Even as more attacks target humans, lack of dedicated staff, relevant skills, and time are making it harder to develop a security-aware and engaged workforce, SANS says.

The increasingly complex threat landscape and the porous IT environment – driven by the shift to permanent remote/hybrid work and digital transformation – make the need for a security-aware workforce and healthy security culture more critical than ever. Enterprise defenders say that phishing and social-engineering attacks, ransomware, and business email compromise (BEC) are among their biggest day-to-day headaches.

Security awareness programs can help lessen them, but no one seems to have time to create them, according to the "SANS 2022 Security Awareness Report." The three top challenges for building a mature awareness program cited are lack of time for project management, limits on time available to train employees, and not having enough time to focus on security awareness because of staffing shortages. Lack of budget and lack of leadership support also made the list.

“People have become the primary attack vector for cyberattackers around the world,” says Lance Spitzner, SANS Security Awareness director and co-author of the SANS report. "Humans rather than technology represent the greatest risk to organizations, and the professionals who oversee security awareness programs are the key to effectively managing that risk."

Security awareness professionals lack relevant skills, the report shows. Security awareness responsibilities are very commonly assigned to staff with highly technical backgrounds who may lack the skills needed to effectively engage their workforce and communicate security risks in simple-to-understand terms, according to the report.

More than 69% of security awareness professionals are spending less than half their time on security awareness, the report also shows. That's because they have other security responsibilities. Enterprises should focus on having more professionals focused on security awareness rather than making it part of an already long to-do list. The report encourages documenting and contrasting how many people on the security team are focused on technology versus how many on the team are focused on human risk in order to create a case for a more dedicated team.

The report suggests that a successful security awareness program requires strong leadership support, a larger dedicated team, and a training schedule for employees that emphasizes frequency. Organizations should also communicate to, interact with, or train their workforces at least once a month. Keeping training simple and easy to follow is key toward an engaged workforce, the report says.

“Organizations can no longer justify an annual training to check the compliance box, and it remains critical for organizations to dedicate enough personnel, resources, and tools to manage their human risk effectively," said Spitzner.

Time Constraints Hamper Security Awareness Programs

The latest evolution in social engineering could put fraudsters in a position to commit insider threats.

Security experts are on the alert for the next evolution of social engineering in business settings: deepfake employment interviews. The latest trend offers a glimpse into the future arsenal of criminals who use convincing, faked personae against business users to steal data and commit fraud.

The concern comes following a new advisory this week from the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which warned of increased activity from fraudsters trying to game the online interview process for remote-work positions. The advisory said that criminals are using a combination of deepfake videos and stolen personal data to misrepresent themselves and gain employment in a range of work-from-home positions that include information technology, computer programming, database maintenance, and software-related job functions.

Federal law-enforcement officials said in the advisory that they’ve received a rash of complaints from businesses.

“In these interviews, the actions and lip movement of the person seen interviewed on-camera do not completely coordinate with the audio of the person speaking,” the advisory said. “At times, actions such as coughing, sneezing, or other auditory actions are not aligned with what is presented visually.”

The complaints also noted that criminals were using stolen personally identifiable information (PII) in conjunction with these fake videos to better impersonate applicants, with later background checks digging up discrepancies between the individual who interviewed and the identity presented in the application.

**Potential Motives of Deepfake Attacks**

While the advisory didn’t specify the motives for these attacks, it did note that the positions applied for by these fraudsters were ones with some level of corporate access to sensitive data or systems.

Thus, security experts believe one of the most obvious goals in deepfaking one's way through a remote interview is to get a criminal into a position to infiltrate an organization for anything from corporate espionage to common theft.

“Notably, some reported positions include access to customer PII, financial data, corporate IT databases and/or proprietary information,” the advisory said.

“A fraudster that hooks a remote job takes several giant steps toward stealing the organization’s data crown jewels or locking them up for ransomware,” says Gil Dabah, co-founder and CEO of Piiano. “Now they are an insider threat and much harder to detect.”

Additionally, short-term impersonation might also be a way for applicants with a “tainted personal profile” to get past security checks, says DJ Sampath, co-founder and CEO of Armorblox. 

“These deepfake profiles are set up to bypass the checks and balances to get through the company's recruitment policy," he says.

There’s potential that in addition to getting access for stealing information, foreign actors could be attempting to deepfake their way into US firms to fund other hacking enterprises.

“This FBI security warning is one of many that have been reported by federal agencies in the past several months. Recently, the US Treasury, State Department, and FBI released an official warning indicating that companies must be cautious of North Korean IT workers pretending to be freelance contractors to infiltrate companies and collect revenue for their country,” explains Stuart Wells, CTO of Jumio. “Organizations that unknowingly pay North Korean hackers potentially face legal consequences and violate government sanctions.”

