Tag Archives: credential theft

Inventorying Organization Authentication Points

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Are you looking for threat-proactive ways to secure your enterprise? One of the best ways to do this is by inventorying all of the points of authentication within your organization. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the steps you need to take to properly inventory and secure your Internet-facing authentication points. While you should have a complete and accurate inventory of these exposures, starting the process with a focus on critical systems is a common approach.

Inventory Process

1. Identify the different types of authentication used by the organization for remote access (e.g. passwords, two-factor authentication). If possible, use vendor data to include cloud-based critical services as well.

2. List all of the systems and applications that require remote access within the organization. External vulnerability scanning data and Shodan are both useful sources for this information.

3. For each system/application, document the type of authentication used and any additional security measures or policies related to remote access (e.g., password complexity requirements). Vendor management risk data can be useful here, if available.

4. Check with user groups to ensure that they use secure authentication methods and follow security policies when accessing systems/applications remotely.

5. Monitor access logs for signs of unauthorized access attempts or suspicious activity related to remote access authentication.

6. Regularly review and update existing remote access authentication processes as necessary to ensure the continued security of organizational resources over the Internet.

Why This Is Important – Credential Stuffing & Phishing

Inventorying all of the points of authentication within an enterprise is essential as protection against credential stuffing and phishing attacks. Credential stuffing is a type of attack where malicious actors use stolen credentials to gain access to different accounts, while phishing attacks are attempts to acquire confidential information through deceptive emails or websites. In both cases, it is important that organizations have proper authentication measures in place to prevent unauthorized access. Inventorying all of the points of authentication within an organization can ensure that the right security protocols are in place and that any suspicious activity related to authentication can be quickly identified and addressed.

In addition, having a detailed inventory of all points of authentication can help organizations identify any weak spots in their security measures. This allows them to take steps to strengthen those areas and further protect themselves from potential credential stuffing or phishing attacks. By regularly reviewing and updating their authentication processes, organizations can ensure that their resources remain secure and protected from any malicious actors.

Lastly, ensure that you feed this inventory and the knowledge gained into your enterprise risk assessment processes, incident response team, and other security control inventories. Make a note of any security gaps identified during the inventory process and ensure complete coverage of the logs and other intrusion detection systems at each potential point of authentication. By following these steps, you can ensure that your enterprise remains secure and protected from any potential threats associated with credential stuffing and credential theft associated with common phishing attacks.

 

How To Handle Leaked Credentials

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OK, so you used ClawBack™ or some other tool and found leaked credentials linked to one of your employees on the web. Now, what do you do?

First, don’t panic. Leaked credentials happen all of the time. On average, it was discovered that employee email credentials from 10% of all Fortune 500 companies have been leaked in some form of data breach. (blog.finjan.com)  Another report published recently suggests that the web currently hosts leaked credentials of employees for 97% of the top 1,000 global companies – many stemming from third-party data breaches. (blog.finjan.com)

Once you come to terms with your find, it’s time to get down to business researching the issue. The first step is to determine what kind of data you have identified. Usually, leaked credentials come with a user ID like an email, system login name, or the like. Presumably, this is how you found the credentials in the first place. Next, determine if you have a password and/or hash for that user that was contained in the leak. If you found only a list of emails or names, there is not much actionable intelligence there, beyond maybe letting those users know that they are at increased risk for phishing and reminding them to be vigilant.

If, however, you have a password or hash tied to one of your user names in the leak, a few more steps are involved. If you have a password, the first step is to determine if that password meets whatever password policies you have defined across the organization. This is a key leverage point for identifying potential leaks – many, if not most, leaked passwords come from third-party systems and websites that are compromised by attackers but are only used by the firm’s employees. It’s pervasive for industry sites, or shopping sites to be linked to your employee’s identity – it could be as simple as your employee signed up for the site with their work email, and that site got breached. If that is the case, then as long as your employee doesn’t use that password at work (or similar passwords: eg: Summer12 and Summer13, etc.) there is little risk to the firm. If the password would not meet your password policy for your domain, webmail, and other applications, then this is likely the case. If that happens, simply contact the employee, advise them of the leaked credential, and make sure that they understand to change their passwords anywhere they used that password in their online life.

But, what if the password could be one of your domain or webmail accounts? If the password would meet your policies, then immediately force a password change on all systems for that user. If possible, you should also terminate any open sessions and force the user to change their credentials. While a determined attacker may exploit this process to reset the password themselves if they have the ability, it prevents any non-resourced attackers from exploiting the credentials. The worst case is that an employee loses a current session and has to reset their passwords to continue working.

