IT News

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• KMSpico explained: No, KMS is not “kill Microsoft”
• Twitter data breach affects 5.4M users
• Can your EDR handle a ransomware attack? 6-point checklist for an anti-ransomware EDR
• Twilio breached after social engineering attack on employees
• Summer of exploitation leads to healthcare under fire
• Education hammered by exploits and backdoors in 2021 and 2022
• 5 cybersecurity tips for students going back to school
• Update now! Microsoft fixes two zero-days in August’s Patch Tuesday
• Now it’s BlenderBot’s turn to make shocking, inappropriate, and untrue remarks
• Slack flaw exposed users’ hashed passwords
• Thousands of Zimbra mail servers backdoored in large scale attack

Stay safe!

A group of security researchers have discovered a series of vulnerabilities in Electron, the software underlying popular apps like Discord, Microsoft Teams, and many others, used by tens of millions of people all over the world.

Electron is a framework that allows developers to create desktop applications using the languages used to build websites: HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s an open source project that has been used as the foundation for some extremely popular apps. Electron itself is built on the open source Chromium browser project (the basis of Google Chrome), and the NodeJS JavaScript runtime which is built on Chromium’s V8 JavaScript engine—a significant source of Chrome security problems.

Building blocks

It is not uncommon for developers to use other projects, frameworks and libraries as building blocks for their projects. Building on proven code makes sense: It saves time, it is easier for others to get involved, and everyone benefits from all the layers of solved problems in the existing codebase.

The problem with building software on existing foundations, provided by others, is that its developer may not fully understand the security implications of certain decisions or configurations. And they need to rebuild their own application whenever a security vulnerability is fixed in the software they’re building on top of, and then distribute that update to their users.

Probably the most famous example of such a building block vulnerability is Log4Shell. Log4Shell is a vulnerability that was found in Log4j, an open source logging library written in Java that was developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Millions of applications use it, and some of them are enormously popular—such as iCloud, Steam, and Minecraft—so the impact of the vulnerability was enormous.

The chances of applications harboring out-of-date underpinnings are software are high. And the reservoir of known bugs that are fixed in, say, Chrome, but not yet fixed in Electron, or fixed in Electron but not yet fixed an application built on top of Electron, is something that criminals and researchers can exploit.

A group of researchers recently presented research into Electron vulnerabilities at the Black Hat security conference having done exactly that. For a peek into what they did, and a look at how complicated modern bug hunting is, read researcher s1r1us’s explanation of how they went about finding a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Discord by chaining a new cross-site scripting vulnerability, a CSP bypass in Discord’s out-of-date Chrome version, and an exploit for an existing V8 vulnerability.

In the case of s1r1us’s Discord bug, what the researchers found could be exploited with nothing more than a malicious link to a video. With Microsoft Teams, the bug they found could be exploited by inviting a victim to a meeting. In both cases, if the targets clicked on these links, an attacker would have been able to take control of their computers.

Mitigation

The most general and best advice in many cases is to avoid clicking on links that come in unexpected or in unusual ways. In an ideal world you would distrust them with the same vigor as the links in your mailbox and on social media. However, this can be very difficult in practice because many of these applications require you to click on links to join meetings, accept invitations and so on.

A more workable solution, suggested by the researcher, is to use apps like Discord or Spotify inside your browser, because then you have the protection afforded by Chrome, which is much larger than the one provided by Electron, and you have control whether it’s up to date or not.

Most of us though, will simply stick to downloading our security updates, and hoping the people who make the software are too.

This blog post was authored by Jérôme Segura

Viral content shared on social media is highly coveted since it gets a lot of impressions and engagement. Unfortunately, the people who push this kind of content don’t always have the best of intentions.

We recently identified a malvertising campaign on Facebook that uses a cute story that gained attention last year. The fraudsters are luring potential victims into clicking on its link so that they are conditionally redirected to a fake tech support page.

This technique is far from being new but yet still works really well and deserves to be analyzed once again so that affected parties better understand how they are being abused.

Too cute to be true

The scam starts with the sweet story of a man who jumped out of his car at a traffic light to have his puppy meet another dog. This moment was shared on a number of platforms last year and could melt any animal lover’s heart.

We saw this post on Facebook and it has been viewed and shared since at least mid July. Yet, in this case, the link is a trap set to redirect potential victims to a malicious page known as a browser locker. While it does not actually ‘lock’ anything, the page displays fake messages about computer viruses and entices users to call for assistance. What follows after are the well-known tech support scams.

