Helping Apache Servers stay safe from zero-day path traversal attacks (CVE-2021-41773)
On September 29, 2021, the Apache Security team was alerted to a path traversal vulnerability being actively exploited (zero-day) against Apache HTTP Server version 2.4.49. The vulnerability, in some instances, can allow an attacker to fully compromise the web server via remote code execution (RCE) or at the very least access sensitive files. CVE number 2021-41773 has been assigned to this issue. Both Linux and Windows based servers are vulnerable.
An initial patch was made available on October 4 with an update to 2.4.50, however, this was found to be insufficient resulting in an additional patch bumping the version number to 2.4.51 on October 7th (CVE-2021-42013).
Customers using Apache HTTP Server versions 2.4.49 and 2.4.50 should immediately update to version 2.4.51 to mitigate the vulnerability. Details on how to update can be found on the official Apache HTTP Server project site.
Any Cloudflare customer with the setting normalize URLs to origin turned on have always been protected against this vulnerability.
Additionally, customers who have access to the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF), receive additional protection by turning on the rule with the following IDs:
1c3d3022129c48e9bb52e953fe8ceb2f(for Continue reading
Hedge 103: BGP Security with Geoff Huston
Our community has been talking about BGP security for over 20 years. While MANRS and the RPKI have made some headway in securing BGP, the process of deciding on a method to provide at least the information providers need to make more rational decisions about the validity of individual routes is still ongoing. Geoff Huston joins Alvaro, Russ, and Tom to discuss how we got here and whether we will learn from our mistakes.
May I ask who’s calling, please? A recent rise in VoIP DDoS attacks
Over the past month, multiple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers have been targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from entities claiming to be REvil. The multi-vector attacks combined both L7 attacks targeting critical HTTP websites and API endpoints, as well as L3/4 attacks targeting VoIP server infrastructure. In some cases, these attacks resulted in significant impact to the targets’ VoIP services and website/API availability.
Cloudflare’s network is able to effectively protect and accelerate voice and video infrastructure because of our global reach, sophisticated traffic filtering suite, and unique perspective on attack patterns and threat intelligence.
If you or your organization have been targeted by DDoS attacks, ransom attacks and/or extortion attempts, seek immediate help to protect your Internet properties. We recommend not paying the ransom, and to report it to your local law enforcement agencies.
Voice (and video, emojis, conferences, cat memes and remote classrooms) over IP
Voice over IP (VoIP) is a term that's used to describe a group of technologies that allow for communication of multimedia over the Internet. This technology enables your FaceTime call with your friends, your virtual classroom lessons over Zoom and even some “normal” calls you make from your cell phone.
State of IT Security in 2021
Patrik Schindler sent me his views on code quality and resulting security nightmares after reading the Cisco SD-WAN SQL Injection saga. Enjoy!
I think we have a global problem with code quality. Both from a security perspective, and from a less problematic but still annoying bugs-everywhere perspective. I’m not sure if the issue is largely ignored, or we’ve given up on it (see also: Cloud Complexity Lies or Cisco ACI Complexity).
State of IT Security in 2021
Patrik Schindler sent me his views on code quality and resulting security nightmares after reading the Cisco SD-WAN SQL Injection saga. Enjoy!
I think we have a global problem with code quality. Both from a security perspective, and from a less problematic but still annoying bugs-everywhere perspective. I’m not sure if the issue is largely ignored, or we’ve given up on it (see also: Cloud Complexity Lies or Cisco ACI Complexity).
Check: that Republican audit of Maricopa
Author: Robert Graham (@erratarob)
Later today (Friday, September 24, 2021), Republican auditors release their final report on the found with elections in Maricopa county. Draft copies have circulated online. In this blogpost, I write up my comments on the cybersecurity portions of their draft.
https://arizonaagenda.substack.com/p/we-got-the-senate-audit-report
The three main problems are:
- They misapply cybersecurity principles that are meaningful for normal networks, but which don’t really apply to the air gapped networks we see here.
- They make some errors about technology, especially networking.
- They are overstretching themselves to find dirt, claiming the things they don't understand are evidence of something bad.
In the parts below, I pick apart individual pieces from that document to demonstrate these criticisms. I focus on section 7, the cybersecurity section, and ignore the other parts of the document, where others are more qualified than I to opine.
In short, when corrected, section 7 is nearly empty of any content.
7.5.2.1.1 Software and Patch Management, part 1
They claim Dominion is defective at one of the best-known cyber-security issues: applying patches.
