Unlike the SolarWinds and CodeCov incidents, all that it took for an adversary to nearly pull off a massive supply chain attack was some slick social engineering and a string of pressure emails.

Source: Mongta Studio via Shutterstock

An adversary doesn't need sophisticated technical skills to execute a broad software supply chain attack like the ones experienced by SolarWinds and CodeCov. Sometimes, all it takes is a little bit of time and ingenius social engineering.

That appears to have been the case with whoever introduced a backdoor in the XZ Utils open source data compression utility in Linux systems earlier this year. Analysis of the incident from Kaspersky this week, and similar reports from others in recent days, identified the attacker as relying almost entirely on social manipulation to slip the backdoor into the utility.

**Social Engineering the Open Source Software Supply Chain**

Ominously, it may be a model that attackers are using to slip similar malware into other widely used open source projects and components.

In an alert last week, the Open Source Security Foundation (OSSF) warned of the XZ Utils attack likely not being an isolated incident. The advisory identified at least one other instance where an adversary employed tactics similar to the one used on XZ Utils to take over the OpenJS Foundation for JavaScript projects.

"The OSSF and OpenJS Foundations are calling all open source maintainers to be alert for social engineering takeover attempts, to recognize the early threat patterns emerging, and to take steps to protect their open source projects," the OSSF alert said.

A developer from Microsoft discovered the backdoor in newer versions of an XZ library called liblzma while investigating odd behavior around a Debian installation. At the time, only unstable and beta releases of Fedora, Debian, Kali, openSUSE, and Arch Linux versions had the backdoored library, meaning it was virtually a non-issue for most Linux users.

But the manner in which the attacker introduced the backdoor is especially troubling, Kasperksy said. "One of the key differentiators of the SolarWinds incident from prior supply chain attacks was the adversary’s covert, prolonged access to the source/development environment," Kaspersky said. "In this XZ Utils incident, this prolonged access was obtained via social engineering and extended with fictitious human identity interactions in plain sight."

**A Low and Slow Attack**

The attack appears to have begun in October 2021, when an individual using the handle "Jia Tan" submitted an innocuous patch to the single-person XZ Utils project. Over the next few weeks and months, the Jia Tan account submitted multiple similar harmless patches (described in detail in this timeline) to the XZ Utils project, which its sole maintainer, an individual named Lasse Collins, eventually began merging into the utility.

Starting in April 2022, a couple of other personas — one using the handle "Jigar Kumar" and the other "Dennis Ens" — began sending emails to Collins, pressuring him to integrate Tan's patches into XZ Utils at a faster pace.

The Jigar Kumar and Dennis Ens personas gradually ratcheted up the pressure on Collins, eventually asking him to add another maintainer to the project. Collins at one point reaffirmed his interest in maintaining the project but confessed to being constrained by "long-term mental health issues." Eventually, Collins succumbed to the pressure from Kumar and Ens and gave Jia Tan commit access to the project and the authority to make changes to the code.

"Their goal was to grant full access to XZ Utils source code to Jia Tan and subtly introduce malicious code into XZ Utils," Kaspersky said. "The identities even interact with one another on mail threads, complaining about the need to replace Lasse Collin as the XZ Utils maintainer." The different personas in the attack — Jia Tan, Jigar Kumar, and Dennis Ens — appear to have deliberately been made to look like they were from different geographies, to dispel any doubts about their working in concert. Another individual, or persona, Hans Jansen, surfaced briefly in June 2023 with some new performance optimization code for XZ Utils that ended up being integrated into the utility.

**A Wide Cast of Actors**

Jia Tan introduced the backdoor binary into the utility in February 2024 after gaining control of the XZ Util maintenance tasks. Following that, the Jansen character resurfaced — along with two other personas — each pressuring major Linux distributors to introduce the backdoored utility into their distribution, Kasperksy said.

What's not entirely clear is if the attack involved a small team of actors or a single individual who successfully managed several identities and manipulated the maintainer into giving them the right to make code changes to the project.

Kurt Baumgartner, principal researcher at Kaspersky’s global research and analysis team, tells Dark Reading that additional data sources, including login and netflow data, could help aid in the investigation of the identities involved in the attack. "The world of open source is a wildly open one," he says, "enabling murky identities to contribute questionable code to projects that are major dependencies."

**About the Author(s)**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

Attacker Social-Engineered Backdoor Code Into XZ Utils

The city is stymied in efforts to pinpoint the issue since its IT systems were shut down in the wake of the cyberattack.

Source: Jim Monk via Alamy Stock Photo

In the wake of a cyberattack that led to operational troubles, the city council for Leicester City, England, is still struggling with its city's streetlights failing to shut off.

Roger Ewens, a resident of Beaumont Leys, was among those who noticed the streetlights in Leicester were on day and night.

"I noticed that down Anstey Lane they're all on along one side but off on the other side," he said.

