Entries Tagged "cybersecurity"

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Vaccine for Emotet Malware

Interesting story of a vaccine for the Emotet malware:

Through trial and error and thanks to subsequent Emotet updates that refined how the new persistence mechanism worked, Quinn was able to put together a tiny PowerShell script that exploited the registry key mechanism to crash Emotet itself.

The script, cleverly named EmoCrash, effectively scanned a user’s computer and generated a correct—but malformed—Emotet registry key.

When Quinn tried to purposely infect a clean computer with Emotet, the malformed registry key triggered a buffer overflow in Emotet’s code and crashed the malware, effectively preventing users from getting infected.

When Quinn ran EmoCrash on computers already infected with Emotet, the script would replace the good registry key with the malformed one, and when Emotet would re-check the registry key, the malware would crash as well, preventing infected hosts from communicating with the Emotet command-and-control server.

[…]

The Binary Defense team quickly realized that news about this discovery needed to be kept under complete secrecy, to prevent the Emotet gang from fixing its code, but they understood EmoCrash also needed to make its way into the hands of companies across the world.

Compared to many of today’s major cybersecurity firms, all of which have decades of history behind them, Binary Defense was founded in 2014, and despite being one of the industry’s up-and-comers, it doesn’t yet have the influence and connections to get this done without news of its discovery leaking, either by accident or because of a jealous rival.

To get this done, Binary Defense worked with Team CYMRU, a company that has a decades-long history of organizing and participating in botnet takedowns.

Working behind the scenes, Team CYMRU made sure that EmoCrash made its way into the hands of national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), which then spread it to the companies in their respective jurisdictions.

According to James Shank, Chief Architect for Team CYMRU, the company has contacts with more than 125 national and regional CERT teams, and also manages a mailing list through which it distributes sensitive information to more than 6,000 members. Furthermore, Team CYMRU also runs a biweekly group dedicated to dealing with Emotet’s latest shenanigans.

This broad and well-orchestrated effort has helped EmoCrash make its way around the globe over the course of the past six months.

[…]

Either by accident or by figuring out there was something wrong in its persistence mechanism, the Emotet gang did, eventually, changed its entire persistence mechanism on Aug. 6—exactly six months after Quinn made his initial discovery.

EmoCrash may not be useful to anyone anymore, but for six months, this tiny PowerShell script helped organizations stay ahead of malware operations—a truly rare sight in today’s cyber-security field.

Posted on August 18, 2020 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

UAE Hack and Leak Operations

Interesting paper on recent hack-and-leak operations attributed to the UAE:

Abstract: Four hack-and-leak operations in U.S. politics between 2016 and 2019, publicly attributed to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, should be seen as the “simulation of scandal” ­—deliberate attempts to direct moral judgement against their target. Although “hacking” tools enable easy access to secret information, they are a double-edged sword, as their discovery means the scandal becomes about the hack itself, not about the hacked information. There are wider consequences for cyber competition in situations of constraint where both sides are strategic partners, as in the case of the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf.

Posted on August 13, 2020 at 9:28 AM • View Comments

The NSA on the Risks of Exposing Location Data

The NSA has issued an advisory on the risks of location data.

Mitigations reduce, but do not eliminate, location tracking risks in mobile devices. Most users rely on features disabled by such mitigations, making such safeguards impractical. Users should be aware of these risks and take action based on their specific situation and risk tolerance. When location exposure could be detrimental to a mission, users should prioritize mission risk and apply location tracking mitigations to the greatest extent possible. While the guidance in this document may be useful to a wide range of users, it is intended primarily for NSS/DoD system users.

The document provides a list of mitigation strategies, including turning things off:

If it is critical that location is not revealed for a particular mission, consider the following recommendations:

  • Determine a non-sensitive location where devices with wireless capabilities can be secured prior to the start of any activities. Ensure that the mission site cannot be predicted from this location.
  • Leave all devices with any wireless capabilities (including personal devices) at this non-sensitive location. Turning off the device may not be sufficient if a device has been compromised.
  • For mission transportation, use vehicles without built-in wireless communication capabilities, or turn off the capabilities, if possible.

