Category Archives: FireEye

Data Breaches, FBI, FireEye, ICRC hack, International Committee for the Red Cross, KELA, kelvinmiddelkoop@hotmail.com, Ne'er-Do-Well News, RaidForums, Ransomware, Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, Restoring Family Links, Sheriff, threat_actor, unindicted

Red Cross Hack Linked to Iranian Influence Operation?

A network intrusion at the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in January led to the theft of personal information on more than 500,000 people receiving assistance from the group. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the email address used by a cybercriminal actor who offered to sell the stolen ICRC data also was used to register multiple domain names the FBI says are tied to a sprawling media influence operation originating from Iran.

On Jan. 19, the ICRC disclosed the compromise of servers hosting the personal information of more than 500,000 people receiving services from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The ICRC said the hacked servers contained data relating to the organization’s Restoring Family Links services, which works to reconnect people separated by war, violence, migration and other causes.

The same day the ICRC went public with its breach, someone using the nickname “Sheriff” on the English-language cybercrime forum RaidForums advertised the sale of data from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Sheriff’s sales thread suggests the ICRC was asked to pay a ransom to guarantee the data wouldn’t be leaked or sold online.

“Mr. Mardini, your words have been heard,” Sheriff wrote, posting a link to the Twitter profile of ICRC General Director Robert Mardini and urging forum members to tell him to check his email. “Check your email and send a figure you can pay.”

RaidForums member “unindicted” aka Sheriff selling access to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement data. Image: Ke-la.com

In their online statement about the hack (updated on Feb. 7) the ICRC said it had not had any contact with the hackers, and no ransom demand had been made.

“In line with our standing practice to engage with any actor who can facilitate or impede our humanitarian work, we are willing to communicate directly and confidentially with whoever may be responsible for this operation to impress upon them the need to respect our humanitarian action,” the ICRC statement reads.

Asked to comment on Sheriff’s claims, the ICRC issued the following statement:

“Right now, we do not have any conclusive evidence that this information from the data breach has been published or is being traded. Our cybersecurity team has looked into any reported allegation of data being available on the dark web.”

The email address that Sheriff used to register at RaidForums — kelvinmiddelkoop@hotmail.com — appears in an affidavit for a search warrant filed by the FBI roughly a year ago. That FBI warrant came on the heels of an investigation published by security firm FireEye, which examined an Iranian-based network of inauthentic news sites and social media accounts aimed at the United States., U.K. and other western audiences.

“This operation is leveraging a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across multiple social media platforms to promote political narratives in line with Iranian interests,” FireEye researchers wrote. “These narratives include anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes, as well as support for specific U.S. policies favorable to Iran.”

The FBI says the domains registered by the email address tied to Sheriff’s RaidForums account were used in service of the Liberty Front Press, a network of phony news sites thought to originate from Iran.

According to the FBI affidavit, the address kelvinmiddelkoop@hotmail.com was used to register at least three different domains for phony news sites, including awdnews[.]com, sachtimes[.]com, and whatsupic[.]com. A reverse WHOIS search on that email address at DomainTools.com (an advertiser on this site) shows it was used to register 17 domains between 2012 and 2021, including moslimyouthmedia[.]com, moslempress[.]com, and realneinovosti[.]net.

A review of Sheriff’s postings to RaidForum reveals he has used two other nicknames since registering on the forum in December 2021: “Unindicted,” and “threat_actor.” In several posts, Sheriff taunts one FireEye employee by name.

In a Jan. 3, 2022 post, Sheriff says their “team” is seeking licenses for the Cobalt Strike penetration testing tool, and that they’re prepared to pay $3,000 – $4,000 per license. Cobalt Strike is a legitimate security product that is sold only to vetted partners, but compromised or ill-gotten Cobalt Strike licenses frequently are used in the run-up to ransomware attacks.

“We will buy constantly, make contact,” Sheriff advised. “Do not ask if we still need)) the team is interested in licenses indefinitely.”

On Jan. 4, 2022, Sheriff tells RaidForums that their team is in need of access to a specific data broker platform, and offers to pay as much as $35,000 for that access. Sheriff says they will only accept offers that are guaranteed through the forum’s escrow account.

The demand for escrow in a sales thread is almost universally a sign that someone means business and they are ready to transact on whatever was advertised or requested. That’s because escrow transactions necessarily force the buyer to make a deposit with the forum’s administrators before proceeding on any transaction.

Sheriff appears to have been part of a group on RaidForums that offered to buy access to organizations that could be extorted with ransomware or threatened with the publication of stolen data (PDF screenshot from threat intelligence firm KELA). In a “scam report” filed against Sheriff by another RaidForums member on Dec. 31, 2021, the claimant says Sheriff bought access from them and agreed to pay 70 percent of any ransom paid by the victim organization.

Instead, the claimant maintains, Sheriff only paid them roughly 25 percent. “The company pay $1.35 million ransom and only payment was made of $350k to me, so i ask for $600k to fix this dispute,” the affiliate wrote.

In another post on RaidForums, a user aptly named “FBI Agent” advised other denizens to steer clear of Sheriff’s ransomware affiliate program, noting that transacting with this person could run afoul of sanctions from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that restrict commerce with people residing in Iran.

“To make it clear, we don’t work with individuals under the OFAC sanctions list, which @Sheriff is under,” the ransomware affiliate program administrator wrote in reply.

RaidForums says Sheriff was referred to the forum by Pompompurin, the same hacker who used a security hole in the FBI’s website last year to blast a phony alert about a cybercrime investigation to state and local authorities. Pompompurin has been quite active on RaidForums for the past few years, frequently posting databases from newly-hacked organizations, and selling access to stolen information.

Reach via Twitter, Pompompurin said they had no idea who might have offered money and information on Sheriff, and that they would never “snitch” on Sheriff.

“I know who he is but I’m not saying anything,” Pompompurin replied.

The information about Sheriff was brought to my attention by an anonymous person who initially contacted KrebsOnSecurity saying they wanted to make a donation to the publication. When the person offering the gift asked if it was okay that the money came from a ransomware transaction, I naturally declined the offer.

That person then proceeded to share the information about the connection between Sheriff’s email address and the FBI search warrant, as well as the account’s credentials.

The same identity approached several other security researchers and journalists, one of whom was able to validate that the kelvinmiddelkoop@hotmail.com address actually belonged to Sheriff’s account. Those researchers were likewise offered tainted donations, except the individual offering the donation seemed to use a different story with each person about who they were or why they were offering money. Others contacted by the same anonymous user said they also received unsolicited details about Sheriff.

