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CLOUD SECURITY: PROTECTING YOUR CLOUD-BASED IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Stephen Coty Chief Security Evangelist

Threats in the Cloud are Increasing With Adoption

•  Increase in attack frequency

•  Traditional on-premises threats are moving to the cloud

•  Majority of cloud incidents were related to web application attacks, brute force attacks, and vulnerability scans

•  Brute force attacks and vulnerability scans are now occurring at near-equivalent rates in both cloud and on-premises environments

•  Malware/Botnet is increasing year over year

Cloud Attacks With the Biggest Change

•  Cloud environments saw significant increases with brute force attacks climbing from 30% to 44% of customers, and vulnerability scans increasing from 27% to 44%

•  Malware/botnet attacks, historically the most common attacks in the on-premises datacenter, are on the rise in CHP environments

Honeypots Designs

• The honeypot data cited was gathered using •  Low-interaction – Simulates high level services

•  Medium Interaction – Delivers form pages and collects Keystrokes

•  SCADA – Simulates a (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system

•  Web application software that emulates a vulnerable OS and application

• Fictitious business domains have been created to redirect traffic to what would be considered a legitimate business

• These particular honeypots monitored connections to common ports and gathered statistics on IP, country, and malware, if submitted

Honeypot Findings

•  Highest volume of attacks occurred in Europe

•  Attacks against Microsoft DS accounted for over 51% of the overall attack vectors

•  Database services have been a consistent target

•  14% of the malware loaded on the Honeypots was considered undetectable by AV

•  Underscores the importance of a defense in depth strategy for the need to secure your enterprise and cloud infrastructure

Global Analysis

Industry Analysis - Financial

Industry Analysis - Healthcare

Emerging Groups

Tools of the Trade

HOW DO WE DEFEND AGAINST THESE ATTACKS

Security Architecture

Firewall/ACL Intrusion Detection

Deep Packet Forensics

Network DDOS

Netflow Analysis

Backup

Patch Mgmt Vulnerabilities

Server/App

Log Mgmt SDLC

Anti-Virus Encryption GPG/PGP

Host Anti Malware

FIM

NAC Scanner

Mail/Web Filter Scanner

IAM Central Storage

Data Correlation is the Key

Content is King alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> any any (msg:"Heartbleed Scan Detected - Heartbeat"; flow:to_server,established; content:"|00 0f|"; rawbytes; classtype:successful-recon-limited; sid:4560000004; rev:1;) alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> any any (msg:"Heartbleed Scan Detected - Metasploit - Pattern 1"; flow:to_server,established; content:"|18 03 02 00 03 01|"; rawbytes; classtype:heartbleed-information-leak; sid:4560000005; rev:1;) alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> any any (msg:"Heartbleed Scan Detected - Mal Pattern 2"; flow:to_server,established; content:"|18 03 01 00 03 01|"; rawbytes; classtype:heartbleed-information-leak; sid:4560000006; rev:1;) alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> any any (msg:"Heartbleed Scan Detected - Mal Pattern 3"; flow:to_server,established; content:"|18 03 03 00 03 01|"; rawbytes; classtype:heartbleed-information-leak; sid:4560000007; rev:1;)

THREAT INTELLIGENCE

Why Honeypots?

Honeypots give us a unique data set Simulates vulnerable systems without the risk of real data loss Gives the ability to collect intelligence from malicious attackers Allows for collection of various different attacks based on system Helps identify what industry specific targets are out there

Samples of Malware detected

If an attacker were using the collected malware to launch an attack against an individual or an enterprise it would be theoretically run in this order. 1.  Ping Sweep 2.  Port Reconnaissance 3.  Exploit a Vulnerability 4.  Check for Shares or Networked Drives 5.  Load Malware 6.  Load Worm 7.  Load Remote Access Trojan for full Control