After reaching out to city council for a reason, Ewens was told that the cyberattack the city council suffered from was affecting the "central management system," causing the streetlights to "misbehave."

This latest development in the cyberattack fallout is of concern to locals because of the amount of energy the lights use, which likely is driving up the cost of electricity. Ewens was told in an email that the light issue should be resolved by the end of the first week of May.

A city council spokesperson reported that they are aware of the issue, which they attributed to a recent cyberattack. Because the city also had to shut down IT systems, it remains unable to "remotely identity faults in the street lighting system."

"The default mode for faults is that the lights stay on to ensure that roads are not left completely unlit and become a safety concern," said the spokesperson. "There are a number of steps required to resolve the problem, and we are working through these as quickly as we can."

**About the Author(s)**

Lights On in Leicester: Streetlights in Disarray After Cyberattack

Lazarus, Kimsuky, and Andariel all got in on the action, stealing "important" data from firms responsible for defending their southern neighbors (from them).

Source: Steve Allen Travel Photography via Alamy Stock Photo

North Korea's premiere advanced persistent threats (APTs) have been quietly spying on South Korean defense contractors for at least a year and a half, infiltrating some 10 organizations.

South Korean police this week released the findings of an investigation that uncovered concurrent espionage campaigns carried out by Andariel (aka Onyx Sleet, Silent Chollima, Plutonium), Kimsuky (aka APT 43, Thallium, Velvet Chollima, Black Banshee), and the broader Lazarus Group. Law enforcement did not name the victim defense organizations nor provide details on the stolen data.

The announcement comes one day after North Korea conducted its first-ever drill simulating a nuclear counterattack.

**DPRK APTs Persist**

Few countries are so aware of cyber threats from foreign nation-states as South Korea, and few industries so aware as military and defense. And yet, Kim's best always seem to find a way.

"APT threats, particularly those driven by state-level actors, are notoriously difficult to fully deter," laments Mr. Ngoc Bui, cybersecurity expert at Menlo Security. "If an APT or actor is highly motivated, there are few barriers that can't eventually be overcome."

In November 2022, for instance, Lazarus targeted a contractor which was cyber aware enough to operate separate internal and external networks. However, the hackers took advantage of their negligence in managing the system connecting the two. First, the hackers breached and infected an external network server. While defenses were down for a network test, they tunneled through the network connection system and into the innards. They then began harvesting and exfiltrating "important data" from six employee computers.

In another case beginning around October 2022, Andariel obtained login information belonging to an employee of a company that performed remote IT maintenance for one of the defense contractors in question. Using the hijacked account, it infected the company's servers with malware and exfiltrated data relating to defense technologies.

Police also highlighted an incident that lasted from April to July 2023, in which Kimsuky exploited the groupware email server used by one defense firm's partner company. A vulnerability allowed the unauthorized attackers to download large files that'd been sent internally via email.

**Snuffing Out Lazarus**

Of use to authorities, Bui explains, is that "DPRK groups such as Lazarus frequently reuse not only their malware but also their network infrastructure, which can be both a vulnerability and a strength in their operations. Their OPSEC failures and reuse of infrastructure, combined with innovative tactics such as infiltrating companies, make them particularly intriguing to monitor."

The perpetrators behind each of the defense breaches were identified thanks to the malware they deployed post-compromise — including the Nukesped and Tiger remote access Trojans (RATs) — as well as their architecture and IP addresses. Notably, some of those IPs traced to Shenyang, China, and a 2014 attack against the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co.

"North Korea's hacking attempts targeting defense technology are expected to continue," the Korean National Police Agency said in a statement. The agency recommends that defense companies and their partners use two-factor authentication and periodically change passwords associated with their accounts, cordon off internal from external networks, and block access to sensitive resources for unauthorized and unnecessary foreign IP addresses.

**About the Author(s)**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

North Korea APT Triumvirate Spied on South Korean Defense Industry For Years

A state-sponsored hacking team employed a clever masquerade and elaborate back-end infrastructure as part of a five-year info-stealing campaign that compromised the US State and Treasury Departments, and hundreds of thousands of accounts overall.

Source: Joe Quinn via Alamy Stock Photo

An elite team of Iranian state-sponsored hackers successfully infiltrated hundreds of thousands of employee accounts at US companies and government agencies, according to the Feds, as part of a multiyear cyber espionage campaign aimed at stealing military secrets.

The US Departments of Treasury and State are among those compromised in the elaborate campaign, which lasted from 2016 to 2021 according to a US Justice Department indictment unsealed this week. Various defense contractors with high-level security clearances, a New York-based accounting firm, and a New York-based hospitality company were also affected, according to the documents.

In all, more than a dozen entities and hundreds of thousands of employee accounts were compromised in the attacks, including more than 200,000 accounts at the hospitality victim.

