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SEC-LABS R&D > Security

24/7 protection during Covid-19 – Defender ATP Auto IR

2020-05-14 0 Comments

One thing we usually discuss with customers is the workload. Everyone has too much to do and it can, sometimes be difficult to prioritize investigations.

Especially now, where you might be short on staff, and the Covid-19 virus can strike at the SOC organization or reduce the numbers of available people.

Of course, this does not only apply during the world crisis of Covid-19. Automation is also a help in the normal day to day work.

There are benefits of being able to automate responses and we have these discussions with many customers.

MDATP Automatic self-healing is built-in into Defender ATP and is mimicking these ideal steps a human would take to investigate and remediate organizational assets, impacted by a cyber threat.

This is done using 20 built-in investigation playbooks and 10 remediation actions

Increased Capacity

  • Respond at the speed of automation
  • Investigate and remediate all alerts automatically
  • Free up critical resources to work on strategic initiatives

Cost implications

  • It will drive down the cost per investigation and remediation
  • Takes away manual, repetitive tasks
  • Automated remediation eliminates downtime

Get full value of your protection suite and people, quick configuration and you are up and running

SecOps Investigation (Manual)

Sometimes it will take some time from the alert being triggered until someone has the time to start looking at it.  Manual work also requires more resources for review and approval for each action

From a SecOPs perspective, an initial response involves information gathering.

Collecting:

  1. Process list
  2. Services
  3. Drivers
  4. Network connections
  5. Files created
    1. Where did the file originate from?
    1. etc

Based on our results, we will decide the remediation steps (if we do not follow a playbook here, the catch will be different result depending on who makes the response).

Remediation:

The remediation will include connecting remotely or manually collect the device and then launch tools for the remediation process.

Automatic response with Auto IR

Fast time to respond which will avoid additional damage and compromise of additional devices, when attackers will start moving lateral in the environment.

It’s our 24/7 buddy who assists the SOC staff to remediate threats so the human staff can focus on other things

  1. MDATP is sending telemetry data to the cloud
  2. MDATP cloud continuously analyzes the data to detect threats
  3. Once a threat is identitfied an alert is being raised
  4. The alert kicks off a new automated investigation
  5. AIRS component asks Sense client to initiate SenseIR
  6. SenseIR is then orchestrated by AIRS on what action should be executed (Collection/Remediation)
  7. Based on the data collected from the machine (current and historical) AIRS decides what actions should be taken
  8. For every threat identified, AIRS will automatically analyze the best course of action and tailor a dedicated surgical remediation action to be executed using on device components (e.g. Windows Defender Antivirus)

Playbook is executed

“suspicious host” playbook is just an example of “catch all” playbook that is applied after detailed AutoIR investigation for evidences raised by alerts / incident  to ensure that nothing is missed.

Data Collection

  • Volatile data
    • All processes list – main image, loaded modules, handles, suspicious memory sections
    • All services list
    • All drivers list
    • All connections
  • None-Volatile data
    • Recently created files – x minutes febore / after alert
    • All persistence methods
    • Recently executed files
    • Download location

Incrimination

  • Microsoft Security Graph eco system – DaaS, AVaaS, TI, TA, Detection engine, ML infrastructure etc.
  • Custom TI indicators – for allow / block list

Remediation

  • How?
    • By leveraging OS components (e.g. Defender Antivirus) to perform the remediation (prebuilt into the system, low level actions (driver), tried and tested)
  • What?
    • File actions
    • Process actions
    • Service actions
    • Registry actions
    • Driver actions
    • Persistency methods (Reg, Link files, etc.) actions
    • Scheduled task actions
    • More…

Getting started

Advanced Features (edited list)
  • In machine groups select Add machine group

As you can see in the options, you can select different AutoIR levels

Summary

Go auto approval, save time and protect your business!

Happy Hunting

Detect, Protect, Respond, Security

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SANS Threat Hunting Summit – Link list

2020-01-12 0 Comments

Thank you for attending our session at Sans Threat Hunting & IR Summit in London.

Here are some resources as promised during our session which may help.

Threat Hunting

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/advanced-hunting-overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/advanced-hunting-overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/advanced-hunting-query-language

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/advanced-hunting-schema-reference

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/mtp/hunting

https://blog.sec-labs.com/2018/06/threat-hunting-with-windows-defender-atp/

https://blog.sec-labs.com/2019/10/hunting-for-minint-security-audit-block-in-registry/

https://blog.sec-labs.com/2019/07/hunt-for-nuget-squirrel-update/

Power Automate / Logic Apps

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-app-security/flow-integration

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-create-api-app

Azure Automation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-dsc-overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-hybrid-runbook-worker

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/shared-resources/credentials

Configuration

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/best-practices-for-configuring-eop