Partnering with other Researchers

Associations

Monitoring the Social Media Accounts

Following IRC and Forums

Tracking and Predicting the Next Move

•  He is a guy from a European country/ (Russia) •  His handle or nick is madd3 •  Using ICQ 416417 as a tool of communication (illegal

transaction) •  A simple /whois command to the nick provided us with

good information •  85.17.139.13 (Leaseweb) •  ircname : John Smith •  channels : #chatroom •  server : irc.private-life.biz [Life Server] •  Check this out user has another room. #attackroom4 •  We can confirm that Athena version 2.3.5 is being use

to attack other sites. •  2,300 infected Users •  Cracked Software is available in forums •  As of today 1 BTC to $618.00 or £361.66

Forums to Follow – darkode.com & exploit.in- Russian

CLOUD SECURITY BEST PRACTICES

Cloud Environments 101

How the Hypervisor functions •  In this model the processor provides 4 levels, also known as rings, which are arranged in a

hierarchical fashion from Ring 0 to Ring 3. Only 0, 1 and 3 have privilege, some kernel designs demote curtain privileged components to ring 2

•  The operating system runs in ring 0 with the operating system kernel controlling access to the underlying hardware

•  To assist virtualization, VT and Pacifica insert a new privilege level beneath Ring 0. Both add nine new machine code instructions that only work at "Ring -1," intended to be used by the hypervisor

Cloud Server Architecture

• VM Servers are designed so that the hypervisor (or monitor, or Virtual Machine Manager) is the only fully privileged entity in the system, and has an extremely small footprint.

•  It controls only the most basic resources of the system, including CPU and memory usage, privilege checks, and hardware interrupts

Nine Best Practices of Cloud Security

1.  Secure your code 2.  Create access management policies 3.  Adopt a patch management approach 4.  Review logs regularly 5.  Build a security toolkit 6.  Stay informed of the latest vulnerabilities that may affect you 7.  Understand your cloud service providers security model 8.  Understand the shared security responsibility 9.  Know your adversaries

1. Secure Your Code

• Test inputs that are open to the Internet • Add delays to your code to confuse bots • Use encryption when you can • Test libraries • Scan plugins • Scan your code after every update • Limit privileges • Stay informed

2. Create Access Management Policies

•  Identify data infrastructure that requires access • Define roles and responsibilities • Simplify access controls (KISS) • Continually audit access • Start with a least privilege access model

3. Adopt a Patch Management Approach

•  Inventory all production systems • Devise a plan for standardization, if possible • Compare reported vulnerabilities to production infrastructure • Classify the risk based on vulnerability and likelihood • Test patches before you release into production • Setup a regular patching schedule • Keep informed, follow bugtraqer • Follow a SDLC

4. Importance of Log Management and Review

• Monitoring for malicious activity • Forensic investigations • Compliance needs • System performance

• All sources of log data is collected • Data types (Windows, Syslog) • Review process •  Live monitoring • Correlation logic

5. Build a Security Toolkit

• Recommended Security Solutions •  Antivirus •  IP tables/Firewall •  Backups •  FIM •  Intrusion Detection System •  Malware Detection •  Web Application Firewalls •  Anomaly behavior via netflow •  Future Deep Packet Forensics

6. Stay Informed of the Latest Vulnerabilities

• Websites to follow •  http://www.securityfocus.com •  http://www.exploit-db.com •  http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/ •  http://www.securitybloggersnetwork.com/ •  http://cve.mitre.org/ •  http://nvd.nist.gov/ •  https://www.alertlogic.com/weekly-threat-report/

7. Understand Your Cloud Service Providers Security Model

• Review of Service Provider Responsibilities • Hypervisor Example • Questions to use when evaluating cloud service providers

8. Service Provider & Customer Responsibility Summary

Cloud Service Provider

Responsibility

Provider Services

Hosts

•  Logical network segmentation •  Perimeter security services •  External DDoS, spoofing, and scanning prevented

•  Hardened hypervisor •  System image library •  Root access for customer

•  Access management •  Patch management •  Configuration hardening •  Security monitoring •  Log analysis

Apps

•  Secure coding and best practices •  Software and virtual patching •  Configuration management

•  Access management •  Application level attack monitoring

•  Network threat detection

•  Security monitoring Networks

Customer Responsibility

Compute Storage DB Network

9. Understand your Adversaries

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EXAMPLES OF SHARED RESPONSIBILITIES

Cloud Server Architecture

• VM Servers are designed so that the hypervisor (or monitor, or Virtual Machine Manager) is the only fully privileged entity in the system, and has an extremely small footprint.

