Login
A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.
A researcher found DC Health had five Salesforce Community sites exposing data.
Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.
However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization’s private information and lead to potential data leaks.
Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant’s full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.
This misconfigured Salesforce Community site from the state of Vermont was leaking pandemic assistance loan application data, including names, SSNs, email address and bank account information.
Vermont’s Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said his security teams have been conducting a full review of their Salesforce Community sites, and already found one additional Salesforce site operated by the state that was also misconfigured to allow guest access to sensitive information.
“My team is frustrated by the permissive nature of the platform,” Carbee said.
Carbee said the vulnerable sites were all created rapidly in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and were not subjected to their normal security review process.
“During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and let’s just say a lot of them didn’t have the full benefit of our dev/ops process,” Carbee said. “In our case, we didn’t have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.”
Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity notified Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank that its recently acquired TCF Bank had a Salesforce Community website that was leaking documents related to commercial loans. The data fields in those loan applications included name, address, full Social Security number, title, federal ID, IP address, average monthly payroll, and loan amount.
Huntington Bank has disabled the leaky TCF Bank Salesforce website. Matthew Jennings, deputy chief information security officer at Huntington, said the company was still investigating how the misconfiguration occurred, how long it lasted, and how many records may have been exposed.
KrebsOnSecurity learned of the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who said he wrote a program that identified hundreds of other organizations running misconfigured Salesforce pages. But Akiri said he’s been wary of probing too far, and has had difficulty getting responses from most of the organizations he has notified to date.
“In January and February 2023, I contacted government organizations and several companies, but I did not receive any response from these organizations,” Akiri said. “To address the issue further, I reached out to several CISOs on LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, five companies eventually fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive any responses from government organizations.”
The problem Akiri has been trying to raise awareness about came to the fore in August 2021, when security researcher Aaron Costello published a blog post explaining how misconfigurations in Salesforce Community sites could be exploited to reveal sensitive data (Costello subsequently published a follow-up post detailing how to lock down Salesforce Community sites).
On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity used Akiri’s findings to notify Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information. One DC Health Salesforce Community website designed for health professionals seeking to renew licenses with the city leaked documents that included the applicant’s full name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, license number and expiration, and more.
Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, interim Chief Information Security Officer Mike Rupert initially said the District had hired a third party to investigate, and that the third party confirmed the District’s IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss from the reported Salesforce configuration issue.
But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.
Washington, D.C. health administrators are still smarting from a data breach earlier this year at the health insurance exchange DC Health Link, which exposed personal information for more than 56,000 users, including many members of Congress.
That data later wound up for sale on a top cybercrime forum. The Associated Press reports that the DC Health Link breach was likewise the result of human error, and said an investigation revealed the cause was a DC Health Link server that was “misconfigured to allow access to the reports on the server without proper authentication.”
Salesforce says the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but they can occur when customers’ access control permissions are misconfigured.
“As previously communicated to all Experience Site and Sites customers, we recommend utilizing the Guest User Access Report Package to assist in reviewing access control permissions for unauthenticated users,” reads a Salesforce advisory from Sept. 2022. “Additionally, we suggest reviewing the following Help article, Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile.”
In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release “robust tools and guidance for our customers,” including:
Control Which Users Experience Cloud Site Users Can See
Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile
“We’ve also continued to update our Guest User security policies, beginning with our Spring ‘21 release with more to come in Summer ‘23,” the statement reads. “Lastly, we continue to proactively communicate with customers to help them understand the capabilities available to them, and how they can best secure their instance of Salesforce to meet their security, contractual, and regulatory obligations.”
woo-1200
Mimicry is a security tool developed by Chaitin Technology for active deception in exploitation and post-exploitation.
Active deception can live migrate the attacker to the honeypot without awareness. We can achieve a higher security level at a lower cost with Active deception.
English | 中文文档
FreshRSS docker info
docker-compose version
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d
update config.yaml,replace ${honeypot_public_ip} to the public IP of honeypot service
./mimicry-tools webshell -c config.yaml -t php -p webshell_path
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| Web-Deception | Fake vulnerabilities in web applications |
| Webshell-Deception | live migrate webshell to the honeypot |
| Shell-Deception | live migrate ReverseShell/BindShell to the honeypot |
Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) online portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. Both are alleged to be part of a larger criminal organization that specializes in using fake emergency data requests from compromised police and government email accounts to publicly threaten and extort their victims.
Prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York today unsealed criminal complaints against Sagar Steven Singh — a.k.a “Weep” — a 19-year-old from Pawtucket, Rhode Island; and Nicholas Ceraolo, 25, of Queens, NY, who allegedly went by the handles “Convict” and “Ominus.”
The Justice Department says Singh and Ceraolo belong to a group of cybercriminals known to its members as “ViLE,” who specialize in obtaining personal information about third-party victims, which they then use to harass, threaten or extort the victims, a practice known as “doxing.”
“ViLE is collaborative, and the members routinely share tactics and illicitly obtained information with each other,” prosecutors charged.
The government alleges the defendants and other members of ViLE use various methods to obtain victims’ personal information, including:
-tricking customer service employees;
-submitting fraudulent legal process to social media companies to elicit users’ registration information;
-co-opting and corrupting corporate insiders;
-searching public and private online databases;
-accessing a nonpublic United States government database without authorization
-unlawfully using official email accounts belonging to other countries.
The complaint says once they obtained a victim’s information, Singh and Ceraolo would post the information in an online forum. The government refers to this community only as “Forum-1,” saying that it is administered by the leader of ViLE (referenced in the complaint as “CC-1”).
“Victims are extorted into paying CC-1 to have their information removed from Forum-1,” prosecutors allege. “Singh also uses the threat of revealing personal information to extort victims into giving him access to their social media accounts, which Singh then resells.”
Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity in addition to being members of ViLE, both Weep and Ominous are or were staff members for Doxbin, a highly toxic online community that provides a forum for digging up personal information on people and posting it publicly. This is supported by the Doxbin administrator’s claimed responsibility for a high-profile intrusion at the DEA’s law enforcement data sharing portal last year.
A screenshot of alleged access to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s intelligence sharing portal, shared by “KT,” the current administrator of the doxing and harassment community Doxbin.
The government alleges that on May 7, 2022, Singh used stolen credentials to log into a U.S. federal government portal without authorization. The complaint doesn’t specify which agency portal was hacked, but it does state that the portal included access to law enforcement databases that track narcotics seizures in the United States.
On May 12, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that hackers had gained access to a DEA portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. As reported at the time, the inside scoop on how that hack went down came from KT, the current administrator of the Doxbin and the individual referenced in the government’s complaint as “CC-1.”
Indeed, a screenshot of the ViLE group website includes the group’s official roster, which lists KT at the top, followed by Weep and Ominus.
A screenshot of the website for the cybercriminal group “ViLE.” Image: USDOJ.
In March 2022, KrebsOnSecurity warned that multiple cybercrime groups were finding success with fraudulent Emergency Data Requests (EDRs), wherein the hackers use compromised police and government email accounts to file warrantless data requests with social media firms and mobile telephony providers, attesting that the information being requested can’t wait for a warrant because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.
That story showed that the previous owner of the Doxbin also was part of a teenage hacking group that specialized in offering fake EDRs as a service on the dark web.
Prosecutors say they tied Singh to the government portal hack because he connected to it from an Internet address that he’d previously used to access a social media account registered in his name. When they raided Singh’s residence on Sept. 8, 2022 and seized his devices, investigators with Homeland Security found a cellular phone and laptop that allegedly “contained extensive evidence of access to the Portal.”
The complaint alleges that between February 2022 and May 2022, Ceraolo used an official email account belonging to a Bangladeshi police official to pose as a police officer in communication with U.S.-based social media platforms.
“In these communications, Ceraolo requested personal information about users of these platforms, under the false pretense that the users were committing crimes or in life-threatening danger,” the complaint states.
For example, on or about March 13, 2022, Ceraolo allegedly used the Bangladeshi police email account to falsely claim that the target of the EDR had sent bomb threats, distributed child pornography and threatened officials of the Bangladeshi government.
On or about May 9, 2022, the government says, Singh sent a friend screenshots of text messages between himself and someone he had doxed on the Doxbin and was trying to extort for their Instagram handle. The data included the victim’s Social Security number, driver’s license number, cellphone number, and home address.
“Look familiar?” Singh allegedly wrote to the victim. “You’re gonna comply to me if you don’t want anything negative to happen to your parents. . . I have every detail involving your parents . . . allowing me to do whatever I desire to them in malicious ways.”
Neither of the defendants could be immediately reached for comment. KT, the current administrator of Doxbin, declined a request for comment on the charges.
Ceraolo is a self-described security researcher who has been credited in many news stories over the years with discovering security vulnerabilities at AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast and Cox Communications.
Ceraolo’s stated partner in most of these discoveries — a 30-year-old Connecticut man named Ryan “Phobia” Stevenson — was charged in 2019 with being part of a group that stole millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies via SIM-swapping, a crime that involves tricking a mobile provider into routing a target’s calls and text messages to another device.
In 2018, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Stevenson earned bug bounty rewards and public recognition from top telecom companies for finding and reporting security holes in their websites, all the while secretly peddling those same vulnerabilities to cybercriminals.
According to the Justice Department, if convicted Ceraolo faces up to 20 years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to commit wire fraud; both Ceraolo and Singh face five years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to commit computer intrusions.
A copy of the complaint against Ceraolo and Singh is here (PDF).
Thunderstorm is a modular framework to exploit UPS devices.
For now, only the CS-141 and NetMan 204 exploits will be available. The beta version of the framework will be released on the future.
Thunderstorm is currently capable of exploiting the following CVE:
It is recommended to clone the complete repository or download the zip file. You can do this by running the following command:
git clone https://github.com/JoelGMSec/Thunderstorm
Also, you probably need to download the original and the custom firmware. You can download all requirements from here: https://darkbyte.net/links/thunderstorm.php
- To be disclosed
This project is licensed under the GNU 3.0 license - see the LICENSE file for more details.
