Category Archives: Malware

Ask The Experts: Malware Infection Mitigation

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This time, we have a question from a reader:

Dear Experts, I’ve been fighting with my help desk team about the proper response to a malware infection. Once we know a workstation or server has been infected, what should we do to make sure that machine is clean before we put it back in service? We have heard a variety of stories about cleanup versus rebuild. What is the MSI security expert’s take on the proper response to malware infection?

John Davis replied:

It would be nice to be able to eliminate Malware without having to totally rebuild your computer. I wish I had some good news for folks on that score. But unfortunately, the only way to be sure that a malware infection has been totally eliminated is to do just that: rebuild your computer completely from reliable backups. This illustrates the importance of making frequent backups and storing those backups securely!

Adam Hostetler also added:

The only proper response is complete wipe and reinstall. It’s impossible to say it’s clean after it has a known infection, one part might be gone but the malware may have installed or downloaded other components that weren’t detected. I recommend having a good image to use on workstations, and store as little data on them as possible, so a quick turn around is likely. It’s also a good idea to implement strong egress controls on your firewalls and monitor them. This helps in preventing malware from doing damage, and aids in finding infections. 

Got a question for the Experts? Get in touch on Twitter (@lbhuston or @microsolved) or via the comments. Thanks for reading!

PS – Chris Jager (@ChrisJager) points out on Twitter: Also to consider: Closing vuln that allowed the malware onto the host & refreshing backups & build docs w/said updates.

Thanks Chris! We just ASSUMED (yeah, we know…) that was already in scope, but good to mention that it should be pointed out. Clearly, making sure the bad guys lose their foothold from being re-exploited is CRITICAL.

Threat Update: Wide Scale Phishing in Progress

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Just a quick update about the ongoing threat from malware dropped by phishing attacks. There are a lot of phishing attacks currently in progress. Fishing has been a leading form of compromise for quite some time and indicators appear to point to an increasing amount of phishing attacks and a larger amounts of damage from successful exploitation.

Many organizations are reporting wide spread phishing using recycled, older malware including Zeus, Tepfer and other common remote access tools. In some cases, these malware are repackaged or otherwise modified to evade anti-virus detection. Attackers are showing medium to high levels of success with these attacks.

Once compromised, the normal bot installation and exfiltration of data occurs. For most organizations that don’t play a role in critical infrastructure, this likely means credentials, customer information and other commercially valuable data will be targeted. For critical infrastrcuture organizations, more specific  design, future state and architectural data is being targeted along with credentials, etc.

Organizations should be carefully and vigilantly reviewing their egress traffic. They should also be paying careful attention to user desktop space and the ingress/egress from the user workstation DMZ or enclaves (You DO have your user systems segregated from your core operations, correct???). Remember, you CAN NOT depend on AV or email filtering to rebuff these attacks at a meaningful level. Detection and response are key, in order to limit the length of time the attacker has access to your environment. Anything short of full eradication of their malware and tools is likely to end with them still maintaining some level of access and potentially, control.

Now is a good time to consider having a phishing penetration test performed, or to consider using MSISimplePhish to perform some phishing for yourself. Awareness alerts and training are also encouraged. This is going to be a long term threat, so we must begin to implement ongoing controls over the entire technology/ppolicy & process/awareness stack. 

If you have any questions on phishing attacks, malware or incident response, please let us know. Our teams are used to working with these attacks and their subsequent compromises. We also have wide experience with designing enclaved architectures and implementing nuance detection mechanisms that focus on your critical assets. Feel free to touch base with us for a free 30 minute call to discuss your options for increasing security postures.

What is HPSS? :: HoneyPoint Agent

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This post builds on the What is HPSS? Series. Previous posts are here and here. 


HoneyPoint Agent is the original detection capability of the HoneyPoint Security Server suite. Basically, it allows a system to offer up a variety of “fake services” to the network for the purpose of detection. These services can either be simple port listeners or can be complex, deeper emulations of protocols like SMTP, HTTP, Telnet, FTP, etc. These ports have no real users and no legitimate traffic flows to them. This means that anytime these ports are tampered with, the interactions are “suspicious at best and malicious at worst”. 


