PRESS RELEASE

Auburn, Ala. – Auburn University’s McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security was awarded a $10 million Department of Energy grant in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to create a pilot regional cybersecurity research and operations center to protect the electric power grid against cyberattacks. 

The total value of the project is $12.5 million, with the additional $2.5 million coming from Auburn University and other strategic partners.

The center, officially named the Southeast Region Cybersecurity Collaboration Center (SERC3), will bring together experts from the private sector, academia and government to share information and generate innovative real-world solutions to protect the nation’s power grid and other key sectors. It will include a mock utility command center to train participants in real-time cyber defense.  

“Auburn University is proud to be at the forefront of this important field as we work against one of the greatest threats the country and the business sector will face in the future,” said Steve Taylor, Auburn University’s senior vice president for research and economic development. “The center will conduct critical research and provide real operational solutions to protect all of us as we address these challenges. We are thankful to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for partnering with us and Rep. Mike Rogers for his support in securing funding for this critical program.”  

The center will run experiments with industry partners in a research lab environment to support integration of new and existing security software and hardware into operational environments. Research labs will be established at Auburn University, housed at the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“We are excited to work with Auburn on this important national mission,” said Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Stephen Streiffer. “We’re combining our capabilities to partner with industry, develop new security technologies and transfer those technologies to industry, all while developing the workforce that will operate these enhanced systems.”

Workforce and skills development will be a core role of Auburn’s in this partnership.

“This project provides an exciting opportunity for our college and our students,” said Mario Eden, dean of the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. “Our students will get hands-on experience in a real-world environment. We have a proven track record of innovation and this project perfectly aligns with our mission to provide the best student-centered engineering experience in America and expand our engineering knowledge through research.”

With an emphasis on critical infrastructure, the research will help utilities across the nation become more resilient to the increasing threat of cyberattacks. 

“We know that adversaries want the ability to disrupt our energy infrastructure, which could be devastating for our communities,” said Moe Khaleel, associate laboratory director for National Security Sciences at ORNL. “SERC3 will focus on establishing regional partnerships and developing science-based solutions to mitigate these threats – and keep everyone’s lights on.”

Puesh M. Kumar, director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER), praised the collaboration between organizations.

“I applaud Auburn University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s collaborative effort to advance grid cybersecurity,” Kumar said. “Everyone must come together – industry, the national laboratories, academia, as well as State and Federal governments – if we are to succeed against the growing cyber threats facing the U.S. energy sector from malicious actors and nation-states like the People’s Republic of China. This partnership is a critical example of that.”

Frank Cilluffo, director of the McCrary Institute, said the project is at the core of what the institute does. 

“A secure and resilient grid is a national and regional imperative,” Cilluffo said. “Spearheaded by James Goosby at McCrary and Tricia Schulz at Oak Ridge, we will create new research to rapidly identify, share and mitigate cybersecurity risks while we train the future workforce we need to keep us safe.”

Web source: https://www.eng.auburn.edu/news/2024/04/mccrary-serc3.html

Auburn University is a nationally ranked land grant institution recognized for its commitment to world-class scholarship, interdisciplinary research with an elite, top-tier Carnegie R1 classification, life-changing outreach with Carnegie’s Community Engagement designation and an undergraduate education experience second to none. Auburn is home to more than 30,000 students, and its faculty and research partners collaborate to develop and deliver meaningful scholarship, science and technology-based advancements that meet pressing regional, national and global needs. Auburn’s commitment to active student engagement, professional success and public/private partnership drives a growing reputation for outreach and extension that delivers broad economic, health and societal impact.

Auburn's McCrary Institute and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Partner on Regional Cybersecurity Center

CISA advisory warns of critical ICS device flaws, but a lack of available fixes leaves network administrators on defense to prevent exploits.

Source: rapsian sawangphon via Alamy Stock Photo

A security advisory issued this week by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) alerts administrators of vulnerabilities in two industrial control systems devices — Unitronics Vision Series PLCs and Mitsubishi Electric MELSEC iQ-R Series.

CISA warned that the Unitronics Vision Series PLC controller is open to remote exploit due to its storage of passwords in a recoverable format. This vulnerability (CVE-2024-1480) was assigned a CVSS score of 8.7.

Unitronics has not responded to, or worked with, the agency to mitigate the issue, leaving networks with these devices open to cyberattack, according to CISA. The advisory recommends ensuring the controllers are not connected to the Internet, isolating them from business networks, protecting the devices behind firewalls, and using secure methods, like virtual private networks (VPNs), for remote access.

The remaining ICS vulnerabilities impact the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation MELSEC iQ-R CPU Module. A design flaw in the CPU, tracked under CVE-2021-20599, has been assigned a CVSS score of 9.1. The unit transmits passwords in cleartext, which are easily intercepted by adversaries.

The Mitsubishi MELSEC CPUs also harbor a trio of reported flaws that could allow a threat actor to compromise usernames, access the device, and deny access to legitimate users. These include: exposure of sensitive information (CVE-2021-20594, CVSS 5.9); insufficiently protected credentials (CVE-2021-20597, CVSS 7.4); and a restrictive account lockout mechanism (CVE-2021-20598, CVSS 3.7).

Mitsubishi is working to provide mitigations and workarounds for the issues. However, systems with these devices are unable to be updated with a fix, according to CISA. The agency advises administrators with these devices in their networks to shore up defenses with firewalls, remote access limitations, and IP address restrictions.

