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Better Together: AWS and Trend Micro

There’s a very good reason why AWS remains a leader in cloud computing. While many providers describe themselves as “customer obsessed,” few come close to our long-time partner in the lengths it goes to earn and retain the trust of its customers.

AWS starts with the customer and works backwards. That means the vast majority of its feature enhancements and new services are directly driven from their input. The latest is Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection.

This threat detection tool, which will work closely with Trend Micro cloud solutions, will provide another valuable layer of defense in our fight against a shared adversary.

Shining a light on an expanding attack surface

Spurred by a drive for greater cost efficiency and business agility, global organizations are migrating to the cloud in droves. Gartner predicts the worldwide market for public cloud services will reach almost $495bn this year, and grow by over 21% in 2023. In this environment, security remains a persistent concern for cloud builders, because if not properly managed, investments can increase the digital attack surface.

According to recent Trend Micro research, many global organizations are already struggling to securely manage their cloud assets. We found that 73% of IT and business leaders are concerned with the size of their attack surface, and 43% claim it is “spiralling out of control.” Cloud is the area where most respondents say they have least insight. They want their cloud providers to do more—for example by building enhanced detection into their systems, to complement third-party tools.

That’s part of the reason why AWS built Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection was built. This new feature is triggered by detection of known malicious signatures across the cloud network. Based on this detection, the service scans the associated Amazon EBS storage environment for malware and reports any findings to AWS Security Hub. Open APIs from here link to products like Trend Micro Cloud One to enhance existing detection and response efforts.

Better together

Trend Micro and AWS have been working closely together for over a decade now, and this latest announcement represents another exciting stage in the journey. Customers will welcome AWS native threat detection as a complement to their Trend Micro Cloud One capabilities, delivering a comprehensive range of features to secure the hybrid cloud. Once they add the AWS tool to our virtual patching, vulnerability scanning, lateral movement detection, posture management and other capabilities, joint customers will have a powerful set of integrated offerings to deliver simple, all-in-one cloud security and compliance.

In addition, this move from AWS validates our XDR strategy, which is focused on using as many data sources as possible to enhance detection and response. The bottom line is that security takes a village. Customers, cloud providers and security vendors have a shared responsibility to work together as the threat landscape continues to evolve. That’s what we’ll continue to do, expanding and deepening our strategic partnerships with AWS and other providers in a collective effort to make the digital world safer.

Source :
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/g/aws-trend-micro.html

Google Delays Blocking 3rd-Party Cookies in Chrome Browser Until 2024

Google on Wednesday said it’s once again delaying its plans to turn off third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser from late 2023 to the second half of 2024.

“The most consistent feedback we’ve received is the need for more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome,” Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox, said.

In keeping this in mind, the internet and ad tech giant said it’s taking a “deliberate approach” and extending the testing window for its ongoing Privacy Sandbox initiatives prior to phasing out third-party cookies.

Cookies are pieces of data planted on a user’s computer or other device by the web browser as a website is accessed, with third-party cookies fueling much of the digital advertising ecosystem and its ability to track users across different sites to show targeted ads.

Privacy Sandbox is Google’s umbrella term for a set of technologies that aim to improve users’ privacy across the web and Android by limiting cross-site and cross-app tracking and offering improved, safer alternatives to serve interest-based ads.

While Google had originally planned to roll out the feature in early 2022, it revised the timeline in June 2021, pushing its proposal to transition from third-party cookies over a three-month period, starting in mid-2023 and ending in late 2023.

“It’s become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right,” the company noted at the time.

The second extension comes as Google announced Topics API as a replacement for FLoC (short for Federated Learning of Cohorts) in January 2022, following it up with a developer preview of Privacy Sandbox for Android in May.

In February 2022, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) formally accepted commitments from Google over how it develops the technology, pointing out the need to flesh out Privacy Sandbox such that it promotes competition and supports publishers to raise revenue from ads while also safeguarding consumer privacy.

