Overview: This is not a disclosure of a new vulnerability in SonicWall software. Customers with the current SonicWall Global Management System (GMS) 8.2 and above have nothing to worry about. The reported vulnerability relates to an old version of GMS (8.1), which was replaced in December 2016. Customers with GMS 8.1 and earlier releases should patch, per SonicWall guidance, as they are running out-of-support software. Best practice is to deploy a SonicWall next-generation firewall (NGFW) or a web application firewall (WAF) in front of GMS and other web servers to protect against such attacks. Look for global third-party validation on protection effectiveness, such as the 2018 NSS Labs NGFW Group Test. After rigorous testing, SonicWall firewalls earned the NSS Labs coveted ‘Recommended’ rating five times.

On Sept. 9, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 published a blog post highlighting a developing trend of botnets picking up publicly known CVE exploits and weaponizing them against enterprise infrastructure. This marks a change in the botnet authors’ tactics from targeting consumer-grade routers and IP cameras to searching for higher-profile enterprise targets to harness additional endpoints for DDoS attacks.

The first botnet, Mirai, targeted the Apache Struts vulnerability from early 2017, which affects web servers around the world. On March 6, 2017, SonicWall provided protection against the Apache Struts vulnerability with the Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS) on the NGFW line, rolling out protection to all firewalls with licensed IPS service.

The second botnet highlighted in the Palo Alto Networks post, Gafgyt, picked up the Metasploit code for an XML-RPC vulnerability for an obsolete version of SonicWall GMS (8.1) central management software, which was replaced by GMS 8.2 in December 2016.

The bottom line: the reported botnet attack is misguided and presents no threat to SonicWall GMS in production since December 2016.

Implementing Cybersecurity Best Practices

Current SonicWall GMS users are not at risk. However, there are broader lessons here for the industry and business owners:

• Take End-of-Life and End-of-Support announcements seriously and update proactively. They become a compliance and security risk for critical systems and compromise an enterprise’s compliance and governance posture.
• Security best practices dictate that you never expose a web server directly to the internet without a NGFW or WAF deployed in front.
• A security layer between the internet and critical enterprise infrastructure, like web servers or centralized firewall management, provides the ability to virtually patch zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits while working out a sensible patching strategy. For example, a SonicWall NGFW with Intrusion Prevention or a SonicWall WAF can easily handle this task.

Using Third-Party Validation

The blog post does, however, underscore the rapidly-evolving nature of today’s threat landscape, evidenced by the mixing of malware and exploits to create new malware cocktails, and the need to use the latest and most effective security solutions to protect against them.

When selecting a product to protect your critical infrastructure, go beyond listening to vendor claims and look at globally recognized independent testing, such as the NSS Labs NGFW report, to validate security efficacy. Items that you should consider when selecting a security product for the modern threat landscape:

1. NSS Labs specifically tests for protection on non-standard ports (not just 80/443, for example) because malware often uses non-standard ports to bypass traffic inspection. Products that lack inspection on non-standard ports are blind to many malware attacks, and are easily fooled into missing dangerous traffic and allowing malware and exploits to sail right through.

_{2018 NSS Labs NGFW Group Test Report — Evasion Resistance}

_{2018 NSS Labs Next Generation Firewall Security Value Map^TM (SVM)}

2. Evaluate your NGFW on security efficacy, and how it deals with malware cocktails, such as the recently exposed Intel-based, processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow.

• SonicWall patented and patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI^TM) technology is proven to catch chip/processor attacks through its unique approach to real-time memory inspection.
• SonicWall RTDMI protection can also be applied to mitigate malicious PDFs, Microsoft Office documents and executables. The focus on PDF and Office document protection is especially important. Attacks are shifting into this delivery mechanism as browsers clamped down on Flash and Java content, drying up a fertile area of exploit and malware delivery. For example, RTDMI discovered more than 12,300 never-before-seen attack variants in the first half of 2018 alone.
• The SonicWall Capture Client endpoint suite plugs into the RTDMI engine to offer the same protection for users that are outside a protected network.

“SPARTANS! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty. For tonight, WE DINE IN HELL!!”

Remember this passionate line by King Leonidas from the movie “300”? We are at the brink of another war — the modern cyber arms race. You need to gear up and be prepared for the thousands of malicious “arrows” that shoot down on you.

This cyber arms race is aimed against governments, businesses and individuals alike, and it’s comprised of different types and forms of cyber attacks. These attacks grow more sophisticated each year, with over 12,500 new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) reported in 2017 — 78 percent of which were related to network attacks.

It’s critical we learn from the past experiences — successes and failures. So, what can 2017 teach us to be better prepared in 2018? Let’s first look at the hard data.

