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Cryptojacking Apocalypse: Defeating the Four Horsemen of Cryptomining

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Despite price fluctuations of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, cryptojacking remains a serious — and often hidden — threat to businesses, SMBs and everyday consumers.

And the most covert of these threats is cryptomining via the browser, where popular forms of malware attempt to turn your device into a full-time cryptocurrency mining bot called a cryptojacker.

To help you creatively understand this trend, let me summon my classical training and be a little hyperbolic. If you see the cryptojacking wave as an apocalypse like some of their victims do, the Four Horsemen would be the four threats to your endpoint or business:

  • The White Horse: The energy it consumes or wastes
  • The Red Horse: The loss to productivity due to limited resources
  • The Black Horse: The damage it can do to a system
  • The Pale Horse: Security implications due to created vulnerabilities

Unlike ransomware that wants to be found (to ask for payment), a cryptojacker’s job is to run invisibly in the background (although your CPU performance graph or device’s fan may indicate something is not normal).

Ransomware authors have switched gears over the past two years to use cryptojacking more, because a ransomware strain’s effectiveness and ROI diminish as soon as it ends up on public feeds like VirusTotal.

Like anyone else running a highly profitable business, cybercriminals need to constantly find new ways to fulfill their financial targets. Cryptojacking is being used to solve that challenge.

In April 2018, SonicWall started tracking cryptojacking trends, namely the use of Coinhive in malware. Over the course of the year, we saw cryptojacking ebb and flow. In that time, SonicWall recorded nearly 60 million cryptojacking attacks, with as many as 13.1 million in September 2018. As published in the 2019 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, volume dipped across the final quarter of 2018.

Global Cryptojacking Attacks | April-September 2018

The lure of cryptomining

Cryptomining operations have become increasingly popular, now consuming almost half a percent of the world’s electricity consumption. Despite the wild swings in price, roughly 60% of the cost of legitimately mining bitcoin is the energy consumption. In fact, at the time of writing, the price of a bitcoin is worth less than the cost of mining it legitimately.

With such costs and zero risk as compared to buying and maintaining equipment, cybercriminals have strong incentives to generate cryptocurrency with someone else’s resources. Infecting 10 machines with a cryptominer could net up to $100/day, so the challenge for cryptojackers is three-fold:

  1. Find targets, namely organizations with a lot of devices on the same network, especially schools or universities.
  2. Infect as many machines as possible.
  3. Stay hidden for as long as possible (unlike ransomware and more akin to traditional malware).

Cryptojackers use similar techniques as malware to sneak on to an endpoint: drive-by downloads, phishing campaigns, in-browser vulnerabilities and browser plugins, to name a few. And, of course, they rely on the weakest link — the people — via social engineering techniques.

Am I infected by cryptominers?

Cryptominers are interested in your processing power and cryptojackers have to trade stealth against profit. How much of your CPU resources they take depends on their objectives.

Siphoning less power makes it harder for unsuspecting users to notice. Stealing more increases their profits. In either case, there will be a performance impact, but if the threshold is low enough it could be a challenge to distinguish the miner from legitimate software.

Enterprise administrators may look for unknown processes in their environment, and end users on Windows should spawn a Sysinternals Process Explorer to see what they are running. Linux and macOS users should investigate using System Monitor and Activity Monitor, respectively, for the same reason.

How to defend against cryptominers

The first step in defending against cryptominers is to stop this type of malware at the gateway, either through firewalls or email security (perimeter security), which is one of the best ways to scrub out known file-based threats.

Since people like to reuse old code, catching cryptojackers like Coinhive was also a simple first step. But in February 2019, Coinhive publicly announced it was ceasing operations March 8. The service stated that it wasn’t “economically viable anymore” and that the “crash” impacted the business severely.

Despite this news, SonicWall predicts there will still be a surge in new cryptojacking variants and techniques to fill the void. Cryptojacking could still become a favorite method for malicious actors because of its concealment; low and indirect damage to victims reduces chances of exposure and extends the valuable lifespan of a successful attack.

