Tag Archives: Global Cyber Attack

Oddities in WannaCry ransomware puzzle cybersecurity researchers

Cables and computers are seen inside a data centre at an office in the heart of the financial district in London, Britain May 15, 2017. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez

By Jeremy Wagstaff

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The WannaCry malware that spread to more than 100 countries in a few hours is throwing up several surprises for cybersecurity researchers, including how it gained its initial foothold, how it spread so fast and why the hackers are not making much money from it.

Some researchers have found evidence they say could link North Korea with the attack, but others are more cautious, saying that the first step is shedding light on even the most basic questions about the malware itself.

For one thing, said IBM Security’s Caleb Barlow, researchers are still unsure exactly how the malware spread in the first place. Most cybersecurity companies have blamed phishing e-mails – e-mails containing malicious attachments or links to files – that download the ransomware.

That’s how most ransomware finds its way onto victims’ computers.

The problem in the WannaCry case is that despite digging through the company’s database of more than 1 billion e-mails dating back to March 1, Barlow’s team could find none linked to the attack.

“Once one victim inside a network is infected it propagates,” Boston-based Barlow said in a phone interview, describing a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that allows the worm to move from one computer to another.

The NSA used the Microsoft flaw to build a hacking tool codenamed EternalBlue that ended up in the hands of a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers, which then published that and other such tools online.

But the puzzle is how the first person in each network was infected with the worm. “It’s statistically very unusual that we’d scan and find no indicators,” Barlow said.

Other researchers agree. “Right now there is no clear indication of the first compromise for WannaCry,” said Budiman Tsjin of RSA Security, a part of Dell.

Knowing how malware infects and spreads is key to being able to stop existing attacks and anticipate new ones. “How the hell did this get on there, and could this be repeatedly used again?” said Barlow.

PALTRY RANSOM

Some cybersecurity companies, however, say they’ve found a few samples of the phishing e-mails. FireEye said it was aware customers had used its reports to successfully identify some associated with the attack.

But the company agrees that the malware relied less on phishing e-mails than other attacks. Once a certain number of infections was established, it was able to use the Microsoft vulnerability to propagate without their help.

There are other surprises, that suggest this is not an ordinary ransomware attack.

Only paltry sums were collected by the hackers, according to available evidence, mostly in the bitcoin cryptocurrency.

There were only three bitcoin wallets and the campaign has far earned only $50,000 or so, despite the widespread infections. Barlow said that single payments in some other ransomware cases were more than that, depending on the victim.

Jonathan Levin of Chainalysis, which monitors bitcoin payments, said there were other differences compared to most ransomware campaigns: for instance the lack of sophisticated methods used in previous cases to convince victims to pay up. In the past, this has included hot lines in various languages.

And so far, Levin said, the bitcoin that had been paid into the attackers’ wallets remained there – compared to another campaign, known as Locky, which made $15 million while regularly emptying the bitcoin wallets.

“They really aren’t set up well to handle their bitcoin payments,” Levin said.

The lack of sophistication may bolster those cybersecurity researchers who say they have found evidence that could link North Korea to the attack.

A senior researcher from South Korea’s Hauri Labs, Simon Choi, said on Tuesday the reclusive state had been developing and testing ransomware programs only since August. In one case, the hackers demanded bitcoin in exchange for client information they had stolen from a South Korean shopping mall.

Choi, who has done extensive research into North Korea’s hacking capabilities, said his findings matched those of Symantec and Kaspersky Lab, who say some code in an earlier version of the WannaCry software had also appeared in programs used by the Lazarus Group, identified by some researchers as a North Korea-run hacking operation.

The Lazarus hackers have however been more brazen in their pursuit of financial gain than others, and have been blamed for the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank, according to some cybersecurity firms. The United States accused it of being behind a cyber attack on Sony Pictures in 2014.

Whoever is found to be behind the attack, said Marin Ivezic, a cybersecurity partner at PwC in Hong Kong, the way the hackers used freely available tools so effectively may be what makes this campaign more worrying.

By bundling a tool farmed from the leaked NSA files with their own ransomware, “they achieved better distribution than anything they could have achieved in a traditional way” he said.

