Information Technology

Kaseya has urged customers to be wary of a wave of phishing emails taking advantage of the disruption caused by a recent ransomware attack. 

Kaseya attack

Last Friday, Kaseya — which serves managed service providers (MSPs) among its client base — was hit by REvil, a ransomware group that managed to exploit vulnerabilities in the firm’s VSA software. As a precaution, the company pulled both VSA and SaaS servers offline. However, roughly 50 direct clients and up to 1,500 businesses further down the chain have been impacted.  On July 8, the software solutions provider said that scam artists are leveraging the security incident to “send out fake email notifications that appear to be Kaseya updates.” “These are phishing emails that may contain malicious links and/or attachments,” the company added.  Samples of fake, emailed Kaseya advisories, as noted by Malwarebytes, urge recipients to download and execute an attachment called “SecurityUpdates.exe” to resolve a vulnerability in Kaseya and to protect themselves against ransomware.  However, the attachment, a Windows executable, is actually a Cobalt Strike package. The legitimate threat emulation tool is used by penetration testers, but unfortunately, is also widely abused by threat actors. 

Cobalt Strike may be used to set up a connection with a command-and-control (C2) server. Together with Metasploit, an open source penetration testing toolkit, these tools were used to host over a quarter of all malware-linked C2s in 2020.  The email sample also contained a direct link to a malicious executable.  Previously, some legitimate emails sent to customers appear to have included links to the Kaseya helpdesk; however, if customers are used to this sort of format then they may be more susceptible to clicking on malicious links sent via email by threat actors.  In light of this potential security risk adding to the existing burden of restoration efforts, the company says it will no longer send email updates containing any links or attachments.  Kaseya has encountered some issues during recovery attempts. In a July 8 update, Kaseya CTO Dan Timpson said the vulnerabilities have been fixed and additional security measures “are being created prior to deployment to improve the overall security posture of our products.” At present, the company hopes to bring customers back online this Sunday at 4 PM EDT.  Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

A resident of Houston, Texas, has been sentenced to over seven years in jail for his role in romance and business scams that netted over $2.2 million in illicit proceeds. 

Akhabue Ehis Onoimoimilin, otherwise known as David Harrison, stood before US District Judge Robert Pitman this week and was sentenced to 87 months in prison and ordered to pay back just over $865,000 in restitution. According to the US Department of Justice (DoJ), the 29-year-old has been embroiled in romance and Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams since approximately 2015.Romance scams will often begin with the creation of fake profiles on social media and dating apps. Predators will target individuals and will try to establish trust with their victim, who believes they are a potential romantic partner.  Requests for money soon follow for fake reasons; a need for credit, a medical emergency, or in recent years, in order to join a time-sensitive and lucrative financial opportunity.  However, once a vulnerable person has no money left to give, the scam artist vanishes.  UK police, too, have warned of another form of romance scam that has become more prevalent due to stay-at-home orders: requests for explicit photos, videos, or live camera sessions are made, and then victims are threatened with this content being leaked to family members or employers unless they pay the scammer. 

BEC schemes take a different road. Organizations, large and small, are phished and employees — such as those in accounts or HR — are duped into believing they are being emailed by other staff, including executives and business leaders.  Spoof emails request wire transfers and invoice payments, but the bank details included ensure that payment is sent to attacker-controlled accounts.  In both romance and BEC scams, a way to launder cash may be needed — and Onoimoimilin has pleaded guilty to this role. While working with co-conspirators, he used a fake passport to open bank accounts under the name of David Harrison in both Austin and Houston, Texas.  These accounts were used to launder funds, and for his efforts, Onoimoimilin took a cut of between 10% and 15% of over $420,000 banked.  Following his prison term, Onoimoimilin will also have to submit to two years of supervised release. A money judgement to the amount of $50,605 against the Nigerian national was also recognized. “These morally reprehensible schemes deprive people of their hard-earned money and even their entire life savings and retirement funds, leaving humiliation and financial ruin behind,” commented US Attorney Ashley Hoff. “Our office will continue to vigorously prosecute those who conspire to prey on vulnerable victims in this manner.” Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

The CEO of Australia’s Cyber Security CRC Rachael Falk has offered clarity on the contentious government “step in” powers that are set to be legislated under the Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020.She told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) that there has been a “bit of a labelling problem” in the Bill when it is called “step in” powers or powers to intervene.”I don’t think what is intended, if I may say so, is not what we call in traditional corporations law step in rights, which is traditionally associated with companies in liquidation where you have liquidators come in and step into the shoes of the companies and literally operate the company as if it were their own,” she said. “So I think this power has kind of been misunderstood and mislabelled.”Falk said, instead, it should be explained as a way for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) or its Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to lend their expertise.”It could be by way of a compulsory notice served in an organisation when it is clearly struggling to gain control of quite a serious cyber attack, that they then are able to be served with a compulsory notice, and then they have to engage and discuss with ASD,” she said. “I think what’s lost here a little bit in the debate is the Australian Signals Directorate are the experts here in terms of poacher and gamekeeper, they do this for a living every day. So a compulsory notice to be served, not step in rights, I think that label should be removed.”

