Mar 25, 2024The Hacker NewsData Breach / Password Security

In January 2024, Microsoft discovered they’d been the victim of a hack orchestrated by Russian-state hackers Midnight Blizzard (sometimes known as Nobelium). The concerning detail about this case is how easy it was to breach the software giant. It wasn’t a highly technical hack that exploited a zero-day vulnerability – the hackers used a simple password spray attack to take control of an old, inactive account. This serves as a stark reminder of the importance of password security and why organizations need to protect every user account.

Password spraying: A simple yet effective attack

The hackers gained entry by using a password spray attack in November 2023, Password spraying is a relatively simple brute force technique that involves trying the same password against multiple accounts. By bombarding user accounts with known weak and compromised passwords, the attackers were able to gain access to a legacy non-production test account within the Microsoft system which provided them with an initial foothold in the environment. This account either had unusual privileges or the hackers escalated them.

The attack lasted for as long as seven weeks, during which the hackers exfiltrated emails and attached documents. This data compromised a ‘very small percentage’ of corporate email accounts, including those belonging to senior leadership and employees in the Cybersecurity and Legal teams. Microsoft’s Security team detected the hack on January 12th and took immediate action to disrupt the hackers’ activities and deny them further access.

However, the fact that the hackers were able to access such sensitive internal information highlights the potential damage that can be caused by compromising even seemingly insignificant accounts. All attackers need is an initial foothold within your organization.

The importance of protecting all accounts

While organizations often prioritize the protection of privileged accounts, the attack on Microsoft demonstrates that every user account is a potential entry point for attackers. Privilege escalation means that attackers can achieve their goals without necessarily needing a highly privileged admin account as an entry point.

Protecting an inactive low-privileged account is just as crucial as safeguarding a high-privileged admin account for several reasons. First, attackers often target these overlooked accounts as potential entry points into a network. Inactive accounts are more likely to have weak or outdated passwords, making them easier targets for brute force attacks. Once compromised, attackers can use these accounts to move laterally within the network, escalating their privileges and accessing sensitive information.

Second, inactive accounts are often neglected in terms of security measures, making them attractive targets for hackers. Organizations may overlook implementing strong password policies or multi-factor authentication for these accounts, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. From an attacker’s perspective, even low-privileged accounts can provide valuable access to certain systems or data within an organization.

Defend against password spray attacks

The Microsoft hack serves as a wake-up call for organizations to prioritize the security of every user account. It highlights the critical need for robust password protection measures across all accounts, regardless of their perceived significance. By implementing strong password policies, enabling multi-factor authentication, conducting regular Active Directory audits, and continuously scanning for compromised passwords, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of being caught out in the same way.

1. Active Directory auditing: Conducting regular audits of Active Directory can provide visibility into unused and inactive accounts, as well as other password-related vulnerabilities. Audits provide a valuable snapshot of your Active Directory but should always be complemented by ongoing risk mitigation efforts. If you’re lacking visibility into your organization’s inactive and stale user accounts, consider running a read-only audit with our free auditing tool that gives an interactive exportable report: Specops Password Auditor.
2. Robust password policies: Organizations should enforce strong password policies that block weak passwords, such as common terms or keyboard walks like ‘qwerty’ or ‘123456.’ Implementing long, unique passwords or passphrases is a strong defense against brute-force attacks. Custom dictionaries that block terms related to the organization and industry should also be included.
3. Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Enabling MFA adds an authentication roadblock for hackers to overcome. MFA serves as an important layer of defense, although it’s worth remembering that MFA isn’t foolproof. It needs to be combined with strong password security.
4. Compromised password scans: Even strong passwords can become compromised if end users reuse them on personal devices, sites, or applications with weak security. Implementing tools to continuously scan your Active Directory for compromised passwords can help identify and mitigate potential risks.

Continuously shut down attack routes for hackers

The Microsoft hack underscores the need for organizations to implement robust password protection measures across all accounts. A secure password policy is essential, ensuring that all accounts, including legacy, non-production, and testing accounts, aren’t overlooked. Additionally, blocking known compromised credentials adds an extra layer of protection against active attacks.

Specops Password Policy with Breached Password Protection offers automated, ongoing protection for your Active Directory. It protects your end users against the use of more than 4 billion unique known compromised passwords, including data from both known leaks as well as our own honeypot system that collects passwords being used in real password spray attacks.

The daily update of the Breached Password Protection API, paired with continuous scans for the use of those passwords in your network, equals a much more comprehensive defense against the threat of password attack and the risk of password reuse. Speak to expert today to find out how Specops Password Policy could fit in with your organization.

Jan 04, 2024NewsroomCryptocurrency / Social Media

American cybersecurity firm and Google Cloud subsidiary Mandiant had its X (formerly Twitter) account compromised for more than six hours by an unknown attacker to propagate a cryptocurrency scam.

As of writing, the account has been restored on the social media platform.