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Because the Agent is designed to be extremely light weight in terms of computing power needed, the Agents can be sprinkled throughout the network environment easily. Many organizations simply add Agent into default server and workstation builds, turning most of the systems in their network into sensors for detection. 

 

Other organizations deploy Agent more sporadically, either using virtual or physical appliances dedicated to HoneyPoint hosting. These organizations often assign multiple physical or virtual interfaces to the devices, allowing them to have a presence on many network segments at the same time.

 

Still other users leverage an approach called “scattersensing” by deploying HoneyPoint on systems that they move periodically around their environment. This makes for a less dependable detection mechanism, but gives them the capability to get more vision into “hotspots” where targeting is expected or where malware is more likely to pop-up. 

 

The most successful HoneyPoint Agent deployments use a combination of these tactics, along with including strategies like DNS redirection of known command and control sites and other more active forms of getting bad traffic into the HoneyPoint systems.

 

HoneyPoint Agent has proven to be very useful in identifying scanning and malware outbreaks. Customers with supposedly secure networks have found malware that had been missed for years by their traditional internal security tools. These were detected when the ongoing slow and low scanning triggered HoneyPoint deployments, particularly for SQL, Terminal Server and other commonly targeted ports.

 

HoneyPoint Agent can be configured through the command line or via a GUI application, making it easy to manage and deploy. Once installed, it is a “deploy and forget” style tool which doesn’t require ongoing tuning or signature updates. Generally speaking, customers deploy Agent and it runs for years without feeding and care.

 

HoneyPoint Agent also features MSI’s patented “defensive fuzzing” capabilities (previously known as HornetPoint mode), which can create self-defending services that attempt to take down attacker tools during their probing to interfere with propagation. Still other users automate defense with Agent using it as a means for black holing hosts that probe their environment. In these optional, more active roles, Agent can help organizations strengthen their posture with a “one strike and you’re out” kind of approach. 

 

HoneyPoint Agent runs in Linux, Windows and OS X. It communicates securely with the HoneyPoint Console. It also features user configurable services, a known scanning host ignore list (for ongoing vulnerability assessment clients) and a wide variety of common service emulation templates (available through support). 

 

To learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server or to get a demo, please contact us. We would be happy to walk you through the product and discuss how it might fit into your environment. There is even a free for personal use “Community Edition” available to get you started or to let you experience the power, ease and flexibility of the platform yourself. Just give us a call to learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server and HoneyPoint Agent. You’ll be glad you did! 


Malware in Many Places

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Just a quick reminder that malware can come in many forms and from many places. These days, it isn’t just phishing, drive-by downloads and stray email attachments that you have to worry about. USB drives, digital picture frames, wireless devices, watches with USB plugs, exercise equipment with public “charge and data monitoring ports” and whole variety of other things.

Basically, today, if it can plug into your systems or talk to your network and has any kind of processing, memory or storage – it can likely carry malware. That’s certainly something to keep in mind as the “Internet of Things” becomes more and more a part of our daily lives. 

All of the usual defenses still apply, but today we need more than just anti-virus to keep us safe. We have to be using a variety of security controls from throughout the spectrum of prevention, detection and response. Since malware can be everywhere, so too must our vigilance against it. 

PS – Those of you with teens and older parents who use/depend on electronics and computers should discuss malware and safer computing with them. They likely have an entirely different risk profile than you do, and they may not be paying as much attention to the impacts that these attacks can have or where they can come from. They may be doing risky things without even knowing it. Talk to them about malware and help keep them safer in the online world.

What is HPSS? :: The Console

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This article builds on the What is HPSS? Series. The original overview article is here. 

The HoneyPoint Security Server Console is the “brain” of the HoneyPoint product platform. It is the central component responsible for getting alert data from the sensors, tracking and maintaining the alert data, presenting it to the user and safely passing the essential alert data on to the automated plugins or other systems in the security event chain.


