Information Technology

A “design flaw” in the Microsoft Autodiscover protocol was subject to an investigation by researchers who found they were able to harvest domain credentials. 

On Wednesday, Guardicore Labs’ AVP of Security Research Amit Serper published the results of an analysis of Autodiscover, a protocol used to authenticate to Microsoft Exchange servers and to configure client access.  There are different iterations of the protocol available for use. Guardicore explored an implementation of Autodiscover based on POX XML and found a “design flaw” that can be exploited to ‘leak’ web requests to Autodiscover domains outside of a user’s domain, as long as they were in the same top-level domain (TLD).  To test out the protocol, the team first registered and purchased a number of domains with a TLD suffix, including Autodiscover.com.br, Autodiscover.com.cn, Autodiscover.com.fr, and Autodiscover.com.uk, and so on.  These domains were then assigned to a Guardicore web server, and the researchers say they “were simply waiting for web requests for various Autodiscover endpoints to arrive.” The “back-off” procedure is described as the “culprit” of the leak as failures to resolve URLs based on parsed, user-supplied email addresses will result in a “fail up”: “Meaning, the result of the next attempt to build an Autodiscover URL would be: http://Autodiscover.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml,” the researchers explained. “This means that whoever owns Autodiscover.com will receive all of the requests that cannot reach the original domain. […] To our surprise, we started seeing significant amounts of requests to Autodiscover endpoints from various domains, IP addresses, and clients.”

In total, Guardicore was able to capture 372,072 Windows domain credentials and 96,671 unique sets of credentials from sources including Microsoft Outlook and email clients between April 16 and August 25, 2021. Some sets were sent via HTTP basic authentication.
Guardicore
Chinese companies, food manufacturers, utility firms, shipping and logistics organizations, and more were included.  “The interesting issue with a large amount of the requests that we received was that there was no attempt on the client’s side to check if the resource is available or even exists on the server before sending an authenticated request,” the team explained.  Guardicore was also able to create an attack method based on an attacker controlling relevant TLD domains which downgraded credentials sent to them in alternative authentication systems — such as NTLM and OAuth — to HTTP basic authentication. Serper told ZDNet, “the protocol flaw isn’t new; we were just able to exploit it at a massive scale.” Past research conducted by Shape Security and published in 2017 explores Autodiscover and its potential for abuse (.PDF). However, the paper focuses on Autodiscover implementations in mobile email clients. Guardicore says it has “initiated responsible disclosure processes with some of the vendors affected” by the latest discovery.In order to mitigate this issue, Guardicore says that Autodiscover TLD domains should be blocked by firewalls, and when Exchange setups are being configured, support for basic authentication should be disabled — as this is “the same as sending a password in clear text over the wire.” Update 20.39 BST: “We are actively investigating and will take appropriate steps to protect customers,” Jeff Jones, Sr. Director at Microsoft said in a statement. “We are committed to coordinated vulnerability disclosure, an industry standard, collaborative approach that reduces unnecessary risk for customers before issues are made public. Unfortunately, this issue was not reported to us before the researcher marketing team presented it to the media, so we learned of the claims today.”  Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

There’s been a rise in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in recent months in what cybersecurity researchers say is a record-breaking number of incidents. According to a report by cybersecurity researchers at Netscout, there were 5.4 million recorded DDoS attacks during the first half of 2021 – a figure that represents an 11% rise compared with the same period last year. 

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A DDoS attack is a crude but effective form of cyberattack that sees attackers flood the network or servers of the victim with a wave of internet traffic that’s so large that the infrastructure is overwhemed by the number of requests for access, slowing down services or taking them fully offline and preventing legitimate users from accessing the service at all.  Often, the machines being used to launch DDoS attacks – which can be anything that connects to the internet and so can range from servers and computers to Internet of Things products – are controlled by attackers as part of a botnet. The real owners of the devices are unlikely to know that their device has been hijacked in this way.  SEE: Cybersecurity: Let’s get tactical (ZDNet special feature) In some cases, DDoS attacks are simply designed to cause disruption with those behind the attacks just launching them because they can. However, in other instances there’s also an extortion element at play, with attackers threatening to launch a DDoS attack against a victim if they don’t give into a demand for payment. But it isn’t just the rise in DDoS attacks that makes them disruptive; cyber criminals are adapting new techniques to evolve their attacks in order to help them bypass cloud-based and on-premise defences. 

