4 reasons forensics will remain a pillar of cyber security

Artificial intelligence (AI), security orchestration and the Internet of Things (IoT) are disrupting our industry. Some bombastic pundits are even predicting a Jetsons-like world where computers and IoT devices replace workers with machines. Yet most futurists believe computing will only evolve to the level of a digital assistant. Tasks, they say, will be split between artificial and biologic intelligence. Forensics is a prime example of a human compliment to both AI and security automation.

Here are some reasons Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) will stay relevant in this world of intelligent devices and software that “thinks.”

1. Alerts produced by AI may actually increase incident response workload

Artificial intelligence is making threat detection better. Yet AI has two downsides which will keep responders busy. The first is higher rates of false positives in detecting malware.

At the risk of oversimplifying, many AI approaches are closer to human intelligence because they think statistically. So far, AI trained with the prejudices ingrained in the data they’re modeled against, have produced high false positives. Chief data scientists at major vendors admit misfiring at rates of 20%. Filters and traditional signature detection are often mixed in to alleviate the burden on the user. Yet excessively sensitive detection is why many AV 2.0 vendors include investigative capabilities allowing humans to vet their conclusions.

AI also passes limited information about the malware it detects, leaving forensics to fill in the rest. The traditional approach of discovering malware was through reverse engineering, or by monitoring it inside sandboxes. These both produced detailed reports of behavior, capabilities and other threat intelligence. Conversely, some AI based approaches only report that a threat was flagged by, “XYZ Threat Model.” Automatically flagging things on the wrong side of a machine learning statistical curve is a powerful approach. Yet it isn’t too helpful for those investigating incidents.

2. Orchestration and automation won’t replace forensic practitioners

When I talk friends with more than a decade in forensics, they often bemoan the lack of deep knowledge in today’s practitioner. The influx of new professionals does mainly Tier 1 work: light triage, log file examination and replaying “flight recorder” style continuous monitoring. They barely tap into forensic artifacts, and couldn’t do reverse engineering, or carve encryption keys from RAM during a ransomware case. For these things you need to hire the few remaining Tier 3 DFIR practitioners.

The new Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) products, typified by Demisto and Phantom, automate incident response and the usage of forensic tools through playbooks. This could reduce the size of incident response teams, but will it commoditize forensic tools and skills?

Most would agree that organizations are barely digging into the forensic toolbox and that important alerts still aren’t being given enough attention. SOAR opens the door to finally employ the proper variety and depth of forensics via automation. What I’ve seen so far in SOAR rollouts is their use as a forensics force multiplier.

3. IoT, mobile and cloud don’t change the fundamental issue

Sometimes I hear people predict that all traditional computing devices will transition into the cloud, mobile and IoT. Their next statement is usually that InfoSec departments and incident response activities will disappear too; taken over by cloud service providers, or mobile and IoT device vendors.

While access to the servers behind SaaS and access into IoT devices make things a little tougher for hackers and forensics, that’s missing the point. Your biggest security hole is your user who clicks phishing emails, browses scary websites and inserts sketchy USB devices they pick up in the parking lot.

In the far-off future I don’t know what tablet, kiosk or Elon Musk brain chip employees with be interfacing with. I do know that they will drag them into the dark corners of the internet and infect them with malicious code. Then they’re going to connect to your cloud-based CRM or proprietary source code repository. This is human nature and it’s not going away. Neither is the job investigating the people and devices connecting to your valuable assets.

4. There’s always a new detection approach…and sophisticated actors bypassing it

State funded cyber warfare and opportunities to pillage digital banking pull bright minds to the dark side. The same quality of talent working at security vendors and InfoSec departments now work to develop exploits and malware. Sometimes it’s the same people doing both!

Cybersecurity is a human arms race. Sure, AI is supplementing security analysts, but AI is now deployed by humans on both side of the war. AI-powered hacking tools that learn to bypass AI detection were released at last year’s hacker conference, DefCon. The parity between each side is why, despite security breakthroughs, new attacks will always appear and succeed.