"Mitsubishi Electric has released the fixed version ... but updating the product to the fixed version is not available," the advisory said. "CISA recommends users take defensive measures to minimize the risk of exploitation of this vulnerability."

**About the Author(s)**

ICS Network Controllers Open to Remote Exploit, No Patches Available

Existing AI technology can allow hackers to automate exploits for public vulnerabilities in minutes flat. Very soon, diligent patching will no longer be optional.

Source: Rokas Tenys via Shutterstock

AI agents equipped with GPT-4 can exploit most public vulnerabilities affecting real-world systems today, simply by reading about them online.

New findings out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) threaten to radically enliven what's been a somewhat slow 18 months in artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled cyber threats. Threat actors have thus far used large language models (LLMs) to produce phishing emails, along with some basic malware, and to aid in the more ancillary aspects of their campaigns. Now, though, with only GPT-4 and an open source framework to package it, they can automate the exploitation of vulnerabilities as soon as they hit the presses.

"I'm not sure if our case studies will help inform how to stop threats," admits Daniel Kang, one of the researchers. "I do think that cyber threats will only increase, so organizations should strongly consider applying security best practices."

**GPT-4 vs. CVEs**

To gauge whether LLMs could exploit real-world systems, the team of four UIUC researchers first needed a test subject.

Their LLM agent consisted of four components: a prompt, a base LLM, a framework — in this case ReAct, as implemented in LangChain — and tools such as a terminal and code interpreter.

The agent was tested on 15 known vulnerabilities in open source software (OSS). Among them: bugs affecting websites, containers, and Python packages. Eight were given "high" or "critical" CVE severity scores. There were 11 that were disclosed past the date at which GPT-4 was trained, meaning this would be the first time the model was exposed to them.

With only their security advisories to go on, the AI agent was tasked with exploiting each bug in turn. The results of this experiment painted a stark picture.

Of the 10 models evaluated — including GPT-3.5, Meta's Llama 2 Chat, and more — nine could not hack even a single vulnerability.

GPT-4, however, successfully exploited 13, or 87% of the total.

It only failed twice for utterly mundane reasons. CVE-2024-25640, a 4.6 CVSS-rated issue in the Iris incident response platform, survived unscathed because of a quirk in the process of navigating Iris' app, which the model couldn't handle. Meanwhile, the researchers speculated that GPT-4 missed with CVE-2023-51653 — a 9.8 "critical" bug in the Hertzbeat monitoring tool because its description is written in Chinese.

As Kang explains, "GPT-4 outperforms a wide range of other models on many tasks. This includes standard benchmarks (MMLU, etc.). It also seems that GPT-4 is much better at planning. Unfortunately, since OpenAI hasn't released the training details, we aren't sure why."

**GPT-4 Good**

As threatening as malicious LLMs might be, Kang says, "At the moment, this doesn't unlock new capabilities an expert human couldn't do. As such, I think it's important for organizations to apply security best practices to avoid getting hacked, as these AI agents start to be used in more malicious ways."

If hackers start utilizing LLM agents to automatically exploit public vulnerabilities, companies will no longer be able to sit back and wait to patch new bugs (if ever they were). And they might have to start using the same LLM technologies as well as their adversaries will.

But even GPT-4 still has some ways to go before it's a perfect security assistant, warns Henrik Plate, security researcher for Endor Labs. In recent experiments, Plate tasked ChatGPT and Google's Vertex AI with identifying samples of OSS as malicious or benign, and assigning them risk scores. GPT-4 outperformed all other models when it came to explaining source code and providing assessments for legible code, but all models yielded a number of false positives and false negatives.

Obfuscation, for example, was a big sticking point. "It looked to the LLM very often as if \[the code\] was deliberately obfuscated to make a manual review hard. But often it was just reduced in size for legitimate purposes," Plate explains.

"Even though LLM-based assessment should not be used instead of manual reviews," Plate wrote in one of his reports, "they can certainly be used as one additional signal and input for manual reviews. In particular, they can be useful to automatically review larger numbers of malware signals produced by noisy detectors (which otherwise risk being ignored entirely in case of limited review capabilities)."

**About the Author(s)**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

GPT-4 Can Exploit Most Vulns Just by Reading Threat Advisories

The group gained access to the victim network by duping IT employees with high administrative-access privileges.

Source: Scharfsinn via Alamy Stock Photo

Researchers this week shared details of an attack campaign by the infamous FIN7 threat group that targeted a large US-based global automotive manufacturer.

FIN7, a Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) group, also known as Carbon Spider, ELBRUS, and Sangria Tempest, conducted a spear-phishing campaign in late 2023 that was spotted and ultimately halted by BlackBerry's threat and research team. The attackers identified IT employees with high admin-level rights and lured them in by impersonating an IP scanning tool with a malicious URL. Once the employees opened the link, the threat actor ran its Anunak backdoor, allowing them to "gain an initial foothold utilizing living off the land binaries, scripts, and libraries (lolbas)," BlackBerry researchers said in blog post detailing the attack.

BlackBerry said its threat and research team detected and disrupted the attack before FIN7 was able to launch the ransomware portion of the attack.

In the past, FIN7 has targeted US retail, hospitality, and restaurant sectors, though it is now branching out to defense, insurance, and transportation sectors. BlackBerry researchers believe that the threat group is now likely targeting larger entities, with the assumption that they will pay a higher ransom.

BlackBerry did not disclose the name of the targeted automotive manufacturer.