This tool has been created and designed from scratch by Joel Gámez Molina // @JoelGMSec
This software does not offer any kind of guarantee. Its use is exclusive for educational environments and / or security audits with the corresponding consent of the client. I am not responsible for its misuse or for any possible damage caused by it.
For more information, you can find me on Twitter as @JoelGMSec and on my blog darkbyte.net.
IBM Security X-FORCE Exchange library in Python 3. Search: threat_activities, threat_groups, malware_analysis, collector and industries.
pip3 install XForce
Using you API_KEY make a basic authentication. After make a base64 code → Key + : + Password:
printf "d2f5f0f9-2995-42c6-b1dd-4c92252da129:06c41d5e-0604-4c7c-a599-300c367d2090" | base64
# ZDJmNWYwZjktMjk5NS00MmM2LWIxZGQtNGM5MjI1MmRhMTI5OjA2YzQxZDVlLTA2MDQtNGM3Yy1hNTk5LTMwMGMzNjdkMjA5MAo=Using API_KEY, call functions.
import XForce
# Args: 1 - Term of search, 2 - API KEY
# Threat activity search return in string
XForce.threat_activities(Term, API_KEY)
# Malware analysis search return in string
XForce.malware_analysis(Term, API_KEY)
# Threat groups search return in string
XForce.threat_groups(Term, API_KEY)
# Industries search return in string
XForce.industries(Term, API_KEY)
# All categories search return in list with dict
XForce.industries(Term, API_KEY)For see more details of consult, run:
from XForce import details
# Args: 1 - GUID, 2 - API KEY
# IMPORTANT: all GUID are correspondent to category
# All function of details have:
# url → with x-force exchange panel
details.activity(Id, API_KEY)
details.group(Id, API_KEY)
details.malware(Id, API_KEY)
details.industry(Id, API_KEY)The Biden administration today issued its vision for beefing up the nation’s collective cybersecurity posture, including calls for legislation establishing liability for software products and services that are sold with little regard for security. The White House’s new national cybersecurity strategy also envisions a more active role by cloud providers and the U.S. military in disrupting cybercriminal infrastructure, and it names China as the single biggest cyber threat to U.S. interests.
The strategy says the White House will work with Congress and the private sector to develop legislation that would prevent companies from disavowing responsibility for the security of their software products or services.
Coupled with this stick would be a carrot: An as-yet-undefined “safe harbor framework” that would lay out what these companies could do to demonstrate that they are making cybersecurity a central concern of their design and operations.
“Any such legislation should prevent manufacturers and software publishers with market power from fully disclaiming liability by contract, and establish higher standards of care for software in specific high-risk scenarios,” the strategy explains. “To begin to shape standards of care for secure software development, the Administration will drive the development of an adaptable safe harbor framework to shield from liability companies that securely develop and maintain their software products and services.”
Brian Fox, chief technology officer and founder of the software supply chain security firm Sonatype, called the software liability push a landmark moment for the industry.
“Market forces are leading to a race to the bottom in certain industries, while contract law allows software vendors of all kinds to shield themselves from liability,” Fox said. “Regulations for other industries went through a similar transformation, and we saw a positive result — there’s now an expectation of appropriate due care, and accountability for those who fail to comply. Establishing the concept of safe harbors allows the industry to mature incrementally, leveling up security best practices in order to retain a liability shield, versus calling for sweeping reform and unrealistic outcomes as previous regulatory attempts have.”
In 2012 (approximately three national cyber strategies ago), then director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander made headlines when he remarked that years of successful cyber espionage campaigns from Chinese state-sponsored hackers represented “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
The document released today says the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “now presents the broadest, most active, and most persistent threat to both government and private sector networks,” and says China is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.”
Many of the U.S. government’s efforts to restrain China’s technology prowess involve ongoing initiatives like the CHIPS Act, a new law signed by President Biden last year that sets aside more than $50 billion to expand U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing and research and to make the U.S. less dependent on foreign suppliers; the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative; and the National Strategy to Secure 5G.
As the maker of most consumer gizmos with a computer chip inside, China is also the source of an incredible number of low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are not only poorly secured, but are probably more accurately described as insecure by design.
The Biden administration said it would continue its previously announced plans to develop a system of labeling that could be applied to various IoT products and give consumers some idea of how secure the products may be. But it remains unclear how those labels might apply to products made by companies outside of the United States.
One could convincingly make the case that the world has witnessed yet another historic transfer of wealth and trade secrets over the past decade — in the form of ransomware and data ransom attacks by Russia-based cybercriminal syndicates, as well as Russian intelligence agency operations like the U.S. government-wide Solar Winds compromise.
On the ransomware front, the White House strategy seems to focus heavily on building the capability to disrupt the digital infrastructure used by adversaries that are threatening vital U.S. cyber interests. The document points to the 2021 takedown of the Emotet botnet — a cybercrime machine that was heavily used by multiple Russian ransomware groups — as a model for this activity, but says those disruptive operations need to happen faster and more often.
To that end, the Biden administration says it will expand the capacity of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF), the primary federal agency for coordinating cyber threat investigations across law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, and the Department of Defense.
“To increase the volume and speed of these integrated disruption campaigns, the Federal Government must further develop technological and organizational platforms that enable continuous, coordinated operations,” the strategy observes. “The NCIJTF will expand its capacity to coordinate takedown and disruption campaigns with greater speed, scale, and frequency. Similarly, DoD and the Intelligence Community are committed to bringing to bear their full range of complementary authorities to disruption campaigns.”
The strategy anticipates the U.S. government working more closely with cloud and other Internet infrastructure providers to quickly identify malicious use of U.S.-based infrastructure, share reports of malicious use with the government, and make it easier for victims to report abuse of these systems.
“Given the interest of the cybersecurity community and digital infrastructure owners and operators in continuing this approach, we must sustain and expand upon this model so that collaborative disruption operations can be carried out on a continuous basis,” the strategy argues. “Threat specific collaboration should take the form of nimble, temporary cells, comprised of a small number of trusted operators, hosted and supported by a relevant hub. Using virtual collaboration platforms, members of the cell would share information bidirectionally and work rapidly to disrupt adversaries.”
But here, again, there is a carrot-and-stick approach: The administration said it is taking steps to implement Executive Order (EO) 13984 –issued by the Trump administration in January 2021 — which requires cloud providers to verify the identity of foreign persons using their services.
“All service providers must make reasonable attempts to secure the use of their infrastructure against abuse or other criminal behavior,” the strategy states. “The Administration will prioritize adoption and enforcement of a risk-based approach to cybersecurity across Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers that addresses known methods and indicators of malicious activity including through implementation of EO 13984.”
Ted Schlein, founding partner of the cybersecurity venture capital firm Ballistic Ventures, said how this gets implemented will determine whether it can be effective.
“Adversaries know the NSA, which is the elite portion of the nation’s cyber defense, cannot monitor U.S.-based infrastructure, so they just use U.S.-based cloud infrastructure to perpetrate their attacks,” Schlein said. “We have to fix this. I believe some of this section is a bit pollyannaish, as it assumes a bad actor with a desire to do a bad thing will self-identify themselves, as the major recommendation here is around KYC (‘know your customer’).”
One brief but interesting section of the strategy titled “Explore a Federal Cyber Insurance Backdrop” contemplates the government’s liability and response to a too-big-to-fail scenario or “catastrophic cyber incident.”
“We will explore how the government can stabilize insurance markets against catastrophic risk to drive better cybersecurity practices and to provide market certainty when catastrophic events do occur,” the strategy reads.
When the Bush administration released the first U.S. national cybersecurity strategy 20 years ago after the 9/11 attacks, the popular term for that same scenario was a “digital Pearl Harbor,” and there was a great deal of talk then about how the cyber insurance market would soon help companies shore up their cybersecurity practices.
In the wake of countless ransomware intrusions, many companies now hold cybersecurity insurance to help cover the considerable costs of responding to such intrusions. Leaving aside the question of whether insurance coverage has helped companies improve security, what happens if every one of these companies has to make a claim at the same time?
The notion of a Digital Pearl Harbor incident struck many experts at the time as a hyperbolic justification for expanding the government’s digital surveillance capabilities, and an overstatement of the capabilities of our adversaries. But back in 2003, most of the world’s companies didn’t host their entire business in the cloud.
Today, nobody questions the capabilities, goals and outcomes of dozens of nation-state level cyber adversaries. And these days, a catastrophic cyber incident could be little more than an extended, simultaneous outage at multiple cloud providers.
The full national cybersecurity strategy is available from the White House website (PDF).
ESET Research has compiled a timeline of cyberattacks that used wiper malware and have occurred since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022
The post A year of wiper attacks in Ukraine appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Sandworm continues to conduct attacks against carefully chosen targets in the war-torn country
The post SwiftSlicer: New destructive wiper malware strikes Ukraine appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Popeye is a utility that scans live Kubernetes cluster and reports potential issues with deployed resources and configurations. It sanitizes your cluster based on what's deployed and not what's sitting on disk. By scanning your cluster, it detects misconfigurations and helps you to ensure that best practices are in place, thus preventing future headaches. It aims at reducing the cognitive overload one faces when operating a Kubernetes cluster in the wild. Furthermore, if your cluster employs a metric-server, it reports potential resources over/under allocations and attempts to warn you should your cluster run out of capacity.
Popeye is a readonly tool, it does not alter any of your Kubernetes resources in any way!
Popeye is available on Linux, OSX and Windows platforms.
Binaries for Linux, Windows and Mac are available as tarballs in the release page.
For OSX/Unit using Homebrew/LinuxBrew
brew install derailed/popeye/popeyeBuilding from source Popeye was built using go 1.12+. In order to build Popeye from source you must:
Clone the repo
Add the following command in your go.mod file
replace (
github.com/derailed/popeye => MY_POPEYE_CLONED_GIT_REPO
)
Build and run the executable
go run main.goQuick recipe for the impatient:
# Clone outside of GOPATH
git clone https://github.com/derailed/popeye
cd popeye
# Build and install
go install
# Run
popeyePopeye uses 256 colors terminal mode. On `Nix system make sure TERM is set accordingly.
export TERM=xterm-256colorPopeye scans your cluster for best practices and potential issues. Currently, Popeye only looks at nodes, namespaces, pods and services. More will come soon! We are hoping Kubernetes friends will pitch'in to make Popeye even better.
