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GreyNoise Tag Round Up | May 24 - June 4

New Tags

CVE-2021-21985

Tag: Vmware vSphere Client RCE Attempt [Intention: Malicious]

Tag: VMware vSphere Client RCE Vuln Check [Intention: Unknown]

CVE-2021-28799

Tag: VMware ESXi OpenSLP RCE Attempt [Intention: Malicious]

Tag Improvements

As part of our process, our research team continues to clean up and improve on existing tags as new information or better processes are introduced.

Tag: Elasticsearch RCE Attempt [Intention: Malicious]

Recent Actor Tag

Removed Tags

These tags have been removed because they no longer exist, scan, and/or can no longer be accurately identified

  • Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI)
  • Elasticsearch Worm

GreyNoise Use Cases: Twitter Edition

Andrew Morris got on a roll the other day and whacked out this tweetstorm describing the three key use cases for GreyNoise. You can check out the original Twitter thread here. Enjoy!

I'd like to do an overview of the three most common use-cases to use  @GreyNoiseIO  for.   1. Ignore/deprioritize pointless telemetry or alerts in the SOC 2. Identify compromised systems 3. Track which vulnerabilities are being opportunistically exploited ITW  Thread (1/26)

1. Improve SOC efficiency

Benign IPs

Let's say I get a wacky IDS alert or am seeing something strange in my logs. I'll look up the IP address in GreyNoise (either using our visualizer or our free community API.

I looked up the IP address and, oh wow! It's just Shodan! GreyNoise already marked it as benign. No big deal. Paste a link in your ticket to the GreyNoise visualizer and move on.

https://viz.greynoise.io/ip/71.6.135.131

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing benign IP address detail

Maybe I don't want to use the GreyNoise web interface. Let's say I look up the IP in the free unauthenticated GreyNoise Community API and... cool, reports back that it's Censys. No problemo. Move on.

Example of GreyNoise Community API showing benign IP address detail

Malicious IPs

Let's say I look up an IP address, and it comes back with this big scary red IP address that says "malicious." What does this mean?

https://viz.greynoise.io/ip/45.155.205.165

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing malicious IP address detail

Well, this means that the IP is probably malicious (or was observed by GreyNoise doing something bad on our sensors), but whatever attack you're seeing is not targeted at *you specifically*. It was an opportunistic attack. Background noise.

Unknown IPs (to GreyNoise)

What if the IP address... doesn't come back at all?

This means that we've never seen that IP scanning/crawling the Internet, and it doesn't belong to any benign business services. It actually *might* be targeted your organization specifically. Investigate.

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing "No results found"

GreyNoise APIs

The GreyNoise Community API is rate limited to a few thousand lookups per day, but it's completely free and unauthenticated. As long as we continue to add enterprise customers and can afford to pay our staff and AWS bills, this will continue to be free.

Note that you don't get context, raw data, metadata, or tags using the Community API. Sorry folks, we've gotta make our money somewhere. This is available in our Enterprise API. If you want this data via API, hit up our sales team. But hey, it's free.

Fun fact: Just about every customer we have at GreyNoise sees at least a 20% alert contextualization/reduction rate from using GreyNoise. That's a LOT of wasted human hours spent chasing ghosts.

Analyze a List of IPs

Now let's say you've had an incident, and you need to figure out which of the gazillion IP addresses in some log file compromised your device.

No problemo. Just dump the log file (or just the IP addresses) into the GreyNoise analysis page, and now you can do two things:

  1. Quickly filter out known good guys
  2. If the situation warrants it, quickly identify opportunistic bad guys.

Here's an Analysis from an SSH auth.log I grabbed on a live server on the Internet.

~*~97.22% noise~*~

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing Analysis results

Filter Known-Benign Services (RIOT)

Let's say I'm trawling through a ton of netflow logs, and I want to identify any connections OUT of my network that might be going to bad guys.

I can filter known-benign services (Zoom, Github, Office365, Cloudflare, etc.). I can use GreyNoise RIOT for this.

