Analysis of Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Digest

I’m staring to make it a habit to do a quick read and summary of data breach reports.

Here’s the summary for Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Digest.

Observations

• Covers 2015
• Over 500 cybersecurity incidents
• Over 40 countries
• Over 70 contributors
• VERIS is the Vocabulary for Event Recording and Incident Sharing
• The DBD looks at a subset, in this case 18 scenarios, based on prevalence and lethality
• Certain details are modified to protect anonymity
• The most common types of attacks in the past have been: POS intrusions, web app attacks, state-affiliated targeted attacks, crimeware, insider and privilege misuse, payment card skimmers, mistakes that compromise security, physical loss, and DoS
• They’re focusing on the first six
• Witness social tactics being used in about 20% of confirmed data breaches
• As one would expect, email is the primary means of communication to the target (72%) followed by in-person deception (18%) and phone calls (12%), with a small amount of overlap across the three means of communication
• Having net flow and other such data is invaluable for determining what actually happened
• Scenario 1: Chinese company targets head design engineer and infects his system with malware, pivots, and extracts tons of sensitive IP from the network
• Scenario 2: Someone clicks an infected link in the office that authorizes bank transfers. They get infected, and now a bunch of transfers are attempted
• Scenario 3: Iterator-based web vuln allowed extraction of customer data, which lead to an extortion attempt. They went public to release the pressure of disclosure
• Scenario 4: Insider reads CEO emails through misconfigured SPAM filter
• Scenario 5: Partner access is abused to extract credit card data
• Scenario 6: USB malware infects film studio executive with intent of stealing unreleased video, security catches it, sort of
• Scenario 7: Altered PEDs (keypad where you buy things at stores)
• Scenario 8: AS400-based SCADA system and numerous internet-facing vulnerabilities lead to PII theft and the ability to modify chemicals going into water
• Scenario 9: infected system on BYoD network blacklists corporate network because they shared the same NAT egress point
• Scenario 10: banking victim has malware infect and decrypt encrypted ATM transactions due to high volume of data to start from
• Scenario 11: SQLi issue on payroll site let attackers modify and then fix paycheck values and destinations to avoid detection
• Scenario 12: Attackers compromise custom CMS upload function to extract data about what material will be on what boats at what time. They then actually pirate the ships in question
• Scenario 13: malware in R&D department looking to extract key research
• Scenario 14: data extraction over DNS
• Scenario 15: ransomware
• Scenario 16: advanced malware creates P2P mesh network using UDP port 53 as the daemon
• Scenario 17: RAM-scraping POS malware
• Scenario 18: SQLi, password dumping malware, notification by the FBI that their systems were being used

Summary

These types of reports are fascinating.

Sure, there is usually some marketing of services. And it isn’t science where you’re getting perfect samples of the real world in a balanced way. But you are at least hearing about real incidents in the real world.

Definitely go read the whole thing.

Notes

1. Verizon’s Business Group was recently breached themselves, so a lot of this data has been leaked. It can happen to anyone.

Original Post: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/analysis-verizons-2016-data-breach-digest

Certified Ethical Hacker website caught spreading crypto ransomware

Embedded code used in a drive-by attack on the website of EC-Council, the professional organization that maintains the Certified Ethical Hacker program.

Fox IT

For the past four days, including during the hour that this post was being prepared on Thursday morning, a major security certification organization has been spreading TeslaCrypt malware—despite repeated warnings from outside researchers.

EC-Council, the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based professional organization that administers the Certified Ethical Hacker program, started spreading the scourge on Monday. Shortly afterward, researchers from security firm Fox IT notified EC-Council officials that one of their subdomains—which just happens to provide online training for computer security students—had come under the spell of Angler, a toolkit sold online that provides powerful Web drive-by exploits. On Thursday, after receiving no reply and still detecting that the site was infected, Fox IT published this blog post, apparently under the reasonable belief that when attempts to privately inform the company fail, it’s reasonable to go public.