**About the Author(s)**

Russian APT Group Thwarted in Attack on US Automotive Manufacturer

The missing ingredient in NIST's newest cybersecurity framework? Recovery.

Alex Janas, Field Chief Technology Officer, Commvault

April 18, 2024

5 Min Read

Source: Borka Kiss via Alamy Stock Photo

COMMENTARY

As the digital landscape grows more treacherous, companies are finally beginning to treat cybersecurity as a top operational risk. And for enterprises revising their data security strategies, the updated guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the US government's key technical standards adviser, is a good starting point. NIST's cybersecurity framework, first released in 2014, has functioned as the leading educational and academic guide. The newest version includes important updates, like the addition of data governance as one of the core pillars. Unfortunately, it falls short in a significant way. It doesn't say nearly enough about the most crucial ingredient of any comprehensive and contemporary cybersecurity plan: the ability to recover from a cyberattack. 

It's important to keep in mind that recovering from an attack is not the same as disaster recovery or business continuity. It's not enough to simply tack the recovery function onto a broader incident response plan. Recovery must be ingrained into the security stack and into your response plans. And even outside a crisis scenario, there must be a continual feedback loop established, where all parts of the cybersecurity function — including recovery — are always sharing information and are a part of the same workflow. 

Given the persistent threat landscape and the growing number of mandatory regulations, such as the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), companies must urgently address the gaps in their cybersecurity preparedness plans.

**Shifting From a Frontline Mentality **

While NIST is a comprehensive framework, the cybersecurity industry (and, by proxy, most companies) put far more attention on the part that focuses on preventing cyberattacks. That's important, but prevention can never be assured and should not be done at the expense of a comprehensive security plan. 

A company that only uses the NIST Cybersecurity Framework will put that company in a position where they are underinvested in responding to current and future cyberattack scenarios. That's a risk no organization can afford to take. You will be breached. In fact, you are breached, you just don't know it yet. This means the restoration platform must be integrated with the security stack to help protect itself and the business environment to ensure the company can get back to business — which is one of the main goals of this work.

Vendors and customers alike must put resources toward returning to a post-attack state: How to get there, and how to test and verify that capability. The secret to a robust recovery is planning. To truly be safe, businesses must take steps now to integrate the technology and people responsible for recovery into the rest of their cybersecurity function. 

Once that happens, although recovery teams can still operate independently, there's a continual feedback loop. So, all the different parts of the security teams can still easily send and receive information to and from the other functions. 

**Test, Test, Test**

While companies often have time frames in mind of how quickly systems must be back online, far fewer have fully considered what it takes to get to that safe state following an attack. 

Testing helps inform how long each step in the identification and remediation of a breach should take, so companies have a benchmark to use when an actual incident occurs. And without adequately testing backup environments, the recovery function becomes much more difficult — and potentially more dangerous. When restoring from an untested backup environment, the company might inadvertently restore implanted malicious code, provide attacker access, or return to a vulnerable state. 

Companies must actively run simulated or real-world drills that test all facets of their cyber resilience to uncover the weak points, including any issues that could impact a company's ability to get their IT systems operational again. 

**Linking the Steps  **

Integrating recovery tools into the larger incident response arsenal can yield valuable intelligence, both in preparing for and responding to an attack. 

These days, modern recovery systems can actively monitor backup repositories and regularly send feeds back to the security teams to detect any abnormal behavior far quicker than in the past — a vital capability as attackers increasingly aim their efforts at the last-mile data centers. And as a cyber-resilient restoration platform becomes integrated into the modern security stack, it must connect with the systems that transform the intelligence from the various systems and services to provide security teams with better context about the events that are happening in their environment as well as better auditing required under the various compliance and regulations around the globe. 

**Aligning the People to the Process **

While many organizations have experts attached to every other process in the NIST framework, few have teams or even individuals dedicated to managing recovery. 

Often, the function falls between the domain of the chief information security officer (CISO) and chief information officers (CIO), which leads to both assuming the other owns it. The overworked security team typically views recovery as tedious — and something that occurs only at the tail end of a chaotic process that should be handled by the IT team. 

Meanwhile, the IT team, unless steeped in security, may not even know what the NIST framework is. Facing a deluge of complaints, their focus is on simply getting the environment back online as quickly as possible, and they may not recognize how perilous an unplanned, hasty recovery can be. 

Taking this seriously involves dedicating resources to oversee recovery, making sure this step doesn't get overlooked in the ongoing planning and testing — let alone in the chaos that often accompanies a breach. 

When given strategic direction from the C-suite, and assigned the right ongoing responsibilities, the recovery individual or team can ensure that the response protocols are regularly tested, as well as serve as the bridge to connecting recovery with the rest of the cybersecurity function.  

**The Most Vital Step**

In this era when every business should assume they are breached, recovery must be recognized as just as important as the other steps in the NIST framework. Or maybe even more important.

Companies that only play cyber defense will eventually lose. They are playing a game where they think the score matters. Defenders can have 1,000 points but will lose to an attacker who scores once. There's simply no way to guarantee victory against an opponent who plays outside the rules and controls when and how the game is played.

Businesses must allocate resources to prepare for cyberattacks. Without a tested response plan to resume operations safely and securely, companies will have no choice but to capitulate to attackers' demands, pay the ransom, and thereby embolden an attacker.