The aim of the sanitizers is to pick up on misconfigurations, i.e. things like port mismatches, dead or unused resources, metrics utilization, probes, container images, RBAC rules, naked resources, etc...
Popeye is not another static analysis tool. It runs and inspect Kubernetes resources on live clusters and sanitize resources as they are in the wild!
Here is a list of some of the available sanitizers:
| Resource | Sanitizers | Aliases | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Node | no | |
| Conditions ie not ready, out of mem/disk, network, pids, etc | |||
| Pod tolerations referencing node taints | |||
| CPU/MEM utilization metrics, trips if over limits (default 80% CPU/MEM) | |||
| Namespace | ns | |
| Inactive | |||
| Dead namespaces | |||
| Pod | po | |
| Pod status | |||
| Containers statuses | |||
| ServiceAccount presence | |||
| CPU/MEM on containers over a set CPU/MEM limit (default 80% CPU/MEM) | |||
| Container image with no tags | |||
Container image using latest tag | |||
| Resources request/limits presence | |||
| Probes liveness/readiness presence | |||
| Named ports and their references | |||
| Service | svc | |
| Endpoints presence | |||
| Matching pods labels | |||
| Named ports and their references | |||
| ServiceAccount | sa | |
| Unused, detects potentially unused SAs | |||
| Secrets | sec | |
| Unused, detects potentially unused secrets or associated keys | |||
| ConfigMap | cm | |
| Unused, detects potentially unused cm or associated keys | |||
| Deployment | dp, deploy | |
| Unused, pod template validation, resource utilization | |||
| StatefulSet | sts | |
| Unsed, pod template validation, resource utilization | |||
| DaemonSet | ds | |
| Unsed, pod template validation, resource utilization | |||
| PersistentVolume | pv | |
| Unused, check volume bound or volume error | |||
| PersistentVolumeClaim | pvc | |
| Unused, check bounded or volume mount error | |||
| HorizontalPodAutoscaler | hpa | |
| Unused, Utilization, Max burst checks | |||
| PodDisruptionBudget | ||
| Unused, Check minAvailable configuration | pdb | ||
| ClusterRole | ||
| Unused | cr | ||
| ClusterRoleBinding | ||
| Unused | crb | ||
| Role | ||
| Unused | ro | ||
| RoleBinding | ||
| Unused | rb | ||
| Ingress | ||
| Valid | ing | ||
| NetworkPolicy | ||
| Valid | np | ||
| PodSecurityPolicy | ||
| Valid | psp |
You can also see the full list of codes
To save the Popeye report to a file pass the --save flag to the command. By default it will create a temp directory and will store the report there, the path of the temp directory will be printed out on STDOUT. If you have the need to specify the output directory for the report, you can use the environment variable POPEYE_REPORT_DIR. By default, the name of the output file follow the following format : sanitizer_<cluster-name>_<time-UnixNano>.<output-extension> (e.g. : "sanitizer-mycluster-1594019782530851873.html"). If you have the need to specify the output file name for the report, you can pass the --output-file flag with the filename you want as parameter.
Example to save report in working directory:
$ POPEYE_REPORT_DIR=$(pwd) popeye --saveExample to save report in working directory in HTML format under the name "report.html" :
$ POPEYE_REPORT_DIR=$(pwd) popeye --save --out html --output-file report.htmlYou can also save the generated report to an AWS S3 bucket (or another S3 compatible Object Storage) with providing the flag --s3-bucket. As parameter you need to provide the name of the S3 bucket where you want to store the report. To save the report in a bucket subdirectory provide the bucket parameter as bucket/path/to/report.
Underlying the AWS Go lib is used which is handling the credential loading. For more information check out the official documentation.
Example to save report to S3:
popeye --s3-bucket=NAME-OF-YOUR-S3-BUCKET/OPTIONAL/SUBDIRECTORY --out=jsonIf AWS sS3 is not your bag, you can further define an S3 compatible storage (OVHcloud Object Storage, Minio, Google cloud storage, etc...) using s3-endpoint and s3-region as so:
popeye --s3-bucket=NAME-OF-YOUR-S3-BUCKET/OPTIONAL/SUBDIRECTORY --s3-region YOUR-REGION --s3-endpoint URL-OF-THE-ENDPOINTYou don't have to build and/or install the binary to run popeye: you can just run it directly from the official docker repo on DockerHub. The default command when you run the docker container is popeye, so you just need to pass whatever cli args are normally passed to popeye. To access your clusters, map your local kube config directory into the container with -v :
docker run --rm -it \
-v $HOME/.kube:/root/.kube \
derailed/popeye --context foo -n barRunning the above docker command with --rm means that the container gets deleted when popeye exits. When you use --save, it will write it to /tmp in the container and then delete the container when popeye exits, which means you lose the output. To get around this, map /tmp to the container's /tmp. NOTE: You can override the default output directory location by setting POPEYE_REPORT_DIR env variable.
docker run --rm -it \
-v $HOME/.kube:/root/.kube \
-e POPEYE_REPORT_DIR=/tmp/popeye \
-v /tmp:/tmp \
derailed/popeye --context foo -n bar --save --output-file my_report.txt
# Docker has exited, and the container has been deleted, but the file
# is in your /tmp directory because you mapped it into the container
$ cat /tmp/popeye/my_report.txt
<snip>You can use Popeye standalone or using a spinach yaml config to tune the sanitizer. Details about the Popeye configuration file are below.
# Dump version info
popeye version
# Popeye a cluster using your current kubeconfig environment.
popeye
# Popeye uses a spinach config file of course! aka spinachyaml!
popeye -f spinach.yml
# Popeye a cluster using a kubeconfig context.
popeye --context olive
# Stuck?
popeye helpPopeye can generate sanitizer reports in a variety of formats. You can use the -o cli option and pick your poison from there.
| Format | Description | Default | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| standard | The full monty output iconized and colorized | yes | |
| jurassic | No icons or color like it's 1979 | ||
| yaml | As YAML | ||
| html | As HTML | ||
| json | As JSON | ||
| junit | For the Java melancholic | ||
| prometheus | Dumps report a prometheus scrappable metrics | dardanel | |
| score | Returns a single cluster sanitizer score value (0-100) | kabute |
A spinach.yml configuration file can be specified via the -f option to further configure the sanitizers. This file may specify the container utilization threshold and specific sanitizer configurations as well as resources that will be excluded from the sanitization.
NOTE: This file will change as Popeye matures!
Under the excludes key you can configure to skip certain resources, or certain checks by code. Here, resource types are indicated in a group/version/resource notation. Example: to exclude PodDisruptionBugdets, use the notation policy/v1/poddisruptionbudgets. Note that the resource name is written in the plural form and everything is spelled in lowercase. For resources without an API group, the group part is omitted (Examples: v1/pods, v1/services, v1/configmaps).
A resource is identified by a resource kind and a fully qualified resource name, i.e. namespace/resource_name.
For example, the FQN of a pod named fred-1234 in the namespace blee will be blee/fred-1234. This provides for differentiating fred/p1 and blee/p1. For cluster wide resources, the FQN is equivalent to the name. Exclude rules can have either a straight string match or a regular expression. In the latter case the regular expression must be indicated using the rx: prefix.
NOTE! Please be careful with your regex as more resources than expected may get excluded from the report with a loose regex rule. When your cluster resources change, this could lead to a sub-optimal sanitization. Once in a while it might be a good idea to run Popeye „configless“ to make sure you will recognize any new issues that may have arisen in your clusters…
Here is an example spinach file as it stands in this release. There is a fuller eks and aks based spinach file in this repo under spinach. (BTW: for new comers into the project, might be a great way to contribute by adding cluster specific spinach file PRs...)
# A Popeye sample configuration file
popeye:
# Checks resources against reported metrics usage.
# If over/under these thresholds a sanitization warning will be issued.
# Your cluster must run a metrics-server for these to take place!
allocations:
cpu:
underPercUtilization: 200 # Checks if cpu is under allocated by more than 200% at current load.
overPercUtilization: 50 # Checks if cpu is over allocated by more than 50% at current load.
memory:
underPercUtilization: 200 # Checks if mem is under allocated by more than 200% at current load.
overPercUtilization: 50 # Checks if mem is over allocated by more than 50% usage at current load.
# Excludes excludes certain resources from Popeye scans
excludes:
v1/pods:
# In the monitoring namespace excludes all probes check on pod's containers.
- name: rx:monitoring
code s:
- 102
# Excludes all istio-proxy container scans for pods in the icx namespace.
- name: rx:icx/.*
containers:
# Excludes istio init/sidecar container from scan!
- istio-proxy
- istio-init
# ConfigMap sanitizer exclusions...
v1/configmaps:
# Excludes key must match the singular form of the resource.
# For instance this rule will exclude all configmaps named fred.v2.3 and fred.v2.4
- name: rx:fred.+\.v\d+
# Namespace sanitizer exclusions...
v1/namespaces:
# Exclude all fred* namespaces if the namespaces are not found (404), other error codes will be reported!
- name: rx:kube
codes:
- 404
# Exclude all istio* namespaces from being scanned.
- name: rx:istio
# Completely exclude horizontal pod autoscalers.
autoscaling/v1/horizontalpodautoscalers:
- name: rx:.*
# Configure node resources.
node:
# Limits set a cpu/mem threshold in % ie if cpu|mem > limit a lint warning is triggered.
limits:
# CPU checks if current CPU utilization on a node is greater than 90%.
cpu: 90
# Memory checks if current Memory utilization on a node is greater than 80%.
memory: 80
# Configure pod resources
pod:
# Restarts check the restarts count and triggers a lint warning if above threshold.
restarts:
3
# Check container resource utilization in percent.
# Issues a lint warning if about these threshold.
limits:
cpu: 80
memory: 75
# Configure a list of allowed registries to pull images from
registries:
- quay.io
- docker.ioAlternatively, Popeye is containerized and can be run directly in your Kubernetes clusters as a one-off or CronJob.