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The Console is a GUI application that includes a built-in database engine for tracking Alert Data state and to empower reporting and analysis over time. Alert Data from the sensors are sent to the Console over TCP and the data is encrypted. The Console application runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. 

 

Once the Console receives Alert Data from the sensors, it parses it to validate that the data is good and checks to see what actions it should take based on the alerting configuration, assigned admins list, ignored hosts lists, and other trust rules in place. 

It then presents the alert data to the appropriate mechanisms, alerting users, passing the desired elements of the alert data to syslog/event log on the Console system for upstream processing by SEIMs or other event tools. The Console also passes certain event data as determined by the configuration into the “plugins mechanism”. 

 

The plugins then execute the desired operations on the data, easily allowing the security team to further extend reporting to custom event handlers or perform automated responses. This flexible solution empowers the security team to integrate HoneyPoint Security Server fully into whatever technology platform/response process they desire or have in place.

 

Reporting from the Console is very simple. The included reporting engine can create a wide variety of canned reports in either CSV or HTML format, ensuing that the data in the HoneyPoint system is easy to use. Additionally, other reporting tools like Crystal Reports or the like, or even languages like PERL, Python or Ruby, can easily attach to the Console database to create whatever types of custom reports you desire.

 

All in all, HoneyPoint Security Server was designed to make it easy to use and yet flexible enough for the most demanding and mature infosec teams. The console interface is friendly, functional and easily understandable. Most teams require less than a 30 minute walk through before they are off and running with the basic detection power HoneyPoint provides. When they get comfortable with the system, they quickly master the plugins meta-language and are soon automating large groups of detection and response tasks.

 

To learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server or to get a demo, please contact us. We would be happy to walk you through the product and discuss how it might fit into your environment. There is even a free for personal use “Community Edition” available to get you started or to let you experience the power, ease and flexibility of the platform yourself. Just give us a call to learn more about HoneyPoint Security Server Console. You’ll be glad you did! 


What is this HoneyPoint Thing Anyway?

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Launched in 2006, initially as a distributed honey pot product, HoneyPoint Security Server (HPSS) has grown well beyond the initial concept. Today HPSS is a platform of components woven into a tightly integrated, fully capable, extremely flexible threat detection product. Organizations around the world are using it as a means of early detection of internal and external attackers, malware outbreaks and signs of users poking around where they shouldn’t be. Mature organizations have leveraged the product as a means of deterring attacks through automated black holing of scanning hosts on their perimeter, embedded detective controls inside their web applications to cut off users violating their terms of service and gather real world threat metrics to feed back into their mature risk management initiatives.

 

In the world of ICS/SCADA, HoneyPoint has found a quickly growing set of fans. HPSS can be deployed in a completely passive way that has no chance of interfering with critical operations, yet still brings incredible detection capability and vision into even the most sensitive of networks. ICS/SCADA environments have traditionally embraced the honeypot ideal, coining the term “canary” for these tools, but never before have they had such an easy to use, distributable, centrally monitored honeypot capability like HoneyPoint brings to the table.

 

Over the next few months, we will be deep diving into each of the HPSS components, but for now, as a high-level overview, here is a quick and dirty explanation of each of them:

 

