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OpenSSL Downgrades Panic Bug After Days of Anxiety

Initial Report
On October 27th it was reported by Dark Reading that organizations have five days to get ready for what the OpenSSL Project defined as a “serious” vulnerability impacting versions 3.0 and up of the widely used cryptographic library for encrypting digital communications. They caution that enterprises would rush to remedy the problem as soon as possible if this vulnerability turns out to be another Heartbleed flaw, which was the most recent serious vulnerability to affect OpenSSL.

Favorable News
We now have some good news after five days since the initial revelations of an internet-reshaping major flaw in OpenSSL. Instead of the critical rating that initially alarmed the online community, CVE-2022-37786 and CVE-2022-3602 have been published as high-rated vulnerabilities. According to OpenSSL:

“A buffer overrun can be triggered in X.509 certificate verification, specifically in name constraint checking. Note that this occurs after certificate chain signature verification and requires either a CA to have signed the malicious certificate or for the application to continue certificate verification despite failure to construct a path to a trusted issuer. An attacker can craft a malicious email address to overflow four attacker-controlled bytes on the stack. This buffer overflow could result in a crash (causing a denial of service) or potentially remote code execution.”

As a result, the vulnerability is considerably harder to exploit than what was initially suggested.

Remediation
The two CVE reports published on November 1st indicate this issue as being present in OpenSSL versions 3.0.0 to 3.0.6. Despite the fact that these flaws are not as severe as anticipated, it is still advised that all businesses identify their OpenSSL implementations and update to version 3.0.7 right away. At this point, according to OpenSSL, there is no evidence that this vulnerability has been exploited in the wild and no operational exploit that could result in code execution. A list of notable operating systems and application runtimes which are packaged with a vulnerable version of OpenSSL has been established by the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) for the Netherlands.

What Now?
nGuard is ready to assist clients in detecting and mitigating OpenSSL vulnerabilities. nGuard can identify whether or not a vulnerable version of OpenSSL is present in your environment by performing vulnerability scans and penetration testing against both external and internal facing services. Organizations may feel at ease knowing that OpenSSL versions that are insecure are being fixed in their environments by carrying out these scans on a frequent basis.

TWiC | Fortinet PoC, US Airport Sites Go Offline, CISA Warns of Industrial Appliance Flaws, & Windows 11 Phishing Protection

Over the past few weeks there have been several hot topics and time sensitive advisories released. In this edition of This Week in Cybersecurity, nGuard will highlight the Fortinet proof-of-concept (PoC) that was released; Russian-speaking hackers taking down US Airport websites; Windows 11 offering automatic phishing protection; and CISA warning of critical flaws in some industrial appliances.

Fortinet PoC Released
A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has been made available for the recently disclosed critical security flaw affecting Fortinet FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager. A successful exploitation of the shortcoming is tantamount to granting complete access “to do just about anything” on the affected system. Fortinet issued an advisory urging customers to upgrade affected appliances to the latest version as soon as possible and CISA added this to their Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog. 12 unique IP addresses have accounted for most responsibility in weaponizing CVE-2022-40684 as of October 13, 2022. A majority of them are located in Germany, followed by the U.S., Brazil, China and France. nGuard covered this in more detail in a Security Advisory last week. Conducting ongoing penetration testing and vulnerability management can alert you to these types of vulnerabilities being present in your environment.

US Airport Sites Taken Down by Russian-Speaking Attackers
On Monday October 10th, more than a dozen public-facing airport websites, including those for some of the nation’s largest airports, appeared inaccessible, and Russian-speaking hackers claimed responsibility. The attack was carried out by a group known as Killnet, who support the Kremlin but are not thought to be government hackers. Killnet favors a type of attack known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS). Two of the sites that were affected by this attack were Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and the Los Angeles International Airport websites. Fortunately, there did not seem to be an impact to air travel itself but may have caused inconveniences for individuals traveling during the time access to those sites was attempted.

Windows 11 Offers Automatic Phishing Protection
Enhanced phishing protection now comes prebuilt into the Windows 11 operating system. This protection can automatically detect when users type their password into any app or site that is known to be dangerous. Admins can know exactly when a password has been stolen and can be equipped to better protect against such attacks. According to Microsoft, “When Windows 11 protects against one phishing attack, that threat intelligence cascades to protect other Windows users interacting with other apps and sites that are experiencing the same attack.” A blocking dialog warning is displayed prompting users to change their password if they type it into a phishing site in any Chromium browser or into an application connecting to a phishing site. If users try to store their password locally, like in Notepad or in any Microsoft 365 app, Windows 11 warns them that this is an unsafe practice and urges them to delete it from the file. To help train and test your employees on their security awareness, nGuard offers custom, tailored Security Awareness Training and social engineering.