After the onslaught of AI-based attacks pierce our defenses, DFIR will need to be employed to reduce hacker dwell time, as it always has. When protection fails, forensics can still prevail.

Have You Heard About Tor?

TOR: the Internet “anonymizer.”

For most of us what is personally important while using the Internet, is to have the best of:

• Speed
• Security
• Access
• Privacy

But there’s no such thing as the average person on the Internet; we’re all likely to have different priorities for different reasons.

• As Internet users, we are as different as out personalities, work and personal responsibilities.
• We also use the Internet different from each other based on our interests, obsessions, political affiliations and hobbies.

When privacy comes out on top.

However, there are many people who use the Internet and who definitely do not want to be identified by name on the Internet, at least when they are doing certain activities if not all the time. They would like to stay anonymous, as often as they can, online.

• This isn’t simply a matter of not identifying themselves: they don’t want anyone to be able to track them down and find out who they are.
• They also want to visit any type of website they want without anybody knowing about it and stopping them…no matter the content, whether it borders on being illegal or is even outright illegal.
• They also want to say what they want, even if it’s not popular or raises concerns…and they don’t want to be put under surveillance, monitored, arrested or worse. (After all, freedom of expression changes depending on what country you’re in.)
• Finally, they believe—with conviction, that we could be tracked down and identified very easily with the way the Internet and Web work today.

That’s where the very special Internet network known as Tor comes in for this crowd.

What is Tor?

As explained in the picture, Tor is a service that redirects Internet traffic through a special network which helps someone stay unidentifiable and unidentified online. Tor exists to keep an Internet user’s name and identity out of Internet activity (some or all) that they don’t want their true name and actual identity attached to.

Because, sometimes people simply want to communicate online, post messages and view websites in private, but are afraid to. That’s what Tor does, when the goal of these people is not to harm others.

What does Tor stand for?

Tor stands for The Onion Router, and it’s never spelled TOR or T.O.R., just so you know. It’s simply Tor.

Tor was developed in the mid 1990s by some computer scientists and a mathematician while working for the United States Naval Research Laboratory. They were tasked with coming up with a way to protect their Navy’s online intelligence communications.

Obviously, their goal wasn’t simply staying anonymous. They wanted to prevent others (an individual, organization or foreign country) from stealing and deciphering the Navy’s communications.

Tor made available to the public.

In the ensuing years, Tor transformed from a special network for sending secure military communications to a network that was open to the world at large. An Internet inside the Internet, so to speak.

This happened with the creation of The Tor Project, which was developed between 2002-2005, and founded by some of the original creators. However, by then there were several organizations who recognized that Tor offered something special—the ability for anyone in the world to use the Internet and send messages and email anonymously.

Tor became a beacon for privacy and free speech advocates.

Where does the “onion” idea come in?

If you’ve ever peeled apart an onion, you know it comes apart in layers. The computer engineers who created Tor chose a method that added layers of encryption over data that was going across a network.

Along with that, they ingeniously created special stops along the network, called relays, where a layer of encryption is pulled off, but just enough to get information the next relay destination. When the encrypted message arrives at the subsequent relay, the same thing happens—another layer is stripped and the message is moved on.

By the time the data reaches its destination, the last layer is peeled away and the information can be read. But everywhere along the way, nobody could see the data that was being transmitted. Not the contents and definitely not the IP address of the sender, which (if the person worked from one primarily locations) would identify where they were.

That also means if there were an intruder or hacker along the network, they wouldn’t be able to know who the sender was.

Tor today.

Today, Tor is vibrant and growing in popularity, and controversy. Tor is free, just like the Internet, and it moves Internet traffic from millions of users across a network of volunteer relays, numbering in the thousands.

However, as you start to look into Tor, be prepared. Because as you might expect, that level of freedom, which can be used for all the right reasons, is also abused by many people on the Internet…significantly…and for all the wrong reasons.

It all depends on what your perspective is on freedom of expression.

