Cyber World on Fire: Uncovering the latest events, from Google's outage to the newest threats and trends in technology

A few days ago, Microsoft says that their system was exposed. But not only Microsoft majority of fortune 500 companies including the FBI, treasury departments, state health departments, real estate and a whole lot of people probably 18000 to 19000 big companies are vulnerable to this attack. This is the very first time you are hearing of such a big massive attack.

In this article, we also go through the reason behind, why Google was a little bit down a couple of days ago??

In 2020, we all go through corona pandemic, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and many more disasters and we all thought that now this is the end of all nightmares with the end of 2020. But for 2021, there is already biggest nightmare has been started for all fortune companies and in the cyber world.  

Now, as we all know cyber security is always a cat-and-mouse game. Sometimes, you think that you are safe but the next moment you found that you were being hacked. And to protect that, there are so many good companies which put advisories to the companies who want to secure and also want to keep there all details with safety. No matter how big you are, the next day you can be a potential target and you are down the next day as happened with Google, a couple of days ago.

So, FireEye is one of the biggest names in cyber security. It is so big that the higher management of FireEye is not allowed to even go for two days of vacation. Now a few days ago, FireEye came out and said that we were hacked and this actually made big news that one of the biggest firms in the world was attacked and is accepting that they were hacked. Now, during the hack, when it was asked of them they found out what was breached? they said that actually the biggest nightmare was not the nightmare that we were hacked but the nightmare was, what was actually hacked from us.

Nowadays, in the cyber security world usually, there are two teams the Red team and the Blue team. The job of the blue team is to simply go ahead and roll out patches and secure them and put the firewalls so that people cannot breach through them. On the other hand, the red team is responsible for simulating the attacks, of course in a controlled environment. But since some of these attacks are so sophisticated that they need automation. So, companies like FireEye, have their own kind of big box in which they use these red tools (and by the box I simply mean their software stack, their server or wherever they keep their simulation of these red attacks). Now some of these red attacks are so much more complex and so much more powerful if they get out of the world they can do so much damage. 

And that’s exactly what was attacked and that’s exactly what was stolen from FireEye. So, all those boxes which were holding these simulations for red teams or the red attacks. They got stolen.

Now according to the official statement of FireEye, there was no zero-day tool. Zero-day is a potential vulnerability but nobody has seen it yet so there is no patch and not a whole lot of people know about it. Probably few people know that there are zero days. But according to FireEye's statement, there are no zero days which is not so true.

Another big news you heard these days is the SolarEye attack. SolarWind tool is so much popular and powerful that every 2 of 3 companies use this tool. The SolarWind tool is goto tool for every single fortune company. They used this as a network monitoring tool. So SolarWind is a nice tool which keeps track of monitoring the network, its bandwidth, how it is using the logs and how the fluctuation is going on, everything that possibly you can do by networking is being done there. So you can say that it is almost like a monitoring tool for the entire internet which is running on the planet. And what’s scarier is their client list of SolarWind. Including all 500 big fortune companies also the state department, lot of governments use this, like the FBI, state health governments, treasury departments etc. So all of them were the potential victims of this hack.

Now let me tell you how this hack was actually planned up. So now the hackers have access to this red tool and they actually found out how the network updates of this tool are being delivered. Whenever we got software patches and software updates, we update the tools which we used, the same goes for the SolarWind tool as well. And the reason why it’s a little bit scarier is that the new update came out in march 2020. And what attackers did was they somehow got access to the network or CDN through which they were delivering these updates and they injected a DLL, a malicious DLL along with the patch. So the patch is now gonna act as a potential vulnerability to every single person who is gonna be updating their software. And of course, this is a talk about the march and now this is almost the end of 2020, so every single company did update. Now FireEye came out with a public disclosure that we were attacked and entire dots were connected. And this is scary because hackers had these access to all of the big giant companies from the march. Now they are saying, this attack was planned by Russia but no one has proof of that. Now the danger here is that attackers had network-level access to everything in all of these fortune 500 companies and 18000 customers from the march. They also know that, how these attacks are being made and how the potential firewalls are being kept, so they are knowing too much of the details. But, currently, we are not seeing any impact. Currently, the news is just out and we have seen one big giant (Google) being down for an hour, a couple of days ago. Now obviously, it is expected that in 2021 it’s gonna be a bigger nightmare of the cyber attacks that are gonna happen and eventually it’s gonna scale up.

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