According to the 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, SonicWall Capture Labs detected 184 million ransomware attacks and a 101.2 percent increase in new ransomware variants from more than 1 million sensors across more than 200 countries. The increase in new variations signifies a shift in attack strategies.

In addition, SonicWall Capture Labs logged 9.32 billion malware attacks. Network attacks using encryption tactics are also on the rise. Without the ability to inspect such traffic, an average organization would have missed over 900 file-based attacks per year hidden by SSL/TLS encryption.

IoT attacks loom

Internet of Things (IoT) threats and memory attacks are also impending challenges that we face across wired and wireless solutions. According to Gartner, by 2020, IoT technology will be in 95 percent of electronics for new product designs.

Recently, Spiceworks performed a survey that resulted in IoT devices being the most vulnerable to Wi-Fi attacks. This makes IoT and chip processors the emerging battlegrounds. IoT was also a big target as “smart” (pun intended) hardware is not updated regularly and is often physically located in unknown or hard-to-reach places, leading to memory attacks and vulnerabilities.

IoT ransomware attacks are alone on the rise and gain control of a device’s functionality. While many of the IoT devices may not hold any valuable data, there is a risk for owners or individuals to be held at ransom for personal data. Gartner also predicts, through 2022, half of all security budgets for IoT will go to fault remediation, recalls and safety failures rather than protection.

There are many smart devices and IoT devices in the market that connect over Wi-Fi, such as cameras, personal and TVs. Imagine an attack on your personal privacy and a hacker gaining control over your device. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks still remain a major threat to these devices. Each compromised device can send up to 30 million packets per second to the target, creating an IoT powered botnet.

In fact, at one point in 2017, SonicWall Capture Labs was recording more than 62,000 IoT Reaper hits each day. Considering there could be an estimated 6 billion mobile devices in circulation by 2020, it wouldn’t be totally surprising if the next wave of ransomware targets mobile devices,

How to secure wired, wireless and mobile networks

It is critical to secure your network, both from a wireless and wired perspective. Total end-to-end security is the key to prevent such attacks from happening in the first place. To survive this cyber war, you can follow certain best practices to ensure your protection:

• Layer security across your wired, wireless, mobile and cloud network
• Deploy next-gen firewalls that can provide real-time intrusion detection and mitigation
• Patch your firewalls and endpoint devices to the latest firmware
• Secure your IoT devices to prevent device tampering and unauthorized access
• Educate your employees on the best practices
• Change default login and passwords across your devices

SonicWall solutions include next-generation firewalls, 802.11ac Wave 2 access points, secure mobile access appliances and the Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) cloud sandbox service, all of which combine to provide an effective zero-day threat protection ecosystem.

To protect customers against the increasing dangers of zero-day threats, SonicWall’s cloud-based Capture ATP service detects and blocks advanced threats at the gateway until a verdict is returned. In addition, Capture ATP also monitors memory-based exploits via Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection^TM (RTDMI). With innovative SonicWall solutions, rest assured your IoT and mobile devices are protected for the cyberwar.

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:

• https://blockchain.info/address/13AM4VW2dhxYgXeQepoHkHSQuy6NgaEb94
• https://blockchain.info/address/12t9YDPgwueZ9NyMgw519p7AA8isjr6SMw
• https://blockchain.info/address/115p7UMMngoj1pMvkpHijcRdfJNXj6LrLn

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.

Note: This blog was updated on Monday, May 15.

First, if you are a SonicWall customer and you are using our Gateway Anti-Virus, Intrusion Prevention service, and Capture Advanced Threat Protection then your SonicWall firewall has been protecting your network from WannaCry ransomware and the worm that spreads it since 17 April, 2017. Since the release of the first version of the code, we have identified several new variants and have released additional counter measures. We will continue to update this blog as our Capture Labs research team uncovers more information and as additional protection is automatically rolled out to our customers’ firewalls.

Here’s more:

The Attack

This massive ransomware attack became infamous by shutting down a number of hospitals in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) system and thus preventing patients from receiving critical care. The attack hit over 100 countries across the world with an untold number of victims. WannaCry is a combination of a Trojan/ransomware and a worm that leverages an SMB file sharing protocol exploit named EternalBlue. The Shadow Brokers leaked EternalBlue in April 2017 as part of a bigger dump of NSA developed exploits. This exploit affects various versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems, including a number of versions that are in end-of-life status. Although Microsoft released a large number of patches on March 14 to address this vulnerability, the attack remains dangerous as many organizations have not applied the patch.

The first version of the worm/ransomware package had a kill switch that was accidently used to disable the worm feature which slowed its advance on Friday, 12 May 2017. However, new variants are appearing in the wild without this weakness. While the first version of the worm code can no longer spread the ransomware code, systems encrypted by WannaCry 1.0 will remain encrypted. Unfortunately, there is no known decryption method to recover files affected by WannaCry without paying cyber criminals (which is not advised).

