Category Archives: Public safety

Potential Risk of CVE, Public safety

Is the CVE process late? Esri has managed and remedy those vulnerabilities in May 2021.

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Preface: When smartphones and Google Maps were born. The GIS function determines these two functions in a silent manner.

Background: Geographic Information System (GIS) plays a key role in military operations. The military uses GIS in various applications, including cartography, intelligence, battlefield management, terrain analysis, remote sensing, etc.

– Use of geospatial intelligence:The role of machine learning and GEOINT in disaster response
– Open geospatial data platform and food shortage
– Interoperability of GEOINT applications and military data
– The role of data management in crisis mapping

Vulnerability details: There are vulnerabilities announcement of GIS server on 11th Jul, 2021. Whereby those vulnerability has been addressed by ESRI on May, 2021. Seems the details of two announcement are similar and believed that both are describe the same matters. In fact, designated vulnerabilities are common vulnerabilities in OWASP Top 10. However, the applicability of GIS is becoming more and more important for human life and daily use. So we should seriously consider it.

Official announcement – https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-enterprise/administration/arcgis-server-security-2021-update-1-patch/

Potential Risk of CVE, Public safety

If the design defect cannot be remedied in time. Prevention and detection control is one of them. (Philips Vue PACS) [7-7-2021]

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Preface: In theory, if your software application design trusts multiple vendors. Repairing takes more time. Because you need to do more verification.

Technology background: Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is the standard for the communication and management of medical imaging information and related data. DICOM is most commonly used for storing and transmitting medical images enabling the integration of medical imaging devices such as scanners, servers, workstations, printers, network hardware, and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) from multiple manufacturers. It has been widely adopted by hospitals and is making inroads into smaller applications like dentists’ and doctors’ offices.

What is Vue PACS Philips?

Philips Vue Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), formerly known as CARESTREAM Vue PACS, is an image-management software that provides scalable local
and wide area PACS solutions for hospitals and related institutions.

Philips Vue PACS communications are based on the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) 3.0 standard. This enables the server to communicate with any DICOM 3.0 compliant products (such as scanners, workstations, hardcopy units). The server acts as a DICOM Provider, thus other stations can retrieve and send images to and from the server.

Vulnerability details: Philips Vue PACS design require to work with Redis and Oracle. This technology utilizes an Oracle Database and its servers are stored on VA premises. DICOM image data from the modalities is stored on image cache on the PACS server attached to Storage Area Network/Network Attached Storage (SAN/NAS)-type storage technology. However it was discovered design limitation in both software. Meanwhile the software application itself also discovered different vulnerabilities.

My observation: If exisitng vulnerabilities cannot fixed immediately. It is recommended to monitoring the network connectivitiy. It is better to install a IPS to monitoring inbound and outbound network traffics in this segment. If this philips web server and DN are mistaken install to a flat LAN. Perhaps you require to install a proxy server in front of this device.

US-Cert recommendation: https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ics/advisories/icsma-21-187-01

2021, cyber security incident news highlight, Public safety

Headline News – unauthorized access to japan government systems via Fujitsu ProjectWeb – 28-05-2021

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Headline News – The incident affected the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cabinet Office and Narita Airport. The stolen data included files stored by government employees on the cloud-based collaboration and file sharing platform ProjectWEB, which was launched by Fujitsu in the mid-2000s and was very popular among Japanese civil servants.
According to Japanese media reports, hackers stole documents containing employees of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism and extended more than 76,000 email addresses, but the government did not confirm this information.

Background: ProjectWEB is a a cloud-based enterprise collaboration and file-sharing platform that Fujitsu has operated since the mid-2000s, and which a number of agencies within the Japan government currently use.

One of the possibilities of data leakage in this accident:
If daily operation in many small projects will go through web base management system. Furthermore, daily communication between project managers and project members uses Excel to complete status management and quality management. If excel spreadsheet encounter design weakness (CVE-2017-0006, CVE-2017-0019, CVE-2017-0020, CVE-2017-0030, CVE-2017-0031, and CVE-2017-0053). Therefore, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (memory corruption) via a crafted document. As a result, the data breaches will be occurred.

Headline News – https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20210526_28/

Public safety, Ransomware, Under our observation

Update to CISA-FBI Joint Cybersecurity Advisory on DarkSide Ransomware (May 19, 2021).