It seems clear that whoever offered that money and information has their own agenda, which may also involve attempts to make members of the news media appear untrustworthy for agreeing to accept stolen funds. However, the information they shared checks out, and since there is precious little public reporting on the source of the ICRC intrusion, the potential connection to hacker groups based in Iran seems worth noting.

Amazon, cisco, Department of Homeland Security, disrupting ransomware payments, Emsisoft, Europol, FBI, FireEye, Institute for Security and Technology, mcafee, Microsoft, Philip Reiner, Ransomware, The Coming Storm, The Wall Street Journal, U.K. National Crime Agency, U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Treasury Department

Task Force Seeks to Disrupt Ransomware Payments

Some of the world’s top tech firms are backing a new industry task force focused on disrupting cybercriminal ransomware gangs by limiting their ability to get paid, and targeting the individuals and finances of the organized thieves behind these crimes.

In a 50-page report delivered to the Biden administration this week, top executives from Amazon, Cisco, FireEye, McAfee, Microsoft and dozens of other firms joined the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Europol and the U.K. National Crime Agency in calling for an international coalition to combat ransomware criminals, and for a global network of ransomware investigation hubs.

The Ransomware Task Force urged the White House to make finding, frustrating and apprehending ransomware crooks a priority within the U.S. intelligence community, and to designate the current scourge of digital extortion as a national security threat.

The formation of the industry partnership comes just days after The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the DOJ was forming its own task force to deal with the “root causes” of ransomware. An internal DOJ memo reportedly “calls for developing a strategy that targets the entire criminal ecosystem around ransomware, including prosecutions, disruptions of ongoing attacks and curbs on services that support the attacks, such as online forums that advertise the sale of ransomware or hosting services that facilitate ransomware campaigns.”

According to security firm Emsisoft, almost 2,400 U.S.-based governments, healthcare facilities and schools were victims of ransomware in 2020.

“The costs of ransomware go far beyond the ransom payments themselves,” the task force report observes. “Cybercrime is typically seen as a white-collar crime, but while ransomware is profit-driven and ‘non-violent’ in the traditional sense, that has not stopped ransomware attackers from routinely imperiling lives.”

A proposed framework for a public-private operational ransomware campaign. Image: IST.

It is difficult to gauge the true cost and size of the ransomware problem because many victims never come forward to report the crimes. As such, a number of the task force’s recommendations focus on ways to encourage more victims to report the crimes to their national authorities, such as requiring victims and incident response firms who pay a ransomware demand to report the matter to law enforcement and possibly regulators at the U.S. Treasury Department.

Last year, Treasury issued a controversial memo warning that ransomware victims who end up sending digital payments to people already being sanctioned by the U.S. government for money laundering and other illegal activities could result in hefty fines.

Philip Reiner, executive director of the Institute for Security and Technology, said the reporting recommendations are one of several areas where federal agencies will likely need to dedicate more employees. For example, he said, expecting victims to clear ransomware payments with the Treasury Department first assumes the agency has the staff to respond in any kind of timeframe that might be useful for a victim undergoing a ransomware attack.

“That’s why we were so dead set in putting forward comprehensive framework,” Reiner said. “That way, Department of Homeland Security can do what they need to do, the State Department, Treasury gets involved, and it all needs to be synchronized for going after the bad guys with the same alacrity.”

Some have argued that making it illegal to pay a ransom is one way to decrease the number of victims who acquiesce to their tormentors’ demands. But the task force report says we’re nowhere near ready for that yet.

“Ransomware attackers require little risk or effort to launch attacks, so a prohibition on ransom payments would not necessarily lead them to move into other areas,” the report observes. “Rather, they would likely continue to mount attacks and test the resolve of both victim organizations and their regulatory authorities. To apply additional pressure, they would target organizations considered more essential to society, such as healthcare providers, local governments, and other custodians of critical infrastructure.”

“As such, any intent to prohibit payments must first consider how to build organizational cybersecurity maturity, and how to provide an appropriate backstop to enable organizations to weather the initial period of extreme testing,” the authors concluded in the report. “Ideally, such an approach would also be coordinated internationally to avoid giving ransomware attackers other avenues to pursue.”

The task force’s report comes as federal agencies have been under increased pressure to respond to a series of ransomware attacks that were mass-deployed as attackers began exploiting four zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server email products to install malicious backdoors. Earlier this month, the DOJ announced the FBI had conducted a first-of-its-kind operation to remove those backdoors from hundreds of Exchange servers at state and local government facilities.

Many of the recommendations in the Ransomware Task Force report are what you might expect, such as encouraging voluntary information sharing on ransomware attacks; launching public awareness campaigns on ransomware threats; exerting pressure on countries that operate as safe havens for ransomware operators; and incentivizing the adoption of security best practices through tax breaks.

A few of the more interesting recommendations (at least to me) included:

-Limit legal liability for ISPs that act in good faith trying to help clients secure their systems.

-Create a federal “cyber response and recovery fund” to help state and local governments or critical infrastructure companies respond to ransomware attacks.

-Require cryptocurrency exchanges to follow the same “know your customer” (KYC) and anti-money laundering rules as financial institutions, and aggressively targeting exchanges that do not.

-Have insurance companies measure and assert their aggregated ransomware losses and establish a common “war chest” subrogation fund “to evaluate and pursue strategies aimed at restitution, recovery, or civil asset seizures, on behalf of victims and in conjunction with law enforcement efforts.”

-Centralize expertise in cryptocurrency seizure, and scaling criminal seizure processes.

-Create a standard format for reporting ransomware incidents.

-Establish a ransomware incident response network.

Amazon, cisco, Department of Homeland Security, disrupting ransomware payments, Emsisoft, Europol, FBI, FireEye, Institute for Security and Technology, mcafee, Microsoft, Philip Reiner, Ransomware, The Coming Storm, The Wall Street Journal, U.K. National Crime Agency, U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Treasury Department

Task Force Seeks to Disrupt Ransomware Payments

Some of the world’s top tech firms are backing a new industry task force focused on disrupting cybercriminal ransomware gangs by limiting their ability to get paid, and targeting the individuals and finances of the organized thieves behind these crimes.

In a 50-page report delivered to the Biden administration this week, top executives from Amazon, Cisco, FireEye, McAfee, Microsoft and dozens of other firms joined the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Europol and the U.K. National Crime Agency in calling for an international coalition to combat ransomware criminals, and for a global network of ransomware investigation hubs.

The Ransomware Task Force urged the White House to make finding, frustrating and apprehending ransomware crooks a priority within the U.S. intelligence community, and to designate the current scourge of digital extortion as a national security threat.