**What This Means for CISOs**

A lot of the deepfake warnings of the past few years have been primarily around political or social issues. However, this latest evolution in the use of synthetic media by criminals points to the increasing relevance of deepfake detection in business settings.

“I think this is a valid concern,” says Dr. Amit Roy-Chowdhury, professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California at Riverside. “Doing a deepfake video for the duration of a meeting is challenging and relatively easy to detect. However, small companies may not have the technology to be able to do this detection and hence may be fooled by the deepfake videos. Deepfakes, especially images, can be very convincing and if paired with personal data can be used to create workplace fraud.”

Sampath warns that one of the most disconcerting parts of this attack is the use of stolen PII to help with the impersonation.

“As the prevalence of the DarkNet with compromised credentials continues to grow, we should expect these malicious threats to continue in scale,” he says. “CISOs have to go the extra mile to upgrade their security posture when it comes to background checks in recruiting. Very often these processes are outsourced, and a tighter procedure is warranted to mitigate these risks.”

**Future Deepfake Concerns**

Prior to this, the most public examples of criminal use of deepfakes in corporate settings have been as a tool to support business email compromise (BEC) attacks. For example, in 2019 an attacker used deepfake software to impersonate the voice of a German company’s CEO to convince another executive at the company to urgently send a wire transfer of $243,000 in support of a made-up business emergency. More dramatically, last fall a criminal used deepfake audio and forged email to convince an employee of a United Arab Emirates company to transfer $35 million to an account owned by the bad guys, tricking the victim into thinking it was in support of a company acquisition.

According to Matthew Canham, CEO of Beyond Layer 7 and a faculty member at George Mason University, attackers are increasingly going to use deepfake technology as a creative tool in their arsenals to help make their social engineering attempts more effective.

“Synthetic media like deepfakes is going to just take social engineering to another level,” says Canham, who last year at Black Hat presented research on countermeasures to combat deepfake technology.

The good news is that researchers like Canham and Roy-Chowdhury are making headway on coming up with detection and countermeasures for deepfakes. In May, Roy-Chowdhury’s team developed a framework for detecting manipulated facial expressions in deepfaked videos with unprecedented levels of accuracy.

He believes that new methods of detection like this can be put into use relatively quickly by the cybersecurity community.

“I think they can be operationalized in the short term -- one or two years -- with collaboration with professional software development that can take the research to the software product phase,” he says.

Criminals Use Deepfake Videos to Interview for Remote Work

The hacktivist group is ramping up its activities and ready to assault governments and businesses with escalating capabilities.

The hacktivist group DragonForce Malaysia has released an exploit that allows Windows Server local privilege escalation (LPE) to grant access to local distribution router (LDR) capabilities. It also announced that it's adding ransomware attacks to its arsenal.  

The group posted a proof of concept (PoC) of the exploit on its Telegram channel on June 23, which was subsequently analyzed by CloudSEK this week. While there's no known CVE for the bug, the group claims that the exploit can be used to bypass authentication "remotely in one second" in order to access the LDR layer, which is used to interconnect local networks at various locations of an organization.

The group says it would be using the exploit in campaigns targeted at businesses operating in India, which falls directly within its wheelhouse. During the past three months, DragonForce Malaysia has launched several campaigns targeting numerous government agencies and organizations across the Middle East and Asia.

“DragonForce Malaysia is adding to a year that will long be remembered for geopolitical unrest," says Daniel Smith, head of research for Radware’s cyber threat intelligence division. "In combination with other hacktivists, the threat group has successfully filled the void left by Anonymous while remaining independent during the resurgence of hacktivists related to the Russian/Ukrainian war."

The most recent, dubbed "OpsPatuk" and launched in June, has already seen several government agencies and organizations across the country targeted by data leaks and denial-of-service attacks, with the number of defacements topping 100 websites.

“DragonForce Malaysia is expected to continue defining and launching new reactionary campaigns based on their social, political, and religious affiliations for the foreseeable future," Smith says. "The recent operations by DragonForce Malaysia ... should remind organizations worldwide that they should remain vigilant during these times and aware that threats exist outside the current cyber conflict in Eastern Europe.”

**Why LPE Should Be on the Patching Radar**

While not as flashy as remote code execution (RCE), LPE exploits provide a path from a normal user to SYSTEM, essentially the highest privilege level in the Windows environment. If exploited, LPE vulnerabilities not only allow an attacker a step in the door but also provide local admin privileges — and access to the most sensitive data on the network.