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Preface: Critical infrastructure cybersecurity is not new – it was first addressed by Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 63 in 1998. The term Internet of Things (IOT) was used but it was for consumer product applications not industrial applications. Perhaps the Executive Order on Cybersecurity does not adequately protect critical infrastructures

Background: Best Practices for Preventing Disruption from Ransomware Attacks was released by CISA on May 11, 2021 – https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/alerts/aa21-131a

The goal provides a directive to computer users to reduce the possibility on ransomware attack. Apart of best Practices, whether there is other way to enhance your current system infrastructure to avoid computer user negligent.

Solution 1: Technology so called clean DNS works by adding a layer of security between a user and the internet that prevents visits to websites used for scams, phishing, and malware and ransomware distribution.

Solution 2: Be aware that unofficial observation concluded that if you had infected trickbot, you would receive ransomware attack soon.
Please refer to the attached diagram for the solution.

Potential Risk of CVE, Public safety

Zerologon vulnerability note – last revised (23rd Mar, 2021)

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Preface: “Logic 0” and “logic 1” represent binary digits (0 and 1) or Boolean logic conditions (true and false).  A vulnerability in the cryptography of Microsoft’s Netlogon process that allows an attack against Microsoft Active Directory domain controllers.

Background: The algorithm originally used to encrypt the logon process in Windows NT was 2DES. Thus design weakness found in this place. MS-NRPC uses an obscure setting known as AES-CFB8 (Advanced Encryption Standard – Cipher Feed Back 8 bit). However use of AES-CFB8 within MS-NRPC has an issue with the Initialisation Vector (IV) which should be a random number, but MS-NRPC has it fixed at a value of 16 bytes of zeros.

Impact: Tom Tervoort from Secura, he discovered there is a likelihood of one of every 256 keys used will create cipher text that has a value of all zeros.  Whereby, a high possibility way to root AD server. To change the password, attackers use the message NetServerPasswordSet2 in MS-NRPC. It is possible to change a password by simply sending the frame with the preferred new password. The easiest approach is to remove the password or set it to a blank value –  the hacker can now log in through a normal process.

Since February 9, 2021 is the enforcement phase. And therefore, vendor will be enforce the following setttings.

  • Enforces secure RPC usage for machine accounts on non-Windows based devices unless allowed by “Domain controller: Allow vulnerable Netlogon secure channel connections” group policy.
  • Logging of Event ID 5829 will be removed.  Since all vulnerable connections are denied, you will now only see event IDs 5827 and 5828 in the System event log.

Official announcement: https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/490028

Potential Risk of CVE, Public safety

Microsoft fixes actively exploited Exchange zero-day bugs attacks (2nd Mar 2021). When service you are not in used, you should disable immediately.

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Preface: The Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging service on the Mailbox server will accept connections from a Client Access server on SIP ports 5062 and 5063.

Technical background: Unified Messaging (UM) enables users to use voice mail and other features, including Outlook Voice Access and Call Answering Rules. UM combines voice messaging and email messaging into one mailbox that can be accessed from many different devices.

Security Focus – Vulnerability details: This vulnerability is part of an attack chain. The initial attack requires the ability to make an untrusted connection to Exchange server port 443.

Workaround: Restrict untrusted connections, or by setting up a VPN to separate the Exchange server from external access.

Reference: u’Buffer overflow can happen as part of SIP message packet processing while storing values in array due to lack of check to validate the index length’ in Snapdragon Auto, Snapdragon Compute, …….

Official announcement – https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2021-26857

Potential Risk of CVE, Public safety, Virus & Malware

To avoid malware misuse “PACKET_MMAP” function,from Linux environment. CISA Releases Free Detection Tool for Azure/M365 Environment (29th Dec 2020)

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Preface: Neither shellcode or shellcode injection have anything to do with shell scripting. It is a sophisticated way of finding a vulnerable spot on the cyber security layer of an organization and exploiting it for malicious purposes.

Background: Azure Sphere is a secured, high-level application platform with built-in communication and security features for internet-connected devices. The platform consists of the integration of hardware built around a secured silicon chip; the Azure Sphere OS (operating system), a custom high-level Linux-based operating system; and the Azure Sphere Security Service, a cloud-based security service….

About “PACKET_MMAP” function: From official article, it illustrated below:
PACKET_MMAP provides a size configurable circular buffer mapped in user space that can be used to either send or receive packets. However a design weakness has occured! The mmap‘ed memory buffer will be filled by the kernel when using PACKET_RX_RING. As a result, the user’s process, it’s enough to mmap a buffer with PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC permissions flags, and let the kernel fill the buffer.

