Information Technology

The FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued a joint advisory in the aftermath of a devastating ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline. 

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The alert, published on Tuesday, provides details on DarkSide, malware operators that run a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) network. DarkSide is responsible for the recent cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline. Last Friday, the fuel giant said a cyberattack had forced the company to halt pipeline operations and temporarily pull IT systems offline to contain the incident, found to be an infection caused by DarkSide affiliates.  Colonial Pipeline is yet to recover and as a critical infrastructure provider — one of whom supplies 45% of the East Coast’s fuel and which usually delivers up to 100 million gallons of fuel daily — the FBI has become involved.  “Cybercriminal groups use DarkSide to gain access to a victim’s network to encrypt and exfiltrate data,” the alert says. “These groups then threaten to expose data if the victim does not pay the ransom. Groups leveraging DarkSide have recently been targeting organizations across various CI sectors including manufacturing, legal, insurance, healthcare, and energy.” The DarkSide ransomware is provided to RaaS customers. This cybercriminal model has proven popular as it only requires a core team to develop malware, which can then be distributed to others.  RaaS, also known as ransomware affiliate schemes, may be provided on a subscription basis and/or the creators receive a cut of the profits when a ransom is paid. In return, the developers continue to improve their malware ‘product’.  

DarkSide tries to portray itself in a ‘Robin Hood’ light, with terms of service for clients that dictate no medical, care homes, or palliative care providers should be targeted. The operators have been quick to distance themselves from the attack on Colonial Pipeline as a core country fuel provider and vaguely blamed the attack on a partner.”Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society,” DarkSide said.  The FBI/CISA advisory also includes advice and best practices for preventing or mitigating the threat of ransomware.  “CISA and FBI urge CI [critical infrastructure] asset owners and operators to adopt a heightened state of awareness and implement recommendations […] including implementing robust network segmentation between IT and OT networks; regularly testing manual controls; and ensuring that backups are implemented, regularly tested, and isolated from network connections,” the agencies say. “These mitigations will help CI owners and operators improve their entity’s functional resilience by reducing their vulnerability to ransomware and the risk of severe business degradation if impacted by ransomware.” Other recommendations include: Multi-factor authentication for remote access to IT networks Spam filters to mitigate phishing, network traffic filters Employee training programs Frequent patch processes Implementing security audits, risk assessment  RDP restrictions Anonymization service connection monitoring “CISA and the FBI do not encourage paying a ransom to criminal actors,” the agencies added. “Paying a ransom may embolden adversaries to target additional organizations, encourage other criminal actors to engage in the distribution of ransomware, and/or may fund illicit activities. Paying the ransom also does not guarantee that a victim’s files will be recovered.” Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

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The Auditor-General of Western Australia on Wednesday tabled a report into the computer systems used at 50 local government entities, revealing 328 control weakness across the group.It was Auditor-General Caroline Spencer’s intention to list the entities, but given the nature of her findings, all case studies included in Local Government General Computer Controls [PDF] omit entity, and system, names.”Included in the case studies are real life examples of how extremely poor general computer controls can result in system breaches, loss of sensitive and confidential information and financial loss,” Spencer said. “They serve as important reminders of the need to remain ever vigilant against constant cyber threats.”The report states that none of the 11 entities that the Auditor-General performed capability maturity assessments on met minimum targets. For the remaining 39, general computer controls audits were conducted.The audit probed information security, business continuity, management of IT risks, IT operations, change control, and physical security.Of the 328 control weaknesses, 33 rated as significant and 236 as moderate. Like last year, nearly half of all issues were about information security.2019-20 capability maturity model assessment results
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The capability assessment results, meanwhile, showed that none of the 11 audited entities met the auditor’s expectations across the six control categories, with 79% of the audit results below the minimum benchmark.