**Iran's State-Sponsored, Elaborate Social Engineering Efforts**

Four Iranian nationals — including one alleged member of the government's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Electronic Warfare division — have been indicted for the attacks. The defendants are accused of posing as an Iran-based company that purported to provide "cybersecurity services" in a series of spearphishing overtures to their targets. Their aim was to trick email recipients into clicking on a malicious link that executed an unnamed custom malware and allowed account takeover.

In one case, they managed to allegedly take over an administrator email account at a defense contractor, which they then used to create other unauthorized accounts in order to send spearphishing emails to employees of a different defense contractor and a consulting firm.

In some cases, they also successfully posed as women interested in romantic connections, targeting victims through social media connections. This gambit was also aimed at eventually deploying malware onto victim computers, according to the indictment (PDF).

Both approaches align with Iran's long-standing MO of creating clever social-engineering campaigns to gain targets' confidence. A recent Charming Kitten effort for example involved the creation of an entire phony webinar platform to compromise its targeted victims. In general, Iran-nexus threat actors are "more advanced and more sophisticated by a significant margin" in their social-engineering efforts, according to Steven Adair, co-founder and president of Volexity, speaking after disclosing the Charming Kitten campaign. "It's a level of effort and dedication ... that is definitely different and uncommon."

**The Extent of Data Compromise Is Unclear**

In the campaign revealed this week, once the accounts were compromised, the hacking team allegedly used a complex back-end infrastructure and a custom application called "Dandelion" to manage the attack. Dandelion provided a dashboard that enumerated the victims, their IP addresses, physical locations, Web browsers, and OS; whether they clicked on the malicious spearphishing links; and whether the accounts should be targeted for further activity.

The Justice Department did not publicize many other details on the effort; nor did it reveal whether the state-sponsored attackers were able to access and steal classified data. Thus, the level of compromise they were able to achieve in the five years they lurked within the high-value networks remains unclear.

Unfortunately, jailtime will likely not be on offer in the event of a conviction in the case: Hossein Harooni (حسین هارونی), Reza Kazemifar (رضا کاظمی فر), Komeil Baradaran Salmani (کمیل برادران سلمانی), and Alireza Shafie Nasab (علیرضا شفیعی نسب) all remain at large. The State Department is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information that could help with their apprehension.

**About the Author(s)**

Tara Seals has 20+ years of experience as a journalist, analyst and editor in the cybersecurity, communications and technology space. Prior to Dark Reading, Tara was Editor in Chief at Threatpost, and prior to that, the North American news lead for Infosecurity Magazine. She also spent 13 years working for Informa (formerly Virgo Publishing), as executive editor and editor-in-chief at publications focused on both the service provider and the enterprise arenas. A Texas native, she holds a B.A. from Columbia University, lives in Western Massachusetts with her family and is on a never-ending quest for good Mexican food in the Northeast.

Iran Dupes US Military Contractors, Gov't Agencies in Years-Long Cyber Campaign

Attacks increased by "only" 19% last year. But that number is expected to grow significently.

Andrew Ginter, Vice President of Industrial Security, Waterfall Security Solutions

April 24, 2024

4 Min Read

Source: Nicholas Klein via Alamy Stock Photo

COMMENTARY

Waterfall Security Solutions, in collaboration with ICS Strive, recently released its "2024 Threat Report." The bad news is that, in 2023, there were 68 cyberattacks that took down more than 500 physical operations. The good news (sort of) is that this is only 19% more attacks than the previous year. What's going on? Ransomware attacks with physical consequences are down slightly, hacktivist attacks are constant, and everything else is increasing. The report's authors conclude that the 19% increase is most likely an aberration, and that we'll see an increase closer to 90% to 100% in 2024.

**The Details**

Waterfall's operational technology (OT) security threat report is the most cautious in the industry — it tracks only deliberate cyberattacks that caused physical consequences in building automation, heavy industry, manufacturing, and critical industrial infrastructures in the public record. That is, no private or confidential disclosures. The complete data set for the report is included in its appendix. This means the report is certain to be an underestimate of what's really happening in the world, because the authors report regular confidential disclosures that they cannot include in their counts.

OT incidents since 2010. Source: "2024 Threat Report," Waterfall Security Solutions, in collaboration with ICS Strive

**More Attacks**

In spite of this underestimate, cyberattacks that met the inclusion criteria continue to increase, nearly doubling annually since 2019. This is a big change from 2010–2019, when OT attacks with physical consequences were flat, bouncing around between zero and five attacks annually.

Threat actors. Source: "2024 Threat Report," Waterfall Security Solutions, in collaboration with ICS Strive

What are these attacks? In 24 of 68 cases, there was not enough information in the public record to attribute the attack. Of the remaining, 35 attacks (80%) were ransomware, six (14%) were hacktivists, two were supply chain attacks, and one was attributed to a nation state. The 35 ransomware attacks are down slightly from last year's 41, which is unexpected, given that ransomware attacks on IT networks continue to increase at between 60% to 70% per year, depending on the report. Why? In part, because public reports this year were less detailed, there were many more "unknown" threat actors this year. 