However, don’t stop there – contact the user and advise them of the leaked credential. Ask them if it was used on any work-related systems or applications, and if so, immediately begin an investigation on those systems looking for signs of illicit access. This should be performed using intensive log reviews and should go back to the date of the user’s previous password change whenever possible. Do not depend on the leak date, if shown, as the boundary for the incident. Attackers may have had knowledge and access prior to making the leak public. Often, attackers use compromised accounts for some time, getting what they want from the victim, and then release the stolen credentials to other attackers via a sale, or to the public, in the hopes that the additional attacker traffic will hide the original compromise.

Lastly, if you only have a hash of a potential password, I would still follow the process above. Most hashes can be broken given enough resources. Thus, it is erring on the side of caution to follow the above process, and accept the hash as a credential that could be in use in your environment.

Got other workarounds for leaked credentials? I’d love to hear them. Drop me a line on Twitter, and let me know (@lbhuston). I’ll share any insights in future posts.

If you’d like to learn more about ClawBack – check out our solution for hunting down leaked credentials, source code, and configuration data. Get in touch with us for a discussion, or check out the videos on our website for a walkthrough.

 

 

 

All About Credit Union Credential Stuffing Attacks

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Credential stuffing attacks continue to be a grave concern for all organizations worldwide. However, for many Credit Unions and other financial institutions, they represent one of the most significant threats. They are a common cause of data breaches and are involved in some 76% of all security incidents. On average, our honey nets pretending to be Credit Union and other financial services experience targeted credential stuffing attacks several times per week. 

What Is Credential Stuffing?

“Credential stuffing occurs when hackers use stolen information, such as usernames and passwords from database breaches or phishing software from one account, and attempt to gain access to another. The hackers prey on people’s habit of using the same usernames and passwords for multiple sites. Using automated tools, they run large amounts of stolen information across multiple sites looking to find the same usernames and passwords being used elsewhere. Once they find a match, they can monetize the personal and financial information they gather.” (ardentcu.org)

How Common is Credential Stuffing?

Beyond our honey nets, which are completely fake environments used to study attackers, credential stuffing and the damage it causes is quite starteling. Here are some quick facts:

  • It is estimated that automated credential-stuffing attempts makes up 90% of enterprise login traffic in the US. (securityboulevard.com)

  • It’s estimated that credential stuffing costs companies more than $5 billion a year and creates havoc with consumers. (ardentcu.org)

  • According to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report on credential stuffing, its customers alone were deluged by 30 billion malicious login attempts between November 2017 and June this year, an average of 3.75 billion per month. (theregister.com)

  • Significant credential stuffing attacks are a favorite of professional hacking groups from Russia, India, Asia and Africa. They often gather extensive lists of stolen and leaked credentials through advanced Google hacking techniques, by combing social media for password dumps (so called “credential spills”) and by purchasing lists of exposed credentials from other criminals on the dark web. Lists of member information from compromised online banking, online retailers and business association sites are common. This information often includes names, addresses, bank account numbers/credit card numbers, social security numbers, phone numbers and other sensitive data – enabling credential stuffing and social engineering attacks against victims around the world.

What Can Credit Unions Do About Credential Stuffing?

The key to handling this threat is to be able to prevent, or at the very least, identify illicit login attempts and automate actions in response to failed logins. Cybercriminals use a variety of tools, rented botnets (including specifically built credential stuffing bots) and brute force attacks to pick off less than strong passwords all around the Internet. Then, as we discussed above, they use that stolen information to probe your credit union for the same login credentials. 

The first, and easiest step, in reducing these cybercriminals’ success rate is to teach all of your legitimate users not to use the same password across multiple systems, and NEVER use passwords from public sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter for example, as account credentials at work or on other important sites. Instead, suggest that they use a password manager application to make it simple to have different passwords for every site. Not only does this help make their passwords stronger, but it can even reduce support costs by reducing password reset requests. Ongoing security awareness is the key to helping them understand this issue and the significance their password choices have on the security of their own personal information and that of the company.

Next, the Credit Union should have a complete inventory of every remote login service, across their Internet presence. Every web application, email service, VPN or remote access portal and every single place that a cybercriminal could try or use their stolen credentials to gain an account takeover. Once, the Credit Union knows where login credentials can be used, they should go about preventing abuse and cyberattacks against those attack surfaces. 

The key to prevention should start with eliminating any Internet login capability that is not required. It should then progress to reducing the scope of each login surface by restricting the source IP addresses that can access that service, if possible. Often Credit Unions are able to restrict this access down to specific countries or geographic areas. While this is not an absolute defense, it does help to reduce the impacts of brute force attacks and botnet scans on the login surfaces. 

