Quickhits: Thursday Dec 14 2018

Posted on December 14, 2017 by Cheryl Biswas

Attacks on ICS: FireEye has identified a new targeted attack on ICS. “Triton” is designed to cause physically damage and harm operations. Thanksfully, this latest attack failed, but the lessons and warning are huge. Consider the implications of this against water ppurification plants; nublear power plants; major processing plants that cannot sustain downtime. Triton goes after the SIS or safety implemented system controllers. The FIreEye report describes the malware as follows:

TRITON is one of a limited number of publicly identified malicious software families targeted at industrial control systems (ICS). It follows Stuxnet which was used against Iran in 2010 and Industroyer which we believe was deployed by Sandworm Team against Ukraine in 2016. TRITON is consistent with these attacks, in that it could prevent safety mechanisms from executing their intended function, resulting in a physical consequence.

While FireEye cannot attribute the actor, they suggest with some certainty this is the act of a nationstate, they back it up with this statement:

The attacker targeted the SIS suggesting an interest in causing a high-impact attack with physical consequences. This is an attack objective not typically seen from cyber-crime groups.

New Banking APT: The discovery of a new long term attack on banks was revealed this week. Dubbed “MoneyTaker”, a report issued by Group-IB Security details how the group has taken over $11 million across 18 months from over 20 targets in the UK, Russia and US, including banks and legal firms. Dmitry Volkov, co-founder of Group-IB and head of intelligence, stated:

“MoneyTaker uses publicly available tools, which makes the attribution and investigation process a non-trivial exercise,” says. “In addition, incidents occur in different regions worldwide and at least one of the US Banks targeted had documents successfully exfiltrated from their networks, twice. Group-IB specialists expect new thefts in the near future.”

The twist here is that MoneyTaker is leveraging pentesting tools like Metasploit, NirCmd, psexec, Mimikatz, Powershell Empire. They used PSExec to propogate across the network, per The Hackernews. The article reports they are also using Citadel and Kronos banking trojans to deliver a specific point of sale or POS malware known as ScanPOS.

The group has been targetting card processing systems, like the Russian Interbank System AWS CBR and SWIFT which prompted Group-IB to warn that Latin America is a tempting target because of their broad use of STAR. I’ll be writing more about this as a separate piece. Stay tuned.

Update: WannaCry Ransomware

Posted on May 14, 2017 by Cheryl Biswas

real time botnet tracking map by http://www.malwaretech.com

The number of countries impacted is over 1 00. We are expecting version 2.0 to hit by Monday, because that’s the nature of these attacks: the attackers know when they have their victims over a barrel, and the maximize the opportunity. Microsoft has issued patches. But what everyone can and must do, over and above applying these specific patches, is this:

Ensure you have full, and working backups that are offline and removed from the network.
Have a Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity plan that specifically addresses cyber events like this one
Be ready with a crisis communications designated spokesperson and prepared statements. If you’ve been hit, and things are going terribly wrong, then you don’t want to be dealing with that and trying to say the right things to press, staff, stakeholders
Check in with and listen to your network and sysadmins. They know what’s going on out there. They’ve seen the sh*t that happens, what breaks, and why
Don’t evade or deflect this topic. Don’t underplay it, and of course don’t focus on the fear. Have honest discussions with your staff because this is how you creating lasting awareness and create change in behaviours that will better secure your organization

I follow these two experts on the risks to specialized systems, notably ICS or Industrial Control Systems and SCADA, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. Note that medical facilities, mass transit, manufacturing and utilities all rely on these specialized systems that are proprietary; are often set up with hard coded or default passwords that are NOT secure; and with older equipment that just can’t be upgraded so is left to run unpatched until it fails. There is so much more we need to address.

