Corona Virus Phishing Threat

The top trend all over the world is Corona Virus now of course. Countries are trying to solve this big problem but incidents numbers are still increasing. By this situation, everyone's first topic became Corona Virus. People spend their time at home, working as home office and of course watching and reading the latest situations about this infection. So, this trend topic became the top trend for the attackers too. While people are always searching for the latest news on internet, attackers already started to turn it into threat.

Too many articles have been published about this threat in the last few months. Today's top threat is phishing about Corona Virus. According to @SophosLabs;

"Of the more than 37,000 domains that have been registered since February, at least 1765 of them also use the word "test" in the domain name. While many of these registrations may just come from domain speculators, some may be scams and a few legitimate."

And @SophosLabs also mentioned that someone registered a domain for every US state, followed by "covidtest" and parked them. This shows us that we will see new phishing campaigns including covid test, against people who are worrying about their health and want to make test.

Fall of A Hero - Rise and Fall of AV

All IT Security experts surely faced with such situations that anyone who does irrelevant with security, know only AV about computer security. AVs was the hero of our security for long times.

Legendary Times

AVs begin their advanture as signature based protection against known viruses and worms. With the development of the threats; fisrtly with script kiddies, than financially motivated hacker groups, it was enough to update signatures weekly or every few days. Today, things work a little differently. Actually, much more differently. As mentioned in the “A Guide to Choose EDR” blog before, with the explosion of the connectivity between PCs and mobile devices, usage of cloud more day by day, threats have also changed. Attackers now have the ability to bypass signature based detection and protection technologies. For dealing with these situations, heuristics detection skills have been added to AVs. Machine learning and behavior monitoring added for detecting and blocking suspicious behaviors. Also, AV vendors added host based IDS/IPS, hostbase firewall and device control skills, and these features become very useful for admins, to use all of these features within one agent, while this agent is already deployed in all PCs.

Fall of the Hero

Despite all these new features, researches conducted after 2018 say that AV products misses more than %50 of attacks. Besides, false positives caused by constantly updates causes difficult situations fort he IT professionals.

Everyone accepts that there is no any solution providing %100 security. With this approach, speed of response and visibility become the key features against threats. This is the reason SIEMs must be used to complement to AV. Yet there are also caveats that it is not enough and advanced tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions must be implemented alongside AV. That must be true, at least we see that AV vendors are also now developing such solutions beside their AV solutions. You can access to a more detailed review of EDR solutions; what they must include and how to choose them here.

What is next?

Now, AV vendors thich are also developing EDR solution, suggest that the customers must implement these solutions beside the AV. Meanwhile, the vendors developing only EDR solutions, or vendors which entered endpoint field with EDR, say that customers can change their AV with EDR solutions peace of mind. But is it so easy to replace AV with EDR? Or simply, is it easy to change any AV with something else.

As mentioned before, companies are now using their AV agents for device control, host IDS/IPS, host firewall, application control and whitelisting. For replacing the AV, the new product must support these features, even if the solution is very success in detecting and responding. Meanwhile, event if the solution has these features, there are too many policies, rules and exceptions for all. I am sure all IT Professionals will be afraid of this replacement since these policies. Until overcoming these problems, it seems better to use EDR beside AV solution. For now, it is also important to use a vendor that have enough working experience with commonly used AVs.

Keepnet Labs Exposure

Bob Diachenko, Cyber Threat Intelligence Director of SecurityDiscovery.com announced that he has discovered an unsecured Elasticsearch install belonging to the security firm Keepnet Labs that contained 5 billion records of data leaked in previous incidents that took place between 2012 and 2019. 

"The irony of that discovery is that it was a 'data breach database', an enormously huge collection of previously reported (and, perhaps, non-reported) security incidents spanning 2012-2019 era" he says about this data leakage.

NOTE: Company's or customers' data were not exposed

Diachenko also specifies how they discovered this exposure and the dangers of these stolen data, in his article. Of course, with this data leakage incident, the biggest danger must be unreported incidents for some companies were disclosed.

Dark Web; Anonymity and Privacy

While talking on Dark Web, one is the most confused concepts with Dark Web is Deep Web. But first, I want to touch Surface Web. Surface Web is the indexable part of the internet. This includes all websites that you can find via search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Deep Web means everything else. It is everything on the internet that cannot be indexed. Deep Web is any system requires login credentials. Social media shares, personal data like credit card or medical information, company databases and more, create deep web.

Dark Web, is a part of the internet that cannot be indexable Only can be accessible via private softwares lie Tor (or the Onion Router). Tor is a distributed network where traffic is bounced between various routers (https://www.torproject.org/).

The poster below is showing the concepts of the internet (https://coar.risc.anl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/DarkNet_Poster_R8-622x1024.png)

Privacy

Privacy is the most important concern for people today, with the rise of internet and personal cloud usage. People want to feel safe and not monitored. With the sites visited or applications, these websites can collect some tracking actions of the user. Using the information collected with these tracking actions, simply, the websites can perform targeted advertising, moreover location based advertising to the user. Our internet usage is becoming a way for vendors, collecting information about us. Using Dark Web provide users making their online activities anonymously. Websites or applications cannot collect these type of data while using Dark Web.

Criminals

Since its anonymity and privacy, most people think that using Dark Web is illegal, because criminals use it to protect themselves. Criminals create online markets for selling their illegal materials. But also law enforcement agents such as police also uses Dark Web to capture these criminals.

