A highly recommended skim from BleepingComputer:
The BlueKeep remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Services is currently exploited in the wild. Vulnerable machines exposed to the web are apparently compromised for cryptocurrency mining purposes.

The attempts have been recorded by honeypots that expose only port 3389, specific for remote assistance connections via the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

Attacks are not wormable

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont noticed on Saturday that multiple honeypots in his EternalPot RDP honeypot network started to crash and reboot. They’ve been active for almost half a year and this is the first time they came down. For some reason, the machines in Australia did not crash, the researcher noted in a tweet.

First details about BlueKeep being the cause of these events came from MalwareTech, who investigated the crash dumps from Beaumont’s machines. He said that he “found BlueKeep artifacts in memory and shellcode to drop a Monero Miner.”

According to early analysis from MalwareTech, an initial payload runs an encoded PowerShell command that downloads a second PowerShell script, also encoded. The researcher says that the final payload is a cryptocurrency miner, likely for Monero, currently detected by 25 out of 68 antivirus engines on the VirtusTotal scanning platform.

Talking to BleepingComputer, the researcher said that the malware may not be a worm but it is mass-exploiting the BlueKeep bug. This indicates that the cybercriminals are using a BlueKeep scanner to find vulnerable systems exposed on the web and drop the cryptocurrency miner on them.

In an update, MalwareTech says that analysis of the network traffic does not indicate self-propagation, meaning that the server doing the exploitation gets the target IP addresses from a predefined list.

Update: according to netflow it doesn’t appear to be self propagating, I assume a list of vulnerable IPs are being fed to a server which performs the exploitation.

— MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) November 3, 2019

The first public BlueKeep exploit was added to Metasploit in September but scanners for the bug have been available before that date. MalwareTech’s analysis confirmed that the same code in the Metasploit module is also present in the malware.

It is likely that whoever is behind these attacks is using public resources and did not develop a reliable, wormable threat, as proved by Beaumont’s honeypot crashes.

A combination of cryptocurrency miner and a BlueKeep scanner was reported in July in a piece of malware called Watchbog, which typically focused on vulnerable Linux servers.

At the time, cybersecurity company Intezer said that integrating the scanner module for the RDP vulnerability alongside the Linux exploits “suggests that WatchBog is preparing a list of vulnerable systems to target in the future or to sell to third party vendors for profit.”

MalwareTech told us that the indicators of compromise Intezer provided for Watchbog do not seem to match the malware currently hitting machines vulnerable to BlueKeep.

These assaults generated over 26 million events on Beaumont’s honeypot infrastructure, which makes determining the indicators of compromise a more time consuming task. However, the researcher promised to sort through them for the relevant sequence and provide the data.

Brief BlueKeep history

BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) is a serious vulnerability that can allow malware to spread across connected systems without user intervention. Microsoft patched it on May 14, followed by a barrage of alerts about its severity from governments and security companies, some reiterating their concern.

Exploiting this RDP flaw for remote code execution (RCE) is not easy and the most common result of this endeavor is a crash of the target system. Security researchers that created a working exploit kept the details private to delay attackers creating their version and compromise still unpatched systems.

Two private exploit modules were developed in June and July, for Metasploit and CANVAS penetration testing tools. Both were hard to get as the former was private and the latter was delivered to subscribers that paid at least $32,480.

At the enterprise level, the worldwide update rate was 83% in June. However, this statistic did not count consumer machines. This suggests that the cybercriminals are likely hitting consumer computers.

The vulnerability does not affect all versions of Windows operating system. Microsoft’s advisory lists Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008.

Update [11/03/2019]: Article updated with information from MalwareTech’s analysis of the malware on Kryptos Logic blog

General Information

Executive Summary

Microsoft is releasing this security advisory to inform customers that an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine addresses a security vulnerability that was reported to Microsoft. The vulnerability could allow denial of service if the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scans a specially crafted file. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could prevent the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine from monitoring affected systems until the specially crafted file is manually removed and the service is restarted.

The Microsoft Malware Protection Engine ships with several Microsoft antimalware products. See the Affected Software section for a list of affected products. Updates to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine are installed along with the updated malware definitions for the affected products. Administrators of enterprise installations should follow their established internal processes to ensure that the definition and engine updates are approved in their update management software, and that clients consume the updates accordingly.