Here is a global snapshot (per CTV news):

Russian Train Control Center Ransomwared

EUROPEAN UNION: Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, known as EC3, said the attack “is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits.”
BRITAIN: Britain’s home secretary said the “ransomware” attack hit one in five of 248 National Health Service groups, forcing hospitals to cancel or delay treatments for thousands of patients — even some with serious aliments like cancer.
GERMANY: The national railway said Saturday departure and arrival display screens at its train stations were affected, but there was no impact on actual train services. Deutsche Bahn said it deployed extra staff to help customers.
RUSSIA: Two security firms — Kaspersky Lab and Avast — said Russia was hit hardest by the attack. The Russian Interior Ministry, which runs the country’s police, confirmed it was among those that fell victim to the “ransomware,” which typically flashes a message demanding payment to release the user’s data. Spokeswoman Irina Volk was quoted by the Interfax news agency Saturday as saying the problem had been “localized” and that no information was compromised. Russia’s health ministry said its attacks were “effectively repelled.”
UNITED STATES: In the U.S., FedEx Corp. reported that its Windows computers were “experiencing interference” from malware, but wouldn’t say if it had been hit by ransomware. Other impacts in the U.S. were not readily apparent.
TURKEY: The head of Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority or BTK says the nation was among those affected by the ransomware attack. Omer Fatih Sayan said the country’s cyber security centre is continuing operations against the malicious software.
FRANCE: French carmaker Renault’s assembly plant in Slovenia halted production after it was targeted. Radio Slovenia said Saturday the Revoz factory in the southeastern town of Novo Mesto stopped working Friday evening to stop the malware from spreading.
BRAZIL: The South American nation’s social security system had to disconnect its computers and cancel public access. The state-owned oil company Petrobras and Brazil’s Foreign Ministry also disconnected computers as a precautionary measure, and court systems went down, too.
SPAIN: The attack hit Spain’s Telefonica, a global broadband and telecommunications company.

Irongate & Customized ICS Malware: Don’t Hit the Snooze Button This time

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Cheryl Biswas

icspic3

ICS or Industrial Control System networks are integral to running our critical infrastructure, industrial and manufacturing processes, hospitals. These are specialized systems that have been kept separate or “air gapped” from main networks, but that has been changing over the past few years as everybody finds ways to get connected. However, a mindset persists that because these systems are “special” and “different”, and because they have been segregated from conventional networks for so long, they are inherently protected. This past week heralded the discovery of “Irongate”, customized malware for ICS that is still in the testing stages and has not been used against production facilities – yet. The fact that somebody has carried on from where Stuxnet left off is a warning to us all that our assumptions on what keeps us secure no longer apply.

Stuxnet showed us that specialized systems offer attackers, especially at the nation state level, a unique opportunity for this reason. Nobody is looking when they think they are secure. The fact is that attackers live within our networks for long periods. We have seen this proven in recent months through the rapid escalation of ransomware and lateral movement through networks to accumulate info and destroy data; in the attack on the power grid in the Ukraine where attackers harvested credentials to access the VPN and get into supposedly secure systems; and the SWIFT banking heists where attackers learned the most intricate details of how to manipulate printer outputs and redirect huge monetary transactions.

‘Airgaps’ are great in theory, but don’t hold up given the growing reality of the Iot and now the IIoT. With pressures to cut costs, increase productivity, and just make things easier, these systems are being connected to corporate networks and the “Cloud”. There’s a whole lot of scary here because the truth is that ICS systems are not well monitored. Experts like Chris Sistrunk and Robert M. Lee have made this pointedly clear in emphasizing the need for NSM, network system monitoring and DFiR, digital forensics, to look for what attackers leave behind. You can’t find the danger if you aren’t looking.

While the big announcement of Irongate was this week, researchers actually found samples late 2015, and reports show that the malware can be dated as far back at 2012, and was submitted to VirusTotal through the web interface in Israel in 2014. There is no evidence of this having been used in any campaign, nor is it associated with known threat actors. Siemens ProductCERT confirmed that “the code would not work against a standard Siemens control system environment”. As it stands, it is not proof-of-concept for an actual weapon or adversary. Yet, the code was found when searching for droppers compiled with PyInstaller; Irongate droppers are Python scripts converted to executables from that same software. Somebody saw the need to make this, and the opportunity for exploit. We need to read into that and act on it before it moves from test to production.