The formation of the industry partnership comes just days after The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the DOJ was forming its own task force to deal with the “root causes” of ransomware. An internal DOJ memo reportedly “calls for developing a strategy that targets the entire criminal ecosystem around ransomware, including prosecutions, disruptions of ongoing attacks and curbs on services that support the attacks, such as online forums that advertise the sale of ransomware or hosting services that facilitate ransomware campaigns.”

According to security firm Emsisoft, almost 2,400 U.S.-based governments, healthcare facilities and schools were victims of ransomware in 2020.

“The costs of ransomware go far beyond the ransom payments themselves,” the task force report observes. “Cybercrime is typically seen as a white-collar crime, but while ransomware is profit-driven and ‘non-violent’ in the traditional sense, that has not stopped ransomware attackers from routinely imperiling lives.”

A proposed framework for a public-private operational ransomware campaign. Image: IST.

It is difficult to gauge the true cost and size of the ransomware problem because many victims never come forward to report the crimes. As such, a number of the task force’s recommendations focus on ways to encourage more victims to report the crimes to their national authorities, such as requiring victims and incident response firms who pay a ransomware demand to report the matter to law enforcement and possibly regulators at the U.S. Treasury Department.

Last year, Treasury issued a controversial memo warning that ransomware victims who end up sending digital payments to people already being sanctioned by the U.S. government for money laundering and other illegal activities could result in hefty fines.

Philip Reiner, executive director of the Institute for Security and Technology, said the reporting recommendations are one of several areas where federal agencies will likely need to dedicate more employees. For example, he said, expecting victims to clear ransomware payments with the Treasury Department first assumes the agency has the staff to respond in any kind of timeframe that might be useful for a victim undergoing a ransomware attack.

“That’s why we were so dead set in putting forward comprehensive framework,” Reiner said. “That way, Department of Homeland Security can do what they need to do, the State Department, Treasury gets involved, and it all needs to be synchronized for going after the bad guys with the same alacrity.”

Some have argued that making it illegal to pay a ransom is one way to decrease the number of victims who acquiesce to their tormentors’ demands. But the task force report says we’re nowhere near ready for that yet.

“Ransomware attackers require little risk or effort to launch attacks, so a prohibition on ransom payments would not necessarily lead them to move into other areas,” the report observes. “Rather, they would likely continue to mount attacks and test the resolve of both victim organizations and their regulatory authorities. To apply additional pressure, they would target organizations considered more essential to society, such as healthcare providers, local governments, and other custodians of critical infrastructure.”

“As such, any intent to prohibit payments must first consider how to build organizational cybersecurity maturity, and how to provide an appropriate backstop to enable organizations to weather the initial period of extreme testing,” the authors concluded in the report. “Ideally, such an approach would also be coordinated internationally to avoid giving ransomware attackers other avenues to pursue.”

The task force’s report comes as federal agencies have been under increased pressure to respond to a series of ransomware attacks that were mass-deployed as attackers began exploiting four zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server email products to install malicious backdoors. Earlier this month, the DOJ announced the FBI had conducted a first-of-its-kind operation to remove those backdoors from hundreds of Exchange servers at state and local government facilities.

Many of the recommendations in the Ransomware Task Force report are what you might expect, such as encouraging voluntary information sharing on ransomware attacks; launching public awareness campaigns on ransomware threats; exerting pressure on countries that operate as safe havens for ransomware operators; and incentivizing the adoption of security best practices through tax breaks.

A few of the more interesting recommendations (at least to me) included:

-Limit legal liability for ISPs that act in good faith trying to help clients secure their systems.

-Create a federal “cyber response and recovery fund” to help state and local governments or critical infrastructure companies respond to ransomware attacks.

-Require cryptocurrency exchanges to follow the same “know your customer” (KYC) and anti-money laundering rules as financial institutions, and aggressively targeting exchanges that do not.

-Have insurance companies measure and assert their aggregated ransomware losses and establish a common “war chest” subrogation fund “to evaluate and pursue strategies aimed at restitution, recovery, or civil asset seizures, on behalf of victims and in conjunction with law enforcement efforts.”

-Centralize expertise in cryptocurrency seizure, and scaling criminal seizure processes.

-Create a standard format for reporting ransomware incidents.

-Establish a ransomware incident response network.

A Little Sunshine, CVE-2020-4006, Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Administration, Democratic National Committee, FBI, FireEye, GoldMax, Lexicon.exe, Microsoft, national security agency, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, NTIA, SolarWinds hack, Sunshuttle, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. Treasury Department, VirusTotal, VMware

Did Someone at the Commerce Dept. Find a SolarWinds Backdoor in Aug. 2020?

On Aug. 13, 2020, someone uploaded a suspected malicious file to VirusTotal, a service that scans submitted files against more than five dozen antivirus and security products. Last month, Microsoft and FireEye identified that file as a newly-discovered fourth malware backdoor used in the sprawling SolarWinds supply chain hack. An analysis of the malicious file and other submissions by the same VirusTotal user suggest the account that initially flagged the backdoor as suspicious belongs to IT personnel at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the U.S. Commerce Department that handles telecommunications and Internet policy.

Both Microsoft and FireEye published blog posts on Mar. 4 concerning a new backdoor found on high-value targets that were compromised by the SolarWinds attackers. FireEye refers to the backdoor as “Sunshuttle,” whereas Microsoft calls it “GoldMax.” FireEye says the Sunshuttle backdoor was named “Lexicon.exe,” and had the unique file signatures or “hashes” of “9466c865f7498a35e4e1a8f48ef1dffd” (MD5) and b9a2c986b6ad1eb4cfb0303baede906936fe96396f3cf490b0984a4798d741d8 (SHA-1).

“In August 2020, a U.S.-based entity uploaded a new backdoor that we have named SUNSHUTTLE to a public malware repository,” FireEye wrote.

The “Sunshuttle” or “GoldMax” backdoor, as identified by FireEye and Microsoft, respectively. Image: VirusTotal.com.

A search in VirusTotal’s malware repository shows that on Aug. 13, 2020 someone uploaded a file with that same name and file hashes. Premium VirusTotal users can see other files submitted by specific users, and several of those submitted by the same user over nearly two years include messages and files sent to email addresses for people currently working in NTIA’s information technology department.

An apparently internal email that got uploaded to VirusTotal in Feb. 2020 by the same account that uploaded the Sunshuttle backdoor malware to VirusTotal in August 2020.

