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The recent breach of major cyber security company FireEye by nation-state hackers was part of a much larger attack that was carried out through malicious updates to a popular network monitoring product and impacted major government organisations and companies.
The incident highlights the severe impact software supply chain attacks can have and the unfortunate fact that most organisations are woefully unprepared to prevent and detect such threats.
A hacker group believed to be affiliated with the Russian government gained access to computer systems belonging to multiple US government departments including the US Treasury and Commerce in a long campaign that is believed to have started in March. The news triggered an emergency meeting of the US National Security Council on Saturday.
The attack involved hackers compromising the infrastructure of SolarWinds, a company that produces a network and applications monitoring platform called Orion, and then using that access to produce and distribute trojanised updates to the software's users.
On a page on its website that was taken down after news broke out, SolarWinds stated that its customers included 425 of the US Fortune 500, the top ten US telecommunications companies, the top five US accounting firms, all branches of the US Military, the Pentagon, the State Department, as well as hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.
The SolarWinds software supply chain attack also allowed hackers to access the network of US cyber security firm FireEye, a breach that was announced last week. Even though FireEye did not name the group of attackers responsible, the Washington Post reports it is APT29 or Cozy Bear, the hacking arm of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
"FireEye has detected this activity at multiple entities worldwide," the company said in an advisory Sunday. "The victims have included government, consulting, technology, telecom and extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. We anticipate there are additional victims in other countries and verticals. FireEye has notified all entities we are aware of being affected."
Malicious Orion updates
The software builds for Orion versions 2019.4 HF 5 through 2020.2.1 that were released between March 2020 and June 2020 might have contained a trojanised component. However, FireEye noted in its analysis that each of the attacks required meticulous planning and manual interaction by the attackers.
The attackers managed to modify an Orion platform plug-in called SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll that is distributed as part of Orion platform updates.
The trojanised component is digitally signed and contains a backdoor that communicates with third-party servers controlled by the attackers. FireEye tracks this component as SUNBURST and has released open source detection rules for it on GitHub.
"After an initial dormant period of up to two weeks, it retrieves and executes commands, called 'Jobs,' that include the ability to transfer files, execute files, profile the system, reboot the machine, and disable system services," the FireEye analysts said.
"The malware masquerades its network traffic as the Orion Improvement Program (OIP) protocol and stores reconnaissance results within legitimate plugin configuration files allowing it to blend in with legitimate SolarWinds activity. The backdoor uses multiple obfuscated blocklists to identify forensic and anti-virus tools running as processes, services, and drivers."
The attackers kept their malware footprint very low, preferring to steal and use credentials to perform lateral movement through the network and establish legitimate remote access.
The backdoor was used to deliver a lightweight malware dropper that has never been seen before and which FireEye has dubbed TEARDROP. This dropper loads directly in memory and does not leave traces on the disk. Researchers believe it was used to deploy a customised version of the Cobalt Strike BEACON payload. Cobalt Strike is a commercial penetration testing framework and post-exploitation agent designed for red teams that has also been adopted and used by hackers and sophisticated cyber criminal groups.
To avoid detection, attackers used temporary file replacement techniques to remotely execute their tools. This means they modified a legitimate utility on the targeted system with their malicious one, executed it and then replaced it back with the legitimate one.
A similar technique involved the temporary modification of system scheduled tasks by updating a legitimate task to execute a malicious tool and then reverting the task back to its original configuration.
"Defenders can examine logs for SMB sessions that show access to legitimate directories and follow a delete-create-execute-delete-create pattern in a short amount of time," the FireEye researchers said.
"Additionally, defenders can monitor existing scheduled tasks for temporary updates, using frequency analysis to identify anomalous modification of tasks. Tasks can also be monitored to watch for legitimate Windows tasks executing new or unknown binaries."
This is some of the best operational security exhibited by a threat actor that FireEye has ever observed, being focused on detection evasion and leveraging existing trust relationships. However, the company's researchers believe these attacks can be detected through persistent defence and have described multiple detection techniques in their advisory.
SolarWinds advises customers to upgrade to Orion Platform version 2020.2.1 HF 1 as soon as possible to ensure they are running a clean version of the product. The company also plans to release a new hotfix 2020.2.1 HF 2 on Tuesday that will replace the compromised component and make additional security enhancements.
The US Department of Homeland Security has also issued an emergency directive to government organisations to check their networks for the presence of the trojanised component and report back.
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