**About the Author(s)**

Field Chief Technology Officer, Commvault

As the Field Chief Technology Officer for Commvault, Alex Janas is responsible for overseeing cybersecurity. He is a distinguished cybersecurity expert with over 20 years of diverse experience, spanning the private sector and the Department of Defense (DOD). 

In his work within the private sector, Alex has excelled in a wide range of security responsibilities; Cyber and Physical Security Penetration Assessments, Incident Response and Forensics, Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO), Cyber Executive Protection and Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM).

Alex’s government experience is highlighted by his tenure at the National Security Agency (NSA), where he served for 11 years in the Tailored Access Operations as an Analyst, Operator, and Division Technical Director. Alex is a proud recipient of the Master Operator designation, a prestigious honor bestowed upon a highly select cadre of Computer Network Operations personnel.

Rebalancing NIST: Why 'Recovery' Can't Stand Alone

Industry leaders aim to solve the threat to both the mental health of workers and security of organizations with solutions that recognize the enormous pressures facing cybersecurity professionals.

Source: Roman Samborskyi via Alamy Stock Photo

It's no secret that burnout is an epidemic among cybersecurity professionals that threatens not only the mental health of workers in the field, but also the security of organizations. But how to solve the growing crisis is still something with which the industry is grappling.

Peter Coroneos, founder of Cybermindz, and Kayla Williams, CISO of Devo, have different perspectives on cybersecurity burnout given their distinct roles and perspectives as industry leaders, but together they have a shared vision to find solutions to help break the current cycle of burnout that faces the cybersecurity profession.

Coroneos is founder of Cybermindz, a not-for-profit that offers resilience training for cyber teams, among others; and Williams is chief information security officer (CISO) of Devo, a cloud-native security analytics company.

The two — whose companies already are partners in fighting burnout — will come together at the upcoming RSA Conference to host a session called "Burnout in Cyber: The Intersection of Neuroscience, Gender, and Wellbeing." Their session will present some reasons why cybersecurity burnout has become a vicious cycle, as well as how a combination of empathetic leadership and neuroscience-based training can help break it.

**Security Staff Burnout: A Wake-Up Call**

The "wake-up call" for Coroneos on how serious the burnout problem came when a survey of 200 cybersecurity professionals conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Devo released its results last September. The study found that a hefty 83% of those surveyed admit that stress has led them and peers to make errors that have caused data breaches.   

The COVID-19 pandemic-related workplace changes as well as the increased cyberattacks taking advantage of organizations' hasty and often insecure shift to accommodate a remote workforce really threw cybersecurity burnout into high gear, he said.

"COVID brought together a number of factors that have been brewing in the background for a number of years," Coroneos says in a recent interview.

Working remotely, cybersecurity professionals felt even less of a separation between their work and home lives and felt as if they quite literally always took their work home with them. And with cyberattackers exploiting the vulnerable security situation with which many companies were faced at the time, there was even more work for them to do, and thus more pressure than ever, he says.

It was a "perfect storm" of conditions to foster burnout, Coroneos says. "We started to see many more reports of the degradation in the mental health status of cybersecurity teams," he says. "They feel this relentless pressure with no end in sight."

**The Blame Game**

Some of that pressure comes with the often-unfair burden of blame that CISOs and chief security officers (CSOs) in particular shoulder when a data breach or attack goes horribly wrong for a company, says Williams, who in her position as CISO knows all too well.

A key source of stress these executives experience is that they often don't control their budgets and the overall security roadmap at their respective organizations, and thus don't typically get the sufficient funding to execute their vision for a company's security. However, they still will be held accountable if something goes wrong, Williams says.

She cited notable high-profile lawsuits brought against top security executives from Uber and SolarWinds in which they took the brunt of the blame for security incidents at their respective companies as scenarios that are scaring top professionals out of the industry.

"From what I'm seeing and hearing, turnover is incredibly high," Williams says. "Speaking to my peers, they don't want to be CSOs anymore."

Indeed, the Devo survey found that 85% of professionals surveys will leave their role in the next year, while 25% will leave the industry entirely.

The current situation that many security professionals find themselves in is a burnout cycle that keeps those who stay in the profession feeling stressed out and hopeless about their jobs, while creating unprecedented numbers of turnover in a position that already faces job shortages. This circular cycle creates even more burnout for those who stay in cybersecurity roles, Coroneos and Williams say.

**Breaking the Security Fatigue Cycle**

To break this cycle, the two professionals pose a combination of empathetic leadership strategies and a neuroscience-based solution to help retrain people's minds to deal with high levels of stress.

As a CISO herself, Williams says she knows how important it is to communicate effectively with people in various cybersecurity roles within the organization to ensure that their individual needs both professionally and emotionally are being met. This is especially true as a new generation of cyber professionals with different emotional needs is entering the workforce, she says.

"As a people leader, it is my responsibility to ensure that I am communicating to my teams in a way that resonates with them," Williams says. It's important for leaders to take time to understand the needs of individuals on a team and to check in with them as they would with family or friends to ensure they are not feeling overwhelmed by stress or the demands of their responsibilities, she says.

Meanwhile, Cybermindz is taking a page out of the playbook of international armed forces with a training solution called Integrative Restoration (iRest) that has been implemented by the US and Australian military since 2006 and 2016, respectively.

iRest — the result of more than 40 years of observation, research and development by clinical psychologist Richard Miller and his team at an institute of the same name California — is an attention-training technique to help the brain's limbic system return to a restful state after an intense period of high stress.

