The previously unknown state-sponsored group is compromising industrial targets with the ShadowPad malware before burrowing deeper into networks.

A previously unknown Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) is exploiting the ProxyLogon Microsoft Exchange vulnerability to deploy the ShadowPad malware, researchers said — with the end goal of taking over building-automation systems (BAS) and moving deeper into networks.

That's according to researchers at Kaspersky ICS CERT, who said that the infections affected industrial control systems (ICS) and telecom firms in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as a logistics and transport organization in Malaysia. The attacks came to light in October but appear to date back to March 2021.

"We believe that it is highly likely that this threat actor will strike again and we will find new victims in different countries," according to Kaspersky's Monday analysis.

In this specific spate of attacks, Kaspersky observed a unique set of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) linking the incidents together, including attackers compromising BAS engineering computers as their initial access point. Researchers noted this is an unusual move for an APT group, despite proof-of-concept malware being available for such platforms.

"Building-automation systems are rare targets for advanced threat actors," said Kirill Kruglov, security expert at Kaspersky ICS CERT, in the alert. "However, those systems can be a valuable source of highly confidential information and may provide the attackers with a backdoor to other, more secured, areas of infrastructures."

The attacks also threaten the physical integrity of buildings, researchers warned. BAS infrastructure unites operational features, such as electricity, lighting, HVAC systems, fire alarms, and security cameras, so they can be managed from a single management console.

"Once a BAS is compromised, all processes within that are at risk, including those relating to information security," according to Kaspersky's alert about the attacks.

In a real-world example of this rare kind of attack, last December a building automation engineering firm suddenly lost contact with hundreds of its BAS devices, including light switches, motion detectors, shutter controllers, and others — after being locked down with the system's own digital security key, which the attackers hijacked. The firm had to revert to manually flipping on and off the central circuit breakers in order to power on the lights in the building.  

**ProxyLogon Leads to ShadowPad Malware in Stealthy Infections**

In many cases, the cyberattackers exploited the ProxyLogon remote code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in MS Exchange (CVE-2021-26855), the firm added. When used in an attack chain, the exploits for these ProxyLogon could allow an attacker to authenticate as the Exchange server and deploy a Web shell so they can remotely control the target server.

ProxyLogon was disclosed in March 2021 after being exploited as a zero-day bug by a Chinese state-sponsored group that Microsoft calls Hafnium — but soon a dizzying array of threat groups piled on to exploit the issue to enable different kinds of attacks.

In this case, once in, the APT deploys the ShadowPad remote access Trojan (RAT) — a popular backdoor and loader used by various Chinese APTs. According to previous analysis from Secureworks, ShadowPad is advanced and modular, first deployed by the "Bronze Atlas" threat group in 2017. "A growing list of other Chinese threat groups have deployed it globally since 2019 in attacks against organizations in various industry verticals," the report noted.

Kaspersky researchers said that in the BAS attacks, "The ShadowPad backdoor was downloaded onto the attacked computers under the guise of legitimate software."

Specifically, the malware originally masqueraded as the mscoree.dll file, which is a Microsoft library file essential for the execution of "managed code" applications written for use with the .NET Framework. As such, the malware was launched by the legitimate AppLaunch.exe application, which itself was executed by creating a task in the Windows Task Scheduler. Last fall, the attackers switched to using the DLL-hijacking technique in legitimate software for viewing OLE-COM objects (OleView). The Windows Task Scheduler is also used in the newer approach. In both cases, using such living-off-the-land tools (i.e., legitimate native software) means that the activity is unlikely to raise any system-intrusion flags.

After the initial infection, the attackers first sent commands manually, then automatically, to deploy additional tools. Researchers said those included the following:

*   The CobaltStrike framework (for lateral movement)
*   Mimikatz (for stealing credentials)
*   The well-known PlugX RAT
*   BAT files (for stealing credentials)
*   Web shells (for remote access to the Web server)
*   The Nextnet utility (for scanning network hosts)

"The artifacts found indicate that the attackers stole domain-authentication credentials from at least one account in each attacked organization (probably from the same computer that was used to penetrate the network)," according to Kaspersky. "These credentials were used to further spread the attack over the network … we do not know the ultimate goal of the attacker. We think it was probably data harvesting."

