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What Is a Volatile Memory Definition Now comes the tricky part. It`s time to focus. Once you have started, you need to work continuously until the process is complete. Doing something else only invites error. Before you begin, collect everything you need: report forms, pens, storage capture tools, and more. Every interaction with the computer should be noted. You could use an action/response approach (“I did this. The computer did it. »). The paging file has fascinated reviewers for years, as it could theoretically contain all the data kept in memory long after a system is powered off. This data can include unzipped executable files, unencrypted passwords, encryption and communication keys, live chat messages, and more. However, the challenge has always been to extract usable data from the mass of digital detritus often found in the interchange file.sys. One strategy is to use a tool such as strings.exe (technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897439.aspx), or BinText (www.foundstone.com/us/resources/proddesc/bintext.htm) to try to extract user-readable text from the paging file. This can be effective, but even eliminating all the characters of “machine code” can cause the investigator to search line by line for the strings “48dfhs9bn” and “%__” and not see the meaning of the seemingly random data. Another strategy is to look for recognizable data structures. To name just a few examples: searching for executable headers (x4dx5Ax90), searching for URL prefixes (e.B. or www.) or finding the PRIVMSG text (which precedes every message sent in many IRC chat clients) could be cost-effective depending on the type of survey. In addition, it can be helpful to understand the geographic relationship between the data. Consider the email enrollment prompt in Figure 5.47. There is a storage hierarchy so that systems can get the most out of both worlds with limited trade-offs. A typical memory hierarchy in a computer system would resemble Figure 3.11. RAM is a volatile memory used to store instructions and data from running programs. He loses his integrity after losing his power. RAM modules are installed in slots on the computer`s motherboard. Read-only memory (ROM) is not volatile: data stored in the ROM retains its integrity after a power outage. The BioS (Basic Input/Output System) firmware is stored in the ROM. Although the ROM is read-only, some types of ROM can be described via flashing, as we will see shortly in the Flash Memory section. RAM is a volatile memory used to store instructions and data from running programs. He loses his integrity after losing his power. RAM modules are installed in slots on the computer`s motherboard. In computing, memory refers to devices used to store information for use in a computer. The term primary storage is used for storage systems that operate at high speed (i.e., RAM) in distinction from secondary storage, which provides program and data storage that is slow to access but offers higher storage capacity. If necessary, primary storage can be stored in secondary storage via a storage management technique called “virtual memory.” An archaic synonym for memory is stored. Since volatile memory inherently loses data, the mechanism for storing data in volatile memory is to continuously update the contents of the data. By updating, we mean reading the data and rewriting it in the cycle. Because updating memory results in significant power consumption, it cannot replace non-volatile memory for convenience. Now it`s time to use a validated memory capture tool to collect this ephemeral evidence in RAM. Once this step is complete, the process ends with the appropriate shutdown. Proper shutdown allows any running application to write artifacts to the hard drive so that we can recover them later. Volatile memory is sometimes called temporary memory. First of all, volatile memory is usually faster than non-volatile memory, so when using data, it`s usually faster to do it on volatile memory. And since electricity is available during operation or data processing anyway, this is not a problem. Fig. 13.7 shows the concept of combining two storage layers (Patterson and Hennessy, 2005). In the case of write access, the data is first written to the volatile memory. Custodial PDUs must be written directly to persistent storage before accepting writing. However, traditional PDUs can be transferred when they are on volatile memory. These PDUs can be written to persistent memory at any time (writeback). For write access, hybrid storage allows a specific amount of data to be stored at the native speed of volatile storage. If the volatile memory is exceeded, the memory performance drops to persistent memory. This model fits well with the burst traffic model of typical DTON. ROM (read-only memory) is non-volatile: data stored in the ROM retains its integrity after a power failure. A computer`s Basic Input Output System (bioS) firmware is stored in the ROM. While the ROM is “read-only”, “some types of ROM can be described via flashing, as we will see soon in the “Flash Memory” section. Various studies have shown that memories are generally divided into two basic categories: volatile memory and non-volatile memory [2,3,17]. .
A Review on Intrusion Detection System using Machine Learning Techniques In the present world, the protection of networks in the computing environment is one of the most difficult and essential challenges to cyber-security. Intrusion Detection (ID) is a significant key mechanism to provide computer networks with security. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a popular system for intrusion detection which is impending through an Internet. Securing networks become a substantial issue to provide services through a network with an increment of growing dependence and attacks on different fields such as finance, medicine, entertainment and engineering. The major aim of IDS is to detect malicious actions in network traffic or particular computer environment analysis and take necessary actions. This study analyses and reviews the research scenario of IDSs based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques into a comprehensible taxonomy and recognizes the gaps in this critical research area. This article provides complete details about the advantages and disadvantages of all the mentioned approaches. A comparative analysis is presented among the approaches based on their working methodology. This study also concentrated on the latest developments in the datasets of IDS which are used by different communities of researchers to develop effective and efficient ML technique-based IDS. The major aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive and strong comparative study of latest research on review spam detection by using different ML techniques and to develop a methodology for directing the investigation to next level.
For ISA Server 2006 Enterprise Edition, for enterprise-level requests, expand Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, expand Enterprise, expand Enterprise Policies, and then click For ISA Server 2006 Enterprise Edition, for array-level requests, expand Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, expand Arrays, expand Array_Name, and then click Firewall For ISA Server 2006 Standard Edition, expand Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, expand Server_Name, and then click Firewall In the details pane, click the rule for which logging should be On the Tasks tab, click Edit Selected Rule. On the Action tab, select the Log requests matching this rule check box. To open ISA Server Management, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft ISA Server, and then click ISA Server Management. If a large amount of data is being logged from a specific protocol or source, you can create a new rule, which applies to that type of traffic, for which requests are not logged. For example, suppose your policy does not allow DHCP requests, and as a result, there are many DHCP requests that are being denied. You can create a new access rule that denies DHCP requests, but does not log the requests. By disabling logging for a specific rule, you effectively reduce the load on the ISA Server computer if it is under attack. However, note that if you disable logging on the default deny rule, ISA Server cannot detect port scan attacks.
Honeypots, find out what they are, monitor them and hunt the hunter Nowadays, most computer attacks come from individuals who try taking control of different systems or damage them. They are able to perform these attacks by finding vulnerabilities in the devices, so, to avoid these events, the best defense that exists is installing honeypots in our network. What are honeypots? There is an old idiom that goes “more flies are caught with a drop of honey than with a bowl of vinegar” and this suits all this topic perfectly, since honeypots are precisely about attracting the most requests to analyze their intentions. We may wonder, “Who is going to attack me if I belong to a small business, a speck of dust on the Internet?” But the truth is that many years have passed since hackers were personally engaged in the cyberspace, surfing for victims. Today’s threats are the attacks performed by automated programs, taking control of thousands of online devices (webcams, refrigerators, televisions, routers, etc.) to get an army of clones ready and listening to the commands of their master. They can be used, for example, to massively attack a web domain – which is known as a denial-of-service or DoS attack – or to keep this troop occupied in its spare time by putting it to snoop into all that gets in their way. Here we will discuss the latter: it doesn’t matter if your fixed IP address has spread or that your Internet provider has assigned you a dynamic IP address (which changes over time). You can be attacked mercilessly, just like this expert discovered when monitoring his own modem, given to him by his Internet provider. There he illustrates what would happen if an attacker took over our router by force: That is why the best defense is a good attack and hence the reason for having honeypots. We can define a honey pots as: “a systematic resource of information whose value rests on the illegal or unauthorized use of those resources” (according to “SecurityFocus ™”). How do honeypots work? At first sight, honey pots seem unprotected lambs in the middle of the field at the mercy of the marauding wolves that swarm through the net. They record every action and interaction with those users, and just because they don’t offer any legitimate service, all that activity is unauthorized and therefore, possibly malicious. Meaning, for example, opening a port commonly used for MySQL databases, could offer similar responses to this database management system, without having such software installed. Thus, it is possible to observe the behavior of the attacker and to be able to terminate at any moment the connection with any excuse like “server is shutting down” when the programmed target has been reached. Monitoring a honeypot involves first, understanding what the dangers are and how each of them works. This article aims to be a flash of light on the subject and we include links for anyone who wants to go deeper into their study. Honeypots are NOT a solution It is a warning that we must clarify, in case of doubts: honeypots are tools that we will use depending on our objectives, they are not oriented to give solutions. A pragmatic case may be to place a copy of our database server but full of invented data, in order to make a follow up. Overwhelmed with information? Go grab a coffee – and a breath of fresh air – because here comes the best part. In the previous paragraph we talked about a specific example of what low-interaction honeypots are: we want to investigate how it would affect an attack on our database server with fake data called “token honeypot” which can then be traced. Here are also included honeypots in production for very specific cases. The other type of honeypot is the high-interaction: allowing the attacker to interact with the operating system to know their global skills and capture that information. It is widely used in research, but what the heck does this have to do with monitoring? No data must be kept in our honeypots! If the attacker could have access to them, he could use them against us. Honeypots monitoring must be done in real time by removing the data immediately. There are several ways to do this. If our honeypot is a virtual machine, we can create an external virtual hard disk with which we can backup from time to time with the configuration that we have decided to save there. Another option: if our honeypot is a real machine, we could have another real machine (server collector) in the same local area network and create data requests from time to time, the important thing would be that the collecting server can not receive connection requests from the honeypot (assuming that the attacker has taken complete control of the honeypot). Needless to say, the data collected will be isolated from each other for later analysis and to discard at a certain point those that may have contaminated by the attacker. Since the combinations are practically endless let’s see a practical case. “Artillery” practical example “Artillery” is a fork of the code created by TrustedSec, although BinaryDefense is in charge of it now, and it is based on a BSD open source license. It also includes the installation instructions for a Ubuntu server, which you can find in this link. It is written in Python and these are the main characteristics: - It opens multiple common ports used by a variety of applications and it includes the IP address of the attacker in a denial list located in “/var/artillery/banlist.txt” (We have our first file to monitor ready: download with a written script in bash with a frequency of 5 minutes and rename it adding time and date to the filename). - By default, “Artillery” monitors the “/var/www” directories (where a web page would be stored if we had Apache web server installed) and “/etc” (crucial for every GNU/Linux server). There is a configuration file where we can add other folders that are interesting for us to monitor. - Artillery monitors SSH and looks for forceful access attempts. - It also gives you the option of sending an email when an attack occurs and lets you know what the attack consisted of (which is a form of integrated monitoring by default). - For us to configure this, we must access a “/var/artillery/config” and establish our preferences. - It is important that we add ourselves to a list of allowed IP addresses to prevent the honeypot from blocking all access, in case of, for example, misspelling the password by SSH. If it is necessary to “unblock” an IP address, there is the module “remove_ban.py”, specially designed for this purpose. - It works in GNU/Linux and Windows, being necessary some installation peculiarities for the latter, but the curious thing is that our attackers will always think they’re dealing with a Linux computer! Other ways of creating honeypots For years, there have been venerable tools in the marke that can be used to penetrate this field, considering that the attackers may have foreseen their application (we’ll see later the advantages and disadvantages of honeypots). Some of those tools are: - Honeyd, created by Niels Provos. Although it is a single honey pot in GNU / Linux or Windows the attacker will see multiple honeycomb servers. What’s the trick? Honeyd creates virtual IP addresses, each one with the ports and services that we want to emulate. To help understand the concept, imagine a router device connected by a modem to the Internet and with a hard disk connected to several virtual machines running, each one with different ports and services open. A basic tutorial on how to install and start using Honeyd can be read in this link. - HoneyBOT,which is made for Microsoft Windows and has its own integrated graphical interface, which makes it a wise choice for anyone who’s starting in the world of honeypots. It is known by its level of detail, and it even saves every byte received from the attacker. It includes interesting charts that will allow you to see the most relevant attacks at a single glance. It is a private software (there is an academic version too) and it belongs to “Atomic Software Solutions”. - Specter is more powerful, since it has profiles of various operating systems preconfigured, it injects encrypted data to the attacker that can be used later as proof It opens custom and cumulative profiles for each intruder. We won’t be monitoring this program ourselves, instead, it has predefined reports with data to safeguard the software house and we don’t know how to take care of them because it is closed source. - Kippo is written in Python and it’s hosted in GitHub with free license. It is described as a medium interaction honeypot, an intermediate category compared to those we previously described, since it focuses on SSH. You can install it by clicking on this link. Advantages and Disadvantages of Honeypots - Works in isolated environments. - Since it uses non-legitimate services it produces very few false positives. - The data are concise and specific to non-legitimate activity. - It can potentially be discovered by the attacker and used against us. - It can be used by the attacker against other systems apart from ours (see previous point). - It only detects direct attacks on the honeypot, it doesn’t detect the local area network environment (except Honeyd that creates its own private virtual network). However, we will address an approximate solution to this problem. Honeypot farms and honeypot networks Both cluster honeypots and are differentiated by centralized administration. The idea is to divert attention from a real potential target for the attacker and channel it to another honeypot specialized in the assigned task (later we will see the different applications that are desirable to monitor). By means of a GNU / Linux computer that properly executes iptables, we will be able to establish rules where any request that is not related to our work environment, can be redirected to a honeypot. Any other system administrator would simply deny traffic and go, but you should always be open to how the world evolves. A very personalized honeypot model How about modernizing ourselves and make totally public the intrusions to our honeypots by means of Twitter and even keep our monitoring in Dropbox? Welcome to the 21st century. This is possible thanks to Professor Sam Bowne of City College of San Francisco, in the United States. His project is to create an Apache web server in Ubuntu and installing tcpdump to send that large amount of network traffic to Dropbox and save all shell commands to a syslog via a script created he created. A scheduled task is in charge of uploading the data in 50 pieces of 10 megabytes in a regular and constant manner. It also uses tripwire to keep a detailed log of the modified files (warning, you must start with a “clean” system before exposing it in order to start with a good base) and a client called speedtest-cli, written in Python, that measures Internet speed. In another server that monitors the files stored in Dropbox, it extracts the keywords and through a script written in PHP, it publishes them on Twitter, which is not a good idea because it gives clues to the attackers about what they do (there appears the IP address associated with the attack). Then he modified the PHP script to send direct messages on Twitter, away from the public view (we can configure it so that direct messages are also sent to our email, best monitoring, impossible!). About Pandora FMS Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring system, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes. Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can control is the hard disks of your computers. Would you like to know more about what Pandora FMS can offer you? Discover it by entering here: https://pandorafms.com If you have more than 100 devices to monitor, you can contact us through the following form: https://pandorafms.com/en/contact/ Also, remember that if your monitoring needs are more limited you have at your disposal the OpenSource version of Pandora FMS. Find more information here: https://pandorafms.org El equipo de redacción de Pandora FMS está formado por un conjunto de escritores y profesionales de las TI con una cosa en común: su pasión por la monitorización de sistemas informáticos. Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring.
Skip to Main Content This paper proposes the use of an intrusion detection system (IDS) tailored to counter the threats to an IEC61850-automated substation based upon simulated attacks on intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). Intrusion detection (ID) is the process of detecting a malicious attacker. It is an effective and mature security mechanism. However, it is not harnessed when securing IEC61850-automated substations. The IDS of this paper is developed by using data collected by launching simulated attacks on IEDs and launching packet sniffing attacks using forged address resolution protocol (ARP) packets. The detection capability of the system is then tested by simulating attacks and through genuine user activity. A new method for evaluating the temporal risk of an intrusion for an electric substation based upon the statistical analysis of known attacks is also proposed.
Testing of threat intelligence data at DNS protection The paper sums up the key results of ESET and Whalebone's collaboration that have come from testing ESET Threat Intelligence and whalebone domain name protection. During the testing, the data feed on dangerous domains and their categories (IoC) was blocked at DNS level on a sample of nearly 100,000 Internet connections in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, representing an estimate of up to half a million end devices. Information and statistics on "false positives," and comparisons with other types of IoC resources can provide a basis for reflection on the security status of Internet connections, how to protect against targeted attacks on some companies, or other aspects of Internet security. Unlike the information that can be provided by automated vulnerability scanners from Internet testing, this is a different and deeper look at the state of the end devices in the monitored sample that are hidden in business, home networks, in Internet service providers. Testing also enabled Whalebone to measure the extent of the current threat extensions on devices that are not protected against the threats covered in the test feed data. For clarification, information will be provided on: - the generation and method of generating IoC, - Dividing DNS protection into basic categories of malware, phishing and blacklist, - the method of providing IoC, - the use of the data in the context of multilevel protection, - Functional DNS protection and its effectiveness and reach, - types of DNS protection incident, - their amount and the extent of false positives in their use. Ing. Peter Dekýš, PhD. Works as a consultant and manager of ESET Services, ESET spol. s r.o. Bratislava. He graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. Later he worked as a pedagogue at STU Bratislava and subsequently in several companies dealing with information security, computer networks and other information technology solutions. Since 2009 he manages information security services for external customers, internal security in ESET, and as a consultant is involved in selected audits and information security management consulting projects. Recently, he has begun to launch Threat Intelligence in ESET. Mgr. Jakub Daubner, PhD. Graduated in 2008 from Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava aimed at Mathematical Methods in Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. Graduated with Ph.D. in 2012 from Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, University in Zilina aimed at Applied Informatics. During Ph.D. studies, in 2009, he entered ESET as Infiltration Analytics. Since 2011, he is department leader of Internal Systems, which belongs to technology sub-division Core Research and Threat Detection. This department focus mainly on research and development of tools and automatic systems designed for Viruslab. One of the current department projects is also research and development of ESET Threat Intelligence. Mgr. Robert Šefr Graduated from Faulty of Informatics Masaryk university in 2009 with thesis aimed at malware reverse engineering. Joined the Comguard company as a security consultant with responsibilities for penetration testing, endpoint protection, network security, incident analysis through SIEM and vulnerability management. Later while leading consultants at Comguard, Robert also joined CSIRT.cz as an analyst, where he was involved in incident handling automation for two years. Afterwards he started working on the idea of DNS level client protection and founded Whalebone, which is now his full-time job and hobby at the same time.
Deployment models for AWS Network Firewall with VPC routing enhancements Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a logically isolated virtual network. It has inbuilt network security controls and implicit routing between VPC subnets by design. Network security controls such as security groups (SGs) and network access control lists (ACLs) provide you with options to control network traffic. However these controls operate at network and transport layers of OSI model, and filter traffic based on IP addresses, transport protocols, and ports. You may have additional requirements to have network security controls at application layer. As an example, application protocol detection and filtering based on application protocol properties such as HTTP headers and TLS version. Previously, you could implement such control with AWS Network Firewall in select deployment models as per part 1 of “Deployment models for AWS Network Firewall”. With a recent enhancement to VPC routing primitives, you can insert AWS Network Firewall between workloads in different subnets of the same VPC. In this blog post, we will review how the enhancement helps a middlebox insertion based on AWS Network Firewall example, and also available deployment models. VPC routing enhancements With the launch of VPC routing enhancements, you now have additional agility, programmability, and control over the forwarding path of VPC traffic. VPC has an implicit router and route tables are pre-configured with a local route, a default route for communication within the VPC. By default, any traffic from a source within a VPC destined to a target within the same VPC is covered by the local route and therefore directly routed. The enhancement allows you to configure more specific routes at a subnet route table level or replace target for the “local” destination with a middlebox such as firewall endpoint. The key use case is insertion of a middlebox between two subnets for inter-subnet traffic (east-west) inspection. For example, you can create routing rules to send all traffic from a subnet to a network firewall endpoint when the destination is a specific subnet as per figure 1. A couple of noteworthy items to clear upfront about any middlebox insertion described in figure 1: - For communication to work, SGs and network ACLs must allow traffic in addition to the middlebox itself. The flow from a source in subnet A to destination in subnet B is effectively broken into two parts, source to middlebox, and middlebox to destination flows. With such configuration, workloads cannot use SG referencing to allow traffic through the firewall endpoint as a middle box. - Traffic return-path must be symmetric. Asymmetric traffic will not be returned to source. Traffic symmetry can become complex in scenarios where traffic is crossing multiple availability zones (multi-AZ) and we will focus on it in the next section. Routing strategy with multi-AZ deployments When you build highly available applications on AWS, you can partition your application to run across multiple AZs. At AWS, we have a principle of keeping AZ independence (AZI) which means all packet flows stay within the Availability Zone rather than crossing boundaries. Network traffic is kept local to the AZ as per figure 2. In such scenario, it is easy to maintain traffic symmetry. There are however scenarios where traffic must cross AZ boundaries and it is critical to have a guiding principle on how to arrange your routes tables and corresponding routes. The principle is to keep the inter-AZ traffic inspection local to client’s AZ. With such a principle applied, you avoid unnecessary inter-AZ traffic cost in case traffic has to be dropped (as it drops closer to the client). In figure 3, you can see this principle in action with a load balancer sending traffic to application tier, and similarly an application tier sending traffic to a database. Figure 3: inter-AZ traffic inspection local to client’s AZ (click for larger image) In the figure 3 example, an Application Load Balancer (ALB) enables you to offload TLS. Decrypted HTTP traffic is sent to backend application targets which could be in a different AZ enabling HTTP header and payload inspection. Following our principle, traffic from ALB to backend target is inspected in the same AZ as the client (ALB). The application in turn requires connectivity to the relational (main/active node) database. This traffic once again is processed closer to the client (application EC2 instance) and traffic is returned symmetrically. Deployment models with VPC routing enhancements Keeping in mind the guiding principle for traffic symmetry – let’s take a look at available deployment models using VPC routing enhancements: 1) AWS Network Firewall is deployed to protect traffic between two different subnets in the same VPC. This model allows traffic inspection between two or more subnets within the same VPC. These subnets may reflect different application tiers and trust levels between workloads such as web tier (low trust), application tier (medium trust) and database tier (high trust) which requires policy enforcement using AWS Network Firewall. The model is suitable for architectures where additional traffic inspection is required and it resembles classic network segmentation as oppose to micro-segmentation more common to cloud native applications. As shown in figure 4, in a single AZ deployment, you can implement this mode with three distinct subnet route tables. Public route table for incoming traffic from Internet Gateway towards a public workload such as web server or a load balancer. AWS Network Firewall endpoint is provisioned in its own subnet also known as “Firewall subnet” which also has a dedicated route table with the original local VPC route to send traffic to workloads in VPC. This ensures that traffic remains symmetric and both legs of the traffic are passed via AWS Network Firewall. Finally, private route table is associated with App subnet as well as DB subnet forwarding all traffic to Network Firewall endpoint in Firewall subnet. This model can be further expanded to include multi-AZ deployments which are following AZI principles as shown in figure 5 below. Depending on how many availability zones are used, this would require two unique subnet route tables as well as a common firewall subnet route table between all availability zones. Workloads which are dependent on resources in other availability zones should follow the routing principle outlined in the routing strategy with multi-AZ deployments section. It ensures that traffic is symmetric and inspected close to the client as shown in figure 3. 2) AWS Network Firewall deployed to protect traffic between a workload private subnet and NAT gateway With this deployment model, traffic sourced in private subnet towards internet is inspected. Prior to the ability to override local routes in subnet route tables, AWS Network Firewall could only be placed between internet gateway and NAT gateway which obscured the source IP addresses of workloads. With VPC routing enhancements, now we are able to place Network Firewall between private workloads and NAT gateway by replacing target of the “local” route with the firewall endpoint in public subnet route table. This allows us to have complete visibility of IP addresses of the workloads which further allows you to build 5-tuple rules. Figure 6: AWS Network Firewall deployed in between NAT gateway and private workloads For multi-AZ deployments of this model, each availability zone requires three unique subnet route tables for each subnet i.e. public, private and firewall as shown in figure 7. This ensures traffic is symmetric and remains within the originating availability zone. Figure 7: AWS Network Firewall deployed in between NAT gateway and private workloads for Multi-AZ deployments (click for larger image) 3) AWS Network Firewall deployed to protect traffic from an ingress or shared services VPC to the rest of network connected via AWS Transit Gateway In this deployment model, traffic from an ingress VPC can be inspected and filtered before it enters the rest of the network connected via AWS Transit Gateway e.g. other VPCs, on-premises or branch offices. For ingress purpose, you can use ALB or NLB (Network Load Balancer) targeting workloads by IP addresses or any other self-managed reverse proxy solutions. The benefit is that traffic is inspected very early on the network before traversing your Transit Gateway to other parts of your network. This could be compelling for use cases where 3rd parties are accessing your workloads. The model also minimizes data processing cost as the traffic does not have to traverse in and out of Transit Gateway to an inspection VPC. Figure 8: Ingress workloads and traffic to the rest of network is inspected using AWS Network Firewall (click for larger image) Similarly, another use case is shared services. AWS PrivateLink-enabled SaaS offerings can be hosted within the same VPC. Directory Services, Client VPN, hosted document management system are additional examples of shared services. Once again, you can avoid setting up a separate inspection VPC if all your care about is additional inspection for your shared services and you might be already using Transit Gateway route tables for network segmentation. Figure 9 below, shows an example for traffic from Transit Gateway entering shared services VPC and is being inspected/filtered by AWS Network Firewall. For multi-AZ deployments, each AZ requires three unique subnet route tables as well as a common firewall subnet route table which allows the traffic to be symmetric. An important change in this model is return routes configuration for traffic coming from AWS Transit Gateway and ensuring the symmetrical routing. Using the guiding principle discussed earlier in the blog, you can configure more specific routes in each Transit Gateway subnet route tables to ensure the traffic goes to local AWS Network Firewall endpoint where the destination belongs. Figure 10: Multi-AZ ingress and shared service combined together and traffic to the rest of network is inspected (click for larger image) With ability to create more specific routes or replace the destination of the local route, a VPC owner have additional options to inspect and secure traffic between shared subnets. VPC owner can effectively segregate VPC participants and only allow traffic as permitted by your security policy. You can find more information about Shared VPCs best practices and network segmentation in this blog post. - Use SGs and network ACLs where possible and implement inter-subnet (east-west) inspection only where necessary. - Once a firewall endpoint (or any other middelbox) is inserted into your traffic flow, security group referencing cannot be used to allow source to connect to your destination. You can use IP addresses of your source in the security groups to permit the incoming traffic. - Traffic between NLB and backends of instance target type does not follow VPC route table routes. If you want to inspect traffic between NLB and backends, use IP target type. - When adding routes more specific than VPC CIDR, each route destination must match existing subnet CIDR. - Network Firewall endpoint requires a dedicated subnet. - You cannot inspect traffic coming from VPC peering. - Deploying a large number of firewall endpoints in a distributed model and across many VPCs could be costly. Consider centralized deployment models for your firewall deployment or Shared VPCs. - Default number of routes per route table is 50. You can increase it up to 1,000. - Default number of firewalls per account per Region is 5. You can view more details on Network Firewall quotas and request a modification to these here. AWS Network Firewall is an easy to deploy, transparent firewall, and IPS service which can be inserted to achieve desired network segmentation and application layer traffic filtering. With VPC routing enhancements, you can insert AWS Network Firewall between VPC subnets in a variety of deployment models. You have flexibility in selecting your network topology. Prior to VPC routing enhancement, you had to place workloads in different VPCs to perform East-West traffic inspection. After VPC routing enhancement, workloads in the same VPC and different subnets can have traffic flows inspected transparently by a middlebox such as AWS Network Firewall.
Accept network packet if destination is on the origin segment lars.lindstrom at gmx.at Sun Apr 7 17:32:10 UTC 2019 I am operating a server hosting a set of services, each run in a separate Docker container. In addition, there is a KVM running pfSense based on FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p3 acting as firewall. The firewall has a physical interface that is connected to the external network and a virtual network card that is connected to the internal container network, using MACVLAN Docker-side, so each container has its own IP address, but all of them are on the same subnet. For security reasons, the containers need to be isolated and shall not be able to communicate with each other principally (just with the external network). For this, MACVLAN is configured in VEPA mode, which allows traffic from and to the parent device, but not to other addresses on the same parent device. Now, I would like to allow specific traffic between specific containers, using pfSense as router, considering the configured firewall rules. However, I cannot seem to get this scenario working. As it looks like, FreeBSD drops each packet on the virtual network card targeting a host on the same subnet (if the destination is on the same segment as the origin segment). I assume this is the standard behaviour if hairpinning (or reflective relay as some call it) is not activated, because in theory the receiver has already had a chance to see the frame - but has not in this case. Is there any option to activate hairpinning for a bridge (as for instance the 'hairpin' switch for a Linux bridge) or, better (as it requires no bridge), disable this behaviour for a specific interface? Might there be another reason for this behaviour? More information about the freebsd-questions
etherpoke is a scriptable network session monitor. It defines two events, SESSION_BEGIN and SESSION_END, to which a hook (system command) can be assigned. The event hook can be any program installed in the system. SESSION_BEGIN is triggered when the first packet with an Ethernet source address matching the filter is captured. SESSION_END is triggered when the time since the last captured packet with an Ethernet source address matching the filter exceeds the session timeout. The SimpleV4L2 is a Linux V4L2 grabber program that shows, in XRender accelerated X windows on the screen, a memory RGB buffer captured with the Video For Linux 2 API provided by the libv4l library. It has support for SSSE3 instructions for converting RGB to RGBA zones of memory. Cyberprobe is a distributed architecture for real-time monitoring of networks against attack. The software consists of two components: cyberprobe, which collects data packets and forwards it over a network in standard streaming protocols; and cybermon, which receives the streamed packets, decodes the protocols, and interprets the information. Cyberprobe can optionally be configured to receive alerts from Snort. In this configuration, when an alert is received, the IP source address associated with the alert is dynamically targeted for a period of time. Collecting data and forwarding over the network to a central collection point allows for a much more "industrialized" approach to intrusion detection. The monitor, cybermon, is highly configurable using LUA, allowing you to do a great many things with captured data: summarize, hexdump, store, and respond with packet injections. libbadger is an alternative to existing decentralized authentication systems which require regular direct communication between client and authority. Badger allows clients to authenticate with servers easily and securely in a browserless environment because there is no necessity to tunnel the client to an authority for the purposes of its own authentication. Using Badger, clients only need to communicate with an authority once in their lifetimes. nrun is a tool that runs a single command or script on multiple target servers synchronously. ncopy will copy a file or directory to multiple target servers. The underlying remote access mechanism is interchangeable, and currently supports ssh, nsh, rsh, and local execution modes. The return code and all command output is logged.
Deploying detection solutions on an endpoint host comes with constraints - limited availability of CPU, memory, disk and other resources, stability constraints, policy adherence and restrictions, the need to be non-intrusive to the user, the host OS and other applications on the host. In response to this, Juniper Threat Labs research presents HoneyProcs, a new deception methodology (patent pending) and an all user space method that extends existing deception honeypot technology on endpoint hosts. HoneyProcs complements existing deception technology by using forged, controlled decoy processes to catch info stealers, Banking Trojans, rootkits and other generic malware, and it does so by exploiting a common trait exhibited by these malwares - code injection. By limiting its inspection footprint to only these decoy processes, HoneyProcs effectively addresses efficacy and performance concerns that otherwise constrain endpoint deployments. Throughout this article, we further explain how the reduced and targeted inspection footprint can be leveraged to turn HoneyProcs into an intelligence gathering toolkit that can be used to write automated signatures for other antivirus and detection solutions to remediate infections on the system. Turning Malware Behavior Against Itself A common trait shared by most malware is code injection - HoneyProcs exploits this trait and uses it to form the foundation of its detection methodology. Malware injects code into other processes for the following reasons: Malware can inject its payload into an existing clean system process like svchost or explorer in order to avoid detection by solutions looking for suspicious process names. Malware can inject into explorer and task manager to create user mode rootkits in order to hide their artifacts, like their files and processes. Information stealers and banking malware inject into browsers in order to intercept and steal user credentials when they log into a website of interest. While there are malware that spawn new processes and inject into them, the above mentioned categories of malware like info stealers, Banking Trojans, rootkits and some other generic malware inject their malicious code into existing, running benign processes without necessarily breaking their functionality. Malware that steals credentials and other important data from your computer are called info stealers. Info stealers can steal credentials from your social engineering sites and many of the info stealers, like Zeus, inject their malicious code into browsers. Keylogging can be considered one of the oldest methods for stealing data, so why is there a need to complicate the process by injecting code into browsers? There can be multiple reasons for this. One can be the introduction of virtual keyboards. By injecting code into browsers, malware can hook APIs that are responsible for sending and receiving HTTP(s) requests and responses. Malware would gain the capability to intercept, steal and manipulate the HTTP(s) requests and responses. This kind of attack is sometimes categorized as “man in the browser attack”. Banking malware is a type of info stealer that has seen a rise of 50 percent in 2018. Banking trojans target stealing banking credentials. It can be done by installing keyloggers on a machine, stealing data from browsers or redirecting the victim to phishing sites. The most common technique used these days is stealing data from the browsers. This is done by injecting a malware module into the browser. The module is mostly used for API hooking, a technique that can manipulate the functionality of a legitimate API. As an example, one common API hooked by banking trojans is HttpSendRequest() from wininet.dll on a Windows machine. The API can be used by an application to send an http request to a server. After hooking the API, the malware can intercept the http requests sent from the browser to the banking site. The http request can contain username, password and other credentials. The hooked function can send the intercepted data to the attacker’s command and control server. This technique is called “form grabbing”. Some famous banking trojans like zbot, spyeye, trickbot and kronos use web injects. Rootkits are used to hide malware artifacts on the system such as files, process, network and registry entries on Windows. Rootkits can be both User mode and Kernel mode. User mode rootkits are usually created by API hooking while kernel mode is done by injecting kernel drivers that can hook kernel APIs/system calls or manipulate kernel data structures related to process, files and network. A regular Windows user browses the file system using “explorer”. So, in order to hide its files, a malware injects code into explorer.exe process. FindFirstFile(), FindNextFile() are Windows APIs that are used to traverse the files. Malware can hook these APIs in explorer.exe process and manipulate the results returned by the APIs in order to hide their files. Similarly, in order to hide a particular process in task manager, malware hooks Process32First and Process32Next in the Windows task manager process. So, a regular user who tries to view the list of running processes using task manager cannot locate the malware’s processes. HoneyProcs - A New Dawn in Deception Technology for Endpoints HoneyProcs is a new deception methodology that complements and extends existing honeypot technology on endpoint hosts. It works by exploiting an important trait of Banking Trojans and rootkits - code injection- and extends to all kinds of malware that inject into legitimate processes. HoneyProcs works by using forged controlled decoy processes that mimic other legitimate processes that are usually targeted by aforementioned malware for injecting code. By controlling the state and properties of these decoy processes and using this fixed state as a baseline, and by monitoring for any changes to this state, we are able to effectively track the presence of infections on the system. Our solution consist of two components: The Decoys and The Scanner. To start, we have forged multiple programs whose processes are the usual targets of Banking Trojans and Rootkits - Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, explorer and svchost. Each of the forged programs has been developed to have its processes mimic and look similar to its corresponding original benign counterpart’s processes. Some of the methods used by HoneyProcs to mimic their corresponding benign counterparts include loading the same dependent libraries and using the same file size on disk, similar amount of memory, similar PE properties, a similar directory location on disk, the same working directory and the same number of threads, etc. The screenshot below shows the loaded libraries for the benign processes on the left hand side and its corresponding HoneyProc decoy processes on the right hand side. As you can see, the loaded libraries are similar. The forged processes have also been developed to go into a fixed, non-modifying state after starting up, which is either achieved by having the process go into a sleep loop or by carrying out some other NO-OP type of activity that keeps the threads running without leading to a change in the process state or properties. Each of these forged processes also don’t have a UI, so there are no chances for a regular user to interact with them and modify their state. The forged processes have been created to handle all exceptions, in order to handle the scenario where the process might crash due to a faulty injection by a malware. While a crash of the decoy process can indicate the possibility of some meddling with the process, an exception handler can also aid in helping the scanner (explained in the next section) accurately figure out the presence of an injection and also extract other intelligence on the injection and the infection. Post deploying the forged decoy processes and once they reach their steady state, the scanner process monitors these decoy processes. The scanner stores a baseline of the process state for each of these decoys. The baseline state stored includes a snapshot of the memory map including the size, properties, permissions of the memory pages, number of threads, etc. The properties can be expanded to include a hash of each page, but in light of keeping the scanning lightweight, it may not be necessary. Post saving a baseline, the scanner continuously monitors these decoy processes, where periodically it snapshots the decoy processes’ properties and compares it to the baseline state it saved earlier at the start of the decoy process. If a change in state is noticed, it indicates a code injection from a malware infection on the system and generates an alert. HoneyProcs: Case in Point The screenshots below show HoneyProcs in action in combination with Feurboos trojan. We have set up a decoy process mimicking the Chrome browser process. On the left hand side we show the memory map of the decoy process before injection. On the right hand side, we see the memory map post the malware’s code injection. The malware starts up, goes through the list of currently running processes on the system until it finds the decoy process for “Chrome” and injects its code into it via a new memory block allocation at 0x1910000 with RWX(Read Write Execute) permission. The scanner detects the injection and alerts with the MessageBox alert “INJECTION DETECTED” Code injection remains a vital component for malware. Even more so for Banking Trojans, rootkits and certain categories of malware where code injection is the focal point of their functionality. Effective detection of such malware on endpoints is important while keeping the solution lightweight, efficient, non-intrusive and stable. On a deception front, although we do see solutions, the number of solutions that target endpoint host deployments are few. HoneyProcs opens the door for a new deception technique that is lightweight, non-intrusive and efficient. It complements existing honeypot technologies and extends the detection net laid out by other solutions. Also being an all user space solution, it addresses stability and complexity issues that otherwise concern kernel based solutions. Catching malware is a cat and mouse game and we do expect malware to get smart and add armoring against HoneyProcs on the system. Such armoring enhancements from malware have to be dealt with on a case by case basis. Some of our future research will focus on tackling possible armoring directions.
Welcome to the Virus Encyclopedia of Panda Security. Killfiles.CA is a Trojan, which although seemingly inoffensive, can actually carry out attacks and intrusions. It causes information loss: it indiscriminately deletes random files. It uses stealth techniques to avoid being detected by the user: Killfiles.CA uses the following propagation or distribution methods: ARE YOU FACING ANY PC OR INTERNET RELATED PROBLEMS? FREE SUPPORT INCLUDED. CALL US 24/7 powered by Anytech365
Data Sharding for Back-End Cloud Security April 27, 2020 By Dr. Edward G. Amoroso Data sharding for back-end cloud security addresses the threat of compromised insiders with privileged access. The Method disaggregates, separates, and obfuscates data so that insiders within cloud service infrastructure cannot make sense of stored assets. ShardSecure™ Data Sheet ShardSecure’s Microshard™ technology shreds, mixes and distributes data to eliminate the value of data on backend infrastructure, ensuring data is protected in the event of a breach, separated from those with privileged access and that the sensitivity class is reduced.
