Author: Tom Caiazza

It’s the Summer of AppSec: Q2 Improvements to Our Industry-Leading DAST and WAAP

Summer is in full swing, and that means soaring temperatures, backyard grill-outs, and the latest roundup of Q2 application security improvements from Rapid7. Yes, we know you’ve been waiting for this moment with more anticipation than Season 4 of Stranger Things. So let’s start running up that hill, not beat around the bush (see what we did there?), and dive right in.

OWASP Top 10 for application security

Way, way back in September of 2021 (it feels like it was yesterday), the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) released its top 10 list of critical web application security risks. Naturally, we were all over it, as OWASP is one of the most trusted voices in cybersecurity, and their Top 10 lists are excellent places to start understanding where and how threat actors could be coming for your applications. We released a ton of material to help our customers better understand and implement the recommendations from OWASP.

This quarter, we were able to take those protections another big step forward by providing an OWASP 2021 Attack Template and Report for InsightAppSec. With this new feature, your security team can work closely with development teams to discover and remediate vulnerabilities in ways that jive with security best practice. It also helps to focus your AppSec program around the updated categories provided by OWASP (which we highly suggest you do).

The new attack template includes all the relevant attacks included in the updated OWASP Top 10 list which means you can focus on the most important vulnerabilities to remediate, rather than be overwhelmed by too many vulnerabilities and not focusing on the right ones. Once the vulns are discovered, InsightAppSec helps your development team to remediate the issues in several different ways, including a new OWASP Top 10 report and the ability to let developers confirm vulnerabilities and fixes with Attack Replay.

Scan engine and attack enhancements

Product support for OWASP 2021 wasn’t the only improvement we made to our industry-leading DAST this quarter. In fact, we’ve been quite busy adding additional attack coverage and making scan engine improvements to increase coverage and accuracy for our customers. Here are just a few.

Spring4Shell attacks and protections with InsightAppSec and tCell

We instituted a pair of improvements to InsightAppSec and tCell meant to identify and block the now-infamous Spring4Shell vulnerability. We now have included a default RCE attack module specifically to test for the Spring4Shell vulnerability with InsightAppSec. That feature is available to all InsightAppSec customers right now, and we highly recommend using it to prevent this major vulnerability from impacting your applications.

Additionally, for those customers leveraging tCell to protect their apps, we've added new detections and the ability to block Spring4Shell attacks against your web applications. In addition, we've added Spring4Shell coverage for our Runtime SCA capability. Check out more here on both of these new enhancements.

New out-of-band attack module

We’ve added a new out-of-band SQL injection module similar to Log4Shell, except it leverages the DNS protocol, which is typically less restricted and used by the adversary. It's included in the "All Attacks" attack template and can be added to any customer attack template.

Improved scanning for session detection

We have made improvements to our scan engine on InsightAppSec to better detect unwanted logouts. When configuring authentication, the step-by-step instructions will guide you through configuring this process for your web applications.

Making it easier for our customers

This wouldn’t be a quarterly feature update if we didn’t mention ways we are making InsightAppSec and tCell even easier and more efficient for our customers. In the last few months, we have moved the "Manage Columns" function into "Vulnerabilities" in InsightAppSec to make it even more customizable. You can now also hide columns, drag and drop them where you would like, and change the order in ways that meet your needs.

We’ve also released an AWS AMI of the tCell nginx agent to make it easier for current customers to deploy tCell. This is perfect for those who are familiar with AWS and want to get up and running with tCell fast. Customers who also want a basic understanding of how tCell works and want to share tCell’s value with their dev teams will find this new AWS AMI to provide insight fast.

Summer may be a time to take it easy and enjoy the sunshine, but we’re going to be just as hard at work making improvements to InsightAppSec and tCell over the next three months as we were in the last three. With a break for a hot dog and some fireworks in there somewhere. Stay tuned for more from us and have a great summer.

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For Finserv Ransomware Attacks, Obtaining Customer Data Is the Focus

Welcome back to the third installment of Rapid7's Pain Points: Ransomware Data Disclosure Trends blog series, where we're distilling the key highlights of our ransomware data disclosure research paper one industry at a time. This week, we'll be focusing on the financial services industry, one of the most most highly regulated — and frequently attacked — industries we looked at.