Under the new plan, Privacy Sandbox trials are expected to be expanded to users globally next month, with the number of users included in the tests ramped up throughout the rest of the year and into 2023.

Google also emphasized that users will be shown a prompt to manage their participation, adding it intends to make the APIs generally available by Q3 2023, with third-party cookie support tentatively dropped in H2 2024.

The CMA, for its part, acknowledged today that it’s aware of “alternative proposals being developed by third-parties,” and that it’s “working with the [Information Commissioner’s Office] to better understand their viability and likely impacts.”

Source :
https://thehackernews.com/2022/07/google-delays-blocking-3rd-party.html

LockBit Ransomware Abuses Windows Defender to Deploy Cobalt Strike Payload

A threat actor associated with the LockBit 3.0 ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has been observed abusing the Windows Defender command-line tool to decrypt and load Cobalt Strike payloads.

According to a report published by SentinelOne last week, the incident occurred after obtaining initial access via the Log4Shell vulnerability against an unpatched VMware Horizon Server.

“Once initial access had been achieved, the threat actors performed a series of enumeration commands and attempted to run multiple post-exploitation tools, including Meterpreter, PowerShell Empire, and a new way to side-load Cobalt Strike,” researchers Julio Dantas, James Haughom, and Julien Reisdorffer said.

LockBit 3.0 (aka LockBit Black), which comes with the tagline “Make Ransomware Great Again!,” is the next iteration of the prolific LockBit RaaS family that emerged in June 2022 to iron out critical weaknesses discovered in its predecessor.

It’s notable for instituting what’s the first-ever bug bounty for a RaaS program. Besides featuring a revamped leak site to name-and-shame non-compliant targets and publish extracted data, it also includes a new search tool to make it easier to find specific victim data.

The use of living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques by cyber intruders, wherein legitimate software and functions available in the system are used for post-exploitation, is not new and is usually seen as an attempt to evade detection by security software.

Earlier this April, a LockBit affiliate was found to have leveraged a VMware command-line utility called VMwareXferlogs.exe to drop Cobalt Strike. What’s different this time around is the use of MpCmdRun.exe to achieve the same goal.

MpCmdRun.exe is a command-line tool for carrying out various functions in Microsoft Defender Antivirus, including scanning for malicious software, collecting diagnostic data, and restoring the service to a previous version, among others.

In the incident analyzed by SentinelOne, the initial access was followed by downloading a Cobalt Strike payload from a remote server, which was subsequently decrypted and loaded using the Windows Defender utility.

“Tools that should receive careful scrutiny are any that either the organization or the organization’s security software have made exceptions for,” the researchers said.

“Products like VMware and Windows Defender have a high prevalence in the enterprise and a high utility to threat actors if they are allowed to operate outside of the installed security controls.”

The findings come as initial access brokers (IABs) are actively selling access to company networks, including managed service providers (MSPs), to fellow threat actors for profit, in turn offering a way to compromise downstream customers.

In May 2022, cybersecurity authorities from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. warned of attacks weaponizing vulnerable managed service providers (MSPs) as an “initial access vector to multiple victim networks, with globally cascading effects.”

“MSPs remain an attractive supply chain target for attackers, particularly IABs,” Huntress researcher Harlan Carvey said, urging companies to secure their networks and implement multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Source :
https://thehackernews.com/2022/08/lockbit-ransomware-abuses-windows.html

What is ransomware and how can you defend your business from it?

Ransomware is a kind of malware used by cybercriminals to stop users from accessing their systems or files; the cybercriminals then threaten to leak, destroy or withhold sensitive information unless a ransom is paid.

Ransomware attacks can target either the data held on computer systems (known as locker ransomware) or devices (crypto-ransomware). In both instances, once a ransom is paid, threat actors typically provide victims with a decryption key or tool to unlock their data or device, though this is not guaranteed.

Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh, CEO of Defense.com, the all-in-one cybersecurity platform, shares knowledge and advice in this article on how ransomware works, how damaging it can be, and how your business can mitigate ransomware attacks from occurring.