Example of netflow log with a large number of IP addresses to triage
After analysis, just a handful of IP addresses are identified as "malicious" or "unknown"
Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing RIOT IP address detail

*I'd like to note here that the IPs in RIOT *could potentially* be used by a sufficiently advanced adversary to attack you (async c2, etc.), but that doesn't mean that 99% of bad guys will be doing this, and it's not like you can just *BLOCK ZOOM* and not expect blowback.

Don't think of RIOT as a NACL or whitelist/allowlist. Think of RIOT as added context and a time-saver. You can either find out from GreyNoise via RIOT, or you can find out from your helpdesk reps when you block an IP and execs suddenly can't send emails anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2. Identify compromised devices

Let's say I want to find compromised devices that belong to ME, my users, or just some interesting network around the world.

Just punch in a GNQL query into the web interface of the IP block I'm interested in + the facet: "classification:malicious"

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing malicious scanning from devices within an IP address range

You can actually also find compromised devices in other facets as well. Here are examples of finding compromised devices in a specific country or using free text search to find compromised devices in hospitals or government facilities (or both):

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing malicious IP addresses related to government
Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing malicious IP addresses related to hospitals
Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing malicious IP addresses from a country related to hospitals

You can use your FREE GreyNoise account to register alerts on any network block or IPs. Once you've registered your alerts, we email you if we see any of your IPs get compromised (e.g., unexpectedly start scanning the internet )

https://viz.greynoise.io/account/alerts

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing how to set up Alerts

3. Emerging vulnerability exploitation

You can use GreyNoise to find whether a given vulnerability is being opportunistically exploited or "vuln checked" at scale. Simply craft a GNQL query for CVE.

https://viz.greynoise.io/query/cve:CVE-2021-3129

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer showing malicious IP addresses related to a CVE

When a big scary vulnerability is announced, basically everyone has the exact same thought:

"How much do I **really** have to care about this? Is this... being exploited in the wild right now?"

GreyNoise is declaring war on this ambiguity.

You can also see *which* CVEs a given IP address is probing the internet for or opportunistically exploiting. This list is not exhaustive - it takes a lot of work to add coverage to these. This is what @ackmage @nathanqthai and @4b4c41 do.

Example of GreyNoise Visualizer for a malicious IP address showing targeted CVEs

Our Business Model

We have a long ways to go on properly productizing this offering. It's really hard to do at scale, and not every vulnerability can be exploited in a way that GreyNoise will ever see. That said, we'll be announcing some new offerings focusing on this use case later this year.

Our business model is pretty simple:

  • Most viz stuff == free but rate limited
  • Community API == free but rate limited
  • GreyNoise in your SIEM/TIP/SOAR == paid

Expect a lot of this stuff to shift over the next few months/years as we find better ways to price/package our features.

That pretty much covers it.

Here are my asks to you:

  • If you use GreyNoise's free products, get in touch with @SupriyaMaz and she'll hook you up with free swag
  • If you work in SOC/TI or at an MSSP and want to hear about our commercial offering, ping sales@greynoise.io

And, of course, ping me anytime. I can't promise a snappy response, but I try to clear my inbox at least every few weeks (aspirational). My email is andrew@greynoise.io.

Oh, last thing. We tag like... hundreds of activities and actors and exploits and vuln probes and tools. Check them all out here (it's searchable, but the layout is pretty unwieldy considering how massive our tag library is now).

https://viz.greynoise.io/tags

Some of the activities and actors and exploits and vuln probes GreyNoise has identified

Onward.

--Andrew

GreyNoise Use Cases: Twitter Edition V2

Andrew Morris got on a roll the other day and whacked out this tweetstorm describing the three key use cases for GreyNoise. Enjoy!


