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Everything You Need to Know About DNS AttacksIt'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
Incident Readiness and Building Response Playbook
In this special report, learn the Xs and Os of any good security incident readiness and response playbook.
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1 Comments
User Rank: Apprentice
12/17/2016 | 1:46:20 PM
[from the blog titled
Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee
"immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR. We've had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well."
I have not looked at any of the forensic evidence collected and analyzed by CrowdStrike, so my next few comments are obviously speculation. That being said, I would point out that since CrowdStrike has knowledge of the operational signatures of Cozy and Fancy, other cyber intelligence and even cyber-threat agents as or even more sophisticated then the CrowdStrike team would obviously also know these "operational signatures". And with that knowledge, other sophisticated cyber threat agents would be able to and likely would emulate these operational signatures as part of the offensive attacktic of false attribution to cover tracks. CrowdStrike does indicate that one of the operational tactic signatures they detected was the use of metamorphic actions, but even that attacktic can be sufficiently randomized to approximate the CozyBear / FancyBear signiature.
My main point here is that there really is no way to rule out the distinct possibility that either a different threat actor had penetrated and potentially took total super-user control over the DNC, DCCC, and Podesta e-mail systems or perhaps even multiple sophisticated threat actors were traversing in and out of those systems. As a professional cyber expert involved in work on critical infrastructures, I would have preferred that CrowdStrike and Dmitri had rendered their reports using the specification of probablities of occurence which is really all that CrowdStrike or any other credible incident response / forensics team should be including in both their reports and public statements (like the recent interview that Dmitri had with Wolf Blitzer and als NPR).
On your discussion about the reports from Recorded Future about the incursions and leaks of US EAC database access credentials, I am concerned that the system administrators of the EAC infrastructure did not utilize best practice implementations of security controls to have those database access credentials deployed using data-at-rest encryption with salted hashes and also deployed in the relatively common deployment of Active Directory or LDAP. The poor implementation of readily available NIST 800-53 or ISO 2700x series security contols is actually the largest vector to all of these incursions - DNC, DCCC, Podesta, and US EAC.
Looking forward to your thoughts on these factors.