**How to Protect Against APT Attacks Targeting BAS, Critical Infrastructure**

The attacks develop "extremely rapidly," Kaspersky said, so early-state detection and mitigation is key to minimizing damage. The researchers recommended the following best practices to protect industrial infrastructure, including BAS footprints:

*   Regularly update operating systems and any application software that are part of the enterprise's network. Apply security fixes and patches to operational-technology (OT) network equipment such as BAS, as soon as they are available.
*   Conduct regular security audits of OT systems to identify and eliminate possible vulnerabilities.
*   Use OT network traffic monitoring, analysis, and detection solutions for better protection from attacks that potentially threaten OT systems and main enterprise assets.
*   Provide dedicated OT security training for IT security teams and OT engineers.
*   Provide the security team responsible for protecting ICS with up-to-date threat intelligence.
*   Use layered security solutions for OT endpoints and networks.

China-Backed APT Pwns Building-Automation Systems with ProxyLogon

Creating temporary keys that are not stored in central repositories and time out automatically could improve security for even small businesses.

While multifactor authentication, single-sign-on infrastructure, and stronger password requirements have improved the security of most enterprise identity and access management (IAM) environments, the longevity of passwords continues to pose problems for businesses, especially in granting temporary access to contractors and third-party partners.

A variety of vendors are trying to solve this problem. Last week, for example, data-security firm Keeper Security announced one-time shared passwords that allow companies to grant third-party partners temporary access to data and resources without adding them to the company's overall IT environment. The approach allows specific types of documents to be shared to a single user device, automatically removing access when the time expires.

The business case is all about securing access granted to contractors, says Craig Lurey, chief technology officer and co-founder of Keeper Security.

"We get asked constantly to allow short term, temporary access to third parties without requiring them to onboard as a licensed user," he says. "With this new feature, there is not 20 steps anymore. It is just instant, but preserving that encryption, simplifying the secure-sharing process, and eliminating the need to send private information over text messages."

**Credential Theft Is Big Business**

Supply chain breaches, stolen credentials, and the proliferation of software keys and secrets continue to undermine IT and data security. In March, secrets-detection firm GitGuardian found that developers leaked 50% more credentials, access tokens, and API keys in 2021, compared to 2020. Overall, 3 out of every 1,000 commits exposed a sensitive password, key, or credential, the company said at the time.

Failing to protect software secrets, user passwords, and machine credentials can lead to compromises of application infrastructure and development environments. Attackers have increasingly targeted identities and credentials as a way to gain initial access to corporate networks. Last week, for example, software security firm Sonatype discovered that at least five malicious Python packages attempt to exfiltrate secrets and environment variables for Amazon environments.

"It remains yet to be known who the actors behind these packages are and what is their ultimate goal," Sonatype stated in an advisory on the issue. "Were the stolen credentials being intentionally exposed on the web or a consequence of poor OpSec practices?"

**How Zero-Knowledge Encryption Protects Credentials**

Managing the access credentials for data means avoiding centralized storage of sensitive keys — a security advantage of zero-knowledge encryption (ZKE) — and regularly expiring keys so that former contractors, partners, and employees no longer have access to data. ZKE breaks up keys in specific ways, using both cryptography and tokenization, to prevent any device or database from having all the necessary information to reconstitute the master keys to unlock data.

    

Source: Keeper Security

The move to de-emphasize master passwords and keys is part of the cybersecurity industry's effort to create a passwordless security infrastructure. Yet, in the end, most enterprises rely on some sort of password to secure massive stores of keys or unlock cloud IAM services, says Lurey.

"Every year, the platforms try to come up with new schemes to bury the password, \[but\] at the end of the day, those platforms still rely on passwords, especially for account recovery," he says. "There is a growing number of passwords and secrets that everyone has to deal with, whether you are on the tech side and you have to deal with API keys and software secrets, or on the personal side and the growing number of sites that require personal or private information."

Creating a zero-knowledge way of managing secrets and offering one-use, temporary passwords requires significant design effort and a move away from the consolidation among large brands that are assuming the mantles of identity providers, Lurey says.