According to Robert M. Lee,

“ICS is a viable target and attackers are getting smarter on how to impact ICS with ICS specific knowledge sets… The unique nature of ICS offers defenders many advantages in countering adversaries but it is not enough. You cannot rest on the fact that ‘ICS is unique’ or ‘ICS can be hard to figure out’ as a defense mechanism. It is a great vantage point for defenders but must be taken advantage of or adversaries will overcome it.”

Right now, there is a lot of speculation around why this exists in test, without a known contributor. Dan Scali, senior manager for FireEye Mandiant ICS Consulting, posits “Is someone trying this in a simulated [environment] before taking it to a production environment? Or is it a researcher saying ‘look what I can do … a Stuxnet-type thing?”

Robert M Lee expressed concern that this illustrates a fundamental security problem with ICS/SCADA. “It’s a sign of the interest in this by pen testers, security companies, as well as adversaries…I am not confident that a majority of the industry could respond to it. We don’t know what’s out there; antivirus companies aren’t finding it and even if they had, who would know what to do with it [the threat]?”

If we’re not looking, we’re not finding. And we won’t be able to prepare for attacks which are already in the works. We would be foolish to think otherwise.

This argument is made by Lior Frenkel, CEO of Waterfall Security. He expects attacks similar to Stuxnet “are in the pipeline”.

“these attacks will increase in their sophistication and complexity so any solution needs to be completely comprehensive and robust to cover the full perimeter of an ICS site … (adding that) unidirectional gateways are the optimal solution for these attacks”.

Add to that this assertion by Sean McBride, attack synthesis lead for FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence: “I would not be surprised to see sandbox evasion and file replacement attacks incorporated by future ICS malware deployed in the wild.” This is yet another wakeup call for ICS SCADA, and other sensitive segregated systems.

Irongate is

sophisticated,
has the capacity to be persistent,
is evasive
undetected by AV
introduces new features to existing knowledge of customized ICS malware.

The key feature is a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, where the malware replaces existing DLL (Dynamic Link Library) files with malicious ones, enabling it to come between a PLC and legitimate monitoring software to engineer the next step. Like a scene from a movie, where the security camera footage is manipulated, the malicious DLL records five seconds of ‘normal’ traffic from a PLC to the user interface. This “footage” goes on replay while other data gets sent back to the PLC. Hence an attacker can alter a controlled process without alerting the process operators.

Causes for concern should be: this malware was undetected by AV, even though some strings had the word “dropper” and there was an actual module named scada.exe; the malware is evasive, and will not run if it detects the use of VMware or Cuckoo Sandbox environments – something Stuxnet could not do.

Although Irongate is not as complex, the similarities to Stuxnet stand out:

Both types of malware search for a single, highly specific process.
Both replace DLLs to manipulate processes
Both are evasive. IRONGATE looks for sandbox or VMware that allow observation of malware; Stuxnet sought out antivirus software.
Both manipulate process data. IRONGATE actively records and plays back to conceal it manipulations however.

A key difference is that unlike Stuxnet, “Irongate has no worm-like spreading function, nor any apparent ties to nation-state actors”.

Recommendations on how to secure against this latest variant of ICS malware include integrity checks and code. But it really comes down to following through on best practices and those areas already identified as weak. The problem is that what we’ve been doing will fail us going forward, and we’re failing at doing the basics right. Know your baselines and actively look for anomalies. NSM needs to happen, as does DFiR within ICS, comprehensively and without further delays and excuses. Otherwise, we are turning a blind eye to attackers who know these systems better than we do.

This latest variant of customized ICS malware may be in the testing stages as we found it. But you can bet if someone else is working on this, things have already moved toward production and deployment. Irongate is yet another major wakeup call and we can’t keep hitting the snooze button.

Resources:

https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2016/06/irongate_ics_malware.html

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/04/13/ics-network-attacks/?utm_content=buffer3b349&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/shades-of-stuxnet-spotted-in-newly-found-ics-scada-malware-/d/d-id/1325753

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/06/03/ics-focused-irongate-malware/