Within days of Microsoft’s announcement and corresponding blogs from DEVCORE, Volexity, and others, various public Proof of Concepts (POCs) appeared from independent researchers and security firms starting 09 March 2021. In the final installment of our SOAR series, learn how to expose a possible campaign when you don’t have obvious pivots by using DomainCAT to show clusters of malicious activity. Use proactive monitoring solutions to detect and disrupt phishing activity. One potentially easy mitigation strategy prior to patching would be to eliminate direct access to Exchange from the internet over HTTPS, a necessary condition for remote exploitation. DEVCORE research started in October 2020, with acknowledgement from Microsoft that the SSRF vulnerability ProxyLogon existed on 06 January 2021. Since 27 February 2021 and especially following public disclosure by Microsoft on 02 March 2021, multiple additional entities have opportunistically leveraged these vulnerabilities as part of multiple, independent campaigns. Provide customers with faster results and a proactive security posture. Yet defenders retain several possible avenues to detect this activity through Network Security Monitoring (NSM) and similar practices. While concerning, defenders are not completely without recourse in this situation. Contact UsHow can we help you? In this case, a server that should only be accepting traffic to a few narrowly-defined resources (such as the URI to reach an accessible OWA resource), can be monitored for new, unusual URIs in network traffic. Typical server functionality would indicate receiving and responding to significant traffic, but not normally initiating connections to clients within the network. Depending on scope and geographic reach, organizations can identify typical source Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for legitimate connectivity. Independent reporting from FireEye indicates at least three clusters—referred to as UNC2639, UNC2640, and UNC2643—actively targeting at least CVE-2021-26855 if not the complete exploitation chain since January 2021, without specifying links to any known threat actors or state interest. As of this writing, nearly all instances of identified adversary post-exploitation activity relate to webshell deployment. If not already the case previously, exploitation of CVE-2021-26855 and related vulnerabilities in the exploit chain took off such that multiple entities—from opportunistic state-sponsored organizations through likely criminal elements—are actively looking for and taking advantage of these security issues. The China Chopper webshell framework first appeared no later than 2010. Get real answers and powerful insights for attack response and prevention. Since China Chopper’s discovery, researchers linked the tool to operations from a variety of entities, ranging from state-sponsored espionage campaigns through cyber criminal elements. Initial reporting from Microsoft noted that HAFNIUM is “state-sponsored and operating out of China, based on observed victimology, tactics and procedures.” While the statement notes operations out of China and that the entity is assessed to be “state-sponsored,” the sentence as constructed does not explicitly make the claim that HAFNIUM is a Chinese state-directed operation. Meet our exceptional executive team of business leaders and industry experts. AWS DeepRacer is the fastest way to get rolling with machine learning, giving developers the chance to learn ML hands-on with a 1/18th scale autonomous car, 3D virtual racing simulator, and the world’s largest global autonomous car racing league. Created by Red Canary. Gain better visibility and risk assessment with our domain and DNS data. Improve your threat detection and response time with our threat hunting tools. Yet despite the very careful wording in Microsoft’s blog, multiple media reports quickly made the direct link to China. For example, in the case of the Exchange exploitation activity, multiple vendors reported use of Virtual Private Servers (VPSs) from providers such as DigitalOcean (see Appendix). This also means it's nearly impossible to attribute attacks to a particular group using only [the] presence of China Chopper as an indicator.”. Although historical China Chopper use is associated with threats physically located in China, subsequent disclosures and widespread availability mean, as noted by researchers at Cisco Talos, that: “This web shell is widely available, so almost any threat actor can use [it]. CVE-2021-26855 was under active exploitation since January 2021 by multiple groups, with the possibility of some exploitation activity prior to this time. Microsoft Defender for endepunkt gir forebyggende beskyttelse, oppdagelse etter brudd, automatisert undersøkelse og respons. info@redcanary.com +1 855-977-0686 Privacy Policy. More significantly still, as pointed out by various researchers examining intrusion data, China Chopper deployments linked to Exchange exploitation are not uniform. In coordination with Microsoft’s release, information security company Volexity released its own report covering intrusion activity utilizing this exploitation chain, referred to as Operation Exchange Marauder, since 03 January 2021—interestingly, a few days prior to Microsoft’s acknowledgment of the vulnerability . Introducing the 2021 Threat Detection Report… Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This Expert report looks into how AI-enhanced behavioural analytics can identify the most challenging threats in your network and help future-proof your cyber security strategy. Using this list as a baseline, defenders can then monitor for connections from new or unique ASNs, ISPs, or hosting providers. Regardless of how or when malicious actors learned of these vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange and began using them, through at least 09 March 2021 adversary