Reacting to Advanced, Unknown Attacks in Real-Time with Lastline

Reacting to Advanced, Unknown Attacks in
Real-Time with Lastline
Engin Kirda // engin@lastline.com
Ph.D., Prof., Co-Founder & Chief Architect, Lastline
www.lastline.com

Me
• Professor at Northeastern University, Boston
– started malware research in about 2004
– Helped build and release popular malware analysis and
detection systems (Anubis, Exposure, …)
• Co-founder of Lastline, Inc.
– Lastline offers protection against zero-day threats and
advanced malware
– Commercialization of many years of advanced research
Copyright ©2014 Lastline, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

Overview of This Talk
• Introduction to the Problem
• Evasive Malware (Backoff examples)
• Automatically Mitigating Breaches
• Conclusion

Cyberattack (R)Evolution
Targeted Attacks
and Cyberwar
!!!
Time
$$ Damage
Billions
Millions
Hundreds of
Thousands
Thousands
Hundreds
Cybercrime
Cybervandalism $$$
#@!

Online Crime is a Business
• Klikparty, 2007

Malware is a Problem of Scale …

… and Sophistication
Current solutions fail to protect
organizations from sophisticated,
targeted attacks.
Simple Threats
Opportunistic Attacks
APT
Solutions
Antivirus
Solutions
Security Gap
Targeted Attacks
Packing
Sophisticated Threats
Plain
Virus
Poly-morphic
C&C
Fluxing
Persistent
Threats
Evasive
Threats

Lastline Labs AV Vendor Review
Antivirus systems take months to catch up to highly evasive threats.
Copyright ©2014 Lastline, Inc. All rights reserved.
9

You’ve Probably Read This:
Recent Payment Breaches
• The last year has seen a dramatic escalation in the number of
breached PoS systems
• Many of these PoS payloads, like Backoff, evaded installed
defenses and alarms
• In few cases an early alarm was received, but it was ignored
since indistinguishable from the background noise.

What is Backoff?
• Malware used in numerous breaches in the last year
• Secret Service currently estimates 1,000+ U.S. businesses affected
• Targeted to PoS systems
• Evades analysis

What is Backoff?
[1 Slide Summary from Kyle]
• Product screenshot?
• Mention evasive behaviors exhibited

What is Backoff?
• Timing evasion (an anti-VM technique)
• Utilizes code obfuscation
• Also uses rare and poorly emulated instructions to defeat simple
emulators
• Attempts to encrypt parts of the command and control traffic

How are the attackers deploying it?
• Scan for Internet facing Remote Desktop applications
• Brute force login credentials
• Often successfully find administrative credentials
• Use admin credentials to deploy Backoff to remote PoS systems

Understanding Evasive Malware
Malware authors are not stupid
• Clearly, they got the news that sandboxes are all the rage now
• since the code is executed, malware authors have options
Evasion defined
• Develop code that exhibits no malicious behavior in a traditional
sandbox, but still infects the intended target
• Can be achieved in a variety of ways…

Understanding Evasive Malware
• Malware can detect underlying runtime environment
– differences between virtualized and bare metal environment
– checks based on system (CPU) features
– artifacts in the operating system
• Malware can detect signs of specific analysis environments
– checks based on operating system artifacts (files, processes, …)
• Malware can avoid being analyzed
– tricks in making code run that analysis system does not see
– wait until someone clicks something
– time out analysis before any interesting behaviors are revealed
– simple sleeps, but more sophisticated implementations possible
Copyright ©2014 Lastlin1e6, Inc. All rights reserved.

3 Ways to Build a Sandbox
Not all sandbox solutions can detect highly evasive malware.

Virtualized Sandboxing vs. Full System Emulation
Even APT Solutions with virtualized sandboxing fail to detect highly evasive malware.

