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BLACK HAT ASIA – Singapore – Security analysts here today demonstrated how to detect security breaches by using Amazon Web Services (AWS) keys as honey tokens to lure cybercriminals.

A honey form is any form of credential or resource that you can use for monitoring and logging on, but doesn’t exist anywhere in practical terms, explained Daniel Grzelak, head of security at Atlassian. It can be anything: an email address that doesn’t belong to anyone and is generally available, a DNS name no one should ever resolve, a URL that nobody ever visits.

In their presentation, Grzelak and Dan Bourke, senior security analyst at Atlassian, showed how AWS keys can be configured as honey tokens at scale. These tokens can be placed anywhere across your environment or the supply chain and when threat actors find them, they’ll try to use them. As a result, you’ll know when and where a security breach occurs.

These keys are valuable to attackers and interesting for a few reasons, Grzelak said. Hackers who find AWS keys know they could use them to control someone’s infrastructure. “Whenever some account gets compromised, one of the first things attackers do is look for another credential that lets them get into something more,” he continued.

AWS provides complex, full-featured policy access management infrastructure, and keys to this infrastructure are placed everywhere. They’re frequently found in GitHub repositories but also in .txt files, on the desktop, etc.

An AWS access key is like a scratch-off lottery ticket. If the attacker wins, they gain control over someone’s infrastructure. If they lose, the key is simply an information disclosure vector that gives them more chances to win. However, they have to test it first.

“If an attacker finds an access key, there’s no other way to find if it’s useful other than to use the access key,” Grzelak said. “One important property is, while access keys might be the keys to the kingdom, they don’t have to be.”

These keys could potentially grant hackers a lot of power or grant them nothing. They could also help businesses detect breaches in their networks. The logging capability in AWS means denial actions are logged and businesses can use them. If AWS keys are configured as honey tokens, a security team can know when, exactly, someone tried to use a specific token to log in.

If you want to generate a single access token, you can do so on Thinkst and put the token on your desktop. However, Grzelak and Bourke wanted to create tokens at scale to determine the implications if a business could place thousands of honey tokens across an enterprise.

Project Spacecrab

To generate this many tokens, the researchers built Project Spacecrab, which let users create, annotate, and alert on AWS keys, which don’t provide access to anything, at mass scale. All keys get the deny-all policy so if anyone tried to use them, their actions are loaded into an S3 bucket.

Since AWS has a per-account user limit of 5,000 users and each can have two tokens, there is a limit of 10,000 tokens per account. However, as the researchers pointed out, that would be plenty to cover microservices for cloud services, or the number of desktops in an enterprise.

A few interesting lessons came from this experiment. The first: AWS closely monitors public Github repositories and will open support cases when public keys are put into a public GitHub repository. The second: Posting hundreds of keys to the Internet violates the AWS terms of use.

Project Spacecrab also showed that when someone posts their credentials to a public repository on GitHub, there’s an 83% chance someone will use them. The average time to exploit after posting is almost exactly 30 minutes, the researchers pointed out.

Pastebin, in contrast, has a completely different exploitation profile. Only 9% of tokens posted on Pastebin were exploited, compared with more than 80% on GitHub.

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Kelly Sheridan is the Staff Editor at Dark Reading, where she focuses on cybersecurity news and analysis. She is a business technology journalist who previously reported for InformationWeek, where she covered Microsoft, and Insurance Technology, where she covered financial … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/hunting-cybercriminals-with-aws-honey-tokens/d/d-id/1331342?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Spoiler alert: If application security isn’t dead yet, its days are numbered. OK, this is an over-exaggeration, but fear not, application security engineers — the work you do is actually becoming more important than ever, and your budget will soon reflect this. Application security will never die, but it will have to morph to succeed.

Application security has been around for well over 15 years as a subset of enterprise security. Since the early 2000s, application security experts have made a great living assessing websites and selling application penetration tests. But today, more and more of those experts are changing titles from application security engineer to product security engineer. This is more than just a semantic shift; it reflects a real change in the nature of enterprise security. To understand its significance, consider the impact of two major industry trends: the move to the cloud and enterprise digital transformation.

The Move to the Cloud
The rapid rise of cloud, DevOps, and agile development has left security teams struggling to keep up. As applications are built using as-a-service platform, infrastructure, and function offerings such as Amazon Web Services, Pivotal, and Lambda, the traditional model of network- and host-based security is now in the hands of third-party providers. This abstraction has shrunk the security perimeter and forced traditional enterprise security experts to update their skills.

At the same time, we’ve also seen the rise of the DevOps security specialist. In the past, application security teams held responsibility for the security of code and ran static and dynamic analysis tools to help the development team vet their output. Now these techniques are being reinvented into a more DevOps-focused model where developers and operations teams analyze, secure, and repair their own code and deployments. This eases the burden on the already overtaxed application security team and puts security ownership where it belongs: in the hands of the team that built the application in the first place. Integrating application security into the continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline also allows security verification to occur in real time, long the dream of application security experts.

Digital Transformation
Adding fuel to the fire is the transformation of enterprise business from traditional models to digital-first. Businesses of all kinds are now integrating digital technology into all areas of their products, services and operations to support new ways of delivering value.