Like so many drive-by attack campaigns, the one hitting the EC-Council is designed to be vexingly hard for researchers to replicate. It targets only visitors using Internet Explorer and then only when they come to the site from Google, Bing, or another search engine. Even when these conditions are met, people from certain IP addresses—say those in certain geographic locales—are also spared. The EC-Council pages of those who aren’t spared then receive embedded code that redirects the browser to a chain of malicious domains that host the Angler exploits.

The Fox IT blog post continued:

Through this embedding the client is redirected a couple of times to avoid/frustrate/stop manual analysis and some automated systems. Once the user has jumped through all the redirects he/she ends up on the Angler exploit kit landing page from which the browser, flashplayer plugin or silverlight plugin will be exploited. The Angler exploit kit first starts the ‘Bedep’ loader on an exploited victim machine which will download the final payload.

The way the redirect occurs on the EC-COUNCIL website is through PHP code on the webserver which is injecting the redirect into the webpage. A vulnerability in the EC-COUNCIL website is most likely exploited as it runs the very popular WordPress CMS which has been a target through vulnerable plug-ins for years.

Payload details: TeslaCrypt

This specific campaign instance of the Angler exploit kit drops ‘TeslaCrypt’ on the exploited victim’s machine. TeslaCrypt is a piece of ransomware which takes a victim’s files hostage with the use of encryption. Once the victim’s files have been successfully encrypted a ransom note is presented to instruct the victim on ways to recover files:

Enlarge

TeslaCrypt requires the victim to pay around 1.5 BTC to get their files back; this equals to approximately 622$ at the current conversion rate.

The EC-Council infection comes eight days after The New York Times, the BBC, and other big-name Web publishersfell victim to a rash of malicious ads that attempted to surreptitiously install crypto ransomware and other malware on the computers of unsuspecting visitors. Last week’s campaign was unusual for hitting so many different ad networks all at once. So far, none of the compromised networks—including those run by Google, AppNexis, AOL, and Rubicon—have provided statements explaining how the mass compromise happened or what they’ve done to ensure that similar attacks won’t succeed again.

Original Post: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/certified-ethical-hacker-website-caught-spreading-crypto-ransomware/

Bypassing Antivirus With Ten Lines of Code or (Yet Again) Why Antivirus is Largely Useless

I had originally set out to write a long winded blog post on different antivirus bypass techniques. I went through what was supposed to be step 1 of my guide and uploaded my resultant binary to virustotal. To my complete and utter shock, the binary got a 0/56 detection rate. I decided to throw out my long winded idea and move forward with this quick, dirty, and unbelievably easy method.

I believe that most of my readers would agree with me that bypassing most antivirus based solutions is rather trivial, however I do occasionally bump in to some people who solely rely on tools that generate binaries that can easily be fingerprinted and flagged by antivirus solutions. This article is largely intended for that audience.

Before I dive in to this small tidbit of C++ code, I’d like to touch on a tool that is really good at producing binaries that almost always evade detection, Veil-Evasion (part of theVeil-Framework). This tool is awesome (many thanks to @harmj0y and others for creating and contributing to this awesome project) and in almost all instances I have had to use it has not let me down. If it has, I blame people who keep generating binaries and then testing them on virustotal. If you people could stop doing that, that would be great.

At any rate, this begs the question, if tools like Veil Evasion are so epic, why should you care about knowing how to slap togother a binary with a shellcode payload yourself? Well there are a number of reasons:

• People get busy and tools become deprecated
• The binaries generated by tools become fingerprintable; not the payload necessarily, but the compiled structure of the binary.
• As a penetration tester, you should really know how to do this. Ups your leet cred.. or so I hear.