Contributed by Carolyn Crandall, Chief Deception Officer, Attivo Networks Many will advocate that the cybersecurity battle is fought at the endpoint. Completely secure these devices and the attacker will not be able to advance their attack. This belief has fueled a new interest and focus on moving from endpoint protection (EPP) to endpoint detection and response solutions (EDR) as well as managed detection and response (MDR) solutions. The threat landscape is rapidly changing, and organizations’ defenses need to change with it. The latest generation of sophisticated attackers have proven that they can evade anti-virus solutions and bypass traditional perimeter defenses. Given their ability to routinely compromise networks, it has become more important than ever to layer in a “Defense in Depth” strategy that includes prevention, detection, and response. In many cases, predictive measures are also becoming a factor, increasing the need for collection of threat intelligence, which may have been discarded with prior prevention-only approaches. Unlike endpoint protection solutions, EDR is more than a single product or simple set of tools. The term covers a range of capabilities that combines monitoring, analysis, reporting, response, and forensic functions into a suite of defenses designed to respond to highly skilled attackers. By placing sensors and response capability on the endpoints, these systems are positioned to identify and stop an attacker while the attack is in play. The forensic capabilities in many EDR solutions also facilitate the ability to capture threat intelligence and to analyze an attack for identifying weaknesses in their existing defenses. Despite the many enrichments found in EDR, a full Defense-in-Depth strategy requires more. EDR solutions from major providers such as Carbon Black, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Cybereason, FireEye, Symantec, Tanium, and others still have gaps related to the detection of in-network threats, discovery and inventory of endpoint assets, information sharing amongst security controls, and processes to minimize response times. Complementary technologies can close many of these gaps. The deployment of deception technology as a complimentary technology alongside an EDR platform can play a significant role in closing these exposures. Most people will identify with deception as an efficient means for early and accurate detection of threats and for its role in reducing attacker dwell time. However, with advanced distributed deception platforms (DDPs), organizations can also gain visibility, asset discovery, and information sharing automations. The following are four areas in which deception technology adds significant value when deployed with EDR platforms for Defense-in-Depth, or what Gartner, Inc. refers to as an “Adaptive Defense.” In-network Detection and Visibility Deception Technology enhances EDR defenses by quickly detecting threats that are moving laterally within the network, credential theft, and other forms of sophisticated attacks like man-in-the-middle compromises. By creating a synthetic attack surface based on skillfully crafted decoys designed to mirror production assets, organizations create an environment where an attacker is unable to differentiate between deception and real devices. This not only redirects them away from legitimate targets, but also proactively lures and entices them into engaging with the deception environment that will raise a real-time alert of their presence. Detection strategies include placing breadcrumbs on the endpoints in the form of fake credentials, file shares, mimicked services, and decoy data that can quickly lure attackers into the deception environment where their actions can be recorded and studied without their knowledge. Discovery and Tracking of Endpoints To prepare, deploy, and operate deceptions, modern-day DDPs use machine self-learning to understand new devices coming on and off the network, along with their profiles and attributes. Originally designed for creating authenticity, this information also provides security teams with powerful knowledge of adds and changes to the network. This has proven invaluable for detecting unauthorized personal devices, IoT, and other less-secure devices being placed on the network, or devices added with malicious intent. In addition to device visibility, platforms also come with the ability to alert on exposed credential attack paths. Exposed and orphaned credentials, along with system misconfigurations, are often the opening needed for an attacker to gain a foothold. The insight provided in topographical maps not only reduces risk but eliminates hours of manual processing work.
Threat actors already are exploiting vulnerability, dubbed ‘Follina’ and originally identified back in April, to target organizations in Russia and Tibet, researchers said. Microsoft has released a workaround for a zero-day flaw that was initially flagged in April and that attackers already have used to target organizations in Russia and Tibet, researchers said. The remote control execution (RCE) flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-3019, is associated with the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), which, ironically, itself collects information about bugs in the company’s products and reports to Microsoft Support. “A remote code execution vulnerability exists when MSDT is called using the URL protocol from a calling application such as Word,” Microsoft explained in its guidance on the Microsoft Security Response Center. “An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can run arbitrary code with the privileges of the calling application.” Microsoft’s workaround comes some six weeks after the vulnerability was apparently first identified. Researchers from Shadow Chaser Group noticed it on April 12 in a bachelor’s thesis from August 2020—with
Challenges in Windows 8 operating system for digital forensic investigations Windows 8 was released in October 2012 and was followed by Windows 8.1 in October 2013. It was hypothesised that the improvements in Windows 8 and new features of Windows 8 may cause new challenges to digital forensic investigation. Similarly, the forensic techniques that worked perfectly on the past version of Windows might require changes when dealing with a Windows 8 machine. The objective of the research was hence to find out the investigation challenges of the new features in Windows 8 that could impact on the digital forensic investigation process. The research focuses on the digital forensic investigation process gap when dealing with the new version of the operating system. The research first started by reviewing the past Windows platforms with a focus on comparing Windows 7 and Windows 8 to identify the differences. Digital forensic areas such as digital forensic tools and existing digital forensic model were also explored. The problem areas related to digital forensic techniques, Windows 8 digital forensic issues, and Windows 8 features issues were identified. The reviews were narrowed down to review the gap in research in one area. Then the main research question and sub questions for the research were constructed. The main questions chosen for the research was “What new features in Windows 8 Operating System pose new challenges to the digital forensic investigation?” The hypotheses of the research were also defined for testing before the methodology was introduced in order to conduct the experiments to answer the research question and also test the hypothesis. The research phases followed the six phases “Preparation, Incident Response, Data Collection, Data Analysis, the Report and Incident Closure”. Each of the phases was recorded and the results of the findings were used to assist in answering the research questions. Based on the findings, the three new features in Windows 8 of significance were the secure boot, after reset option and communication applications. These features, in Windows 8 were found to bring new challenges for digital forensic investigations.
Ghost (Jamper) ransomware removal instructions What is Ghost (Jamper)? Ghost (Jamper) is new variant of a high-risk ransomware called Jamper. Once infiltrated Ghost (Jamper) encrypts most of stored files and appends filenames with a random string, probably victim's unique ID (e.g., "sample.jpg" could be renamed to something like "sample.jpg.38254CED-1646-C41E-8E1F-0B8268EE8D"). Following successful encryption, Ghost (Jamper) generates a text file ("===HOW TO RECOVER ENCRYPTED FILES===.TXT") and drops it on victim's desktop wallpaper. This ransomware was firstly discovered by a malware security researcher Sandor Nemes. Note that there's another ransomware called Ghost, however, it is not related to this one. The created text file contains a very short message stating that data is encrypted and that victims have to contact cyber criminals and purchase a decryption tool in order to restore it. Unfortunately, the fact that cyber criminals are the only ones capable of restoring data is true. Ghost (Jamper) encrypts data by using a cryptography that generates unique decryption key individually for each victim. The problem is that all keys are stored in a remote server controlled by cyber criminals. Thus, since data recovery without the key is impossible, users are encouraged to purchase a decryption tool with the key embedded within. To receive payment/decryption instructions victims have to contact cyber criminals via one of provided email addresses. Ransomware developers usually ask for $500-$1500 and the payments are typically have to be submitted using some sort of cryptocurrency. Nevertheless, no matter how low or high the price is, it should never be paid. Research results show that cyber criminals often ignore victims, once payments are submitted. This means that paying typically gives no positive result and users merely get scammed. Hence, no matter how low or high the price is, it should never be paid. Research results show that cyber criminals often ignore victims, once payments are submitted. For this reason, paying usually gives no positive result and users merely get scammed. All encouragements to submit payments and contact these persons should be ignored. Unluckily, Ghost (Jamper) is an undecryptable ransomware, meaning that there are no tools capable of cracking its encryption. The thing victims can do is restore everything from a backup if there is one created. Screenshot of a message encouraging users to pay a ransom to decrypt their compromised data: Ghost (Jamper) shares many similarities with dozens of other ransomware infections, such as Poret, Buran, SECURE. Almost every single one is designed to encrypt data so that developers could blackmail victims by offering a paid recovery. Unfortunately, encryptions are typically performed using RSA, AES, or other similar algorithms that generate unique decryption keys. Therefore, unless this virus is still in development and/or has certain bugs/flaws (e.g., the key us hard-coded, stored locally, or something like that), restoring data manually (without developers interfering) is impossible. We highly recommend you to maintain regular data backups. Yet be sure to store them in unplugged storage devices (e.g., external hard drive, flash drive, or similar) or either remote server (e.g., Cloud). This way you'll prevent ransomware from compromising backups alongside with regular data. Moreover, you should keep in mind that there's always a chance that used server/storage device will be damaged. For this reason, you should have multiple backup copies stored in different locations. How did ransomware infect my computer? Developers proliferate Ghost (Jamper) via Danabot botnet. However, such infections are also proliferated using email spam campaigns, third party software download sources, fake software updaters/cracks, and trojans. Spam campaigns are used to send thousands of emails consisting of malicious attachments (links/files) and deceptive messages encouraging recipients to open them. Additionally, cyber criminals present malicious attachments as some important documents just to create the impression of legitimacy and increase the chance of tricking recipients. Unofficial software download sources (free file hosting websites, freeware download websites, peer-to-peer [P2P] networks, etc.) are also used in a similar manner. Crooks simply present malicious executables as legitimate software, thereby tricking users into downloading and installing malware manually. Fake updaters usually infect computers by exploiting outdated software's bugs/flaws or simply downloading and installing malware rather than actual updates. Software cracks are meant to bypass paid software activation. Yet since crooks use them to spread malware, users are way more likely to infect their computers instead of gaining access to paid software features. Last but not least are trojans which stealthily infiltrate computers with an intention of injecting additional malware. \|Name\|\|Ghost (Jamper) virus\| \|Threat Type\|\|Ransomware, Crypto Virus, Files locker\| \|Encrypted Files Extension\|\|Random string (potentially victim's unique ID).\| \|Ransom Demanding Message\|\|===HOW TO RECOVER ENCRYPTED FILES===.TXT text file.\| \|Cyber Criminal [email protected], [email protected]\| \|Detection Names\|\|Avast (Win32:DangerousSig [Trj]), Emsisoft (MalCert.B (A)), ESET-NOD32 (A Variant Of Win32/Kryptik.GTSI), Kaspersky (Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Upatre.hmco), Full List Of Detections (VirusTotal)\| \|Rogue Process Name\|\|Rowrub (the process name may vary).\| \|Symptoms\|\|Can't open files stored on your computer, previously functional files now have a different extension, for example my.docx.locked. A ransom demanding message is displayed on your desktop. Cyber criminals are asking to pay a ransom (usually in bitcoins) to unlock your files.\| \|Distribution methods\|\|Infected email attachments (macros), torrent websites, malicious ads.\| \|Damage\|\|All files are encrypted and cannot be opened without paying a ransom. Additional password stealing trojans and malware infections can be installed together with a ransomware infection.\| To eliminate Ghost (Jamper) virus our malware researchers recommend scanning your computer with Spyhunter. How to protect yourself from ransomware infections? The main reasons for computer infections are poor knowledge and reckless behavior. Caution is the key to its safety and, therefore, paying attention when browsing the Internet, as well as downloading/installing software is a must. It is highly recommended to download software only from official sources, using direct download links. Third party downloaders/installers often include rogue apps, which is why such tools should never be used. Same goes for software updates. Keeping installed applications and operating system updated is paramount. Yet to achieve this users should employ only implemented functions or tools provided by the official developer. Be aware that software piracy is considered a cyber crime and, if that wasn't enough, the risk of infections is extremely high. Therefore, cracking installed applications should never be considered. We highly recommend to have a reputable anti-virus/anti-spyware suite installed and running at all times - tools like such will help you detect and eliminate malware before it harms the system. If your computer is already infected with Ghost (Jamper), we recommend running a scan with Spyhunter for Windows to automatically eliminate this ransomware. Text presented in Ghost (Jamper) ransomware's text file ("===HOW TO RECOVER ENCRYPTED FILES===.TXT"): Your important files have been encrypted. We can help you decrypt them. If you are interested in purchasing our decryptor, please contact us by email: Screenshot of Ghost (Jamper)'s process ("Rowrub") in Windows Task Manager: Screenshot of files encrypted by Ghost (Jamper) (random string extension): Ghost (Jamper) ransomware removal: Instant automatic removal of Ghost (Jamper) virus: Manual threat removal might be a lengthy and complicated process that requires advanced computer skills. Spyhunter is a professional automatic malware removal tool that is recommended to get rid of Ghost (Jamper) virus. Download it by clicking the button below: - What is Ghost (Jamper)? - STEP 1. Ghost (Jamper) virus removal using safe mode with networking. - STEP 2. Ghost (Jamper) ransomware removal using System Restore. Windows XP and Windows 7 users: Start your computer in Safe Mode. Click Start, click Shut Down, click Restart, click OK. During your computer start process, press the F8 key on your keyboard multiple times until you see the Windows Advanced Option menu, and then select Safe Mode with Networking from the list. Video showing how to start Windows 7 in "Safe Mode with Networking": Windows 8 users: Start Windows 8 is Safe Mode with Networking - Go to Windows 8 Start Screen, type Advanced, in the search results select Settings. Click Advanced startup options, in the opened "General PC Settings" window, select Advanced startup. Click the "Restart now" button. Your computer will now restart into the "Advanced Startup options menu". Click the "Troubleshoot" button, and then click the "Advanced options" button. In the advanced option screen, click "Startup settings". Click the "Restart" button. Your PC will restart into the Startup Settings screen. Press F5 to boot in Safe Mode with Networking. Video showing how to start Windows 8 in "Safe Mode with Networking": Windows 10 users: Click the Windows logo and select the Power icon. In the opened menu click "Restart" while holding "Shift" button on your keyboard. In the "choose an option" window click on the "Troubleshoot", next select "Advanced options". In the advanced options menu select "Startup Settings" and click on the "Restart" button. In the following window you should click the "F5" button on your keyboard. This will restart your operating system in safe mode with networking. Video showing how to start Windows 10 in "Safe Mode with Networking": Log in to the account infected with the Ghost (Jamper) virus. Start your Internet browser and download a legitimate anti-spyware program. Update the anti-spyware software and start a full system scan. Remove all entries detected. If you cannot start your computer in Safe Mode with Networking, try performing a System Restore. Video showing how to remove ransomware virus using "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" and "System Restore": 1. During your computer start process, press the F8 key on your keyboard multiple times until the Windows Advanced Options menu appears, and then select Safe Mode with Command Prompt from the list and press ENTER. 2. When Command Prompt mode loads, enter the following line: cd restore and press ENTER. 3. Next, type this line: rstrui.exe and press ENTER. 4. In the opened window, click "Next". 5. Select one of the available Restore Points and click "Next" (this will restore your computer system to an earlier time and date, prior to the Ghost (Jamper) ransomware virus infiltrating your PC). 6. In the opened window, click "Yes". 7. After restoring your computer to a previous date, download and scan your PC with recommended malware removal software to eliminate any remaining Ghost (Jamper) ransomware files. To restore individual files encrypted by this ransomware, try using Windows Previous Versions feature. This method is only effective if the System Restore function was enabled on an infected operating system. Note that some variants of Ghost (Jamper) are known to remove Shadow Volume Copies of the files, so this method may not work on all computers. To restore a file, right-click over it, go into Properties, and select the Previous Versions tab. If the relevant file has a Restore Point, select it and click the "Restore" button. If you cannot start your computer in Safe Mode with Networking (or with Command Prompt), boot your computer using a rescue disk. Some variants of ransomware disable Safe Mode making its removal complicated. For this step, you require access to another computer. To protect your computer from file encryption ransomware such as this, use reputable antivirus and anti-spyware programs. As an extra protection method, you can use programs called HitmanPro.Alert and EasySync CryptoMonitor, which artificially implant group policy objects into the registry to block rogue programs such as Ghost (Jamper) ransomware. Note that Windows 10 Fall Creators Update includes "Controlled Folder Access" feature that blocks ransomware attempts to encrypt your files. By default this feature automatically protects files stored in Documents, Pictures, Videos, Music, Favorites as well as Desktop folders. Windows 10 users should install this update to protect their data from ransomware attacks. Here's more information on how to get this update and add additional protection layer from ransomware infections. HitmanPro.Alert CryptoGuard - detects encryption of files and neutralises any attempts without need for user-intervention: Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware Beta uses advanced proactive technology that monitors ransomware activity and terminates it immediately - before reaching users' files: - The best way to avoid damage from ransomware infections is to maintain regular up-to-date backups. More information on online backup solutions and data recovery software Here. Other tools known to remove Ghost (Jamper) ransomware:
AWS Honeypot Data: Visualizing the Threat of Cyberattacks What Will You Learn? - Learn how cyberattacks develop - Shed light on different attack patterns - Find ways to mitigate and protect an organization - Determine which measures are working for your organization What's in This Whitepaper? This report delves into a dataset from a Kaggel report of six months of successfully-deflected honeypot attacks made against AWS servers. We compare two types of cyberattacks, considering the time and duration of the attacks, the intensity of the attacks (number of attacks/attempts) and the country source of the attackers. We introduce abnormality of cyberattacks at different times (week/days/hours/seconds) and by the origin of the attack (place). Why Should You Read It? Amazon IT teams set up a honeypot system that, to outsiders, looks like the Amazon network. They monitor traffic to such systems, and they can see where the attacks are coming from, how they operate, and what they want. This helps determine which security measures are working and which ones may need improvement. This report analyzes this data set to decipher and visualize types of cyber attacks in order to learn how they develop, understand different attack patterns, and help minimize and protect your organization.
In this the third and final installment we’ll go through the security options available to admins through SecurityGateway. This is going to be a good bit of information to cover. Let’s get started! All options noted below can be found by first logging into SecurityGateway as an admin and then clicking the ‘Security’ button in the bottom left hand corner. Anti-Spam Sub Menu “Outbreak Protection” is a spam and virus filtering component, developed by Cyren, that is different from your traditional signature, or rule-based anti-spam filter. Outbreak Protection uses “Recurrent Pattern Detection” technology to detect spam or viruses. This approach to filtering allows for the quick identification of new threats. Instead of having to wait for vendors to release new rules, or signatures to detect new threats the Outbreak Protection can start identifying them within minutes. Outbreak Protection is considered a “zero hour protection” filter since new threats can be detected so quickly. Heuristics and Bayesian This is the core spam filtering component of SecurityGateway. This portion of SecurityGateway’s spam filter uses the highly popular SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin uses heuristics rules to find and classify emails. SpamAssassin rules, when triggered, are set to add a certain number of points to a message’s spam score. If the score reaches a certain threshold, or higher, the email is then classified as spam. Bayesian Classification, in a nut shell, uses a learning approach to spam filtering.This component works by recording key words found in good emails and key words found in bad, or spam, emails. Based on this information a mathematical algorithm is then used to determine whether an email is spam or ham (ie good email). DNS Blacklists (DNSBL) SecurityGateway will check connecting IP addresses with blacklist services that maintain lists of servers known to relay spam. Although you can add any number of different blacklist servers that you wish, Spamhaus and SpamCop are two servers added by default on a new installation of SecurityGateway. URI Blacklists (URIBL) This filtering component will lookup web links found in the bodies of emails. As URLs, or domains, are found in links of spam emails they will be added to a database that SecurityGateway can query. We can then either outright block emails with blacklisted URLs or add points to the message’s spam score. This is an anti-spam option that inserts an intentional delay on inbound emails from unknown senders. Emails servers, using greylisting, do this by initially giving a 400 series type SMTP error. Any sending server encountering a 400 series type error will retry sending the email according to it’s own retry settings. The main premise of this feature is that typically spammers don’t retry sending their emails if they encounter an error during delivery. They simply blast out as many emails as they can and hope for the best! Email Certification is a process by which a source, that you trust, vouches for the behavior of an authenticated identity (the sender’s domain) associated with a message. Certification allows you to treat inbound email differently when doing certain security lookups. A sending domain that has been certified, can then be either exempt from spam filtering, or we can elect to subtract points from the message’s spam score. Spammers are known for spoofing who an email is from and if a receiving email server rejects a message then the real user gets the bounce message notification. This is known as backscatter. SecurityGateway prevents these bounced messages from being delivered to your users by protecting the Return-Path header by appending an encryption key to the local user’s email address. This encryption key is added on to every email going to an external source. If a bounce message is returned to SecurityGateway, and the encryption key is missing, we can then reject the email since SecurityGateway didn’t send the original email. As noted above, “Heuristics and Bayesian” filtering use a scoring system to determine whether a message is spam. The options in this section are used to define a threshold for this scoring. Emails that receive a score above a certain threshold can be rejected. Another threshold can be set to quarantine an email that gets a certain score or higher. Anti-Virus Sub Menu Virus scanning options in SecurityGateway inlcude the Clam AntiVirus email scanning engine and Cyren’s Anti-Virus. Clam AntiVirus is your traditional signature based virus scanner. Cyren uses it’s own Recurrent Pattern Detection technology to detect virus. You decide how often that SecurityGateway should check for new virus signatures! Anti-Spoofing Sub Menu SecurityGateway can do PTR lookups, lookups on the HELO/EHLO given value, and the domain name passed in the MAIL FROM command during the SMTP session. By default SecurityGateway does not reject any emails based on these lookups but it is available to us if needed. By default SecurityGateway will verify DKIM signed email. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a security method of signing an email, using a private/public key process, that verifies the identity of the sender as well as the message content. DKIM helps ensure that messages coming from a certain domain are in fact coming from that domain (ensuring it’s not spoofed) and that the content of the message was not tampered with. There’s a great read explaining what DKIM is by Message Exchange titled “How to explain DKIM to your grandmother“. Use these options to configure SecurityGateway to start signing outbound emails using DKIM. There is not much to configure here except the turning on of the signing of emails using DKIM, and what domain to sign emails for. The longest part of this process is adding DNS records to your domain. SecurityGateway can verify if senders are valid users who can receive email. A large number of spam emails have forged “From” addresses that may not actually exist. SecurityGateway can verify that the sending email address is a legitimate one. We do this by connecting to the sender’s email server and giving their email address in the RCPT TO command. SecurityGateway is either looking for a “Recipient OK” or a “Unknown User” response. Anti-Abuse Sub Menu Out-of-the-box, SecurityGateway will not allow the relaying of any emails. Although we can allow certain hosts to be able to relay based on their connecting IP address or host name. SecurityGateway by default requires authentication during the SMTP session if email is is reportedly from a local user. This security feature works by pairing a domain name with an IPaddress or, IP address range. If an inbound email is claiming to be from a local domain, or a domain listed here, then SecurityGateway expects the email to be coming from the supplied IP/IP range. This is a great feature to weed out those emails where a spammer has spoofed your local users email address in the From header. Here’s a link to another blog article I wrote on the IP Shield feature found in MDaemon. While GUI options may look a bit different the IP Shielding feature works the same in both products. These options allow SecurityGateway to track the behavior of connecting IP addresses while they attempt to deliver email. If they behave in a suspicious way (i.e. producing too many failed RCPT TO command during the SMTP session (indicates they may be trying to guess valid addresses), too many failed authentication attempts (password guessing), or too many RSET commands) SecurityGateway will ban the IP address from connecting for a default of 10 minutes. This limits how effective their email address or password guessing can be. Tarpitting is the act of inserting a delay in the processing of SMTP commands. Spam sending bots typically just try to send out as many emails as possible while not caring about any responses they get back. By inserting this delay in SMTP command processing may “trip” up the spam sending bots. If they start sending commands out of sequence SecurityGateway will reject the email and close the session. Use these options if you wish to restrict how much bandwidth SMTP sessions are allowed to use. A handy feature for sites that many be forced to use slower internet connections, ie due to the location of the company. Account Hijack Detection In an ideal world we would all use secure pass phrases for passwords that would be very hard to guess. In the real world though, even when using strong passwords/pass phrases, account credentials do get compromised. Once a spammer has an account’s credentials figured out they will start to send as much spam as they possible can before an admin notes and corrects the problem. This feature limits the amount of email that can be sent from a local user within a certain time frame. Therefore limiting the amount of damage done and hopefully prevents your server from being blacklisted. When this limit is breached SecurityGateway will prevent the account from sending any more new email, although the account will still receive email. Filtering Sub Menu Here you can create content filter rules that will trigger on messages based on header, IP address, or the information found in the body of an email. Once detected the content filter can then act upon the message. For example we can simply reject a message, send the email to a quarantine, or maybe redirect the email to another email address. Here an admin can choose what type of email attachments are acceptable to be received by local users. We can opt to have certain attachments blocked outright or we can opt to have them quarantined. Blacklists Sub Menu Use these options to block or quarantine emails from email addresses, hosts, and/or IP addresses. Whitelists Sub Menu Use these options to allow certain senders to be exempt from a number of security features in SecurityGateway. Most security features have the ability to exempt senders who have been whitelisted. Advanced Sub Menu Sieve is a powerful email filtering language which you can do a lot with! I could probably create an entire blog article that only talked about Sieve. (let me know if this is something you’d like to see!) Many admins will simply use the GUI driven “message filter” in SecurityGateway due to its simplicity compared to Sieve. If you are interested in creating your own sieve scripts this information will help get you started. And there you have it! I hope you have found this 3 part series helpful in understanding the robust security options available when using SecurityGateway. If you have any questions please send us an email to [email protected].
Machine Learning is an ever-increasing part of security, but what does it actually mean? And how is it used? Learn how Cisco’s Next Generation Endpoint security solution, AMP for Endpoints, uses machine learning techniques to protect you against new and advanced threats. Learn more at http://cs.co/6053Dsm9Z. You can watch this video also at the source.
CCN-KRS: A Key Resolution Service for CCN A key feature of the Content Centric Networking (CCN) architecture is the requirement for each piece of content to be individually signed by its publisher. Thus, CCN should, in principle, be immune to distributing fake content. However, in practice, the network cannot easily detect and drop fake content as the trust context (i.e., the public keys that need to be trusted for verifying the content signature) is an application-dependent concept. CCN provides mechanisms for consumers to request a piece of content restricted by its signer's public key or the cryptographic digest of the content object to avoid receiving fake content. However, it does not provide any mechanisms to learn this critical information prior to requesting the content. In this paper, we introduce a scalable Key Resolution Service (KRS) that can securely store and serve security information (e.g., public key certificates of publishers) for a namespace in CCN. We implement KRS as a service for CCN in ndnSIM, a ns-3 module, and discuss and evaluate such a distributed service. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of our design via simulations driven by real-traffic traces.
THANK YOU FOR SUBSCRIBING About 18 percent of programs do not limit the number of authentication attempts to sign in. FREMONT, CA: Mobile security attacks are on the rise of cyber players. These players are aware of security vulnerabilities in the world of smartphone applications. Therefore, hackers break computers using several techniques. If the attack is successful, the intruder would have access to sensitive information. This type of attack is based on WiFi networks, hardware, operating systems, and software. In comparison, 18 percent of programs do not limit the number of authentication attempts to sign in. Moreover, the attacker can use any data collected for malicious purposes. When that happens, things will escalate fast for the victim. Usually, it is too late to defend by the time an attack has been detected. At this point, the cyber actor has already obtained access to the account numbers, passwords, media, contacts, social security numbers, and other essential material. Above all, mobile users can learn how to use the security features of their phones to protect their records. Indeed, some businesses provide security features, which incorporate vital chain applications. Developers can follow a few rules to help avoid leakage of data. On the negative side, these flaws vary from disclosing user details to providing glitches that give admin access to hackers. Before downloading an application, please be aware of the terms of service for that application. Specifically, the terms of service include a summary that discloses the arrangements between an individual and a service. In essence, it is necessary to ensure that only trustworthy applications have permission allowed. Data can be obtained from voice, post, camera, location, or other applications. The following segment is meant to help developers recognize mobile security risks. • Preventive Steps and Malware Spotting. • Data recovery and encryption. • Do not import software from third-party sources. • Use the antivirus to check the installed and new applications regularly. • Do not open unusual file types. • Evite downloading software from undisclosed sources. • Review the app scores at the store • Check attachments before opening • Only check app permissions with trusted sources. Check out: Top Enterprise Security Solution Companies
Terminate this ransomware’s processes HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen (also known as HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.genRansomware), also known as HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen Ransonware, is a dangerous infection that puts your personal files at risk. This malicious ransomware can attack your operating system without your notice, and our research team warns that its distribution could be performed in various ways. This worm sends itself to all the contacts in the Microsoft Outlook Address Book and MSN messenger contact list, and it attempts to spread itself through the KaZaA file-sharing network. No matter that it looks trustworthy, this Trojan is extremely dangerous as it rewrites the master boot record (MBR) what makes its victims disabled from booting into Windows. We very rarely advise our readers to pay such fees because on one hand, it is tantamount to supporting criminals to commit further crimes; Not all ransomware infections are very sophisticated threats, but they still belong to the category of harmful malicious software because they perform damaging activities. All files that were encrypted should have an additional extension, e.g. Besides removing infected files, you will need to restore original boot record To protect the computer from such threats in the future, it would be advisable not only to use a legitimate security tool but also stay away from suspicious Spam emails, especially if they come from an unknown source. The most widely used method for criminals to spread ransomware threats like HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen Ransomware is the use of spamming campaigns. It means the threat can work right from the directory where its launcher was downloaded. Since this malicious program uses a strong cipher to lock your files, manual decryption is out of the question.Download Removal Toolto remove HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen Delete the registry strings It is very easy to replace the Desktop wallpaper and HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen files. —-README—-! The flaw in this ransomware is that even if you click the Pay button on the ransom note, your files are decrypted automatically. .avi; It is possible that this is just a temporary flaw that will be fixed, but it is also possible that cyber criminals have no intention of decrypting your files. If you do not have such a tool, make sure to install one as it is an imperative part of virtual security because it can identify and warn you about any questionable programs beforehand. As soon as you get your files back, you need to HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen from your operating system. Nevertheless, there are also other techniques the ransomware creators employ in the distribution of this trojan, for instance, exploit kits. Leaving even potentially harmful programs on your computer may expose you to malicious web content and cause further system security issues for you. In fact, there is no indication that HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen is even capable of accepting a decryption key that could return your files to normal. Because when users need their files, they are more likely to pay the ransom. Our comments section is open to all questions regarding the threat and its elimination. How is HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen Trojan Spread? At present, we do now know how this particular ransomware is distributed. Users can try to do so manually by following the instructions located below or with a reliable antimalware tool of their choice. Apart from this, your HOSTS.txt file is also modified to include a list of mainly Russian websites, including vk.com, ok.ru, and playground.ru, which become blocked from you. All these files should have been copied to a separate device so that you can safely restore them to the computer after removing the infection. Also, feel free to write us a comment below if you need any help or want to ask more questions about the threat. Now, if you choose not to pay the ransom, you might have to lose your files, which is not a problem if they are backed up.Download Removal Toolto remove HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen You have to be experienced to erase HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen from your operating system successfully. To be quite frank, a lot of ransomware programs do not really care how easily you can delete them; Therefore, we suggest that you HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen from your PC as soon as you can. Unfortunately, files will stay the way they are, i.e. An unprotected computer can be compromised by a Trojan horse, browser hijacker, adware program, or any other malicious piece of software aimed at getting from you as much as possible. This up-to-date security software can automatically identify and eliminate all kinds of threats that could endanger your PC. Therefore, we suggest that you HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen ASAP. Also, a new Value called zcrypt will be visible in the RUN registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run). Manual HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen removalBelow you will find instructions on how to delete HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen from Windows and Mac systems. If you follow the steps correctly, you will be able to uninstall the unwanted application from Control Panel, erase the unnecessary browser extension, and eliminate files and folders related to HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen completely. Uninstall HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen from Windows - Click on Start and select Settings - Choose System and go to Apps and features tab - Locate the unwanted app and click on it - Click Uninstall and confirm your action Windows 8/Windows 8.1 - Press Win+C to open Charm bar and select Settings - Choose Control Panel and go to Uninstall a program - Select the unwanted application and click Uninstall Windows 7/Windows Vista - Click on Start and go to Control Panel - Choose Uninstall a program - Select the software and click Uninstall - Open Start menu and pick Control Panel - Choose Add or remove programs - Select the unwanted program and click Remove Eliminate HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen extension from your browsersHEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen can add extensions or add-ons to your browsers. It can use them to flood your browsers with advertisements and reroute you to unfamiliar websites. In order to fully remove HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen, you have to uninstall these extensions from all of your web browsers. - Open your browser and press Alt+F - Click on Settings and go to Extensions - Locate the HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen related extension - Click on the trash can icon next to it - Select Remove - Launch Mozilla Firefox and click on the menu - Select Add-ons and click on Extensions - Choose HEUR:Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Miner.gen related extension - Click Disable or Remove - Open Internet Explorer and press Alt+T - Choose Manage Add-ons - Go to Toolbars and Extensions - Disable the unwanted extension - Click on More information - Select Remove Restore your browser settingsAfter terminating the unwanted application, it would be a good idea to reset your browsers. - Open your browser and click on the menu - Select Settings and click on Show advanced settings - Press the Reset settings button and click Reset - Open Mozilla and press Alt+H - Choose Troubleshooting Information - Click Reset Firefox and confirm your action - Open IE and press Alt+T - Click on Internet Options - Go to the Advanced tab and click Reset - Enable Delete personal settings and click Reset
Nuclei is a powerful tool that has been gaining popularity among security researchers and penetration testers. It is an open-source project developed by Project Discovery, a company that specializes in vulnerability scanning and security testing. Nuclei is designed to automate the process of detecting security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in web applications and APIs. It does this by using templates, which are pre-built rulesets that describe specific vulnerabilities or attack vectors. Nuclei comes with a large collection of pre-built templates that cover a wide range of vulnerabilities and attack vectors. These templates are constantly being updated and improved by the community, which means that Nuclei is always up-to-date with the latest vulnerabilities and attack techniques. Additionally, Nuclei allows users to create their own templates, which can be shared with the community. Nuclei templates are written in YAML, a human-readable data serialization language. YAML is easy to read and write, which means that creating templates for Nuclei is relatively simple. Templates are structured into three main sections: metadata, requests, and matchers. The metadata section contains information about the template, such as its name, author, and description. The requests section describes the HTTP requests that Nuclei will send to the target. Finally, the matchers section describes how Nuclei should interpret the responses it receives from the target. Let's take a closer look at each of these sections: - name: Name of the template - author: Name of the author - severity: Severity of the vulnerability (low, medium, high, critical) - description: A brief description of the vulnerability being tested - references: Links to relevant CVEs or other resources - method: The HTTP method to use (GET, POST, etc.) - path: The URL path to target - headers: HTTP headers to include in the request - body: The HTTP request body - status: The expected HTTP status code (200, 403, etc.) - words: Keywords to search for in the response body - regex: Regular expressions to match against the response body - json: JSON path expressions to extract data from the response body As you can see, Nuclei templates are highly customizable and can be tailored to meet the specific needs of a particular security assessment. By using pre-built templates or creating their own, security researchers and penetration testers can quickly and easily identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in web applications and APIs. Here's an example of a simple Nuclei template that checks for the presence of a PHPInfo file: id: phpinfo name: Check for PHPInfo file severity: low description: Checks for the presence of a PHPInfo file requests: - method: GET path: /phpinfo.php matchers: - status: 200 - words: - "phpinfo" In this example, the template is checking for the presence of a file called phpinfo.php. If the file exists and returns a 200 status code, the template will return a positive match. The severity of the vulnerability is classified as low, and the description provides more information about what the template is checking for. One of the great features of Nuclei is its ability to generate reports that provide a detailed overview of the vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that were identified during a scan. Reports can be generated in a variety of formats, including JSON, HTML, and Markdown, making it easy to share the results with other team members or stakeholders. In conclusion, Nuclei is a powerful and flexible tool that can help security researchers and penetration testers identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in web applications and APIs. With its extensive library of pre-built templates and its ability to create custom templates, Nuclei offers a fast and efficient way to perform security assessments, reducing the time and effort required to manually scan web applications and APIs. By automating the process of vulnerability detection, Nuclei allows security professionals to focus their time and attention on more complex security issues. One of the key benefits of using Nuclei is its ability to scale. Nuclei can be used to scan large numbers of web applications and APIs simultaneously, making it ideal for organizations with large and complex IT infrastructures. This can be particularly useful for security teams who need to perform regular vulnerability scans across a large number of applications. Another benefit of Nuclei is its ease of use. The tool is designed to be user-friendly, with a simple and intuitive command-line interface. This means that security professionals with varying levels of technical expertise can use the tool effectively, without the need for extensive training or technical knowledge. Finally, Nuclei is an open-source project, which means that it is freely available to anyone who wants to use it. This makes it an accessible and cost-effective solution for organizations with limited budgets or resources. The open-source nature of the project also means that it is constantly being improved and updated by the community, ensuring that it remains an effective and up-to-date tool for vulnerability scanning and security testing. In conclusion, Nuclei is a powerful and flexible tool that can help security professionals identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in web applications and APIs quickly and efficiently. With its extensive library of pre-built templates and its ability to create custom templates, Nuclei offers a scalable and easy-to-use solution for vulnerability scanning and security testing. As the tool continues to evolve and improve, it is likely to become an even more valuable asset for security teams around the world. Post a Comment
The source code uses comment styles or formats that are inconsistent or do not follow expected standards for the product. This issue makes it more difficult to maintain the software due to insufficient legibility, which indirectly affects security by making it more difficult or time-consuming to find and/or fix vulnerabilities. It also might make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities. The table(s) below shows the weaknesses and high level categories that are related to this weakness. These relationships are defined as ChildOf, ParentOf, MemberOf and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as PeerOf and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar weaknesses that the user may want to explore. Relevant to the view "Research Concepts" (CWE-1000) Relevant to the view "Development Concepts" (CWE-699) More information is available — Please select a different filter.
