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Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 19 March 2021

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 19 March 2021: Tens Of Thousands Of Microsoft Exchange Customers Under Attack, Targeted By Multiple Hacker Groups; Over $4.2 Billion Officially Lost To Cyber Crime In 2020; Cyber Attacks Multiply On HNWIs; Largest Ransomware Demand Now Stands At $30 Million; 71 Percent Of Office 365 Users Suffer Malicious Account Takeovers; More Than 16 Million Covid-Themed Cyber Attacks Launched In 2020; Cyber Now Key To National Security;

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

Tens Of Thousands Of Microsoft Exchange Customers Are Under Assault From Hackers, Experts Warning Of Unprecedented Damage, Exploits Being Targeted By "At Least 10 Hacker Groups"

Four exploits in Microsoft Exchange Server hit the news last week, when we heard that a Chinese hacking group had targeted the email servers of some 30,000 U.S. government and commercial organisations. The exploits had been patched by Microsoft, but the hacking group known as “Hafnium” had doubled-up on efforts targeting unpatched servers. Security researchers found that at least 10 APT groups are taking advantage of the exploits in an attempt to compromise servers around the world. Winniti Group, Calypso, Tick, and more are among the groups identified.

https://www.techspot.com/news/88913-microsoft-exchange-server-exploits-targeted-least-10-hacker.html

Over $4.2 Billion Officially Lost To Cyber Crime In 2020

Cyber crime affecting victims in the U.S., noting a record number of complaints and financial losses in 2020 compared to the previous year. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received last year 791,790 complaints - up by 69% from 2019 - of suspected internet crime causing more than $4 billion in losses. While most complaints were for phishing, non-payment/non-delivery scams, and extortion, about half of the losses are accounted by business email compromise (BEC), romance and confidence scams, and investment fraud.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fbi-over-42-billion-officially-lost-to-cybercrime-in-2020/

Cyber Attacks Multiply On Wealthy Investors

An email nearly cost a wealthy British art collector £6m, after hackers monitored email correspondence between the client and an art dealer the client had been negotiating with for a year, with hackers impersonating the genuine art dealer, learning to impersonate the tone and language used — even gleaning private family news and the names of partners and children.

Just when the collector and the art dealer finally reached a conclusion on price, the client received an email to say something along the lines of, I hope the children are recovering from their colds — we have just amended our bank details for security and here they are. As it matched the tone of previous emails the art-loving client didn't think anything was amiss.

Fortunately, his family office phoned the real dealer to check the transaction before approving a transfer and the scam was discovered in time, but many people are not so lucky.

https://www.ft.com/content/cdfe8d97-6431-48e2-a8a7-7d760c6e9ed6

Cyber Strength Now Key To National Security, Says UK

In what has been billed as the largest security and foreign policy strategy revamp since the Cold War, the UK government has outlined new defence priorities – with at their heart, the imperative to boost the use of new technologies to safeguard the country. Prime minister Boris Johnson unveiled the integrated review this week, which has been in the making for over a year and will be used as a guide for spending decisions in the future. Focusing on foreign policy, defense and security, the review sets goals for the UK to 2025; and underpinning many of the targets is the objective of modernizing the country's armed forces.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cyber-strength-now-key-to-national-security-says-uk/

Largest Ransomware Demand Now Stands At $30 Million As Crooks Get Bolder

Ransomware shows no sign of slowing down as the average ransom paid to cyber criminals by organisations that fall victim to these attacks has nearly tripled over the past year. Cyber security researchers analysed ransomware attacks targeting organisations across North America and Europe and found that the average ransom paid in exchange for a decryption key to unlock encrypted networks rose from $115,123 in 2019 to $312,493 in 2020.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/largest-ransomware-demand-now-stands-at-30-million-as-crooks-get-bolder/

Mimecast: SolarWinds Attackers Stole Source Code

Hackers who compromised Mimecast networks as part of the SolarWinds espionage campaign have swiped some of the security firm’s source code repositories, according to an update by the company. The email security firm initially reported that a certificate compromise in January was part of the sprawling SolarWinds supply-chain attack that also hit Microsoft, FireEye and several U.S. government agencies.

https://threatpost.com/mimecast-solarwinds-attackers-stole-source-code/164847/

71 Percent Of Office 365 Users Suffer Malicious Account Takeovers

88 percent of companies have accelerated their cloud and digital transformation projects due to COVID-19. But it also finds that 71 percent of Microsoft Office 365 deployments have suffered an account takeover of a legitimate user's account, not just once, but on average seven times in the last year.