“The tooling behind these attacks has matured over the years,” Hardik Modi, Netscout area vice president of engineering, threat and mitigation products, told ZDNet.  For example, cyber criminals are increasingly leveraging multi-vector DDoS attacks that amplify attacks by using many different avenues to direct traffic towards the victim, meaning that if traffic from one angle is disrupted or shut down, the others will continue to flood the network of the target. In many cases, the attackers will specifically tailor these to exploit vulnerabilities of the target. 

Researchers note that multi-vector attacks are getting more diverse (a vector is essentially a method or technique that is used in the attack like DNS reflection or TCP SYN floods). In 2020, the largest one of these attacks used 26 vectors. During the first half of 2021, there have been a number of attacks using between 27 and 31 different vectors, plus an attacker can switch between them to make the attack harder to disrupt. SEE: Four months on from a sophisticated cyberattack, Alaska’s health department is still recoveringDDoS attacks have become more effective during the past year due to the added reliance on online services. Disruption to services that people are relying on in both their professional and personal lives has the potential to have a significant impact.  However, in the majority of cases it’s possible to defend against DDoS attacks by implementing the industry’s best current practices to maintain availability of services in the face of an incident. These practices include setting specific network access policies as well as regularly testing DDoS defences to confirm they can protect the network from attacks. MORE ON CYBERSECURITY More

Microsoft is shining a light on a phishing-as-a-service operation that’s selling fake login pages for cloud services like OneDrive that help non-technical cybercriminals steal business user passwords and usernames. Phishing kits are nothing new, but this phishing-as-a-service service caught the attention of Microsoft’s security teams because it lowers the bar to quality phishing even more. 

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That business, called BulletProofLink and a few other names, provides email and web site templates as phishing kits do, but also offers email delivery, hosting services, credential theft. It also claims to provide ‘fully undetected’ (FUD) links and logs and is available for purchase as a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or annual subscription. SEE: Half of businesses can’t spot these signs of insider cybersecurity threatsAs Microsoft outlines, phishing service providers are one link in the chain that can help ransomware gangs unload file-encrypting ransomware pain on targets, chiefly by providing passwords to attackers who can try them out on compromised networks. If the ransomware buyer is lucky, the credentials can include passwords for high-value admin accounts, allowing for greater movement within a compromised network. “These [FUD] phishing service providers host the links and pages and attackers who pay for these services simply receive the stolen credentials later on. Unlike in certain ransomware operations, attackers do not gain access to devices directly and instead simply receive untested stolen credentials,” the Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team notes in a blogpost.   Microsoft is concerned about businesses like these because they offer dozens of templates for the login pages of popular web services and allow anyone on a small budget to beat a path to theft or extortion. It currently offers “login scam” pages for Microsoft OneDrive, LinkedIn, Adobe, Alibaba, American Express, AOL, AT&T, Dropbox, and Google Docs. 

It’s also worried about “double theft”, where the phishing service provider captures the credentials on behalf of one customer and then sells the credentials to other customers.BulletProofLink markets itself openly on the web and on underground forums, and is also known as BulletProftLink or Anthrax. It’s even published ‘how-to’ videos on YouTube and Vimeo to help customers use its fraud tools. Microsoft published its research into this operation to help customers refine email-filtering rules and adopt security technologies it offers. While phishing kits are sold once in a ZIP file with phishing templates to set up a bogus login page or emails, phishing-as-a-service includes the whole package. The company caught Microsoft’s attention while it was investigating a phishing campaign that was using BulletProofLink services. The campaign used a whopping 300,000 subdomains with a technique Microsoft calls “infinite subdomain abuse”, which is where an attacker has compromised a website’s domain name system server (DNS) or when a compromised site is configured with a DNS that allows wildcard subdomains.

