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Crypto
Las criptomonedas y el futuro de la ciberdefensa
Prelude
The last 12 months have shown tremendous volatility in the value of cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is the most prominent example. At the start of 2017, Bitcoin lingered around the $2,000 mark before suddenly taking off, climbing to historic highs of close to $20,000 in December 2017. Demand has since subsided, and at the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin is near to $10,772.
While Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency, numerous alternatives, often called ‘altcoins’ have emerged and grown in value in the last 12 months. For example, Dogecoin, originally created to be a spoof cryptocurrency after a widespread internet meme, reached a notable market capitalization milestone of $2bn in January 2018.
Nowadays it is almost impossible to profitably mine Bitcoin on commodity hardware such as laptops, smartphones or desktop computers. At this late state, it just takes too long to perform the relevant calculations, and the cost of electricity is higher than the anticipated revenue in most cases. Other altcoins such as Monero use different algorithms, making them viable alternatives for aspiring crypto miners. It is often still feasible to mine altcoins on commodity hardware and see a return on investment.
The value of most altcoins is closely tied to the value of Bitcoin and, in many cases, the relationship is broadly proportional – a rise in Bitcoin prompting a similar lift in the altcoins. Monero, which has been rapidly adopted by Darknet markets, has profited from this effect. While Monero was valued at around $10 in January 2017, its price has been pumped up to $419 a year later.
There is much that is still not clear about the cryptocurrency phenomenon. Debate as to its relative value and its status as a currency rages, and will not be resolved any time soon. However, from a cyber security perspective there can be no doubt that the combination of altcoins being mineable on commodity hardware, the fact that mining is now becoming profitable as a side-effect of Bitcoin’s rise, and a maturity in cryptocurrency-related tech has led to a surge in cryptocurrency-related attacks.
Attack vectors
Darktrace has observed an abrupt increase of cryptocurrency-related attacks over the last 12 months. Both the frequency and the diversity of these attacks has grown significantly and largely mirrors the remarkable rise in the value of Bitcoin over that period.
Previously, cyber-criminals monetized their operations via banking Trojans/credit card fraud, selling stolen data and ransomware on the Darknet. However, criminals are notoriously adaptable and will follow the money wherever it leads, leading to an increase in cryptojacking’s popularity.
Cryptocurrency mining might not be as profitable as ransomware is upfront, but it can be secretly pursued for months without creating the havoc that characterizes ransomware attacks. Most users and security products might not notice a cryptocurrency miner being installed on a corporate device as it does not show obvious threats or messages to a user, except for an occasional increase in CPU or RAM usage.
Identifying these attacks can be very difficult for traditional security tools as they were not originally designed to catch this type of threat. Nor was Darktrace, but its approach – which relies on its evolving understanding of patterns of behavior – means that it can detect such attacks without having to know what to look for in advance.
Darktrace has detected a number of different attack vectors related to cryptocurrency attacks.
- Nefarious use of corporate resources
Darktrace has detected a range of incidents where employees were intentionally installing cryptocurrency mining software on their corporate devices to mine for personal gain. These employees do not have to pay for the electricity used to run the corporate device in the office – they are basically turning their employer’s electricity into cash by commandeering it for mining operations.
This is commonly seen as a compliance breach and increases the attack surface of a device that has mining software installed. It puts the corporate device at risk and also increases operational costs as the power consumption usually goes up for mining devices. The most popular cryptocurrency choices for this kind of mining in the last 12 months were Etherium and Monero – altcoins that can profitably be mined without the need for inordinate electricity. - Coinhive drive-by mining
Coinhive is a technology that allows website owners to use their visitors’ computing power to mine a tiny fraction of cryptocurrency for the website owner. Visitors will experience a small increase in computer resource consumption while browsing the website. Some websites experiment with this model to create new forms of revenue streams alternative to advertisement and banner placements.
