There's a lot of confusion around what actually happened with #Kaseya. We initially thought Kaseya was popped leading to a supply chain attack with a malicious update. However, if it's an 0-day on Kaseya VSA software then it's not a supply chain attack at that point.... #Pedantry
BUT! If popping VSA with an 0day leads to compromise of an MSP and their customers are subsequently hacked, that would constitute a supply-chain attack. (Early reports suggest as much) #Pedantry
If you need an easier short-hand for this whole incident, 'clusterfuck' will do.
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Ok, I have to admit this @Apple vs. @CorelliumHQ business just doesn’t sit right with me. Let me @ @tim_cook and pretend to have some meaningful engagement regarding Apple’s larger security dilemma. #Thread
Everyone knows I’m a huge Apple fanboy. Until the cheese grater Mac Pro came out, I more or less had one of every apple product in my house (with some wiggle room). While I may gripe about missing function keys, there’s no system I’d rather use than MacOS and iOS.
I’ve also, at diverse points in my career, had the privilege to report ongoing APT campaigns directly to Apple alongside colleagues (h/t @craiu) and was treated kindly by folks invested in securing the Apple ecosystem within the means available to them.
1st point is that we (private sector threat intel researchers) mistook the provenance of Neuron and Nautilus. NCSC’s previous advisory denounced the use of both tools alongside Turla’s staple rootkit and we assumed new tools from the Turla devs but it seems they’d been stolen.
Keep in mind that the advisory is hinting at some dev access, some infrastructure access, but perhaps not complete access to Iran’s full operational stack. Turla first deploys the tool to their rootkit victims for testing and further functionality.
Those non-existent norms were originally shattered by Flame subverting the actual Windows Update mechanism via an unheard of md5 collision to impersonate signing certs (implemented in its GADGET module).
Flame really doesn't get the credit it deserves as the first public harbinger of so many trends we'd come to know all too well in cyberespionage over the following 7 years.
It’s surprising how often folks mistake familiarity and expertise with one area as competency in a field writ large. This happens often in the vuln-dev vs AVs/TI debates, the ‘if you’d only used Chrome’ camp, and ‘experts’ vs the people debates.
It’s usually not worth engaging, however, I think it’s important to counteract myopic views that may affect effective recruitment in infosec writ large.