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/skypeforbusiness/plan-your-deployment/modern-authentication/turn-on-modern-auth

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/identity-management-best-practices

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/mtp/microsoft-secure-score

Auditing and Logs

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4026501/office-auditing-in-office-365-for-admins

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/enable-mailbox-auditing

Investigation

https://github.com/OfficeDev/O365-InvestigationTooling

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/automated-investigation-response-office

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/automated-investigations

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-app-security/investigate-risky-oauth

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-app-security/manage-app-permissions

API

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office-365-management-api/office-365-management-apis-overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-app-security/investigate-activities-api

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/apis-intro

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/security-api-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0

Free Training resources

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/kusto-query-language-kql-from-scratch

Happy Hunting!

follow us on twitter @mattiasborg82 and @stefanschorling

Detect, Events, Protect, Respond, Security

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Blocking MCAS Unsanctioned Apps at the Endpoint with MDATP

2020-01-07 0 Comments

*Note Preview Feature

Yes you read that right, its now possible to block unsanctioned apps in Microsoft Cloud App Security directly at your Windows 10 Endpoints. Moving towards a Zero-Trust network away from the corporate firewalls and proxies you still want to maintain network control from the endpoint side, this new feature will give you the possibility to block applications, this is a great step forward in the area and its clear that Microsoft is taking Zero-Trust and Security seriously.

So how to get started first of requirements! Last year we wrote about the Network Block Feature and it could be a good start before reading this article it can be found here. https://blog.sec-labs.com/2019/07/using-wdatp-network-block/

Requirements

  • MDATP and MCAS Integration Enabled
    • MDATP Portal > Settings > Advanced Features
  • Windows 10 with Network Block Enabled
  • MCAS Cloud App Control Enabled
    • MCAS Portal > Settings > Cloud App Control
      • (Its important to note if you have marked apps as unsanctioned in the MCAS Portal already they will automatically be marked as blocked so before turning this on review your unsanctioned apps.)

Configuring Unsanctioned Apps

Once you have your requirements in-place we can start to configure unsanctioned apps, You can either select to maintain this manually or configure a policy to set all apps matching a certain criteria to be blocked. An example could be block all apps with a Risk Score Lower than 3.

Manually

If you go to your Cloud App Dashboard and find the App you want to block just click on the App and select unsanctioned.


Automatically

To have apps marked as unsanctioned automatically can be done with a Policy. Below we have an example of blocking apps that meet the criteria Risk Score 1-3.

Its also possible to add other types of criteria if you want to refine your policy. It all depends what you want to limit and the purpose, is it to control Shadow IT or is it from a Security perspective. Some examples below of other criteria that could be useful depending on the use case.

  • App Category Productivity
  • Daily Traffic Below 5 MB
  • Number of Users Below 5

PRO TIP: When building your Policy its very good that you can play with the Preview Results, that gives you instant feedback on how well your query will perform so try that out.

Back-end Integration

When the unsanctioned app is marked as unsanctioned the back end integration between MCAS and MDATP exchanges data and Custom Indicators are being populated. You can find these under Settings > Indicators > URLs/Domains

Like in this example we did block WhatsApp and that would replicate over to the Indicators in MDATP. The whole flow depending on sync should not take longer than 3 hours. From that you have blocked in MCAS to that the Endpoint has the blocking instruction.

Once its available in MDATP the Endpoints should update their Indicators and should start blocking.

End User Experience

At the moment the end user experience is fairly limited the user would get a Toast Notification that something has been blocked unless you have turned notifications off.

Depending on the App you are trying to communicate with the blocked app/url the behavior would occur differently.

For WhatsApp it would look like this when Launching it (sorry message in Swedish)

And a Default Notification Message like this below

Reporting

At the moment the tracking and reporting is also limited to whats available in MCAS and MDATP and its supported retention times.

Future Asks

Things I want to see and I have fed back to the Product groups I want this to evolve to going forward.

  • Support for X-Platform Devices
  • Block without Alerting like Block and Report
  • Having the possibility to do Exclusions and Custom Targeting of Devices/Users
  • Expand this to URL Categories Block / Monitor
  • Better Historical Reporting
  • Customize Messages
  • End User Coaching
  • End User Exclusion Request

If you have other ideas feel free to tweet me at @stefanschorling and I will relay.

Detect, Protect, Security

Defender ATP EDR for MAC preview

2019-11-07 0 Comments

During Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft announced Defender ATP EDR capabilities for Mac is available in preview.

It’s great to see Microsoft extends the EDR capabilities to cross-platform

  1. Rich investigation experience – including machine timeline, process creation, file creation, network connections and, of course, the popular Advanced Hunting.
  2. Optimized performance – enhanced CPU utilization in compilation procedures and large software deployments.
  3. In-context AV detections – just like with Windows, get insight into where a threat came from and how the malicious process or activity was created.