Cloaking games

In order to evade detection and remain active for as long as possible, these fraudulent schemes use a simple technique known as cloaking. The idea is to only display the malicious page in specific scenarios while showing legitimate content the rest of the time.

Here are some examples of filters that threat actors may use to their advantage:

• IP address
  • Geolocation (country and city)
  • Internet Service Provider (ISP)
• Browser user-agent
  • Operating system (Windows, Mac, Mobile)
  • Browser name and version
• Referer (the site visited just before)
• Cookies
• Time zone

In other words, for a given campaign a target may be: people living on the US’s west coast using Windows 10 and Google Chrome with a valid Facebook referer clicking on the link for the first time after 6 PM on weekdays. For the rest of the time and other visitors, a decoy page will be shown instead:

The proverbial ‘smoking gun’

When it comes to reporting such abuses, most registrars, hosting companies and platforms will require some hard evidence unless you have worked with them in the past and they already trust the information you pass along.

While a video capture is a pretty damning piece of evidence, it may not necessarily be enough to convince a provider especially if they aren’t able to reproduce the issue on their side. Because of cloaking, finding that smoking gun can literally take hours of frustrated attempts until finding the right combination of parameters. In fact, in some cases you may have to wait for when the scammers manually activate a redirect for a specific time window.

Running a web proxy is often invaluable to capture the event as it is happening as well as hard evidence of the suspected behavior. For example, what we see below are the request and response headers for the domain performing cloaking.

• The request headers show the host (fnbchecklagsin[.]com) the referer (Facebook) and the full URI we requested (GET)
• The response headers show that the server responded with the HTTP 302 code which indicates a redirect to a new location (browser locker)

Essentially, the malicious remote server did not even serve the decoy content but immediately redirected our browser to the tech support scam page.

We have reported this incident to the registrar (NameCheap), the hosting provider (DigitalOcean) and the platform (Facebook) abused to spread this scam. Malwarebytes users were already protected thanks to our Browser Guard extension.

If there is one thing we know about the people around us, even the perfect strangers, it’s that they almost all have smartphones. And those smartphones aren’t merely passive receivers, they’re broadcasting constantly, looking for things you might want to connect to.

Advertisers have exploited the electronic noise that smartphones make for years, using it to track people in places like shopping malls. But now a security researcher has used the same idea to detect if you’re being followed.

Matt Edmondson had the idea for the tool when a friend of his, who also works for the government, expressed concerns about being tailed when meeting a confidential informant who had ties to a terrorist organization. Although the friend is skilled at escaping those following them by car, he was looking for “an electronic supplement”.

“He was worried about the safety of the confidential informant,” Edmondson explained to Wired.

Edmondson wears many hats. He served as a federal agent for the US Department of Homeland Security for 21 years; he is the founder of an infosec consultation company; a hacker; a certified SANS instructor; and a digital forensics expert. Suffice it to say, he has the skills and experience to create something that would make someone safe using parts that don’t cost much, some open-source Python code, and a Raspberry Pi.

Edmondson presented his project at Black Hat on Thursday. His talk, Chasing Your Tail With a Raspberry Pi, touched on how he assembled the anti-tracking device, the challenges encountered when building it, and some best practices to consider, including creating an ignore list for friendly smartphones, and the importance of randomizing your MAC address (the rarely-changed identifier that allows others to track your smart phone).

The anti-tracking device works by scanning for wireless devices and checking if these have been present within the past 20 minutes. Unlike tools made to scan stationary devices, Edmonson’s machine was designed to scan moving ones. This is necessary as the act of tailing requires movement.

The device can fit in a shoebox and is in a waterproof case. It has a Wi-Fi card that runs Kismet (a popular wireless network detector), a portable charger, and a touchscreen where the user sees alerts. Each alert solidifies the possibility that one is being tailed.

“It’s purely designed to try to tell you that you’re seeing something now that you were also seeing a few minutes ago,” Edmondson says. “This isn’t designed to follow people in any way, shape, or form.”

Edmondson pleads with the tech community to take digital tracking and surveillance seriously. “It was really kind of disheartening and depressing to look at the ratio of tools to spy on people versus tools to help you not get spied on,” he says.