What does a ransomware attack comprise?

There are three key elements to a ransomware attack:

Access

In order to deploy malware to encrypt files and gain control, cybercriminals need to initially gain access to an organization’s systems.

Trigger

The attackers have control of the data as soon as the malicious software is activated. The data is encrypted and no longer accessible by the targeted organization.

Demand

The victims will receive an alert that their data is encrypted and cannot be accessed until a ransom is paid.

Big business for cybercriminals

The motives of cybercriminals deploying malware may vary but the end goal is typically that of financial gain.

What is the cost of being targeted by ransomware?

The average pay-out from ransomware attacks has risen from $312,000/£260,000 in 2020 to $570,000/£476,000 in 2021 – an increase of 83%. One report also showed that 66% of organisations surveyed were victims of ransomware attacks in 2021, nearly double that of 2020 (37%). This highlights the need for businesses to understand the risks and implement stronger defenses to combat the threats.

Ransomware continues to rank amongst the most common cyberattacks in 2022, due to its lucrative nature and fairly low level of effort required from the perpetrators. This debilitating attack causes an average downtime of 3 weeks and can have major repercussions for an organization, for its finances, operations and reputation.

Because there is no guarantee that cybercriminals will release data after a ransom is paid, it is crucial to protect your data and keep offline backups of your files. It’s also very important to proactively monitor and protect entry points that a hacker may exploit, to reduce the possibility of being targeted in the first place.

Who is at risk of being a target of ransomware?

In the past, cybercriminals have typically targeted high-profile organizations, large corporations and government agencies with ransomware. This is known as ‘big game hunting’ and works on the premise that these companies are far more likely to pay higher ransoms and avoid unwanted scrutiny from the media and public. Certain organizations, such as hospitals, are higher-value targets because they are far more likely to pay a ransom and to do so quickly because they need access to important data urgently.

However, ransomware groups are now shifting their focus to smaller businesses, in response to increased pressure from law enforcement who are cracking down on well-known ransomware groups such as REvil and Conti. Smaller companies are seen as easy targets that may lack effective cybersecurity defenses to prevent a ransomware attack, making it easier to penetrate and exploit them.

Ultimately, threat actors are opportunists and will consider most organizations as targets, regardless of their size. If a cybercriminal notices a vulnerability, the company is fair game.

How is ransomware deployed?

Phishing attacks

The most common delivery method of ransomware is via phishing attacks. Phishing is a form of social engineering and is an effective method of attack as it relies on deceit and creating a sense of urgency. Threat actors trick employees into opening suspicious attachments in emails and this is often achieved by imitating either senior-level employees or other trusted figures of authority.

Malvertising

Malicious advertising is another tactic used by cybercriminals to deploy ransomware, where ad space is purchased and infected with malware that is then displayed on trusted and legitimate websites. Once the ad is clicked, or even in some cases when a user accesses a website that’s hosting malware, that device is infected by malware that scans the device for vulnerabilities to exploit.

Exploiting vulnerable systems

Ransomware can also be deployed by exploiting unpatched and outdated systems, as was the case in 2017, when a security vulnerability in Microsoft Windows, EternalBlue (MS17-010), led to the global WannaCry ransomware attack that spread to over 150 countries.

It was the biggest cyberattack to hit the NHS: it cost £92m in damages plus the added costs of IT support restoring data and systems affected by the attack, and it directly impacted patient care through cancelled appointments.

Four key methods to defend your business against ransomware

It is crucial that businesses are aware of how a ransomware attack may affect their organization, and how they can prevent cybercriminals from breaching their systems and holding sensitive data to ransom. Up to 61% of organizations with security teams consisting of 11–25 employees are said to be most concerned about ransomware attacks.

The NHS could have avoided being impacted by the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 by heeding warnings and migrating away from outdated software, ensuring strategies were in place to strengthen their security posture.

