Apr 12, 2024NewsroomCyber Attack / Data Breach

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday issued an emergency directive (ED 24-02) urging federal agencies to hunt for signs of compromise and enact preventive measures following the recent compromise of Microsoft’s systems that led to the theft of email correspondence with the company.

The attack, which came to light earlier this year, has been attributed to a Russian nation-state group tracked as Midnight Blizzard (aka APT29 or Cozy Bear). Last month, Microsoft revealed that the adversary managed to access some of its source code repositories but noted that there is no evidence of a breach of customer-facing systems.

The emergency directive, which was originally issued privately to federal agencies on April 2, was first reported on by CyberScoop two days later.

“The threat actor is using information initially exfiltrated from the corporate email systems, including authentication details shared between Microsoft customers and Microsoft by email, to gain, or attempt to gain, additional access to Microsoft customer systems,” CISA said.

The agency said the theft of email correspondence between government entities and Microsoft poses severe risks, urging concerned parties to analyze the content of exfiltrated emails, reset compromised credentials, and take additional steps to ensure authentication tools for privileged Microsoft Azure accounts are secure.

It’s currently not clear how many federal agencies have had their email exchanges exfiltrated in the wake of the incident, although CISA said all of them have been notified.

The agency is also urging affected entities to perform a cybersecurity impact analysis by April 30, 2024, and provide a status update by May 1, 2024, 11:59 p.m. Other organizations that are impacted by the breach are advised to contact their respective Microsoft account team for any additional questions or follow up.

“Regardless of direct impact, all organizations are strongly encouraged to apply stringent security measures, including strong passwords, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and prohibited sharing of unprotected sensitive information via unsecure channels,” CISA said.

The development comes as CISA released a new version of its malware analysis system, called Malware Next-Gen, that allows organizations to submit malware samples (anonymously or otherwise) and other suspicious artifacts for analysis.

Feb 24, 2024NewsroomActive Directory / Data Protection

Microsoft has expanded free logging capabilities to all U.S. federal agencies using Microsoft Purview Audit irrespective of the license tier, more than six months after a China-linked cyber espionage campaign targeting two dozen organizations came to light.

“Microsoft will automatically enable the logs in customer accounts and increase the default log retention period from 90 days to 180 days,” the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said.

“Also, this data will provide new telemetry to help more federal agencies meet logging requirements mandated by [Office of Management and Budget] Memorandum M-21-31.”

Microsoft, in July 2023, disclosed that a China-based nation-state activity group known as Storm-0558 gained unauthorized access to approximately 25 entities in the U.S. and Europe as well as a small number of related individual consumer accounts.

“Storm-0558 operates with a high degree of technical tradecraft and operational security,” the company noted. “The actors are keenly aware of the target’s environment, logging policies, authentication requirements, policies, and procedures.”

The campaign is believed to have commenced in May 2023, but detected only a month later after a U.S. federal agency, later revealed to be the State Department, uncovered suspicious activity in unclassified Microsoft 365 audit logs and reported it to Microsoft.

The breach was detected by leveraging enhanced logging in Microsoft Purview Audit, specifically using the MailItemsAccessed mailbox-auditing action that’s typically available for Premium subscribers.

The Windows maker subsequently acknowledged that a validation error in its source code allowed for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tokens to be forged by Storm-0558 using a Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key, and then use them to penetrate the mailboxes.

The attackers are estimated to have stolen at least 60,000 unclassified emails from Outlook accounts belonging to State Department officials stationed in East Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, Reuters reported in September 2023. Beijing has denied the allegations.

It also faced intense scrutiny for withholding basic-yet-crucial logging capabilities to entities that are on the more expensive E5 or G5 plan, prompting the company to make changes.

“We recognize the vital importance that advanced logging plays in enabling federal agencies to detect, respond to, and prevent even the most sophisticated cyberattacks from well-resourced, state-sponsored actors,” Microsoft’s Candice Ling said. “For this reason, we have been collaborating across the federal government to provide access to advanced audit logs.”

Jan 20, 2024NewsroomNetwork Security / Threat Intelligence

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday issued an emergency directive urging Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to implement mitigations against two actively exploited zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) and Ivanti Policy Secure (IPS) products.

The development came after the vulnerabilities – an authentication bypass (CVE-2023-46805) and a code injection bug (CVE-2024-21887) – came under widespread exploitation of vulnerabilities by multiple threat actors. The flaws allow a malicious actor to craft malicious requests and execute arbitrary commands on the system.

The U.S. company acknowledged in an advisory that it has witnessed a “sharp increase in threat actor activity” starting on January 11, 2024, after the shortcomings were publicly disclosed.

“Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities in these affected products allows a malicious threat actor to move laterally, perform data exfiltration, and establish persistent system access, resulting in full compromise of target information systems,” the agency said.

Ivanti, which is expected to release an update to address the flaws next week, has made available a temporary workaround through an XML file that can be imported into affected products to make necessary configuration changes.

CISA is urging organizations running ICS to apply the mitigation and run an External Integrity Checker Tool to identify signs of compromise, and if found, disconnect them from the networks and reset the device, followed by importing the XML file.

In addition, FCEB entities are urged to revoke and reissue any stored certificates, reset the admin enable password, store API keys, and reset the passwords of any local user defined on the gateway.

Cybersecurity firms Volexity and Mandiant have observed attacks weaponizing the twin flaws to deploy web shells and passive backdoors for persistent access to compromised appliances. As many as 2,100 devices worldwide are estimated to have been compromised to date.

The initial attack wave identified in December 2023 has been attributed to a Chinese nation-state group that is being tracked as UTA0178. Mandiant is keeping tabs on the activity under the moniker UNC5221, although it has not been linked to any specific group or country.

Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise said it has also observed the vulnerabilities being abused to drop persistent backdoors and XMRig cryptocurrency miners, indicating opportunistic exploitation by bad actors for financial gain.