Another factor has to do with the fact that most ransomware attacks that impact physical operations did so only accidentally — either because of "abundance of caution" OT shutdowns, when IT is impaired, or physical operations being dependent on crippled IT infrastructure. In 2023, we saw a material fraction of ransomware criminal groups shift away from encrypting and disabling systems to simply stealing the data and demanding ransoms to destroy the stolen data rather than publish it. With fewer IT systems being crippled through encryption, it looks like fewer OT systems and physical operations are being impaired.

We expect this trend to stabilize in 2024, and for OT impacts due to ransomware to go back to the recently historic norm of nearly doubling annually. Why? Because not all businesses have data they are willing to pay to protect. Such businesses, especially critical infrastructures, may still, however, pay a ransom to restore functionality to crippled systems, so it makes sense that at least some ransomware criminals will not leave money on the table and will continue to cripple servers, in addition to stealing what data they can.

**Supply Chain**

Supply chain attacks with physical consequences showed up this year for the first time in many years. Newag SA was accused of embedding code in its trains to maximize the revenues of authorized repair shops. It is accused of acting to "lock up the train with bogus error codes after some date, or if the train wasn't running for a period of time." Some of the code was found to contain GPS coordinates to confine the behavior to third-party workshops. Newag denies the accusations, blaming "unknown hackers." And in an apparent contractual dispute, ORQA, a manufacturer of first-person view (FPV) virtual reality headsets, had its products locked up by what it describes as a "greedy former contractor."

**Wrapping Up**

There are many other findings in the report: GPS blocking and spoofing is becoming a widespread problem, manufacturing businesses accounted for more than one half of the attacks with outages, hacktivists are targeting critical infrastructures, and there is an alarming batch of near misses, including the many critical infrastructures and utilities  targeted by China's Volt Typhoon "living off the land" campaign. The report also touches on promising new developments on the defensive side, including the Cyber-Informed Engineering Strategy. 

**About the Author(s)**

Vice President of Industrial Security, Waterfall Security Solutions

At Waterfall, Andrew leads a team of experts who work with the world's most secure industrial enterprises. Before Waterfall, he led the development of high-end industrial control system products at Hewlett-Packard, of IT/OT middleware products at Agilent Technologies, and of the world's first industrial SIEM at Industrial Defender. He is the author of two books on industrial / OT cybersecurity, a co-author of the Industrial Internet Security Framework, and a co-author of the UITP report on cybersecurity requirements in rail system tendering. Andrew co-hosts the Industrial Security Podcast and contributes regularly to industrial security standards and best-practice guidance.

2023: A 'Good' Year for OT Cyberattacks

An exploit for the vulnerability allows unauthenticated attackers to escape a virtual file system sandbox to download system files and potentially achieve RCE.

Source: Andre Boukreev via Shutterstock

Virtual file transfer system provider CrushFTP and various security researchers are sounding the alarm about a sandbox escape flaw in the CrushFTP server that attackers already have exploited as a zero-day in attacks against organizations in the US.

CrushFTP is a multiprotocol, multiplatform, cloud-based file transfer server. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-4040, is an improper input validation bug in the CrushFTP file transfer server version 11.1. The company unveiled and patched the flaw on April 19 with the release of version 11.1.0 of the product; however, there already were various reports of threat actors hammering the flaw with an existing exploit.

These attacks, which were potentially "politically motivated," were targeted in nature for intelligence gathering and detected at various US entities, according to Crowdstrike's threat hunters Falcon OverWatch and Falcon Intelligence, which published an advisory on Reddit.

**A Developing Attack Scenario for Cloud File Transfer**

The attack scenario is developing, with new research by Tenable published April 23 identifying more than 7,100 CrushFTP servers publicly accessible "based on a Shodan query in a Nuclei template created by h4sh," according to the report. However, "it's unclear how many of these systems are potentially vulnerable," Satnam Narang, a Tenable senior staff research engineer, noted in the post.

Attacks are likely to continue on unpatched servers given that a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw is now publicly available, posted April 23 to GitHub by the researcher who discovered and reported the flaw to CrushFTP, Simon Garrelou of Airbus Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), Narang added.

Other attackers also aim to benefit from all the attention in the flaw, by targeting users with fake PoCs, Narang wrote, noting there already is a repository posted to GitHub that directs users to a third-party site called SatoshiDisk, which requests a payment of 0.00735 bitcoin (around $513) for an alleged exploit.

"It is unlikely that the exploit code will work and we do not expect it to be malicious in nature," Narang wrote. "Instead, it is more likely that the attackers are seeking to make money from the interest in the exploit code for this vulnerability."

**CVE-2024-4040: Potential for RCE**

The vulnerability as described by the vendor is an arbitrary read flaw that allows an attacker with low privileges to escape the server's virtual file system (VFS) sandbox to access and download system files.

However, there is evidence that it is more to the flaw than has so far been reported, Rapid7 researchers noted in a blog post published on April 23.

