Security experts investigating Bit9 defense breach found evidence proving that cyber espionage hackers also attacked firm’s security system in July 2012. While customers, who suffered the attack, are still unknown, Bit9 rep stated only that the custom-made malicious software was deployed last year in attacks against U.S. Defense contractors.
KrebsOnSecurity experts told earlier this month about the breach involving theft of one of the Bit9’s private digital certificates. The hijacked certificate was used to sign malicious software. According to Bit9, the company managed to identify "haches" of 33 files signed by hackers with the help of the certificate.
After investigation KrebsOnSecurity experts were able to locate two of them. According to the specialists, the first file, called “media.exe”, was compiled and then signed using Bit9’s certificate on July 13, 2012. The second one, compiled and signed on July 15, 2012, was a Microsoft driver file for an SQL database server.
Bit9 confirmed that the breach did actually start last year in July, when its Web-server was compromised, using SQL injection attack. The company rep also said that the experts detected January 29 breach when the employee started up a virtual machine that was equipped with an older Bit9’s signing certificate.
Bit9’s chief technology officer, Harry Sverdlove, said that although it is not clear what the source of the attack was, but it wasn’t the company that was targeted: “Although it doesn’t make us feel any better, this wasn’t a campaign against us, it was a campaign using us. We don’t take any solace in this, but the good news is they came after us because they weren’t able to come after our customers directly”.
The company rep said the SQL injection vulnerability was used to plant HiKit, which was first detailed in August 2012 by Alexandria, security forensics firm Mandiant that uncovered the custom tool while investigating targeted attacks against a small number of defense contractors in the US.
During the investigation of the breach cyber security experts found a group of state-sponsored hackers in China which may be the source of most of the attacks against U.S. Defense contractors. It is still unknown whether it is connected with the Bit9’s breach in any way.
Sverdlove stated: “On one level, this is just more evidence that we are dealing with motivated, well organized attackers and long-term campaigns that are being waged in terms of cyber espionage… On another, it’s a reminder that all of us — even security companies –need to remain diligent and deploy a layered defense-in-depth. It’s a bitter pill, and it doesn’t feel good, that is the truth. But we’re strong believers in threat intelligence sharing, and I think as a security community we need to share intelligence and come together on this, because we’re facing enemies that are definitely doing that”.