With this heightened level of access, attackers can make system modifications, recover credentials from stored services, or recover credentials from other users who are using or have authenticated to that system. Recovering other users' credentials can allow an attacker to impersonate those users, providing paths for lateral movement on a network.

With escalated privileges, an attacker can also perform admin tasks, execute malware, steal data, execute a backdoor to gain persistent access, and much more.

Darshit Ashara, principal threat researcher for CloudSEK, offers one sample attack scenario.

“The attacker from the team can easily exploit any simple Web application-based vulnerability to gain aninitial foothold and place a Web-based backdoor,” Ashara says. “Usually, the machine on which Web server is hosted will have user privilege. That is where the LPE exploit will enable the threat actor to gain higher privileges and compromise not only a single website but other websites hosted on the server.”

**LPE Exploits often Remain Unpatched**

Tim McGuffin, director of adversarial engineering at LARES Consulting, an information-security consulting firm, explains that most organizations wait to patch LPE exploits because they typically require initial access to the network or endpoint in the first place.

“A lot of effort is placed on the initial prevention of access, but the further you move into the attack chain, the lesser effort is placed on tactics like privilege escalation, lateral movement, and persistence,” he says. “These patches are typically prioritized and patched on a quarterly basis and do not use an emergency 'patch now' process.”

Nicole Hoffman, senior cyber threat intelligence analyst at Digital Shadows, notes that the importance of every vulnerability is different, whether it's LPE or RCE.

“Not all vulnerabilities can be exploited, meaning not every vulnerability requires immediate attention. It is a case-by-case basis,” she says. “Several LPE vulnerabilities have other dependencies, such as needing a username and password to carry out the attack. That's not impossible to obtain but requires a higher level of sophistication.”

Many organizations also create local admin accounts for individual users, so they can carry out everyday IT functions such as installing their own software on their own machines, Hoffman adds.

“If many users have local admin privileges, it is more difficult to detect malicious local admin actions in a network,” she says. “It would be easy for an attacker to blend into normal operations due to poor security practices that are widely used.”

Any time an exploit is released into the wild, she explains, it doesn't take long before cybercriminals with varying levels of sophistication take advantage and perform opportunistic attacks.

“An exploit takes out some of this legwork,” she notes. “It is realistically possible mass scanning is already taking place for this vulnerability.”

Hoffman adds that vertical privilege escalation requires more sophistication and is typically more in line with advanced persistent threat (APT) methodologies.

**DragonForce Plans Shift to Ransomware**

In a video and through social-media channels, the hacktivist group also announced its plans to start conducting mass ransomware attacks. Researchers say this could be an adjunct to its hacktivist activities rather than a departure.

“DragonForce mentioned carrying out widespread ransomware attacks leveraging the exploit they created,” Hoffman explains. “The WannaCry ransomware attack was a great example of how widespread ransomware attacks all at the same time are challenging if financial gain is the end goal.”

She also points out that it is not uncommon to see these announcements from cybercriminal threat groups, as it draws attention to the group.

From the perspective of McGuffin, however, the public announcement of a shift in tactics is “a curiosity,” especially for a hacktivist group.

“Their motives may be more around destruction and denial of service and less around making a profit like typical ransomware groups, but they may be using the funding to enhance their hacktivist capabilities or awareness of their cause,” he says.

Ashara agrees that DragonForce’s planned shift is worth highlighting, as the group’s motive is to cause as much of an impact as possible, boost their ideology, and spread their message.

“Hence, the group's motivation with the announcement of ransomware is not for financial cause but to cause damage,” he says. “We have seen similar wiper malwares in the past where they would use ransomware and pretend the motivation is financial, but the root motivation is damage.”

DragonForce Malaysia Releases LPE Exploit, Threatens Ransomware

The RSA conference in San Francisco always feels like drinking from a fire hose but especially this year at the first in-person RSA since the pandemic began.

It had been a few years, so with much anticipation, and not a little trepidation, 26,000 people descended on San Francisco for the RSA Conference. Vendors were eager to get back out in front of a live audience and the expo floor was tightly packed with more than 400 exhibitors. Themes emerged in numerous services.

Let’s start with data security. With all the talk of application security needing to "shift left", (i.e., embedding security processes into the development pipeline to reduce the attack surface of code before it enters production), it is only natural that data security should move in the same direction.

Keys and certificates associated with applications and containers need to be protected, as any organization that has adopted a DevSecOps approach will be aware. Indeed, in an ideal scenario, capabilities such as key management and encryption are baked into the workflows of developers and DevSecOps teams and "just work."

