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By Ben Nahorney Online advertising is an integral part of today’s internet experience. In many ways, ads are the lifeblood behind many websites, providing the necessary funding to keep sites running, as well as supporting the creation of new content.
While it may appear as though the ads that are displayed are just a component of the site you’re visiting, this isn’t often the case. Behind the scenes there is a complex network of advertisers, affiliates, and ad exchanges that bring the ads to you. A whole industry has built up around the process of serving up ads, by some estimates exceeding $100 billion in revenue per year. Tracking the sites a user visits and the ads they click on, alongside other metrics, has led to the tailored advertising experience we often see today.
These ads can run the gamut from amusing to annoying. The latter can be a source of frustration for users, with ads popping up while viewing a page, appearing in the middle of an article, or being masked as “sponsored content” that can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from the core content on a page.
In addition, many legitimate websites and content creators heavily rely on ad revenue as an income stream. This can cause even greater confusion for users trying to stay safe online, as legitimate sites may urge users to turn off any ad-blocking software they may have installed. Likewise, content creators and influencers are known to ask users to engage with their ads in order to support their work. Simply put, ad culture is everywhere online.
And those ads can be dangerous. Malicious advertising, or “malvertising” for short, has become a more common occurrence as bad actors have figured out how to infiltrate ad networks in order to serve up malicious content. And while there are steps that you can take, there is no simple, silver bullet to fully protect yourself and your organization from malvertising.
Today’s ad networks
There are a variety of delivery methods for online advertising, though ad exchanges are one of the most common today. This process includes publishers who post the ads to the site, exchanges that facilitate bidding for ad placement, and advertisers who bid to win placement on the site.
At a basic level, you can look at this process as being similar to a car auction. The seller (web user) puts their car (ad space) up at an auction house (publisher). The auctioneer (ad exchange) opens bidding up to the potential buyers (advertisers). The highest bid ultimately wins the car, and the buyer pays the user with money (ad).
To be more specific, this process for serving ads works like this:
A user requests a particular page that includes an ad space.
A publisher collects information about the user and passes it to an ad exchange.
The ad exchange passes the information available to advertisers and creates an auction placing an ad on the page.
The advertisers determine if they have suitable ads and make bids for the ad space accordingly.
The winning bid is passed back to the publisher, who displays the ad to the user.

