Exploit Development for Fun & Profit

Last week I pulled together a posting for DarkReading covering the commercial aspects of exploit development - "The Business of Commercial Exploit Development". I hope you find it interesting... it sheds some light in to a side of the security business that few understand or operate within, but has a huge impact on what the threat landscape looks like in reality.

Persistent Threat Detection (on a Budget)

If there’s one simple – high impact – thing you could do to quickly check whether your network has been taken over by a criminal entity, or uncover whether some nefarious character is rummaging through your organizations most sensitive intellectual property out of business hours, what would it be? In a nutshell, I’d look to my DNS logs.

It’s staggering to me how few security teams have gotten wise to regularly interrogating the logs from their recursive DNS servers. In many ways DNS logging can be considered sprinkling flour on the floor to track the footsteps of the culprit who’s been raiding the family fridge. Each step leaves a visible impression of where and how the intruder navigated the kitchen, and their shoe size.

Whenever an electronic intruder employs their tools to navigate your network, tries to connect back to their command and control server, or attempts to automatically update the malicious binaries they've installed upon the system they have control over (or wish to control), those victim devices tend to repeatedly resolve the domain names that that attacker is operating from. Therefore, armed with a list of known bad domain names and/or IP addresses, it’s a trivial task to mine the DNS logs and identify any successful intrusions.

Depending upon how authoritative your “blacklist” of criminal domains is, and how picky you are about the IP destinations that the domain names are resolving to, you can rapidly spot those nefarious shoe impressions in the flour.

One word of caution though, this isn’t a comprehensive technique for detecting persistent threats operating within your network – but it is one of the simplest! It also has the highest impact – particularly if you’re operating on a shoestring budget.

An obvious limitation of DNS log mining is the depth and accuracy of the blacklist you’re matching DNS events to – so you’ll want to ensure that the list you’re using covers the types and classes of threats you’re most interested in detecting. While there are plenty of free blacklists out there, the vast majority of them deal with spam, phishing and drive-by hosts… so you’ll want to invest some time shopping around a little.

Here are a few tips to using DNS as a means of detecting persistent threats (advanced or otherwise):

• Turn DNS logging on! Seriously, do it now… you can read the rest of this blog after you've turned it on.
• Select a bunch of relevant blacklists that contain malicious domains associated with the threats (and criminal actors) you’re most interested in.
• Create a list of IP address ranges for countries, companies or regions that computer systems within your organization shouldn’t be communicating with, and use this as a second-pass filter for spotting other unwanted or likely malicious traffic.
• Scrape your DNS logs frequently – ideally at least once per week.
• If you’re worried about a handful of specific threats (e.g. a criminal operator or state that is likely targeting your organization), scrape your DNS logs for relevant domain names hourly – and alert upon their discovery.
• Even if you’re only scraping you’re DNS logs weekly, don’t throw them away after you’re done. Try to keep your DNS logs for multiple years at least. (Note: DNS logs compress to almost nothing – so they’re not going to take up much space).
• Consider scraping all the older logs (going back up to 5 years) once a month or so. New domains will be added to the blacklists you’re using over time, and new intelligence can shed new insight in to past intrusions. It’ll also help to establish when the intruder first compromised your network when you do find one.
• If your DNS server allows it, turn on logging of “failed” lookups – i.e. NX domain requests. While these events won’t help in your blacklist lookups, they will help identify malware families that make use of domain generation algorithms (DGA) as well as “broken” applications within your network that need some tuning in finding their legitimate destinations.
• DNS log scraping can be conveniently done off-line through simple batch script processing. So the impact on the team responsible for securing the corporate infrastructure is minimal after a nominal development investment.

If you’re not happy with the quality of the blacklist you’ll be able to bring to bear in uncovering the persistent threats likely already operating within your environment, or if it would be helpful to do a “one-off” check of your DNS logs and to help build the internal business case for investing in a more permanent detection solution, let me know.

Point of Sale (POS) and Card Reader Tampering

In the field of consumer retail the most important piece of equipment is the cash register; better known by those in the trade as the Point of Sale (POS) terminal. In essence, if the retailer can’t complete a sale by successfully taking the money from the customer, then there is no business. Which means it’s a critical component of the business and needs to be treated as such.

Over the last two decades POS technology has evolved considerably. Today’s systems are predominantly networked computers capable of not only processing a sale, but also querying inventory, managing customer loyalty programs and even delivering news and mandatory training materials directly to the store employee.

At their heart, these modern POS terminals are often a standard desktop PC adorned with a number of card readers, money drawers and barcode scanners and, as such, are all too often vulnerable to the same threats that affect any other PC around the world. Some all-in-one POS systems incorporate a number of physical safeguards to protect against the everyday insertion or removal of attached peripherals, and to also prevent theft of the equipment – which you rarely see on corporate desktop systems.

In many stores you go to you’ll also encounter a separate card reader (often with a touch-screen and numeric keypad) that’s designed to allow the customer to swipe and complete a credit or debit card transaction by themselves. These card readers are typically owned and managed by the merchant bank that processes the financial transfers for the retailer and, while there are many different types, a handful are more popular than others.

These merchant-supplied card readers typically include any number of logical and physical anti-tampering technologies – most of which are designed to elevate the retailers trust in the reader, and to help protect against semi-sophisticated criminals. There are entire books and engineering courses in anti-tampering technology, but an interesting paper I came across a few years ago will likely be a good primer for hinting at the sophistication of the anti-tampering technologies found in the POS card readers, and the techniques available to organized criminals for defeating them.

Check out “Thinking inside the box: system-level failures of tamper proofing” by the University of Cambridge from 2008. It has a few pretty pictures too.

It should be no surprise that the criminals have access to many of the tools and techniques to alter even the most sophisticated anti-tampering technology. It’s interesting to note that there are online tutorials and walkthroughs on many hacking sites and (more importantly) carding forums. Here is just one example:
A carder forum at carderbase.cc

If you’re a retailer, what should you be doing to protect yourself from POS (and card reader) tampering? I’m sure there are a number of audit points within the PCI standards that cover this topic but, frankly, it’s so difficult to locate those points and distil them into something immediately actionable I’d recommend the following as a bare minimum:

• Maintaining a list of the POS terminals and card readers within the store – that includes the type, make, model and serial number. This list and terminals should be checked on a daily basis.

• Checking that serial numbers on the terminals match the serial numbers displayed on the terminal screen.

• Checking for signs of terminal and component tampering; and making sure that staff are trained in identifying evidence of physical tampering.

• Checking that stickers and other visual identifiers are unchanged.

• Prohibiting unauthorised people from accessing terminals and any CCTV equipment.

At the end of the day, modifying the card reader and defeating the anti-tampering technologies within them is not a trivial task for the uninitiated… unlike installing a piece of malware, keylogger or battery-powered card skimmer on the POS computer. However, as we’ve already seen with the growing sophistication and almost commoditization of ATM card skimmers (see Brian Krebs excellent series of blogs on the topic: “All about skimmers“), this has become a business and the sophisticated fraud can be achieved with a relatively low investment by the criminal.