysmon this will be EventCode 10.
CallTrace: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll+9d234|C:\Windows\System32\KERNELBASE.dll+2c0fe|C:\Users\localuser\EDRSandblast.exe+5eb1f|C:\Users\localuser\EDRSandblast.exe+5fb11|C:\Users\localuser\EDRSandblast.exe+5b106|C:\Users\localuser\EDRSandblast.exe+74c68|C:\Windows\System32\KERNEL32.DLL+17034|C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll+52651In addition to the methods of detection mentioned, you can also identify these WFP Filters through the registry. They will create an entry under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\FirewallRules\{GUID} as seen here.
Channel: Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/OperationalFor more logs, details, and detections, we have captured this activity in our platform here.
EDRSandBlast also has a technique to perform LSASS dumping without triggering Credential Dumping activity alerts. EDRSandBlast enumerates the Kernel “Notify Routines” callbacks and remove any callback routine linked to a predefined list of EDR drivers (more than 1000 drivers of security products supported, see the EDR driver detection section. The enumeration and removal are made possible through the exploitation of an arbitrary Kernel memory read / write primitive provided by the exploitation of a vulnerable driver (see Vulnerable drivers section).
Vulnerable Driver LoadHere we can see the tool creating the malicious service and loading the vulnerable driver.
LSASS DumpedAfterwards it uses this driver to remove those callback routines and make the process safe. Then lsass.exe is access and dumped to the current directory. Once done the service and driver are removed.
These activities will still create some logs despite the efforts of the tool to hide activity. The first we can look at is the service creation for the kernel driver (Windows Event 7045)
Channel: SystemHere we can see the driver being loaded from an unusual location (C:\Users\localuser\gdrv.sys) as a kernel mode driver with a start type of auto start. The combination of auto start with kernel mode should be investigated but adding in a known vulnerable driver really makes this stand out. This technique is commonly referred to as a "bring your own vulnerable driver" (BYOVD) attack. The LOLDrivers project contains a massive list of information about these known drivers including names and hashes.
For more logs, details, and detections, we have captured this activity in our platform here.
Blackout/NimBlackoutThese tools leverage a different driver, gmer, to effectively disable or kill EDRs and Antiviruses. It uses a very similar approach to EDRSandBlast by loading a kernel mode driver and then exploiting the vulnerable driver to accomplish something it normally wouldn’t have permission to. In the particular case of this tool, it will repeatedly terminate the specified process over and over. Likely targets for this are EDR and AntiVirus products.
NimBlackout Killing DefenderIf you have telemetry for registry activity you can actually see the service creation keys as well with EventCode 13. These tools will both use the Blackout.sys driver as the ImagePath.
Channel: Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/OperationalIf you have telemetry for Windows Events you can monitor for termination of your EDR Processes. This is Event Id 4689, and here we can see the Defender process from our execution being killed.
EventCode: 4689For more logs, details, and detections, we have captured this activity in our platform here.
Threat Actor Tools — AuKillWhile all the tools covered so far have been open source tools, or educational experiments, these techniques are being actively used by threat actors. One such example is a tool dubbed AuKill by Sophos discussed here. However, this tool uses many of the techniques covered in this blog and includes many of the same detection opportunities.
The AuKill tool abuses an outdated version of the driver used by version 16.32 of the Microsoft utility, Process Explorer, to disable EDR processes before deploying either a backdoor or ransomware on the target system.
The method of abusing the Process Explorer driver to bypass EDR systems isn’t new; it was implemented in many open-source tools. AuKill possibly uses multiple code snippets from, and built their malware around, the core technique introduced by Backstab. AuKill drops a driver named PROCEXP.SYS (from the release version 16.32 of process Explorer) into the C:\Windows\System32\drivers path. The legitimate Process Explorer driver is named PROCEXP152.sys, and normally is found in the same location. Both drivers can be present on a machine that has a copy of Process Explorer running. The AuKill installer also drops an executable copy of itself to either the System32 or the TEMP directory, which it runs as a service as seen below.
EventCode: 4697Another interesting thing that this tool does that we hadn’t seen in many of the open source tools was disabling the Windows Update Service. This can be seen in a registry key change.
Details: DWORD (0x00000004)This value change disables the automatic starting of the update service. This can prevent future security updates that might mess with an attacker’s access.
For more logs, details, and detections, we have captured this activity in our platform here.
MITRET1562.001: Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools
Adversaries may modify and/or disable security tools to avoid possible detection of their malware/tools and activities
T1562.004: Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify System Network Configurations
Adversaries may disable or modify system firewalls in order to bypass controls limiting network usage.
