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Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud

Image: Shutterstock, ArtHead.

In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such outfit — a sprawling network tied to Chinese organized crime gangs and aptly named “Funnull” — highlights a persistent whac-a-mole problem facing cloud services.

In October 2024, the security firm Silent Push published a lengthy analysis of how Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were providing services to Funnull, a two-year-old Chinese content delivery network that hosts a wide variety of fake trading apps, pig butchering scams, gambling websites, and retail phishing pages.

Funnull made headlines last summer after it acquired the domain name polyfill[.]io, previously the home of a widely-used open source code library that allowed older browsers to handle advanced functions that weren’t natively supported. There were still tens of thousands of legitimate domains linking to the Polyfill domain at the time of its acquisition, and Funnull soon after conducted a supply-chain attack that redirected visitors to malicious sites.

Silent Push’s October 2024 report found a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull promoting gambling sites that bear the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean Lazarus Group.

In 2023, Suncity’s CEO was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of fraud, illegal gambling, and “triad offenses,” i.e. working with Chinese transnational organized crime syndicates. Suncity is alleged to have built an underground banking system that laundered billions of dollars for criminals.

It is likely the gambling sites coming through Funnull are abusing top casino brands as part of their money laundering schemes. In reporting on Silent Push’s October report, TechCrunch obtained a comment from Bwin, one of the casinos being advertised en masse through Funnull, and Bwin said those websites did not belong to them.

Gambling is illegal in China except in Macau, a special administrative region of China. Silent Push researchers say Funnull may be helping online gamblers in China evade the Communist party’s “Great Firewall,” which blocks access to gambling destinations.

Silent Push’s Zach Edwards said that upon revisiting Funnull’s infrastructure again this month, they found dozens of the same Amazon and Microsoft cloud Internet addresses still forwarding Funnull traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names before redirecting malicious or phishous websites.

Edwards said Funnull is a textbook example of an increasing trend Silent Push calls “infrastructure laundering,” wherein crooks selling cybercrime services will relay some or all of their malicious traffic through U.S. cloud providers.

“It’s crucial for global hosting companies based in the West to wake up to the fact that extremely low quality and suspicious web hosts based out of China are deliberately renting IP space from multiple companies and then mapping those IPs to their criminal client websites,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “We need these major hosts to create internal policies so that if they are renting IP space to one entity, who further rents it to host numerous criminal websites, all of those IPs should be reclaimed and the CDN who purchased them should be banned from future IP rentals or purchases.”

A Suncity gambling site promoted via Funnull. The sites feature a prompt for a Tether/USDT deposit program.

Reached for comment, Amazon referred this reporter to a statement Silent Push included in a report released today. Amazon said AWS was already aware of the Funnull addresses tracked by Silent Push, and that it had suspended all known accounts linked to the activity.

Amazon said that contrary to implications in the Silent Push report, it has every reason to aggressively police its network against this activity, noting the accounts tied to Funnull used “fraudulent methods to temporarily acquire infrastructure, for which it never pays. Thus, AWS incurs damages as a result of the abusive activity.”

“When AWS’s automated or manual systems detect potential abuse, or when we receive reports of potential abuse, we act quickly to investigate and take action to stop any prohibited activity,” Amazon’s statement continues. “In the event anyone suspects that AWS resources are being used for abusive activity, we encourage them to report it to AWS Trust & Safety using the report abuse form. In this case, the authors of the report never notified AWS of the findings of their research via our easy-to-find security and abuse reporting channels. Instead, AWS first learned of their research from a journalist to whom the researchers had provided a draft.”

Microsoft likewise said it takes such abuse seriously, and encouraged others to report suspicious activity found on its network.

“We are committed to protecting our customers against this kind of activity and actively enforce acceptable use policies when violations are detected,” Microsoft said in a written statement. “We encourage reporting suspicious activity to Microsoft so we can investigate and take appropriate actions.”

Richard Hummel is threat intelligence lead at NETSCOUT. Hummel said it used to be that “noisy” and frequently disruptive malicious traffic — such as automated application layer attacks, and “brute force” efforts to crack passwords or find vulnerabilities in websites — came mostly from botnets, or large collections of hacked devices.