Of course, turning off your wireless devices is itself a signal that something is going on. It’s hard to be clandestine in our always connected world.

News articles.

Posted on August 6, 2020 at 12:15 PM • View Comments

Fake Stories in Real News Sites

Fireeye is reporting that a hacking group called Ghostwriter broke into the content management systems of Eastern European news sites to plant fake stories.

From a Wired story:

The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops in Poland and the Baltics; they’ve posted fake content on everything from social media to pro-Russian news websites. In some cases, FireEye says, Ghostwriter has deployed a bolder tactic: hacking the content management systems of news websites to post their own stories. They then disseminate their literal fake news with spoofed emails, social media, and even op-eds the propagandists write on other sites that accept user-generated content.

That hacking campaign, targeting media sites from Poland to Lithuania, has spread false stories about US military aggression, NATO soldiers spreading coronavirus, NATO planning a full-on invasion of Belarus, and more.

EDITED TO ADD (8/12): This review of three books on the topic is related.

Posted on July 30, 2020 at 2:56 PM • View Comments

Update on NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography Program

NIST has posted an update on their post-quantum cryptography program:

After spending more than three years examining new approaches to encryption and data protection that could defeat an assault from a quantum computer, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has winnowed the 69 submissions it initially received down to a final group of 15. NIST has now begun the third round of public review. This “selection round” will help the agency decide on the small subset of these algorithms that will form the core of the first post-quantum cryptography standard.

[…]

For this third round, the organizers have taken the novel step of dividing the remaining candidate algorithms into two groups they call tracks. The first track contains the seven algorithms that appear to have the most promise.

“We’re calling these seven the finalists,” Moody said. “For the most part, they’re general-purpose algorithms that we think could find wide application and be ready to go after the third round.”

The eight alternate algorithms in the second track are those that either might need more time to mature or are tailored to more specific applications. The review process will continue after the third round ends, and eventually some of these second-track candidates could become part of the standard. Because all of the candidates still in play are essentially survivors from the initial group of submissions from 2016, there will also be future consideration of more recently developed ideas, Moody said.

“The likely outcome is that at the end of this third round, we will standardize one or two algorithms for encryption and key establishment, and one or two others for digital signatures,” he said. “But by the time we are finished, the review process will have been going on for five or six years, and someone may have had a good idea in the interim. So we’ll find a way to look at newer approaches too.”

Details are here. This is all excellent work, and exemplifies NIST at its best. The quantum-resistant algorithms will be standardized far in advance of any practical quantum computer, which is how we all want this sort of thing to go.

Posted on July 24, 2020 at 6:36 AM • View Comments

NSA on Securing VPNs

The NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate—that’s the part that’s supposed to work on defense—has released two documents (a full and an abridged version) on securing virtual private networks. Some of it is basic, but it contains good information.

Maintaining a secure VPN tunnel can be complex and requires regular maintenance. To maintain a secure VPN, network administrators should perform the following tasks on a regular basis:

  • Reduce the VPN gateway attack surface
  • Verify that cryptographic algorithms are Committee on National Security Systems Policy (CNSSP) 15-compliant
  • Avoid using default VPN settings
  • Remove unused or non-compliant cryptography suites
  • Apply vendor-provided updates (i.e. patches) for VPN gateways and clients

Posted on July 15, 2020 at 9:29 AM • View Comments

IoT Security Principles

The BSA—also known as the Software Alliance, formerly the Business Software Alliance (which explains the acronym)—is an industry lobbying group. They just published “Policy Principles for Building a Secure and Trustworthy Internet of Things.”

They call for:

  • Distinguishing between consumer and industrial IoT.
  • Offering incentives for integrating security.
  • Harmonizing national and international policies.
  • Establishing regularly updated baseline security requirements

As with pretty much everything else, you can assume that if an industry lobbying group is in favor of it, then it doesn’t go far enough.

And if you need more security and privacy principles for the IoT, here’s a list of over twenty.

Posted on July 7, 2020 at 6:38 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.