Figure 1 – Ad network process.The entire bidding process takes place in a fraction of a second. It’s so quick that multiple bids can be completed between the time a link is clicked and the page loads.
The data that drives the process—determining which ads advertisers bid for and how much they bid—is often the information gathered about the user. Geographic location, language, browser type and version, and operating system can commonly be determined when a page loads. If you add information gathered from third-party cookies, such as age and other demographics, far more information can be gathered as well.
Where things go wrong
From an advertiser’s perspective, ad exchanges can help facilitate cheaper ads that reach the customers that they want to reach. However, the bar is quite low in terms of who qualifies as an “advertiser.” In many ways this is necessary for smaller businesses and sellers to be able to get their ads easily distributed online. However, it also leaves the door open for bad actors.
Without significant vetting taking place on many advertising networks, it’s fairly straightforward for cyber criminals to enter these networks and bid for ad placement alongside legitimate advertisers. By doing so, these bad actors have the opportunity to place malicious ads in front of users.
Not only that, but a malicious advertiser can leverage the advantages gained by the information gathered about the user. For instance, if the malicious actor learns that the user is running an out-of-date version of the Google Chrome web browser they can place a bid and, if they win the auction, serve up a malicious ad that could exploit the vulnerable browser.
It’s also important to note that websites rely on the legitimacy and security of ad networks when utilizing them to display ads on their sites. There is very little that they can do to screen for malvertising. If a malicious ad is identified, website owners can technically request that it be removed, but that does little to protect already affected users. Because of this, it’s important that users not conflate the trust instilled in a particular website with the ads displayed in the site.
Redirection in malvertising
While more could be done, online advertising isn’t entirely a free-for-all, and some vetting does occur. That means a bad actor can’t necessarily send a user directly to a page with an exploit or a malicious payload without being found out.
As a result, attackers leverage redirection. In a nutshell, when a redirection is included in a URL or on a web page, the browser is told to go to another site to retrieve the content it is looking for. Frequently, malicious actors will redirect a user through a series of URLs before landing on the malicious page.
There are a variety of ways attackers can do this. One of the most common methods today is by using what are called 302 requests in HTTP. In these cases, the browser is told that the page they are looking for has temporarily been moved to another location and a new URL is provided.
In other cases, a redirection can be performed using HTML or JavaScript. There are even techniques, such as the JavaScript location.replace method, that don’t even leave a record in the browser’s history, masking the redirect from the user.
Payload delivery
Using this method, an attacker can attempt to distribute any sort of payload they wish. In many cases, the final content displaying on the user’s page is an ad that entices them to download adware or potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) that offer a service, but does so by displaying further ads.
In other cases, the malicious ad opens a window or alert that attempts to trick the user into thinking their software is out-of-date. However, if they attempt to install the fake update, they find themselves infected with malware.
Figure 2- A fake Flash update.However, what’s most concerning is the information that an attacker can glean from a user, through the ad exchange, can be used for active exploitation. For instance, an attacker can choose to only bid on ads that come from users running Internet Explorer. Obtaining the winning bid, the attacker can send an Adobe Flash Player exploit in their “ad.” If the version of Flash installed is out-of-date, the machine can be compromised without the user even clicking the ad. The attacker has exploited the browser right out of the gate, requiring zero interaction from the user apart from loading the page that contains the ad.
Figure 3- Targeted selection options in an ad network.Protecting against malvertising
The simplest way to shield yourself from malvertising is to block ads and connections to third-party sites (sites beyond the specific domain in the URL). Ad blocking add-ons are available for most major browsers, and sometimes protections come baked in to modern browsers.
However, taking too aggressive a stance against ads can impact the performance of a web site. Sometimes it may break key features and components. Many sites now stop browsers with ad-blocking from viewing their site to begin with, requesting that the user disable it to view the site’s content. And in some cases, ad blocking software will allow certain ads through anyway, if the ad provider has paid the blocker to avoid them.
Given the current advertising network climate, there really isn’t a simple solution to protect against all forms of attack. Ultimately, a layered approach is the best defense against malicious advertising.
Domain-level protections, such as those offered by Cisco Umbrella, will help to block redirects to domains that are known to be malicious, often stopping a series of redirects halfway through the chain.
An endpoint protection application, such as AMP for Endpoints, can prevent malicious payloads from being installed onto a computer that encounters a malicious advertisement.
Network Security appliances that include IPS signatures, like Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System, can detect malicious activity such as exploit attempts against vulnerable software.
Cisco’s Secure Internet Gateway and Web Security Appliance contain web scanning features that can prevent access to malicious websites.
Finally, if you’re looking for a deep dive into malvertising, how it works, and more of the latest techniques used by cyber criminals, check out Cisco Talos‘ blog post on the topic, Malvertising: Online advertising’s darker side.

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The post Malvertising appeared first on Cisco Blogs.

Source:: Cisco Security Notice

By Samuel Brown Accelerate Threat Hunts and Investigations with Pre-Curated Complex Queries
Security teams often lack the ability to gain deep visibility into the state of all their endpoints in real time. Even with a bevy of tools at their fingertips, once an incident occurs, conducting investigations can be likened to searching for a needle in a haystack. Teams struggle to make well informed remediation decisions fast enough, finding themselves asking questions like, what should I be searching for? Where specifically in my environment should I zero-in? Which datasets matter? Which are irrelevant? The struggle is real. As we all know, the longer a threat runs wild, the more havoc it stands to wreak on your environment. Between the intense time-pressure, endless datasets to sift through, and ambiguity associated with not knowing where or how to start, incident investigations can feel like frenzied wild goose chases.
Many teams have adopted threat hunting to take a more proactive and preventative (rather than purely reactive) approach to managing their security hygiene. With 43% of organizations performing continuous threat hunting operations in 2018, versus just 35% in 2017, the practice is undoubtedly growing in scope and popularity. However, this begs the question: what’s holding back the remaining majority – the other 57% – of organizations? The reality is that although many teams want to threat hunt, they simply don’t know how to get started, or erroneously believe that they don’t have the personnel, time, and resources to dedicate to the endeavor. But fortunately, that’s no longer the case…
Know everything. About every endpoint. Right now.
Cisco recently rolled out a powerful new advanced threat hunting and investigation capability in Cisco® AdvancedMalware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints called Advanced Search that gives users the ability to search across all endpoints for forensic information and malware artifacts. Think of this as the ultimate search engine for all your endpoints – with over a hundred pre-canned queries provided, Advanced Search makes security investigations and threat hunting simple by allowing you to quickly run complex queries on hundreds of attributes in near real-time on any or all endpoints. For example, it allows you to type in queries like:
Show me all computers that are listening on certain ports – something that certain variants of malware will do when they are waiting on instructions from a C&C on what to do.
Show me all processes that are running in memory but do not have a file on disk – something that is rarely seen with innocuous processes, and thus strongly indicates the possible presence of fileless malware trying to escape scanning and analysis hiding out in your environment.
Show me all the users logged in – if a user is logged into systems in a department that the user doesn’t belong in, or if the user is logged into multiple machines at one time, this could indicate a breach.
Advanced Search gives you deep visibility into what’s happening on any endpoint at any time by taking a snapshot of its current state, and the search options are limitless; users can immediately perform advanced searches via the 100+ curated queries that come with the tool or create their own custom queries. Whether you’re threat hunting, conducting an incident investigation, IT operations, or vulnerability and compliance assessments, Advanced Search gets you the answers you need about your endpoints fast.

