Dark Reading is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Attacks/Breaches

End of Bibblio RCM includes -->
7/1/2021
01:10 PM
Connect Directly
Twitter
RSS
E-Mail

NSA & CISA Issue Warning About Russian GRU Brute-Force Cyberattacks Against US, Global Orgs

Fancy Bear nation-state hacking team add a modern twist on old-school hacking method by using a cluster of Kubernetes software containers to expedite credential theft.

The National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) today issued a rare alert together that warns of widespread brute-force attacks on US and global organizations by Russia's GRU military intelligence agency that initially began in mid-2019.

The advisory - which NSA bills as part of its "mission" to alert on nation-state threats - includes the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) the nation-state hacking team uses to infiltrate hundreds of targets in the energy, government, political, defense, logistics, think tanks, media, legal, and higher-education sector organizations, as well as defenses to mitigate the cyber-spying attacks.

The Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS), aka APT 28, Fancy Bear, STRONTIUM, and Sofacy, are engaging in old-school brute-force hacking to gain credentials from their targets but with a modern twist of employing Kubernetes software containers to perform the attacks at scale, according to the NSA. They use leaked credentials as well as password-guessing methods to steal the credentials in order to move throughout the target to steal information.

The Kubernetes cluster of containers assist their brute-force attacks, which mostly target organizations on Microsoft Office 365 cloud services but also included other service providers and enterprise email servers. 

"This brute force capability allows the 85th GTsSS actors to access protected data, including email, and identify valid account credentials. Those credentials may then be used for a variety of purposes, including initial access, persistence, privilege escalation, and defense evasion," the advisory says.

The GRU attackers are also dropping exploits of two older and patched Microsoft Server vulnerabilities - the CVE 2020-0688 Exchange Validation Key flaw and the CVE 2020-17144 Exchange remote code execution flaw - to drop malware and dig deeper into the targeted networks.

Defenders should employ and "expand" their use of multifactor authentication to thwart abuse of stolen credentials and double down on access controls, such as timeout and lockout features, strong passwords, and zero-trust practices, that can help weed out any malicious activity.

"Additionally, organizations can consider denying all inbound activity from known anonymization services, such as commercial virtual private networks (VPNs) and The Onion Router (TOR), where such access is not associated with typical use," the NSA and CISA recommend in the advisory.

Kelly Jackson Higgins is the Executive Editor of Dark Reading. She is an award-winning veteran technology and business journalist with more than two decades of experience in reporting and editing for various publications, including Network Computing, Secure Enterprise ... View Full Bio

Comment  | 
Print  | 
More Insights
//Comments
Newest First  |  Oldest First  |  Threaded View
Edge-DRsplash-10-edge-articles
I Smell a RAT! New Cybersecurity Threats for the Crypto Industry
David Trepp, Partner, IT Assurance with accounting and advisory firm BPM LLP,  7/9/2021
News
Attacks on Kaseya Servers Led to Ransomware in Less Than 2 Hours
Robert Lemos, Contributing Writer,  7/7/2021
Commentary
It's in the Game (but It Shouldn't Be)
Tal Memran, Cybersecurity Expert, CYE,  7/9/2021
Register for Dark Reading Newsletters
White Papers
Video
Cartoon
Current Issue
Everything You Need to Know About DNS Attacks
It's important to understand DNS, potential attacks against it, and the tools and techniques required to defend DNS infrastructure. This report answers all the questions you were afraid to ask. Domain Name Service (DNS) is a critical part of any organization's digital infrastructure, but it's also one of the least understood. DNS is designed to be invisible to business professionals, IT stakeholders, and many security professionals, but DNS's threat surface is large and widely targeted. Attackers are causing a great deal of damage with an array of attacks such as denial of service, DNS cache poisoning, DNS hijackin, DNS tunneling, and DNS dangling. They are using DNS infrastructure to take control of inbound and outbound communications and preventing users from accessing the applications they are looking for. To stop attacks on DNS, security teams need to shore up the organization's security hygiene around DNS infrastructure, implement controls such as DNSSEC, and monitor DNS traffic
Flash Poll
How Enterprises are Developing Secure Applications
How Enterprises are Developing Secure Applications
Recent breaches of third-party apps are driving many organizations to think harder about the security of their off-the-shelf software as they continue to move left in secure software development practices.
Twitter Feed
Dark Reading - Bug Report
Bug Report
Enterprise Vulnerabilities
From DHS/US-CERT's National Vulnerability Database
CVE-2023-33196
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Craft is a CMS for creating custom digital experiences. Cross site scripting (XSS) can be triggered by review volumes. This issue has been fixed in version 4.4.7.
CVE-2023-33185
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Django-SES is a drop-in mail backend for Django. The django_ses library implements a mail backend for Django using AWS Simple Email Service. The library exports the `SESEventWebhookView class` intended to receive signed requests from AWS to handle email bounces, subscriptions, etc. These requests ar...
CVE-2023-33187
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Highlight is an open source, full-stack monitoring platform. Highlight may record passwords on customer deployments when a password html input is switched to `type="text"` via a javascript "Show Password" button. This differs from the expected behavior which always obfuscates `ty...
CVE-2023-33194
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Craft is a CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web.The platform does not filter input and encode output in Quick Post validation error message, which can deliver an XSS payload. Old CVE fixed the XSS in label HTML but didn’t fix it when clicking save. This issue was...
CVE-2023-2879
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
GDSDB infinite loop in Wireshark 4.0.0 to 4.0.5 and 3.6.0 to 3.6.13 allows denial of service via packet injection or crafted capture file