Ethical Hacking

Hackers are stepping up attacks on health care systems with ransomware in the United States and other countries, creating new risks for medical care as the global coronavirus pandemic accelerates. Alerts from US authorities and security researchers highlight a wave of cyberattacks on hospitals coping with rising virus infections. An unusual warning this week from the FBI with the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, underscored the threat. The three agencies “have credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and health care providers,” said the alert issued Wednesday, calling on health systems to “take timely and reasonable precautions to protect their networks from these threats.”

            Ransomware is a longstanding security issue and health care has been a frequent target. A September attack disrupted Universal Health Services, which operates hospitals in the US and Britain. But security experts say the attacks are accelerating as the pandemic worsens. Researchers at the security firm Check Point said its survey showed health care has been the most targeted industry by ransomware, with a 71 percent jump in attacks on US providers in October from a month earlier. Check Point said there have been significant rises in ransomware attacks on hospitals in Asia, Europe and the Middle East as well. Globally, the firm said ransomware attacks were up 50 percent in the third quarter compared with the first half of this year . Many of the attacks use a strain of ransomware known as Ryuk, which security researchers say may be tied to North Korean or Russian cybercriminals. The US government warning said health organizations are being targeted by phishing attacks to get access to the systems, with hackers using sophisticated tools including TrickBot software which can harvest credentials and exfiltrate data. The Canadian government’s Cyber Centre issued a similar warning in early October, warning of Ryuk ransomware “affecting multiple entities, including municipal governments and public health and safety organizations in Canada and abroad. “The ransomware problem is steadily worsening and a solution desperately needs to be found,” said Brett Callow of the security firm Emsisoft”.

US Healthcare providers have been warned that Trickbot malware and ransomware is targeting the sector.  Trickbot emerged in 2016 as a banking trojan but evolved into a multi-purpose malware downloader that infected systems that were sold on to other criminal groups as a service.  Trickbot developers created Anchor_DNS, a tool for sending and receiving data from victim machines using Domain Name System (DNS) tunneling.

The Anchor_DNS backdoor forces infected PCs to communicate with command-and-control servers over DNS to bypass network defense products and hide malicious communications with legitimate DNS traffic.  Anchor_DNS uses a single-byte XOR cipher to encrypt its communications, which have been observed using key 0xB9. Once decrypted, the string Anchor_DNS can be found in the DNS request traffic.  CISA has now listed several indicators of compromise that security teams should look for.  It notes that the Trickbot malware for Windows copies itself as an executable file with a 12-character (includes .exe), randomly generated filename – for example, mfjdieks.exe – and places this file in the directories, C:\Windows\, C:\Windows\SysWOW64\, and C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-warning-trickbot-and-ransomware-attackers-plan-big-hit-on-us-hospitals/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

Readings this week had a concentration in Burp Suite and injection attacks.  Injection attacks have dominated the top of web application vulnerability lists for much of the past decade.  XSS remains the most prevalent vulnerability, while SQL injection is the most often exploited of these vulnerabilities.  Injection attacks are preferred by malicious users as a way to obtain restricted data from a back end database or to embed malicious code onto a web server that will in turn serve up malware to unsuspecting clients.

Questions for the class:

What is an example of a SQLi?  Meaning what input would the attacker put in the URL to try a SQLi?