Traditional application development emits events in the form of logs. Use CloudWatch we can generate metrics from our logs using pattern matching. By generating metrics based on observed log messages we can increase the value of our CloudWatch logs by providing visualizations of the metric data through dashboard, and providing alerts when metrics breach baseline thresholds. Using the AWS CLI or API you can publish your own custom metrics. Create a Confidence metric Monitoring for Business Outcomes Titus Grone wants to know that ExampleCorp is delighting our customers. Feedback from the customer indicates that accuracy of items identified in the upload images is the greatest source of satisfaction when it works well, and frustration when it does not. Focus groups indicate that it is better to not have misidentified (low confidence) objects. He wants to track the image recognition confidence levels as a measure of how accurate the ExampleCorp application is performing. He will use this information to help determine where to focus development efforts. 4.1 Create the Log Metric [logType, myTimestamp, severity, delim1, delim2, type, action, for, Image, imgNum, Name, imgTags, Confidence, cValue] - To test your filter pattern, for Select Log Data to Test, select the log group to test the metric filter against, and then choose Test Pattern. - Under Results, CloudWatch Logs displays a message showing how many occurrences of the filter pattern were found in the log file. To see detailed results, click Show test results. - Choose Next 3. On the Create Metric Filter and Assign a Metric screen, - For Filter Name type confidenceLevels - Under Metric Details, for Metric Namespace, type ApplicationLogMetrics - For Metric Name, type cValue - For Metric Value choose $cValue. - Leave the Default Value undefined, and then choose Next. - Review the metric filter, and then choose Create metric Filter. 4.2 Review the resulting metrics 4.3 Create a dashboard
- July 24, 2014The “open“ nature of Android allows many app developers to explore the potential of the system. However, the very “open“ nature of Android could also allow abuse and exploits. Trend Micro analyzes some of these risks. - July 23, 2014Smart grids are power grids with digital capabilities. Given the widespread control smart grids hold over public utilities, attackers are likely to target them to gain power or extort money. - July 22, 2014By targeting session tokens sent via SMS in an elaborate fashion, a cybercriminal gang is able to intercept two-factor authentication and get your banking credentials. This attack is dubbed Operation Emmental. - July 21, 2014Smart meters are already installed in many cities across the globe. As more homes are installed with smart meters, homeowners should be aware of the possible risks they may bring. - July 18, 2014Hours after the fateful crash of Malaysia Airlines 777, suspicious .tk links on Twitter posts led to spyware downloads, while “actual footage“ posts on Facebook pointed to adware. - July 17, 2014OpenWireless.org may have good intentions with its project to make routers, via firmware, that open wireless access to those near its range. However, this initiative carries critical risks that cannot be ignored. - July 17, 2014Use-After-Free exploits are now unheard of. Thanks to “delay free,“ an improvement deployed by Microsoft on Internet Explorer 11. With this improvement, timing to occupy freed object space becomes difficult to find for an attacker. - July 16, 2014In an ideal world, IT administrators go out of their way to protect the organization's information. However, even IT admins are prone to misconceptions that leave organizations vulnerable to attacks. - July 15, 2014Repackaged apps use lures such as using a legitimate/popular app's icon or name. This method allows these malicious apps to thrive in app stores other than Google Play. Trend Micro research shows that repackaged apps are crucial in proliferation of mobile malw
When should I use breach and attack simulation tools? Thanks to automation and other features, breach and attack simulation tools are an effective way to help network administrators keep their operations secure. The purpose of breach and attack simulation, or BAS, tools is to test the existing infrastructure security components, processes and procedures implemented within an enterprise IT infrastructure. Results of the simulations can verify they are working as intended. If a simulated breach does make it through, the tools can provide useful insights into the effectiveness of breach identification and remediation processes. The growing popularity of BAS tools over the last few years shows the importance of running these types of security breach simulations. There's no precise answer when it comes to determining when a breach and attack simulation should be run. Much of it depends on the business's need to verify that security prevention tools and processes are functioning as intended. At a minimum, simulations should be run on an annual basis and thoroughly reviewed. Additionally, simulations should be conducted whenever a major add or change occurs to the overall network and/or security posture of the enterprise infrastructure. This way, the changes can be verified to prove no unintentional gaps in security mechanisms were created. Automation makes running tests easier It should also be noted that the overall security landscape is growing more hostile by the day. As a result, from a data protection perspective, it's increasingly important to verify that security tools are functioning properly. Many security administrators are realizing that, compared to penetration tests that occur at regularly scheduled times, it's better to run continuous attack simulations and constantly tune data security tools and procedures. The good news is that modern BAS tools are highly automated. Therefore, it doesn't take much more time out of a security administrator's day to continuously run breach and attack simulation tests. Dig Deeper on Data security and privacy Related Q&A from Andrew Froehlich Understanding UC interoperability challenges The growth of remote and hybrid work has driven demand for better interoperability among collaboration tools. But supporting interoperability isn't ... Continue Reading SOAR vs. SIEM: What's the difference? When it comes to the SOAR vs. SIEM debate, it's important to understand their fundamental differences to get the most benefit from your security data. Continue Reading NOC vs. data center: What's the difference? Network operations centers and data centers are two facilities organizations use to store IT devices and manage operations. But they differ ... Continue Reading
Phishing Group Found Abusing .top Domains WhoisXML API threat researcher Dancho Danchev recently discovered a phishing operation seemingly amassing .top domains for their malicious cause. He collated 89 email addresses that he has dubbed indicators of compromise (IoCs) so far. To uncover as many potentially connected artifacts as possible, the WhoisXML API research team scoured the DNS for domains and IP addresses the threat actors could weaponize for future attacks if they haven’t already and found: - 4,284 domains that were registered using the email addresses identified as IoCs - 71 IP addresses that played host to the email-connected domains, two of which turned out to be malicious based on malware checks - 890 domains hosted on the same IP addresses as the email-connected domains Download a sample of the threat research materials now or contact us to access the complete set of research materials.
The robots.txt file is a simple text file placed on a website to communicate with web robots (also known as “bots”) and tell them which pages or sections of the site they should or should not access. The robots.txt file acts as a set of instructions for these robots, helping to ensure that they don’t cause harm to the site or its content. Meetanshi’s Robots.txt generator is a tool that can be used to create a robots.txt file for a website. The generator typically asks a series of questions to determine which sections of the site should be blocked, and then generates the appropriate code for the robots.txt file. Here’s an example of a basic robots.txt file generated by Meetanshi’s robots.txt generator: In this example, the “User-agent” line specifies which robots the rules apply to. The asterisk (*) means that the rules apply to all robots. The “Disallow” lines specify the directories on the site that should be blocked. In this case, the wp-admin and wp-includes directories are blocked. Note that not all robots follow the instructions in a robots.txt file,
Block some Office documents to assure security Microsoft is recommending IT administrators block users opening Office documents as a way to prevent attacks, tacitly acknowledging that Office cannot be completely secured. Called "File Block," the feature allows administrators - or technically astute end users - to declare the specific Office file types that can or cannot be opened by Word 2003/2007, Excel 2003/2007 and PowerPoint 2003/2007. File type restrictions are spelled out by editing the Windows registry or through Group Policy settings. [ Read more ]
AIDIS: Detecting and Classifying Anomalous Behavior in UbiquitousKernel Processes Targeted attacks on IT systems are a rising threat against the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical information and infrastructures. With the rising prominence of advanced persistent threats (APTs), identifying and under-standing such attacks has become increasingly important. Current signature-based systems are heavily reliant on fixed patterns that struggle with unknown or evasive applications, while behavior-based solutions usually leave most of the interpretative work to a human analyst.In this article we propose AIDIS, an Advanced Intrusion Detection and Interpretation System capable to explain anomalous behavior within a network-enabled user session by considering kernel event anomalies identified through their deviation from a set of baseline process graphs. For this purpose we adapt star-structures, a bipartite representation used to approximate the edit distance be-tween two graphs. Baseline templates are generated automatically and adapt to the nature of the respective operating system process.We prototypically implemented smart anomaly classification through a set of competency questions applied to graph template deviations and evaluated the approach using both Random Forest and linear kernel support vector machines.The determined attack classes are ultimately mapped to a dedicated APT at-tacker/defender meta model that considers actions, actors, as well as assets and mitigating controls, thereby enabling decision support and contextual interpretation of ongoing attacks The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Citation : Luh, R., Janicke, H. and Schrittwieser, S. (2019) AIDIS: Detecting andClassifying Anomalous Behavior in Ubiquitous Kernel Processes,Computers & Security, 84, pp. 120-147 Research Institute : Cyber Technology Institute (CTI) Peer Reviewed : Yes
Fonte: “Reinforcement Learning Agents for Simulating Normal and Malicious Actions in Cyber Range Scenarios”, Paper, https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3260/paper1.pdf Cyber-attacks and their consequences have become one of the primary sources of risk in recent years. Cyber-attacks have the potential to cause physical damage both to infrastructures and to people. To prevent such risks, several methods have been proposed. Cyber security knowledge required for cyber defense can be developed by active learning in a cyber range. Although this type of cyber learning is popular and used worldwide by numerous organizations and companies, typically such simulations lack the presence of users and their relative effects on the systems. In particular, in a cyber environment where the only activities on the systems are those carried out by the Red Team, the assessment of maliciousactions on the systems will be a trivial activity for the Blue Team. Hence, the reality of the resulting simulation does not reflect a real working condition. Users simulation is needed for providing more realistic scenarios for training sessions. Additionally, a cyber range that relies on the actions of simulated users introduces the possibility to simulate a Zero Trust (ZT) condition. In such scenarios, the simulated users act also as virtual attackers or use social engineering attacks (i.e., phishing) within the company network. This work presents the development of a model whose purpose is to generate human-addressable actions in the cyber range. Moreover, the agent leverages a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to simulate the user-system interactions. Finally, the agent simulates both normal and malicious actions on the systems. The rapid technological advancements (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT), 5G) have become the main transformation source for several IT/OT domains (e.g., energy, health care, public transport) by increasing their productivity, value creation, and the social welfare. Despite these flourishing perspectives, the insufficient knowledge jointly with the lack of security awareness provides a fertile ground for several threat actors. Threat actors may carry out different types of attacks that can produce tangible damages. In fact, there are several organizations or companies that own or access to different cyber systems that can be exposed to several known and/or unknown attack vectors. The majority of the cyber attacks have involved the categories of Transportation and Storage, Industrial Control System (ICS), Government, Healthcare and Entertainment. Furthermore, the proliferation of the IoT devices in industrial plants (e.g., power grids, gas, and water distribution systems) led to an increasing transformation of the traditional ICS. Not only, due to the migration of the control components from the electronic world to the software one, the resulting ICS components are exponentially increased in complexity. Consequently, this led to the sudden increase of the attack surface.
Security experts predict a global AI-related cyber attack before year-end As artificial intelligence technologies become more complex and better integrated with new services and products, executives worldwide are concerned about cyber security vulnerabilities. While AI is a strong tool for security, security experts also predict that malicious actors will utilize artificial intelligence to unleash a global cyber incident in the near future. Today, unauthorized users can get easy access to AI-powered systems to create sophisticated cyber threats. For example, AI chatbots have emerged as a novel doorway to cyber attackers, and the Emotet Trojan malware is hyped as an AI-based cyber threat prototype directed at the financial services sector. A recent global study of early adopters found that over 40 percent of executives have "extreme" or "major" concerns about AI threats, with cybersecurity vulnerabilities leading that list. Executives are concerned about hackers leveraging AI to steal proprietary or sensitive data, for data manipulation, and to automate cyber-attacks or conduct corporate espionage. These results indicate that key stakeholders aren’t oblivious to the possibilities of malicious actors and hackers using AI systems. Attackers and defenders are both getting smarter The underlying idea of AI security -- leveraging data to become more accurate and more intelligent -- is what makes this trend so risky. AI-based attacks can be so sophisticated that they can be difficult to predict and avoid. Cyber researchers are doing their best to stay ahead of the curve, but it’s essential to understand that the attacks become more difficult to control once the threats outpace protectors’ tools and expertise. That is why it is imperative to react immediately to the growing possibility of cyberattacks before it’s too late to catch up. While there’s no denying that AI offers increased reliability and speed to your business, that is precisely what motivates malicious actors. For example, cybercriminals gain a lot from this speed, particularly in terms of augmented network coverage. In addition, cyberattacks can leverage swarm attacks to access the system more quickly. As the bad actors become more advanced, it is vital to prepare for cyberattacks by leveraging machine learning (ML). Even though widely considered a type of AI, machine learning is actually the type of algorithm that powers artificial intelligence. ML algorithms are specifically designed to enable machines to learn from insights without requiring human intervention, so they have many applications in cybersecurity -- as well as uses in cyber attacks. How cyber criminals leverage AI Threat and malicious actors weaponize artificial intelligence by using it to plan the attack and then perform the attack. What’s more, as the World Economic Forum reveals, AI can easily impersonate trusted actors, helping them achieve these nefarious goals. They only need to take the time to study a legitimate user and then leverage bots to imitate their language and actions. Since AI can become a powerful part of their arsenal, expect hackers and cyber-criminals to get more innovative and sophisticated in their attacks. They may even employ "deep fakes" -- leveraging AI to manipulate and replicate a user’s image and voice. By leveraging AI, attackers can move quickly and spot opportunities for infiltration, such as faulty firewalls or networks without multi-layered security. Additionally, their AI-powered systems help them explore vulnerabilities that a human could not detect. For example, a bot can leverage data from former attacks to identify very slight changes in your security infrastructure. While many companies leverage AI to predict the needs of their customers, threat actors use similar concepts to augment the odds of a cyberattack’s success. For businesses, customer data may go into a marketing plan, while cybercriminals use it to design an attack that not only puts the users at risk but may endanger entire organizations. For instance, if a person receives emails from their kids’ school on their work address, a bot can quickly launch a phishing attack that mimics the same school email. Additionally, AI can also make it challenging for defenders to identify the specific attack or bot. Malicious actors use it to design new mutations of cyberattacks depending on the type of protection they target. The challenge of AI cyberattacks The problem with safeguarding your systems against AI-powered cyber incidents is the pace of adaptation you have to deal with. Defensive technology development is often slower than the speed of attacks. This means it’s likely that hackers might have the upper hand if you don’t already have systems and processes in place to thwart their attacks before they ever get to your network. If they do gain access, it can be challenging for protectors to regain access and control. These cyberattacks are becoming more powerful and can launch at a larger scale by adding new attack vectors. Particularly during the pandemic, when more people than ever are working from home and using personal devices for business tasks, the risks associated with mobile devices are ever-increasing. According to the Mobile Security Index Report by Verizon, 79 percent of the mobile devices in enterprises are in the hands of employees. Moreover, cybersecurity firms Verizon and Lookout reveal a 37 percent rise in enterprise mobile phishing attacks globally in 2020. From a business’s standpoint, it is imperative to start with an in-depth understanding of how unauthorized actors leverage AI for attacks and the types of incidents and common lead-ins they exploit. Only then can you work to prevent them. Protecting against AI-enabled attacks It is essential to plan your defense to keep your employee and customer data protected. For starters, use PCI-compliant hosting to gather, store, and process credit card info. This is a must for any business gathering payment information from customers. Here are some other ways to defend your company against AI-powered cyberattacks internally: Train for secure practices Some of the biggest recent hacks to date were caused by human errors. So, make sure your employees don’t make avoidable errors like using personal USBs on company computers, falling victim to phishing scams, and clicking on links without knowing where it will take them. As long as you have appropriate protocols in place, it’s possible to minimize the risk. Know your code Learn how to analyze all software code for malware, bugs, and behavioral anomalies. As new attacks are likely to use unknown tools and techniques, understanding the bugs inside your code is more important than ever. Testing is critical, both of the systems and products you build and the integrations between ones you purchase. Monitor your logs Continue to track and identify the threats and gauge behavioral anomalies to predict security events before they happen. AI-powered tools can be used to do this, so you can harness artificial intelligence to battle artificial intelligence. But be sure you have a human audit the logs as well to make sure nothing slips through. As ML-powered technologies continue to evolve, hackers gain highly innovative tools to undermine corporate digital security. But while the use of artificial intelligence in cyber-attacks becomes more prevalent, your business can also deploy it as a tool to enhance security. As a security expert, you need to prepare for an AI-powered system that can assess all potential threat vectors and effectively mitigate AI-enabled cyber threats. Shanice Jones is a techy nerd and copywriter from Chicago. For the last five years, she has helped over 20 startups building B2C and B2B content strategies that have allowed them to scale their business and help users around the world.
It’s common knowledge in the cybersecurity industry that attackers are evolving, and their attacks are becoming more sophisticated. As a result, the harm and cost to targeted victims and organizations are also steadily increasing. This situation demands a smart and innovative response from security practitioners because no organization can defend against every threat. Trying to protect against all the adversarial TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) threat actors deploy would be extraordinarily costly and difficult to maintain for most enterprises. Perhaps the greatest challenge is scale. More than 370 attack techniques have been documented to date, and every quarter or so, another technique or implementation of a technique appears. Keeping track of attack techniques and launching appropriate and timely countermeasures can overwhelm most defense systems and security professionals. Narrowing down the scope and scale of potential attacks is a critical first line of defense. Fortunately, help is on the way in the form of a just-published research paper titled 2021 ATT&CK Sightings Report that addresses the question: “Which of these techniques do we need to prioritize and prepare to fight?” The Sightings Report is based on a research project run by MITRE Engenuity’s Center for Threat-Informed Defense (Center) in collaboration with Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs and several other Center participants. The researchers analyzed more than one million attacks using the MITRE ATT&CK® framework, collected over 28 months (April 1, 2019, to July 31, 2021), to provide contextual, actionable threat intelligence to explain how attackers are conducting their nasty business. This threat intelligence report provides crucial visibility into which TTPs are being used the most by cyber adversaries. Its “high resolution” visibility helps security professionals identify those threats they are most likely to face. This enables them to quickly prioritize and fine-tune their defenses, including what security technologies to deploy and where. The research from the Sightings Report paints “a picture of common adversary behavior, including which techniques adversaries use, how their use changes over time, and how adversaries sequence techniques. Defenders can use this information to create a threat-informed defense against what they are most likely to see, not just the latest cyberthreat headlines.” The biggest takeaway from the research data is that 90% of all attacks arise from only 15 techniques across six tactics. This intel is extremely useful as it significantly narrows down the most likely threats from the entire corpus of more than 370 possible techniques across 14 tactics. The MITRE ATT&CK framework has been the de facto standard for mapping and responding to cyberattacks of all types. Using it to analyze aggregated global threat data from various sources and then presenting according to the prevalence of potential attacks gives defenders a unique opportunity to change the economics of the attack cycle. Instead of testing for all techniques and their respective defenses—which can be very costly and time-consuming—defenders can now prioritize specific techniques and build defenses around them while focusing their red team efforts on trying new strategies for implementing those techniques. A deeper look at those six tactics that account for 90% of all attacks reveals even more helpful information. Five of those tactics involve defensive evasion, which involves exploiting security gaps to prevent detection. The report’s detailed analysis of this tactic provides crucial insight into how attackers try to get around security holes, enabling defenders to identify similar weaknesses in their defenses and effectively close those gaps. It also identifies which parts of the ATT&CK matrix attackers focus on to best hide their efforts. The second most common tactic employed is privilege escalation, which makes sense given that most enterprise systems today are protected using privilege isolation. This information helps security teams assess and correct their internal functions, such as using admin user privilege levels for basic tasks like emailing and browsing. Remember that attackers will struggle to take over a system when an unprivileged user is compromised. Many of the specific techniques identified in the report are heavily focused on “living off the land.” This means using legitimate systems, tools, or functions already present on a system to move around the device or network without attracting attention. T1053 (Schedule Task/Job) is the most common of these techniques, representing over 24% of all sightings. It is followed by Command and Script Interpreter (T1059), representing 15.77%. These techniques have been employed across all major platforms, attacking Linux, Windows, and macOS. The other techniques combined accounted for less than 11% of all sightings. Zero-trust strategies can play a critical role in defending against these techniques. Again, quoting from the report, “Adversaries are attempting to appear as legitimate users. Therefore, creating strong baselines and restricting permissions is key to detecting and disrupting adversary behaviors.” This information gives defenders an upper hand in effectively preparing and hardening their systems since it’s clear from the global data on these TTPs that attackers are trying to appear as legitimate users. Without strong baselines of normal end-user behavior and company-approved applications and the ability to restrict access to systems and resources based on policy, detection and mitigation of threats designed to look like “normal” behavior can be nearly impossible. Fortunately, defenders aren’t left to figure out how best to defend against these threats. The report also provides deeper insight into how organizations can go about detecting and containing these threats using open-source tools and intel, as well as which techniques are generally seen together to facilitate proactive threat hunting, which is one of the most potent actions cyber defenders can take to lessen the impact of an attack. With this research paper, the Center has provided the cybersecurity community with valuable, up-to-date intelligence that can be widely used to prioritize defensive actions. And it provides it in a low-cost way while providing a high return. Because of the specific insight and guidance it provides, cyberdefenders worldwide can build threat-informed defenses using curated, high-fidelity data. Security is everyone’s responsibility, and if we have more secure organizations, the internet and the digital economy will be more stable and predictable. And that’s a win for everyone. Fortinet has been at the forefront of cybersecurity innovation and research for more than 20 years. We are proud to have been able to leverage this expertise in our participation in the Sightings research project with the Center.
Use of Genetic Algorithm in Network Security After overcoming some drawbacks from an improved genetic feedback algorithm based network security policy framework. A motivation was experienced for the need of a strong network security policy framework. In this paper a strong network model for security function is presented. A gene for a network packet is defined through fitness function and a method to calculate fitness function is explained. The basic attacks encountered can be categorized as buffer overflow, array index out of bound, etc. A stress is given on passive attack, active attack, its types and brute force attack. An analysis on recent attacks and security is provided. Finally, the best policy using a comparator is found.
Recall that one of our goals for this book is to help you actually get anomaly detection running in production and solving monitoring problems you have with your current systems. Typical goals for adding anomaly detection probably include: To avoid setting or changing thresholds per server, because machines differ from each other To avoid modifying thresholds when servers, features, and workloads change over time To avoid static thresholds that throw false alerts at some times of the day or week, and miss problems at other times In general you can probably describe these goals as “just make Nagios a little better for some checks.” Another goal might be to find all metrics that are abnormal without generating alerts, for use in diagnosing problems. We consider this to be a pretty hard problem because it is very general. You probably understand why at this point in the book. We won’t focus on this goal in this chapter, although you can easily apply the discussion in this chapter to that approach on a case by case basis. The best place to begin is often where you experience the most painful monitoring problem right now. Take a look at your alert history or outages. What’s the source of the most noise or the place where problems happen the most without an alert to notify you? Not all of the alerting problems you’ll find are solvable with anomaly detection. Some come from alerting ...
Telephony option in configuration menu is used to configure all parameters of the cisco unified communication 500 series devices as a phone system can be set. Settings for voice mail, SIP trunks, voice system features, user information, and network and internet parameters are configured from this menu option. Switching, routing, Smartports, & ports portions, addition of network interfaces, VLANs or static routing can be configured from this interface. We can select DHCP server appropriate DNS settings based on SP requirement or incase customer or VAR need to change the default DHCP configuration. Figure 1 illustrates changing DNS in the “data” DHCP pool settings. Figure 1: changing DNS in the “data” DHCP pool settings In order to change DNS settings for UC500 – click on Device Propertiesà IP Addresses – this is important if the SIP trunking provider uses domain names in place of IP addresses to route SIP calls between devices. Figure 2 illustrates default DNS settings for UC500. Figure 2: Default DNS settings for UC500 Click on Device Configuration tab in right pane and do the following: Domain name: name the provider requires the UC500 to have. Enable domain lookup: should be checked Remove any old DNS server setting in the configuration. New server: Enter IP address of DNS server and click Add. Click Ok to continue at the bottom. Figure 3 illustrates updated DNS settings for UC500 Figure3: Updated DNS settings for UC500 Click on Internet Connection in left panel and configure the WAN interface with proper WAN IP option. This is a must do step when using CCA tool for UC500 configuration. Click the FastEthernet0/0 interface and then the Modify button. In the below example a static IP is used (18.104.22.168), we can also use DHCP as well as PPPoE for DSL. Click OK to go back to Internet connection pane. Figure 4 illustrates WAN Connection setup screen. Click OK to continue. Figure 4: WAN connection setup We can configure IP routing with default gateway with UC500. Click Routing from the left pane and click the FastEthernet0/0 interface and then click the Modify button. In the current example default gateway is 22.214.171.124. Figure 5 illustrates configuring IP routing. Figure 5: IP Routing setup We can also setup security settings as HIGH, MEDIUM and LOW in firewall. The firewall settings can be set using CCA tool. Figure 6 illustrates setting firewall security to MEDIUM Figure 6: Firewall settings (Security) To ensure SIP traffic goes thru in case your used CCA 1.1 or earlier to configure this tab do the following: Check the WAN interface configuration by running the show run interface FastEthernet0/0 command. UC500# show run interface FastEthernet0/0 Ip verify unicast reverse-path Ip inspect SDM_MEDIUM out Add the below via the command line interface: UC500(config)#no ip verify unicast reverse-path UC500(config)#interface integrated-service-engine 0/0 UC500(config)#no ip access-group 100 in UC500(config)#interface loopback 0 UC500(config)#no ip access-group 101 in UC500(config)#ip inspect name SDM_MEDIUM udp router-traffic timeout 300 Once this is done, then save the configuration settings as shown in figure 8 below. Figure 8: Saving configuration This concludes session on configuring networking parameters on UC500 series devices using CCA tool.
Brian uses the standard Python logging package to generate information and warnings. All messages are sent to the logger named brian or loggers derived from this one, and you can use the standard logging functions to set options, write the logs to files, etc. Alternatively, Brian has four simple functions to set the level of the displayed log (see below). There are four different levels for log messages, in decreasing order of severity they are ERROR, WARN, INFO and DEBUG. By default, Brian displays only the WARN and ERROR level messages. Some useful information is at the INFO level, so if you are having problems with your program, setting the level to INFO Shows log messages only of level ERROR or higher. Shows log messages only of level WARNING or higher (including ERROR level). Shows log messages only of level INFO or higher (including WARNING and ERROR levels). Shows log messages only of level DEBUG or higher (including INFO, WARNING and ERROR levels).
Loopback is the process of routing electrical signals back to their origin without any modifications. It majorly involves testing the transmission infrastructure. 127.0.0.1, is an IP address that is specifically designed to operate on a networked device. How does it work? The Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol deliver packets having the IP addresses for the recipients to whom the information was to be delivered. 127.0.0.1 Loopback is recognized as a special IP address and operates effectively in carrying out its functions. Each message is first analyzed by the protocol before being sent to the physical network. The data having a destination of 127.0.0.1 IP address is re-transmitted automatically to the terminal of the TCP/IP tower. The TCP/IP program also examines the messages being received on the network gateways or other routers to improve the network security. It gets rid of any content that that has a loopback internet protocol address. The process enacted by the TCP/IP program is useful in averting network aggressors from camouflaging vindictive network traffic that originates from the address of loopback process. This feature is important for most application softwares and can be utilized for purposes of local testing. Information transmitted to the 127.0.0.1 Loopback address goes directly to the receive queues of the TCP/IP program. They do not arrive at out of the local area network and when they are received by the TCP/IP, they tend to behave as if they originated from an external source. The port number is usually common in the loopback messages that combines with the address. These port numbers are useful to most applications which initiates the division of various information to several groupings. 127.0.0.1, is an IPv4 address that is used for special cases. The reserves which range from this address to 127.255.255.255 are effective for testing the loopback. The 127.0.0.1 is the most popular although they are not categorized among the private IP address outlined by the IPv4. The internet protocol addresses that have been recognized in the ranges classified by IPv4 utilizes the inter-device form of communication and can be committed to devices in the local network. 127.0.0.1 Loopback address is sometimes associated with localhost in computer networking. When combined together, an entry in their hosts file is maintained by the computer operating systems. They are used to allow loopback messages to be created by the applications using the name. Sometimes confusion arises among users when they utilize the 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 It is important to know that 0.0.0.0 IP address does not guarantee the loopback process and thus 127.0.0.1 remains the most suitable in executing the loopback. It has the specific purpose of allowing automatic delivery of messages to their destinations. Transmission tests can be performed by the loopback devices from the switching center and does not require much support at the terminal. The interface of the machine in which the 127.0.0.1 Loopback operates is not associated with any hardware. It is also not connected physically to any network and you are free to test an IP software with no worries about corrupted hardware or drivers.
