Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 31 December 2021
Welcome to this week’s Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing – a weekly digest, collated and curated by our cyber experts to provide senior and middle management with an easy to digest round up of the most notable threats, vulnerabilities, and cyber related news from the last week.
Top Cyber Stories of the Last Week
The Log4j Flaw Will Take Years to be Fully Addressed
More than 80% of Java packages affected by the vulnerability in the Apache Log4j library cannot be updated directly, and will require coordination between different project teams to address the flaw.
Shortly after the first vulnerability in the Apache Log4j library (CVE-2021-44228) was disclosed, Google's Open Source Insights Team surveyed all the Java packages in the Maven Central Repository "to determine the scope of the issue in the open source ecosystem of JVM based languages, and to track the ongoing efforts to mitigate the affected packages," say team members James Wetter and Nicky Ringland. The team estimates it could take years before the vulnerability is fully addressed within the Java ecosystem.
A significant part of the problem has to do with indirect dependencies. Direct dependencies, or the cases where package explicitly pulls log4j into the code, are relatively straightforward to fix, as the developer or project owner just has to update log4j to the latest version.
https://www.darkreading.com/tech-trends/the-log4j-flaw-will-take-years-to-be-fully-addressed
Copycat And Fad Hackers Will Be The Bane Of Supply Chain Security In 2022
Replicable attacks and a low barrier to entry will ensure the rate of supply chain attacks increases next year, cyber security researchers have warned.
The supply chain is a consistent attack vector for threat actors today. By compromising a centralized service, platform, or software, attackers can then either conduct widespread infiltration of the customers and clients of the original -- singular -- victim or may choose to cherry-pick from the most valuable potential targets.
This can save cyber criminals time and money, as one successful attack can open the door to potentially thousands of victims at once.
A ransomware attack levied against Kaseya in 2021 highlighted the disruption a supply chain-based attack can cause. Ransomware was deployed by exploiting a vulnerability in Kaseya's VSA software, leading to the compromise of multiple managed service providers (MSP) in Kaseya's customer base.
This Nightmare Incident Shows Why You Really Shouldn't Store Passwords In Your Browser
An infostealer is scooping up passwords stored in browsers, experts warn
An unnamed company was recently breached after an employee stored their corporate account password in their web browser, a new report suggests.
According to research from security company AhnLab, the employee was working from home on a device shared with other household members, which was already infected with Redline Stealer, an infostealing malware.
Although the computer was equipped with antivirus software, the malware was able to evade detection, before stealing the passwords stored in the victim's browser.
Kaspersky Research: 47% of Incident Response Requests Linked to Ransomware
This year — 2021 — marked a “new era of ransomware,” said Vladimir Kuskov, head of threat exploration at Russian cyber security company Kaspersky. This is reflected in security incident requests handled by Kaspersky’s Global Emergency Response Team (GERT) between January and November 2021.
Kaspersky reported 46.7 percent of the security incidents that GERT handled in the first 11 months of 2021 were related to ransomware. Comparatively, Kaspersky attributed ransomware to 37.9 percent of security incidents that GERT handled for all of 2020 and 34 percent for 2019.
In addition, the government and industrial sectors have been the most common targets for ransomware attacks in 2021 to date, Kaspersky indicated. These industries accounted for nearly 50 percent of ransomware-related incident response requests that GERT has handled.
Global Cyber Attacks from Nation-State Actors Posing Greater Threats
Casey Ellis, CTO at Bugcrowd, outlines how international relations have deteriorated into a new sort of Cold War, with espionage playing out in the cyber-domain.
The macro-trend I’m most alarmed by today is the fact that attackers don’t seem to care about getting caught anymore. We have seen an increase in temerity of attacks by nation-states, such as the Russian attack on SolarWinds, and seen their attack tactics shift from targeted, stealthy operations into opportunistic hacks for potential future uses, such as the attacks attributed to Hafnium.
Such a brazen approach hasn’t been a common tactic of nation-states in the past, but now seems to be the status quo. In part, this trend may also be due to a destabilization of the international relations climate stemming from COVID-19, as well as work-from-home forcing core business services out onto the internet to facilitate employee access.
Broadly speaking, we should see China as a rising cyber security threat on the international stage. That has been the case for some time in terms of their economic, defense and military posture, but 2021 has quite clearly demonstrated that the relationship has deteriorated into a sort of Cold War, with espionage playing out in the cyber-domain.
https://threatpost.com/global-cyberattacks-nation-state-threats/177253/
Y2k22 Bug Is Causing Microsoft Exchange Server To Fail Worldwide: FIP-FS Scan Engine Failed To Load
Company admins are having their New Year’s celebrations interrupted by reports that their Exchange Servers are failing with the error “FIP-FS Scan Engine failed to load – Can’t Convert “2201010001” to long (2022/01/01 00:00 UTC)“.
The issue appears to be due to Microsoft using the first two numbers of the update version to denote the year of the update, which caused the “long” version of the date to overflow.
At present, it seems the main workaround is to disable the anti-malware scanner on the Exchange Server by using Set-MalwareFilteringServer -BypassFiltering $True -identity <server name> and restarting the Microsoft Exchange Transport service.
It appears Microsoft has not acknowledged the issue yet, but if you are affected some peer support is available at Reddit here.
Update: Microsoft has now acknowledged the issue and is working on a fix
https://mspoweruser.com/y2k22-bug-is-causing-microsoft-exchange-server-to-fail-worldwide/
External Attackers Can Penetrate Most Local Company Networks
In 93% of cases, external attackers can breach the organisation’s network perimeter and gain access to local network resources, and it takes an average of two days to penetrate the company’s internal network. In 100% of companies analysed, an insider can gain full control over the infrastructure.
These are the results of a new research report by Positive Technologies, analyzing results of the company’s penetration testing projects carried out in the second half of 2020 and first half of 2021.
The study was conducted among financial organizations (29%), fuel and energy organizations (18%), government (16%), industrial (16%), IT companies (13%), and other sectors.
During the assessment of protection against external attacks, Positive Technologies experts managed to breach the network perimeter in 93% of cases. According to the company’s researchers, this figure has remained high for many years, confirming that criminals are able to breach almost any corporate infrastructure.
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/12/28/external-attackers-local-company-networks/
The Have I Been Pwned Service Now Includes 441K Accounts Stolen By RedLine Malware
The Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service now allows victims of the RedLine malware to check if their credentials have been stolen. The service now includes credentials for 441K accounts stolen by the popular info-stealer.
The RedLine malware allows operators to steal several information, including credentials, credit card data, cookies, autocomplete information stored in browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, credentials stored in VPN clients and FTP clients. The malicious code can also act as a first-stage malware.
Stolen data are stored in an archive (logs) before being uploaded to a server under the control of the attackers.
A few days ago the data breach hunter Bob Diachenko discovered an unsecured server exposing over 6 million RedLine logs containing data harvested between August and September 2021. The server is still accessible, but the researchers pointed out that threat actors abandoned it because the the number of logs is not increasing.
https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/126186/malware/redline-malware-hibp.html
Threats
Ransomware
Organisations Targeted With Babuk-Based Rook Ransomware | SecurityWeek.Com
QNAP NAS Devices Hit With Surge Of Ransomware Attacks | TechRadar
Shutterfly Hit By A Conti Ransomware Attack - Security Affairs
Malware
Threat Actor Uses HP iLO Rootkit To Wipe Servers - The Record by Recorded Future
New Malware Uses SSD Over-Provisioning to Bypass Security Measures | Tom's Hardware
Threat Actors Are Abusing MSBuild To Implant Cobalt Strike Beacons - Security Affairs
Data Breaches/Leaks
LastPass Says No Passwords Were Compromised Following Breach Scare - The Verge
T-Mobile Welcomed Christmas With Its Second Data Breach In Less Than Six Months - Phonearena
Organised Crime & Criminal Actors
Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking
Insider Risk and Insider Threats
Scams, Fraud & Financial Crime
Nation State Actors
China-linked BlackTech APT Uses New Flagpro Malware In Recent Attacks - Security Affairs
APT ‘Aquatic Panda’ Targets Universities with Log4Shell Exploit Tools | Threatpost
Passwords
Other News
What the Rise in Cyber-Recon Means for Your Security Strategy | Threatpost
Most Companies Struggling To Achieve Observability Despite Investing In Tools - Help Net Security
A New Year Will Bring New Targets: What to Look for in 2022 | SecurityWeek.Com
University Loses 77TB Of Research Data Due To Backup Error (bleepingcomputer.com)
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