Identity was at the center of many a discussion. Achieving "zero trust" transformation with passwordless authentication received renewed attention at the show. Getting rid of passwords has been the holy grail for many organizations and individuals over the past 30 years, and Omdia believes that 2022 will be the year that we finally start to properly phase out passwords.

When it comes to infrastructure security, figuring out the 'risk' of cloud environments was a key topic of interest. Vendors such as Palo Alto Networks, Orca, Wiz, Check Point, and many, many others highlighted tooling to enable deeper understanding of one's cloud estate, with an increasing emphasis on cloud permissions management as a key focus area.

Working to secure the development process for creating cloud environments was another area much discussed, with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) a key pattern for achieving necessary scale. The broad interest in API security was also noteworthy. Specialized vendors such as Salt Security, Wallarm, Cequence, and others joined several of the cloud security vendors in adding API security capabilities to their offerings.

Wrapping up the key topics around infrastructure security, it was noticeable how prevalent the conversations around Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) were, in terms of major security vendors aligning themselves to the broader SASE theme or to its subset known as SSE. Cisco, Netskope, Versa Networks, Forcepoint, among others, demonstrated integrated offerings in this space.

Moving on to SecOps, RSA Conference 2022 will perhaps be seen as the first big opportunity for extended detection and response (XDR) vendors to make their case. Numerous vendors made significant XDR announcements, including BitDefender (launching GravityZone XDR solution), CrowdStrike (expanding Falcon's XDR module), and RSA Group (debuting NetWitness XDR), among others. XDR has the potential to revolutionize enterprise threat detection and incident response (TDIR), making it faster, easier, and potentially even cheaper to find, analyze, and fix cybersecurity threats.

Proactive approaches such as risk-based vulnerability management and attack surface management (ASM) were also in the spotlight. It has been clear throughout 2022 that ASM products are quickly becoming an important component of broader proactive posture management strategies. The market, particularly for external ASM (EASM) solutions, has been busy with both investment and M&A activity.

RSA 2022: Omdia Research Take Aways

Transitive dependencies can complicate the process of developing software bills of materials.

If you're building software applications, you're familiar — or should be familiar — with SBOMs, or software bills of materials. Think of an SBOMs as a list of ingredients in your application. The urgency for organizations to create and maintain accurate SBOMs has increased in the wake of recent software supply chain vulnerabilities such as Log4Shell and Spring4Shell. What's more, if you do business with the US government, an accurate and up-to-date SBOM is now a requirement, based on the May 2021 Executive Order issued by the White House in response to the far-reaching repercussions of the SolarWinds attack.

According to Gartner, "by 2025, 60% of organizations building or procuring critical infrastructure software will mandate and standardize SBOMs in their software engineering practice, up from less than 20% in 2022." Gartner also acknowledges that "keeping software bills of materials (SBOMs) data in sync with corresponding software artifacts presents a key challenge."1

Are organizations keeping pace with such market dynamics? A recent Tidelift survey shows that only 37% of organizations are aware of new government software supply chain requirements around security and SBOMs. Of these organizations, only 20% are using SBOMs for most or all applications today.

However, change is coming quickly: The vast majority of organizations — 78% — are either already using SBOMs in at least some applications or have plans to do so in the next year, according to the survey.

**Open Source Complicates SBOM Matters**

Developing SBOMs can be challenging, but if you are using open source components in your applications — as most modern software development teams do — then the process for building an SBOM and keeping it up to date becomes even more complex because of the impact of transitive dependencies.

Open source components that other open source components rely on, transitive dependencies can be difficult to track down. For example, many organizations affected by Log4Shell weren't immediately aware of their exposure because it came through transitive dependencies. It is therefore critical that your SBOM identifies not only direct open source dependencies but also transitive dependencies.

In addition, because developers are constantly committing code to deliver enhanced functionality to applications, it is critical that SBOMs are dynamic, capturing changes to the open source components up and down the open source software supply chain.

**Conclusion: Get a Handle on SBOMs**

To ensure the integrity of software supply chains, the use of SBOMs will become more common — and will often be required. To ensure that your organization is delivering accurate and up-to-date SBOMs for the applications it develops and delivers, it's important to get a handle not just on your list of ingredients, but also the ingredients your ingredients are using.

1 Gartner, "Innovation Insight for SBOMs," Manjunath Bhat, Dale Gardner, Mark Horvath, 14 February 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

When It Comes to SBOMs, Do You Know the Ingredients in Your Ingredients?

