Day: January 27, 2015

The “Internet of Things,” or “IoT” is a fascinating field of technology representing growth of interconnected devices that can be controlled and managed remotely through mobile devices or many other means.

The Internet of Things spans all areas of life and work, especially if we consider:

• Smart homes with refrigerators ordering groceries, remote controlled HVAC equipment, or smart lighting
• Connected industries and cities with remote meters, automatic analytics, or robotics.
• Wearables such as smart watches, fitness bands or smart glasses
• Connected cars with automatic driving technology, remote diagnostics, or fleet management.

…and much more.

From a business perspective, the IoT offers incremental revenue opportunities as well as productivity and cost savings to companies across the globe. According to analyst firm IDC, the number of IoT devices will grow from approximately 6 billion in this decade to 28 billion in 2020 — a staggering number. The market for wearable smart devices alone is expected to increase at an average rate of 60% per year to $20 billion in 2017.

What is the common characteristic of all of these devices? Connectivity to the Internet through applications. And with this connectivity comes increased exposure to cyber threats. Think of it as today’s mobility market on steroids.

While it will become increasingly important (and common) for most companies to enable Internet-connected devices, a key goal for IT and security departments will remain the safe enablement of the applications that power those devices.  Neither Web nor email security will be able to appropriately protect against future attacks from cybercriminals targeting your organization through the IoT. Many of these applications will most likely utilize more than Web channels to access data and can easily circumvent web security solutions by utilizing uncommon ports.

Now is the time for companies to start thinking about security strategies against tomorrow’s cyber attacks through the Internet of Things. No one has all the answers to the security-related questions posed by the IoT in the coming years, but it helps to ask, at the very least, the following 5 questions to prepare for the onslaught of Internet enabled devices facing your company in the near future:

1. What IoT devices are likely to be used in your organization in the next decade?
2. What types of data will these devices access?
3. What types of devices will your employees own or utilize?
4. How do these devices interact with your corporate network?
5. How do you currently ensure safe application enablement across all ports?

The answers to these questions will have a significant impact on your organization’s security strategy in the next few years. The best you currently can do to prepare for the fast approaching army of networked devices is to deploy the best possible application control with a solution monitoring all ports in and out of your network. Palo Alto Networks Enterprise Security Platform not only protects companies against applications utilizing a few common ports, but also offers complete visibility into all enterprise network traffic. Learn more about our approach here.

[Palo Alto Networks Blog]

On January 22 Adobe confirmed the existence of a Zero Day affecting Adobe Flash Player 16.0.0.287 and assigned CVE-2015-0311 to it. This is the classic zero day scenario of exploitation in the wild before any vendor patch was available and in this blog post we will explain how the uniqueness of Palo Alto Networks Traps blocks this vulnerability.

Let’s start with a brief background on CVE-2015-0311 security implications.  Successful exploitation could result in an attacker compromising data security, potentially allowing access to confidential data, or could compromise processing resources in a user’s computer. All versions of Internet Explorer or Firefox, with any version of Windows with Flash up to 16.0.0.287 (included) installed and enabled, are exposed.

Following the disclosure, several security companies reported encounters with attacks utilizing this zero day, as well as a considerable surge in Angler EK activity, mainly in the United States.

Zero days such as CVE-2015-0311 illustrate why signature-based solutions are a dead-end when facing the current advanced threat landscape. Prior knowledge is futile when encountering an attack that is, by definition, unknown. Reliance on vendor patching is also insufficient both from security and operational perspectives – we all know large enterprises do not easily pause company-wide IT activity in favor of mass updates.

Traps Advanced Endpoint Protection is designed to proactively block attacks targeting endpoints, including unknown zero-day exploits. Traps automatically detects and blocks the core set of techniques that every attacker must link together in order to accomplish exploitation. Because of the chain-like nature of an exploit, preventing just one technique in that chain is all that is needed in order to block the entire attack even before a payload is dropped.

The exploitation of CVE-2015-0311 is no different than other exploitations in the essential phases it needs do go through. Traps blocks it.

To further illustrate how, let’s reflect on a common exploitation pattern.  First, there are preparation acts intended to expand the victim machine’s memory attack surface. What usually follows next is an attempt to actually seize a memory portion, and circumvent standard protection means. Upon accomplishing these stages, the exploit still needs to access certain OS functions to gain the required resources for malicious activity. Once all these steps are successful the attacker can remotely run its code on the victim’s machine.

There are several techniques attackers deploy to perform each one of these stages. Obstructing any of these stages terminates the exploitation. Posing obstructions to each and every one of the core techniques creates a powerful multilayered defense which proactively prevents any exploitation attempt from maturing into an ongoing attack.

Moreover, such defense will succeed, regardless of the utilized CVE and regardless of specific exploit prior knowledge since it relies on obstructing the core techniques all exploits utilize.