“EternalBlue (the hacking tool) has now demonstrated the ROI (return on investment) of the right sort of worm and this will become the focus of research for cybercriminals,” Ivezic said.

(Additional reporting Ju-Min Park in Seoul, Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Global cyber attack slows but experts see risk of fresh strikes

An ambulance waits outside the emergency department at St Thomas' Hospital in central London, Britain May 12, 2017. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

By Jeremy Wagstaff and Eric Auchard

SINGAPORE/FRANKFURT (Reuters) – A global cyber attack described as unprecedented in scale forced a major European automaker to halt some production lines while hitting schools in China and hospitals in Indonesia on Saturday, though it appeared to die down a day after its launch.

Capitalizing on spying tools believed to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, the cyber assault has infected tens of thousands of computers in nearly 100 countries, with Britain’s health system suffering the worst disruptions.

Cyber extortionists tricked victims into opening malicious malware attachments to spam emails that seemed to contain invoices, job offers, security warnings and other legitimate files.

Once inside the targeted network, so-called ransomware made use of recently revealed spy tools to silently infect other out-of-date machines without any human intervention. This, security experts said, marked an unprecedented escalation in the risk of fresh attacks spreading in the coming days and weeks.

The ransomware encrypted data on the computers, demanding payments of $300 to $600 to restore access. Researchers observed some victims paying via the digital currency bitcoin, though no one knows how much may have been transferred to extortionists because of the largely anonymous nature of such transactions.

Researchers with security software maker Avast said they had observed 126,534 ransomware infections in 99 countries, with Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan the top targets.

The hackers, who have not come forward to claim responsibility or otherwise been identified, took advantage of a worm, or self-spreading malware, by exploiting a piece of NSA spy code known as “Eternal Blue” that was released last month by a hackers group known as the Shadow Brokers, according to researchers with several private cyber security firms.

Renault said it had halted auto production at several sites including Sandouville in northwestern France and Renault-owned Dacia plants in Romania on Saturday to prevent the spread of ransomware in its systems.

Nissan’s manufacturing plant in Sunderland, northeast England, was also affected by the cyber assault though “there has been no major impact on our business”, a spokesman for the Japanese carmaker said.German rail operator Deutsche Bahn [DBN.UL] said some electronic signs at stations announcing arrivals and departures were infected, with travelers posting pictures showing some bearing a message demanding a cash payment to restore access.

“UNPRECEDENTED” ATTACK EASES

Europol’s European Cybercrime Center said it was working closely with country investigators and private security firms to combat the threat and help victims. “The recent attack is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits,” it said in a statement.

Some experts said the threat had receded for now, in part because a British-based researcher, who declined to give his name, registered a domain that he noticed the malware was trying to connect to, and so limited the worm’s spread.

“We are on a downward slope, the infections are extremely few, because the malware is not able to connect to the registered domain,” said Vikram Thakur, principal research manager at Symantec.

“The numbers are extremely low and coming down fast.”

But the attackers may yet tweak the code and restart the cycle. The researcher in Britain widely credited with foiling the ransomware’s proliferation told Reuters he had not seen any such tweaks yet, “but they will (happen).”

Researchers said the worm deployed in the latest attack, or similar tools released by Shadow Brokers, are likely to be used for fresh assaults not just with ransomware but other malware to break into firms, seize control of networks and steal data.

Finance chiefs from the Group of Seven rich countries were to commit on Saturday to joining forces to fight the growing threat of international cyber attacks, according to a draft statement of a meeting they are holding in Italy.

“Appropriate economy-wide policy responses are needed,” the ministers said in their draft statement, seen by Reuters.

HOSPITALS IN FIRING LINE

In Asia, some hospitals, schools, universities and other institutions were affected, though the full extent of the damage is not yet known because it is the weekend.

“I believe many companies have not yet noticed,” said William Saito, a cyber security adviser to Japan’s government. “Things could likely emerge on Monday” as staff return to work.

China’s information security watchdog said “a portion” of Windows systems users in the country were infected, according to a notice posted on the official Weibo page of the Beijing branch of the Public Security Bureau on Saturday. Xinhua state news agency said some secondary schools and universities were hit.

In Vietnam, Vu Ngoc Son, a director of Bkav Anti Malware, said dozens of cases of infection had been reported there, but he declined to identify any of the victims.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported a university hospital had been affected, while a communications official in Indonesia said two hospitals there had been hit.