Coinhive usage is often not an opt-in process. Darktrace has observed various customer devices that regularly visit websites leveraging Coinhive technology. While the power consumption increase for a device browsing a website with Coinhive is ultimately negligible, the cumulative effect of a sizeable portion of the workforce unwittingly browsing websites using Coinhive results in increased power consumption cost for the organization as a whole. - Malicious insider
A malicious insider compromised his employer’s website to put a Coinhive script on there. This then mined Monero for every visitor on the employer’s website for the malicious insider’s personal gain. - Traditional malware
Cyber criminals are constantly looking to improve the return on investment of their operations. Reports suggest that criminals are starting to adjust their monetization methods based on the financial means of their targets. Suppose you can’t pay the fee extorted in a ransomware attack? They’ll just install a crypto miner on your device instead to ensure that the attack is not completely fruitless.
As malware authors become more sophisticated, they often deploy multi-staged malware that can swap weaponized payloads. Once malware has infected a system successfully, its authors can often decide what actions to take next. Encrypt the device and extort a ransom? Install a banking Trojan to harvest credit card details? Install more spyware modules to look for data exfiltration? Or, now, install a cryptocurrency miner.
These pieces of malware operate stealthily and often go undetected for several weeks. An infection might start with a phishing email that contains a macro-enabled document. As soon as a user enabled the macro, the malware will download a file-less stager that lives in memory and cannot be detected by traditional antivirus. Command and control communication is usually maintained via IP addresses that change on a daily basis in order to outrun threat intelligence and blacklisting attempts. As no obvious damage is done straight away, these attacks often stay under the radar for prolonged times, so long as self-learning technology such as Darktrace is not employed.
This becomes much more concerning as malware authors could swap one payload for another overnight if they deem it more profitable, switching from a furtive crypto mining Trojan to ransomware the next day. While we have not observed this kind of attack in the wild yet, it is plausible, and in cyberspace what can be done, will be done.
Conclusions
Revolutionary technologies like cryptocurrencies have both their dark and light aspects. For all of the creative energy released by the crypto-blockchain revolution, Bitcoin and its alternatives have quickly become the universal currency of the criminal underworld. Indeed, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz – an adamant critic of cryptocurrencies – has said that the whole value of Bitcoin resides in its “potential for circumvention” and “lack of oversight”.
While Stiglitz’s case may be overstated, there can be no question that cyber criminals have sensed a new opportunity to make money. A lot of organizations still regard crypto mining as a compliance incident. This can lead to grave consequences as a cryptocurrency mining device might lead to more severe incidents that can have a serious effect on business operations.
This kind of threat is difficult to detect as no obvious damage is done. However, with Darktrace’s machine learning we can correlate even the weakest indicators of such an attack into a compelling picture of threat. While traditional tools may struggle to see these deviations, Darktrace can pinpoint the changes in behavior effected by cryptocurrency miners without having to rely on any blacklists or signatures.
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Dentro del SOC
How Abuse of ‘PerfectData Software’ May Create a Perfect Storm: An Emerging Trend in Account Takeovers
Amidst the ever-changing threat landscape, new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) seem to emerge daily, creating extreme challenges for security teams. The broad range of attack methods utilized by attackers seems to present an insurmountable problem: how do you defend against a playbook that does not yet exist?
Faced with the growing number of novel and uncommon attack methods, it is essential for organizations to adopt a security solution able to detect threats based on their anomalies, rather than relying on threat intelligence alone.
In March 2023, Darktrace observed an emerging trend in the use of an application known as ‘PerfectData Software’ for probable malicious purposes in several Microsoft 365 account takeovers.
Using its anomaly-based detection, Darktrace DETECT™ was able to identify the activity chain surrounding the use of this application, potentially uncovering a novel piece of threat actor tradecraft in the process.
Microsoft 365 Intrusions
In recent years, Microsoft’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite, Microsoft 365, along with its built-in identity and access management (IAM) service, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), have been heavily targeted by threat actors due to their near-ubiquitous usage across industries. Four out of every five Fortune 500 companies, for example, use Microsoft 365 services [1].
Malicious actors typically gain entry to organizations’ Microsoft 365 environments by abusing either stolen account credentials or stolen session cookies [2]. Once inside, actors can access sensitive data within mailboxes or SharePoint repositories, and send out emails or Teams messages. This activity can often result in serious financial harm, especially in cases where the malicious actor’s end-goal is to elicit fraudulent transactions.
