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InfoSec Insider


CONVERGENCE AHOY: GET READY FOR CLOUD-BASED RANSOMWARE

InfoSec Insider
Oliver Tavakoli
December 17, 2021 10:45 am
4:30 minute read
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Oliver Tavakoli, CTO at Vectra AI, takes us inside the coming nexus of
ransomware, supply-chain attacks and cloud deployments.

The two types of cyberattacks that have dominated the news over the past year
have been ransomware, and software and service supply-chain attacks. The former
have mainly been perpetrated by criminal enterprises looking to turn a quick
profit. In contrast, the latter attacks have primarily been the domain of
nation-states looking to expand their information-gathering capabilities.

There’s a good chance these two approaches will start converging — and it’s
going to happen in the cloud.

One example of this already happening is the ransomware attack that leveraged
Kaseya software – but that was a different kind of supply-chain attack in that
the supply chain consisted of the managed security service providers (MSSPs) who
were hosting Kaseya software on behalf of their customers. Kaseya itself (unlike
SolarWinds) was not hacked, and all the action happened downstream.



Why are ransomware and the supply chain coming together? Historically, what
started out as nation-state techniques make their way into pen-testing and red
teaming tools and eventually become commoditized in attacks undertaken by
hackers seeking profit. There’s no reason to think the same won’t happen in this
case; thus, it is useful to consider tools and techniques employed in
supply-chain attacks as a harbinger of what is to come to ransomware attacks.


CLOUD LEVERAGE IN SUPPLY-CHAIN ATTACKS

Nation-states have plenty of time and human capital to expend in supply-chain
efforts, so the complexity or relatively unknown nature of the environment does
not present a significant barrier. In fact, many nation-state attacks involve
cloud components — they often mix and match traditional on-prem steps in an
attack with steps taken in the cloud.

The SolarWinds hack was a case in point. After hacking into SolarWinds and
laboriously crafting and inserting a payload into the Orion software, Cozy Bear
(aka the Russian SVR) waited for software updates to go out and the infected
Orion servers to call home. What followed from there was a careful selection of
high-value targets to pursue. One of the common approaches, which was observed
across multiple targets, was that the attackers went on to steal the SAML
certificate-signing key. The end goal was to be able impersonate an
authenticated user accessing data in Office 365 or other software-as-a-service
(SaaS)-delivered applications.

More recently, that same threat actor (referred to by Microsoft as Nobelium) was
reported to be hacking  MSSPs, expressly to gain access to administrative
account credentials. These were used to create accounts in Azure Active
Directory (AD), and then onward to victim’s on-premise AD — the cloud was used
again.

This all comes against the backdrop of security monitoring having a particular
scope (data center, cloud, federated identity, endpoints, etc.) — overall,
security monitoring implemented by most organizations doesn’t do a good job of
stitching these scopes together, and that presents another advantage to advanced
attackers. As they hopscotch through these areas, they can generally count on
any slightly suspicious behavior in one scope not leading to elevated concern in
the next.


THE TRADITIONAL NATURE OF RANSOMWARE ATTACKS 

In contrast, most ransomware attacks that have made the news have been
relatively pedestrian. They have used well-known tool chains that are also used
by pen-testers and red teams (think Mimikatz, Cobalt Strike, BloodHound, etc.)
to perpetrate attacks on relatively traditional IT environments.

There is generally very little reliance on zero-day vulnerabilities (Kaseya
being an exception in that the attackers burned a couple of Kaseya VSA server
zero-days). When software vulnerabilities are exploited as part of the attack,
it’s typically via well-known vulnerabilities for which patches are already
available but have not yet been applied by the target. The poster child for this
was the EternalBlue exploit in the internal propagation of WannaCry in 2017 –
Microsoft released the patch in March, while the large-scale outbreak of
WannaCry happened in May.


WHY RANSOMWARE WILL COME TO THE CLOUD 

There is also Willie Sutton’s famous quote when asked why he robbed banks:
“Because that’s where the money is.” The migration of data and applications to
the cloud which was already well underway at the end of 2019 has been
supercharged by the pandemic. And as almost every piece of data of value moves
to the cloud, either into SaaS applications or into public-cloud stacks,
attackers will undoubtedly follow to the cloud as the pickings for on-premise
attacks become slim.

And thanks to the supply-chain attacks, detailed information on how clouds
operate and how to attack them is becoming commoditized. So once the money moves
to the cloud, the ability to attack there will not be limited to nation states.


WHAT RANSOMWARE WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE CLOUD

With most attacks, there is a question of what the initial point of entry will
be and how that initial foothold will be expanded to gain access to valuable
data.

We have already seen multiple points of entry to attacks involving the cloud:

 * Account takeover – compromising an endpoint belonging to the organization by
   coaxing users to provide account credentials in seemingly legitimate
   exchanges.
 * Identity system takeover – stealing an organization’s SAML-signing key allows
   the attacker to authenticate as any account in the system.
 * Sprawling DMZ – workloads (often created by development teams) in the public
   cloud which are unpatched or unsecured, and are accessible to the internet
   without the organization’s security team being aware of them.

Lateral movement (from point of entry to targeted data) in the cloud almost
always involves stolen or impersonated credentials, or the leverage of available
APIs. Cloud systems come with incredibly powerful APIs – particularly for
privileged credentials – which enable attackers to rapidly progress to their
ultimate goal.


TAKEAWAYS

There are things organizations can do to prepare for these attacks:

 * Ensure you keep your SAML-signing key under incredibly strict control and
   monitor any access to the system which uses the key.
 * Review your multifactor authentication (MFA) policies – I know, everyone
   claims to have MFA enabled for all accounts, but most Azure AD customers do
   this via conditional-access policies, which often contain a mess of
   contradictory logic which may or may not accomplish what you believe your
   policy to be.
 * Review permissions granted to your cloud-accessible identities and practice
   principles of least privilege.
 * Carefully monitor the creation of new privileged accounts as well as any use
   of privileged accounts.
 * Know thy internet-accessible footprint – where possible, implement
   overarching policies which prevent a developer from accidentally exposing
   your cloud footprint to the internet and constantly scan for such accidents
   on the assumption that such policies can fail.
 * Shift a substantial portion of your pen testing and red teaming efforts to
   your public cloud and SaaS applications – find out how hard a target you
   really are.

And obviously, put strict controls over the data you most care about and
practice restoring the data from isolated backups.

Oliver Tavakoli is CTO at Vectra AI.

Enjoy additional insights from Threatpost’s Infosec Insiders community by
visiting our microsite.

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