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On March 2, 2021, Microsoft announced that four previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities were exploited to attack on-premises versions of the Microsoft Exchange Servers.  Microsoft has reported that attackers exploited these vulnerabilities to gain access to Exchange servers, gain access to email accounts, and deploy malware (typically web shells) for long-term persistent access to victim organizations.  Microsoft credited a security company called Volexity for first observing these exploits on January 6, 2021. These vulnerabilities do not affect Microsoft Office 365 or Azure Cloud deployments of Exchange email servers.

Microsoft has reported they have attributed these attacks to a threat actor group it calls HAFNIUM and assessed it is a People’s Republic of China sponsored campaign.  Additional details of HAFNIUM targeting and attack techniques are included in Microsoft’s security blog. Meanwhile, FireEye’s analysis indicates this attack has ties activity it tracks across three unknown attack clusters and provides additional analysis and indicators in their blog.

A recent Interisle Consulting Group research report, WHOIS Contact Data Availability, and Registrant Classification Study, finds that more than half of the top-level-domains under ICANN's remit are now controlled by unidentifiable parties. According to the report, "ICANN's policy has allowed registrars and registry operators to hide much more contact data than is required by the GDPR-perhaps five times as much..." 

Regardless of if contact data is ultimately needed to maintain a secure and interoperable Internet, it is now more important than ever to leverage available threat intelligence to combat harmful cyber activity. Traditionally, WHOIS has told analysts who owns a domain. Threat hunters used to be able to use this information to pivot on names, addresses, and phone numbers to find other domains registered to the same owner. For the most part, GDPR broke that.

With WHOIS becoming significantly less useful to build out threat investigations, threat analysts must rely more frequently on other internet data sets as part of their digital tool belt. RiskIQ has made it a core part of our business to collect and correlate as much relevant Internet data as possible to supercharge threat investigations—data that's become even more valuable to analysts since the advent of the GDPR. 

We recently analyzed LogoKit, a simple, modularized, and adaptable phish kit running on thousands of domains. Easy to use and able to accommodate a wide range of attacker skill levels, LogoKit is a hot commodity on the black market. 

LogoKit's popularity has given rise to enterprising threat actors who manufacture, package, and sell the kit to meet a strong and still growing demand among cybercriminals worldwide. However, these crimeware purveyors are more than just cybercriminals; they're also expert marketers who use social media sites, web forums, and messaging apps to build their brand, advertise their product, and streamline transactions.

After analyzing LogoKit itself last week, we took a closer look at the infrastructure and criminal enterprise behind it. The resulting investigation illuminated a massive phishing ecosystem and thriving crimeware economy driven by a high demand for simple, effective phishing tools. Below, we'll look at a major player in the sale of LogoKit. 

There will be many more breaches like the one of SolarWinds. 

Moving into 2021 and beyond, the ability to view your organization from the outside-in, as attackers do, will be the best defense against these internet-scale attacks by advanced APTs. FireEye and other security experts analyzing early information on SunBurst have said mass scanning and internet-scale data are critical to incident response efforts. This real-time global visibility shows security teams if their organization is affected and helps uncover attacker fingerprints on the network. 

RiskIQ is helping organizations respond to attacks like SunBurst with our Internet Intelligence Graph, built by mapping the Internet via over ten years of crawling and mass scanning. Our brand new JARM feature will help incident responders quickly query this graph, putting the world’s largest index of applications, components, and behaviors at their fingertips for a smarter, faster response.

Ryuk Ransomware has flooded US hospitals, threatening to shut down their operations when they're needed most. Ryuk now accounts for a third of all ransomware attacks in 2020, with its operators finding success while many healthcare organizations are most vulnerable. 

However, the cybersecurity community is coming together to combat this rash of attacks, combining resources to provide network defenders with alerts and intelligence to protect our healthcare institutions. 

To do our part, RiskIQ released the entirety of the infrastructure related to the Ryuk strain of ransomware collected by RiskIQ's Internet Intelligence Graph.

In incident response, speed and visibility are everything, but they can’t be achieved without a 360-degree view of your attack surface. 

RiskIQ PassiveTotal now integrates directly with Microsoft Defender and Azure Sentinel, bringing Microsoft Defender endpoint telemetry and Azure Sentinel alert data directly to the PassiveTotal threat hunting platform. This combination of RiskIQ and Microsoft data enriches threat infrastructure to show pertinent SIEM alerts and endpoint details alongside RiskIQ's rich Internet intelligence to speed up and supercharge investigations. 

RiskIQ and Microsoft joint customers can enable integrations for both Microsoft Defender and Azure Sentinel separately in their organization's account settings in RiskIQ PassiveTotal. Once enabled, analysts can pivot across RiskIQ data during an investigation to understand all the related infrastructure affecting impacted endpoints or existing security tickets. 

Ocean Lotus, or APT32, is a now-notorious threat group active since 2014, best known for its relentless malware attacks and spy campaigns against Southeast Asian governments, dissidents, and journalists worldwide.

While investigating previously reported OceanLotus activity, RiskIQ analysts came across a unique SSL certificate associated with the espionage group's infrastructure. Unique to them, the SSL correlated with more than 70 IP addresses since 2017, a connection that earlier this month helped reporters from German Publications BR24 and Zeit Online track Ocean Lotus activity across Europe.

Further analysis of this custom certificate and its associated IP addresses led us to conclude that it is part of the infrastructure OceanLotus uses to deploy Windows-based malware. Based on RiskIQ's first observation of the SSL certificate in our Internet Intelligence Graph, which links together infrastructure across the entire web, the group has been using this certificate since at least February 27, 2020, and continues to use it today.

Organizations lack visibility into their digital assets, their external network of internet-connected services and devices growing wildly outside their firewalls to support a workforce that will be remote for the foreseeable future. 

The enterprise digital attack surface is now regularly in flux and no longer in the purview of most security controls. More internet devices and services stood up outside the firewall mean complexity goes up, and "non-standard" becomes the norm. Keeping tabs on its composition and the infrastructure of attackers targeting it is one of the most challenging jobs facing security teams today. While organizations grapple with their attack surface, attackers are more active than ever before. More than 375 new threats sprout up every minute, with a wave of phishing attacks, typosquat registrations, and disinformation taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In this new security environment, attack surface management and a 360-degree view of your attack surface. Deep insight across the public internet makes it not only possible but also manageable. 

Ransomware defense is a perpetual cat and mouse game between incident responders and attackers who are continuously evolving their tactics, tools, and strategy. With Ransomware attacks on the rise and costing the US a whopping $7.5 billion in 2019, SOCs and threat hunters must maintain full situational awareness to protect their organization and customers' data—and avoid massive material loss. However, ransomware defense is no easy task and requires a 360-degree view of your organization's attack surface.