Bold Statements
Hi,
are you curious about the agenda of the Active Directory- & Entra ID security track at TROOPERS24? Here’s a sneak peak of the already published tracks:
Continue reading “TROOPERS24 Agenda Preview: Active Directory & Entra ID Security Track”
Continue readingHi!
We’re excited to announce the nearly complete composition of the Active Directory & Azure Security Track on Troopers 23 with fantastic speakers!
Here we go:
“Dumping NTHashes from Azure AD”
(Nestori Syynimaa)
“Hidden Pathways: Exploring the Anatomy of ACL-Based Active Directory Attacks and Building Strong Defenses”
(Jonas Bülow Knudsen, Alexander Schmitt)
“Priority for Effective Action – A Practical Model for quantifying the Risk of Active Directory Attacks”
(Mars Cheng, Dexter Chen)
“(Windows) Hello from the other side” (Dirk-jan Mollema)
“The Power of Coercion Techniques in Windows Environments”
(Martin Grottenthaler)
Stay tuned for regularly updated info about Troopers 23 conference.
Cheers,
Friedwart.
Continue readingWir freuen uns, dass das Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) im Rahmen des gemeinsam mit ERNW durchgeführten SiSyPHuS Win10-Projekts (Studie zu Systemintegrität, Protokollierung, Härtung und Sicherheitsfunktionen in Windows 10) heute (ca. 10 Uhr) die nächsten drei Arbeitspakete veröffentlicht:
In den Dokumenten finden sich unterschiedliche Empfehlungen für Domänenmitglieder (mit normalem und mit hohem Schutzbedarf) und Einzelplatzrechner. Die Dokumente bauen auf den Empfehlungen von Microsofts Security Baseline und dem CIS Benchmark für Windows 10 auf und ergänzen diese in von Microsoft und CIS nicht betrachteten Bereichen oder modifizieren sie dort, wo es aus Erfahrung von ERNW im Hardening von Windows-Systemen sinnvoll ist.
Sie finden die Dokumente hier.
Wir hoffen, damit zur Sicherheit von Windows-Umgebungen beitragen zu können, und wünschen Ihnen viel Spaß bei der Lektüre!
German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Publishes Hardening Guideline, Logging Guideline And Related GPOs for Windows 10
We are happy to announce that today the BSI publishes several documents that ERNW created as part of the long-term SiSyPHuS Win10-Project (ger: “Studie zu Systemintegrität, Protokollierung, Härtung und Sicherheitsfunktionen in Windows 10”, en: “Study on System Integrity, Logging, Hardening and Security relevant Functionality in Windows 10”):
The guidelines are built on recommendations from Microsoft´s Security Baseline, CIS Benchmarks and ERNW´s expertise.
You can find the documents and GPOs here.
Let’s make the Windows world a safer place, and have fun reading!
Cheers,
Friedwart.
Continue readingSome weeks ago, Heinrich and I had the pleasure to participate in the heisec-Webinar “Emotet bei Heise – Lernen aus unseren Fehlern”. We really enjoyed the webinar and the (alas, due to the format: too short) discussions and we hope we could contribute to understand how to make Active Directory implementations out there a bit safer in the future.
Continue readingHeise berichtet aktuell öffentlich über die Emotet-Infektion im eigenen Haus, bei dessen Aufklärung ERNW unterstützte. Damit liefert Heise Informationen zum Verlauf aktueller Angriffe, aber insbesondere auch wertvolle Einsichten zu Vorbeugung, Erkennung, Analyse und Gegenmaßnahmen aus eigener Erfahrung, wie sie nur selten der Öffentlichkeit preisgegeben werden.
Ein Team aus Incident-Response Spezialisten der ERNW Research unterstützte Heise bei der Analyse und Rekonstruktion des Vorfalls und analysierte die Schadsoftware, um deren Ausbreitungswege nachzuvollziehen und IoCs (Indicators of Compromise) zu extrahieren. Hierdurch konnten effektive Gegenmaßnahmen entwickelt und gemeinsam mit Heise erfolgreich umgesetzt werden.
Im Zuge dessen unterstützten Active-Directory-Spezialisten der ERNW Heise bei der Konzeption und dem Wiederaufbau eines neuen Active Directory. Im heisec-Webinar am 3. Juli berichtet Heise über den Incident und die wichtigsten Erkenntnisse daraus. Dabei sein werden zwei unserer Active Directory-Security-Spezialisten. Sie werden Konzepte und Verfahren für ein sicheres, resilientes und trotzdem betreibbares Active Directory vorstellen und den Teilnehmern mit Tipps für Containment nach einer Infektion und in gemeinsamer Diskussion zur Verfügung stehen.