But he said the vast majority of the infrastructure used to funnel this type of traffic is now proxied through major cloud providers, which can make it difficult for organizations to block at the network level.

“From a defenders point of view, you can’t wholesale block cloud providers, because a single IP can host thousands or tens of thousands of domains,” Hummel said.

In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark Industries Solutions, an ISP that materialized at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has been used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia. Experts said much of the malicious traffic  traversing Stark’s network (e.g. vulnerability scanning and password brute force attacks) was being bounced through U.S.-based cloud providers.

Stark’s network has been a favorite of the Russian hacktivist group called NoName057(16), which frequently launches huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a variety of targets seen as opposed to Moscow. Hummel said NoName’s history suggests they are adept at cycling through new cloud provider accounts, making anti-abuse efforts into a game of whac-a-mole.

“It almost doesn’t matter if the cloud provider is on point and takes it down because the bad guys will just spin up a new one,” he said. “Even if they’re only able to use it for an hour, they’ve already done their damage. It’s a really difficult problem.”

Edwards said Amazon declined to specify whether the banned Funnull users were operating using compromised accounts or stolen payment card data, or something else.

“I’m surprised they wanted to lean into ‘We’ve caught this 1,200+ times and have taken these down!’ and yet didn’t connect that each of those IPs was mapped to [the same] Chinese CDN,” he said. “We’re just thankful Amazon confirmed that account mules are being used for this and it isn’t some front-door relationship. We haven’t heard the same thing from Microsoft but it’s very likely that the same thing is happening.”

Funnull wasn’t always a bulletproof hosting network for scam sites. Prior to 2022, the network was known as Anjie CDN, based in the Philippines. One of Anjie’s properties was a website called funnull[.]app. Loading that domain reveals a pop-up message by the original Anjie CDN owner, who said their operations had been seized by an entity known as Fangneng CDN and ACB Group, the parent company of Funnull.

A machine-translated message from the former owner of Anjie CDN, a Chinese content delivery network that is now Funnull.

“After I got into trouble, the company was managed by my family,” the message explains. “Because my family was isolated and helpless, they were persuaded by villains to sell the company. Recently, many companies have contacted my family and threatened them, believing that Fangneng CDN used penetration and mirroring technology through customer domain names to steal member information and financial transactions, and stole customer programs by renting and selling servers. This matter has nothing to do with me and my family. Please contact Fangneng CDN to resolve it.”

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a proposed rule that would require cloud providers to create a “Customer Identification Program” that includes procedures to collect data sufficient to determine whether each potential customer is a foreign or U.S. person.

According to the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP, the Commerce rule also would require “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) providers to report knowledge of any transactions with foreign persons that might allow the foreign entity to train a large AI model with potential capabilities that could be used in malicious cyber-enabled activity.

“The proposed rulemaking has garnered global attention, as its cross-border data collection requirements are unprecedented in the cloud computing space,” Crowell wrote. “To the extent the U.S. alone imposes these requirements, there is concern that U.S. IaaS providers could face a competitive disadvantage, as U.S. allies have not yet announced similar foreign customer identification requirements.”

It remains unclear if the new White House administration will push forward with the requirements. The Commerce action was mandated as part of an executive order President Trump issued a day before leaving office in January 2021.

It's Time to Master the Lift & Shift: Migrating from VMware vSphere to Microsoft Azure

While cloud adoption has been top of mind for many IT professionals for nearly a decade, it’s only in recent months, with industry changes and announcements from key players, that many recognize the time to make the move is now. It may feel like a daunting task, but tools exist to help you move your virtual machines (VMs) to a public cloud provider – like Microsoft Azure

U.S. Cyber Safety Board Slams Microsoft Over Breach by China-Based Hackers

The U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) has criticized Microsoft for a series of security lapses that led to the breach of nearly two dozen companies across Europe and the U.S. by a China-based nation-state group called Storm-0558 last year. The findings, released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday, found that the intrusion was preventable, and that it became successful

Patch Tuesday, March 2024 Edition

Apple and Microsoft recently released software updates to fix dozens of security holes in their operating systems. Microsoft today patched at least 60 vulnerabilities in its Windows OS. Meanwhile, Apple’s new macOS Sonoma addresses at least 68 security weaknesses, and its latest update for iOS fixes two zero-day flaws.