With more staff working remotely, identity, authentication, and access (IAA) has never been more important. Microsoft has a new response.

At the start of June 2022, just before RSAC 2022, Microsoft announced a new product family, Microsoft Entra, which encompasses all of Microsoft’s identity and access capabilities. Microsoft Entra products include:

*   Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) as well as two new product categories:
*   Microsoft Entra Permissions Management (a Cloud Permissions management (CPM) / Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solution)
*   Microsoft Entra Verified ID (a decentralized identity product offering)

According to Microsoft, Entra is part of the company’s expanded vision for identity and access. The plan is to verify all types of identities and secure, manage, and govern their access to any resource, by:

*   Protecting access to any app or resource for any user;
*   Securing and verifying every identity across hybrid and multicloud environments;
*   Discovering and governing permissions in multicloud environments; and
*   Simplifying the user experience with real-time intelligent access decisions.

**Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)**  

**Microsoft Azure AD**, is also part of the Microsoft Entra family, and all its capabilities, such as conditional access and passwordless authentication, remain unchanged. Azure AD External Identities continues to be the vendor’s identity solution for customers and partners under the Microsoft Entra family.

Identity Governance for employees and partners is another area of focus for Microsoft. It’s a significant challenge for IT and security teams to provision new users and guest accounts and manage their access rights manually. This can have a negative impact on both IT and individual productivity. New employees often experience a slow ramp-up to full effectiveness while they wait for the access required for their jobs. Similar delays in granting necessary access to guest users undermine a smoothly functioning supply chain. At the other end, without formal or automated processes for reprovisioning or deactivating people’s accounts, their access rights may remain in place when they change roles or exit the organization (the dangerous "orphan account" scenario that can be exploited by threat actors).  

Microsoft believes that their **Identity Governance (in Azure AD)** offering addresses this with identity lifecycle management, which simplifies and speeds up the processes for onboarding and offboarding users. Lifecycle workflows automate assigning and managing access rights and monitoring and tracking access as user attributes change. Lifecycle workflows enhancements in Identity Governance are scheduled to enter public preview in July 2022.

Omdia believes that automating identity, authentication, and access features and tasks is a key trend within this space. There is an ever-increasing amount of data that companies need to keep secure and interpret when things go wrong, the automating of features and tasks will continue to accelerate in the coming years. This increase in data is helping to drive automation in a number of segments within the identity, authentication and access sector.

**Microsoft Entra Permissions Management** (Cloud Permissions Management)

Microsoft stated that the Microsoft Entra Permissions Management product/solution will be a standalone offering, be integrated within the Defender for Cloud dashboard, extending Microsoft Defender for Cloud's protection into the CPM realm (a.k.a. CIEM). It is worth recalling the history and development of this product. In July 2021, Microsoft **acquired CloudKnox Security, which was the market leader in CPM technology, with a view to enabling businesses using its Azure Active Directory service to exercise tighter control over employees’ access rights to their cloud assets, regardless of which cloud they reside in.**

CPM is an emerging technology segment, with most of the start-ups offering the capability dating from the late 2010s. CloudKnox was among the first, having been founded in 2017. So recent is the technology that it still has no standard name: one analyst firm calls it cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM), which is both excessively wordy and confusing, given its similarity to security incident and event management (SIEM) and customer identity and access management (CIAM). Another calls it cloud identity governance, which is less self-explanatory than Omdia's preferred name, cloud permissions management. The permissions management product/solution will be available worldwide in July 2022.

It is also worth noting that the Permissions Management product is cloud agnostic, i.e. it will be able to enforce the principle of least privilege in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platforms.

**Microsoft Entra Verified ID** (Decentralized Identity)

Microsoft Entra Verified ID is a new product offering based on decentralized identity standards that makes portable, self-owned identity possible. Verified ID represents Microsoft's commitment to an open, trustworthy, interoperable, and standards-based decentralized identity future for individuals and organizations. Instead of granting broad consent to countless apps and services and spreading identity data across numerous providers, Verified ID allows individuals and organizations to decide what information they share, when and with whom they share it, and—when necessary—to take it back by rescinding access rights. The Verified ID product will be available from early August 2022. Omdia believes that decentralized identity is gaining traction and this announcement by Microsoft to launch a product in this space will help to turbocharge the segment.