Rapid7's threat intelligence platform (TIP) scans the clear, deep, and dark web for data on threats, and operationalizes that data automatically with our Threat Command product. We used that data to conduct unique research into the types of data threat actors disclose about their victims. The data points in this research come from the threat actors themselves, making it a rare glimpse into their actions, motivations, and preferences.

Last week, we discussed how the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are particularly impacted by double extortion in ransomware. We found that threat actors target and release specific types of data to coerce victims into paying the ransom. In this case, it was internal financial information (71%), which was somewhat surprising, considering financial information is not the focus of these two industries. Less surprising, but certainly not less impactful, were the disclosure of customer or patient information (58%) and the unusually strong emphasis on intellectual property in the pharmaceuticals sector of this vertical (43%).

Customer data is the prime target for finserv ransomware

But when we looked at financial services, something interesting did stand out: Customer data was found in the overwhelming majority of data disclosures (82%), not necessarily the company's internal financial information. It seems threat actors were more interested in leveraging the public's implied trust in financial services companies to keep their personal financial information private than they were in exposing the company's own financial information.

Since much of the damage done by ransomware attacks — or really any cybersecurity incident — lies in the erosion of trust in that institution, it appears threat actors are seeking to hasten that erosion with their initial data disclosures. The financial services industry is one of the most highly regulated industries in the market entirely because it holds the financial health of millions of people in their hands. Breaches at these institutions tend to have outsized impacts.

Employee info is also at risk

The next most commonly disclosed form of data in the financial services industry was personally identifiable information (PII) and HR data. This is personal data of those who work in the financial industry and can include identifying information like Social Security numbers and the like. Some 59% of disclosures from this sector included this kind of information.

This appears to indicate that threat actors want to undermine the company's ability to keep their own employees' data safe, and that can be corroborated by another data point: In some 29% of cases, data disclosure pointed to reconnaissance for future IT attacks as the motive. Threat actors want financial services companies and their employees to know that they are and will always be a major target. Other criminals can use information from these disclosures, such as credentials and network maps, to facilitate future attacks.

As with the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, our data showed some interesting and unique motivations from threat actors, as well as confirmed some suspicions we already had about why they choose the data they choose to disclose. Next time, we'll be taking a look at some of the threat actors themselves and the ways they've impacted the overall ransomware “market" over the last two years.

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For Ransomware Double-Extorters, It's All About the Benjamins — and Data From Healthcare and Pharma

Welcome to the second installment in our series looking at the latest ransomware research from Rapid7. Two weeks ago, we launched "Pain Points: Ransomware Data Disclosure Trends", our first-of-its-kind look into the practice of double extortion, what kinds of data get disclosed, and how the ransomware “market" has shifted in the two years since double extortion became a particularly nasty evolution to the practice.

Today, we're going to talk a little more about the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry data and analysis from the report, highlighting how these two industries differ from some of the other hardest-hit industries and how they relate to each other (or don't in some cases).

But first, let's recap what "Pain Points" is actually analyzing. Rapid7's threat intelligence platform (TIP) scans the clear, deep, and dark web for data on threats and operationalizes that data automatically with our Threat Command product. This means we have at our disposal large amounts of data pertaining to ransomware double extortion that we were able to analyze to determine some interesting trends like never before. Check out the full paper for more detail, and view some well redacted real-world examples of data breaches while you're at it.

For healthcare and pharma, the risks are heightened

When it comes to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, there are some notable similarities that set them apart from other verticals. For instance, internal finance and accounting files showed up most often in initial ransomware data disclosures for healthcare and pharma than for any other industry (71%), including financial services (where you would think financial information would be the most common).

After that, customer and patient data showed up more than 58% of the time — still very high, indicating that ransomware attackers value these data from these industries in particular. This is likely due to the relative amount of damage (legal and regulatory) these kinds of disclosures could have on such a highly regulated field (particularly healthcare).

For Ransomware Double-Extorters, It's All About the Benjamins — and Data From Healthcare and Pharma

All eyes on IP and patient data

Where the healthcare and pharmaceutical differed were in the prevalence of intellectual property (IP) disclosures. The healthcare industry focuses mostly on patients, so it makes sense that one of their biggest data disclosure areas would be personal information. But the pharma industry focuses much more on research and development than it does on the personal information of people. In pharma-related disclosures, IP made up 43% of all disclosures. Again, the predilection on the part of ransomware attackers to “hit 'em where it hurts the most" is on full display here.