"The reason why the password continues to be popular is because it is something that you have that can be used to encrypt and decrypt data at the end of the day," he says. "The passkeys, which are just passwords, are being stored by Apple, Google, and Microsoft, so those are being synched with other devices and onboard devices, but how do you sync those secrets — it is basically a rabbit hole of authentication issues."

**The Passwordless Path Ahead**

The focus on ZKE is relatively new, and the vast majority of companies protect their secrets using key management systems, says Andras Cser, vice president and principal analyst for security and risk at Forrester Research. The focus on passwordless technologies typically involves biometrics, QR-code-based authentication, pushing authentication tokens to mobile devices, and sending one-time passwords via e-mail or text message, he says.

"Because of phishing issues, OTP and passwordless is slowly replacing the static password for authentication. Identity management and governance (IMG) to onboard, review, and off-board contractors and third parties for access is very important in this flow," Cser says.

Whether ZKE takes off will likely depend on whether third-party identity services using de facto standards, such as the FIDO2 and WebAuthn passwordless standards, gain popularity. In a white paper acknowledging the slow adoption of FIDO and the future integration with WebAuthn, the FIDO Alliance outlined what its passwordless future would look like, using mobile devices as standardized authenticators and allowing credentials to be synced across devices.

The changes will make "FIDO the first authentication technology that can match the ubiquity of passwords, without the inherent risks and phishability," the white paper stated.

Can Zero-Knowledge Crypto Solve Our Password Problems?

Like a hydra, every time one ransomware gang drops out (REvil or Conti), plenty more step up to fill the void (Black Basta).

After a 2021 beleaguered by ransomware, attack volumes continue to balloon in 2022. In fact, a report issued Tuesday indicates that in just the first three months of this year, the volume of ransomware detections almost doubled the total volume reported for all of last year. 

The increasingly high numbers came in spite of what appeared to be the downfall of a major ransomware group at the end of 2021: REvil. This serves as a testament to the persistence of criminal actors in reforming, rebranding, and regrouping their criminal gangs to profit handsomely off of ransomware tactics.

This persistence has been studied most recently by security researchers who have noted the rapid rise of the Black Basta ransomware gang in the past two months, quickly following the emergence of the LAPSUS$ group earlier in the year.

**Ransomware 2022 Volumes: Up, Up, Up**

The numbers today come by way of the quarterly "Internet Security Report" from WatchGuard Threat Lab, which examines Q1 2022 threat trends. Researchers with the firm report that unique ransomware detections in the first three months of the year were triple the volume of the same time period in 2021. Meantime, Q1 2022 ransomware volume equaled more than 80% of the total volume recorded in all of 2021.

“Based on the early spike in ransomware this year and data from previous quarters, we predict 2022 will break our record for annual ransomware detections,” says WatchGuard chief security officer Corey Nachreiner, noting that the last annual high-water mark for ransomware volume came back in 2018.

**LAPSUS$ Steps Up in the Underground Economy**

The report from his team explains that even in the face of high-profile arrests and charges made by US and Russian authorities in late 2021 and early 2022 that resulted in the disruption of the prolific REvil ransomware gang, the ransomware hits keep coming. Their analysis shows that REvil’s disruption “opened the door” for LAPSUS$ to emerge in a big way.

“The LAPSUS$ group made global headlines with their double-extortion ransomware techniques that caused cybersecurity decision-makers to take notice,” the report states. “The group was known to hire employees of organizations to steal information from the inside and then use extortion techniques to blackmail victim organizations. Their victim list also put decision makers on notice. Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Ubisoft, Okta, and T-Mobile are all victims of LAPSUS$.”

This kind of resurgence of new groups should dampen security teams' celebrations of the demise of groups like REvil and Conti, which in May were reported to have shut down their operations. Stats from NCC Group show a slight dip in attacks that month, with a warning that other heads of the ransomware gang Hydra were already starting to emerge.

**Black Basta: New Kid on the Ransomware Block**

Most recently, the Black Basta ransomware gang has surged into the scene. Earlier in the month, two separate reports from Uptycs and NCC Group showed that Black Basta was targeting ESXi-based systems and servers among other victims, and leveraging the Qbot malware family (aka Qakbot) to maintain persistence on networks it goes after. 