It’s essential that your business takes a proactive approach to cybersecurity by implementing the correct tools to help monitor, detect, and mitigate suspicious activity across your network and infrastructure. This will reduce the number and impact of data breaches and cyberattacks.

Defense.com recommend these four fundamental tactics to help prevent ransomware attacks and stay one step ahead of the hackers:1 — Training

Cybersecurity awareness training is pivotal for businesses of all sizes as it helps employees to spot potentially malicious emails or activity.

Social engineering tactics, such as phishing and tailgating, are common and successful due to human error and employees not spotting the risks. It’s vital for employees to be vigilant around emails that contain suspicious links or contain unusual requests to share personal data, often sent by someone pretending to be a senior-level employee.

Security training also encourages employees to query visitors to your offices to prevent ransomware attacks via physical intrusion.

Implementing cybersecurity awareness training will help your business routinely educate and assess your employees on fundamental security practices, ultimately creating a security culture to reduce the risk of data breaches and security incidents.2 — Phishing simulators

These simulator tools support your security awareness training by delivering fake but realistic phishing emails to employees. Understanding how prone your staff are to falling for a real cybercriminal’s tactics allows you to fill gaps in their training.

When you combine phishing simulators with security training, your organization can lessen the chance of falling victim to a ransomware attack. The combination of training and testing puts you in a better position to prevent the cunning attempts of cybercriminals to infiltrate your IT systems and plant malware.3 — Threat monitoring

You can make your business less of a target for cybercriminals by actively monitoring potential threats. Threat Intelligence is a threat monitoring tool that collates data from various sources, such as penetration tests and vulnerability scans, and uses this information to help you defend against potential malware and ransomware attacks. This overview of your threat landscape shows which areas are most at risk of a cyberattack or a data breach.

Being proactive ensures you stay one step ahead of hackers and by introducing threat monitoring tools to your organization, you ensure any suspicious behaviour is detected early for remediation.4 — Endpoint protection

Endpoint protection is key to understanding which of your assets are vulnerable, to help protect them and repel malware attacks like ransomware. More than just your typical antivirus software, endpoint protection offers advanced security features that protect your network, and the devices on it, against threats such as malware and phishing campaigns.

Anti-ransomware capabilities should be included in endpoint protection so it can effectively prevent attacks by monitoring suspicious behaviour such as file changes and file encryption. The ability to isolate or quarantine any affected devices can also be a very useful feature for stopping the spread of malware.

In summary

With ransomware groups continually looking for vulnerabilities to exploit, it’s important that businesses develop robust strategies to prevent ransomware threats: ensure your staff takes regular security awareness training, set up threat monitoring tools to detect and alert you of vulnerabilities, and implement endpoint protection to protect your devices across your network.

Following the above guidelines will increase your chances of safeguarding your business against ransomware attacks that could cost your organization a substantial amount of money and reputational damage.

Defense.com believes world-class cyber protection should be accessible to all companies, regardless of size. For more information, visit Defense.com.

Source :
https://thehackernews.com/2022/08/what-is-ransomware-how-to-defend-your.html

Apple Releases Security Patches for all Devices Fixing Dozens of New Vulnerabilities

Apple on Wednesday rolled out software fixes for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS to address a number of security flaws affecting its platforms.

This includes at least 37 flaws spanning different components in iOS and macOS that range from privilege escalation to arbitrary code execution and from information disclosure to denial-of-service (DoS).

Chief among them is CVE-2022-2294, a memory corruption flaw in the WebRTC component that Google disclosed earlier this month as having been exploited in real-world attacks aimed at users of the Chrome browser. There is, however, no evidence of in-the-wild zero-day exploitation of the flaw targeting iOS, macOS, and Safari.

Besides CVE-2022-2294, the updates also address several arbitrary code execution flaws impacting Apple Neural Engine (CVE-2022-32810, CVE-2022-32829, and CVE-2022-32840), Audio (CVE-2022-32820), GPU Drivers (CVE-2022-32821), ImageIO (CVE-2022-32802), IOMobileFrameBuffer (CVE-2022-26768), Kernel (CVE-2022-32813 and CVE-2022-32815), and WebKit (CVE-2022-32792).

