NB Defense, ModelScan, and Rebuff, which detect vulnerabilities in machine learning systems, are available on GitHub.

Protect AI, maker of Huntr, a bug-bounty program for open source software (OSS), is venturing further into the OSS world by licensing three of its artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) security tools under the permissive Apache 2.0 terms.

The company developed the first tool, NB Defense, to protect ML projects being developed in Jupyter Notebooks, a common application favored by data scientists. As it became widely used, hackers began targeting Jupyter because of the power inherent in a tool meant to test code and packages. In response, Protech AI developed NB Defense, a pair of tools for scanning Notebooks for vulnerabilities, such as secrets, personally identifiable information (PII), CVE exposures, and code subject to restrictive third-party licenses. The JupityrLab extension finds and fixes security issues within a Notebook, whereas the CLI tool enables scanning of multiple Notebooks simultaneously and automatic scanning of those being uploaded to a central repository.

The second tool, ModelScan, originated from the need for teams to share ML models across the Internet, as more companies are developing AI/ML tools for internal use. ModelScan scans Pytorch, Tensorflow, Keras, and other formats for model serialization attacks,such as credential theft, data poisoning, model poisoning, and privilege escalation (wherein the model is weaponized to attack other company assets).

The third tool, Rebuff, was an existing open source project that Protect AI acquired in July and has continued developing. Rebuff addresses prompt injection (PI) attacks, in which an attacker sends malicious inputs to large language models (LLMs) in order to manipulate outputs, expose sensitive data, and allow unauthorized actions. The self-hardening prompt injection detection framework employs four layers of defense: heuristics, which filters out potentially malicious input before it reaches the model; a dedicated LLM, which analyzes incoming prompts to identify potential attacks; a database of known attacks, which helps it recognize and fend off similar attacks later on; and canary tokens, which modify prompts to detect leaks.

The spread of AI and LLMs across organizations of various sizes has led to a similar rise in tools to secure — or attack — such models. For example, HiddenLayer, this year's winner of the RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox, made securing those models against tampering its mission. In 2021, Microsoft released a security framework and its own open source tools for protecting AI systems against adversarial attacks. And the flaws just announced in TorchServe underscore the real-world stakes for even the biggest players, such as Walmart and the three major cloud service providers.

All three of Protect AI's tools — NB Defense, ModelScan, and Rebuff — are available on GitHub.

Protect AI Releases 3 AI/ML Security Tools as Open Source

Financial services organizations migrating applications to the cloud need to think about cloud governance, applying appropriate policies and oversight, and compliance and regulatory requirements.

When it comes to financial services moving securely to the cloud, there are several important considerations. Secure cloud usage first starts with secure use of the cloud by the financial services industry, including secure configurations, resiliency, and using pipelines that ensure consistent guardrails for developers, infrastructure teams, and security teams. This is layered on top of a secure foundation from cloud service providers. Additionally, there are compliance and regulatory requirements that must be met in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the security measures in place.

Key areas to consider:

*   Business objectives and risk appetite
*   Oversight and governance of the cloud program
*   Threat and compliance-driven security controls
*   Continuous monitoring and drift detection
*   Talent
*   Culture

When migrating to the cloud, every organization must think about how they'll govern the process. This includes applying appropriate policies and oversight, as well as implementing technical controls. It is crucial to approach this from a threat-driven perspective, considering the various threat actors that may try to compromise security practices and policies.

**Cloud Governance is Key**

For financial services, cloud governance is essential. Cloud governance is a set of policies and procedures that help organizations manage their cloud computing resources effectively. It is important to establish a clear cloud governance structure before moving to the cloud, as it helps ensure that cloud resources are used securely and efficiently. This requires an organizational, operational, and technological approach to assist financial services in leveraging the cloud.

There are three lines of governance that are important for cloud governance:

*   **First line of governance:** This is responsible for the day-to-day management of cloud resources. It typically includes IT teams, development teams, cybersecurity, and DevOps teams.
*   **Second line of governance:** This is responsible for overseeing the first line of governance and ensuring that cloud resources are being managed in accordance with organizational policies and procedures. It typically includes audit and risk teams.
*   **Third line of governance:** This is responsible for providing independent assurance that cloud governance is effective. It typically includes an audit that reports to the board's audit committee.

When implementing an  organizational, operational, and technological approach to cloud governance, you should consider the following:

*   **Infrastructure pipelines:** These are automated pipelines that can be used to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure via terraform.
*   **Application pipelines:** These are automated pipelines that can be used to deploy and manage cloud applications with embedded security controls and checkers.
*   **Data pipelines:** These are automated pipelines that can be used to move and manage data in the cloud using tools like data classification, data tokenization/encryption, and data loss prevention tooling.
*   **Change management:** An integrated process for managing changes to cloud resources that enforces good governance around change.
*   **Policy revisions:** This is the process of reviewing and updating cloud governance policies and procedures with stakeholders.
*   **Monitoring:** This is the process of logging and tracking changes to cloud resources, as well as monitoring the environment for security. This includes both application, infrastructure, and security monitoring.
*   **Asset inventories:** This is a process for identifying and tracking cloud resources and what is running at any given time,

**What to Consider With Cloud Adoption**

As you move to adopt the above, it’s important to take an “everything as code” approach, in order to scale the operations and ensure repeatability in deploying, recovering applications, and ensuring controls are working effectively.