The most disruptive attacks were reported in Britain, where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing access to computers on Friday.

International shipper FedEx Corp said some of its Windows computers were also breached. “We are implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible,” a FedEx statement said.

Telecommunications company Telefonica was among many targets in Spain. Portugal Telecom and Telefonica Argentina both said they were also targeted.

Only a small number of U.S.-headquartered organizations were hit because the hackers appear to have begun the campaign by focusing on targets in Europe, said Thakur.

By the time they turned their attention to the United States, spam filters had identified the new threat and flagged the ransomware-laden emails as malicious, he added.

MICROSOFT BOLSTERS WINDOWS DEFENCES

Private security firms identified the ransomware as a new variant of “WannaCry” that had the ability to automatically spread across large networks by exploiting a known bug in Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

“This is one of the largest global ransomware attacks the cyber community has ever seen,” said Rich Barger, director of threat research with Splunk, one of the firms that linked WannaCry to the NSA.

The Shadow Brokers released Eternal Blue as part of a trove of hacking tools that they said belonged to the U.S. spy agency.

The attack targeted Windows computers that had not installed patches released by Microsoft in March, or older machines running software that Microsoft no longer supports and for which patches did not exist, including the 16-year-old Windows XP system, researchers said.

Microsoft said it pushed out automatic Windows updates to defend existing clients from WannaCry. It had issued a patch on March 14 to protect them from Eternal Blue. Late on Friday, Microsoft also released patches for a range of long discontinued software, including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

“Today our engineers added detection and protection against new malicious software known as Ransom:Win32.WannaCrypt,” Microsoft said in a statement on Friday, adding it was working with customers to provide additional assistance.

POLITICALLY SENSITIVE TIMING

The spread of the ransomware capped a week of cyber turmoil in Europe that began when hackers posted a trove of campaign documents tied to French candidate Emmanuel Macron just before a run-off vote in which he was elected president of France.

On Wednesday, hackers disrupted the websites of several French media companies and aerospace giant Airbus. The hack happened four weeks before a British general election in which national security and the management of the state-run National Health Service are important issues.

Authorities in Britain have been braced for cyber attacks in the run-up to the election, as happened during last year’s U.S. election and on the eve of the French run-off vote on May 7.

But those attacks – blamed on Russia, which has repeatedly denied them – followed a different modus operandi involving penetrating the accounts of individuals and political organizations and then releasing hacked material online.

On Friday, Russia’s interior and emergencies ministries, as well as its biggest bank, Sberbank, said they were targeted by ransomware. The interior ministry said about 1,000 computers had been infected but it had localized the virus.

Although cyber extortion cases have been rising for several years, they have to date affected small- to mid-sized organizations. “Seeing a large telco like Telefonica get hit is going to get everybody worried,” said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer with cyber security firm Veracode.

(Additional reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka, Jim Finkle, Eric Auchard, Jose Rodriguez, Alistair Smout, Andrea Shalal, Jack Stubbs, Antonella Cinelli, Dustin Volz, Kate Holton, Andy Bruce, Michael Holden, David Milliken, Rosalba O’Brien, Julien Toyer, Tim Hepher, Luiza Ilie, Patricia Rua, Axel Bugge, Sabine Siebold and Eric Walsh, Engen Tham, Fransiska Nangoy, Soyoung Kim, Mai Nguyen; editing by Mark Heinrich)

UK government in dark over who behind cyber attack

FILE PHOTO: A National Health Service (NHS) sign is seen in the grounds of St Thomas' Hospital, in front of the Houses of Parliament in London June 7, 2011. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo

LONDON (Reuters) – The British government does not yet know who was behind Friday’s global cyber attack that disrupted the country’s health system, interior minister Amber Rudd said on Saturday.

“We’re not able to tell you who’s behind the attack. That work is still ongoing,” she told BBC radio.

She said Britain’s National Cyber Security Center was working with the country’s health service to ensure the attack was contained, while the National Crime Agency was working with them to find out where it came from.

Rudd said the government did not know if the attack was directed by a foreign government.

