After his last dispute (https://www.securityartwork.es/2018/02/26/evadiendo-av-shellter-tambien-sysmon-wazuh-i/), Pepote decided to rehire Pepito, who at heart  was a good worker. But before that, Pepote took a couple of precautions, such as blocking web pages with “hacking” content that could make it easier for Pepito to perform improper actions.

Pepito accepted, but still holds a grudge from the time he was in prison, so on his first day on the job he is already trying to find ways to carry out malicious actions against his boss. (Already from here it smells like a promising and cordial working relationship, but that’s for another day).

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The current pandemic situation caused by the infamous COVID-19 (or Coronavirus) is impacting all areas of society: the first and most important, that of public health and the individual’s inherent primary survival instinct. Probably, the second concern is the economic impact that, as a worker or as an entrepreneur, the epidemic is causing in the operations and forecasts of companies and corporations of any sector and nature.

But the world does not stop … and organizations cannot afford to stop their business operations either!

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Since in 2013 the US cybersecurity consultancy Mandiant published its famous report about APT1, showing its links with different agencies presumably associated with the Chinese government, the news about its actions in cyberspace has been significantly increased.

Among others, we find APT15, APT27 or Winnti Group (APT41); the US DoJ’s allegations of cyber espionage towards five Chinese military members associated with the APT1 group; the links that the FBI has established between Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong and APT10; or the alleged link of PLA unit 61398 (People’s Liberations Army) with APT1.

With the permission of Russia and its popular operation against the DNC, China has become the main actor in cyberspace, developing an uncountable number of operations against all kind of sectors as: IT, military or naval industries and different governmental organizations. Sometimes using more sophisticated malware, and sometimes less, but more and more with its own seal linked to its extensive tradition.

Today’s post is authored by Robert Mardisalu, co-founder & editor of TheBestVPN.com, a computer security professional, privacy specialist and cybersecurity writer.
He has written for many insightful blogs that help readers to think beyond the surface.

Every new year presents new cybersecurity issues and challenges for organizations. Skimming through the latest cybersecurity statistics will show how much of a threat cyberattacks pose. Handling information means you are charged with ensuring its availability, confidenciality and integrity against attackers, and be ready for the possible threats it may face.

In order to determine whether your organization is prepared to face these threats, you need to assess its cybersecurity readiness. This guide will help you do just that.

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Today’s post is authored by Stefan Beyer, CEO @ Cryptonics, Blockchain Consultant and Smart Contract Auditor. If you are interested in learning about blockchain technology, we recommend you to check the recently created Cryptonics Academy. Please enjoy.

A False Sense of Security

Blockchains are protected by complex mathematical protocols and by decentralization. Cryptographic primitives, such as digital signatures and hashing, are used to verify transaction authenticity and the integrity of the data stored on the blockchain. It is only through these primitives that the concept of digital ownership can be secured. Decentralization makes it incredibly hard for an attacker to gain sufficient control over a blockchain to alter transaction history or apply censorship.

This means that blockchains are quite secure at the protocol level. Although there are confirmed incidents of protocol-level breaches, such as 51% attacks, these are relatively rare and confined to smaller blockchains. Nevertheless, digital assets represented on blockchains are stolen on an alarmingly regular basis, even from large established networks.

In a recent article, we already identified smart contracts as a significant risk vector. In this article, we look at two recent high profile attacks, in order to highlight hidden dangers in the security of support systems that allow attackers to sidestep the sophisticated cryptographic defense mechanisms blockchain protocols provide. This type of attack is typically called a supply chain attack, as it focuses on less secure parts of a project’s supply chain.

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Today’s post is authored by Stefan Beyer, CEO @ Cryptonics, Blockchain Consultant and Smart Contract Auditor. Please enjoy.

Smart contracts are hard to get right. Their three main properties, the ability to hold value, transparency, and immutability, are essential for them to work. However, these properties also turn smart contracts into a security risk and a high-interest target for cybercriminals. Even without deliberate attacks, there are plenty of examples of funds getting stuck and companies losing money due to smart contract bugs and vulnerabilities.

Over the last two years, we have audited the smart contracts of more than 40 projects here at Cryptonics. The contracts audited include different types of asset tokenization, insurance policies, decentralized finance platforms, investment funds, and even computer games. We have observed certain trends in the types of vulnerabilities that we usually encounter, and some issues seem more common than others. In this article, we will describe the five most common issues we detect in our daily auditing activities.

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The post, next week.

Own text. Original comic strip by RaphComic. Modified with permission.

(Editor’s note: this post was originally published in the Spanish version of Security Art Work on 11th November 2019)

Today we have a doctrinal and somewhat metaphysical article… I.e., something dense. Be warned :)

Within CNO (Computer Network Operations) we find three types of capabilities or actions: CND, CNA and CNE (Defense, Attack and Exploitation respectively).

While CND obviously deals with the defense of technological environments against attacks also technological —not against a missile that hits a Datacenter—, CNE operations and capabilities focus on the acquisition and exploitation of information through networks and computers: what we currently call cyberspying. For its part, CNA, Computer Network Attack, refers to what is often identified with purely destructive operations (the famous “4D”: disrupt, deny, degrade and destroy).

Any actor that executes CNO operations develops TTP (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) to achieve its objectives; without going into the more formal definitions of the US military literature, tactics specify what an actor does, techniques specify how a tactic is implemented and procedures define a particular implementation —depending even on the person who applies them— of that tactic; this approach, from the higher level to a more operational level, models the behaviour of an actor, something similar to what is usually called its modus operandi.

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During the management of forensic cases, there are times when we find ourselves in a dead end, where after the detection of a critical compromise indicator, we have to approach an analysis with weak evidence.

That is why I decided to develop a carving tool based on Yara rule detection. This tool also had to handle raw files in and be able to carry out a wide variety of options on this data in a flexible way, so I decided to use Radare2.

From this combination was born YaraRET, a file carving tool developed in Go, whose stable version is available in the repository of YaraRules: https://github.com/Yara-Rules/YaraRET

The development version can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/wolfvan/YaraRET

So, during the next article the resolution of a fictitious forensic case with YaraRET will be presented, which is based on the combination of several cases that I have been finding for a few months. [Read more…]