GreyNoise Tag Round Up | May 10 - 21

New Tags

CVE-2021-26912 | CVE-2021-26913 | CVE-2021-26914 | CVE-2021-26915

Tag: NetMotion Mobility Server RCE Attempt [Intention: Malicious]

  • This IP address has been observed attempting to exploit a deserialization vulnerability in NetMotion Mobility Server that can lead to remote code execution.
  • Sources: NIST [1, 2 , 3, 4], SSD Disclosure
  • See it on GreyNoise Viz

CVE-2021-21402

Tag: Jellyfin File Disclosure [Intention: Malicious]

CVE-2021-28799

Tag: QNAP walter SSH Backdoor Attempt [Intention: Malicious]

  • This IP address has been observed attempting to connect using the username and password 'walter,' which are hardcoded backdoor SSH credentials that exist in some QNAP devices.
  • Source: QNAP, QNAP Forum
  • See it on GreyNoise Viz

CVE-2021-30461

Tag: VoIPmonitor Unauthenticated RCE Attempt  [Intention: Malicious]

Tag Improvements

As part of our process, our research team continues to clean up and improve on existing tags as new information or better processes are introduced.

Tag: RDP Bruteforcer [Intention: Malicious]

  • This IP address has been observed attempting to brute-force Microsoft Remote Desktop credentials.
  • Source: Microsoft [1, 2]
  • See it on GreyNoise Viz

Recent Integrations

Rapid 7 InsightConnect: Supports Enterprise API and Community API access.

CORTEX XSOAR: Supports Enterprise API and Community API access.

How Internet Noise Makes Security Harder

Defining Internet Noise

Every machine connected to the internet is exposed to a constant barrage of communications from tens of thousands of unique IP addresses per day. A percentage of these communications are malicious attacks and web crawls; some are non-malicious scans and pings;  some are legitimate business services; and still others are unknown. Taken together, this massive volume of unsolicited traffic is a challenge for security organizations because these communications trigger security tools to generate thousands of events to be analyzed, with little context on the potential threats.

Sources of Internet Noise

Let’s take a look at the different kinds of internet communications traffic that create this “noise” for security organizations:

Internet Scanners (aka Internet Background Noise)

Scanning the internet means reaching out and trying to initiate communications with a wide range of devices  that are directly connected to the internet. At a technical level, mass scanning the internet means requesting a slight amount of information (specifically a TCP SYN, UDP/ICMP packet, or banner grab) from all 4.2 BILLION IP addresses on the entire routable IPv4 space. And it turns out that tens of thousands of devices are scanning the internet constantly, generating a tremendous amount of internet “noise.”

Who scans the Internet?

Good guys scan the internet to measure the exposure of vulnerabilities, take inventory of software market share, and find botnet command & control servers.  In fact, there are entire websites and companies that act as "search engines" devoted to mass scanning the internet. Examples of this include companies like Shodan and Censys, as well as researchers and universities, who scan in good faith to help uncover vulnerabilities for network defense.

Bad guys scan the internet with malicious intent to find vulnerable devices that they can compromise and use for nefarious purposes. So while benign mass-scanner IP addresses might check if a port is running and then go away, malicious scanners might attempt to compromise the target machine by brute-forcing login credentials or launching a remote exploit. A good example was a recently discovered vulnerability in F5 network devices - in this case, malicious IPs scanned for F5 BIG-IP devices, checked if the device was vulnerable, and attempted to exploit the vulnerability.

Unknown groups scan the internet for unclear or covert reasons. Unknown actors could be individual researchers, companies, or nation-state actors that are attempting to remain anonymous, and everything in between.

At the end of the day, web crawlers, port scanners, researchers, and malware such as worms and botnets are all part of the activities  that contribute to Internet Noise. The challenge for security organizations is differentiating which of these scans are malicious signs of a targeted attack, and which are just “noise.”

Common Business Services

Another increasingly challenging source of Internet Noise is legitimate network communications with common business applications like Microsoft O365, Google Workspace, and Slack, as well as services like CDNs and public DNS servers. These applications often communicate through unpublished or dynamic IPs, making them difficult to identify. The result is a storm of log events from “unknown” IP addresses that are, in reality, from well-known and benign business services. Without context, this harmless communication distracts security teams from investigating true threats.

Security Challenges of Internet Noise

The goal for security teams is to identify malicious internet traffic that represents a potential threat to the organization, so they can focus research and remediation efforts quickly. Internet Noise ends up being a huge tax on SOC teams by taking time away from analysts that could be spent addressing true threats,  inflating log volumes and increasing storage costs, and contributing to analyst burnout.

GreyNoise Identifies Internet Noise So Security Teams Can Focus on Targeted Threats

GreyNoise tracks two distinct sets of Internet Noise today, making them available through our API, integrations, and visualizer:

  • Internet Background Noise: At GreyNoise, we deploy and manage hundreds of servers in multiple data centers and countries around the world to listen to internet Background Noise. Our purpose is to sit back and soak up all the opportunistic traffic generated by anyone mass scanning the internet. GreyNoise analyzes and enriches this data to identify behavior, methods, and intent. The goal is to give analysts the context they need to answer questions like: How many people are scanning the internet right now? What IP addresses is it coming from? What are they scanning for?
  • RIOT: RIOT provides context to communications between your users and common business applications (e.g., Microsoft O365, Google Workspace, and Slack) or services like CDNs and public DNS servers. These applications communicate through unpublished or dynamic IPs, making it difficult for security teams to track. Without context, this harmless behavior distracts security teams from investigating true threats.

The data GreyNoise collects can be used by security analysts to identify and de-prioritize traffic from omnidirectional scanners and common business services, allowing them to focus on targeted scan and attack traffic. They can use the data to

  • Track opportunistic botnets and other compromised devices
  • Understand what software vulnerabilities the bad guys are actively scanning for
  • Automatically enrich and prioritize alerts in SIEM and SOAR systems
  • And, if so inclined, opt out of many malicious mass-scanners altogether by blocking them preemptively and dynamically at the firewall

Viewing Internet Noise with GreyNoise

If you’re interested in learning more about what Internet Noise is and how much of it is happening on the internet right now, please check out the GreyNoise Visualizer. Free to use, the Visualizer can show you:

  • Overall volume of Internet Noise
  • New IPs generating Internet Noise
  • Classification of Internet Noise into malicious, benign, and unknown actors
  • Top organizations that are sources of Internet Noise
  • Trends and anomalies in Internet Noise traffic over the past month
  • Detailed behavioral information about specific IP addresses running scans
  • Emerging threat data about vulnerabilities being actively exploited

And if you find this information interesting or useful, please sign up for a free Community account, which includes access to our API for a subset of the “noise” data we collect. Our community of 10,000+ security analysts is a tremendous source of insight into Internet Noise and other InfoSec knowledge. If you are interested in joining, please reach out to community@greynoise.io

Also, please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn!

Get Started With GreyNoise for Free

Introducing the GreyNoise Blog

Every company has a distinct culture and style of communicating information between itself and the rest of the world. At GreyNoise, we’ve relied heavily on our use of Twitter and other social media that are popular with our users. This has historically worked well, but it has limited us to only brief pulses of information. Now, I’m excited to announce the GreyNoise blog, where we will be able to convey more information and ideas with more opportunities for detail and nuance.

GreyNoise was founded in 2017 with a simple mission: Use data to make security teams more efficient, and provide answers and insights where there are none. Our flagship enterprise product contextualizes noisy alerts in the SOC that are generated by internet background noise and harmless online services. Our free web interface and community API provide insights to thousands of security professionals every day.

To provide these services, we collect lots of data from across the internet at a very large scale. We operate a really big network of passive collector sensors in hundreds of data centers around the world (kind of like honeypots) to analyze internet background noise. And we constantly enumerate the IP addresses and domains of common benign SaaS services to “rule out” harmless traffic from security products.

In building and scaling GreyNoise, we’ve learned a lot of interesting lessons and witnessed a lot of interesting phenomena. The GreyNoise blog will be another forum for us to share these lessons and phenomena with the rest of the world.

GreyNoise has made a tremendous amount of progress over the past three years, but we are still in the early days. I’m excited to share the journey with you here.

Onward.

– Andrew

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