When Mike Miller was hired by a client to run a penetration test on one of their offices, he knew exactly where to start: Krispy Kreme. Equipped with five dozen donuts (the boxes stacked just high enough to partially obscure his face, Miller said), Miller walked briskly into a side-door of his client’s offices, tailing another employee and asking them to hold the door open. Once inside, he cheerfully asked where the break room was located, dropped off the donuts, and made small talk.

Then he went to work.  

By hard-wiring his laptop into the company’s Internet, Miller’s machine received an IP address and, immediately after, he got online. Once connected, Miller ran a few scanners that helped him take a rough inventory of the company’s online devices. He could see the systems, ports, and services running on the network, and gained visibility into the servers, the work stations, even the printers. Miller also ran a vulnerability scanner to see what vulnerabilities the network contained, and, after a little probing, he learned of an easy way to access the physical printers, even peering into print histories. 

Miller’s work as a penetration tester means he is routinely hired by clients to do this exact type of work—to test the security of their own systems, from their physical offices to their online networks. And while his covert work doesn’t always go like this, he said that it isn’t uncommon for companies to allow basic flaws. Even when he shared his story on LinkedIn, several people doubted his story. 

“It’s crazy because so many people say ‘Well, there’s no way you could’ve just plugged in.’ Well, you’re right, I should not have been able to do that.”

Today, on Lock and Code with host David Ruiz, we speak with Miller about common problems he’s seen in his work as a pen-tester, how companies can empower their employees to provide better security, and what the relationship is between physical security and cybersecurity. 

You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus whatever preferred podcast platform you use.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

Researchers at Volexity have discovered that a known vulnerability has been used in a large scale attack against Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) email servers. But the vulnerability was supposed to be hard to exploit since it required authentication. So they decided to dig deeper.

An incomplete fix

Zimbra is a brand owned by Synacor. Zimbra Collaboration, formerly known as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is a collaborative software suite that includes an email server and a web client. It is widely used across different industries and government organizations. We reported about a cross-site scripting (XSS) zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra email platform back in February 2022. At the time, Zimbra claimed there were 200,000 businesses, and over a thousand government and financial institutions, using its software.

The initial investigations showed evidence indicating the likely cause of these breaches was exploitation of CVE-2022-27925, a remote-code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in ZCS. This vulnerability was patched by Zimbra in March 2022.

The description of the CVE informs us that Zimbra Collaboration (aka ZCS) 8.8.15 and 9.0 has mboximport functionality that receives a ZIP archive and extracts files from it. An authenticated user with administrator rights has the ability to upload arbitrary files to the system, leading to directory traversal.

Zimbra patched the vulnerability, but, in the company’s own words, it would turn out to be an “incomplete fix for CVE-2022-27925”.

Mass exploitation

Mitigation

Zimbra has patched the authentication issue in its 9.0.0P26 and 8.8.15P33 releases. If you were late to patch for the RCE vulnerability, you should assume that your server instance has been compromised.

In order to verify the presence of web shells on a ZCS instance, one technique that can be used is to compare the list of JSP files on a Zimbra instance with those present by default in Zimbra installations. Lists of valid JSP files included in Zimbra installations can be found on GitHub for the latest version of 8.8.15 and of 9.0.0.

Stay safe, everyone!

Slack, the workplace communication platform, has notified some of its users that their hashed passwords have been subject to exposure for the last five years. The company wasn’t specific in its notice, but Wired said that the flaw was in one of its “low-friction features”. The flaw exposed hashed passwords of users when creating or revoking shared invitation links for workspaces.

“When a user performed either of these actions, Slack transmitted a hashed version of their password to other workspace members,” the company said in a notice. “It affected all users who created or revoked shared invitation links between 17 April 2017 and 17 July 2022.”

Putting a plaintext password through a hashing algorithm changes it to a cryptographically scrambled or obfuscated version of itself, now called a “ciphertext”. It is a unique string of characters with a fixed length. Adding “salt”—essentially random data—when hashing would further protect the password from getting easily extracted by threat actors.

The exposure only occurs behind the scenes, though, as Slack users who were sent these invitations couldn’t see the passwords. However, they weren’t completely inaccessible, although seeing the exposed passwords required actively monitoring encrypted traffic from Slack’s servers.

“We have no reason to believe that anyone was able to obtain plaintext passwords because of this issue. However, for the sake of caution, we have reset affected users’ Slack passwords.”

Slack warned that hashes are “secure, but not perfect.” Hashed passwords could still be revered by brute force methods.