During its hearing on Thursday, the PJCIS heard from four large technology firms that declared they did not need assistance from the Australian government and the installation of software would do more harm than good. But later that day it was a different story, with representatives from the nation’s water, electricity, and logistics sectors accepting government assistance if it was within reason.As part of his testimony, Water Services Association of Australia’s director of business excellence Greg Ryan discussed the potential for an indemnity or insurance that provides security to the organisation ahead of ASD/ACSC engagement.Falk believes rebranding it to “compulsory engagement” rather than being a step in power would remove the need for indemnity.”I think there’s a bit of a vision that Homer Simpson comes in and presses all sorts of red buttons, which in that case you might want the indemnity scenario. I think if there were more of a compulsory notice to engage, then they would be working with the impacted organisation, not working as the impacted organisation,” she said.”So it might mean there is no need for an indemnity because they are saying you need to engage and we advise you to take this advice.”I can see the advantages of an indemnity but if they were simply the subject of a compulsory notice to engage, they could disregard ASD advice and therefore wouldn’t need the indemnity.”She also touched on the requirement to notify the government of an incident within 12 hours. While Falk accepted it may not be known within 12 hours that an incident has occurred, she suggested a “staged approach” to notification.”Immediate notification isn’t too onerous. Once you realise you’re in the middle of an incident, and details can also follow in a reasonable period of time … I think a staged process where there’s immediate notification, we have an incident running, we’re unsure of what it is, we will come back once we have clarity within up to a timescale of 21 days,” she pondered. A case for ransomware payment notificationThe federal opposition last month introduced a Bill to Parliament that, if passed, would require organisations to inform the ACSC before a payment is made to a criminal organisation in response to a ransomware attack. The Ransomware Payments Bill 2021 was introduced in the House of Representatives by Shadow Assistant Minister for Cyber Security Tim Watts, who at the time took the opportunity to say the government’s current position of telling businesses to defend themselves by “locking their doors to cyber-criminal gangs” was “not good enough”.Cybersecurity expert and former United States CISA chief Chris Krebs agreed with Watts.He told the PJCIS it would be useful to compel critical infrastructure providers to disclose cybersecurity incidents, including ransomware.”Mandatory reporting for any ransomware victim before they make a payment,” he told the committee. “For ransomware, in particular, we do not know how big this problem is, in fact, probably the only people that know how big it is, are the criminals themselves. And they’re not apparently sharing that with us. “We have to get to the denominator of ransomware attacks and the easiest way to do that is require ransomware victims to make a notification to the government. This is not yet in determination on whether paying ransom itself is illegal, I think that’s a separate conversation, but just at a minimum, if you’re going to be engaging with the transaction, with the ransomware group, that that needs to be notified.”Krebs said this was so authorities could understand the scope of the problem and also collect the data on the payment. “We also want to make sure that the information, specifically the wallet to which the ransomware payment is going, to be tracked by law enforcement intelligence officials to light up the economy,” he explained.Last month, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) revealed it managed to recover some of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to the cybercriminals behind the DarkSide ransomware in May.The DoJ and the FBI seized 63.7 bitcoins — valued at $2.3 million at the time — of the 75 bitcoins that the Colonial Pipeline CEO admitted to paying. Despite paying for the ransom, the encryption tools handed over did not work nor help the company’s efforts to restore its systems.Apprentice sparkies to be treated like an ASIO employeeActing national secretary of the Electrical Trades Union of Australia Michael Wright told the committee during his testimony that the Bill, as currently drafted, would see apprentice electricians held to the same security standards that ASIO officers are.”We’ve been engaging with the Department of Home Affairs around the rules that have been drafted … the department isn’t familiar with our industry, nor would you reasonably expect it to be. The issue we have is that they’re requiring the draft rules that they’ve designed have said that everyone who accesses, provides access to assets, would therefore need to go through the Auscheck process,” Wright said.”That may or may not make sense in other industries, but in an industry where asset means power pole and you do need an access permit to work on that, that means that the entire workforce … or workers in that industry would wind up being required to go through that Auscheck, that ASIO backgrounding … it really stats to pry into their personal lives.”Senator James Paterson said he considered it to be an unintended consequence for an apprentice electrician to be subject to the federal government’s ASIO vetting process, calling the idea “absurd”.”That’s a process that can take anywhere between six months and a year and researches all of the family and personal connections that a person might have, their international travel, their prior employment — are you suggesting seriously that apprentice electricians will have to get PV [positive vetting] security clearance to work?,” Paterson questioned.”We raised these concerns and we get nothing back,” Wright said in response.MORE FROM THE INQUIRYThe Chris Krebs case for including election systems as critical infrastructureThe cybersecurity expert has told an Australian Parliamentary committee there are elements of the election administration function that should ‘absolutely’ be considered critical infrastructure.Logistics and utilities providers agree to help from ASD in the event of a cyber incidentAfter being hit twice by ransomware last year, Toll has said it welcomes the installation of software from the Australian government to help with thwarting cyber criminals, admitting it already let the ASD into its systems. Qantas, AGL, and Water Services Association of Australia are all happy with the looming mandate, too, providing it is done proportionately.Tech giants say government cyber assistance would simply cause more problemsGoogle, Microsoft, AWS, and Atlassian all believe they are best placed to respond to cyber incidents and that installing software from the Australian government would only increase the risk in their respective platforms and systems. More