Darktrace regularly observes malicious actors behaving in predictable ways once they gain access to customer Microsoft 365 environment. One typical example is the creation of new inbox rules and sending deceitful emails intended to convince recipients to carry out subsequent actions, such as following a malicious link or providing sensitive information. It is also common for actors to register new applications in Azure AD so that they can be used to conduct follow-up activities, like mass-mailing or data theft. The registration of applications in Azure AD therefore seems to be a relatively predictable threat actor behavior [3][4]. Darktrace DETECT understands that unusual application registrations in Azure AD may constitute a deviation in expected behavior, and therefore a possible indicator of account compromise.
These registrations of applications in Azure AD are evidenced by creations of, as well as assignments of permissions to, Service Principals in Azure AD. Darktrace has detected a growing trend in actors creating and assigning permissions to a Service Principal named ‘PerfectData Software’. Further investigation of this Azure AD activity revealed it to be part of an ongoing account takeover.
‘PerfectData Software’ Activity
Darktrace observed variations of the following pattern of activity relating to an application named ‘PerfectData Software’ within its customer base:
- Actor signs in to a Microsoft 365 account from an endpoint associated with a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Private Network (VPN) service
- Actor registers an application called 'PerfectData Software' with Azure AD, and then grants permissions to the application
- Actor accesses mailbox data and creates inbox rule
In two separate incidents, malicious actors were observed conducting their activities from endpoints associated with VPN services (HideMyAss (HMA) VPN and Surfshark VPN, respectively) and from endpoints within the Autonomous System AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01.
In March 2023, Darktrace observed a malicious actor signing in to a Microsoft 365 account from a Kuwait-based IP address within the Autonomous System, AS198605 AVAST Software s.r.o. This IP address is associated with the VPN service, HMA VPN. Over the next couple of days, an actor (likely the same malicious actor) signed in to the account several more times from two different Nigeria-based endpoints, as well as a VPS-related endpoint and a HMA VPN endpoint.
During their login sessions, the actor performed a variety of actions. First, they created and assigned permissions to a Service Principal named ‘PerfectData Software’. This Service Principal creation represents the registration of an application called ‘PerfectData Software’ in Azure AD. Although the reason for registering this application is unclear, within a few days the actor registered and granted permission to another application, ‘Newsletter Software Supermailer’, and created a new inbox rule names ‘s’ on the mailbox of the hijacked account. This inbox rule moved emails meeting certain conditions to a folder named ‘RSS Subscription. The ‘Newsletter Software Supermailer’ application was likely registered by the actor to facilitate mass-mailing activity.
Immediately after these actions, Darktrace detected the actor sending out thousands of malicious emails from the account. The emails included an attachment named ‘Credit Transfer Copy.html’, which contained a suspicious link. Further investigation revealed that the customer’s network had received several fake invoice emails prior to this initial intrusion activity. Additionally, there was an unusually high volume of failed logins to the compromised account around the time of the initial access.
In a separate case also observed by Darktrace in March 2023, a malicious actor was observed signing in to a Microsoft 365 account from an endpoint within the Autonomous System, AS397086 LAYER-HOST-HOUSTON. The endpoint appears to be related to the VPN service, Surfshark VPN. This login was followed by several failed and successful logins from a VPS-related within the Autonomous System, AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01. The actor was then seen registering and assigning permissions to an application called ‘PerfectData Software’. As with the previous example, the motives for this registration are unclear. The actor proceeded to log in several more times from a Surfshark VPN endpoint, however, they were not observed carrying out any further suspicious activity.
It was not clear in either of these examples, nor in fact any of cases observed by Darktrace, why actors had registered and assigned permissions to an application called ‘PerfectData Software’, and there do not appear to be any open-source intelligence (OSINT) resources or online literature related to the malicious usage of an application by that name. That said, there are several websites which appear to provide email migration and data recovery/backup tools under the moniker ‘PerfectData Software’.
It is unclear whether the use of ‘PerfectData Software’ by malicious actors observed on the networks of Darktrace customers was one of these tools. However, given the nature of the tools, it is possible that the actors intended to use them to facilitate the exfiltration of email data from compromises mailboxes.
