Research Saturday

In the late 90s, hackers who discovered vulnerabilities would sometimes send an email to Bugtraq with details. Bugtraq was a notification system used by people with an interest in network security. It was also a place that might have been monitored by employees of software companies looking for reports of vulnerabilities pertaining to their software. The problem was - there wasn't an easy way to track specific vulnerabilities in specific products. 

It was May 1999. Larry Cashdollar was working as a system administrator for Bath Iron Works under contract by Computer Sciences Corporation. Specifically, he was a UNIX Systems Administrator, level one. His team managed over 3,000 UNIX systems across BIW's campuses. Most of these were CAD systems used for designing AEGIS class destroyers. This position gave me access to over 3,000 various flavors of UNIX ranging from Sun Solaris to IBM AIX.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss his journey from finding that first CVE through the next 20 years and hundreds of CVEs is Akamai Senior Response Engineer Larry Cashdollar.

The research can be found here: 

• MUSIC TO HACK TO: MY FIRST CVE AND 20 YEARS OF VULNERABILITY RESEARCH

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Cisco Talos discovered PoetRAT earlier this year. Since then, they observed multiple new campaigns indicating a change in the actor's capabilities and showing their maturity toward better operational security. They assess with medium confidence this actor continues to use spear-phishing attacks to lure a user to download a malicious document from temporary hosting providers. They currently believe the malware comes from malicious URLs included in the email, resulting in the user clicking and downloading a malicious document. These Word documents continue to contain malicious macros, which in turn download additional payloads once the attacker sets their sites on a particular victim. As the geopolitical tensions grow in Azerbaijan with neighboring countries, this is no doubt a stage of espionage with national security implications being deployed by a malicious actor with a specific interest in various Azerbajiani government departments.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the research from Cisco's Talos Outreach is Craig Williams.

The research can be found here: 

• PoetRAT: Malware targeting public and private sector in Azerbaijan evolves

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The U.S. government has charged seven men in relation to hundreds of cyber attacks against organizations in the U.S. and multiple other countries in Asia and Europe. Two of the men, who were based in Malaysia, were arrested and their extradition to the U.S. has been requested. The other five are based in China and remain at large.

The attacks were attributed to a China-linked organization dubbed APT41 and involved a combination of intellectual property theft and financially motivated cyber crime. While some of our peers monitor APT41 as a single operation, Symantec regards it as two distinct actors: Grayfly and Blackfly.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the research from Symantec's Threat Hunter Team is Jon DiMaggio.

The research can be found here: 

• APT41: Indictments Put Chinese Espionage Group in the Spotlight

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Ben-Gurion University researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence technique that will protect medical devices from malicious operating instructions in a cyberattack as well as other human and system errors. Complex medical devices such as CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and ultrasound machines are controlled by instructions sent from a host PC. Abnormal or anomalous instructions introduce many potentially harmful threats to patients, such as radiation overexposure, manipulation of device components or functional manipulation of medical images. Threats can occur due to cyberattacks, human errors such as a technician's configuration mistake or host PC software bugs.

As part of his Ph.D. research, Tom Mahler has developed a technique using artificial intelligence that analyzes the instructions sent from the PC to the physical components using a new architecture for the detection of anomalous instructions.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss his research is CBG - Cyber@Ben Gurion University's Tom Mahler.

The research can be found here: 

• A Dual-Layer Architecture for the Protection of Medical Devices from Anomalous Instructions

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Bitdefender researchers recently uncovered a sophisticated APT-style attack targeting an international architectural and video production company. The attack shows signs of industrial espionage, similar to another of Bitdefender’s recent investigations of the StrongPity APT group. The real-estate industry is highly competitive, and information exfiltrated by APT mercenary group can give negotiation advantages to other players in high-profile real-estate contracts.

While APT groups traditionally could only be afforded by governments or were financially motivated purely out of self-interest, they recently appear to have become a commodity.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the research is Global Cybersecurity Researcher Liviu Arsene from Bitdefender.

The research can be found here: 

• APT Hackers for Hire Used for Industrial Espionage

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Containers offer speed, performance, and portability, but do they actually contain? While they try their best, the shared kernel is a disturbing attack surface: a mere kernel vulnerability may allow containerized processes to escape and compromise the host. This issue prompted a new wave of sandboxing tools that use either unikernels, lightweight VMs or userspace-kernels to separate the host OS from the container's OS.

One of these solutions is Kata Containers, a container runtime that spawns each container inside a lightweight VM, and can function as the underlying runtime in Docker and Kubernetes. Kata's virtualized containers provide two layers of isolation: even if an attacker breaks out of the container, he is still confined to the microVM.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the research is Yuval Avrahami from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42.

The research presented at Black Hat USA 2020 can be found here: 

• Escaping Virtualized Containers

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Threat actors and cybercriminals that don’t have the ability to develop their own ransomware for malicious campaigns can turn to the Smaug Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) offering, which is available via a Dark Web Onion site. At least two threat actors are operating the site, providing ransomware that can be used to target Windows, macOS, and Linux machines. The site is built with ease of use in mind. To launch an attack, threat actors simply need to sign up, create a campaign, and then start distributing the malware. The site also handles decryption key purchasing and tracking for victims.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the research is Anomali's Joakim Kennedy and Rory Gould.

The research can be found here: 

• Anomali Threat Research Releases First Public Analysis of Smaug Ransomware as a Service

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Throughout March and April, QuoIntelligence (QuoINT) observed four attacks (i.e. sightings) utilizing various tools from the Golden Chickens (GC) Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) portfolio – they recently declassified their findings, after first notifying their clients. Further, during their analysis of the sightings, QuoIntelligence confirmed the GC MaaS Operator, Badbullzvenom, released improved variants with code updates to three tools in the service portfolio.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the research is QuoIntelligence's Vice President of Threat Intelligence, Chaz Hobson. 

The research can be found here: 

• Latest Golden Chickens MaaS Tools Updates and Observed Attacks

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After the 2016 General Election, the talk was all around foreign meddling. Rumors swirled that some votes may have been changed or influenced by state-sponsored actors. Sanctions and accusations followed. Four years later, is the U.S. any more prepared to protect the results of its largest elections? More than you may realize.

Talos researchers take a deep dive into election security after spending the past four years talking to local, state and national officials, performing their own independent research and even watching one state plan an election in real-time.

Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the report on this timely topic is Cisco Talos' Matt Olney. 

The research can be found here: 

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