Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

January 2023

How Adversaries Can Persist with AWS User Federation

In recent incident response investigations, CrowdStrike Services has observed adversaries use the sts:GetFederationToken API call to create federated sessions from IAM users. In this scenario, the federated session inherits permissions from the base IAM user. Perhaps surprising to many incident responders, the privileges and access of the federated session are not revoked when the base IAM user’s credentials are deactivated.

Small Business Cyberattack Analysis: Most-Targeted SMB Sectors and Key Prevention Tips

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are more frequent targets of cybercrime than larger companies, industry research shows, and the trend is putting enormous financial pressure on small businesses. Some SMBs feel this pressure more strongly than others: CrowdStrike’s data shows sectors including not-for-profit and transportation are more frequently targeted with high- and critical-severity attacks than other industries.

Data Protection Day 2023: Misaligned Policy Priorities Complicate Data Protection Compliance

January 28 is recognized as Data Protection Day in Europe, the United States and dozens of other countries including Canada and Israel. It provides a moment to reflect on where data protection regulations stand today and where they are going. At present, seemingly incongruent trends in cybersecurity policy threaten to confuse data protection efforts.

Securing PostgreSQL from Cryptojacking Campaigns in Kubernetes

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Because of its robustness and scalability, PostgreSQL is used extensively in the cloud. Most public cloud providers including AWS, Azure and GCP provide database services to their customers based on PostgreSQL.

Importing Logs from FluentD into Falcon LogScale

One of the primary debugging tools for a cloud-native developer is the simple, humble log file. Some malfunctioning systems can be impossible to debug without them. FluentD is an open source log collector that provides unified log processing across multiple emitter systems, either on the same logical device or separate devices. For example, on a single k8s pod, logs are emitted from the pod itself, the container running in the pod and the microservice running in the container.

Under the Wing: Taking on Patch Tuesdays with Falcon Spotlight

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday is dreaded by every security team. With dozens of new patches inundating your team every month, how do you know which to prioritize? CrowdStrike combines the power of our world-class machine learning and our unparalleled intelligence to arm every customer with the insight they need to prioritize patches and take action. In this Under the Wing episode, you’ll learn how CrowdStrike enables you to protect your organization with Falcon Spotlight.

Importing Logs from Logstash into Falcon LogScale

Logging is an important tool in the cloud developer’s toolbox. It can be the critical component used to discover why your authentication service can’t connect to its database or why your API gateway is not routing upstream traffic correctly. Today, humans are not the only ones reading logs. Machines are also participating in the logging landscape by helping identify patterns (and outliers) in your system logs.

3 Easy Steps for End-to-End XDR with CrowdStrike and Zscaler

Hybrid working models have increasingly become the normal way of doing business. Employees are working from anywhere, users and their devices are moving on and off the office network, and many applications once hosted in data centers are now moving to public clouds or being replaced with software as a service (SaaS).

Exploiting CVE-2021-3490 for Container Escapes

Today, containers are the preferred approach to deploy software or create build environments in CI/CD lifecycles. However, since the emergence of container solutions and environments like Docker and Kubernetes, security researchers have consistently found ways to escape from containers once they are compromised. Most attacks are based on configuration errors.

SMB Cybersecurity: How Small Businesses Solve Big Challenges with CrowdStrike

The cybersecurity threats facing small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are real and growing. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reports a majority of the 800,000+ complaints they received regarding cyberattacks in 2021 targeted small businesses. A cyberattack can cause significant damage to any organization. But for SMBs, a security incident that causes productivity loss, financial trouble or reputation harm can be devastating.

Walking Through Walls: Four Common Endpoint Tools Used to Facilitate Covert C2

Adversaries continue to find new and innovative ways to penetrate an organization’s defenses. Defenders who focus on plugging these holes can find themselves exhausted and frustrated. Hunting for adversarial defense evasion for the purpose of data exfiltration and command-and-control (C2), however, remains a good strategy. Many adversaries leverage tooling to establish C2 or to enable successful data exfiltration, all while evading an organization’s defenses.

SCATTERED SPIDER Exploits Windows Security Deficiencies with Bring-Your-Own-Vulnerable-Driver Tactic in Attempt to Bypass Endpoint Security

In December, CrowdStrike reported that beginning in June 2022, the CrowdStrike Services, CrowdStrike® Falcon OverWatch™ and CrowdStrike Intelligence teams observed an increase in the targeting of telco and BPO industries. CrowdStrike Intelligence attributed this campaign with low confidence to the SCATTERED SPIDER eCrime adversary.

Cloud Asset Inventory and Visualization

Track your cloud asset inventory at a high level in one view and continuously monitor your cloud assets and investigate details about individual assets in the Cloud Assets table and graph. The Asset Inventory Overview shows top counts, trends, detections, and more across multiple clouds. Filter the widgets to see the info you want, and click areas in the widgets to see details in the Cloud Assets table.

2022 MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation for Managed Services | CrowdStrike MDR Results

See how CrowdStrike Managed Detection and Response (MDR) achieved the highest detection coverage (99%) in the 2022 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations for Security Service Providers, accurately and conclusively reporting 75 of the 76 adversary actions and identifying the threat actor in minutes.

How to visualize your data using the LogScale API - Part One

CrowdStrike Falcon® LogScale dashboards are great for monitoring your data with all kinds of visualizations. You can choose between a range of nice charts and arrange your dashboards for wall monitor display or exploring your data. Sometimes, however, you need other ways to explore or present your data. You may want more control of the shape of your data, or you may want to create small tools tailored to your organization’s environment and use cases.

Under the Wing: Detecting Fileless Attacks with Advanced Memory Scanning

In 2021, over 60% of all attacks were malware free. Because malware free or fileless attacks can be carried out entirely in memory, detection can be challenging. But with new cutting-edge Advanced Memory Scanning capabilities, organizations can quickly automate high-performance scanning to detect the most advanced attacks.