It’s not true. The systems are “air gapped”, disconnected from the typical sort of threat that exploits unpatched systems. The primary Continue reading
That Alfa-Trump Sussman indictment
Five years ago, online magazine Slate broke a story about how DNS packets showed secret communications between Alfa Bank in Russia and the Trump Organization, proving a link that Trump denied. I was the only prominent tech expert that debunked this as just a conspiracy-theory[*][*][*].
Last week, I was vindicated by the indictment of a lawyer involved, a Michael Sussman. It tells a story of where this data came from, and some problems with it.
But we should first avoid reading too much into this indictment. It cherry picks data supporting its argument while excluding anything that disagrees with it. We see chat messages expressing doubt in the DNS data. If chat messages existed expressing confidence in the data, we wouldn't see them in the indictment.
In addition, the indictment tries to make strong ties to the Hillary campaign and the Steele Dossier, but ultimately, it's weak. It looks to me like an outsider trying to ingratiated themselves with the Hillary campaign rather than there being part of a grand Clinton-lead conspiracy against Trump.
With these caveats, we do see some important things about where the data came from.
We see how Tech-Executive-1 used Continue reading
Another SD-WAN Security SNAFU: SQL Injections in Cisco SD-WAN Admin Interface
Christoph Jaggi sent me a link to an interesting article describing security vulnerabilities pentesters found in Cisco SD-WAN admin/management code.
I’m positive the bugs have been fixed in the meantime, but what riled me most was the root cause: Little Bobby Tables (aka SQL injection) dropped by. Come on, it’s 2021, SD-WAN is supposed to be about building secure replacements for MPLS/VPN networks, and they couldn’t get someone who could write SQL-injection-safe code (the top web application security risk)?
Another SD-WAN Security SNAFU: SQL Injections in Cisco SD-WAN Admin Interface
Christoph Jaggi sent me a link to an interesting article describing security vulnerabilities pentesters found in Cisco SD-WAN admin/management code.
I’m positive the bugs have been fixed in the meantime, but what riled me most was the root cause: Little Bobby Tables (aka SQL injection) dropped by. Come on, it’s 2021, SD-WAN is supposed to be about building secure replacements for MPLS/VPN networks, and they couldn’t get someone who could write SQL-injection-safe code (the top web application security risk)?
How to Simplify Your Journey to Zero Trust with NSX Workshops
At its core, Zero Trust is an operational framework that helps enterprises secure modern network environments. Zero Trust insists organizations strip away ambiguity from their security and focus on the basics: committing to a risk-based approach across end-users, networks, data, devices, and much more. If you’re ready to take the next step toward built-in, Zero Trust networking (ZTN), we can help. Learn how to successfully implement Zero Trust networking and segmentation strategies at one of our upcoming NSX Network Security Workshop Sessions on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 or on Wednesday, September 29, 2021.
During these live virtual events, Patricio Villar, Principal Network Architect and VMware Certified Expert/Network Virtualization, will cover Zero Trust foundational concepts, including:
- How to identify communication paths to segment and build policy to protect your data center
- How implementing NSX security supports ZTN framework
- How to easily implement stronger distributed security with VMware NSX
NSX Network Security Workshop topics include:
- Zero Trust Networking concepts
- Tools to implement ZTN
- Distributed Firewall
- Distributed IDS/IPS
- NSX Intelligence
- Live demos
- And much more
If you’re ready to simplify Zero Trust so you can have simply zero worries, grab your spot and register today.
See you there!
The post How to Simplify Your Journey to Zero Trust with NSX Workshops appeared first on Network and Security Virtualization.
How not to get caught in law-enforcement geofence requests
I thought I'd write up a response to this question from well-known 4th Amendment and CFAA lawyer Orin Kerr:
Question for tech people related to "geofence" warrants served on Google: How easy is it for a cell phone user, either of an Android or an iPhone, to stop Google from generating the detailed location info needed to be responsive to a geofence warrant? What do you need to do?
— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) September 15, 2021
(FWIW, I'm seeking info from people who actually know the answer based on their expertise, not from those who are just guessing, or are who are now googling around to figure out what the answer may be,)
— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) September 15, 2021
First, let me address the second part of his tweet, whether I'm technically qualified to answer this. I'm not sure, I have only 80% confidence that I am. Hence, I'm writing this answer as blogpost hoping people will correct me if I'm wrong.
There is a simple answer and it's this: just disable "Location" tracking in the settings on the phone. Both iPhone and Android have a one-click button to tap that disables everything.