Here is a sample setup, please modify per your needs/wants. The manifests for this are in the k8s directory in this repo.
kubectl apply -f k8s/popeye/ns.yml && kubectl apply -f k8s/popeye---
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: popeye
namespace: popeye
spec:
schedule: "* */1 * * *" # Fire off Popeye once an hour
concurrencyPolicy: Forbid
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
serviceAccountName: popeye
restartPolicy: Never
containers:
- name: popeye
image: derailed/popeye
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
args:
- -o
- yaml
- --force-exit-zero
- true
resources:
limits:
cpu: 500m
memory: 100MiThe --force-exit-zero should be set to true. Otherwise, the pods will end up in an error state. Note that popeye exits with a non-zero error code if the report has any errors.
In order for Popeye to do his work, the signed-in user must have enough RBAC oomph to get/list the resources mentioned above.
Sample Popeye RBAC Rules (please note that those are subject to change.)
---
# Popeye ServiceAccount.
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
name: popeye
namespace: popeye
---
# Popeye needs get/list access on the following Kubernetes resources.
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
name: popeye
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
resources:
- configmaps
- deployments
- endpoints
- horizontalpodautoscalers
- namespaces
- nodes
- persistentvolumes
- persistentvolumeclaims
- pods
- secrets
- serviceaccounts
- services
- statefulsets
verbs: ["get", "list"]
- apiGroups: ["rbac.authorization.k8s.io"]
resources:
- clusterroles
- clusterrolebindings
- roles
- rolebindings
verbs: ["get", "list"]
- apiGroups: ["metrics.k8s.io"]
resources :
- pods
- nodes
verbs: ["get", "list"]
---
# Binds Popeye to this ClusterRole.
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
name: popeye
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: popeye
namespace: popeye
roleRef:
kind: ClusterRole
name: popeye
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.ioThe sanitizer report outputs each resource group scanned and their potential issues. The report is color/emoji coded in term of Sanitizer severity levels:
| Level | Icon | Jurassic | Color | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ok | ✅ | OK | Green | Happy! |
| Info | | I | BlueGreen | FYI |
| Warn | | W | Yellow | Potential Issue |
| Error | | E | Red | Action required |
The heading section for each scanned Kubernetes resource provides a summary count for each of the categories above.
The Summary section provides a Popeye Score based on the sanitization pass on the given cluster.
This initial drop is brittle. Popeye will most likely blow up when…
This is work in progress! If there is enough interest in the Kubernetes community, we will enhance per your recommendations/contributions. Also if you dig this effort, please let us know that too!
Popeye sits on top of many of open source projects and libraries. Our sincere appreciations to all the OSS contributors that work nights and weekends to make this project a reality!
This tool is only for legally authorized enterprise security construction behaviors and personal learning behaviors. If you need to test the usability of this tool, please build a target drone environment by yourself.
When using this tool for testing, you should ensure that the behavior complies with local laws and regulations and has obtained sufficient authorization. Do not scan unauthorized targets.
We reserve the right to pursue your legal responsibility if the above prohibited behavior is found.
If you have any illegal behavior in the process of using this tool, you shall bear the corresponding consequences by yourself, and we will not bear any legal and joint responsibility.
Before installing and using this tool, please be sure to carefully read and fully understand the terms and conditions.
Unless you have fully read, fully understood and accepted all the terms of this agreement, please do not install and use this tool. Your use behavior or your acceptance of this Agreement in any other express or implied manner shall be deemed that you have read and agreed to be bound by this Agreement.
_ __
|#| /#/ Lightweight Asset Mapping Tool by: kv2
|#|/#/ _____ _____ * _ _
|#.#/ /Edge/ /Forum| /#\ |#\ |#|
|##| |#|___ |#| /###\ |##\|#|
|#.#\ \#####\|#| /#/_\#\ |#.#.#|
|#|\#\ /\___|#||#|____/#/###\#\|#|\##|
|#| \#\\#####/ \#####/#/ \#\#| \#|
Kscan is an asset mapping tool that can perform port scanning, TCP fingerprinting and banner capture for specified assets, and obtain as much port information as possible without sending more packets. It can perform automatic brute force cracking on scan results, and is the first open source RDP brute force cracking tool on the go platform.
At present, there are actually many tools for asset scanning, fingerprint identification, and vulnerability detection, and there are many great tools, but Kscan actually has many different ideas.
Kscan hopes to accept a variety of input formats, and there is no need to classify the scanned objects before use, such as IP, or URL address, etc. This is undoubtedly an unnecessary workload for users, and all entries can be normal Input and identification. If it is a URL address, the path will be reserved for detection. If it is only IP:PORT, the port will be prioritized for protocol identification. Currently Kscan supports three input methods (-t,--target|-f,--fofa|--spy).
Kscan does not seek efficiency by comparing port numbers with common protocols to confirm port protocols, nor does it only detect WEB assets. In this regard, Kscan pays more attention to accuracy and comprehensiveness, and only high-accuracy protocol identification , in order to provide good detection conditions for subsequent application layer identification.
Kscan does not use a modular approach to do pure function stacking, such as a module obtains the title separately, a module obtains SMB information separately, etc., runs independently, and outputs independently, but outputs asset information in units of ports, such as ports If the protocol is HTTP, subsequent fingerprinting and title acquisition will be performed automatically. If the port protocol is RPC, it will try to obtain the host name, etc.
Kscan currently has 3 ways to input targets
IP address: 114.114.114.114
IP address range: 114.114.114.114-115.115.115.115
URL address: https://www.baidu.com
File address: file:/tmp/target.txt
[Empty]: will detect the IP address of the local machine and detect the B segment where the local IP is located
[all]: All private network addresses (192.168/172.32/10, etc.) will be probed
IP address: will detect the B segment where the specified IP address is located
fofa search keywords: will directly return fofa search results
usage: kscan [-h,--help,--fofa-syntax] (-t,--target,-f,--fofa,--spy) [-p,--port|--top] [-o,--output] [-oJ] [--proxy] [--threads] [--path] [--host] [--timeout] [-Pn] [-Cn] [-sV] [--check] [--encoding] [--hydra] [hydra options] [fofa options]
optional arguments:
-h , --help show this help message and exit
-f , --fofa Get the detection object from fofa, you need to configure the environment variables in advance: FOFA_EMAIL, FOFA_KEY
-t , --target Specify the detection target:
IP address: 114.114.114.114
IP address segment: 114.114.114.114/24, subnet mask less than 12 is not recommended
IP address range: 114.114.114.114-115.115.115.115
URL address: https://www.baidu.com
File address: file:/tmp/target.txt
--spy network segment detection mode, in this mode, the internal network segment reachable by the host will be automatically detected. The acceptable parameters are:
(empty), 192, 10, 172, all, specified IP address (the IP address B segment will be detected as the surviving gateway)
--check Fingerprinting the target address, only port detection will not be performed
--scan will perform port scanning and fingerprinting on the target objects provided by --fofa and --spy
-p , --port scan the specified port, TOP400 will be scanned by default, support: 80, 8080, 8088-8090
-eP, --excluded-port skip scanning specified ports，support：80,8080,8088-8090
-o , --output save scan results to file
-oJ save the scan results to a file in json format
-Pn After using this parameter, intelligent survivability detection will not be performed. Now intelligent survivability detection is enabled by default to improve efficiency.
-Cn With this parameter, the console output will not be colored.
-sV After using this parameter, all ports will be probed with full probes. This parameter greatly affects the efficiency, so use it with caution!
--top Scan the filtered common ports TopX, up to 1000, the default is TOP400
--proxy set proxy (socks5|socks4|https|http)://IP:Port
--threads thread parameter, the default thread is 100, the maximum value is 2048
--path specifies the directory to request access, only a single directory is supported
--host specifies the header Host value for all requests
--timeout set timeout
--encoding Set the terminal output encoding, which can be specified as: gb2312, utf-8
--match returns the banner to the asset for retrieval. If there is a keyword, it will be displayed, otherwise it will not be displayed
--hydra automatic blasting support protocol: ssh, rdp, ftp, smb, mysql, mssql, oracle, postgresql, mongodb, redis, all are enabled by default
hydra options:
--hydra-user custom hydra blasting username: username or user1,user2 or file:username.txt
--hydra-pass Custom hydra blasting password: password or pass1,pass2 or file:password.txt
If there is a comma in the password, use \, to escape, other symbols do not need to be escaped
--hydra-update Customize the user name and password mode. If this parameter is carried, it is a new mode, and the user name and password will be added to the default dictionary. Otherwise the default dictionary will be replaced.
--hydra-mod specifies the automatic brute force cracking module: rdp or rdp, ssh, smb
fofa options:
--fofa-syntax will get fofa search syntax description
--fofa-size will set the number of entries returned by fofa, the default is 100
--fofa-fix-keyword Modifies the keyword, and the {} in this parameter will eventually be replaced with the value of the -f parameter
The function is not complicated, the others are explored by themselves
ESET researchers spot a new ransomware campaign that goes after Ukrainian organizations and has Sandworm's fingerprints all over it
The post RansomBoggs: New ransomware targeting Ukraine appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Since 1996, United Nations members have commemorated Nov. 16 as International Day of Tolerance. As a word, tolerance can mean different things to different people and cultures. The UN defines tolerance as: “respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human.” I define it slightly differently. To me, tolerance is acceptance. Tolerance is inclusion. Tolerance is humanity. Tolerance is letting people be and live authentically as they choose.
Being able to live authentically is key. It’s about creating an environment for everyone to fit in and feel a sense of belonging. In a way, this means obfuscating the “standard” and stop paying attention to the degrees of variation from it. Tolerance is a step one in that process and a critical step toward a more diverse and tolerant world.