Bei Interesse an diesem Thema beachten Sie auch die vielen Vorträge internationaler Active Directory-Security-Spezialisten des Active Directory Security Tracks auf der diesjährigen Troopers (so wie unsere eigenen Beiträge dazu, wie etwa hier und hier) und unsere Workshops zu Active Directory-Sicherheit und Inicdent Response.
Wir wünschen allen Lesern ein schönes verlängertes und hoffentlich Incident-freies Pfingstwochenende!
Friedwart Kuhn & Andreas Dewald.
Continue readingon Tuesday, 13.th of November we realized our second AD security summit with the title: “Active Directory Security: On-Prem-Security, Secure Extension into the Cloud & Secure Operations” in Heidelberg. First, we had three talks: the first one about “Active Directory Core Security Principles & Best Practices” covering hybrid AD and AD Trusts as well (by Friedwart Kuhn & Heinrich Wiederkehr from ERNW), the second one a case study about the implementation of an ESAE Forest in a big insurance company (by Fabian Böhm from Teal Technology Consulting) and the third one about a case study with respect to the (security) challenges of a hybrid AD (by Raphael Rojas from STIHL). Continue reading “Active Directory Security Summit 2018 – Slides Online”
Continue readingServer operating systems with an OS, for which vendor support has ended, come with many risks that have to be considered and addressed. The primary goal should be always to decommission or migrate the majority of end-of-life (EoL) servers to OS versions, supported by the vendor. Here it should be noted that a migration to an up-to-date OS should be preferably done before your organization enters the end of life of that software 😉
However, it must be considered that a number of servers cannot be migrated or shut down (easily) and must remain operational and accessible. Based on a customer project in 2014 we developed a high-level security concept for the secure operation of end-of-life Windows servers. We published this concept in our latest newsletter. You will find it here (https://www.ernw.de/download/newsletter/ERNW_Newsletter_47_Security_Concept_for_End-of-Life_Windows_Servers_signed.pdf)
Continue reading “How to go ahead with future end of life Windows (2003) Servers”
Continue readingJust recently, Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit(TM) (CTU) researchers published details (see http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/skeleton-key-malware-analysis/ ) on a especially nasty piece of malware that bypasses authentication on Active Directory (AD) systems which implement single-factor (password only) authentication. Once deployed the malware stays quite noiseless in the Domain Controller´s (DC) RAM, and the DC´s replication issues caused by it weren´t interpreted – in this case – during months as a hint for system compromise. Probably the malware´s modification on the LSASS process reduced the DC´s ability to perform DC-to-DC authentication, but this is only speculation and not where we would like to go today.
So, what to do? The relevant mitigations, pointed out by Dell´s CTU, as event log monitoring and scanning processes on suspicious systems with the published YARA signature should be applied.
Still, let’s discuss for a second which long-term, preventative measures could come into play as well. Continue reading “Skeleton Key – a Nasty Piece of Malware. Some Remarks.”
Microsoft released EMET v4.0 with a new (security) feature that enables protection against fraudulent websites or compromised root certification authorities (do you remember Comodo, DigiNotar, DigiCert, Turktrust et al. ;-)?)
EMET defines via “certificate trust“ a trust chain between the domain name of a website (and its associated website certificate) and a root CA certificate. This is done through so called “pinning rules”. Here is one of the default pinning rules of EMET 4.0 for the domain name login.live.com:
Continue reading “EMET v4.0 with New Certificate Trust Feature Released”
Continue readingRecommendations by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI – Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) are obligatory for German government agencies, civil services and authorities (like recommendations of the NIST are relevant to American government agencies and authorities). They are often used as references and security best practices in other countries as well. Hence it is hard to understand why the recommendations on how to harden Windows Server 2008 based systems were published only some weeks ago and only on a preliminary draft basis (which is, obviously, better than nothing ;-)).
We at ERNW, however, did an overall baseline security approach of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Active Directory for a large German authority last year. The aim was to fullfil the requirements of the German Federal Office for Information Security without having precise technical guidelines by the BSI itself (from our side we do have guidelines of course ;-)). The hardened Windows Server 2008 R2 environment was then approved at the end of 2011 by the German BSI. Now we published the results of our overall approach in our latest newsletter [German language].
Enjoy reading!
Friedwart Kuhn
PS: There’s also a digitally signed version of the newsletter. (Because it is signed with a qualified certificate, the validation requires an appropriate validation software, for example SecSigner from SecCommerce – which is free software).
Continue reading