How does it work?
Whether you are investigating an incident or proactively hunting for threats Advanced Search can help you simplify and accelerate these tedious processes in the following ways:
Forensics snapshots. We can capture snapshots of data from endpoints such as running processes, open network ports and a lot more at the time of detection or on demand. It’s like “freeze framing” activity on an endpoint right to the moment. This allows you to know exactly what was happening on your endpoint at that point in time.
Live search. Run complex queries on your endpoints for threat indicators on demand or on a schedule, capturing the information you need about your endpoints in near real time.
Predefined and customizable queries. We provide over a hundred predefined queries that you can quickly run as they are or customize them as needed. These queries are simply organized in a catalog of common use cases and mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK.
Storage options. The results of your queries can be stored in the cloud or sent to other applications such as Cisco Threat Response for further or future investigations.

Common use cases
Advanced Search can help you do the following important tasks better, faster:
Advanced Threat Hunting: Search for malicious artifacts across any or all your endpoints in near real-time to accelerate threat hunts.
Mature organizations – Streamline workflows for seasoned teams that already perform continuous threat hunting operations and get beyond atomic and computed IOCs and into the really interesting stuff, like registry keys, process PID exploits, and all kinds of attacker TTPs cataloged with Threat Grid and the MITRE ATT&CK.
Novice Threat Hunters – Empowers teams that don’t have threat hunting programs in place to begin to threat hunt without requiring them to hire additional staff or rip and replace their security stack.

Incident Investigation: Get to the root cause of incidents faster to accelerate incident investigation and remediation efforts.
IT Operations: Track software inventory, disk space, memory, computer utilization, and other IT operations artifacts quickly and expediently – good threat hunting tools can also be used to enhance IT operations.
Vulnerability and Compliance: Easily check the status of Operating Systems for things like software version levels to validate patch management to ensure that your endpoints are in compliance with current policies.
Threat Hunting Versus Incident Response
An additional bonus to threat hunting is that it breeds familiarity with tools and techniques that come into play when an incident or breach does occur, effectively training teams to be better incident responders. Since both disciplines deal directly with threats in your environment, the skills exercised when threat hunting are arguably one and the same as those associated with incident response. The only difference is that whereas incident response is reactive and involves known evidence of a threat in your environment, threat hunting is a proactive practice that is carried out without evidence. Since practicing threat hunting sharpens investigative skills and response times, teams that threat hunt are naturally better equipped to react like pros when faced with real incidents. The ‘Hunting for hidden threats‘ whitepaper in Cisco’s Cybersecurity Report Series covers this topic in more detail and is a great place to learn even more.
Whether you’re new to threat hunting, are a seasoned veteran who wants to streamline operations and take your threat hunting program to the next level, or merely want to accelerate incident remediation, the solution to your woes has arrived. Test drive Advanced Search today with a free trial of Cisco AMP for Endpoints, or register for one of our Threat Hunting Workshops to get hands-on experience threat hunting, investigating, and responding to threats so that you can become a pro at finding the malicious needles in your digital haystacks.
The post Finding the malicious needles in your endpoint haystacks appeared first on Cisco Blogs.