The NTIA did not respond to requests for comment. But in December 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that the NTIA was among multiple federal agencies that had email and files plundered by the SolarWinds attackers. “The hackers broke into about three dozen email accounts since June at the NTIA, including accounts belonging to the agency’s senior leadership, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter,” The Journal wrote.

It’s unclear what, if anything, NTIA’s IT staff did in response to scanning the backdoor file back in Aug. 2020. But the world would not find out about the SolarWinds debacle until early December 2020, when FireEye first disclosed the extent of its own compromise from the SolarWinds malware and published details about the tools and techniques used by the perpetrators.

The SolarWinds attack involved malicious code being surreptitiously inserted into updates shipped by SolarWinds for some 18,000 users of its Orion network management software. Beginning in March 2020, the attackers then used the access afforded by the compromised SolarWinds software to push additional backdoors and tools to targets when they wanted deeper access to email and network communications.

U.S. intelligence agencies have attributed the SolarWinds hack to an arm of the Russian state intelligence known as the SVR, which also was determined to have been involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee six years ago. On Thursday, the White House issued long-expected sanctions against Russia in response to the SolarWinds attack and other malicious cyber activity, leveling economic sanctions against 32 entities and individuals for disinformation efforts and for carrying out the Russian government’s interference in the 2020 presidential election.

The U.S. Treasury Department (which also was hit with second-stage malware that let the SolarWinds attackers read Treasury email communications) has posted a full list of those targeted, including six Russian companies for providing support to the cyber activities of the Russian intelligence service.

Also on Thursday, the FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) issued a joint advisory on several vulnerabilities in widely-used software products that the same Russian intelligence units have been attacking to further their exploits in the SolarWinds hack. Among those is CVE-2020-4006, a security hole in VMWare Workspace One Access that VMware patched in December 2020 after hearing about it from the NSA.

On December 18, VMWare saw its stock price dip 5.5 percent after KrebsOnSecurity published a report linking the flaw to NSA reports about the Russian cyberspies behind the SolarWinds attack. At the time, VMWare was saying it had received “no notification or indication that CVE-2020-4006 was used in conjunction with the SolarWinds supply chain compromise.” As a result, a number of readers responded that making this connection was tenuous, circumstantial and speculative.

But the joint advisory makes clear the VMWare flaw was in fact used by SolarWinds attackers to further their exploits.

“Recent Russian SVR activities include compromising SolarWinds Orion software updates, targeting COVID-19 research facilities through deploying WellMess malware, and leveraging a VMware vulnerability that was a zero-day at the time for follow-on Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) authentication abuse,” the NSA’s advisory (PDF) reads. “SVR cyber actors also used authentication abuse tactics following SolarWinds-based breaches.”

Officials within the Biden administration have told media outlets that a portion of the United States’ response to the SolarWinds hack would not be discussed publicly. But some security experts are concerned that Russian intelligence officials may still have access to networks that ran the backdoored SolarWinds software, and that the Russians could use that access to affect a destructive or disruptive network response of their own, The New York Times reports.

“Inside American intelligence agencies, there have been warnings that the SolarWinds attack — which enabled the SVR to place ‘back doors’ in the computer networks — could give Russia a pathway for malicious activity against government agencies and corporations,” The Times observed.

CrowdStrike, FireEye, Orion, Other, SolarWinds breach, Sudhakar Ramakrishna, Sunburst malware, Sunspot malware, Teardrop malware

SolarWinds: What Hit Us Could Hit Others

New research into the malware that set the stage for the megabreach at IT vendor SolarWinds shows the perpetrators spent months inside the company’s software development labs honing their attack before inserting malicious code into updates that SolarWinds then shipped to thousands of customers. More worrisome, the research suggests the insidious methods used by the intruders to subvert the company’s software development pipeline could be repurposed against many other major software providers.

In a blog post published Jan. 11, SolarWinds said the attackers first compromised its development environment on Sept. 4, 2019. Soon after, the attackers began testing code designed to surreptitiously inject backdoors into Orion, a suite of tools used by many Fortune 500 firms and a broad swath of the federal government to manage their internal networks.

Image: SolarWinds.

According to SolarWinds and a technical analysis from CrowdStrike, the intruders were trying to work out whether their “Sunspot” malware — designed specifically for use in undermining SolarWinds’ software development process — could successfully insert their malicious “Sunburst” backdoor into Orion products without tripping any alarms or alerting Orion developers.

In October 2019, SolarWinds pushed an update to their Orion customers that contained the modified test code. By February 2020, the intruders had used Sunspot to inject the Sunburst backdoor into the Orion source code, which was then digitally signed by the company and propagated to customers via SolarWinds’ software update process.

Crowdstrike said Sunspot was written to be able to detect when it was installed on a SolarWinds developer system, and to lie in wait until specific Orion source code files were accessed by developers. This allowed the intruders to “replace source code files during the build process, before compilation,” Crowdstrike wrote.

The attackers also included safeguards to prevent the backdoor code lines from appearing in Orion software build logs, and checks to ensure that such tampering wouldn’t cause build errors.

“The design of SUNSPOT suggests [the malware] developers invested a lot of effort to ensure the code was properly inserted and remained undetected, and prioritized operational security to avoid revealing their presence in the build environment to SolarWinds developers,” CrowdStrike wrote.

A third malware strain — dubbed “Teardrop” by FireEye, the company that first disclosed the SolarWinds attack in December — was installed via the backdoored Orion updates on networks that the SolarWinds attackers wanted to plunder more deeply.

So far, the Teardrop malware has been found on several government networks, including the Commerce, Energy and Treasury departments, the Department of Justice and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

SolarWinds emphasized that while the Sunspot code was specifically designed to compromise the integrity of its software development process, that same process is likely common across the software industry.

“Our concern is that right now similar processes may exist in software development environments at other companies throughout the world,” said SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna. “The severity and complexity of this attack has taught us that more effectively combatting similar attacks in the future will require an industry-wide approach as well as public-private partnerships that leverage the skills, insight, knowledge, and resources of all constituents.”

Data Breaches, FireEye, GoDaddy, Microsoft, Orion, RedDrip Team, SolarWinds breach, SUNBURST

Malicious Domain in SolarWinds Hack Turned into ‘Killswitch’

A key malicious domain name used to control potentially thousands of computer systems compromised via the months-long breach at network monitoring software vendor SolarWinds was commandeered by security experts and used as a “killswitch” designed to turn the sprawling cybercrime operation against itself, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds disclosed this week that a compromise of its software update servers earlier this year may have resulted in malicious code being pushed to nearly 18,000 customers of its Orion platform. Many U.S. federal agencies and Fortune 500 firms use(d) Orion to monitor the health of their IT networks.

