Vulnerability Archives

Useful tips about CVE:

It is run by the MITRE Corporation, a non-profit organization. (attack.mitre.org)

The CVE aims to share vulnerability information easily and provide a standard for naming them.

The CVE IDs are in the format ‘CVE-YYYY-NNNNN’, where YYYY stands for the year the vulnerability was made public or the CVE ID was assigned.

It also provides the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) that defines the severity of a disclosed security flaw. The CVSS score ranges from 0.0 to 10.0; a higher score indicates a higher severity level.

The common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) program has been around for quite some time now, helping organizations improve their cybersecurity posture by providing a wealth of knowledge about vulnerabilities and exposures.

It creates a standardized identifier for every vulnerability or exposure disclosed, so they can be accessed easily across multiple sources.

In this article, we’ll explore the basics of CVE. But before that let’s quickly recap what vulnerabilities and exposures are.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability is a security flaw that may be exploited to perform cyber attacks. Criminals use a number of ways including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and buffer overflows to look for vulnerabilities to exploit.

Many organizations invest in specialized teams that test for vulnerabilities and provide security patches. The causes of vulnerability include weak passwords, operating system flaws, unintentional development bugs, and unchecked user input, among others.

Exposure

Exposures are unintentional issues or errors that allow unauthorized access to a network or system.

Some of the massive data breaches are the result of exposures. A recent example of this is a record showing data breaches and cyber attacks in October 2019 alone, where 421 million records were breached.

These attacks usually come in form of Cyber attacks, Ransomeware, Data breaches, Financial information or PII data leaks, malicious insiders and miscellaneous incidents

CVE: Weighing the benefits and risks

CVEs are publicly available and may be exploited by malicious actors to launch cyberattacks. However, the benefits overshadow this risk.

CVE only lists publicly disclosed vulnerabilities and exposures. This allows individuals and organizations to be aware of the security flaws and available patches.

While organizations need to take care of several vulnerabilities to ensure security, a hacker needs to find just one flaw to exploit. This reinforces the importance of sharing details about vulnerabilities and exposures.

This article provides an elemental outline of CVE. For more details, you can refer to the official CVE website.

An emergency directive from the Department of Homeland Security provides “required actions” for U.S. government agencies to prevent widespread DNS hijacking attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security is ordering all federal agencies to urgently audit Domain Name System (DNS) security for their domains in the next 10 business days.

The department’s rare “emergency directive,” issued Tuesday, warned that multiple government domains have been targeted by DNS hijacking attacks, allowing attackers to redirect and intercept web and mail traffic.

“[The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] (CISA) is aware of multiple executive branch agency domains that were impacted by the tampering campaign and has notified the agencies that maintain them,” said the alert.

The warning comes on the heels of a Jan. 10 FireEye report which detailed a wave of DNS hijacking attacks targeting victims in North America, Europe, Middle East and North Africa.

The Attacks

DNS hijacking is a type of malicious attack in which an individual redirects queries to a domain name server via overriding a computer’s transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) settings – generally by modifying a server’s settings.

The DHS, for its part, said that the attacker begins by logging into the DNS provider’s administration panel using previously-compromised credentials.

The attacker then alters DNS records – including the address mail exchanger or name server records – and replaces the legitimate address of a service with their own address controls, thus redirecting traffic. Attackers can also alter and tamper with the traffic flows.

Credit: PureVPN

“This enables them to direct user traffic to their own infrastructure for manipulation or inspection before passing it on to the legitimate service, should they choose,” said the DHS in its advisory. “This creates a risk that persists beyond the period of traffic redirection.”

Since the attackers can set record values for the domain name systems, they can obtain valid encryption certificates for an organization’s domain names; this allows browsers to establish a connection without any certificate errors as the certificate can be trusted, FireEye researchers said. In the most recent campaigns, the attackers have used certificates from the Let’s Encrypt open certificate authority.

That valid certificate then enables the redirected traffic to be decrypted and exposes any user-submitted data.

Government Response

The emergency directive issued by the DHS provides “required actions” that government agencies must fulfill in the next 10 business days.

“To address the significant and imminent risks to agency information and information systems presented by this activity, this emergency directive requires… near-term actions to mitigate risks from undiscovered tampering, enable agencies to prevent illegitimate DNS activity for their domains and detect unauthorized certificates,” said the report.

First, the DHS said all .gov domain admins must audit their DNS records over the next 10 days to verify if any traffic is being redirected.

The department also urged agencies to update their passwords for all accounts on systems that can make changes to agency DNS records, and to implement multi-factor authentication for accounts on DNS admin systems. Finally, agencies are being directed to monitor certificate transparency logs.

The warning comes as the U.S. government enters its 33rd day of a shutdown (as of Wednesday), a longstanding incident which has sparked concerns about its impact across the board when it comes to security.

Iran Attribution

Researchers assess “with moderate confidence” that the recent DNS hijacking activity is conducted by a group or groups in Iran, and that the activity aligns with Iranian government interests.

The attacks have been observed in clusters between January 2017 to January 2019, the researchers said in an analysis of the attacks.

Alister Shepherd, MEA director of Mandiant at FireEye, told Threatpost that the campaign is ongoing – but that there is no indication of how many credentials have been harvested thus far. However, researcher do state that the attackers had “a high degree of success” harvesting targets’ credentials.

This most recent DNS hijacking campaign “showcases the continuing evolution in tactics from Iran-based actors,” FireEye researchers stressed. “This is an overview of one set of TTPs that we recently observed affecting multiple entities.”

Source: Threatpost