Slack promptly patched the flaw after an independent security researcher reported it to Slack last month. It then notified the approximately 0.5 percent of all its users who may have been affected, 

The company also took this opportunity to advise its users to enable 2FA (two-factor authentication) on their accounts and create strong and unique passwords. It also advised users to check access logs, which they can find here, for their accounts.

Microsoft has published fixes for 141 separate vulnerabilities in its batch of August updates, fixing a total of 118 CVEs in multiple products. This is a new monthly record if you look at the CVE count.

Publicly disclosed computer security flaws are listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. Its goal is to make it easier to share data across separate vulnerability capabilities (tools, databases, and services). These are the CVEs that jumped out at us.

Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool

CVE-2022-34713: is a Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability. This is a known to be exploited vulnerability which requires the target to open a specially crafted file. This CVE is a variant of the vulnerability publicly known as Dogwalk.

CVE-2022-35743: is another MSDT RCE vulnerability. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available, but we do know that user interaction is required and the attack vector is local, so this is very likely another case where a specially crafted file needs to be opened by the victim.

Microsoft Exchange

CVE-2022-30134: is a Microsoft Exchange Information Disclosure vulnerability. This vulnerability is publicly disclosed but has not yet been detected in attacks. Affected products are Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 CU 11, Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 CU 22, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 CU 23, Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 CU 23, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 CU 12. Users vulnerable to this issue would need to enable Extended Protection in order to prevent exploitation of this vulnerability. More details can be found on the Exchange Team Blog.

CVE-2022-24477: is a Microsoft Exchange Server Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerability. Affected products are Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 CU 23, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 CU 12, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 CU 11, Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 CU 22, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 CU 23. Users vulnerable to this issue would need to enable Extended Protection in order to prevent exploitation of this vulnerability. More details can be found on the Exchange Team Blog.

CVE-2022-24516: is another a Microsoft Exchange Server EoP vulnerability. Affected products are Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 CU 23, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 CU 12, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 CU 23, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 CU 11, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 CU 22. Users vulnerable to this issue would need to enable Extended Protection in order to prevent exploitation of this vulnerability. More details can be found on the Exchange Team Blog.

Windows Point-to-Point Protocol

CVE-2022-30133: is a Windows Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) RCE vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. An unauthenticated attacker could send a specially crafted connection request to a remote access server (RAS) server, which could lead to remote code execution (RCE) on the RAS server machine. This vulnerability can only be exploited by communicating via port 1723. As a temporary workaround prior to installing the updates that address this vulnerability, you can block traffic through that port thus rendering the vulnerability unexploitable.

Windows Network File System

CVE-2022-34715: is a Windows Network File System (NFS) RCE vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. This vulnerability could be exploited over the network by making an unauthenticated, specially crafted call to a Network File System (NFS) service to trigger a Remote Code Execution (RCE). This vulnerability is not exploitable in NFSV2.0 or NFSV3.0. Prior to updating your version of Windows that protects against this vulnerability, you can mitigate an attack by disabling NFSV4.1. This could adversely affect your ecosystem and should only be used as a temporary mitigation.

Other vendors

Other vendors have synchronized their periodic updates with Microsoft. Here are few major ones that you may find in your environment.

Adobe has also released security updates for many of its products, including Acrobat, Reader, Adobe Commerce, and Magento Open Source. More details on the Adobe security site.

Cisco released security updates for numerous products this month.

Google released Android security updates.

SAP released 5 new Security Notes.

VMware released Security Advisory VMSA-2022-0022 and warned that a recently disclosed auth bypass flaw is now actively exploited.

Twitter has confirmed that it was breached last month via a now-patched 0-day vulnerability in Twitter’s systems, allowing an attacker to link email addresses and phone numbers to user accounts. This enabled the attacker to compile a list of 5.4 million Twitter user account profiles.

“We want to let you know about a vulnerability that allowed someone to enter a phone number or email address into the log-in flow in the attempt to learn if that information was tied to an existing Twitter account, and if so, which specific account. We take our responsibility to protect your privacy very seriously, and it is unfortunate that this happened.”

When a person submits a publicly known email address or phone number to Twitter, the system tells this person what Twitter account the email or phone number is associated with. The attacker took advantage of this and created a list containing 5.4 million Twitter users with scraped publicly available details of the accounts, including whether the account was verified.

This is especially worrying for users who want to remain anonymous on the platform. It’s a bit late now, but Twitter recommends anyone trying to stay anonymous should not tie a publicly known phone number or email to their Twitter account.

