nation state hackers caught exploiting cisco firewalls
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 24. 04. 2024
- An advanced backdoor has been found on several Cisco ASAs around the world. Reported by Cisco Talos, these backdoors are sophisticated, and hint towards a larger campaign targeting telecommunications providers and energy sector organizations around the world
Talos Report: blog.talosintelligence.com/ar...
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That first hook is worming the Host for greater parasitism. Ensuring all analytics terminate is the sign of a more evolved Host that stays based in its original objective. Performance comes first, not safety nor other promiscuity posing as nicety.
I still have an old Linksys router with a simple backdoor on port 32764, it was fun to play with this.
I remember also playing with some D-Link routers, we could access their admin panel by changing your user-agent of your browser to "xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide". ("backdoor/roodkcab lol")
Someone here remember "xmlset_roodkcableoj..." or the port 32764 ?
Edit: I got confused by the title, I thought these routers were sold like this...
WEF cyber pandemic
Reminds me of SC1. I dig⊠I read ya, siiiir.
At this point, itâs probably easier to just list the systems that donât have some glowie backdoor
*psst, Hey Kid, want a list of uncompromised systems?*
If you find one, let us know
The list:
đ€
TempleOS, probably has bugs but definitely not made with glowies influence in trying to compromise it.
TempleOS ftw đ
I dunno if I'd agree that this is nothing out of the ordinary. Vulnerabilities are found all the time, sure. But this month we're finding nation-state attackers actively compromising lots of things successfully with 0-day you're-already-infected crap. That does happen. It doesn't happen several times a month usually.
I've been in a cybersecurity-adjacent field for awhile now, and this feels more like the plot from the (2nd?) pacific rim movie where the kaiju end up coming with less and less time between events until they get more than one kaiju in a single 'breach'. I feel like we were bound to hit a cve-tipping point where instead of having one a big one every month or two in the past, we get several a month, several a week, etc.
The source of the problem isn't shrinking, its growing. The increase in the rate of security vulnerabilities feels inevitable.
The wider geopolitical situation is driving this. Nation-states have been keeping their powder dry for higher priority engagement opportunities. We're into higher priority engagements than "ordinary" objectives. It's also a bit of a panic that other nation-states will use the exploit that they have before they can use it, so we have a situation where there are high priority operations AND "use it or lose it" fear.
@@quantumuninstall feels like the cyberpunk future where the Internet as it was got destroyed by a virus that was unstoppable and infected all systems... I think the solution in cyberpunk was the creation of completely physically isolated networks.
The west is busy with Ukraine and Israel, Taiwan looks very juicy. Nation states are lining up their ducks to be sure to have ways of knowing and redirecting attention.
Source: trust me bro
â@@lawrencemanning Is there such a thing as true digital privacy in this day and age?
wake up babe, new 10/10 CVE just dropped!
evidence that babe exists
Loool â€â€đ
Oh faxk off with this nonsense
Actual babe: âthat guy talks too muchâ đ
One of my favorite sayings, "There are organizations that know they have been hacked, and those that don't."
Reminds me of an internal google meme:
"That's my secret, Cap. I'm always under attack."
Especially in the energy sector. Everyone knows there is espionage.
Yeah. I also like âThere are people that know how to build a house, and those that donât.â
âThere are things that exist, and things that donât.â
âThere are that that they have been , and that donât.â
Such a meaningful quote.
@@o0Donuts0o r/whoosh.
It means everyone has been hacked, but some know it and some don't.
@@superneenjaa718 oooh got me with a Reddit reference. đ. That quote is as stupid as the person who wrote it and the people who quote it.
Thatâs my feel of ITSec in general. Do nothing all day and suddenly enlightened when the pen testers come along. You know, the actual knowledgeable ones. This quote just embodies them in general. Say a lot of nothing.
Cisco is synonymous with backdoor at this point...
But is Israel involved?
Any company that relies on a vendor that outsources their own TAC is a back door .
Well, they are targeted more simply due to their sheer numbers out there in backbone routing. Same with OS's, Windows being targeted more due to it's market market share.