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Cybersecurity expert and former United States CISA chief Chris Krebs has testified before an Australian security and intelligence committee, providing a case as to why policymakers should consider adding elements of the country’s election system to the list of what constitutes as critical infrastructure.”I think there are elements of the election administration function that should absolutely be considered critical infrastructure, and that is the administration element,” he said. “That’s the systems, the machines, the counting process, the protocols around it — I think it’s, at least in the US, a step too far to call the political parties themselves as part of the infrastructure, but they do have certainly a contribution and a piece involvement.”The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) is currently looking into Australia’s Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020, which, among other things, looks to bring more sectors into the definition of “critical infrastructure”.These are communications, financial services and markets, data storage and processing — including cloud providers — defence industry, higher education and research, energy, food and grocery, healthcare and medical, space technology, transport, and water and sewerage sectors.Krebs said Russian interference in the 2016 US election led the focus for the 2020 election to be on thwarting technical attacks and disruptions of election systems by ransomware attacks against voter registration databases, and of media outlet hacks, both on websites and television, such as changing the results on the live tally.”But as we got closer to the election, what we actually realised were the most likely were perception hacks, or disinformation campaigns, claiming to have been able to access the system, claiming to have been able to change an outcome, or that somebody else was doing it,” Krebs explained. “And ultimately, that’s what we saw with some of the claims of Hugo Chávez from the grave hacking into the vote counting systems, and those persist to this very day, with the so-called audit in Arizona, and elsewhere. “Those are the more pervasive, much harder to debunk, because there’s an asymmetry of the adversary. Even if it’s domestic, it’s still an adversary, in this case, [a] domestic actor that is trying to undermine confidence in the process for their own outcomes.”

He said what is at stake is defending democracy.See also: Researchers found three flaws in ACT e-voting system that could affect election outcomesAdding to Krebs’ remarks was the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s international cyber policy centre, Fergus Hanson, who considers political parties themselves as a key vulnerability, given the scale to which their operations need to grow come election time. “Trying to provide a solid cybersecurity basis for that is very difficult for a very small organisation that’s undergoing massive and rapid scaling. I think providing government support for all political parties to be more resilient to interference, I think, would be really important,” he told the PJCIS. “And we’ve seen in lots of countries where political parties have been breached [or] there’s been hacks or leaks — operations that have potentially swayed people’s views on parties during the heat of a campaign.”Further on misinformation and disinformation, Krebs said an understanding exists of there being underinvestment in cybersecurity and the critical infrastructure community, but there has been “virtually no investment on countering disinformation, nowhere”. “More important is that right now than in the deployment of COVID-19 vaccinations, we are seeing an active threat environment from Russia and China for vaccine diplomacy and we’re also seeing it from conspiracy theorists and just anti-vaxxers in general — there’s a much longer tail on the disinformation,” he said. “But I will say that I’ve been impressed with the Australian government’s efforts over the last several years to take disinformation and threats to democracy in particular, very, very seriously. In fact, they’re well ahead of where I would say the United States is.”RELATED COVERAGECountering foreign interference and social media misinformation in AustraliaDFAT, the Attorney-General’s Department, and the AEC have all highlighted what measures are in place to curb trolls from spreading misinformation across social media.ASPI wants statutory authority to prevent foreign interference through social mediaIt said the authority would be granted explicit insight into how content is filtered, blocked, amplified, or suppressed, both from a moderation and algorithmic amplification point of view.Facebook, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and Twitter adopt Aussie misinformation codeCode will not apply to government content, political advertising, satirical work, or other journalistic pieces that are governed by an existing Australian law. More

