homepage
Open menu
Go one level top
  • Train and Certify
    Train and Certify

    Immediately apply the skills and techniques learned in SANS courses, ranges, and summits

    • Overview
    • Courses
      • Overview
      • Full Course List
      • By Focus Areas
        • Cloud Security
        • Cyber Defense
        • Cybersecurity and IT Essentials
        • DFIR
        • Industrial Control Systems
        • Offensive Operations
        • Management, Legal, and Audit
      • By Skill Levels
        • New to Cyber
        • Essentials
        • Advanced
        • Expert
      • Training Formats
        • OnDemand
        • In-Person
        • Live Online
      • Course Demos
    • Training Roadmaps
      • Skills Roadmap
      • Focus Area Job Roles
        • Cyber Defence Job Roles
        • Offensive Operations Job Roles
        • DFIR Job Roles
        • Cloud Job Roles
        • ICS Job Roles
        • Leadership Job Roles
      • NICE Framework
        • Security Provisionals
        • Operate and Maintain
        • Oversee and Govern
        • Protect and Defend
        • Analyze
        • Collect and Operate
        • Investigate
        • Industrial Control Systems
      • European Skills Framework
    • GIAC Certifications
    • Training Events & Summits
      • Events Overview
      • Event Locations
        • Asia
        • Australia & New Zealand
        • Latin America
        • Mainland Europe
        • Middle East & Africa
        • Scandinavia
        • United Kingdom & Ireland
        • United States & Canada
      • Summits
    • OnDemand
    • Get Started in Cyber
      • Overview
      • Degree and Certificate Programs
      • Scholarships
    • Cyber Ranges
  • Manage Your Team
    Manage Your Team

    Build a world-class cyber team with our workforce development programs

    • Overview
    • Why Work with SANS
    • Group Purchasing
    • Build Your Team
      • Team Development
      • Assessments
      • Private Training
      • Hire Cyber Professionals
      • By Industry
        • Health Care
        • Industrial Control Systems Security
        • Military
    • Leadership Training
  • Security Awareness
    Security Awareness

    Increase your staff’s cyber awareness, help them change their behaviors, and reduce your organizational risk

    • Overview
    • Products & Services
      • Security Awareness Training
        • EndUser Training
        • Phishing Platform
      • Specialized
        • Developer Training
        • ICS Engineer Training
        • NERC CIP Training
        • IT Administrator
      • Risk Assessments
        • Knowledge Assessment
        • Culture Assessment
        • Behavioral Risk Assessment
    • OUCH! Newsletter
    • Career Development
      • Overview
      • Training & Courses
      • Professional Credential
    • Blog
    • Partners
    • Reports & Case Studies
  • Resources
    Resources

    Enhance your skills with access to thousands of free resources, 150+ instructor-developed tools, and the latest cybersecurity news and analysis

    • Overview
    • Webcasts
    • Free Cybersecurity Events
      • Free Events Overview
      • Summits
      • Solutions Forums
      • Community Nights
    • Content
      • Newsletters
        • NewsBites
        • @RISK
        • OUCH! Newsletter
      • Blog
      • Podcasts
      • Summit Presentations
      • Posters & Cheat Sheets
    • Research
      • White Papers
      • Security Policies
    • Tools
    • Focus Areas
      • Cyber Defense
      • Cloud Security
      • Digital Forensics & Incident Response
      • Industrial Control Systems
      • Cyber Security Leadership
      • Offensive Operations
  • Get Involved
    Get Involved

    Help keep the cyber community one step ahead of threats. Join the SANS community or begin your journey of becoming a SANS Certified Instructor today.

    • Overview
    • Join the Community
    • Work Study
    • Teach for SANS
    • CISO Network
    • Partnerships
    • Sponsorship Opportunities
  • About
    About

    Learn more about how SANS empowers and educates current and future cybersecurity practitioners with knowledge and skills

    • SANS
      • Overview
      • Our Founder
      • Awards
    • Instructors
      • Our Instructors
      • Full Instructor List
    • Mission
      • Our Mission
      • Diversity
      • Scholarships
    • Contact
      • Contact Customer Service
      • Contact Sales
      • Press & Media Enquiries
    • Frequent Asked Questions
    • Customer Reviews
    • Press
    • Careers
  • Contact Sales
  • SANS Sites
    • GIAC Security Certifications
    • Internet Storm Center
    • SANS Technology Institute
    • Security Awareness Training
  • Search
  • Log In
  • Join
    • Account Dashboard
    • Log Out
  1. Home >
  2. Blog >
  3. NewsBites Drilldown for the Week Ending 13 March 2021
370x370_john-pescatore.jpg
John Pescatore

NewsBites Drilldown for the Week Ending 13 March 2021

March 16, 2021

Newsbites.jpg

John Pescatore - SANS Director of Emerging Security Trends

Avoiding “Too Big to Fail” Risk Assessment and Mitigation Blind Spots

This week’s Drilldown will focus on an item (included below) from NewsBites Issue 20, again focusing on high criticality, zero day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange software, which are being actively exploited by multiple threat actors. Some attacks started before Microsoft issued the emergency patches.