If the malware strain is unknown (new or updated), then it will bypass static filters in perimeter security. If a file is unknown, it will be routed to a sandbox to inspect the nature of the file.

The multi-engine SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox environment is designed to identify and stop evasive malware that may evade one engine but not the others.

If you have an endpoint not behind this typical set up (e.g., it’s roaming at the airport or hotel), you need to deploy an endpoint security product that includes behavioral detection.

Cryptominers can operate in the browser or be delivered through a fileless attack, so the legacy solutions you get free with a computer are blind to it.

A behavioral-based antivirus like SonicWall Capture Client would detect that the system wants to mine coins and then shut down the operation. An administrator can easily quarantine and delete the malware or, in the case of something that does damage to system files, roll the system back to the last known good state before the malware executed.

By combining a mixture of perimeter defenses and behavioral analysis, organizations can fight the newest forms of malware no matter what the trend or intent is.

How SonicWall Signature “Families” Block Emerging Ransomware Variants

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When you look at the most damaging network security invasions over the last year, you see a recurring pattern: leaked government cyber tools being repurposed by cybercriminals. The compromised NSA toolset leaked by Shadow Brokers was devastating in many respects. These were highly targeted tools that many nation states wish they had the operational capacity to deploy.

But the tools developed by the NSA fell into criminal hands, who used them not for state-backed cyber espionage, but for capital gain. They repurposed these tools into WannaCry, Petya and, most recently, BadRabbit, as a means to install ransomware, encrypt information and keep it hostage until a targeted victim pays to release it, typically via Bitcoin.

Alas, sometimes victims pay and the data is still not released.  Sometimes, other actors see an organization has been held hostage and sends their own ransom demands, even though they are not affiliated with the original ransomware creators. The victim organization pays for this misdirection but still cannot unlock their files. They are out of the money and damages are incurred. “There is no honor among thieves,” as they say.

WannaCry, Petya and BadRabbit form a “family” of ransomware variants developed from the same leaked NSA tools. It is when there are these multiple attacks using the same family of exploits that SonicWall can give you breathing room and help you sleep at night.

To explain, first let me discuss how signatures work in our next-generation firewalls (NGFWs). Individual signatures exactly match bit patterns from IP-based frame payloads to detect a specific variant of malware. Our award-winning Capture ATP technology, a multi-engine network sandbox,  not only stops unknown and zero-day threats from entering networks, but also helps create new signatures for detecting emerging malware.

Few vendors look at both incoming and outgoing packets for malware, as it can be a large performance hit to do both. Most vendors are only concerned with traffic going from the internet to the trusted zones and only inspect this pattern. Yet SonicWall inspects every single packet in each direction.

Why? Well, if you own a network and somehow a device is compromised, the only way you will find out is by seeing what it sends out. Is it talking to a command-and-control server (C&C)? Is it sending malware out, as infected machines do? Without scanning every packet, you do not have visibility of your internal network. While it is important to block incoming malware, it’s also important to determine what machines may have been infected and are trying to send data outside your organization.

This brings us back to our “family” of signatures. Have you ever wondered why SonicWall uses a different naming convention than other well-known malware strands?  It’s because we find them first, and give them their own names. Other vendors do this too, but we are vastly different. I am proud to say that SonicWall is extremely competent in creating a family of signatures to cover many individual signatures with one pass. SonicWall uses a fast memory-tree lookup as packets pass through the NGFW with our family of signatures, so only one lookup is needed. This is an extremely fast method of traffic processing.

Sometimes in sales, we have to quote statistics in answer to questions, such as “How many signatures do you store on the firewall?” And we dutifully respond, “Over 32,000 locally, with more in the cloud.” But this only tells part of the story. With our family of signatures, one family will catch 100 or more variation of one signature.

