Virtualization technology is powering a momentous revolution in today’s modern data centers and clouds, leading to designs that are commonly a mix of private, public and hybrid cloud computing environments.

International Data Corporation (IDC) research predicts that more than 90% of organizations will have some portion of their applications or infrastructure running in the cloud by the end of 2024.

As multi-cloud migration happens and organizations embrace technologies, such as containers, network virtualization must expand to adequately secure highly dynamic environments ranging from public clouds to private clouds to data centers. Otherwise, organizations face the risks of visibility blind spots and control challenges.

To circumvent this, organizations are implementing cloud security solutions that operate together and are easily managed. The benefits of cloud computing are well-known and significant. However, so are the security challenges, exemplified by the many recent high-profile data breaches. Whether stored in a physical data center or in a public, private or hybrid cloud, your data is the hacker’s goal.

Securing the cloud introduces a range of challenges, including a lack of network traffic visibility, unpredictable security functionality and the struggle to keep pace with the rate of change commonly found in cloud computing environments. To be efficacious, organizations need a cloud security solution that:

• Identifies and controls network traffic within the cloud based on identity, not the ports and protocols they may use.
• Stops malware from gaining access to and moving laterally within the cloud.
• Determines who should be allowed to use the applications, and grants access based on need and credentials.
• Streamlines deployment and gets a new instance up and running with a click. You do not want to configure each virtual firewall, since that is time-consuming. Ideally, you have a pre-defined configuration pushed to the device and it is up and running.
• Cost-effectively replaces expensive WAN connection technologies, such as MPLS, with secure SD-WAN.
• Simplifies administration and minimizes the security policy delay as virtual machines (VM) are added, removed or moved within the cloud environment.

Securing the cloud with SonicWall NSv virtual firewalls

Recently, SonicWall announced a new firmware, SonicOS 6.5.4, on its virtual firewall platforms to provide feature parity with its hardware firewall platform.

SonicWall Network Security virtual (NSv) firewalls now support secure SD-WAN, Zero-Touch Deployment, DNS security, Restful API and many more features that help solve the aforementioned problems.

SonicWall NSv firewalls help security teams reduce different types of security risks and vulnerabilities, which can cause serious disruption to business-critical services and operations.

With full-featured security tools and services, including reassembly-free deep packet inspection (RFDPI), security controls and networking services equivalent to what a SonicWall physical firewall provides, NSv effectively shields all critical components of your private/public cloud environments.

NSv is easily deployed and provisioned in a multi-tenant virtual environment, typically between virtual networks (VN). This allows it to capture communications and data exchanges between VMs for automated breach prevention, while establishing stringent access control measures for data confidentiality and VM safety and integrity.

Security threats (such as cross-virtual-machine or side-channel attacks and common network-based intrusions and application and protocol vulnerabilities) are neutralized successfully through SonicWall’s comprehensive suite of security services.

All VM traffic is subjected to multiple threat analysis engines, including intrusion prevention, gateway anti-virus and anti-spyware, cloud anti-virus, botnet filtering, application control and the Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) multi-engine sandbox.

Despite price fluctuations of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, cryptojacking remains a serious — and often hidden — threat to businesses, SMBs and everyday consumers.

And the most covert of these threats is cryptomining via the browser, where popular forms of malware attempt to turn your device into a full-time cryptocurrency mining bot called a cryptojacker.

To help you creatively understand this trend, let me summon my classical training and be a little hyperbolic. If you see the cryptojacking wave as an apocalypse like some of their victims do, the Four Horsemen would be the four threats to your endpoint or business:

• The White Horse: The energy it consumes or wastes
• The Red Horse: The loss to productivity due to limited resources
• The Black Horse: The damage it can do to a system
• The Pale Horse: Security implications due to created vulnerabilities

Unlike ransomware that wants to be found (to ask for payment), a cryptojacker’s job is to run invisibly in the background (although your CPU performance graph or device’s fan may indicate something is not normal).

Ransomware authors have switched gears over the past two years to use cryptojacking more, because a ransomware strain’s effectiveness and ROI diminish as soon as it ends up on public feeds like VirusTotal.

Like anyone else running a highly profitable business, cybercriminals need to constantly find new ways to fulfill their financial targets. Cryptojacking is being used to solve that challenge.

In April 2018, SonicWall started tracking cryptojacking trends, namely the use of Coinhive in malware. Over the course of the year, we saw cryptojacking ebb and flow. In that time, SonicWall recorded nearly 60 million cryptojacking attacks, with as many as 13.1 million in September 2018. As published in the 2019 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, volume dipped across the final quarter of 2018.

Global Cryptojacking Attacks | April-September 2018

The lure of cryptomining

Cryptomining operations have become increasingly popular, now consuming almost half a percent of the world’s electricity consumption. Despite the wild swings in price, roughly 60% of the cost of legitimately mining bitcoin is the energy consumption. In fact, at the time of writing, the price of a bitcoin is worth less than the cost of mining it legitimately.

