I’ve two tales to let you know. The primary is a few software program developer at a giant monetary company. The second is in regards to the safety crew on the identical firm. We’ll undergo the identical cyber incident, from these two views, to get a superb perceive of how a malicious actor would possibly attempt to infiltrate a banking utility by an admin person, and how the corporate can detect this malicious habits – utilizing automation as a lot as attainable.
The incorrect hyperlink
Let’s begin by how an attacker would possibly attempt to infiltrate a banking utility from the within. What’s the easiest method? Sadly, the reply is sort of all the time by a person that has entry to the infrastructure and code repositories: an administrator or a developer.
Often, an assault consists of a few phases, popularly generally known as the “kill chain” mannequin:
- Reconnaissance: An attacker selects a goal, for instance our financial institution, and particularly a developer who’s engaged on a particular part of the banking utility that’s of curiosity. The attacker would possibly discover out that he’s utilizing Gmail as private e mail (by a LinkedIn publish). Additionally, he is aware of that GitHub is getting used to commit code, and AWS EKS is used to deploy the code in manufacturing.
- Weaponization: The attacker designs a malware file, which can take over the laptop computer of the developer.
- Supply: Everybody has a weak spot. The attacker designs an e mail, with a particular attachment, which can trick the developer into opening the file.
- Exploitation: The malware executes upon the developer opening the attachment.
- Set up: The malware installs a backdoor, usable by the attacker.
- Command and Management: The malware permits attacker to have “arms on the keyboard” persistent entry to focus on community.
- Actions on Goal: The attacker will get entry to the backend of the banking utility, because the developer has admin privileges.
Section 7 is clearly the payoff. Earlier than that calamity, there are a number of defenses that must be in place:
- Detect: Decide whether or not an attacker is current.
- Deny: Stop info disclosure and unauthorized entry.
- Disrupt: Cease or change outbound visitors (to attacker).
- Degrade: Counter-attack command and management.
- Deceive: Intrude with command and management.
- Include: Community segmentation modifications
Now trying on the above, you possibly can in all probability think about that we need to detect whether or not an attacker is current as quickly as attainable. If we don’t know the attacker is there, that’s after we are most weak. There are various prevention and detection options on the market that you should use to guard your customers and purposes, nonetheless none will probably be 100% efficient. That is largely why the pc safety trade exists. And for this reason it is very important use good sources of menace intelligence and expert menace hunters. Let’s dive a bit deeper.
What’s menace intelligence?
Cyber menace intelligence is what cyber menace info turns into as soon as it has been collected, evaluated within the context of its supply and reliability, and analyzed by rigorous and structured tradecraft strategies by these with substantive experience and entry to all-source info. Principally, any info can turn out to be menace intelligence, and there are a lot of methods to mannequin this info as information construction. One of many extra well-known strategies is STIX (Structured Risk Data Expression), which is a structured language for describing cyber menace info so it may be shared, saved, and analyzed in a constant method. Why is all of this necessary? We’ll cowl that subsequent!
What’s menace searching?
Risk searching is the method of proactively and iteratively looking by environments to detect and isolate superior threats that evaded present safety options. Risk Searching is a steady course of, not a one-off job that you just do now and again. The method principally entails making a speculation over a possible cyber incident, investigating this, uncovering patterns, and eventually enriching your investigation. The speculation might be both confirmed or denied, and the method begins over once more with a brand new or related speculation.
There are three several types of menace searching: Intelligence-Pushed, TTP-Pushed (Ways, Strategies and Procedures), and Anomaly-driven (by which you search for outlier habits on networks and hosts). The primary relies on atomic indicators (additionally known as observables), like an IP deal with, area title, file hash, and many others. These are comparatively easy to hunt for, since all you must search is your logging and inner monitoring techniques for a particular indicator. TTP- or anomaly-driven are harder, since you’re trying to find a particular or outlying sample of habits. That is clearly extra advanced than simply looking your logging for a particular indicator. Let’s concentrate on intelligence-driven menace hunts for now.
Since Risk Searching is all about gathering information from native/inner monitoring techniques and cross-referencing this with international menace intelligence, it’s of upmost significance that you would be able to mix totally different units of data sources, whether or not you’re looking out for an SHA256 file hash or a habits sample. There are various instruments, like Cisco SecureX, that may assist with this. For instance, SecureX integrates with many Cisco and third-party safety instruments, and interprets returned information right into a coherent information mannequin known as Cisco Risk Intelligence Mannequin (CTIM). CTIM is a simplified model of the earlier-mentioned STIX (there may be additionally a CTIM-STIX converter obtainable). This translation part is essential within the speedy investigation of incidents, or when menace searching. SecureX gives a built-in instrument, Risk Response, to do that in a graphical manner, however it additionally gives wealthy APIs which might automate components of the menace searching course of.
Discovering recent indicators of compromise to your hypotheses
The web incorporates many free sources of menace intelligence that can be utilized, along with Cisco’s menace intelligence analysis group, Talos. There’s a massive neighborhood on the market that shares new indicators associated to new cyber assaults and malware campaigns. There’s loads on the market, and it’s necessary to maintain updated with this intelligence. However how?
A technique is to make use of the SecureX API (Examine and Enrichment). It will probably “harvest” recent indicators, and likewise uncover inner safety occasions from many sources – like Twitter. Over on Twitter, the #opendir Twitter hashtag is utilized by many menace intelligence researchers to publish their findings on new threats. This can be a excellent instance of a type of free sources of menace intelligence that may be discovered on the web.
Since nobody has the time to learn all of those Tweets, test all of their safety instruments for hits, and take motion on them, I need to present you an automatic manner of doing this, utilizing SecureX Orchestration. However first, let’s get again to our story of the developer on the banking company.
Suppose that our developer certainly fell for the e-mail that was crafted by the attacker, and unintentionally executed malware on his laptop computer. The file gave the impression to be innocent, and the developer didn’t see this as something malicious and continues together with his day. In the meantime, the attacker is now inside, and is ready for the appropriate second to leap over from the laptop computer into the applying infrastructure of the banking utility. When the developer connects to their AWS EKS cluster, that is the place the an infection occurs. The attacker connects to his command and management server and begins to exfiltrate information, or different malicious actions. Now since his command and management server is just not identified but as being a malicious vacation spot, no safety controls are blocking this connection. Fortunately a safety researcher simply discovered about this by an investigation and tweets about it. That is the place our automations kick in!
Automating your menace hunts
Utilizing the Twitter Search API we will really retrieve the newest tweets that use the #opendir hashtag. Utilizing this, together with the SecureX API to extract and enrich observables, we will discover out if now we have sightings of this in our environments. Under is an summary of this automation workflow in a circulation diagram:
As you possibly can see, we at the moment are utterly automating our menace searching, by routinely ingesting attention-grabbing tweets, parsing them and checking our surroundings. Based mostly on this, the safety crew of the monetary company will get an alert that one among their companies made a connection to an observable which is talked about in a tweet. What to do subsequent to nip this within the bud, although? That we’ll discover out in Half 2 of this story, coming quickly!
We’d love to listen to what you suppose. Ask a query or go away a remark under.
And keep related with Cisco DevNet on social!
LinkedIn | Twitter @CiscoDevNet | Fb | Developer Video Channel
Share:
