ESXiargs Summary 09-02-2023 10:03

What do we know?

Adversary: Unknown, likely Criminal Actor/s

Initial Access Vector: Unknown/Unproven

Impact: ~3K+ Hosts have had Remote Code Execute and their ESXi logon pages changed (plus had encryption routines run to encrypt virtual machines, with varying success). A Second encryption routine has been deployed to some hosts; the threat actor is expanding/changing capabilities.

Risk: Further impact, Additional Threat Actors Exploit the vulnerability

Getting into Cyber

How to get into Cyber? It’s EASY!

Quick, I’ll tell you a little secret… to get into CYBER you must first follow this guide:

Now if you are going to GET INTO CYBER you need to have a range of things:

Computer Hacking Skills
Num-chuk Skills

Right ok, so let’s get some Hacking Skills!

Head over to KALI LINUX and download KALI

Threat Intel

ESXiARGS Ransomware – Global Incident

Thousands of ESXi hosts around (some of the) globe have been encrypted by cyber criminals. This post is a fast publish showing some of what has occurred, it’s impact and now includes limited remedial advice.

If you have been affected by this ransomware event there is an attempted recovery script by CISA

https://github.com/cisagov/ESXiArgs-Recover/blob/main/recover.sh

Leadership

Technology in the Wild

Whilst every marketing person will talk about the latest and greatest tech innovation and product, how much does that reflect the reality of technology deployed in the world? Everyone is running Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 right?! They also don’t use computers, because everything is cloud and mobile first right! and security, well everyone has that down as well! Great… let’s just go and check those statements out… oh wait…. no maybe err.. let’s take a look with our friends at shodan.io

Hacking

CrackMapExec (CME) on Windows

Ok this is going to be really short post, but expect more later! Did you ever want to run CME but you were stuck on a Windows machine? Well don’t worry you can! How do we do this?

First we download CME

https://github.com/Porchetta-Industries/CrackMapExec/releases/download/v5.4.0/cme-windows-latest-3.10.1.zip

Extract the zip file

Make sure you have python3 installed!

Guides

Ransomware + Mega = Mega Cyber Pain

Did you ever read about ransomware actors? They often use mega upload to exfiltrate data! So I figured, why would we not detect this with MDE?

I mean sure we should probably block this with a custom indicator using Web Content Filtering and sure it would probably get blocked by Protective DNS but let’s say for whatever reason you don’t have those in place, let’s look at a really simple query to find mega connections in MDE:

Defence

Threat hunting with some funny results!

You never know what you will find when you go hunting! So here’s a quick tale of an explore I did using Advanced Hunting!

I went hunting here in Advanced Hunting:

Threat Intel

Simulating Human Operated Discovery

Did you want to check out some of your detections? This isn’t everything of course but it’s a simple batch file to simulate a range of enumeration techniques used by actors like CONTI or LOCKBIT affiliates/operators:

Uncategorized

Hunting for New Group Policies Where Scheduled Tasks are…

A common way to deploy an encryption routine used in Ransomware scenarios is to create a scheduled task to launch a cyptor exe. This is commonly deployed via a Group Policy Object (GPO).

So I wanted to look at how with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) we could detect this both on domain controllers but also on CLIENT devices (MEMBER SERVERS/PCs)

Strategy

When forming a strategy you must realise for starts that people view the word strategy differently. However, the general view is STRATEGY AS A PLAN. Without a PLAN a strategy is a DREAM.

The plan must be supported by a rang of factors, it must also be managed. It should be something which helps you go from where you are (CURRENT STATE) to where you want to be (FUTURE STATE) and should have a roadmap (TRANSITION PLAN/ROADMP) of how you will get there.

When we talk about can I see your strategy, you will need to have it documented, a strategy without a document isn’t a strategy that can be shared and communicated. As to what “THE STRATEGY” document must be… well there is no such thing as a MUST, but there’s some component that are largely and widely recognised to be useful.