These subdomains “allow attackers to use a unique URL for each recipient while only having to purchase or compromise one domain for weeks on end”, Microsoft says. They’re useful before the attacker can simply compromise the DNS of a site and not bother with hacking the site itself. It also allows phishing businesses to create a ton of unique URLs that are hard to detect. SEE: Four months on from a sophisticated cyberattack, Alaska’s health department is still recoveringRansomware service provider models are also influencing how phishing businesses operate. One notable ransomware technique is to steal data before encrypting it and then either sell that data or use it as leverage during extortion attempts. “We have observed this same workflow in the economy of stolen credentials in phishing-as-a-service,” Microsoft says. “With phishing kits, it is trivial for operators to include a secondary location for credentials to be sent to and hope that the purchaser of the phish kit does not alter the code to remove it. This is true for the BulletProofLink phishing kit, and in cases where the attackers using the service received credentials and logs at the end of a week instead of conducting campaigns themselves, the PhaaS operator maintained control of all credentials they resell.”    More

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If you haven’t patched vCenter in recent months, please do so at your earliest convenience. Following on from its remote code execution hole in vCentre in May, VMware has warned of a critical vulnerability in the analytics service of vCenter Server. “A file upload vulnerability that can be used to execute commands and software on the vCenter Server Appliance. This vulnerability can be used by anyone who can reach vCenter Server over the network to gain access, regardless of the configuration settings of vCenter Server,” the company said in a blog post. Handed the label CVE-2021-22005, the vulnerability hit a CVSSv3 score of 9.8, and means a malicious actor only needs to access port 443 and have a file to upload that is capable to exploiting an unpatched server. The vulnerability hits versions 6.7 and 7.0 of vCenter Server Appliances, with builds greater than 7.0U2c build 18356314 from August 24 and 6.7U3o build 18485166 released on September 21 patched. The exploit does not impact vCenter 6.5 versions. For those looking for a workaround instead of applying a patch, VMware has issued instructions. The workaround will be reverted once the server instance is patched. VMware said users should patch immediately.

“The ramifications of this vulnerability are serious and it is a matter of time — likely minutes after the disclosure — before working exploits are publicly available,” it said. Other vulnerabilities addressed in VMware’s advisory included CVE-2021-21991, a CVSSv3 8.8 local privilege escalation involving session tokens that would see users gain administrator access; CVE-2021-22006, a CVSSv3 8.3 reverse proxy bypass that could allow access to restricted endpoints; and CVE-2021-22011 that could allow for unauthenticated VM network setting manipulation. All up, of the 19 vulnerabilities listed in its advisory, 10 were found by George Noseevich and Sergey Gerasimov of SolidLab. Elsewhere, Claroty Team 82 detailed how it chained together a number of vulnerabilities in Nagios XI to gain a reverse shell with root remote code execution. Although 11 vulnerabilities were found — four of which were handed a CVSSv3 score of 9.8 and included an SQL injection — only two were needed for the reverse shell: CVE-2021-37343, a path traversal vulnerability that allows for code to be executed as the Apache user; and CVE-2021-37347 that allows for local privilege escalation. The auto login feature of Nagios XI that allows for read-only access to the Nagios dashboard without credentials greatly expanded the attack surface, Team 82 said. “While this feature might be useful for NOC purposes, allowing users to easily connect to the platform and view information without the need for credentials also allows attackers to gain access to a user account in the platform, thus rendering any post-auth vulnerability exploitable without authentication,” they said. Patched versions of vulnerable Nagios XI products were released in August.One reverse root shell coming up
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Democracy advocate Freedom House has published findings that indicate a growing number of governments are forcing tech businesses to comply with online censorship and surveillance. The findings were released as part of the non-profit, non-governmental organisation’s (NGO) annual Freedom on the Net 2021 report [PDF], which found that 48 out of 70 countries covered in the report — which account for 88% of the world’s internet users — have pursued new rules for tech companies on content, data, or competition over the past year. “While some moves reflected legitimate attempts to mitigate online harms, rein in misuse of data, or end manipulative market practices, many new laws imposed excessively broad censorship and data-collection requirements on the private sector,” the report said. Of specific concern to the NGO was that at least 24 countries have passed or announced new laws or rules governing how platforms treat content, which it worries could lead to increased censorship of political dissent, investigative reporting, and expressions of ethnic, religious, sexual, or gender identity. According to Freedom House, this has culminated in global internet freedom declining again for the 11th consecutive year, with the greatest deteriorations being in Myanmar, Belarus, and Uganda. Freedom House’s measurement of internet freedom is done through assessing 21 different indicators pertaining to obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights, it explained.China, meanwhile, remained as the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom, the NGO claimed. This was due to the country introducing new legislation criminalising online expression that insults members of the armed forces, “heroes”, and “martyrs”, and its continued online censorship.