If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

According to BleepingComputer, the attacker sold the data on twice, saying that “the data would likely be released for free in the future.”

Twitter introduced the vulnerability after updating its code in June 2021. A threat hunter reported this vulnerability in January 2022, with Twitter eventually awarding the researcher for the find as part of its bug bounty program.

While the company says no passwords were compromised, it continues to encourage users to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for their accounts, either in the form of authentication apps or hardware keys.

Most cybersecurity experts agree that having Endpoint Detection and Response software is essential to fighting ransomware today—but not every EDR is equal.

Businesses, especially small-to-medium sized ones with limited budget or IT resources, need to make sure that their EDR is cost-effective, easy-to-use, and able to reliably stop the growing ransomware threat. So precisely what features should SMBs be looking for in an anti-ransomware EDR, and why?

In this post, Robert Zamani, Regional Vice President, Americans Solutions Engineering at Malwarebytes, gives his 6-point checklist of features your EDR should have to stop ransomware.

Table of contents

How should EDR address ransomware?

At its core, ransomware is an exploitation of trust, Zamani says.

“We place our trust in applications to perform only the functions we intended, Operating Systems to perform functions we authorized, and that our credentials (user ID/password) are used only by authorized personnel. Stolen credentials, phishing attacks, zero-day applications, and OS vulnerabilities exploit our trust in endpoints. And since ransomware stems from exploitation of trust, then EDR is not optional when it comes to mitigating a detected threat.”

A risk management strategy states that we cannot eliminate all system vulnerabilities or block all cyberattacks. In other words, your EDR should be optimized to “prevent what you can and mitigate the rest.”

“Since ransomware stems from exploitation of trust, then EDR is not optional when it comes to mitigating a detected threat.”

Robert Zamani, Regional Vice President, Americans Solutions Engineering

1.   Multi-vector Endpoint Protection (EP) is built-in

The base functionality of any EDR is to notify you of any suspicious activity that is taking place on your systems and offer “response” capabilities to mitigate the detection. However, EDR doesn’t inherently do any prevention: It won’t stop the threat from breaching your environment in the first place. 

Relying solely on EDR as a prevention solution will overwhelm your staff and increase operational costs.

That is why anti-ransomware starts with preventing the known bad, Zamani says. Enter Endpoint Protection (EP), an advanced threat prevention solution for endpoints that uses a layered approach with multi-vector detection techniques.

Many EDR vendors will offer EP as a separate offering—usually, these are just file-based scanners looking for possible clues to malware in binary files. This is the minimal functionality of EP and insufficient because there is more that can be prevented, Zamani says.

EP must reduce the attack surface of ransomware through a combination of comprehensive web protection, application hardening, and other “first-layers of defense”. Since most ransomware attacks start with a phishing email, this primary ‘preventative’ type of endpoint protection is essential.

For a budget-friendly way to get the first layer of ransomware protection, look for an EDR with full-stack Endpoint Protection.

EP gives you a “first-layer of defense” against known and unknown malware, ransomware, and other threats.

2. Maintains visibility and patching regularly

Patching is not just system maintenance, Zamani says. According to the Ponemon Institute, 57% of cyberattack victims report that their breaches could have been prevented by installing an available patch. 

“Application and OS vulnerability assessment and patch management solutions are preventative and reduce the ransomware attack surface on endpoints. A good application and OS, vulnerability management solution must automate inventory and severity classification based on CVSS scoring,” Zamani says. “The sorting by severity and grouping by the asset (endpoint) will allow you to prioritize patching the most valuable endpoints.”

In short, make sure your EDR has some sort of vulnerability and patch management component to make it more difficult for ransomware attackers to breach your systems.

3. Has machine learning (ML) to recognize ‘goodware’ instead of malware

A good EDR is looking for a deviation from good behavior, Zamani says. When an application launches and performs in an expected way, we call that an example of good behavior—and when it doesn’t, the administrator gets an alert notifying them of suspicious activity warranting investigation.

Contrast this with an ML model trained to recognize “bad behavior,” where the model finds patterns in datasets of known malware code. On the low side, there are tens of billions of unique malware, so we can safely assume “bad behavior” is seemingly endless.

The larger the dataset of bad behavior, the greater the chances of misinterpreting good behavior as bad, leading to many false positives.