Since Friday, 12 May 2017, SonicWall’s Capture Labs released six new signatures to block all known versions of WannaCry.  It is also worth noting that SonicWall security services on the firewall have built-in protections against the many components of this code, ranging from blocking contact with WannaCry Command and Control (C&C) servers to blocking attempts at exploitation of any unpatched SMB Microsoft vulnerabilities (such as EternalBlue).

The Protection

SonicWall Capture Labs analyzed the EternalBlue attack in mid-April immediately after the Shadow Brokers file dump and rolled out protection for all SonicWall firewall customers well in advance of the first public attack.  All known versions of this exploit can be blocked from SonicWall protected networks via active next-generation firewall security services.

As a SonicWall customer, ensure that your next-generation firewall has an active Gateway Security subscription to receive automatic real-time protection from known ransomware attacks such as WannaCry. Gateway Security includes Gateway Anti-virus (GAV), Intrusion Prevention (IPS), Botnet Filtering, and Application Control. This set of technology has signatures against WannaCry (part of GAV), protections against vulnerabilities outlined in Microsoft’s security bulletin MS17-010 (part of IPS), and it blocks communication with the C&C servers where WannaCry’s payload comes from (part of botnet filtering).

Since SonicWall Email Security uses the same signatures/definitions as Gateway Security, we can effectively block the emails that deliver the initial route to infection. Ensure all email security services are also up to date to block malicious emails.  Since 65% of all ransomware attacks happen through phishing emails, this needs to be a major focus when giving security awareness training. Additionally, customers with SonicWall Content Filtering Service should activate it to block communication with malicious URLs and domains, which works in a similar way Botnet filtering disrupts C&C communication.

As a best practice always deploy Deep Packet Inspection of all SSL/TLS (DPI-SSL) traffic since more than 50% of malware is encrypted. This will enable your SonicWall security services to identify and block all known ransomware attacks. Enabling DPI-SSL also allows the firewall to examine and send unknown files to SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection for multi-engine processing to discover and stop unknown ransomware variants.

View our webpage to learn more on how SonicWall protects against ransomware.

The most recent list of GAV/IPS signatures against EternalBlue and WannaCrypt as of 14 May 2017 at 11:45 AM PST

What’s Next

The party behind this attack has already released several variations of this attack for which we have established protections in place (see above). To ensure you are safe from newly developed updates and similar copycat attacks, first apply the Windows patch provided by Microsoft listed in the resources section.  Second, apply Capture Advanced Threat Protection (Capture ATP), SonicWall’s multi-engine network sandbox, to examine suspicious files coming into your network to discover and stop the latest threats just as we did with Cerber ransomware. Enable the service’s block until verdict feature to analyze all files at the gateway to eliminate malware before it can enter your network. Additionally, Capture Labs will continue to email customers Sonic Alerts on new threats.

Finally, phishing emails are the most common delivery mechanism for ransomware. It is possible that future variants of this ransomware will be delivered via emails. SonicWall’s email security solution uses Advanced Reputation Management (ARM) to inspect not only the sender IP but also the message content, embedded URLs and attachments. In addition, make sure you enable SPF, DKIM and DMARC advanced email authentication to identify and block spoofed emails and protect from spam and phishing attacks. For the best possible protection against such attacks, deploy SonicWall’s email security solution with Capture ATP service to inspect every email attachment in a multi-engine sandbox environment.

Apart from SonicWall security protections in place (listed above), as a best practice we recommend to disallow or block inbound SMB traffic (TCP 445, UDP ports 137-138, and TCP 139) and RDP traffic coming  from the internet on edge-facing Firewalls. If such access is required, implement secure remote access solutions like IPsec or SSL-VPN with proper authentication mechanisms in place.

Apply vulnerability patches on servers and PCs as recommended in Microsoft MS17-010 bulletin (listed above and below), disable SMBv1 communication (limit access via SMBv2/v3), as well as monitor for any suspicious activity on TCP 445.

Resources

• Microsoft’s Customer Guidance for WannaCrypt attacks
• Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010
• SonicWall Gateway Anti-Virus Information
• SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection Service Information
• SonicWall Email Security
• SonicWall Content Filtering ServiceLearn More Watch our webcast Stopping WannaCry Ransomware

To understand how SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection Service (ATP) protects the average company we looked at the data for 300 networks. SonicWall Capture ATP examines suspicious code and files to discover never-before-seen zero-day attacks.  So, in one day, how many of these new variants did Capture find?  See the infographic below to see what you could be up against without it. Read more about SonicWall Capture in my earlier blog: We are Sparta; the Battle to Defend Our Data From Invaders. Already a fan of SonicWall Capture? Share the infographic with your followers.