Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you are probably familiar with the recent Shadow Brokers data dump of the Equation Group tools. In that release a precision SMB backdoor was included called Double Pulsar. This backdoor is implemented by exploiting the recently patched Windows vulnerability: CVE-2017-0143. For detection, we are going to first focus on the backdoor portion of the implant, hunting for traces left behind on the network.

A number of domain “forgeries” or tricky, translated look-alikes have been observed recently. These attack campaigns cleverly abuse International Domain Names (IDN) which, once translated into ASCII in a standard browser, result in the appearance of a corporate or organization name that allows the targeting of such organization’s domains for impersonation or hijacking. This attack has been researched and defined in past campaigns as an IDN homograph attack.

The ability of an actor to remain undiscovered or obfuscating its doings when driving a malicious campaign usually affects the gains of such campaigns. These gains can be measured in different items such as time to allow completion of operations (exfiltration, movement of compromised data), ability to remain operative before take down notices are issued, or ability to obtain gains based on for-profit driven crimeware (DDoS for hire, Crypto mining).

Our digital surface is expanding rapidly and threats are becoming more sophisticated day by day. This is putting enormous strain on security teams, which have already been stretched to the limits. Nonetheless, organizations are skeptical of relieving this cybersecurity strain with AI and automation. Why does this situation persist when it’s simply against the logic?

A type of credential reuse attack known as credential stuffing has been recently observed in higher numbers towards industry verticals. Credential stuffing is the process of automated probing of and access to online services using credentials usually coming from data breaches, or bought in the criminal underground.

Implementing and operationalizing the best practices and capabilities of DevOps into an organization is a key predictor for increased customer satisfaction, organizational productivity and profitability. Doing so successfully can be a challenging endeavour. Implementing DevOps can be particularly difficult because it oftentimes requires technology changes, process changes and a drastic change in mindset.

In this post, we continue our discussion of use cases involving account take over and credential access in enterprise data sets. In the first part of this series, we introduced the definition of a VIP account as any account that has privileged or root level access to systems/services. These VIP accounts are important to monitor for changes in behavior, particularly because they have critical access to key parts of the enterprise.