Last week, Apple pushed out an urgent software update to its flagship iOS platform, warning that there were at least two zero-day exploits for vulnerabilities being used in the wild (CVE-2024-23225 and CVE-2024-23296). The security updates are available in iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, and iOS 16.7.6.

Apple’s macOS Sonoma 14.4 Security Update addresses dozens of security issues. Jason Kitka, chief information security officer at Automox, said the vulnerabilities patched in this update often stem from memory safety issues, a concern that has led to a broader industry conversation about the adoption of memory-safe programming languages [full disclosure: Automox is an advertiser on this site].

On Feb. 26, 2024, the Biden administration issued a report that calls for greater adoption of memory-safe programming languages. On Mar. 4, 2024, Google published Secure by Design, which lays out the company’s perspective on memory safety risks.

Mercifully, there do not appear to be any zero-day threats hounding Windows users this month (at least not yet). Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, notes that of the 60 CVEs in this month’s Patch Tuesday release, only six are considered “more likely to be exploited” according to Microsoft.

Those more likely to be exploited bugs are mostly “elevation of privilege vulnerabilities” including CVE-2024-26182 (Windows Kernel), CVE-2024-26170 (Windows Composite Image File System (CimFS), CVE-2024-21437 (Windows Graphics Component), and CVE-2024-21433 (Windows Print Spooler).

Narang highlighted CVE-2024-21390 as a particularly interesting vulnerability in this month’s Patch Tuesday release, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in Microsoft Authenticator, the software giant’s app for multi-factor authentication. Narang said a prerequisite for an attacker to exploit this flaw is to already have a presence on the device either through malware or a malicious application.

“If a victim has closed and re-opened the Microsoft Authenticator app, an attacker could obtain multi-factor authentication codes and modify or delete accounts from the app,” Narang said. “Having access to a target device is bad enough as they can monitor keystrokes, steal data and redirect users to phishing websites, but if the goal is to remain stealth, they could maintain this access and steal multi-factor authentication codes in order to login to sensitive accounts, steal data or hijack the accounts altogether by changing passwords and replacing the multi-factor authentication device, effectively locking the user out of their accounts.”

CVE-2024-21334 earned a CVSS (danger) score of 9.8 (10 is the worst), and it concerns a weakness in Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), a Linux-based cloud infrastructure in Microsoft Azure. Microsoft says attackers could connect to OMI instances over the Internet without authentication, and then send specially crafted data packets to gain remote code execution on the host device.

CVE-2024-21435 is a CVSS 8.8 vulnerability in Windows OLE, which acts as a kind of backbone for a great deal of communication between applications that people use every day on Windows, said Ben McCarthy, lead cybersecurity engineer at Immersive Labs.

“With this vulnerability, there is an exploit that allows remote code execution, the attacker needs to trick a user into opening a document, this document will exploit the OLE engine to download a malicious DLL to gain code execution on the system,” Breen explained. “The attack complexity has been described as low meaning there is less of a barrier to entry for attackers.”

A full list of the vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft this month is available at the SANS Internet Storm Center, which breaks down the updates by severity and urgency.

Finally, Adobe today issued security updates that fix dozens of security holes in a wide range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Premiere Pro, ColdFusion 2023 and 2021, Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, and Adobe Animate. Adobe said it is not aware of active exploitation against any of the flaws.

By the way, Adobe recently enrolled all of its Acrobat users into a “new generative AI feature” that scans the contents of your PDFs so that its new “AI Assistant” can  “understand your questions and provide responses based on the content of your PDF file.” Adobe provides instructions on how to disable the AI features and opt out here.