"While Black Basta isn't the first to develop capabilities against ESXi (LockBit, Hive, and Cheerscrypt already have demonstrated ESXi capabilities), this shows the relative sophistication of the teams working under Black Basta performing the ransomware operations," said Jake Williams, executive director of cyber threat intelligence at SCYTHE, in a statement provided to Dark Reading. "Use of commodity malware like Qakbot demonstrates that there is no such thing as a 'commodity' malware infection. Organizations must treat every malware detection as an opportunity for a threat actor to deploy ransomware."

Meantime, an advisory report from the Cybereason Nocturnus research team last week offered further details about Black Basta’s tactics, techniques, and procedures. They deemed the threat from the group to be highly severe, as it has victimized more than 50 companies in English-speaking countries worldwide since April. Researchers said the hallmark of the firm is its use of double extortion – i.e., stealing sensitive files and information and using it to extort victims by threatening publication of the details unless a ransom is paid. The amounts asked for are often in the millions.

The sudden rise of Black Basta has some speculating that the group is actually just a regrouping of the two most recently disbanded groups.

“Due to their rapid ascension and the precision of their attacks, Black Basta is likely operated by former members of the defunct Conti and REvil gangs, the two most profitable ransomware gangs in 2021,” says Lior Div, CEO of Cybereason.

Ransomware Volume Nearly Doubles 2021 Totals in a Single Quarter

‘Manual workaround’ kickstarts phased recovery after cybercrooks disrupt meal provision to vulnerable people

‘Manual workaround’ kickstarts phased recovery after cybercrooks disrupt meal provision to vulnerable people

Deliveries of prepared meals to thousands of vulnerable people in England continue to be disrupted following a “sophisticated” cyber-attack on food distributor Apetito.

Apetito’s impacted UK arm delivers ready meals to hospitals, care homes, schools, childcare facilities, and the homes of vulnerable people across the west of England.

In an update (PDF) posted to its website yesterday (June 27), Paul Freeston, chair and CEO of Apetito UK and North America, reiterated that the firm would be unable to fulfill deliveries until and including Thursday June 30 following the cyber-attack over the weekend.

He advised customers with “deliveries on these days to make contingency plans”.

Freeston added that “a limited number of test deliveries from a manual system will be made tomorrow”, and if successful, “we hope to extend \[this system\] further this week”.

**Emergency procedures**

Freeston said on Sunday that the company had activated “emergency procedures” to ensure “most” customers of meals on wheels (home-delivered hot food) should still receive a meal – “although it may not be the meal they chose”.

Apetito subsidiary Wiltshire Farm Foods, which delivers frozen ready meals to the homes of mostly vulnerable people, usually seniors, managed to make “a limited number of local deliveries” yesterday using “a manual work-around system” that would “continue this week”.

Read more of the latest cyber-attack news

As expected, Monday’s Apetito deliveries to businesses, including other ‘meals-on-wheels’ operators, proceeded normally “as these orders were already picked” before systems were disrupted.

On the production front, “a significant but restricted” program was up and running as of yesterday.

Meal orders submitted by businesses after 7.30pm on Friday “should be assumed not to have been received”, said Freeston.

Wiltshire Farm Foods is apparently unable to take orders over the phone or via its website and app, with fulfilment new orders expected to resume from July 4.

**‘Designed to extort money’**

Apetito, announced on Sunday (June 26) that it shut down many IT systems following the cyber-attack, which was “designed to extort money from the company”.

The company said it was “building new hardware and software to replace the affected systems”, which did not include its UK Microsoft systems, while “email communication is fully functional”.

RELATED Ransomware market evolution results in fewer variants, but rise in off-the-shelf cybercrime kits continues

It was also “seeking to establish whether any personally identifiable information (PII) has been compromised” and would alert customers and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if necessary.

Freeston said he was confident that payment card data was not compromised since this data was not held on Apetito’s systems.

“Our crisis management team is meeting multiple times each day to review progress, direct resources and respond to emerging issues”, he continued, adding that Apetito would continue providing updates at least daily.