But if this is the goal, I say we have lots of work left in promoting this within our workforce, especially in the cybersecurity industry. I wrote extensively about this in a blog last year on why diversity matters so much to create stronger cybersecurity organizations. I pointed out that cybersecurity as a technology is multi-faceted and constantly changing. So, it would make sense that a highly diverse organization would provide different perspectives and more creative solutions to these challenges.
Even in the face of this logical goal of creating more diverse workforces, legacy recruiting, education, and even hiring practices are holding us back as an industry. I’ll look at one workforce populations specifically, women in cybersecurity. Currently, women constitute less than 25 percent of the workforce in cybersecurity. Of course, this is inclusive of all roles in cybersecurity meaning that I think it’s fair to say that the percentage of women in technical cybersecurity roles (e.g., software and hardware engineering) would be much lower. That’s discouraging, especially when there are still more than 700,000 cybersecurity positions that remain unfilled, many of them being high-paying roles.
Perhaps the more important question is “why?” The International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC2) commissioned a study to examine this issue closely and came up with some important conclusions that I’ll summarize.
In promoting the International Day of Tolerance, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon listed three ways we as a global society can be more tolerant: education, inclusion, and opportunities. As it happens, those are also exactly the approaches required to create more diverse workforces.
Of the three, I believe education (the earlier the better) is key as it’s foundational to being able to take advantage of inclusion and opportunities. Yes, we must continue to invest in STEM education and encourage more girls and minorities to take part. But the harder challenge is to somehow overcome the perception issue among large parts of these populations that the STEM field is not for them.
I believe that will require an investment in time and interaction in the form of mentoring and community outreach. For example, the Cisco Women in Technology employee resource organization that I’m proud to be the executive sponsor for, started a coding bootcamp targeting underrepresented populations. There will be many more bootcamps next year including weeklong camps in the summer. We need more of this, much more and I know there are many companies in cybersecurity who have similar aspirations and programs.
So, on this International Day of Tolerance, I ask my fellow cybersecurity professionals to at least think of ways they can influence someone in an underrepresented population to explore a career in the STEM field including cybersecurity. Take part in local volunteer activities at a school, especially in an inner-city one, like the kind that the Cisco Networking Academy is renowned for. Join and be an active participant in one of many cybersecurity organizations and affinity groups. Become a sponsor and a mentor to a girl or a minority and help encourage them to get ready to join this exciting and lucrative industry.
But whatever you do, get started. Author and activist Rachel Cargle spoke to us earlier this year as part of our Black History Month celebration about what it means to show up with purpose toward addressing many injustices that still exist today. “There’s an incredible disconnect here between humanity and dignity and all of this stuff in the country, and that should hopefully push you to action,” she said. Indeed, as these are issues that have existed for decades, and we will not solve them in a day, a month, or even a year. But if we don’t start, I’m afraid that the diversity issues that I’ve highlighted will be much the same in the International Day of Tolerance for years to come.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
The word is out! Cisco Secure Endpoint’s effectiveness is off the charts in protecting your enterprise environment.
This is not just a baseless opinion; however, the facts are rooted in actual test results from the annual AV-Comparative EPR Test Report published in October 2022. Not only did Secure Endpoint knock it out of the park in enterprise protection; but Cisco Secure Endpoint obtained the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) per agent at $587 over 5 years. No one else was remotely close in this area. More to come on that later.
If you are not familiar with the “AV-Comparatives Endpoint Prevention and Response Test is the most comprehensive test of EPR products ever performed. The 10 products in the test were subjected to 50 separate targeted attack scenarios, which used a variety of different techniques.”
These results are from an industry-respected third-party organization that assesses antivirus software and has just confirmed what we know and believe here at Cisco, which is our Secure Endpoint product is the industry’s best of the best.
Look for yourself at where we landed. That’s right, Cisco Secure Endpoint smashed this test, we are almost off the quadrant as one of the “Strategic Leaders”.
We ended up here for a combination of reasons, with the top being our efficacy in protecting our customers’ environments in this real-world test that emulates multi-stage attacks similar to MITRE’s ATT&CK evaluations which are conducted as part of this process (click here for an overview of MITRE ATT&CK techniques). Out of all the 50 scenarios tested, Secure Endpoint was the only product that STOPPED 100% of targeted threats toward enterprise users, which prevented further infiltration into the organization.
In addition, this test not only assesses the efficacy of endpoint security products but also analyzes their cost-effectiveness. Following up on my earlier remarks about achieving the lowest cost of ownership, the graph below displays how we stacked up against other industry players in this space including several well-known vendors that chose not to display their names due to poor results.
These results provide a meaningful proof point that Cisco Secure Endpoint is perfectly positioned to secure the enterprise as well as secure the future of hybrid workers.
Enriched with built-in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities, Cisco Secure Endpoint has allowed our customers to maintain resiliency when faced with outside threats.
As we embark on securing “what’s next” by staying ahead of unforeseen cyber threats of tomorrow, Cisco Secure Endpoint integration with the complete Cisco Secure Solutions portfolio allows you to move forward with the peace of mind that if it’s connected, we can and will protect it.
Now that you have seen how effective Secure Endpoint is with live real-world testing, try it for yourself with one of our live instant demos. Click here to access instructions on how to download and install your demo account for a test drive.
Click here to see what analysts, customers, and third-party testing organizations have to say about Cisco Secure Endpoint Security efficacy, easy implementation and overall low total cost of ownership for their organization —and stay ahead of threats.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
During the forensic analysis of a Windows machine, you may find the name of a deleted prefetch file. While its content may not be recoverable, the filename itself is often enough to find the full path of the executable for which the prefetch file was created.
The following fields must be provided:
Executable name
Including the extension. It will be embedded in the prefetch filename, unless this happens.
Prefetch hash
8 hexadecimal digits at the end of the prefetch filename, right before the .pf extension.
Hash function
Bodyfile
Mount point
There are 3 known prefetch hash functions:
SCCA XP
Used in Windows XP
SCCA Vista
Used in Windows Vista and Windows 10
SCCA 2008
Used in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1
A bodyfile of the volume the executable was executed from.
The bodyfile format is not very restrictive, so there are a lot of variations of it - some of which are not supported. Body files created with fls and MFTECmd should work fine.
The mount point of the bodyfile, as underlined below:
0|C:/Users/Peter/Desktop ($FILE_NAME)|62694-48-2|d/d-wx-wx-wx|...The provided bodyfile is used to get the path of every folder on the volume. The tool appends the provided executable name to each of those paths to create a list of possible full paths for the executable. Each possible full path is then hashed using the provided hash function. If there's a possible full path for which the result matches the provided hash, that path is outputted.
The following cases are not supported:
svchost.exe and mmc.exe
/prefetch:# flagIf the executable name is longer than 29 characters (including the extension), it will be truncated in the prefetch filename. For example, executing this file:
This is a very long file nameSo this part will be truncated.exe
From the C:\Temp directory on a Windows 10 machine, will result in the creation of this prefetch file:
THIS IS A VERY LONG FILE NAME-D0B882CC.pf
In this case, the executable name cannot be derived from the prefetch filename, so you will not be able to provide it to the tool.
Just a few years ago when the topic of supporting offsite workers arose, some of the key conversation topics were related to purchase, logistics, deployment, maintenance and similar issues. The discussions back then were more like “special cases” vs. today’s environment where supporting workers offsite (now known as the hybrid workforce) has become a critical mainstream topic.
Now with the bulk of many organization’s workers off-premise, the topic of security and the ability of a security vendor to help support an organization’s hybrid workers has risen to the top of the selection criteria. In a soon to be released Cisco endpoint survey, it’s not surprising that the ability of a security vendor to make supporting the hybrid workforce easier and more efficient was the key motivating factor when organizations choose security solutions.
Today, when prospects and existing customers look at Cisco’s ability to support hybrid workers with our advanced security solution set and open platform, it’s quite clear that we can deliver on that promise. But, yes, good tools make it easier and more efficient, but the reality is that running a SOC or any security group, large or small, still takes a lot of work. Most organizations not only rely on advanced security tools but utilize a set of best practices to provide clarity of roles, efficiency of operation, and for the more prepared, have tested these best practices to prove to themselves that they are prepared for what’s next.
Knowing that not all organizations have this degree of security maturity and preparedness, we gathered a couple of subject matter experts together to discuss 5 areas of time-tested best practices that, besides the advanced tools offered by Cisco and others, can help your SOC (or small security team) yield actionable insights and guide you faster, and with more confidence, toward the outcomes you want.
In this webinar you will hear practical advice from Cisco technical marketing and a representative from our award winning Talos Threat Intelligence group, the same group who have created and are maintaining breach defense in partnership with Fortune 500 Security Operating Centers (SOC) around the globe.
You can expect to hear our 5 Best Practices recommendations on the following topics;
Check out our webinar to find out how you can become more security resilient and be better prepared for what’s next.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Article tags
A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate accounts — are creating major headaches for corporate HR departments and for those managing invite-only LinkedIn groups.
Some of the fake profiles flagged by the co-administrator of a popular sustainability group on LinkedIn.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity examined a flood of inauthentic LinkedIn profiles all claiming Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at various Fortune 500 companies, including Biogen, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Hewlett Packard.
Since then, the response from LinkedIn users and readers has made clear that these phony profiles are showing up en masse for virtually all executive roles — but particularly for jobs and industries that are adjacent to recent global events and news trends.
Hamish Taylor runs the Sustainability Professionals group on LinkedIn, which has more than 300,000 members. Together with the group’s co-owner, Taylor said they’ve blocked more than 12,700 suspected fake profiles so far this year, including dozens of recent accounts that Taylor describes as “cynical attempts to exploit Humanitarian Relief and Crisis Relief experts.”
“We receive over 500 fake profile requests to join on a weekly basis,” Taylor said. “It’s hit like hell since about January of this year. Prior to that we did not get the swarms of fakes that we now experience.”
The opening slide for a plea by Taylor’s group to LinkedIn.