Before you take a look at the below code, it’s worth noting that this is targeting the windows platform; as obviously noted with the reference to windows.h 😉

#include <windows.h>
#include <iostream>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
 char b[] = {/* your XORd with key of 'x' shellcode goes here i.e. 0x4C,0x4F, 0x4C */};
 char c[sizeof b];
 for (int i = 0; i < sizeof b; i++) {c[i] = b[i] ^ 'x';}
 void *exec = VirtualAlloc(0, sizeof c, MEM_COMMIT, PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE);
 memcpy(exec, c, sizeof c);
 ((void(*)())exec)();
}

Quite simply, the above code creates a character array with shell code you can add, performs an XOR operation with the incredibly sophisticated key of lowercase ‘x’, allocates some memory, copies the character array in said allocated memory, and executes it. It may be worth highlighting that you will need to XOR your shellcode with your key of choosing (in this case ‘x’) before you put it in the above code and compile.

So you are probably looking at that and thinking ‘really?’ – I know how you feel. This is how I felt after I intended this to be step 1 of my tutorial and I ran it through virustotal and it returned 0/56 detection. I’d like to stress that this is an incredible simple and most basic technique, yet its success is still rather astonishing.

I originally wrote this example and tested it on virus total a while ago, but I did reanalyze the executable on virustotal at the time of publishing this post and found it still had a 0 detection rate.

The binary you generate will very likely not match the SHA256 of the binary I have tested; the binary I uploaded contained shellcode generated with the metasploit framework.

Final Comments

Alright, so antivirus is dead. We all know that. That being said, we can’t argue that over 95% of organizations are still depending on antivirus to protect endpoints.

Is there a better way? certainly. A number of vendors, which I shall not name, have launched products that take a new approach to protecting endpoints primarily focusing on identification of known exploit techniques. This is usually performed by way of injecting DLLs in to processes that will monitor for these known techniques and prevent the exploit from working successfully.

Is this fool proof technique? I would be inclined to say no. The bar will be raised, but a new type of cat and mouse game will begin.

Final note: The above may not work on _all_ antivirus solutions. I figure that was obvious, but thought I would mention it before the pitch forks come after me!

Original Post: http://www.attactics.org/2016/03/bypassing-antivirus-with-10-lines-of.html

Practical and Effective Security Incident Management

An organization’s incident management procedures should be appropriate to its size. There are lots of materials about – and many opinions on – the right way to handle incidents, so this is my high-level view based upon my own experience. Here are no flow charts, nor any assumptions about how large (or small) your organization is. Instead, I’ll identify some common factors that will help organizations of any size, anywhere, handle their security incidents effectively.

Assessing Consequences

It is a characteristic of InfoSec incidents that their first causes can often set off achain reaction of things going wrong. Sometimes the biggest damage is not directly connected to the initial hurt, but to shortcomings in the affected organization’s backup plans. For example, if one IT system has been compromised by a single piece of malware, a poorly thought out business continuity plan can result in extended service downtimes while essential systems all have to be taken offline (i.e. so they can be thoroughly checked, disinfected and tested for compromise). This can lose business and clients. Malware authors would doubtless be delighted to hear how their malicious work has caused damage that exceeds anything they had planned. For this reason, just knowing about the technical aspects (and the initial impact) of malware is not enough: additional skills are required to identify all of the risks from any particular piece of malware that shows up in your organization. This is a major question for any incident management model: who is involved in recognizing the complete consequences of a single incident?

Failures Three

Failures of incident management usually fall into one of three broad types:

1. An incident is ignored or is not acted upon in good time
2. An incident is acted upon, but actions taken don’t stop problems (including secondary, unforeseen ones) because the consequences have not been judged accurately
3. An event is acted upon, but the results of actions taken are even more disruptive than the event they are reacting to.