Last Words

One of the most popular marketplace is Silk Road. Silk Road started for selling magic mushrooms at first, but then, grew to be used for other drugs also. Another popular marketplace is Wallstreet Market. Wallstreet Market offers goods like drugs, jewellery, malware, fraud information, stolen data, etc.  

Dark Web markets are not just buying or selling illegal goods. These markets can provide a better pricing since there is no anyone between the seller and the buyer, there is no taxes and advertisements, for also legal services, electronics, vegetables and etc. However, I think most people like to make shopping without receiving offers, based on the previous purchases, since the market does not collect any information about you.

People, mostly users away from these technologies think that Dark Web is a place where they need too much technical information to use it. However, there is not much difference between Surface Web and Dark Web. Only the softwares to reach there and the anonymity and privacy are the differences. Meanwhile, people have to be familiar with cryptocurrency technology tos hop from Dark Web.

A Guide to Choose EDR

As spoken in all security events in last decade, the attacker’s purposes and methods have changed greatly and become more complex. As if this is not enough, increase in the number of the mobile devices used in the organizations and moving some (or most of the) services to cloud made endpoints’ protection more difficult. With the expanded cloud usage and development of the mobile technologies, more users are coming less to the Office. This situation makes management, monitoring and protecting more difficult for the endpoints.

As said at the beginning, with the new advanced techniques of the attackers (like advanced malwares, fileless malwares or exploits), it is very difficult to protect endpoints with only traditional endpoint security solutions. Neverthless, as the subject of another discussion, this does not mean that signature based antivirus, host IPS, host firewall or other conventional endpoint security solutions meaningless anymore.

Meanwhile, while talking about traditional security solutions, we have to touch what endpoint is. Because, attack surface increased against today’s organizations, since IoT and OT are parts of the endpoints’ of them. Now, we need to expand endpoint security solutions as covering mobile phones, POS, wearable devices, sensors, cameras, HVAC, and cars, since they can access both to internet – even if confined with the cloud - and organization’s network, wherever they are and whenever they want.

According to this traditional endpoint security solutions, EDR solutions have malicious activity detection, containment of the endpoint, investigation of the incident and remediation capabilities fort he endpoint. With this capabilities, they can reduce the impact of an incident in the organization and provides intelligence for responding faster.

EDR systems use an agent on each endpoint system. EDR vendors feed these agents with their intelligence services, global customer data, firewalls, network and/or e-mail based APT devices, etc. With these intelligence data, the agent provides deep and real-time monitoring on the endpoint, discovery and response.

An EDR system must use at least a few monitoring methods such;

IOC Detection, means that the agent is comparing the system changes with its Indicator of Compromises. This IOCs can be feed from other devices of the vendor 

in the same network, or global customers and intelligence services.

Anolmaly Detection, means checking the system for anormal states.

Behavior Detection, means checking the system for bad or malicious behaviours.

Machine Learning and AI, means that the solution has the ability to determine the malicious activities without being explicitly programmed.

For an effective tussle against threats, time is the most important thing. Your EDR solution should help you detect, investigate and response  as quickly as possible. For doing this, first, your EDR should detect the threat as soon as possible. Right here, the power of the tools mentioned above shows the importance of their capabilities.

Power of the intelligence services of your EDR solution’s vendor, shows the power of the IOCs. A vendor should feed customers’ EDR with fast and effective intelligences. Also, as community data, vendors can feed their customers with other customers’ known bad data. This means, bigger community helps you better.

Also, integration with other security tools in the network is a key point. If an EDR solution can be fed with the other network tools, endpoints can be ready for the threats seen elsewhere, like in network traffic or in an e-mail. When we think that the malicious software reaches to the endpoint via e-mail or network channel, this feature becomes very important. With the integration and the advanced search capabilities in the EDR solution, a threat that seen in network anywhere can be catch quickly in the endpoint. From here, we also must see that an EDR solution must include an advanced search feature, searching the endpoint by many different options. These advanced searching options helps admin searching his clients against possible threats.

An EDR solution must provides clear and meaningful explanations about the threats. Only determining a threat is not enough for admins. The solutions must help them responding to these threats. For responding quickly and correctly, admins must understand the content of the threat. Also, containment is an important feature fort he EDR solutions, a time-saving feature for the admins, while they are working on the threat. An endpoint has a malicious content should be contained during the analysis, so other endpoints prevented against spreading of this malicious content.

Also, for investigation, EDR solution must provide a full state output of the endpoint, for the timezone that the malicious thing happen. A full or specific memory dump information, states of the services, etc. An automatic creation of these information is critical during the investigation processes.

From the experiences, I know that the endpoint is the most boring and difficult part of the security. Distribution problems, slowing machines after distributing, user complaints, etc. Most of the security admins don’t like to deal with the endpoint security. But as shown in most studies, thousands of threats are produced every day. Just protecting the network and a-mail channel is not enough for these new threats. We have to give the necessary importance to the endpoints. So, with all these problems of endpoints, choosing the right vendor becomes the most important thing. An endpoint security solution must not obstruct end users’ business. Even for security, business must go on. At this point, vendor’s experience is very important to choose. Also, getting a quick answer during a problem must be evaluated, during the selection process of the EDR solution.