Taylor recently posted an entry on LinkedIn titled, “The Fake ID Crisis on LinkedIn,” which lampooned the “60 Least Wanted ‘Crisis Relief Experts’ — fake profiles that claimed to be experts in disaster recovery efforts in the wake of recent hurricanes. The images above and below show just one such swarm of profiles the group flagged as inauthentic. Virtually all of these profiles were removed from LinkedIn after KrebsOnSecurity tweeted about them last week.
Another “swarm” of LinkedIn bot accounts flagged by Taylor’s group.
Mark Miller is the owner of the DevOps group on LinkedIn, and says he deals with fake profiles on a daily basis — often hundreds per day. What Taylor called “swarms” of fake accounts Miller described instead as “waves” of incoming requests from phony accounts.
“When a bot tries to infiltrate the group, it does so in waves,” Miller said. “We’ll see 20-30 requests come in with the same type of information in the profiles.”
After screenshotting the waves of suspected fake profile requests, Miller started sending the images to LinkedIn’s abuse teams, which told him they would review his request but that he may never be notified of any action taken.
Some of the bot profiles identified by Mark Miller that were seeking access to his DevOps LinkedIn group. Miller said these profiles are all listed in the order they appeared.
Miller said that after months of complaining and sharing fake profile information with LinkedIn, the social media network appeared to do something which caused the volume of group membership requests from phony accounts to drop precipitously.
“I wrote our LinkedIn rep and said we were considering closing the group down the bots were so bad,” Miller said. “I said, ‘You guys should be doing something on the backend to block this.”
Jason Lathrop is vice president of technology and operations at ISOutsource, a Seattle-based consulting firm with roughly 100 employees. Like Miller, Lathrop’s experience in fighting bot profiles on LinkedIn suggests the social networking giant will eventually respond to complaints about inauthentic accounts. That is, if affected users complain loudly enough (posting about it publicly on LinkedIn seems to help).
Lathrop said that about two months ago his employer noticed waves of new followers, and identified more than 3,000 followers that all shared various elements, such as profile photos or text descriptions.
“Then I noticed that they all claim to work for us at some random title within the organization,” Lathrop said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “When we complained to LinkedIn, they’d tell us these profiles didn’t violate their community guidelines. But like heck they don’t! These people don’t exist, and they’re claiming they work for us!”
Lathrop said that after his company’s third complaint, a LinkedIn representative responded by asking ISOutsource to send a spreadsheet listing every legitimate employee in the company, and their corresponding profile links.
Not long after that, the phony profiles that were not on the company’s list were deleted from LinkedIn. Lathrop said he’s still not sure how they’re going to handle getting new employees allowed into their company on LinkedIn going forward.
It remains unclear why LinkedIn has been flooded with so many fake profiles lately, or how the phony profile photos are sourced. Random testing of the profile photos shows they resemble but do not match other photos posted online. Several readers pointed out one likely source — the website thispersondoesnotexist.com, which makes using artificial intelligence to create unique headshots a point-and-click exercise.
Cybersecurity firm Mandiant (recently acquired by Google) told Bloomberg that hackers working for the North Korean government have been copying resumes and profiles from leading job listing platforms LinkedIn and Indeed, as part of an elaborate scheme to land jobs at cryptocurrency firms.
Fake profiles also may be tied to so-called “pig butchering” scams, wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out.
In addition, identity thieves have been known to masquerade on LinkedIn as job recruiters, collecting personal and financial information from people who fall for employment scams.
But the Sustainability Group administrator Taylor said the bots he’s tracked strangely don’t respond to messages, nor do they appear to try to post content.
“Clearly they are not monitored,” Taylor assessed. “Or they’re just created and then left to fester.”
This experience was shared by the DevOp group admin Miller, who said he’s also tried baiting the phony profiles with messages referencing their fakeness. Miller says he’s worried someone is creating a massive social network of bots for some future attack in which the automated accounts may be used to amplify false information online, or at least muddle the truth.
“It’s almost like someone is setting up a huge bot network so that when there’s a big message that needs to go out they can just mass post with all these fake profiles,” Miller said.
In last week’s story on this topic, I suggested LinkedIn could take one simple step that would make it far easier for people to make informed decisions about whether to trust a given profile: Add a “created on” date for every profile. Twitter does this, and it’s enormously helpful for filtering out a great deal of noise and unwanted communications.
Many of our readers on Twitter said LinkedIn needs to give employers more tools — perhaps some kind of application programming interface (API) — that would allow them to quickly remove profiles that falsely claim to be employed at their organizations.
Another reader suggested LinkedIn also could experiment with offering something akin to Twitter’s verified mark to users who chose to validate that they can respond to email at the domain associated with their stated current employer.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, LinkedIn said it was considering the domain verification idea.
“This is an ongoing challenge and we’re constantly improving our systems to stop fakes before they come online,” LinkedIn said in a written statement. “We do stop the vast majority of fraudulent activity we detect in our community – around 96% of fake accounts and around 99.1% of spam and scams. We’re also exploring new ways to protect our members such as expanding email domain verification. Our community is all about authentic people having meaningful conversations and to always increase the legitimacy and quality of our community.”
In a story published Wednesday, Bloomberg noted that LinkedIn has largely so far avoided the scandals about bots that have plagued networks like Facebook and Twitter. But that shine is starting to come off, as more users are forced to waste more of their time fighting off inauthentic accounts.
“What’s clear is that LinkedIn’s cachet as being the social network for serious professionals makes it the perfect platform for lulling members into a false sense of security,” Bloomberg’s Tim Cuplan wrote. “Exacerbating the security risk is the vast amount of data that LinkedIn collates and publishes, and which underpins its whole business model but which lacks any robust verification mechanisms.”
psudohash is a password list generator for orchestrating brute force attacks. It imitates certain password creation patterns commonly used by humans, like substituting a word's letters with symbols or numbers, using char-case variations, adding a common padding before or after the word and more. It is keyword-based and highly customizable.
System administrators and other employees often use a mutated version of the Company's name to set passwords (e.g. Am@z0n_2022). This is commonly the case for network devices (Wi-Fi access points, switches, routers, etc), application or even domain accounts. With the most basic options, psudohash can generate a wordlist with all possible mutations of one or multiple keywords, based on common character substitution patterns (customizable), case variations, strings commonly used as padding and more. Take a look at the following example:
The script includes a basic character substitution schema. You can add/modify character substitution patterns by editing the source and following the data structure logic presented below (default):
transformations = [
{'a' : '@'},
{'b' : '8'},
{'e' : '3'},
{'g' : ['9', '6']},
{'i' : ['1', '!']},
{'o' : '0'},
{'s' : ['$', '5']},
{'t' : '7'}
]
When it comes to people, i think we all have (more or less) set passwords using a mutation of one or more words that mean something to us e.g., our name or wife/kid/pet/band names, sticking the year we were born at the end or maybe a super secure padding like "!@#". Well, guess what?
No special requirements. Just clone the repo and make the script executable:
git clone https://github.com/t3l3machus/psudohash
cd ./psudohash
chmod +x psudohash.py
./psudohash.py [-h] -w WORDS [-an LEVEL] [-nl LIMIT] [-y YEARS] [-ap VALUES] [-cpb] [-cpa] [-cpo] [-o FILENAME] [-q]
The help dialog [ -h, --help ] includes usage details and examples.
--years and --append-numbering with a --numbering-limit ≥ last two digits of any year input, will most likely produce duplicate words because of the mutation patterns implemented by the tool.I'm gathering information regarding commonly used password creation patterns to enhance the tool's capabilities.
Article tags
The hybrid work environment has been around for years, albeit not common but it existed. I can recall my first job where I was able to split my time working in an office and working from my makeshift home office. This was many moons ago as I will call it… pre-COVID-19.
Job seekers are certainly looking to have the flexibility of working from anywhere at any time – preferably in an environment of their choosing. Even though a hybrid workforce will provide people with the option to work from anywhere, those remote locations are sometimes in unsecured locations. Organizations must now reimagine a workforce that will need access to your internal collaboration tools along with access to your network from both on- and off-premises.
Cisco, a leader in equipping organizations with the right products for a hybrid workforce, provides the tools & services to protect your organization from bad threat actors.
With pervasive ransomware attacks, malware attacks, and email attacks, you must be ready and have not only a security solution but also a security analyst team ready to respond when an attack happens.
Securing access to your endpoint must be a top priority and your security analysts must be agile and have the right telemetry to provide around-the-clock monitoring and the ability to quickly respond to threats.
Cisco Secure Endpoint provides you with the visibility and ability to respond to threats by blocking them before they compromise your network. Combined with global, proactive threat hunting, leading-edge forensic/analytic capabilities, and reduced leading Mean Time To Detection (MTTD)/Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) across the supply chain that no other vendor can parallel; why would you partner with any other company to secure and scale your unique hybrid workforce or workplace clients?
Click here to listen to my fireside chat on how we at Cisco would define 5 Best Practices Security Analysts Can Use to Secure Their Hybrid Workforce:
I am joined by Cisco Talos global Senior Threat Defense and Response Analyst, William (Bill) Largent who has over 20 plus years of infosec experience, specifically in network intrusion detection, traffic analysis, and signature/rule writing.
I will also be speaking with Eric Howard, Cisco Secure Technical Marketing Engineer Leader for the Security Platform and Response Group. Eric is a seasoned team leader in both Information Security Sales, and Product Management. He has built and led teams that apply deep technical understanding to business needs, initiatives, and strategies in both start-ups and established companies.
This is a conversation you do not want to skip! There were a lot of gems shared by these gentlemen that will get you where you need to be as a Security Analyst.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
ForceAdmin is a c# payload builder, creating infinate UAC pop-ups until the user allows the program to be ran. The inputted commands are ran via powershell calling cmd.exe and should be using the batch syntax. Why use? Well some users have UAC set to always show, so UAC bypass techniques are not possible. However - this attack will force them to run as admin. Bypassing these settings.
For building on your own, the following NuGet packages are needed
Fody: "Extensible tool for weaving .net assemblies."Costura.Fody "Fody add-in for embedding references as resources."Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Client "This package adds support for formatting and content negotiation to System.Net.Http. It includes support for JSON, XML, and form URL encoded data."You can download the latest tarball by clicking here or latest zipball by clicking here.
