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.

















































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Query, Visualize, & Monitor Data in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Azure Sentinel Workbooks Several ready for use templates are provided by the Azure Sentinel that can be used to create your own workbook and then modify them as needed for Contoso. Most of the data connectors it uses to ingest data come with their own workbooks, but better insight can be obtained by simply looking into the data that is being ingested by using tables and visualizations, including bar and pie charts. You can also make your own workbook easily by using this data from the beginning instead of using the predefined templates. Workbook Page You can easily access the workbook page from the Azure Sentinel from the navigation pane which consists of the: Workbook header- You can add a new workbook and review the saved workbooks as well as templates that are available on the workbook page. Templates section- You can access existing workbook templates on the Templates tab. You can save some of the workbooks for quick access and they will appear on the My Workbooks tab.  From the
Read more

Planning for Implementing SAP Solutions on Azure (Part 2 of 5)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 1 please click  here To read part 3 please click  here To read part 4 please click  here To read part 5 please click  here Load Balancing The load balancer uses probe ports to determine as well as route the traffic to an active DBMS node, but of there's any failover then the most common SAP application architecture can automatically reconnect against the private virtual IP address without the need for the SAP application to reconfigure it, while the load balancer redirect the traffic against the private virtual IP address without any need for the SAP application to reconfigure. The loaf balancer also offers an option of DirectServerReturn which if configured, can help in directing the traffic from the DBMS VM to the SAP application layer directly to the application layer without routing through the load balancer. But, if it isn't configured, then the return traffic to the SAP application layer is routed through the load balancer. You can also use Azure Load Balan
Read more

Work with String Data Using KQL Statements

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Extract Data from Unstructured String Fields Unstructured string fields often contains the Security log data and requires parsing to extract data. There are multiple ways of pulling information from string fields in KQL and the two primary operators used are extract and parse.  Extract It gets a match for a regular expression from a text string. You can convert the extracted substring to the indicated type.  Arguments regex- A regular expression. captureGroup- A positive int constant indicating the capture group to extract. 0 stands for the entire match, 1 for the value matched by the first '('parenthesis')' in the regular expression, 2 or more for subsequent parenthesis.  text- A string to search. typeLiteral- An optional type literal. If provided, the extracted substring is converted to this type.  Returns If regex finds a match in text- the substring matched against the indicated capture group captureGroup, optionally converted to typeLiteral. If there's no mat
Read more