The problem for cybersecurity pros is that they often get stuck in a constant state of psychological fight-or-flight response pattern due to the constant stress cycle of their jobs, Coroneos explains. iRest is a training that helps them switch out of this cycle to bring them to a deeper state of relaxation to reset that fight-or-flight response. This will help the brain switch off, so it is not constantly creating stress not only in the workplace but throughout their everyday lives, thus creating burnout, he says.

"We need to get them into a position where they can come into a proper relationship into their subconscious," Coroneos says, adding that so far cybersecurity professionals who have experienced the training — which Cybermindz is currently piloting— report they are sleeping better and making clearer decisions after only a few sessions of the program.

Indeed, while burnout remains a serious problem, the message Coroneos and Williams ultimately want to convey is one of hope that there are solutions to solve the burnout problem currently facing cybersecurity professionals, and that the enormous pressures these dedicated professionals face is not being overlooked.

"We want to show them that their mental health need not be the price of their career," Coroneos says.

**About the Author(s)**

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing music, yoga, and cooking.

Break Security Burnout: Combining Leadership With Neuroscience

Two new code-execution techniques, Poison Fiber and Phantom Thread, take advantage of a little-known Windows OS workhorse to sneak shellcode and other malware onto victim machines.

Source: Robert K. Chin via Alamy Stock Photo

BLACK HAT ASIA – Singapore – Windows fibers, little-known components of Windows OS, represent a largely undocumented code-execution pathway that exists exclusively in user mode — and is therefore largely overlooked by endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms. As such, it's possible for attackers to exploit them to stealthily land on PCs and deploy malicious payloads.

That's according to Daniel Jary, an independent security researcher, who laid out two new proof-of-concept (PoC) attacks using fibers in a session at Black Hat Asia on Thursday.

Fibers are an alternative to the standard "threads" that Windows uses to execute code from the OS or an application, he explains.

"Threads are like workers, essentially, within a Windows process or an application, and traditionally, they've always been the way that you'd execute code and get things done," he tells Dark Reading. "But there's a more niche way of doing it, through fibers."

**Fibers: A Forgotten & Overlooked Windows OS Pathway**

Fibers, when used, exist within threads — they're essentially smaller, more lightweight versions of the bigger thread concept. Fibers were initially developed at a time when CPUs had fewer cores available to them and could accommodate only so many threads. At a high level, the smaller were a way to expand capacity, by allowing developers to split up workloads within a single thread and make processes more efficient.

"But as computers became more powerful, with more memory to play with, fibers became somewhat redundant in the vast majority of scenarios," Jary explains. "That's why a lot of people really haven't heard about them and they're a bit obscure, but they do serve a few purposes for some old legacy applications and a way to port programs from other operating systems over to Windows. And some Windows processes themselves actually still use fibers."

Thus, fibers enjoy the dubious honor of being both a core Windows function and an overlooked one by security teams. To boot, Jary notes that traditional detection mechanisms in EDR platforms and antivirus engines tend to ignore them — making them a perfect stealth avenue to execute malicious code.

"Threads are heavily monitored by EDR agents, which look at syscalls and kernel mode callbacks to capture telemetry and send it to a rules engine to generate detection," Jary says. "But fibers exist purely in user mode and don't show up in kernel collection, so their telemetry is not actually getting recorded by EDRs."

Some open source techniques already exist to take advantage of fibers' under-the-radar status. A PoC from 2022, for instance, details a method for hiding malicious shellcode inside a fiber, thus evading the majority of AV engines.  

Others have created methods for callstack masking, which enables attackers to hide a malicious execution pathway within a thread — in this case, a fiber — behind a different, dormant fiber that's benign, also evading detection. The technique takes advantage of the fact that if fibers are in use, there's always an active fiber, then a dormant fiber that it switches off with. This masking capability that was added into Cobalt Strike's Artefact Kit in 2022.

**New Frontiers in Malicious Fiber Execution**

Jary set off to explore whether it's possible to improve on existing malicious fiber techniques, and came up with two new PoCs, dubbed Phantom Thread and Poison Fiber.

Existing adversarial fiber methods have certain disadvantages for attackers: Some indicators could still be used for EDR detection, and the maliciousness isn't hidden from inline event-based callstack collection. Any collection of dormant fibers, for which several techniques exist, would remove callstack masking.

Phantom Thread is a next-gen callstack masking approach that removes the ability of memory scans to target fibers by having those fibers masquerade as threads. This involves creating a fiber, then patching it so that it self-identifies as a thread. Then it becomes possible to remove any fiber callstack indicators and essentially hide the fibers from any scanning altogether.

The second PoC, Poison Fiber, enumerates any running Windows processes, looking at threads in use and then whether any of those threads are using fibers. Then "it presents you with an opportunity to inject your payload or your shellcode into a dormant fiber," Jary explains.

"You can only one run one fiber per thread at any one time, which means you always have another dormant fiber parked somewhere else on the stack," he says. "When we execute our code using Poison Fiber, this injects our code into a dormant fiber, so we don't have to suspend the thread in order to inject the shellcode, which is a huge indicator for malicious activity. And because we've injected the payload into a dormant fiber, then the application triggers the execution for us, and we don't initiate the execution ourselves." The technique has an added benefit of allowing remote code execution (RCE) as well.

**Wake Up to Fiber's Adversarial Potential**

While they remain somewhat obscure, fibers should be on security teams' list of attack vectors, warns Jary, who has not yet released his evolved PoCs or granular details on the methods publicly. He reasons that it's only a matter of time before others find ways of overcoming drawbacks in existing open source fiber execution methods.  