Iran-Linked UNC1549 Hackers Target Middle East Aerospace & Defense Sectors

An Iran-nexus threat actor known as UNC1549 has been attributed with medium confidence to a new set of attacks targeting aerospace, aviation, and defense industries in the Middle East, including Israel and the U.A.E. Other targets of the cyber espionage activity likely include Turkey, India, and Albania, Google-owned Mandiant said in a new analysis. UNC1549 is said to overlap with&nbsp

Researchers Uncover Undetectable Crypto Mining Technique on Azure Automation

Cybersecurity researchers have developed what's the first fully undetectable cloud-based cryptocurrency miner leveraging the Microsoft Azure Automation service without racking up any charges. Cybersecurity company SafeBreach said it discovered three different methods to run the miner, including one that can be executed on a victim's environment without attracting any attention. "While this

Researchers Detail 8 Vulnerabilities in Azure HDInsight Analytics Service

By: THN
More details have emerged about a set of now-patched cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in the Microsoft Azure HDInsight open-source analytics service that could be weaponized by a threat actor to carry out malicious activities. "The identified vulnerabilities consisted of six stored XSS and two reflected XSS vulnerabilities, each of which could be exploited to perform unauthorized actions,

Experts Uncover How Cybercriminals Could Exploit Microsoft Entra ID for Elevated Privilege

By: THN
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of privilege escalation associated with a Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) application by taking advantage of an abandoned reply URL. "An attacker could leverage this abandoned URL to redirect authorization codes to themselves, exchanging the ill-gotten authorization codes for access tokens," Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (

TeamTNT's Cloud Credential Stealing Campaign Now Targets Azure and Google Cloud

By: THN
A malicious actor has been linked to a cloud credential stealing campaign in June 2023 that's focused on Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, marking the adversary's expansion in targeting beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS). The findings come from SentinelOne and Permiso, which said the "campaigns share similarity with tools attributed to the notorious TeamTNT cryptojacking crew,"

Critical 'nOAuth' Flaw in Microsoft Azure AD Enabled Complete Account Takeover

A security shortcoming in Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) Open Authorization (OAuth) process could have been exploited to achieve full account takeover, researchers said. California-based identity and access management service Descope, which discovered and reported the issue in April 2023, dubbed it nOAuth. "nOAuth is an authentication implementation flaw that can affect Microsoft Azure AD

Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Microsoft Azure Bastion and Container Registry

Two "dangerous" security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Microsoft Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry that could have been exploited to carry out cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. "The vulnerabilities allowed unauthorized access to the victim's session within the compromised Azure service iframe, which can lead to severe consequences, including unauthorized data access,

MAAD-AF - MAAD Attack Framework - An Attack Tool For Simple, Fast And Effective Security Testing Of M365 And Azure AD

By: Zion3R

MAAD-AF is an open-source cloud attack tool developed for testing security of Microsoft 365 & Azure AD environments through adversary emulation. MAAD-AF provides security practitioners easy to use attack modules to exploit configurations across different M365/AzureAD cloud-based tools & services.

MAAD-AF is designed to make cloud security testing simple, fast and effective. Through its virtually no-setup requirement and easy to use interactive attack modules, security teams can test their security controls, detection and response capabilities easily and swiftly.

Features

  • Pre & Post-compromise techniques
  • Simple interactive use
  • Virtually no-setup requirements
  • Attack modules for Azure AD
  • Attack modules for Exchange
  • Attack modules for Teams
  • Attack modules for SharePoint
  • Attack modules for eDiscovery

MAAD-AF Attack Modules

  • Azure AD External Recon (Includes sub-modules)
  • Azure AD Internal Recon (Includes sub-modules)
  • Backdoor Account Setup
  • Trusted Network Modification
  • Disable Mailbox Auditing
  • Disable Anti-Phishing
  • Mailbox Deletion Rule Setup
  • Exfiltration through Mailbox Forwarding
  • Gain User Mailbox Access
  • External Teams Access Setup (Includes sub-modules)
  • eDiscovery exploitation (Includes sub-modules)
  • Bruteforce
  • MFA Manipulation
  • User Account Deletion
  • SharePoint exploitation (Includes sub-modules)

Getting Started

Plug & Play - It's that easy!

