S1E03: Hunting Targeted Attackers @ Scale, Live-ish from RSA

State of the Hack

In episode 3, we were joined by Alex Lanstein (@alex_lanstein) - one
of the first employees at FireEye who hunts through product telemetry
data to identify new targeted campaigns. During the RSA conference,
and with so many others referencing breaches and hunting from the
periphery, we thought it would be good to chat about primary source
data from our on-going APT and FIN attack investigations and how to
identify anomalies the way Alex does.
We live streamed this episode from the RSA Conference 2018 expo floor.
In an unforeseen twist of events, the sheer number of cyber threat
maps on the conference floor degraded the bandwidth and video quality.
We re-recorded the episode the next day from an undisclosed location
with a better connection.
“Community Protection: Southeast Asian Campaign”: We discuss our
on-going Community Protection Event (CPE) where we’ve pulled together
teams within the company to identify and protect against a suspected
Chinese attack group using new methods to compromise Southeast Asian
entities. We explore how it was found with custom passwords to decrypt
phishing docs as well as the unique PowerShell-laden shortcut (.LNK)
builder that was last seen with APT29 campaign around the 2016 U.S.
election.
“APT19 and RepeaTTPs”: We chat about APT19 resuming their targeting of
law firms this month using many of the exact same techniques as our
2017 blog post on the activity. Alex shares some insight into
interesting APT19 phishing lure choices.
• 2017 TTPs: https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-r...
“RO-BORAT Kazakhstani Attribution”: #ThreatIntel attribution can be
difficult, but not always. We chat about the level of rigor we applied
to analyzing some recent activity that we attributed to Kazakhstan.
Very nice!
• Related reading - https://www.eff.org/press/releases/ma...
“What’s M-Trending”: We close out the show by some round-robin
discussion of evolving attacker methods and what we found most
interesting within our M-Trends 2018 report released in April, which
compiled technical intelligence and #DFIR breach data from our 500+
Mandiant investigations in 2017.
• https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/c...
State of the Hack is FireEye’s monthly live broadcast series, hosted
by Christopher Glyer (@cglyer) and Nick Carr (@itsreallynick), that
discusses the latest in information security, cyber espionage, attack
trends, and tales from the front lines of responding to targeted
intrusions. You can catch it live each month on FireEye's Twitter
account: https://twitter.com/fireeye