"Fiber's alternate execution method is valuable to attackers because it helps us sidestep traditional telemetry sources that we get with threads, in particular kernel callbacks," he says. "Fibers aren't a privilege escalation tactic, and they aren't a user access control (UAC) bypass. But it does allow a payload delivery that gets a lot less spotlight and attention from the security community. Fibers are really simple to implement, but they're harder to detect. So that makes them perfect for any script kiddie to use to attack businesses."

Jary advises implementing mature EDR products that can be continually tested against emerging techniques like these.

"Talk to your red teamers about open source fiber methods that are being used in the wild," he says. "Do some research to see what attackers are having joy with, what's popular in the wild, then feed that back into your research team and your EDR product developers. That's going to help build better defenses and probably make your threat hunters' lives a little bit easier as well."

**About the Author(s)**

Tara Seals has 20+ years of experience as a journalist, analyst and editor in the cybersecurity, communications and technology space. Prior to Dark Reading, Tara was Editor in Chief at Threatpost, and prior to that, the North American news lead for Infosecurity Magazine. She also spent 13 years working for Informa (formerly Virgo Publishing), as executive editor and editor-in-chief at publications focused on both the service provider and the enterprise arenas. A Texas native, she holds a B.A. from Columbia University, lives in Western Massachusetts with her family and is on a never-ending quest for good Mexican food in the Northeast.

Sneaky Shellcode: Windows Fibers Offer EDR-Proof Code Execution

A survey of cybercrime experts assessing the top cybercrime-producing nations results in some expected leaders — Russia, Ukraine, and China — but also some surprises.

Source: Wavebreakmedia Ltd IFE-221116 via Alamy Stock Photo

An academic research project to gain insight into which nations produce the most cybercrime has ranked the usual suspects of Russia, Ukraine, China, and the United States at the very top but also found some relative surprises with Nigeria at No. 5, Romania at No. 6, and Brazil at No. 9.

Nations with high technology levels typically scored fairly high on the World Cybercrime Index (WCI), especially if those countries also have state-sponsored threat actors that overlap with cybercriminal groups. Yet other nations dominated in one of the five areas, such as Nigeria taking the top score for scams and Romania scoring highly in data and identity theft, according to the university research effort by academic institutions in the United Kingdom, Australia, and France.

While cybersecurity experts have long associated different countries with different types of cybercrime — Russia with banking and ransomware and China with intellectual-property theft and financial crimes, for example — this is the first time that researchers have been able to compare various countries based on specific attributes and cybercriminal approaches, says Miranda Bruce, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the University of Oxford.

"If you look closely at these five indices, you'll get more insight into the character of each country as a cybercrime hotspot," she says. "Nigeria is No. 1 in the Scams index, but comes between 5th and 10th in the other four cybercrime types. Clearly they're a significant producer of all types of cybercrime, but it's also clear that, as a country, they specialize."

The researchers collected survey data from 92 cybercrime experts, asking them to pick the top five cybercrime-producing nations in five different categories of crime: technical products and services; attacks and extortion; data and identity theft; scams; and cashing out or money laundering. For each nation, participants were asked to rate the nation on the impact of the crimes, the actors' professionalism, and their technical skill.

The top 15 nations as ranked by their overall World Cybercrime Index. Source: PLOS One

In all, the cybercrime experts nominated 97 different countries, according to a paper the group published in the journal PLOS One.

The WCI scores may not, however, discern between true cybercriminals residing in a nation and those mercenary groups that also conduct operations on behalf of their state sponsors, says Sean McNee, vice president of research and data at DomainTools, a domain security services firm.

"When evaluating cybercrime groups in locales such as Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea, it is always challenging to determine if groups are operating purely on their own accord or operating on behalf of a nation-state sponsor," McNee says. "This makes cybercrime actors in other countries more interesting to look into, such as Nigeria, India, and Brazil."

**Low Technical Score, High Threat**

Nigeria's top marks in the scams category — in which the researchers lumped together advance-fee fraud, business email compromise, and online auction fraud — underscore that a highly developed cybercrime ecosystem does not necessarily require significant depth of technical skills and infrastructure. While Nigeria has prioritized its cybersecurity capabilities, the country remains a bastion for email fraud, as demonstrated by the case of a Nigerian-based group conducting romance scams with a US-based national, who was sentenced earlier this year.

Romania, which ranked No. 6 on the list, has a long history of hosting a cybercriminal ecosystem, so its ranking is a bit of a surprise, says Chester Wisniewski, director and field CTO at cybersecurity firm Sophos.

"Romania has always had elevated cybercrime activity ... likely due to its well-educated population and proximity and relationships with neighboring cybercrime states like Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova," he says. "Romania has been cooperative with cybercrime takedowns, but I am not sure they are very proactive in nature."

The researchers plan to investigate how the World Cybercrime Index correlates with other characteristics of each nation — such as gross domestic product (GDP), income inequality, Internet penetration, and corruption — and how cybercrime policies can impact their scores, the University of Oxford's Bruce says.

"There's still much to learn about how and why countries like Russia, China, and the USA have become major cybercrime hotspots, but the countries that appear lower in the Index will tell us more about the nuances of cyber criminality," she says. "That is, the specific combination of factors that enable a region to become a thriving economic hub of cybercriminal activity. It's important that we pay attention to these countries and regions in the coming years."