Analysis, Containment, Eradication, Recovery

All organizations, in particular medium to large ones, should have formally agreed methods for dealing with incidents. There are various frameworks for incident response (e.g. ISO 27001 and ISO 27035). All usually advocate allocating people to specific roles and responsibilities during incidents, and the setting up of processes for analyzing the issues, containing the resultant problems, eradicating these and then restoring affected services as quickly as possible. Procedures and processes should be kept as simple as possible, and be tested for effectiveness and practicality. Effective testing can be challenging for security professionals, as anyone who has been involved in organizing fire drills will know. But tests do not always have to involve full deployment of people and resources: for instance, having someone with an experienced eye for procedures look overwritten incident handling guidelines can give valuable feedback on any untested process.

Not Just Hacking

Not all InfoSec incidents will have an obvious InfoSec origin: InfoSec issues can evolve from other incidents in very short time. For example, the damage of a key data repository through a local or regional natural disaster might affect the availability of an organization’s services in faraway places. Some data is still only held in paper form, with limited possibilities for backup, so damage to a depository of paper records can be particularly challenging.

Keeping Them Close

Incident handlers should cultivate good working relations with those in their organization responsible for internal communications. This will help ensure incidents that are often technical in origin are described in everyday terms, for the benefit of all those affected. Remember that this may include customers and other members of the public, so internal communications should be ready to prepare briefings for all of these and, in the most serious incidents, for the press.

As well as cultivating good relations within an organization, incident handlers should stay some steps ahead of the next incident by tuning into quality information from trusted sources about InfoSec. In the USA, an excellent example of this isInfraGard, an information sharing partnership between the FBI and private sector representatives of business, academia and other law enforcement agencies. InfraGard participants share information and intelligence to prevent “hostile acts” and ensure that special alerts and lessons learned get passed through its trusted network of committed InfoSec professionals.

Keep it Simple

Incident management procedures must be kept as simple as practicable. At first glance, it can seem like larger organizations have an advantage in their access to InfoSec expertise. But the extra complexity required to effectively manage this expertise can actually lead to delays and confusion, ultimately to more damage. As well as complexity, over-enthusiasm during an incident, where everyone seeks to help, can be just as bad as any failure to respond. Recent lessons show that discipline can be difficult to maintain during a serious incident, even within disciplined organizations, e.g. during the manhunt following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when large numbers of law enforcement officers were drawn in, not all of whom were under the direction of lead agencies. Enthusiasm is understandable and usually to be encouraged. But it can very quickly lead to confusion – and thus error. This can be compounded by a tendency for some professionals to use incidents as opportunities to showcase their knowledge and/or over-analyze problems. Also, high levels of ‘chatter’ among experts can confuse and distract the senior staff with ultimate responsibility for successful outcomes.

A lean process in which decisions can be reached quickly should therefore be the aim of any organization creating an incident management system. It is best to build this up from experienced staff with a good knowledge of the whole business of the organization. They should be advised as appropriate by supportive InfoSec people. In all cases, there should be a direct line of communication with the organizations C-suite executives, including legal representatives.

In an age where any organization is liable to face some form of cyber-attack, it is necessary to get the drills for managing this inevitability right. Simplicity, knowledge and a good grasp of risk management principles are key ingredients for constructing your own system for managing incidents. Having these should ensure an incident does not turn into a disaster.

Original Post: http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/practical-and-effective-security-incident-management/

IOCs are Dead – Long Live IOCs!

How a Typo Stopped Hackers from Stealing $1 Billion from Bank

Typos are really embarrassing, but this time it saved the Bangladesh Central Bank and the New York Federal Reserve by preventing a nearly $1 Billion (£700 Million) heist.

Last month, some unknown hackers broke into Bangladesh’s central bank, obtained credentials needed for payment transfers and then transfer large sums to fraudulent accounts based in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. But…

A single spelling mistake in an online bank transfer instruction prevented the full theft, according to Reuters.

Here’s what actually was happened:

Nearly three dozen requests hit the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on 5 February using the Bangladesh Bank’s SWIFT code, out of which four resulted in successful transfers, for a total value of about $81 million.

However, when the hackers attempted to make their fifth transfer of $20 Million to a Sri Lankan non-governmental organization called the Shalika Foundation, they made a typo by attempting a transfer to the Shalika “Fandation.”

