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Date: 6/20/2022
In early March, security firm Volexity detected a sophisticated attack campaign against high profile clients by multiple Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. Specifically, Volexity has attributed many of these attacks to CVE-2022-1040, a zero-day vulnerability in the Sophos firewall product.
Additionally noted was the used of the Behinder framework – a webshell management tool often deployed by APT groups.
The Sophos firewall vulnerability gave attackers remote control via webshell to target infrastructures. This allowed for unprecedented exfiltration abilities. Many attacks have seen the use of man-in-the-middle (MitM) activity by changing DNS responses for specific websites owned by compromised victims. This allows the interception of user credentials and session cookies. After compromising website accounts, many attacks saw the installation of File Manager plugins which were then used for file/data exfiltration.
Organizations should verify than any deployed Sophos firewall are properly patched and up to date. Additionally conducting routine threat intelligence gathering on the organization’s tech stack products is highly recommended to stay on top of critical vulnerability announcements.
Organizations should also deploy advanced network security monitoring mechanisms that detect and log traffic from gateway devices.
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Sources
https://cyware.com/news/chinese-hackers-abuse-zero-day-bug-in-sophos-firewall-4cd59594
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sophos-firewall-zero-day-bug-exploited-weeks-before-fix/
https://www.volexity.com/blog/2022/06/15/driftingcloud-zero-day-sophos-firewall-exploitation-and-an-insidious-breach/
In early 2021 security researchers noticed a new malware-as-a-service project now named Matanbuchus. Matanbuchus has since then been analyzed by Palo Alto Network’s Unit 42, who have mapped many parts of its infrastructure. However, recently an uptick in Matanbuchus-based attacks has been seen, which combine the deployment of Cobalt Strike. This uptick has been attributed to an ongoing phishing campaign that lures users into interaction with malicious emails by emulating replies to previous emails, often featuring a ‘RE:’ subject line.
These emails often carry a ZIP attachment containing a HTML file. This HTML file, if interacted with, will generate a second ZIP archive which carries the malicious MSI package malware. Additionally, this MSI has a valid digital certificate issued by DigiCert with a “Westeast Tech Consulting, Crop” attribute.
If ran, the MSI package will deploy two Matanbuchus DLL payloads, a scheduled task, and establish command and Control (C2) communications primarily with Cobalt Strike.
This new Matanbuchus phishing campaign has been shown to be successful at a larger than normal scale and should be seen as a potential threat to organizations. Since the primary MSI package is digitally signed some endpoint detection and response products might not alert on the package initially. If successfully installed Cobalt Strike becomes the next primary framework for post-exploitation actions. Cobalt Strike contains advanced lateral movement, persistence, and exfiltration capabilities and excels at ‘blending in’ with normal traffic.
To combat this new campaign and malware combination organizations should focus on security awareness training, with an emphasis on avoiding/preventing compromise via phishing emails. Additionally, some indicators of compromise (IoCs) have been noted by the Unit 42 team:
Sources
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-phishing-attack-infects-devices-with-cobalt-strike/?&web_view=true
https://github.com/executemalware/Malware-IOCs/blob/main/2022-06-16%20Matanbuchus%20IOCs
Kaiser Permanente reported in a notice on their website that on April 5, 2022, “an unauthorized party gained access to an employee’s emails” and that they “determined that protected health information was contained in the emails”. Correlation with the Office of Civil Rights listing for cases under investigation indicates that the information of 69,589 individuals were affected.
The impact from a breach such as this usually means identity theft for affected consumers, and fines for Kaiser Permanente.
The remarkable thing about this breach is that the Protected Health Information (PHI) of almost seventy thousand people was contained in an email account. Email is not often considered to be a secure method for transmission of sensitive information. This breach suggests that emailing of PHI was business as usual for the affected employee. It is also surprising that Kaiser was not employing an effective data leakage protection program to its email systems.
Email data leakage protection should be part of corporate data security programs. Additionally, unless it’s part of a planned program complete with appropriate security controls, email should be considered an inappropriate means of exchanging sensitive information.
Sources
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/content/dam/kporg/final/documents/member-services-information/policies/substitute-notice-wa-en.pdf
https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf
The recently discovered Atlassian Confluence vulnerability (CVE-2022-26134) is still being actively exploited. Exploitation of this vulnerability allows an attacker to open a remote shell and execute code in memory without writing to the local disk.
The impact of post-exploitation activity is growing. Attackers are deploying ransomware such as the Cerber variant and cryptominers such as z0miner. Other post-exploitation activity observed has included botnet variants such as Mirai and Kinsing, and post-exploitation toolkits such as Cobalt Strike.
All supported versions of Confluence Server and Data Center are affected. Administrators are advised to apply patches immediately or remove Internet access to these systems until they can be patched.
Sources
https://thehackernews.com/2022/06/atlassian-confluence-flaw-being-used-to.html
Attackers are targeting Linux servers with a Golang-based peer-to-peer botnet. Researchers indicate that this has been targeting Linux servers in the education sector since March 2022. This botnet has been dubbed Panchan. Attackers are compromising Linux servers through a dictionary attack using a basic list of default SSH passwords.
After attackers are able to successfully authenticate to targeted servers, cryptominers such as XMRig and nbhash are being deployed. The miners are running without any local disk persistence. The malware also has the capability to harvest SSH keys are perform lateral movement.
Panchan can be mitigated by implementing multifactor authentication or restricting authentication to Linux servers from only trusted sources. Password hygiene, such as changing default SSH passwords would also mitigate the risk of this attack. Lastly, segmentation and access control can mitigate the risk in the event that SSH keys are harvested.
Sources
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/botnet-panchan-attacking-server/
https://thehackernews.com/2022/06/panchan-new-golang-based-peer-to-peer.html
Cybersecurity company Proofpoint published an article on June 16, 2022, titled “Proofpoint Discovers Potentially Dangerous Microsoft Office 365 Functionality that can Ransom Files Stored on SharePoint and OneDrive”. The article identifies a way in which attackers can reduce the version history of Microsoft 365 files to one and follow through with encryption and ransom demands.
Ransomware is a constant threat, and data, wherever it is stored, needs to be managed and secured. This article is not a major discovery, but rather a reminder that vigilance and a carefully planned security program is essential to business management.
Implement a comprehensive data classification, security, and monitoring program to effectively protect information wherever it is stored.
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