Financial services is a highly regulated industry, and cloud adoption brings increased scrutiny from regulatory and compliance partners. To address this, a cloud-native approach should be taken to mitigate risk and alleviate concerns. This requires collaboration among different teams, including frontline, technology, business, security, tech controls, operational risk management, and audit teams. By working together, a secure and compliant framework can be established.

Trusted third parties may also be involved in the implementation process. It is important to consider how their work will be verified and how their expertise can support the project. This may involve testing and verification of audit and compliance solutions.

From an executive perspective, it is crucial to communicate the cloud strategy and its benefits to the business. This includes demonstrating how security and compliance controls are continuously monitored and maintained. The cloud offers opportunities to showcase compliance and risk through data analysis. Gradual improvements should be made to the control environment over time, fostering a culture of quick learning and adaptation.

In summary, financial services moving to the cloud must address security, compliance, and governance considerations. Collaboration among various teams is essential, as is the involvement of trusted third parties. Executives should effectively communicate the cloud strategy and ensure continuous compliance and risk monitoring.  As with all organizational change management, culture is an important aspect to keeping the team motivated and being able to fail fast. This culture has to be demonstrated by leadership and all teams working collaboratively to achieve the mission.

_Read more_ _Partner Perspectives from Google Cloud_

Securely Moving Financial Services to the Cloud

October's CVE update is here. Here's which security vulnerabilities to patch now to exorcise your Microsoft systems demons.

Microsoft flagged two zero-day security vulnerabilities under active attack in October's Patch Tuesday update, which affect Microsoft WordPad and Skype for Business. The release also features a critical-rated, wormable bug in Message Queuing that could instill terror for admins of vulnerable systems.

The two bugs are part of a cadre of 103 total CVEs addressed by the computing giant this month. The patches run the gamut of Microsoft's portfolio, including Azure, ASP.NET, Core, and Visual Studio; Exchange Server; Office, Microsoft Dynamics, and Windows.

Appropriately for October, the number of critical-rated vulnerabilities comes in at an unlucky 13; and notably, a full 20% of the fixes in the update relate to Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ).

**October 2023 Bugs Under Active Exploit**

Falling into the hair-raising active exploit camp, the first issue under attack in the wild is CVE-2023-36563, an information-disclosure bug in the WordPad word processing program that could open the door to NTLM relay attacks by exposing NTLM hashes.

"To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must first gain access to the system," explained Mike Walters, president and co-founder of Action1, in October Patch Tuesday commentary. "Subsequently, they would run a specially crafted application designed to take advantage of the vulnerability and seize control of the affected system."

He added, "Alternatively, the attacker could persuade a local user to open a malicious file. This persuasion might involve enticing the user to click a link, often via email or instant message, and then convincing them to open the specially crafted file."

As far as mitigation goes, "Microsoft doesn't list any Preview Pane vector, so user interaction is required," said Dustin Childs, researcher for Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, in a blog. "In addition to applying this patch, you should consider blocking outbound NTLM over SMB on Windows 11. This new feature hasn't received much attention, but it could significantly hamper NTLM-relay exploits."

Meanwhile, CVE-2023-41763 in Skype for Business is ready to haunt admin dreams. It's listed as an elevation-of-privilege issue, but Childs pointed out that it should be treated as an information disclosure problem.

"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by initiating a specially crafted network call to the targeted Skype for Business server," Walters said. "This action could lead to the parsing of an HTTP request sent to an arbitrary address, potentially revealing IP addresses and port numbers."

He added that some sensitive information may be exposed, including in some cases data that could grant access to internal networks. However, it won't allow the attacker to modify the exposed data or restrict access to the affected resource.

**20 Microsoft Message Queuing Vulnerabilities**

Also putting the shivers into cybersecurity defenders this month are a full 20 different MSMQ vulnerabilities, which together represent an outsized percentage of the total October fixes. One of them, CVE-2023-35349, earns the distinction of being the scariest (i.e., most severe) issue of the month; it carries a CVSS critical score of 9.8 out of 10.

The bug allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) without user interaction, meaning that the issue is wormable on systems where Message Queuing is enabled.

MSMQ is used to allow applications across multiple servers or hosts to communicate with each other and allow for communications to be stored and queued as required. It is not enabled by default, but Microsoft Exchange Server can enable it during installation, according to Rob Reeves, principal security engineer at Immersive Labs.

"It is highly likely that a successful attack will afford the attacker with SYSTEM-level permissions on the target or allow for kernel exploitation," he said in emailed Patch Tuesday commentary. "It would be considered unusual for an enterprise environment to expose the MSMQ service publicly on the Internet ... so it is reasonable to assume that to leverage this vulnerability in an attack, an attacker would have first successfully phished a target network and discovered the vulnerable service during enumeration."

Users should patch immediately, but can also mitigate the problem by blocking communications on TCP Port 1801 from untrusted connections via the firewall, Reeves added.