Staff at Deutsche Bank, which was involved in routing funds, spotted this spell error and got asked the Bangladeshis for clarification on the typo. The Bangladesh bank then canceled the remaining transfers.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York also queried the Bangladesh central bank after spotting a large number of transfer of funds to private accounts at around the same time.

The hackers, who are still unknown, had been attempting to steal a further $850 Million from the Bangladesh government’s reserve account, but a typo in the requests prevented the full theft.

The $81 Million of transfer that was successfully made has not been recovered, but the typo saved the Bangladeshis because if all the fund transfers were made successfully thieves would have made off with $950 Million.

The attack happened between February 4th-5th and originated from outside the country. Moreover, the hackers are still unknown, and officials said there is not much hope of catching them.

Meanwhile, the Bangladesh central bank says the Federal Reserve should have stopped the transactions. The bank is planning to file a lawsuit against the Federal Reserve in order to recover some of the funds that were lost.

Hacker Shows How To Hack Anyone’s Facebook Account

Short Bytes: By exploiting a flaw in Facebook’s beta sites, a security researcher has shown how to hack any Facebook account in simple steps. The vulnerability dealt with the password reset method that allowed the hacker to brute force any account and gain complete access. Facebook has now fixed this flaw and awarded him $15,000 bug bounty.

How to hack Facebook is one of the most searched hacking-related queries. While hacking Facebook without harming your own account is very difficult, a security researcher from Bangalore, India, did it successfully.

His method deals with exploiting a simple vulnerability that he could’ve used to hack into other people’s Facebook accounts easily and make any type of changes. With his Facebook hack, Anand Prakash was able to view messages, stored information of credit/debit cards, personal pictures and more.

Flaw and method description: How to hack Facebook

This vulnerability deals with the password reset feature in Facebook. Whenever a user forgets the Facebook password, the social networking website allows the user to reset it by entering the email address or phone number. Then, Facebook sends a 6-digit security code to let you change your Facebook password.

To protect an account from brute force attacks, the account holder is allowed to try up to 12 codes before getting blocked on Facebook’s main sitehttp://www.facebook.com.

Anand looked out for the same issue on Facebook’s beta sites beta.facebook.com and mbasic.beta.facebook.com. He was surprised to see that limiting feature of 12 attempts was not implemented on these websites. Using the Forgot Password feature, he tried to brute force the 6-digit password reset code on Facebook beta sites. As a result, he was able to hack his Facebook account and reset the password.

Video Proof-of-concept: How to hack Facebook

In the video below, Anand shows how he was able to set a new password of Facebook account by brute forcing the security code sent to phone number or email:

Which is the vulnerable request that was exploited to hack Facebook?

On the Facebook’s beta page, Anand was able to brute force “n” in the following request and gain the complete control of the account:

lsd=AVoywo13&n=XXXXX

After discovering this flaw, Anand reported it to Facebook Team on February 22. The social media website has now fixed this flaw and awarded him a bug bounty of $15,000.

Original Post: http://fossbytes.com/hacker-shows-hows-to-hack-anyones-facebook-account/

Top 10 Coolest Notepad Tricks and Hacks for Your PC

Short Bytes: The humble Notepad of your laptop goes unappreciated many times. This little tool is capable of doing some amazing tricks with just few simple steps. In this article, I’m going to tell you my 10 favorite Notepad tricks.

What work do you perform with Notepad? Nothing much? Well, Notepad is a lot more than a simple text editor. Few lines of commands create interesting tricks that will definitely surprise you. In this article, I’ve compiled my 10 personal favorite tricks and shared it with you.Check these tricks out and if you have some more, don’t hesitate to share with us.

1. Make Notepad your Personal Diary

Do you want a diary in your computer? Notepad can be turned into a personal logbook by simple steps. Everything you type will be saved with the particular date and time.