“Poor controls in these areas left systems and information vulnerable to misuse and could impact critical services provided to the public,” the report added.”Five of the entities were also included in last year’s in-depth assessment and could have improved their capability by promptly addressing the previous year’s audit findings but, overall, did not discernibly do so.”Among the findings were entities having a poor awareness of cyber threats, with one case study revealing a user’s account details were stolen because of a phishing attack that was not detected or prevented by the entity’s security controls. “The attack resulted in a fraudulent credit card transaction on the user’s corporate credit card, which was immediately cancelled,” the report said. “Further investigation by the entity revealed the attacker downloaded 10GB of entity information in the form of sensitive emails.”Another common weakness was that entities did not have policies, procedures, and processes to effectively manage technical vulnerabilities. At one entity, public facing and internal systems sat in the same network; the same entity also did not monitor devices on its network.Many entities were also not managing privileged access to their networks and systems.One entity was found to not have changed the password for the default network administrator account since 2002, even though various staff who knew the password had since left. “We found instances where this account was used out of office hours and the entity was unable to explain this use,” the report said.Probing the management of IT risks, weaknesses found included no policies and procedures to document, assess, review, and report IT risks; key risks were not documented, meaning entities were left unaware if appropriate controls were in place to protect their information; and entities had not reviewed their risk registers within a reasonable time.IT operations, meanwhile, also revealed many weaknesses, including a lack of user access reviews, no logging of user access and activity, a lack of incident management procedures, and no requirement for IT staff privy to certain sensitive information being required to complete a background check.”At one entity, staff could redirect payments for council rates, infringements, licence and application fees to another bank account by changing a file hosted on a shared server,” the report details. “Access to the server was not appropriately controlled because staff used a shared generic account to access and manage the server.”Physical security was also flagged as weak, with one example showing an entity had no monitoring process regarding its server room, meaning anyone could access it.Further weaknesses under the physical security banner included no backups and no appropriate environmental controls to protect IT infrastructure. The report provided six recommendations, one for each of the security types audited.These included implementing appropriate frameworks and management structures, identifying IT risks, and patching.MORE FROM THE OAG More

Security researcher Mathy Vanhoef, who loves to poke holes in Wi-Fi security, is at it again, this time finding a dozen flaws that stretch back to cover WEP and seemingly impact every device that makes use of Wi-Fi. Thankfully, as Vanhoef explained, many of the attacks are hard to abuse and require user interaction, while others remain trivial. Another positive is Microsoft shipped its patches on March 9, while a patch to the Linux kernel is working its way through the release system. The details of FragAttacks follow a nine-month embargo to give vendors time to create patches. “An adversary that is within radio range of a victim can abuse these vulnerabilities to steal user information or attack devices,” Vanhoef said in a blog post. “Experiments indicate that every Wi-Fi product is affected by at least one vulnerability and that most products are affected by several vulnerabilities.” Several of the identified flaws relate to the ability to inject plaintext frames, as well as certain devices accepting any unencrypted frame or accept plaintext aggregated frames that look like handshake messages. Vanhoef demonstrated how this could be used to punch a hole in a firewall and thereby take over a vulnerable Windows 7 machine.

“The biggest risk in practice is likely the ability to abuse the discovered flaws to attack devices in someone’s home network,” the security researcher wrote. “For instance, many smart home and internet-of-things devices are rarely updated, and Wi-Fi security is the last line of defense that prevents someone from attacking these devices. Unfortunately … this last line of defense can now be bypassed.” Other vulnerabilities relate to how Wi-Fi frames are fragmented and how receivers reassemble them, allowing an attacker to exfiltrate data. Even devices that do not support fragmentation were at risk. “Some devices don’t support fragmentation or aggregation, but are still vulnerable to attacks because they process fragmented frames as full frames,” Vanhoef wrote. “Under the right circumstances this can be abused to inject packets.” Some networking vendors such as Cisco and Juniper are starting to push patches for some of their impacted products, while Sierra has planned some of its products to be updated over the next year, and others will not be fixed. The CVEs registered to due FragAttacks have been given a medium severity rating and have CVSS scores sitting between 4.8 to 6.5. “There is no evidence of the vulnerabilities being used against Wi-Fi users maliciously, and these issues are mitigated through routine device updates that enable detection of suspect transmissions or improve adherence to recommended security implementation practices,” the Wi-Fi Alliance wrote. Vanhoef said anyone with unpatched devices can protect against data exfiltration by using HTTPS connections. “To mitigate attacks where your router’s NAT/firewall is bypassed and devices are directly attacked, you must assure that all your devices are updated. Unfortunately, not all products regularly receive updates, in particular smart or internet-of-things devices, in which case it is difficult (if not impossible) to properly secure them,” the researcher wrote. “More technically, the impact of attacks can also be reduced by manually configuring your DNS server so that it cannot be poisoned. Specific to your Wi-Fi configuration, you can mitigate attacks (but not fully prevent them) by disabling fragmentation, disabling pairwise rekeys, and disabling dynamic fragmentation in Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) devices.” Related Coverage More

