TALOS

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  After what seems like forever and honestly has been a really long time, we’re heading back to BlackHat in-person this year. We’re excited to see a lot of old friends again to commiserate, hang out, trade stories and generally talk about security.   Throughout the two days of the main conference, we’ll have a full suite of flash talks at the Cisco Secure booth and several sponsored talks. Since this is the last edition of the newsletter before BlackHat starts, it’s probably worthwhile running through all the cool stuff we’ll have going on at Hacker Summer Camp.  Our booth should be easy enough to find — it’s right by the main entrance to Bayside B. If you get to the Trellix Lounge, you’ve gone too far north. Our researchers will be there to answer any questions you have and present on a wide variety of security topics, from research into Adobe vulnerabilities to the privacy effects of the overtur...

By Edmund Brumaghin, Azim Khodjibaev and Matt Thaxton, with contributions from Arnaud Zobec. Executive Summary Dark Utilities, released in early 2022, is a platform that provides full-featured C2 capabilities to adversaries. It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems. Payloads provided by the platform support Windows, Linux and Python-based implementations and are hosted within the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), making them resilient to content moderation or law enforcement intervention. Since its initial release, we've observed malware samples in the wild leveraging it to facilitate remote access and cryptocurrency mining. What is "Dark Utilities?" In early 2022, a new C2 platform called "Dark Utilities" was established, offering a variety of services such as remote system access, DDoS capabilities and cryptocurrency mining. The operators of the s...

We spend a lot of time preparing for Blackhat, and as part of putting together content for the show, one of our best, Lurene Grenier, submitted an unexpected piece of content: a poem. Now this poem isn't our regular security research or a shiny piece of corporate correspondence (which we would never do anyways) — but it is raw, and it is painful and it is brilliant. And it raises a number of issues that Cisco takes very seriously, including work-life balance and mental health. In particular, by my interpretation, it speaks about early-in-career work-life balance. I know at that point in my career I felt grateful just to be in the industry while at the same time I felt powerless to advocate for myself in the face of the overwhelming demands of the workplace. This poem hit me hard, and in truth I wouldn't want it published anywhere other than on the Talos blog. So we are presenting Lurene's words here, in hopes that they trigger important conversations and also to remind everyone to just...

By Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos recently discovered a new attack framework called "Manjusaka" being used in the wild that has the potential to become prevalent across the threat landscape. This framework is advertised as an imitation of the Cobalt Strike framework. The implants for the new malware family are written in the Rust language for Windows and Linux. A fully functional version of the command and control (C2), written in GoLang with a User Interface in Simplified Chinese, is freely available and can generate new implants with custom configurations with ease, increasing the likelihood of wider adoption of this framework by malicious actors. We recently discovered a campaign in the wild using lure documents themed around COVID-19 and the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province. These maldocs ultimately led to the delivery of Cobalt Strike beacons on infected endpoints. We have observed the same threat actor using the Cobalt Strike beac...

By Carl Hurd.  The TCL LinkHub Mesh Wi-Fi system is a multi-device Wi-Fi system that allows users to expand access to their network over a large physical area. What makes the LInkHub system unique is the lack of a network interface to manage the devices individually or in the mesh. Instead, a phone application is the only method to interact with these devices. This is noteworthy because, in theory, it significantly reduces the common attack surface on most small office/home office (SOHO) routers, as it moves the entire HTTP/S code base from the product. This means, in theory, fewer issues with integration or hacked-together scripts to trigger various functions within the device. One of the issues with this approach though is that its functionality still needs to reside somewhere for the user to manage the device.  However, this setup leaves the LinkHub Mesh Wi-Fi system open to several vulnerabilities, which we are disclosing today. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to ...

The exploit researcher recently rejoined Talos after starting her career with the company’s predecessor  By Jonathan Munshaw.  Lurene Grenier says state-sponsored threat actors keep her up at night, even after years of studying and following them.   She’s spent her security career warning people why this was going to be a problem.  Today if someone is compromised by a well-funded, state-sponsored actor, she is concerned but doesn’t necessarily feel sorry. After all, she’s been warning the security community about this for years.  “You think about the phrase ‘fool me once, shame on you...’ Five years ago if we had this discussion and you were hit with an attack, you’d think ‘shame on China,’” she said. “Today, if we have that discussion about why you were hit, it’s shame on us.”  Grenier has spent her career looking at state-sponsored actor trends and writing detection content to block those actors. She was one of the first of the smaller research staff at the Sourcefire Vulnerability...

Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed from July 22 - 29. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics, indicators of compromise and discussing how our customers are automatically protected from these threats. As a reminder, the information provided for the following threats in this post is non-exhaustive and current as of the date of publication. Additionally, please keep in mind that IOC searching is only one part of threat hunting. Spotting a single IOC does not necessarily indicate maliciousness. Detection and coverage for the following threats is subject to updates, pending additional threat or vulnerability analysis. For the most current information, please refer to your Firepower Management Center, Snort.org, or ClamAV.net. For each threat described below, this blog post only lists 25 of the associate...

By Jon Munshaw.  Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.  Between the White House’s recent meeting, countless conference talks and report after report warning of cybersecurity burnout, there’s been a ton of talk recently around the cybersecurity skills gap and hiring.  Everyone wants to know the magic ticket to figure out how to increase hiring at their cybersecurity practice without hiring somehow with under-developed skills that could leave clients open to attack. This is not a problem exclusive to cybersecurity, but I do find it interesting that there’s been so much talk about the problems the cybersecurity workforce faces and not much about actual solutions.  I think a good place to start would change the meaning of what an “entry-level” position truly is in security. I came into this field with zero security experience from the domain of journalism. My family considered me to be “a computer guy” just because I was good at searching the internet fo...

By Francesco Benvenuto.  Recently, I was performing some research on a wireless router and noticed the following piece of code:  This unescape function will revert the URL encoded bytes to its original form. But something specifically caught my attention: There was no size check for the performed operations and the function assumes that after a ‘%’ there are always two bytes. So, what would happen if after ‘%’, only one character existed? The answer is that the s+3, in the strcpy, will access after the end of the string. So, it could lead to memory corruption. Then, I tried to exploit this bug on the router in question. But based on how the URL string was managed in that device, it was not possible. But it had the potential to crash other web servers that used this piece of code. That function belonged to the freshtomato library. So, I searched for the source code and noticed that at the beginning of the file containing that function, there was the following comment:  It was code fr...

By Nate Pors and Terryn Valikodath.   Executive summary  In a recent malspam campaign delivering the Qakbot banking trojan, Cisco Talos Incident Response (CTIR) observed the adversary using aggregated, old email threads from multiple organizations that we assess were likely harvested during the 2021 ProxyLogon-related compromises targeting vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers.  This campaign relies on external thread hijacking, whereby the adversary is likely using a bulk aggregation of multiple organizations’ harvested emails to launch focused phishing campaigns against previously uncompromised organizations. This differs from the more common approach to thread hijacking, in which attackers use a single compromised organization’s emails to deliver their threat.  This many-to-one approach is unique from what we have generally observed in the past and is likely an indirect effect of the widespread compromises and exfiltration of large volumes of email from 2020 and 2021.  Understandi...