“I would like to thank our customers and other contacts who are being so supportive during this issue. Our team continue to work tirelessly on the recovery and I am very grateful for their amazing efforts.”

Apetito declined to comment further when contacted by The Daily Swig.

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Abuse primitives have a longer shelf life than bugs and zero-days and are cheaper to maintain. They're also much harder for defenders to detect and block.

Microsoft's cloud services revenue grew 46% in the first quarter of 2022, and its cloud market share has increased by almost 9% since 2017. With Azure finally being used in earnest by the mainstream, now is the ideal time to get involved in Azure abuse research. There are many undiscovered abuse primitives out there, a lot of misconfiguration debt built up, and growing numbers of adversaries starting to target Azure more seriously.

Why spend time looking for abuse primitives rather than bugs or software exploits? Abuses have a much longer shelf life than bugs and zero-days, and they're cheaper to maintain. More importantly for attackers, they exist in nearly all implementations of the software in question and are much harder for defenders to detect and block. That's why it's vital for researchers to uncover new abuse options so they can be fixed or mitigated.

Here's my five-step process for researching a specific system within Azure and trying to find new attack primitives. Following this approach will help you save time, stay on track, and produce better results.

**Step One: Begin With the End in Mind**

First, you'll need to gain an understanding of how your system of choice works, how it interacts with other systems in Azure, and how it can be abused. Beyond that, think about what your final product will be — a blog post? A conference session? Defensive remediation guidelines or updates to an open source tool? Determine what's needed to create these assets. Consider producing audit code as well, so defenders can check for these dangerous configurations, and abuse code, too, so others can easily verify how these configurations can be abused. These are the "success criteria" for your research that will help you maintain focus, avoid unnecessary rabbit holes, and ensure a valuable end result.

**Step Two: Study the Intent and Design of the System**

Once you know exactly what you need to discover, begin research just like anyone else would — doing Google searches and reading official documentation. Look for anything that seems abusable (like the ability to reset passwords and permissions required), dig further into those, and take notes as you go.

Use LinkedIn to identify any product architects or other Microsoft staff involved in creating the subject of your study. Review their LinkedIn and Twitter feeds and look for the resources they've authored or reposted (blog posts, conference presentations, etc.). Delve into community resources like forums or GitHub repositories associated with this service, as these user groups are generally much more open in their discourse around problems and weaknesses than the Microsoft folks. Keep taking notes on the system. Once you can speak intelligently about the architecture and intent of the system and write a highly accurate, nontechnical brief about it, you're ready to move on.

**Step Three: Explore the System**

Documentation can only take you so far — it doesn't keep up with changes in Azure and there are almost always hidden connections that go undocumented. It's tempting to jump straight into this step, but without the context on the system that you built through research, you'll probably waste a lot of time.

Start exploring the system with the easiest interface — often this is the Azure portal GUI. If you bring up the Developer tools in the Chrome browser, you can see all the API requests that the browser is making. Copy them to PowerShell and you'll have a good start to building your own client. Use the official CLI tools in Azure (az binary, the Az PowerShell module, and Azure AD PowerShell module).  

When you’ve explored enough that you can build your own basic client to interact with the system, it’s time to proceed. This provides a foundation for a more mature client, and for automating the process of testing abuse capabilities.

**Step Four: Catalog Abuse Capabilities**

Now you can use your client to enumerate all the permissions that that system can assign, and test the abuse primitives you already know about against each of those permissions (e.g., can you promote yourself to global admin or change a global admin’s password?). Keep an eye out for other abuse primitives that might present themselves during your research — and test them as well to reveal any discrepancies between what the official documentation says and how things work in reality.

Realistically, you’ll need to automate this process. When I went through this research methodology examining the Azure Graph API, I had a list of about 175 permissions and a dozen abuse primitives to test against each of them … you do the math.

**Step Five: Share Findings**

The final step is to help others learn from your work. Write a blog post, do a talk and/or share your code. The point is to help others save time and expand or add on to your work. Think of it as writing the blog post you needed at the start of your research.