"Although the vulnerability has been formally described as an arbitrary file read, Rapid7 believes that it can be more accurately categorized as a server-side template injection (SSTI)," Caitlin Condon, Rapid7's director of vulnerability intelligence, wrote in the post.

CVE-2024-4040 is a "fully unauthenticated flaw" and is easy to exploit; successful exploitation allows not only or arbitrary file read as root, but also authentication bypass for administrator account access and full remote code execution (RCE), she observed.

"Successful exploitation allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to access and potentially exfiltrate all files stored on the CrushFTP instance," Condon wrote.

**Exploit Code Available**

The PoC exploit posted by Garrelou includes two scripts. The first, scan\_host.py, attempts to use the vulnerability to read files outside the sandbox, according to the GitHub post.

"If it succeeds, the script writes Vulnerable to standard output and returns with exit code 1," according to Garrelou. "If exploiting the vulnerability does not succeed, the script writes Not vulnerable and exits with status code 0."

The second script, scan\_logs.py, looks for indicators of compromise in a CrushFTP server installation directory and, upon finding them, will attempt to extract the IP that tried to exploit the server.

**Patch Now for Full Protection**

The best way for organizations with CrushFTP present in their environment to mitigate the situation is to update their systems to the patched version of the product now, the company and security researchers alike advised.

Customers using a front-end demilitarized zone (DMZ) server to process protocols and connections in front of their main CrushFTP instance are afforded partial protection from exploit due to the protocol translation system used in the DMZ, according to CrushFTP.

"A DMZ, however, does not fully protect you, and you must update immediately," the company advised customers in its advisory. One of the factors complicating an organization's detection of exploitation of CVE-2024-4040 is that payloads "can be delivered in many different forms," Rapid7's Condon noted.

"When certain evasive techniques are leveraged, payloads will be redacted from logs and request history, and malicious requests will be difficult to discern from legitimate traffic," she wrote.

For this reason, Rapid7 recommends that CrushFTP customers harden their servers against administrator-level RCE attacks by enabling Limited Server mode with the most restrictive configuration possible. Condon added that they also should use firewalls wherever possible to aggressively restrict which IP addresses are permitted to access CrushFTP services.

**About the Author(s)**

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing music, yoga, and cooking.

Patch Now: CrushFTP Zero-Day Cloud Exploit Targets US Orgs

Just like you should check the quality of the ingredients before you make a meal, it's critical to ensure the integrity of AI training data.

Source: Nico El Nino via Shutterstock

COMMENTARY

Picture this: It's a Saturday morning, and you made breakfast for your family. The pancakes were golden brown and seemingly tasted OK, but everyone, including you, got sick shortly after eating them. Unbeknown to you, the milk that you used to make the batter expired several weeks ago. The quality of the ingredients impacted the meal, but everything looked fine on the outside.

The same philosophy can be applied to artificial intelligence (AI). Regardless of its purpose, AI's output is directly related to the quality of its input. As the popularity of AI continues to rise, security concerns around the data being fed into AI are coming into question.

A majority of today's organizations are integrating AI into business operations at some capacity — and threat actors are taking note. Over the past few years, a tactic known as AI poisoning has become increasingly prevalent. This new malicious practice involves injecting deceptive or harmful data into AI training sets. The tricky part about AI poisoning is that, despite the input being compromised, the output can initially continue as normal. It isn't until a threat actor gets a firm grip on the data and begins a full-fledged attack that deviations from the norm become obvious. The consequences range from slightly inconvenient to damaging a brand's reputation.

It's a risk affecting organizations of all sizes, even today's most prominent tech vendors. For example, over the past few years, adversaries launched several large-scale attacks to poison Google's Gmail spam filters and even turned Microsoft's Twitter chatbot hostile.

**Defending Against AI Data Poisoning**

Fortunately, organizations can take the following steps to shield AI technologies from potential poisoning.

*   Build a comprehensive data catalog. First, organizations should create a live data catalog that serves as a centralized repository of information that is being fed to its AI systems. Any time new data is added to AI systems, it should be tracked in this index. In addition, the catalog should be able to categorize the data flowing into AI systems by the who, what, when, where, why, and how to ensure transparency and accountability.
    
*   Develop a normal baseline for users and devices interacting with AI data. Once the security and IT teams have a solid understanding of all of the data in AI systems and who has access to it, it's important to develop a baseline of normal user and device behavior.
    

Compromised credentials are one of the easiest ways for cybercriminals to break into networks. All a threat actor has to do is either play a guessing game or buy one of the 24 billion username and password combinations available on the cybercriminal marketplace. Once they have access, a threat actor can easily maneuver their way into accessing AI training datasets.