Download the project:
$ git clone https://github.com/catzsec/ForceAdmin.gitEnter the project folder
$ cd ForceAdminRun ForceAdmin:
$ dotnet runCompile ForceAdmin:
$ dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c Release -o ./publish/Any questions, errors or solutions, create an Issue in the Issues tab.
A python script to automatically coerce a Windows server to authenticate on an arbitrary machine through 9 methods.
--analyze, which only lists the vulnerable protocols and functions listening, without performing a coerced authentication.--targets-file
--webdav-host and --webdav-port
$ ./Coercer.py -h
______
/ ____/___ ___ _____________ _____
/ / / __ \/ _ \/ ___/ ___/ _ \/ ___/
/ /___/ /_/ / __/ / / /__/ __/ / v1.6
\____/\____/\___/_/ \___/\___/_/ by @podalirius_
usage: Coercer.py [-h] [-u USERNAME] [-p PASSWORD] [-d DOMAIN] [--hashes [LMHASH]:NTHASH] [--no-pass] [-v] [-a] [-k] [--dc-ip ip address] [-l LISTENER] [-wh WEBDAV_HOST] [-wp WEBDAV_PORT]
(-t TARGET | -f TARGETS_FILE) [--target-ip ip address]
Automatic windows authentication coercer over various RPC calls.
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-u USERNAME, --username USERNAME
Username to authenticate to the endpoint.
-p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
Password to authenticate to the endpoint. (if omitted, it will be asked unless -no-pass is specified)
-d DOMAIN, --domain DOMAIN
Windows domain name to authenticate to the endpoint.
--hashes [LMHASH]:NTHASH
NT/LM hashes (LM hash can be empty)
--no-pass Don't ask for password (useful for -k)
-v, --verbose Verbose mode (default: False)
-a, --analyze Analyze mode (default: Attack mode)
-k, --kerberos Use Kerberos authentication. Grabs credentials from ccache file (KRB5CCNAME) based on target parameters. If valid credentials cannot be found, it will use the ones specified in the
command line
--dc-ip ip address IP Address of the domain controller. If omitted it will use the domain part (FQDN) specified in the target parameter
-t TARGET, --target TARGET
IP address or hostname of the target machine
-f TARGETS_FILE, --targets-file TARGETS_FILE
IP address or hostname of the target machine
--target-ip ip address
IP Address of the target machine. If omitted it will use whatever was specified as target. This is useful when target is the NetBIOS name or Kerberos name and you cannot resolve it
-l LISTENER, --listener LISTENER
IP address or hostname of the listener machine
-wh WEBDAV_HOST, --webdav-host WEBDAV_HOST
WebDAV IP of the server to authenticate to.
-wp WEBDAV_PORT, --webdav-port WEBDAV_PORT
WebDAV port of the server to authenticate to.
In attack mode (without --analyze option) you get the following output:
After all the RPC calls, you get plenty of authentications in Responder:
Pull requests are welcome. Feel free to open an issue if you want to add other features.
Article tags
We’ve all seen the headlines like “race to the cloud” and “cloud-first.” These articles and publications are true, more and more customers have adopted cloud strategies, but there is more to the story. In these customer conversations, cloud security and network security are often discussed in unison. Why is that?
Customers desire freedom and choice when establishing resilience across every aspect of their business, and this requires both the ability to remain agile, and maintain control of their organization’s most sensitive data. Neither of these can be achieved with just the cloud, or private data center. Organizations are investing in hybrid-multicloud environments to ensure continuity amidst unpredictable threats and change. But these investments will fall short if they do not include security.
The modern enterprise relies on the network more than ever before, and it looks a lot different than it did 10 years ago. According to our 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report, where 2,500 global IT leaders were interviewed across 13 countries, 82% said they have adopted hybrid cloud architectures, and 47% of organizations use between two and three public IaaS clouds1. As organizations have grown more dependent on the network, the more complex it has become, making firewall capabilities the most critical element of the hybrid-multicloud security strategy. And Cisco has a firewall capability for every strategy, protecting your most important assets no matter where you choose to deploy it.
In May, Cisco brought offerings from Umbrella and Duo to the AWS Marketplace. Today at AWS Re:Inforce, Cisco Secure announced furthering its partnership with AWS to drive innovation with the goal to protect the integrity of your business. Validating our commitment to hybrid-multicloud security, Cisco has received the AWS Security Competency Partner designation for Network and Infrastructure Security. This designation was awarded through our demonstrated success with customer engagements and rigorous technical validations of Secure Firewall.
This week at AWS Re:Inforce, customers can stop by our booth to see our latest firewall innovation. Cisco Secure Firewall as-a-service on AWS builds on our existing portfolio, giving organizations greater flexibility and choice with a radically simplified SaaS offering. If organizations are truly to embrace security across the multi-environment IT, customers demand simplification without compromising security. With a SaaS-based form factor, management and deployment complexity is reduced. NetOps and SecOps teams will enjoy a simplified security architecture where provisioning of firewalls and control plane infrastructure are managed by Cisco. This will save your teams time by removing the need to rearchitect the network, freeing them to focus on protecting the integrity of your business.
As organizations continue to move more of their day-to-day operations to the cloud, Cisco and AWS are committed to ensure that security is an integral part of their hybrid multi-cloud strategy. We all have seen the impact of security that is bolted on, or too complex. If we are truly to find that balance between agility and protection to ensure business continuity, we need to ensure the same protections we have in the private infrastructure are easily consumed no matter where your data may roam.
Product page: Cisco Secure Firewall for Public Cloud
Partner page: Cisco solutions on AWS
Blog: Securing cloud is everyone’s responsibility
Quick Start page: Cisco solutions on AWS
Amazon Partner Network page: Cisco solutions on AWS
2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report
1 Henderson, N. & Hanselman, E. (2022, May 25). 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report.
S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by Cisco Systems.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/hybrid-cloud/2022-trends.html ‘
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
U.S. state and federal investigators are being inundated with reports from people who’ve lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in connection with a complex investment scam known as “pig butchering,” wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out.
The term “pig butchering” refers to a time-tested, heavily scripted, and human-intensive process of using fake profiles on dating apps and social media to lure people into investing in elaborate scams. In a more visceral sense, pig butchering means fattening up a prey before the slaughter.
“The fraud is named for the way scammers feed their victims with promises of romance and riches before cutting them off and taking all their money,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned in April 2022. “It’s run by a fraud ring of cryptocurrency scammers who mine dating apps and other social media for victims and the scam is becoming alarmingly popular.”
As documented in a series of investigative reports published over the past year across Asia, the people creating these phony profiles are largely men and women from China and neighboring countries who have been kidnapped and trafficked to places like Cambodia, where they are forced to scam complete strangers over the Internet — day after day.
The most prevalent pig butchering scam today involves sophisticated cryptocurrency investment platforms, where investors invariably see fantastic returns on their deposits — until they try to withdraw the funds. At that point, investors are told they owe huge tax bills. But even those who pay the phony levies never see their money again.
The come-ons for these scams are prevalent on dating sites and apps, but they also frequently start with what appears to be a wayward SMS — such as an instant message about an Uber ride that never showed. Or a reminder from a complete stranger about a planned meetup for coffee. In many ways, the content of the message is irrelevant; the initial goal to simply to get the recipient curious enough to respond in some way.
Those who respond are asked to continue the conversation via WhatsApp, where an attractive, friendly profile of the opposite gender will work through a pre-set script that is tailored to their prey’s apparent socioeconomic situation. For example, a divorced, professional female who responds to these scams will be handled with one profile type and script, while other scripts are available to groom a widower, a young professional, or a single mom.
That’s according to Erin West, deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County in Northern California. West said her office has been fielding a large number of pig butchering inquiries from her state, but also from law enforcement entities around the country that are ill-equipped to investigate such fraud.
“The people forced to perpetrate these scams have a guide and a script, where if your victim is divorced say this, or a single mom say this,” West said. “The scale of this is so massive. It’s a major problem with no easy answers, but also with victim volumes I’ve never seen before. With victims who are really losing their minds and in some cases are suicidal.”
West is a key member of REACT, a task force set up to tackle especially complex forms of cyber theft involving virtual currencies. West said the initial complaints from pig butchering victims came early this year.
“I first thought they were one-off cases, and then I realized we were getting these daily,” West said. “A lot of them are being reported to local agencies that don’t know what to do with them, so the cases languish.”
West said pig butchering victims are often quite sophisticated and educated people.
“One woman was a university professor who lost her husband to COVID, got lonely and was chatting online, and eventually ended up giving away her retirement,” West recalled of a recent case. “There are just horrifying stories that run the gamut in terms of victims, from young women early in their careers, to senior citizens and even to people working in the financial services industry.”
In some cases reported to REACT, the victims said they spent days or weeks corresponding with the phony WhatsApp persona before the conversation shifted to investing.
“They’ll say ‘Hey, this is the food I’m eating tonight’ and the picture they share will show a pretty setting with a glass of wine, where they’re showcasing an enviable lifestyle but not really mentioning anything about how they achieved that,” West said. “And then later, maybe a few hours or days into the conversation, they’ll say, ‘You know I made some money recently investing in crypto,’ kind of sliding into the topic as if this wasn’t what they were doing the whole time.”
Curious investors are directed toward elaborate and official-looking online crypto platforms that appear to have thousands of active investors. Many of these platforms include extensive study materials and tutorials on cryptocurrency investing. New users are strongly encouraged to team up with more seasoned investors on the platform, and to make only small investments that they can afford to lose.
The now-defunct homepage of xtb-market[.]com, a scam cryptocurrency platform tied to a pig butchering scheme.
“They’re able to see some value increase, and maybe even be allowed to take out that value increase so that they feel comfortable about the situation,” West said. Some investors then need little encouragement to deposit additional funds, which usually generate increasingly higher “returns.”
West said many crypto trading platforms associated with pig butchering scams appear to have been designed much like a video game, where investor hype is built around upcoming “trading opportunities” that hint at even more fantastic earnings.