Childs noted that the other MSMQ bugs are a mix of RCE issues that do require user interaction, and DoS flaws that do not.

"Microsoft doesn't state if successful exploitation would simply stop the service or blue screen the entire system," he noted. "They also don't note if the system would automatically recover once the DoS exploit ends. There have been many Message Queuing bugs fixed this year, so now is a great time to audit your enterprise to determine your exposure."

**Other Microsoft Bugbears to Prioritize This Month**

As far as other security monsters to be on the lookout for, CVE-2023-36434 in Windows IIS Server stands out, according to ZDI's Childs. An attacker who successfully exploits the bug could log on to an affected IIS server as another user.

The elevation-of-privilege vulnerability was labeled "important" by Microsoft, because a threat actor would need to already be present in the network to use it, but it carries a CVSS 9.8 rating.

"These days, brute force attacks can be easily automated," Childs noted. "If you're running IIS, you should treat this as a critical update and patch quickly."

Action1's Walters meanwhile highlighted a group of nine RCE vulnerabilities in the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, which all have a CVSS score of 8.1 (CVE-2023-41774, CVE-2023-41773, CVE-2023-41771, CVE-2023-41770, CVE-2023-41769, CVE-2023-41768, CVE-2023-41767, CVE-2023-41765, and CVE-2023-38166).

"They possess a network-based attack vector, have a high level of complexity for successful exploitation, do not require any special privileges, and demand no user interaction," he said. "Their exploitation is notably intricate ... To successfully exploit these vulnerabilities, an attacker must overcome a race condition. An unauthenticated attacker could achieve this by sending a carefully crafted protocol message to a Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) server."

An RCE vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Data Access Components (WDAC) OLE DB provider for SQL Server (CVE-2023-36577, CVSS 8.8) caught the eye of Jason Kikta, CISO and senior vice president at Automox.  
"Microsoft WDAC OLE DB Provider for SQL Server is a set of components designed to facilitate efficient data access from Microsoft SQL Server databases to endpoints," he said in a Patch Tuesday advisory. "It's a key element of the WDAC that allows developers to create applications capable of communicating with almost any data source, including SQL Server. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system by convincing a user to connect to a malicious database."

He noted, "These attacks can be mitigated by configuring the environment to connect only to trusted servers and enforcing certificate validation."  
And finally, Chris Goettl, vice president of security products at Ivanti, flagged the fact that October Patch Tuesday includes the last updates for Windows 11 21H2 and Microsoft Server 2012/2012 R2.

"The latter go into Extended Security Support (ESU) starting with a November release, and Microsoft also announced the keys used to enable these updates will be managed as part of Azure Arc. They should be released next week," he said in emailed commentary.

"End-of-life software poses a risk to an organization," he warned. "No public updates will be available for these OS versions going forward. For Windows 11 users this means upgrading to a new Windows 11 branch. For Server 2012\\2012 R2 it is highly recommended to subscribe to ESU or migrate to a newer server edition."

This month's release also includes a patch for the just-disclosed HTTP/2 Rapid Reset distributed denial of service (DDoS) bug, as well as one for an external Chromium flaw that affects Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday Haunted by Zero-Days, Wormable Bug

Researchers believe that more than 70,000 Android devices may have been affected with preloaded Peachpit malware that was installed on the electronics before being sold at market.

After a researcher discovered that an Android-based TV streaming box, known as T95, was infected with preloaded malware, researchers at Human Security released information regarding the extent of infected devices and how malicious schemes are connected to these corrupted products. 

Daniel Milisic, a systems security consultant, created a script alongside instructions to help other users mitigate the threat after first coming across the issue. Now, Human Security's threat intelligence and research team has dubbed the operation "Badbox," which it characterizes as a complex, interconnected series of ad fraud schemes on a massive scale.

Human Security describes the operation as "a global network of consumer products with firmware backdoors installed and sold through a normal hardware supply chain." Once activated, the malware on the devices connect to a command-and-control (C2) server for further instructions. In tandem, a botnet known as Peachpit is integrated with Badbox, and engages in ad fraud, residential proxy services, fake email/messaging accounts, and unauthorized remote code installation.

According to the researchers at Human Security, 200 different models of Android devices are potentially affected, and at least 74,000 Android devices globally are potentially impacted by the Badbox infection. Eight different types of devices have backdoors installed: seven Android-based TV boxes — T95, T95Z, T95MAX, X88, Q9, X12PLUS, and MXQ Pro 5G — and an Android tablet, J5-W. The devices are made in China and somewhere along their supply chain, a firmware backdoor gets implemented on the devices.

The infected devices are from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), meaning that anyone can modify the code, according to a Google spokesperson; they are not built on the official Android TV operating system for smart TVs and streaming devices, which is proprietary and open only to Google and its licensed partners for code modification. "The off-brand devices discovered to be BADBOX-infected were not Play Protect certified Android devices. If a device isn't Play Protect certified, Google doesn't have a record of security and compatibility test results." 

Google's spokesperson adds, "Play Protect certified Android devices undergo extensive testing to ensure quality and user safety. To help you confirm whether or not a device is built with Android TV OS and Play Protect certified, our Android TV website provides the most up-to-date list of partners. You can also take these steps to check if your device is Play Protect certified."