More information available at
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Defender-ATP/Microsoft-Defender-ATP-for-Mac-EDR-in-Public-Preview/ba-p/985879

Happy Hunting!

Detect, News, Security

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Azure Sentinel is now GA

2019-09-25 0 Comments

Azure Sentinel—the cloud-native SIEM that empowers defenders is now generally available

azure sentinel

Some of the new features are:

  • Workbooks are replacing dashboards, providing for richer analytics and visualizations
  • New Microsoft and 3rd party connectors

Detection and hunting:

  • Out of the box detection rules: The GitHub detection rules are now built into Sentinel.
  • Easy elevation of MTP alerts to Sentinel incidents.
  • Built-in detection rules utilizing the threat intelligence connector.
  • New ML models to discover malicious SSH access, fuse identity, and access data to detect 35 unique threats that span multiple stages of the kill chain. Fusion is now on by default and managed through the UI
  • Template playbooks now available on Github.
  • New threat hunting queries and libraries for Jupyter Notebooks

Incidents:

  • The interactive investigation graph is now publicly available.
  • Incidents support for tagging, comments, and assignments, both manually and automatically using playbooks.

MSSP and enterprise support:

  • Azure Lighthouse for multi-tenant management
  • RBAC support

For further information:

Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/azure-sentinel/
Product page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-sentinel/
Documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sentinel/

Happy Hunting

Detect, Events, Respond, Security

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Using WDATP Network Block

2019-07-23 1 Comment

When working with Incident Response you from time to time find artifacts that you need to block, IP Addresses or specific URLs. Instead of doing this on the proxies or firewalls its often more efficient to do this on the endpoint level to catch roaming machines where ever they are. In some cases you also work with other TI vendors and get IPs and URLs you want to block and build automation around. This feature is currently in preview

So, with WDATP you can now block or allow IPs and Urls.

For this feature to work you need to have some prerequisites

  • Windows 10 1709 Pro, E3/E5 or Edu
  • Windows Defender Network Protection
  • Windows Defender AV
  • Cloud Delivered Protection Enabled

It’s possible to enable Network Protection in several ways

  • PowerShell
  • Group Policy
  • System Center Configuration Manager
  • Intune / MDM

For detailed steps for each method

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/windows-defender-exploit-guard/enable-network-protection

In our case we will just leverage PowerShell. To set and verify its configured

Set-MpPreference -EnableNetworkProtection Enabled

Get-MpPreference | fl

Once you have prepared the endpoint you can go to the  MDATP Portal and add your IPs/URLs

  1. Navigate to Settings > Rules > Indicators.
  2. Select the IP Address tab to view the list of IP’s.
  3. Select the URLs/Domains to view the list of URLs/domains.

In this tutorial we will Add a URL but the same procedure would apply for an IP.

1. Click on Add Indicator

2. Enter a url and select if you want the block to expire

3. Add an Action as you like and descriptive texts as you want to have with your alerts. In this case we want to block and get an alert for this.

4. Select Scope, in this case we will select all machines but if you have built a structure with Machine Groups you can select to target specific machine groups where this will apply.

5. On the Summary screen click Save.

Note: from entering an IP/URL it can take some time for it to propagate to the endpoints and when it comes to removal it may even take a bit longer.

So when this has propagated to the endpoints we can test it out and see how this looks on the endpoint.

When browsing to the URL the end user will be notified about that something is blocked with a toast notification and an event log entry will also be logged.

If you want to customize the toast notifications for Windows Defender you can do that with updated group policy templates more information on that here. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/windows-defender-security-center/wdsc-hide-notifications

To create a custom view in event viewer use this url reference.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/windows-defender-exploit-guard/event-views-exploit-guard

In our case an alert will also be triggered in in the MDATP console as well where we can continue our investigation. I hope this gave a little valuable insight on this feature.

Detect, Protect, Security

MDATP Investigation behind forward proxy

2019-07-23 0 Comments

There are still many companies using forward proxies and when analyzing traffic from endpoints this can be a bit challenging. This due to that the client connects to the forward proxy instead of the public endpoint like http://blog.sec-labs.com.

So instead of the public endpoint you would see that the process is connecting to the proxy.

Microsoft have engineers around this and by enabling the Network Protection feature in either Audit Mode or Block mode you can now see the public endpoint the process is actually communicating with behind the forward proxy.

Events that is coming from this type of detection is flagged with the a “NetworkProtection” tag.

If you want to use thees events generated when you do Hunting they are found under Network CommunicationEvents and if you know your proxy ip address you can get everything that has gone via the proxy with the following query.