“Indicators of Compromise (IOC) and Indicators of Attack (IOA) are ill-suited for EDR detections. IOC and IOA define bad, and ‘bad’ mutates, creating 100s of billions of possibilities,” Zamani says. Therefore, a modern EDR heuristics engine must be trained on the good behavior of known-good applications.

Dealing with too many false positives costs time and manpower, distracting you from actual security issues like ransomware. Make sure you choose an EDR that detects deviations from known-good applications to reduce false positives that could distract you in your fight against ransomware.

4. Uses standard reference language and forensic analysis

So your EDR has EP and is looking for deviation from known-good behavior to lower false positives—now, it has sent you a notification of a ransomware threat. The next piece of an anti-ransomware EDR is that the information that comes to you should be standardized both in summary and in detail.

“Traditional, older style EDR will use vendor-specific verbiage for describing the attack,” Zamani says. “But in your EDR, you want the TTPs (tools, techniques, and procedures) of threats to be described in plain English with a common reference number.”

The reference number is necessary for documentation purposes, Zamani says. At the same time, the plain-English description is necessary for you to know at what stage an endpoint was ransomed (because a hacker could have exploited a vulnerability in a still-running application).

“In your EDR, you want the TTPs (tools, techniques, and procedures) of threats to be described in plain English with a common reference number.”

Robert Zamani, Regional Vice President, Americans Solutions Engineering

To avoid unnecessary complexity in figuring out the origin of a ransomware threat, your EDR solution should have an industry standardized way of describing the attack—such as MITRE ATT&CK (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge).

“Your EDR needs to tell the story of what happened using the standard reference language of MITRE with direct links to the MITRE ATT&CK reference library,” Zamani says. “It should provide a summary using a Kanban board and a separate process graph with detailed forensics of what and how it happened.”

Your EDR should show you alerts that are standardized both in summary and in detail.

5. Thorough containment, eradication, and recovery options

Look to an EDR to mitigate unforeseen threats and ultimately a new method of ransomware (exploitation of trust), says Zamani.

If one of your endpoints gets infected with ransomware, we want to stop the spread as fast as possible, which NIST defines as “containment” in its “Computer Security Incident Handling Guide.”

Containment prevents lateral movement of an attack by allowing you to contain individual machines, processes, or user-IDs and continue active response activities—making quick and easy containment features a must for your EDR.

But the fight doesn’t stop at containment, says Zamani.

“So you’ve contained and studied a threat with your EDR. That’s great,” says Zamani. “But now you want to do remediation. You want to remotely eradicate the ransomware and restore the endpoint to a known-good state free of malware, virus, unwanted programs including unwanted modification.”

But you may ask: Aren’t eradicating and recovering from ransomware the same thing? Not quite, Zamani says.

“Just because you deleted the artifacts does not restore the endpoint into a state where the machine can function. For example, a registry key says the startup sequence is ‘malware first, and then boot.’ So we remove the nasty registry key ‘malware first’, but if you say nothing else, the system won’t boot!”

In other words, your EDR needs instrumentation that not only eradicates ransomware but actually recovers and restores the machine’s state into a functioning state where it can be returned to the network.

“Your ransomware rollback should store changes to data files on the system in a local cache for 72 hours (no ransomware actually exceeds 24 hours), which can be used to help revert changes caused by ransomware,” Zamani says.

6. Searches for ransomware indicators across all your managed endpoints

What if you want to see if the same ransomware threat you discovered on one of your endpoints is in the early stages of the attack on other endpoints?

“Your EDR should have a search engine that can look at any of the TTPs and search across your network,” Zamani says. “Because you want to see if you can catch something early enough before it hits the point of ransom.”

Look for an EDR that can search data like files, registry, processes, and networking activity so you can threat hunt or analyze how a ransomware compromise occurred in your environment.

Businesses need an EDR that immediately detects and responds to ransomware threats

In this post, cybersecurity expert Robert Zamani explained the features SMBs should look for in an anti-ransomware EDR and why.

Of course, the fight against ransomware doesn’t stop at EDR: you still good cyber hygiene with a well-written and practiced Incident Response Plan (IRP). Looking to further empower your business in the fight against ransomware?

Read our “A Defender’s Guide to Ransomware Resilience” eBook!

More resources

Ransomware protection with Malwarebytes EDR: Your FAQs, answered!

Simplifying the fight against ransomware: An expert explains

Demo: Your data has been encrypted! Stopping ransomware attacks with Malwarebytes EDR