Tag Archive for: RamsomeWare

Hackers use NSA’s leaked EternalBlue exploit to power more malicious payloads

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Hackers are expanding the use of EternalBlue, the leaked NSA hacking exploit that was thrust into the spotlight in May with its initial use in the WannaCry ransomware and Adylkuzz cryptocurrencyminer.

Security researchers have now found threat actors exploiting the vulnerability in Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to distribute other malicious payloads including Backdoor.Nitol and Trojan Gh0st RAT.

Backdoor.Nitol is a Trojan horse that opens a backdoor on the infected computer. Gh0st RAT is a remote access trojan that has been making the rounds for years to target Windows machines and is capable of giving attackers full access and control of an infected machine. It has also been used in extensive cyber espionage and data stealing campaigns.

According to security firm FireEye, both the well-known payloads have been previously used in cyberattacks targeting the aerospace and defence industry with Gh0st RAT targeting government agencies and activists as well.

“We observed lab machines vulnerable to the SMB exploit were attacked by a threat actor using the EternalBlue exploit to gain shell access to the machine,” FireEye researchers said in blogpost. “The initial exploit technique used at the SMB level is similar to what we have been seen in WannaCry campaigns.

“However, once a machine is successfully infected, this particular attack opens a shell to write instructions into a VBScript file and then executes it to fetch the payload on another server.”

Researchers said the combination of EternalBlue and VBScript has been used to distribute Gh0st RAT in Singapore and Backdoor.Nitol in the South Asia region.

EternalBlue came as part of the cache of alleged NSA hacking tools released by notorious hacking group Shadow Brokers in April.

Security researchers warned that with EternalBlue exploit now released and available for any threat actors to target, it is likely that it will be used in new sophisticated and more frequent cyberattacks.

“The addition of the EternalBlue exploit to Metasploit has made it easy for threat actors to exploit these vulnerabilities,” FireEye said. “In the coming weeks and months, we expect to see more attackers leveraging these vulnerabilities and to spread such infections with different payloads.

“It is critical that Microsoft Windows users patch their machines and update to the latest software versions as soon as possible.”

IBTimes

3 Cybersecurity Practices That Small Businesses Need to Consider Now

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All businesses, regardless of size, are susceptible to a cyberattack. Anyone associated with a company, from executive to customer, can be a potential target. The hacking threat is particularly dangerous to small businesses who may not have the resources to protect against an attack let alone ransomware.

Norman Guadagno, a senior marketing officer at Carbonite, has said that “almost one in five small business owners say their company has had a loss of data in the past year,” with each data hack costing anything ranging $100,000 to $400,000 [about ₦37,500,000 to ₦150,000,000]. It, therefore, pays to understand cybersecurity to better protect you and your business.

Ransomeware Risks
Ransomware attacks can be especially devastating for small business owners. When hackers seize your data, encrypt it, and demand money in exchange for the key to unlock that data, you are truly at the mercy of the criminals.

Given that smaller businesses are likely to have weaker protection than larger ones, it is important that adequate steps are taken to properly secure your information. Ensure that software and hardware is up to date and change passwords often.

Cloud-Based Security
Using some sort of central data vault is a popular solution for business security. There are a great many companies which provide this service, from the large Nokia Networks to smaller bespoke groups.

The advantage of this approach is that you will have access to the cyber expertise of the vault company while also possessing a significant degree of control over the cloud system you will be using. The disadvantage is that adopting this approach does not make your company immune to hackers since there are points of attack either at the vault company or at your own. But you are at least in expert hands.

Biometric Security
Smartphones are already using thumbprints for user identification purposes, but 2017 promises to deliver even more advancements along these lines. Biometric systems will be able to analyze and evaluate every part of your company’s security features. Touch pads will have sensors able to identify a user from their computer habits like typing speed and even online browsing taste.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is such that security measures are under increasing scrutiny as multiple devices, over ever-expanding distances, can be linked together. This facilitates speedier data sharing and storage as the hardware (and the businesses using the hardware) becomes more familiar to users. But it also means that device-level security must be effective if it is to minimize the risk of an effective cyber attack – multiple-factor authentication is needed.