How Cloudflare helped mitigate the Atlassian Confluence OGNL vulnerability before the PoC was released
On August 25, 2021, Atlassian released a security advisory for their Confluence Server and Data Center. The advisory highlighted an Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection that would result in an unauthenticated attacker being able to execute arbitrary code.
A full proof of concept (PoC) of the attack was made available by a security researcher on August 31, 2021. Cloudflare immediately reviewed the PoC and prepared a mitigation rule via an emergency release. The rule, once tested, was deployed on September 1, 2021, at 15:32 UTC with a default action of BLOCK and the following IDs:
100400(for our legacy WAF)e8c550810618437c953cf3a969e0b97a(for our new WAF)
All customers using the Cloudflare WAF to protect their self-hosted Confluence applications have automatically been protected since the new rule was deployed last week. Additionally, the Cloudflare WAF started blocking a high number of potentially malicious requests to Confluence applications even before the rule was deployed.
And customers who had deployed Cloudflare Access in front of their Confluence applications were already protected even before the emergency release. Access checks every request made to a protected hostname for a JSON Web Token (JWT) containing a user’s identity. Any unauthenticated users attempting this exploit Continue reading
Getting Blasted by Backdoors
I wanted to take minute to talk about a story I’ve been following that’s had some new developments this week. You may have seen an article talking about a backdoor in Juniper equipment that caused some issues. The issue at hand is complicated at the linked article does a good job of explaining some of the nuance. Here’s the short version:
- The NSA develops a version of Dual EC random number generation that includes a pretty substantial flaw.
- That flaw? If you know the pseudorandom value used to start the process you can figure out the values, which means you can decrypt any traffic that uses the algorithm.
- NIST proposes the use of Dual EC and makes it a requirement for vendors to be included on future work. Don’t support this one? You don’t get to even be considered.
- Vendors adopt the standard per the requirement but don’t make it the default for some pretty obvious reasons.
- Netscreen, a part of Juniper, does use Dual EC as part of their default setup.
- The Chinese APT 5 hacking group figures out the vulnerability and breaks into Juniper to add code to Netscreen’s OS.
- They Continue reading
Marketing Wins
Off-topic post for today …
In the battle between marketing and security, marketing always wins. This topic came to mind after reading an article on using email aliases to control your email—
One of the most basic things you can do to increase your security against phishing attacks is to have two email addresses, one you give to financial institutions and another one you give to “everyone else.” It would be nice to have a third for newsletters and marketing, but this won’t work in the real world. Why?
Because it’s very rare to find a company that will keep two email addresses on file for you, one for “business” and another for “marketing.” To give specific examples—my mortgage company sends me both marketing messages in the form of a “newsletter” as well as information about mortgage activity. They only keep one email address on file, Continue reading
Making Magic Transit health checks faster and more responsive
Magic Transit advertises our customer’s IP prefixes directly from our edge network, applying DDoS mitigation and firewall policies to all traffic destined for the customer’s network. After the traffic is scrubbed, we deliver clean traffic to the customer over GRE tunnels (over the public Internet or Cloudflare Network Interconnect). But sometimes, we experience inclement weather on the Internet: network paths between Cloudflare and the customer can become unreliable or go down. Customers often configure multiple tunnels through different network paths and rely on Cloudflare to pick the best tunnel to use if, for example, some router on the Internet is having a stormy day and starts dropping traffic.
Because we use Anycast GRE, every server across Cloudflare’s 200+ locations globally can send GRE traffic to customers. Every server needs to know the status of every tunnel, and every location has completely different network routes to customers. Where to start?
In this post, I’ll break down my work to improve the Magic Transit GRE tunnel health check system, creating a more stable experience for customers and dramatically reducing CPU and memory usage at Cloudflare’s edge.
Everybody has their own weather station
To decide where to send traffic, Cloudflare edge servers Continue reading
MUST Read: Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (RFC 9099)
After almost a decade of bickering and haggling (trust me, I got my scars to prove how the consensus building works), the authors of Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (many of them dear old friends I haven’t seen for way too long) finally managed to turn a brilliant document into an Informational RFC.
Regardless of whether you already implemented IPv6 in your network or believe it will never be production-ready (alongside other crazy stuff like vaccines) I’d consider this RFC a mandatory reading.
MUST Read: Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (RFC 9099)
After almost a decade of bickering and haggling (trust me, I got my scars to prove how the consensus building works), the authors of Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (many of them dear old friends I haven’t seen for way too long) finally managed to turn a brilliant document into an Informational RFC.
Regardless of whether you already implemented IPv6 in your network or believe it will never be production-ready (alongside other crazy stuff like vaccines) I’d consider this RFC a mandatory reading.