1. Cybercrime in the Cloud
and how to defend yourself
Stephen Coty
Chief Security Evangelist

2. Threats in the Cloud are Increasing With Adoption
• Increase in attack frequency
• Traditional on-premises threats are moving
to the cloud
• Majority of cloud incidents were related to
web application attacks, brute force attacks,
and vulnerability scans
• Brute force attacks and vulnerability scans
are now occurring at near-equivalent rates in
both cloud and on-premises environments
• Malware/Botnet is increasing year over year

3. Cloud Attacks With the Biggest Change
• Cloud environments saw significant increases with brute force attacks
climbing from 30% to 44% of customers, and vulnerability scans increasing
from 27% to 44%
• Malware/botnet attacks, historically the most common attacks in the on-
premises datacenter, are on the rise in CHP environments

4. Why Honeypots
Honeypots give us a unique data set
Simulates vulnerable systems without the risk of real data loss
Gives the ability to collect intelligence from malicious attackers
Allows for collection of various different attacks based on system
Helps identify what industry specific targets are out there

5. Honeypot Designs
• The honeypot data cited was gathered using
- Low-interaction – Simulates high level services
- Medium Interaction – Delivers form pages and collects Keystrokes
- SCADA – Simulates a (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition)
system
- Web application software that emulates a vulnerable OS and
application
• Fictitious business domains have been created to redirect traffic to
what would be considered a legitimate business
• These particular honeypots monitored connections to common
ports and gathered statistics on IP, country, and malware, if
submitted

6. Global Analysis

7. The Technology

8. Firewall/ACL
Intrusion
Detection
Deep Packet
Forensics
Network
DDOS
Netflow
Analysis
Backup
Patch MgmtVulnerabilities
Server/App
Log Mgmt SDLC
Anti-Virus Encryption GPG/PGP
Host
Anti Malware
FIM
NAC Scanner
Mail/Web Filter Scanner
IAM Central Storage
http://aws.amazon.com/security/security-resources/
Security Architecture

9. Data Correlation is the Key

10. SIEM Operations
8.2
Million
Per Day
40,000
Per Month

11. The People

12. Enterprise Cyber Security Teams
Monitor and Maintain
non-managed hardware
deployment uptime
Operational
Implementation of all
security infrastructure
Incident Response Team
Collect and Maintain content for all
non-managed devices
Cyber Security Awareness
Program
Network and Application
Penetration Testing and
Audit Team

13. 24x7 Security Operations Center and Intelligence
Monitor intrusion detection
and vulnerability scan
activity
Search for Industry trends
and deliver intelligence on
lost or stolen data
Collect data from OSINT
and Underground Sources
to deliver Intelligence and
Content
Identify and implement
required policy
changes
Escalate incidents and provide
guidance to the response team to
quickly mitigate Incidents
Monitor for Zero-Day
and New and
Emerging attacks
Cross product
correlate data sources
to find anomalies

14. Monitoring the Social Media Accounts

16. Following IRC and Forums

17. Tracking and Predicting the Next Move
• He is a guy from a European country/ (Russia)
• His handle or nick is madd3
• Using ICQ 416417 as a tool of communication (illegal
transaction)
• A simple /whois command to the nick provided us with
good information
• 85.17.139.13 (Leaseweb)
• ircname : John Smith
• channels : #chatroom
• server : irc.private-life.biz [Life Server]
• Check this out user has another room. #attackroom4
• We can confirm that Athena version 2.3.5 is being use
to attack other sites.
• 2,300 infected Users
• Cracked Software is available in forums
• As of today 1 BTC to $618.00 or £361.66

18. Forums to Follow – darkode.com & exploit.in- Russian
Forums to Follow – darkode.com & exploit.in- Russian

19. Cloud Security Best Practices

20. Cloud Environments 101

21. Eight Best Practices of Cloud Security
1. Secure your code
2. Create access management policies
3. Adopt a patch management approach
4. Review logs regularly
5. Build a security toolkit
6. Stay informed of the latest vulnerabilities that may affect you
7. Understand your cloud service providers security model
8. Understand the shared security responsibility

22. 1. Secure Your Code
• Test inputs that are open to the Internet
• Add delays to your code to confuse bots
• Use encryption when you can
• Test libraries
• Scan plugins
• Scan your code after every update
• Limit privileges
• Stay informed