**Room for Improvement**

Unfortunately, the data gives little actionable information to defenders, although it could be useful to policymakers and diplomats interested in influencing countries and gaining cooperation, says Sophos' Wisniewski.

"If these stats are accurate, only the countries listed are in a position to address the problem of them being a source country for cybercrime," he says. "Many of those listed might not only be uninterested in reducing their rank, but they may also be proud of it."

The researchers conducted the survey in 2021, so unfortunately, that means that the rankings have aged, and do not include major changes to the cyberthreat landscape, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the most recent rise in romance scams, and an increase in cryptocurrency scams from North Korea, says DomainTools' McNee.

"This suggests that encouraging policies to promote technology sectors in these countries — turn cybercriminals to entrepreneurs — could have a net positive impact on the economy," he says. "It may be more beneficial to track these trends in countries further down the WCI to help encourage such policies before a notable cybercrime industry takes hold."

**About the Author(s)**

Veteran technology journalist of more than 20 years. Former research engineer. Written for more than two dozen publications, including CNET News.com, Dark Reading, MIT's Technology Review, Popular Science, and Wired News. Five awards for journalism, including Best Deadline Journalism (Online) in 2003 for coverage of the Blaster worm. Crunches numbers on various trends using Python and R. Recent reports include analyses of the shortage in cybersecurity workers and annual vulnerability trends.

Nigeria &amp; Romania Ranked Among Top Cybercrime Havens

Permiso Security announced Cloud Console Cartographer during Black Hat Asia to help defenders look inside Amazon Web Services events logs for signs of cyberattacks.

Source: Pop Tika via Shutterstock

When investigating a potential attack on cloud services, Daniel Bohannon frequently has to contend with the verbose logging of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a problem that can allow an attacker to hide in an avalanche of data.

While AWS typically produces only a single event for every programmatic API call, accessing the management console through the Web leads to an exponential increase in events, says Bohannon, a principal threat researcher with cloud identity service provider Permiso Security. In one session, for example, 81 clicks on users, workloads, and roles resulted in 5,370 events recorded in the AWS log file.

The sheer volume of events results in so much noise that it becomes hard to determine what a user is actually doing in the AWS console, the threat researcher says. For that reason, Bohannon and fellow threat researcher Andi Ahmeti plan to release an open source tool at the Black Hat Asia conference in Singapore to help security managers and incident responder consolidate cloud log events into a record of user actions.

"The idea is that you input your raw logs — and we \[show\] 100% of those raw logs — but then we enrich the data on top of that, which ... contains all the information about the events that led to those events," he says. "We all have that full signal information, which ... contains the summary, the labels, all that kind of stuff."

Historically, the volume of data in log files have made it difficult to determine the events that led up to a compromise. Sometimes the problem is that the cloud service does not log enough events to determine what happens, such as last year's criticism that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) fails to log adequate data when a user accesses a storage instance.

In other cases, the specific ways that cloud services communicate information to their customers can result in a lack of visibility, especially with the differences that companies face with multicloud use. More than half of companies have open ports undermining their security and take some two months to close the vulnerabilities. 

**AWS Produces Avalanche of Events**

For businesses using AWS, the number of events produced in a log while using the Web console can be significant. Just clicking on a list of users produces 18 events for only three identities, and that's a mild case of AWS's verbosity, says Bohannon. A user who clicks in the AWS console to view the users in the identity and access management (IAM) console will see more than 300 events produced in the logs for CloudTrail, Amazon's auditing capability.

"That number can actually get as high as 100, 300, or even 700 events, depending on the settings you have in your Web browser — all just for one click," he says. "So at a core level, every single action you take produces at least one event, but often it's dozens or sometimes even hundreds of additional events associated with it."

The researchers' open source tool, Cloud Console Cartographer, aims to turn the list of events captured by CloudTrail into a succinct timeline of actions taken by the user. The program adds comments to the cloud log that categorizes a series of captured events into signals — actual user actions.

"We want to show all of our mapping to remove as much noise as we can but still keep all the raw events," Bohannon says. "So anything that's unmapped is great, it's still evidence, and defenders can make the most sense of it."

**No Plans for Other Clouds**

Cloud Console Cartographer, which will be available on GitHub, produces an enriched log of events and has a Web interface that lists the signals in a table. Currently, 240-plus rules for classifying collections of events into user actions — that is, signals — have been created that will be used to enrich log files.

The two threat researchers intend to keep working on expanding the number of classifiers and hope that others will do the same.

Bohannon and Ahmeti may move on to developing the tool for other cloud platforms, but because different cloud providers have different ways of logging, what works for AWS will not work for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, they say. AWS is verbose, but Azure is the opposite — its logs are so terse as to be unhelpful, Bohannon says.

"I feel like every platform, every cloud platform has unique challenges that will have to be addressed in different ways," he says. "So we might find in the future that we can integrate other cloud platforms into this, but \[for now\] we at least have plans for additional GUIs related to AWS that we are going to be working on after the initial release."

**About the Author(s)**

Veteran technology journalist of more than 20 years. Former research engineer. Written for more than two dozen publications, including CNET News.com, Dark Reading, MIT's Technology Review, Popular Science, and Wired News. Five awards for journalism, including Best Deadline Journalism (Online) in 2003 for coverage of the Blaster worm. Crunches numbers on various trends using Python and R. Recent reports include analyses of the shortage in cybersecurity workers and annual vulnerability trends.