  • HPSS Console – This is the central “brain” of the product. Designed as an easy to use GUI application, it receives the alerts detected by the sensor components and presents them to the user for analysis. It includes the “plugin” capability which allows for additional reporting and security automation based on the event data detected. The Console provides for “point and click” easy integration with SEIM products for clients who have deeper back-end data aggregation systems in place.
  • HoneyPoint Agent – This is the original HoneyPoint detection capability. Agent creates “fake services” on the network that have no real use other than detection. Since the services aren’t real, any interaction with them is “suspicious at best and malicious at worst”. Agent is capable of emulating a great variety of services and is completely user configurable. Agent runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. 
  • Wasp – Wasp is HoneyPoint’s hybrid client for Windows systems. It offers many of the port dilation features of Agent, but layers on top of that a whitelisting detection mechanism, file change detection for key files and some simple heuristics to identify the most common signs of intrusion. Tiny footprint, immense flexibility, self tuning whitelisting and no interference with operations make it an excellent choice for critical infrastructure use.
  • HoneyPoint Web – This is a completely emulated web environment with a mock up of applications that the organization uses. The entire environment is “fake” and studded with detection mechanisms that capture and measure attacker behavior, intent and capability. It might seem to be a new version of a banking application “accidentally” exposed to the Internet, or a replica of an HMI or maybe a login portal for Sharepoint/VPN or some other mechanism. What it really is is a detection mechanism for the good guys. Completely customized, able to detect the difference between a human attacker and most malware, it offers organizations a deeper, sneakier way to detect illicit behavior and measure the attacker attention various attack surfaces receive.
  • HoneyElements – Embeddable HTML and Javascript objects that can be added to new or existing real web applications, these HoneyPoints extend detection into the layers of the application itself. Integrates well with automated response and attacker black holing defenses to stop attackers and those engaging in undesired behaviors in real time.
  • HoneyBees – These work with Agent to simulate users authenticating to emulated services with plain text credentials. Organizations use this combination of tools to detect sniffing attacks and other attempts to harvest credentials off the wire or from network monitoring systems. 
  • HoneyPoint Trojans – Trojans are “fake” documents, applications or archives that appear to be real, but are actually detection mechanisms. For example, they might appear to be a PDF of some acquisition plans, while in reality they are armed with code to alert the security team when they have been opened or tampered with. Trojans use many of the same tactics as attackers, but instead of infection as a goal, they provide for detection and alerting.
  • HoneyPoint Handler – The Handler is a mechanism for getting external events into the HoneyPoint data ecosystem. Organizations often use the handler to receive events generated by custom nuance detection scripts. For example, a script might routinely check for new files in a directory or new files that contain the call base64decode(). When the script identifies a new file, the script can send an alert to the Handler, which will create a standard HoneyPoint alert from the script’s data and send it to the Console for easy and standardized security event management.
  • HoneyPoint Decoy Appliances – This is a set of hardened Linux powered devices that serve as an appliance for other components, usually Agent and Web. The appliances are available in three physical form factors (a rack mountable server, a mini-desktop, and a field deployable power substation solid state system) and/or a set of virtual appliances for most common virtualization platforms.
  • HoneyPoint Proxy – Lastly, this component is designed to act as an alerting data aggregator to simplify firewall ACLs that might be deployed between DMZ segments, enclaves or other network segments. The proxy can receive events from HoneyPoints and send them on to the Console without the need to expose the Console to each individual HoneyPoint. This makes managing global and highly distributed deployments significantly easier.

 

To learn more about these components and how they can be leveraged to give your organization new, flexible and deep detection capabilities, give us a call. Our engineers would be glad to discuss the technical capabilities and an account executive would be happy to work with you to create a HoneyPoint deployment that meets your needs AND your budget. At MicroSolved, we are passionate about information security and HoneyPoint Security Server is just another that way it shows!

HoneyPoint HoneyBees Help Catch Sniffers

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HoneyPoint has a component called a HoneyBee that can help organizations detect sniffing on their networks. The tool works like this:

  • HoneyBees are configured to talk to HoneyPoint Agents with a set of known credentials for an Agent emulated service
  • HoneyPoint Agent knows where the HoneyBees will be connecting from and those hosts are added to the local ignore list for that Agent
  • HoneyBees randomly create emulated “conversations” with HoneyPoint Agent in plain text, transmitting their credentials across the network for sniffers to pick up
  • The attacker or sniffing malware grabs the credentials through their sniffed traffic
  • The attacker or malware attempts to use those same credentials to authenticate to the HoneyPoint Agent
  • HoneyPoint Agent flags the authentication attempt as tampered traffic and alerts the security team to take action

By properly configuring the setup, this approach makes for a very effective tool to catch sniffing malware and attackers. Backing the credentials up with other detection mechanisms, such as in web applications and on AD forests can extend the approach even further. Our team has helped organizations stand up these kinds of nuance detection schemes across a variety of platforms. 