Also patched is a Pointer Authentication bypass affecting the Kernel (CVE-2022-32844), a DoS bug in the ImageIO component (CVE-2022-32785), and two privilege escalation flaws in AppleMobileFileIntegrity and File System Events (CVE-2022-32819 and CVE-2022-32826).

What’s more, the latest version of macOS resolves five security vulnerabilities in the SMB module that could be potentially exploited by a malicious app to gain elevated privileges, leak sensitive information, and execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.

Users of Apple devices are recommended to update to iOS 15.6, iPadOS 15.6, macOS Monterey 12.5 (Big Sur 11.6.8 or 2022-005 Catalina for older generation Macs), tvOS 15.6, and watchOS 8.7 to obtain the latest security protections.

Source :
https://thehackernews.com/2022/07/apple-releases-security-patches-for-all.html

DNS-over-HTTP/3 in Android

Posted by Matthew Maurer and Mike Yu, Android team

To help keep Android users’ DNS queries private, Android supports encrypted DNS. In addition to existing support for DNS-over-TLS, Android now supports DNS-over-HTTP/3 which has a number of improvements over DNS-over-TLS.

Most network connections begin with a DNS lookup. While transport security may be applied to the connection itself, that DNS lookup has traditionally not been private by default: the base DNS protocol is raw UDP with no encryption. While the internet has migrated to TLS over time, DNS has a bootstrapping problem. Certificate verification relies on the domain of the other party, which requires either DNS itself, or moves the problem to DHCP (which may be maliciously controlled). This issue is mitigated by central resolvers like Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS and Quad9, which allow devices to configure a single DNS resolver locally for every network, overriding what is offered through DHCP.

In Android 9.0, we announced the Private DNS feature, which uses DNS-over-TLS (DoT) to protect DNS queries when enabled and supported by the server. Unfortunately, DoT incurs overhead for every DNS request. An alternative encrypted DNS protocol, DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), is rapidly gaining traction within the industry as DoH has already been deployed by most public DNS operators, including the Cloudflare Resolver and Google Public DNS. While using HTTPS alone will not reduce the overhead significantly, HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a transport that efficiently multiplexes multiple streams over UDP using a single TLS session with session resumption. All of these features are crucial to efficient operation on mobile devices.

DNS-over-HTTP/3 (DoH3) support was released as part of a Google Play system update, so by the time you’re reading this, Android devices from Android 11 onwards¹ will use DoH3 instead of DoT for well-known² DNS servers which support it. Which DNS service you are using is unaffected by this change; only the transport will be upgraded. In the future, we aim to support DDR which will allow us to dynamically select the correct configuration for any server. This feature should decrease the performance impact of encrypted DNS.

Performance

DNS-over-HTTP/3 avoids several problems that can occur with DNS-over-TLS operation:

As DoT operates on a single stream of requests and responses, many server implementations suffer from head-of-line blocking³. This means that if the request at the front of the line takes a while to resolve (possibly because a recursive resolution is necessary), responses for subsequent requests that would have otherwise been resolved quickly are blocked waiting on that first request. DoH3 by comparison runs each request over a separate logical stream, which means implementations will resolve requests out-of-order by default.
Mobile devices change networks frequently as the user moves around. With DoT, these events require a full renegotiation of the connection. By contrast, the QUIC transport HTTP/3 is based on can resume a suspended connection in a single RTT.
DoT intends for many queries to use the same connection to amortize the cost of TCP and TLS handshakes at the start. Unfortunately, in practice several factors (such as network disconnects or server TCP connection management) make these connections less long-lived than we might like. Once a connection is closed, establishing the connection again requires at least 1 RTT.In unreliable networks, DoH3 may even outperform traditional DNS. While unintuitive, this is because the flow control mechanisms in QUIC can alert either party that packets weren’t received. In traditional DNS, the timeout for a query needs to be based on expected time for the entire query, not just for the resolver to receive the packet.