Follow these steps to make notepad your diary:

1. Open Notepad

2. In the first line, type “.LOG”

3. Save the file as “log.txt”

2. Password-protected Folder using Notepad

You can protect the files and folders in your computer by using this Notepad trick. A password-protected folder is created using few lines of code and you can keep your important stuff safe.

Type the following code. Instead of “fossBytes” written in the code, type in the password of your wish. Save the file as private.bat and choose File type as All Files (*.*). Double click on the file private.bat. A Private folder will be created in which you can move the files and folders that you want to protect. Now, a password will be required to open this folder.

@ECHO OFF
title Folder Private
if EXIST “Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}” goto UNLOCK
if NOT EXIST Private goto MDLOCKER
:CONFIRM
echo Are you sure you want to lock the folder(Y/N)
set/p “cho=>”
if %cho%==Y goto LOCK
if %cho%==y goto LOCK
if %cho%==n goto END
if %cho%==N goto END
echo Invalid choice.
goto CONFIRM
:LOCK
ren Private “Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}”
attrib +h +s “Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}”
echo Folder locked
goto End
:UNLOCK
echo Enter password to unlock folder
set/p “pass=>”
if NOT %pass%==fossBytes goto FAIL
attrib -h -s “Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}”
ren “Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}” Private
echo Folder Unlocked successfully
goto End
:FAIL
echo Invalid password
goto end
:MDLOCKER
md Private
echo Private created successfully
goto End
:End

3. The Matrix Effect

‘Matrix’ movie fan? Create your own window of random strings of green digits displayed all over.

Type the following code, save the file as .bat, open the saved file and see the Matrix magic! (You can find the saved file by performing a simple search in start menu).

@echo off
color 02
:start
echo %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random%
goto start

4. Shutdown your Computer with a Message

Don’t you find the process of shutting down too tedious? Open Start menu, Click on Turn Off button, Click Ok! Why not just double click an icon! Follow the steps and you can shut down your system by just double clicking on an icon. Also, a message of your choice will be displayed.

Open Notepad, type the following code and save the file with any name but with extension .bat

@echo off
msg * Computer will now shut down
shutdown -c “Sweet Dreams. Take care.” –s

5. Pop out the CD Drive continuously

Play a prank with your friends and make their computer’s CD drive open and close repeatedly.

Open Notepad, type the following code and save the file with extension .vbs  Then open the file. It will make CD drive pop out continuously. To stop the process, open Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete) and end wscript.vbs process.

Set oWMP = CreateObject(“WMPlayer.OCX.7?)
Set colCDROMs = oWMP.cdromCollection
do
if colCDROMs.Count >= 1 then
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count – 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count – 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next
End If
wscript.sleep 5000
loop

6. Text to Speech using Notepad

What if your computer speaks what you type! Follow these steps and Notepad will speak to you:

1. Open Notepad and type the following command.

Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox(“What should I speak?”,”Speak to me”)
Set sapi=CreateObject(“sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message 

2. Save the file as speak.vbs

3. Open the file, type the sentence you want Notepad to speak and click OK.

7. Shortcuts for Changing Header and Footer in Notepad

Open Page Setup from File menu and use the following codes in the header and footer fields for the particular purpose:

&d Print the current date
&t Print the current time
&f Print the name of the document
&p Print the page number

&l Left-align the characters that follow
&c Center the characters that follow
&r Right-align the characters that follow

8. “Bush hid the facts” Trick

This trick is one of most popular tricks of Notepad. Follow these steps to use the trick:

1. Open Notepad.

2. Type “bush hid the facts” or “this app can break”.

3. Save the file and close it.

4. Open the file again.

What happens is when you open the saved file again, you see some different characters instead of what you had typed and saved (i.e. bush hid the facts or this app can break). This happens due to 4-3-3-5 string length bug in old versions of Windows.

9. Toggle Capslock

You can make the Capslock key of your keyboard toggle repeatedly by just typing a simple code in the Notepad.