To learn more, watch a talk I gave on this topic (and access the accompanying deck). Inspired to start researching Azure abuses? Here are some useful websites to find technical content around Azure security: The Lazy Administrator, Good Workaround!, AZAdvertizer, Thomas Van Laere, and Microsoft Portals.

How to Find New Attack Primitives in Microsoft Azure

Researchers have created a new community website for reporting and tracking security issues in cloud platforms and services — plus fixes for them where available.

Organizations traditionally have struggled to track vulnerabilities in public cloud platforms and services because of the lack of a common vulnerability enumeration (CVE) program like the one that MITRE maintains for publicly disclosed software security issues.

A new community-based database launched this week seeks to begin addressing that issue by providing a central repository of information on known cloud service-provider security issues and the steps organizations can take to mitigate them.

The database — cloudvulndb.org — is the brainchild of security researchers at Wiz, who for some time have been advocating the need for a public catalog of known security flaws on platforms and services run by the likes of AWS, Microsoft, and Google. The database currently lists some 70 cloud security issues and vulnerabilities that security researcher Scott Piper had previously compiled in a document on GitHub titled "Cloud Service Provider security mistakes." Going forward, anyone is free to suggest new issues to add to the website or to suggest new fixes to existing issues. The goal is to list issues that a cloud service provider might have already addressed.

**Centralized Vulnerability Repository**

"The centralized database can help organizations review all past security issues in their \[cloud service provider\] at any time and check if they have not applied necessary remediation actions," says Alon Schindel, director of data and threat research at Wiz. "For example, organizations can check if they were using a certain service during a critical security issue’s exploitability period and use the recommended detection methods — if available — to check if they were affected."

For now, the vulnerability database site does not have a system in place to automatically notify users when new security issues are added to it. But the goal is to add an RSS feed or mailing list for that purpose, says Schindel, one of the maintainers of the new database.

Schindel — like many other researchers — has noted how the lack of a formal and standardized system for publicly recording cloud security issues, and sharing information about them, is heightening risks for organizations. In a blog last November, Schindel and another Wiz researcher pointed to vulnerabilities — such as one dubbed ChaosDB in Microsoft Azure and another called OMIGOD in Microsoft Azure — as specific reasons why a cloud vulnerability database has become a critical industry necessity. Both vulnerabilities were serious. And unlike many cloud vulnerabilities, the responsibility for mitigating risk with both vulnerabilities rested not just with the cloud provider but also with their customers.

ChaosDB impacted four Azure services and gave users overly permissive access to storage buckets belonging to other cloud tenants. OMIGOD was a set of four flaws in OMI, a Microsoft cloud middleware technology, that enabled remote code execution and privilege escalation. Though Azure and Microsoft addressed the vulnerabilities promptly, many organizations using the affected services had limited information on the changes they needed to make to address them, the Wiz researchers said.

"Typically, cloud service provider security issues do not have a patch in the traditional sense, as issues are fixed internally by the CSP without the need for any manual user action," Schindel says. But no CVEs mean that there are no industry conventions for assessing severity, no proper notification channels, and no unified tracking mechanisms. 

"This means that it’s difficult for a cloud customer to answer otherwise simple questions like, 'Is my environment currently vulnerable to this?' or, 'Was it ever vulnerable to this?'" he adds.

**Inconsistent Practices**

Currently all major CSPs accept responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities, and some have an official bug bounty or vulnerability reward program in place. Occasionally, a cloud service provider might even publish details of a fix they might have developed for a reported security vulnerability. However, there is little consistency among the various providers, Schindel says. 

"Notification channels vary; vendors usually email affected customers only or send them a notification through a service health system," he says.

Wiz has been unable to find any consistency in the publication cadence of security issues of the different CSPs, though Microsoft usually included fixes for Azure vulnerability in its monthly patch release cycle.

Wiz will maintain the new site, though anyone is free to contribute to it. The goal is to try and get major CSPs to engage with the effort or to use the site to provide more transparency around vulnerabilities discovered in their services. This can include information such as indicating the time periods during which a security issue might have been exploitable. 

"We also hope that the value of such a database will help CSPs standardize their security issues publication processes," he says.