â@@BillAntfor clients yes, for servers no
They're living rent free in your head that's insane â@@DudeSoWin
i love when the last 5-6 videos of LLL are security vulnerabilites
Well he is a security researcher after all đ€
@@lawrencemanning I could keep watching vuluns forever. They're all different and unique.
No memes, no ads, no nonsense content. Keep it up! Thank you.
Yeah well that's fine and good. he didn't remind me to watch till the end and I wandered off
I'd 50% agree on the reason why lately people are noticing way more security problems: I too think it is because more people are talking about this type of stuff in CZcams videos etc., but mostly triggered by the XZ almost-vulnerability(which was bad, but caught early, and probably got somewhat overhyped).
Not an almost vulnerability. Whatever group put it in, they had around two weeks to abuse it. Assuming their target was running Debian or Fedora their target was probs compromised.
â@@universallyepicnarwhal9102Linux cultists will always try their best to downplay their Ls
@@universallyepicnarwhal9102 it was never released in a release version of debian. No one would have been using that version in production.
@@ImNotActuallyChristian True, but it hit unstable debian. I know of some people (unfortunately) who use that in production. And they did successfully hit fedora
â@@universallyepicnarwhal9102lol. Using unstable in production is idiotic.
I once worked for a vendor to the Cisco campus in San Jose. They had a particular technical glitch at the campus they could never resolve--I was offering to refer a Cisco Certified Network Engineer to them every single week.
so long as you don't print your own chips, you can guarantee your chips are backdoored
Even if you print your own chips, can you ensure that no malicious actor along the way put a backdoor into the design that you yourself missed.
ken thompson hack reference
x-ray every chip you produce before adding to the motherboard which you x-rayed as well :D
@@todorkolev7565 don't forget to xray the xray machine to make sure the xray machine isn't compromised
AI will make it very hard to hide hardware backdoors in the future. It will be able to take an image of a circuit and point out suspicious things.
As you said, this were happening all the time, but the peaople are now sharing more info and realising the situation.
Its not only that, more people work on security every year, more programs and services being created and more people using them every year. Everything is ramping up, the reporting as well
@@dracula7779 I am absolutely agree with you. Security vulnerabilities we can sort in two major groups:
1. Accidental
2. Intentional
This one belongs to the second group, with a purpose of collecting some data for some reasons..
Just had one of my ASR1001-x devices compromised and was being used as a Tor relay. This was a couple of weeks ago. I found it strange that i got a visit from someone with the department of homeland security that knew everything that was happening on my systems before i did.
They don't compromise things to be Tor relays... There are enough Tor relays run by volunteers.
A hack is not as traceable as running your own relay or proxy or vpn or whatever, a hacker could certainly do this to try and put their egress location at arms length
@@thewhitefalcon8539 I could imagine the Tor relay was a malicious Tor relay attempting to expose its users. In that case, it would make sense they are compromising things sense the more Tor relays you have access to the more control you have over the Tor network. It's always possible this commenter is lying, but this is entirely a realistic and possible scenario.
â@@thewhitefalcon8539 exit nodes are uncommon for volunteers just because of the heat you get from it.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 not true. alot of the relays are run by the government and somewhat unsafe.
It's so true about security patches..there have been hacking and patches since day one. but some people believe erroneously that less security patches means your system is more secured.
" have you tried yanking the power cord? "
This is a real thing. Sometimes a device needs to be powered off to completely reset. A "reboot" doesn't always clear everything.
i watch your videos twice because you pack so much info into them, its so good
thank you Mr. Low
Governments not back-dooring any & all tech devices challenge (Impossible)
them:H-HOW are keep getting hacked by another nations and steal our secrets!! cyber security: they used your backdoor you placed into it. stop adding backdoors? them:nahhh, that ain't the problem at all.
@@Sunrise-d819i2 But i mean, if they didnt backdoor all our devices, how would they rape the undesirables??????????
We need Edward Snowden more than ever
Just make your own silicone
@@Rudxain its not the us
As a guy who has played with computers since the TRS80, I find this stuff fascinating, but not surprising. The layers of complexity of over lapping programs still used in code in modern software is mind blowing.
Fascinating analysis.
waiter waiter! more cves please!
twenty course meal
Ah yes, Chili Vinegar Eggs, my favorite meal
great video. thank you for covering this.
Is this news? My dad worked in telecoms. Was an open secret the NSA had a backdoor for CISCO products. Prospective orders for networking equipment that could packet an entire undersea cable worth of stuff. It's been known
Just because it's an open-secret doesn't mean it's not a very bad idea to have a backdoor any nation-state can get access to.
The US intelligence community has done a great job painting anyone who's vaguely aware of their operations, even in ways that are openly known, as the exact same as cooky anti-government nutjobs.
I will remind you that mass-scale digital surveillance featuring collaboration from essentially every multinational tech giant was completely real. We're a decade post Snowden and it feels like everything he leaked has been completely swept under the rug.
Your dad.
I think there's been a breakdown of cooperation with two intelligence agencies. These vulnerabilities are being found way too easy.
You have come! You have come to hear the word of Cisco-Talos!
loving itđ
Woo backdoor mania, love the vids, interesting stuff
so much for the TRUSTED FOUNDRY campaign
Thanks for sharing
The only tech channel remaining I watch that doesn't upload 50 minute video essays every 2 seconds about every fart in the universe
Nice
thanks, I just started working with PA.
random idea for a video: do a "top 10 CVEs" for different ratings. like top ten 10/10 CVEs, or top ten 1/10's for the less exploitable, but still fascinating ones. I've seen a lot of really interesting CVEs listed, especially ones that are related to like jailbreaking a device or allowing modification of consumer devices
very interesting, would love an even more in-depth video like this
And that's why I always said that, at the end of the day, Picard is really the GOAT. We already knew you couldn't quite trust cisco ever since "In the Pale Moonlight". This is just another nail on the coffin of his reputation, tbh.
"It's *_reeeeal!_* I can _see_ it... _in my mind."_ - Sisko, Deep Space Nine
"$vuln in Cisco found!" Yeah, they call it monday
what!? they donât stop!!!!!
Everyone has no doubt noticed the acronym of 'Nation State Actor' is 'NSA' ? :)
Yup
during the backdoor firmware year a few years ago i dumped all routers and smart switches and made my pwn using linux and iptables. Faster and fixable.
They're also have an idea of utilizing their system on a dpu for example for computer to computer Communications and even identifying devices which need firmware updates flagging them and semi isolating them making it really clear that this needs to get done etc etc using deep machine learning as well they really up their game on this new rollout and it's worth a look.
Assuming the accuracy of your report, the easiest way to detect that your device has been compromised would be to have a separate syslog server notice the absence of logging from registered devices.
Nation states probably got access to Cisco source code - was analysed, hence easier to find weaknesses.
If you have the hardware then you have the software. You can trace and reverse engineer. And you can run tooling that hunts for exploits against the binary.
@@mrpocock sure, but much easier with the source. Just need one bent software engineer on the inside.
@@UnCoolDad and doing that is harder than just reverse engineering. it's a lot more expesnive and diffult going that route. you have the company and gov to worry about. you've nothing to worry about just using the hardware.
@@mycelia_ow Or cisco just gives the NSA the hardware on source code.
well explained. thank you for this. keep up the good work this is needed! telecommunication providers are not much help.
This reminds me a lot of how the xz backdoor worked... In the case of xz, the 'magic' token was signed with a ecc private key. But presenting that signed token to ssh would have activated the backdoor, much like this.
Crazy stuff
Several years back I think some home routers could be cleared by just unplugging them. I do remember some print servers that once you re flashed the firmware. It would kill the bot.