On Dec. 13, cyber incident response firm FireEye published a detailed writeup on the malware infrastructure used in the SolarWinds compromise, presenting evidence that the Orion software was first compromised back in March 2020. FireEye said hacked networks were seen communicating with a malicious domain name — avsvmcloud[.]com — one of several domains the attackers had set up to control affected systems.

As first reported here on Tuesday, there were signs over the past few days that control over the domain had been transferred to Microsoft. Asked about the changeover, Microsoft referred questions to FireEye and to GoDaddy, the current domain name registrar for the malicious site.

Today, FireEye responded that the domain seizure was part of a collaborative effort to prevent networks that may have been affected by the compromised SolarWinds software update from communicating with the attackers. What’s more, the company said the domain was reconfigured to act as a “killswitch” that would prevent the malware from continuing to operate in some circumstances.

“SUNBURST is the malware that was distributed through SolarWinds software,” FireEye said in a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity. “As part of FireEye’s analysis of SUNBURST, we identified a killswitch that would prevent SUNBURST from continuing to operate.”

The statement continues:

“Depending on the IP address returned when the malware resolves avsvmcloud[.]com, under certain conditions, the malware would terminate itself and prevent further execution. FireEye collaborated with GoDaddy and Microsoft to deactivate SUNBURST infections.”

“This killswitch will affect new and previous SUNBURST infections by disabling SUNBURST deployments that are still beaconing to avsvmcloud[.]com. However, in the intrusions FireEye has seen, this actor moved quickly to establish additional persistent mechanisms to access to victim networks beyond the SUNBURST backdoor.

This killswitch will not remove the actor from victim networks where they have established other backdoors. However, it will make it more difficult to for the actor to leverage the previously distributed versions of SUNBURST.”

It is likely that given their visibility into and control over the malicious domain, Microsoft, FireEye, GoDaddy and others now have a decent idea which companies may still be struggling with SUNBURST infections.

The killswitch revelations came as security researchers said they’d made progress in decoding SUNBURST’s obfuscated communications methods. Chinese cybersecurity firm RedDrip Team published their findings on Github, saying its decoder tool had identified nearly a hundred suspected victims of the SolarWinds/Orion breach, including universities, governments and high tech companies.

Meanwhile, the potential legal fallout for SolarWinds in the wake of this breach continues to worsen. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that top investors in SolarWinds sold millions of dollars in stock in the days before the intrusion was revealed. SolarWinds’s stock price has fallen more than 20 percent in the past few days. The Post cited former enforcement officials at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) saying the sales were likely to prompt an insider trading investigation.

Alan Paller, Andrew Morris, Center for Strategic and International Studies, CISA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Data Breaches, FireEye, GreyNoise Intelligence, James Lewis, Microsoft, Orion software, SANS Institute, SolarWinds breach, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Vinoth Kumar

SolarWinds Hack Could Affect 18K Customers

The still-unfolding breach at network management software firm SolarWinds may have resulted in malicious code being pushed to nearly 18,000 customers, the company said in a legal filing on Monday. Meanwhile, Microsoft should soon have some idea which and how many SolarWinds customers were affected, as it recently took possession of a key domain name used by the intruders to control infected systems.

On Dec. 13, SolarWinds acknowledged that hackers had inserted malware into a service that provided software updates for its Orion platform, a suite of products broadly used across the U.S. federal government and Fortune 500 firms to monitor the health of their IT networks.

In a Dec. 14 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SolarWinds said roughly 33,000 of its more than 300,000 customers were Orion customers, and that fewer than 18,000 customers may have had an installation of the Orion product that contained the malicious code. SolarWinds said the intrusion also compromised its Microsoft Office 365 accounts.

The initial breach disclosure from SolarWinds came five days after cybersecurity incident response firm FireEye announced it had suffered an intrusion that resulted in the theft of some 300 proprietary software tools the company provides to clients to help secure their IT operations.

On Dec. 13, FireEye published a detailed writeup on the malware infrastructure used in the SolarWinds compromise, presenting evidence that the Orion software was first compromised back in March 2020. FireEye didn’t explicitly say its own intrusion was the result of the SolarWinds hack, but the company confirmed as much to KrebsOnSecurity earlier today.

Also on Dec. 13, news broke that the SolarWinds hack resulted in attackers reading the email communications at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments.

On Dec. 14, Reuters reported the SolarWinds intrusion also had been used to infiltrate computer networks at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). That disclosure came less than 24 hours after DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) took the unusual step of issuing an emergency directive ordering all federal agencies to immediately disconnect the affected Orion products from their networks.

ANALYSIS

Security experts have been speculating as to the extent of the damage from the SolarWinds hack, combing through details in the FireEye analysis and elsewhere for clues about how many other organizations may have been hit.

And it seems that Microsoft may now be in perhaps the best position to take stock of the carnage. That’s because sometime on Dec. 14, the software giant took control over a key domain name — avsvmcloud[.]com — that was used by the SolarWinds hackers to communicate with systems compromised by the backdoored Orion product updates.

Armed with that access, Microsoft should be able to tell which organizations have IT systems that are still trying to ping the malicious domain. However, because many Internet service providers and affected companies are already blocking systems from accessing that malicious control domain or have disconnected the vulnerable Orion services, Microsoft’s visibility may be somewhat limited.

Microsoft has a long history of working with federal investigators and the U.S. courts to seize control over domains involved in global malware menaces, particularly when those sites are being used primarily to attack Microsoft Windows customers.

Microsoft dodged direct questions about its visibility into the malware control domain, suggesting those queries would be better put to FireEye or GoDaddy (the current domain registrar for the malware control server). But in a response on Twitter, Microsoft spokesperson Jeff Jones seemed to confirm that control of the malicious domain had changed hands.

Neither FireEye nor Godaddy has responded to questions about the malicious domain. FireEye declined to answer questions about exactly when it learned of its own intrusion via the Orion compromise, or approximately when attackers first started offloading sensitive tools from FireEye’s network. But the question is an interesting one because its answer may speak to the motivations and priorities of the hackers.

Based on the timeline known so far, the perpetrators of this elaborate hack would have had a fairly good idea back in March which of SolarWinds’ 18,000 Orion customers were worth targeting, and perhaps even in what order.

Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, a security education and training company based in Maryland, said the attackers likely chose to prioritize their targets based on some calculation of risk versus reward.

Paller said the bad guys probably sought to balance the perceived strategic value of compromising each target with the relative likelihood that exploiting them might result in the entire operation being found out and dismantled.