> Ms Word > MS Word Bombs Intermittently MS Word Bombs Intermittently Finally, they make a note of the IP address of the computer they've taken over. Soon this insight is exhilaratingly expanded by inviting us into Conrad's world-view through his diary (where we also get short glimpses of Conrad's own perspective on the family members). Subsequent programs that are executed are infected with the virus until the computer is shut down or turned off. An employee known here as John Doe copies games and other executables from a 1.44 MB disk onto his local hard drive and then runs the executables. find more info Department of Health & Human Services HHS/Open USA.gov Top ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved The following error was encountered while trying to retrieve the URL: http://0.0.0.10/ Connection to Authorization. Some of these resources include network bandwidth, memory, CPU time, and hard drive space. Almost everything else in the film is superb, however. http://montagesmagazine.com/2016/01/louder-than-bombs-joachim-triers-play-on-perspective/ Other threats such as riots, wars, and terrorist attacks could be included here. Narrative re-evaluation In a film so drenched in perspective it is only fitting that, like the characters see things in a new light, our understanding of characters and events are changing In a continuous common-source outbreak, the range of exposures and range of incubation periods tend to flatten and widen the peaks of the epidemic curve (Figure 1.22). Beyoncé, who... There were no security mechanisms to separate users, to separate the user from the system, or to stop intentional modification of system or user files. The process of allowing only authorized users access to sensitive information. The easiest one to relate to is the use of smart cards. Intrusion Attacks Attackers using well-known techniques can penetrate many networks. The play on mood and point-of-view is highly sophisticated, complex and resonant, even more so since she is a substitute character for his mother. Some Internet service providers give temporary accounts to anyone who signs up for a trial subscription, and those accounts can be used to launch e-mail attacks. In most cases the victim of such an attack will have difficulty accepting any new, legitimate incoming connections. They have respectively blond and dark hair. Occasionally, the amount of disease in a community rises above the expected level. But towards the end of the film this is changing. Many organizations address errors and omissions in their computer security, software quality, and data quality programs. It should be noted that most viruses attempt to retain the original host program's code and functionality after infection because the virus is more likely to be detected and deleted if - Directly after this realisation he visualises the final moments of her crash, so one could say that Conrad reciprocates by “watching” and guiding her during her moment of death. - There are also dozens of comments referring to elements of the code as hacks, while a couple others throw around the word "fuck." Perhaps the most entertaining comment unearthed by Zandman - How could a Focke-Wulf 190 pilot see anything at all from his cockpit? - Another ethical aspect is touched upon in the Jonah/Conrad bonding scene, where the elder brother comments on a military computer game Conrad is fond of (which could well have taken place During the first run-through, the original perspective on this day, when Gene arrives at school after having met with Richard and the gallery people, he peeks into the classroom where Conrad anchor This photo seems to elicit a special fascination in Jonah. Disabling network cable ceases problem; During hanging here is no cpu or disk activity; It only happens during document load. New, 3 comments Transportation Cars Motorsports New concept images show just how crazy Formula E's race cars will look next year by Sean O'Kane@sokane1 All-electric racing series Formula E is getting Why do people do postdocs rather than become a professor, assuming a PhD trains them in how to do research? a fantastic read MMWR 1971;20:26. Modems have become standard features on many desktop computers. Other targets are systems that control access to any resources, such as time and attendance systems, inventory systems, school grading systems, or long-distance telephone systems. Introduction: Characters and personalities Gene Reed (Gabriel Byrne) is a middle-aged teacher. Here is a blog article by the creator of both Process Explorer and Process Monitor (Mark Russinovich) explaining how he diagnosed a very similar problem: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/28/the-case-of-the-intermittent-and-annoying-explorer-hangs.aspx. We have already discussed the film's brilliant use of voice-over, but it is also employed to play with perspective in a direct way. see it here Users also become disgruntled at the heavy security policies making their work difficult for no discernable reason, causing bad politics within the company. Viruses can also be spread via e-mail and disks. In this case, the intruder is consuming valuable server resources. Company employees with malicious intent could also do this. The second function is to provide a trigger or gating mechanism that determines when to activate planned responses to an incident. An example of poor security measures would be to allow anonymous access to sensitive information. The implication is that an intruder can execute this attack from a dial-up connection against a computer on a very fast network. At one point we hear Gene talk to someone about how he invaded Conrad's computer game in disguise. Consuming Server Resources The goal of a DoS attack is to prevent hosts or networks from communicating on the network. Modems. It can be temporarily disabled by clicking the "shield" icon in the address bar. Outbreak of West Nile-Like Viral Encephalitis–New York, 1999. Homepage Users should be made aware of various security issues, even those that are not common. Authentication. Companies gain a competitive advantage by knowing how to use that information. Methods in observational epidemiology. As if signalling the imminent explosion of his mind, we see a tree he is looking at outside the window. Exercise 1.11 For each of the following situations, identify the type of epidemic spread with which it is most consistent. Social engineering is a hacker term for tricking people into revealing their password or some form of security information. Loading comments... Commands that reveal user and system information pose a threat because crackers can use that information to break into a system. Gene helpfully adds to the motif by providing three versions of himself as this non-existing smoker. (There is of course a meta dimension here: the actor Gabriel Byrne demonstrating his craft.) share\|improve this answer answered Oct 10 '12 at 6:47 Adam Ryczkowski 4521521 I agree this seems a network-related issue. The last diary instalment is the only one clearly from the viewpoint a much younger child, suggesting greater intensity. Attackers want to achieve these goals for either personal satisfaction or for a reward. The results of these calls must be altered to correspond to the file's original state. After these three actions take place, the connection between the client and server is open and they can exchange service-specific data. Note that all viruses found in the wild target personal computers. Outsiders might attack just to prove that they can or for the fun of it. The epidemic usually wanes after a few generations, either because the number of susceptible persons falls below some critical level required to sustain transmission, or because intervention measures become effective. For one thing, the ending leans heavily on a rather conventional use of embraces and warm smiles. Sometimes knowing it will influence the behaviour of the observed, as when Conrad puts on a little show for his father at the graveyard after he has realised Gene is following © Copyright 2017 newsmdcommunications.com. All rights reserved.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates, in general, to a method of improving security performance in a stateful inspection of transmission control protocol connections and, more particularly, to a method of improving security performance in a stateful inspection, which sets an optimal timeout to be sufficiently long not to influence the normal operation of legitimate flows in the stateful inspection of transmission control protocol connections, and sufficiently short to minimize the number of session entries generated by abnormal flows, such as attacks, so that stateful inspection continues even in the face of network attacks, thus improving the security performance of a stateful inspection computer. 2. Description of the Related Art Recently, with the development of the Internet, various types of computers specified for packet processing have been used. Representative of these computers may be a firewall , a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a network intrusion detection system, traffic monitoring equipment [2, 3], an accounting and charging system or load balancing equipment , in addition to equipment such as a router or switch. As the rate of Internet traffic increases to exceed the rate of Moore's law , the load of a packet processing task increases in such a computer, so that the optimization of packet processing is required to improve performance. Therefore, various research into the improvement of the efficiency of functions required for packet processing, such as routing table lookup and packet classification, have been conducted [7, 8 and 9]. However, research into the configuration and management of dynamically allocated memory to execute packet processing is relatively insufficient. Therefore, the present invention handles the issue of configuring and managing dynamically allocated memory in packet processing. Packet processing in a stateful packet inspection is influenced by previous packets in the same flow, in addition to individual data values of a corresponding packet. Therefore, it is required to maintain information about the states of previous packets in the same flow. For this operation, as a flow is generated or deleted, a corresponding entry is created in or purged from a packet inspection computer. Currently, all of a firewall, a VPN, a network intrusion detection system, traffic monitoring equipment and a usage-based charging system require stateful inspection in different degrees. Generally, a stateful inspection computer purges invalid entries using a timeout mechanism to improve space utilization and lookup efficiency. However, such a computer only allows a developer to arbitrarily designate a timeout value (typically, a considerably high value, such as 60 seconds or 120 seconds) or allows a user to configure a timeout value, but does not present a systematic guideline for timeout, that is, a guideline based on protocol and traffic analysis . However, the setting of a suitable timeout is necessary for efficient packet processing. First, if a timeout is excessively short, the excessive creation and deletion of entries occurs, thus causing undesirable results. For example, if an entry corresponding to a permitted flow is deleted, a firewall may block a packet even though the packet is legitimate. In contrast, if a timeout is lengthened, an entry in an expired flow is maintained for an unnecessarily long time, thus increasing the amount of memory required . Furthermore, even if a packet inspection computer itself is not a target of network attacks, memory overflow may be caused by the attacks. This is because an IP address or port number continuously changes with respect to each packet in the case of an attack traffic stream, so that packets are recognized to be in different flows from the standpoint of the definition of typical flows. In this case, since each attack packet corresponds to a single flow entry, the amount of memory required to create flow entries rapidly increases in a computer performing a stateful inspection on the traffic. As described above, conventional research has been concentrated on the reduction of a static table size and the minimization of lookup time for packet classification, not on the management of dynamic memory for a stateful inspection [7, 8 and 9]. In a table used for a stateful inspection employing a session or flow table, only one thesis has mentioned the probability of overflow caused by attacks. However, even this thesis merely mentions that overflow is an element disturbing packet monitoring in high speed links, but research into a method of setting a timeout value is not mentioned. It is possible that a dearth of such research exists because it is difficult to obtain a great number of “typical” Internet traces. That is, in order to set a guideline, a large amount of actual network traffic must be analyzed, and the time for which most TCP connections are set up must be clarified. Therefore, actual systems, such as Cisco, Netscreen or Checkpoint, set a default to a value of at least 60 seconds due to the lack of a guideline . The present invention addresses such a problem first through the analysis of Internet backbone trace of about 1 terabyte capacity, so that it is determined that preceding research addressing the problem scarcely exists. Dynamic State Management A stateful packet inspection computer has a list of information about currently tracked flows at an observation location in a network, which is generally designated as a session table. Typically, information about a single flow is composed of a protocol, an origin IP address, an origin port number, a destination IP address, and a destination port number. According to the application, additional information may be required. For example, in the case of a stateful inspection firewall, a TCP sequence number is recorded . A packet inspection computer extracts flow information for each observed packet and compares the flow information with an entry in a session table. If an entry having matching information exists, an action defined in the corresponding entry is performed on the packet. For example, a firewall admits therethrough or blocks a packet, or a usage-based charging system increases a packet or byte count. In contrast, if an entry having matching information does not exist, that is, if a current packet is a start packet of a new flow, a new entry for the flow is created in a session table. Further, if the termination of the flow is observed, a corresponding entry is purged from the session table. The determination of the start and end of a flow differs according to the protocol used. In a connectionless protocol, such as a User Datagram Protocol (UDP), the end of a flow is determined by means of presumption, strictly speaking. Typically, if a packet for a corresponding flow has not been observed for a predetermined period of time, it is considered that the flow is terminated. FIG. 1 is a view showing a process of setting up a TCP connection, observed in a packet inspection computer. A TCP of FIG. 1 is a representative of a connection-oriented protocol. As shown in FIG. 1, TCP connection setup is designated as a 3-way handshake because three packets are exchanged between two hosts . First, in order to initiate connection, host A transmits a SYN packet to the other host B. When receiving the SYN packet from host A, host B transmits a SYN/ACK packet to host A to establish a reverse data channel while transmitting an acknowledgement of the SYN packet. The TCP is a full-duplex protocol, which requires a single data channel in each direction with respect to each connection, so bidirectional synchronization packets are required. Finally, host A transmits an ACK packet that is an acknowledgement of the SYN packet to host B, thus completing the setup of a TCP connection. It is assumed that a stateful inspection computer is placed at a location on a network through which the connection, formed between hosts A and B, passes (FIG. 1). In this case, a TCP connection setup event can be detected and, additionally, the progress of the connection setup can also be monitored during a 3-way handshake. Further, if a connection setup delay is Dc, Dc′≈Dc is observed, so that the connection setup delay can be measured. In accordance with the Request For Comments (RFC) 2988 standard , if a TCP SYN packet is lost, retransmission is attempted. At this time, a k(≧1)-th retransmission of the SYN packet must be performed within 3×2 (k-1) seconds after a (k-1)-th retransmission of the SYN packet (according to the definition, the 0-th retransmission is the first transmission of the SYN packet). This is called exponential backoff, which is a kind of congestion control mechanism. If the transmission of the SYN packet successively fails, the time interval between the retransmissions of the SYN packet gradually increases, for example, to 3, 6, 12 and 24 seconds, during the 3-way handshake, so that Dc, that is, Dc′, increases. The TCP allows a FIN packet and an ACK packet of the FIN packet to be exchanged to terminate the connection in a manner similar to that of the connection setup. If the exchange of the FIN and ACK packets is performed with respect to both channels, a packet inspection computer purges a corresponding entry from a session table. Further, if a connection is interrupted by a RST packet, a corresponding entry is purged from the session table. In the stateful inspection computer, the total number of entries in the session table depends on the number of concurrent active flows. In the core part of the. Internet in 2003, it can be observed that at least hundreds of thousands of flows typically and simultaneously pass through a single link. For example, a maximum of 2-37,000 flows were simultaneously observed in a certain OC-48 (2.4 Gbps) link corresponding to an Internet backbone in April, 2003 . Recently, if the fact that an OC-192 (10 Gbps) link is starting to be used in a backbone network is taken into consideration, it can be predicted that several million flows will simultaneously exist in a high speed link in the future. Analysis of the Influence of Network Attacks The size of a session table is the multiplication of the number of entries by the size of the entries. If the size of each entry (including two IP addresses, two port numbers, a protocol number and additional overhead for table maintenance) is 40 bytes, the size of a session table in a packet inspection computer having a million entries is 40 Mbytes. Considering the memory capacity of the current computer, the session table having such a size can be sufficiently supported. However, as network attacks are conducted, the number of entries in the session table may explosively increase. The present invention is focused, among network attacks, on Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and scanning that can influence a stateful inspection, and describes the features thereof. Table 1(a) shows part of the packet flow (trace) information of a DoS attack observed in an actual backbone . In this case, the host IP of a victim is expressed as “y.y.y.y” to protect the privacy of the victim. Typically, an attacker fixes the host IP address Id of the victim in the case of the DoS attack, while the attacker fills Is with randomly generated numbers. The attacker not only does not attempt to connect to the victim, but also randomly selects Is to avoid the tracing of the attacker's IP . For example, because an origin address of “184.108.40.206” shown in Table 1(a) is an address that is not assigned to anyone in the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) , it can be known that the origin address is an invalid address. \|TABLE 1 \| \|Time \|\|Is \|\|ps \|\|Id \|\|pd \| \|(a) DoS attack \| \|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|. . . \| \|09:37:03.319081 \|\|220.127.116.11 \|\|7804 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16675 \| \|09:37:03.319647 \|\|18.104.22.168 \|\|47582 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16675 \| \|09:37:03.319652 \|\|22.214.171.124 \|\|61602 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16687 \| \|09:37:03.319922 \|\|126.96.36.199 \|\|61602 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16687 \| \|09:37:03.320607 \|\|188.8.131.52 \|\|10086 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16695 \| \|09:37:03.321665 \|\|184.108.40.206 \|\|4787 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16706 \| \|09:37:03.322084 \|\|220.127.116.11 \|\|51005 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16709 \| \|09:37:03.322098 \|\|18.104.22.168 \|\|5928 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16716 \| \|09:37:03.322582 \|\|22.214.171.124 \|\|58585 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16718 \| \|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|. . . \| \|09:37:03.325331 \|\|126.96.36.199 \|\|8210 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16736 \| \|09:37:03.326188 \|\|188.8.131.52 \|\|23371 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16754 \| \|09:37:03.326565 \|\|184.108.40.206 \|\|23371 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16754 \| \|09:37:03.327048 \|\|220.127.116.11 \|\|63149 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16768 \| \|09:37:03.327248 \|\|18.104.22.168 \|\|18073 \|\|y.y.y.y \|\|16765 \| \|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|. . . \|\|. . . \| \|(b) host scan based on Code Red II worm \| \|13:27:35.602109 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2101 \|\|22.214.171.124 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.602113 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2100 \|\|126.96.36.199 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.602117 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2102 \|\|188.8.131.52 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.602122 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2293 \|\|184.108.40.206 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.602127 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2367 \|\|220.127.116.11 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.602616 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2378 \|\|18.104.22.168 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.642113 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2379 \|\|22.214.171.124 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.692445 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2380 \|\|126.96.36.199 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.702067 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2108 \|\|188.8.131.52 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.702071 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2107 \|\|184.108.40.206 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.702076 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2294 \|\|220.127.116.11 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.702080 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2105 \|\|18.104.22.168 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.702084 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2106 \|\|22.214.171.124 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.702089 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2362 \|\|126.96.36.199 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.762039 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2381 \|\|188.8.131.52 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.801651 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2109 \|\|184.108.40.206 \|\|80 \| \|13:27:35.801661 \|\|x.x.x.x \|\|2297 \|\|220.127.116.11 \|\|80 \| In a host scan, the host IP address Id of a victim varies according to packet. Typically, a hacker attempts a host scan to detect vulnerability prior to initiating an attack, and conducts a host scan to detect a target host to be infected in the case of a worm. An attacker randomly conducts a scan with respect to an arbitrary range of IP addresses to detect a vulnerable host address. For example, it can be seen that an address of “18.104.22.168”, which is not currently assigned by IANA, appears on part of an actual trace of Code Red II worm shown in Table 1(b). The packet inspection computer creates a single session entry with respect to each flow, so that separate entries are created even though any one value of flow identifiers Is, ps, Id and pd, differs. There is a difference in that Is, Id and pd are changed in a DoS attack, a host scan and a port scan, respectively. That is, because all packets belonging to the same attack do not share the same flow identifier, different session entries are created with respect to individual packets. A more serious problem is that these attacks have a very high probability of creating packets. If several attacks among large-scale attacks having occurred on the Internet are described as examples, this problem is clarified (an extreme example is taken for emphasis). In the case of a DoS attack, as the probability of packet generation increases, attack power can increase. Therefore, referring to a DoS attack on a root Domain Name System (DNS) server occurring in October, 2002, about one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand attack packets per second on a single server were recorded . This example means that, if a certain packet inspection computer is placed near the root DNS server, attack-related entries will be created in a number which is much greater than that of flows that can be typically simultaneously observed in an OC-48 link within several seconds. Even in the case of a host scan, as the rate at which packets are created increases, the infection rate of a worm increases, or a vulnerable host can be detected fast. In the case of a host scan based on the Structured Query Language (SQL) Slammer worm, there was the case in which a single infected host transmitted a maximum of 26,000 packets per second . For example, if the stateful inspection computer is placed at the boundary of an enterprise network including 10 infected hosts, the number of attack-related entries will exceed a million within 4 seconds after the initiation of the attack. The fact that entries created by attack packets may exist in a session table for a maximum allowable time period further worsens the situation. In a normal TCP flow, a FIN or RST packet is exchanged at the time of termination and is observed, so a corresponding entry can be purged. However, in the case of a DoS attack, since a FIN or RST packet does not exist, an attack-related entry still remains in the session table until it is purged by a timeout. In the case of a host scan, the lifespan of an entry differs according to protocol. If a scanner uses TCP, a scanned host reacts variously according to the scanning technique . For example, if Code Red II succeeds in finding an infectable host, normal connection setup and termination (after the worm is transmitted) are performed, so a corresponding entry is purged from the session table. However, most scan packets are transmitted to an unused IP address, and then a router causes a destination unreachable Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) error. A flow entry created by packets causing the ICMP error will not be purged until the stateful inspection computer separately processes an ICMP message for the purpose of purging the entry. - SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION In summary, an entry caused by the attack is created with respect to each attack packet at high speed, and remains in the session table for a long period of time. Since the stateful inspection computer performs session table lookup with respect to each packet, this lookup performance may greatly influence packet throughput of the stateful inspection computer. Since hashing is generally used for the session table lookup, an increase in the number of entries increases the average number of entries per hash bucket, thus decreasing session table lookup speed. Therefore, in order to prevent an increase in the number of unnecessary entries that decrease packet throughput, a method of preventing the creation of incomplete entries occurring due to network attacks is required. Accordingly, the present invention has been made keeping in mind the above problems occurring in the prior art, and an object of the present invention is to provide a method of improving security performance in a stateful inspection, which sets an optimal timeout to be sufficiently long not to influence the normal operation of legitimate flows in the stateful inspection of transmission control protocol connections, and sufficiently short to minimize the number of session entries generated by abnormal flows, such as attacks, so that stateful inspection continues even in the face of network attacks, thus improving the security performance of a stateful inspection computer. In order to accomplish the above object, the present invention provides a method of improving security performance in a stateful inspection of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections, comprising the steps of a) a stateful inspection computer, placed between first and second hosts in which TCP connections are set Up, creating a single session entry corresponding to a new SYN packet whenever the new SYN packet is generated between the first and second hosts; b) updating a state of connection progress whenever a packet for a flow between the first and second hosts arrives at the stateful inspection computer; c) determining whether a time required for the connection progress updated at step b) has exceeded a predetermined timeout; and d) purging a session entry in an embryonic connection stage exceeding the timeout at step c), wherein the timeout is the sum of a pure connection setup delay that s a time difference between a time when the SYN packet is successfully transmitted by the first host to the second host and a time when a SYN/ACK packet from the second host is received by the first host in response to the successful transmission of the SYN packet, and a SYN packet retransmission delay, occurring as the SYN packet is retransmitted so that the SYN packet is successfully transmitted by the first host to the second host. Preferably, the session table may be configured so that, if the number of entries in the session table exceeds a predetermined threshold, the pure connection setup delay is decreased and a session entry in the embryonic connection stage is purged, thus decreasing the number of entries in the session table. Preferably, the pure connection setup delay may be longer than 1 second and shorter than 2 seconds. Preferably, the SYN packet retransmission may be attempted at intervals based on RFC2988 standard. Preferably, the session table may be configured so that, if the number of entries in the session table exceeds a predetermined threshold, the number of retransmissions of the SYN packet decreases, and the session entry in the embryonic connection stage is purged, thus decreasing the number of entries in the session table. Preferably, the SYN packet retransmission may be performed in such a way that the number of attempts to retransmit the SYN packet is 0, and the SYN packet retransmission delay is 0 seconds. Preferably, the SYN packet retransmission may be performed in such a way that the number of attempts to retransmit the SYN packet is 1, and the SYN packet retransmission delay is 3 seconds. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS Preferably, the SYN packet retransmission may be performed in such a way that the number of attempts to retransmit the SYN packet is 2, and the SYN packet retransmission delay is 9 seconds. FIG. 1 is a view showing a process of setting up a TCP connection, observed by a packet inspection computer; FIG. 2 is a graph showing the cumulative probability distribution of connection setup delays; FIG. 3 is a graph showing the cumulative distribution of a pure connection setup delay, excluding time delays caused by thee retransmission of a SYN packet; FIG. 4 is a graph showing the influence of the number of purged entries on the size of a session table when a timeout value is changed; and DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS FIG. 5 is a graph showing the size of a session table according to a timeout value. Hereinafter, embodiments of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the attached drawings. Internet Trace Analysis How the number of session entries can be explosively increased by attack traffic in a packet inspection computer has been described above. The object of the present invention is to propose a session entry timeout guideline to prevent the explosive increase in the number of entries. A basic approach adopted in the present invention to derive a guideline is described below. 1. A great number of TCP connections are observed on the Internet and a “typical” distribution of a total connection setup delay is obtained. 2. Based on the distribution, a connection setup timeout period sufficient to allow the normal setup of almost all non-attack connections to be completed is selected. 3. Connections that remain incomplete by the timeout are considered as attacks and are purged from a session table. That is, the timeout value derived at (2) is presented as the guideline for the timeout value of an embryonic session entry. In order to analyze the distribution of the total connection setup delay of (1), a backbone packet trace collected for ten days in December, 2001 was used. The trace was obtained by recording traffic exchanged between two trans-Pacific T3 links for connecting Korea Internet Exchange (KIX), which is one of four Internet exchanges (IXs) in Korea, to the United States. In the trace, only packet headers were collected during an interval ranging from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. About six billion or more packets were collected everyday, and, on the average, eight million or more TCP connections were derived from a quantity of trace corresponding to one day as a result of the analysis of the packet trace. As shown in FIG. 1, the total connection setup delay may be defined as the time between the transmission of a SYN packet and the reception of a corresponding ACK packet. It is not easy to estimate the time difference Dsa between the transmission of the SYN packet and the reception of the SYN/ACK packet on the basis of the time difference Dsa′ between the transmission of the SYN packet and the reception of SYN/ACK packet that is viewed from the standpoint of an observer placed in the middle of a connection path. In addition, the time difference Dsa cannot be generally considered as a connection setup time. This is because, when asymmetric routing occurs, a SYN/ACK packet corresponding to the SYN packet may be transmitted to another path while deviating from an observation location. In this case, it is impossible for the observer to calculate the time difference between the SYN packet and the SYN/ACK packet. Further, the trace collected in a backbone network is a packet at the intermediate location of the network, so Dsa′≦Dsa is satisfied. This problem becomes serious as the observation location approaches host B. Therefore, the present invention is intended to define a total connection setup delay as the time difference Dc between the transmission of the SYN packet and the transmission of the ACK packet, not the time difference Dsa between the transmission of the SYN packet and the reception of the SYN/ACK packet. An approximation value of Dc can be obtained by measuring the time difference Dc′ between the transmission of the SYN packet and the transmission of the ACK packet that is viewed from the standpoint of the observer (in this case, “approximation value” is used because of a variable delay probability occurring in a network path ranging from host A to the observation location). In an Internet environment operating under asymmetric routing, the usage of the approximation value is more essential. Even if the SYN packet is transmitted by host A to host B while passing through the observation location, the SYN/ACK packet can be received in the opposite direction, that is, through another path. However, if host A transmits the ACK packet, the ACK packet proceeds along the same path as the SYN packet, so that the ACK packet can be observed again and Dc′ can be calculated. The fact that a target trace to be analyzed is obtained by collecting packets crossing the Pacific, that is, long-distance packets, has important meaning. Since all TCP connections recorded in the trace are long-distance connections between Korea and the United States, it can be predicted that the delay and loss rate are relatively high. That is, the observed TCP connection behavior can be considered to be close to the worst situation from the standpoint of the timeout or total connection setup delay. On the basis of this conservative delay estimation value, the timeout value is selected, so the setup of most normal TCP connections is intended to be completed before the timeout. FIG. 2 is a graph showing a Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of connection setup delays. In FIG. 2, the X-axis represents a connection delay time in milliseconds, and the Y-axis represents a cumulative probability. The lower curve ttotal represents a total connection setup delay Dc′. The total connection setup delay Dc′ includes delay times caused by the retransmission of the SYN packet. The upper curve placed above ttotal represents the distribution of (ttotal−tlast) where tlast is the difference between the time when the SYN packet was last transmitted (that is, successfully transmitted) and the time when the SYN/ACK packet is received in response to the SYN packet. That is, the upper curve represents the distribution of time spent in retransmitting the SYN packet, that is, the delays caused by the retransmission of the SYN packet. tlast denotes a pure connection setup delay, excluding the time delays caused by the retransmission of the SYN packet. It can be observed from FIG. 2 that curve ttotal exhibits, a sharp increase at around 1 second, and also at around 3 seconds. After the second increase, the cumulative probability of connection setup exceeds 99%. If the graph is examined in detail, there is a relatively sharp increase even at around 9 seconds. After this increase, the cumulative probability exceeds 99.5%. Although not easily detected, it can be observed that a relatively sharp increase occurs even at around 6 seconds. This distribution represents the following important fact. The sharp increase at 3, 6 and 9 seconds is due to the retransmission of the SYN packet. The time interval between the retransmissions of the SYN packet differs according to the TCP implementation basis. For example, a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)-derived implementation retransmits the SYN packet 6 seconds after the first transmission of the SYN packet. Although the time is initially prescribed as 12 seconds, not 6 seconds , the time is set to 6 seconds due to a bug in the BSD code. The next retransmission is performed 24 seconds after the previous retransmission of the SYN packet, that is, 30 seconds after the first transmission of the SYN packet. In FIG. 2, difficulty in identifying an increase after 6 seconds means that the BSD-derived TCP implementation is hardly used at the present time. Recently, most TCP implementations comply with the RFC2988 standard . The first sharp increase at 3 seconds can be described by the initial Retransmission Timeout (RTO) of RFC2988. The minor increase at 9 seconds means a second retransmission (where 9=3+6). It can be seen from the observation that most TCP implementations comply with the RFC2988 standard. Further, in FIG. 2, referring to the delay time caused by the retransmission of the SYN packet, that is, ttotal−tlast, 97% or more of connections do not go through the retransmission of the SYN packet. It can be estimated that only 2% of the connections go through the retransmission of the SYN packet once, and an extremely small part of the connections goes through the retransmission of the SYN packet twice or more. Another important matter that can be known in FIG. 2 is that ttotal, that is, the total connection setup delay Dc′, typically does not exceed 1 second. For 1 second, 92% of the TCP connections are completed. FIG. 3 is a graph showing the cumulative distribution of a pure connection setup delay, excluding time delays caused by the retransmission of a SYN packet, that is, tlast. As shown in FIG. 3, a cumulative connection completion rate increases up to 84.58%, 96.71%, 98.59% and 99.33% when tlast is 0.5, 1, 1.5 and 2 seconds, respectively. On the basis of the above analysis, the following results are obtained. First, the setup of a great number of connections is completed only when at least 1 second elapses from the first transmission of the SYN packet. If the time is lower than 1 second, the connection setup completion rate decreases remarkably. Second, in the majority of the connections, the round-trip for the exchange of SYN-ACK packets is completed in 2 seconds or less. If the fact that the trace is related to data for long distance connections is considered, the connection setup completion rate will be further increased when tlast is 2 seconds if statistical data include local (short distance) connections (for example, connections in Korea). TCP Connection Timeout Guideline It can be seen that the above-described distribution of TCP connection setup times is greatly influenced by the retransmission behavior of the TCP SYN packet defined in the RFC2988. In the following description, several timeout values are selected and the influences thereof are examined on the basis of the analysis of the distributions in FIGS. 2 and 3 and the RFC2988. As assumed above, the packet inspection computer creates a single session entry for a new SYN packet. Thereafter, whenever a packet for this flow is received, the progress state of a connection is updated and recorded. After a certain period of time elapses from an initial incomplete state, a corresponding entry is purged. First, on the basis of the observation of FIG. 3 =1 is set. In order to obtain a higher connection setup completion rate, a timeout value can be increased. However, even if the timeout value is changed to 2 seconds as shown in FIG. 3 , the connection completion rate increases by only 2.5%. Further, whenever the timeout value additionally increases by 1 second, more embryonic entries, the number of which corresponds to the number of attack packets per second, are created, so that the attainable profit relative to the resultant risk is very slight. \|TABLE 2 \| \|Maximum \|\| \|\| \| \|allowable \|\|RFC2988-conformant \|\|BSD-derived \| \|number of SYN \|\| \|\|Completion \|\| \|\|Completion \| \|Retransmissions \|\|Timeout \|\|rate \|\|Timeout \|\|rate \| \|0 \|\| 1 s \|\|93.07% \|\|1 s \|\|93.07% \| \|1 \|\| 4 s \|\|98.92% \|\|7 s \|\|99.55% \| \|2 \|\|10 s \|\|99.86% \|\|31 s \|\|99.99% \| \|3 \|\|22 s \|\|99.99% \|\|— \|\|— \| Table 2 is a chart showing the relationship between a connection timeout length and a connection setup completion rate according to the maximum allowable number of SYN packet retransmissions. Table 2 shows the influence of several timeout values, selected in consideration of the RFC2988 and BSD-derived implementations, on the connection completion rate. The BSD-derived implementation allows a total of three retransmissions of the SYN packet because a connection setup timer expires at 75 seconds, that is, 3 seconds before the fourth retransmission of the SYN packet. Regardless of the RFC2988 or BSD, the connection completion rate is close to 1 when the timeout value τ=10. Further, when 4≦τ≦10 is given, only a slight variation is exhibited. For example, if τ is changed from 4 to 7, that is, even if one retransmission of the SYN packet is allowed with respect to a BSD-derived system, the connection completion rate increases by only 0.57% for the additional 3 seconds. In contrast, as shown in FIG. 2, if τ is lower than 1, there is a very undesirable effect on connection setup. The guideline for the connection setup timeout values obtained through the analysis is described below. If it is assumed that R is a delay caused by the retransmission of the SYN packet, and T is a pure connection setup delay, the timeout value is designated as (R+T), where it is preferable that 0, 3 or 9 be selected as R according to the allowable number of retransmissions of the SYN packet, and one of values, satisfying 1≦T≦2, be selected as T according to a desired trip delay. For example, a default timeout can be set to 4 (that is, R=3 and T=1). Under this guideline, the stateful packet inspection computer can increase the timeout value until a given target completion rate is achieved. In contrast, if the utilization level of dynamic memory exceeds a threshold, the timeout value can be decreased so that the utilization level decreases below the threshold. FIG. 4 is a graph showing the influence of the number of purged entries on the size of a session table when a timeout value is changed. In order to obtain the graph of FIG. 4, a session table is periodically examined, entries, existing in embryonic connection stages after timeout, are purged, and the number of purged entries is recorded. Sharp spikes of FIG. 4 are DoS attack attempts. The remaining parts thereof can be considered as normal traffic and scan traffic (in the trace, weak DoS attacks and scan traffic are observed almost every minute ). In FIG. 4, it can be observed that, as the timeout value increases, the number of purged connections decreases, so that the setup of more connections is completed, but, if the number of connections that have been completely set up and the absolute number of purged connections are compared to each other, the difference therebetween is not high. The reason for this is that an increase in the connection completion rate is slight even if a timeout is lengthened after 1 second, as shown in Table 1. That is, FIG. 4 shows that, although τ is increased, most purged embryonic entries do not consequently reach a connection completion state. In contrast, the required size of a session table varies with the value of τ. FIG. 5 is a graph showing the size of a session table according to a timeout value. Respective curves, indicated sequentially in an upward direction in FIG. 5, represent the sizes of the session table according to times observed while τ is changed to 1, 4, 7, 10, 22 and 31, respectively. In the worst case, when τ is 31, the number of entries is 14 times the value obtained when τ is 1, and is 6 times the value obtained when τ is 4. Therefore, it can be seen that lower τ values are more resistant to attack traffic. In other words, a DoS attack more strongly influences the inspection computer as the timeout is lengthened. The reason for this is that the number of entries in the session table is proportional to the value of τ and is also proportional to the strength of an attack. That is, if it is assumed that xt is the number of legitimate connection entries at time t, and λ is an attack rate, the total number of entries ct existing in the session table at time t is expressed by the following Equation , c t(τ)=x t+λτ In this case, it is difficult to define xt as a function of τ. That is, the timeout value τ does not influence the number of legitimate connection entries, because most legitimate connections are set up before the timeout, as shown in Table 1. A second term on the right side of Equation has a value other than 0 only when there is an attack. On the basis of Equation and FIG. 5, the rate of an attack flow occupied in the session table can be estimated. For example, in FIG. 5, when t=800, the DoS attack is activated. At this time, if ct(1)≈10,000 and ct(10)≈55,000 given in FIG. 5 are applied to Equation , simultaneous equations can be obtained as indicated by Equation . x t+10λ=55,000 If the simultaneous equations are solved, xt=λ=5,000 is obtained. This means that the number of entries caused by attacks is 5,000 (=λτ) and occupies half of the session table even at τ=1. If xt=λ=5,000 and τ=31 are applied to Equation , ct(31)=160,000 is obtained in which about 3% error exists between the actual measurement value and the obtained value. The estimated number of entries purged for 10 seconds at t=800 is 10λ=50,000, which is almost identical to the measurement value of FIG. 4. The strength of an attack is relatively low in the present trace. Even in the case of the strongest attack, an attack rate does not exceed 5,000 packets per second . However, if a host is exposed to a full-fledged distribution DoS attack or large-scale worm epidemic traffic, the size of the session table may be uncontrollably increased. For example, if there are 10 infected hosts struck by 26,000 attack packets per second as in the case of the SQL Slammer infection, 26 million attack entries occupy the session table when τ=100. The gist intended to be described here is as follows. If the embryonic state of TCP flows is allowed to be longer to increase a connection setup completion rate, a stateful packet inspection computer is at risk of memory exhaustion and lookup performance deterioration without actually increasing the connection setup completion rate. Therefore, if the embryonic state of connection setup continues for 4 or 10 seconds, which is the timeout recommended in the embodiments of the present invention, or longer, it is preferable to immediately purge the embryonic connection. Although the preferred embodiments of the present invention have been disclosed for illustrative purposes, those skilled in the art will appreciate that various modifications, additions and substitutions are possible, without departing from the scope and spirit of the invention as disclosed in the accompanying claims. Stateful-inspection firewalls: The Netscreen way, white paper, http://www.netscreen.com/products/firewall_wpaper.html. G. Iannaconne, C. Diot, I. Graham, N. McKeown, “Dealing with high speed links and other measurement challenges,” Proceedings of ACM Siacom Internet Measurement Workshop, 2001. K. Claffy, G. Polyzos, and H.-W. Braun, “A parametrizable methodology for Internet traffic flow monitoring,” IEEE JSAC 8(13), October 1995, pp. 1481-1494. H.-W. Braun, K. Claffy, and G. Polyzos, “A framework for flow-based accounting on the Internet,” Proceedings of IEEE Singapore International Conference on Information Engineering, 1993. pp. 847-851. V. Srinivasan, G. Varghese, S. Suri, M. Waldvogel, “Fast Scalable Algorithms for Level Four Switching,” Proceedings of ACM Sigcomm, 1998. L. G. Roberts, “Beyond Moore's Law: Internet Growth Trends,” IEEE Computer, 33 (1), January 2000, Page(s): 117 -119 P. Gupta and N. McKewon, “Packet classification on multiple fields,” Proceedings of ACM Sigcomm, 1999. F. Baboescu and G. Varghese, “Scalable packet classification,” Proceedings of ACM Sigcomm, 2001. S. Singh, F. Baboescu, G. Varghese and J. Wang, “Packet Classification Using Multidimensional Cuts,” Proceedings of ACM Sigcomm 2003. Gill, “Maximizing firewall availability,” http://www.qorbit.net/documents/maximizing-firewall-availability.htm. IP Monitoring Project at Sprint, http://ipmon.sprint.com/ipmon.php. R. Stevens, TCP/IP Illustrated Vol. 1. Addison-Wesley, 1994. V. Paxson and M. Allman, Computing TCP's retransmission timer, RFC 2988, November 2000. H. Kim, “Dynamic memory management for packet inspection computers,” techreport, http://ubiquitous.korea.ac.kr/lifetime.html. K. Houle and G. Weaver, “Trends in denial of service attack technology,” a CERT paper, http://www.cert.org/archive/pdf/DoS._trends.pdf, October 2001. IANA, “Internet protocol V4 address space,” http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space. P. Vixie (ISC), G. Sneeringer (UMD), and M. Schleifer (Cogent). Events of 21 Oct. 2002. Nov. 24, 2002 D. Moore et al., “The spread of Sapphire worm,” techreport, http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2003/sapphire/sapphire.html, February 2003. M. de Vivo, E. Carrasco, G. Isern, and G. de Vivo, “A review of port scanning techniques,” ACM Computer Communication Review, 29(2), April 1999. NLANR, “NLANR network traffic packet header traces,” http://pma.nlanr.net/Traces/. As described above, the present invention provides a method of improving security performance in a stateful inspection of TCP connections, which sets an optimal timeout value for TCP connections between hosts, so that the memory of a stateful inspection computer is efficiently used, lookup performance is maintained, arid stateful inspection continues functioning even in the face of network attacks, thus improving security performance of the stateful inspection computer.
The primary disadvantages of using routed mode are the following: • Limited routing protocol choices exist when using multiple-context mode and single-routed mode. • The configuration can become very complex. • Multicast support is limited. If you plan to use multiple contexts, you can choose between static routes and BGP stub. Significant limitations to BGP stub exist (see Chapter 9, "Configuring Routing Protocols," for details), and static routes do not have the capability to propagate routing changes when a next-hop device is unavailable. If single-routed mode is used, all the access lists for every interface, both inbound and outbound, appear in the configuration. The larger the configuration, the easier it is to overlook configuration mistakes. Careful attention needs to be exercised when adding, removing, or modifying ACLs. Multicast support is limited to eight outgoing interfaces. In transparent mode, the FWSM does not need to participate in multicast. Was this article helpful?
Authorized networks allow whitelisting of specific CIDR ranges and permit IP addresses in those ranges to access the cluster master endpoint using HTTPS. GKE uses both TLS and authentication to secure access to the cluster master endpoint from the public Internet. This approach enables the flexibility to administer the cluster from anywhere. We recommend you enable master authorized networks in GKE clusters. Using authorized networks you will be able further restrict access to specified sets of IP addresses. Updated 3 months ago
The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc. \|Content Last Reviewed\|\| Thanks for visiting this category direction page on Container Scanning in GitLab. This page belongs to the Container Security group of the Protect stage and is maintained by Sam White ([email protected]). This direction page is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute. We welcome feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and community contributions. /label ~"devops::protect" ~"Category:Container Scanning" ~"group::container security". Our best practices are to package applications into containers, so they can be deployed to Kubernetes. Container Scanning checks your Docker images against known vulnerabilities that may affect software that is contained in the image. Users often use existing images as the base for their containers. It means that they rely on the security of those images and their preinstalled software. Unfortunately, as this software is subject to vulnerabilities, this may affect the security of the entire project. Our goal is to provide Container Scanning as part of the standard development process. This means that Container Scanning is executed every time a new commit is pushed to a branch, and only vulnerabilities introduced within the merge request are shown. We also include Container Scanning as part of Auto DevOps. In the future, another place where Container Scanning results would be useful is in the GitLab Container Registry. Images built during pipelines are stored in the registry, and then used for deployments. Integrating Container Scanning into GitLab Container Registry will help to monitor if it is safe to deploy a specific version of the app. Primary: Sasha (Software Developer wants to know when adding a container if it has known vulnerabilities so alternate versions or containers can be considered. Secondary: Sam (Security Analyst) wants to know what containers have known vulnerabilities (to reduce the OWASP A9 risk - Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities), to be alerted if a new vulnerability is published for an existing component, and how behind current version the components are. Our vision for container security is to provide the ability to scan container images regardless of where they may reside and to shift those results as far left as possible. To reach the Complete Maturity level, at a minimum we will need to implement the following features. We will likely need to implement additional features as well and this is currently being researched. Some of the key long-term themes for our pipeline-scanning functionality include the following: In an upcoming milestone, we plan to allow users to scan container images that are actively running in a Kubernetes instance for vulnerabilities and to report those vulnerabilities back to the Security Center. Additionally, in the short-term, we are working on the existing container pipeline scanning functionality to accomplish the following: To accomplish these goals, we plan to replace our current Container Scanning engine Clair with Trivy. Although the work to integrate Trivy was primarily completed in the %13.11 release, we do not plan to change the default scanning engine until the %14.0 release. To minimize our on-going maintenance work, we have formally deprecated our integration with Clair. For additional details and context behind the change, or to provide feedback, please reference our deprecation issue. We will be researching current user challenges in this issue. Please feel free to comment! Currently we notify developers when they add containers with known vulnerabilities in a merge request, if security approvals are configured, we will require an approval for critical, high or unknown findings. A summary of all findings for a project can be found in the Security Dashboard where Security Teams can quickly check the security status of projects. In some cases we are able to offer automatic remediation for the findings. Our primary success metric is the number of unique users who run a container security scan each month. In addition to being A9 Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities in the OWASP top 10, keeping components up to date is code quality issue, and finally as the need for software bill of materials (SBoM) grows being able to list your dependencies will become a needed feature for all application developers. We continue to engage analysts so they remain aware that we offer Container Scanning, which is sometimes considered stand-alone and other times it is considered part of Application Security Testing (AST) or Software Composition Analysis (SCA) bundles as defined in our Solutions, since vulnerabilities for base images can be considered very similar to vulnerabilities for software dependencies. We can get valuable feedback from analysts, and use it to drive our vision. Top Epics and Issues can be viewed in this list If you don't see the customer success label on an issue yet, and you are a customer success team-member, feel free to add it! If you don't see the customer label on an issue yet, feel free to add it if you are the first customer! If you don't see the internal customer label on an issue yet, and you are a team-member, feel free to add it! To be determined.
Malware analysts have found multiple samples of a new malware toolkit that can collect sensitive files from systems isolated from the internet. They call it Ramsay and there are few known victims to date. Ramsay has not been publicly documented until today. It lands on a victim computer via a malicious RTF file and scans removable drives and network shares for Word documents, PDF files, and ZIP archives. Three variants found Researchers at cybersecurity company ESET found one Ramsay sample on the VirusTotal scanning platform, uploaded from Japan. At least three variants of this malware exist, though: v1, v2.a, and v2.b. Based on the compilation timestamps, Ramsay v1 is the earliest one, from September 2019, and is also the least complex. The other two samples (v2.a and v2.b) are more elaborate and appear to be compiled on March 8 and March 27, respectively. Both come with a rootkit component but only 2.a also has spreading capabilities. ESET malware researcher Ignacio Sanmillan says that there is sufficient evidence indicating that Ramsay framework is still under development and that the delivery vectors are still to be refined. In technical analysis published today, the researcher notes that the less complex versions of the malware are dropped by malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882, two vulnerabilities that allow executing arbitrary code. In another attack vector delivering the more refined Ramsay v2.a, the malware posed as an installer for the 7-zip file compression tool. The spreader component in this version is highly aggressive, Sannmillan said, to the point that it can infect any portable executable present on targeted drives. The logical assumption for this behavior is that the attacker may want to ensure proliferation to a larger number of victims. The lack of this functionality in the other versions of the malware could indicate that the attacker needs stricter control of distribution in the targe network, the researcher said. It could also hint at targeting a specific air-gapped system and not the entire network. Ramsay’s purpose is to steal files from a compromised host. All variants analyzed by ESET collect all Microsoft Word documents on the file system of the target computer; newer ones will also search for PDF files and ZIP archives on network drives and removable drives. Files collected this way are encrypted with the RC4 cipher and compressed with WinRAR, dropped by Ramsay installer. A container artifact is then generated to make it easier to hide them on the system and to simplify extraction. “Ramsay implements a decentralized way of storing these artifacts among the victim’s file system by using inline hooks applied on two Windows API functions, WriteFile and CloseHandle” – ESET The artifact containing the stolen data is added at the end of a benign Word document. To make everything look normal to the naked eye, a footer section is appended. The resulting document looks and behaves like a valid file that can be opened in Microsoft Word. ESET’s research covers only the part of Ramsay framework that spreads to other computers, steals files, and prepares the data for the taking. Since Ramsay is targeting air-gapped systems that are cut off from the wider internet, the threat actor cannot communicate directly with victim systems to extract stolen data or get commands. Sannmillan says that the malware scans the local filesystem, network shares, or removable drives for special control files that contain instructions from the attacker. This means that another Ramsay component exists to exfiltrate data and to deliver commands to the local implant. “We did not see those two communications in action (data exfiltration or command execution), and in fact we don’t have a sample of the Ramsay exfiltrator tool, which we imagine exists in some way” – Ignacio Sannmillan One way the attacker could do it, the researcher told us, is to compromise a computer connected to the internet that is used by an employee to transfer files to a host on the air-gapped network. Such as system would intermediate the communication with the disconnected computer via a removable drive that is used on both. A special control file could instruct Ramsay to copy on the drive the already prepared Word file When the drive connects to the computer with internet access, the file is exfiltrated. which is then exfiltrated. Another scenario is for the attacker to have physical access to the infected system. After planting Ramsay and leaving it running for a while, they can return and grab the files. Despite finding artifacts previously seen in the Retro backdoor used by DarkHotel advanced group of hackers, attributing Ramsay to an adversary is not possible at this time. One clue pointing to a potential connection to Retro backdoor are several tokens present used by both malware pieces. ESET discovered additional common ground between the two pieces of malware. According to their research, Ramsay and Retro use the same API to generate the unique identifier (GUID) for the infected machines and the same algorithm to encode it. Additionally, both saved some log files following the same naming convention and relied on the same open-source tools for privilege escalation and for deploying some of their components. On top of this, the malicious documents that delivered Ramsay contain language metadata in the form of the Korean word for “title.” However, all this cannot be considered reliable evidence for a connection with DarkHotel. ESET researchers believe that the adversary behind Ramsay has knowledge of the victim’s environment and is developing attack vectors that would preserve resources. The information contained in this website is for general information purposes only. The information is gathered from Bleeping Computer, while we endeavour to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the website or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained on the website for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk. Through this website, you are able to link to other websites which are not under the control of CSIRT-CY. We have no control over the nature, content and availability of those sites. The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them. Every effort is made to keep the website up and running smoothly. However, CSIRT-CY takes no responsibility for, and will not be liable for, the website being temporarily unavailable due to technical issues beyond our control.
Anomaly Detector Client The Anomaly Detector API detects anomalies automatically in time series data. It supports two kinds of mode, one is for stateless using, another is for stateful using. In stateless mode, there are three functionalities. Entire Detect is for detecting the whole series with model trained by the time series, Last Detect is detecting last point with model trained by points before. ChangePoint Detect is for detecting trend changes in time series. In stateful mode, user can store time series, the stored time series will be used for detection anomalies. Under this mode, user can still use the above three functionalities by only giving a time range without preparing time series in client side. Besides the above three functionalities, stateful model also provide group based detection and labeling service. By leveraging labeling service user can provide labels for each detection result, these labels will be used for retuning or regenerating detection models. Inconsistency detection is a kind of group based detection, this detection will find inconsistency ones in a set of time series. By using anomaly detector service, business customers can discover incidents and establish a logic flow for root cause analysis.