CSO Group has signed a four-year cybersecurity deal with the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) to provide real-time visibility, intelligence, and remediation. Worth AU$7 million, the deal will see CSO Group deliver a fully-managed security monitoring service, security operations centre (SOC), and managed security information and event management, which will be delivered through a sovereign architecture via Macquarie Government’s protected cloud and government-certified environment. “Working with enterprise-grade Australian cybersecurity companies that house the data in a protected Australian data centre is a highly valuable requirement.” NSW DCJ CISO Matthew Fedele-Sirotich said.”Furthermore, the services offered enables our internal teams to conduct the in-depth threat hunts to continuously validate the secure nature of our environment. All the while knowing our service partner is acting as our overwatch, ensuring we identify and respond to malicious behaviours and events.”The contract is part of the NSW DCJ’s cyber refresh program and is in addition to a four-year AU$16 million deal that was recently awarded to CSO Group to deliver new cybersecurity solutions for the cloud, endpoint, and email.At the end of last year, the Information and Privacy Advisory Committee was set up by the NSW government to provide it with information, advice, assistance, and training on how to best deliver information and privacy management practices in government. The committee was also tasked with facilitating collaboration between government, industry, and academia.A dedicated cyber and privacy resilience group was also established by the state government as a vow to keep customer data safe.

It followed the state government announcing a AU$240 million commitment to improve NSW’s cybersecurity capabilities, including investments towards protecting existing systems, deploying new technologies, and increasing the cyber workforce. With that funding, it announced plans to create an “army” of cyber experts.Related Coverage More

Brazilians are concerned about the security of their data despite knowing that companies they interact with keep some type of information about their consumption and leisure habits, according to a new survey. According to te research carried out by Datafolha Institute on behalf of Mastercard with 1517 users of digital services in January 2021, 92% of respondents said they are aware companies retain their information to some degree. However, on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is “very secure”, 5.1 is the average score given to how secure respondents feel their information is in digital environments.

The survey, carried out with the goal of measuring the level of concern regarding the security of consumers within data and information exchange environments, found that only 13% consider their data to be very secure, while 21% consider their data to be insecure.The fear of cyber attacks is high among Brazilian users, according to the survey, which suggests that 73% of respondents reported having suffered some kind of digital threat such as receiving fake messages from companies and stolen passwords. As a result of these incidents, many of those polled have taken additional security measures, the study noted. More than 80% of the survey respondents said they avoid clicking suspicious links while 75% avoid using public Wi-Fi networks and 64% have different passwords for each of the accounts they have on digital platforms or apps. Social networks were considered by respondents as the least trustworthy environments, while hospitals, medical examination clinics, schools and colleges are the institutions that respondents have the greatest level of confidence.Moreover, nearly 70% of respondents stated they know that when they access a social network, shop over the internet or make financial transactions online, the data is stored by the companies they are transacting with, and that data can be used to better target offers, benefits and monitor consumption habits.

Brazilians are willing to allow the collection of their personal data, as long as they give something in return, according to a separate study, published by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in June 2020. Some 43% of respondents said they would share sensitive private data to ensure better ranking in social rating systems, discounts, or to receive customized services. Brazilian consumers are also more willing to share their social media profiles in exchange for other benefits, they Kaspersky study noted, such as protecting their job, finding a better place to live, a place at a good school for their children or getting a visa. More

Morgan Stanley has notified New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella that one of it’s vendors was attacked through the Accellion FTA vulnerability and that some customer information — including Social Security numbers — was accessed. In a letter dated July 2, Morgan Stanley said that Guidehouse, a vendor that provides account maintenance services to Morgan Stanley’s StockPlan Connect business, informed them on May 20 that it had been hacked. The information of some StockPlan Connect participants, including those in New Hampshire, were “obtained by an unauthorized individual.” Morgan Stanley said it “regularly” sends a secure file to Guidehouse of existing StockPlan long shareholders scheduled for escheatment and “engages Guidehouse to obtain current contact information for these StockPlan participants prior to the escheatment process commencing.”

