Organizations Slow at Patching Heartbleed in VMware Deployments: Report
Posted on July 25, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
VMware released a series of updates to address the OpenSSL vulnerability known as Heartbleed in its products in April, but many organizations still haven’t secured their installations, virtualization management firm CloudPhysics reported on Monday.
Based on machine metadata collected from virtualized datacenters, CloudPhysics determined that 57% of VMware vCenter servers and 58% of VMware ESXi hypervisor hosts are still vulnerable to Heartbleed attacks.
“This is a remarkably high percentage given that ESX run the majority of business critical VMs in the world. I speculate that IT teams are more lax about patching ESXi since those machines are typically behind the firewall and not easy to reach from the outside world,” Irfan Ahmad, CTO and co-founder of CloudPhysics, wrote in a blog post.
“However, that laxity doesn’t make the delay in patching a good idea,” he added. “For one thing, insider attacks continue to be a major source of breaches. Another consideration is that if outside attackers do manage to infiltrate a low privilege service inside your firewall, you have just given them carte blanche to attack your most sensitive data.”
According to Ahmad, 40% of the organizations in CloudPhysics’ dataset have at least one vCenter server or ESXi host running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. By May, over 25% of vCenter servers and ESXi hosts had been patched, but over the next two months, the rate at which organizations were applying the updates had slowed down.
Shortly after the existence of the Heartbleed bug came to light, there were roughly 600,000 vulnerable systems. A couple of months later, Errata Security reported that the number was down to 300,000. However, some experts predict that it will take months, possibly even years, until all systems are patched.
“If insiders, or attackers via insiders, exploit the Heartbleed vulnerability through an untraceable attack they can gain access to mission-critical systems. With the window for the exploit being so large, combined with the current slowness of patching, the severity of an already serious problem is exacerbated,” Ron Zalkind, CTO of cloud data protection company CloudLock, told SecurityWeek.
“Maintaining patches is always prudent, but with an exploit like Heartbleed, its importance cannot be overstated. We strongly encourage organizations to immediately patch their systems per guidance from VMware, with a particular focus on systems that are the most significant to their businesses.”
Eric Chiu, founder and president of cloud control company HyTrust, points out that the traditional approach to security has been to protect the perimeter, which has bred a long-standing misconception that systems within an organization’s datacenter don’t need to be protected.
“However, breaches are not only happening more often and getting bigger, but they’re also primarily happening from the inside. Attackers are using social engineering, phishing, malware and other attack techniques to steal employee or I.T. credentials in order to gain access to networks. Once in, they can move forward, backward or laterally, and siphon large amounts of sensitive data without ever being detected. Given that virtualization is a ‘concentration’ of systems and data, the result is a higher concentration of risk. If an attacker is able to pose as a virtualization admin, for example, that could ultimately be ‘game over’ for a victim company,” Chiu told SecurityWeek.
“Bottom line, organizations need to shift their security strategy from that of just an ‘outside-in’ approach, to an ‘inside-out’ model. They should assume attackers are already inside, in which case access controls, audit logging, alerts and data encryption are important—if not critical… especially in ensuring a secure cloud environment.”
Related: Heartbleed Vulnerability Still Beating Strong
Related: Recovering from Heartbleed: The Hard Work Lies Ahead
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Oracle Issues Heartbleed Updates
Posted on April 22, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
Oracle issued an advisory today listing both security updates and detailing what is known and unknown about the Heartbleed vulnerability’s impact on Oracle products.
“The Oracle Global Product Security and Development teams are investigating the use of the affected OpenSSL cryptographic libraries in Oracle products and will provide mitigation instructions when available for these affected Oracle products,” Oracle noted in its advisory. “Note that only a number of OpenSSL cryptographic libraries versions were reported as affected by vulnerability CVE-2014-0160. In other words, certain Oracle products, while they may be reported as using OpenSSL, may not be using versions of OpenSSL that were reported as vulnerable to CVE-2014-016.”
The products known to be vulnerable include and for which there are patches are: MySQL Connector/C 6.1.0-6.1.3; MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1.13, 5.2.5-5.2.6 and 5.3.2; MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.10.0; MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.3.13-2.3.15 and 3.0.0-3.0.8; MySQL Enterprise Server 5.6.11-5.6.17 and MySQL Workbench 6.1.4 and earlier. Other products known to be vulnerable that have patches available are: Oracle Big Data Appliance; Oracle Communications Interactive Session Recorder 4.0.0 and later; Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control 5.0.1; Oracle Communications Session Monitor Suite 3.3.40 and 3.3.50; Oracle Linux 6; Oracle Mobile Security Suite; Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance Software; and Solaris 11.2.
