In Episode 6 of Know Your Adversary™, we detail a previous supply chain attack from 2007 and then again in 2015 against a security software company. Foreign nation state adversaries conducted detailed reconnaissance and knew when a router was going to be rebooted for maintenance updates. Upon rebooting the router, the attackers “slipped through the crack” and into the software provider’s network by exploiting a vulnerability of the router model. This gave them a foothold into the software provider’s environment. The attackers then attempted to escalate to compromise the certificate authorities potentially to go upstream and compromise the software provider’s customers. Luckily, knowledge of a previous attack that occurred five years ago, compliance checks, and the properly alerting configurations contained the incident before it became a large-scale breach.
- Supply chain attacks have been a common vector for many years, but are becoming more sophisticated as displayed during the Solarwinds and Kaseya attacks.
- Appropriate compliance controls allowed the software provider to maintain redundant visibility from internal telemetry when the adversary wiped the memory from the router. They were able to show that the attack was contained within the first two hours of the router exploitation and the attacker went no further.
- Threat intelligence is critical to detailing actual reconnaissance that is ongoing against the enterprise, not just vague threats to the broader industry.