Defending Downwind as the Cyberwar Heats up

The last few weeks have seen a substantial escalation of tensions between Iran and the US as regional cyberattacks gain pace and sophistication with Iran’s downing of a US drone, possibly leveraging its previously claimed GPS spoofing and GNSS hacking skills (to trick it into Iranian airspace) and a retaliatory US cyberattack knocking out Iranian missile control systems. 

While global corporations have been targeted by actors often cited as supported by or sympathetic to Iran, the escalating tensions in recent weeks will inevitably bring more repercussions as tools and tactics change with new strategic goals. Over the last decade, at other times of high tension, sympathetic malicious actors have often targeted the websites or networks of Western corporations – pursuing defacement and denial of service strategies. Recent state-level cyberattacks show actors evolving from long-cycle data exfiltration to include tactical destruction.

State sponsored attacks are increasingly focused on destruction. Holmium, a Middle Eastern actor, has been observed recently by Microsoft to target oil & gas and maritime transportation sectors – using a combination of tactics to gain access to networks, including socially engineered spear phishing operations and password spray attacks – and are increasingly associated with destructive attacks.

Many businesses may be tempted to take a “business as usual” stand but there is growing evidence that, as nation state cyber forces square off, being downwind of a festering cyberwar inevitably exposes organizations to collateral damage. 

As things heat up, organizations can expect attacks to shift from data exfiltration to data destruction and for adversarial tooling to grow in sophistication as they expose advanced tools and techniques, such as zero-day exploits, in order to gain a temporary advantage on the cyber battlefield.

Against this backdrop, corporate security teams and CISOs should focus on the following areas:

1. Pivot SOC teams from daily worklist and ticket queue response to an active threat hunting posture. As state-sponsored attackers escalate to more advanced tools and break out cherished exploits, some attacks will become more difficult to pick up with existing signature and payload-based threat detection systems. Consequently, SOC teams will need to spend more time correlating events and logs, and hunting for new attack sequences.
2. Prepare incident responders to investigate suspicious events earlier and to mitigate threats faster. As attackers move from exfiltration to destruction, a timely response becomes even more critical.
3. Review the organization’s back-up strategy for all critical business data and business systems, and verify their recoverability. As the saying goes, a back-up is only as good as its last recovery. This will provide continuity in the event actors using ransomware no longer respond to payment, leaving your data unrecoverable.
4. Update your business response plan and practice disaster recovery to build your recovery muscle memory. Plan for new threat vectors and rapid destruction of critical business systems, both internal and third-party.
5. Double-check the basics and make sure they’re applied everywhere. Since so many successful attack vectors still rely on social engineering and password guessing, use anti-phishing and multi-factor authentication (MFA) as front-line defenses for the cyberwar. Every privileged account throughout the organization and those entrusted to “trusted” supplier access should be using MFA by default.
6. Engage directly with your preferred security providers and operationalize any new TTPs and indicators associated with Middle Eastern attack operators that they can share with you. Make sure that your hunting tools account for the latest threat intelligence and are capable of alerting the right teams should a threat surface.
7. For organizations that have adopted cyber-insurance policies to cover business threats that cannot be countered with technology, double-check which and what “acts of war” are covered.

While implementing the above advice will place your organization on a better “cyberwar footing”, history shows that even well-resourced businesses targeted by Iranian state-sponsored groups fall victim to these attacks. Fortunately, there’s a silver lining in the storm clouds. Teaming up in-house security teams with public cloud providers puts companies in a much better position to respond to and counter such threats because doing so lets them leverage the massively scalable capabilities of the cloud provider’s infrastructure and the depth of security expertise from additional responders. For this reason, organizations should consider which critical business systems could be duplicated or moved for continuity and recovery purposes to the cloud, and in the process augment their existing on-premises threat response.

-- Gunter Ollmann

First Published: SecurityWeek - July 2, 2019

Bypassing Geo-locked BYOD Applications

In the wake of increasingly lenient BYOD policies within large corporations, there’s been a growing emphasis upon restricting access to business applications (and data) to specific geographic locations. Over the last 18 months more than a dozen start-ups in North America alone have sprung up seeking to offer novel security solutions in this space – essentially looking to provide mechanisms for locking application usage to a specific location or distance from an office, and ensuring that key data or functionality becomes inaccessible outside these prescribed zones.