Increased Automation Assists Security Staff
Biometrics, the cloud, and the increasing prevalence of the IoT are signposting an expanding role for automation in cybersecurity. When the smart systems already mentioned combined with the human element of a security process, a strong deterrent against criminals can be created. Automated technology constantly reviews your protection arrangements, looking for possible gaps and plugging them. The use of these systems complements the work of your staff and safeguards your business against all but the most determined attackers.

Cybersecurity is evolving as it tries to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated hack attacks. This is why it is important to secure your business effectively by taking expert advice. The cost to businesses of cyberattacks is already monumental, and it is growing. Consumers are also becoming more aware of the dangers of computer crime and they will often take their custom to those businesses which take data security seriously. Being small is no excuse for businesses – they must pay heed to industry advice and ensure that they are properly protected against cybercrime in 2017.

Tech.co

Windows 7, not XP, was the reason last week’s WCry worm spread so widely

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Wanacry stats

Eight days ago, the WCry ransomware worm attacked more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries. The outbreak prompted infected hospitals to turn away patients and shut down computers in banks and telecoms. Now that researchers have had time to analyze the self-replicating attack, they’re learning details that shed new and sometimes surprising light on the world’s biggest ransomware attack.

Chief among the revelations: more than 97 percent of infections hit computers running Windows 7, according to attacks seen by antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. By contrast, infected Windows XP machines were practically non-existent, and those XP PCs that were compromised were likely manually infected by their owners for testing purposes. That’s according to Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team, who spoke to Ars.

While the estimates are based only on computers that run Kaspersky software, as opposed to all computers on the Internet, there’s little question Windows 7 was overwhelmingly affected by WCry, which is also known as “WannaCry” and “WannaCrypt.” Security ratings firm BitSight found that 67 percent of infections hit Windows 7, Reuters reported.

The figures challenge the widely repeated perception that the outbreak was largely the result of end users who continued to deploy Windows XP, a Windows version Microsoft decommissioned three years ago. In fact, researchers now say, XP was largely untouched by last week’s worm because PCs crashed before WCry could take hold. Instead, it now appears, the leading contributor to the virally spreading infection were Windows 7 machines that hadn’t installed a critical security patch Microsoft issued in March

The Kaspersky figures are illuminating because they show Windows 7 x64 Edition, which is widely used by large organizations, being infected close to twice as much as Windows 7 versions mostly used in homes and small offices. It’s not clear if that means enterprises are less likely to patch or if there are other explanations.

Also on Friday, researchers published convincing evidence that malicious spam e-mails played no role in initially seeding last week’s ransomware worm. Rather, according to a blog post published by AV provider Malwarebytes, it spread through a mechanism that scanned the Internet for computers with open Server Message Block ports. The worm then used a modified version of “EternalBlue,”—the advanced SMB exploit that was developed by the National Security Agency and leaked by the Shadow Brokers group—to install WCry on vulnerable computers. From there, WCry propagated from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine inside local networks.

“Developing a well-crafted campaign to identify just… a few thousand vulnerable machines would allow for the widespread distribution of this malware on the scale and speed that we saw with this particular ransomware variant,” Malwarebytes Senior Malware Intelligence Analyst Adam McNeil wrote.

A third revelation: more people than previously known may have been repackaging EternalBlue and other recently leaked NSA exploits in the weeks before the WCry outbreak. Security firm Secdo said on Friday that it unearthed evidence showing that multiple groups exploited the SMB vulnerabilities to install a separate ransomware package, steal login credentials, and to conscript computers into a botnet.

According to Secdo researcher Gil Barak:

Based on these findings, we suspect that the scope of the damage is much greater than previously thought and that there are at least three different groups that have been leveraging the NSA exploit to infect enterprise networks since late April… These attacks demonstrate that many endpoints may still be compromised despite having installed the latest security patch.

