Our mission at Arctic Wolf is to end cyber risk, and our North Star on that mission is the NIST security operations framework. Spanning five functions (Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover), the NIST framework offers guidelines and best practices that when followed, allow an organization to both reduce the likelihood and the impact of cyber-attacks.

Another year, another reshaping of the never-boring and constantly evolving world of online crime. Old favorites like phishing, MITM attacks, and, of course, ransomware carried on strong while new variations and tricky workarounds continued to develop. For our final monthly cyber attack roundup of the calendar year, let’s take a look at four cases that stood out for the versatility of their executions, the escalation of their tactics, and/or the aggressiveness of their perpetrators.

As 2022 comes to an end, I’m prouder than ever of the steps that every team member at Arctic Wolf has taken to protect and delight our customers as we steadily advance toward our mission of ending cyber risk.

On Thursday, December 22, 2022, LastPass updated their security incident notice to include additional details around the data breach they began investigating in November 2022. According to their notice, the threat actor used information obtained in an earlier, August 2022, data breach to target an employee and obtain credentials and keys used to decrypt storage volumes within their cloud-based storage service.

Challenge Accepted is a podcast from Arctic Wolf that has informative and insightful discussions around the real-world challenges organizations face on their security journey. Hosted by Arctic Wolf’s VP of Strategy Ian McShane and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Adam Marrè, the duo draw upon their years of security operations experience to share their thoughts and opinions on issues facing today’s security leaders.

On Wednesday, December 21, 2022, security researchers shared that they observed ransomware threat actors using a new exploit chain that bypasses the ProxyNotShell URL rewrite mitigations that were shared by Microsoft in September and October. This new exploit chain works by abusing CVE-2022-41080 & CVE-2022-41082 and leads to remote code execution on affected Exchange servers through Outlook Web Access (OWA).

“It’s about doing good and doing it exceedingly well.” This was how Daniel Thanos, Head of Arctic Wolf Labs, described the work of Arctic Wolf Labs when accepting the award for Open-Source Tool Creator of the Year, as voted by the SANS Insitute community at the 2022 Difference Makers Awards. This prestigious awards program “honors individuals and teams in the cyber security community who have made a measurable and significant difference in security.”

Like many industries, the federal government and the Department of Defense (DoD) are more digital, more dispersed, and work with more third parties than ever before. This shift means that information the departments deal with, referred to as controlled unclassified information, needs to be protected due to its high value. Enter “Safeguarding covered defense information and cyber incident reporting,” which is part of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) requirements.

In a coordinated disclosure with Microsoft on December 13th, 2022, security researchers with Mandiant, SentinelOne, and Sophos published evidence of a threat actor technique where malicious crafted drivers were invoked using a valid cryptographic signature. The malicious drivers were observed attempting to terminate a list of security products and evade detection.

On December 13th, 2022, Citrix disclosed a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) affecting several versions of Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway. Citrix strongly advises affected customers to update to a supported version as soon as possible. While no public proof-of-concept exploit code is available for this vulnerability, Citrix has observed several instances of targeted exploitation.