T1569: System Services
Adversaries may abuse system services or daemons to execute commands or programs.
T1112: Modify Registry
Adversaries may interact with the Windows Registry to hide configuration information within Registry keys, remove information as part of cleaning up, or as part of other techniques to aid in persistence and execution.
The tools and techniques used by attackers to bypass or disable EDRs underscore the continuous and evolving struggle between cybersecurity defenses and adversarial tactics. By exploiting legitimate system features, such as the Windows Filtering Platform, attackers can effectively neutralize critical EDR functions, creating blind spots. However, defenders are not without recourse. While these tools aim to obscure their activities, certain logs and registry modifications still offer valuable indicators of compromise. Monitoring for these signals — like specific WFP filters, unusual process behaviors, or suspicious service creations — can help defenders detect these evasive tactics. Having a strong detection workflow is paramount to catch these sorts of attacks, especially when they are attacking the EDRs themselves.
SnapAttack is the threat hunting, detection engineering, and detection validation platform for proactive threat-informed defense. Register for a FREE community account to access the tons of content included in this blog post, as well as thousands of other detections. Subscribers also get advanced features like a no-code detection builder, one-click deployments to leading SIEMs and EDRs like Chronicle, Sentinel, Splunk, CrowdStrike and SentinelOne, advanced threat profiles to prioritize relevant threats, and customized reports that track MITRE ATT&CK coverage and more!
ResourcesBlinded by Silence was originally published in SnapAttack on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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via the comic humor & dry wit of Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD
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Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) is the first example of a specific threat becoming a financially viable business model. The subscription model approach has propelled ransomware to be one of the most pervasive cyber threats of our time, evolving over the last decade to include mainstream SaaS capabilities that enable user success, such as 24/7 helpdesk support, training, and documentation.
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The Tenable Cloud Risk Report 2024 reveals that nearly four in 10 organizations have workloads that are publicly exposed, contain a critical vulnerability and have excessive permissions. Here’s what to watch for in your organization.
In a “GPS mapping” of today’s most pressing cloud security issues, the Tenable Cloud Risk Report 2024 from Tenable Cloud Research revealed serious flaws across workloads, identities, containers, storage and Kubernetes.;
Particularly concerning was the discovery that nearly four in 10 organizations (38%) have an elevated level of exposure from workloads bearing an especially risky blend of security gaps. We called this blend a “toxic cloud trilogy,” defined as any cloud workload having these three risk factors:
Like the big bad wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood fable, a toxic cloud trilogy masks its existence and severity in the cloud environment. The masking makes these high risks hard to spot, prioritize and remediate. In this blog we discuss the implications of the toxic cloud trilogy and offer guidance for actions to avoid them.
Why we conducted this researchTo help our customers — and ourselves — better understand the most prevalent risks in cloud environments, the Tenable Cloud Research team analyzed telemetry from millions of cloud resources in active production across multiple public cloud repositories. Conducted in the first half of 2024, the research included cloud workload and configuration information. To determine the most exploitable vulnerabilities the team applied Tenable’s Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) to common cloud CVEs.
Why a toxic cloud trilogy increases riskA toxic cloud trilogy increases risk by making the workload’s weaknesses easier for attackers to exploit — and making the scope of exploitation potentially greater.
Cloud security involves layers of defense to prevent breaches if a given layer fails; a toxic trilogy effectively erodes these layers. Bad actors seek out critical vulnerabilities or publicly accessible assets. Finding one, they can commandeer highly privileged permissions or roles to burrow their way in, accessing — and even exfiltrating — sensitive data. For example, an attacker can modify access policies or elevate privileges, moving laterally and deploying resources to gain access to even more sensitive areas.
Prevalence of toxic cloud trilogies in organizations worldwide Source: Tenable Cloud Risk Report 2024, October 2024The work of mitigating toxic cloud trilogies needs to be high on a security team’s “to do” list. That’s easier said than done. Let’s explore the challenges organizations face in addressing such exposures.
Organizational causes of toxic cloud trilogiesHow are such risky combinations getting through? Fault lines can be organizational, due to siloed tooling that limits visibility. Another contributing factor is the distributed ownership of systems, spanning development, IT and cybersecurity teams, among others. Each of these teams may have a different level of risk appetite.
Here are three examples of how these factors contribute to the creation of toxic cloud trilogies:
Let’s take a closer look at each factor implicated in a toxic cloud trilogy and why these issues can be so difficult for organizations to address.