Field measurements during the initial limited rollout of this feature show that DoH3 significantly improves on DoT’s performance. For successful queries, our studies showed that replacing DoT with DoH3 reduces median query time by 24%, and 95th percentile query time by 44%. While it might seem suspect that the reported data is conditioned on successful queries, both DoT and DoH3 resolve 97% of queries successfully, so their metrics are directly comparable. UDP resolves only 83% of queries successfully. As a result, UDP latency is not directly comparable to TLS/HTTP3 latency because non-connection-oriented protocols have a different notion of what a “query” is. We have still included it for rough comparison.

Memory Safety

The DNS resolver processes input that could potentially be controlled by an attacker, both from the network and from apps on the device. To reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities, we chose to use a memory safe language for the implementation.

Fortunately, we’ve been adding Rust support to the Android platform. This effort is intended exactly for cases like this — system level features which need to be performant or low level (both in this case) and which would carry risk to implement in C++. While we’ve previously launched Keystore 2.0, this represents our first foray into Rust in Mainline Modules. Cloudflare maintains an HTTP/3 library called quiche, which fits our use case well, as it has a memory-safe implementation, few dependencies, and a small code size. Quiche also supports use directly from C++. We considered this, but even the request dispatching service had sufficient complexity that we chose to implement that portion in Rust as well.

We built the query engine using the Tokio async framework to simultaneously handle new requests, incoming packet events, control signals, and timers. In C++, this would likely have required multiple threads or a carefully crafted event loop. By leveraging asynchronous in Rust, this occurs on a single thread with minimal locking⁴. The DoH3 implementation is 1,640 lines and uses a single runtime thread. By comparison, DoT takes 1,680 lines while managing less and using up to 4 threads per DoT server in use.

Safety and Performance — Together at Last

With the introduction of Rust, we are able to improve both security and the performance at the same time. Likewise, QUIC allows us to improve network performance and privacy simultaneously. Finally, Mainline ensures that such improvements are able to make their way to more Android users sooner.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Luke Huang who greatly contributed to the development of this feature, and Lorenzo Colitti for his in-depth review of the technical aspects of this post.

Some Android 10 devices which adopted Google Play system updates early will also receive this feature. ↩
Google DNS and Cloudflare DNS at launch, others may be added in the future. ↩
DoT can be implemented in a way that avoids this problem, as the client must accept server responses out of order. However, in practice most servers do not implement this reordering. ↩
There is a lock used for the SSL context which is accessed once per DNS server, and another on the FFI when issuing a request. The FFI lock could be removed with changes to the C++ side, but has remained because it is low contention. ↩

Source :
https://security.googleblog.com/2022/07/dns-over-http3-in-android.html

Microsoft Teams outage also takes down Microsoft 365 services

What initially started like a minor Microsoft Teams outage has also taken down multiple Microsoft 365 services with Teams integration, including Exchange Online, Windows 365, and Office Online.

“We’ve received reports of users being unable to access Microsoft Teams or leverage any features,” the company revealed on its official Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account more than 8 hours ago.

Two hours later, Redmond said the issue causing the connection problems was a recent deployment that featured a broken connection to an internal storage service.

However, Teams was not the only product impacted by the outage since users also began reporting failures to connect to various Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft confirmed the issues saying that the subsequent Microsoft 365 outage only affected services that came with Teams integration.

“We’ve identified downstream impact to multiple Microsoft 365 services with Teams integration, such as Microsoft Word, Office Online and SharePoint Online,” Microsoft explained.