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Apple stopped nearly 1 million risky or vulnerable apps from being included in the App Store in 2020 as part of efforts to protect users from being manipulated.Of those rejections, 48,000 were executed due to the apps containing hidden or undocumented features, while more than 150,000 apps were rejected because they were found to be spam, copycats, or misleading to users in ways such as manipulating them into making a purchase, Apple said in a blog post.In 2020, Apple’s app review team also rejected over 215,000 apps due to developers either seeking more user data than they needed or mishandling user data.Apple added that it terminated 470,000 developer accounts in 2020 and rejected an additional 205,000 developer enrolments over fraud concerns. It claimed that its monitoring practices resulted in these fraudulent developer accounts, on average, being terminated less than a month after they were created.”Unfortunately, sometimes developer accounts are created entirely for fraudulent purposes. If a developer violation is egregious or repeated, the offender is expelled from the Apple Developer Program and their account terminated,” Apple said.By performing these monitor protocols, in addition to preventing more than 3 million stolen credit cards from being used, Apple claimed it prevented more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent App Store transactions.

Apple’s App Store update comes shortly after documents were submitted into court that reportedly scrutinised its security capability.In a 2015 email entered into court last week, Apple managers said they uncovered 2,500 malicious apps that were downloaded 203 million times by 128 million users.Despite other emails indicating that Apple was considering whether to notify affected users of the malicious apps, Apple’s legal representatives did not provide evidence that they let users know they had installed malware, according to an ArsTechnica report.The emails were submitted as part of an ongoing three-week trial for a legal stoush between Apple and Epic Games. Epic Games raised the lawsuit against Apple in August last year, accusing the iPhone maker of misusing its market power to substantially lessen competition in-app distribution and payment processes. The US lawsuit is one among many that Epic Games has raised against Apple, with the Fortnite maker seeking legal action across other jurisdictions, such as Australia, the EU, and the UK.RELATED COVERAGE More

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The Australian Capital Territory Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety has been looking into the 2020 ACT Election and the Electoral Act, covering among other things, systems for electronic voting.The COVID-19 Emergency Response Legislation Amendment Act 2020 introduced temporary amendments to the Electoral Act for the October 2020 election. These included the deployment of an overseas electronic voting solution for eligible ACT electors who were abroad. The amendments expired in April.The 2020 election also used the territory’s Electronic voting and counting (EVACS) system, which was previously used in the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections. EVACS uses a PC to register an individual’s vote. These e-voting stations were also made available at pre-polling stations.Providing a submission [PDF] to the committee was a group of four security researchers — with vast experience in finding holes in electoral systems — who addressed the implementation, security, and transparency of electronic voting.They declared they have identified “serious problems” in the accuracy and integrity of ACT elections, the privacy of votes in ACT elections, and the transparent demonstration of accuracy, integrity, and vote privacy in ACT elections.”Secretive, unverifiable systems like the ones used in the ACT 2020 election, make it relatively easy to change the recorded list of votes cast, in a way that observers cannot notice,” they said. “It also makes accidental errors more likely to remain undetected.