actions remained relatively static: either leverage process execution to gather system information and dump credentials and other items for memory; or utilize the exploitation chain to install a webshell on victim Exchange instances. While this would limit accessibility to services such as Outlook Web Access (OWA), such services can be provided via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or similar portal to reduce attack surface. A combination of timely patching, attack surface reduction, and active threat hunting within environments can be applied to reduce the likelihood of intrusion and identify potential breaches that have already taken place. Reach out to our team and we'll get in touch. Identifying traffic to an Exchange server or similar service from a VPS node would likely be anomalous compared to traffic from typical, legitimate user activity. Defenders are cautioned that none of the above approaches are universal in scope or applicability, and would require a combination of testing, baselining, and similar evaluation to avoid implementing detection or alerting logic which may lead to significant false positives. Join us in building profitable business and supporting customer success. Product DemoRequest a Demo to see how Red Canary helps you shut down attacks. The Impact of the SolarWinds Breach on Cybersecurity, Bandura Cyber and DomainTools Join Forces, Anticipate Early Stage Threats With Splunk and DomainTools. Antivirus vendor ESET noted an astounding 10 separate groups targeting the Exchange vulnerabilities in their telemetry, including nine cases overlapping with existing threat groups and one cryptocurrency mining campaign. ... You need to be a big organisation to protect against every threat in-house these days. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. Given these observations, while PRC-linked entities appear to be targeting the set of vulnerabilities since disclosure, it remains unclear with any degree of certainty what entities were doing so prior to late February 2021. The TTPs of other threat actors may be different than HAFNIUM which means there may be additional techniques observed that end up … Immediately predict the risk level and likely threats associated with a domain. While a number of entities linked to the Exchange exploitation activity have previously been linked to PRC-directed or -sponsored operations, multiple additional entities are also involved. All 2021 Threat Detection Report content is fully available through this website. Discover our products and see what DomainTools can do for your organization. Webshells are a difficult security problem to resolve as they take advantage of the inherent nature of the servers on which they are installed to listen for and accept remote traffic via HTTP or HTTPS. Introducing the 2021 Threat Detection Report. See how DomainTools gives back and supports the community. Starting with narrowly tailored targeting in January 2021 (and possibly earlier), activity exploded from late February onward as an increasing number of threats learned about and either developed or gained access to exploit code. Or you can always contact us. On 02 March 2021, Microsoft released out-of-band updates for Microsoft Exchange to cover four actively-exploited vulnerabilities: Used together, these vulnerabilities allow for remote access to an exposed Microsoft Exchange instance, follow-on code execution at privileged levels, and the ability to establish persistence on the victim system. Examine trends in concentrations of badness in domain and DNS datasets. MktoForms2.loadForm("//resource.redcanary.com", "003-YRU-314", 1664); Check your inbox, the 2021 Threat Detection Report is headed your way. Learn about the DomainTools mission, history, and team culture. Learn about cybersecurity trends and challenges from industry surveys. China Chopper Web shells are an older threat … Register for expert-led webinars, panel discussions, and on-demand recordings. Such observations strongly indicate that more than one adversary—likely operating independently of each other—is associated with Exchange exploitation operations. Take A Sneak Peak At The Movies Coming Out This Week (8/12) New Movie Releases This Weekend: April 16th – April 18th Click to see our best Video content. The former utilized a number of common, publicly-available (and even legitimate) tools such as ProcDump, Covenant, and Nishang. Lead enhanced investigations within your preferred threat intelligence platform. Given the desirability of Exchange as both a source of intelligence collection itself and as an effective way to pivot throughout a victim network, defenders should anticipate savvy attackers attempting to exploit on-premise, vulnerable Exchange deployments post-intrusion where possible as well. Atomic Red Team is an open source tool that makes it fast and easy to test your detection coverage across MITRE ATT&CK techniques. Booming market for fake COVID-19 vaccine passports sparks alarm, ThreatConnect Research Roundup: Threat Intel Update April 8th, 2021, Suspected Chinese spies cover tracks in efforts to breach Vietnamese government, Blog  |  DomainTools Research  |  March 10, 2021, various researchers examining intrusion data, subsequent public comments from Kevin Mandia, ESET noted an astounding 10 separate groups, Exposing Possible Campaigns with DomainCAT, COVID-19 Phishing With a Side of Cobalt Strike. The history and details of China Chopper - a Web shell commonly seen in the widespread Microsoft Exchange Server attacks. Watch demonstrations and use case overviews of DomainTools products. Defend your reputation and online assets from cybercriminals. While none of the reports beyond Microsoft and public comments from FireEye leadership link identified activity to China, it is worth noting that several of the groups identified in ESET’s analysis have previously been linked to PRC-sponsored activity. Although adversaries are ultimately judged on how successful their operations are, and this particular campaign appears to be very successful, as opposed to their technical complexity, this divergence between access and entrenchment capabilities is nonetheless curious. View our open positions and see what it’s like to work at DomainTools. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. While not especially useful for services designed for general public access (such as a web server), this approach may work reasonably well with more circumscribed items such as mail services. However, subsequent public comments from Kevin Mandia, CEO of FireEye, to the Associated Press indicated “two groups of Chinese state-backed hackers...installed backdoors known as ‘web shells’ on an as-yet undetermined number of systems.” As of this writing, DomainTools is not aware if this is a revision to FireEye’s earlier technical reporting. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. See DomainTools in the news and read our latest announcements. However, given the speed in which adversaries weaponized these vulnerabilities and the extensive period of time pre-disclosure when these were actively exploited, many organizations will likely need to shift into response and remediation activities to counter existing intrusions. The Nibiru cataclysm is a supposed disastrous encounter between the Earth and a large planetary object (either a collision or a near-miss) that certain groups believed would take place in the early 21st century.Believers in this doomsday event usually refer to this object as Nibiru or Planet X.The idea was first put forward in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, founder of the website ZetaTalk. Our goal is to help enable organizations to be more efficient, knowledgeable, and proactive in the day-to-day defense of their organization. This includes: While this reporting indicates that PRC-related entities are tied to Exchange exploitation activity, ESET’s analysis and telemetry shows that such activity started on 28 February 2021 at the earliest, with most entities commencing exploitation following Microsoft’s public release. For externally accessible servers with known specific functionality (such as Exchange OWA), NSM looking for odd, unusual, or simply new Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) can alert defenders to a potential webshell. See the findings. Precise identification and origin of the initial groups targeting these vulnerabilities, including HAFNIUM and the FireEye UNC clusters, remains unavailable as of this writing. Identify threats, map adversary infrastructure, and streamline investigations. Differentiate your products with our domain and DNS infrastructure intelligence. Furthermore, multiple sources revealed that, while public reporting indicated initial exploitation in tracked campaigns started in January 2021, such activity may extend as far back as November 2020. Catch up on your industry reading with a curated list of the most popular blogs of Q1 2021. Identifying successful communication to a different URI at minimum reveals a misconfiguration or potentially insecure service, and at worst can identify functionality put into place by an attacker. These cookies do not store any personal information. Access cybersecurity industry reports, market research, and strategy papers. For services that must remain accessible, simply blocking these services and related connectivity is not an option. Identifying anomalous traffic flows from servers can indicate a potentially compromised host and an intruder attempting to move deeper into the victim network. Finally, rapid enrichment and analysis of source traffic to servers may be able to identify suspicious or anomalous connections. ... CVE-2021-26855 was under active exploitation since January 2021 by multiple groups, with the possibility of some exploitation activity prior to this time. The Forrester Wave™: Managed Detection And Response, Q1 2021 is intended to help security teams find the right MDR provider for their needs. The remainder of this article focuses on network-specific avenues available to defenders. The latter, while opening up possibilities for a number of actions for webshell installation and function, stands out as the majority of observed instances across multiple vendors reflect a long-lived, well-known, essentially publicly-available framework: China Chopper. Security company Red Canary noted two distinct clusters separate from HAFNIUM behaviors, including one labeled Sapphire Pigeon active since 05 March 2021, along with other activity that could not be clustered based on limited evidence. Get to know the industry organizations we’re proud to be members of. All rights reserved. Threat Hunting Improve your threat detection and response time with our threat hunting tools. We therefore observe a significant disconnect between intrusion methodologies (technically complex and non-public) and follow-on actions on objective (use of widely known, commodity tools). Provided an intruder desires to move beyond their initial point of access, they will need to transition to other hosts. Based on this rapid expansion in activity, threat attribution and similar evaluation will be difficult if not impossible, especially as public POCs become available for widespread use. Joe Slowik analyzes an intrusion with COVID-19 themed lures actively targeting Vietnamese entities. Enrich your SIEM and SOC capabilities with the DomainTools API integration. Our website uses cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. The rapid expansion in Microsoft Exchange exploitation is extremely concerning for a variety of organizations using this software. Turn threat data into threat intelligence with a DomainTools integration. While strongly recommended, defenders must also appreciate that this is