**Expansion of the Microsoft Entra product family – Which IAA segments next?**

It was interesting to note in Microsoft's recent press release that they stated this launch "is an important step towards delivering a comprehensive set of products for identity and access needs, and we’ll continue to expand the Microsoft Entra product family." So what areas are they likely to expand into? PAM? CPM technology looks like a natural adjacency for privileged access management (PAM) vendors, and indeed, the largest player in PAM, CyberArk, launched a CPM module in late 2020. Meanwhile Zscaler, which delivers security as a service from the cloud, acquired CPM start-up Trustdome in April 2021, reportedly for $31M, and XDR vendor SentinelOne's $616M acquisition of Attivo in March this year brought it, among other things, a CPM capability.

If Microsoft were to enter the PAM market, then what other areas of identity, authentication and access are logical to look at?

In recent years, segments such as PAM and IGA have undergone the cloudification of their products/solutions. Enterprise applications were already moving to the cloud long before the pandemic, to be delivered as a service. However, the impact of the pandemic was to turbocharge that process, and with it, the need for cloud-based identity management capabilities.

This backdrop explains the importance Omdia attributes to the cloud in the identity services market, not only as a locus from which to deliver IGA, but also as the place where an increasing number of corporate assets now reside, which puts a new level of requirement for entitlements management. It is also worth noting that Okta, the 800 pound gorilla of cloud-native identity management, is planning to launch IGA and PAM products in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023.

There has also been an expansion of diverse access points over the last couple of years and an overlapping of identity and access tools. All of this helps to explain why Microsoft has expanded its identity, authentication, and access product portfolio and why it sees this area as being central to secure access in a connected world.

**Identity As a Trust Fabric**

By launching Entra, Microsoft plans to move forward, by expanding their identity and access solutions so that they can serve as a "trust fabric" for the _entire_ digital ecosystem, now and long into the future.

The "trust fabric" is an identity mesh of connections that secures, governs, and manages for Microsoft products. To make this vision a reality, identity must evolve. This interconnected world requires a flexible and agile model where people, organizations, apps, and even smart devices could confidently make real-time access decisions.

**Conclusions**

Microsoft has traditionally been seen as the unspoken giant of identity. With the Entra announcements it is now entering the fray in a more direct fashion, and other IAA vendors need to sit up and take notice of these developments. Where once they simply played nicely with Active Directory as the backend identity repository for their technology, Microsoft may now be coming for their lunch.

The next few years will certainly be an interesting time in the identity space, with new entrants, new product launches and more mergers and acquisitions. Omdia predicts disruption and displacement, with Microsoft as the disruptor in chief!

Microsoft Going Big on Identity with the Launch of Entra

Cyber mercenaries in countries like India, Russia, and the UAE are carrying out data theft and hacking missions for a wide range of clients across regions, a couple of new reports said.

The threat associated with nation-state-backed hacking groups has been well-researched and chronicled in recent times, but there's another, equally dangerous set of adversaries that's operated comparatively in the shadows for years.

These are hack-for-hire groups that specialize in breaking into systems and stealing email and other data as a service. Their clients can be private investigators, law firms, business rivals, and others that don't have the capabilities to carry out these attacks on their own. Such cyber mercenaries often openly advertise their services and target any entity of interest to their clients, unlike state-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, which tend to be stealthy and have specific missions and a tight target focus.

Researchers from Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) this week released a report on the threat, using hack-for-hire ecosystems in India, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates as examples of the prolific nature of the criminal activity. The TAG researchers identified the services offered by cyber mercenaries as different from that offered by surveillance vendors that sell tools and capabilities for others — such as intelligence agencies and law enforcement — to use.

**Broad Range of Targets**

"The breadth of targets in hack-for-hire campaigns stands in contrast to many government-backed operations, which often have a clearer delineation of mission and targets," said Shane Huntley, director of Google TAG, in a blog Thursday.

As an example, he pointed to a recent operation that Google observed where an Indian hack-for-hire outfit targeted an IT company in Cyprus, a shopping company in Israel, a financial technology company in the Balkans, and an academic entity in Nigeria. In other campaigns, Google has observed these groups targeting human rights advocates, journalists, and political activists.

"They also conduct corporate espionage, handily obscuring their clients' role," Huntley wrote.

Google's report on hack-for-hire activity coincided with a lengthy Reuters investigative report on how parties involved in courtroom litigation have in recent years hired Indian cyber mercenaries to steal information from the other side that would give them an edge in the battle.

Reuters said it was able to identify at least 35 instances going back to 2013, when someone involved in a lawsuit hired Indian hackers to obtain information from the entity they were litigating against. One of them involved a $1.5 billion legal battle between the Nigerian government and the heirs of an Italian businessman over control of an oil company.

In each of these instances, the hackers sent phishing emails to targeted victims with malware for stealing credentials for their email accounts and other data.