It also said China’s crackdown on tech has been “among the most aggressive” in addressing anti-competitive practices, raising concerns that the government is more interested in reining in the private sector’s autonomy and influence, rather than creating fairer markets. Other statistics unveiled in the report included 80% of countries that were analysed in the report arrested people for their online speech; 64% of those countries’ authorities deployed pro-government commentators to manipulate online discussions; 41% of countries disconnected internet or mobile networks for political reasons; and 46% of countries blocked or restricted social media platforms, which primarily occurred during protests and elections. On the surveillance front, authorities in at least 45 of the 70 countries covered by the report are suspected of having access to sophisticated spyware or data-extraction technology supplied by companies like NSO Group, Cellebrite, Circles, and FinFisher, Freedom House said. In providing this warning, the organisation has called for policymakers responsible for drafting data privacy laws to focus on protecting users while preventing greater fragmentation of the internet, such as by ensuring government surveillance programs adhere to the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance. It also said policymakers should view encryption as being fundamental to cybersecurity, commerce, and human rights, and that weakening encryption would endanger the lives of activists, journalists, and members of marginalised communities. For other areas of legislation, Freedom House said competition policy should foster innovation that responds to user demand for greater personalisation, security, and interoperability and regulation should ensure that power does not accumulate in the hands of a few dominant actors, whether in government or the private sector.Related Coverage More

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The Chrome security team has said it is willing to make the browser slightly slower if it means the tradeoff is a much more secure browser. Pointing to previous figures that 70% of all security problems are related to memory safety, the team said in a blog post that it was looking at three approaches: Compile-time checks, runtime checks, and using a memory safe language. Thanks to the use of C++, the first option was not possible, but it was looking at solutions such as MiraclePtr for runtime checking. “MiraclePtr prevents use-after-free bugs by quarantining memory that may still be referenced. On many mobile devices, memory is very precious and it’s hard to spare some for a quarantine,” the team said. “Nevertheless, MiraclePtr stands a chance of eliminating over 50% of the use-after-free bugs in the browser process — an enormous win for Chrome security, right now.” At the same time, the browser is continuing to look at how to integrate the Rust language to allow for compile-time checks which subsequently do not impact performance. “There are open questions about whether we can make C++ and Rust work well enough together,” the team said.

“Even if we started writing new large components in Rust tomorrow, we’d be unlikely to eliminate a significant proportion of security vulnerabilities for many years. And can we make the language boundary clean enough that we can write parts of existing components in Rust? We don’t know yet. ” The team said it is trying out some limited usage of Rust, but this has yet to make it through to production builds of Chrome. Invented by Mozilla, Rust has been used in parts of Firefox since 2016, and Google’s Android team has pushed to introduce Rust into the Linux kernel.Related Coverage More