Going back to WannaCry, SonicWall created a family that caught WannaCry right after it was announced to the public. Since the NSA leak variants caused Petya and BadRabbit derivatives, the family signature in your SonicWall firewall blocked all these new attack vectors.

Even though these new variants were targeted delivery to networks, SonicWall blocked all these different bit patterns as part of our WannaCry signature family.  The signature updates were performed in the background – as you enjoyed the holidays with your friends and family.

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Did WannaCry Perpetrators Ever Get Their Ransom?

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Cyber criminals prefer to receive ransom in the cyber currency Bitcoin because it is anonymous. The truth is “sort of.” Let’s take a closer look at how Bitcoins work, and how the WannaCry perpetrators, possibly the Lazarus Group, want to be paid.

Bitcoins are different from fiat currencies because, with Bitcoins, no actual coins or bills exist, not even digital ones. With a fiat currency like the dollar, money is represented by actual coins and bills that can be physically stored. Depending on how you pay, your transaction is not recorded or, more often, either recorded anonymously or via an account number, such as a credit card number.

In any case, the number of coins and bills, either in actual money that you have on your hand, or what is recorded on your bank account, are decreased. With Bitcoins, you only have the transaction. Transactions are always public, and can be viewed by anyone. That is right: public, anyone. Anybody can see that money was paid from your account to that of WannaCry. Though, what is different from fiat currencies is that the actual ownership of an account is not necessarily know to anyone. It can be completely anonymous. This is a bit similar to a Swiss number account.

Let’s summarize this, the ownership of an account in Bitcoin may or may not be known to anyone, or generally public. The transaction, however, is always public. Bitcoin tracks transactions in so called Blocks that are linked in a Blockchain. In order to find out how much money somebody has, a “wallet” application would have to browse through the entire Blockchain and select out any transaction that involves the owner’s account number(s).

Different from fiat currencies, though, with Bitcoin, account numbers are free and one can have an endless amount of them. If somebody wants to be completely anonymous, they would use a new account number for every single transaction. Wallet or Account software would make it easy to keep track of them.

WannaCry made use of only three hard-coded account numbers:

Why didn’t WannaCry use a new account number for every instance of WannaCrypt0r to be installed? The answer might be: because in order to get the money from a Bitcoin account, one has to first generate the account number/private key pair, AND be in possession of the private key. Without the private key, they could not get their money: if the private key is being generated within WannaCrypt0r it would need to be communicated reliably where the hostage takers would have real-time access to it. That would give the perpetrators away. If the keys are generated somewhere in the cloud, the communication of private keys may be disguised in some layers of Darknet labyrinth, but it would be easy to shut them down by taking the key servers offline which would be easy to sniff. Also using hundreds or thousands of account numbers would not make it necessarily significantly more difficult for security experts to track payments.

The bigger question how can the perpetrators associate payment with a specific instance of WannaCry. With a uniquely generated account number that might be easy. But there does not appear any way to link the two, other than manually via the Contact Us button in WannaCrypt0r. In fact, the function of the Check Payment appears dubious at best. Supposedly, it is supposed to fetch the private key, but there is no public record of anybody ever having received it. The question is whether it actually works.

How would the perpetrators get the money after people paid ransom? Good question. Since transactions are public, we would know the account numbers to which the money is being transferred. In order to exchange the BTC into a fiat currency, the perpetrators would need to go to an exchange that are more and more government regulated. While a small-scale thug might slip through, the likelihood that a group of Lazarus’ size would stay anonymous is small. The WannaCry perpetrators also could exchange their account numbers for different ones in so called Mixer services as well in Account or Wallet services. Again, a small time thief might stay anonymous, but not when the NSA and every other state actor is after you.

In short, it is very possible that the WannaCry perpetrators never get their money. However, at the same time it is very possible that you never get the key either to recover your files. Even worse, your organization will be on the public record for having paid the extortionists, something which is not good publicity.

For so many reasons it is not a good idea to ever pay ransom, but specifically in the case of WannaCry is practically pointless.

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