Lastline Platform Components
Sensor Analyzes network, email, web, and mobile traffic. Detects
callbacks and extracts objects for advanced malware
analysis and stops cyber threats.
Manager Correlates low-level threat events into high-level network
incident views of network and object activity.
Engine Analyzes objects with a next-generation sandbox using full-system
emulation. This approach allows for greater visibility
into advanced malware.
Threat Intel Offers a rich knowledge base of malicious network sources
and objects containing advanced cyber threats built through
machine learning, web crawling, emulated browsers,
automated and dynamic techniques.
API Provides ability to submit objects for advanced malware
analysis from any third-party sensor or system, queries the
Threat Intelligence and displays pertinent threat
information.
software
software
software
subscription
software

Lastline Enterprise On-Premise
Suitable for those environments with tight requirements in terms of privacy and
compliance. Customers may decide to share anonymous information with the Lastline Labs
20

Lastline Enterprise Hosted
Suitable for those customers who want to minimize the operational effort

Technology Plays a Crucial Role but…
• Deploying an advanced solution to detect and mitigate a
breach is a crucial input for the breach detection process
• However, to fully leverage the detection capabilities, the
platform must be easily integrated into an organization from
both a technology and a process perspective

It’s Part of a Multi-Phase Process
Assess the Environment
Deploy the
Components
Correlate the
Information
Share the
Actionable
Threat
Intelligence
Automatically
Enforce
Countermeasures
• Who, when,
where, how?
• Avoid the “Target
Syndrome”;
• Build a process
that is incident-based
rather then
event-based;
• Deploy a Scalable
Architecture;
• Provide a
comprehensive
coverage in terms
of attack vectors;
Reduce the TCO
and boost the ROI;
• Quickly and
Seamlessly adapt
to changes;
• Provide multi-dimensional
actionable threat
intelligence;
• Feed Automated
Systems (SIEM,
Trouble Ticketing);
• Identify reliable
IOCs
• Use the correlated
information to
quickly enforce
countermeasures
23

Correlate the Information
• Lastline Enterprise
Platform provides an
incident-centric view,
rather then an event-centric
view
• Single events are post-processed
and
summarized into high-level
incidents
28

Correlate the Information
Stage 1: Connection
to the Drive-By Site
Stage 3: Malicious
C&C connections
Stage 2: Malicious
Binary Download
Everything
correlated into a
single incident
Security Analysts look at a
single incident rather than
4 separated events
Result of the correlation process:
Drive-by +
Malicious Binary Download =
------------------------------------
Endpoint successfully compromised!
29

Share the Actionable Threat Intelligence
• The post-processed information can
be exported to external devices
• For further integration, Lastline API
can be easily integrated with existing
security infrastructures
• SWGs (Secure Web Gateways), IPSs
(Intrusion Protection System), NGFWs
(Next-Generation Firewalls) and SIEM
(Security Information Event
Management) installations can all
interoperate seamlessly with Lastline
Enterprise
30

Providing Multi-Dimensional Information…
• The information provided by the Lastline Enterprise reports can be
used at different levels
 Operational level: extract the information to contain and mitigate the breach
 Analytical level: perform post-mortem forensic analysis
31

Detailed Information for Security Analysts
Security Analysts
can extract the
Process Dumps and
analyse them on
Ida PRO
It is also possible to
derive reliable IoC.
32

Automatically Mitigating the Breach
User n
User 1
Exploit Site
C&C Site
1
2
3
5
Feedback To
Global Threat
Intelligence
User 2
4
33

• The sensor detects an advanced threat for the organization
• The artifact is analyzed by the Lastline Engine leveraging full
system emulation
• The manager triggers an alert using post processing and
correlation to ensure it is displayed with the right priority;
• The information can be automatically transmitted in real time to
the third parties products part of the Lastline Defense Program,
or virtually to any other technology by means of the Lastline API
• Other occurrences of the same threats are immediately
detected and blocked
1
2
3
4
5
Mitigating the Breach
34

Thank You!
For more information visit www.lastline.com
or contact us at info@lastline.com.

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