As the company further detailed on its Microsoft 365 Service health status page, affected customers experienced issues with one or more of the following services:

Microsoft Teams (Access, chat, and meetings)
Exchange Online (Delays sending mail)
Microsoft 365 Admin center (Inability to access)
Microsoft Word within multiple services (Inability to load)
Microsoft Forms (Inability to use via Teams)
Microsoft Graph API (Any service relying on this API may be affected)
Office Online (Microsoft Word access issues)
SharePoint Online (Microsoft Word access issues)
Project Online (Inability to access)
PowerPlatform and PowerAutomate (Inability to create an environment with a database)
Autopatches within Microsoft Managed Desktop
Yammer (Impact to Yammer experiments)
Windows 365 (Unable to provision Cloud PCs)

After redirecting traffic to a healthy service to mitigate the impact, Redmond said its telemetry indicates that Microsoft Teams functionality started to recover.

“Service availability has mostly recovered with only a few service features still requiring attention,” Microsoft added on the service health status page and on Twitter two hours ago, at 4 AM EST.

“We’ll continue to monitor the service as new regions enter business hours to ensure the service health does not fluctuate while the remaining actions are completed.”

Source :
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-teams-outage-also-takes-down-microsoft-365-services/

Windows 11 now blocks RDP brute-force attacks by default

Recent Windows 11 builds come with the Account Lockout Policy policy enabled by default which will automatically lock user accounts (including Administrator accounts) after 10 failed sign-in attempts for 10 minutes.

The account brute forcing process commonly requires guessing the passwords using automated tools. This tactic is now blocked by default on the latest Windows 11 builds (Insider Preview 22528.1000 and newer) after failing to enter the correct password 10 times in a row.

“Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute force password vectors,” David Weston, Microsoft’s VP for Enterprise and OS Security, tweeted Thursday.

“This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks – this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!”

As Weston also said, brute forcing credentials is a popular tactic among threat actors to breach Windows systems via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) when they don’t know the account passwords.

The use of Windows Remote Desktop Services to breach enterprise networks is so prevalent among cybercriminals that the FBI said RDP is responsible for roughly 70-80% of all network breaches leading to ransomware attacks.

*Windows 11 Account Lockout Policy (David Weston)*

Slowly blocking the most popular attack vectors

Coupled with other security-focused changes Microsoft has recently announced, including auto-blocking Office macros in downloaded documents and enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) in Azure AD, the company is slowly closing all entry vectors used by ransomware operators to breach Windows networks and systems.

The Account Lockout Policy is also available on Windows 10 systems. However, unfortunately, it’s not enabled by default, allowing attackers to brute force their way into Windows systems with exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services.

Admins can configure this policy on Windows 10 in the Group Policy Management Console from Computer Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Account Policies\Account Lockout Policy.

This is a crucial security improvement since many RDP servers, especially those used to help teleworkers access corporate assets, are directly exposed to the Internet, exposing the organizations’ network to attacks when poorly configured.

To put things in perspective, attacks targeting RDP services have seen a sharp increase since at least mid-late 2016, starting with the rise in popularity of dark web marketplaces that sell RDP access to compromised networks, per an FBI IC3 report from 2018.

One notable mention is UAS, the largest hacker marketplace for stolen RDP credentials at one point, which leaked login names and passwords for 1.3 million current and historically compromised Windows Remote Desktop servers.

Source :
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-11-now-blocks-rdp-brute-force-attacks-by-default/

How to set up proxy server on Windows 11

On Windows 11, you can set up a proxy server quite easily. A proxy server is a service that works as a man-in-the-middle between the computer and the internet. When using this feature, the requests you make to websites and other services will be handled by the proxy instead.

Usually, you’d see a proxy configuration in organizations and schools, but anyone can set up a proxy server because of its benefits. Using a proxy helps save data usage and reduce bandwidth use because web requests are cached in the server and then served again when the user requests the same content.

It can increase your privacy by hiding the IP address of the client making an internet request. It can improve security by blocking malicious traffic and logging users’ activities. It can also block sites, by using rules, a company can stop users from accessing social networks and other websites, and much more.

In this guide, you will learn three ways to set up a proxy server on your Windows 11 device without the need for third-party tools. (Just to be clear, in this guide, we’re setting proxy settings to connect to a server, not to set up the actual proxy server.)

