Understanding Attacks Linked to APT33

By Ashwin Venugopal -




 

To know more about it, you can go through my detailed document by clicking here









Overview

It is suspected to be an Iranian cyber espionage threat group, active since 2013. There main targets have been the multiple aviation and energy sectors of USA, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, etc. They are also known as Refined Kitten by Crowdstrike, Magnallium by Dragos, and Holmium by Microsoft.

Targets

APT33 has targeted multiple industries through various techniques:

  • Spear Phishing- They can send corrupted emails to an employee of the targeted industry with a link seemingly showing a job description or any other information relevant to the individual. They have sent hundreds of these type of emails to the targeted individuals in 2016.

  • Domain Masquerading- APT33 may masquerade as a domain of the organizations (like Saudi Arabia's aviation company and a western company) who are in a type of partnership in order to train, maintain, and support Saudi's military and commercial fleet.  They can also use these domains to send spear phishing emails to the targeted victim.

As per the type of attacks by APT33, the threat group is always looking for some strategic intelligence to benefit the military or government and we can expect that these activities may continue to grow according to Iranian interests.

Remedy

Modernization of everything has made it a challenging task to secure an organization's cyberspace from many serious issues or attacks. However, following methods may prove helpful in this regard:

  • Regular patching or update of all systems. 

  • Employees should be made aware of all the latest techniques used by the cybercriminals.

  • Least privilege policy should be applied to easily manage in-and-out traffic by an IT administrator.

  • Multilayer protection system should be installed in order to detect as well as block all the malicious attacks from the gateway to the endpoint.









To know more about it, you can go through my detailed document by clicking here









































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deployment (Part 3)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 1, please click  here To read part 2, please click  here Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) MMA is used across multiple Microsoft solutions and has undergone a few name changes as its features and functionality have evolved. If it is being considered to be used, then following areas should be covered during a Microsoft Sentinel deployment project: Consider the timelines and the strategy for a migration to AMA (Azure Monitor Agent) before the MMA end-of-life.  Consider the central deployment and management methodology for MMA. Determine which endpoints are in scope for deployment as these affect the log ingestion volume significantly.  Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) Organizations with MMA as the main Microsoft Sentinel agent should start planning the migration to AMA as soon as possible to avoid a rushed migration. One of the main advantages of AMA is the ability to control the log collection policy centrally and apply different policies against different...
Read more

Deployment (Part 1)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 2, please click  here To read part 3, please click  here Azure Resources Microsoft Sentinel needs following resources to be created: Subscription (if a dedicated subscription(s) will be used) Resource group(s) Log Analytics workspace(s) Automation rules/playbook Alert rules Workbooks Microsoft Sentinel offers hundreds of alert rules, workbooks, and automation playbook templates along with hunting scripts. The templates can be used to activate/deploy schedule alerts, create customized dashboards, create automation playbooks and perform threat-hunting activities. Generally, once deployed, the resources created have to be adjusted to match the existing environment, configure local credentials, etc. Methods of deployment: Manual- Administrator can manually configures the Microsoft Sentinel resources with the help of Azure portal. Any manual process has the inherent risks of human operator error, lack of compliance with potential change control procedures, and u...
Read more

Project Resourcing (Part 2)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 1, please click  here Engineering - SIEM The SIEM engineers configures Microsoft Sentinel, including Log Analytics, Logic Apps, workbooks, and playbooks. They are also responsible for the following high-level tasks: Initial configuration of Azure tenant, including provisioning required resources, assigning access roles, and configuring workspace parameters like log retention, resource tagging, and blueprints.  Deployment and configuration of syslog/CEF log collection agents in appropriate locations to collect logs from on-premises devices. Generally, it will be joint effort of both system engineer and SIEM engineer, involving configuration and potential troubleshooting.  Working with system owners to enable log forwarding and configuring any required parsing of log data in Log Analytics.  Working with security operations to create and deploy KQL analytic rules to offer detections for SOC/Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSRIT) use. Tuning...
Read more