It’s currently not clear how the account was breached. But the hacked Mandiant account was initially renamed to “@phantomsolw” to impersonate the Phantom crypto wallet service, according to MalwareHunterTeam and vx-underground.

Specifically, the scam posts from the account advertised an airdrop scam that urged users to click on a bogus link and earn free tokens, with follow-up messages asking Mandiant to “change password please” and “check bookmarks when you get account back.”

Mandiant, a leading threat intelligence firm, was acquired by Google in March 2022 for $5.4 billion. It is now part of Google Cloud.

“The Mandiant Twitter account takeover could have happened [in] a number of ways,” Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, said on X.

“Some folks are giving the advice to turn on MFA to prevent ATO and of course that is a good idea always *but it’s also possible that someone in Support at Twitter was bribed or compromised which allowed the attacker access to Mandiant’s account*.”

The Hacker News has reached out to Mandiant for further comments, and we will update the story once we hear back.

Dec 28, 2023NewsroomSpyware / Hardware Security

The Operation Triangulation spyware attacks targeting Apple iOS devices leveraged never-before-seen exploits that made it possible to even bypass pivotal hardware-based security protections erected by the company.

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which discovered the campaign at the beginning of 2023 after becoming one of the targets, described it as the “most sophisticated attack chain” it has ever observed to date. The campaign is believed to have been active since 2019.

The exploitation activity involved the use of four zero-day flaws that were fashioned into a chain to obtain an unprecedented level of access and backdoor target devices running iOS versions up to iOS 16.2 with the ultimate goal of gathering sensitive information.

The starting point of the zero-click attack is an iMessage bearing a malicious attachment, which is automatically processed sans any user interaction to ultimately obtain elevated permissions and deploy a spyware module. Specifically, it involves the weaponization of the following vulnerabilities –

• CVE-2023-41990 – A flaw in the FontParser component that could lead to arbitrary code execution when processing a specially crafted font file, which is sent via iMessage. (Addressed in iOS 15.7.8 and iOS 16.3)
• CVE-2023-32434 – An integer overflow vulnerability in the Kernel that could be exploited by a malicious app to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. (Addressed in iOS 15.7.7, iOS 15.8, and iOS 16.5.1 )
• CVE-2023-32435 – A memory corruption vulnerability in WebKit that could lead to arbitrary code execution when processing specially crafted web content. (Addressed in iOS 15.7.7 and iOS 16.5.1)
• CVE-2023-38606 – An issue in the kernel that permits a malicious app to modify sensitive kernel state. (Addressed in iOS 16.6)

It’s worth noting that patches for CVE-2023-41990 were released by Apple in January 2023, although details about the exploitation were only made public by the company on September 8, 2023, the same day it shipped iOS 16.6.1 to resolve two other flaws (CVE-2023-41061 and CVE-2023-41064) that were actively abused in connection with a Pegasus spyware campaign.

This also brings the tally of the number of actively exploited zero-days resolved by Apple since the start of the year to 20.

Of the four vulnerabilities, CVE-2023-38606 deserves a special mention as it facilitates a bypass of hardware-based security protection for sensitive regions of the kernel memory by leveraging memory-mapped I/O (MMIO) registers, a feature that was never known or documented until now.

The exploit, in particular, targets Apple A12-A16 Bionic SoCs, singling out unknown MMIO blocks of registers that belong to the GPU coprocessor. It’s currently not known how the mysterious threat actors behind the operation learned about its existence. Also unclear is whether it was developed by Apple or it’s a third-party component like ARM CoreSight.

To put it in another way, CVE-2023-38606 is the crucial link in the exploit chain that’s closely intertwined with the success of the Operation Triangulation campaign, given the fact that it permits the threat actor to gain total control of the compromised system.

“Our guess is that this unknown hardware feature was most likely intended to be used for debugging or testing purposes by Apple engineers or the factory, or that it was included by mistake,” security researcher Boris Larin said. “Because this feature is not used by the firmware, we have no idea how attackers would know how to use it.”

“Hardware security very often relies on ‘security through obscurity,’ and it is much more difficult to reverse-engineer than software, but this is a flawed approach, because sooner or later, all secrets are revealed. Systems that rely on “security through obscurity” can never be truly secure.”

The development comes as the Washington Post reported that Apple’s warnings in late October about Indian journalists and opposition politicians may have been targeted by state-sponsored spyware attacks prompted the government to question the veracity of the claims and describe them as a case of “algorithmic malfunction” within the tech giant’s systems.

In addition, senior administration officials demanded that the company soften the political impact of the warnings and pressed the company to provide alternative explanations as to why the warnings may have been sent. So far, India has neither confirmed nor denied using spyware such as those by NSO Group’s Pegasus.

Citing people with knowledge of the matter, the Washington Post noted that “Indian officials asked Apple to withdraw the warnings and say it had made a mistake,” and that “Apple India’s corporate communications executives began privately asking Indian technology journalists to emphasize in their stories that Apple’s warnings could be false alarms” to shift the spotlight away from the government.