https://betanews.com/2021/03/17/office-365-malicious-account-takeovers/

More Than 16 Million Covid-Themed Cyber Attacks Launched In 2020

COVID-19 dominated everyone's lives throughout 2020 but a new report from a cyber security company found that the pandemic was also the main theme of nearly 16.5 million threats and attacks launched against its customers. Researchers wrote that they dealt with 16,393,564 threats that had a COVID-19-related tint to them, with 88% of the threats coming in spam emails and another 11% coming in the form of URLs. Malware accounted for 0.2%, or nearly 33,000, of the threats

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/more-than-16-million-covid-themed-cyberattacks-launched-in-2020/#ftag=RSS56d97e7

“Expert” Hackers Used 11 0-Days To Infect Windows, iOS, And Android Users

Using novel exploitation and obfuscation techniques, a mastery of a wide range of vulnerability types, and a complex delivery infrastructure, the group exploited four zero-days in February 2020. The hackers’ ability to chain together multiple exploits that compromised fully patched Windows and Android devices led members of Google’s Project Zero and Threat Analysis Group to call the group “highly sophisticated.”

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/expert-hackers-used-11-zerodays-to-infect-windows-ios-and-android-users/

Cyber Attacks: Is The ‘Big One’ Coming Soon?

2020 was the year that the COVID-19 crisis also brought a cyber pandemic. Late last year, the security industry’s top experts from global cyber security company leadership predicted even worse cyber security outcomes for 2021 compared to what we saw in 2020. In December, we learned about how SolarWinds’ Orion vulnerability was compromised, causing one of the worst data breaches in history that is still evolving for about 18,000 organisations.

https://www.govtech.com/blogs/lohrmann-on-cybersecurity/cyber-attacks-is-the-big-one-coming-soon.html


Threats

Ransomware

Phishing

Malware

IOT

Vulnerabilities

Data Breaches

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

OT, ICS, IIoT and SCADA

Nation-State Actors

Denial of Service

Privacy



As usual, contact us to help assess where your risks lie and to ensure you are doing all you can do to keep you and your business secure.

Look out for our weekly ‘Cyber Tip Tuesday’ video blog and on our YouTube channel.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Links to articles are for interest and awareness and linking to or reposting external content does not endorse any service or product, likewise we are not responsible for the security of external links.

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Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 18 December 2020

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 18 December 2020: The great hack attack - SolarWinds breach exposes big gaps in cyber security; A wake-up for the world on cyber security; White House activates cyber emergency response; US nuclear weapons agency targeted; UK companies targeted; Increasing Risk of Cyber Attacks; millions of users install malicious browser extensions; C19 Vaccines sold on dark web

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 Headlines of the Week

The great hack attack: SolarWinds breach exposes big gaps in cyber security

Until this week, SolarWinds was a little known IT software group from Texas. Its deserted lobby has a framed magazine article from a few years ago when it was on a list of America’s “Best Small Companies”.

Now the Austin-based company is at the heart of one of the biggest and most startling cyber hacks in recent history, with ramifications that extend into the fields of geopolitics, espionage and national security.

For nine months, sophisticated state-backed hackers have exploited a ubiquitous SolarWinds software product in order to spy on government and business networks around the world, including in the US, UK, Israel and Canada. Wielding innovative tools and tradecraft, the cyber spies lurked in email services, and posed as legitimate staffers to tap confidential information stored in the cloud.

The bombshell revelations have sent 18,000 exposed SolarWinds customers scrambling to assess whether outsiders did indeed enter their systems, what the damage was and how to fix it.

https://www.ft.com/content/c13dbb51-907b-4db7-8347-30921ef931c2

A wake-up for the world on cyber security

Imagine intruders break into your home and loiter undetected for months, spying on you and deciding which contents to steal. This in essence is the kind of access that hackers, assumed to be Russian, achieved in recent months at US government institutions including the Treasury and departments of commerce and homeland security, and potentially many US companies. If the fear in the Cold War was of occasional “moles” gaining access to secrets, this is akin to a small army of moles burrowing through computer systems. The impact is still being assessed, but it marks one of the biggest security breaches of the digital era.

https://www.ft.com/content/d3fc0b14-4a82-4671-b023-078516ea714e

US government, thousands of businesses now thought to have been affected by SolarWinds security attack

Thousands of businesses and several branches of the US government are now thought to have been affected by the attack on software firm SolarWinds.

The Austin-based company has fallen victim to a massive supply chain attack believed to be the work of state-sponsored hackers.

Along with the US treasury and commerce departments, the Department of Homeland Security is now thought to have been affected by the attack. In a statement to the SEC today, SolarWinds said it had notified 33,000 customers of its recent hack, but that only 18,000 of these used the affected version of its Orion platform.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/solarwinds-suffers-massive-supply-chain-attack

White House activates cyber emergency response under Obama-era directive

In the wake of the SolarWinds breach, the National Security Council has activated an emergency cyber security process that is intended to help the government plan its response and recovery efforts, according to White House officials and other sources.

The move is a sign of just how seriously the Trump administration is taking the foreign espionage operation, former NSC officials told CyberScoop.

The action is rooted in a presidential directive issued during the Obama administration known as PPD-41, which establishes a Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG) that is intended to help the U.S. government coordinate multiple agencies’ responses to the significant hacking incident.

The UCG is generally led by the Department of Justice — through the FBI and the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force — as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security.

https://www.cyberscoop.com/solarwinds-white-house-national-security-council-emergency-meetings/

Hackers targeted US nuclear weapons agency in massive cyber security breach, reports say

The National Nuclear Security Administration and Energy Department, which safeguard the US stockpile of nuclear weapons, have had their networks hacked as part of the widespread cyber espionage attack on a number of federal agencies.

Politico reports that officials have begun coordinating notifications about the security breach to the relevant congressional oversight bodies.

Suspicious activity was identified in the networks of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation, and the Richland Field Office of the Department of Energy.

Officials with direct knowledge of the matter said hackers have been able to do more damage to the network at FERC, according to the report.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/hackers-nuclear-weapons-cybersecurity-b1775864.html

Microsoft warns UK companies were targeted by SolarWinds hackers

Microsoft has warned that some of its UK customers have been exposed to the malware used in the Russia-linked SolarWinds hack that targeted US states and government agencies.

More than 40 of the tech giant's customers are thought to have used breached SolarWinds software, including clients in Britain, the US, Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, Israel, and the UAE.

The company would not name the victims, but said they include government agencies, think tanks, non-governmental organisations and IT firms. Microsoft said four in five were in the US, with nearly half of them tech companies.

“This is not ‘espionage as usual,’ even in the digital age,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft's president. “Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world.”

The attackers, believed to be working for the Russian government, got into computer networks by installing a vulnerability in Orion software from SolarWinds.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/12/18/microsoft-warns-uk-companies-targeted-solarwinds-hackers/

Society at Increasingly High Risk of Cyber Attacks

Cyber attacks are becoming easier to conduct while conversely security is getting increasingly difficult, according to Kevin Curran, senior IEEE member and professor of cyber security, Ulster University, during a virtual media roundtable.

“Any company you can think of has had a data breach,” he commented. “Whenever a data breach happens it weakens our credentials because our passwords are often reused on different websites.”

He observed that the art of hacking doesn’t necessarily require a significant amount of technical expertise anymore, and bad actors can receive substantial help from numerous and readily accessible tools online. “You don’t have to spend seven years in college to learn how to hack, you just have to know about these sites and what terms to use,” noted Curran.

A number of legitimate online mechanisms that can help damaging attacks to be launched by hackers were highlighted by Curran in his presentation. These include Google Dorks, which are “search strings which point to website vulnerabilities.” This means vulnerable accounts can be identified simply via Google searches.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/society-increasingly-risk-cyber/

Three million users installed 28 malicious Chrome or Edge extensions

More than three million internet users are believed to have installed 15 Chrome, and 13 Edge extensions that contain malicious code, security firm Avast said today.

The 28 extensions contained code that could perform several malicious operations, including:

-redirect user traffic to ads

-redirect user traffic to phishing sites

-collect personal data, such as birth dates, email addresses, and active devices

-collect browsing history

-download further malware onto a user's device

But despite the presence of code to power all the above malicious features, Avast researchers said they believe the primary objective of this campaign was to hijack user traffic for monetary gains.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/three-million-users-installed-28-malicious-chrome-or-edge-extensions/

Vaccines for sale on dark web as criminals target pandemic profits

Black market vendors were offering coronavirus vaccines for sale on hidden parts of the internet days after the first Covid-19 shot was approved this month, as criminals seek to profit from global demand for inoculations.

One such offer on the so-called dark web, traced by cyber security company Check Point Software, was priced at $250 with the seller promising “stealth” delivery in double-wrapped packaging. Shipping from the US via post or a leading courier company would cost $20, with an extra $5 securing overnight delivery.

https://www.ft.com/content/8bfc674e-efe6-4ee0-b860-7fcb5716bed6

Threats

Ransomware

Phishing

IoT

Malware

Vulnerabilities

Data Breaches

Organised Crime

Nation State Actors

Privacy

Other News

Reports Published in the Last Week


As usual, contact us to help assess where your risks lie and to ensure you are doing all you can do to keep you and your business secure.

Look out for our weekly ‘Cyber Tip Tuesday’ video blog and on our YouTube channel.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Links to articles are for interest and awareness and linking to or reposting external content does not endorse any service or product, likewise we are not responsible for the security of external links.

Read More