Protection Against Hackers: How SentinelOne Protects Singularity Computers, Cloud Containers, & IoT Networks Whether it’s merely spinning in the age of the Coronavirus or malware called Mozart that communicates via DNS protocol – IT security is a never-ending topic. In this context, security solutions such as Singularity from SentinelOne play an increasingly important role. This affects a wide variety of scenarios, such as data center, cloud, and IoT. First of all: SentinelOne Singularity combines the provider’s existing security solutions on a single platform. As a company, you no longer have to worry about the ways in which the respective attack targets are threatened by hackers. So whether the sensitive data and possessions are in the data center, on an edge node or in the cloud – Singularity detects the malware and quarantines it. The unique thing about it: With the help of continually learning AI algorithms, this comprehensive protection is always a bit smarter. SentinelOne Singularity protects everything: data center, IoT networks, cloud containers SentinelOne Singularity uses the usual technologies such as Endpoint Protection (EPP) and Endpoint Detection & Response. This means that malware can be detected and eliminated before it even gains unauthorized access to the data center or the company network. This is where machine learning algorithms take full effect by the security system examining the perceived threat for its potential hazard. The question that can be answered with this: Is it a friend or an enemy? Comprehensively Protect IoT Networks With SentinelOne Ranger Brand new, but no less effective, SentinelOne Ranger deals in this context with attackers who target IoT devices within a network. All IoT data from rogue and smart devices are integrated into the Singularity Security platform. This should make it easier to find possible threats. This is particularly successful where SentinelOne agents are already installed and active within the network. This also enables inventory of IoT devices. It can be used to identify components such as cameras and other devices that may pose a threat to the IT infrastructure. Because they have outdated software installed on them, for example, which has not been patched for a while. SentinelOne Singularity Ensures Secure Cloud Containers Attackers don’t just stop in front of data centers and IoT networks, hackers and similar journeys also target cloud infrastructures. In these cases, too, SentinelOne Singularity provides more security, and this again with the help of behavior-based AI methods. SentinelOne Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP) calls this protection. It is used wherever hackers can target native cloud data and Kubernetes containers. This can increase the transparency of cloud containers by making their behavior visible and understandable. The practical thing about the CWPP approach is the agent used, which behaves like the Linux agent already installed and can, therefore, also be used in the cloud environment without significant adjustments.
A firmware Trojan for Android devices incorporated in a launching application. It contains a number of special modules (SDK) responsible for showing advertisements. Moreover, the malware can download and run not only additional advertising packages but also other applications, including malicious ones. If the user removes the graphical shell containing Android.Cooee.1, next time the device is turned on, the operating system will not load. Before uninstalling the malicious launcher, users are recommended to install some other launching application and set it as default. If the mobile device is operating normally, download and install Dr.Web for Android Light. Run a full system scan and follow recommendations to neutralize the detected threats. If the mobile device has been locked by Android.Locker ransomware (the message on the screen tells you that you have broken some law or demands a set ransom amount; or you will see some other announcement that prevents you from using the handheld normally), do the following: Load your smartphone or tablet in the safe mode (depending on the operating system version and specifications of the particular mobile device involved, this procedure can be performed in various ways; seek clarification from the user guide that was shipped with the device, or contact its manufacturer); Once you have activated safe mode, install the Dr.Web для Android Light onto the infected handheld and run a full scan of the system; follow the steps recommended for neutralizing the threats that have been detected;
This learning path has been designed to introduce you to many of the different AWS Security services that are available to help you implement varied levels of security within your AWS environment. Security is one of the most important factors when implementing cloud services as you must ensure that the data you are storing on the Cloud remains restricted, controlled, monitored, maintained and secured to the correct level. AWS has developed a number of AWS security services and management tools to help you protect your data and environment from unwanted exposures, vulnerabilities, and threats, but largely it's down to us as customers to ensure these AWS security services are implemented effectively. This AWS Security Services learning path will introduce a number of key AWS security services that can be used effectively within your security processes and procedures to ensure that you remain protected from both internal and external threats. The services covered within this learning path are as follows: - AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM) - AWS Key Management Service (KMS) - AWS CloudHSM - AWS WAF - AWS CloudTrail - Amazon Inspector - AWS Config By the end of the AWS Security Services learning path, you would have a solid understanding of each of these AWS security services and will be able to confidently implement them within your own AWS environment. - AWS: Overview of AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM) - Introduction to AWS Web Application Firewall - AWS CloudTrail: An Introduction - Amazon Inspector - AWS Config: An Introduction - Amazon Web Services - Key Management Service (KMS) - Getting started with AWS CloudHSM - April 6, 2018 - Added Learning Path Exam - September 21st 2018 - Added Course 'Enforcing Compliance & Security Controls with Amazon Macie' - September 21st 2018 - Added Course 'Understanding Amazon GuardDuty' - September 21st 2018 - Added Lab 'Detecting EC2 Threats with Amazon GuardDuty Learning Path Steps This course looks at one of the key Security services within AWS, Identity & Access Management, commonly referred to IAM. This service manages identities and their permissions that are able to access your AWS resources and so understanding how this service ... Learn how to manage our organization using IAM Users and Groups and IAM Roles Course Description Unencrypted data can be read and seen by anyone who has access to it, and data stored at-rest or sent between two locations, in-transit, is known as ‘plaintext’ or ‘cleartext’ data. The data is plain to see and can be seen and under... In this lab, you'll learn about Amazon Key Management Service to encrypt S3 and EBS Data at an intermediate level. Get started today! AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Intermediate Course Description: AWS CloudHSM is the name of Amazon’s original encryption key solution. HSM stands for Hardware Security Module and in the solution provided by AWS is a Safenet Luna appliance hosted at AWS. The appliance is single tenant and exclusive t... Explore the 3 AWS services, designed to help protect your web applications from external malicious activity, with this course. Once getting started, this course will delve into depth on all three services, comprised of AWS Web Application Firewall Service (... AWS Web Application Firewall Intermediate Any information that helps to secure your Cloud infrastructure is of significant use to security engineers and architects, with AWS CloudTrail you have the ability to capture all AWS API calls made by users and/or services. Whenever an API request is made ... AWS CloudTrail Intermediate With the ever increasing threats of attacks against the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of your data within your organization, the need to ensure strict security procedures and processes is paramount and learn how to use Amazon Inspector is key... With the ever-changing nature of Cloud Computing in AWS, through the use of Auto Scaling, and self-healing architecture mechanisms, having visibility and awareness of your AWS resources is invaluable. It can be difficult to understand what your resources wi... Compliance check using AWS Config Rules: See how AWS Config can enhance your security and compliance with AWS managed rules and custom rules with AWS Lambda Course Description Amazon Macie was launched in the summer of 2017, much to the delight of cloud security engineers. Amazon Macie is a powerful security and compliance service that provides an automatic method to detect, identify, and classify data within ... Course Description During AWS re:Invent 2017, AWS launched their 11th security service in the on-going drive to help its customers protect and secure their applications, environments, and accounts. This service was Amazon GuardDuty, a regionally based, int... Learn how to use Amazon GuardDuty to automatically uncover malicious EC2 activity and configure threat lists to improve the security of your AWS environments. Exam: Security Services on AWS About the Author Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data centre and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation. To date Stuart has created over 40 courses relating to Cloud, most within the AWS category with a heavy focus on security and compliance He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape. In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community. Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.
IoT Security Integration with Next-generation Firewalls IoT Security integrates with the logging service and next-generation firewalls using Device-ID. The IoT Security solution involves the integration of three key architectural components to process network data: - Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewallscollect device data and send it to the logging service. - The logging serviceuses a cloud-based log-forwarding process to direct the logs from firewalls to destinations like IoT Security and Cortex Data Lake. Depending on the type of IoT Security subscription you have, the logging service either streams metadata to your IoT Security account and Cortex Data Lake instance or just to your IoT Security account. - IoT Securityis an app that runs on a cloud-based platform in which machine learning, artificial intelligence, and threat intelligence are used to discover, classify, and secure the IoT devices on the network. The app ingests firewall logs with network traffic data and provides Security policy recommendations and IP address-to-device mappings to the firewall for use in Security policy rules. Administrators access the dynamically enriched IoT device inventory, detected device vulnerabilities, security alerts, and recommended policy sets through the IoT security portal. The IoT Security app integrates with next-generation firewalls through Device-ID, which is a construct that uses device identity as a means to apply policy. The integration uses three mechanisms. - Device dictionary– This is an XML file that IoT Security generates and makes available for Panorama and firewalls to import. The dictionary file provides the Panorama and firewall administrator with a list of device attributes for selection when importing recommended Security policy rules from IoT Security and when creating rules themselves. These attributes are profile, category, vendor, model, OS family, and OS version and are for both IoT and traditional IT devices. - Policy rule recommendations– After an IoT Security administrator creates a set of Security policy rules based on traffic from IoT devices in the same device profile, a firewall administrator can import them as recommendations for use in its policy set. - IP address-to-device mappings– These mappings tell firewalls which attributes a device with a particular IP address has. When traffic to or from that IP address reaches a firewall, it checks if one of its attributes matches a policy and, if so, the firewall applies the policy. IoT Security sends IP address-to-device mappings to firewalls for both IoT and IT devices if the confidence score for device identities is high (90% or higher) and they’ve sent or received traffic within the past hour. The goal of Device-ID is to leverage the intelligence of IoT Security to enforce firewall policy on IoT devices. PAN-OS 10.0 introduces a new concept for policy enforcement: Device-ID. Device-ID is a way to enforce policy rules based on device attributes. IoT Security provides the firewall with a device dictionary file containing a list of device attributes such as profiles, categories, vendors, and models. For various attributes in the dictionary file, it lists a set of entries. For example, three entries for the profile attribute might be Advidia Camera, BK Medical UltraSound Machine, and Carefusion Infusion Pump Base Station. When configuring a Security policy rule, firewall administrators have the option to select device attributes from the device dictionary. If they select profile, they can choose one of the profile entries: Polycom IP Phone, for example. The policy rule then applies to all devices that match this profile. But how does the firewall know what the profile is for a device? It knows this from the IP address-to-device mappings that IoT Security also gives the firewall. These mappings identify attributes for each device. When traffic from an IP address that's mapped to a device attribute specified in the policy rule reaches the firewall, the policy rule lookup will find a match with this rule and apply whatever action it enforces. A firewall downloads a device dictionary file from the update server. The dictionary file populates entries in all the Device-ID attribute lists for profile, category, vendor, and so on. These attribute entries are then available for use as policy rule configuration elements. The firewall administrator next configures a firewall policy rule using the profile attribute “Polycom IP Phone”. After a Polycom Trio 8800 device joins the network and IoT Security identifies it, IoT Security provides the firewall with an IP address-to-device mapping for it. The two key elements in the mapping for this example are its device profile (Polycom IP Phone profile, highlighted in yellow) and its IP address (10.1.2.3, highlighted in blue). When traffic from the Polycom Trio 8800 device at 10.1.2.3 reaches the firewall, it does a Device-ID policy rule lookup, finds that the profile for the device at this IP address matches one specified in a policy rule, and then applies the rule. If a firewall becomes disconnected from IoT Security, the firewall retains its IP address-to-device mappings and continues enforcing Device-ID policy rules with them until the connection is re-established. Every next-generation firewall model has the same maximum of 1000 unique Device-ID objects. The maximum of 1000 Device-ID objects is not the same as that for IP address-to-device mappings. The maximum number of IP address-to-device mappings varies based on firewall model and is the same as the User-ID maximums listed in the + Show More sections for each firewall model on the Product Selection page The device dictionary is an XML file for firewalls to use in Security policy rules. It contains entries for the following device attributes: profile, category, vendor, model, OS family, and OS version. These entries come from devices across all IoT Security tenants and are completely refreshed on a regular basis and posted as a new file on the update server. If there are any changes to a dictionary entry, a revised file will be posted on the update server so that Panorama and firewalls will get it the next time they check the update server, which they do automatically every two hours. IP Address-to-device Mappings After IoT Security identifies a device, it bundles the following set of identifying characteristics about it: - IP address - MAC address - Device type - Device category - Device profile - OS family - OS version - Risk score - Risk level Firewalls poll IoT Security for these IP address-to-device mappings for use in policy enforcement. A firewall polls for new or modified mappings every second, and IoT Security returns mappings that it has identified with high confidence (a confidence score of 90 or more) for devices that were active within the last hour. If the IoT Security app discovers duplicate IP address-to-device mappings—that is, there are two IP addresses mapped to the same device MAC address—it resolves it to the MAC address with the latest network activity. There is no time limit for how long a firewall retains IP address-to-device mappings. It only begins deleting them when its cache fills up, starting with the oldest first. Policy Rule Recommendations You can generate Security policy rule recommendations based on the normal, acceptable network behaviors of the IoT devices in the same device profile and manually import them into firewalls for enforcement. PAN-OS 8.1 and later supports the importing of IoT Security policy rule recommendations. For Panorama-managed firewalls that have an IoT Security subscription requiring Cortex Data Lake – Panorama can only import policy rule recommendations if it was used to onboard its managed firewalls to Cortex Data Lake. Firewall and Panorama Communications Related to IoT Security IoT Security communications from firewalls without Panorama management: - Firewalls retrieve IP address-to-device mappings and policy recommendations from IoT Security through iot.services-edge.paloaltonetworks.com on TCP port 443. During the certificate exchange between a firewall and the edge server in front of the IoT Security cloud, they verify each other’s certificates. The firewall validates the certificate it receives by checking these sites: Communications to these sites occur over HTTP on TCP port 80. - Firewalls download device dictionary files from the update server at updates.paloaltonetworks.com on TCP port 443. - Firewalls forward logs to the logging service on TCP ports 444 and 3978. IoT Security communications from Panorama: - A Panorama management server imports policy recommendations from IoT Security through iot.services-edge.paloaltonetworks.com on TCP port 443. When validating the certificate the edge server presents, Panorama checks the same sites listed above that firewalls check.Firewalls under Panorama management still contact IoT Security through iot.services-edge.paloaltonetworks.com for IP address-to-device mappings, they still download device dictionaries from the update server, and they still forward logs to the logging service. - A Panorama management server sends queries for logs to the logging service on TCP port 444. Recommended For You Recommended videos not found.
08 Jun Active Response Against Cybercrime – Is It Time? With the continuing onslaught of cybercrime and malware, more and more organizations are seriously contemplating an active response program—striking back at their attackers instead of merely taking a defensive posture. Done correctly, active response could significantly slow cybercrime, or at least give cybercriminals pause. However, active response is a vigilante endeavor, and if it goes wrong, the consequences could be worse than the crimes it is intended to stop. Actively responding to a cyberattack, also known as “hacking back,” is illegal in most countries. In the United States, it’s specifically outlawed in the 30-year-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which criminalizes unauthorized access to a computer. However, a bill has recently been introduced within the U.S. government that would, to some degree, amend the CFAA to allow “active cyber defense measures.” This “Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act” (ACDC), if passed, would “decriminalize defensive deeds undertaken by, or at the direction of, a victim.” Such defensive actions would consist of accessing, without authorization, the computer of the attacker who went after the victim’s network. The bill would protect defensive computer intrusion that’s done to gather information about who’s behind an attack and that’s shared with law enforcement or used to disrupt a continued attack or intrusion. The defensive actions of the bill are limited to information gathering. Hacking into the attacker’s computers or networks to modify or disable their system(s) is not authorized by the bill. Even this partial step towards active response is likely to meet stiff resistance from some. Any sort of active response is very challenging. Here’s a sampling of potential pitfalls: - Attacks launched from innocent person’s machines: Cybercriminals use innocent middlemen to launch attacks. It’s often difficult to know who’s behind an attack that appears to be coming from a specific machine or network. Very few organizations have the skills and resources to root out the actual criminals behind most attacks. - Addresses are easily spoofed: IPv4 is still the predominant protocol in use today, but it lacks secure packet origin. Attackers can easily fake the addresses of their packet streams to implicate a nonexistent or worse, innocent person’s IP address. - A web of legal confusion: Even if defensive hacking is legalized in some areas, it will likely remain illegal in other regions, creating a confusing web of laws for organizations to understand and adhere to. These skills are not likely to be found in even the best security operation centers. - Accidental loss of control: Strike back always runs the risk of casualties from friendly fire, or worse yet, powerful weapons falling into the hands of enemies. Microsoft recently accused the US federal government of creating the very hacking tools used in the global Wannacry ransomware attack [i]. With all of the challenges, should we be taking any steps towards active response? Some would argue that yes, we should begin to carefully investigate active response. Today, the laws and regulations certainly favor the criminals. Able to launch attacks from virtually any location in the world, cybercriminals can hide behind not only geographic, political, and technical walls, but legal barriers too. The current cyberwar is akin to a ground war where the defending army is limited to using shields—they have no guns, even on their own turf–while the invading army has every modern weapon available. Some believe that unless we start equipping ourselves with tools to actually fight back, the cybercriminals will continue to advance and win the battles. Others however, are vehemently opposed to any sort of active response. Concerns over privacy, mistakenly impacting innocents, loss of control, and over-zealous vigilantes are all significant and legitimate. Currently we don’t have regulations in place to adequately address these issues. Whether we should engage in any sort of active response is a difficult question, and surrounded by strong viewpoints. Even taking a few baby-steps could be dangerous, yet doing nothing is also hazardous. It will be very interesting to watch the debate on this topic as the ACDC bill and similar initiatives move forward. [i] The Seattle Times, Microsoft criticizes government creation of hacking tool used in global cyberattack, May 14, 2017. http://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-criticizes-government-creation-of-hacking-tools-used-in-global-cyberattack/
VirusTotal analysts presented a report on the methods that malware operators use to bypass protection and increase the effectiveness of social engineering. The study showed that attackers are increasingly imitating legitimate applications such as Skype, Adobe Reader and VLC Player to gain the trust of victims. Let me remind you that we also wrote that Scammers spread malware under the mask of the Brave browser, and also that Hackers majorly use Microsoft and DHL brands in phishing attacks. Attackers use various approaches to compromise endpoints by tricking users into downloading and running seemingly harmless executable files. Researchers report that in addition to Skype, Adobe Reader and VLC Player, hackers often disguise their programs as 7-Zip, TeamViewer, CCleaner, Microsoft Edge, Steam, Zoom and WhatsApp. Such deception, among other things, is achieved through the use of legitimate domains in order to bypass firewall protection. Some of the most commonly abused domains are discordapp[.]com, squarespace[.]com, amazonaws[.]com, mediafire[.]com, and qq[.]com. In total, the experts found at least 2.5 million suspicious files downloaded through 101 domains included in the list of 1000 best sites according to Alexa. Another commonly used tactic is signing malware with valid certificates, usually stolen from software developers. Since January 2021, VirusTotal has detected over a million malware samples, of which 87% had a legitimate signature when they were first uploaded to the database. VirusTotal also reports that it found 1,816 malware samples that disguised themselves as legitimate software, hiding in the installers of popular programs, including products such as Google Chrome, Malwarebytes, Zoom, Brave, Mozilla Firefox and Proton VPN.
This week's articles How Threat Actors Use GitHub The article explains how threat actors leverage GitHub for command and control & data exfiltration, malware delivery, and supply chain attacks. Unleashing in-toto: The API of DevSecOps The article discusses the importance of integrating security into the DevOps process and introduces In-Toto, an open-source framework that provides a way to verify the integrity of software supply chains. It explains how In-Toto can be used as an API in DevSecOps to ensure the security and trustworthiness of software. Terraform best practices for reliability at any scale #aws, #build, #terraform At scale, many Terraform state files are better than one. But how do you draw the boundaries and decide which resources belong in which state files? What are the best practices for organizing Terraform state files to maximize reliability, minimize the blast-radius of changes, and align with the design of cloud providers?
Microsoft quietly patched a critical vulnerability Wednesday in its Malware Protection Engine. The vulnerability was found May 12 by Google’s Project Zero team, which said an attacker could have crafted an executable that when processed by the Malware Protection Engine’s emulator could enable remote code execution. Unlike a May 9 emergency patch for what Google researchers called the worst Windows vulnerability in recent memory, this week’s bug was a silent fix, said Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who privately disclosed it to Microsoft. The previous zero day (CVE-2017-0290) was also in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, running in most of Microsoft’s antimalware offerings bundled with Windows. “MsMpEng includes a full system x86 emulator that is used to execute any untrusted files that look like PE executables. The emulator runs as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM and isn’t sandboxed,” Ormandy wrote. “Browsing the list of win32 APIs that the emulator supports, I noticed ntdll!NtControlChannel, an ioctl-like routine that allows emulated code to control the emulator.” That exposed the MsMpEng engine to a number of different problems such as giving attackers the ability to carry out various input/output control commands. “Command 0x0C allows allows you to parse arbitrary-attacker controlled RegularExpressions to Microsoft GRETA (a library abandoned since the early 2000s)… Command 0x12 allows you to load additional “microcode” that can replace opcodes… Various commands allow you to change execution parameters, set and read scan attributes and UFS metadata. This seems like a privacy leak at least, as an attacker can query the research attributes you set and then retrieve it via scan result,” Ormandy wrote. Both Microsoft and Google did not return requests for comment. “This was potentially an extremely bad vulnerability, but probably not as easy to exploit as Microsoft’s earlier zero day, patched just two weeks ago,” said Udi Yavo, co-founder and CTO of enSilo, in an interview with Threatpost. The fact the MsMpEng isn’t sandboxed is also notable, said Yavo. He said most Windows applications such as Microsoft Edge browser are sandboxed. That means an adversary targeting Edge would have to exploit a vulnerability in Edge and then escape the sandbox to cause harm. “MsMpEng is not sandboxed, meaning if you can exploit a vulnerability there it’s game over,” Yavo said. Yavo notes another unique aspect of this bug in Microsoft’s Malware Protection Engine. “The emulator’s job is to emulate the client’s CPU. But, oddly Microsoft has given the emulator an extra instruction that allows API calls. It’s unclear why Microsoft creates special instructions for the emulator,” he said. “If you think that sounds crazy, you’re not alone,” wrote Ormandy of the API calls. Microsoft did not issue a security advisory regarding this patch, as it did for the previous zero day. Users don’t have to take any action if their security products are set to the default, which will update their engines and definitions automatically.
“In this occasion, the request should be repeated with another URI, but future requests can still use the original URI. In contrast to 303, the request method should not be changed when reissuing the original request. For instance, a POST request must be repeated using another POST request.“ — wikipedia “The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.“ — ietf
Understanding Rule-Based Detection As delivered on a Gartner blog post, “One of the famous insults that security vendors use against competitors nowadays is ‘RULE-BASED.’” But what does this really mean, and is this really such a bad thing? The essence of rule-based detection is precisely what’s implied by the name itself: The technology and tools in place operate on a set of predetermined rules. These are used to detect and respond to threats that are known to show certain characteristics. Rule-based detection, therefore, is used to identify and mitigate the continuous known threats coming at enterprise networks. The dig in the insult mentioned refers to the fact that these tools only go so far in preventing breaches. Rule-based detection isn’t going to be as effective at identifying and stopping zero-day exploits. For this, more advanced technologies that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning are necessary. While these are important new forces in the field of cybersecurity, they’re not the only essential players. Despite the digs, there’s a lot of utility to rule-based detection. Why Does Rule-Based Detection Matter? Even though there’s a ton of value to be gained from some of the security tools that use technology more advanced than what’s needed for rule-based detection, this doesn’t mean rule-based detection isn’t still important. Threats come in all shapes and sizes, and can reach their targets through a variety of mediums. Focusing too much on a narrow pool of security tools can leave organizations open to attack. The thing is, rule-based detection is still quite effective at spotting and isolating certain threats. By knowing what kinds of threats can be stopped most effectively through rule-based detection, such as known malware, it’s possible to utilize it in a way that creates effective network defense. What Are Use Cases for Rule-Based Detection? Once you see there are in fact reasons to utilize and care about rule-based detection, it’s time to dig into some of the more specific uses. How can enterprises actually utilize these tools in order to keep their networks more secure? One of the most obvious answers is endpoint detection and response (EDR). With EDR, you’re deploying series of tools and protocols designed specifically for stopping threats at endpoints. These are basically any kind of device that might connect to enterprise networks, such as laptops, smartphones, or eve IoT sensors. Endpoints are everywhere and only getting more prevalent due to the increase of autonomous devices and remote working. In order to sufficiently protect endpoints, enterprises should deploy EDR that utilizes rule-based detection and endpoint behavioral analysis. This isn’t just a good idea, it’s pretty much essential in today’s world. About 70 percent of all breaches begin at endpoints, so it’s pretty critical to have them secure. Utilizing EDR with rule-based detection can facilitate safer endpoints. Should Enterprises Adopt Rule-Based Detection Solutions? While some still might scoff at rule-based detection systems, this is not the correct attitude. Modern enterprises can’t simply put rule-based detection solutions on the shelf when they have some clear benefits. Arguably the most critical component to rule-based detection is the fact that it can give your team a head start on isolating attacks before they’re able to jump throughout your network. Due to rule-based detection’s ability to spot specific behaviors across the board, it’s possible to contain threats before they lead to damage. This capability is a huge plus considering time is such a crucial component in reducing the impact of a breach. No matter the scope of your business, utilizing rule-based detection in your security posture is a wise move. These tools are able to give security teams a better chance at cutting off threats before they do real harm.
[As presented at BSidesDC on 23 October 2016.] Organizations today are collecting more information about what's going on in their environments than ever before, but manually sifting through all this data to find evil on your network is next to impossible. Reliable detection of security incidents remains elusive, and there is a distinct lack of open source innovation. It doesn't have to be this way! In this presentation, we’ll walk through the creation of a simple Python script that can learn to find malicious activity in your HTTP proxy logs. At the end of it all, you'll not only gain a useful tool to help you identify things that your IDS and SIEM might have missed, but you’ll also have the knowledge necessary to adapt that code to other uses as well.
Blacklist and whitelist are terms commonly used in IT world and cybersecurity to indicate something is allowed, or not allowed. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, defines the word “blacklist” as “a list of banned or excluded things of disreputable character,” its first known use dates back to 1624. Blacklists and whitelists are important tools in cybersecurity, as they help to prevent unauthorized or malicious access to systems and services. A blacklist is a list of items (such as IP addresses, email addresses, or domain names) that are blocked or denied access to a particular system or service. These items may be blocked for many reasons, such as, being known or associated with malicious or unwanted activity, such as spamming, hacking, or malware (aka their internet reputation) A blacklist can be used to prevent access to a system or service by known bad actors, and to protect the system or service from being used for malicious purposes. A whitelist is a list of items (such as IP addresses, email addresses, or domain names) that are explicitly allowed access to a particular system or service. These items are considered to be safe and trusted, and are not blocked or denied access. A whitelist can be used to ensure that only authorized or known-good actors can access a system or service, and to protect the system or service from unauthorized or malicious access. Whitelisting is the opposite of blacklisting, where a list of items are restricted or prohibited. However, it’s worth noting that both whitelists and blacklists are not perfect solutions and have their own limitations. They can be difficult to maintain and update, and new malicious actors and IP addresses can be added all the time. They might also cause false positives, blocking legitimate access. Therefore, it’s important to use them as a complementary tool with other security measures such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and antivirus software. nadar CyberSecurity Hardware Device is able to keep up with blacklists and is updated 4 times a day, so you and your IT department can spend your time elsewhere.
C.3 Cellular and Mobile Security As more communications are conducted via mobile and cellular technologies, these technologies have become critical (and continue to become more critical) to cyber operations. It is important for those involved in cyber operations to understand how data is secured during processing and transmission of information. Specific topics to be covered in this knowledge unit include, but are not limited to: - Access and non-access stratum protocols - Short Message Service (SMS) (i.e. implementation, operations and vulnerabilities) - LTE Security Architecture (i.e. AS and NAS) - Operations administration, maintenance, and provisioning (i.e. charging, billing and accounting, UDR and CDR protocols) - Lawful intercept design, implementations, and restrictions - EPC Location based services (i.e. mobile location centers, privacy profile register, E911) Outcome: Students will understand the system wide security implications and vulnerabilities of a cellular/mobile system.
Deception is quickly emerging as one of the most innovative and effective ways to protect a network. It’s an idea that occupies a sensible middle ground in the spectrum of cybersecurity tactics. Instead of merely reacting to an attack in progress, or aggressively “hacking back”, deception allows enterprises to protect themselves by diverting the attack into a walled off zone. When attackers try to use harvested credentials to infiltrate a network, they’re actually being examined and identified. Implementing deception technology requires the creation of a network that appears real enough to fool attackers. Generating the appropriate level of credibility usually means mixing real network data with markers which allow security administrators to discover and track malicious actors. At a practical level, that requires a certain level of coordination between the security teams implementing deception technology and the network teams which control the network architecture. The general rule of thumb for deception is that the less people know about it, the better. Since attacks from insiders are a constant challenge, it’s important that knowledge of deception technology is limited to a small group of administrators. The need for network resources to build out a realistic-looking environment unfortunately runs counter to this goal. The illusion of the real Illusive’s ersatz networks deploy on endpoints and strategic intersections of network activity. In these places, Illusive will associate a real IP address with a fake Active Directory profile. If a malicious actor sends a DNS query to the deceptive IP address, the query will be directed to a trap server, which then produces a notification for the security team. Ordinarily, Illusive needs help from the network team to build out these connections. For every endpoint or strategic juncture they protect, they have to request an IP address from the network teams. That’s usually a manual process – one which slows down deployments and prevents timely expansion to newer areas of the network. Even worse, it involves notifying the network team when and where Illusive’s technology is deployed – hardly an ideal situation. The automation factor Using BlueCat’s Adaptive DNS platform, Illusive takes advantage of automated IP address provisioning to speed up deployments and minimize the number of administrators who are aware that deception is in use. Reaching into the single source of truth for IPAM data, Illusive uses BlueCat’s API to automatically provision IP addresses for use in creating deceptive environments. Network administrators know that an IP address is assigned, and ultimately regulate the pool those addresses come from – an essential control which prevents duplicate assignments and network outages. At the same time, network administrators aren’t tipped off to how the IP address will be used, limiting the scope of knowledge to essential personnel only. By integrating with BlueCat’s Adaptive DNS on the back end, Illusive makes its own deployments more dynamic, flexible, and reliable. It can spin up or wind down deception on the fly, without the need to constantly submit help desk tickets to the network team. Illusive’s customers in turn are ensured that every IP address used for deception won’t cause a devastating network conflict. How to get it Illusive’s integration with BlueCat is available now. You can access it within the Illusive solution, either from the dashboard or through the API repository. There you’ll find all the details about how to connect the two platforms. Renowned cybersecurity expert Richard Clarke delves into protecting your network from ransomware and what cloud adoption means for your security strategy. Learn how the Java-based Log4j2 logging vulnerability works, how severe it is, its potential effects on BlueCat products, and what has been done to fix it. With REST APIs and CLI parsers, present your network state data in a variety of consumable ways for developers and stakeholders. Learn how with BlueCat. With Terraform BlueCat Provider, networking teams can automate against a single source of truth when deploying key resources to public and private cloud.
Listen to this blog post below In this edition of the weekly newsletter, you get to closely examine the four latest stories involving email security and associated cybersecurity news. Online scammers exploit email forwarding vulnerabilities, allowing them to impersonate high-profile domains, including government agencies, financial institutions, and major news organizations. These vulnerabilities expose users to malware and spyware risks. It requires users to re-evaluate their email security practices. In another new development, the transformative power of generative AI threatens the email security market. With sophisticated tools available, malicious actors quickly fix grammar and language flaws that used to be a sign of phishing emails. Foolproof emails are now a challenge for traditional detection methods to identify. In a unique incident, Chinese threat actors have carried out an audacious theft of a Microsoft signing key in a recent incident, leading to the compromise of government email accounts. This security loophole is a stark reminder of securing sensitive keys and the potential consequences of lapsed security. This update also covers the appalling development of five threat groups collaborating to become one unified malicious entity, ready to wreak havoc on organizations on a large scale. Scammers Exploit Email Forwarding Vulnerabilities The University of California, San Diego researchers reveal that malicious actors can now easily send fraudulent emails due to vulnerabilities in the email forwarding process. The integrity of emails sent by various domains is under scrutiny as attackers can impersonate these organizations. The affected entities include financial institutions, governmental agencies, and significant news establishments. As the attackers impersonate these organizations using a flaw in email forwarding processes, they can evade email provider safeguards. It could lead to spyware being installed or malware infections. These vulnerabilities stem from outdated email validation protocols that do not account for organizations outsourcing their email infrastructure to third-party providers like Outlook and Gmail. Although these providers authenticate their users, email forwarding can still bypass them. For instance, a threat actor can forward a spoofed email through an Outlook account. The process would make it appear legitimate when the target receives it. The threat can affect several domains. While existing defense mechanisms can temporarily mitigate the risks, research suggests that more robust email security measures are required to address the issue. Generative AI Poses New Threats to Email Security Generative AI, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is revolutionizing email phishing attacks. As email security flaws are detected, malicious actors leverage sophisticated technology to generate flawless and convincing emails. Traditionally, phishing emails could be detected through common mistakes in spelling and grammar. However, with AI now accessible to adversaries, they are creating highly personalized and perfectly structured messages. Thus, traditional detection systems find it increasingly challenging to detect phishing attempts. Malicious actors not only use generative AI to create emails that appear legitimate and more convincing but also to analyze public data and gain more specific inputs about their targets. The impact of this threat extends beyond the email security market. Attackers can also leverage AI to create deepfake audio and video for attacks in the future. Image sourced from zapier.com With the attack vectors evolving, it’s time to spearhead cybersecurity strategies capable of identifying AI-generated content in phishing attacks. Chinese Malicious Actors Steal Microsoft Signing Key The Chinese threat group Storm-0558 stole a Microsoft signing key from a Windows crash dump. The incident has led to the compromise of the email accounts of several organizations, including the government. The attackers have apparently exploited a zero-day validation issue to impersonate accounts within targeted organizations. The breach started with the corporate account of a Microsoft engineer being compromised. Thus, attackers gained access to the debugging environment that had the signing key. While it remains unclear how they carried out the exfiltration, the key appeared in a crash dump. It was then moved to an internet-connected environment. This incident highlights the importance of securing sensitive keys in organizations. It also points to the potential consequences or even lapses in security. Microsoft has taken steps to address the issue and enhance its logging capabilities to detect problems in the future. Five Families – Collaboration Among Threat Actors A new collective of malicious groups, named the “Five Families,” has emerged, claiming to mastermind some recent online attacks. Five organizations form this new collaboration: Blackforums, GhostSec, SiegedSec, Stormous, and ThreatSec. Five Families recently appeared in the headlines after successfully breaching a Brazilian software development organization, Alpha Automation. They accessed a massive 230 GB of data, which included financial information, customer data, business software, and internal documents of the organization. They also encrypted their cloud systems and servers.
Published: February 8, 2018 With another CENGN project in the books, we are proud to announce the successful validation of StreamScan’s Compromise Detection System (CDS)! StreamScan’s CDS is an innovative cybersecurity solution that uses AI and machine learning to block compromised data and sensitive information from exfiltration. By actively scanning a network, the CDS is able to identify unusual network traffic and cut connection between the infected device and the source of the malicious traffic. StreamScan’s CDS was successfully integrated with pfSense’s firewall on our infrastructure, blocking traffic between two infected Windows user IPs and the source of the attack, a command and control (C&C) server. Thanks to StreamScan’s CDS and its ability to integrate with pfSense, all compromised data on the network was blocked from exfiltration, keeping sensitive and important information completely safe in the wake of a cyberattack. In a world that is becoming increasingly digital, protection from malicious content and sensitive information defence continues to be a problem of growing importance, and StreamScan has the solution! To learn more about the project, check out StreamScan’s Success Story embedded below:
May (or Maysomware) ransomware virus has every intention of proceeding as an awe-inspiring crypto infection, setting AES-256 and RSA-4096 algorithms for encryption against your digital data. It makes demands for a very hefty ransom: 1.5 BTC which translates into 3255.61 US dollars. The primary version which was detected did not take long to receive an renewal which commands victims to hand over a bigger sum of money. Nevertheless, their malicious activity is similar and should be discussed side by side. The payloads of these infections are May_ransomware.exe and May.exe. Based on the analysis, provided by multiple security tools, both of these samples are based on Hidden Tear open-source project. Either .maysomware or .locked extension are appended to the encoded executables. Further analysis of this ransomware infection Investigation of payloads has definitely provided some valuable information about these variants. One of the first points to discuss is the potential guilty parties. We have reason to believe that hackers from Russian Federation are involved as the payload sends DNS requests to a domain of Mayofware.solution which is registered in this country. It contacts the host at 18.104.22.168 IP address. Also, it monitors specific registry key for possible changes which will mostly include launching the payloads automatically. This crypto-virus also runs a file which has privileges to delete executables. This means that it is capable of destroying your digital data. Both variants put a countdown and after 5 days of no response from the victims, the payload can presumably start a rampage. Encrypted executables could be permanently deleted. Moreover, samples also point to the same bitcoin wallet which is the one to receive ransoms: 3Gw6b57A3E34nAph3mzGbKAj8sTSgD8GP9. Following a transaction of the required ransom, victims are instructed to send a letter to [email protected] email address with their special ID number as the subject. Likewise, variants have a function of decrypting two files free-of-charge. Victims should select the biggest encrypted files and insist that hackers would decrypt them. After crooks send the recovered sample back, you should immediately supply both versions (encrypted and decrypted) to security researchers. It is possible that this will assist in the generation of free file-recovery tool. Instructions are available in two possible Restore_maysomware_files.html and Restore_your_files.txt files. Their content is similar, but the newer version demands 1.5 BTC while at first, only 1 BTC was indicated as the necessary ransom. Before trying to restore your digital data, it is crucial to save them in an alternative location. Place them in a flash drive for instance. Since this ransomware appends a file which is to delete files, it is possible that file-recovery methods might trigger its activity. Then, after data is secured, you are advised to remove the infection itself. This procedure is recommended to be implemented with the help from respectable anti-malware tools like Spyhunteror Hitman. Only then shall you begin to explore the possible ways of data-decryption. Main points for this task are explained at the very end and you should try each of them. For future reference, we are reminding our visitors that it is important to store your files in backup storages. This is the number one method to protect yourself from ransomware infections. Since they are becoming more active and successful, you should not hesitate to safeguard digital data from encryption. How does a ransomware ends up in operating systems? A crypto-virus can potentially arrive from several sources. One of them: infectious email messages. If you find letters from unknown senders and these emails contain attachments, these files might actually be payloads of ransomware. Do not download them without checking that the message is legitimate and safe. Additionally, links in email messages often lead to websites, capable of infecting users with malware. Trojans could also be promoted in file-sharing domains: be careful not to download a program that only poses as reliable. May Ransomware quicklinks - Further analysis of this ransomware infection - File-recovery options - How does a ransomware ends up in operating systems? - Automatic Malware removal tools - How to recover May ransomware encrypted files and remove the virus - Step 1. Restore system into last known good state using system restore - 1. Reboot your computer to Safe Mode with Command Prompt: - 2.Restore System files and settings. - Step 4. Use Data Recovery programs to recover May ransomware encrypted files Automatic Malware removal tools How to recover May ransomware encrypted files and remove the virus Step 1. Restore system into last known good state using system restore 1. Reboot your computer to Safe Mode with Command Prompt: for Windows 7 / Vista/ XP - Start → Shutdown → Restart → OK. - Press F8 key repeatedly until Advanced Boot Options window appears. - Choose Safe Mode with Command Prompt. for Windows 8 / 10 - Press Power at Windows login screen. Then press and hold Shift key and click Restart. - Choose Troubleshoot → Advanced Options → Startup Settings and click Restart. - When it loads, select Enable Safe Mode with Command Prompt from the list of Startup Settings. 2.Restore System files and settings. - When Command Prompt mode loads, enter cd restore and press Enter. - Then enter rstrui.exe and press Enter again. - Click “Next” in the windows that appeared. - Select one of the Restore Points that are available before Maysomware virus has infiltrated to your system and then click “Next”. - To start System restore click “Yes”. Step 2. Complete removal of May ransomwareAfter restoring your system, it is recommended to scan your computer with an anti-malware program, like Spyhunter and remove all malicious files related to Maysomware virus. You can check other tools here. Step 3. Restore May ransomware affected files using Shadow Volume CopiesIf you do not use System Restore option on your operating system, there is a chance to use shadow copy snapshots. They store copies of your files that point of time when the system restore snapshot was created. Usually Maysomware virus tries to delete all possible Shadow Volume Copies, so this methods may not work on all computers. However, it may fail to do so. Shadow Volume Copies are only available with Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. There are two ways to retrieve your files via Shadow Volume Copy. You can do it using native Windows Previous Versions or via Shadow Explorer. a) Native Windows Previous Versions Right-click on an encrypted file and select Properties → Previous versions tab. Now you will see all available copies of that particular file and the time when it was stored in a Shadow Volume Copy. Choose the version of the file you want to retrieve and click Copy if you want to save it to some directory of your own, or Restore if you want to replace existing, encrypted file. If you want to see the content of file first, just click Open. b) Shadow Explorer It is a program that can be found online for free. You can download either a full or a portable version of Shadow Explorer. Open the program. On the left top corner select the drive where the file you are looking for is a stored. You will see all folders on that drive. To retrieve a whole folder, right-click on it and select “Export”. Then choose where you want it to be stored. Step 4. Use Data Recovery programs to recover May ransomware encrypted filesThere are several data recovery programs that might recover encrypted files as well. This does not work in all cases but you can try this: - We suggest using another PC and connect the infected hard drive as slave. It is still possible to do this on infected PC though. - Download a data recovery program. - Install and scan for recently deleted files.
Configuring an inbound mail route on the G Suite domain is required to restrict message delivery from Mailprotector's servers and prevent spammers from using a direct connection to Google Gmail host addresses, bypassing Mailprotector scanning. Configuration steps for an outbound mail route are in the Outbound Mail Routes article. Google Workspace, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Before configuring the Workspace Gmail mail routes, the Mailprotector Console should have the domain, inbound SMTP host address, and users configured to ensure the Mailprotector solution is ready to scan and protect the domain. If the domain and users need to be configured in the Mailprotector Console, please start with Step 2: Add Users. You should also have access to the domain's public DNS zone. Changing the MX record is a required step to provisioning Mailprotector. The MX record should be modified before configuring the inbound mail route on G Suite. View Step 3: Change the DNS MX Records for more information. Inbound Mail Route Configuration - Go to the Google Admin Console and click on Apps as shown in Figure 1 in the left-hand navigation bar. - Under the "Apps" section of the navigation bar, select "Gmail," and you will arrive at the Settings for Gmail page as shown in Figure 2. Click on Spam, Phishing and Malware to begin the configuration process. - Locate the Inbound gateway setting. Move your mouse over the setting and click on the Edit Button (pencil icon) as shown in Figure 3. If you have an existing inbound gateway setting, you will click on the Edit button instead. - Select the "Enable" box as shown in Figure 4 - Under "IP Addresses/Ranges" Select the "Add" button. You will need to add each IP address individually. NOTE: There isn't currently a way to add multiples simultaneously. Add the three transport IP addresses Mailprotector will deliver from: Check the boxes for Automatically detect external IP (recommended) and Reject all mail not from gateway IPs. This will allow Gmail to evaluate a sender's correct origin IP address and prevent spammers from going around Mailprotector's systems. The completed settings window should look similar to Figure 5, and you will click on ADD SETTING in the lower right to save the changes. NOTE: You may only have the three transport IP addresses from above. Other IP addresses may be for other services not related to Mailprotector. - At the bottom of your browser window, you will see a notice stating, 'These changes may take up to 24 hours to propagate to all users.' To the right of the message is a SAVE link as shown in Figure 5. Click on the SAVE link to complete the Inbound Mail Route configuration. IMPORTANT: These changes may take up to 24 hours to propagate to all users in the Workspace domain.
The Central government has issued an advisory against a malware called ‘Daam’ that infects Android phones. The virus can hack into your call records, contacts, history and camera, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT-In advisory says. The national cyber security agency advisory has warned that the ‘Daam’ virus is capable of “bypassing anti-virus programs and deploying ransomware on the targeted devices". Avoid downloading materials from unknown sources The Android botnet gets distributed through third-party websites or applications downloaded from untrusted/unknown sources. How will the Daam Virus affect your device and its data? The government advisory also said that the 'Daam' virus is also capable of hacking phone call recordings, contacts, gaining access to camera, and modifying device passwords. Not just this, the virus can also take screenshot, steal SMSes, downloading/uploading files, etc. and transmitting to the C2 (command-and-control) server from the victim's device. Risk of data getting DELETED The malware, it said, utilises the AES (advanced encryption standard) encryption algorithm to code files in the victim's device. Due to this, other files get deleted from the storage and only the encrypted filed are left with “.enc" extension and a ransom note “readme_now.txt". Beware of shortened URLs It also asked users to exercise caution towards shortened URLs (uniform resource locators), such as those involving 'bitly' and 'tinyurl' hyperlinks like: "https://bit.ly/", "\nbit.ly" and "tinyurl.com/".
With more and more businesses basing their phone systems in the cloud, it’s important to be mindful of common implementation errors that can create security risks. Potential risks include the distribution of malware, toll fraud, botnets, and denial of service attacks, among others. While such attacks remain a rarity, they can cause major disruptions, leading to possible financial losses and the compromise of critical, proprietary, or confidential data. In addition to choosing the right vendor, businesses can mitigate these risks by paying close attention to their implementation techniques. In particular, there are four common mistakes to avoid when setting up a cloud phone network: Keeping Passwords Set to Defaults Default passwords are very vulnerable, and often include easy-to-guess standards like “admin.” The problem is that busy IT departments often elect to change the passwords after the network is up and running, then forget to follow through. Always change default passwords to strong, specially chosen alternatives that include alphanumeric characters and cannot be guessed. A Lack of Up-to-Date Network Security Signing up for a cloud-based phone service means that all voice data also migrates to the new LAN. If the existing LAN has security gaps that have not been addressed, they will also affect the hosted phone service. Instead of relying on incomplete or ineffective security technologies, be sure to have the vendor perform a comprehensive network security assessment when the new phone service is implemented. Failing to Use Encryption Data can easily be intercepted over the Internet, and sensitive phone conversations can be damaging if they fall into the wrong hands. However, while many businesses use encryption techniques for their email and online communications, they fail to apply them to their phone services. End-to-end voice data packet encryption is a must-have for enterprises that conduct sensitive business over the phone. Complete voice encryption, while complex, is also an option. Using Public Internet Connections Cloud phone services use the Internet rather than traditional telephone lines. Thus, a company’s Internet service provider and the type of Internet service that’s in place both become critical factors in phone network security. A surprising number of businesses still use publicly accessible Internet connections that require little to no user authentication. This leaves the door open for hackers and cyber criminals to gain unauthorized access, and possibly intercept phone conversations. On the whole fiber-optic Internet services are also considered more secure, since cables cannot be spliced or otherwise disrupted. Consider making the switch to fiber optics to maximize network security. The best way to avoid these issues altogether is to partner with a trusted vendor of telecom solutions like thinQ. With an advanced understanding of current best practices for cloud security and a complete line of communications services for businesses, thinQ is a leading provider of fast, reliable next-generation technologies. Visit thinQ today to learn more.
Recently Viewed Topics The Connections page displays information in two tabs: - The Client Connections tab displays a list of hosts where the host is the client side of the communication. - The Server Connections tab displays a list of hosts where the host is the server side of the communication. On the Connections page, you can use filter options to increase granularity when viewing results. Note: After you set a filter on the Connections page, it persists across all other pages until you clear the filter. For more information, see Filter Results. Note: The connection table filters out ICMP and UDP connections. Only connections that are true client/server connections appear.
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system widely used in production environments. However, like any other technology, Kubernetes presents its own security challenges that must be addressed to ensure your clusters are secure. In this article, we’ll discuss some best practices that can help you improve the security of your Kubernetes clusters. Kubernetes Security Best Practices in 2023 1. Limit Access to Kubernetes API Limiting access to the Kubernetes API is a key step in securing your Kubernetes clusters. Only authorized users should be able to access the API server, and they should be authenticated and authorized using role-based access control (RBAC). 2. Use Network Segmentation Limiting access to Kubernetes API is not sufficient alone. It is also important to segment your network to prevent unauthorized access to the cluster. You should use network security groups, firewalls, and other security mechanisms to control access to the Kubernetes control plane and worker nodes. 3. Use RBAC Role-based access control (RBAC) is a built-in security feature of Kubernetes that helps you to control access to Kubernetes resources. You should use RBAC to define roles and permissions for different users and groups. 4. Secure Kubernetes Secrets Kubernetes secrets are sensitive information like API keys or passwords. They need to be stored and transmitted securely. You should ensure that your secrets are encrypted at rest and in transit. Also, avoid embedding secrets into the container images, as an attacker can easily access them. 5. Update Kubernetes Regularly Kubernetes is a rapidly evolving technology with active development. Keeping your cluster up-to-date with the latest security patches and updates is essential. Schedule regular updates and apply them as soon as they are released. 6. Use Container Runtime Security Use secure container runtimes, like Docker, that incorporate advanced security mechanisms like seccomp and AppArmor. These will help you prevent container breakout attacks. 7. Use Network Policies Network policies allow you to secure network traffic between Pods in Kubernetes. You can use them to control inbound and outbound network traffic to a Pod or a set of Pods. 8. Implement Logging and Monitoring Kubernetes logging can help you detect and investigate security breaches. Implement logging and monitoring mechanisms to detect any unusual activity in your Kubernetes cluster. 9. Implement Image Scanning Scan the container images for vulnerabilities before deploying them in your cluster. Use an image scanner capable of detecting vulnerabilities and malware in your container images. 10. Minimize the Use of Privileged Containers Use non-privileged containers wherever possible, as privileged containers are more prone to attacks. Grant privileged access only to authorized users and ensure they are adequately trained. Also Read, Why Should You Learn Kubernetes Security 11. Harden Your Worker Nodes Harden your worker nodes by removing unnecessary services and applications and reducing attack surface area. Limit access to sensitive directories, such as /proc, and ensure your worker nodes have the latest security patches and updates. Also Read, Best Kubernetes Security Certifications 12. Backup and Recovery Plan Have a backup and recovery plan to reduce downtime and data loss in case of a security incident. Test the plan regularly to ensure its effectiveness. Also Read, Best Tools for Kubernetes Security Kubernetes security is a critical component of your overall security program. These best practices can help you secure your Kubernetes clusters and mitigate the risk of cyber-attacks. However, ensuring the security of your Kubernetes clusters requires ongoing attention, testing, and updates to stay ahead of evolving threats. You can get trained in Kubernetes security by enrolling in our Cloud-Native Security Expert (CCNSE) course, which provides hands-on training in important concepts of Kubernetes security, such as: Hacking Kubernetes Cluster, Kubernetes Authentication and Authorization, Kubernetes Admission Controllers, Kubernetes Data Security, Kubernetes Network Security, Defending Kubernetes Cluster. - Hands-on training through browser-based labs - Vendor-neutral course - 24/7 instructor support - CCNSE Certification is among the preferred for Kubernetes security roles by global organizations Take the first step in becoming skilled in Kubernetes security by obtaining the Cloud-Native Security Expert Certification (CCNSE) from Practical DevSecOps.
Is Malicious AI a Threat to Cybersecurity? Malicious AI could pose a serious threat to cybersecurity in the near future, according to a new report, which also calls for effective strategies to tackle the growing problem. According to the report, the growing utility of AI products and services, against a background of increasing sophistication spells trouble in both the digital and physical worlds if not taken seriously. First and foremost, the ability of attackers to use AI to automate tasks involved in carrying out cyberattacks will alleviate the existing trade off between the scale and efficacy of attacks, which could result in a rise in threats connected to labour-intensive cyber attacks (such as spear phishing). In addition, the report pointed to the possibility of exploiting the AI systems themselves, though techniques such as adversarial examples and data poisoning. Other avenues for attackers might include exploiting human vulnerabilities, such as through the use of speech synthesis for impersonation, and through existing software vulnerabilities by enabling faster, more potent automated hacking, said the report, which drew on experience from 26 authors from 14 institutions, spanning academia, civil society, and industry. Ilia Kolochenko, CEO High-Tech Bridge urged caution in using the term AI too widely: “First of all, we shall clearly distinguish Strong AI [capable of replacing human brain] and generally misused “AI” term that has become amorphous and ambiguous.” “So far, virtually all ML/AI algorithms are only as good as humans who design, train and improve them. Since a while already, cybercriminals are progressively using simple ML algorithms to increase efficiency of their attacks, for example to better profile and target the victims and increase speed of breaches. However, modern cyberattacks are so tremendously successful mainly because of fundamental cybersecurity problems and omissions in organizations, ML is just an auxiliary accelerator.” “One should also bear in mind that AI/ML technologies are being used by the good guys to fight cybercrime more efficiently. Moreover, development of AI technologies usually requires expensive long term investments that Black Hats usually cannot afford. Therefore, I don’t see substantial risks or revolutions that may happen in the digital space because of AI in the next five years at least.” The report makes four high-level recommendations: Policymakers should collaborate closely with technical researchers to investigate, prevent, and mitigate potential malicious uses of AI. Researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence should take the dual-use nature of their work seriously, allowing misuse related considerations to influence research priorities and norms, and proactively reaching out to relevant actors when harmful applications are foreseeable. Best practices should be identified in research areas with more mature methods for addressing dual-use concerns, such as computer security, and imported where applicable to the case of AI. Actively seek to expand the range of stakeholders and domain experts involved in discussions of these challenge High-Tech Bridge’s AST platform ImmuniWeb leverages Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for intelligent automation and acceleration of application security testing. Complemented by highly qualified manual testing, it detects the most sophisticated application vulnerabilities but also comes with a zero false-positives SLA. The platform was named a a Key Innovator on the global market of cybersecurity companies that leverage AI and Machine Learning technologies in 2018 by Markets and Markets.
One should not expect to find all user information sitting in the default folder or default location for a given type of file (e.g. Application Data or similar folder). Searching the entire hard disk is required in order to locate all unencrypted log and history files. First responders must use caution when they seize electronic devices. Improperly accessing... Over the years, cookies have been overlooked in forensic examinations. For the most part,... Triaging a computer can be a methodology to avoid many issues inherent with “pulling the plug.” For instance, capturing the system volatile information can very quickly provide investigators valuable information. Digital forensic science is not a matter of recovering a file that proves somebody’s guilt; it is about wading through hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of a wide variety of digital artifacts and making very pointed critical judgments about which provide some sort of inculpatory or exculpatory evidence relevant to the case. Realistically, Live RAM analysis has its limitations, lots of them. Many types of artifacts stored in the computer’s volatile memory are ephemeral. While information about running processes will not disappear until they are finished, remnants of recent chats, communications, and other user activities may be overwritten with other content any moment the operating system demands yet another memory block. There is clearly a difference in the type of investigations and examinations being performed versus what are encountered in the public sector. The private sector examiner can be expected to provide evidence to private attorneys, corporations, private investigators, and corporate security departments. Let’s be very clear before we go down the flasher box path, there is no replacement or substitute for the automated forensic tools produced by mobile forensic manufacturers. Unfortunately, with growing consumer demand for newer and more technologically advanced mobile phones, these automated and safe solutions do not meet some investigative requirements. Solid-state drives represent a new storage technology. They operate much faster compared to traditional hard drives. SSD drives employ a completely different way of storing information internally, which makes it much easier to destroy information and much more difficult to recover it. Network investigations can be far more difficult than a typical computer examination, even for an experienced digital forensics examiner, because there are many more events to assemble in order to understand the case and the tools do not do as much work for the examiner as traditional computer forensics tools. The premise that an effective digital forensic examiner must be able to validate all of the tools that he or she uses is universally accepted in the digital forensic community. I have seen some less-educated members of the community champion a particularly insidious, and I will argue, invalid method of tool validation, often referred to as the two-tool validation method. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon is affecting forensic data acquisition because it creates crossover between data that is controlled by an individual versus by a company. People are using their personal devices for work-related tasks because it can seem easier than trying to use typical work resources. What happens when a smartphone is locked and unsupported by forensic tools? Flasher box, JTAG, or chip-off extraction methods become necessary. All three enable physical extraction — a logical examination cannot be performed on an unsupported locked device. However, even this capability can be limited. Boot loaders are currently considered the most forensically sound physical extraction method. While they do involve loading a piece of code onto the device, this happens before the forensic tool accesses any evidentiary data. For the digital crimes of today, specialists need to examine a much more complex environment. Investigators need to image digital media of a multitude of types: magnetic, solid-state, or optical, for example. Apps, not just available for iPhone or Android but also through device vendors like Samsung, Nokia, and LG — as well as from mobile carriers like T-Mobile and retailers like Amazon — are a digital forensics challenge. Prepaid phones have been a problem for some time, and continue to be a problem for law enforcement in particular. The term metadata is sometimes defined with the abstract expression: “data about data.” When any data is defined, described, or created, it can always be characterized in terms of similarities, structure, or related data. There are multiple techniques for comparing the code of two binaries, where none or only partial source code is present. A trivial way is to use a binary diffing utility. This utility is used in a similar way as plaintext code comparison listing. Each social media platform is different, with unique code and variations. Each one runs on its own hardware and software platform, and some, such as Facebook, have even developed custom technology to run their sites. Because of that, each requires its own method of forensically collecting data. Vendors and operating systems can vary widely, particularly with Android, but also even within iOS and BlackBerry user groups. More than 40 iOS versions are commercially available, and are spread among six different iPhones, five iPads, and five iPod Touch devices. Once a password has been bypassed, an investigator has full access to the computer, allowing them to gather any evidence necessary, including the contents of the DRAM in the system. You can then use a PCI Express or ExpressCard device for memory acquisition. In today’s world of social media, investigators are taking on a new role; they are becoming a form of eyewitness. As the eyewitness, an investigator observes evidence that might not be visible to any other available investigator. The investigator is wise to create a record of what he or she sees at any particular point in time, including print outs of screenshots. Not only does data storage vary from device to device and OS to OS, but devices may also be passcode-protected and/or encrypted. iPhone passcodes fall into two categories: simple and complex. A mobile data extraction tool should be able to reveal a simple passcode automatically for most devices. A question often asked is, “What education and training is necessary to work in digital forensics?” There is not one easy, simple answer to this question. First of all, an individual has to make a choice of career pathways, namely do they wish to work in the public sector or in the private sector. Source code and text comparison is an established, well-known analysis technique. Using a program capable of simply listing file A in the left window and file B in the right window and highlighting the differences between each and every line, preferably in a different color, is frequently an easy way to detect copied text. Some of the more advanced analysis utilities can also compare, merge, and synchronize files and directories. It is very important that the digital evidence be preserved from the time of seizure until it is presented as evidence in court. If evidence is suspected of being tampered with, it could be ruled as inadmissible in court. Therefore, it is important for CCEs to preserve digital evidence by using a Faraday bag and noting its usage on the chain of evidence form. Prepaid phones have been a problem for some time, and continue to be a problem for law enforcement in particular. That’s because the disabled data port on these devices cannot be enabled, and vendors don’t make the devices’ APIs available to commercial forensic extraction tools’ developers. - Page 1
Web Application Penetration Testing: Why It’s Necessary and What You Need to Know Web applications are the critical systems of many networks. They store, process, and transmit data. They are also vulnerable to hackers who can find vulnerabilities. So, the question becomes how secure is your network? And how comprehensively has it been tested?
You've just implemented security tools that lower your organization's risk profile for your applications deployed on the Microsoft Azure Public Cloud. End-user experience is compromised and you're trying to figure out why...sound familiar? Responsibility rests squarely upon the DevOps, SecOps or DevSecOps teams who modified the application workflow behavior. So where to start? You contact the DevOps team to provide you a test environment so that you can start your troubleshooting efforts. The DevOps team is busy updating the latest software updates and don't have cycles to spare due to production deployment deadlines. At the same time, you are notified that the Azure Load Balancer is being replaced with Nginx and you have no idea what the ramifications will be on your security posture or end-user experience. The initial troubleshooting activity occurs in the SecOps environment but you still require the involvement of the DevOps team. DevOps will provide the latest updated software releases. DevOps teams, responsible for cloud architectural components, re-platform the Azure environment to reflect network modifications. These tasks are daunting without an ability to access self-service Azure test environments. In order to address these challenges, test environments are required to isolate troubleshooting activities. The following example outlines a microservice application deployed in a hybrid Azure cloud utilizing Quali CloudShell for orchestration. Functionality: The first step in any application and infrastructure deployment is to ensure that the baseline functions of the application are responsive per the requirements. CloudShell provides the capability to introduce objects that represent the physical and virtual elements required within the solution architecture. These objects are modeled and deployed in Azure Public Cloud and within the Azure Stack at the organization's datacenter or remote edge network. Cybersecurity: Once the functionality of the solution has been validated, the security software components are assessed to determine if they are the cause of the traffic bottlenecks. In this example, a security scan utilizing Cavirin's Automated Risk Analysis Platform (ARAP) determines the risk posture. If the risk score violates a regulation or compliance standard, a Polymorphic Binary Scrambling solution from Polyverse is installed to enable a Moving Target Defense. The DevSecOps team utilizes the blueprint design to update the application software, determine risk posture and remediate as required. Performance: So we're feeling good, functionality is in place, security protection is enabled, but end-user experience is terrible! Visibility is required at the data, application and network layers within the Azure Cloud environment to determine where the bottlenecks exist. In this example, Accedian PVX captures, analyzes and reports on the traffic workflows with test traffic from Blazemeter. Environments are quickly stood up by the DevSecOps team and a root cause is identified for the traffic bottlenecks. Automation: To bring it all together requires a platform that allows you to mix and match different objects to build your solution architecture. In addition, Self-service is a key workflow component that allows each team to conduct each operation. This allows savings in time, resources and costs whereby solution validation can be achieved in minutes and hours rather than days, weeks and months. In summary, CloudShell automates environment orchestration, modeling, and deployments. Any combination of public/private/hybrid cloud architectures are supported. The DevOps team can ensure functionality and collaborate with SecOps to validate the security risk and posture. This collaboration enables a DevSecOps workflow that ensures performance bottlenecks are addressed with visibility into cloud workloads. Together this allows the DevSecOps team to deploy environments secure and fast. To learn more on DevSecOps Environments please visit the Quali resource center to access documents and videos. Electric cars may be stealing the limelight these days, but in this blog, we'll discuss a different kind of newsworthy plugin: Quali just released the TeamCity plugin, to help DevOps teams integrate CloudShell automation platform and JetBrains TeamCity pipeline tool. This integration package is available for download on the Quali community. It adds to a comprehensive collection of ARA pipeline tool integrations that reflects the value of CloudShell in the DevOps toolchain - To name a few: Jenkins Pipeline, XebiaLabs XL Release, CA Automic, AWS Code Pipeline, Microsoft TFS/VSTS. JetBrains is well known for its large selection of powerful IDEs. Comes to mind their popular PyCharm for Python developers. They've also built a solid DevOps offering over the years, including TeamCity, a popular CI/CD tool to automate the release of applications. So what does this new integration bring to the TeamCity user? Let's step back and consider the challenges most software organizations are trying to solve with application release. Application developers and testers have a mandate to release as fast and as possible. However, they are struggling to get in a timely manner, an environment that represents accurately the desired state of the application once deployed in production. On the other hand, IT departments do have budget constraints on any resource deployed during or before production, so the onus is on the DevOps team to meet these business needs. The CloudShell solution provides environments modeling that can closely match the end state of production using standard blueprints. Each blueprint can be deployed with standard out of the box orchestration that can provision complex application infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment. As illustrated in the diagram above, the ARA tool (TeamCity) triggers the deployment of a Cloud Sandbox at each stage of the pipeline. The built-in orchestration also takes care of the termination of the virtual infrastructure once the test is complete. The governance and control CloudShell provides around these Sandboxes guarantee the IT department will not have to worry about budget overruns. As we've discussed earlier, when it comes to selecting a DevOps tool for Application Release Automation, there is no lack of options. The market is still quite fragmented and we've observed from the results of our DevOps/Cloud survey as well as our own customer base, that there is no clear winner at this time. No matter what choice our customers and prospects make, we make sure integrating with Quali's CloudShell Sandbox solution is simple: a few configuration steps that should be completed in a few minutes. Since we have developed a large number of similar plugins over the last 2 years, there are a few principles we learned along the way and strive to follow: Wrapping up the "Summer of Love" 50th anniversary, Quali will be at the 3 day JenkinsWorld conference this week from 8/29-8/31 in San Francisco. If you are planning to be in the area, make sure to stop by and visit us at booth #606! We will also have lots of giveaways (cool Tshirts and schwag) as well as a drawing for a chance to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card! Can't make it but still want to give it a try? Sign up for CloudShell VE Trial. The process of automating application and IT infrastructure deployment, also known as "Orchestration", has sometimes been compared to old fashioned manual stitching. In other words, as far as I am concerned, a tedious survival skill best left for the day you get stranded on a deserted island. In this context, the term "Orchestration" really describes the process of gluing disparate pieces that never seem to fit quite perfectly together. Most often it ends up as a one-off task best left to the expert, system integrator and other professional service organization, who will eventually make it come together after throwing enough time, $$ and resources at the problem. Then the next "must have" cool technology comes around and you have to repeat the process all over again. But it shouldn't have to be that way. What does it take for Orchestration to be sustainable and stand the test of time? IT automation over the years has taken various names and acronyms. Back in the days (early 2000s - seems like pre-history) when I got first involved in this domain, it was referred to as Run Book Automation (RBA). RBA was mostly focused around troubleshooting automatically failure conditions and possibly take corrective action. Cloud Orchestration became a hot topic when virtualization came of age with private and public cloud offerings pioneered by VMWare and Amazon. Its main goal was primarily to offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on top of the existing hypervisor technology (or public cloud) and provide VM deployment in a technology/cloud agnostic fashion. The primary intent of these platforms (such as CloudBolt) was initially to supply a set of ready to use catalog of predefined OS and Application images to organizations adopting virtualization technologies, and by extension create a "Platform as a Service" offering (PaaS). Then in the early 2010s, came DevOps, popularized by Gene Kim's Phoenix Project. For Orchestration platforms, it meant putting application release front and center, and bridging developer automation and IT operation automation under a common continuous process. The wide spread adoption by developers of several open source automation frameworks, such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible, provided a source of community driven content that could finally be leveraged by others. Integrating and creating an ecosystem of external components has long been one of the main value add of orchestration platforms. Once all the building blocks are available it is both easier and faster to develop even complex automation workflows. Front and center to these integrations has been the adoption of RESTful APIs as the de facto standard. For the most part, exposing these hooks has made the task of interacting with each component quite a bit faster. Important caveats: not all APIs are created equal, and there is a wide range of maturity level across platforms. With the coming of age and adoption of container technologies, which provide a fast way to distribute and scale lightweight application processes, a new set of automation challenges naturally occurs: connecting these highly dynamic and ephemeral infrastructure components to networking, configuring security and linking these to stateful data stores. Replacing each orchestration platform by a new one when the next technology (such as serverless computing) comes around is neither cost effective or practical. Let's take a look at what makes such framework(s) a sustainable solution that can be used for the long run. What is clear from my experience interacting with this domain over the last 10 years is that there is no "one size fits all" solution, but rather a combination of orchestrations frameworks that depend on each others with a specific role and focus area. A report on the topic was recently published by SDx Central covering the plethora of tools available. Deciding what is the right platform for the job can be overwhelming at first, unless you know what to look for. Some vendors offer a one stop shop for all functions, often taking the burden of integrating different products from their portfolio, while some others provide part of the solution and the choices to integrate northbound and southbound to other tools and technologies. To better understand how this would shape up, let's go through a typical example of continuous application testing and certification, using the Quali's CloudShell Platform to define and deploy the environment (also available in a video). The first layer of automation will come with a workflow tool such as the Jenkins pipeline. This tool will be used to orchestrate the deployment of the infrastructure for the different stages of the pipeline as well as trigger the test/validation steps. It delegates the next layer down the task to deploy the application. then orchestration will set up the environment and deploy the infrastructure and configure the application on top. Finally the last layer, closest to the infrastructure will be responsible for deploying the Virtual Machines and Containers onto the hypervisor or physical hosts, such as Openstack and Kubernetes. When it comes to scaling such a solution to multiple applications across different teams, there are 2 fundamental aspects to consider in any orchestration platform: standardization and extensibility. Standardization should come from templates and modeling based on a common language. Aligning on an industry open standard such as TOSCA to model resources will provide a way to quickly on board new technologies into the platform as they mature without "reinventing the wheel". Standardization of the content also means providing management and control to allow access by multiple teams concurrently. Once the application stack is modeled into a blueprint it is published to a self service catalog based on categories and permissions. Once ready for deployment, the user or API provides any required input and the orchestration creates a sandbox. This sandbox can then be used for completing some testing against its components. Once testing and validation is complete, another "teardown" orchestration kicks in and all the resources in the sandbox get reset to their initial state and are cleaned up (deleted). Extensibility is what brings the community around a platform together. From a set of standard templates and clear rules, it should be possible to extend the orchestration and customize it to meet the needs of my equipment, application and technologies. That means the option, if you have the skill set, to not depend on professional services help from the vendor. The other aspect of it is what I would call vertical extensibility, or the ability to easily incorporate other tools as part of an end to end automation workflow. Typically that means having a stable and comprehensive northbound REST API and providing a rich set of plugins. For instance, using the Jenkins pipeline to trigger a Sandbox. Another important consideration is the openness of the content. At Quali we've open sourced all the content on top of the CloudShell platform to make it easier for developers. On top of that a lot of out of the box content is already available so a new user will never have to start from scratch. Want to learn more on how we implemented some of these best practices with Quali's Cloud Sandboxes? Watch a Demo! 3 in 1! we recently integrated CloudShell with 3 products from CA into one end to end demo, showcasing our ability to deploy applications in cloud sandboxes triggered by an Automic workflow and dynamically configure CA Service Virtualization and Blazemeter end points to test the performance of the application. Financial and HR SaaS services, such as Salesforce and Workday have become de-facto standards in the last few years. Many ERP enterprise applications while still hosted on premises (Oracle, SAP…) are now highly dependent on connectivity to these external back end services. For any software update, they need to consider the impact on such back end application service that they have no control on. Developer accounts may be available but they are limited in functionalities and may not reflect accurately the actual transaction. One alternative is to use a simulated end point known as service virtualization that records all the API calls and responds as if it was the real SaaS service call. We've discussed earlier on this year in a webinar about the benefits of using Cloud Sandboxes to automate your application infrastructure deployment using devOps processes. The complete application stack is modeled into a blueprint and publish to a self service catalog. Once ready for deployment, the end user or API provides any required input to the blueprint and deploys it to create a sandbox. This sandbox can then be used for completing some testing against its components. A Service virtualization component is yet a new type of resource that you can model into a blueprint, connected to the Application server template, to make this process even faster. The Blazemeter virtual traffic generator, also a SaaS application, is represented as well in the blueprint and connected to the target resource (the web server load balancer). As an example let's consider a web ERP application using Salesforce as one of its end point. We'll use CA Service Virtualization product to mimic the registration of new Leads into Salesforce. The scenario is to stress test the scalability of this application with a virtualized Salesforce in the back end to simulate a large number of users creating leads through that application. For the stress test we used Blazemeter SaaS application to run simultaneous user transactions originating from various end points at the desired scale. We used the Automic ARA (Application Release Automation) tool to create a continuous integration workflow to automatically validate and release end to end a new application built on dynamic infrastructure from QA stage all the way to production. CloudShell components are pulled into the workflow project as action packs and include the create sandbox, delete sandbox and execute test capabilities. The way everything gets connected together is by using CloudShell setup orchestration to configure the linkage between application components and service end points within the sandbox based on the blueprint diagram. On the front end, the Blazemeter test is updated with the load balancer web IP address of our application. On the back end, the application server is updated with the service virtualization IP address. Once the test is complete, the orchestration tear down process cleans up all the elements: resources get reset to the initial state and the application is deleted. Want to learn more? Watch the 8 min demo! Infrastructure as code can certainly be considered a key component of the IT revolution in the last 10 years (read "cloud") and more recently the DevOps movement. It has been widely used in by the developer community to programmatically deploy workload infrastructure in the cloud. Indeed the power of describing your infrastructure as a definition text file in a format understood by an underlying engine is very compelling. This brings all the power of familiar code versioning reviewing and editing to the infrastructure modeling and deployment, ease of automation and the promise of elegant and simple handling of previously complex IT problems such as elasticity. Here's an Ansible playbook, that a 1st grader could read and understand (or should): The idea of using a simple human like language to describe what is essentially a list of related component is nothing new. However the rise of the DevOps movement that puts developers in control of the application infrastructure has clearly contributed to a flurry of alternatives that can be quite intimidating to the newbies. Hence the rise of the "SRE", the next-gen Ops guru who is a mix between developer and operations (and humanoid). Continuous Configuration management and Automation tools (also called "CCA" - one more 3 letter acronym to remember) come in a variety of shapes and forms. In no particular order, one can use Puppet manifests, Chef recipies, Ansible playbooks, Saltstack, CFEngine, Amazon CloudFormation, Hashicorp Terraform, Openstack Heat, Mesosphere DCOS, Docker Compose, Google Kubernetes and many more. CCAs can be mostly split between two categories: runtime configuration vs. immutable infrastructure. In his excellent TheNewStack article, Kevin Fishner describes the differences between these two approaches. The key difference between immutable infrastructure and configuration management paradigms is at what point configuration occurs. Essentially, Puppet style tools apply the configuration (build) after the VM is deployed (at run time) and container style approaches apply the configuration (build) ahead of deployment, contained in the image itself. There is much debate in the devOps circles about comparing the merits of each method, and it's certainly no small feat to decide which CCA framework (or frameworks) is best for your organization or project. Once you get past the hurdle of deciding on a specific framework and understanding its taxonomy, the next step is to adjust it to make it work in your unique environment. That's when frustrations can happen since some frameworks are not as opinionated as others or bugs may linger around. For instance, the usage of the tool will be loosely defined, leaving you with a lot of work ahead to make it work in your "real" world scenario that contains elements other than the typical simple server provided in the example. Let's say that your framework of choice works best with Linux servers and you have to deploy Windows or even worse you have to deploy something that is unique to your company. As the complexity of your application increases, the corresponding implementation as code increases exponentially, especially if you have to deal with networking, or worse persistent data storage. That's when things start getting really "interesting". Assuming you are successful in that last step, you still have to keep up with the state of the infrastructure once deployed. State? That stuff is usually delegated to some external operational framework, team or process. In the case of large enterprises DevOps initiatives are typically introduced in smaller groups, often from a bottom up driven approach of tool selection, starting with a single developer preference for such and such open source framework. As organizations mature and propagate these best practices across other teams, they will start deploying and deleting infrastructure components dynamically with high frequency of change. Very soon after, the overall system will evolve to a combination of a large number of loosely controlled blueprint definitions and their corresponding state of deployment. Overtime this will grow into an unsustainable jigsaw with occurrence of bugs and instability that will be virtually impossible to troubleshoot. One of the approaches that companies such as Quali have taken to bring some order to this undesirable outcome is adding a management and control layer that significantly improves the productivity of organizations facing these challenges. The idea is to delegate the consumption of CCA and infrastructure to a higher entity that provides a SaaS based central point of access and a catalog of all the application blueprints and their active states. Another benefit is that you are no longer stuck with one framework that down the road may not fully meet the needs of your entire organization. For instance if it does not support a specific type of infrastructure or worse becomes obsolete. By the way, the same story goes for being locked to a specific public cloud provider. The management and control layer approach also provides you a way to handle network automation and data storage in a more simplified way. Finally, using a management layer allows tying your deployed infrastructure assets to actual usage and consumption, which is key to keeping control of cost and capacity. There is no denying the agility that CCA tools bring to the table (with an interesting twist when it all moves serverless). That said, it is still going to take quite a bit of time and manpower to configure and scale these solutions in a traditional application portfolio that will contain a mix of legacy and greenfield architecture. You'll have to contend with domain experts in each tool and the never ending competition for a scarce and expensive pool of talent. While this is to be expected of any technology, this is certainly not a core competency for most enterprise companies (unless you are Google, Netflix or Facebook). A better approach for more traditional enterprises that want to pursue this kind of application modernization is to rely on a higher level management and control layer to do the heavy lifting for them. Coming back from the San Diego Delivery of Things conference, I had a few thoughts on the DevOps movement that I'd like to share. Positioned as "boutique" conference with only 140 attendees, this event had all the ingredients for good interactions and conversations, and indeed a lot of learning. As far as DevOps conferences go, you're pretty much guaranteed to have some Netflix engineering manager invited as a keynote speaker. They are the established trend setters in the industry, along with other popular label such as Spotify and Microsoft, who were also invited to the summit. For the brick and mortar companies who send their CTOs and IT managers to sit in, this is gospel: 4000 updates to prod everyday! Canary feature! Minimal downtime! Clearly these guys must have figured it out. All you need is to "leverage", right? The small problem for the audience in awe, is to figure out how to achieve this nirvana in their own organization. That's when reality sets in: what about compliance testing? HIPA? PCI? Security validation? Performance? The conference attendees were coming from a variety of backgrounds and maturity when it comes to their DevOps practice. For instance, on one end of the spectrum, there was a DevOps lead from Under Armor, a respected fitness apparel brand who was well under way to build fully automated Continuous Integration for the MapMyFitness mobile app. On the other end, there were representative from the defense industry that were just getting started and were trying to figure out how to adjust the rosy picture they heard to the swarm of cultural and technical barriers they had to deal with internally. They certainly had no intention to release directly to prod the application controlling their rocket launcher. Another example was this healthcare provider who shared they would not be able to roll out their telemedicine application unless it meets the strict HIPA compliance standard. All these conversations got me to reflect on the value the Sandbox concept could bring to these companies. Not everyone had the luxury of doing a greenfield deployment, or having 1000s of top notch developers at your disposal. In such case, a well controlled pre-production environment offered as self service to the CI/CD pipeline tools seems to bring in the DevOps rewards of release acceleration and increased quality in a less disruptive and risky way. It became very apparent from hearing some of the attendees, that the level of automation that you can achieve with a legacy SAP/ERP application is going to be quite different than the micro-service, cloud based, mobile app designed from scratch. So eventually it also means setting the right expectation from the very start, knowing that application modernization is a long process. Case in point, the IT lead of a large banking companies shared the strong likelihood that some of his applications will still be around in the next 10 years. To sum up, there is no question listening to the DevOps trendsetters stories is inspiring, but the key learning from this conference was how to ground this powerful message into the reality of established corporations, navigating around the maze of culture, process and people changes. Finally on a lighter note, we had the pleasure to listen on Thursday evening to Nolan Bushnell, a colorful character from the early days of computers, founder of Atari, the Pac-Man game and buddy of Steve Jobs, who had many fun stories to share (including the time when he declined the offer from Jobs and Wozniak to own 1/3 of Apple). Now at the respectable age of 73, Bushnell is just starting a new venture in VR gaming, still full of energy, reminding everyone to keep learning new skills and experimenting. Welcome to our first of many Quali Chalk Talk Sessions! Quali's Chalk Talk Sessions aim to give you a deeper technical understanding of Cloud Sandboxes. In these sessions we'll explore various aspects of Quali's Cloud Sandbox architecture, how Cloud Sandboxes integrate with other DevOps tools, and provide tips and tricks on how you can effectively use Sandboxes to deliver Dev/Test infrastructure faster. We hope these sessions help you on your DevOps Journey! In this Session we'll hear Maya, our VP of Product, talk about integrating Quali's Cloud Sandboxes with CI/CD tools like Jenkins Pipeline.
The network environment becomes more and more complex as the enterprise develops in size and years. Whether it is cloud computing, multiply cloud to hybrid cloud or multi-tier IT architecture, the host-based security observation dimension is like the perspective of God, fundamentally eliminating the risk of security out of control. Whether it is an external attack from attacker or a potential risk in its own system, it will trigger abnormal changes in the network environment. Non-stop monitoring can detect threats and process them quickly. Innovative WebShell detection and analysis engine can sense hidden threats in the system. With traditional intelligent algorithms, it can automatically perceive and discover the security risks in the network environment. [ "The analysis results are highly visualized and flexibly denoised, making it easy for users to implement policy-level management.", "The millisecond-level warning speed achieves intrusion awareness and stops the loss in time.", "It can support multiple operating systems, batch processing, and open APIs for extremely convenient and open experience for users." ]
Multilevel structure of cyber physical parking lot operation system. Classification of the ways of driver identification has been given. The functions and algorithms of parking lot equipment unit’s work have been described. The succession of cars entering the parking lot has been shown. Structural scheme of parking equipment control board has been suggested. The calculation methods of the configuration parameters for cyber physical parking lots operation system have been produced.
Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor networks are improving the cooperation between organizations, becoming more efficient and productive for the industrial systems. However, high iteration between human, machines, and heterogeneous IoT technologies increases the security threats. The IoT security is an essential requirement to fully adoption of applications, which requires correct management of information and confidentiality. The system and devices’ variability requires dynamically adaptive systems to provide services depending on the context of the environment. In this paper, we propose a model driven adaptive approach to offer security services for an ontology-based security framework. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach allows creating secure capabilities more efficient with the generation of security services based on security requirements in the knowledge base (IoTSec ontology). An industrial scenario of C2NET project was analyzed to identify the transformation of a system design of security solution in a platform specific model.
This new Android malware steals Facebook data directly from the device Facebook is no stranger to spreading of scams and installation of malicious malware on its platform. Thanks to its large user base, the popular social media networking site has always been the favorite of cybercriminals and hackers. In a newly identified scam detected by security company Symantec, a malicious app dubbed ‘Android.Fakeapp’, involves a new malware strain that is phishing for Facebook login credentials directly from the targeted devices. Once the Facebook user credentials are obtained, the malware logs into the account and collects account information and results using the Facebook mobile app’s search functionality. According to the researchers, the Fakeapp malware is currently made available via malicious apps to English-speaking users on third-party app stores. How does the Fakeapp malware work? Once installed, the apps infected with the Fakeapp malware will immediately hide from the phone’s home screen, leaving only a service running in the background. The malware acts step-by-step (see below) since its installation to steal details from a Facebook user’s account: - It checks for a target Facebook account by submitting the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) to the command and control (C&C) server. - If no account can be collected, it verifies that the app is installed on the device. - It then launches a spoofed Facebook login user interface (UI) to steal user credentials. - It periodically displays this login UI until credentials are successfully collected. Besides sending the collected Facebook login credentials to the attacker’s server, the Fakeapp malware also immediately uses the login details to login into the compromised Facebook account. Once the malware is logged into the Facebook page, it can collect wide variety of information on education, work, contacts, bio, family, relationships, events, groups, likes, posts, pages, and so on. “The functionality that crawls the Facebook page has a surprising level of sophistication,” Martin Zhang and Shaun Aimoto, the two Symantec researchers who analyzed Fakeapp say. “The crawler has the ability to use the search functionality on Facebook and collect the results. Additionally, to harvest information that is shown using dynamic web techniques, the crawler will scroll the page and pull content via Ajax calls,” Symantec explained. In order to stay safe, Facebook users are recommended to regularly update the software and avoid installing applications from unknown sources. Only download apps that are from trusted sources.
The node internal log (nilog) contains information about physical (as opposed to logical, row level) operations at the local node. For example, it provides information on whether there are disk block allocations and deallocations, and B-tree block splits. This buffer is maintained in shared memory, and is also checked to disk (a separate log device) at regular intervals. The page size of this buffer, and the associated data device is 4096 bytes. Large BLOBs necessarily allocate many disk blocks, and thus create a high load on the node internal log. This is normally not a problem, since each entry in the nilog is small. Begin with the default value. Look out for HIGH LOAD informational messages in the history files. The relevant messages contain nilog, and a description of the internal resource contention that occurred. Use the following command to display node internal log buffer information: hadbm resourceinfo --nilogbuf For example, the output might look something like this: Node No. Avail Free Size 0 11 11 1 11 11 To change the size of the nilog buffer, use the following command: hadbm set InternalLogbufferSize The hadbm restarts all the nodes, one by one, for the change to take effect. For more information on using this command, see Configuring HADB in Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1 High Availability Administration Guide. If the size of the nilog buffer is changed, the associated log device (located in the same directory as the data devices) also changes. The size of the internal log buffer must be equal to the size of the internal log device. The command hadbm set InternalLogBufferSize ensures this requirement. It stops a node, increases the InternalLogBufferSize, re initializes the internal log device, and brings up the node. This sequence is performed on all nodes.
This paper has been published in several security conferences during 2011, and is now being made fully available (as well as a PDF version for downloading) Penetration testing and red-team exercises have been running for years using the same methodology and techniques. Nevertheless, modern attacks do not conform to what the industry has been preparing for, and do not utilize the same tools and techniques employed by such tests. This paper discusses the different ways that attacks should be emulated, and focuses mainly on data exfiltration. The ability to “break into” an organization is fairly well documented and accepted, but the realization that attacks do not stop at the first system compromised did not get to all business owners. As such, this paper describes multiple ways to exfiltrate data that should be used as part of penetration testing in order to better simulate an actual attack, and stress the organization’s security measures and detection capabilities of data that leaves it. Modern attack trees employ multiple realms of information that are not necessarily extensively tested and protected by organizations. Some of these paths involve not only technical factors, but also human, business, and physical ones. From a technical perspective, even though information security as a practice has been around ever since computer systems have been in use, organizations tend to focus on the issues that are well documented, and have a plethora of products that address them. On the other hand, attackers would do exactly the opposite – try to find infiltration paths that involve some human interaction (as humans are generally less secure than computers), and focus on elements that are less scrutinized by protection and control mechanisms. One example for such an attack path is using formats that are commonly used by organizations, and are known to contain multiple vulnerabilities. Such formats (like WinZIP, Rar, PDF, Flash) and applications (vulnerable Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other commonly used tools) are bound to be found in organizations – even if the installed versions are problematic from a security standpoint. This is due to the fact that a lot of internal applications are still enforcing the use of old versions of such tools (notably Internet Explorer). The human element kicks in when trying to introduce the malicious code into the organization. A common and still highly useful attack avenue is the use of targeted phishing emails (spear-phishing) that provide an appealing context to the target which would make it more “legitimate” to open and access any content embedded in the email or referred by it (external links to sites that would carry the malicious code). Another human element that can be easily exploited in getting malicious content into an organization is using physical devices that are dropped or handed to key personnel. This paper is read at a conference, where multiple vendors provide giveaways in the form of electronic media (be it CDs, or USB memory devices). A classic attack vector would use such an opportunity to deliver crafted malicious code over said media (or follow-up emails) to key personnel. The last element of the infiltration attack surface is the physical one – gaining physical access to the offices or the target (or one of its partners) is easier than perceived, and provides the attacker multiple ways of getting their attack code onto the network. From casually tapping into open ports and sniffing the network via a remote connection (by plugging in a wireless access point), or simply plugging in an infected USB drive into various PCs, such attacks can be carried out by personnel that are not necessarily security professionals (we often use paid actors to carry out such engagements and gain a familiarity bonus for local accent and conversation context). Data targeting and acquisition Before launching the actual attack on the organization, the attacker will perform some basic intelligence gathering in order to properly select the target thorough which the attack would be conducted, as well as the data that is being sought after. Such intelligence gathering would be done through open source intelligence, as well as onsite reconnaissance. From an organizational perspective, the ability to map out the information that is available through public channels on it is crucial. It provides a baseline on which the organization can prepare the threat model, which reflects the attacker’s intelligence data, and allows it to properly address any policy/procedure issues in terms of exposing data. Social media channels are one of the more popular means of intelligence gathering, and can easily be used to build an organizational map and identify the right targets to go through. Finally – in terms of data targeting, the attacker would usually focus on intellectual property, financial and personal information – all of which would be easily sold on the open market and to competitors. Once the target has been selected, and the data have been identified, the actual payload needs to be created and deployed using the attack tree that was chosen for infiltration. Such payload (often called an “APT” – Advanced Persistent Threat) is usually no more sophisticated than a modern banker Trojan that has been retooled for a singular targeted attack. Such Trojans are available for purchase on the criminal markets for $500 to $2,500, depending on the plugins and capabilities provided. These by themselves offer a fairly low detection rate by security software, but in order to assure a successful attack they are often further obfuscated and packed. Command and Control One of the main differences between targeted attacks and the more common malware is that targeted attacks need to take into consideration the fact that the connectivity between the payload and the attacker cannot be assured for long periods of time (and sometimes are consistently nonexistent). As such, the C&C (command & Control) scheme for such an attack needs to take that into considerations and the payload should be well equipped to operate fairly independently. Nevertheless, some form of control communication is needed, and usually utilizes a hierarchical control structure, where multiple payloads are deployed into the organization at different locations, and are able to communicate with each other to form a “grid” that enables the more restricted locations to communicate through other layers to the attacker outside the organization. So far we have reviewed how an attacker would infiltrate an organization, target the data it is after, and find a way to somehow control the payload deployed. Nevertheless, getting the actual data out is still a challenge, as more often than not, it is located so deep inside the network that traditional means of communications (DNS/HTTP tunneling for example) are not applicable. However, the way that organizations build their infrastructure these days basically call for other means of getting the data out. Following are a few concepts that should be used for testing exfiltration capabilities as part of penetration testing – which have proved to be useful on multiple major corporations, as well as government/defense organizations. First off – the obvious: use “permitted” protocols to carry the information out. These are usually DNS traffic and HTTP traffic. The data itself may be sensitive and filtered by DLP mechanisms, and as such should be encrypted using a method that would not allow a filtering/detection device to parse through it. After encryption, the data can be sent out through services such as Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, blog comments and posts, wikis, etc… These are often not filtered by the corporate control mechanisms, and are easy to set up if needed to (a WordPress blog for example, where the payload can post encrypted data using the attacker’s public key). The next exfiltration method that usually works is simply printing documents. Obviously, we won’t print out the original data as it would be easily detected and shredded. Instead – the encrypted information can be sent to shared printers (which are easy to map in the network), and made to look like print errors (i.e. remove any header/footer from the encryption method we utilize). Printouts like that are more likely to end up in the paper bin rather than the shredder, and later extracted as part old-school dumpster-diving. Such documents just need to be OCR’d after their retrieval and decrypted to reveal the sensitive data that has been stolen. This method is usually more efficient where proper mapping of the paper disposal process of the target has been performed. An alternative to printing the encrypted data uses the same means of exfiltration – the shared printers. When a shared printer is found to be a multi-function device with faxing capabilities, the payload can utilize it to fax out the encrypted documents. In this situation the payload would still need to keep “operational awareness” as some DLP products would actually look at the fax queue for information that is not supposed to leave the organization, hence using the encrypted text is better form. Exfiltrartion through VoIP This is the main concept that is being displayed here. As VoIP networks are usually accessible to the local network (usually to accommodate soft-phones, and just a simpler network topology), crafted payloads are able to utilize this channel to exfiltrate data. The method proposed here is to initially sniff the network and observe recurring patterns of calls, and user identifications (to be later used when initiating the SIP call). After some initial pattern can be mapped out, the payload encodes the data to be exfiltrated form its binary format to audio. A proposed encoding maps out the half-byte values of the data stream to a corresponding scale of audio tones using 16 distinct octaves on the human audible frequency range (20Hz to 20,000Hz). Therefore, a byte value is split into it’s high, and low values, and then the value is used to select an octave (out of the 16 available ones). For each byte do: hb_low = byte & 0xF hb_high = byte >> 4 voice_msg += octave[hb_low] voice_msg += octave[hb_high] sip_call.play(voice_msg) Sample 1: pseudo-code for voice encoding of data to 16-octave representation The octave is then played for a short period of time (for example ½ second) on the final output voice channel. The final output is then played back on an opened SIP call that can be made to almost any number outside the organization (for example a Google voice account’s voicemail) for later decoding back to the original binary data. For the decoding itself, an approximation analysis is performed on the input sound file in order to identify the maximum frequency detected for each “time slice” which carries the generated tone, and then comparing the frequency to the octaves used in generating the original sound. As sounds get distorted and downsampled as they go through older telephony systems, and cannot be guaranteed the same quality as used on pure VoIP circuits, the spacing between the frequencies used should be enough to create a distinction between tones. For each sample_pair do: max_f = getMaxFreq(sample0) bh = getByteFromFreq(max_f) max_f = getMaxFreq(sample1) bl = getByteFromFreq(max_f) byte = bl \| bh << 4 out_stream += byte file.write(out_stream) Sample 2: pseudo-code for voice encoding of data to 16-octave representation This method can obviously be optimized in several ways – first, using more octaves (as long as they are distant enough in their frequencies and non-harmonic) to represent more data in each tone being played, and again in the time each tone is played to essentially compress the data over less time. The proof-of-concept that is being released along with this paper is intentionally designed to act as an example (although it can be easily tooled to carry out a significant amount of data, and has been used in several occasions to do so in penetration testing engagements to exfiltrate highly sensitive data). In terms of protection against such exfiltration techniques, the recommended strategy is to basically extend the same kind of monitoring and scrutiny that is being applied to traditional electronic communication channels (web, email) to the VoIP channels. Although voice communication monitoring has been traditionally associated with more government type organizations, the move to VoIP enables small companies and businesses to extend the same security controls to the voice channel as well. DLP systems for example could easily be used to transcribe (voice to text) phone conversations, and apply the same filtering to them, while alerting on calls that contain non-verbal communications as suspicious. The concepts presented here in relation to advanced techniques in data exfiltration are not only theoretical. We have been observing progress in the way that advanced threats are addressing this issue, and adding more capabilities and techniques to the arsenal od data exfiltration beyond simply staging data in archives and pushing it out through FTP connections. The proliferation of VoIP networks that are being configured mainly for convenience with not much security concern into them have allowed us to observe a few cases where similar methods of utilizing such channels were used in the transmission of data outside of the targeted organization. Additionally, VoIP networks also allow simple bridges between networks with different classifications that may not have a direct data connection in the “classic” sense of a TCP/IP network infrastructure. The other techniques mentioned in this paper (namely the use of covert channels in legitimate services such as blogs, social networks, Wikis, and DNS) are already in full use and should be a reality that corporate security should already address. When attempting to address data exfiltration the first important thing to realize is that infiltration is almost taken for granted. With so many attack surfaces encompassing different facets of the organization (outside technical scopes), security managers need to realize that detection and mitigation of data exfiltration is an integral part of the strategic approach to security. Identifying data in transit and in-motion is the basic element that allows detection of exfiltration paths, and many tools already allow organizations to address this issue. The missing components usually lie in the realms that traditional products and approaches neglect such as encrypted communications, and “new” channels such as VoIP. Addressing these channels is not an unresolved problem, and in our experience simple solutions can provide insight into the data carried in them. For encrypted channels a policy (both legal as well as technical) of terminating such encryption at the organizational perimeter before it is being continued to the outside should be applied. This approach, coupled with an integration of existing DLP products to identify and detect misplaced data, will provide the required insight into such communications. An unknown data type carried over legitimate channels should be flagged and blocked until proven “innocent” (for example custom encryption used inside a clear-text channel that cannot be correctly identified and validated as legitimate). For VoIP channels, the same approach that is being applied to the more traditional web and email channels should be used as well. Full interception and monitoring of such channels can be applied, even when not in real-time – such as recording all conversations, processing them using speech recognition software, and feeding the results back to the DLP. This approach yield the same results as a DLP installed on the email and web channels does. Additionally, the investment in terms of time, human resources, and materials is negligible when compared with the added security in terms of detection and mitigation of such threats, and complements the layered security approach that should have covered these aspects in the first place. This paper covered both the more advanced infiltration techniques utilized by targeted attack on organizations (which should have been covered by the security industry to a point, although organizations are still struggling with this aspect), as well as raises the awareness to the more problematic issue of detecting data in transit outside of the organization as it is being exfiltrated. Several methods of exfiltration have been discussed, with the more evasive one being the use of voice channels on VoIP infrastructure. We believe that the current practices do a disservice to the layered security approach that is being preached in the security industry by leaving gaping holes in the exfiltration paths monitoring and mitigation. While there may be claims of privacy issues, such gaps are similar in the way that data is being processed and inspected to existing channels, and should adhere to the same standards of privacy protection and abuse as traditional solutions that address data leakage do.
Skip to Main Content In the field of malware detection, method based on syntactical consideration are usually efficient. However, they are strongly vulnerable to obfuscation techniques. This study proposes an efficient construction of a morphological malware detector based on a syntactic and a semantic analysis, technically on control flow graphs of programs (CFG). Our construction employs tree automata techniques to provide an efficient representation of the CFG database. Next, we deal with classic obfuscation of programs by mutation using a generic graph rewriting engine. Finally, we carry out experiments to evaluate the false-positive ratio of the proposed methods. Date of Conference: 7-8 Oct. 2008
A protection operations facility, additionally called a security data management facility, is a single center workplace which deals with safety concerns on a technological as well as organizational level. It constitutes the entire 3 building blocks pointed out over: processes, people, and also technology for improving and also taking care of a company’s security position. The center has to be tactically located near critical pieces of the organization such as the employees, or sensitive information, or the delicate materials made use of in manufacturing. Consequently, the place is really essential. Additionally, the personnel accountable of the operations need to be properly informed on its features so they can execute capably. Workflow employees are basically those that manage and also route the operations of the facility. They are appointed the most vital duties such as the installment and upkeep of local area network, equipping of the numerous safety gadgets, as well as producing plans and also procedures. They are additionally responsible for the generation of records to support administration’s decision-making. They are called for to keep training seminars and also tutorials concerning the organization’s plans and also systems fresh so workers can be kept updated on them. Procedures personnel need to guarantee that all nocs as well as workers follow firm plans as well as systems in any way times. Workflow personnel are likewise in charge of checking that all tools as well as machinery within the facility are in good working condition as well as completely operational. NOCs are eventually the people that manage the company’s systems, networks, and inner treatments. NOCs are responsible for keeping track of compliance with the company’s security policies as well as procedures as well as replying to any unapproved accessibility or malicious behavior on the network. Their fundamental duties consist of evaluating the safety environment, reporting security associated events, establishing and preserving protected connectivity, developing and also implementing network safety and security systems, and also carrying out network as well as data security programs for internal usage. A trespasser discovery system is a necessary part of the procedures administration functions of a network as well as software group. It spots burglars and monitors their activity on the network to figure out the source, duration, as well as time of the invasion. This establishes whether the protection violation was the outcome of a worker downloading and install an infection, or an exterior source that permitted outside infiltration. Based upon the resource of the violation, the protection group takes the appropriate activities. The objective of a trespasser detection system is to swiftly locate, monitor, and manage all safety associated occasions that might occur in the organization. Security procedures normally incorporate a variety of various techniques as well as competence. Each member of the protection orchestration team has actually his/her very own details ability, expertise, expertise, as well as capabilities. The job of the protection manager is to recognize the most effective methods that each of the group has actually created during the course of its operations as well as apply those best methods in all network activities. The very best methods identified by the safety and security supervisor may call for extra resources from the various other members of the team. Safety and security managers need to collaborate with the others to carry out the most effective techniques. Danger knowledge plays an indispensable function in the procedures of protection operations facilities. Threat intelligence supplies crucial information regarding the activities of threats, so that safety and security actions can be adjusted appropriately. Hazard intelligence is used to configure ideal security approaches for the organization. Numerous threat knowledge devices are made use of in safety and security operations centers, including notifying systems, penetration testers, antivirus definition data, and also signature documents. A safety and security expert is accountable for evaluating the threats to the company, advising rehabilitative procedures, establishing options, as well as reporting to monitoring. This placement calls for evaluating every aspect of the network, such as email, desktop computer machines, networks, servers, as well as applications. A technical support expert is in charge of fixing protection issues as well as helping users in their usage of the products. These positions are usually located in the details security department. There are numerous sorts of procedures protection drills. They aid to check and also determine the operational procedures of the company. Workflow safety and security drills can be performed constantly and regularly, depending upon the needs of the company. Some drills are made to examine the very best practices of the organization, such as those related to application safety and security. Various other drills review safety systems that have been recently deployed or evaluate brand-new system software. A protection procedures facility (SOC) is a huge multi-tiered structure that resolves safety worries on both a technical and also business degree. It includes the three primary building blocks: procedures, individuals, and modern technology for enhancing and also managing an organization’s protection stance. The operational management of a protection procedures center includes the setup and maintenance of the numerous security systems such as firewall softwares, anti-virus, and software program for managing accessibility to info, information, and programs. Allocation of resources and assistance for staff needs are likewise dealt with. The key mission of a security operations facility may consist of discovering, avoiding, or quiting dangers to an organization. In doing so, safety services provide a service to companies that might or else not be dealt with with other ways. Protection services may likewise discover and also stop safety and security risks to a specific application or network that an organization makes use of. This may consist of spotting breaches into network systems, identifying whether safety hazards relate to the application or network setting, identifying whether a protection risk impacts one application or network section from an additional or identifying and avoiding unapproved accessibility to details as well as information. Protection surveillance aids stop or discover the detection as well as evasion of malicious or believed destructive activities. For example, if a company believes that a web server is being abused, security tracking can signal the suitable personnel or IT experts. Safety monitoring likewise helps companies reduce the cost and risks of receiving or recouping from safety and security hazards. For example, a network protection monitoring solution can identify harmful software that makes it possible for a trespasser to access to an inner network. When a trespasser has gained access, protection monitoring can assist the network managers quit this burglar and protect against additional attacks. pen testing Some of the normal functions that a procedures center can have our notifies, alarms, regulations for individuals, as well as notifications. Alerts are made use of to alert individuals of hazards to the network. Guidelines may be established that allow managers to block an IP address or a domain name from accessing specific applications or information. Wireless alarm systems can alert protection personnel of a threat to the wireless network infrastructure.
SecPro #33: Ransomware – Exploring MITRE ATT&CK’s Defense Evasion, Fixing Security Misconfigurations As mentioned in the last issue, I plan to enhance your community experience and make our conversations real-time and more engaging. Use the button below to join the SecPro Discord community! Here’s what you’ll get access to: - Exclusive, actionable content, learning resources, and tools - Private community of security practitioners and tech professionals - Exciting rewards and ambassador program - Opportunity to discuss your learning and projects with like-minded professionals in the field of Threat Detection, Red/Blue teams, Pentesting, DevSecOps, and more - Early access to SecPro events, expert fireside chats, and future announcements! - MITRE ATT&CK’s Defense Evasion – Ransomware Investigated: How the Adversary Evades the Defences (MITRE ATT&CK) - OWASP A05: Security Misconfiguration - Log4j and Defender for Endpoint - SecPro Bytes: Your Security Binocular - Secret Knowledge: Building Your Security Arsenal MITRE ATT&CK’s Defense Evasion – Ransomware Investigated: How the Adversary Evades Defenses By Austin Miller Ransomware attacks are a sophisticated bunch. Often exploiting cutting-edge attack vectors to launch a ransomware attack, understanding the most common TTPs of the adversary is key to defending your organization against these effective malware developers. Understanding how to avoid impaired defenses attacks would help in stopping a ransomware malware infection in its tracks. Exploring the MITRE ATT&CK framework’s Defense Evasion section is the best way to learn how ransomware attackers will launch targeted attacks against your systems, making it the best way to understand how to prevent ransomware too. So let’s quantify MITRE ATT&CK’s Defense Evasion! Understanding the TTPs of Ransomware Attacks Although ransomware gangs have a wide range of tactics, techniques, and procedures for accessing an organization, research from Recorded Future has shown that Defense Evasion is the most common tactic employed by threat actors. Within the broad MITRE ATT&CK framework Defense Evasion tactic or MITRE ATT&CK’s Defense Evasion, there are two techniques in particular that ransomware gangs commonly employ: impair defenses and abusing the pre-OS boot process. MITRE ATT&CK’s Defense Evasion – Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools T1562.001 is concerned with attackers disabling and/or modifying security tools. For example, Cobalt Strike uses the Smart Applet attacks to disable the Java SecurityManager sandbox and DarkComet uses built-in tools to disable Security Center tools such as anti-viruses and anti-malware software. Because a wide range of techniques is employed by the adversary to infect systems and demand ransom payments, detection can be difficult. But the following techniques are advised by the ATT&CK framework: - DS0009 – Process Termination detection - DS0013 – Sensor Health: Host Status detection - DS0017 – Command Execution detection - DS0019 – Service Metadata changes detection - DS0024 – Windows Registry Key Deletion/Manipulation detection MITRE ATT&CK’s Defense Evasion: Abusing the Pre-OS Boot Although not in the T1562 series, understanding pre-OS boot attacks is important for identifying defense evasion from malware developers. All these attacks take aim at the target system before the OS boot kicks in, allowing for the adversary to launch attacks through tools such as LoJax, the Hacking Team UEFI Rootkit, and Trojan.Membroni. There are five sub-techniques that you need to understand: - T1542.001 – System Firmware - T1542.002 – Component Firmware - T1542.003 – Bootkit - T1542.004 – ROMMONkit - T1542.005 – TFTP Boot Diagnosing Impair Attacks Against your Organization Depending on the weaknesses present within your systems, the MITRE ATT&CK framework proposes a number of different mitigation techniques for the adversary’s defense evasion tactics. We discuss the impairing defense mitigation technique here: Impair Defenses Mitigation In order to stop the adversary from undermining your defensive tooling, there are three mitigations included in the MITRE ATT&CK framework: - M1022: Restrict File and Directory Permissions – proper permissions must be set for all files and directories to stop the adversary from disabling or interfering with security software. - M1024: Restrict Registry Permissions – security tooling must be protected at the Registry level via permissions that are proper. - M1018: User Account Management – every user account must have the proper permissions assigned to it to stop the adversary from gaining access and launching a downgrade attack. Stopping Common Attack Vectors for Ransomware Ransomware is a common worry for all security professionals. By using the MITRE ATT&CK Framework and the D3FEND Matrix, we can build effective defensive postures based on an understanding of the tactics and techniques the adversary uses. Take a look at these articles on the newest forms of ransomware that the best security researchers are discovering in 2022: - TellYouThePass Ransomware Analysis Reveals a Modern Reinterpretation Using Golang by CrowdStrike - Night Sky is the latest ransomware targeting corporate networks by BleepingComputer OWASP: A05 – Security Misconfiguration By Austin Miller The weakest part of any security system is the human interacting with it. Although some InfoSec professionals like to think that they are above that adage, human-caused weaknesses are still common enough that OWASP has boosted Security Misconfigurations from A06:2017 to A05:2021. As software becomes more configurable, misconfigurations were bound to occur. That’s why understanding your organization’s security needs, and the way to configure the software is key to secure operations. Improving Web Application Security Although individual applications will have specific needs, broad application security practices help organizations get on the right track. By implementing the following, you can prevent security misconfiguration and stop adversaries who aim to gain unauthorized access to your systems. Changing Default Passwords Default accounts/passwords shouldn’t be a vulnerability, especially if you are following the ICS-CERT best practices – the default username/password combination should be changed as soon as possible. Accessing secure user accounts might be near impossible, but credentials to an admin account posted online will lead to sensitive data exposure in no time! Leaving unnecessary ports open is an easy way for the adversary to gain access to your systems. Closing the attack surface as much as possible is key to not giving the adversary the keys to the castle. Missing Security Hardening Human error occurs, but systematic and containerized approaches to hardening your systems are the best way to cut down on the chaotic human factor as much as possible. Automated checking for divergent installations is the best way to stop common attacks such as downgrade attacks and malware where the adversary installs unwanted files on your system. When software is no longer needed, it should be uninstalled from all systems to ensure your organization’s secure configurations. Removing default programs may also be necessary for workstations that have no use for bloatware. Unnecessary software is closely linked to outdated or vulnerable components and software, a separate entry in the OWASP Top 10. Cutting Out Misconfigurations The road to overcoming security misconfigurations is difficult without a plan. But securing a web server or application becomes easier when you enforce the following rules and implement proper security controls: - Hardening your systems (including everything from operating systems to cloud services) should be systematic – implementing new, secure versions of necessary software should be configured. - Get rid of unused features and software as well as shadow IT installations to secure the entirety of the network – if something isn’t used, it becomes an unnecessary attack vector that possibly isn’t closely monitored by the security team. - Having a specialized team or workflow for updating the system allows smooth transitions from insecurity to security. - Security settings should allow for segmented architectures that separate components and allow for better security testing in safe, containerized/segmented sections. - Any changes from the default configurations in a system should be handled through automation – de-escalation attacks or insider threat actors set off alerts, stopping malicious misconfiguration before it becomes a problem. Log4j and Defender for Endpoint By Joe Anich It is no surprise to anyone that the Log4j is still very much top of mind for security teams, and likely will be for some time as this type of vulnerability is almost a commodity. The image we are all used to seeing, quickly turned into a cringe image in all our minds. The moral of the story is to identify anything you have in your environments that are internet-facing and ensure its use of the Log4j logging framework. Other systems to identify if you have them are systems running VMware Horizon, there is a ransomware campaign called Night Sky being deployed right now. Ransomware notes for this campaign have been as high as $800,000! For patching information on VMware Horizon systems, please see this link. SecPro Bytes: Your Security Binocular WordPress Vulns Run Rampant In the last year, the number of known WordPress vulnerabilities has doubled and as many as 77% of them are still exploitable. Thanks to research from Risk Based Security, we now know that 10,359 individual vulnerabilities were reported at the end of 2021. 2,240 of those vulns are new, a 142% increase on the reports from 2020. Attackers are now focusing on exploitable vulns instead of critical ones – like the high-profile Log4Shell crisis, which is quickly tackled by the community at large. For WordPress hackers, finding a weak plug-in would let the adversary in. The Elephant Beetle in the Room The threat team wreaking havoc in Latin America has been named Elephant Beetle that used over 80 tools and scripts to infect an organization’s financial operations also inject fraudulent transactions. Elephant Beetle’s tools change, but the approach stays pretty much the same: - Infect a system and build operational capabilities while laying low. - Slowly build an understanding of the victim’s network and start to mimic legitimate transactions. - Inject fraudulent transactions that appear to be legitimate. - If discovered, return to laying low and start operations again when the coast is clear. 96 New Security Updates for Microsoft Another series of critical and 0-day vulnerabilities from the Microsoft security team. In fact, there are 9 critical patches and 6 0-days which hopefully have been successfully installed on your systems by now. Here are the top picks from the batch: - CVE-2022-21907 – a CVSS 9.8 vulnerability that allows remote code execution through the HTTP protocol. Discovered by Mikhail Medvedev. - CVE-2022-21849 – a CVSS 8.5 vulnerability that allows remote code execution through the IKE extension. A full list of the patches and the relevant security issues addressed through them can be found on the official Microsoft January 2022 Security Updates page. Secret Knowledge: Building Your Security Arsenal Discover useful security resources, cheatsheets, hacks, and open-source CLI/web tools. New & Trending - j3ssie/osmedeus – Build your own reconnaissance system with Osmedeus, a workflow engine for offensive security. - Shogan/kube-chaos – A chaos engineering style game where you seek out and destroy Kubernetes pods, twin-stick shoot-em-up style. Powered by the Unity engine. The SecPro is a weekly security newsletter to help you stay sharp and upgrade your skills with trending threat insights, practical tutorials, hands-on labs, and useful resources. Build skills in as little as 10 minutes.
The following direct links can be used to order the book now: This is a full-colour transcript of a lecture which introduces a pattern language for memory forensics - investigation of past software behaviour in memory snapshots. It provides a unified language for discussing and communicating detection and analysis results despite the proliferation of operating systems and tools, a base language for checklists, and an aid in accelerated learning. The lecture has a short theoretical part and then illustrates various patterns seen in crash dumps by using WinDbg debugger from Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows. Also available in PDF and/or print format as a part of Memory Forensics Training Pack from Software Diagnostics Services.