Critical vulnerabilitiesAttackers abuse cloud vulnerabilities — flaws in cloud-based software — to gain unauthorized access, steal sensitive data and/or disrupt services. You would expect published CVEs to be easy, low-hanging fruit for cybersecurity teams to act on quickly. Doing so prevents or dismantles a toxic cloud trilogy. Yet, to our surprise, many high risk vulnerabilities in the data we examined remained unremediated even a month after a CVE was published.
High risk vulnerabilities remained largely unremediated after 30 days.
Why does remediating a vulnerability take so much time? One reason may be that, regardless of who technically “owns” vulnerability management in the organization, it requires the involvement of several teams. Depending on the organization’s structure, those involved in the process of remediating vulnerabilities could include security teams alerting vulnerability management teams, applications teams issuing software update requests of operating systems teams and DevSecOps teams needing to make related changes in CI/CD pipelines.
Another “drag” factor in resolving vulnerabilities may be tactical: teams see vulnerability remediation as time-consuming, requiring an arbitrary cycle of tasks. Adopting conventional wisdom, they may try to save cycles by taking a “batch the patch” approach: delaying the fix until every relevant patch is available. While this approach is understandable from a time management perspective, it places operational efficiency above security.
Excessive permissionsAttackers target credentials, putting identity and access management (IAM) on the radar of everyone responsible for securing the cloud. Overprivileged human identities are a known, high-impact risk factor in identity-based attacks. Overprivileged non-human identities are the key impact factor in breaches based on application vulnerabilities. All are part of the same IAM system.
87% of human identities in AWS have critical or high excessive permissions
Our research revealed extensive instances of excessive permissions in both human and non-human identities. We also found that human identities are granted significantly more risky excessive permissions than non human identities. For example, in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) permissions we studied, the vast majority had excessive critical and high risk permissions.
Human and non-human identity permissions in AWS Source: Tenable Cloud Risk Report 2024, October 2024Avoiding risky permissions is a cloud security best practice, and also, in many cases, a compliance requirement, achieved by acting on least privilege implementation.
At the helm of permissions and access management are the IAM teams. Aided by no shortage of cloud providers and third-party tools — including AWS IAM, Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) IAM; AWS IAM Access Analyzer, Azure Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Okta and Auth0 — they work to create and maintain access permissions structures and policies, and apply least privilege to the extent possible.
Security teams, on the other hand, are at another helm, and using other tools, to spot exposures. They are looking not only at permissions but also workloads, data, applications and infrastructure as a whole. This broader approach informs security teams about permissions-related risks as well as granular policy refinements that enforce least privilege, including when elevated permissions should be granted but limited by time.
By design, IAM tools lack full stack and even multi-cloud entitlements context; they may recommend least privilege yet from a narrow permissions and policy lens. They are unable to bring into focus access risk that feeds into a vulnerability or resource to create a toxic cloud trilogy.
IT and security leaders need to enable their IAM and security teams to work closely with each other. Do they?
And why are human identities more likely to be assigned excessive privileges? In some cases, project managers prevail upon their IT colleagues to elevate privileges for an urgent business need. Note, too, that developers may be using programmatic, IAM role-based templates to define access for non-human identities.
Public exposureThe phrase “public exposure” conjures up an actor performing before an audience. In cloud infrastructure, public assets — databases, websites, email servers and other online services — are just that: exposed to external networks so legitimate parties outside the organization can access them.
Risk increases when assets are unintentionally public with either excessive permissions and/or a vulnerability. Worse is when the asset contains sensitive data. Organizations need to be able examine whether an asset is configured as public. In the case of publicly exposed cloud storage, they need to be able to discover and classify sensitive data contained within, including who can access it and how it is used, so any remediation measures can be prioritized accordingly.
29% of organizations have public-facing storage buckets
Our research found that 96% of organizations have public-facing cloud assets; 29% of organizations have public-facing storage buckets. It is essential to know if this exposure is due to a misconfiguration, such as an unpatched resource or overprivileged access. If oversight is at play, it may be due to business drivers such as time to market or lack of cloud security personnel, or the need to implement guardrails, policies or visibility. Context and tools are needed to be able to monitor and close such exposure, and downgrade permissions to the minimal needed.
Key actions to prevent toxic cloud trilogiesTaking a few key actions can prevent toxic cloud trilogies in your cloud environment. Here’s what we recommend:
Our research showed that unwittingly or not, many organizations have unnecessary exposures in their cloud environments. Since we can’t know what a malicious actor will do next, control what you can. Add context to unmask and prioritize security gaps like the cloud toxic trilogy, and close such exposures swiftly.
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