As products move online, the domain of the security expert is expanding greatly. Applications are no longer limited to internally focused support systems — they’re now the lifeblood of the organization and its most important revenue stream. It’s no longer enough to focus on safeguarding a handful of web applications; application security engineers must now own security across entire product lines and protect the business itself.

The Rise of Product Security
In this light, the shift from application security to product security — as both a job title and a way of thinking about security — makes perfect sense. Cloud, DevOps, agile development, and the digital transformation they enable have rendered the traditional app-focused security perspective obsolete. It’s not about securing a handful of line-of-business applications anymore. Security engineers are now responsible for the security of the products created to deliver value to customers, drive competitive differentiation, and advance corporate strategy.

The stakes have never been higher. A compromised in-house productivity app can temporarily disrupt or delay operations — but a compromised core product or service in the hands of customers can deal a devastating blow to the business itself.

The distinction may seem nuanced, but consider this: ask an executive how much sleep he or she loses worrying about the integrity of the company’s applications and you’re likely to get a blank stare. Now ask the same question about the integrity of the company’s products.

Security engineers are right to embrace this new product-centric conception of their role. Hopefully, this shift will help bring awareness to the growing importance of their work — and help them secure the enhanced budget, resources, and tools they need to ensure the security of the products that power their business, and the businesses that power the new digital economy.  

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Tyler Shields is Vice President of Marketing, Strategy, and Partnerships at Signal Sciences. Prior to joining Signal Sciences, Shields covered all things applications, mobile, and IoT security as distinguished analyst at Forrest Research. Before Forrester, he managed mobile … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/is-application-security-dead/a/d-id/1331324?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Criminals have deployed a variety of tactics in recent months to try and profit from the cryptocurrency boom.

One of them is the use of Web injects to intercept and modify traffic between user browsers and cryptocurrency sites in order to steal coins from victims and transfer it to accounts held by criminals.

Third-party risk management firm SecurityScorecard says it has seen recent evidence of threat actors using Web injects to target cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Bitcoin wallet Blockchain.info. Tens of thousands of bots can run the Web injects to steal cryptocurrency, making them a potent threat for investors and exchanges, according to SecurityScorecard.

A Web inject is basically code for injecting malicious content into a Web page before the page is rendered on a user’s browser. This work by intercepting and modifying traffic between a Web server and user browser in such a manner that the victim typically does not notice anything amiss.

Web injects can be used to add or delete content on the Web pages that a victim sees. For instance, a Web inject can be used to add a field in the login screen for capturing the PIN a user might use to access his or her bank account, or it can be used to delete warnings that a user might normally see when viewing a particular Web page. Web injects typically have been used to steal credentials for accessing bank accounts, but recently have begun to play a role in cryptocurrency heists as well.

Bot masters can readily buy the Web injects for Coinbase and Blockchain.info and distribute them to infected computers in a botnet, says Doina Cosovan, malware researcher at SecurityScorecard. The malware installed on those infected computers receive the Web injects and inject them in the Coinbase and Blockchain.info websites if a user happens to visit either site.

These Web injects are provided as a service, so different malware families can use them. Cosovan says. “We noticed Zeus and Ramnit in particular, but these are simply examples we observed. Any other bot master controlling bots infected with a malware family which has capabilities to inject code in websites can buy and use these Web injects on their bots,” she notes.

The Web inject for Coinbase that SecurityScorecard discovered is designed to change the settings on a victim’s account in order to enable digital coin transfers without requiring the user’s confirmation. When a user tries to log in to his or her Coinbase account, the injected JavaScript content first disables the “Enter” key for the email and password fields so the user has to actually click on the “Submit” button in order to submit the form, according to SecurityScorecard.

It also creates a new button that has mostly the same attributes as the original button, and a few additional malicious ones. It then adds the rogue “Submit” button on top of the original sign-in button so that the victim clicks on the malicious button rather than the original. The ultimate goal is to capture the victim’s multifactor authentication information and then using it to change account settings so further transactions can be carried out without requiring the user’s approval.

“Once this change is made, the injected content can start making transactions without the need to authorize them with [two-factor authentication],” Cosovan says. “Even more, the user’s access to the settings is blocked, so that he can’t enable the two-factor authentication for transactions,” she adds.

The Blockchain.info Web inject has somewhat similar functionality but in this case is designed to steal from a user’s Bitcoin wallet and transfer the digital currency to accounts held by threat actors. As a final touch, the Web inject presents the user with a “Service Unavailable” notice after stealing the cryptocurrency, thereby delaying the victim’s ability to detect the theft, SecurityScorecard said.

The use of Web injects in cryptocurrency theft is one of many tactics that cybercriminals are employing to profit from the surging interest in Bitcoin, Monero, and other cryptocurrencies worldwide. Even as defenders have adapted their tactics to deal with threats, criminals have come up with new ways around them.

The latest, reported by security vendor Minerva this week, is a campaign it has dubbed GhostMiner, which involves the use of fileless crypto-mining malware. According to Minerva, the operators of the campaign are using PowerShell frameworks to conceal the presence of crypto-mining software on infected systems.