Provided by: firehol-doc_3.1.7+ds-2_all firehol-mac - ensure source IP and source MAC address match mac IP macaddr Any mac commands will affect all traffic destined for the firewall host, or to be forwarded by the host. They must be declared before the first router or interface. Note There is also a mac parameter which allows matching MAC addresses within individual rules (see firehol-params(5)). The mac helper command DROPs traffic from the IP address that was not sent using the macaddr specified. When packets are dropped, a log is produced with the label “MAC MISSMATCH” (sic.). mac obeys the default log limits (see [LOGGING] in firehol-params(5)). Note This command restricts an IP to a particular MAC address. The same MAC address is permitted send traffic with a different IP. mac 192.0.2.1 00:01:01:00:00:e6 mac 198.51.100.1 00:01:01:02:aa:e8 • firehol(1) - FireHOL program • firehol.conf(5) - FireHOL configuration • firehol-params(5) - optional rule parameters • FireHOL Website (http://firehol.org/) • FireHOL Online PDF Manual (http://firehol.org/firehol-manual.pdf) • FireHOL Online Documentation (http://firehol.org/documentation/)
In this tutorial we will learn what is Static Application Security Testing (SAST), how does it work, its benefits, its implementation, etc: Static Application Security Testing is a security tool that analyzes source code to detect any security vulnerabilities in your enterprise applications. It is white box testing, and it scans an application before the source code gets compiled. SAST is a security tool that handles a very important role within a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) environment which is used to identify security bugs in an application before it is deployed to the production environment. It helps organizations remediate vulnerabilities very early in the SDLC. It is at this stage that developers do code analysis to detect which line the vulnerability lies in so that they can fix the security issues and re-test before it is deployed to production. When SAST is integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, it helps transform DevOps into DevSecOps which helps to secure your agile environment. What You Will Learn: What Is Static Application Security Testing According to the Micro Focus application security risk report about web applications, it was observed that 94% of 11,000 web applications that were analyzed have security vulnerabilities and it was also confirmed that code quality and API issues have increased over the years. If some of these vulnerabilities find their way to production, they could provide a backdoor for attackers to carry out an exploit and could lead to a data breach which could cause financial loss and can damage the reputation of an organization. How Does SAST Work Static Application Security Testing makes use of a code analysis process to check the code for any coding design flaws which could cause an application vulnerability. During the analysis, it will identify different security issues like SQL injections, un-sanitized input, error handling, and many more. It is an application security tool that can check for different security issues and also check for other functional issues that bugs or quality of code could cause and at the same time enforce coding standards for the development team. It is usually good to set up Static Application Security Testing right from the beginning of a project and not when the code lines have risen to a very high figure which could now become a challenge for the development and security team to start remediating the vulnerabilities within. SAST is often compared to DAST but the two have several differences. Suggested Reading =>> Compare SAST, DAST, IAST, And RASP Static Application Security Testing makes use of white-box testing to analyze the source code to remove vulnerabilities while DAST on the other way does not have access to the source code but only uses the process of black-box testing to scan a compiled application to detect any vulnerabilities that exist within. How Do You Implement SAST There are distinct steps you can take to implement SAST into your organization’s development process because most of these organizations build their applications with different programming languages and frameworks. #1) Getting the right tool: The first thing you need to do is to pick the right SAST tool that can properly carry out the code analyses in the languages that your applications have been written. This is very important because, for a SAST tool to do well, it must support the application framework used. #2) Set-up testing and deployment environment: There is a need to purchase all necessary resources, like servers and network tools needed to deploy the SAST tool. After all these resources are put in place for a proper testing environment, the installation of the tool can proceed. Once the SAST has been installed, then the next step will be to scan all the applications in the pipeline. One major concern is scanning the applications with the highest risk first before scanning the ones with lower risk. #3) Scanning Interval: This tool must be run regularly. This could be daily, weekly, and monthly. Anytime you have a code that is checked in or a code release then carry out your scan. #4) SAST tool customization. The tool can be customized to suit your testing requirement. You can set up your dashboard to display scan results you can track, and you can also generate reports both online and offline. You can also configure the SAST with some new rules in a manner to detect some other security vulnerabilities. The rate at which Static Application Security Testing picking false positives is high, so there is a way to configure the SAST to reduce all the false positives picked before the result is sent to the development team for remediation purposes. When the result is sent back to the developers in an organized way, it will help the developers to quickly remediate the issues and create a new release. #5) Essential training. Every team member should be trained on the use of SAST in the right way for it to bring out the best result. Necessary guidelines for the use of the SAST should be available and it should be properly followed. The tool should be part of the secure code review session where there is always a deliberation on what could go wrong with the coding style used. We should encourage Static Application Security Testing within the development team and management team as a very important security tool that every organization must have in their possession. Benefits Of SAST In DevOps These are as follows: #1) Discover Vulnerabilities: One major purpose is the detection of vulnerabilities in the source code. They help developers and security teams to detect some security bugs that other security tools may not detect. #2) Early Detection: When a security issue is not detected and fixed on time may cause serious repercussion. That is where this tool comes into play. This tool helps the development and security team to diagnose an issue very early and such an issue is fixed before releasing the application for general consumption. It helps reduce the amount that would have been spent on remediating the issue when the application is already deployed. It does not need to interact with a running application, it only needs access to the source code and it will discover any security issues within. #3) Simplify Root-Cause Analysis: No developer wants to go through the rigorous way of checking the source code to know where the issues lie in the line of code. With this tool, you get informed where the problem lies in the line of code and what needs to be done to remediate the issue. This simplifies the task of the developer in finding what to fix in the code and they now spend most of their useful time in developing new applications and new features. The feedback system that it provides is very simple and guides you on what to do even though you are not an expert in the security domain. Vulnerabilities Detected By SAST Tools The kind of vulnerabilities this tool detects is depended on the type of programming language, libraries, and frameworks used. Below are some common vulnerabilities that you can find seriously affecting all applications and which SAST can help you fix: #1) SQL Injections This is a kind of attack that can be carried out on an application that is data-driven by a mere injection of SQL into the database to retrieve confidential information. With Static Application Security Testing, these vulnerabilities in an application can quickly be detected and remediated. Below is an example of an SQL Injection: #2) Input Validation This is a vulnerability that is still very common today. This occurs when an attacker intentionally inserted malicious inputs into an application and watches the effect it has on the application. The SAST is a tool that is fully designed and ready to detect anywhere in the coding section that would allow this vulnerability. The below is an example of input validation: #3) Stack Buffer Overflows This occurs because of a program trying to write more data into the buffer of an application more than what it can accommodate. Stack buffer overflow can cause data corruption and sometimes cause an application to shut down or even crashes. Below is an example of stack overflow: #4) Cross-Site Scripting Cross-site scripting occurs when an attacker tries to deceive a genuine user of an application by sending malicious code as a browser-side script to this user. Currently, we have so many applications online that allow this kind of attack to be carried out on it simply because both the input and output are not properly validated and encoded. Below is an example of cross-site scripting: Static Application Security Testing: Pros And Cons - Early SDLC: It is built for source code and can scan your code even while still writing it. We have IDE readily available that the Static Application Security Testing application can plug into. It checks your code against best practices. It can be applied when you are writing your code. The IDE plugins for SAST are readily available online it is a matter of a click away. - Line of Problem: It is a wonderful security tool that will not only detect vulnerabilities for you but also show you where the exact issue is so it can be quickly remediated. - Defined or Pre-defined Rules: Unlike DAST tool you decide what you want to test but with SAST it will apply rules to the source code and these rules can be set manually or can be automated using algorithms used for the predefined rules in the SAST. - Non-execution: It is a security tool that only needs the static source code to work and does not need the code to be run. The reason SAST scan is much faster than DAST is that runs on a compiled code. - Easy automation: Static Application Security Testing does not need many configurations like DAST as the automation is purely simple and easy. - False positives: One of the major disadvantages of SAST access to the source code is the high level at which it captures false positives. When SAST is used to scan an application code, it usually picks some line of codes that has issues even though it will later be found that it is a false positive claim. Some of these raised security issues may not be a problem and may not even pose a threat to the organization. - Misplaced Test: One reason Static Application Security Testing usually displays false positives is that sometimes it scans the wrong place meanwhile the fix is in another place. For instance, un-sanitized user input could have been fixed at the back-end and because the same issue has not been fixed from the front-end, the tool could capture it as an issue simply because all the application codes are not in the same repository and this could result into false positives. - Language Dependent: SAST is a security tool that depends on the type of programming language used. For instance, if you need to procure a SAST tool, you will need to get the type that supports the programming language used to develop your application. - Getting over one SAST: Sometimes it is advisable to have more than one SAST tool as a particular one may not detect all the vulnerabilities in an application. While one may support multi-language, another one may have high performance in wide testing. - Difficult Initial Setup: Some developers complain that the initial setup of SAST in an agile environment does not come easy. The more reason you need to carefully consider the type of SAST you want to use, it should be a tool that will give you fewer challenges when setting it up. Using SAST With Other Security Tools Static Application Security Testing interacts with the source code by scanning the codes for vulnerabilities. This is in total opposite to DAST which does not have access to the source code but only interacts with inputs and outputs when the application is running. Both security tools complement each other, a vulnerability that one does not seem may be detected by the other tool. The speed is another factor when using SAST with other security tools. For instance, DAST requires more time to complete scanning of a running application, while access to the source code makes SAST scanning to be faster, but both will always give you the best approach to remediate the issue and improve your application security. Always plan to use a SAST tool from the commencement of the development and you can integrate other tools like IAST and RASP also very early during the SDLC while using the DAST tool at a later time when the code has been compiled and deployed to the staging environment for alpha and beta testing. Always know that any vulnerabilities that cannot be found very early by Static Application Security Testing could later be found by other security tools. Frequently Asked Questions Q #1) What SAST means? Answer: Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is a security tool designed to analyze the source code of an application in other to detect any vulnerabilities within and guide the remediation process. Q #2) What are SAST and DAST? Answer: SAST is white box testing by accessing the application source code without running. While DAST is a black box testing that does not have access to the source code but only examines an application as it’s running to find vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. Q #3) What are SAST and DAST tools? Answer: Both are security tools that help detect security issues within an application code before such application is deployed to the production environment. Q #4) Is Static Application Security Testing more expensive to fix vulnerabilities? Answer: It is not expensive to fix vulnerability the reason is that it is a security tool used very early in the SDLC to detect and fix vulnerability at a lower cost which is in contrast to the DAST tool that fixes security bugs after code compilation and fixing this vulnerability could later be more expensive. Q #5) How do you perform a SAST test? Answer: SAST performs security testing by scanning the static source code in other to detect vulnerabilities that could make the application susceptible to exploitation from attackers. It scans this code before it is compiled for the production environment. Q #6) What are examples of SAST tools? Answer: They are: - Micro Focus - HCL AppScan Static Application Security Testing tool supports the shift-left testing principle where the test is done very early during the SDLC. So every organization must start transforming their DevOps environment to DevSecOps because you cannot keep developing applications for the public without going through proper security checks. Any application that has not gone through a rigorous security test should never be allowed to the production environment. Also, Read =>> Best Application Security Testing tool It is also advisable to combine a Static Application Security Testing tool with other security tools. This will bring the best result and most of the security vulnerabilities will be removed. Every organization should start spending big in terms of security because security is not optional in an agile environment.
Malicious behavior: we generally know it when we see it Most of the time, unfortunately, malicious behavior is hidden from view. Consider that the average dwell time for cyberattackers within networks is still measured in months. Per FireEye, the global median dwell time in 2018 was 78 days, down from 101 days in 2017, but still far too long. Malicious behavior may manifest itself as the discovery or use of software designed to gain access and to leverage or create vulnerabilities that can be used to further penetrate networks, endpoints, and servers; perform reconnaissance; gain authentication data; and ultimately exfiltrate sensitive information or damage ongoing enterprise operations. Alternatively, it may manifest itself through the more subtle activities of malicious insiders. How can we detect malicious behavior more rapidly and reduce dwell time, thereby reducing the risk of a successful data breach? There are several technologies in play that are used today in networks. This includes network threat detection using unsupervised machine learning, supervised machine learning, and deception technology. Deception technology also integrates machine learning where it provides an advantage to analysis and discovery. Supervised machine learning Supervised machine learning is an important technology used in cybersecurity, often for network threat detection. Algorithms such as supervised neural nets, Bayesian networks, k-nearest neighbors, and other variants are commonly used. Supervised machine learning is a type of machine learning where automation learns how to classify activity based on examples of behavior that produce a recognized output value. Supervised machine learning algorithms use training data to help establish the boundaries of classification. Inside of the boundary may be deemed as normal and hence acceptable behavior. Outside is anomalous behavior. If you pull the requirements too tightly with your training data, the amount of apparent anomalous behavior increases substantially. If you loosen the training requirements, almost nothing will appear anomalous. You can see how one moment, in one scenario, anomalous behavior which is truly valid might appear malicious, while malicious behavior might not show as anomalous at all. Unsupervised machine learning Unsupervised machine learning is another important technology used in cybersecurity. Algorithms commonly used for unsupervised machine learning include k-means, c-means, self-organizing maps (SOM), and one-class support vector machines. Unsupervised machine learning, simply put, doesn’t require training data. The key assumption of unsupervised machine learning is that the bulk of existing behavior is normal, which thereby segregates infrequent and statistically uncommon activity as suspect and possibly malicious. In this case, an infrequent but valid user activity may be flagged as statistically anomalous, while pre-existing network threats might inadvertently be missed when unsupervised machine learning is set-up. These undetected threats often arise in markets like health care, manufacturing, and financial and banking networks. Statistical sensitivity can be adjusted, but, in the final analysis, there must be a set boundary condition, just as there was in supervised machine learning. On one side, what appears to be non-anomalous behavior can be malicious, and vice versa. Acalvio ShadowPlex Core Technology Acalvio ShadowPlex core technology is not conditional, statistical, or probabilistic. The detection is absolute and 100 percent certain. We integrate machine learning but temper our use with absolute adherence to our core policy alignment: nothing, absolutely nothing, should be engaging with our decoys at any time. As we have seen, not all malicious behavior within your networks will stand out as anomalous. In counterpoint, not all anomalous behavior within your networks is necessarily malicious. - Deception technology focuses attention on those instances of behavior that are clearly in violation of process and immediately identifies these threats present within your network at virtually 100 percent certainty. - Deception technology provides virtually flawless detection to ensure that threats are rapidly identified and rapidly shut down. Please talk to us about how deception technology is an important adjunct to your other security controls! We’d be pleased to introduce you to our latest technology and share information about how Acalvio ShadowPlex protects the most sensitive enterprise and government networks.
Sophos UTM (SG), like almost all Linux based systems, has the native functionality to perform a tcpdump to capture and show network packet information. This information is very useful in troubleshooting connectivity issues as they show every packet that the firewall has to handle. The Sophos UTM tcpdump utility that makes this possible is not accessible from the web-UI. You need to connect to a remote shell using an SSH client like putty. In this article, I will show you how to configure shell access to Sophos UTM and use the tcpdump command to verify if syslog packets are leaving your Sophos UTM appliance. This can be useful when troubleshooting if no log data is showing up on your Fastvue Sophos Reporter server (if you’re experiencing this issue, please see our support article on the full list of troubleshooting steps). Configuring Shell Access on Sophos UTM By default, shell (or SSH) access to your Sophos UTM SG is disabled. To enable shell access: - Navigate to Management \| System Settings \| Shell Access - Toggle the switch to enable access - Specify and repeat a root password - Specify and repeat a loginuser password - Click Set Specified Passwords - Change allowed networks from Any to Internal (Network). This is optional but strongly recommended! - Click Apply Access the Sophos UTM Shell You can use any SSH client application for shell access, I personally use PUTTY. To access the Sophos UTM Shell using Putty: - Launch Putty and specify the management IP of the Sophos UTM, port 22, and SSH as the connection type - On first connection, you will be prompted to trust a certificate. Click Yes - When prompted for a login, enter loginuser - Specify the password and press enter - To use tcpdump, you need to elevate your session to root. Do this by entering su- - Specify the root password Run the Sophos UTM tcpdump command The tcpdump command has numerous options to allow you to capture network packets and render them in different modes. The example below will help you identify if your Sophos UTM is actually sending syslog packets to your Fastvue Sophos Reporter server. tcpdump -i any host 192.168.2.10 and port 514 -nn -XX (Substitute 192.168.2.10 for your own Fastvue server’s ip) Did you know: Fastvue Sophos Reporter produces clean, simple, web usage reports using log data from your Sophos UTM that you can confidently send to department managers and HR team. The Sophos UTM SG appliance has a remote syslog buffer. This means that syslog messages such as web filtering logs are batched and sent through as opposed to being sent through as they occur. Because of this, you may have to run the tcpdump for a minute or so to actually capture some syslog packets. When you do capture a syslog packet, it will look similar to the example below. Examining the Sophos UTM tcpdump Packet Capture A captured syslog packet with the suggested setting will show the following characteristics Timestamp Source-IP.Source-port > Destination-IP.Destination-port The HEX and ASCII section will show the actual content of the packet. Here you should be able to identify enough information to see that this is a web activity log entry. This verifies that the web filtering syslog messages are correctly being sent from 192.168.2.1 to 192.168.2.10:514. If you’re not seeing the syslog data arrive on 192.168.2.10, then there could be another device or a local firewall preventing the packets from being received. Sophos UTM tcpdump information is very useful in troubleshooting connectivity issues. Unlike log files, the packet capture shows you what is actually happening “on the wire” and will show every packet that the firewall has to handle. The example above shows how to use tcpdump to verify if syslog packets are leaving your Sophos UTM appliance but the same techniques can be used with other tcpdump commands to troubleshoot other similar issues. Here are some useful tcpdump resources with commands you may like to familiarise yourself with: Take the pain out of troubleshooting your Sophos UTM Packet captures are great, but why not make troubleshooting your Sophos UTM even easier and setup Fastvue Sophos Reporter? Fastvue Sophos Reporter consumes syslog data from Sophos UTM (SG) and Sophos XG Firewalls and produces clean, simple reports to help you troubleshoot bandwidth, web filtering policies and Internet usage productivity issues. You can also automate reports to get the job of reporting on web usage off your desk and into the hands of people that need it. Download the 30 day free trial today!
This document describes a proposal the "referrer" metadata name. Using the referrer metadata attribute, a document can control the behavior if the Referer HTTP header attached to requests that originate from the document. The referrer metadata attribute can have one of four values: Let directive be the value of the content attribute with LWS stripped and covered to lower case. If directive is none of the strings listed above, the user agent MUST act as if directive is the string This meta element instructs the user agent to omit the Referer header in all HTTP requests that originate from the document containing the element: <meta name="referrer" content="never"> This meta element instructs the user agent to include the document's origin in the Referer header rather than the full URL of the document. <meta name="referrer" content="origin">
We’ve published a detailed analysis of Sality in a whitepaper titled, “Sality: Story of a Peer-to-Peer Viral Network.” Sality is a file infector that spreads by infecting executable files and by replicating itself across network shares. Infected hosts join a peer-to-peer network used to propagate malware on the compromised computer. Typically, those additional programs will be used to relay spam, proxy communications, steal private information, infect Web servers, or achieve distributed computing tasks, such as password cracking. The combination of file infection mechanism and the fully decentralized peer-to-peer network, along with other anti-security measures, make Sality one of the most effective and resilient malware in today’s threat landscape. Estimations show than hundreds of thousands of computers are infected by the virus. In this comprehensive whitepaper, we introduce the readers to the threat and describe the architecture of the malware. The core of the paper focuses on the peer-to-peer characteristics of Sality, and examines its strengths and potential limitations. We also have a look at current trends and metrics.
The ABC’s of Cyber Security is a blog series designed to break down the complex meaning behind the terms associated with cyber security. Worrying about the threat of a cyber-attack on your business is enough to keep you up at night, but trying to understand what it all means should not. APT – Advanced Persistent Threat: More commonly described as a set of covert and constant computer backing processes, often coordinated by hackers targeting a specific entity. An APT usually has a business or political motive behind their actions. ACL – Access Control List: Who and what you allow or deny a user with in your network to operate. ATD – Advanced Threat Defense: This allows companies to detect complex, intentional attacks in order to evaluate and take immediate or necessary action. For more information, contact your team of experts at NetStandard. Also, be on the lookout for part 2 in the series The ABC’s of Cyber Security.
An anomaly is defined as a pattern that does not conform to expected or normal behavior. When finding anomalies goes beyond the skill of mere humans due to quantity, complexity, speed, or the infrequent occurrence of anomalies, machine learning can be used for confident anomaly detection. Machine learning anomaly detection is used extensively across many industries for tasks such as fraud detection, process control, manufacturing, cyber-security, fault detection in critical systems, and military surveillance. A typical machine learning anomaly detection approach defines a region in the data that represents normal behavior, fits a model that describes this normal behavior, then concludes that any observation not belonging to this model is an anomaly. However, common issues with data can make anomaly detection very challenging. With some ingenuity, there are paths to overcome the challenges. - Defining a normal region in the data that encompasses every possible normal behavior is very difficult. For example, one SpaceTime customer seeking to predict anomalies with a sophisticated renewable energy asset had less than a year of operating data to train their model. This, in turn, created a challenge to define a broad swath of ‘normal’ operating conditions in the model. To overcome this challenge, we focused on short time periods following the asset type’s maintenance intervals to help define ‘normal’, which provided a higher level of assurance that the data used for training did not contain operating anomalies. - The normal behavior may evolve also over time, so that the currently-used normal model may become obsolete. To overcome this issue, a regularized model that reduces the variability of the estimated model and avoids overfitting to the training data can be applied in an Expectation Maximization algorithm. Regularization deliberately adds bias to the estimated model parameters, which is essential to make the normal fitted model generalize well to time periods that were never observed before. - Finally, noisy data (seemingly meaningless data with many random outliers) can lead to a high rate of false positives. To overcome this, SpaceTime has used a scoring technique that relies on the Irwin-Hall distribution that not only scores each observation for anomalies, but combines a sequence of observations to trigger an alert. In other words, if the data is noisy, the alert will not be triggered, however if a sequence of anomalous observations occurs for an extended period of time, an alert will be triggered. Anomaly detection, in its most general form, is not an easy problem to solve. When your project begins with imperfect data, it makes anomaly detection even more challenging. With an understanding of the project’s subject, the business it supports, the assets’ characteristics and operations, and the relationship of the data among them, proven statistical techniques can be applied to overcome many of the common issues with data. Read the follow-on post Confident Anomaly Detection: Put Anomalies To Work.
Skip to Main Content This paper investigates network policies and mechanisms to enhance security in SCADA networks using a mix of TCP and UDP transport protocols over IP. It recommends creating a trust system that can be added in strategic locations to protect existing legacy architectures and to accommodate a transition to IP through the introduction of equipment based on modern standards such as IEC 61850. The trust system is based on a best-of-breed application of standard information technology (IT) network security mechanisms and IP protocols. The trust system provides seamless, automated command and control for the suppression of network attacks and other suspicious events. It also supplies access control, format validation, event analysis, alerting, blocking, and event logging at any network-level and can do so on behalf of any system that does not have the resources to perform these functions itself. Latency calculations are used to estimate limits of applicability within a company and between geographically separated company and area control centers, scalable to hierarchical regional implementations.
A sinkhole is a DNS server that gives out false information, to prevent the use of the domain names it represents, often times redirecting information from one to another, where security researchers capture the data and analyze it for threats. Wapack Labs monitors several such sinkholes --purchased by the team, these domains are typically command and control nodes that malware will call to, looking for instructions, when installed on a computer. What a computer is identified on the sinkhole list, we assume it to be compromised. The full report was published to Wapack Labs on 7/5/16. For more information, users can search for the domain name on ThreatRecon.co or contact Red Sky Alliance or Wapack Labs for assistance at 844-4-WAPACK. Universities mentioned in this report in crude Ali, Brookings, Brook Law, Boston University, Clarkson, CUNY, Georgia Tech, Kean, Khai, Lake Forest, Missouri State, MSU, Najah, University of Rhode Island, UCLA, University of Houston, University of Kentucky, University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The developers of the notorious Dyre (Dyreza) banking Trojan have released a new version of the threat that includes support for Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge. According to researchers, Dyre now also targets Windows 10 users, and in addition to Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, the malware can also hook its malicious code into the process of Microsoft’s latest web browser, Edge. The changes in the latest version of Dyre were documented by both Heimdal Security and F5 Networks. F5 reported that the authors of Dyre have renamed some of the existing commands and added new ones for novel functionality. The new commands are used to get the IP of the command and control (C&C) server, the botnet name, configuration for fake pages, configuration for server-side webinjects, account information stolen by the Pony module, and an anti-antivirus module. This anti-antivirus module, named “aa32” or “aa64” in the case of 64-bit versions of Windows, is injected into the “spoolsv.exe” process, which is normally used for fax and print jobs. The module is designed to locate security products installed on the infected machine and disable them by deleting their files or by changing their configuration. The list of targeted antiviruses, detected by Dyre based on registry entries, includes products from Avira, AVG, Malwarebytes, Fortinet and Trend Micro. The malware also attempts to disable the Windows Defender service. In order to make the malware more difficult to analyze, the developers have encrypted hardcoded debug strings and only decrypt them during runtime. As a result of this change, static analysis provides a lot less information about the Trojan’s behavior than before. As for persistence after a reboot, previous versions of Dyre used a Run key in the registry, but the latest variant relies on a scheduled task that is run every minute. Dyre developers also attempted to make the malware more difficult to detect by generating a pipe name based on a hash of the computer’s name and version of the operating system — initially the name of the pipe was hardcoded. However, experts say this doesn’t really help as the name can now be predicted for each infected device. “We conclude from the addition of these features that the authors of the malware strive to improve their resilience against anti-viruses, even at the cost of being more conspicuous,” F5 said in a blog post. “They also wish to keep the malware up-to-date with current OS releases in order to be ‘compatible’ with as many victims as possible. There is little doubt that the frequent updating will continue, as the wicked require very little rest.” According to Heimdal Security, Dyre has already infected roughly 80,000 machines and the company believes the number will increase. “The timing of this new strain is just right: the season for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Christmas shopping is ready to start, so financial malware will be set to collect a huge amount of financial data. Users will be busy, prone to multitasking and likely to choose convenience over safety online,” Heimdal Security noted. Related Reading: Dyre Banking Trojan Counts Processor Cores to Detect Sandboxes Related Reading: Dyre Malware Gang Targets Spanish Banks
Kubernetes has released a latest version that includes patches for security bugs that allow attackers to abuse the subPath property of YAML configuration files to execute malicious commands on Windows hosts. The vulnerability allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to apply a malicious YAML file on the cluster. Kubernetes allows mounting a directory from the host system inside a container through a property called volume. This is a widely used feature and comes with several subproperties to define the path of the directory on the host and the mount path inside the container. The mountPath further has a subPath property that when provided in a YAML file is processed by kubelet, a core Kubernetes service. It has been found that when the subPath string is processed, kubelet also checks if it is a symlink, which is part of the defenses put in place for the older vulnerabilities. However, it does this through a PowerShell command that is invoked by the “exec.Command” function call. This opens the possibility that an attacker could attach PowerShell code to the subPath string where it would be executed. This vulnerability is now tracked as CVE-2023-3676 and was patched in Kubernetes 1.28, but it also led to the discovery and fixing of two more similar command injection vulnerabilities: CVE-2023-3955 and CVE-2023-3893. The flaw impacts Kubernetes on Windows in its default configuration, but the attacker needs to obtain apply privileges to a node. The Kubernetes team chose to patch this class of vulnerabilities by passing parameters from environment variables instead of from user input which will be treated as strings — therefore, they will not be evaluated as expressions by PowerShell. If they can’t update to the patched version immediately, - Admins can disable the use of Volume.Subpath, but this will also cripple a commonly used feature and functionality. - Use the Open Policy Agent (OPA), an open-source agent that can take policy-based actions based on the received data. - Admins can create rules to block certain YAML files from being implemented using the Rego language in OPA, - Use role-based access control (RBAC) to limit the number of users who can perform actions on a cluster.
However, there is one more component, which is often overlooked. Nearly every network operator has varying business processes, restrictions, and regulations outlining how messages can be sent through their network. The variations are typically due to imposed legislation to the local region, or the networks. From the perspective of a multi-national company sending PIN codes and messages to several countries, different regulations in different markets for the doing the same thing usually don’t make much sense, right? Well, renegotiating some of these local rules and regulations to limit variations with in regions is a significant responsibility of Messente’s network integration team.Below are a few common examples of some regulations still encountered in some countries and their reasoning. Registered sender names only.The requirement to whitelist every sender name used with the network operator usually exists due to either the operator itself, or a central government agency, needs to have a simple way of tracking every message back to its original sender. While easier methods now exist, the requirement still applies in several countries. Sender name restrictions.Many mobile networks and countries restrict the types of sender names. The reasons for this restriction varies, depending on what is allowed. Some countries and networks only allow active long numbers (regular mobile numbers) as sender names, so that the recipient of the message has a simple and direct way to contact the sender. On the other hand, there are regulations that require letters in the name, so that companies and brands identify themselves. Lastly, laws may only allow for short codes, which are 3-6 digit numbers that must be licensed by a network operator or government agency (911, for example.) Restrictions are created, again, to easily indicate between commercial messages and phone-to-phone messages, as well as tracking a message back to the original sender. Sender info included in the message text. There is a requirement in some countries to include sender info in the body text of every message. One can see how this can limit SMS messaging, as the identity information diminishes the available characters of the text. Most mobile network operators require their clients and messaging partners to prove that strong spam prevention mechanisms in place, whether it be to stop messages from being sent repeatedly, or technical problems that result in unwanted messages accidentally being sent. While, it is a reasonable requirement, the definition of spam messages also considerably vary by region. Overall, while SMS is a ubiquitous technology, the business application of SMS messaging create complexities, as commercial use is regulated with various laws depending on the country or mobile operator. The goal at Messente is to provide clients a unified experience through our services across all markets, so that single businesses alone don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
roughly Safe E mail Menace Protection: Offering vital perception into enterprise threat will lid the newest and most present counsel around the globe. gate slowly appropriately you perceive skillfully and appropriately. will layer your information precisely and reliably Attackers particularly create phishing and Enterprise E mail Compromise (BEC) emails utilizing a mixture of malicious methods, chosen by specialists from an ever-evolving bag of methods. They’ll use these methods to impersonate an individual or firm identified to the meant recipient and conceal their true intentions, whereas making an attempt to keep away from detection by safety checks. On account of the experience required to fight these complicated assaults, e mail safety has historically been siled in disparate gear and safety controls. Professionals are buried underneath an ever-growing pile of RFCs, requiring in depth domain-specific information, infinite vigilance, and meticulous guide interventions, akin to adjusting belief ranges and cultivating enable/block lists with IP addresses, domains, shippers and suppliers. Cisco Safe E mail Menace Protection is main the trade with a serious shift, elevating e mail safety into a brand new period; the place administration will merely encompass associating particular enterprise dangers with the suitable due diligence response required to remediate them. E mail Menace Protection has launched a brand new risk profile that provides prospects deep perception into the precise enterprise dangers of particular person e mail threats and the boldness to behave rapidly. This new visualization is powered by a brand new patent-pending risk detection engine. This engine leverages intelligence distilled from Talos global-scale risk analysis by means of huge volumes of e mail site visitors utilizing machine studying, conduct modeling, and pure language understanding. The detection engine granularly identifies particular underlying risk methods used within the message by the attacker. The recognized methods present the complete context of the risk message as a foundation for the engine to find out risk categorization and particular threat to the enterprise. These malicious methods, together with the risk class and particular enterprise threat, are used to finish the risk profile. The risk profile of every message is recognized in actual time, robotically corrected by coverage, and displayed on to the operator in detailed views of the message, offering deep contextual details about https://weblog.talosintelligence.com/the- benefits-of- primarily based on the intent to take/intent of the attacker and the related dangers to the enterprise. As a part of a broader Prolonged Detection and Response (XDR) technique, the actionable intelligence in E mail Menace Protection integrates with the broader enterprise orchestration of safety controls by means of SecureX, easing operational burden by reducing time technique of remediation (MTTR). E mail Menace Protection supplies a transparent understanding of malicious messages, essentially the most weak targets inside the group, and the simplest means to guard them in opposition to phishing, scams, and BEC assaults. With a clear design and a core deal with simplifying administration, E mail Menace Protection deploys in minutes to strengthen the safety of your present Microsoft 365 Change On-line platform in opposition to essentially the most superior e mail threats. For extra data, go to the Cisco Safe E mail product pages, learn the E mail Menace Protection truth sheet, and watch the demo video beneath. We might love to listen to what you assume. Ask a query, remark beneath, and keep related with Cisco Safe on social media! Cisco Safe Social Channels I want the article roughly Safe E mail Menace Protection: Offering vital perception into enterprise threat provides perspicacity to you and is beneficial for additive to your information
If you are new to the cloud, then planning is important. Having the right tools to monitor and audit your resources within the cloud is a good start. Microsoft Azure has several tools that can assist. Azure Monitor is one of the most important services within Azure to monitor services. At the foundation of Azure Monitor is the agent that collects activity and diagnostic logs for services within Azure as well as outside resources. Information from these agents are presented to the Monitor dashboard. Azure Monitor can be configured to receive network watcher information to determine connectivity issues within the environment. Alerts can be created that set thresholds that may be a cause for concern with corresponding actions that identify what should be done if these alerts are triggered. Azure Policy is a service that allows you to assign rules to govern the Azure subscription and resources. Assigning a policy to a subscription or resource group enforces compliance when creating new resources. They will also audit existing resources against the policy for compliance and allow you to make the adjustments necessary to remediate those resources to comply. Azure Policy feeds governance and compliance information into Azure Security Center. This information is gathered through assigned policies and initiatives within the subscription or resource groups. Much of the data collected from the activity logs, service logs, and policies are fed into the Azure Security Center dashboard, such as MFA, updates, policy compliance, and RBAC roles. The security center dashboard can be used as a central source for policy and compliance of security controls. Azure Security Center provides a central location for monitoring and managing your security posture. Security Center provides a number of graphics and tools based on best practices that can assist you with: - Review policy and compliance to regulatory controls - Monitor resources to best practice security controls - Review network topology and traffic for potential external threats - Monitor and alert using advanced threat analysis and global threat intelligence maps These tools can provide valuable insight into where your company stands in their defense in depth strategy. It will also provide recommendations for improving that strategy.
The virtualized environment is definitely a step forward compared to standard systems of data protection utilized by old-fashioned networks. These older systems are focused on shielding a network from traffic that is coming from the outside. Now, even though these kinds of data shields are still welcomed, the nature of modern business and other endeavors mean that traffic flow needs to continuously happen between networks and the outside environment. This is the moment when data center virtualization can prove to be indispensable. \|Image Credit: trendmicro.com\| Virtualization is a procedure that allows for a different kind of network architecture. It can be used to offer cost reduction, power saving enhancements and as a general consolidation tool. But, at the same time, using it also creates new challenges for the IT teams that run and organize it. This is also the reason why the initial phase of this process needs to be really carefully devised and implemented. Because of these facts, here are the crucial points in the conceptualization of any kind of data center virtualization process for maximum security. Infrastructure Device Access: Using devices to access any virtual data center should be tightly regulated and controlled. The infrastructure used for data access via different devices should be thoroughly hardened and employ the AAA standard for allowing control of access and the initial logging processes. The same should also require devices to be authenticated and then authorized by some form of ACS (Access Control Server). But, a fallback system on a local network should also be available if some or all of ACS servers prove to be unreachable. Out-of-Band Management Interface Hardening: Often, attacks on data centers will take up the form of DOS (Denial of Service) intrusions, so any data center virtualization needs to employ systems that follow bandwidth, looking for any unusual activity. The same should also limit the amount of traffic that can be allocated to any single device and redirect it if need be. This goes for both inbound and outbound traffic because both can become a problem if the data center is compromised. This is why it is really important to have safeguards that constantly measure it and react when it is needed. NetFlow and Syslog: NetFlow, first introduced by Cisco Company, allows for the collection of traffic based on IP networks as it passes through the system interface. These can be used to determine the sources of the traffic, their destination, and many other important factors. On the other hand, Syslog follows production and storing of internal system messages. Both need to be configured in the right manner to allow data center virtualization to be correctly conceptualized. Network Time Protocol: NTP or the Network Time Protocol offers any virtual data center an indispensable way of logging and time marking all access to a system. The same should be enabled on any device that is used during a data center virtualization process, no matter what its function is in the broader network. These can be very important for any troubleshooting procedure that might come during the conceptualization process, but also when the virtual center is activated. Employing these steps during the conceptualization of a data center virtualization process will prove to be exceedingly helpful for any kind of future virtual network. The same actions can both make the network easier for construction and maintenance, but also much safer when it comes to data security. Deney Dentel is the CEO at Nordisk Systems Inc., a managed data backup and recovery solution company in Portland, OR. Deney is the only localised and authorised IBM ProcTIER business partner in Pacific Northwest.
- published: 27 Jul 2015 - views: 12368 Machine learning techniques used in network intrusion detection are susceptible to “model poisoning” by attackers. The speaker will dissect this attack, analyze some proposals for how to circumvent such attacks, and then consider specific use cases of how machine learning and anomaly detection can be used in the web security context. Author: Clarence Chio More: http://www.phdays.com/program/tech/40866/ Any use of this material without the express consent of Positive Technologies is prohibited. With the realisation that Cyber attacks present a significant risk to an organisation’s reputation, efficiency, and profitability, there has been an increase in the instrumentation of networks; from collecting netflow data at routers, to host-based agents collecting detailed process information. To spot the potential threats within a Cyber environment, a large community of researchers have produced many exciting innovations, aligned with such data. Much of this research has been focused around "data driven" techniques, and does not often fuse data from multiple sources. Moreover, incorporation of threat actors' behaviours and motivations (as specified by Cyber security experts) is often non-existent. In this talk, I will present an initial unified Bayesian model for Cyber security, which a... This video shows how to create an intrusion detection system (IDS) with Keras and Tensorflow, with the KDD-99 dataset. An IDS scans network traffic (or other data feeds) and looks for transactions that might indicate that a hacker has successfully infiltrated your system. Code for This Video: https://github.com/jeffheaton/t81_558_deep_learning/blob/master/t81_558_class_14_04_ids_kdd99.ipynb Course Homepage: https://sites.wustl.edu/jeffheaton/t81-558/ Follow Me/Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/HeatonResearch https://github.com/jeffheaton https://twitter.com/jeffheaton Support Me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jeffheaton For ECE,EEE,E&I, E&C & Mechanical,Civil, Bio-Medical,IT, CSE, MSC, MCA, BSC(CS)B.COM(cs) #257, Sapthagiri Complex, Katpadi Main Road, Vellore. (Opp to Reliance Petrol Bunk). Tamil Nadu-632007. Mobile : 9176 620 620 Landline : 0416-2241 901 Email: [email protected] Like Us On: https://www.facebook.com/spiroprojectvellore 📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚 GOOD NEWS FOR COMPUTER ENGINEERS INTRODUCING 5 MINUTES ENGINEERING 🎓🎓🎓🎓🎓🎓🎓🎓 SUBJECT :- Discrete Mathematics (DM) Theory Of Computation (TOC) Artificial Intelligence(AI) Database Management System(DBMS) Software Modeling and Designing(SMD) Software Engineering and Project Planning(SEPM) Data mining and Warehouse(DMW) Data analytics(DA) Mobile Communication(MC) Computer networks(CN) High performance Computing(HPC) Operating system System programming (SPOS) Web technology(WT) Internet of things(IOT) Design and analysis of algorithm(DAA) 💡💡💡💡💡💡💡💡 EACH AND EVERY TOPIC OF EACH AND EVERY SUBJECT (MENTIONED ABOVE) IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING LIFE IS EXPLAINED IN JUST 5 MINUTES. 💡💡💡💡💡💡💡💡 THE EASIEST EXPLANATION EVER ON EVERY ENGINEERING SUBJECT IN JUST 5 MINUTES. 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏... Recorded: 10/11/2000 CERIAS Security Seminar at Purdue University Developing Data Mining Techniques for Intrusion Detection: A Progress Report Wenke Lee, North Carolina State University Intrusion detection (ID) is an important component of infrastructure protection mechanisms. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) need to be accurate, adaptive, extensible, and cost-effective. These requirements are very challenging because of the complexities of today's network environments and the lack of IDS development tools. Our research aims to systematically improve the development process of IDSs. In the first half of the talk, I will describe our data mining framework for constructing ID models. This framework mines activity patterns from system audit data and extracts predictive features from t... A10's Gunter Reiss and Kurt Bertone, CEO Fidelis Cybersecurity, talk about the role of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in network intrusion detection and prevention as well as endpoint security and why eliminating the SSL blind spot is essential. For more information please open this site: http://www.sans.org/course/advanced-computer-forensic-analysis-incident-response FOR508: Advanced Incident Response will help you determine: How the breach occurred Compromised and affected systems What attackers took or changed Incident containment and remediation. THE ADVANCED PERSISTENT THREAT IS IN YOUR NETWORK - TIME TO GO HUNTING! DAY 0: A 3-letter government agency contacts you to say critical information was stolen through a targeted attack on your organization. They won't tell how they know, but they identify several breached systems within your enterprise. An Advanced Persistent Threat adversary, aka an APT, is likely involved - the most sophisticated threat you are likely to face in your efforts to defend your systems and data. ... Originally aired on September 3, 2014. In this webcast, Michael Collins will give you an amazing piece of technology: a real-time intrusion detection system which, if you're monitoring a /16 or larger, has a 100% true positive rate. Are you ready? You will be scanned on ports 22, 25, 80, 135 and 443. Intrusion detection systems are very good at providing a large stream of useless information. Built in an era when attackers built hand-crafted exploits in the backyard woodshed and tested them on systems over slow and extensive periods, they were never really built to handle an Internet where attackers effectively harvest networks for hosts. Michael will discuss building actionable notifications out of intrusion detection systems, the base-rate fallacy, the core statistical problem that li... KDDCUP 99 by Chongshen Ma, Carnegie Mellon University. The Independent \| 27 Feb 2020 Canada Dot Com \| 27 Feb 2020 The Spokesman-Review \| 27 Feb 2020 The Independent \| 27 Feb 2020 Time Magazine \| 27 Feb 2020
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