Even though the approach seems quite simple, it has proven to be quite adept at catching a variety of attacks. Customers continue to tell us that HoneyBees working with HoneyPoint Agent have been key indicators of compromise that have led them to otherwise undetected compromises.

HoneyBees are just another example of some of the ways that people are using the incredible flexibility of HoneyPoint to do nuance detection more easily than ever before. Gaining vision where they never had it has paid off, and HoneyPoints ability to turn vision into intelligence has proven itself over and over again.

To discuss HoneyPoint, HoneyBees or other forms of nuance detection, get in touch with MicroSolved. We would be happy to discuss how we can help your organization get more vision all around your enterprise.

Tool Review: Synalyze It! Pro for OS X

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Rounding out this week with another tool review for the Mac under OS X. Earlier this week, we reviewed our favorite disassembler, Hopper for OS X. Synalyze It! Pro is another invaluable tool that we depend on. This tool is a hex editor with some very very useful features in the GUI. Namely, it lets you “lasso” different bits of text and highlight them in different colors. While this might sound basic, it is amazingly useful for performing reverse engineering of protocols and other deep-level analysis tasks of textual data.

Recently, we have been doing quite a bit of protocol testing in the lab and this tool has proven itself again and again as invaluable. My favorite feature of the tool is available by highlighting some piece of data and right clicking to bring up a menu, then selecting “compare code pages”. This brings up a window in which the highlighted data is run through a bunch of encoding/decoding schemes and presented to you both as ASCII and as hex. This makes reversing simple encoding on text as easy pie and as quick as swatting a fly. In my recent protocol work, this was a feature I used over and over again to identify various components of the data stream and figure out how each was encoded as a part of a bigger puzzle.

Another feature we have come to love is the “Show Checksums” feature. This feature displays a wide variety of checksums for the data that is highlighted and updates the checksums in realtime. This makes it pretty easy to figure out if different fields are included in the protocol’s checksum activities and leads to faster, cleaner reversing. However, I do have a couple of things I would like to see as future features for this capability. For one, I would like to see additional checksum mechanisms added and perhaps even an interface for creating your checksum scripts or equations. Additionally, I would really like it if you could get realtime updates, but with a mechanism for selecting multiple data elements and not just single strings. I really thought this would work, but could not seem to selections to “stick” so that I could add multiples. 

The real power of the tool is in the creation of the “grammar files”. This is an easy to use, intuitive and powerful mechanism for reversing. I still need to practice a bit more with the grammar definition mechanisms, but I can see where this will grow the product’s usefulness rapidly. The grammar definition could lend itself to a better toolbox in the GUI. It might be easier for beginners to learn to master this capability if an set of quick and easy tools were easily available without a bunch of menu navigation. However, the feature is still excellent and the tool remains a very powerful addition to our toolbox. 

The link to the App Store has a variety of screenshots of the product if you want to check it out. The product retails for $25 in the App Store and a non-Pro version is available for $5 – however, note that it lacks many features of the Pro version that make it such a useful tool. 

PS – MSI has no affiliation or relationship with the product and/or the developers. 

Tool Review: Hopper Disassembler for OS X

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I have recently been playing with Hopper, a disassembler for Mac OS X, quite a bit. The tool is essentially a mid-line tool for working to reverse engineer code. It is more accessible on the mac than firing up a VM and using the venerable OllyDbg and the interface is quite a bit more elegant and user friendly. It is even mid-line in price, coming in between Olly, which is free, and IDA Pro which can run over a thousand dollars per license. If you hack stuff, reverse stuff or study malware on the Mac, the $60 price point is likely to make this a big winner for your budget. The app store link for the tool, in case you want to check it out, is here. 