“The way this probably played out is the guy running the cybercrime team asked his people to build a spreadsheet where they ranked targets by the value of what they could get from each victim,” Paller said. “And then next to that they likely put a score for how good the malware hunters are at the targets, and said let’s first go after the highest priority ones that have a hunter score of less than a certain amount.”

The breach at SolarWinds could well turn into an existential event for the company, depending on how customers react and how SolarWinds is able to weather the lawsuits that will almost certainly ensue.

“The lawsuits are coming, and I hope they have a good general counsel,” said James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Now that the government is telling people to turn off [the SolarWinds] software, the question is will anyone turn it back on?”

According to its SEC filing, total revenue from the Orion products across all customers — including those who may have had an installation of the Orion products that contained the malicious update — was approximately $343 million, or roughly 45 percent of the firm’s total revenue. SolarWinds’ stock price has fallen 25 percent since news of the breach first broke.

Some of the legal and regulatory fallout may hinge on what SolarWinds knew or should have known about the incident, when, and how it responded. For example, Vinoth Kumar, a cybersecurity “bug hunter” who has earned cash bounties and recognition from multiple companies for reporting security flaws in their products and services, posted on Twitter that he notified SolarWinds in November 2019 that the company’s software download website was protected by a simple password that was published in the clear on SolarWinds’ code repository at Github.

Andrew Morris, founder of the security firm GreyNoise Intelligence, on said that as of Tuesday evening SolarWinds still hadn’t removed the compromised Orion software updates from its distribution server.

Another open question is how or whether the incoming U.S. Congress and presidential administration will react to this apparently broad cybersecurity event. CSIS’s Lewis says he doubts lawmakers will be able to agree on any legislative response, but he said it’s likely the Biden administration will do something.

“It will be a good new focus for DHS, and the administration can issue an executive order that says federal agencies with regulatory authority need to manage these things better,” Lewis said. “But whoever did this couldn’t have picked a better time to cause a problem, because their timing almost guarantees a fumbled U.S. response.”

A Little Sunshine, APNIC, Bill Woodcock, Cisco Talos, Comodo, CrowdStrike, Data Breaches, DHS, DNSpionage, DNSSEC, EPP, extensible provisioning protocol, Farsight Security, FireEye, Frobbit, ICANN, John Crain, Key Systems, Lars Michael Jogbäck, LetsEncrypt, Netnod, Packet Clearing House, Patrik Fältström, PCH, SecurityTrails, The Coming Storm, U.S. Department of Homeland Security

A Deep Dive on the Recent Widespread DNS Hijacking Attacks

The U.S. government — along with a number of leading security companies — recently warned about a series of highly complex and widespread attacks that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to siphon huge volumes of email passwords and other sensitive data from multiple governments and private companies. But to date, the specifics of exactly how that attack went down and who was hit have remained shrouded in secrecy.

This post seeks to document the extent of those attacks, and traces the origins of this overwhelmingly successful cyber espionage campaign back to a cascading series of breaches at key Internet infrastructure providers.

Before we delve into the extensive research that culminated in this post, it’s helpful to review the facts disclosed publicly so far. On Nov. 27, 2018, Cisco’s Talos research division published a write-up outlining the contours of a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign it dubbed “DNSpionage.”

The DNS part of that moniker refers to the global “Domain Name System,” which serves as a kind of phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly Web site names (example.com) into numeric Internet address that are easier for computers to manage.

Talos said the perpetrators of DNSpionage were able to steal email and other login credentials from a number of government and private sector entities in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates by hijacking the DNS servers for these targets, so that all email and virtual private networking (VPN) traffic was redirected to an Internet address controlled by the attackers.

Talos reported that these DNS hijacks also paved the way for the attackers to obtain SSL encryption certificates for the targeted domains (e.g. webmail.finance.gov.lb), which allowed them to decrypt the intercepted email and VPN credentials and view them in plain text.

On January 9, 2019, security vendor FireEye released its report, “Global DNS Hijacking Campaign: DNS Record Manipulation at Scale,” which went into far greater technical detail about the “how” of the espionage campaign, but contained few additional details about its victims.

Twelve days after the FireEye report, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a rare emergency directive ordering all U.S. federal civilian agencies to secure the login credentials for their Internet domain records. As part of that mandate, DHS published a short list of domain names and Internet addresses that were used in the DNSpionage campaign, although those details did not go beyond what was previously released by either Cisco Talos or FireEye.

That changed on Jan. 25, 2019, when security firm CrowdStrike published a blog post listing virtually every Internet address known to be (ab)used by the espionage campaign to date. The remainder of this story is based on open-source research and interviews conducted by KrebsOnSecurity in an effort to shed more light on the true extent of this extraordinary — and ongoing — attack.

The “indicators of compromise” related to the DNSpionage campaign, as published by CrowdStrike.

PASSIVE DNS

I began my research by taking each of the Internet addresses laid out in the CrowdStrike report and running them through both Farsight Security and SecurityTrails, services that passively collect data about changes to DNS records tied to tens of millions of Web site domains around the world.

Working backwards from each Internet address, I was able to see that in the last few months of 2018 the hackers behind DNSpionage succeeded in compromising key components of DNS infrastructure for more than 50 Middle Eastern companies and government agencies, including targets in Albania, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

For example, the passive DNS data shows the attackers were able to hijack the DNS records for mail.gov.ae, which handles email for government offices of the United Arab Emirates. Here are just a few other interesting assets successfully compromised in this cyber espionage campaign:

-nsa.gov.iq: the National Security Advisory of Iraq
-webmail.mofa.gov.ae: email for the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs
-shish.gov.al: the State Intelligence Service of Albania
-mail.mfa.gov.eg: mail server for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
-mod.gov.eg: Egyptian Ministry of Defense
-embassy.ly: Embassy of Libya
-owa.e-albania.al: the Outlook Web Access portal for the e-government portal of Albania
-mail.dgca.gov.kw: email server for Kuwait’s Civil Aviation Bureau
-gid.gov.jo: Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate
-adpvpn.adpolice.gov.ae: VPN service for the Abu Dhabi Police
-mail.asp.gov.al: email for Albanian State Police
-owa.gov.cy: Microsoft Outlook Web Access for Government of Cyprus
-webmail.finance.gov.lb: email for Lebanon Ministry of Finance
-mail.petroleum.gov.eg: Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum
-mail.cyta.com.cy: Cyta telecommunications and Internet provider, Cyprus
-mail.mea.com.lb: email access for Middle East Airlines

The passive DNS data provided by Farsight and SecurityTrails also offered clues about when each of these domains was hijacked. In most cases, the attackers appear to have changed the DNS records for these domains (we’ll get to the “how” in a moment) so that the domains pointed to servers in Europe that they controlled.

Shortly after the DNS records for these TLDs were hijacked — sometimes weeks, sometimes just days or hours — the attackers were able to obtain SSL certificates for those domains from SSL providers Comodo and/or Let’s Encrypt. The preparation for several of these attacks can be seen at cert.sh, which provides a searchable database of all new SSL certificate creations.

Let’s take a closer look at one example. The CrowdStrike report references the Internet address 139.59.134[.]216 (see above), which according to Farsight was home to just seven different domains over the years. Two of those domains only appeared at that Internet address in December 2018, including domains in Lebanon and — curiously — Sweden.

The first domain was “ns0.idm.net.lb,” which is a server for the Lebanese Internet service provider IDM. From early 2014 until December 2018, ns0.idm.net.lb pointed to 194.126.10[.]18, which appropriately enough is an Internet address based in Lebanon. But as we can see in the screenshot from Farsight’s data below, on Dec. 18, 2018, the DNS records for this ISP were changed to point Internet traffic destined for IDM to a hosting provider in Germany (the 139.59.134[.]216 address).

Source: Farsight Security

Notice what else is listed along with IDM’s domain at 139.59.134[.]216, according to Farsight:

The DNS records for the domains sa1.dnsnode.net and fork.sth.dnsnode.net also were changed from their rightful home in Sweden to the German hosting provider controlled by the attackers in December. These domains are owned by Netnod Internet Exchange, a major global DNS provider based in Sweden. Netnod also operates one of the 13 “root” name servers, a critical resource that forms the very foundation of the global DNS system.

We’ll come back to Netnod in a moment. But first let’s look at another Internet address referenced in the CrowdStrike report as part of the infrastructure abused by the DNSpionage hackers: 82.196.11[.]127. This address in The Netherlands also is home to the domain mmfasi[.]com, which Crowdstrike says was one of the attacker’s domains that was used as a DNS server for some of the hijacked infrastructure.

As we can see in the screenshot above, 82.196.11[.]127 was temporarily home to another pair of Netnod DNS servers, as well as the server “ns.anycast.woodynet.net.” That domain is derived from the nickname of Bill Woodcock, who serves as executive director of Packet Clearing House (PCH).

PCH is a nonprofit entity based in northern California that also manages significant amounts of the world’s DNS infrastructure, particularly the DNS for more than 500 top-level domains and a number of the Middle East top-level domains targeted by DNSpionage.

TARGETING THE REGISTRARS

Contacted on Feb. 14 by KrebsOnSecurity, Netnod CEO Lars Michael Jogbäck confirmed that parts of Netnod’s DNS infrastructure were hijacked in late December 2018 and early January 2019 after the attackers gained access to accounts at Netnod’s domain name registrar.

Jogbäck pointed to a statement the company published on its Web site on Feb. 5, which says Netnod learned of its role in the attack on January 2 and has been in contact with all relevant parties and customers throughout this process.

“As a participant in an international security co-operation, Netnod became aware on 2 January 2019 that we had been caught up in this wave and that we had experienced a MITM (man-in-the-middle) attack,” the statement reads. “Netnod was not the ultimate goal of the attack. The goal is considered to have been the capture of login details for Internet services in countries outside of Sweden.”

In an interview with this author on Feb. 15, PCH’s Woodcock acknowledged that portions of his organization’s DNS infrastructure were compromised after the DNSpionage hackers abused unauthorized access to its domain name registrar.

As it happens, the registrar records for both pch.net and dnsnode.net point to the same sources: Key-Systems GmbH, a domain registrar based in Germany; and Frobbit.se, a company in Sweden. Frobbit is a reseller of Key Systems, and the two companies share some of the same online resources.

Woodcock said domain records for the targeted Middle East TLDs it managed were altered after the DNSpionage hackers phished credentials that Key-Systems uses to make domain changes for their clients.

Specifically, he said, the hackers phished credentials that PCH’s registrar used to send signaling messages known as the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP). EPP is a little-known interface that serves as a kind of back-end for the global DNS system, allowing domain registrars to notify the regional registries (like Verisign) about changes to domain records, including new domain registrations, modifications, and transfers.

“At the beginning of January, Key-Systems said they believed that their EPP interface had been abused by someone who had stolen valid credentials,” Woodcock said.

Key-Systems declined to comment for this story, beyond saying it does not discuss details of its reseller clients’ businesses.

Netnod’s written statement on the attack referred further inquiries to the company’s security director Patrik Fältström, who also is co-owner of Frobbit.se.

In an email to KrebsOnSecurity, Fältström said unauthorized EPP instructions were sent to various registries by the DNSpionage attackers from both Frobbit and Key Systems.

“The attack was from my perspective clearly an early version of a serious EPP attack,” he wrote. “That is, the goal was to get the right EPP commands sent to the registries. I am extremely nervous personally over extrapolations towards the future. Should registries allow any EPP command to come from the registrars? We will always have some weak registrars, right?”

DNSSEC

One of the more interesting aspects of these attacks is that both Netnod and PCH are vocal proponents and adopters of DNSSEC (a.k.a. “DNS Security Extensions”), which is a technology designed to defeat the very type of attack that the DNSpionage hackers were able to execute.

Image: APNIC

DNSSEC protects applications from using forged or manipulated DNS data, by requiring that all DNS queries for a given domain or set of domains be digitally signed. In DNSSEC, if a name server determines that the address record for a given domain has not been modified in transit, it resolves the domain and lets the user visit the site. If, however, that record has been modified in some way or doesn’t match the domain requested, the name server blocks the user from reaching the fraudulent address.

While DNSSEC can be an effective tool for mitigating attacks such as those launched by DNSpionage, only about 20 percent of the world’s major networks and Web sites have enabled it, according to measurements gathered by APNIC, the regional Internet address registry for the Asia-Pacific region.

Jogbäck said Netnod’s infrastructure suffered three separate attacks from the DNSpionage attackers. The first two occurred in a two-week window between Dec. 14, 2018 and Jan. 2, 2019, and targeted company servers that were not protected by DNSSEC.

However, he said the third attack between Dec. 29 and Jan. 2 targeted Netnod infrastructure that was protected by DNSSEC and serving its own internal email network. Yet, because the attackers already had access to its registrar’s systems, they were able to briefly disable that safeguard — or at least long enough to obtain SSL certificates for two of Netnod’s email servers.

