Defending against Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks

What is a DoS Attack?

According to NIST, a denial of service (DoS) is:

“The prevention of authorized access to resources or the delaying of time-critical operations. (Time-critical may be milliseconds or it may be hours, depending upon the service provided).”

denial of service (DoS) – Glossary | CSRC (nist.gov)

a distributed denial of service (DDoS) is:

“A denial of service technique that uses numerous hosts to perform the attack.”

distributed denial of service (DDoS) – Glossary | CSRC (nist.gov)

Threat Intel

CVE-2022-26134 – Confluence Zero Day RCE

We are seeing active exploitation in the wild: MIRAI deployment, coinminer deployments etc.

THIS DOES SHOW IN THE ACCESS LOGS! The comment about “what isn’t in the logs” is about POST request BODY not showing in them, not that nothing is logged

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/5d2530b809fd069f97b30a5938d471dd2145341b5793a70656aad6045445cf6d/community

XMRIG, KINSING, MIRAI etc. are being deployed by threat actors after exploiting this vulnerability.

This is a fast publish

POC is in the wild: https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2022/06/02/active-exploitation-of-confluence-cve-2022-26134/

https://github.com/jbaines-r7/through_the_wire

keep checking vendor guidance and keep checking this for updates… use at own risk etc.

Workaround/Hotfixes have been published by Atlassian:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-security-advisory-2022-06-02-1130377146.html

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-79000

GreyNoise Tag is online: GreyNoise Trends

Also check this out for scanners: GreyNoise

Nice work https://twitter.com/_mattata and all the other people in the cyber community that are working on this!

IT MAY BE WISE TO ASSUME BREACH

The vulnerability appears to be in: xwork-1.0.3-atlassian-10.jar

Background

Velocity discovers a zero-day in confluence 03/06/2022 (GMT)

.@Volexity discovers zero-day exploit impacting all current versions of Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center. Attackers deploy in-memory Java implant to evade detection. Read more in our latest blog post: https://t.co/aCSwnSUfj8 #DFIR #ThreatIntel #InfoSec
— Volexity (@Volexity) June 2, 2022

Guides

Cyber Essentials Readiness

So, you have a driver to achieve cyber essentials, great stuff. Now if you are a business of reasonable size and scale this activity requires a bit of planning, context and lots of access and data. This could be via a distributed team or via a dedicated project team. In this post I’m going to look at what you may need to conduct the planning, discovery, assessment, and certification for Cyber Essentials and/or CE+.

Guides

Cyber Essentials – Out of the Box

New machines means it’s easy right?

Ok, another post on cyber essentials! I talk about this quite a lot (mainly driven by procurement requirements rather than orgs expressing a deep desire to “have better security” (which is a shame)) however, I want to show people what the real world is like and that meeting cyber essentials is a good thing, but also to look at real world challenges of meeting the standards. In this post we look at some thought provoking questions, then we look at an out of the box Windows and MAC device to see if they meet the standard!

Guides

Adding a removing the mark of the web via…

A quick post becuase this is useful for security control testing:

If you want to enable MOTW (mark of the web) on a file you can run the following PowerShell cmdlet:

Set-Content -Path '.\safe3.rtf' -Stream Zone.Identifier -Value '[ZoneTransfer]','ZoneId=3'

This will set the alterate data stream (ADS) Zone.Identifier value to ZoneID=3 (Internet Zone)

You can unblock this with

Guides

Wireguard Client for Linux on KALI

So as always there are a million things in tech and well it’s rare that someone knows EVERYTHING. I must connect to a Wireguard VPN from a KALI VM. Should be simple, well actually it was a bit more complicated as I had two errors along the way!

Leadership

Cyber Leadership

Myth: you must be a “techie” to lead in the CYBERS

Ok so you might be sitting here going… but Dan you send pews and do “techy” stuff… do you not lead? Well, I mean I do all kinds of things, I write business cases, I play with spreadsheets (fun right!), I integrate systems and look at data and sometimes write really bad code! (hey, the pews aren’t going to send themselves!) but… I want to talk about some realities here.

Education

The CYBER GANG Cookbook

Volume 1

Introduction

I am sitting here, and I need another cup of tea, but I thought I’d start to have a think about what common “CYBER GANGS” look like. This isn’t criminal or non-criminal. But you know there’s some commonality between both. I thought this was fun little thinking exercise to show the duality of life, what digital worlds look like but also to give a glimpse into the mysteryious (its not!) world of cyberz (including crime!)

Defence

The Challenges of Cyber Essentials Audit and Compliance Activities

It’s “only” essential but it can be bloody difficult!
mRr3b00t

Cyber Essentials Areas

Cyber Essentials is a minimum baseline standard for ensuring foundational cyber security considerations and controls are in place. It’s a good starting point, but by no means should it be “THE GOAL” and just because it has “Essentials” in its name, don’t think it’s easy to comply with. Whilst the standard isn’t outlandish with its requirements in the main, the reality between technical capabilities and being able to discover, audit and remediate security configurations in organisations is often nowhere near as simple as someone may tell you. The news here is that the standard has been extended to include some wider areas.

Defence

The Director of GCHQ speaks at CyberUK 2022

Sir Jeremy Fleming was speaking at CyberUK, the UK’s flagship cyber security conference this week.

The full presentation is here but I’ve picked out some key highlights.

“Of course, we can count ourselves lucky compared to those caught up in wars, but we are also seeing a heightened cyber risk. Cyber criminals are consistently evolving their tactics; the lines are blurring with hostile state activity and ransomware remains a real threat.”

“Cyber clearly matters to everyone.”

“At the global level, the UK has developed as a cyber power. Alongside the more traditional forms of diplomacy and statecraft, cyber now plays a vital role in our national security and prosperity.”