**Numerous Hacking-for-Hire Victims**

Reuters said it identified some 75 US and European companies, three dozen advocacy groups, and numerous business executives in western countries that were the targets of these attacks. In all, over the seven-year period that was the focus of the investigation, Indian hackers sent some 80,000 phishing emails to 13,000 targets across multiple countries.

Among those whose email inboxes the attackers tried to access were at least 1,000 attorneys at 108 law firms, such as Baker McKenzie and Cooley and Cleary Gottlieb in the US and Clyde & Co. and LALIVE in Europe.

Reuters described the report as being based on information from victim interviews, US government officials, lawyers, and court documents from seven countries. Also helping with the investigation was a database of those tens of thousands of emails sent by the Indian hackers that Reuters said it received from two email providers.

"The database is effectively the hackers' hit list, and it reveals a down-to-the-second look at who the cyber mercenaries sent phishing emails to between 2013 and 2020," the Reuters story stated.

Among the Indian entities that Reuters named in its report were Appin, BellTroX, and Cyberoot — all of which shared infrastructure and staff at some point.

**Tracking Cyber Campaigns**

Google said it also has been tracking Indian hack-for-hire operators, many of which were associated with Appin and BellTroX, since 2012. A lot of the activity has focused on organizations in the government, telecom, and healthcare sectors in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, according to TAG.

Google's report also described hack-for-hire operators that TAG researchers have been tracking in Russia and the UAE. One of them is a previously known Russian actor that others have referred to as Void Balaur, which has spied on thousands of individuals and stolen private information about them for sale to various clients.

This is not the first time that security researchers have sounded a warning on hackers-for-hire. Trend Micro, for instance, reported on the Void Balaur threat in November 2021. A year prior, BlackBerry security researchers reported on a hack-for-hire group it had observed called CostaRicto, which targeted victims in multiple countries, many of them in South Asia.

"The hack-for-hire landscape is fluid, both in how the attackers organize themselves and in the wide range of targets they pursue in a single campaign at the behest of disparate clients," TAG's Huntley wrote.

Google: Hack-for-Hire Groups Present a Potent Threat

It didn't have to be this way: So far 2022's tranche of zero-days shows too many variants of previously patched security bugs, according Google Project Zero.

So far this year, a total of 18 security vulnerabilities have been exploited as unpatched zero-days in the wild, according to an analysis – and half of those were preventable flaws.

According to Google's Project Zero, nine of the issues were simply variants of previously patched bugs, with four being variants of previous 2021 in-the-wild zero-day bugs. Since these are closely related to security weaknesses that have been seen before, it blows a hole in the theory that zero-day exploits are so advanced that defenders can't hope to catch them, Project Zero's Maddie Stone notes.

"\[After\] the original in-the-wild zero-day \[was\] patched, attackers came back with a variant of the original bug," she explains in a Thursday blog post. "Many of the 2022 in-the-wild 0-days are due to the previous vulnerability not being fully patched."

The slate of 2022 zero-days affects a wide range of platforms, including Apple iOS, Atlassian Confluence, Chromium, Google Pixel, Linux, WebKit, and, of course, Windows (including the Follina and PetitPotam vulns).

In some these cases (Windows win32k and Chromium), the proof-of-concept attack path was patched but not the root cause, so attackers could trigger the original vulnerability through a different path. In other cases, such as PetitPotam, the original vulnerability was patched but "at some point regressed so that attackers could exploit the same vulnerability again," Stone says.

"The goal is to force attackers to start from scratch each time we detect one of their exploits: they’re forced to discover a whole new vulnerability, they have to invest the time in learning and analyzing a new attack surface, they must develop a brand new exploitation method," she says. "To do that effectively, we need correct and comprehensive fixes."

18 Zero-Days Exploited So Far in 2022

A recent analysis of breaches involving application programming interfaces (APIs) arrives at some eye-popping damage figures, but which companies are most affected, and in what ways?

US companies face a combined $12 billion to $23 billion in losses in 2022 from compromises linked to Web application programming interfaces (APIs), which have proliferated with the increased adoption of cloud services and DevOps-style development methodologies, according to an analysis of breach data.

In the last decade, API security has grown to become a significant cybersecurity issue. Acknowledging this, the Open Web Security Application Project (OWASP) released a top-10 list of API security issues in 2019, flagging major API weaknesses — such as broken authorization for objects, weak user authentication, and excessive data exposure — as critical issues for software makers and companies that rely on cloud services.

According to the Quantifying the Cost of API Insecurity report out this week, published last week by application-security firm Imperva and risk-strategy firm Marsh McLennan, security issues will only likely grow as APIs continue to become a common pattern for cloud and mobile infrastructure.