Spoofed Canada Revenue Agency Important – Secure Bank Communication malspam delivers Trickbot banking Trojan

An email with the subject of Important – Secure Bank Communication coming from either  Canada Revenue Agency <no-reply@secure-gc.ca>  or Canada Revenue Agency <no-reply@securegcemail.ca>  with a malicious word doc attachment delivers Trickbot banking Trojan

They are using email addresses and subjects that will scare or entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.

Canada Revenue Agency has not been hacked or had their email or other servers compromised. They are not sending the emails to you. They are just innocent victims in exactly the same way as every recipient of these emails.

As usual the domain sending these emails was registered today by criminals, through Godaddy and hosted on Rackspace.

canonical name     secure-gc.ca.
aliases
addresses     104.130.228.66
104.130.228.65
Domain Whois record

Queried whois.cira.ca with “secure-gc.ca“…

Domain name:           secure-gc.ca
Domain status:         registered
Creation date:         2017/02/22
Expiry date:           2018/02/22
Updated date:          2017/02/22
DNSSEC:                Unsigned

Registrar:
Name:              Go Daddy Domains Canada, Inc
Number:            2316042

Name servers:
ns47.domaincontrol.com
ns48.domaincontrol.com

IP     Hostname     City     Region     Country     Organisation
104.130.228.66     secure-gc.ca     San Antonio     Texas     US     AS27357 Rackspace Hosting
Note: Only the final IP address outside of your network in the Received: fields can be trusted as others can be spoofed
Other sending IPs include 104.130.228.66, 146.20.36.44 , 104.130.228.67. Other sending domains include: securegcemail.ca

The email looks like:

From: Canada Revenue Agency <no-reply@secure-gc.ca>

Date: Wed 22/02/2017 16:48

Subject: Important – Secure Bank Communication

Attachment: SecureDoc.doc

Body content:

February 22, 2017
Secure Documents
Please find attached your secure documents. Please review, complete and return completed documents via email to CRAoffice@cra-arc.gc.ca.

If you have any queries relating to the above, feel free to contact us at: CRAoffice@cra-arc.gc.ca or securegc.ca or anothers stringe

Confidentiality Note: The information contained in and transmitted with this communication is strictly confidential, is intended only for the use of the intended recipient, and is the property of Australian Taxation Office or its affiliates and subsidiaries. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use of the information contained in or transmitted with the communication or dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited by law. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately return this communication to the sender and delete the original message and any copy of it in your possession.

Screenshot:

spoofed canada revenue agency secure doc email delivering trickbot banking trojan

22 February 2017 : SecureDoc.doc   Current Virus total detections [1] [2] : Payload Security [1] [2] none of which are showing the download location of the actual Trickbot itself, although it is on Virus Total . I am informed the download location is www.TPSCI.COM/pngg/granionulos.png or http://www.sungkrorsang.com/fileFTP/granionulos.png  which of course is not an image file but a renamed .exe

Previous campaigns over the last few weeks have delivered numerous different download sites and malware versions. There are frequently 5 or 6 and even up to 150  download locations on some days, sometimes delivering the exactly same malware from all locations and sometimes slightly different malware versions. Dridex /Locky  does update at frequent intervals during the day, sometimes as quickly as every hour, so you might get a different version of these nasty Ransomware or  Banking password stealer Trojans.

All the alleged senders, companies, names of employees, phone numbers, amounts, reference numbers etc. mentioned in the emails are all innocent and are just picked at random. Some of these companies will exist and some won’t.  Don’t try to respond by phone or email, all you will do is end up with an innocent person or company who have had their details spoofed and picked at random from a long list that the bad guys have previously found .  The bad guys choose companies, Government departments and other organisations with subjects that are designed to entice you or alarm you into blindly opening the attachment or clicking the link in the email to see what is happening.

This email attachment contains what appears to be a genuine word doc or Excel XLS spreadsheet with either a macro script or  an embedded OLE object that when run will infect you.

Modern versions of Microsoft office, that is Office 2010, 2013, 2016 and Office 365 should be automatically set to higher security to protect you.