Typically, no action is required of enterprise administrators or end users to install updates for the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, because the built-in mechanism for the automatic detection and deployment of updates will apply the update within 48 hours of release. The exact time frame depends on the software used, Internet connection, and infrastructure configuration. Read More…

Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks of the old already have mitigation steps being practiced by network professionals today. Internet service providers have disabled accepting ICMP echo requests, used ingress filtering for spoofed source address and have limited their opened ports. All of this mitigation affects only the network and transport layer of the OSI protocol stack.Плиты погреба

The techniques described above don’t work against bot threats which use a legitimate way in retrieving Internet resources. It does not spoof its source address, it does not send ICMP packets, and it does jordans for cheap not use ports other than the HTTP port. The attacks usually originate from a Cheap Ray Ban Sunglasses compromised machine with multiple threads or processes that connects to a website simultaneously.

The HTTP port is used by browsers to access a web page and this port sits on the application layer of the OSI protocol stack which does not have any established mitigation steps against DDoS attacks. The application layer is where data have been decapsulated or stripped of its transmission details between machines and protocols.

Mitigation steps against HTTP-based DDoS attack varies between internet service providers (ISPs) and network administrators. The reason behind this is because it is hard to distinguish legitimate traffic from an attack coming from a botnet. The botnet DDoS mimics an event that a flash crowd visitor creates.

The obvious solution for this is to have bigger bandwidth to support all the requests; the same way that a hosted website upgrades to a costlier hosting plan as it grows in popularity and wholesale football jerseys generates huge traffic. Instead of upgrading the subscription, there cheap nfl jerseys are already commercial anti-DDoS services which provide additional bandwidth in the event of flash crowds.

Companies serving DDoS defense also have services which involve packet scrubbing. This uses high performance network appliances and computers to inspect packets content and behavior before forwarding the packets to its destination. It hooks the website IP address and catches all the packets in the event of DDoS and inspects them of how they react to responses sent by the defense. If the connecting host is legitimately accessing the site, the packet is then forwarded to the באשלים hosting server.

In case the website is hosted via a web-hosting provider, the site owner does not Как have any access to the network devices to control and filter traffic. For the site owners on the budget, there have been proposed solutions that can be used by their site developers.

It involved the use of a reverse Turing test, which gives a challenge to the connecting hosts. One example of reverse Turing test is the use of CAPTCHA which contains Zuid-Afrika words or sound that humans can easily understand but not computers. When a source IP address tries to access a URL repeatedly within a short time frame, the challenge routine is triggered. If the machine does not reply or incorrectly answers, an HTTP 503 response (Service Unavailable) is always sent to the source IP address until the DDoS subsides. The Service Unavailable response is the cheapest way to send to a connecting host in terms of bandwidth.

For network administrators that don’t have access to high performance network appliances or services, there’s a passive way to mitigate DDoS and it’s called tarpitting. It is deployed by network administrators in cheap football jerseys china their gateway firewall which is the boundary cheap nfl jerseys wholesale of their intranet and their ISP.

Tarpitting works by taking advantage of TCP, nfl jerseys china a protocol which the botnet must follow to send and receive packets. Once the offending source is detected, the victim’s firewall forwards the Cheap Football Jerseys connection to a tarpitted address. The tarpitted address has its TCP window size set at the minimum. This causes the offending machine to send further data having the wholesale jerseys same size that it received from the tarpitted address. The result more bandwidth is ray ban outlet served to legitimate users.

In normal DDoS attack where an attacker initially sends a synchronization packet (SYN), the victim replies with a synchronization and acknowledgment packet (SYN-ACK) which is completed by the offending machine with an custom jerseys acknowledgment packet (ACK). Completing this three-way handshake is what differentiates this attack from SYN floods which already have defense technology built in routers and operating systems.

In a tarpitted Cheap Oakleys connection, the victim only replies to SYN packets with a SYN-ACK having a zero TCP window size. Without the victim replying to other packets, the attacking machine will have multiple open connections. These connections made by the offending machine will only be closed when time-out is reached or if the attacking machine can’t handle too many open connections causing it to crash – sort of like attacking itself with DoS.

Security and network professionals agree that the best thing to mitigate, if not eradicate, DDoS attacks is to have cooperation. Information sharing Cheap nfl Jerseys between security and network community will help standardize the best practices how systems and applications interact to process data efficiently. Information from the victim network should be relayed to the ISP nearer to the attacking machine in order to block DDoS packet. Cybercrime laws should be enforced to get the cooperation of ISPs and infected companies’ intranets that send DDoS packets to clean their networks. Until Ray Ban sale we get this to reality, we just have to accept that DDoS threats from botnets are unstoppable if handled alone.

These are suggested methods to prevent distributed denial of service attacks.

1. Use the ip verify unicast reverse-path interface command on the input interface on the router at the upstream end of the connection.

   This feature examines each packet received as input on that interface. If the source IP address does not have a route in the CEF tables that points back to the same interface on which the packet arrived, the router drops the packet.