CISA Publishes Two Advisories Regarding Industrial Appliances
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published two Industrial Control Systems advisories pertaining to severe flaws in Advantech R-SeeNet and Hitachi Energy APM Edge appliances. The list of issues, which affect R-SeeNet Versions 2.4.17 and prior are:

Patches have been made available in version R-SeeNet version 2.4.21 released on September 30, 2022.

These alerts come less than a week after CISA published 25 ICS advisories on October 13, 2022, spanning several vulnerabilities across devices from Siemens, Hitachi Energy, and Mitsubishi Electric.

nGuard has a wide array of experience assessing critical infrastructure, SCADA, and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and can help you secure yours. Conducting annual penetration testing, having a proper Incident Response Plan, and ensuring you have the proper logging, alerting, and correlation can help you stay ahead of the attackers.

URGENT | Fortinet Authentication Bypass Vulnerability

On October 10, 2022, Fortinet, Inc released a new advisory for CVE-2022-40684 which affects the FortiOS, FortiProxy and FortiSwitchManager products.

Each of these products are vulnerable to an authentication bypass vulnerability. This vulnerability could allow an attacker to perform unauthenticated actions on the target system.  These actions include, but are not limited to:

  • Modifying admin user SSH keys.
  • Adding new local users
  • Updating network configurations to reroute traffic
  • Initiating packet captures to capture sensitive information

Publicly available exploit code is now starting to become available.

Affected Products

  • FortiOS version 7.2.0 through 7.2.1
  • FortiOS version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6
  • FortiProxy version 7.2.0
  • FortiProxy version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6
  • FortiSwitchManager version 7.2.0
  • FortiSwitchManager version 7.0.0

Solutions

  • Upgrade to FortiOS version 7.2.2 or above
  • Upgrade to FortiOS version 7.0.7 or above
  • Upgrade to FortiProxy version 7.2.1 or above
  • Upgrade to FortiProxy version 7.0.7 or above
  • Upgrade to FortiSwitchManager version 7.2.1 or above

Read more in:

Ongoing penetration testing and vulnerability management can alert you to these types of vulnerabilities being present in your environment. nGuard account executives are standing by to discuss solutions that elevate the overall security posture of your organization and ensure you are ready to handle vulnerabilities such as the ones described above.

Microsoft Zero-Day with No Patch!

Overview
CVE-2022-30190, known as Follina, was released by Microsoft on Monday, May 30th, 2022. The vulnerability resides within the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool (MSDT), which may allow an attacker to run arbitrary code with the privileges of the calling application. Microsoft Office applications use MSDT to troubleshoot and collect diagnostic information when something goes wrong.

This vulnerability was discovered by the independent cybersecurity researchers at nao_sec after they noticed a strange word document posted to VirusTotal. Using the Remote Template feature in Microsoft Word, an HTML file was pulled from a remote web server. It then made use of the “ms-msdt://” URI scheme to run a malicious payload. Experts are now saying this vulnerability is being exploited by attackers in the wild. Some security researchers have demonstrated execution of the malicious code merely by previewing the document in Windows File Explorer or Outlook.

Exploit
The video below demonstrates how easily this vulnerability can be exploited. Exploit code is now publicly available, making this process trivial. We will outline the steps taken in this video below:

  1.  An attacker downloads exploit code from GitHub.
  2. This exploit code is then utilized to create the malicious Word document and stand up a web server to serve up the HTML file. In the video below, this Word document is called “sploit.docx.”
  3. Once the user opens the Word document, you see the MSDT tool also fire off. MSDT is also commonly referred to as “Program Compatibility Troubleshooter.”
  4. The producer of this video then shows you that both a cmd.exe process and powershell.exe process have been launched on the system. At this point, the document can be closed, but the malicious process is still running.
  5. The demo then shows a Cobalt Strike window. Cobalt Strike is a command-and-control framework used for maintaining persistent access on compromised systems. You can see in the video that a “beacon” has been launched on the system. A beacon is an agent on the system that allows an attacker to maintain persistent access and run arbitrary code.
  6. At this point the producer of this video runs “whoami” on the system itself to show you which user account launched the Word document. They then flip back to Cobalt Strike and run “whoami” from the interactive beacon. This displays the same user account. Persistent remote code execution achieved.

What To Do?
At this point in time, Microsoft has not released an official fix for this vulnerability. They are recommending that the MSDT URL protocol be disabled in order to protect systems from this vulnerability. That guidance can be found here. nGuard offers a bevy of services that can help prevent and identify these types of attacks. Both Social Engineering simulations and Social Engineering Awareness Training can assist your organizations employees in identifying these types of attacks. Internal Penetration Testing can boost the overall security posture of your internal network. If a machine on your network does become compromised, you have assurance that the adversary won’t make it very far. Lastly, Managed Event Collection & Correlation gives you 24×7 monitoring from advanced log analysis tools and nGuard professionals who are trained to detect suspicious activity.

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