Security News
A Russian spymaster has denied that his agency carried out the infamous SolarWinds supply chain attack in a public relations move worthy of the Internet Research Agency. Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR spy agency, made his denial in a BBC interview broadcast on Tuesday.
The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has published guidance detailing the steps that organizations affected by the SolarWinds attack should take to ensure they evict the attackers from compromised environments. Tailored for federal agencies that used affected versions of SolarWinds Orion and which discovered adversary activity within their environments, the newly published analysis report, AR21-134A, details resource-intensive and highly complex steps that will require disconnecting the enterprise network from the internet for three to five days.
SolarWinds' chief exec has described the 18,000 customers who downloaded backdoored versions of its Orion software as a "Very small" number while giving a speech to an infosec event. "Although the number of affected customers is very small, that we eventually discovered, it is still a very important thing to discover, because this is a unique and very novel attack on the supply chain of a company," said Ramakrishna in his opening remarks - adding that "None of our source code control systems were tampered with."
Texas-based IT management company SolarWinds on Friday shared more information on the impact of the significant breach disclosed late last year, and claimed that less than 100 of its customers were actually hacked. Initial reports said more than 250 organizations were actually breached, but the U.S. government later said that it had identified roughly 100 private sector companies and 9 federal agencies whose systems were targeted by the attackers.
Agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom on Friday published a joint report providing more details on the activities of the Russian cyberspy group that is believed to be behind the attack on IT management company SolarWinds. The FBI, NSA, CISA and the UK's NCSC say the Russian threat actor tracked as APT29 was behind the SolarWinds attack, which resulted in hundreds of organizations having their systems breached through malicious updates served from compromised SolarWinds systems.
The past four months have exposed two high-profile attacks, which both had pundits declaring them the "Worst-ever" and "Unprecedented." They shared other similarities - both attacked businesses rather than individuals, and affected tens of thousands of organizations. The second hack was against Microsoft Exchange servers and had a more familiar trajectory: Attackers found a series of zero-day vulnerabilities that could be chained together to break into any Exchange servers that were internet-accessible - and steal all the emails and files stored on them.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has disclosed details of a new advanced persistent threat that's leveraging the Supernova backdoor to compromise SolarWinds Orion installations after gaining access to the network through a connection to a Pulse Secure VPN device. "The threat actor connected to the entity's network via a Pulse Secure virtual private network appliance, moved laterally to its SolarWinds Orion server, installed malware referred to by security researchers as SUPERNOVA, and collected credentials," the agency said on Thursday.
The U.S. government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has raised an alarm for a new cyberattack in which both a Pulse Secure VPN appliance and the SolarWinds Orion platform were abused for malicious purposes. Both the Pulse Secure virtual private network appliances and the SolarWinds platform are known targets for threat actors: the former for initial access to an environment, and the latter for performing supply chain attacks.
The sprawling SolarWinds cyberattack which came to light last December was known for its sophistication in the breadth of tactics used to infiltrate and persist in the target infrastructure, so much so that Microsoft went on to call the threat actor behind the campaign "Skillful and methodic operators who follow operations security best practices to minimize traces, stay under the radar, and avoid detection." By analyzing telemetry data associated with previously published indicators of compromise, RiskIQ said it identified an additional set of 18 servers with high confidence that likely communicated with the targeted, secondary Cobalt Strike payloads delivered via the TEARDROP and RAINDROP malware, representing a 56% jump in the attacker's known command-and-control footprint.
The open source community delivered vital help to companies affected by the SolarWinds attack. One underappreciated facet of the wide-ranging scandal that has engulfed much of the U.S. government and hundreds of major companies involves the powerful role the open source community played in helping enterprises respond to the crisis, according to Greg Bell, co-founder and CSO of cybersecurity company Corelight.