These “Geo-locking” technologies are in hot demand as organizations try desperately to regain control of their networks, applications and data.

Over the past 9 months I’ve been asked by clients and potential investors alike for advice on the various technologies and the companies behind them. There’s quite a spectrum of available options in the geo-locking space; each start-up has a different take on the situation and has proposed (or developed) a unique way in tackling the problem. Unfortunately, in the race to secure a position in this evolving security market, much of the literature being thrust at potential customers is heavy in FUD and light in technical detail.

It may be because marketing departments are riding roughshod over the technical folks in order to establish these new companies, but in several of the solutions being proposed I’ve had concerns over the scope of the security element being offered. It’s not because the approaches being marketed aren’t useful or won’t work, it’s more because they’ve defined the problem they’re aiming to solve so narrowly that they’ve developed what I could only describe as tunnel-vision to the spectrum of threat organizations are likely to face in the BYOD realm.

In the meantime I wanted to offer this quick primer on the evolving security space that has become BYOD geo-locking.

Geo-locking BYOD

The general premise behind the current generation of geo-locking technologies is that each BYOD gadget will connect wirelessly to the corporate network and interface with critical applications. When the device is moved away from the location, those applications and data should no longer be accessible.

There are a number of approaches, but the most popular strategies can be categorized as follows:

• Thick-client – A full-featured application is downloaded to the BYOD gadget and typically monitors physical location elements using telemetry from GPS or the wireless carrier directly. If the location isn’t “approved” the application prevents access to any data stored locally on the device.
• Thin-client – a small application or driver is installed on the BYOD gadget to interface with the operating system and retrieve location information (e.g. GPS position, wireless carrier information, IP address, etc.). This application then incorporates this location information in to requests to access applications or data stored on remote systems – either through another on-device application or over a Web interface.
• Share-my-location – Many mobile operating systems include opt-in functionality to “share my location” via their built-in web browser. Embedded within the page request is a short geo-location description.
• Signal proximity – The downloaded application or driver will only interface with remote systems and data if the wireless channel being connected to by the device is approved. This is typically tied to WiFi and nanocell routers with unique identifiers and has a maximum range limited to the power of the transmitter (e.g. 50-100 meters).

The critical problem with the first three geo-locking techniques can be summed up simply as “any device can be made to lie about its location”.

The majority of start-ups have simply assumed that the geo-location information coming from the device is correct – and have not included any means of securing the integrity of that device’s location information. A few have even tried to tell customers (and investors) that it’s impossible for a device to lie about its GPS location or a location calculated off cell-tower triangulation. I suppose it should not be a surprise though – we’ve spent two decades trying to educate Web application developers to not trust client-side input validation and yet they still fall for web browser manipulations.

A quick search for “fake location” on the Apple and Android stores will reveal the prevalence and accessibility of GPS fakery. Any other data being reported from the gadget – IP address, network MAC address, cell-tower connectivity, etc. – can similarly be manipulated. In addition to manipulation of the BYOD gadget directly, alternative vectors that make use of private VPNs and local network jump points may be sufficient to bypass thin-client and “share-my-location” geo-locking application approaches.

That doesn’t mean that these geo-locking technologies should be considered unicorn pelts, but it does mean that organization’s seeking to deploy these technologies need to invest some time in determining the category of threat (and opponent) they’re prepared to combat.

If the worst case scenario is of a nurse losing a hospital iPad and that an inept thief may try to access patient records from another part of the city, then many of the geo-locking approaches will work quite well. However, if the scenario is that of a tech-savvy reporter paying the nurse to access the hospital iPad and is prepared in install a few small applications that manipulate the geo-location information in order to remotely access celebrity patient records… well, then you’ll need a different class of defense.

Given the rapid evolution of BYOD geo-locking applications and the number of new businesses offering security solutions in this space, my advice is two-fold – determine the worst case scenarios you’re trying to protect against, and thoroughly assess the technology prior to investment. Don’t be surprised if the marketing claims being made by many of these start-ups are a generation or two ahead of what the product is capable of performing today.

Having already assessed or reviewed the approaches of several start-ups in this particular BYOD security realm, I believe some degree of skepticism and caution is warranted.

-- Gunter Ollmann

First Published: IOActive Blog - May 7, 2013