So what happened
The attack on CodeSpaces was an extortion attempt, it is not clear from the CodeSpaces statement when the attacker had gained access to the Amazon EC2 control panel. What is known is that a DDoS attack was launched and a blackmail attempt was initiated with the attacker using a Hotmail account. CodeSpaces currently have no indication that a malicious insider was involved.
When CodeSpace started to investigate they found the attacker had control panel access but not the private keys. According to their statement on the incident they believed that protected machines had not been accessed. However this did not prevent artefact’s being deleted via the control panel when the attacker realised CodeSpace was attempting to regain control. Codespace reported "In summary, most of our data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted." The attackers have now appeared to of delivered what is a fatal blow to CodeSpaces .
How could it of happened
The critical factor to the attacker delivering a fatal blow was the attackers privileged access to the control panel for the hosted environment.
How and when the access was gained is not clear. Access to the Amazon EC2 control could have been obtained through a vulnerability within the control panel, knowledge of the credentials or brute forcing the password. It is unlikely since there has not been a spate of attacks on Amazon EC2 control panel that a vulnerability in the panel was exploited, but rather a social engineering attack on an administrator during the DDoS attempt or the password was brute forced prior to the attack indicating potential a weak password was used are the more likely options.
It could be a credible explanation that whilst trying to prevent the DDoS attack, an administrator might respond to a phishing attempt for credentials when in normal circumstances they more be more suspicious. It is a common technique of attackers is to launch a DDoS attack to distract the administrators from the activities of hackers trying to break into a site. Whilst administrators are distracted during firefighting the DDoS attack and normal business activities such as responding to log events are ignored, these everyday activities would indicate additional malicious activities are underway.
Incident Response and BC&DR
A key part of any organisations BC&DR activities involves back up and protecting the back up files. CodeSpaces proudly discussed the Backups, Security and Continuity on their web site.
They claimed full redundancy; with data centres in 3 continents, they guaranteed 99% uptime. For backups they claimed to backup clients data every time a change was made at multiple off-site locations. The backups were supposedly in real-time as they had invested a great deal of time and effort in developing a real-time backup solution that allows us to keep off-site, fully functional backups of clients data. They did state that backups are only as good as the recovery plan and claimed they had a recovery plan that it is well-practiced and proven to work time and time again.
However the password was gained, by having access to the EC2 Control panel the attacker was able to create multiple backdoor access routes and had full control over the artefacts including deleting them, affecting the availability. The attacker may of not been able to breach the confidentiality of the artefacts as they didn't gain access to private keys according to CodeSpaces.
Incident response procedures should of attempted to prevent remote access to the affected systems, in an in-house operation the network cable can be pulled and access obtained via a console. With hosted and cloud services this style of brute force disconnect from the internet is not possible. A better strategy would of been to create a new administrator level account, throw off all logged in users and disable all other accounts from login.
For BC&DR backups not only need to offsite but also stored offline, CodeSpaces were providing resiliency for clients rather than BC&DR for themselves.
Preventing it
With regard to the credentials to the EC2 Control panel, Amazon Web Services customers are responsible for credential management according to Amazon's terms and conditions. Amazon, however, has built-in support for two-factor authentication that can be used with AWS accounts and accounts managed by the AWS Identity and Access Management tool. AWS IAM enables control over user access, including individual credentials, role separation and least privilege.
A key part of any organisations BC&DR activities involves back up and protecting the back up files. Amazon do provide white papers and the tools and services to run BC&DR for an organisation, but it appears not only CodeSpaces ignoring the stronger authentication mechanisms that Amazon provide but they did the same for the support Amazon give to a BC&DR architectures.
The use of the cloud is not a replacement for a well thought out and implemented BC&DR policy.
What's Next
This attack could be conducted against a large number of organisations and not necessarily restricted to those hosted in the cloud. Organisations are not helping themselves in protecting sensitive data, in a recent survey by a team of researchers from Columbia University (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/pubs/sigmetrics2014_playdrone.pdf) who discovered by reverse engineering 880,000 applications found on Google Play that the developers had hard coded secret authentication keys in the apps, which can lead to attackers stealing server resources or user data available through services such as Amazon Web Services
Extortion or Blackmail are common threats on the Internet, the BBC have recently reported that Nokia 'paid blackmail hackers millions' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27909096) to keep source code and keys secret. Previously it was the gambling industry that were prone to blackmail attempts via DDoS, however increasingly with organisation dependent on the internet anyone could become a victim.
As it appears that password compromise was the key factor, the secure use of strong passwords must be part of the culture of an organisation, staff awareness combined with strong computer generated random passwords with technology such as passwords vaults and two factor authentication would mitigate attacks on passwords.
Additionally, well designed and implemented disaster recovery an business continuity plans that are tested should be in place. Cyber attacks and the results need to be catered for in the plan.
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