Human Security recommends that users avoid off-brand devices and be wary of clone apps that could potentially infect their device. In addition, users should consider restoring factory settings if a device is behaving oddly.

"While the disruption of Bandbox is a victory for the cybersecurity community, research must continue into the supply chain that allowed the threat to develop in the first place," Human Security said in its report, and added that other threat actors are poised to fill the vacuum.

Badbox Operation Targets Android Devices in Fraud Schemes

An overlooked library contains a vulnerability that could enable full remote takeover simply by clicking a link.

Researchers have uncovered a vulnerability in a library within the GNOME desktop environment for Linux systems. If embedded in a malicious link, it could enable attackers to perform machine takeover in an instant.

GNOME — short for GNU Object Model Environment — is an open source desktop environment implemented by popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.

According to a new blog from the GitHub Security Lab, within one of GNOME's default applications is a dependency containing a "High" 8.8 out of 10-rated, out-of-bounds array access vulnerability. Because of how the application works, all an attacker would need is one click from a victim in order to execute arbitrary code on a GNOME OS.

It "underscores a critical business risk," says Igor Volovich, VP of compliance strategy at Qmulos. "For businesses, this is a stark reminder that a single vulnerability, even in seemingly benign software components, can be leveraged for wide-scale compromise, especially when these components are interconnected within larger systems or platforms."

**A Bug in a Dependency, App, Environment, or OS**

The new vulnerability — CVE-2023-43641 — isn't with Linux or GNOME, at least directly.

The issue, rather, lies in "libcue," an obscure library with just nine forks on GitHub. libcue is used to parse "cue sheets," a metadata format for describing the layout of tracks on a CD or DVD.

Among other projects, libcue is used by "tracker-miners," a default application in GNOME used for indexing files in the home directory. Of note in this case is that tracker-miners automatically updates when files are added or modified in certain subdirectories, for example the "~/Downloads" folder.

GitHub's researchers took advantage of this fact when designing an exploit for CVE-2023-43641. They wrote a malicious Web page which, when visited, triggers the download of a cue sheet (.cue) file. The file was saved to ~/Downloads, and tracker-miners automatically scanned it using libcue, enabling their code to run (in this case, simply opening a calculator app).

The researchers have successfully tested exploits for the most recent versions of Ubuntu and Fedora. They have also publicly released a harmless, six-line proof-of-concept.

**Implications for Linux Users**

The open source nature of Linux, its applications, libraries, and so on, are both a weakness and a strength where enterprise security is concerned.

"Its open-source nature invites vast community contributions, fostering innovation but also expanding its threat surface," Volovich points out. On one hand, "preparedness lies in the robustness of the Linux community, which is often quick to patch and remediate identified vulnerabilities. However, the sheer scale of Linux deployments and varied custom configurations means that vulnerabilities can persist unnoticed."

That one tiny syntax handling error in one minor component of one easily missed application can be shown to cause such significant consequences means that Linux users cannot be content with simply patching as needed, Volovich thinks. "While patching remains an essential reactive measure in the cybersecurity arsenal, a singular focus on it creates a game of perpetual catch-up. The continuously evolving threat landscape necessitates a shift in mindset."

"Rather than isolating specific vulnerabilities, it's more effective to approach security from a controls perspective. By doing so, organizations can identify and address potential weak spots before they're exploited," he says, pointing to frameworks and standards like NIST and ISO. "When enterprises embed these standards into their operations, they don't merely respond to threats; they anticipate them."

One-Click 'Gnome' Exploit Is a Supply Chain Risk for Linux OSes

Ongoing Rapid Reset DDoS flood attacks exposed organizations need to patch CVE-2023-44487 immediately to head off crippling outages and business disruption.

An Internet-wide security vulnerability is at the root of a zero-day attack dubbed "HTTP/2 Rapid Reset," which resulted in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) flood that was orders of magnitude larger than any previous attack ever recorded. It marks a new chapter in the evolution of DDoS threats, researchers noted.

Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and Google Cloud each independently observed the attack in question, which featured multiple waves of traffic that lasted for just minutes each. They targeted cloud and Internet infrastructure providers, and the attack took place over Aug. 28–29. Unknown perpetrators are behind the event, but it's clear that they exploited a bug in the HTTP/2 protocol, which is used in about 60% of all Web applications.

AWS, Cloudflare, and Google worked with other cloud, DDoS security, and infrastructure vendors in a coordinated effort to minimize any real-world impact of the Rapid Reset attacks, mainly with load balancing and other edge strategies. But that doesn't mean the Internet is protected; plenty of organizations are still susceptible to the attack vector and will need to proactively patch their HTTP/2 instances to be immune to the threat.

The pioneering attack vector represents an important evolution of the DDoS landscape, according to Alex Forster, Cloudflare's technical lead over DDoS engineering.

"The threat of DDoS attacks is evolving quickly, and are far from a low-level annoyance that they used to be thought of as," he says. "This attack – the largest in the history of the Internet – shows just how critical it is to increasingly pay mind to and consider DDoS as a key way for threat actors to disrupt businesses and wreak havoc."  

