CyberPoint Blog

Old Exploits Up to Old and New Tricks: TrickBot

The classics never get old, do they? Sometimes an old classic receives a new look, like the remake of West Side Story or Ghostbusters. In the case of Conti ransomware, the classics that never get old are TrickBot and Cobalt Strike, used by Conti to distribute their ransomware. In the case of TrickBot, the remake comes with creative new obfuscation techniques. This article discusses the current incarnation of TrickBot, its historical evolution, new tradecraft it employs, and what the future holds according to some hints dropped in recent weeks.

TrickBot certainly merits the discussion, as the stakes involved are high. During its campaigns, TrickBot has been used for bank account takeover, high-value wire fraud, and ransomware attacks striking critical organizations, to name a few of the consequences of its deployment.

Major Leak from Conti Ransomware Group Translated

As you may be aware there was a major leak from Conti ransomware/crimeware group. A group I hang out with got the leak. A portion of it was translated with machine learning. The translation was poor so I added a column and manually translated key parts that were incorrect.

Apache Log4j Vulnerabilities: The Basics

A series of exploits leveraging vulnerabilities in the popular Apache Log4j Java library were uncovered recently, prompting tremendous cyber security activity in response to the threats. The Log4j module allows Java-based applications to better handle internal event logging and is used by many popular applications, cloud-based services, and even operating systems. Because of Log4j's ubiquity, the threat these vulnerabilities represent is significant.

Sylphs in the Cloud

A Sylph (also known as Sylphid) is an air spirit. They are formed of air, they live in the air, and they have unusual power over the air, particularly the wind and the clouds. Usually, Sylphs are portrayed as guardians who protect secret knowledge, beautiful women, or the environment, but it's not out of the question for a Sylph to cause mischief among men.

CyberPoint is no stranger to malware and malware analysis. Our work has us detecting malware, analyzing malware, and occasionally writing malware.

Got MODBUS? Please Check!

In the past three years, we have been fortunate to have been given the opportunity to study industrial control systems (or 'control systems' for short) in excruciating detail for vulnerabilities, exploits and mitigations. While I am a relative newcomer in industrial control security when compared to people like the Dragos team, what we discovered in 2020 was worthy enough to write about even if only as a brief post.

When you are finished reading, please ask yourself and your team, "Do we have any MODBUS on our network? What are we doing to protect those devices from attack?"

Protecting Legacy Encryption from Quantum Computing: A Possible Solution

The advent of quantum computing (QC), if it happens, will break nearly every practical application of cryptography in use today, making e-commerce and many other digital applications insecure.

Symmetric algorithms used for encryption, like AES, are still thought to be safe (with sufficient key length – e.g. AES-256 or larger); however, current asymmetric algorithms like RSA and ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) will be rendered essentially useless once quantum computers reach a certain scale.

An alternative approach to quantifying cyber risk using comprehensive attack surface evaluation assessments and Value-at-Risk modeling.

Organizations have an imperative to protect the data that has been entrusted to them, as well as securing their digital borders against business-interrupting intrusions. The legal landscape regarding accountability for data breaches continues to develop, but it has become clear that regulators, lawmakers, and the public will hold the breached entity responsible for a cyber event and the loss of data. This trend means that a cyber event of any type has the potential to negatively affect an organization's revenue and reputation.

Worst-Case Complexity of Ford-Fulkerson

Ask a computer scientist the worst-case complexity of the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm¹ with integral edge capacities, and you'll likely get the answer of O(E*|f|), where E is the number of edges in the graph, and |f| is the capacity of the maximum flow, f, that the algorithm seeks to find. Indeed, that would have been my answer, as well. Until I tried to exploit that worst-case behavior.

Cyberspace — the Next Utility Infrastructure

Note: This White Paper represents the exploratory thoughts and analysis of the author; the assertions and recommendations are provided for consideration and validation by our industry, academic, and government partners. The opinions expressed herein may not be the same as those held by the owners, investors, or other executives of CyberPoint who were not involved in the writing of this White Paper…but they should be!

Accelerating Capabilities Acquisition Through OTAs and PIAs: A Contractor Perspective

OTAs (Other Transaction Agreements) are appropriate when you want prototypes (demos, validation, feasibility) of innovative capabilities directly relevant to weapons or weapons systems, and directly related to mission effectiveness (of personnel and supporting platforms, or by improvement of platforms/systems/components thereof).

Malicious Browser Extensions

As we do more and more of our day-to-day tasks online, our web browsers have become an irreplaceable tool for many people. Often, we decide to augment the default behavior of these browsers with browser extensions to provide custom functionality to our browsers in order to make the tasks that we perform online easier.

Using Compression to Compare Objects

In my previous blog post, I discussed our endeavor to benefit from unsupervised learning on CyberPoint's malware dataset. One of the more intriguing tools I played with during that effort was the normalized compression distance (NCD).

Learning in the Dark: Lessons Learned in Unsupervised Learning

CyberPoint has seen great success in using supervised machine learning for malware detection. A while back, however, some colleagues and I set out to investigate whether we could make any interesting discoveries by applying unsupervised learning to CyberPoint's malware dataset.

Logging Keystrokes with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)

As a follow-up to our talk at Ruxcon, "Make ETW Great Again", we wanted to go into a bit more depth than we could cover in our hour long talk. While our talk consisted of multiple examples of ETW usage, detecting ransomware, USB Keylogging, and sniffing SSL encrypted data from WinINet…

The Human Interface Device (HID) Attack, aka USB Drive-By

As a part of our effort to educate, assess and train (EAT), we want to highlight a physical host attack technique that is extremely cheap and simple to pull off, and unfortunately yields a significant return for the attacker if successful. The technique is commonly referred to as a "Human Interface Device (HID) attack" or a "USB drive-by".

Software Defined Security at CyberPoint

Software-defined networking, commonly referred to as SDN, has received a lot of press recently regarding both the technology itself and the impact that it will have in the networking world. At CyberPoint, being a cyber security company, we got curious and decided to take a look at the impact that SDN could have on security.

The Minimum

"If the minimum weren't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum." It's not just a rationalization of laziness. It's often the correct approach to compliance with externally mandated cyber security requirements.

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