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Safety Corporations Warn Microsoft of Signed Drivers Used to Kill EDR, AV Processes

By Eduard Kovacs on December 14, 2022

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A number of cybersecurity companies have warned Microsoft that cybercriminals have been utilizing signed malicious drivers to kill processes related to antivirus (AV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) merchandise.

Alongside its Patch Tuesday updates for December 2022, Microsoft issued an advisory to tell prospects about drivers licensed by its Home windows {Hardware} Developer Program being utilized by risk actors in post-exploitation exercise, together with the deployment of ransomware.

“Microsoft has accomplished its investigation and decided that the exercise was restricted to the abuse of a number of developer program accounts and that no compromise has been recognized. We’ve suspended the companions’ vendor accounts and applied blocking detections to assist shield prospects from this risk,” the tech large mentioned.

“This investigation revealed that a number of developer accounts for the Microsoft Associate Middle had been engaged in submitting malicious drivers to acquire a Microsoft signature,” it added.

Along with suspending the accounts, Microsoft has launched Home windows safety updates to revoke the abused certificates.

[ Read: Microsoft Plugs Windows Hole Exploited in Ransomware Attacks ]

The corporate discovered in regards to the abuse from SentinelOne, Mandiant and Sophos. Every firm revealed a weblog publish on Tuesday to explain its findings.

SentinelOne reported seeing a number of assaults the place a risk actor used malicious signed drivers to evade safety merchandise, which usually belief elements signed by Microsoft.

The safety agency noticed risk actors focusing on organizations within the enterprise course of outsourcing (BPO), telecommunications, leisure, transportation, MSSP, monetary and cryptocurrency sectors. In some circumstances, the objective was to conduct SIM swapping.

This description is just like CrowdStrike’s current description of a cybercrime group tracked as Scattered Spider, which focused the identical industries and had comparable objectives.

SentinelOne has additionally seen signed drivers getting used to deploy the Hive ransomware in opposition to a company within the medical business.

The corporate has analyzed a small toolkit designed to terminate AV and EDR processes. The toolkit has two important elements: a userland element known as StoneStop and a kernel mode element known as PoorTry. PoorTry is a malicious driver that has been signed by hackers, and StoneStop is its loader.

Mandiant has seen this toolkit being utilized by a financially motivated risk group it tracks as UNC3944, which has been lively since at the very least Could and has been utilizing stolen credentials obtained from SMS phishing operations to achieve preliminary entry to focused networks.

Mandiant has noticed a number of distinct malware households, related to totally different risk actors, abusing the identical course of to get their drivers signed by Microsoft.

Certainly one of them seems to be the Cuba ransomware, which has been linked by Sophos to assaults leveraging signed drivers to disable cybersecurity merchandise. The group behind the Cuba operation has used a utility known as BurntCigar to disable endpoint safety merchandise. BurntCigar was initially signed with stolen certificates, then with legitimate certificates of shady origin, after which with professional Microsoft certificates.

Coinciding with the alerts from Microsoft and cybersecurity companies, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company (CISA) has up to date its alert on the Cuba ransomware with extra indicators of compromise (IoCs).

This isn’t the primary time risk actors have used drivers signed by Microsoft of their operations and it appears that evidently placing a cease to this apply has not been a straightforward process for Microsoft, which mentioned on Tuesday that it’s taking steps to handle the difficulty.

Each SentinelOne and Mandiant imagine the malicious signed drivers could also be offered to totally different risk actors by a number of suppliers specializing in providing all these companies. SentinelOne famous that this concept is supported by the same performance and design of drivers utilized by totally different risk teams.

Associated: North Korean Hackers Exploit Dell Driver Vulnerability to Disable Home windows Safety

Associated: Ransomware Operator Abuses Anti-Cheat Driver to Disable Antiviruses

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