Airlock Digital announces plans for growth, expansion with investment from CyberCX
Adelaide, 28 June 2022 Airlock Digital, a world-leading solution…
Preventing Ransomware and Zero Days Using an Overlooked Basic Security Control
Continued successful exploitation of the software supply chain
As…
Opinion: Why the Information Security Manual (ISM) Control ‘1471’ isn’t practical for allowlisting at scale
TLDR; Take a look at the tables containing Product Names for…
Airlock Digital announces plans for growth, expansion with investment from CyberCX
/in News /by adminAdelaide, 28 June 2022 Airlock Digital, a world-leading solution for application allowlisting, has today announced plans for further growth and expansion following an investment from CyberCX, Australia and New Zealand’s largest cyber security services firm.
Founded in Adelaide in 2014, Airlock has become the preferred allowlisting solution for a growing number of enterprise organisations and government agencies in Australia, New Zealand (ANZ) and globally, achieving rapid growth and earning a strong reputation for its innovative solutions and customer success.
Allowlisting is considered one of the most effective security strategies to prevent threats such as ransomware and malware from infecting an organisation’s systems, and is recognised in standards such as the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential 8 mitigation strategies, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s Top 10 IT Security Actions and the Center for Internet Security’s Basic Six. Despite being an essential security measure, allowlisting has traditionally been expensive and laborious to implement and maintain.
Airlock offers a unique solution to these issues, using smart workflows to significantly reduce maintenance time, enabling organisations to effectively and efficiently use allowlisting within their suite of cyber security measures.
Airlock already has an established customer base in the US, supporting customers to implement effective allowlisting and application controls. With this new investment, Airlock intends to accelerate an ambitious global growth strategy, expanding its presence in the North American and European markets and launch a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.
This investment will also assist Airlock in growing its already strong network of channel partners, leveraging Airlock’s enhanced allowlisting solution for managed service providers (MSPs).
Airlock CEO David Cottingham said today’s announcement is a milestone event for the company, “This investment will fuel unprecedented growth for us and accelerate market adoption of our proven platform, further empowering us to deliver forward thinking endpoint protection for customers around the world.
“We’re excited to partner with a market leader like CyberCX that has deep expertise and experience in solving cyber security challenges with a broad range of customers, across the ANZ region and beyond.
“With CyberCX providing further access and insights into the market, we will be able to deliver on Airlock’s ambitious growth plan even faster.” Cottingham added.
In confirming the company’s investment in Airlock Digital, CyberCX CEO John Paitaridis said the company strongly backs Airlock’s growth strategy and is committed to helping accelerate their expansion into international markets, “As the region’s leading cyber security services firm, CyberCX is committed to supporting Australian cyber security technology companies through strategic partnerships and investment.
“We want to support cyber security innovators with truly exceptional platforms like Airlock, become global cyber technology leaders and take on the world.” Paitaridis added.
About Airlock
Airlock enables customers to easily create and manage secure allowlists (formerly application whitelists) in dynamically changing computing environments. Airlock technology is practitioner built, from real world experience, enabling organisations to operationalise allowlisting without negatively impacting their business.
About CyberCX
CyberCX is the leading provider of cyber security services across Australia and New Zealand. With a workforce of over 1000 cyber security professionals, CyberCX is a trusted partner to private and public sector organisations, helping customers confidently manage cyber risk, respond to incidents and build resilience in an increasingly complex and challenging threat environment.
Preventing Ransomware and Zero Days Using an Overlooked Basic Security Control
/in News /by adminContinued successful exploitation of the software supply chain
As the world continues to assess the scope of the biggest global ransomware attack on record – with the REvil/Sodinokibi group claiming to have infected over one million systems, outpacing even WannaCry from 2017, it is becoming clear that ransomware continues to be a successful business model for criminal groups and poses as a significant risk to businesses and government organisations.
Just this month, Australian businesses UnitingCare Queensland and JBS Foods became the latest victims of ransomware and the exploitation of a vulnerability on the US based managed services platform provider Kaseya showed continued escalation of successful attacks targeted on the software supply chain.
While the full impact of the attack is still undergoing investigation, the Australian Cyber Security Center has confirmed that at least three Australian MSPs had been affected by the attack and had customers data encrypted.
