Monthly Archives: November 2017

Puzzling: Five years old critical vulnerabilities exploited in November 2017

26 November 2017

Section Exploited Vulnerabilities of the Recorded Future Cyber Daily is sometimes really frightening. On November 9th, 2017, 249 successful exploits of CVE-2012-1823, a vulnerability in PHP, were recorded. This is hard to believe because CVE-2012-1823 was published on May 11th, 2012. Although a patch was available at the date of publication, it seems that the operators of this systems were not able to implement them within the past five years.

However, it would have been of urgent need in this case. CVE-2012-1823 is a so-called RCE (Remote Code Execution) vulnerability, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on a victim’s computer, and, in the worst case, to hijack the victim’s network.

RCE vulnerabilities are included in the critical vulnerabilities. Critical vulnerabilities are

  • exploitable from the network
  • need only low or medium skills to exploit
  • need no authentication
  • cause great damage, have high severity
  • allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the victims computer

If an application system is operated in the DMZ, critical vulnerabilities must be patched directly upon publication to prevent attackers from getting onto your network. Or at least, between the time of publication and an exploit or proof of concept shows up. Since examples of how to exploit this PHP vulnerability were available in early May 2012, immediate action was required.

The big question is: Why were this vulnerable PHP versions not directly patched?

Exploitation of older vulnerabilities is not an isolated case. The HPE 2016 Cyber Risk Report shows, that in 2016

  • 47% of successful exploits use five or more years old vulnerabilities.
  • 68% of successful exploits use three or more years old vulnerabilities, 47% of them were critical vulnerabilities.
  • Stuxnet, CVE-2010-2568, was used in 29% of successful exploits.

An analysis of the critical vulnerabilities by vendors shows, that more critical vulnerabilities were found in non-Microsoft products than in Microsoft products.

Critical vulnerabilities 2010 - 2016

Critical vulnerabilities 2010 – 2016 by vendors. Click to enlarge.

But automated patch management is only available for Microsoft and few of the other vendors’ (e.g. Adobe, Oracle, SAP) products. Thus, we can expect that many critical vulnerabilities remain unpatched, which results in an ever-growing pool of opportunities for cyber criminals.

An ever growing pool of opportunities

An ever-growing pool of opportunities. Click to enlarge.

1) For the chart above I assumed that 50% of critical vulnerabilities remain unpatched. This assumption is based on the analysis of the 2017 NIST NVD data as of August 31st, 2017.

Since no automated patch management exists for PHP we can expect, that CVE-2012-1823 was rarely patched. But the worst is yet to come: From the HPE 2016 Cyber Risk Report we learn, that even six years old Microsoft vulnerabilities (Stuxnet, CVE-2010-2568) are not patched.

How to tackle this issue? From my point of view, the cause is compliance driven security. We often do patching of everything to meet compliance with a certain standard, instead of focusing on the real important issues, e.g., the critical vulnerabilities. Or, in other words, we close a lot of mouse holes while the barn door remains wide open.

WIth this, we must move from patching to vulnerability management, and priority patching for the critical vulnerabilities. Through a differentiated inspection of vulnerabilities we get out of the patch treadmill and can start working on the important cyber security issues.

By the way, if you haven’t subscribed to the Recorded Future Cyber Daily yet, consider to do it this week.

Have a great week.

AutoIt Scripting Used By Overlay Malware to Bypass AV Detection

13 November 2017

Seven Phases Cyber Kill Chain

Cyber Kill Chain

Anti-Virus (AV) protection works fine if the attacker uses a well-known malware, e.g. Locky, or one of its variants. In this case, the AV scan engine computes the fingerprint of the malicious object and checks it against its fingerprint database. Since a fingerprint is available, the attack is stopped in the delivery phase of a cyber attack the latest.

In the case of the AutoIt Overlay Malware the attacker hides the pattern in an AutoIt script which results in a modified fingerprint. Since this fingerprint is not known in the database the AV scan engine cannot stop the attack. For details about the AutoIt Overlay Malware see this excellent report by Gadi Ostrovsky published on November 8, 2017 in the IBM Security Intelligence blog

Anti-Virus evasion techniques are well known for years. Thus companies are well advised to rely not only on an anti-malware system in their endpoint protection strategy.

My favorite add-on to Anti-Malware systems is still Blue Ridge Networks AppGuard because its available for consumers as well as for businesses. AppGuard would block the AutoIt Overlay Malware during the installation phase the latest because it just blocks the execution of whatever objects from inside a user’s home directory.

Have a great week.

Microsoft announces unbreakable Edge Browser with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

4 November 2017

On 13 July 2015 Bromium announced a partnership with Microsoft to integrate the Bromium micro-virtualization technology in Windows 10. Two years later, on 23 October 2017, Microsoft announced the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. With this update, Microsoft enhances Systems Center Endpoint Protection by many new security functions. The Bromium micro-virtualization technology is integrated in Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG):

Windows Defender Application Guard makes Microsoft Edge the most secure browser for enterprise by hardware isolating the browser away from your apps, data, network and even Windows itself. WDAG protects your Microsoft Edge browsing sessions so if users encounter malware or hacking attempts while online they won’t impact the rest of your PC.

This sounds very promising! For details see this post published on 23 October 2017 in the Windows Security blog.

Unfortunately, currently only enterprise customers benefit from WDAG. I would appreciate it if Microsoft would integrate WDAG as soon as possible in all Windows versions to allow consumers and small businesses to benefit from WDAG as well.

Have a great weekend.