Configure proxy server on Windows 11

The following instructions will apply to Ethernet and Wi-Fi network connections, but these settings won’t work during a VPN session.

To enable automatic configuration for proxy server on Windows 11, use these steps:

Open Settings on Windows 11.
Click on Network & Internet.
Click the Proxy tab.
Turn on the Automatically detect settings toggle switch to set up a proxy server on Windows 11.

Once you complete the steps, Windows 11 will automatically detect the settings using the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD). Organizations and schools typically use this option to automatically configure or change the proxy settings to computers connected to their networks.

If you do not want the computer to detect settings automatically, or you are trying to set up a proxy server manually, you need to turn off the Automatically detect settings toggle switch.

Configure proxy through script on Windows 11

It is also possible to configure a proxy server automatically using the setup script option on Windows 11.

To configure a proxy server using a script, use these steps:

Open Settings.
Click on Network & Internet.
Click the Proxy tab.
Under the “Automatic proxy setup” section, click the “Set up” button for the “Use setup script” setting.
Turn on the Use setup script toggle switch.
Confirm the address of the script (or .pac file).
Click the Save button.

After you complete the steps, Windows 11 will load the proxy configuration from the specified file.

Configure automatic proxy with manual configuration on Windows 11

To set up proxy server settings manually on Windows 11, use these steps:

Open Settings.
Click on Network & Internet.
Click the Proxy tab.
Under the “Manual proxy setup” section, click the “Set up” button for the “Use a proxy server” setting.
Turn on the “Use a proxy server” toggle switch.
In the “Proxy IP address” setting, confirm the address that connects to the proxy server.
In the “Port” setting, confirm the port number required for the proxy to work.
Check the “Don’t use the proxy server for local (intranet) addresses” option.
(Optional) Confirm the addresses that will bypass the proxy in the available section.Quick note: You need to specify these addresses using a semicolon (;) to separate each entry. You can use an asterisk as a wildcard if you have multiple addresses from the same domain. For example, *.website.com will match all the addresses in the asterisk part, including forums.website.com, docs.website.com, etc.
Click the Save button.

Once you complete the steps, the proxy will be configured and the network traffic will automatically pass through the proxy server. However, it is also possible to specify a list of addresses that will not use the proxy.

Source :
https://pureinfotech.com/setup-proxy-server-windows-11/

Juniper Releases Patches for Critical Flaws in Junos OS and Contrail Networking

Juniper Networks has pushed security updates to address several vulnerabilities affecting multiple products, some of which could be exploited to seize control of affected systems.

The most critical of the flaws affect Junos Space and Contrail Networking, with the tech company urging customers to release versions 22.1R1 and 21.4.0, respectively.

Chief among them is a collection of 31 bugs in the Junos Space network management software, including CVE-2021-23017 (CVSS score: 9.4) that could result in a crash of vulnerable devices or even achieve arbitrary code execution.

“A security issue in nginx resolver was identified, which might allow an attacker who is able to forge UDP packets from the DNS server to cause 1-byte memory overwrite, resulting in worker process crash or potential other impact,” the company said.

The same security vulnerability has also been remediated in Northstar Controller in versions 5.1.0 Service Pack 6 and 6.2.2.

Additionally, the networking equipment maker cautioned of multiple known issues exist in CentOS 6.8 that’s shipped with Junos Space Policy Enforcer before version 22.1R1. As mitigations, the version of CentOS packed with the Policy Enforcer component has been upgraded to 7.9.

Also listed are 166 security vulnerabilities impacting its Contrail Networking product that impact all versions prior to 21.4.0 and have been collectively given the maximum CVSS score of 10.0.

“Multiple vulnerabilities in third party software used in Juniper Networks Contrail Networking have been resolved in release 21.4.0 by upgrading the Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) container image from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8,” it noted in an advisory.

Source :
https://thehackernews.com/2022/07/juniper-releases-patches-for-critical.html