The PrintNightmare that won’t go away
Continuing to make big news for the last couple weeks is the PrintNightmare privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2021-167, CVE-2021-28344) which refuses to go away despite multiple patches from Microsoft and mixed messaging with-in the the information security community on how to effectively mitigate vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler service.
How did this Happen?
REvil Ransomware delivered via Kaseya Platform
For the Kaseya supply chain attack the REvil group used the Kaseya Agent software itself to distribute malware, going through a variety of steps before executing the file “agent.exe” which had been signed with a likely stolen certificate.
The payload distributed by the REvil group using Kaseya platform
When executed the file extracted an old copy of Windows Defender binary “msmpeng.exe” and a DLL file “mpsvc.dll” which is the actual ransomware payload. The agent then starts the Windows Defender binary which sideloads payload the DLL and the machine contents are encrypted.
Whats HapPen? Workstation after being ransomwared by REvil on Kaseya platform
PrintNightmare delivered via user action
Looking into the recent PrintNightMare vulnerability (CVE-2021-167), we can observe that that either locally or remotely an unprivileged user can escalate their privileges to SYSTEM by calling the AddPrinterDriverEx API call, delivering malicious code that will then be executed as a DLL on the target.
A malicious DLL file being loaded by the printer service, creating a new local adm1n user
In both these cases, these vulnerabilities rely on the deployment of malicious code using trusted processes. These are run with system privileges by executing malicious .dll files and even used PowerShell (trusted system process) to turn off Microsoft Defender.
The Race To The Fix
As security professionals across the world scramble to apply patches, mitigations and IOCs to their security suite, is there a security control that is able to prevent such threats from happening in the first place?
Yes, Allowlisting – A long forgotten friend
One of these foundational controls, Allowlisting (formerly Application Whitelisting), is a security strategy that involves only allowing applications trusted by an organisation to run and then blocking all other files. This an alternative strategy to a signature based blocklisting approach of allowing everything to run by default and only blocking what’s known to be bad (eg anti-virus).
Allowlisting is not a new idea; it has been around for a long time and has been regarded as one of the most effective controls against threats like ransomware, fileless malware and lateral movement. Yet it is also one of the most overlooked security controls and is often put on the backburner. Most organisations that are not mandated by the ACSC Essential 8 framework, do not feel inspired to pick it up. This is mostly due to the first-hand experience people have had or have heard of, with Allowlisting taking an excruciatingly long time to implement and at some point, or another, resulting in situations of heated user disruption (especially with the dev team).
No security practitioner wants to devote huge amounts of skilled resources and time into implementing a security policy which at the end results in major BAU interruptions. Apart from problems with implementation, there are also significant gaps in the majority of allowlisting solutions like:
Do these problems and gaps still hold up in 2021?
The answer is no.
Airlock Digital, an Australian company, created by security practitioners who were implementing allowlisting solutions at federal government organisations and seeing the traditional problems first hand. Taking these learnings, they developed a solution that covers these gaps and busts the myth that allowlisting is simply too hard to do.
This is made possible through features like:
With comprehensive policies in place, threats like REvil ransomware and zero day exploits like Kaseya & PrintNightmare, will automatically be blocked because the publisher of the executables, and the .dll files that are run afterwards, are simply not approved to run in the environment.
Airlock preventing untrusted DLL being loaded by Windows Print Spooler
This avoids a lot of panic and saves time from trying to find a fix for zero days that are regularly found. Here’s what one of Airlock’s customers recently said in the light of the recent attacks:
“Airlock Digital worked great for the Kaseya ransomware threat last weekend. While we were not hit, we use Kaseya, and after analysing the Indicators of Compromise, our Airlock Digital Allowlisting solution would have blocked the main applications used for delivery of the code even though they were delivered using Kaseya and MS defender. Airlock also allowed us to react quickly by blocklisting the malicious and known indicators of compromise as they were being identified.”
Airlock preventing untrusted agent.exe extractor being called. If this would be allowed, the subsequent DLL sideload would also have been blocked.
Conclusion
While there is no silver bullet to cyber risk and defence in depth is always best practice, performing basic security practices like Allowlisting right, can go a long way in proactively stopping breaches.
If you would like to know more about Allowlisting and how it can make a difference in your security posture, contact Airlock Digital at [email protected]l.com.
Opinion: Why the Information Security Manual (ISM) Control ‘1471’ isn’t practical for allowlisting at scale
/in Blog, News /by adminTLDR; Take a look at the tables containing Product Names for Adobe Acrobat DC in this article, the variations in product names are staggering.
Overview
At Airlock Digital, we often hear from new and existing Australian customers regarding the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM) control 1471. In particular, customers ask how they can achieve compliance with this control using the Airlock allowlisting platform.
The control was first introduced in 2019 and reads as follows:
Security Control: 1471; Revision: 2; Updated: Apr-20; Applicability: O, P, S, TS
When implementing application control using publisher certificate rules, both publisher names and product names are used.
Source: https://www.cyber.gov.au/acsc/view-all-content/ism
This article will describe the practicality of allowlisting using this rule type at scale. Allowlisting is the process of choosing which files you trust and blocking everything else on an endpoint.
The Intent
The intent of this control is clear, ensure companies are reducing the attack surface of publisher rules by tying them to specific products. This does two things:
Sounds straightforward right? Ultimately it is good security advice. However, in reality, practical implementation and management of this control is near impossible in dynamic computing environments (any environment with users), regardless of the allowlisting technology used.
The working example I’m going to use in this article is a fairly common one. Let’s say the organisation wants to allow Acrobat Reader DC, on the surface it would seem as simple as trusting ‘Adobe Inc’ as the publisher and then ‘Acrobat Reader DC’ as the product name.
The Data
Let’s take a look at the files that make up an Acrobat Reader DC installation. Executable files in the application are all signed by the publisher ‘Adobe Inc.’, which is a great start. The following table displays all executable files with their associated product names:
Table 1: Acrobat Reader DC Executable Product Names
Let’s now take a look at application library names, keeping in mind that all listed files are signed by ‘Adobe Inc’:
Table 2: Acrobat Reader DC Application LibraryProduct Names
Looking at the tables above, you can start to see the scale of the challenge due to the significant variation in product names across files.
The Challenges
Challenge One: Software is nearly always more than a single executable file
Software comes in many shapes and sizes and is nearly always composed of multiple executable files and application libraries (.dll’s). Additionally, third party software is bundled within software which can be seen above, with Chromium dll’s shipped with Adobe Acrobat DC and signed by Adobe Inc.
This may be manageable when allowlisting executable files only (I’m looking at you default AppLocker deployments). However, if a customer intends on achieving Maturity Level Two or greater for application control on the ACSC Essential eight maturity model, the sheer number of files and application libraries that need to be handled to allow a single product to run can be overwhelming.
In order to allow Acrobat Reader DC via product names:
This could be cut down with creative wildcarding, however if you are allowing the product name ‘*Adobe*’ it defeats the purpose of the ISM control 1471 in the first instance.
Challenge Two: The Product Name field can be blank
As you can see from the above files, many of them contain a blank Product Name field as it is an optional entry for developers at the time of software compilation. This makes the original ISM rule impossible to apply on these files and they effectively require an exemption.
Challenge Three: Scale and Maturity
Extrapolating the above data out, it is easy to see how the scale of rules required is staggering. Additionally, maintaining this ruleset through application updates (note that Adobe uses compilation dates in a number of files above) makes management near impossible, regardless of the technology used even with automated and slick product workflows.
Proposed Compensating Control
So if this isn’t practical? What can be done to achieve the intent of the control?
Combining Publisher and Path rules is an alternative and has the following benefits:
Airlock Digital appreciates the guidance ACSC provides with the ISM, which continues to drive the maturity uplift of organisations. Proposing the above compensating control is not intended to water down the security requirements of 1471, it’s simply an alternative to customers not being able to comply due to administrative overhead.
Airlock Recommendations
Organisations can use the Airlock Blocklisting rule engine to achieve compliance with this control. In the event organisations are struggling to comply due to management overhead, Airlock recommends customers consider the implementation of publishers and path rules as an alternative.
Each organisation should use a risk based approach when assessing if this alternative is right for them.
Fig 1: The Edit Blocklist Metadata Rule Window
Shown in the Window above is a rule that applies to any file containing ‘Adobe Inc’ as a publisher and is not part of the default ‘Acrobat DC’ folder path. Since Blocklisting is a negative match, files that are signed by Adobe Inc and are located outside of this folder path will be blocked.
Author: David Cottingham
Some Context, Process Herpaderping
/in News /by adminEssentially, an attacker who has the capability to execute arbitrary code is able to launch additional arbitrary code in a novel manner. Launching code with Herpaderp will:
How would an attacker use this in practice?
As Herpaderp has a number of moving parts, the code to perform this attack goes beyond calling a single operating system function and requires a software stager.
An attacker would use this as follows:
This is demonstrated in the Herpaderp writeup in a video showing Mimikatz appearing to be signed by Google Chrome. This bypasses Windows Defender detection. Cool and scary stuff!
Detection?
The Herpaderp writeup shows that this technique of loading files is missed by the majority of security vendors on the market today. It is likely that security vendors will quickly flag the stagers (and the inevitable variants that appear) as malware.
Just as an interesting experiment, at the time of writing only two security vendors identify the compiled Herpaderp code as malicious, likely via their machine learning capability (VT link)
Application Allowlisting configured well, prevents the stager from being used in the first instance effectively preventing the attack without signatures. Matt Graeber had a very succinct take on the matter
Ultimately, preventing the staging code is the best chance of detection and will likely be the focus for defenders in the future.
Why would an attacker use this vs other options?
To avoid malicious code being detected as malware by endpoint protection products. Herpaderp is also great for attackers looking to fool incident responders by masking the actual file executed.
To be clear, if the target code being launched is on disk already on the target system, many Anti-Virus products will likely scan the file before launch. The attacker needs a way of delivering the target code to the Herpaderp stager, in a diskless manner.
While this technique is novel, if you are an attacker that already has:
Then there are a number of techniques available such as .NET assembly reflection that do not require stagers, although these may have a higher chance of being caught or monitored.
Thoughts on the lack of Microsoft servicing?
The Herpaderp writeup highlights that Microsoft have not seen fit to provide an immediate fix for this technique, and that from Microsoft’s perspective the case is closed without resolution. The authors disagree, and provide the following reasoning:
We disagree on the severity of this bug; this was communicated to MSRC on 8/27/2020.
Source: https://jxy-s.github.io/herpaderping/.
We suspect that Microsoft has not serviced this due to point three above “The vulnerability allows an actor to gain execution of arbitrary code”. The catch 22 here is that the technique needs the execution of arbitrary (untrusted) code in the first instance in order to perform the attack and the attacker needs a way to stage malicious code without touching disk to avoid AV. It’s just a difficult technique to set up without being detected in the first instance.
There are also difficulties in servicing the solution as it deals with core Windows internals and may have compatibility implications.
Are we likely to see this as a widespread technique in the future?
It’s very likely we will see this method of execution added to the menus of offensive tooling frameworks in the near future. We would also expect to see the method being ported to other languages such as Powershell as attackers attempt to find ways around defenses as detections are created for the current PoC code.
What is the impact of Process Herpaderping in an allowlisting / application control context?
To use this method an attacker requires arbitrary code execution, and allowlisting is a great preventative control which will stop the use of the technique at this time.
The Herpaderp method also does not provide any obvious way of retaining persistence, something that other known techniques (also requiring arbitrary execution) are capable of today.
The caveat is that an allowlisting solution is as only as good as its implementation. It is important to understand if an attacker discovers a way of executing the Herpaderp stager, they would be able execute any other code with ease and therefore it is important to understand the level of coverage and protection your allowlisting implementation provides.
TLDR;
The advantage of Herpaderp is that it is a new technique which is difficult to detect and fix. However, the disadvantage is it requires a stager which in itself can be detected.
The research behind Herpaderp is technically brilliant, however while a stager is required to perform the attack it’s unlikely that this will be seen as a viable option for threat actors going forward. If someone can figure out how to use this technique without staging, then it’s a whole different ball game.
Authors: Daniel Schell & David Cottingham
Airlock interview on RiskyBusiness Podcast #573
/in Blog, News /by adminThis week Airlock Digital whitelisting was featured on the Risky Business podcast with Airlock Co-Founder, David Cottingham.
You can listen to this episode online here: https://risky.biz/RB573 – The interview starts at approximately 43:40 for the “whitelisting curious”.