According to the company, the tactics employed in the campaign have been extremely effective at bypassing anti-malware tools. Some of the payloads being used in the campaign were completely undetected by products from all major security vendors, Minerva said.

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Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop ITX. Learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop ITX 2018 agenda here.

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/criminals-using-web-injects-to-steal-cryptocurrency/d/d-id/1331350?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

F5 Labs recently examined 433 data breach incidents to better understand attack paths from the initial attack to the root cause of the breach. Specifically, we looked at breaches where there was a known attack type, root cause, data type and count of records breached, or cost of the breach. Not all of the cases included every one of these elements, but there was enough compelling data in total to conclude that 86% of the breach cases started with an application or identity attack.

The report totaled breach records by type, and the results are sobering:

• 11.8 billion records were compromised in just 337 cases;
• 10.3 billion usernames, passwords, and email accounts were breached, which is equivalent to 1.36 records per person on the planet, or 32 records per US citizen;
• 280 million social security numbers (SSNs) were breached, which is equal to 86.5% of the US population.

The startling counts of breached records in the “Lessons Learned from a Decade of Data Breaches” report start to make sense when you consider that over half of the world’s population today is online and applications are the new storefronts of businesses. In a lot of cases, applications are the business.

Applications are also the gateway to data which has immense value to attackers. The concern over the safety of applications and data is borne out in a separate report by F5 and Ponemon, “The Evolving Role of CISOs and their Importance to the Business,“ in which respondents were asked to rank their top threats. On a scale of 1 (minimal impact) to 10 (significant impact), respondents ranked both “insecure applications” and “data exfiltration” at 8.2.

Exploiting Applications Directly
Applications were the initial target of attack in the majority of breaches at 53%. Those attacks exploited the systems by targeting web application vulnerabilities with primarily injection attacks. These two commonly breached application vulnerabilities represent low hanging fruit for attackers.

• Forum software is a favorite target for injection attacks because they consume user content that, if not sanitized properly, could be a crafty little malicious script that injects a PHP backdoor.
• SQL injection, a critical vulnerability that enables an attacker to inject SQL queries and execute administrative operations on the backend database, shouldn’t require explanation because it’s been around for decades. These vulnerabilities are extremely easy for anyone (an attacker, or the company’s security team) to find—and for attackers to exploit.

User Identity Attacks
When the development and security teams have done a good job securing an application, it’s much easier for attackers to obtain data through users who have access to the application and the data within.

In the cases we researched, identities were the initial attack target in 33% of the breaches. Most of these attacks were attributed to phishing; it turns out tricking a user into giving up their credentials is remarkably easy, despite security awareness training efforts. Thanks to social media and consumers’ eagerness to share every aspect of their personal lives, phishing attacks will remain highly effective for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, phishing has no boundaries, ranging from executives, to receptionists and system administrators. Our breach trends report states that more data is collected by attackers through phishing attacks than any other attack type.

Identifying Common Attack Vectors
Security teams are constantly struggling to keep up. Leverage the research available and prioritize your security initiatives. If 86% of breaches start with identities and applications, then managing application vulnerabilities and limiting the impact of exploited identities should be your highest priority. It’s encouraging to see that many organizations are at least moving in the right direction by steadily increasing their investment in application protection. The CISOs we surveyed report spending 12% on app protection two years ago but that figure has increased to 17% today and is expected to rise to 29% two years from now.

Here are two tactics to stop your cyber attackers: 

Deploy a web application firewall (WAF). There are decent, free WAFs (in software form) that you can deploy in listen-only mode. Once you’ve logged and monitored enough of your web application traffic, you can begin defining a blocking policy that won’t take down your app. If your app is actively being exploited, the post data in your WAF logs will tell you exactly how.

WAFs require technical skillsets in both web application vulnerabilities and secure development, and someone who knows how the application works. Freeware solutions provide a good way to get your feet wet but can quickly become cumbersome. If you can afford it, buy an enterprise solution for more effective, centralized management. Another option is to outsource the service to a team of experts who do this 24x7x365.

Deploy multifactor authentication (MFA). Your users will fall victim to phishing attacks, so this is a critical defense, even though deploying MFA to all applications takes time, perhaps years. The trick is to prioritize applications that are externally accessible. Leveraging an MFA solution that integrates seamlessly with an identity federation solution can help streamline the deployment and also will be less frustrating for your users. Identity federation solutions also reduce password fatigue and the massive problem we have now with the one-to-many relationship passwords have with applications. When the Yahoo and Sony compromised databases were compared, 59% of the credentials were found to be the same.

For a more comprehensive list of recommendations, see the full F5 Labs’ “Lessons Learned from a Decade of Data Breaches” report.

Sara Boddy currently leads F5 Labs, F5 Networks’ threat intelligence reporting division. She came to F5 from Demand Media where she was the Vice President of Information Security and Business Intelligence. Sara ran the security team at Demand Media for 6 years, covering all … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/partner-perspectives/f5/applications-and-identities-initial-targets-in-86--of-breaches-report/a/d-id/1331320?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple