First off, let’s have a brief overview of what SolarWinds Orion is and what’s it good for. Orion’s main purpose is to give a single pane of glass to look at your IT infrastructure. Various technologies can pump their metrics into Orion Database using Orion poller as a proxy. Orion Pollers will sit in your network, consume the metrics they need, and push it to the database engine. From the design perspective, it’s a robust, effective, and scalable way of having the data always ready. Oh btw, SolarWinds has nearly 18,000 customers worldwide.

The first foothold of the Malware was delivered via IP Address (IOC) 209.141.61.11. When the user navigates to that server, depending on the User-Agent string of the request, you’ll either get a signed, legitimate, non-malicious PDF document (Artifact #1 ZIP, 1d2d5b2befe5fcfea8e9303d87b92adaaf9f161a82e0e1341008518d1585e81a, VT 0/60) or a page with a simple CAPTCHA (Artifact #2 PCAP, dfed73960bd9aa030cc5d84df18eaf2d295dfa7f990614c53673e74b84034ef5, VT N/A) that ultimately leads to a ZIP file (Artifact #3 PCAP, 38dcef9b23f21a98fe9dde3f5b5eb643292bf41556b7e4d5da30484848c4cf3d, VT N/A and Artifact #4 ZIP, db647308649e2d3815f7d53d024ac50e8dead8a3caf33bc203dac90b5dbb1596, VT 15/61).

Let’s start from the basics. We’re all familiar with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and we’re (hopefully) using it everywhere: Twitter, Gmail, Slack, etc. On the other hand, we don’t usually use it for our infrastructure access. RDP, SSH, Telnet are among those services that are not easy to secure on the open internet, so we usually tuck them away under a bastion host or a “gateway” of sorts that can provide this MFA functionality. Unfortunately, those services are quite expensive and according to Shodan, we have ~23 MILLION SSH servers exposed to the open internet. Those services might not be any of my concern now, but when (not if) they’re compromised, they’re gonna form a zombie army for a botnet and then it becomes everyone’s problem.

Say you have a 30GB PCAP full of DNS data, and you want to analyse unusual activity on it. To make things simple, let’s see how long it’ll take to find a list of IPs that have accessed PSN’s domain (prppsn.com) and the timestamp associated with them.

As a member of a Security Incident Response Team, I’ve seen that the normal security practices like deploying firewalls, IDS sensors, NSM Toolkit and Netflow Monitoring. SIRT is increasingly looking to the network as a data source. For years infosec has been network-address-centric and the attackers have adapted. Today it is very common to see malware command and control (C&C) use domain generation algorithms (DGAs), Peer-to-Peer (P2P), or even fast-flux DNS to evade IP address-based detection and blocking. It’s very clear that monitoring DNS activity inside the network and trying to find anomalies associated with it is an essential part of SIRT toolkit.

Almost every Internet-connected device on the planet comes with a nice web interface to interact with. And some of them like routers and APs come with their own little firewall to prevent backdoors and whatnot. So what if one of these devices or even servers gets compromised? Where do you look at to find IoC (indication of compromise) in them?

I don’t think I need to explain why IoT is a huge security challenge for every organization since everyone at least has a “smart” printer lying around somewhere. Lately, I was looking at ways to hide the traffic within another traffic type or regular TCP port and I stumbled upon two great ways to make it happen.