Now for the age old question: Could Rust have prevented thi-
no, even if it would prevent this attack, you search for another way to implement a backdoor. and if you can control the code, you can do it
If (as is presumably the case) the initial vector was a memory safety issue, then yes, a memory safe language is extremely likely to have prevented it (extremely likely here meaning at least 90%+ chance, and only that low because you have to hit unsafe code eventually and people like to think they're clever)
Could they find *other* issues? Sure, but the reason it's often memory safety is that they're the majority of security issues in the first place. Why make things easier for the bad guy?
đ
â@@SimonBuchanNzLLVM
@@rusi6219 what about it?
Okay. I feel like I've really jinxed it after saying "inb4 we learn of an expoit that can bypass our firewalls" on your xz video.
I would like to point out that those devices are aging Francisco has just announced a completely radical rework of their security framework and it's worth a look if you imagine that they used to be the industry number one without question leader in this area, then you probably can imagine they had a lot of money stash for R&D and if they're putting out something like what I heard they're doing it could be quite interesting.
Careful with blurring text...
If the font, the character set, and the string length are known, there are methods to recover the clear text. A blur, is not encryption. Folks in the security space should know better. Cover the redacted entirely with a solid colored box - it leaks no data.
Cisco reporting on itself.
Iâm astonished that this security org only blurred the secret rather than removing it entirely. Blurred text can be recovered by blurring letters and comparing to the blurred phrase. The font would be trivial to identify since there is a bunch of other text surrounding it.
Next level plan: Use blurring, but replace that section of text (before blurring) to random nonsense, just to waste the time of potential attackers. (but yeah, speaking seriously, I had the same annoyance/complaint)
Wow!
Thanks for covering this! Everyoneâs favorite 3 letter controlled hacker forum ;) was censoring this story so always nice to see someone cover it
Low Level Learning & Mental Outlaw are two of the most based CZcamsrs in the Tech Space.
For internet appliances and their always on nature, in memory malware is fairly common, going back to 2008-10 Chuck Norris router malware.
Lua mentioned!
In software, security is an illusion.
Not in software. Everywhere. You are not safe.
Security is a _practice._
Being secure, is the illusion.
Exactly, and that's precisely why I've stopped caring about security completely. Much less paranoia, more relaxed and efficient life. And probably no difference in effective security outcome.
Pretty secure when itâs turned off. The trick is keeping it that way when itâs running.
@@greggoog7559 It's not that security practices are pointless; they're more vital than ever, actually. The problem is that doing anything while maintaining best practices, has become so onerous that the best approach is often to just not do things.
Security isn't just about privacy, it's also about safety... & we are not safe, when relying on these type of shoddy systems.
cisco is pretty well known for backdoors.
Nation State Actor, I see what you did there
Everyone saw what they did there, they just didn't feel the need to comment about it due to how basic it is.
so interesting
Twenty twenty-four: the year of the backdoor - there have been so many exploits discovered this year alone (it's only April) I've completely lost count. It's beginning to seem like all the security promised by all these "trusted" OEMs has been nothing but an elaborate ruse.
Yup.
Trust â security
It's technology, security is impossible. No OEMs are going to be invincible to vuluns.
I left IT for health reasons years ago, but at the time I was trying to get attention for all the shady "delivery optimization" shit that gets installed on our systems. There is no way with all of those over the years, someone hasn't been using one for nefarious reasons. Everyone just accepts SO much good behavior in the tech space, it's a problem.
Isn't it possible that there are more cases because there are more devices?
As humanity grows, we connect more things and people, and therefore need more network infrastructure devices. So I think it is reasonable that there would be more holes, but also more people and users to find said holes.
Finally, my not bothering to troubleshoot beyond unplugging my crappy Cox router and plugging it back in pays off for security. XD
Do they not know the access vector or are they not ready to publicize what is it?
Or would publicizing it be bad so they're only telling people who need to know?
Ciscoâs other big back door is probably outsourced TAC engineers that can record customer data in various ways.
Actually thatâs possibly a problem across the board and ultimately relates to inherent issues with remote work and cloud :/
Yeah, trust â security.
In fact, the more trust we rely on, the less secure.