On Friday, cyber extortionists tricked victims into opening malicious malware attachments to spam emails that appeared to contain invoices, job offers, security warnings and other legitimate files. Nearly 100 countries were impacted.

Rudd said the attack was not specifically targeted at Britain’s health service.

“(The virus) feels random in terms of where it’s gone to and where it’s been opened,” she said.

Though 45 health service organizations in England and Scotland were affected by malicious software, no patient data has been accessed or transferred, said Rudd.

The minister said lessons had to be learned from the attack.

“There will be lessons to learn … Why is it certain regions are affected more than others? Is it to do with the software? Is it to do with better IT?”

Separately on Saturday, finance chiefs from the Group of Seven rich countries will commit to join forces to fight the growing threat of international cyber attacks, according to a draft statement of a meeting they are holding in Bari, Italy.

(Reporting by James Davey; Editing by Mark Potter)

Global cyber attack fuels concern about U.S. vulnerability disclosures

An undated aerial handout photo shows the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters building in Fort Meade, Maryland. NSA/Handout via REUTERS

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A global cyber attack on Friday renewed concerns about whether the U.S. National Security Agency and other countries’ intelligence services too often hoard software vulnerabilities for offensive purposes, rather than quickly alerting technology companies to such flaws.

Hacking tools believed to belong to the NSA that were leaked online last month appear to be the root cause of a major cyber attack unfurling throughout Europe and beyond, security researchers said, stoking fears that the spy agency’s powerful cyber weapons had been stolen and repurposed by hackers with nefarious goals.

Some cyber security experts and privacy advocates said the massive attack reflected a flawed approach by the United States to dedicate more cyber resources to offense rather than defense, a practice they argued makes the internet less secure.

Across the U.S. federal government, about 90 percent of all spending on cyber programs is dedicated to offensive efforts, including penetrating the computer systems of adversaries, listening to communications and developing the means to disable or degrade infrastructure, senior intelligence officials told Reuters in March. (http://reut.rs/2o7qHqN)

“These attacks underscore the fact that vulnerabilities will be exploited not just by our security agencies, but by hackers and criminals around the world,” Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

The NSA did not respond to a request for comment.

Hospitals and doctors’ surgeries in parts of England on Friday were forced to turn away patients and cancel appointments after they were infected with the “ransomware”, which scrambled data on computers and demanded payments of $300 to $600 to restore access.

Security software maker Avast said it had observed more than 57,000 infections in 99 countries. Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan were the top targets, it said.

Private security firms identified the virus as a new variant of ‘WannaCry’ ransomware with the ability to automatically spread across large networks by exploiting a bug in Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.

Security experts said the ransomware used in the attacks leveraged a hacking tool found in a leak of documents in April by a group known as Shadow Brokers.

At the time, Microsoft acknowledged the vulnerabilities and said they had been patched in a series of earlier updates pushed to customers, the most recent of which had been rolled out only a month earlier in March. But the episode prompted concerns about whether the tools could be leveraged by hackers to attack unpatched systems.

In a statement, a Microsoft spokesman said on Friday its engineers had provided additional detection and protection services against the WannaCry malware and that it was working with customers to provide additional assistance. The spokesman reiterated that customers who have Windows Updates enabled and use the company’s free antivirus software are protected.

Shadow Brokers first emerged last year and began dumping tranches of documents that it said belonged to the NSA, though the files appeared at least a few years old.

Over time, western researchers have grown more confident that Russia may be behind Shadow Brokers and possibly other recent disclosures of sensitive information about cyber capabilities that have been pilfered from U.S. intelligence agencies.

Some researchers cast blame not on the NSA but on the hospitals and other customers that appeared to leave themselves open to attack.

“The main problem here is organizations taking more than eight weeks to patch once Microsoft released the update,” said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at the cyber firm Veracode. “Eight weeks is plenty of time for a criminal organization to develop a sophisticated attack on software and launch it on a wide scale.”

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked documents to journalists revealing the existence of broad U.S. surveillance programs, said on Twitter the NSA had built attack tools targeting U.S. software that “now threatens the lives of hospital patients.”

“Despite warnings, (NSA) built dangerous attack tools that could target Western software,” Snowden said. “Today we see the cost.”

(This version of the story has been refiled to correct spelling of hoard in first paragraph)

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)