Type this code in Notepad and save the file as .vbs Open the saved file. See what happens on using Capslock key

Set wshShell =wscript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
do
wscript.sleep 100
wshshell.sendkeys “{CAPSLOCK}”
loop

10. Fake Windows Error Message

Type the following command in Notepad and save the file as error.vbs then Open the saved file and your fake error message will appear.

X=Msgbox(“Press OK and Windows will restart now.”,0+16,“There is a serious problem in your system”)

Original Post: http://fossbytes.com/top-10-coolest-notepad-tricks-and-hacks-for-your-pc/

New HTTPS Flaw: “DROWN” Attack

The OpenSSL project recently released a new update to address a critical vulnerability (CVE-2016-0800) dubbed “DROWN” which stands for “Decrypting RSA using Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption”.

From the OpenSSL security advisory:

“A cross-protocol attack was discovered that could lead to decryption of TLS sessions by using a server supporting SSLv2 and EXPORT cipher suites as a Bleichenbacher RSA padding oracle. Note that traffic between clients and non-vulnerable servers can be decrypted provided another server supporting SSLv2 and EXPORT ciphers (even with a different protocol such as SMTP, IMAP or POP) shares the RSA keys of the non-vulnerable server. This vulnerability is known as DROWN (CVE-2016-0800).”

In a nutshell, the DROWN attack relies on servers that support SSLv2. The first version of the attack relies on servers that support both SSLv2 and TLS. The second version relies on SSLv2 servers and TLS servers that both share the same keypair. The second version means that an SSLv2 server could be used to decrypt the TLS server’s traffic.

This vulnerability could easily be mitigated by disabling SSLv2 and never reusing keypairs across servers. “But if it’s so easy to mitigate, why is it such a big deal?”, one might ask. According to the DROWN website (which is ironically behind CloudFlare who is in a position to MITM SSL traffic), the vulnerability affects 33% of all HTTPS servers on the internet, including Yahoo, BuzzFeed, and HostGator.

Although CVE-2016-0800 is the CVE assigned to DROWN, there are other CVEs that make DROWN even worse, as the website explains:

“The DROWN attack itself was assigned CVE-2016-0800. DROWN is made worse by two additional OpenSSL implementation vulnerabilities. CVE-2015-3197, which affected OpenSSL versions prior to 1.0.2f and 1.0.1r, allows a DROWN attacker to connect to the server with disabled SSLv2 ciphersuites, provided that support for SSLv2 itself is enabled. CVE-2016-0703, which affected OpenSSL versions prior to 1.0.2a, 1.0.1m, 1.0.0r, and 0.9.8zf, greatly reduces the time and cost of carrying out the DROWN attack.”

The US government is largely responsible for this vulnerability due it restricting the export of strong cryptography up until the end of the 1990s. The DROWN website explains:

“The U.S. government deliberately weakened three kinds of cryptographic primitives: RSA encryption, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and symmetric ciphers. FREAK exploited export-grade RSA, and Logjam exploited export-grade Diffie-Hellman. Now, DROWN exploits export-grade symmetric ciphers, demonstrating that all three kinds of deliberately weakened crypto have come to put the security of the Internet at risk decades later.”

The system administrators are also to blame for not disabling a protocol that has been known to be weak and vulnerable for over a decade.

The security researchers have said “We’ve been able to execute the attack against OpenSSL versions that are vulnerable to CVE-2016-0703 in under a minute using a single PC. Even for servers that do not have these particular bugs, the general variant of the attack, which works against any SSLv2 server, can be conducted in under 8 hours at a total cost of $440.”

Not only is traffic decryption possible, MITM attacks are possible as well according to the technical paper

Configuring your browser to reject SSLv2 will only prevent the first version of this attack, the second version can still be carried out.

You can read the technical paper, get more information, and check if your site is vulnerable to this attack at the DROWN website.

Original Post: https://www.deepdotweb.com/2016/03/03/new-https-flaw-drown-attack