Source:: Cisco Security Notice

By Meg Diaz
What makes a great partnership? Open communication and a passion for constant advancement are two important elements. Our customers have helped us continuously innovate, and together, we’re transforming how security is delivered. Over the past 12+ months, we embarked on a journey to take Cisco Umbrella to a new level.
DNS has always been at our core — starting as a recursive DNS service (OpenDNS) in 2006, then moving into the enterprise security space in 2012 with the release of Umbrella. Enforcing security at the DNS layer was something brand new at the time. People started to see how valuable it was to have a single view of all internet activity across every location, and it was an incredibly effective way to block threats at the earliest possible point (and who doesn’t love fewer alerts to investigate!?). Add in the fact that it’s delivered from the cloud and can be deployed enterprise-wide in minutes…you can start to see the appeal it has.
As we saw more applications and infrastructure move to the cloud, more people working off-network (and “forgetting” to turn on that pesky VPN), and the move to more direct internet access at remote offices, we heard more from our customers about what they needed from a security service. It wasn’t just about DNS-layer security — they often needed more. We’re excited to share that we’re now delivering more. Much more.
Now, Umbrella offers secure web gateway, cloud-delivered firewall, and cloud access security broker (CASB) functionality — in addition to the DNS-layer security and threat intelligence from Investigate — all in a single, integrated cloud console. All of this is available in a new Umbrella package: Secure Internet Gateway Essentials.
By unifying multiple security services in the cloud, we are now able to offer our customers greater flexibility, sharper visibility, and consistent enforcement, everywhere your users work. The goal is simple ­– if we can simplify your security operations and reduce complexity, then you can reduce risk and accelerate secure cloud adoption.
Here are a few examples of innovations that we’re introducing as part of this:
Bye Security Silos, Hello Consolidation
It can be an overwhelming endeavor to help your organization transition to the cloud and secure direct internet access. It takes skill and a considerable amount of resources. How many office locations are you tasked with securing? We’ve heard loud and clear that it’s not sustainable for you to build a separate security stack in each location. By moving those core security services to a single cloud solution, you’ll be able to deploy the right level of security consistently across your organization. And you have the flexibility to deploy it as needed — you’re not forced to proxy everything or deploy in a specific way. For example, you could start with DNS for fast protection everywhere and leverage additional security services (secure web gateway, firewall, CASB, etc.) wherever you need them.

“I like the simplicity of Cisco Umbrella from a management perspective, but I also enjoy the complexity of the advanced layers of protection that Cisco Umbrella provides. This one product has truly transformed our ability to protect our entire workforce, regardless of location.” – Ryan Deppe, Network Operation Supervisor, Cianbro Corporation

Well-known Technology, Brand New Approach
IPSec tunnels have been around forever. But, we set out to do something different based on what we’ve heard from you. Cisco developed a new technology for IPSec tunnels that minimizes downtime and eliminates the need to build secondary tunnels with a patent-pending approach using Anycast technology for automated failover. A single IPsec tunnel can be deployed to send traffic to Umbrella from any network device, including SD-WAN. This integrated approach combined with Anycast routing can efficiently protect branch users, connected devices, and application usage from all internet breakouts with 100% business uptime.
Real-time Detection of DNS Tunneling
Even though we’ve been a leader in DNS-layer security for years, we won’t rest on our laurels. We’re watching attacker tactics and quickly adjusting ours — DNS Tunneling is one example. DNS tunneling utilizes the DNS protocol to communicate non-DNS traffic (i.e. HTTP) over port 53. There are legitimate reasons why you would use DNS tunneling, but attackers have been using it for data exfiltration and command and control callbacks. To better identify and stop this, we’ve added advanced detection capabilities, real-time heuristics, signature, and encoded data detection to Umbrella.
Deeper Web Control, Retrospective Alerts on Malicious Files
Our new secure web gateway (full proxy) provides complete web traffic visibility, control, and protection — with capabilities such as content filtering at the URL-level, blocking applications or app functions, HTTPS decryption (either for select sites or all), file inspection with Cisco Advanced Malware Protection and antivirus, sandboxing unknown files with Cisco Threat Grid, and retrospective alerts on files that subsequently display malicious behavior. Think about it — file behavior can change over time or could put mechanisms in place to evade initial detection. If a file is initially determined to be safe by Threat Grid and downloaded from the web, but later is deemed to be malicious, you can now see that in Umbrella.
All of these Umbrella enhancements are designed to help your organization accelerate cloud adoption with confidence — you need assurance that your users will be secure wherever they connect to the internet and that’s exactly what we’re focused on delivering for you. If you want to learn more, join our Security Virtual Summit on November 12th and check out Jeff Reed’s blog to hear about other Cisco Security innovations.
The post Consolidate your Security in the Cloud with Cisco Umbrella appeared first on Cisco Blogs.

Source:: Cisco Security Notice