How useful is it really to disable syslog? The Eye of Sauron is drawn to you every time you use the ring for invisibility! The sudden absence of syslog lines has got to be a huge red flag to many monitoring systems. Hard to imagine that the light anti-forensics gain outweighs the detection risk.
There's legitimate reasons for a system to not be reporting logs. For example, many customers would want to avoid reporting them for privacy, security, or legal reasons. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Cisco provides official mechanisms to turn off syslogs, which is probably what the backdoor emulated.
Not so much "monitoring systems". I don't know of any such technology that has any logic to detect a system being abnormally silent. Yes, syslogd has had a "mark" target for eons, but (a) no one turns it on, and (b) even fewer setup systems to look for it. In my world, I ("The Human") am the only thing that would ever notice "I haven't seen anything from XXX for a while." Depending on the system, there may not be anything to be logged.
@@mollthecoder There is, and the default is local only. If an admin has configured logging, and there aren't any logs coming from it... it's something to be checked. I would expect this level of attack to have disabled syslog in the executable, not just removing the logging commands. (one can see the commands aren't there and put them back.)
I need we need to build our own router and switches, so we know what backdoors we have within our codes.
We can thank NSA for all the backdoors, imo.
Id love to write tooling like fine tuned llms for/with these blue teams
I believe there is still more to discover
It's getting tough for NSA now
it's probably nsa
Disable syslog? Hence, the importance to monitor for the absence of logs.
Well that sure took long
THANK YOU for harping a bit on the fact that this shit is happening all the time and it's just that nobody knows about it. If they actually knew I'm sure they would care a lot more!
It works exactly as the NSA and Cisco designed it to work.
4:56 why would they blur the token, blurring isn't destructive...
If they want to uniquely identify each org with that token then they can't destroy it
given the light dark pattern they probably replaced it with words first.
I think there may be confusion between a 32-bit and 32-byte token. The number of unmasked characters is insufficient for 32 bytes.
@@Marc16180 OP is saying that even with blurring text can still be identified
Then recover it and tell the world what it is.
it kinda looks like the xz backdoor, at least conceptually, doesn't it?
I would think a firewall suddenly not sending syslogs would be a huge red flag but okayâŠ
have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?
since last month somehow we get backdoors or 10/10 problems with biggest tech companies every weekđ€
Sometimes I wish they were legally allowed to hack back once their system has been compromised. It's technically gathering information on the attack just more proactively...
Media license holders _are_ allowed to... Seems weird to have made an exception specifically for IP, but all socially enforced copyright restriction seems weird to me.
Can someone explain how does this happen? How does someone commit a backdoor into proprietary code?
in memory backdoor installed via an exploit, not in all the code
â@@LowLevelLearning So the backdoor is planted using some existing vulnerable code on the device, which is why shutting down the device requires reinitialization of backdoor, that makes more sense, thanks!
What a suprise đ
It ramped up in 2008 + you have to check the cve but I'm pretty sure you'll see a jump.....
please buy more cisco productrs
lol... the same appliances that years back people reported to be delivered opened while travelling straight from the manufacturers? And traces or re-flashed firmware? :)
Iâm new to this but it seems that no matter how much you try to prevent and protect yourself in the cyber world is practically impossible. Going back to the fax machine.
I wonder if the rate of (known) "nation state threat actor" campaigns being launched correlates with the number of technologically advanced countries currently at war.
That is the reason hay so many countries will bit permit US equipmebt in their critical network infrastructure.
Nation State as in the NSA
4:54 hey, no mention of Binja? :(
So ... why is security critical code not gated behind a digital signature so that it only executes if it is correctly signed?
You gotta build your own firewall. Use old pc with open BSD and network card.
NSA strikes again
That's cool and all, but why is there "include" instead of "grep" at 6:00?
Why they havenât formatted the code
snippet ??
Pretty sure it is just another multi-million dollar weapon developed by NSA, like XZ.
You could probably reverse that gaussian blur on the magic token.
Absolutely insane hooking crash dump.
Nah. Covering your tracks is a standard practice. (not that many a would be hacker gets it wrong)
the palo alto backdoor has took down our entire districts network