Applying this defense paradigm to CVE-2015-0311 reveals that despite it being a zero day, and supposedly an unknown attack vector, it is blocked by Palo Alto Networks Traps. Traps prevents the exploit from writing to memory and from accessing OS functions. Each of these is sufficient for successful prevention. Even if the attack is a zero day and not a known exploit, it poses no additional challenge to Traps.

Traps users are exempt from emergency patching and from the concern that an unknown attacker is crawling undiscovered in their endpoints. Traps users were actually protected from CVE-2015-0311 way before it has even existed.

Learn more about Advanced Endpoint Protection here.

[Palo Alto Networks Blog]

In September 2014, two news sites in Israel fell victim to a malvertising campaign that affected thousands of viewers. One month later, Yahoo! and AOL became victims of a similar campaign. Malvertising concerns me more than the average attack method for a several reasons:

1. It utilizes ad space on any web page that hosts third party ads… so basically most of the Internet.

Have you counted how many ads are on each web page as you casually browse news articles, or look up that film with what’s-her-name and so-and-so? This article states that the average user saw over 1,000 ads per month in 2012, and one can only assume that this number has increased since then. There’s no easy escape. Malvertising grants attackers access to hundreds of millions of users. Makes you want to install some ad blocking software, doesn’t it?

2. Malvertisements are indistinguishable from legitimate ads.

You’d be pretty hard-pressed to pick out a malicious ad at first glance even if you have “cyber intuition.”

A strict “no-click” policy for web ads isn’t enough to protect you because some malvertisements, like pop-up ads, don’t even require users to click— malware is installed when the ad loads on the page, and the malware could be anything from bots (think zombie computer) to ransomware.

3. Repercussions are basically nonexistent because the hosting web site has no control over the ads placed, and the attacker is several times removed from the ad network.

Attackers take advantage of the way an advertising network functions, with its low prices, automatic bidding process, potential for very large audiences via “trusted” sources, and almost nonexistent means for tracking them down.

This is how it works: The attacker, along with legitimate ad buyers, submits advertisement code and the highest price they’re willing to pay to an ad publisher who then uses an ad network to bid on ad space on third-party web sites. The ad network sells each space to the highest bidder on behalf of the web site — this is an automatic selling process that takes milliseconds, and prices are typically less than a dollar. An attacker’s “ad” code is then placed on the web site.

Attackers will typically build a solid reputation for themselves by placing ads with clean code for a few months before injecting them with attack code. Once this happens, the attack has a widespread reach and the potential to inject hundreds of thousands of users and generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for an initial cost was a mere fraction of that. The malvertisement only needs to be posted for a few days or a few hours before the attacker has the victims he needs, so he’ll then remove the ad altogether.

Creating an industry safeguard against malvertising requires the coordinated effort of ad networks and publishers, as well as pressure from ad hosting web sites. Such cooperation between many parties is difficult to orchestrate unless the problem greatly affects profits. But because ad networks are still being paid for ad space sold to attackers, the impact on the bottom line is revealed much more slowly. Attackers use this process because it’s easy and it works.

4. Malvertising as a consumer-based attack method is a shift from the sketchiness seen in spear phishing and packet sniffing to one that’s almost legitimate because it leverages a real business process to do all the hard work normally involved in delivering malware.

Gone are the days when malware only hung out on the bad side of the internet. Cyber threats are out in the open, hiding on real web pages that we trust and frequently visit, using methods honest people intentionally created to improve business, and we must continue to adapt in order to protect our cyber valuables. Attackers are upping their game and focusing their guile on identifying loopholes in commonplace business processes.

Luckily, there are things we at Palo Alto Networks already do to thwart malvertising threats:

• Drive-by download protection alerts users that a download is attempting to take place and requires the user to either allow or deny the download. If a malvertisement tries to auto-download malware, this mechanism gives the user an opportunity to nix it before it happens
• File-blocking profiles restrict the types of files that can be downloaded to only the files that are needed and expected by the user
• WildFire creates new anti-virus protections for unknown malware immediately after it’s seen. Malvertisements attempting to deliver known or unknown malware are detected and blocked
• URL Filtering stops traffic to known malicious web sites and uncategorized web sites. If a malvertisment is clicked, resulting web page is blocked
• Even if malware succeeds in downloading onto your machine, Traps prevents it from installing itself

Security isn’t something that stops with network architecture and coding practices. Business-to-business processes need it, too. Anything that uses the internet, or an intranet, in the slightest way must be included on the list of potential threat vectors, poked at with a cyber-stick by someone wearing their “if-I-were-a-hacker” hat, and secured accordingly.

For more information on what can happen as a result of a successful malvertisement, check out Dan Kaminsky’s interview with USA Today staff writer, Elizabeth Weise.

[Palo Alto Networks Blog]