New Vulnerability Database Catalogs Cloud Security Issues

RaaS model continues to be adopted by criminals looking to maximize their ROI, new study indicates

RaaS model continues to be adopted by criminals looking to maximize their ROI, new study indicates

The number of new ransomware families and unique variants has fallen over the last year, according to new research from WithSecure.

The company, formerly known as F-Secure Business, says in its latest Ransomware Threat Update (PDF) that the number of new families and unique variants appearing each year peaked around 2017, but stayed relatively stable for most of the second half of the last decade.

Last year, though, saw a significant drop in the amount of new ransomware families discovered by the researchers.

The main reason, says the firm, appears to be a consolidation of efforts by attackers, who are increasingly exploiting off-the-shelf Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) packages.

**RELATED** DBIR 2022: Ransomware surge increases global data breach woes

“These days, cybercriminals are often operating as organisations, and they want to maximise their ROI,” Paolo Palumbo, vice president of WithSecure’s Tactical Defense Unit, tells _The Daily Swig_.

“In this sense, they are focusing their resources on getting a foothold in a victim’s system, rather than developing their own ransomware. People often forget that this isn’t a game of who makes the best ransomware – it’s about getting money out of victims.”

**Rise of RaaS**

Importantly, Palumbo says that the fall in the number of ransomware families doesn’t necessarily imply a fall in the number of attackers.

“Like many other businesses, cybercriminals are taking advantage of specialist tech vendors who prepare readily-available platforms to conduct these types of scams and attacks,” he says.

“But we shouldn’t assume it makes the users of these systems incompetent or any less expert.”

Read more of the latest infosec research news

Ransomware was the most widespread threat type identified in 2021, accounting for nearly 17% of identified threats.

And WannaCry was the most prevalent ransomware family – by a considerable margin, accounting for more than half of non-generic ransomware detections.

This was followed by three RaaS families: GandCrab, REvil, and Phobos.

**Double extortion**

In terms of tactics, threat actors are increasingly finding new ways of extorting cash from victims, for example by stealing data before encryption and threatening to leak it, with Maze and REvil the most notable examples of what’s been dubbed ‘double extortion’.

Malicious Microsoft Office documents and downloads were the most commonly observed ransomware attack vectors in 2021, followed by exploiting vulnerabilities and accessing networks via exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) ports.

WithSecure points out that many of these vectors rely on unpatched vulnerabilities – particularly in internet-facing infrastructure – poor password hygiene, lack of multi-factor authentication to secure online accounts, and other weaknesses that organizations should be able to address.

Meanwhile, says Palumbo, governments have their part to play.

“The role of governments and agencies is extremely important and multi-faceted,” he says.

“They need to continue pushing the importance of cybersecurity education and hygiene for both individuals and organizations, making it more difficult for cybercriminals to take advantage and extort money.”

**DON’T MISS** Researchers crack MEGA’s ‘privacy by design’ storage, encryption

Ransomware market evolution results in fewer variants, but rise in off-the-shelf cybercrime kits continues

Entities located in Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Pakistan are in the crosshairs of an attack campaign that targets unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as an initial access vector to deploy the ShadowPad malware.
Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which first detected the activity in mid-October 2021, attributed it to a previously unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor. Targets include

Entities located in Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Pakistan are in the crosshairs of an attack campaign that targets unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as an initial access vector to deploy the ShadowPad malware.

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which first detected the activity in mid-October 2021, attributed it to a previously unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor. Targets include organizations in the telecommunications, manufacturing, and transport sectors.

"During the initial attacks, the group exploited an MS Exchange vulnerability to deploy ShadowPad malware and infiltrated building automation systems of one of the victims," the company said. "By taking control over those systems, the attacker can reach other, even more sensitive systems of the attacked organization."

ShadowPad, which emerged in 2015 as the successor to PlugX, is a privately sold modular malware platform that has been put to use by many Chinese espionage actors over the years.

While its design allows users to remotely deploy additional plugins that can extend its functionality beyond covert data collection, what makes ShadowPad dangerous is the anti-forensic and anti-analysis technique incorporated into the malware.

"During the attacks of the observed actor, the ShadowPad backdoor was downloaded onto the attacked computers under the guise of legitimate software," Kaspersky said. "In many cases, the attacking group exploited a known vulnerability in MS Exchange, and entered the commands manually, indicating the highly targeted nature of their campaigns."