If the legitimate software ‘PerfectData’ is the application in question in these incidents, it is likely being purchased and misused by attackers for malicious purposes. It is also possible the application referenced in the incidents is a spoof of the legitimate ‘PerfectData’ software designed to masquerade a malicious application as legitimate.
Darktrace Coverage
Cases of ‘PerfectData Software’ activity chains detected by Darktrace typically began with an actor signing into an internal user’s Microsoft 365 account from a VPN or VPS-related endpoint. These login events, along with the suspicious email and/or brute-force activity which preceded them, caused the following DETECT models to breach:
- SaaS / Access / Unusual External Source for SaaS Credential Use
- SaaS / Access / Suspicious Login Attempt
- SaaS / Compromise / Login From Rare Following Suspicious Login Attempt(s)
- SaaS / Email Nexus / Unusual Location for SaaS and Email Activity
Subsequent activities, including inbox rule creations, registration of applications in Azure AD, and mass-mailing activity, resulted in breaches of the following DETECT models.
- SaaS / Admin / OAuth Permission Grant
- SaaS / Compromise / Unusual Logic Following OAuth Grant
- SaaS / Admin / New Application Service Principal
- IaaS / Admin / Azure Application Administration Activities
- SaaS / Compliance / New Email Rule
- SaaS / Compromiso / Inicio de sesión inusual y nueva regla de correo electrónico
- SaaS / Email Nexus / Suspicious Internal Exchange Activity
- SaaS / Email Nexus / Possible Outbound Email Spam
- SaaS / Compromise / Unusual Login and Outbound Email Spam
- SaaS / Compromise / Suspicious Login and Suspicious Outbound Email(s)
In cases where Darktrace RESPOND™ was enabled in autonomous response mode, ‘PerfectData Software’ activity chains resulted in breaches of the following RESPOND models:
• Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Suspicious SaaS Activity Block
• Antigena / SaaS / Antigena Significant Compliance Activity Block
In response to these model breaches, Darktrace RESPOND took immediate action, performing aggressive, inhibitive actions, such as forcing the actor to log out of the SaaS platform, and disabling the user entirely. When applied autonomously, these RESPOND actions would seriously impede an attacker’s progress and minimize network disruption.
In addition, Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst was able to autonomously investigate registrations of the ‘PerfectData Software’ application and summarized its findings into digestible reports.
Conclusion
Due to the widespread adoption of Microsoft 365 services in the workplace and continued emphasis on a remote workforce, account hijackings now pose a more serious threat to organizations around the world than ever before. The cases discussed here illustrate the tendency of malicious actors to conduct their activities from endpoints associated with VPN services, while also registering new applications, like PerfectData Software, with malicious intent.
While it was unclear exactly why the malicious actors were using ‘PerfectData Software’ as part of their account hijacking, it is clear that either the legitimate or spoofed version of the application is becoming an very likely emergent piece of threat actor tradecraft.
Darktrace DETECT’s anomaly-based approach to threat detection allowed it to recognize that the use of ‘PerfectData Software’ represented a deviation in the SaaS user’s expected behavior. While Darktrace RESPOND, when enabled in autonomous response mode, was able to quickly take preventative action against threat actors, blocking the potential use of the application for data exfiltration or other nefarious purposes.
Appendices
MITRE ATT&CK Mapping
Reconnaissance:
• T1598 – Phishing for Information
Credential Access:
• T1110 – Brute Force
Initial Access:
• T1078.004 – Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts
Command and Control:
• T1105 – Ingress Tool Transfer
Persistence:
• T1098.003 – Account Manipulation: Additional Cloud Roles
Collection:
• T1114 – Email Collection
Defense Evasion:
• T1564.008 – Hide Artifacts: Email Hiding Rules
Lateral Movement:
• T1534 – Internal Spearphishing
Unusual Source IPs
• 5.62.60[.]202 (AS198605 AVAST Software s.r.o.)