a threat reduction step and not an elimination. Fight against cybercrime with our database of domain/IP profile information. Given that public timelines from DEVCORE indicated research and analysis only began in October 2020 with vulnerability discovery in December 2020, the possibility of public exploitation in late 2020 raises a number of questions—sadly none of which can be answered with current evidence. Another NSM possibility focuses on follow-on lateral movement or expansion from initial access on an Exchange (or other) server. Subscribe to DomainTools monthly newsletter to receive innovative, practical advice for improving their security posture. Irrespective of when public exploitation of CVE-2021-26855 started, based on the spike in scanning activity identified just prior to Microsoft’s announcement and subsequent activity, operations appear to have increased rapidly after disclosure. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. Listen to security news stories, interviews, and educational discussions. Meet the group of dedicated leaders who oversee our business. Yet HAFNIUM is far from the only entity assessed to be targeting this vulnerability. More information can be found in our, Get an unbiased look at the top 15 MDR vendors and the strength of their current offering, strategy, and market presence, Find out why Red Canary was recognized as a leader and given the highest possible scores in nine criteria, Learn why Red Canary “truly understands what its MDR clients need and want from a provider.”. The exploited bugs are being tracked as CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858 and CVE-2021-27065. Read about the latest tech news and developments from our team of experts, who provide updates on the new gadgets, tech products & services on the horizon. Explore DomainTools research, infosecurity insights, company updates, and more. Red Canary and Microsoft provided excellent guidance for host-based detection, analysis, and recovery. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. Overall, a combination of visibility and information enrichment can be applied to gain greater insight into network traffic and external connectivity, while potentially revealing malicious behaviors such as webshell installation or communication. In this highly anticipated report, Forrester evaluates the most significant vendors to see how they stack up. Although certainly not easy, given the scale and rapid expansion of Exchange exploitation, organizations running such software are strongly encouraged to enter into response and recovery mode now as an increasingly diverse set of threats are quickly subverting any accessible system. Get sample configurations for the most popular NGINX deployments: load balancing, caching, security, cloud deployment, automation, containers and microservices, high availability, performance tuning, and more. In addition to FireEye, multiple security firms identified multiple actors exploiting these vulnerabilities. Following disclosure on 02 March 2021, multiple parties reported odd activity prior to release and substantial increases in Exchange targeting shortly thereafter. If you prefer to download a PDF, just fill out this form and let us know what email to send it to. Leverage DomainTools data through partnerships with leading security vendors. The Forrester Wave™: Managed Detection And Response, Q1 2021 is intended to help security teams find the right MDR provider for their needs. Ultimately, evidence at this time only supports the following conclusions: The best advice to mitigate the vulnerabilities disclosed by Microsoft is to apply the relevant patches. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Level up on NGINX with this free O'Reilly eBook, updated for 2021. Most notably, several entities reported widespread scanning of Microsoft Exchange servers just prior to Microsoft’s vulnerability disclosure, from 27 to 28 February 2021. Track information and receive alerts as soon as changes are detected. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. Therefore, patching is ultimately necessary to eliminate this intrusion operation, while webshell monitoring and defense is recommended to both counter this event as well as future security concerns. MktoForms2.loadForm("//resource.redcanary.com", "003-YRU-314", 1026); Email marketing@redcanary.com and we’ll help you get registered. Independently of Microsoft and Volexity, FireEye also released reporting on overlapping exploitation activity taking place since January 2021, although no precise date was provided in their post. In fact, Red Canary’s blog earlier this week identified different activities exploiting this same set of vulnerabilities. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. While such a link is certainly possible and has not been ruled out, as of this writing no conclusive evidence has emerged linking HAFNIUM operations to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). © 2014-2021 Red Canary. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Get answers and guidance on how to use DomainTools products. Monitor the Internet for suspicious domain names and new registrations. BlogSharpen your skills with the latest information, security articles, and insights. Obtain all the resources and information you need for the DomainTools API. Use DomainTools data to create repeatable workflows and extensible integrations. While initial access vectors to victims included the exploitation of four zero day vulnerabilities until disclosure on 02 March 2021, this activity concluded with deployment of a commodity, widely known webshell capability. Introducing the 2021 Threat Detection Report. Easily integrate DomainTools data into existing workflows and solutions. See how real customers use and benefit from DomainTools products and solutions.
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