Preface: On 2014, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is asking those that write code and use GitHub to go back and check their work to make sure they didn’t forget to remove login credentials. The warning comes as news is circulating about the availability of nearly 10,000 AWS keys in plain sight on GitHub just by running a simple query.

Background: Security expert found that search for it through source-code on the web, you can find further words by doing find the word ‘AKIA’ to find the Access Key and you can get the Secret key too, if you have found it you can do AWS Configuration.

GitHub does not allow searching of regular expressions in code, and thus the naive approach to search for such patterns is to create a clone of every repository – essentially a mirror of GitHub – and then search their contents for such patterns.

Ref:IAM access key IDs beginning with AKIA are long-term credentials, and access key IDs beginning with ASIA are temporary credentials. ASIA credentials are used with AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) operations for temporary access to AWS services.

Best practice recommended by vendor:

-Note that we recommended against using the root user for everyday work in AWS.

-As a security best practice, we recommended that you regularly rotate (change) IAM user access keys.

-You can review the AWS access keys in your code to determine whether the keys are from an account that you own.

Preface: Do you have doubt for the road map of application penetration test? I believe that it is a logical step. Sometimes, you will concerning the limit time windows for remediation for different of vulnerability result. The penetration tester will narrow down the work scope especially the high risk rating vulnerability item. Since this is the highest priority job which requires customer to do the remedy.

How do you deal with application vulnerabilities? I also encountered this error because the high-risk level vulnerability made me nervous. Believe it or not, whether an application system can do a good vulnerability management sometimes depends on how hard the penetration tester analyzes the collected information. Below example can let you know my statement is true.

Get for POST (Risk: informational) – A request that was originally observed as a POST was also accepted a a GET. This issue does not represent a securit weakness into itself. However it may facilities simplification of other attacks. For example if the original is subject to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), then this finding may indicate that a simplified (GET based) XSS may also be possible.

Hey Guys, don’t be worry too much. But you should be careful when you do the application penetration test report next time. Be remember that ask your consultant once you got a question.

Preface: User Account Control (UAC) is a fundamental component of Microsoft’s overall security vision. UAC helps mitigate the impact of malware.

Synopsis: UAC Bypass Using eventvwr.exe was exploited by malware in 2017. Microsoft fixes Eventvwr.exe UAC Bypass Exploit in Windows 10 Creators Update. In Windows 10 Creators Update preview build 15007, Microsoft seems to have fixed the UAC bypass method involving eventvwr.exe. But the investigator still discovered similar of UAC bypass exploit technique was used by ransomware.
In April of 2019, expert found a new type of ransomware named Sodinokibi. Their design utilize a module loaded into memory functions as a loader on phase 1. Meanwhile it will try to conduct UAC bypass if the processes privileges are insufficient.

The mechanism of UAC bypass technique not limit to use eventvwr.exe. The attacker can writes itself to the registry key (Software\Classes\mscfile\shell\open\command) and launches a new instance of explorer.exe to execute compmgmtlauncher.exe. Whereby it executes anything configured in the registry key Software\Classes\mscfile\shell\open\command\ then execute a script (see above diagram).

So, we have a basic concept that if we only following vendor announcement conduct a patch management will not be a efficient technique to protect your machine avoid ransomware attack.

Objectives and definitions for establishing light weapons: In order to avoid the detection of the anti-malware mechanism, quite a lot of notorious APT malware will be relied on design weakness of UAC. As a result, it can bypass the access control, meanwhile it can significant increase the successful rate of the phase one of cyber attack because it bring the difficulties to the defense mechanism. The fact is that only detect a simple script or code not easy to predict what the intention was. When Wannacry ransomware was born, perhaps the design goal is SMB vulnerability. But it lack of competence of the attack strategy. Whereby, when ransomware take the action to deleting the shadow copies of the system requires local administrator rights the User Account Control will prompt the user for allowing elevated privileges in order to execute the operation (see below diagram). So it alert the end user something will be happened when it click. Therefore the new generation of ransomware try to management this design weakness.

Ransomware author leverage UAC Bypass technique: A novel technique, Dridex User Account Control (UAC) bypass method characterized by its use of recdisc[.]exe, a Windows default recovery disc executable, and its loading of malicious code via impersonated SPP[.]dll. Perhaps you might say, this vulnerability has been fixed by Microsoft. But the market feedback is as follow:

Microsoft doesn’t consider UAC a security barrier, and thus they often don’t fix UAC bypasses. These bypasses are common and easy. The following figure shows another scenario of UAC bypass.
Let’s open our eyes and see what happens in the evolving world of cybersecurity?

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Additional topic: I am wishing that the Coronavirus will be gone in next morning. Perhaps it was not possible but such punishment to man kind that has been enough!