There are other products that are considered likely to be vulnerable but have no fixes, such as Java ME – JSRs and Optional Packages and Oracle Communications Session Delivery Management Suite NNC 7.3. Several other products, including Java CAPS 6.2 and Siebel CRM, are considered by Oracle to be potentially vulnerable but are still investigation.
“Oracle’s Cloud security and development teams are aware of the publicly disclosed vulnerability in certain versions of OpenSSL (a.k.a. CVE-2014-0160; or ‘Heartbleed’),” according to the advisory. “Oracle is investigating the implications of this issue across the Oracle stack.”
“The Oracle Cloud uses a “defense in depth” approach to security, which provides risk mitigation due to layered controls,” Oracle noted. Oracle has assessed that the infrastructure, systems and applications used to provide Oracle Cloud services (“Cloud infrastructure”) were not at risk from this vulnerability, due to Oracle’s network architecture and use of SSL accelerators that have not been reported as vulnerable to CVE-2014-0160. Furthermore, Oracle has assessed our Cloud infrastructure using a number of automated and manual tests and continues to believe that it is not currently at risk from the CVE-2014-0160 vulnerability.”
Brian Prince is a Contributing Writer for SecurityWeek.
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Attackers Exploit Heartbleed Flaw to Bypass Two-factor Authentication, Hijack User Sessions: Mandiant
Posted on April 19, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
Attackers Exploit Heartbleed Vulnerability to Circumvent Multi-factor Authentication on VPNs and Hijack Active User Sessions
After details of the critical “Heartbleed” vulnerability in OpenSSL emerged earlier this month, which enables attackers to steal sensitive data typically protected by TLS encryption, there has been widespread concern among system administrators, network security teams, software developers and essentially anyone with any technical connection to the Internet.
In short, the Heartbleed vulnerability allows attackers to repeatedly access 64K blocks of memory by sending a specially crafted packet to a server running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. Because an attacker can’t specify what kind of data to obtain from the computer’s memory or reliably get the same kind of information each time, the attack depends on luck and timing.
Originally, one of the key concerns about the vulnerability was if an attacker could obtain the private SSL Keys from a server by exploiting Heartbleed. As it turns out, through an experiment setup by CloudFlare, several researchers independently retrieved the private keys from the intentionally-vulnerable NGINX server using the Heartbleed exploit.
Now, according to researchers at Mandiant, now a unit of FireEye, an attacker was able to leverage the Heartbleed vulnerability against the VPN appliance of a customer and hijack multiple active user sessions.
“Specifically, the attacker repeatedly sent malformed heartbeat requests to the HTTPS web server running on the VPN device, which was compiled with a vulnerable version of OpenSSL, to obtain active session tokens for currently authenticated users,” Mandiant’s Christopher Glyer explained in a blog post. “With an active session token, the attacker successfully hijacked multiple active user sessions and convinced the VPN concentrator that he/she was legitimately authenticated. The attack bypassed both the organization’s multifactor authentication and the VPN client software used to validate that systems connecting to the VPN were owned by the organization and running specific security software.”
The victim was an organization located in the United States, a FireEye spokesperson told SecurityWeek.
According to Mandiant, the following evidence proved the attacker had stolen legitimate user session tokens:
1. A malicious IP address triggered thousands of IDS alerts for the Heartbleed vulnerability destined for the victim organization’s SSL VPN.
2. The VPN logs showed active VPN connections of multiple users rapidly changing back and forth, “flip flopping”, between the malicious IP address and the user’s original IP address. In several cases the “flip flopping” activity lasted for multiple hours.
3. The timestamps associated with the IP address changes were often within one to two seconds of each other.
4. The legitimate IP addresses accessing the VPN were geographically distant from malicious IP address and belonged to different service providers.
5. The timestamps for the VPN log anomalies could be correlated with the IDS alerts associated with the Heartbleed bug.
After connecting to the VPN, the attacker attempted to move laterally and escalate his/her privileges within the victim organization, Mandiant said.
Additional details and remediation advice are available from Mandiant.
The vulnerability is “catastrophic” for SSL and Internet security, Bruce Schneier, a well-known cryptologist and CTO of Co3 Systems, previously told SecurityWeek. “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.”
While it’s perfectly possible there are even more serious flaws in TLS lurking undiscovered, Heatbleed is quite possibly the worst one to date. Calling Heartbleed a “ginormous issue” would be a conservative assessment, Schneier said.
It’s very likely governments around the world used Heartbleed to exploit whatever server they could and grab whatever they could get as soon as they heard about the vulnerability, Schneier suggested. “Because why would you not?”
The NSA has denied a report claiming it was aware of and even exploited Heartbleed to gather critical intelligence.
“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report,” an NSA spokeswoman said.
Earlier this week, Canadian police arrested and charged a 19-year-old man for stealing the data of 900 Canadian taxpayers’ data through an attack that exploited the Heartbleed bug.
Managing Editor, SecurityWeek.
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