“We are not claiming that corruption occurred, nor that the system was designed with that goal in mind. There certainly were errors undetected by Elections ACT, however.”Dr Andrew Conway, Dr Thomas Haines, ANU acting professor Vanessa Teague, and T Wilson-Brown reported finding three errors with EVACS that could potentially change the results of an election.The first is that EVACS incorrectly groups votes by transfer value, failing to recognise when votes deserve to be grouped because they acquired the same transfer value in different ways. “In 2020 this caused some tallies to be wrong by more than 20 votes; in general, it could cause much larger divergences,” they added.See also: Tech-augmented democracy is about to get harder in this half-baked worldAnother flaw was incorrect rounding. The ACT Electoral Act explicitly requires rounding down to six decimal places, but EVACS rounds to the nearest six decimal places. Thirdly, the group said EVACS has some other inaccuracies that are consistent with rounding transfer values, despite this not being specified in the legislation. “This is important because a transfer value’s effect may be multiplied by thousands of votes,” they wrote. “This causes errors on the order of thousandths of votes and could possibly make a difference in a very close race.”Fortunately, they said, these flaws did not change the result of the 2020 election.ACT uses four systems for processing votes: The EVACS Electronic Voting module that runs on computers in polling places; EVACS Paper Ballot Scanning module that scans and interprets paper ballots, recording the results electronically; the ACT Internet voting system (OSEV) that receives votes from the internet; and the EVACS Counting module tallies the votes and outputs a set of winning candidates.”The only system we have been able to examine is the counting module, and only because we can compare its inputs with its outputs and find errors without seeing the code,” they said.”We believe that the Internet voting system is new, and that the voting, paper ballot scanning, and counting modules have been completely rewritten since 2016. But we cannot be certain, because we have not seen any of the 2020 source code.”The group has asked that electronic voting code and system documentation be opened six months in advance to the research sector so serious errors and vulnerabilities could be found and rectified.They have also asked that the on-site e-voting system have a voter-verifiable paper record, so that an immutable record of the vote can be verified by the voter independently of the software; and that internet voting be discontinued, due to the high levels of risk involved in current internet voting technology.RELATED COVERAGEAEC confident in its security posture with external audits not welcomeThe Australian Electoral Commissioner said on Tuesday night that it is ‘very, very, very confident’ its systems are ‘incredibly robust’.Researchers want Australia’s digital ID system thrown out and redesigned from scratchResearchers find myGovID is subject to an easily-implemented code proxying attack, while the digital identity solution from Australia Post does not possess a fundamental requirement for accreditation.Flaws found in NSW iVote system yet againAnalysis of source code published at the request of the NSW Electoral Commission shows that the state’s election system software was still vulnerable to attack. More

Adobe has released a security update to address a vulnerability affecting both Windows and Mac versions of Acrobat DC, Acrobat Reader DC, Acrobat 2020, Acrobat Reader 2020, Acrobat 2017 and Acrobat Reader 2017.In a security bulletin, the company acknowledged that it has received reports of the vulnerability being “exploited in the wild in limited attacks targeting Adobe Reader users on Windows.” The flaw, labeled CVE-2021-28550, could lead to arbitrary code execution if successfully exploited.Cybersecurity experts, like nVisium director of infrastructure Shawn Smith, said code execution is a serious threat that can potentially cost hundreds of labor hours to manually verify every instance of some software has been updated. Sean Nikkel, senior cyber threat intel analyst at Digital Shadows, said the use of malicious PDF files has been a staple of various nation-state actors, as well as criminal actors, for years because of the ubiquity of Adobe products in use for the private and public sectors. He called Adobe the “Microsoft of a lot of office productivity software” and added that attackers historically have used phishing emails with PDF attachments to entice users to download and open files, generally under the pretense of it being a critical document for review, such as a financial document, news article, or a shipping label. “In some other instances, a would-be attacker could create a malicious website that is also hosting weaponized PDF files,” Nikkel said. 

