Volt Typhoon

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 







About

Volt Typhoon is a Chinese-backed cyber espionage group, targeting legacy Cisco devices and expanded its attack infrastructure in a sophisticated and systematic campaign. As of now, it has compromised about 30% of the Cisco legacy routers on a SOHO botnet, used by multiple threat groups.

They targets the critical infrastructure via the exploitation of the target's vulnerabilities and insert themselves into the victims' devices to take control of everything.

Targets

Volt Typhoon has successfully entered into the US critical infrastructure organizations, thus indicating a potential future disruption. The targeted attacks includes water utilities, power suppliers, transportation, and communication systems of the countries like the US, UK, and Australia. 

How does Volt Typhoon works?

The initial access is achieved via internet-facing Fortinet FortiGuard Devices. They leverage any type of privileges offered by these devices to extract credentials to an Active Directory account and then try to authenticate the other devices on the network with the help of those credentials. 

After that, Volt Typhoon proxies all its network traffic to its targets through compromised SOHO network edge devices. Proxying of these devices allows them to enhance the stealth of their operations and lowers overhead costs for acquiring infrastructure. 

Volt Typhoon rarely uses malware in their post-compromise activity. They generally rely on living-off-the-land commands to find information, discover additional devices on the network, and exfiltrate data.

Protection

  • Owners of the network edge devices should ensure that management interfaces are not exposed to the public internet to reduce their attack surface.

  • Enforce strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies with the help of hardware security keys or Microsoft Authenticator. 

  • Reduce the attack surface by turning on the attack surface reduction rules to block or audit some observed activity associated with this threat.

  • Turn-on cloud-delivered protection in Microsoft Defender Antivirus to cover rapidly evolving attacker tools, techniques, and behaviors.

  • Run Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) in block mode. In this way, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint can block malicious artifacts that are detected post-compromise.

















































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