•  It controls only the most basic resources of the system, including CPU and memory usage, privilege checks, and hardware interrupts

How the Hypervisor functions •  In this model the processor provides 4 levels, also known as rings, which are arranged in a

hierarchical fashion from Ring 0 to Ring 3. Only 0, 1 and 3 have privilege, some kernel designs demote curtain privileged components to ring 2

•  The operating system runs in ring 0 with the operating system kernel controlling access to the underlying hardware

•  To assist virtualization, VT and Pacifica insert a new privilege level beneath Ring 0. Both add nine new machine code instructions that only work at "Ring -1," intended to be used by the hypervisor

Exploitation of the Hypervisor – CVE-2014-1666 •  The PHYSDEVOP_{prepare,release}_msix operations are supposed to be controlled by dom0 access as it allows access to

host and other vm's controlled by the host, but the necessary privilege level check was missing •  Two different functions were added to Xen in physdevop to manage resources for allocation and deallocation of msi-x devices •  This can easily result in malicious or misbehaving unprivileged guests, causing the host or other guests to malfunction. This

can result in host-wide denial of service of all the vm’s and the host itself •  In physdev.c the attacker has a function:

•  ret_t do_physdev_op(int cmd, XEN_GUEST_HANDLE_PARAM(void) arg) •  This has a command in switch/case values which lead us to:

Exploitation of the Hypervisor – CVE-2014-1666 •  Knowing the attacker has seg, bus, and devfn, functions are now being passed to pci_prepare_msix which is Figure 1 •  The attacker first has to pass the pos check for pci_find_cap_offset. If there's nothing there then they have to pass the pci_get_pdev

check

Figure 1 Check out pci_find_cap_offset

Application Exploitation – Without Secure Coding

WordPress: 162,000 legitimate sites used for DDos attack • Exploited the XML-RPC Protocol • Pingback enabled sites were exploited

- Trackback - Pingbacks - Remote Access via mobile devices

• Generated over 24 million hits at a rate of 3,000 hits per second • Random query of “?4137049=643182” bypasses cache and forces

full page reloads • Check logs for POST requests to the XML-RPC file

Application Exploitation – Without Secure Coding

•  This June 0Day allows an attacker to remotely remove and modify files stored on the server without authentication

•  TimThumb ,written by Ben Gilbanks, is a simple, flexible, PHP script that resizes images. You give it a bunch of parameters, and it spits out a thumbnail image that you can display on your site.

•  Looking at the type of vulnerabilities that hackers were trying to exploit, we saw a clear preference for Remote File Inclusion vulnerabilities, which accounted for 96% of all vulnerability types

•  Patch was released in Q3

Source: WhiteHat Security

To Follow our Research •  Twitter:

-  @AlertLogic -  @StephenCoty

•  Blog: -  https://www.alertlogic.com/resources/blog

•  Newsletter: -  https://www.alertlogic.com/weekly-threat-report/

•  Cloud Security Report -  https://www.alertlogic.com/resources/cloud-security-report/

•  Zero Day Magazine -  http://www.alertlogic.com/zerodaymagazine/

•  Websites to follow •  http://www.securityfocus.com •  http://www.exploit-db.com •  http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/ •  http://www.securitybloggersnetwork.com/ •  http://cve.mitre.org/ •  http://nvd.nist.gov/ •  https://www.alertlogic.com/weekly-threat-report/

THANK YOU