By establishing user and device baseline behavior, security teams can easily detect abnormalities that might be indicative of an attack. Often, this helps stop a threat actor before an incident escalates into a full-blown data breach. For example, say you have an IT executive who typically works from the New York office and who oversees the AI data training sets. One day, it shows that he is active in another country and is adding large amounts of data to the AI. If your security team already has a baseline of user behavior, they can quickly tell that this is abnormal. Then security could either talk to the executive and verify that he was performing the action or, if he wasn't, temporarily disable his account until the alert is thoroughly investigated to prevent any further damage.

**Taking Responsibility of AI Training Sets**

Just like you should check the quality of the ingredients before you make a meal, it's critical to ensure the integrity of AI training data. AI intelligence is intricately linked to the quality of data it processes. Implementing guidelines, policies, monitoring systems, and improved algorithms plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety and effectiveness of AI. These measures safeguard against potential threats and empower organizations to harness the transformative potential of AI. It is a delicate balance where organizations must learn to leverage AI's capabilities, while remaining vigilant in the face of the ever-evolving threat landscape.

**About the Author(s)**

CISO, Exabeam

Tyler Farrar is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Exabeam. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 2012, and received his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Tyler continued his education at Robert H. Smith School of Business, where he earned a Master of Business Administration in Accounting and Finance.

Fortify AI Training Datasets From Malicious Poisoning

PRESS RELEASE

DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., April 23, 2024 – CompTIA, the world’s leading information technology (IT) certification and training body, announced today that eight of its certifications are included in U.S. Department of Defense efforts to create, qualify and upskill a more diverse workforce to protect the nation’s interests, information and infrastructure.

The Cyber Workforce Qualification Program, which includes U.S. Department of Defense Manual 8140.03 (DoDM 8140.03), modernizes DoD talent management, allowing for more targeted and flexible approaches and options to manage and achieve a qualified cyber workforce in IT, cybersecurity, cyber effects, cyber intelligence and cyber enablers.

"As a leader in cybersecurity and IT upskilling, we have worked for years to create, qualify and upskill a more diverse workforce," said Dr. James Stanger, chief technology evangelist, CompTIA. "The DoD has adopted a targeted, role-based approach to identify, develop and qualify cyber personnel. This includes clear, standards-based certifications and training options for military personnel, civilian staff and government contractors."

The eight CompTIA certifications approved for DoDM 8140.03 cover 31 different work roles within the DoD cyber workforce. These job roles range from technical support and network operations specialists to cyber defense forensic analysts, cyber policy and strategy planners and information systems security developers and managers.

"It's exciting to see how CompTIA and the DoD have taken independent paths to achieve the same goals,” Dr. Stanger said. "Pathways are vital, and we're pleased to see how the U.S. DoD has specified the need for standards-based certifications and training options for military personnel, civilian staff and government contractors."

CompTIA certifications validate essential skills through performance-based exams that assess an individual’s ability to solve problems in real-world settings. These certifications are vendor-neutral, internationally recognized and accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to comply with the ISO 17024 standard. CompTIA has awarded 3.5 million certifications to technology professionals around the world, including more than 800,000 in cybersecurity-related disciplines.

CompTIA will lead an education session on "Navigating and Implementing DoD 8140" at TechNet Cyber, the flagship event presented annually by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International (AFCEA). This year’s conference is June 25-27 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

To learn how CompTIA certifications map to DoDM 8140.03 work roles visit https://www.comptia.org/content/tools/comptia-and-dodm-8140.

About CompTIA

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is the world’s leading information technology (IT) certification and training body. CompTIA is a mission-driven organization committed to unlocking the potential of every student, career changer or professional seeking to begin or advance in a technology career. Millions of current and aspiring technology workers around the world rely on CompTIA for the training, education and professional certifications that give them the confidence and skills to work in tech. https://www.comptia.org/

CompTIA Supports Department of Defense Efforts to Strengthen Cyber Knowledge and Skills

Dark Reading talks cloud security with John Kindervag, the godfather of zero trust.

Source: Diego Schtutman via Alamy Stock Photo

While cloud security has certainly come a long way since the wild west days of early cloud adoption, the truth is that there's a long way to go before most organizations today have truly matured their cloud security practices. And this is costing organizations tremendously in terms of security incidents.

A Vanson Bourne study earlier this year showed that almost half of the breaches suffered by organizations in the past year originated in the cloud. That same study found that the average organization lost almost $4.1 million to cloud breaches in the last year.

Dark Reading recently caught up with the godfather of zero trust security, John Kindervag, to discuss the state of cloud security. When he was an analyst at Forrester Research, Kindervag helped conceptualize and popularize the zero-trust security model. Now he's chief evangelist at Illumio, where amid his outreach he's still very much a proponent of zero trust, explaining that it is a key way to redesign security in the cloud era. According to Kindervag, organizations must deal with the following hard truths in order to achieve success.

**1\. You Don't Become More Secure Just by Going to the Cloud**

One of the biggest myths about the cloud is that it is innately more secure than most on-premises environments, Kindervag says.