“Generally, PDF documents, which frequently are opened either via browser or a reader such as Adobe Acrobat or Reader, can contain malicious Javascript or allow some other system interaction that allows code execution or other vectors of attack to occur, sometimes without the user knowing.” Nikkel explained that some researchers are reporting massive increases in attacks with weaponized documents and theorizing the increase resulted from widespread remote work over the past year.  More

Microsoft is enabling IT pros to keep tabs on the security of their Linux devices using the company’s Defender for Endpoint product (formerly known as Microsoft Defender Advanced Thread Protection). The Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) capabilities already available for Windows, and Windows Server are now also in public preview for macOS and Linux as of today, May 11. And Microsoft plans to bring TVM to Android and iOS devices later this summer, officials said today. TVM allows users to review recently discovered vulnerabilities within applications and potential misconfigurations across Linux and remediate any affected managed and unmanaged devices. Users currently can discover, prioritize and remediate more than 30 known unsecure configurations in macOS and Linux with this capability. Initially, Microsoft is supporting RHEL, CentOS and Ubuntu Linux, with Oracle Linux, SUSE and Debian being added shortly, according to a Microsoft security blog post. The ability to assess secure configurations in threat and vulnerability management is a component of Microsoft Secure Score for Devices. It also will be part of Microsoft Secure Score all up once generally available. In other Patch Tuesday news, Microsoft rolled out the 21H1 of the Windows Holographic OS today. This is the version of Windows 10 that works on HoloLens devices, not 21H1 for regular PCs. (Windows 10 21H1 still has yet to start rolling out to mainstream users and remains in preview.) Windows Holographic 21H1 (build 20346.1002) features the new Chromium-based Edge; more granular controls in the settings app; support for “Swipe to Type” in the holographic keyboard; a new Power menu; the ability to display multiple user accounts on the sign-in screen and more. Today also is the last day that several versions of Windows 10 will get security updates. Windows 10 1803 for Enterprise and Education, Version 1809 for Enterprise and Education and Version 1909 Home/Pro are all at end-of-service as of today. Users should upgrade to a newer version of Windows 10 to continue to get security updates. More

Apple enterprise support services provider Jamf this afternoon said it will acquire nine-year-old startup Wandera of San Francisco, a provider of cloud-based software for “zero trust” security, in what it said would “close the gap” between what consumers and what enterprise wants. Minneapolis-based Jamf will pay $350 million up-front, plus an additional $50 million to be paid in two installments later this year, for a total considration of $400 million, which will be financed with cash and debt, said Jamf.Simultaneously, Jamf reported Q1 revenue and profit that topped Wall Street’s expectations, and an outlook that was higher as well. Jamf shares declined by 2% in late trading at $30.80.  The acquisition of Wandera “will provide our customers a single source platform that handles deployment, Application Lifecycle Management, policies, filtering, and security capabilities across all Apple devices,” said Jamf CEO Dean Hager in prepared remarks, “while delivering Zero Trust Network Access for all mobile workers.”Addressing Q1 results, Hager remarked that the company had seen “strong momentum and balanced growth across our business in the first quarter as current trends in mobile work, education technology and digital health continued to strengthen our value proposition to customers as well as our business results.”Added Hager, “The year is off to a great start, and with the strategic acquisition of Wandera, we will enhance our leadership position in security with a uniquely comprehensive platform, including advanced security solutions like zero trust network access. 

“We are excited to round out our offering to provide customers an Apple-first enterprise solution that connects, manages and protects all Apple devices, data and users.””Revenue in the three months ended in December rose 37%, year over year, to $81.2 million, yielding a net profit of 8 cents a share, excluding some costs.Analysts had been modeling $76.7 million and 5 cents per share.Jamf said its annualized recurring revenue rose 37% as well, to $308 million.Subscription revenue in the quarter rose to $74.9 million, it said.For the current quarter, the company sees revenue of $82 million to $84 million, above consensus for $79 million.For the full year, the company sees revenue in a range of $335 million to $341 million, versus consensus of $333.8 million.

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