Displaying items by tag: Hacking

In May of 2023 a few sensitive accounts reported to Microsoft that their environments appeared to be compromised. Due to the nature of these accounts, Microsoft dove in and discovered that an expired Consumer Microsoft Account Singing Key had been used to gain access to these tenants. It was more than a bit embarrassing as the list included environments that appear to have been related to their Government Cloud Computing tenants, fortunately on the low side (non-classified). Microsoft quickly responded and says they expelled the threat actor while removing the possibility of using that key again (they identified the thumbprint of the key used).

There is a topic of conversation that really needs to be talked about in the open. It is the danger of developer systems (personal and company owned) being targets of threat groups. It is a fact; it is not going away, and it is something that people need to consider as they plan out their own security programs. I say this on the heels of coming back from Def Con and hearing AI developers tell me they are not worried about abuse of their AI models (LLM or Statistical). The thought process was an attacker would have to go to too much trouble to have any impact on the model, it would not be worth it. While I can understand this line of thinking, I still feel that it is very wrong and short sighted.

Duolingo, is a language learning site (not to be confused with an LLM) and has a very large base of users. The site is a good target for attackers that might want to take advantage of that user base. This is something that apparently happened sometime before January 2023 with a cache of user data showed up on the now defunct Breached hacking forum. According to Duolingo, the information was listed as scraped as opposed to being part of a regular breach and Duolingo claimed the information was scraped from publicly available information.

Black Hat 2023 – Las Vegas, NV – One of my personal focuses is understanding the “Why” behind changes in the threat landscape. In simple terms understanding the Why of something gives you a good understanding of potential pivots and changes. After all a personal Why is what motivates and moves you, it stands to reason that identifying the Why behind threat groups gives you an insight into their motivations and drivers (besides money). With this in mind I sat down with Don Smith, VP of Threat Intelligence, Counter Threat Unit. The same team that identified the abandoned reply URL flaw in Power Platform.

Microsoft has not been having the greatest of months. First it was identified that a stollen MSA signing key was used by a Nation State to access personal and low-side US government tenants (Low-Side it the unclassified side of Government Cloud Computing). This disclosure seems to have focused all of the attention on Microsoft as more and more security researchers are diving into their cloud services. That being said, there are and have always been researchers that keep Microsoft on their Radar, just because there is always something going on there. That is the case of the latest news to hit the street about Entra ID (formerly Azure AD).

Black Hat 2023 Las Vegas – One of the areas I wanted to focus on this year while at both Black Hat and Def Con was to get an understanding of the threat landscape from both an industry and attacker perspective. My conversations (I don’t really do interviews) all included parts that related to the general attack landscape. So, it only made sense that one of my conversations needed to be with ZeroFox For those of you that might not be aware, ZeroFox throws a great Black Hat party… no wait. ZeroFox is an external attack surface management company. If you only think of them in terms of social media intelligence, then you probably need to revisit them.

It used to be a common phrase that the only certain things are Death and Taxes. These days it seems the list has been extended to Death, Taxes, and 0-days in enterprise tools sets. We have seen a number of zero days being abused since the beginning of 2023 such as Barracuda spam filters, MoveIT MFT, Citrix File share MFT, and (the subject of today’s article) Ivanti’s Sentry (the service formerly known as MobileIron). The uptick in exploitation of 0-days is very concerning just on their own, but when looked at as part of a larger effort, it is borderline frightening.

Las Vegas – So Black Hat 2023 and Def Con 31 have come and gone, and while the exhaustion that comes from this epic combined event might not be completely gone, I am ready to give my thoughts on the events. Before I get started, understand that this is my personal opinion on the show(s) as well as my general takeaways from them. As always, your milage may vary. Either way, I hope that you enjoy the article below and that your time and camp this year was amazing (mine was). So, let’s get started!

As we head into Hacker Summer Camp in Las Vegas, the emails are already flowing freely into my inbox. Some of them are the regular players that I see every year and others are new. Still more are people that I hear from each year but with new faces to talk to. This is part of what I love about going out to Black Hat, talking new people, talking to well known people in the industry and then getting an understanding of what everyone thinks is the “big thing” for cybersecurity. This year, by far, it is AI and automation.

Hey, remember that supply chain attack on NPM that happened recently? Which one? Yeah, that is sort of the problem with recent supply chain attacks. In particular the ones that are targeting the development pipeline. This is because they are starting to happen so often that they all blur together, yet NPM and other critical components of the development supply chain are still targets for attackers to either get their malicious packages onto development systems, or in the final compiled binary that is then sent out to the general public. To call this problematic is to describe a nuclear bomb as a big firecracker. Ok, soapbox on the importance of SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) hygiene and security put away for now.