SolarWinds Orion and Microsoft Exchange are two examples of prime targets for attackers. Those products are directly handled and/or placed on network segments where highly sensitive information is being processed. But an underlooked, and equally as important, factor is that those products have an extremely high enterprise market share. Finding an exploit opens up thousands of targets for exploitation.

There are many other products that fit this profile. For an example, here’s a market share chart of IT Service Management vendors:

image.png

ServiceNow would be the obvious target in this market. Open source tools such as Ansible, Jensen, and others have high “market” shares. Remember the impact of the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL? Cloud services like Azure and AWS have dominant shares.

Products in use by the IT infrastructure aren’t the only examples. Products like SAP or Oracle Business Solutions have high market shares overall or in certain verticals. In manufacturing, power, medical, retail, and other verticals, there are similar software products and appliances that have dominant market shares.

High market share products are often seen as safe and “too big to fail.” The old phrase was, “No one ever got fired for choosing IBM or Cisco.” That thinking has created a blind spot in risk analysis. The damage if one these “safe” choices is compromised is under-represented in risk weighting.

This “concentration” risk means attackers are spending more time looking for vulnerabilities. Equally, if not more important, even if you escape damage, the odds are very high that multiple places in your supply chain will be compromised.

A quick inventory scan will find a few of these high market share products in your environment. Use one of them for a tabletop exercise around how prepared you are if one of them had a SolarWinds or Exchange-class vulnerability. Mitigation and avoidance will invariably require change in many areas outside of security, so the next step is a similar tabletop exercise with CXOs and boards of directors.

______________________________________________________________________________

2021-03-11

Multiple Threat Actors Are Exploiting Exchange Server Vulnerabilities

According to analysis from ESET, at least 10 APT groups are exploiting the Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities. Many of the groups have ties to China. Six of the groups were actively exploiting the flaws prior to Microsoft’s emergency patch release on Tuesday, March 2.

Editor's Note

The interval between initial exploits by Hafnium and additional APT groups is simply too small for them to have independently discovered the vulnerabilities and developed working exploits. This suggests that after the initial exploits were leveraged by Hafnium in or before January, they then were shared with other groups, such as Tick, LuckyMouse, Calypso, Webslic, and APT41. Given the scope of added exploits discovered, assume they are shared even more broadly. For this reason, it is best to operate on the model that all Exchange servers are targets and that you not only need to apply the patches, but also check carefully for signs of compromise. Make sure that your real-time endpoint protection includes the Exchange vulnerabilities and IoCs.

Lee Neely

This issue of NewsBites features a wide array of vulnerabilities in IT critical infrastructure elements, such as Windows, MacOS, Exchange and F5 Big-IP--without even mentioning SolarWinds Orion. This points out two big issues that are pre-requisites to even considering talking about buzzwords like zero trust: (1) to be proactive, risk analysis has to focus as much (really more) on where vulnerabilities would cause the most impact to business as on who might launch attacks; and (2) if you can’t get the critical IT infrastructure elements to the essential security hygiene level (meaningful segmentation, rapid patching, configuration management), you have no chance in assessing the trustability of anything else.

John Pescatore

I concur with John Pescatore, but I want to stress the urgency and seriousness. Our infrastructure now stands naked before a nation-state willing to take the risk of being caught in the act of compromising that infrastructure. We must assume that that state will work to maintain its advantage and that in time of crisis would exploit it.

William Hugh Murray
Share:
TwitterLinkedInFacebook
Copy url Url was copied to clipboard
Subscribe to SANS Newsletters
Receive curated news, vulnerabilities, & security awareness tips
United States
Canada
United Kingdom
Spain
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
Australia
India
Japan
Singapore
Afghanistan
Aland Islands
Albania
Algeria
American Samoa
Andorra
Angola
Anguilla
Antarctica
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Aruba
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belize
Benin
Bermuda
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba
Bosnia And Herzegovina
Botswana
Bouvet Island
Brazil
British Indian Ocean Territory
Brunei Darussalam
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Cayman Islands
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Christmas Island
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Colombia
Comoros
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
Croatia (Local Name: Hrvatska)
Curacao
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic
East Timor
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Faroe Islands
Fiji
Finland
France
French Guiana
French Polynesia
French Southern Territories
Gabon
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Gibraltar
Greece
Greenland
Grenada
Guadeloupe
Guam
Guatemala
Guernsey
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti
Heard And McDonald Islands
Honduras
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Isle of Man
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Jersey
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Korea, Republic Of
Kosovo
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Lao People's Democratic Republic
Latvia
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macau
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Martinique
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mayotte
Mexico
Micronesia, Federated States Of
Moldova, Republic Of
Monaco
Mongolia
Montenegro
Montserrat
Morocco
Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands Antilles
New Caledonia
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Niue
Norfolk Island
Northern Mariana Islands
Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Palestine
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Pitcairn
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Reunion
Romania
Russian Federation
Rwanda
Saint Bartholemy
Saint Kitts And Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Martin
Saint Vincent And The Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino
Sao Tome And Principe
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Sint Maarten
Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
South Africa
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
South Sudan
Sri Lanka
St. Helena
St. Pierre And Miquelon
Suriname
Svalbard And Jan Mayen Islands
Swaziland
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Togo
Tokelau
Tonga
Trinidad And Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Turks And Caicos Islands
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United States Minor Outlying Islands
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Vatican City
Venezuela
Vietnam
Virgin Islands (British)
Virgin Islands (U.S.)
Wallis And Futuna Islands
Western Sahara
Yemen
Yugoslavia
Zambia
Zimbabwe