"There's a fundamental misunderstanding of the cloud that somehow there's more security natively built into it, that you're more secure by going to the cloud just by the act of going to the cloud," he says.

The problem is that while hyperscale cloud providers may be very good at protecting infrastructure, the control and responsibility they have over their customers' security posture is very limited.

"A lot of people think they're outsourcing security to the cloud provider. They think they're transferring the risk," Kindervag says. "In cybersecurity, you can never transfer the risk. If you are the custodian of that data, you are always the custodian of the data, no matter who's holding it for you."

This is why Kindervag is not a big fan of the oft-repeated phrase "shared responsibility," which he says makes it sound like there's a 50-50 division of labor and effort. He prefers the phrase "uneven handshake," which was coined by James Staten, his former colleague at Forrester.

"The fundamental problem is that people think that there's a shared responsibility model, and there's an uneven handshake instead," he says.

**2\. Native Security Controls Are Hard to Manage in a Hybrid World**

Meanwhile, let's talk about those improved native cloud security controls that providers have built up over the past decade. While many providers have done a good job offering customers more control over their workloads, identities, and visibility, that quality is inconsistent. As Kindervag says, "Some of them are good, some of them aren't." The real problem across all of them is that they're hard to manage out in the real world, beyond the isolation of a single provider's environment.

"It takes a lot of people to do it, and they're different in every single cloud. I think every company that I've talked to in the past five years has a multicloud and a hybrid model, both happening at the same time," he says. "Hybrid being, 'I'm using my on-premises stuff and clouds, and I'm using multiple clouds, and I may be using multiple clouds to deliver access to different microservices for a single application.' The only way that you can solve this problem is to have a security control that can be managed across all the multiple clouds."

This is one of the big factors driving discussions about moving zero trust to the cloud, he says.

"Zero trust works no matter where you put data or assets" he says. "It could be in the cloud. It could be on-premises. It could be on an endpoint."

**3\. Identity Won't Save Your Cloud**

With so much emphasis placed on cloud identity management and disproportionate attention on the identity component in zero trust, it's important for organizations to understand that identity is only part of a well-balanced breakfast for zero trust in the cloud.

"So much of the zero trust narrative is about identity, identity, identity," Kindervag says. "Identity is important, but we consume identity in policy in zero trust. It's not the end-all, be-all. It doesn't solve all the problems."

What Kindervag means is that with a zero-trust model, credentials don't automatically give users access to anything under the sun within a given cloud or network. The policy limits exactly what and when access is given to specific assets. Kindervag has been a longtime proponent for segmentation — of networks, workloads, assets, data — long before he began mapping out the zero-trust model. As he explains, the heart of defining zero-trust access by policy is divvying up things into "protect surfaces," since the risk level of different kinds of users accessing each protect surface will define the policies that will be attached to any given credential.

"That's my mission, to get people to focus on what they need to protect, put that important stuff into various protect surfaces, like your PCI credit card database should be in its own protect surface. Your HR database should be in its own protect surface. Your HMI for your IoT system or OT system should be in its own protect surface," he says. "When we break up the problem into these small bite-sized chunks, we solve them one chunk at a time, and we do them one after another. It makes it much more scalable and doable."

**4\. Too Many Firms Don't Know What They're Trying to Protect**

As organizations decide how to segment their protect surfaces in the cloud, they first need to clearly define what it is that they're trying to protect. This is crucial because each asset or system or process will carry its own unique risk, and that will determine the policies for access and the hardening around it. The joke is that you wouldn't build a $1 million vault to house a few hundred pennies. The cloud equivalent to that would be putting tons of protection around a cloud asset that's isolated from sensitive systems and doesn't house sensitive information.

Kindervag says it is incredibly common for organizations to not have a clear idea of what they're protecting in the cloud or beyond. In fact, most organizations today don't even necessarily have a clear idea of what is in the cloud or what connects to the cloud, let alone what needs protecting. For example, a Cloud Security Alliance study shows that only 23% of organizations have full visibility into cloud environments. And the Illumio study from earlier this year shows that 46% of organizations don't have full visibility into the connectivity of their cloud services.

"People don't think about what they're actually trying to accomplish, what they're trying to protect," Kindervag says. This is a fundamental issue that causes companies to waste a lot of security money without appropriately setting up protection in the process.

"They'll come to me and say, 'Zero trust isn't working,' and I'll ask, 'Well, what are you trying to protect?' and they'll say, 'I haven't thought about that yet,' and my answer is, 'Well, then, you're not even close to beginning the process of zero trust,'" he explains.

**5\. Cloud Native Development Incentives Are Out of Whack**

DevOps practices and cloud native development have been greatly enhanced through the speed, scalability, and flexibility afforded them by cloud platforms and tooling. When security is appropriately layered into that mix, good things can happen. But Kindervag says that most development organizations are not properly incentivized to make that happen — which means that cloud infrastructure and all of the applications that rest on it are put at risk in the process.

"I like to say that the DevOps app people are the Ricky Bobbys of IT. They just want to go fast," Kindervag says. "I remember talking to the head of development at a company who eventually got breached, and I was asking him what he was doing about security. And he said, 'Nothing, I don't care about security.' I asked, 'How can you not care about security?' and he says, 'Because I don't have a KPI for it. My KPI says I have to do five pushes a day in my team, and if I don't do that, I don't get a bonus.'"

Kindervag says this is an illustration of one of the big problems, not just in AppSec, but in moving to zero trust for the cloud and beyond. Too many organizations simply do not have the right incentive structures to make it happen — and, in fact, many have perverse incentives that end up encouraging insecure practice.

This is why he's an advocate for building up zero-trust centers of excellence within enterprises that include not just technologists but also business leadership in the planning, design, and ongoing decision-making processes. When these cross-functional teams meet, he says, he's seen "incentive structures change in real time" when a powerful business executive steps forward to say the organization is going to move in that direction.

"The most successful zero-trust initiatives were the ones where business leaders got involved," Kindervag says. "I had one in a manufacturing company where the executive vice president — one of the top leaders of the company — became a champion for zero-trust transformation for the manufacturing environment. That went very smoothly because there were no inhibitors."

5 Hard Truths About the State of Cloud Security 2024

Growing attacks targeting the flaw prompted CISA to include it in the known exploited vulnerabilities catalog earlier this month.

Source: HJBC via Shutterstock

Siemens is urging organizations using its Ruggedcom APE1808 devices configured with Palo Alto Networks (PAN) Virtual NGFW to implement workarounds for a maximum severity zero-day bug that PAN recently disclosed in its next-gen firewall product.

The command injection vulnerability, identified as CVE-2024-3400, affects multiple versions of PAN-OS firewalls when certain features are enabled on them. An attacker has been exploiting the flaw to deploy a novel Python backdoor on affected firewalls.

**Actively Exploited**

PAN patched the flaw after researchers from Volexity discovered the vulnerability and reported it to the security vendor earlier this month. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added CVE-2024-3400 to its catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities following reports of multiple groups attacking the flaw.

Palo Alto Networks itself has said it is aware of a growing number of attacks leveraging CVE-2024-3400 and has warned about proof-of-concept code for the flaw being publicly available.

According to Siemens, its Ruggedcom APE1808 product — commonly deployed as edge devices in industrial control environments — is vulnerable to the issue. Siemens described all versions of the product with PAN Virtual NGFW configured with the GlobalProtect gateway or GlobalProtect portal — or both — as affected by the vulnerability.

In an advisory, Siemens said it is working on updates for the bug and recommended specific countermeasures that customers should take in the meantime to mitigate risk. The measures include using specific threat IDs that PAN has released to block attacks targeting the vulnerability. Siemens' advisory pointed to PAN's recommendation to disable GlobalProtect gateway and GlobalProtect portal, and reminded customers that the features are already disabled by default in Ruggedcom APE1808 deployment environments.

PAN initially also recommended organizations disable device telemetry to protect against attacks targeting the flaw. The security vendor later withdrew that advice, citing ineffectiveness. "Device telemetry does not need to be enabled for PAN-OS firewalls to be exposed to attacks related to this vulnerability," the company noted.

Siemens urged customers, as a general rule, to protect network access to devices in industrial control environments with appropriate mechanisms, saying, "In order to operate the devices in a protected IT environment, Siemens recommends to configure the environment according to Siemens' operational guidelines for Industrial Security."

The Shadowserver Foundation, which monitors the Internet for threat related traffic, identified some 5,850 vulnerable instances of PAN's NGFW exposed and accessible over the Internet as of April 22. Some 2,360 of the vulnerable instances appear to be located in North America; Asia accounted for the next highest number with around 1,800 exposed instances.

**Internet-Exposed Devices Remain a Critical Risk for ICS/OT**

It's unclear how many of those exposed instances are in industrial control system (ICS) and operational technology (OT) settings. But generally, Internet exposure continues to be a major issue in ICS and OT environments. A new investigation by Forescout uncovered nearly 110,000 Internet-facing ICS and OT systems worldwide. The US led the way, accounting for 27% of the exposed instances. However, that number was significantly lower compared with a few years ago. In contrast, Forescout found a sharp increase in the number of Internet-exposed ICS/OT equipment in other countries, including Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and Russia.

"Opportunistic attackers are increasingly abusing this exposure at scale — sometimes with a very lax targeting rationale driven by trends, such as current events, copycat behavior, or the emergencies found in new, off-the-shelf capabilities or hacking guides," Forescout said. The security vendor assessed that the exposure had to do at least in part with systems integrators delivering packaged bundles with components in them that inadvertently expose ICS and OT systems to the Internet. "In all likeliness," Forescout said, "most asset owners are unaware these packaged units contain exposed OT devices."

**About the Author(s)**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

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DARKReading