Cybersecurity and Third-Party Risk. Gregory C. Rasner
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from the top‐tier security company FireEye. As of the time of this writing, it has been confirmed to have affected dozens of U.S. cabinet‐level agencies. Due to the pervasiveness of the SolarWinds product across the world, more breaches will be discovered in the following days, weeks, months, and years to come. Some may never be discovered (or admitted); however, there will be international victims. It is a coup for the suspected perpetrators, thought to be a state actor who used a supply side attack, exploiting the weakness of a popular network and monitoring tool, SolarWinds, to circumvent the tight defenses of the intended victims.
On December 18th, Microsoft released information identifying more than 40 government agencies, higher learning institutions, Non‐Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and information technology companies that were infiltrated, with four‐fifths of them being U.S.‐based, and nearly half of those being tech companies. On his blog, Brad Smith said
This is not “espionage as usual,” even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world. While the most recent attack appears to reflect a particular focus on the United States and many other democracies, it also provides a powerful reminder that people in virtually every country are at risk and need protection irrespective of the governments they live under.
One act of recklessness that he refers to is that this pervasive software, SolarWinds Orion, was clearly not performing its own due diligence and due care to protect itself and its customers, and this product is used by nearly everyone. Further recklessness was that all the customers of SolarWinds were not performing at expectations for cybersecurity's best practice.
If customers had performed some key cybersecurity assessment on a third‐party software maker like SolarWinds, this attack could have been detected. Were intake questions asked about the type of data to which SolarWinds had access and where that data might go or be stored? Depending on a company's solution type, asking questions about how the secure software development lifecycle is managed and audited is considered to be appropriate.
With the hardware device, what was SolarWind's supply chain security for the hardware parts and assembly? For the company that had ventured to perform an on‐site cybersecurity physical validation of SolarWinds, was any evidence produced on how they performed external security scans (which might have detected the default password on their download page “SolarWinds123”)? Who performed these external scans? The company? Or did they hire an outside firm and were the results viewable? Often, such companies will not share these results, so you must negotiate to at least see the Table of Contents, who performed such security scans, and when.
Final question: Had SolarWinds remediated all the findings in the external security scan? While this is not the first time a breach has occurred, the scale of the SolarWinds breach will dwarf all others.
The VGCA Supply‐Chain Attack
On December 17, 2020, ESET Research announced it had detected a large supply‐chain attack against the digital signing authority of the government of Vietnam (ca.gov.vn), the website for the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA), which is part of the Government Cipher Committee under the Ministry of Information and Communication. Vietnam has made the digital leap, and almost anyone in the country who requires a government service, product, or approval is required to use a digital signature. These e‐signatures have the same authority and enforceability as a traditional paper document autograph according to government decree.
The VGCA also develops and makes available for download a toolkit to automate the process of e‐signatures. This toolkit is widely used by the government, private companies, and individuals. VGCA's website was hacked as early as July 23rd, and no later than August 16, 2020. The compromised toolkits contained malware known as PhantomNet, and SManager ESET confirms that the files were downloaded from the VGCA website directly, and not the result of a redirect from another location. While these infected files were not signed with proper digital certificates, it appears that prior files were not correctly signed either. This may have led to users not rejecting the improper digital certificates of the trojan‐infected files because they behaved the same before the malware was added.
When an infected file was downloaded and run, the correct VGCA program ran along with the malware. This masqueraded the trojan to the end user because they saw the normal program running correctly, being unaware of the trojan or unlikely to look for it because the program appeared to be running normally. The file eToken.exe extracted a Windows cabinet file (.cab), which was used as an archive file to support compression and maintain archive integrity. The file 7z.cab was the file that contained a backdoor for the attackers to exploit. The attackers went to great lengths to ensure that the backdoor ran, regardless of the user's privileges on the device.
If the 7z.cab file was able to run as an administrator on the machine, the program wrote the backdoor to c:\Windows\appatch\netapi32.dll, which then registered it as a service to ensure it kept running after any reboot. On a device that only allowed the file to run as a normal user, the install placed it in a temporary directory, but the program scheduled a task to ensure its persistence. ESET named this backdoor PhantomNet. They mentioned that the victim list included the Philippines, but no evidence was found of a delivery mechanism.
The trojan was determined to be a simple program, and according to the sophistication of the attack, it is likely there were other more malicious plugins added to exploit the backdoor. When the victim's web configuration was determined, then it reached out to a command and control (C&C) server to get instructions. Communications with the C&C servers was done over HTTPS (secure, encrypted web traffic), and the attackers went to the trouble of preventing the interception of traffic (i.e., man‐in‐the‐middle attack on their own data) by using their own certificates.
Data analysis indicates that the malware was used for lateral movement. Once inside the computer, it enabled the attacker to move around the network for other data. The malware collected and transferred information about the computer, user accounts, and victim. In the post‐attack forensics, no data was discovered nor was the goal of the attack.
ESET wrote on its website:
Conclusion: With the compromise of Able Desktop, the attack on WIZVERA VeraPort by Lazarus and the recent supply‐chain attack on SolarWinds Orion, we see that supply‐chain attacks are a quite common compromise vector for cyberespionage groups. In this specific case, they compromised the website of a Vietnamese certificate authority, in which users are likely to have a high level of trust. Supply‐chain attacks are typically hard to find, as the malicious code is generally hidden among a lot of legitimate code, making its discovery significantly more difficult.
The Zyxel Backdoor Attack
On January 2, 2020, Zyxel (networking device maker) announced over 100,000 of their firewalls, VPN gateways, and access point controllers (i.e., Wi‐Fi controllers) contained a hardcoded administrator backdoor account, which gives root‐level access (i.e., a super administrator that can do anything on the device) on both the secure shell (SSH) and web administrator portal. This is on top of a previous similar incident with Zyxel in 2016, where they had a backdoor that allowed any user to escalate their account to root‐level account privileges. This backdoor is still being exploited by botnets to this day, four years later.
A hardcoded backdoor root account is one that cannot be underestimated in how critical the security flaw is. When an account is built within the code of a product, it cannot be removed unless the code itself is changed or updated by the manufacturer. Additionally, the root account is what is referred to as a “super user,” which has privileges as an administrator. The products affected the manufacturers Advanced Threat Protection (i.e., firewall), Unified Security Gateway (i.e., hybrid firewall/virtual private network [VPN] gateway), USG FLEX (i.e., hybrid firewall/VPN gateway), VPN, and NXC (i.e., Wi‐Fi access point controller) series. These devices formed the perimeter and internal security control points for thousands of companies worldwide. The attacker's ability to exploit these network