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“Although the files in Guidehouse’s possession were encrypted, we have been told by Guidehouse that the unauthorized individual was able to obtain the decryption key during the security incident, due to the Accellion FTA vulnerability,” the company said, adding that passwords for financial accounts were not accessed during the breach. “The files obtained from the vendor included the following participant information: name; address (last known address); date of birth; Social Security number (if the participant had one); and corporate company name.”Guidehouse told Morgan Stanley that the attacker gained access to the information in January but that they did not discover the attack until March, waiting another two months to then tell Morgan Stanley. Guidehouse defended its actions to Morgan Stanley, claiming the Accellion FTA vulnerability was patched “within 5 days of the patch becoming available” and that they waited until May to notify Morgan Stanley because of the “difficulty in retroactively determining which files were stored in the Accellion FTA appliance when the appliance was vulnerable.”

In a statement to ZDNet, a Morgan Stanley spokesperson said the “protection of client data is of the utmost importance and is something we take very seriously.”   “We are in close contact with Guidehouse and are taking steps to mitigate potential risks to clients,” the spokesperson said. Breach notification letters have already been sent out to those who have been affected by the incident. The company said it is providing any victims in New Hampshire with 24 months of free credit monitoring services from Experian and will “arrange to provide codes to our corporate clients or directly to New Hampshire residents as applicable.” It did not say whether people in other states were affected. The Accellion FTA vulnerability has been used widely by cybercriminals to launch an array of attacks against some of the biggest companies in the world. The Clop ransomware group became well-known for attacking companies using old versions of the Accellion FTA file-sharing server like Stanford Medicine and Bombardier. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the University of Maryland Baltimore, Washington State Auditor, the University of California and cybersecurity firm Qualys are just a few of the victims attacked by Clop members through the Accellion vulnerability. Kroger and Shell have also faced attacks through Accellion FTA vulnerability. Accellion announced the end-of-life for the FTA product in February due to the spate of attacks.  More

The Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) ecosystem is evolving into something akin to a corporate structure, researchers say, with new openings available for “negotiators” — a role focused on extorting victims to pay a ransom. 

On Thursday, KELA threat intelligence analyst Victoria Kivilevich published the results of a study in RaaS trends, saying that one-man-band operations have almost “completely dissolved” due to the lucrative nature of the criminal ransomware business.  The potential financial gains squeezed from companies desperate to unlock their systems have given rise to specialists in cybercrime and extortion and have also led to a high demand for individuals to take over the negotiation part of an attack chain.  Ransomware can be devastating not only to a business’s operations but its reputation and its balance sheet. If attackers manage to strike a core service provider used by other businesses, they may also be able to expand their attack surface to other entities quickly.  In a recent case, zero-day vulnerabilities in VSA software provided by Kaseya were used, over the US holiday weekend, to compromise endpoints and put organizations at risk of ransomware infection. At present, it is estimated that up to 1,500 businesses have been affected, at the least due to the need to shut down VSA deployments until a patch is ready.  According to KELA, a typical ransomware attack comprises four stages: malware/code acquisition, spread and the infection of targets, the extraction of data and/or maintaining persistence on impacted systems, and monetization.  There are actors in each ‘area,’ and recently, demand has increased for extraction and monetization specialists in the ransomware supply chain.  

The emergence of so-called negotiators in the monetization arena, in particular, is now a trend in the RaaS space. KELA researchers say that specifically, more threat actors are appearing that manage the negotiation aspect, as well as piling on the pressure — such as though calls, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and making threats including the leak of information stolen during a ransomware attack unless a victim pays up.  KELA suggests that this role has emerged due to two potential factors: the need for ransomware operators to walk away with a decent profit margin and a need for individuals able to manage conversational English to hold negotiations effectively. “This part of the attack also seems to be an outsourced activity — at least for some affiliates and/or developers,” Kivilevich says. “The ransomware ecosystem, therefore, more and more resembles a corporation with diversified roles inside the company and multiple outsourcing activities.”  Initial access brokers, too, are in demand. After observing dark web and forum activity for over a year, the researchers say that privileged access to compromised networks has surged in price. Some listings are now 25% – 115% more than previously recorded, especially when domain admin-level access has been achieved. 
KELA
These intrusion specialists may be paid between 10% and 30% of a ransom payment. However, it should also be noted that some of these brokers will not work with ransomware deployments at all and will only ‘sign up’ to an attack leveraged against other targets, such as those that will lead to credit card records being obtained.  “During recent years, ransomware gangs grew into cybercrime corporations with members or “employees” specializing in different parts of ransomware attacks and various accompanying services,” KELA commented. “The recent ban of ransomware on two major Russian-speaking forums does not seem to affect this ecosystem because only the advertisement of affiliate programs was banned on the forums.”

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