Security News for the Week Ending Jan 1, 2021

Happy New Year. May 2021 be more sane than 2020.

Microsoft Says Goal of Solar Winds Attack Was Your Cloud Data

Microsoft says that the objective of the Solar Winds Hackers was to get into a number of organizations and then pick and choose which ones to attack, leaving the back door in place at the others for future operations. One way to do that was to generate SAML login tokens from inside the network and then use those tokens to gain access to cloud resources, including, but not limited to email. The article also provides more information on how to detect if the hackers did compromise your cloud resources. Credit: Bleeping Computer

“Swatting” Moves to the Next Level

Swatting, the practice of calling in a fake 911 call so that SWAT teams are deployed to the victim’s location based on, say, a fake kidnapping, are moving to the next level. As if having the police show up unexpected with lots of guns and breaking down your door isn’t bad enough, now the perpetrators are taking advantage of the fact that people choose crappy passwords and are watching and listening to the police assault on the victim’s own smart devices. On occasion, the situation becomes deadly when the police, not really knowing what to believe, shoot the victim. On rare occasions, the swatters, as they are called, are caught and prosecuted. Credit: Bleeping Computer

I Think The Wasabi Got a Little Too Hot

Wasabi, the cloud storage competitor to Amazon S3 that claims that it is significantly cheaper than Amazon and 99.999999999% reliable just got a little less reliable. Their domain registrar notified them of some malware hosted on one of their domains. Only they sent the email to the wrong email address. The registrar, following normal procedures, suspended their domain for not responding to an email they never got, knocking many of their customers offline.

After Wasabi discovered they had been DDoSed by their domain registrar, they suspended the offending customer and asked to get their domain back. That process took over 13 hours. Are you ready for this kind of attack from your suppliers?

That attack probably knocked several of those 9’s off their reliability, depending on how the mess with the data.

Credit: Bleeping Computer

Solar Winds Troubles Are Not Over

A second piece of malware called SUPERNOVA and a zero-day vulnerability that it exploited makes it look like there may have been a second attack against Solar Winds. This appears to be a separate attack from the Russian attack. The attack vector is different too – this is not an attack against Solar Winds code base. This spells additional trouble for Solar Winds. Credit: Security Week

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