   The effect of Unicast RPF is that zona it stops SMURF attacks (and other attacks that depend on source IP address spoofing) at the ISP’s POP (lease and dial-up). This protects your network and customers, Ray Ban sale as well as the rest of the Internet. To use unicast RPF, enable “CEF switching” or “CEF distributed switching” in the router. There is no need to configure the input interface for CEF switching. As long as CEF is running on the router, individual interfaces can be configured Cheap nfl Jerseys with other switching modes. RPF is an input side function that enabled on an interface or sub-interface and operates on packets received by the router.

   It is very important for CEF to be turned on in the router. RPF does not work without CEF. Unicast RPF is not supported in any 11.2 or 11.3 images. Unicast RPF is included in 12.0 on platforms that support CEF, wholesale nfl jerseys which includes the AS5800. Hence, unicast RFP can be configured on the PSTN/ISDN dial-up interfaces on the AS5800.

2. Filter all RFC-1918 address space using Access Control Lists (ACLs).

   Refer to this example:

   access-list 101 deny ip 10.0.0.0 Cheap Ray Ban Sunglasses    0.255.255.255 any
   access-list 101 deny ip 192.168.0.0 0.0.255.255 Fake Oakleys any
   access-list 101 deny Cheap nba Jerseys ip 172.16.0.0  0.15.255.255 any
   access-list 101 permit ip any any
   
   interface xy
      ip access-group 101 in

   Another source of information about special use IPv4 address space that can be oakley outlet filtered is the (now expired) IETF draft ‘Documenting Special Use IPv4 Address Blocks that have cheap jordans online been registered with IANA .’

3. Apply ingress and egress filtering using ACLs.

   Refer to this example:

        { ISP Core } -- ISP Edge Router -- Customer Edge Router -- { Customer network }

   The ISP edge router should only accept traffic with source addresses belonging to the customer network. The customer network should only accept traffic with source addresses other than the customer network block. This is a sample ACL for an ISP edge router:

   access-list 190 permit ip {customer network} {customer network mask} any 
   access-list 190 deny ip any any [log] 
   
   interface {ingress interface} {interface #} 
   	ip access-group 190 in

   This is a sample ACL for a customer edge router:

   access-list 187 deny ip {customer network} {customer network mask} any 
   access-list 187 permit ip any any 
   
   access-list 188 permit ip {customer network} {customer network cheap nba jerseys mask} any 
   access-list 188 deny ip any any 
   
   interface {egress interface} {interface #} 
   	ip access-group 187 in 
   	ip access-group 188 out

   If you are able to turn cheap jerseys wholesale on Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF), the length on the ACLs can be substantially reduced and thus increase performance by enabling unicast reverse path forwarding. In order to support unicast reverse path forwarding, you only need to be able to enable CEF on the router as a whole; the interface on which the feature is enabled does not need to be a CEF switched interface.

4. Use CAR to rate limit ICMP packets.

   Refer to this example:

   interface xy 
    rate-limit output access-group 2020 3000000 512000 786000 conform-action 
   transmit exceed-action drop 
   
   access-list 2020 permit icmp any cheap nba jerseys any echo-reply

5. Configure rate limiting for SYN packets.

   Refer to this example:

   access-list 152 permit tcp any host eq www 
   access-list 153 permit tcp any host eq www established 
   
   interface {int} 
   	rate-limit output access-group 153 45000000 Cheap Jordans 100000 100000 
   conform-action transmit exceed-action drop 
    	rate-limit output access-group 152 1000000 100000 100000 
   conform-action transmit exceed-action drop

   In the previous example, replace:

   • 45000000 with the maximum link bandwidth
   • 1000000 with a value that – is between 50% and 30% of the SYN cheap nfl jerseys flood oakley sunglasses sale rate
   • burst normal and burst max cheap jerseys wholesale rates with accurate values

   Note that if you set the burst rate greater than 30%, many legitimate SYNs may be dropped. In order to get an idea vulputate of where to set the burst rate, use the show interfaces rate-limit command in order to display the conformed and exceeded rates for the interface. Your objective is to rate-limit the SYNs as little as necessary to get things working again.

A denial of service (DoS) attack is an incident in which a user or organization is deprived of the services of a jordan retro 11 resource they would normally expect to have. In a distributed denial-of-service, large numbers of compromised systems (sometimes called a botnet) attack a single target.

Although a DoS attack does not usually result in the theft of information or other security loss, it can cost the target person or company a great deal of time and money. Typically, the loss of ray ban sunglasses service is the inability of a particular network service, such as e-mail, to be available or the temporary loss of all network connectivity and services. A denial of service attack can also destroy programming and files in affected computer systems. In some cases, DoS attacks have forced Web sites accessed by millions of people to temporarily cease operation.

<span Böyle style=”font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif”>Common forms of denial of service attacks are: Read More…