**How the Rapid Reset DDoS Attacks Work**

The susceptibility to the attack within HTTP/2 is tracked as CVE-2023-44487, and it carries a high-severity CVSS score of 7.5 out of 10.

According to Cloudflare, HTTP/2 is "a fundamental piece to how the Internet and most websites operate. HTTP/2 is responsible for how browsers interact with a website, allowing them to 'request' to view things like images and text quickly, and all at once no matter how complex the website."

The attack technique involves making hundreds of thousands of HTTP/2 requests at once, then immediately canceling them, according to the company's analysis.

"By automating this 'request, cancel, request, cancel' pattern at scale, threat actors overwhelm websites and are able to knock anything that uses HTTP/2 offline," according to Cloudflare's advisory on the Rapid Reset attacks, posted on Oct. 10.

During the peak of the August campaign, Cloudflare saw more than 201 million requests per second (rps), it said in a media statement provided to Dark Reading, "with some organizations witnessing even larger numbers due to the timing of their mitigations." That's triple the size of the previous record holder, a DDoS attack last year that peaked at 71 million rps.

Google, meanwhile, observed a peak of 398 million rps, seven and a half times larger than any previous attack against its resources; AWS detected a peak of more than 155 million rps targeted at the Amazon CloudFront service.

"For a sense of scale, this \[peak\] two-minute attack generated more requests than the total number of article views reported by Wikipedia during the entire month of September," Google researchers pointed out in a post on Oct. 10.

"We can't predict the future of DDoS attacks, but this recent series of attacks moves the trend in observed attacks closer to the anticipated exponential growth of doubling every 18 months or so," a Google spokesperson tells Dark Reading. "Defending services from attacks like these requires consistent capacity planning, as well as the ability to monitor for attacks and respond quickly."

The power of the method is such that the August tsunami was launched using a modestly sized botnet — fewer than 20,000 nodes. This makes Rapid Reset not only a powerful weapon but a highly efficient one as well.

"Cloudflare regularly detects botnets that are orders of magnitude larger than this — comprising hundreds of thousands and even millions of machines," according to the company's analysis. "For a relatively small botnet to output such a large volume of requests, with the potential to incapacitate nearly any server or application supporting HTTP/2, underscores how menacing this vulnerability is for unprotected networks."  

**Rapid Reset Mitigation**

While the Rapid Reset attacks haven't had the critical impact that the cyberattackers behind them may have hoped, the fact that threat actors were able to pioneer the technique in the first place should put companies on notice, especially given that DDoS attacks continue to be an important tool in cyberattackers' arsenals.

"Cybersecurity is a race," Forster explains. "While attackers carry out increasingly sophisticated and more impactful attacks, defenders develop cutting-edge methods and technology to combat them...After today, threat actors will be largely aware of the HTTP/2 vulnerability. It will inevitably become trivial to exploit and kick off the race between defenders and attacks — first to patch vs. first to exploit. Organizations of all sizes should assume that systems will be tested, and take proactive measures to ensure protection."

And indeed, attackers are launching DDoS attempts on an ongoing basis using the bug, despite extensive mitigations being put into place by cloud providers and DDoS security vendors in the wake of the initial zero-day offensive in August.

"Over those two days, AWS observed and mitigated over a dozen HTTP/2 rapid reset events, and through the month of September, continued to see this new type of HTTP/2 request flood," the cloud giant said in a post today.  

According to Google researchers, "any enterprise or individual that is serving an HTTP-based workload to the Internet may be at risk from this attack. Web applications, services, and APIs on a server or proxy able to communicate using the HTTP/2 protocol could be vulnerable."

They added, "Organizations that are managing or operating their own HTTP/2-capable server (open source or commercial) should apply vendor patches for CVE-2023-44487 when available."

While the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset vulnerability may have been record-breaking in size, the broader takeaways are not novel, Forster adds: "Turn incident management, patching, and evolving your security protections into ongoing processes. Patches for each variant of a vulnerability reduce risk, but they never fully eliminate it."

Forster provided Dark Reading a list of actionable recommendations for shoring up defenses against Rapid Reset and other DDoS threats:

*   Understand your external and partner network’s external connectivity to remediate any Internet facing systems with the mitigations provided by vendors;
*   Understand your existing security protection and capabilities you have to protect, detect, and respond to an attack, and immediately remediate any issues you have in your network;
*   Ensure your DDoS protection resides outside of your data center, because if the traffic gets to your data center, it will be difficult to mitigate a DDoS attack;
*   Ensure you have DDoS protection for applications (Layer 7), and ensure you have Web Application Firewalls. Additionally as a best practice, ensure you have complete DDoS protection for DNS, network traffic (Layer 3), and API firewalls;
*   Ensure Web server and operating system patches are deployed across all Internet-facing Web servers. Also, ensure all automation like Terraform builds and images are fully patched, so older versions of Web servers are not deployed into production over the secure images by accident;
*   As a last resort, consider turning off HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (potentially also vulnerable) to mitigate the threat. This is a last resort only, because there will be a significant performance issues if you downgrade to HTTP/1.1;
*   And, consider a secondary, cloud-based DDoS Layer 7 provider at perimeter for resilience.