Remedy: Perhaps shellcode injection sometimes can evade your malware protection mechanism. In certain point of view, use SIEM is one of the cost effective solution. Meanwhile, CISA Releases Free Detection Tool for Azure/M365 Environment. Reference link – https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/current-activity/2020/12/24/cisa-releases-free-detection-tool-azurem365-environment

Public safety, Under our observation, Virus & Malware

New variant of the Zebrocy (smqft_exe & sespmw_exe). They are design to perform various functions on the compromised system, said USCERT (3rd Nov 2020)

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Preface: Some expert comment that because of Go language programming file will be large than usual. It might have possibilities to evade virus scanning. So malware author like to use. Perhaps this is not the major factor.

Background: In July 2019, a security researcher found nearly 10,700 unique samples of malware written in Go programming language, also known as GoLang.
According to the analysis conducted by Imperva. As of 2019 37.97% attack use Python language develop the tool and 31.53% was used Go language. Go language really a compiler (in fact it embeds 2 compilers) and it makes totally self sufficient executable. You don’t need any supplementary library or any kind of runtime to execute it on your server.

Technical highlights: Go or Golang attempts to reclaim the memory occupied by other objects that are no longer needed which makes Go a highly garbage collected language. Because of this reclaim feature, so it is easy to let antivirus/malware detection screw up.

Official details: If you are interested in the above matters. Please refer to the link – https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/analysis-reports/ar20-303b

Public safety

Boeing, U.S. regulator made series of errors ahead of 737 Max crashes: congressional report (SeP 2020)

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Preface: From logical point of view, if input only relies on a standalone source (sensor). The integrity of the result all relies on the total amount of variable factors. Perhaps sensor install on airplane is a IoT device. So it lure my interest.

Background: Traditionally the older (NG) 737 variants did not have fly-by-wire technology, and autopilot could be overridden and turned off simply by putting manual pressure on the yoke.

Software that talks to computer like airplanes equipment is often written in a programming language called C. The names of files written in C code usually have .c at the end. This assumes that the MCAS software is contained a file called mcas.c. But this time there was no cyber attack. This is a problem caused by human error.

For the 737 Max crashes (congressional report). Please refer to headline news – https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-congress-boeing-crash-report-1.5725876

Cause of incident: In the case of the Lion Air crash, the sensor malfunctioned and caused the flight computer to push the nose down when the flight was level.

From technical point of view, the sensor is IoT device. There are facilities can avoid such disaster happen. Conceptually, even a simple xor gate with two input. Or the combination of NAND gates equivalent a XOR gate setup. The essential of objectives is the suitable logic apply to the Logic Circuit. Whereby, the output is dependant at all times on the combination of its inputs. It simple to say it is the logic design.

Public safety, Under our observation

APT developing new evasion technique to conducting cyber attack – 23rd Sep 2020

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Preface: The APT organization provides a hard-to-detect malware to attack other hostile campus.

Synopsis: The evasion technique found recently by security expert team is that APT 29 exploit the design weakness of detection machanism. They do a re-engineering to covert a zip file to JPEG.
“This technique works because JPEG files are parsed from the beginning of the file and some Zip implementations parse Zip files from the end of the file (since the index is located there) without looking at the signature in the front,” the researchers explain.

Perhaps APT 28 and 29 using different evasion technique aim to delivery the malicious resources to landing. Whereby, the final executor is the power shell.

So called Zebrocy. Its function is mainly Downloader. The evasion effect is better than the technique use by APT 29. After running, it will perform a persistence operation and pop up an error message box to confuse the user. When it is started with specific parameters, a screenshot will be taken. Through the timer callback function, send data to the remote server and wait for the subsequent payload to be downloaded.

Should you disable PowerShell?
No, minimize the risks with PowerShell Constrained Language mode.

Enabling Constrained Language mode ^
PS C:\Users\xxxx> $ExecutionContext.SessionState.LanguageMode = “ConstrainedLanguage”

This could be configured in registry HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SESSION MANAGER\Environment__PSLockdownPolicy .

Running PS as Admin you can simple remove this property
Remove-ItemProperty -path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment\” -name __PSLockdownPolicy

Recommended article: PSLockDownPolicy and PowerShell Constrained Language Mode – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/kfalde/pslockdownpolicy-and-powershell-constrained-language-mode