Evidence suggests that intrusions mounted by the adversary began in March 2021, right around the time the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities in Exchange Servers became public knowledge. Some of the targets are said to have been breached by exploiting CVE-2021-26855, a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the mail server.

Besides deploying ShadowPad as "mscoree.dll," an authentic Microsoft .NET Framework component, the attacks also involved the use of Cobalt Strike, a PlugX variant called THOR, and web shells for remote access.

Although the final goals of the campaign remain unknown, the attackers are believed to be interested in long-term intelligence gathering.

"Building automation systems are rare targets for advanced threat actors," Kaspersky ICS CERT researcher Kirill Kruglov said. "However, those systems can be a valuable source of highly confidential information and may provide the attackers with a backdoor to other, more secured, areas of infrastructures."

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APT Hackers Targeting Industrial Control Systems with ShadowPad Backdoor

Under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD), cloud-security vendor Palo Alto Networks informed Microsoft of an issue affecting Service Fabric (SF) Linux clusters (CVE-2022-30137). The vulnerability enables a bad actor, with access to a compromised container, to escalate privileges and gain control of the resource’s host SF node and the entire cluster.

Under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD), cloud-security vendor Palo Alto Networks informed Microsoft of an issue affecting Service Fabric (SF) Linux clusters (CVE-2022-30137). The vulnerability enables a bad actor, with access to a compromised container, to escalate privileges and gain control of the resource’s host SF node and the entire cluster.

Though the bug exists on both Operating System (OS) platforms, it is only exploitable on Linux; Windows has been thoroughly vetted and found not to be vulnerable to this attack. The fix for this privilege escalation issue was made available on 26 May 2022 and has been applied to all customers subscribed to automatic updates.

**Customer Impact Customer Impact**

Customers without automatic updates enabled should upgrade their Linux clusters to the most recent SF release. Release notes can be found here. **Customers whose Linux clusters are automatically updated do not need to take further action**.

Additionally, if you are running SF Windows clusters, you are not impacted by this issue. However, we always recommend staying updated to the latest release.

Microsoft recommends that customers continue to review all containerized workloads (both Linux and Windows) which are permitted access to their host clusters. By default, a SF cluster is a single-tenant environment and thus there is no isolation between applications. Creating isolation is possible and additional guidance on hosting untrusted code can be found on the Azure Service Fabric security best practices page.

**Microsoft’s Mitigation Microsoft’s Mitigation**

Once this issue was reported to Microsoft, we took the following steps to investigate and mitigate the issue:

*   **24 May 2022** - We fixed the privilege escalation bug in the SF runtime and started updating the customers with automated updates enabled; specifically, the SF Diagnostics Collection Agent (DCA) was changed to not consume user-generated files written into the container’s log folder.
*   **09 Jun 2022** - We updated our public security guidanceincluding details regarding the implications of hosting untrusted code or having one’s containers compromised.
*   **14 Jun 2022** - CVE-2022-30137 was published for this issue and the fixes were deployed to customers leveraging automatic updates. Customers without automatic updates received portal notifications through Azure Service Health.

**Technical Details Technical Details**

For an attack to be successful on the vulnerability, these ordered steps are required:

*   **Step 1** : An attacker must compromise a containerized workload deployed by the owner of a Linux SF cluster.
    
*   **Step 2** : The hostile code running inside the container could substitute an index file read by DCA with a symlink.
    
*   Using an additional timing attack, an attacker could gain control of the machine hosting the SF node.
    

By design, root access on the machine hosting the SF node is not considered a security boundary in an SF cluster; the highest privileged role on a node is equally privileged anywhere in the same cluster.

Palo Alto Networks posted a blog about this issue available here. We appreciate the opportunity to investigate the findings reported by Palo Alto Networks and thank them for practicing safe security research under the terms of our bug bounty program. More information about the Microsoft Bug Bounty Program and the program’s Terms and Conditions can be found using these links.

**Additional references Additional references**

*   Microsoft published CVE-2022-30137
*   Azure Service Fabric release notes

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