23. 2. Create Access Management Policies
• Identify data infrastructure that requires access
• Define roles and responsibilities
• Simplify access controls (KISS)
• Continually audit access
• Start with a least privilege access model

24. 3. Adopt a Patch Management Approach
• Inventory all production systems
• Devise a plan for standardization, if possible
• Compare reported vulnerabilities to production infrastructure
• Classify the risk based on vulnerability and likelihood
• Test patches before you release into production
• Setup a regular patching schedule
• Keep informed, follow bugtraqer
• Follow a SDLC

25. 4. Importance of Log Management and Review
• Monitoring for malicious activity
• Forensic investigations
• Compliance needs
• System performance
• All sources of log data is collected
• Data types (Windows, Syslog)
• Review process
• Live monitoring
• Correlation logic

26. 5. Build a Security Toolkit
• Recommended Security Solutions
- Antivirus
- IP tables
- Intrusion Detection System
- Malware Detection
- Web Application Firewalls
- Anomaly behavior via netflow
- Future Deep Packet Forensics

27. 6. Stay Informed of the Latest Vulnerabilities
• Websites to follow
- http://www.securityfocus.com
- http://www.exploit-db.com
- http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/
- http://www.securitybloggersnetwork.com/

28. 7. Understand Your Cloud Service Providers Security Model
• Review of Service Provider Responsibilities
• Hypervisor Example
• Questions to use when evaluating cloud service providers

29. 8. Service Provider & Customer Responsibility Summary
Cloud
Service
Provider
Responsibility
Foundation
Services
Hosts
• Logical network segmentation
• Perimeter security services
• External DDoS, spoofing, and scanning prevented
• Hardened hypervisor
• System image library
• Root access for customer
• Access management
• Patch management
• Configuration hardening
• Security monitoring
• Log analysis
Apps
• Secure coding and best practices
• Software and virtual patching
• Configuration management
• Access management
• Application level attack monitoring
• Network threat
detection
• Security monitoring
Networks
Customer
Responsibility
Compute Storage DB Network

30. Examples of Shared Responsibilities

31. Cloud Server Architecture
• VM Servers are designed so that
the hypervisor (or monitor, or
Virtual Machine Manager) is the
only fully privileged entity in the
system, and has an extremely
small footprint.
• It controls only the most basic
resources of the system,
including CPU and memory
usage, privilege checks, and
hardware interrupts

32. How the Hypervisor functions
• In this model the processor provides 4 levels, also known as rings, which are arranged in a hierarchical fashion from Ring
0 to Ring 3. Only 0, 1 and 3 have privilege, some kernel designs demote curtain privileged components to ring 2
• The operating system runs in ring 0 with the operating system kernel controlling access to the underlying hardware
• To assist virtualization, VT and Pacifica insert a new privilege level beneath Ring 0. Both add nine new machine code
instructions that only work at "Ring -1," intended to be used by the hypervisor

33. Application Exploitation – Without Secure Coding
WordPress: 162,000 legitimate sites used for DDos attack
•Exploited the XML-RPC Protocol
•Pingback enabled sites were exploited
- Trackback
- Pingbacks
- Remote Access via mobile devices
•Generated over 24 million hits at a rate of 3,000 hits per second
•Random query of “?4137049=643182” bypasses cache and forces
full page reloads
•Check logs for POST requests to the XML-RPC file

34. Application Exploitation – Without Secure Coding
• This June 0Day allows an attacker to
remotely remove and modify files stored
on the server without authentication
• TimThumb ,written by Ben Gilbanks, is a
simple, flexible, PHP script that resizes
images. You give it a bunch of
parameters, and it spits out a thumbnail
image that you can display on your site.
• Looking at the type of vulnerabilities that
hackers were trying to exploit, we saw a
clear preference for Remote File Inclusion
vulnerabilities, which accounted for 96%
of all vulnerability types
• Patch was released in Q3

35. 6. Stay Informed of the Latest Vulnerabilities
• Websites to follow
- http://www.securityfocus.com
- http://www.exploit-db.com
- http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/
- http://www.securitybloggersnetwork.com/

36. Thank you.