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Zoom’s proposed $14.7 billion deal to acquire Five9 is now under investigation by a government committee for potential national security risks. In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested for FCC’s review of the Zoom-Five9 deal to be halted until a telecommunications security committee could assess for potential national security risks. The FCC is responsible for reviewing whether deals such as the one made between Zoom and Five9 can be approved. Meanwhile, the telecommunications security committee is responsible for providing the FCC with reviews of potential foreign threats in the telecommunications sector. The committee was established last year by former US President Donald Trump.”USDOJ believes that such risk may be raised by the foreign participation (including the foreign relationships and ownership) associated with the application, and a review by the committee is necessary to assess and make an appropriate recommendation as to how the Commission should adjudicate this application,” DOJ foreign investment review acting chief David Plotinsky wrote in the letter. Zoom announced the deal back in July, touting the move as a serious foray into contact centre-as-a-service market. “Enterprises primarily communicate with their customers through the contact center. This acquisition can bring together best-in-class video and contact centre solutions to create a leading customer engagement platform that will redefine how companies of all sizes engage with their customers,” Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said at the time. In Zoom’s most recent financial results, the company reported its total quarterly revenue exceeded $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history.

The letter to FCC was first reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier on Tuesday. Related Coverage More

Digital identity management firm FYEO says it has discovered hundreds of instances of breached credentials from employees of NEW Cooperative, the Iowa-based farm service provider hit with a ransomware attack in recent days. Tammy Kahn, COO of FYEO, told ZDNet that when researchers searched through the company’s database, they found 653 instances of breached credentials connected to NEW Cooperative.The password “chicken1″ was common among the company’s 120 employees and was used over 10 times.Kahn added that the firm’s CEO Brent Bunte appeared to have the second highest number of instances of breached credentials while other current executives also had passwords that had been leaked. NEW Cooperative did not respond to multiple requests for comment.”The NewCoop ransomware situation is concerning for a number of reasons, the first being that hackers are still going after critical infrastructure and seeking to disrupt supply chains even when explicitly stating otherwise. Beyond that, it’s indicative of a larger problem: password management,” Kahn said. “We saw that the Colonial Pipeline breach was ultimately a result of a bad password, and it’s likely a similar case here. A majority of internet users and the companies they work for are likely sitting ducks for hackers as they have a limited number of stale passwords and believe someone else should take responsibility for cybersecurity.”

FYEO built an active domain intelligence database of over 20 billion leaked credentials and passwords, offering alerts any time email addresses and passwords resulting from third party breaches appear on the darknet. By running the newcoop.com domain through the database, they found the 653 instances of credentials that have previously been exposed.Dozens of studies — and previous ransomware incidents or breaches — have shown that leaked passwords are one of the easiest ways cyberattackers routinely gain access to systems. The problem has gotten so bad that some companies, like Microsoft, are doing away with passwords altogether. “Until organizations find ways to empower their employees to practice good cybersecurity hygiene both in and out of the office, these problems will persist and grow,” Kahn said. “Especially in industries like this, password management should be the first line of defense. FireEye execs were alerted to the SolarWinds breach via 2FA — what some consider ‘basic’ in cyber hygiene can often be the most impactful.”The BlackMatter ransomware group has been implicated in the attack on NEW Cooperative, which is involved in a variety of aspects of the grain business, including running grain storage elevators, selling fertilizer, buying from farmers and providing technology to farmers.The company is in the process of helping customers transport grain to livestock and poultry farms as it tries to restore its systems, which they shut down when notified of the attack. The ransomware group is demanding a $5.9 million ransom and refused to back down when negotiators for the company said it was a critical component of the US agriculture industry and would elicit a forceful response from the US government. Critical Insight CISO Mike Hamilton said the company provides a lot of animal feed, meaning the attack “is probably going to have a long tail.” “There have been a number of recent warnings about vulnerabilities in the food and ag sector, which were apparently accurate,” Hamilton said. “The gang seems pretty adamant in their communication: no ransom, no network. They are not being swayed by the critical infrastructure argument.”Chad Anderson, senior security researcher for DomainTools, said BlackMatter has only been around a few short months and already has netted some large victims and millions in ransom payments. “As the direct heir of DarkSide, BlackMatter shares a lot of interesting features with the other, quickly-rising affiliate program LockBit: speedy encryption, stronger anti-analysis techniques than previous malware families, and double-extortion,” Anderson said. “However, one place BlackMatter interestingly differs is that unlike most ransomware families it does not have a function to check a victim computer’s locale before encrypting, making them a threat everywhere. The most recent batch of ransomware families have truly come a long way and are ever more threatening.” More