• 160.152.10[.]215 (AS37637 Smile-Nigeria-AS)
• 197.244.250[.]155 (AS37705 TOPNET)
• 169.159.92[.]36 (AS37122 SMILE)
• 45.62.170[.]237 (AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01)
• 92.38.180[.]49 (AS202422 G-Core Labs S.A)
• 129.56.36[.]26 (AS327952 AS-NATCOM)
• 92.38.180[.]47 (AS202422 G-Core Labs S.A.)
• 107.179.20[.]214 (AS397086 LAYER-HOST-HOUSTON)
• 45.62.170[.]31 (AS396073 MAJESTIC-HOSTING-01)
References
[1] https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/microsoft-facts/
[2] https://intel471.com/blog/countering-the-problem-of-credential-theft
[3] https://darktrace.com/blog/business-email-compromise-to-mass-phishing-campaign-attack-analysis
[4] https://darktrace.com/blog/breakdown-of-a-multi-account-compromise-within-office-365
Blog
Cloud
Darktrace Integrates Self-Learning AI with Amazon Security Lake to Support Security Investigations
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Darktrace has deepened its relationship with AWS by integrating its detection and response capabilities with Amazon Security Lake.
This development will allow mutual customers to seamlessly combine Darktrace AI’s bespoke understanding of their organization with the Threat Intelligence offered by other security tools, and investigate all of their alerts in one central location.
This integration will improve the value security teams get from both products, streamlining analyst workflows and improving their ability to detect and respond to the full spectrum of known and unknown cyber-threats.
How Darktrace and Amazon Security Lake augment security teams
Amazon Security Lake is a newly-released service that automatically centralizes an organization’s security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a customer owned purpose-built data lake. Both Darktrace and Amazon Security Lake support the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), an open standard to simplify, combine, and analyze security logs.
Customers can store security logs, events, alerts, and other relevant data generated by various AWS services and security tools. By consolidating security data in a central lake, organizations can gain a holistic view of their security posture, perform advanced analytics, detect anomalies and open investigations to improve their security practices.
With Darktrace DETECT and RESPOND AI engines covering all assets across IT, OT, network, endpoint, IoT, email and cloud, organizations can augment the value of their security data lakes by feeding Darktrace’s rich and context-aware datapoints to Amazon Security Lake.
Amazon Security Lake empowers security teams to improve the protection of your digital estate:
- Quick and painless data normalization
- Fast-tracks ability to investigate, triage and respond to security events
- Broader visibility aids more effective decision-making
- Surfaces and prioritizes anomalies for further investigation
- Single interface for seamless data management
How will Darktrace customers benefit?
Across the Cyber AI Loop, all Darktrace solutions have been architected with AWS best practices in mind. With this integration, Darktrace is bringing together its understanding of ‘self’ for every organization with the centralized data visibility of the Amazon Security Lake. Darktrace’s unique approach to cyber security, powered by groundbreaking AI research, delivers a superior dataset based on a deep and interconnected understanding of the enterprise.
Where other cyber security solutions are trained to identify threats based on historical attack data and techniques, Darktrace DETECT gains a bespoke understanding of every digital environment, continuously analyzing users, assets, devices and the complex relationships between them. Our AI analyzes thousands of metrics to reveal subtle deviations that may signal an evolving issue – even unknown techniques and novel malware. It distinguishes between malicious and benign behavior, identifying harmful activity that typically goes unnoticed. This rich dataset is fed into RESPOND, which takes precise action to neutralize threats against any and every asset, no matter where data resides.
Both DETECT and RESPOND are supported by Darktrace Self-Learning AI, which provides full, real-time visibility into an organization’s systems and data. This always-on threat analysis already makes humans better at cyber security, improving decisions and outcomes based on total visibility of the digital ecosystem, supporting human performance with AI coverage and empowering security teams to proactively protect critical assets.
Converting Darktrace alerts to the Amazon Security Lake Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) supplies the Security Operations Center (SOC) and incident response team with contextualized data, empowering them to accelerate their investigation, triage and response to potential cyber threats.
Darktrace is available for purchase on the AWS Marketplace.
Learn more about how Darktrace provides full-coverage, AI-powered cloud security for AWS, or see how our customers use Darktrace in their AWS cloud environments.