“There are bonus levels and VIP levels, and they’ll build hype and a sense of frenzy into the trading,” West said. “There are definitely some psychological mechanisms at work to encourage people to invest more.”
“What’s so devastating about many of the victims is they lose that sense of who they are,” she continued. “They thought they were a savvy, sophisticated person, someone who’s sort of immune to scams. I think the large scale of the trickery and psychological manipulation being used here can’t be understated. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before.”
Courtney Nolan, a divorced mother of three daughters, says she lost more than $5 million to a pig butchering scam. Nolan lives in St. Louis and has a background in investment finance, but only started investing in cryptocurrencies in the past year.
Nolan’s case may be especially bad because she was already interested in crypto investing when the scammer reached out. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at or near all-time highs of nearly $68,000 per coin.
Nolan said her nightmare began in late 2021 with a Twitter direct message from someone who was following many of the same cryptocurrency influencers she followed. Her fellow crypto enthusiast then suggested they continue their discussion on WhatsApp. After much back and forth about his trading strategies, her new friend agreed to mentor her on how to make reliable profits using the crypto trading platform xtb.com.
“I had dabbled in leveraged trading before, but his mentor program gave me over 100 pages of study materials and agreed to walk me through their investment strategies over the course of a year,” Nolan told KrebsOnSecurity.
Nolan’s mentor had her create an account website xtb-market[.]com, which was made to be confusingly similar to XTB’s official platform. The site promoted several different investment packages, including a “starter plan” that involves a $5,250 up-front investment and promises more than 15 percent return across four separate trading bursts.
Platinum plans on xtb-market promised a whopping 45 percent ROI, with a minimum investment of $265,000. The site also offered a generous seven percent commission for referrals, which encouraged new investors to recruit others.
The now-defunct xtb-market[.]com.
While chatting via WhatsApp, Nolan and her mentor would trade side by side in xtb-market, initially with small investments ranging from $500 to $5,000. When those generated hefty returns, Nolan made bigger deposits. On several occasions she was able to withdraw amounts ranging from $10,000 to $30,000.
But after investing more than $4.5 million of her own money over nearly four months, Nolan found her account was suddenly frozen. She was then issued a tax statement saying she owed nearly $500,000 in taxes before she could reactivate her account or access her funds.
Nolan said it seems obvious in hindsight that she should never have paid the tax bill. Because xtb-market and her mentor cut all communications with her after that, and the entire website disappeared just a few weeks later.
Justin Maile, an investigation partner manager at Chainalysis, told Vice News that the tax portion of the pig butchering scam relies on the “sunk costs fallacy,” when people are reluctant to abandon a failing strategy or course of action because they have already invested heavily in it.
“Once the victim starts getting skeptical or tries to withdraw their funds, they are often told that they have to pay tax on the gains before funds can be unlocked,” Maile told Vice News. “The scammers will try to get any last payments out of the victims by exploiting the sunk cost fallacy and dangling huge profits in front of them.”
Vice recently published an in-depth report on pig butchering’s link to organized crime gangs in Asia that lure young job seekers with the promise of customer service jobs in call centers. Instead, those who show up at the appointed place and time are taken on long car rides and/or forced hikes across the borders into Cambodia, where they are pressed into indentured servitude.
Vice found many of the people forced to work in pig-butchering scams are being held in Chinese-owned casinos operating in Cambodia. Many of those casinos were newly built when the Covid pandemic hit. As the new casinos and hotels sat empty, organized crime groups saw an opportunity to use these facilities to generate huge income streams, and many foreign travelers stranded in neighboring countries were eventually trafficked to these scam centers.
Vice reports:
“While figures on the number of people in scam centers in Cambodia is unknown, best estimates pieced together from various sources point to the tens of thousands across scam centers in Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, and sites in border regions Poipet and Bavet. In April, Thailand’s assistant national police commissioner said 800 Thai citizens had been rescued from scam centers in Cambodia in recent months, with a further 1,000 citizens still trapped across the country. One Vietnamese worker estimated 300 of his compatriots were held on just one floor in a tall office block hosting scam operations.”
“…within Victory Paradise Resort alone there were 7,000 people, the majority from mainland China, but also Indonesians, Singaporeans and Filipinos. According to the Khmer Times, one 10-building complex of high-rises in Sihanoukville, known as The China Project, holds between 8,000 to 10,000 people participating in various scams—a workforce that would generate profits around the $1 billion mark each year at $300 per worker per day.”
REACTs’ West said while there are a large number of pig butchering victims reporting their victimization to the FBI, very few are receiving anything more than instructions about filing a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which keeps track of cybercrime losses and victims.
“There’s a huge gap in victims that are seeing any kind of service at all, where they’re reporting to the FBI but not being able to talk to anyone,” she said. “They’re filling out the IC3 form and never hearing back. It sort of feels like the federal government is ignoring this, so people are going to local agencies, which are sending these victims our way.”
For many younger victims of pig butchering, even losses of a few thousand dollars can be financially devastating. KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from two different readers who said they were in their 20s and lost more than $40,000 each when the investment platforms they were trading on vanished with their money.
The FBI can often bundle numerous IC3 complaints involving the same assailants and victims into a single case for federal prosecutors to pursue the guilty, and/or try to recapture what was stolen. In general, however, victims of crypto crimes rarely see that money again, or if they do it can take many years.
“The next piece is what can we actually do with these cases,” West said. “We used to frame success as getting bad people behind bars, but these cases leave us as law enforcement with not a lot of opportunity there.”
West said the good news is U.S. authorities are seeing some success in freezing cryptocurrency wallets suspected of being tied to large-scale cybercriminal operations. Indeed, Nolan told KrebsOnSecurity that her losses were substantial enough to warrant an official investigation by the FBI, which she says has since taken steps to freeze at least some of the assets tied to xtb-market[.]com.
Likewise, West said she was recently able to freeze cryptocurrency funds stolen from some pig butchering victims, and now REACT is focusing on helping state and local authorities learn how to do the same.
“It’s important to be able to mobilize quickly and know how to freeze and seize crypto and get it back to its rightful owner,” West said. “We definitely have made seizures in cases involving pig butchering, but we haven’t gotten that back to the rightful owners yet.”
In April, the FBI warned Internet users to be on guard against pig butchering scams, which it said attracts victims with “promises of romance and riches” before duping them out of their money. The IC3 said it received more than 4,300 complaints related to crypto-romance scams, resulting in losses of more than $429 million.
Here are some common elements of a pig butchering scam:
–Dating apps: Pig-butchering attempts are common on dating apps, but they can begin with almost any type of communication, including SMS text messages.
–WhatsApp: In virtually all documented cases of pig butchering, the target is moved fairly quickly into chatting with the scammer via WhatsApp.
–No video: The scammers will come up with all kinds of excuses not to do a video call. But they will always refuse.
–Investment chit-chat: Your contact (eventually) claims to have inside knowledge about the cryptocurrency market and can help you make money.
The FBI’s tips on avoiding crypto scams:
-Never send money, trade, or invest based on the advice of someone you have only met online.
-Don’t talk about your current financial status to unknown and untrusted people.
-Don’t provide your banking information, Social Security Number, copies of your identification or passport, or any other sensitive information to anyone online or to a site you do not know is legitimate.
-If an online investment or trading site is promoting unbelievable profits, it is most likely that—unbelievable.
-Be cautious of individuals who claim to have exclusive investment opportunities and urge you to act fast.
ZenBuster is a multi-threaded, multi-platform URL enumeration tool written in Python by Zach Griffin (@0xTas).
I wrote this tool as a way to deepen my familiarity with Python, and to help increase my understanding of Cybersecurity tooling in general. ZenBuster may not be the fastest or most comprehensive tool of its kind. It is however, simple to use, decently flexible, and in practice only marginally slower than other "tried-and-true" tools like Gobuster. Personally, I have been using it to help me solve CTF challenges on platforms like TryHackMe, and have found my implementation to be satisfactorily reliable.
This software is intended for use in CTF challenges, or by security professionals to gather information on their targets:
ZenBuster is capable of producing a potentially unwelcome number of HTTP requests in a short amount of time.
The developers and contributors are not liable or responsible for any damage caused by misuse or abuse of this software.
Please Enumerate Responsibly!
ZenBuster is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 License, see here for more information.
Yin-Yang ASCII art in the banners were created by Joan G. Stark (jgs) and Hayley Jane Wakenshaw (hjw). Modifications were made by me, when specified with: 'zg'.
Firstly, ensure that Python version >= 3.6 is installed, then clone the repository with:
git clone https://github.com/0xTas/zenbuster.git
Next, cd zenbuster.
ZenBuster relies on 3 external libraries to function, and it is recommended to install these with:
pip install -r requirements.txt
The modules that will be installed and their purposes are as follows:
These dependencies may be installed manually, with pip using requirements.txt, or via interaction with the script upon first run.
Once dependencies have been installed, you can run the program in the following ways:
./zenbuster.py [options] or python3 zenbuster.py [options]
python zenbuster.py [options]
| Short Flag | Long Flag | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| -h | --help | Displays the help screen and exits |
| -d | --dirs | Enables Directory Enumeration Mode |
| -s | -ssl | Forces usage of HTTPS in requests |
| -v | --verbose | Prints verbose info to terminal/log |
| -q | --quiet | Minimal terminal output until final results |
| -nc | --no-color | Disables colored terminal output |
| -nl | --no-lolcat | Disables lolcat-printed banner (Linux only) |
| -u <hostname> | --host | Host to target for the scan |
| -w <wordlist> | --wordlist | Path to wordlist/dictionary file |
| -x <exts> | --ext | Comma-separated list of file extensions (Dirs only) |
| -p <port#> | --port | Custom port option for nonstandard webservers |
| -o [filename] | --out-file | Log results to a file (accepts custom name/path) |
./zenbuster.py -d -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirb/common.txt -u target.thm -v
python3 zenbuster.py -w ../subdomains.txt --host target.thm --ssl -O myResults.log
zenbuster -w subdomains.txt -u target.thm --quiet (With .bashrc alias)
apple-1200
apple-1200