NetworkCommunicationEvents

| where ActionType == “ConnectionSuccess” and RemoteIP != “ProxyIP” 

If you want to enable Network Protection the below link will guide you through the different ways you can enable it. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/windows-defender-exploit-guard/enable-network-protection

Happy Hunting

Detect, Protect, Security

Hunt for nuget/Squirrel update vulnerability

2019-07-01 0 Comments

A few days ago, a post on medium stated that an arbitrary code execution was possible in Squirrel which affected Teams and other applications which used Squirrel and Nuget for updates.

https://medium.com/@reegun/nuget-squirrel-uncontrolled-endpoints-leads-to-arbitrary-code-execution-80c9df51cf12

In the post, Teams is mentioned as example but other affected application were mentioned on twitter.

So, to see what our environment is up to with regards to this. Our favorite place to go to: Defender ATP – Advanced Hunting!

To explain the query, since there are other apps than teams which uses Squirrel, we aim to keep the query as broad as we can.

Since some applications uses Squirrel and web for updates we can’t simply say that all web requests are malicious. But we have done some verification and discovered many apps vulnerable to this.

To make it more easy to overview we’re adding the URL to a column

To continue this we can count unique URL’s to find anomalies

Edit: An Updated Query can be found on the link below here http://blog.sec-labs.com/2019/07/advanced-hunting-defender-atp-squirrel/

ProcessCreationEvents
| where ProcessCommandLine has "update.exe"
| where (ProcessCommandLine contains "http") and (ProcessCommandLine contains "--update")
| extend exeURL = case(ProcessCommandLine has "=",split(ProcessCommandLine, "=", 1), 
                       ProcessCommandLine !has "=", split(ProcessCommandLine, "--update ",1), 
                       "Default")
| where exeURL != "Default"
| sort by EventTime desc 
|project EventTime, 
          ComputerName,
          exeURL,
          FolderPath, 
          ProcessCommandLine, 
          AccountName, 
          InitiatingProcessCommandLine, 
          ReportId, 
          ProcessId, 
          InitiatingProcessId

Defender Application Control would definitely block this attack and other mitigations in operating system will harden the clients in your environment.

Happy Hunting!

Detect, Respond, Security, Uncategorized

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Defender ATP and PowerBI

2019-04-10 0 Comments

Maybe, you don’t want management in the ATP portal, even though it’s configurable via roles, and maybe they don’t want to be there.

One thing I know is that most managers loves numbers, so why not provide them with a PowerBI report.

You can perfectly use cloud based option and there is an app for Windows Defender ATP already there for you to use.

Configure your connector and you’re all good to go

The dasboard looks like the following picture

With the many different tiles you, or your manager, can dig deeper in to events like in this following example with alert status

It’s also possible to filter data based on who a case was assigned to, who resolved the case etc.

If you have a PowerBI Pro account, you could subscribe to get scheduled reports.

You can also to quick filter

This is an easy win for your manager

Recover, Respond, Security, Uncategorized

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CTF, Capture The Flag

2019-03-21 0 Comments

CTF, Capture the Flag is a known form of a game mode for various games like Paintball, laser games and Computer games, but it’s also used in Computer Security.

Capture the Flag is a really good way of enhancing your Security skills, it starts with a few clues and quests you must solve to retrieve the flag for the challenge. These are named as Jeopardy-style CTF. They are often devided into different types of challenges i.e.:

  • Cryptography
  • Web
  • Forensics
  • Binary Exploitation
  • Reversing
  • Networking

There are also modes for CTF called Attack-Defense, where the teams have to defend their own network or machine and att the same time attack the opponents. There is also a version like one team is defending and the other one is attacking, a Blue Team – Red Team approach.  Blue Team defends and tries to find out how and when the Red Team makes their way to get the Flag.

flags

Who is CTF for?

It’s for everyone with a interest in cyber security.

Qualify for bigger events

Some CTF’s are qualifiers for bigger CTF events, so get going and solve the challenges!

Example challenge from (https://capturetheflag.withgoogle.com):

This CTF has beginner challenges (which I can recommend if you’re new to this).

Amongst the beginner challenges we have the following one.

CTF challenge

This challenge want us to find the flag which will look like “CTF{xxxxxx}” by using the clues in the text and the file which we are able to download.

We download the file (Attachment) and extract the content

The clue from the challenge indicates it’s something fishy with this .ico file.

Tha the initial view, it looks alright.

Let’s use binwalk which is a tool for searching binary images for embedded files and executable code to see if there is something hidden inside.

It looks like we’re getting somewhere, it seems to be a zip archive.

Let’s try to list the content with 7zip

Works! Next step would be to unpack the content in our hunt for the flag

We have extracted our files

And we now have the flag!

We enter it on the website and the challenge is completed and can start the next challenge…

Where to start?

So, for those of you who are new or want to get some good links into CTF,  I have tried to gather all CTF Links in this post for reference, I will try to keep the links updated along the way.

Security

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