Open Source Tool Looks for Signals in Noisy AWS Cloud Logs

Caller ID spoofing and AI voice deepfakes are supercharging phone scams. Fortunately, we have tools that help organizations and people protect themselves against the devious combination.

Source: Ian Allenden via Alamy Stock Photo

COMMENTARY  
Three seconds of audio is all it takes to clone a voice. Vishing, or voice fraud, has rapidly become a problem many of us know only too well, impacting 15% of the population. Over three-quarters of victims end up losing money, making this the most lucrative type of imposter scam on a per-person basis, according to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

When caller ID spoofing is combined with AI-based deepfake technology, fraudsters can, at very little cost and huge scale, disguise their real numbers and locations and highly convincingly impersonate trusted organizations, such as a bank or local council, or even friends and family.

While artificial intelligence (AI) is presenting all manner of new threats, the ability to falsify caller IDs is still the primary point of entry for sophisticated fraud. This has also posed serious challenges for authenticating genuine calls. Let's delve into the criminal world of caller ID spoofing.

**What's Behind the Rise in Voice Fraud?**

The democratization of spoofing technology, such as spoofing apps, has made it easier for malicious actors to impersonate legitimate caller IDs, leading to an increase in fraudulent activities conducted via voice calls. One journalist, who said she's known for her rational and meticulous nature, fell victim to a sophisticated scam that exploited her fear and concern for her family's safety. Initially contacted through a spoof call that appeared to be from Amazon, she was transferred to someone posing as an FTC investigator, who convincingly presented her with a fabricated story involving identity theft, money laundering, and threats to her safety.

These stories are becoming increasingly common. Individuals are primed to be skeptical of a withheld, international, or unknown number, but if they see the name of a legitimate company flash up on their phones, they are more likely to answer the call in an accommodating manner.

In addition to spoofing, we are also seeing a rise in AI-generated audio deepfakes. Last year in Canada, criminals scammed senior citizens out of more than $200,000 by using AI to mimic the voices of loved ones in trouble. A mother in the US state of Arizona also received a desperate call from her 15-year-old daughter claiming she'd been kidnapped; the call turned out to be AI-generated. When combined with caller ID spoofing, these deepfakes would be almost impossible for the average person to catch.

As generative AI and AI-based tools become more accessible, this kind of fraud is becoming more common. Cybercriminals don't necessarily need to make direct contact to replicate a voice because over half of people willingly share their voice in some form at least once a week on social media, according to McAfee. Nor do they need exceptional digital skills, since apps do the hard work of cloning the voice based on a short audio clip, as highlighted recently by high-profile deepfakes of US President Joe Biden and singer Taylor Swift.

Entire organizations can fall prey to voice fraud, not just individuals. All it takes is one threat actor to convince one employee to share some seemingly insignificant detail about their business over the phone, which is then used to join the dots and enable a cybercriminal to gain access to sensitive data. It's a particularly worrisome trend in industries where voice communication is a key component of customer interaction, such as banking, healthcare, and government services. Many businesses rely on voice calls for verifying identities and authorizing transactions. As such, they are particularly vulnerable to AI-generated voice fraud.

**What We Can Do About It**

Regulators, industry bodies, and businesses increasingly recognize the need for collective action against voice fraud. This could include intelligence to better understand scam patterns across regions and industries, the development of industrywide standards to improve voice call security, and tighter regulations governing reporting for network operators.

Regulators around the world are now tightening the rules around AI-based voice fraud. For instance, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has made it illegal for robocalls to use either AI-generated or prerecorded voices. In Finland, the government has imposed new obligations on telecommunications operators to guard against caller ID spoofing and the transfer of scam calls to recipients. The EU is investigating similar measures, primarily driven by banks and other financial institutions that want to keep their customers safe. In all instances, efforts are underway to close the door on caller ID spoofing and smishing (fake text messages), which often serve as the entry point for more sophisticated, AI-based tactics.

Many promising detection tools in development could, in theory, drastically reduce voice fraud. They include voice biometrics, deepfake detectors, AI anomaly detection analysis, blockchain, signaling firewalls, and so on. However, cybercriminals are adept at outpacing and outwitting technological leaps, so only time will tell what will work best.

For businesses of all sizes and sectors, cybersecurity capabilities will become increasingly important for telecom services. Aside from the communications network level, businesses should establish clear policies and processes, such as multifactor authentication that uses a variety of verification methods.

Companies should also raise awareness of the most common fraud tactics. Regular training for employees should focus on recognizing and responding to scams, while customers should be encouraged to report suspicious calls.

On a consumer level, the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom, revealed that more than 41 million people were targeted by suspicious calls or texts over a three-month period in 2022. In other words, although brands and governments have been reiterating the message that legitimate businesses will never ask for money or sensitive information over the phone, continued vigilance is necessary.

The easy availability of cloning tools and spiraling crime levels have experts like the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggesting that people should agree on a family password to combat AI-based fraud attempts. It's a surprisingly low-fi solution to a high-tech challenge.

**About the Author(s)**

Senior Industry Analyst, Enea

Laura Wilber is a Senior Industry Analyst at Enea. She supports cross-functional and cross-portfolio teams with technology and market analysis, product marketing, product strategy, and corporate development. She is also an ESG Advisor & Committee Member. Her expertise includes cybersecurity and networking in enterprise, telecom, and industrial markets, and she loves helping customers meet today's challenges while musing about what the next ten years will bring.

Source

DARKReading