With such costs and zero risk as compared to buying and maintaining equipment, cybercriminals have strong incentives to generate cryptocurrency with someone else’s resources. Infecting 10 machines with a cryptominer could net up to $100/day, so the challenge for cryptojackers is three-fold:

1. Find targets, namely organizations with a lot of devices on the same network, especially schools or universities.
2. Infect as many machines as possible.
3. Stay hidden for as long as possible (unlike ransomware and more akin to traditional malware).

Cryptojackers use similar techniques as malware to sneak on to an endpoint: drive-by downloads, phishing campaigns, in-browser vulnerabilities and browser plugins, to name a few. And, of course, they rely on the weakest link — the people — via social engineering techniques.

Am I infected by cryptominers?

Cryptominers are interested in your processing power and cryptojackers have to trade stealth against profit. How much of your CPU resources they take depends on their objectives.

Siphoning less power makes it harder for unsuspecting users to notice. Stealing more increases their profits. In either case, there will be a performance impact, but if the threshold is low enough it could be a challenge to distinguish the miner from legitimate software.

Enterprise administrators may look for unknown processes in their environment, and end users on Windows should spawn a Sysinternals Process Explorer to see what they are running. Linux and macOS users should investigate using System Monitor and Activity Monitor, respectively, for the same reason.

How to defend against cryptominers

The first step in defending against cryptominers is to stop this type of malware at the gateway, either through firewalls or email security (perimeter security), which is one of the best ways to scrub out known file-based threats.

Since people like to reuse old code, catching cryptojackers like Coinhive was also a simple first step. But in February 2019, Coinhive publicly announced it was ceasing operations March 8. The service stated that it wasn’t “economically viable anymore” and that the “crash” impacted the business severely.

Despite this news, SonicWall predicts there will still be a surge in new cryptojacking variants and techniques to fill the void. Cryptojacking could still become a favorite method for malicious actors because of its concealment; low and indirect damage to victims reduces chances of exposure and extends the valuable lifespan of a successful attack.

If the malware strain is unknown (new or updated), then it will bypass static filters in perimeter security. If a file is unknown, it will be routed to a sandbox to inspect the nature of the file.

The multi-engine SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox environment is designed to identify and stop evasive malware that may evade one engine but not the others.

If you have an endpoint not behind this typical set up (e.g., it’s roaming at the airport or hotel), you need to deploy an endpoint security product that includes behavioral detection.

Cryptominers can operate in the browser or be delivered through a fileless attack, so the legacy solutions you get free with a computer are blind to it.

A behavioral-based antivirus like SonicWall Capture Client would detect that the system wants to mine coins and then shut down the operation. An administrator can easily quarantine and delete the malware or, in the case of something that does damage to system files, roll the system back to the last known good state before the malware executed.

By combining a mixture of perimeter defenses and behavioral analysis, organizations can fight the newest forms of malware no matter what the trend or intent is.

The recent WhatsApp breach was very sophisticated and clever in the manner it was delivered. And that should be expected considering who was reported as being behind the zero-day attack against the popular messaging application.

But the attack against the WhatsApp app is not just a concern for its millions of global customers. There’s a very real and imminent threat to businesses and enterprises, too.

For example, let’s assume one of your employees has WhatsApp installed on their device and it is subsequently compromised via the latest WhatsApp exploit. In many situations, this employee will, at some point, connect their device to the corporate network.

This legitimate access could be via VPN, cloud applications (e.g., Office 365, Dropbox, etc.), corporate Wi-Fi or, my personal “favorite,” plugging the device into the USB port of a corporate laptop so the phone can charge. Understanding how and where users connect to the corporate network is critical.

In most cases, organizations can’t prevent personal BYOD phones from being compromised — particularly when outside the network perimeter. They can, however, protect the network from exploits delivered via the compromised phone. Here are the four most common ways the WhatsApp vulnerability could be leveraged to infiltrate a corporate network and, more importantly, how SonicWall can prevent it:

1. Via VPN. If an employee connects to corporate over VPN, SonicWall, for example, would be the endpoint where they establish the VPN Threat prevention (e.g., firewalls, Capture ATP) and access control (e.g., Secure Mobile Access) would prevent the WhatsApp breach from spreading any further than the compromised phone.
2. Via Wi-Fi. In this scenario, next-generation firewalls and secure wireless access points should be in place to inspect all internal traffic and prevent the exploit from going further than the phone.
3. Via compromised credentials. Because the WhatsApp exploit enabled attackers to steal credentials to cloud services and apps, organizations with Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solutions, like SonicWall Cloud App Security, would mitigate account takeovers (ATO), unauthorized access and any related data leakage.
4. Via USB port. Users often forget that a powered USB port on their laptop is an entry point for attackers — even when doing something as innocent as charging a phone. A sound endpoint protection solution (see diagram), such as Capture Client, would monitor the connection to the laptop and inspect any malicious activity attempting to leverage the USB port to deliver malware payloads.

Restore Control & Security of Your Endpoints

With next-generation malware protection, SonicWall Capture Client is a powerful endpoint protection solution that applies advanced threat protection techniques, such as machine learning, network sandbox integration and system rollback, to safeguard your endpoints from cyberattacks in real time.

LEARN MORE