Jogbäck told KrebsOnSecurity that once the attackers had those certificates, they re-enabled DNSSEC for the company’s targeted servers while apparently preparing to launch the second stage of the attack — diverting traffic flowing through its mail servers to machines the attackers controlled. But Jogbäck said that for whatever reason, the attackers neglected to use their unauthorized access to its registrar to disable DNSSEC before later attempting to siphon Internet traffic.

“Luckily for us, they forgot to remove that when they launched their man-in-the-middle attack,” he said. “If they had been more skilled they would have removed DNSSEC on the domain, which they could have done.”

Woodcock says PCH validates DNSSEC on all of its infrastructure, but that not all of the company’s customers — particularly some of the countries in the Middle East targeted by DNSpionage — had configured their systems to fully implement the technology.

Woodcock said PCH’s infrastructure was targeted by DNSpionage attackers in four distinct attacks between December 13, 2018 and January 2, 2019. With each attack, the hackers would turn on their password-slurping tools for roughly one hour, and then switch them off before returning the network to its original state after each run.

The attackers didn’t need to enable their surveillance dragnet longer than an hour each time because most modern smartphones are configured to continuously pull new email for any accounts the user may have set up on his device. Thus, the attackers were able to hoover up a great many email credentials with each brief hijack.

On Jan. 2, 2019 — the same day the DNSpionage hackers went after Netnod’s internal email system — they also targeted PCH directly, obtaining SSL certificates from Comodo for two PCH domains that handle internal email for the company.

Woodcock said PCH’s reliance on DNSSEC almost completely blocked that attack, but that it managed to snare email credentials for two employees who were traveling at the time. Those employees’ mobile devices were downloading company email via hotel wireless networks that — as a prerequisite for using the wireless service — forced their devices to use the hotel’s DNS servers, not PCH’s DNNSEC-enabled systems.

“The two people who did get popped, both were traveling and were on their iPhones, and they had to traverse through captive portals during the hijack period,” Woodcock said. “They had to switch off our name servers to use the captive portal, and during that time the mail clients on their phones checked for new email. Aside from that, DNSSEC saved us from being really, thoroughly owned.”

Because PCH had protected its domains with DNSSEC, the practical effect of the hijack against its mail infrastructure was that for roughly an hour nobody but the two remote employees received any email.

“For essentially all of our users, what it looked like was the mail server just wasn’t available for a short period,” Woodcock said. “It didn’t resolve for a while if they happened to be checking their phone or whatever, and each person thought well that’s funny, I’ll check it back in a while. And by the time they checked again it was working fine. A bunch of our staff noticed a brief outage in our email service, but nobody thought enough of it to discuss it with anyone else or open a ticket.”

But the DNSpionage hackers were not deterred. In a letter to its customers sent earlier this month, PCH said a forensic investigation determined that on Jan. 24 a computer which holds its Web site user database had been compromised. The user data stored in the database included customer usernames, bcrypt password hashes, emails, addresses, and organization names.

“We see no evidence that the attackers accessed the user database or exfiltrated it,” the message reads. “So we are providing you this information as a matter of transparency and precaution, rather than because we believe that your data was compromised.”

IMPROVEMENTS

Multiple experts interviewed for this story said one persistent problem with DNS-based attacks is that a great deal of organizations tend to take much of their DNS infrastructure for granted. For example, many entities don’t even log their DNS traffic, nor do they keep a close eye on any changes made to their domain records.

Even for those companies making an effort to monitor their DNS infrastructure for suspicious changes, some monitoring services only take snapshots of DNS records passively, or else only do so actively on a once-daily basis. Indeed, Woodcock said PCH relied on no fewer than three monitoring systems, and that none of them alerted his organization to the various one-hour hijacks that hit PCH’s DNS systems.

“We had three different commercial DNS monitoring services, none of which caught it,” he said. “None of them even warned us that it had happened after the fact.”

Woodcock said PCH has since set up a system to poll its own DNS infrastructure multiple times each hour, and to alert immediately on any changes.

Jogbäck said Netnod also has beefed up its monitoring, as well as redoubled efforts to ensure that all of the available options for securing their domain infrastructure were being used. For instance, the company had not previously secured all of its domains with a “domain lock,” a service that requires a registrar to take additional authentication steps before making any modifications to a domain’s records.

“We are really sad we didn’t do a better job of protecting our customers, but we are also a victim in the chain of the attack,” Jogbäck said. “You can change to a better lock after you’ve been robbed, and hopefully make it more difficult for someone to do it again. But I can truly say we have learned a tremendous amount from being a victim in this attack, and we are now much better off than before.”

Woodcock said he’s worried that Internet policymakers and other infrastructure providers aren’t taking threats to the global DNS seriously or urgently enough, and he’s confident the DNSpionage hackers will have plenty of other victims to target and exploit in the months and years ahead.

“All of this is a running battle,” he said. “The Iranians are not just trying to do these attacks to have an immediate effect. They’re trying to get into the Internet infrastructure deeply enough so they can get away with this stuff whenever they want to. They’re looking to get as many ways in as possible that they can use for specific goals in the future.”

RECOMMENDATIONS

John Crain is chief security, stability and resiliency officer at ICANN, the non-profit entity that oversees the global domain name industry. Crain said many of the best practices that can make it more difficult for attackers to hijack a target’s domains or DNS infrastructure have been known for more than a decade.

“A lot of this comes down to data hygiene,” Crain said. “Large organizations down to mom-and-pop entities are not paying attention to some very basic security practices, like multi-factor authentication. These days, if you have a sub-optimal security stance, you’re going to get owned. That’s the reality today. We’re seeing much more sophisticated adversaries now taking actions on the Internet, and if you’re not doing the basic stuff they’re going to hit you.”

Some of those best practices for organizations include:

-Use DNSSEC (both signing zones and validating responses)

-Use registration features like Registry Lock that can help protect domain names records from being changed

-Use access control lists for applications, Internet traffic and monitoring

-Use 2-factor authentication, and require it to be used by all relevant users and subcontractors

-In cases where passwords are used, pick unique passwords and consider password managers

-Review accounts with registrars and other providers

-Monitor certificates by monitoring, for example, Certificate Transparency Logs

critical infrastructure, FireEye, Hacking news, ICS Malware, industrial control system, Malware, Russian hackers, SCADA Malware, Scada system, Trisis, Triton Malware

FireEye: Russian Research Lab Aided the Development of TRITON Industrial Malware

Cybersecurity firm FireEye claims to have discovered evidence that proves the involvement of a Russian-owned research institute in the development of the TRITON malware that caused some industrial systems to unexpectedly shut down last year, including a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia.TRITON, also known as Trisis, is a piece of ICS malware designed to target the Triconex Safety