The single best control for any authentication mechanism, however, is multi factor authentication (MFA) (basically a form of secure access code provided to the user). Wheverever possible, this control should be used. While multi factor authentication can be difficult to implement on some services, it is widely available and a variety of products exist to support nearly every application and platform. Financial services should already be aware of MFA, since it has been widely regulated by FFIEC, NCUA and FDIC guidance for some time.

More and more, however, credential stuffing is being used against web mail, Office 365 and other email systems. This has become so common, that a subset of data breaches called Business Email Compromise now exists and is tracked separately by law enforcement. This form of unauthorized access has been wildly popular across the world and especially against the financial services of the United States. Compromised email addresses and the resulting wire transfer fraud and ACH fraud that stems from this form of credential theft/identity theft are among some of the highest financial impacts today. Additionally, they commonly lead to malware spread and ransomware infections, if the attacker can’t find a way to steal money or has already managed to do so.

No matter what login mechanism is being abused, even when MFA is in place, logging of both legitimate access and unauthorized access attempts is needed. In the event that a security breach does occur, this data is nearly invaluable to the forensics and investigation processes. Do keep in mind, that many default configurations of web services and cloud-based environments (like Office 365) have much of this logging disabled by default. 

While Credit Unions remain prime targets, having good prevention and detection are a key part of strong risk management against credential stuffing. Practicing incident response skills and business recovery via tabletop exercises and the like also go a long way to stengthening your security team’s capabilities.

How Can MicroSolved Help?

Our team (the oldest security firm in the midwest) has extensive experience with a variety of risk management and security controls, including helping Credit Unions inventory their attack surfaces, identify the best multi factor authentication system for their environment, create policies and processes for ensuring safe operations and performing assessments, configuration audits of devices/applications/cloud environments. 

We also scope and run custom tabletop exercises and help Credit Unions build better information security programs. Our team has extensive experience with business email compromise, wire/ACH/credit card fraud prevention, cybercriminal tactics and incident response, in the event that you discover that credential theft has occurred. 

Lastly, our ClawBack data leak detection platform, can help you watch for leaked credentials, find source code and scripts that might contain reuseable account credentials and even hunt down device configurations that can expose the entire network to easy compromise. 

You can learn more about all of our services, and our 28 years of information security thought leadership here.

Lastly, just reach out to us and get in touch here. We’d love to talk with your Credit Union and help you with any and all of these controls for protecting against credential stuffing attacks or any other cybersecurity issue.

ClawBack For Credit Unions

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I got a question recently from one of our Credit Union clients about ClawBack™. They explained that they don’t really do any internal development, so leaking source code was not a concern for them. Based on that, they wondered, would ClawBack still be a useful tool for them?

I pointed out that most larger Credit Unions do some form of development, or at the very least, that their systems admin folks often write (and potentially expose) scripts and other management tools that would be of use to an attacker. However, even if they didn’t do any development at all, leveraging something like the Professional level of ClawBack as a DIY tool ($149.00 per month) is still a good idea.

Further, I explained that source code leaks are only one third of the focus of the ClawBack tool. It also searches for leaked device/application configurations and leaked credentials. Every Credit Union with a network needs to think about leaked device and application configurations. These are the most commonly found items in ClawBack’s history. Whether by accident, or misunderstanding or malicious intent, thousands of leaked configuration files wind up on the Internet in repositories, support forums, answer sites, social media and paste bins. When found, they can provide significant amounts of damaging information to attackers, ranging from logins and passwords to sensitive cryptography and API keys. In some cases, they can be a nearly complete map of the internal network.

Thirdly, ClawBack also focuses on leaked credentials. It can help identify stolen and compromised passwords belonging to members of your organization. Many times, these credentials contain the same or similar passwords as Internet exposed applications, webmail or email access and potentially even weakly secured VPN instances. Stolen and leaked credentials are among the most significant root causes of breaches, business email compromise and a variety of other fraud.

Your CU Security team can add ClawBack to their toolkit for less than $150 per month. It’s simple to use, flexible and an incredibly powerful capability to minimize the damage from data leaks. Check out this less than 8 minute video for more information. If you’d like to discuss ClawBack or our ClawBack Managed and Professional Services, please drop us a line, or give us a call at (614) 351-1237 today. 

