Am I a criminal or am I a cybersecurity…

Whilst the common person will largely link the words “hacker/hackers” to criminal the reality is hackers are scientists/artists/creators/ComputerOperators and the choice of being a criminal or not is down to actions and consequences. So the debate about if you identify as “hacker” does that make you a criminal, well it’s nonsense isn’t it. I could call myself a pony but it won’t make me one, much like I could call myself a criminal and I could be entirely law abiding.

Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-39952 Fortinet Global Exposure

There appears to be a new RCE out for Fortinet devices as per this post (it’s against FortiNAC as far I am aware so this is probably a much smaller exposure footprint than all fortinet devices):

https://www.fortiguard.com/psirt/FG-IR-22-300

There’s also this in FortiWeb (and well they released 40 odd fixes to various bits)

https://www.fortiguard.com/psirt/FG-IR-21-186

When we consider security edge devices and the risks these may pose to organizations and society as a whole it’s important to understand that these are no trivial matter. These are “security” appliances that are there to protect your organizations, to provide remote access as well as protect network egress etc.

Fortinet are not the only vendor to suffer from these types of vulnerability (Remote Code Execution – RCE) however there do appear to have been quite a few of these when looking historically.

Threat Intel

Pro Russian Hacktivist Groups

Cyberwarfare in Ukraine was hyped as a MASSIVE thing, yet largely it’s been more bark and bite, but perhaps people need to understand that you can’t just “CYBER” a remote network, and even if you could, let’s say you get RCE on 30 networks in a country, so what? There needs to be value, purpose and something that will support other objectives, this isn’t a CTF.

Espionage (Collection/CNE)
Information Warfare (PsyOps)
Computer Network Attacks/Operations (CNA/CNO)

Education

Is my house spying on me?

Do you ever get the feeing you are being watched? What about listening to it? Do you ever talk about a subject and then see it appear in adverts despite never using a computer to search for it?

Well don’t worry there’s lots of reasons as to why this can occur, and whilst you might want to think someone is spying on you, the truth is they probably aren’t looking for you, but they might be harvesting your data.

Threat Intel

Active Cybercrime Groups

Ransomware this, ransomware that! The problem is, you can be tired of the subject but that doesn’t mean the threat has gone away! So what are the currently active ransomware groups posting victims?

Well here’s a list of currently active group (Both Ransomware and Marketplaces) names who have ONLINE “DARK WEB” (TOR) hidden services online and who are posting victims or are markets:

Education

Lockbit 3.0 and Royal Mail – Chats Published

The loss of availability Ransomware causes is enough to make your day/week/s bad, the loss of data, bad month/quarter or longer.

Lockbit posted “Royal Mail need new negotiator.” Followed by “ALL AVAILABLE DATA PUBLISHED !”

What we actually found is that they published the chat history:

Threat Intel

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

Why is security so hard?

It requires being thorough.
It required documenting things.
It requires conducting training and drills.
It adds what can be viewed as additional effort/cost to the primary goals (sell widgets/services/time)
It involves weird and wonderful ways of abusing functionality that is not always apparent or expected, thus to the typical consumers/user of a service, the idea that it might be abused actually seems very unlikely (to a criminal or security pro, the idea it will be abused seems far more likely based on threat intelligence etc.)