Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Jack Recyder, host of the show. Back in 2018, an interesting cyber attack took place.
It's kind of a funny thing.
Chapter 2: What was the initial cyber attack that Sophos faced?
I mean, it basically came onto my radar the second month I was working at Sophos. Oh, I should introduce you to Andrew. Yeah, so I'm Andrew Brandt. And throughout the time the research was going on for this story, I was a principal researcher for Sophos. But I am now a principal threat researcher for a company called NetCraft.
So one of the things Sophos wanted Andrew to do was research novel threats and write about them on their newly established Sophos blog.
The team that I was on eventually didn't exist. I was the only person on it. And one of the analysts reached out to me through the company chat and said, hey, I've got a great story for some really cool research. I'd like to write it up and have you publish it on the blog and do some edits on it. I said, great, tell me more.
And he told me the story, but the one thing he didn't tell or what he said he couldn't tell me was who the target was.
So he's like, okay, fine, send me what you got. Let me research it and I'll write about it. It started with a TV set.
So there was a sales office and they had a bullpen. Like you have a lot of, you know, in a lot of sales offices where people are on the phone, you're trying to sell the product. And so they had like this leaderboard that was on a computer screen that was running off a little Linux computer. And that was the first machine that got infected.
And the threat actors managed to pivot from that Intel NUC, which is like a tiny little computer that's small enough it can mount on the back of a TV monitor that's hanging on the wall. that they were able to pivot from the NUC and find access to the repository where the source code was and then get into that. And then to do the CloudSnooper attack on that cloud service where the source code was.
It's just mind-boggling to me, the amount of effort involved in pivoting from this to this to this to get into this and then to build this backdoor that allows them access. It's amazing to me.
Oof. The attackers got access to the source code. But why? Was this an insider trying to seek revenge? Were they stealing it in hopes to sell it to someone? Did they steal it so that they could copy the product and steal their intellectual property? At the time, nobody knew what their motive was. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.
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Chapter 3: How did Sophos change its tactics to counter the hacking group?
But the problem they were solving changed because attackers changed. They don't break in like they used to. Now they just log in with real credentials, real sessions, nothing that looks out of place. And once they're in, they're treated like they belong. So ThreatLocker took what they already were doing and pushed it further with their Zero Trust Network Access and Zero Trust Cloud Access.
So now access isn't just about logging in, it's about the device, the connection, and whether any of it should be trusted at all. If you want to see what Zero Trust looks like when it's done right, go to threatlocker.com slash darknet. That's threatlocker.com slash darknet. This episode is sponsored by Meter, the company building networks from the ground up.
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Meter delivers a complete networking stack, wired, wireless, and cellular in one solution that's built for performance and scale. Alongside their partners, Meter designs the hardware, writes the firmware, builds the software, manages deployment, and runs support. That means less time your employees spend writing to multiple vendors and more time working and improving your IT systems.
Meter's full-stack solution covers everything from first site survey to ongoing support, giving you a single partner for all your connectivity needs. Thanks to Meter for sponsoring this show. Go to meter.com slash darknet to book a demo now. That's spelled M-E-T-E-R. Meter.com slash darknet. And go book a demo. So hackers broke into a company and copied the source code for that product.
So we managed InfoSec there for a while. And currently, too, it was the type of network that was, you know, in the process of being brought over to a kind of set standard. This is Craig. He helped clean up the intrusion. So my name is Craig Jones. I'm the chief security officer of Ontinu. But several years ago, I was actually the senior director of information security inside Solvosk.
I mean, if you don't know Sophos, we're a UK-based cybersecurity provider that has everything from kind of EDR, MDR, and through into firewall products. And at the time, they had three different firewall products, one being Cybro, the other one being a German-based firewall provider, and the new Sophos Firewall product.
So essentially, they were collapsing two products into one, and the new one being Sophos Firewall.
But yeah, Sophos' main product is their firewall. This is a network device that will act as a wall between a protected network and an unprotected one. Out of the box, nothing is allowed to pass. You have to tell it exactly what you want to allow through because the point of a firewall is to stop unwanted traffic from coming into your network.
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Chapter 4: What were the ethical implications of Sophos's defensive measures?
It's one that had never been turned on before, which was pretty suspicious. It had never been registered. It was a serial number that had just come from a web trial of a VM. And We found the IP actually related back to Chengdao in China.
Okay, odd. Someone from China with a trial license of the Sophos firewall found this bug and reported it to Sophos? And Sophos did, in fact, pay the bug bounty for this.
It was about $10,000, I think.
Hmm. Someone got paid a pretty penny for reporting this bug to Sophos at almost the exact same time that they were seeing it being exploited by devices in the wild. Strange timing. We called it Asna Rock. So the team investigated this bug further. It was present in the front-end web user interface of the firewall. To configure this firewall, you can use a browser and access it that way.
