The Other Advanced
Attacks
Mike Chapple, CISSP, Ph.D.
Senior Director, IT Service Delivery
University of Notre Dame
© TechTarget
@mchapple mchapple@nd.edu

Agenda
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• The Threat is Changing
• DNS Threats
• NTP DDoS Amplification
• Unmasking Careto

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The Threat is
Changing

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Script Kiddies
Are So Nineties

The New Threats
• Governments
• Terrorist Organizations
• Organized Crime
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6
Cyberwarfare
Is Real

The Participants
Are Well-Funded

Inside an Iranian Nuclear
Facility
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Source: Vitaly Shmatikov
And The Targets
Are High Stakes

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“We're glad they are having
trouble with their centrifuge
machine and (we) are doing
everything we can to make
sure that we complicate
matters for them.”
Gary Samore
Special Assistant to the President
and White House Coordinator
for Arms Control and WMD

Zero Day Vulnerabilities
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NEED VIGILANCE
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We Must
Remain
Vigilant

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DNS Threats

Denial of Service Attacks
• Send huge number of requests to a targeted server,
seeking to overwhelm it
• Difficult to distinguish legitimate requests from attack
traffic
• Several limitations for the attacker
– Requires massive bandwidth
– Easy for victims to block based upon IP
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Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
• Leverage botnets to
exhaust all resources
on a targeted system
• Difficult to distinguish
legitimate requests
from attack traffic
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Amplified DDoS Attacks
• Traditional DDoS still limited
by bandwidth of zombie PCs
• Amplification attacks
leverage the bandwidth of
non-compromised
intermediaries
• Requires a service that
sends responses that are
much larger than the queries
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Amplification Factor
• Amplification factor is the
degree to which the attack
is increased in size
• 64 byte query resulting in a
512 byte response is an
amplification factor of 8
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Characteristics of an Amplification Attack
• Use botnets
• Leverage misconfigured
services
• Spoof source addresses
• Require connectionless
protocol
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How DNS Should Work
• DNS servers should provide domain name resolution
services:
1. To the systems on an organization’s network (for all addresses)
2. To the general Internet (for public names owned by the
organization)
• Most DNS communications take place over UDP
• Some systems are configured as “open resolvers”,
answering any question from the Internet at large
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DNS Amplification Attack
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Source: Microsoft
Amplification
Factor of 60X

Don’t Be a Relay
• Ensure that you’re not an
open resolver
• Open Resolver Project
openresolverproject.org
• DNS Inspect
dnsinspect.com
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Be a Good Internet Citizen
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NTP DDoS
Amplification

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How
Dangerous
Can a Clock
Be?

NTP
• Network Time Protocol
used for clock
synchronization
• Almost three decades of
operation
• Relies upon UDP for
sync traffic
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MON_GETLIST
• System monitoring command
• Retrieves the list of the last 600
systems that interacted with the
server
• Ideal for an amplification attack
when used with forged source
addresses
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Exploring MON_GETLIST
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Source: CloudFlare
Amplification
Factor up to
206X

Be a Good Citizen
• Upgrade NTP servers to v4.2.7p26 or later
• Perform egress filtering at the firewall
• Disable MONLIST and related features (see CERT
VU#348126)
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Unmasking
Careto

What is Careto?
• Spanish for “The Mask”
• Not a single piece of code, but an advanced threat
• Engaged in espionage activities since at least 2007,
undetected until February 2014
• Victimized over 1,000 IPs in 31 countries
• Definite Spanish flavor
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Naming the Beast
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Source: Kaspersky

Who is Targeted?
• Government Agencies
• Energy Companies
• Researchers
• Private Equity Firms
• Activists
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Initial Infection
• Spear phishing messages direct
users to a website
– linkconf.net
– redirserver.net
– swupdt.com
• Malware hosted in non-indexed
folders on those sites
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Malware Bears a Digital Signature
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Source: Kaspersky

Variety of Targets
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Diverse Objectives
• Intercept network traffic
• Perform keylogging
• Monitor Skype conversations
• Steal PGP keys
• Analyze WiFi traffic
• Perform screen captures
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Stolen File Types
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Source: Kaspersky

Hides from Kaspersky AV
• Exploits a 2008 vulnerability in Kaspersky
• Attempts to whitelist itself to avoid detection
• Vulnerability patched long ago; relying upon old
copies with expired update subscriptions
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Protecting Against APTs
• Update, update, update
• Filter at the gateway and defend at the endpoint
• Maintain a defense-in-depth approach that does not rely
upon any single layer of control
• Monitor rigorously
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Questions?
© TechTarget
mchapple@nd.edu
@mchapple