Finally, different ransomware groups favor different types of data disclosures, as our data indicated. When it comes to the data most often disclosed from healthcare and pharma victims, REvil and Cl0p were the only who did it (10% and 20% respectively). For customer and patient data, REvil took the top spot with 55% of disclosures, with Darkside behind them at 50%. Conti and Cl0p followed with 42% and 40%, respectively.

So there you have it: When it comes to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, financial data, customer data, and intellectual property are the most frequently used data to impose double extortion on ransomware victims.

Ready to dive further into the data? Check out the full report.

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Complimentary GartnerⓇ Report

First things first — if you're a member of a cybersecurity team bouncing from one stressful identify vulnerability, patch, repeat cycle to another, claim your copy of the GartnerⓇ report “How to Respond to the 2022 Cyberthreat Landscape" right now. It will help you understand the current landscape and better plan for what's happening now and in the near term.

Ransomware is on the tip of every security professional's tongue right now, and for good reason. It's growing, spreading, and evolving faster than many organizations can keep up with. But just because we may all be targets doesn't mean we have to be victims.

The analysts at Gartner have taken a good, long look at the latest trends in security, with a particular eye toward ransomware, and they had this to say about attacker trends in their report.

Expect attackers to:

  • “Diversify their targets by pursuing lower-profile targets more frequently, using smaller attacks to avoid attention from well-funded nation states."
  • “Attack critical CPS, particularly when motivated by geopolitical tensions and aligned ransomware actors."
  • “Optimize ransomware delivery by using 'known good' cloud applications, such as enterprise productivity software as a service (SaaS) suites, and using encryption to hide their activities."
  • “Target individual employees, particularly those working remotely using potentially vulnerable remote access services like Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services, or simply bribe employees for access to organizations with a view to launching larger ransomware campaigns."
  • “Exfiltrate data as part of attempts to blackmail companies into paying ransom or risk data breach disclosure, which may result in regulatory fines and limits the benefits of the traditional mitigation method of 'just restore quickly.'"
  • “Combine ransomware with other techniques, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, to force public-facing services offline until organizations pay a ransom."

Ransomware is most definitely considered a "top threat," and it has moved beyond just an IT problem but one that involves governments around the globe. Attackers recognize that the game got a lot bigger with well-funded nations joining the fray to combat it, so their tactics will be targeted, small, diverse, and more frequent to avoid poking the bear(s). Expect to see smaller organizations targeted more often and as part of ransomware-as-a-service campaigns.

Gartner also says that attackers will use RaaS to attack critical infrastructure like CPS more frequently:

"Attackers will aim at smaller targets and deliver 'ransomware as a service' to other groups. This will enable more targeted and sophisticated attacks, as the group targeting an organization will have access to ransomware developed by a specialist group. Attackers will also target critical assets, such as CPS."

Mitigating ransomware

But there are things we can do to mitigate ransomware attacks and push back against the attackers. Gartner suggests several key recommendations, including:

  • “Construct a pre-incident strategy that includes backup (including a restore test), asset management, and restriction of user privileges."
  • “Build post-incident response procedures by training staff and scheduling regular drills."
  • “Expand the scope of ransomware protection programs to CPS."
  • “Increase cross-team training for the nontechnical aspects of a ransomware incident.
  • "Remember that payment of a ransom does not guarantee erasure of exfiltrated data, full recovery of encrypted data, or immediate restoration of operations."
  • “Don't rely on cyber insurance only. There is frequently a disconnect between what executive leaders expect a cybersecurity insurance policy to cover and what it actually does cover."

At Rapid7, we have the risk management, detection and response, and threat intelligence tools your organization needs to not only keep up with the evolution in ransomware threat actors, but to implement best practices of the industry.

If you want to learn more about what cybersecurity threats are out there now and on the horizon, check out the complimentary Gartner report.

Gartner, How to Respond to the 2022 Cyberthreat Landscape, 1 April 2022, by Jeremy D'Hoinne, John Watts, Katell Thielemann

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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