Well, the web UI of this firewall had an SQL injection vulnerability in it. Basically, in one of the form fields of the firewall, like maybe the username field or something, an attacker could enter in some commands there, which would glitch out the user input handling mechanism of the firewall and allow the attacker to inject their own commands there
into the database of the firewall where the configuration sat. And this was a really bad bug for Sophos to discover. Their devices are supposed to be blocking hackers from getting into the network, yet it's the vulnerable device which is allowing hackers into it?
This is not good at all. And they found that essentially every firewall that was facing the public internet was affected by this bug.
These firewalls weren't just vulnerable. They all had been hacked into, exploited. Someone probably scanned the whole internet looking for these particular Sophos firewalls and then ran some kind of automation script to go infect them all.
We kind of worked out that there were a huge amount of devices affected. I think in the aimed FBI report that came out about this, I think they mentioned 80,000. It has a guess that it's probably more, you know.
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Chapter 5: What unique methods did the attackers use to exploit Sophos firewalls?
I mean, we wanted a copy of that threat actor device. Like, I wanted to see that Linux box and understand what they've done. I mean, obviously, it was evidence now. It wasn't owned by us. So we couldn't get a snapshot of it, for example. But they allowed us to basically...
you know work with them and analyze the box live on a screen share so we could actually understand the scale of what had happened you know and we'd seen the the threat actor scripts for scanning the devices the outputs that they'd taken from the firewall you know how they'd set this thing up you know kind of chinese characters and notes and things throughout the device um
What was actually surprising was that everything was kind of set up manually on the C2 server. I kind of expected them to deliver the C2 server with some sort of kind of DevOps pizzazz. But it was just basic, you know, it was like a Linux box and someone who copies subscripts to it, you know. But they were amazing.
I mean, the NCSC in the Netherlands just gave us so much help and really helped us focus where we needed to look and the kind of scope and scale of all of this.
At the same time, they got control of the domains used by the hackers and sent all the traffic they were getting to a sinkhole and logged it all.
It's just fascinating to think that, like, I don't know, a Netgear, a Linksys, some other commercial product was checking into SophosFirewallUpdate.com. It almost screams of like, well, we could be bothered to register this domain for Sophos. We're not going to bother to register it for these other companies. We already got the domain. We're just going to keep using it for these other things.
I couldn't find a single article by Linksys mentioning any of this. Nothing at all. Netgear put out an advisory saying a Chinese threat actor is attacking their products. However, they say they are not aware of any Netgear devices being exploited out in the wild.
which if they don't have any telemetry from their customers' products, then yeah, of course they're not going to know if any devices are being exploited. And that's what's challenging me here. Should the firewall vendor be collecting logs off its customers' devices in order to better understand what devices are actively being exploited? Or should that be the responsibility of the customer?
In many organizations, they have their own security logs and even a team to monitor those logs to look for threats. But things like Netgear and Linksys are typically home devices, and it's very rare for people in their own homes to be monitoring their logs looking for threats. I looked it up. Netgear actually does quite a lot of analytic collection from their customers' devices.
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Chapter 6: How did Sophos respond to the vulnerabilities discovered in their firewalls?
It's still an issue.
one of the actors involved in all of this. We talked about him earlier. His name is, you know, use the handle GBigMail. That we eventually figured out his real name. You have pictures of him. And the guy appears on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list today. His name is Guan Tianfeng. And he was the researcher at this company called Sichuan... Sichuan Secret... Silence Technology Company.
Yeah, Sichuan Silence Technology Company Limited, right? So... This guy made it his career to break into firewalls and find vulnerabilities and then pass them off to people who would take advantage of them.
And for all of his efforts, he's in his early 30s, he has a $10 million Rewards for Justice bounty on his head, and he can never travel outside of a non-extradition country in the world ever again without fearing for arrest and... to the United States. And it just makes me wonder if it really was worth it to him. Because in many respects, he seems like a nice guy.
At one point, he had his heart in the right place. So G. Big Mao, in his early days of working in this field, used to post on message boards trying to get firewall companies to fix their stuff. I can't imagine what happened to turn him, to make him break bad in this way.
It actually says in the FBI's Cyber's Most Wanted poster that this guy hacked into 80,000 Sophos firewalls. And just because I'm curious, I took a look at a few dozen other FBI's Cyber's Most Wanted posters, and strangely, I don't see any other person listed for hacking into other security vendors.
So again, hats off for Sophos for taking this threat actor so seriously and getting them on the FBI's cyber's most wanted list.
The story, as we published it, finishes in 2024, not because the attacks stopped, but because at a certain point, you just got to put a pin in it and say, we're going to stop here because if we keep talking about this, it never ends because the attacks have continued. ever since. Nothing has stopped. And if there's anything to be said about this, it's that the cadence has picked up.
It has broadened its scope. We're seeing every security company in the industry in various ways targeted in very similar ways.
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of the hotfixes issued by Sophos?
A single company versus a superpower like China? And not only that, a superpower that's lawless and feels absolutely no shame from breaking the law? You'd think that after their main guy was arrested by the FBI, they'd pull back and maybe apologize. But no, they increased their efforts and are hitting harder than ever against so many security vendors too.
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