By default protected view is enabled and  macros are disabled, UNLESS you or your company have enabled them.  If protected view mode is turned off and macros are enabled then opening this malicious word document will infect you, and simply previewing it in  windows explorer or your email client might well be enough to infect you. Definitely DO NOT follow the advice they give to enable macros or enable editing to see the content.

Most of these malicious word documents either appear to be totally blank or look something like these images when opened in protected view mode, which should be the default in Office 2010, 2013, 2016  and 365.  Some versions pretend to have a digital RSA key and say you need to enable editing and Macros to see the content.  Do NOT enable Macros or editing under any circumstances.

What can be infected by this

At this time, these malicious macros only infect windows computers. They do not affect a Mac, IPhone, IPad, Blackberry, Windows phone or Android phone. The malicious word or excel file can open on any device with an office program installed, and potentially the macro will run on Windows or Mac or any other device with Microsoft Office installed. BUT the downloaded malware that the macro tries to download is windows specific, so will not harm, install or infect any other computer except a windows computer. You will not be infected if you do not have macros enabled in Excel or Word. These Macros do not run in “Office Online”  Open Office, Libre Office, Word Perfect or any other office program that can read Word or Excel files.
Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware. Also please read our post about word macro malware and how to avoid being infected by them

Be very careful with email attachments. All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. It might be a simple message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” that appears to come from a friend. It might be a scare ware message that will make you open the attachment to see what you are accused of doing. Frequently it is more targeted at somebody ( small companies etc.) who regularly receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day, for example an invoice addressed to sales@victimcompany.com.

The basic rule is NEVER open any attachment to an email, unless you are expecting it. Now that is very easy to say but quite hard to put into practice, because we all get emails with files attached to them. Our friends and family  love to send us pictures of them doing silly things, or even cute pictures of the children or pets. Many of us routinely get Word, Excel or PowerPoint attachments in the course of work or from companies that we already have a relationship with.

Never just blindly click on the file in your email program. Always save the file to your downloads folder, so you can check it first. A lot of malicious files that are attached to emails will have a faked extension. That is the 3 letters at the end of the file name. Unfortunately windows by default hides the file extensions so you need to Set your folder options to “show known file types. Then when you unzip the zip file  that is supposed to contain the pictures of “Sally’s dog catching a ball”, an invoice or receipt from some company for a product or service  or receive a Word doc or Excel file report that work has supposedly sent you to finish working on at the weekend,  you can easily see if it is a picture or document & not a malicious program. If you see JS or .EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR or .HTA .vbs, .wsf , .jse  .jar at the end of the file name DO NOT click on it or try to open it, it will infect you.

With these malformed infected word, excel and other office documents that normally contain a vba macro virus, the vital thing is do not open any office document direct from your email client or the web. Always save the document to a safe location on your computer, normally your downloads folder or your documents folder and scan it with your antivirus. Many Antiviruses do not natively detect vba  macro-viruses in real time protection and you need to enable document or office protection in the settings. Do not rely on your Anti-Virus to immediately detect the malware or malicious content.    DO NOT enable editing mode or enable macros

All modern versions of word and other office programs, that is 2010, 2013, 2016 and 365, should open all Microsoft office documents that is word docs, excel files and PowerPoint etc  that are downloaded from the web or received in an email  automatically in “protected view” that stops any embedded malware or macros from being displayed and running. Make sure protected view is set in all office programs to protect you and your company from these sorts of attacks and do not over ride it to edit the document until you are 100% sure that it is a safe document. If the protected mode bar appears when opening the document DO NOT enable editing mode or enable macros the document will look blank or have a warning message, but will be safe.

Be aware that there are a lot of dodgy word docs spreading that WILL infect you with no action from you if you are still  using an out dated or vulnerable version of word. This is a good reason to update your office programs to a recent version and stop using office 2003 and 2007.  Many of us have continued to use older versions of word and other office programs, because  they are convenient, have the functions and settings we are used to and have never seen a need to update to the latest super-duper version.  The risks in using older version are now seriously starting to outweigh the convenience, benefits and cost of keeping an old version going.

We strongly urge you to update your office software to the latest version and stop putting yourself at risk, using old out of date software.