Internet-Wide Zero-Day Bug Fuels Largest-Ever DDoS Event

DDoS for hire and live attacks hit both sides as cyber campaigns continue.

Hacktivists are trading cyberattacks on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

According to detections by ReliaQuest, several pro-Russian hacktivist groups have identified Israeli targets, and Anonymous Sudan's official Telegram channel is discussing how to undermine Israel's Iron Dome defense, a mobile air defense system that intercepts and destroys short-range rockets and artillery shells.

Anonymous Sudan also named the Israeli government in online discussions as a main target and said it had obtained unspecified "zero-day vulnerabilities from Romania" to use in anti-Israel attacks.

The AnonGhost hacktivist group said it had managed to breach the "Red Alert" app to send messages like "The Nuclear Bomb is coming" and "Death to Israel."

Chris Morgan, senior cyber threat intelligence analyst at ReliaQuest, says the discussion on Telegram channels should be taken seriously even though their users' intentions and activities are often not verified, or reflect the true nature of a group.

**DDoS for Hire**

The Krypton network has also offered to sell its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) capabilities to hacktivists wishing to target Israeli organizations. Morgan says Krypton is a known DDoS-for-hire botnet that allegedly includes several features to bypass DDoS mitigation services.

"It is realistically possible that the group saw an opportunity amidst the rush to target Israel, viewing it as a chance to make additional sales," Morgan says.

However, the attacks are not all one way, as ThreatSec reportedly compromised the Palestinian Internet services provider AlfaNet, with "literally every server owned by Alfanet" shut down. The group claimed its original goal was just to get a hold of some infrastructure, but it gained full control of more than 5,000 servers in the Gaza region. Statistics show a decline in Internet connectivity in Gaza over the past few days.

Since the attacks by Hamas began, cybercrime groups have shifted their activities toward the Middle East. More than a dozen threat groups declared their intention to launch disruptive attacks against Israel, Palestine, and their supporters. The Jerusalem Post was taken down by a cyberattack this week.

Morgan says Israel is regularly targeted by cyber threats — such as when the Russia-aligned Ragnar Locker group hit the Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak this summer — often by Iranian APTs. Additionally, hacktivist groups frequently target Israel in response to the ongoing conflict with Hamas.

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Hackers for Hire Hit Both Sides in Israel-Hamas Conflict

Keyloggers have been used for espionage since the days of the typewriter, but today's threats are easier to get and use than ever.

Keyloggers, the often-unseen sentinels of the digital space, silently and meticulously document a user's every tap and keystroke with the objective of harvesting valuable information. While many consider them tools of the cyber elite, it's startling how readily available and easy to use they are today.

Let's explore their lineage, the different kinds that exist, their multiple (good and bad) purposes, and the pressing need for protective measures.

**Historical Keyloggers**

The concept of spying on communication isn't new. But the 1970s, characterized by the ideological tussle between the East and West, offered a unique twist. Soviet engineers developed the Selectric bug to spy on electric typewriters. This ingenious device both underscored the era's espionage intensity and foreshadowed future digital surveillance.

Fast forward to the 1990s, as the tech revolution was reshaping the world. Computers transitioned from huge rooms to desktops. With this, the keylogger evolved too, from tangible devices to sophisticated software programs. In a twist of irony and to acknowledge digital espionage threats, in 2013 the Russian embassies dusted off their old typewriters.

Today's world paints a complex canvas. While keyloggers have become tools to help agencies like the FBI capture criminals, they've also become the weapon of choice for digital pirates and hackers globally.

**Types of Keyloggers**

There are a host of hardware and software devices that can spy on computer keyboard input today.

*   **USB keyloggers:** It's a stark testimony that anyone can purchase a keylogger as easily as they can buy a book. Retailers such as Amazon list these devices camouflaged as innocuous USB drives. While they might seem harmless, they're digital Trojan horses. For example, in 2017 a university student was expelled for using such a hardware keylogger to change academic scores.
*   **Acoustic keyloggers:** Sound, an elemental form of communication, has been weaponized by acoustic keyloggers. Every key on a computer keyboard has a unique sound. By recording and analyzing these sounds, these keyloggers can recreate entire documents. Research labs at University of California, Berkeley, have demonstrated how over 96% of a document's content can be reconstructed from keystroke sounds.
*   **Electromagnetic keyloggers:** Advancing from sound to the electromagnetic spectrum, keyloggers can eavesdrop on keyboards' faint electromagnetic discharges. Finely calibrated receivers can intercept and decode these emissions, even through physical barriers.
*   **Smartphone-based keyloggers:** In this mobile-first era, the array of sensors on mobile phones offer a fertile ground for innovative keylogging methods. By manipulating sensors designed for motion detection, software can decipher typing habits. Reports have unveiled accuracy levels approaching 97% from using smartphone data alone.
*   **Software-based keyloggers:** The 1980s saw the rise of software-based keyloggers. Some were crafted with malicious objectives, while others, such as those embedded in Windows 10, aimed to amplify the user experience through enhanced predictive text abilities. However, the rise of artificial intelligence and voice-activated devices like Amazon's Alexa becoming household staples creates new concerns. Their "always listening" feature has become a contentious topic.

