Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (SYG1781778300)
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Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis
Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis
- Timeline of Sygnia's Cyber Attack and lateral movement inside company's environment.
- Overview of affected data sets, including SSNs and PHI, and why they materially increase incident severity.
- How Rankiteo’s incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score.
- How this cyber incident impacts Sygnia Rankiteo cyber scoring and cyber rating.
- Rankiteo’s MITRE ATT&CK correlation analysis for this incident, with associated confidence level.
Full Incident Analysis Transcript
In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Sygnia breach identified under incident ID SYG1781778300.
The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Sygnia's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sygnia, the number of followers: 26168, the industry type: Computer and Network Security and the number of employees: 260 employees
After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 753 and after the incident was 736 with a difference of -17 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.
In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Sygnia and their customers.
A newly reported cybersecurity incident, "Velvet Ant: A Decade-Long Cyber Espionage Campaign Targeting Critical Infrastructure", has drawn attention.
A sophisticated cyber espionage campaign linked to the China-nexus threat actor Velvet Ant has been uncovered, revealing nearly a decade of undetected infiltration into highly segregated critical infrastructure networks.
The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting Internet-facing servers, Nginx servers, air-gapped IT-to-OT environments, Linux-based critical infrastructure systems, and exposing Credentials, interactive commands, authentication attempts.
In response, and began remediation that includes Replacement of backdoored OpenSSH binaries and PAM modules (with caution to avoid system lockouts).
The case underscores how Ongoing, teams are taking away lessons such as Traditional remediation (e.g., credential rotation) is ineffective against backdoored system components. Zero-downtime environments require careful handling of authentication systems to avoid lockouts. Long-term persistence mechanisms demonstrate advanced threat actor capabilities, and recommending next steps like Audit OpenSSH and PAM modules for tampering. Replace backdoored components with caution to avoid system lockouts. Implement enhanced monitoring for authentication anomalies. Segment networks to limit lateral movement. Conduct thorough forensic analysis to identify all compromised systems.
Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.
MITRE ATT&CK® Correlation Analysis
Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating compromised internet-exposed systems using custom implants and External Remote Services (T1133) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating internet-facing servers used as initial foothold. Under the Persistence tactic, the analysis identified Create or Modify System Process: Systemd Service (T1543.002) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating persistence via systemd units disguised as legitimate services, Create or Modify System Process: Launch Agent (T1543.001) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating modified SysVinit scripts for persistence, Compromise Client Software Binary (T1554) with high confidence (95%), supported by evidence indicating modified OpenSSH binaries (sshd, ssh, scp, ssh-keygen) with backdoors, and Modify Authentication Process: Pluggable Authentication Modules (T1556.003) with high confidence (95%), supported by evidence indicating backdoored PAM modules (pam_unix.so) with nine variants. Under the Privilege Escalation tactic, the analysis identified Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Setuid and Setgid (T1548.001) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating backdoored OpenSSH binaries could escalate privileges and Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Sudo and Sudo Caching (T1548.003) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating hardcoded backdoor passwords in OpenSSH. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Masquerading: Masquerade Task or Service (T1036.004) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating fake Chrome service disguised as legitimate, Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location (T1036.005) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating malware masqueraded as kernel threads, Hide Artifacts: Hidden Files and Directories (T1564.001) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating encrypted logs stored in /usr/share/man9/ph/ with MD5-hashed filenames, Indicator Removal: Clear Linux or Mac System Logs (T1070.002) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating custom -d flag in OpenSSH to disable logging, and Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating pAM modules erased traces of backdoor in memory. Under the Credential Access tactic, the analysis identified OS Credential Dumping: /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow (T1003.008) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating backdoored OpenSSH logged authentication attempts, Adversary-in-the-Middle: LLMNR/NBT-NS Poisoning and SMB Relay (T1557.001) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating hardcoded backdoor passwords in OpenSSH, and Modify Authentication Process: Pluggable Authentication Modules (T1556.003) with high confidence (95%), supported by evidence indicating pAM modules backdoored to exfiltrate credentials. Under the Discovery tactic, the analysis identified Account Discovery: Local Account (T1087.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating openSSH logged interactive commands and authentication attempts and File and Directory Discovery (T1083) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating attackers bridged air-gapped IT-to-OT environments. Under the Lateral Movement tactic, the analysis identified Remote Services: SSH (T1021.004) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating compromised OpenSSH binaries used for lateral movement, Protocol Tunneling (T1572) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating sOCKS5 proxies used for lateral movement, and Proxy: External Proxy (T1090.002) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating nginx servers used to execute binaries remotely. Under the Collection tactic, the analysis identified Data from Local System (T1005) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating openSSH logged interactive commands and authentication attempts and Screen Capture (T1113) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating command logging implies potential screen capture. Under the Command and Control tactic, the analysis identified Proxy: Internal Proxy (T1090.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating sOCKS5 proxies used for C2, Ingress Tool Transfer (T1105) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating custom implants (auditdb) used for C2, and Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols (T1071.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating fastCGI wrapper used for remote execution. Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Exfiltration Over C2 Channel (T1041) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating credentials and commands exfiltrated via encrypted logs and Exfiltration Over Web Service: Exfiltration to Cloud Storage (T1567.002) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating encrypted logs stored in /usr/share/man9/ph/. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.
Sources & References
- Sygnia Rankiteo Cyber Incident Details: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/sygnia/incident/SYG1781778300
- Sygnia CyberSecurity Rating page: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/sygnia
- Sygnia Rankiteo Cyber Incident Blog Article: https://blog.rankiteo.com/syg1781778300-velvet-ant-targets-cyber-attack-january-2016/
- Sygnia CyberSecurity Score History: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/sygnia/history
- Sygnia CyberSecurity Incident Source: https://gbhackers.com/modified-openssh-binaries/
- Rankiteo A.I CyberSecurity Rating methodology: https://www.rankiteo.com/Images/rankiteo_algo.pdf
- Rankiteo TPRM Scoring methodology: https://static.rankiteo.com/model/rankiteo_tprm_methodology.pdf