In terms of use, the tool does exactly what you expect from the description – it disassembles binaries into assembler and makes exploration of the deeper nuances of the code accessible. The newest release supports ARM, 32 & 64 bit ELF and iOS Mach-O. These add to the existing support for the standard Intel platforms of Mac OS X and Windows binaries, making this an all around useful tool for doing the basics. The flow control graphing, colorized interface and intuitive controls make the tool use less complex than Olly and IDA Pro. 

One of things I would like to see in future versions of the tool would be a detector for encoded binaries and support for some of the basic decoding tools to make analysis of obfuscated applications a bit quicker, easier and more intuitive. This a common issue among disassemblers and shows that we have a way to go to improve these products as the reverse engineering and malware study tool sets improve and mature over time. Overall though, that’s about the ONLY complaint I have about Hopper. It’s an amazingly versatile and useful tool at an incredible price. Truly, it is a worthwhile investment if you want to learn more about assembler, the inner workings of code and beginning malware analysis. You can’t go wrong with this one.

Lastly, I would like to thank the author of Hopper, Vincent Benony for his work on this tool and for his engagement with the infosec community on Twitter. Seriously, he is great. He responds quickly to questions and requests, plus provides great insights into where he is taking the product next. 

PS – If you want to see what the GUI looks like, there are a wide variety of screenshots in the App Store at the link above.

PSS – MSI has no affiliation or relationship with the product and/or the developers. 

Port 9100/TCP Probes

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We have been seeing probes to port 9100/TCP in the HITME for a while and decided to check out some of the activity and post about it, so others could know what is going on there.

The connections come from a few sources, often universities, and don’t seem to be anything more than misconfigurations of devices in their environment. The connections that come in on port 9100 often contain the “@PJL INFO PRODINFO” strings, which are apparently tied to the HP Printer Job Language (PJL). Basically, the command is supposed to dump out identifying data from the printer and return it to the user. This data includes a variety of configuration data and other details about the device. You can find an example here. 

The port 9100 connections usually coincide with a connection to port 80/TCP on the same host. This port 80 connection looks something like this (with IP address info in the x.x.x.x string): 

“GET / HTTP/1.1\nAccept-Encoding: identity\nHost: x.x.x.x\nConnection: close\nUser-Agent: Python-urllib/2.7\n\n”

Now this is a little interesting. It is likely meant to be a validation probe that the printer device’s embedded web server is online and that the device is operational. BUT, the “Python-urllib/2.7” made us suspicious. Perhaps this isn’t a usual printer request?

A little Google searching pretty quickly shows that HP’s implementation of CUPS, that is the unix printing mechanism, strongly leverages this Python library.  So, that might not make it suspicious as most folks might think. 

So, we did the next thing in our bag of tricks, and returned valid connections from HoneyPoint on those ports. Our waiting finally came to fruition and lo and behold, we got more connections of the same nature. This time though, we also got a print job for the “printer” to print. What did we get? Spam, of course. Printer spam. An ad to buy some stuff, that needless to say, we don’t really need. 🙂

So, what are those port 9100 probes? What is the basis behind that “@PJL INFO PRODINFO” in your logs? Nothing more than spam attempts to waste your paper, ink/toner and time. Hey, it could have been worse, right? 🙂

Obviously, turning off port 9100/TCP from the Internet will help prevent this stuff from coming into your organization. It looks like a few malware folks have added this capability to their spyware/adware routines as well, so if you have 9100 blocked from the Internet and see printer spam coming in, track the print jobs back to a workstation if possible and do the turn and burn routine. Let us know if you have any questions or issues, and we will keep our ears and eyes open on port 9100 traffic and drop some more info if we see anything that looks wormy or the like. 

MSI ongoing assessment customers will note that port 9100 signatures are routinely tested and you would be notified of any illicit behaviors found during your assessments.

PS – There have been some “worm” like behaviors on port 9100 in the past, including a couple of pieces of printer malware. We didn’t see it in this case, but we know it’s out there…Here is an example of some of what may be lurking in your printer…