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
    • 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 31 July 2020
370x370_john-pescatore.jpg
John Pescatore

NewsBites Drilldown for the Week Ending 31 July 2020

August 4, 2020

Newsbites.jpg

John Pescatore – SANS Director of Emerging Security Trends

Driving Security Priority into Work from Home Product Vendors

This week’s Drilldown looks at two items (included below) from NewsBites Issue 59 and Issue 60,which focused on vulnerabilities in commercial products often used in work-from-home scenarios and vendors’ lack of attention to, and support for, security in their products.

The first item described Netgear’s decision not to release patches for 45 of its routers that have critical remote code execution vulnerabilities. Netgear stated that those 45 products are “outside the security support period.”

The second item detailed an FBI warning for out-of-the-box insecure configurations of products using Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WS-DD), Apple Remote Management Service (ARMS) and Jenkins web-based automation software.

What this translates to is a high level of risk overall and particularly with today’s (and the future’s) increased level of work from home. Remote code execution on employee home internet routers would be an obvious disaster. The FBI warning focused on DDoS exploitation of insecure configurations. Work from home can be completely disrupted by DDoS attacks that disable inbound or outbound internet connectivity.

If you look back to the start of business use of the internet in the early 2000s, Microsoft only sporadically released patches for known vulnerabilities in Windows, and very few hardware and software vendors took a “secure out-of-the-box” approach. It took pressure from buyers to get Microsoft (and other software vendors) to move to more secure out-of-the-box configurations and support efforts such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks.

We are now reliving this scenario with groups of vendors that want to sell to enterprises, but haven’t made the investment in secure design and fast and guaranteed patching processes that enterprises need. Buying power works. Buyers must apply pressure to sellers, essentially “voting” with procurement funds.

If we continue to buy junk, those vendors will happily continue to sell us junk. Security managers should work with procurement to remove from procurement lists vendors who are not providing enterprise levels or security, or to at least assure security evaluation criteria are highly weighted. This should include any ISP contracts where routers are provided to small office, home office and branch office environments. Employees should be given guidance on required patches or mitigation approaches and provided with lists of recommended home equipment to choose when they do have choice.

______________________________________________________________________________

Netgear Will Not Release Patches for 45 Devices Vulnerable to RCE Flaw

(July 30, 2020)

A remote code execution vulnerability affecting Netgear home routers was disclosed in June. Netgear will not release fixes for 45 of the affected router models, identifying them as "outside the security support period." Proof-of-concept exploit code for the stack buffer overflow vulnerability has been released.

[Editor Comments]

[Pescatore] Obviously, with high levels of work from home, use of the unpatchable devices is a concern. The CERT alert has a link to a nice spreadsheet with all the Netgear model numbers that won't be supported with patches. Netgear's response to this issue is a good reason to remove them from procurement lists for any corporate buys, and it is worth looking at what user devices are supplied with any ISP services you are using for small office/home office connectivity, as well. The consumer issue is really something that is going to need legislation to drive required support periods, or at least up-front declaration of guaranteed support periods.

[Ullrich] If you are sick of vendors forcing you to buy new devices versus offering to fix defective devices they sold you: Consider one of the very capable, and by no means difficult to use, open source alternatives that use commodity hardware. My favorite, OPNsense, released an update this week that yet again improves security and offers features that you will have a hard time finding in many expensive enterprise solutions. Other alternatives are pfSense and IPFire; or, for older/less-capable hardware, good-old OpenWrt. Lots of other options depending on what you need. Some of these even offer paid supported versions.

[Murray] "Useful life" ends with the publication of vulnerabilities in unsupported products. Fortunately, the cost of the replacement will be a fraction of the cost of the original and the value higher.

FBI Warning on New DDoS Attack Vectors

(July 27, 2020)

Last week, the FBI issued a Private Industry Notification warning of several new network protocols and a web application that are being abused to conduct DDoS attacks. They are CoAP, WS-DD, ARMS and Jenkins web-based automation software.

[Editor Comments]

[Pescatore] In the 2020 "SANS Top New Attacks and Threats Report," SANS Fellow Ed Skoudis detailed "living off the land" attacks and what to do about them for near-term mitigation. Longer term, pressure needs to be applied to vendors to provide out-of-the-box configurations that have potentially dangerous services off by default. The report can be downloaded at www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/analyst/top-attacks-threat-report-39520

Read more in:

ZDNet: FBI warns of new DDoS attack vectors: CoAP, WS-DD, ARMS, and Jenkins

www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-warns-of-new-ddos-attack-vectors-coap-ws-dd-arms-and-jenkins/

RackCDN: Private Industry Notification | Cyber Actors Exploiting Built-In Network Protocols to Carry Out Larger, More Destructive Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (PDF)

https://dd80b675424c132b90b3-e48385e382d2e5d17821a5e1d8e4c86b.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/external/fbi-private-industry-notification-20200721-002.pdf



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 16, 2021
NewsBites Drilldown for the Week Ending 13 March 2021
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...
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