Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

A newly discovered bug in a cloud system used to manage SonicWall firewalls could have allowed hackers to break into thousands of corporate networks.

Enterprise firewalls and virtual private network appliances are vital gatekeepers tasked with protecting corporate networks from hackers and cyberattacks while still letting in employees working from home during the pandemic. Even though most offices are empty, hackers frequently look for bugs in critical network gear in order to break into company networks to steal data or plant malware.

Vangelis Stykas, a researcher at security firm Pen Test Partners, found the new bug in SonicWall’s Global Management System (GMS), a web app that lets IT departments remotely configure their SonicWall devices across the network.

But the bug, if exploited, meant any existing user with access to SonicWall’s GMS could create a user account with access to any other company’s network without permission.

From there, the newly created account could remotely manage the SonicWall gear of that company.

In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Stykas said there were two barriers to entry. Firstly, a would-be attacker would need an existing SonicWall GMS user account. The easiest way — and what Stykas did to independently test the bug — was to buy a SonicWall device.

The second issue was that the would-be attacker would also need to guess a unique seven-digit number associated with another company’s network. But Stykas said that this number appeared to be sequential and could be easily enumerated, one after the other.

Once inside a company’s network, the attacker could deliver ransomware directly to the internal systems of their victims, an increasingly popular tactic for financially driven hackers.

SonicWall confirmed the bug is now fixed. But Stykas criticized the company for taking more than two weeks to patch the vulnerability, which he described as “trivial” to exploit.

“Even car alarm vendors have fixed similar issues inside three days of us reporting,” he wrote.

A SonicWall spokesperson defended the decision to subject the fix to a “full” quality check before it was rolled out, and said it is “not aware” of any exploitation of the vulnerability.

Ransomware is getting sneakier and smarter.

The latest example comes from ExecuPharm, a little-known but major outsourced pharmaceutical company that confirmed it was hit by a new type of ransomware last month. The incursion not only encrypted the company’s network and files, hackers also exfiltrated vast amounts of data from the network. The company was handed a two-for-one threat: pay the ransom and get your files back or don’t pay and the hackers will post the files to the internet.

This new tactic is shifting how organizations think of ransomware attacks: it’s no longer just a data-recovery mission; it’s also now a data breach. Now companies are torn between taking the FBI’s advice of not paying the ransom or the fear their intellectual property (or other sensitive internal files) are published online.

Because millions are now working from home, the surface area for attackers to get in is far greater than it was, making the threat of ransomware higher than ever before.

That’s just one of the stories from the week. Here’s what else you need to know.

THE BIG PICTURE

Chegg hacked for the third time in three years

Education giant Chegg confirmed its third data breach in as many years. The latest break-in affected past and present staff after a hacker made off with 700 names and Social Security numbers. It’s a drop in the ocean when compared to the 40 million records stolen in 2018 and an undisclosed number of passwords taken in a breach at Thinkful, which Chegg had just acquired in 2019.

Those 700 names account for about half of its 1,400 full-time employees, per a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Chegg’s refusal to disclose further details about the breach — beyond a state-mandated notice to the California attorney general’s office — makes it tough to know exactly went wrong this time.

Data breaches that could cause millions of dollars in potential damages have been the bane of the life of many a company. What’s required is a great deal of real-time monitoring. The problem is that this world has become incredibly complex. A SANS Institute survey found half of company data breaches were the result of account or credential hacking.

GitGuardian has attempted to address this with a highly developer-centric cybersecurity solution.

It’s now attracted the attention of major investors, to the tune of $12 million in Series A funding, led by Balderton Capital . Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, and Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker, also participated in the round.

The startup plans to use the investment from Balderton Capital to expand its customer base, predominantly in the U.S. Around 75% of its clients are currently based in the U.S., with the remainder being based in Europe, and the funding will continue to drive this expansion.

Built to uncover sensitive company information hiding in online repositories, GitGuardian says its real-time monitoring platform can address the data leaks issues. Modern enterprise software developers have to integrate multiple internal and third-party services. That means they need incredibly sensitive “secrets,” such as login details, API keys and private cryptographic keys used to protect confidential systems and data.

GitGuardian’s systems detect thousands of credential leaks per day. The team originally built its launch platform with public GitHub in mind; however, GitGuardian is built as a private solution to monitor and notify on secrets that are inappropriately disseminated in internal systems as well, such as private code repositories or messaging systems.

Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker and investor at GitGuardian, said: “Securing your systems starts with securing your software development process. GitGuardian understands this, and they have built a pragmatic solution to an acute security problem. Their credentials monitoring system is a must-have for any serious organization.”

Do they have any competitors?

Co-founder Jérémy Thomas told me: “We currently don’t have any direct competitors. This generally means that there’s no market, or the market is too small to be interesting. In our case, our fundraise proves we’ve put our hands on something huge. So the reason we don’t have competitors is because the problem we’re solving is counterintuitive at first sight. Ask any developer, they will say they would never hardcode any secret in public source code. However, humans make mistakes and when that happens, they can be extremely serious: it can take a single leaked credential to jeopardize an entire organization. To conclude, I’d say our real competitors so far are black hat hackers. Black hat activity is real on GitHub. For two years, we’ve been monitoring organized groups of hackers that exchange sensitive information they find on the platform. We are competing with them on speed of detection and scope of vulnerabilities covered.”

VirusTotal, the virus and malware scanning service own by Alphabet’s Chronicle, launched an enterprise-grade version of its service today. VirusTotal Enterprise offers significantly faster and more customizable malware search, as well as a new feature called Private Graph, which allows enterprises to create their own private visualizations of their infrastructure and malware that affects their machines.

The Private Graph makes it easier for enterprises to create an inventory of their internal infrastructure and users to help security teams investigate incidents (and where they started). In the process of building this graph, VirtusTotal also looks are commonalities between different nodes to be able to detect changes that could signal potential issues.

The company stresses that these graphs are obviously kept private. That’s worth noting because VirusTotal already offered a similar tool for its premium users — the VirusTotal Graph. All of the information there, however, was public.

As for the faster and more advanced search tools, VirusTotal notes that its service benefits from Alphabet’s massive infrastructure and search expertise. This allows VirusTotal Enterprise to offers a 100x speed increase, as well as better search accuracy. Using the advanced search, the company notes, a security team could now extract the icon from a fake application, for example, and then return all malware samples that share the same file.

VirusTotal says that it plans to “continue to leverage the power of Google infrastructure” and expand this enterprise service over time.

Google acquired VirusTotal back in 2012. For the longest time, the service didn’t see too many changes, but earlier this year, Google’s parent company Alphabet moved VirusTotal under the Chronicle brand and the development pace seems to have picked up since.

 It was a big day for IBM today as it opened its shiny new security headquarters in Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, complete with what the company is calling the first commercial cyber range. A cyber range is a network security testing environment, and is typically run by the military or military contractors. This one, dubbed X-Force Command, however, is much more than a couple of terminals in… Read More