Detecting Info Leaks with ClawBack

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Clawback smallClawBack Is Purpose Built to Detect Info Leaks

ClawBack is MicroSolved’s cloud-based SaaS solution for performing info leak detection. We built the tool because we worked so many incidents and breaches related to three common types of info leaks:

  • Leaked Credentials – this is so common that it lies at the root of thousands of incidents over the last several years, attackers harvest stolen and leaked logins and passwords and use them anywhere they think they can gain access – this is so common, it is even categorized by OWASP as a specific form of attack: credential stuffing 
  • Leaked Configurations – attackers love to comb through leaked device and application configuration files for credentials, of course, but also for details about the network or app environment, sensitive data locations, cryptographic secrets and network management information they can use to gain control or access
  • Leaked Code – leaked source code is a huge boon for attackers; often leaking sensitive intellectual property that they can sell on the dark web to your competitors or parse for vulnerabilities in your environment or products

MicroSolved knows how damaging these info leaks can be to organizations, no matter the type. That’s exactly why we built ClawBack to provide ongoing monitoring for the info leak terms that matter most to you.

How to Get Started Detecting Info Leaks

Putting ClawBack to work for you is incredibly easy. Most customers are up and monitoring for info leaks within 5 minutes.

There is no hardware, software, appliance or agent to deploy. The browser-based interface is simple to use, yet flexible enough to meet the challenges of the modern web. 

First, get a feel for some terms that you would like to monitor that are unique to your organization. Good examples might be unique user names, application names, server names, internal code libraries, IP address ranges, SNMP community strings, the first few hex characters of certificates or encryption keys, etc. Anything that is unique to your organization or at the very least, uncommon. 

Next, register for a ClawBack account by clicking here.

Once your account is created, and you follow the steps to validate it, you can login to the ClawBack application. Here, you will be able to choose the level of subscription that you would like, picking from the three different service levels available. You will also be able to input your payment information and set up additional team members to use the application, if available at your subscription level. 

Next, click on Monitoring Terms and input the terms that you identified in the first step. ClawBack will immediately go and search for any info leaks related to your terms as you put them in. Additionally, ClawBack will continually monitor for the terms going forward and provide alerts for any info leaks that appear in the common locations around the web. 

How To View Any Info Leaks

Reviewing any info leaks found is easy, as well. Simply click on Alerts on the top menu. Here, your alerts will be displayed, in a sortable list. The list contains a summary of each identified leak, the term it matched and the location of the leak. You can click on the alert to view the identified page. Once reviewed, you can archive the alert, where it will remain in the system and is visible in your archive, or you can mark it as a false positive, and it will be removed from your dataset but ClawBack will remember the leak and won’t alert you again for that specific URL. 

If you have access to the export function, based on your subscription level, you can also so export alerts to a CSV file for uploading into SIEM/SOAR tools or ticketing systems. It’s that easy! 

You can find a more specific walkthrough for finding code leaks here, along with some screen shots of the product in action.

You can learn more about ClawBack and view some use case videos and demo videos at the ClawBack homepage.

Give ClawBack a try today and you can put your worries to rest that unknown info leaks might be out there doing damage to your organization. It’s so easy, so affordable and so powerful that it makes worries about info leaks obsolete.

Underground Cyber-Crime Economy Continues to Grow

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I read two interesting articles today that reinforced how the underground economy associated with cyber-crime is still growing. The first, an article from Breech Security, talked about their analysis of web-hacking from 2007. Not surprisingly,  they found that the majority of web hacking incidents they worked last year were geared towards theft of confidential information.

This has been true for the majority of incident response cases MSI has worked for a number of years now. The majority are aimed at gaining access to the underlying database structures and other corporate data stores of the organization. Clearly, the target is usually client identity information, credit card info or the like.

Then, I also read on darknet this morning that Finjin is saying they have been observing a group that has released a small P2P application for trading/sale of compromised FTP accounts and other credentials. Often, MSI has observed trading and sale of such information on IRC and underground mailing lists/web sites. Prices for the information are pretty affordable, but attackers with a mass amount of the data can make very good incomes from the sale. Often, the information is sold to multiple buyers – making the attacker even more money from their efforts.

Underground economies have been around since the dawn of capitalism. They exist for almost every type of contraband and law enforcement is usually quite unsuccessful at stamping them out. Obviously, they have now become more common around cyber-crime and these events that have “bubbled to the surface” are only glimpses of the real markets.

It is critical that information security teams understand these motivations and the way attackers think, target victims and operate. Without this understanding, they are not likely to succeed in defending their organizations from the modern attacker. If your organization still spends a great deal of time worrying about web page defacements and malware infections or if your security team is primarily focused around being “net cops”, it is pretty likely that they will miss the real threat from today’s cyber-criminals and tomorrow’s versions of organized crime.