Researchers from a separate security firm already showed that criminals were using EternalBlue to make vulnerable computers part of a cryptocurrency mining botnet. A Secdo representative said the attacks the company reported occurred around the same time.

Meanwhile, EternalRocks—a separate self-replicating exploit also developed by the NSA and released in last month’s Shadow Brokers release—is also being repackaged in active attacks. Researcher Miroslav Stampar has details here.

Finally, as reported by Wired on Friday, attackers have been using a knock-off of the powerful Mirai Internet-of-things botnet to attack two servers that are currently preventing WCry and a WCry copycat variant from spreading. Before executing on a vulnerable computer, the worms are programmed to reach out to hardcoded domain names. If the domains respond, the worm aborts without infecting or spreading. Researchers suspect developers intended the mechanism to function as a killswitch they could use to stop the worm, should attackers lose control of it. Should the distributed denial-of-service attacks knock the servers out of commission, there is the possibility the self-replicating infections could start again.

MalwareTech, the pseudonymous researcher who registered the domain that stopped last Friday’s WCry worm, said he’s not concerned about the attacks. He explained to Ars: “at this point, very few samples are actually spreading, so even if the sinkhole were to go offline, the damage would be limited.”

Just to be on the safe side, he has sought the help of an unnamed DDoS mitigation service.

7 Steps to Fight Ransomware

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Ransomware can be a highly lucrative system for extracting money from a customer. Victims are faced with an unpleasant choice: either pay the ransom or lose access to the encrypted files forever. Until now, ransomware has appeared to be opportunistic and driven through random phishing campaigns. These campaigns often, but not always, rely on large numbers of emails that are harvested without a singular focus on a company or individual.

As ransomware perpetrators continue to hone their skills, we’re seeing a shift to more specific targets. The driver of this shift is the realization that companies, especially larger ones, are much higher-value targets than an average individual and are thus able to pay significantly higher ransoms.

This change has elevated the need for companies to strengthen their defensive strategies. Executives must allocate resources and ensure strategies are active against ransomware intent on paralyzing their organization.

The best defensive strategies should include the following:

1. Provide user awareness training and friendly testing. This can reduce the human attack surface.

2. Maintain a comprehensive patch management program to keep all systems up to date and reduce the endpoint attack surface.

3. Limit users’ privilege and network drive connectivity to the minimum essential for job requirements.

4. Conduct frequent backups and store them offline because many ransomware variants will spread through drive shares and can even reconnect a disconnected drive share.

5. Use network segmentation that requires authentication. For example, a user must enter a password before traversing the network. This will reduce the network attack surface.

6. Deploy advanced threat intelligence tools. Threat intelligence can be used to identify IP addresses of known command and control sites. Blocking these sites can potentially prevent malware from being able to establish its encryption routine. It’s important to note this strategy may not work on some newer versions of ransomware that operate independently and create their own encryption keys without having to communicate with a command and control server.

7. Lastly, as a final fallback, know how to buy Bitcoin (or Monero, which is emerging as an alternative means of payment.) Consider pre-purchasing some in advance in the event a ransom needs to be paid on short notice.

Should you pay the ransom to continue operations, or do you refuse to pay it as a matter of principle? The tie-breaker is the cost of downtime — measured potentially in the range of thousands of dollars per hour. One should establish in advance the financial impact of losing access to critical information or business processes, and work through the decision before facing a crisis.

Ransomware is a clear and present danger. Companies can no longer afford to take a wait-and-see attitude. If you’re vulnerable to ransomware and take no precautions to mitigate those vulnerabilities, then the only thing you’re relying upon to prevent an infection is hope — and hope is not a strategy. By implementing the seven defensive actions listed above you can greatly reduce, and potentially eliminate, vulnerabilities. Review the list again, and remember that increased security awareness training with testing can be your most effective defense.

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