  1. Clone or download the MAAD-AF github repo to your windows host
  2. Open PowerShell as Administrator
  3. Navigate to the local MAAD-AF directory (cd /MAAD-AF)
  4. Run MAAD_Attack.ps1 (./MAAD_Attack.ps1)

Requirements

  1. Internet accessible Windows host
  2. PowerShell (version 5 or later) terminal as Administrator
  3. The following PowerShell modules are required and will be installed automatically:

Tip: A 'Global Admin' privilege account is recommended to leverage full capabilities of modules in MAAD-AF

Limitations

  • MAAD-AF is currently only fully supported on Windows OS

Contribute

  • Thank you for considering contributing to MAAD-AF!
  • Your contributions will help make MAAD-AF better.
  • Join the mission to make security testing simple, fast and effective.
  • There's ongoing efforts to make the source code more modular to enable easier contributions.
  • Continue monitoring this space for updates on how you can easily incorporate new attack modules into MAAD-AF.

Add Custom Modules

  • Everyone is encouraged to come up with new attack modules that can be added to the MAAD-AF Library.
  • Attack modules are functions that leverage access & privileges established by MAAD-AF to exploit configuration flaws in Microsoft services.

Report Bugs

  • Submit bugs or other issues related to the tool directly in the "Issues" section

Request Features

  • Share those great ideas. Submit new features to add to the MAAD-AFs functionality.

Contact

  • If you found this tool useful, want to share an interesting use-case, bring issues to attention, whatever the reason - I would love to hear from you. You can contact at: maad-af@vectra.ai or post in repository Discussions.


Researchers Discover 3 Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure API Management Service

Three new security flaws have been disclosed in Microsoft Azure API Management service that could be abused by malicious actors to gain access to sensitive information or backend services. This includes two server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaws and one instance of unrestricted file upload functionality in the API Management developer portal, according to Israeli cloud security firm Ermetic. "

Newly Discovered "By-Design" Flaw in Microsoft Azure Could Expose Storage Accounts to Hackers

A "by-design flaw" uncovered in Microsoft Azure could be exploited by attackers to gain access to storage accounts, move laterally in the environment, and even execute remote code. "It is possible to abuse and leverage Microsoft Storage Accounts by manipulating Azure Functions to steal access-tokens of higher privilege identities, move laterally, potentially access critical business assets, and

Researchers Detail Severe "Super FabriXss" Vulnerability in Microsoft Azure SFX

Details have emerged about a now-patched vulnerability in Azure Service Fabric Explorer (SFX) that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Tracked as CVE-2023-23383 (CVSS score: 8.2), the issue has been dubbed "Super FabriXss" by Orca Security, a nod to the FabriXss flaw (CVE-2022-35829, CVSS score: 6.2) that was fixed by Microsoft in October 2022. "The Super FabriXss vulnerability

Microsoft Azure job outlook

Introduction The business world is relocating to the cloud and the trend is strong. It has been predicted that by the end of 2020, 83% of all businesses will be in the cloud and by 2021, the percentage of workloads processed in cloud data centers will reach 94%. By 2022, cloud services will be three […]

The post Microsoft Azure job outlook appeared first on Infosec Resources.


Microsoft Azure job outlook was first posted on October 20, 2020 at 8:05 am.
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Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Domains Overview

Introduction The Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) certification exam is a great way for someone new to the field of cloud computing to demonstrate knowledge, interest and experience to current or potential employers. In this article, we will offer an overview of Microsoft Azure’s most popular certification — the Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals certification. We will […]

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Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Domains Overview was first posted on October 6, 2020 at 8:02 am.
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Microsoft Azure Certification: Overview And Career Path

Introduction The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced individuals and organizations to adopt new ways of doing daily tasks, from working to learning. It has also accelerated the journey to the cloud for many organizations; for others, it has made them more reliant on the cloud. With that move comes a demand for professionals with cloud […]

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Microsoft Azure Certification: Overview And Career Path was first posted on October 5, 2020 at 8:03 am.
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