Microsoft is set to introduce significant changes to the Windows enterprise over the next year. With multiple security settings going from recommended to enforced.
Highlights include the EOL for AD Connector 2.0.x, changes to MFA, and the end of standalone Office Apps for 2016/19.
Caniphish’s Sebastian Salla published a review of thousands of misconfigured SPF records today allowing emails to be sent on behalf of foreign governments, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Miami, among others.
Supplementary information about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are available from EasyDMARC
Slate leaks a new cybersecurity policy from Biden’s Whitehouse. The new policy introduces two controversial concepts. One, mandatory cybersecurity requirements for 20 key industries supporting “critical infrastructure”. Two, “hack back” authorizations for offensive actions by government agencies and public companies.
This comes after Trump officials began cybersecurity efforts in 2019 but stopped short of approving “hack back” policies. Regardless, NSA Chief, General Nakasone, continues to push for more offensive cyber capabilities in the press.
Note: The authors are against “hack back” policies and believe this sets a dangerous precedence for global cyber relations. Specifically, as attribution is concerned.
Speaking of attribution, the always relevant document “Beyond Attribution” by the Atlantic Council should be considered mandatory reading for all cyber professionals and the C-suite.
CISA published its 2022 Year In Review this week, covering 4 major categories: Cyber Defense, Risk Reduction and Resilience, Operational Collaboration, and Agency Unification. Highlights of the document were published in the attached PDF fact sheet.
Consulting company S-RM published a post-breach report on ransomware group Lorenz. The threat actor’s TTPs were notable due to the increased dwell time in the environment. Working as quickly as possible, Lorenz targeted organizations susceptible to CVE-2022-29499 with a backdoor, then returned months later to exploit the now-backdoored network. This deviates from other ransomware groups who generally encrypt and exploit companies as quickly as access can be obtained.
CircleCI disclosed details on a breach that began in late December. An attacker was able to steal a session token and impersonate a high-impact user within CircleCI despite the session being protected by MFA. Customer systems were then compromised resulting in the exfiltration of keys and tokens stored in CircleCI pipelines. This highlights the importance of setting reasonable MFA and SSO session lifetimes that match the risk tolerance of the organization. Likewise, alternatives to statically stored secrets (OIDC, RESTful key vault, etc.) may be implemented to minimize the likelihood of secret disclosure.
Shout out to Travis for his contributions to the News You Should Know this week!