Category: Threat Intel

Defense

Ransomware Realities

Everything is much worse now, or is it? 

”The world is burning, the world is burning but then if you look around, it always has been…” 

Computer systems and security go together much like chalk and cheese! Probably sounds a bit odd but miniaturization, consumerization and mobility have put more technology out in the world than we can really comprehend, yet technology security is still dramatically overlooked by most organizations. 

The insane pace of change, the drive for faster, better, cheaper and the reality that it probably isn’t a stretch to say most people (and organizations) do not really understand what ‘secure’ or ‘hardened’ looks like.

Read more “Ransomware Realities” →
Breach

Following a Kill Chain – Defending against Babuk group’s…

Washington Police Department Pwn3d by Ransomware Group Babuk

So it’s all over the news outlets, a police department (Washington DC PD) has been hit by a ransomware syndicate, Babuk. So firstly, let’s be realistic everyone can get pwn3d and at this time our thoughts go out to those affected and to the teams working the response. Being hit by ransomware is NOT fun and not something we would wish upon anyone. That being said this isn’t an ambulance chase, what I want to do hear is look at the TTPs from Babuk in a bit more detail so hopefully we can help inform and educate people so they can strengthen their security postures.

References

https://news.sky.com/story/russian-hackers-target-washington-dc-police-department-in-apparent-ransomware-attack-12288183

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/27/washington_dc_police_ransomware/ Read more “Following a Kill Chain – Defending against Babuk group’s TTPs” →

Defense

Business Email Compromise in Office 365

BEC

Business email compromise can be a prelude to a range of attacks but commonly it’s either Ransomware of Scammers. In this post we are focsing on scammer activity which uses a ‘man in the mailbox’ attack to get in between two parties in an email converstation with the aim of attempting theft by fradulently altering a wire transfer so that the third party sends funds to the scammers not to the victim. There are cleary other avenues that can be leveraged (the compromised mailbox may be used to phish or email malware to another victim).

Initial Access

To gain access to the mailbox a range of techniques can be employed which includes:

  • Credential stuffing
  • Phishing and credential harvesting
  • Malware

Once they have your logon credentials, they now will attempt to access your mailbox.

Avoiding Geo Location Alerts

A scammer may use a public VPN service (such as services from AVAST etc.) to move their internet connection the target mailbox region. They can usually locate a person through some OSINT.

By moving to the normal area of the user they are less likely to trip geo location alerts. Read more “Business Email Compromise in Office 365” →

Defense

ProxyLogon (CVE-2021-26855) PoC and Metasploit Module Released

The last two weeks we’ve seen major activity around the world with defenders and criminals rushing to respond to the recent zero day vulnerability patches and then the race to reverse engineer the kill chain to create an explot. We saw a PoC fairly early but it required that you reverse engineer some exchange DLLs and/or TAP the 443 to 444 interface on an exchange server to work out how to weaponise it. Things however have progressed, 8 hours ago we saw a metasploit module go online:

Read more “ProxyLogon (CVE-2021-26855) PoC and Metasploit Module Released” →
Breach

ProxyLogon – A god mode backdoor even when used…

Imagine

Imagine being able to read emails from any mailbox from a corporation! But everyone uses office 365… don’t they? Well ok even if that was the case (It’s not) then the RCE would come into play. An RCE into system level access to Exchange which is so heavily tied to active directory they are almost joined at the hip) is a killer foothold. However, you pain the scenarios they aren’t good!

All knowing and all powerful

Imagine if you could read everyone’s email! What could you do with this?

  • Steal IP
  • Steal data
  • Steal credentials
  • Extort, blackmail and bribe

The SSRF vulnerability enabling a threat actor to gain unauthenticated read access to mailboxes would be a killer tool for both nation state spies and criminals alike. Read more “ProxyLogon – A god mode backdoor even when used with READ only” →

Defense

Thoughts on IOCs for Exchange Hafnium/ProxyLogon

Intro

This isn’t a rant, far from it but I’ve been working on this for over a week now and some major questions are sprining to mind with regard to how the IOCs and detection details released may have hindered response efforts. These vulnerabilities were known about since at least December 2020, there were months to get detection intel and scripts/tools ready for people (that’s if you don’t question why did it take so long). So I’ve put some of my thoughts down here on some of the challenges with the IoCs initially released and the detection tools etc. I’ll probably update this later but wanted to publish it before it becomes virtual dust! Read more “Thoughts on IOCs for Exchange Hafnium/ProxyLogon” →

Defense

Hafnium / Exchange Marauder High Level IR Help

Ok so John and I have been working on this for a while. We have been working with both customers and industry profesionals and there’s a common theme. Understranding the events from this incident are quite challenging because:

  • We don’t have sample log output for known bad traffic
  • The vulns can be used for data theft and/or backdoors (and further actions on target)

Getting guidance out so far on this has been challenging becuase:

  1. There is not a public full kill chain POC to do comaprisons to (i’m ok with that)
  2. We don’t have a pw3d server that has all the indicators from all the routes on

So to try and help people we have made a diagram which we will update as we go.

Essentially you need to perform a weighted analysis to understand if:

  • You had recon only
  • You had some SSRF
  • YOu had SSRF that led to data theft
  • You had a webshell planted
Read more “Hafnium / Exchange Marauder High Level IR Help” →
Defense

Checking for Hafnium or other groups impact from Exchange…

Introduction

On March 2nd, 2021 at ~6pm GMT Microsoft released an out of band update to all version of exchange from 2010 through to 2019. This was in response to a range of vulnerabilities which had been abused (a 0-day) by a threat actor (coined by MS as HAFNIUM).

For more info from MS please see the following:

https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/03/02/hafnium-targeting-exchange-servers/

Key CVEs

Key CVES include:

CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065. Read more “Checking for Hafnium or other groups impact from Exchange Abuse” →

Defense

Exchange 2010 Rapid Analysis for IOCs

Purpose

With the Hafnium “incidents” and Exchange vulnerabilities I wanted to help people with ruling in or out compromise of their Exchange 2010 environments. At the time of writing, I don’t believe that Hafnium affected Exchange 2010 via the reported kill chain, I believe that BEC would be required but this is a theory, my general view is Exchange 2010 might be ‘safe’ from this kill chain. This is due to the initial stage leveraging CVE-2021-26855 which is an SSRF vulnerability which only affectes the new architecture (2013+). However, this is an unsupported platform so I wanted to help with some baselines and talk about how I would approach ruling compromise in or out (at least with regards to these vulnerabilities). The key impact area is a web shell. I’ve made some baselines to help people look for abnormalities.

Disclaimer

This document was made with limited time and without full Whitebox access to source code and engineering expertise. The areas we are checking for IOCs appear to make logical sense, but the OS and APP (Exchange 2010) are unsupported, and we are not the vendor. So, I am afraid your hunting responsibility is on you, this is just my opinions and thoughts from a very fast analysis. Use at your own risk. Read more “Exchange 2010 Rapid Analysis for IOCs” →

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