"The growing security risks associated with APIs correlates with the proliferation of APIs," says Lebin Cheng, vice president of API security for Imperva. "The volume of APIs used by businesses is growing rapidly — nearly half of all businesses have between 50 and 500 deployed, either internally or publicly, while some have over a thousand active APIs."

Interestingly, the business losses have less to do with API-specific issues, the analysis found. Rather, breach recovery and interruption of operations account for the majority of the cyber-losses. Only a small subset of companies in any country suffered losses directly linked to API vulnerabilities, the report found.

**API Losses Vary by Business Segment**

The Marsh McLennan data comes from reported breaches, which represents a subset of all businesses. It found that when drilling down into the data, important differences between impact can be drawn out.

For instance, certain kinds of companies (larger firms in IT and professional services, for example) are much more likely to face API-related security incidents than others (smaller companies, say, in the finance sector).

"The $12 billion is not distributed over millions of companies," a Marsh McLennan spokesperson said. "The number of breached companies, especially due to API insecurity, is considerably lower."

Small firms face the highest absolute number of API security events, with most incidents affecting companies with less than $50 million in revenue. Yet API-related incidents only accounted for about 5% of their overall number of security incidents. Conversely, large companies with more than $50 billion in revenue are at a much higher risk of breaches related to APIs, with at least 20% of their security events involving APIs.

To some extent, the increased risk for large companies is due to the growth in the attack surface area caused by APIs, but larger companies are also more attractive targets, says Imperva's Cheng.

"The proliferation of APIs, combined with the lack of visibility into these ecosystems, creates opportunities for massive, and costly, data leakage," he says. "These are issues that scale with an organization's size. Larger organizations have more APIs in production, and limited visibility leaves a larger number of APIs vulnerable. This makes enterprises an attractive target."

Similarly, firms in Asia had slightly more than 100 combined API security events, and US companies had more than 600 API security events. The sheer number of reported security events overall in the United States resulted in API incidents accounting for a much lower share of the pie — about 5% compared to more than 15% for Asia.

**How to Cope With API Security Concerns**

Unlike other types of application vulnerabilities, API security weaknesses typically exploit authorization, authentication, or business logic issues. The exploitation of APIs often results in access to data or the ability to bypass an authorization check, says Cheng.

To prevent this, companies need to gain visibility into how they are using APIs and create a complete inventory of the API traffic in their network, he says.

"API-related security incidents are sophisticated attacks that use a valid API token to exploit a vulnerability in the business logic to access the data layer," Cheng says. "Without the right visibility into the API schema, or the changes being made to the schema, organizations are often unaware if an API is compromised or what data is exfiltrated through the compromised API."

API attacks generally form the initial access vector for a larger campaign, so while the initial intrusion may seem non-critical, the end result could be a widespread compromise, Cheng says.

"API abuse is often part of a larger campaign that involves online fraud, like account takeover or automated scraping," he says. "Organizations need protection from a range of attacks that a criminal may use to abuse the API and get to the underlying data. If the organization is only focused on protecting the API endpoint, they're overlooking attacks on the application and/or business logic."

API Security Losses Total Billions, But It's Complicated

Malicious ISS module exploitation is the latest trend among threat actors targeting Exchange servers, analysts say.

Attackers once focused on exploiting ProxyLogon Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities have made a pivot to the new SessionManager backdoor, which can be used to gain persistent, undetected access to emails -- and even take over the target organization's infrastructure. 

Researchers from Kaspersky today report the emergence of SessionManager, which they say is part of a bigger trend of attackers deploying malicious backdoor modules inside Internet Information Services (ISS) servers for Windows, like Exchange servers.   

The malicious SessionManager backdoor, first observed in March 2021, has been used to target nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, the researchers add. The Kaspersky report says 34 servers across 24 individual NGOs have been compromised by SessionManager. 

"The exploitation of Exchange server vulnerabilities has been a favorite of cybercriminals looking to get into targeted infrastructure since Q1 2021," said Pierre Delcher, senior security researcher at Kaspersky, in a post about the findings. "The recently discovered SessionManager was poorly detected for a year and is still deployed in the wild."

The Kaspersky team recommends regular threat hunting for malicious modules in exposed ISS servers and focusing detection on lateral movement across the network, as well as close monitoring of data exfiltration to the Internet. 

"In the case of Exchange servers, we cannot stress it enough: The past year’s vulnerabilities have made them perfect targets, whatever the malicious intent, so they should be carefully audited and monitored for hidden implants, if they were not already,” Delcher warned.

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