**Ethical Keyloggers**

While the term "keylogger" often conjures negative imagery, many are used for valid, ethical purposes. Examples include enhancing software user experiences, helping parents monitor their children's digital footprints, aiding IT professionals in diagnosing tech issues, and safeguarding communal tech platforms from inappropriate use.

YouTube's vast informational landscape caters to curious minds, offering guidance on myriad subjects, including creating software. These include keylogger tutorials touted for educational enrichment. While they empower and educate genuine learners, they simultaneously risk aiding malicious intent. This duality underscores the need for discerning content consumption and ethical application of knowledge.

**Counteracting the Keylogger Threat**

Knowledge and proactive defense are the watchwords for decreasing your risk of being a keylogger victim. Regularly updating software, using robust two-factor authentication, leveraging virtual keyboards, employing state-of-the-art anti-keylogger tools, and physical examinations can help ward off these digital spies.

From their humble beginnings as tools of geopolitical subterfuge to their current omnipresence in the digital era, keyloggers have charted a dramatic trajectory. As we hurtle into an increasingly digital future, the history of keyloggers serves as a stark reminder of the delicate balance between technology's boons and banes.

How Keyloggers Have Evolved From the Cold War to Today

An unprecedented collaboration by various APTs within the DPKR makes them harder to track, setting the stage for aggressive, complex cyberattacks that demand strategic response efforts, Mandiant warns.

North Korean advanced persistent threat (APT) groups have become aligned in an unprecedented way since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, evolving in terms of adaptability and complexity, and allowing for individual threat groups to diversify and expand activities — all while making it more difficult for investigators to keep up.

Historically, threat researchers have tracked North Korea's threat activities as being carried out by individual groups — Lazarus Group and Kimsuky among them. However, the lines are beginning to blur between individual APTs, who increasingly are coordinating efforts, and sharing both tools and information. As a result, it's becoming harder to distinguish who's responsible for what threat activity, researchers from Mandiant revealed in a report published Oct. 10.

While threat researchers scramble to unravel various threads to define activity according to its perpetrator, North Korean actors are moving nimbly to diversify their attacks, sharing tooling and code as they continue to adapt and change to build tailored malware for different platforms — Linux and MacOs among them, the researchers have found.

The supply chain also may be at an increased risk from North Korean APTs, as the groups evolve toward aggressive and broader intrusions that encompass multiple intrusions to multiple networks by multiple APTs, using various supply chain vectors, the researchers noted.

"This flexible approach to tasking makes it difficult for defenders to track, attribute, and thwart malicious activities, while enabling this now collaborative adversary to move stealthily with greater speed and adaptability," the researchers noted.

That said, individual groups continue to work on "separate, unrelated efforts such as ransomware, collecting information on conventional weapons, nuclear entity targeting, blockchain- and fintech- targeting efforts, among various others," Mandiant analysts wrote in the report. This includes efforts to steal cryptocurrency to fund the regime of North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, who each of them ultimately serve. While this effort is a broad goal across APTs, several sub-groups have emerged in recent years that are exclusively aimed at this activity.

**A More Organized State-Sponsored Structure**

COVID-19 marked a significant change in how North Korean threat groups operate, with an unprecedented level of coordination and information-sharing directly driven by the closure of borders during that time. This left typically secretive and taciturn operators located outside the country in a lurch, and forced them to communicate with other groups, spurring collaboration that continues to this day, Michael Barnhart, principal analyst at Mandiant, says.

"While it remains uncertain whether this collaboration was intentional or driven by necessity, there is no sign of a decrease in such activities," Barnhart says. "In fact, there is evidence of an increasing trend toward such collaborations."

Mandiant researchers compiled a comprehensive structure of the current North Korean APT landscape to help defenders understand what they're currently up against. In general, all threat groups lead back to Kim Jong Un, and all activity is either to provide funding or intelligence for the regime — or both.

Branching directly from the supreme leader are the General Staff Department of the Korean People's Army — which oversees the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) — and the Minister of State Security, to which APT37, better known as ScarCruft or Reaper, directly reports.

Several threat groups also are aligned with North Korea's RGB, including Kimsuky, which Mandiant tracks as APT43; APT38 (better known as Lazarus, one of North Korea's most prolific threat groups); Temp.HERMIT, also tracked as part of Lazarus' activities and dedicated to cyber espionage; and Andariel, often linked to ransomware activities using bespoke ransomware dubbed Maui.

To complicate matters further, each of these groups has sub-groups operating under them to carry out particular tasks. For example, a group tracked as Apple.Jeus operates under the umbrella of Temp.HERMIT and is tasked exclusively with targeting cryptocurrency industry "with the goal of stealing digital assets to fund the regime's priorities," the researchers wrote.

Muddying the waters further are several groups operating under the direction of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea — the United Front Department and IT Workers — each of which work domestically and abroad to conduct cyber operations on behalf of the regime.

**DPRK's Threat Evolution Demands Collaborative Response**

Due to the evolving nature of these diverse and varied groups operating on behalf of North Korea, the ultimate takeaway of Mandiant's findings is that defenders would be better served by focusing on the specific nature of a particular activity rather than getting too deep in the weeds of trying to figure out which North Korea-backed group is perpetrating it, Barnhart says.

"These specific threat actors are extremely adaptable and agile, often leading defenders to spend significant time attempting to attribute actions to specific individuals behind the keyboard," he says.

Because this process is "far from straightforward," a more productive approach would be "to prioritize the mission after \[attributing the attacks\] to North Korea, rather than becoming overly preoccupied with specific units, until it becomes necessary to address those specific concerns," Barnhart says.

Future threat intelligence-gathering efforts will rely on defenders engaging in the same collaborative spirit demonstrated by the North Korean APTs themselves to mount "a more effective, collective response to counter this persistent threat actor," he says.

"Our recommendation is for both governments and the private sector to continue their collaborative efforts, presenting a unified front," Barnhart says. "This approach serves to maximize imposed cost on the threat actor."

North Korea's State-Sponsored APTs Organize & Align

Log management tools help IT and security teams monitor and improve a system's performance by identifying bugs, cybersecurity breaches, and other issues that can create outages or compliance problems.

Logs are like digital footprints or a letter that developers write to themselves for the future. They track every action or event that takes place within software, applications, and IT infrastructure. They provide important information, such as when an action happened, the host name, the type of action, and the application used.

Sometimes you must retrace your or a user's steps to determine where something went wrong … or where it could start going wrong. Unfortunately, technical teams may have to sift through several systems' worth of logs because systems and applications create logs for every action, error, file request, or file transfer that occurred within them. Log management makes the whole process less painful and time consuming.

**How Do You Manage Logs?**

There are five steps to log management:

1.  **Collect your logs:** Before you can manage logs, you have to gather them. A company's logs typically exist across servers, applications, infrastructures, network devices, and more. A log collector collects logs from all these locations. Loading data into your system as-is instead of parsing it first allows you to collect this data quickly because the data going into your system does not have to be organized or uniform until you use it.
2.  **Centralize and index your logs:** Once you've collected your logs, put them in one central location so that your team can easily find and sort through them. Index them to make them searchable.
3.  **Search and analyze information within the logs:** Your technical team has the option to analyze the data from these logs manually or by using machine learning to spot outliers in patterns.
4.  **Monitor the logs and receive alerts about anything unusual:** Monitor collected logs for errors or security breaches and use alerts to notify your team about any error that's spotted.
5.  **Create and share reports and dashboards:** Share data through reports and dashboards so that everyone who needs it has access to the same information. You can also reuse these reports and dashboards without having to recreate them. If you want to limit which reports or dashboards someone can access, you can put permissions on them so that only the necessary team members can view them.

**What Is a Log Management System?**

A log management system provides your team a single place to compile and store all your logs across servers, applications, and devices. From there, you can parse, analyze, and organize your logs as needed. Log management tools help DevOps teams monitor and improve a system's performance by identifying issues, bugs, and security breaches (or attempted ones) and alerting the appropriate people who can address them.

Cloud-based log management systems can be accessed anywhere at any time. They also compile all logs into one platform so that you don't have to sort through several systems and applications to find what you need. Thanks to the elastic nature of the cloud, they offer scalability to help manage the seasonality of data.

**Why Is Log Management Important?**

Log management allows your IT and your security teams to:

*   **Check the health of applications and infrastructures:** With a log management system, you have all your logs in one place and can more easily sort through them to figure out where errors may be. Without a log management system, your team may have to spend hours sifting through various applications or systems or contacting cloud providers to find the log information you need. Using log management best practices allows you to proactively monitor for potential problems before they arise.
*   **Ensure an exceptional customer digital experience:** By accessing the right data on the reliability and performance of your applications through insights about the user experience, you can identify anomalies and resolve issues before users are impacted.
*   **Gain insights when there is a security breach:** Similar to checking the health of your applications and tech stacks, log management makes it easier to monitor for security breaches because you have all your logs in one centralized location. More visibility means you can stop a security breach attempt quickly.
*   **Boost customer satisfaction:** Issues or security breaches may impact your users' experience. Slow loading speeds, delayed customer service response, and complete outages can lead to customer churn. Log management helps prevent these issues.
*   **Maintain compliance with policies or requirements:** Some companies and organizations must follow certain cybersecurity, privacy, financial recording, or reporting guidelines. Those who don't comply with their industry's regulations may face fines, loss of licensing, or even imprisonment. Log management helps organizations demonstrate compliance using the data in their logs.

To get the most out of your logs, lean on log management and log analytics tools with the capabilities to help you build and maintain secure and reliable applications.

**About the Author**

    

Manas Sharma is a Principal Product Manager at Sumo Logic responsible for logs and log analytics. Manas has more than 23 years of experience in the technology industry, with a wealth of knowledge and expertise in networking, embedded systems, network management, and observability. Manas has grown from an engineer executing cutting-edge projects to leading various product initiatives as a product manager while working at companies such as Network Programs, Broadcom, 4RF, Symbol, and HPE.

Source

DARKReading