By providing this information, you agree to the processing of your personal data by SANS as described in our Privacy Policy.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Tags:
  • Cybersecurity Insights

Related Content

Blog
Newsbites.jpg
Cybersecurity Insights
April 1, 2021
NewsBites Drilldown for the Week Ending 26 March 2021
John Pescatore – SANS Director of Emerging Security Trends Don’t Just Put the Egg Salad Back in the Fridge, Make Sure It Hasn’t Spoiled... This week’s Drilldown will focus on an item (included below) from NewsBites Issue 24, which noted that a high percentage of Microsoft Exchange servers have...
370x370_john-pescatore.jpg
John Pescatore
read more
Blog
Newsbites.jpg
Cybersecurity Insights
March 23, 2021
NewsBites Drilldown for the Week Ending 19 March 2021
John Pescatore - SANS Director of Emerging Security Trends Does Integrating Physical Security and Information Security Make Sense? This week’s Drilldown will focus on an item (included below) from NewsBites Issue 21, focusing on a business interruption event caused by a data center fire that not...
370x370_john-pescatore.jpg
John Pescatore
read more
Blog
Newsbites.jpg
Cybersecurity Insights
March 9, 2021
NewsBites Drilldown for the Week Ending 6 March 2021
John Pescatore – SANS Director of Emerging Security Trends Hybrid Cloud Can Be the Best of Times, the Worst of Times This week’s Drilldown will focus on an item (included below) from NewsBites Issue 18, reporting that high-criticality, zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange software are...
370x370_john-pescatore.jpg
John Pescatore
read more
  • Register to Learn
  • Courses
  • Certifications
  • Degree Programs
  • Cyber Ranges
  • Job Tools
  • Security Policy Project
  • Posters & Cheat Sheets
  • White Papers
  • Focus Areas
  • Cyber Defense
  • Cloud Security
  • Cybersecurity Leadership
  • Digital Forensics
  • Industrial Control Systems
  • Offensive Operations
Subscribe to SANS Newsletters
Receive curated news, vulnerabilities, & security awareness tips
United States
Canada
United Kingdom
Spain
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
Australia
India
Japan
Singapore
Afghanistan
Aland Islands
Albania
Algeria
American Samoa
Andorra
Angola
Anguilla
Antarctica
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Aruba
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belize
Benin
Bermuda
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba
Bosnia And Herzegovina
Botswana
Bouvet Island
Brazil
British Indian Ocean Territory
Brunei Darussalam
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Cayman Islands
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Christmas Island
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Colombia
Comoros
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
Croatia (Local Name: Hrvatska)
Curacao
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic
East Timor
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Faroe Islands
Fiji
Finland
France
French Guiana
French Polynesia
French Southern Territories
Gabon
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Gibraltar
Greece
Greenland
Grenada
Guadeloupe
Guam
Guatemala
Guernsey
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti
Heard And McDonald Islands
Honduras
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Isle of Man
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Jersey
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Korea, Republic Of
Kosovo
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Lao People's Democratic Republic
Latvia
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macau
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Martinique
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mayotte
Mexico
Micronesia, Federated States Of
Moldova, Republic Of
Monaco
Mongolia
Montenegro
Montserrat
Morocco
Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands Antilles
New Caledonia
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Niue
Norfolk Island
Northern Mariana Islands
Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Palestine
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Pitcairn
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Reunion
Romania
Russian Federation
Rwanda
Saint Bartholemy
Saint Kitts And Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Martin
Saint Vincent And The Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino
Sao Tome And Principe
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Sint Maarten
Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
South Africa
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
South Sudan
Sri Lanka
St. Helena
St. Pierre And Miquelon
Suriname
Svalbard And Jan Mayen Islands
Swaziland
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Togo
Tokelau
Tonga
Trinidad And Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Turks And Caicos Islands
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United States Minor Outlying Islands
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Vatican City
Venezuela
Vietnam
Virgin Islands (British)
Virgin Islands (U.S.)
Wallis And Futuna Islands
Western Sahara
Yemen
Yugoslavia
Zambia
Zimbabwe

By providing this information, you agree to the processing of your personal data by SANS as described in our Privacy Policy.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
  • © 2023 SANS™ Institute
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • Careers
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn